Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Why do my parents always act like they know best? – Taliyah, age 12, Gwinnett, Georgia

Nobody likes getting bossed around, but your parents’ bossiness is probably well-intentioned.

As a psychologist who studies family relationships, I can tell you that a parent’s No. 1 job is to keep their kids safe. When a kid becomes a teenager, their world becomes more dangerous. Relationships with friends can become complicated and even toxic. Drugs and alcohol become more readily available and more tantalizing. Mental health can take a nosedive, and social media doesn’t help.

There are a bunch of reasons why these risks increase as you grow up, but peer pressure is mostly to blame.

To protect their teens from those dangers, parents have lots of strategies. They may discipline their kids – “You’re grounded!” – or challenge them to do better with phrases like, “When I was your age, I didn’t behave like that.” Or they might reprimand you: “I’m really disappointed in you.”

If your parents have ever acted like that with you, then it is likely about keeping you safe. Most parents understand the dangers you face. They may have experienced them personally and want you to avoid the same mistakes they made. If your parents’ guidance is keeping you from harm, I’d say that they really do know what’s best.

Your brain is still developing

OK, I got that out of the way. Are you still reading? I hope so, because this next part is more interesting and nuanced, and it’s about you and your brain.

Right now, your brain is undergoing remarkable growth. Starting around 10 years old, there’s a flurry of activity in what’s called the subcortical regions of your brain – a scientific term for the brain’s inner core. These parts of the brain are associated with emotions like anger, anxiety and defensiveness.

Are you feeling those emotions pretty regularly these days? If so, congratulations! You are 100% normal.

As you get older, your brain’s outer regions will become more developed, too. The last bit to mature is right behind your forehead, in an area called the prefrontal cortex. That area is associated with the ability to understand how someone else feels, and to put yourself in their shoes.

Experts who study brain development call this skill “perspective-taking.” It means that when you’re reprimanded for breaking the rules – for example, by staying out late – you don’t lash out defensively. Instead, you acknowledge that the person doing the reprimanding is worried or scared, or simply looking out for you.

Seeing life from another perspective

For adults, this perspective-taking can be really hard. For teens, I’m sorry to say, it’s even harder. That’s because your prefrontal cortex simply hasn’t finished developing yet; it won’t be fully functional until about age 25.

Your teenage brain currently allows you to do many incredible things, but you are biologically inclined to see life from your own perspective and struggle to understand why other people act the way they do.

In other words, your perceptions of your parents as bossy are based on the abilities of your yet-to-be fully developed brain. Meanwhile, what is fully developed is the part of your brain associated with those big emotions. That’s a tough combination.

A final note: You might think that your parents “always act like they know what’s best,” but, in my parenting research, it’s clear that they’re often unsure how to handle certain situations. Over 40% of the parents in my last study shared self-critical thoughts about how they’re doing as a parent. In other words, they’re struggling, too.

If you can, give your parents a break – and maybe even a hug.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Annie Pezalla, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology, Macalester College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Beetles are the most diverse group of animals on Earth, accounting for nearly a quarter of all known animal species. Australia is thought to be home to a whooping 30,000 beetle species, and they are crucial to keeping our ecosystems healthy.

Beetles can be distinguished from other insects by their hard, shell-like wing covers called “elytra”. Unlike other insects, beetles hide their soft, thin wings beneath these protective covers when they are not in use.

Summer is a great time to go beetle-watching in Australia. While beetles can be found all year round, many species are more visible and numerous when the weather heats up.

Beetles come in a brilliant range of colours, patterns and textures – even metallic – which makes them especially fun to spot. Here are five beautiful beetles to look out for this summer.

1. Flower chafers

Although bees get all the glory, beetles are the unsung pollinators of many native plants.

Flower chafers (from the subfamily Cetoniinae) are named after their habit of visiting flowers to feed on nectar and pollen. This makes them important pollinators.

Flower chafer larvae live in rotting wood or leaf litter. There are 146 species in Australia, found in all states and territories..

One of the most common is the fiddler beetle (Eupoecila australasiae), found along Australia’s east coast. It features striking black, green and occasionally yellow markings in a fiddle-shaped pattern.

Female fiddler beetles lay eggs in soil or rotting logs. The larvae burrow through the soil to feed, emerging as adults in the spring.

The fiddler beetle feeds on native flowers such as Angophora, Melaleuca and Leptospermum (tea trees) and may occasionally eat rotting fruit.

Beetle-pollinated flowers are often white or cream, with nectar placed where beetles can readily reach it. The below video shows a native tree on which multiple species are feeding at once.

2. Stag beetles

The larvae of stag beetles (from the family Lucanidae) feed on decaying wood – breaking down tough, fibrous material and returning essential nutrients to the soil.

Adult stag beetles have been described as “beautiful baubles” for their shimmery exoskeletons in shades of gold, green, purple and blue.

Stag beetles are most abundant in Tasmania, New South Wales and Victoria, but are also found in Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia.

3. Christmas beetles

In southern and eastern Australia, the festive season is traditionally marked by the arrival of large numbers of iridescent Christmas beetles (Anoplognathus).

Of the 36 species of Christmas beetle, all but one are found exclusively in Australia, making them a truly iconic part of the country’s natural heritage.

Although Christmas beetles were once reliable heralds of summer, their numbers now appear to be declining. A lack of long-term population monitoring makes it challenging to confirm this trend, however.

4. Jewel beetles

Jewel beetles (from the family Buprestidae) feature brilliantly coloured, metallic bodies – features thought to deter predators.

Australia is lucky to have 1,200 species of these beautiful living jewels, found all across the continent.

Adult jewel beetles feed on nectar and pollen, while their larvae usually bore through the wood of trees or the roots of plants.

5. Diamond weevils

The diamond weevil (Chrysolopus spectabilis) is the crown jewel of Australia’s weevil family. It comes in a startling array of colours, from blue to yellow and green.

Diamond weevils are found commonly along the east coast of Australia, eating plant material such as Acacia leaves.

The species is one of Australia’s first insects named by European scientists. It was first collected in 1770 by naturalist Joseph Banks, who landed at Botany Bay with Captain Cook.

Saving our beetles

Despite their ecological importance and phenomenal diversity, beetles are understudied. Scientists are constantly finding new species, such as the adorable fluffy longhorn beetle (Excastra albopilosa) recently discovered in the Gold Coast hinterland.

Unfortunately beetles – like many other insect species – face increasing threats from habitat loss, climate change and the misuse of insecticide.

A few simple actions can help native beetles to thrive.

Planting nectar-rich natives helps provide a reliable food source for flower-feeding beetles. Choose native plants with large, bowl-shaped or flattened flowers which makes the nectar easy for insects to reach. Good examples include the dwarf apple (Angophora hispida), white kunzea (Kunzea ambigua) and rice flower (Ozothamnus diosmifolius).

As a bonus, flowers also attract pest-eating beetles such as ladybirds.

Many beetles rely on decaying leaves and wood for food and shelter. So try to avoid disturbing or removing rotting wood and leaf litter from natural habitats.

Avoid using insecticides in home gardens. Many insecticides commonly used to target pest beetles, such as the invasive Argentinian scarab, indiscriminately kill beneficial ground-dwelling beetle larvae.

And help scientists better understand beetle populations and their conservation needs by uploading beetle sightings to online platforms such as iNaturalist and Canberra Nature Mapr.

Public sightings can have a big impact. Participants in the annual Christmas Beetle Count have rediscovered seven species not seen for decades.

By protecting our valuable – and stunning – Australian beetles, we can ensure they survive for future generations to enjoy.

Tanya Latty, Associate Professor, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney and James Bickerstaff, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Australia National Insect Collection, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Spotify has just released its 2024 Spotify Wrapped, the music streaming site’s annual presentation of each user’s yearly listening habits. It gives you a fun recap of your most listened to songs, artists and genres from the past year – complete with stats like how many minutes you listened and your top genre “phases” or “moments”.

The tradition has seized the cultural zeitgeist throughout the whole year, with a lot of online discourse surrounding what music will top your listens for the year.

In addition to the exciting way the list is presented (aesthetically pleasing tiles, interactive elements), the answer to its ability to captivate may be found in one simple idea: we inherently like understanding ourselves.

But what does this mean? We can unpack this further in the psychological theories of self-concept, social comparison and social connection.

Self-concept

Self-concept is how we see ourselves. It develops from our experiences and our responses to these experiences.

Music is one of those unique mediums that reflects what we’ve experienced (for example, a break-up) and how we feel (sadness and yearning).

So, when we see a yearly list of our top artists, genres and songs, it’s like looking into a mirror that tells us who we’ve been throughout the year.

This drive towards self-reflection is likely because it fulfils some of our most fundamental human needs. Remember that time when everyone was doing the Myers-Briggs personality test?

In 1943, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow developed his theory of human needs.

According to this theory, humans have a need for esteem (gaining respect and recognition within our communities) and self-actualisation (realisation of one’s potential). Neither of these can occur without first an understanding of who we currently are. Sharing a list, then, is a way of saying to others, “this is me!”.

But sharing your Wrapped list serves more functions than simply self-expression. It facilitates social comparison and social connection.

Social comparison

In 1954, American social psychologist Leon Festinger published his social comparison theory.

He believed humans are naturally inclined to compare themselves to others. We constantly evaluate where we stand in relation to those around us.

When you post your Wrapped list, you aren’t just saying, “this is what I listened to” or “this is who I am”. You’re also inviting others to engage in a subtle social dialogue.

Seeing someone else with the same song on their list might spark a sense of connection. Seeing that you’re in the top 1% of Taylor Swift fans might make you feel even a little superior (and others a little envious).

(As a side note, I hope this happens to me again this year.)

Seeing someone else’s Wrapped can also inspire and validate. If a friend’s list includes a mix of genres you’ve never explored, you might feel encouraged to branch out. Or you might see someone else’s list and feel relieved you’re not the only one obsessed with an artist.

Whether conscious or subconscious, these comparisons drive engagement with Spotify.

Social connection

Sharing our Spotify Wrapped satisfies another fundamental human need: belonging.

Humans are inherently social creatures who want to feel loved and accepted. Music is one of the oldest ways we’ve connected with one another.

Sharing our Wrapped lists isn’t just about showing off who we are, but about finding common ground. It’s about finding your tribe, a group of people we can feel safely connected to.

This is even more important during a period in which people’s opinions are becoming more divided and for a younger generation where loneliness is becoming an increasing problem.

Building on your own wrap

This urge to know about yourself and to share is very human.

This year, however, I challenge you to go beyond just dropping a like on someone’s story.

Sure, the dopamine hit is great and is part of what keeps us coming back to this yearly ritual. But it takes more than that to meet our need for connection.

This year, use Spotify Wrapped to start up a conversation with someone. Maybe about how their experiences and feelings this year led to the songs appearing on their list. You might learn something new about them and create or revitalise a meaningful connection.

And that’s a wrap.

Kelvin (Shiu Fung) Wong, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When I was asked to write about Arts Project Australia’s survey show at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Intimate Imaginaries, the term “outsider art” popped unbidden into my mind. As a term it is truly unwanted here, and indeed anywhere in contemporary art discourse.

Despite its origins, in the book of the same name by Roger Cardinal, for use in describing art that emerges outside of the official culture of the art school and gallery system, there is something exclusive about this designation. But let us name it to tame it.

The idea of the “outsider” is instructive in the sense that it draws our attention to the margin and by extension, the centre. The insider is, by definition, at the centre of things. The outsider is on the margins, in some way less representative of the whole. This simply doesn’t hold water when applied to Intimate Imaginaries.

For this is art of immediacy, this is art at the heart of where we live.

Reflecting Australia

Arts Project Australia has been supporting artists with intellectual disabilities for more than 50 years.

Their work in championing these artists cannot be underestimated in terms of its social impact, nor the quality of art. While their artists are characterised by their diversity, they punch above their weight in painting, drawing, ceramic and soft sculpture.

Much of Intimate Imaginaries put me in mind of the small revolution wrought by artists of the post second world war period who brought the industrialised, urbanised, capitalist society into focus through their choice of material and subject matter. Think of nouveau realisme (Daniel Spoerri, Arman), neo dada (power couple Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns) and pop art in Britain and America (Claes Oldenberg, Marjorie Strider, Rosalyn Drexler).

Intimate Imaginaries cleaves very close to that democratic vision. This is art reflecting back at us what it is to live in contemporary Australia. We see people, places, things and experiences close to our everyday suffused with a vitality often left wanting in more overtly political or theory burdened contemporary art.

While the idea of the everyday is very present in the show, there are also examples of other forms of contemporary practice.

Seriality, in the form of diaphanous circular forms, are a daily practice for Fulli Andrinopoulos, in their untitled works across many years. The practice of repeating key motifs or icons can be found throughout Modernism in the work of Josef Albers, who painted squares almost exclusively for the later part of his career, or in the work of our own John Nixon.

Andrinopoulos’ practice recalls Om Kawara’s Today series of date paintings as well as the Japanese art of Shodo, specifically the ensō , the circular form which symbolises the universe (Dharmadhatu), the zen mind and mu (emptiness).

In video performance from multi-disciplinary artist Chris O’Brien, O’Brien inhabits the police procedural, scaffolding his characters with catch phrases and poignant improvisations. His work calls to mind the deft mix of surrealist banality found in the work of Heath Franco and his sometime collaborator Matthew Griffin.

The televisual for O’Brien is an extension of his wider engagement with suburbia as evidenced in his ceramic and soft sculptural work.

Soft sculpture, and the ceramic renderings of soft forms, is also a highlight of the show in the work of Terry Williams, reminiscent for me of the work of aeroplane obsessive, Hans-Jörg Georgi.

Achieving authenticity

There are too many great artists to single out in the space available but if this exhibition has a uniting thread or theme, it is that of authenticity.

These are artists seemingly untroubled by what they “should” make. These works positively thrum with affect; these are artists deeply connected to their subject matter.

While there is humour, there is little in the way of cynicism or ironic posturing. There is no shopping for the topical, no virtue signalling.

This is work that puts me in mind of Claude Levi Strauss’s notion of the bricoleur. French for “handyman” and the name of a chain of hardware stores in France, the bricoleur transforms the “at hand” into a model of their own vision, their sense of what it is that makes up and animates the world.

This is work that finds the sacred close at hand.

Not a transcendent, other worldly significance, but the sacred present in the stuff of the everyday. To take one of many examples, look at Lisa Reid’s ceramic work, Mum’s 1971 Elna Supermatic Sewing Machine (2024). I am transported to my mother’s side as she helped me make a tunic to be Richard the Lion Heart.

This work captures the talismanic quality that such objects can impress upon us. More than nostalgia, Reid confers upon this household object an alchemical power.

A related practice takes on another level of poignancy in the work of Alan Constable, a legally blind artist whose practice consists of meticulously transposing cameras into clay: equal parts a fascination with technology and artifice, and a redemptive curiosity.

Talking to curator Anthony Fitzpatrick, he addressed the title of the show, Intimate Imaginaries and spoke of the imaginary as constantly mediating our encounter with the material world; an overlay of meaning we interpose, so it reflects meaning rather than chaos back at us.

Magical realism seems another apt reference here. In this exhibition the world is seen with great clarity and yet not reduced to mindless matter ticking into entropy.

Rather, it is suffused, stuffed with liveliness and intra-personal significance.

It is no surprise Fitzpatrick chose to bring this important show to TarraWarra. He has form through his work with the DAX Centre which collects and exhibits the work of artists with mental illness. He clearly has a feeling for art as a matter of urgency, a sense-making necessity for us as humans. Here is a curator with a passion for art’s deep connection to the fundamentals of our humanity.

Intimate Imaginaries is at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, until March 10 2025.

Dominic Redfern, Associate Professor, School of Art, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Can you reach down and touch your toes without bending your knees? Can you reach both arms overhead? If these sound like a struggle, you may be lacking flexibility.

Flexibility is the ability to move a joint to through its full range of motion. It helps you perform most sporting activities and may prevent muscle injuries. And because most daily activities require a certain amount of flexibility (like bending down or twisting), it will help you maintain functional independence as you age.

Although there are many types of stretching, static stretching is the most common. It involves positioning a joint to lengthen the muscles and holding still for a set period – usually between 15 and 60 seconds. An example would be to stand in front of a chair, placing one foot on the chair and straightening your knee to stretch your hamstrings.

Static stretching is widely used to improve flexibility. But there are no clear recommendations on the optimal amount required. Our new research examined how long, how hard and how often you need to stretch to improve your flexibility – it’s probably less than you expect.

Assessing the data

Our research team spent the past year gathering data from hundreds of studies on thousands of adults from around the world. We looked at 189 studies of more than 6,500 adults.

The studies compared the effects of a single session or multiple sessions of static stretching on one or more flexibility outcomes, compared to those who didn’t stretch.

How long?

We found holding a stretch for around four minutes (cumulatively) in a single session is optimal for an immediate improvement in flexibility. Any longer and you don’t appear to get any more improvement.

For permanent improvements in flexibility, it looks like you need to stretch a muscle for longer – around ten minutes per week for the biggest improvement. But this doesn’t need to occur all at once.

How hard?

You can think of stretching as being hard, when you stretch into pain, or easy, when the stretch you feel isn’t uncomfortable.

The good news is how hard you stretch doesn’t seem to matter – both hard (stretching to the point of discomfort or pain) and easy stretching (stretching below the point of discomfort) equally improve flexibility.

How often?

If you are looking to improve your flexibility, it doesn’t matter how often you stretch each week. What is important is that you aim for up to ten minutes per week for each muscle that you stretch.

So, for example, you could stretch each muscle for a little more than one minute a day, or five minutes twice a week.

The amount of time you should spend stretching will ultimately depend on how many muscles you need to stretch. If you are less flexible, you will likely need to dedicate more time, given you’ll have more “tight” muscles to stretch compared to someone more flexible.

Can everyone improve their flexibility?

Encouragingly, it doesn’t matter what muscle you stretch, how old you are, your sex, or whether you are a couch potato or an elite athlete – everyone can improve their flexibility.

Static stretching can be done anywhere and at any time. And you don’t need any equipment. You can stretch while watching your favourite TV show, when in the office, or after walking the dog to help you relax. It’s a great way to start and end your day.

Although the exact stretches needed will depend on which muscles are “tight”, examples of some very common stretches include:

• placing one foot upon on bench and leaning forward at the waist while keeping your knee straight to stretch your hamstrings
• bending your knee and holding your ankle against your buttock to stretch your quadriceps muscles
• reaching one arm while bending your elbow to stretch your triceps muscles.

However, the best advice is to visit a qualified health professional, such as a physiotherapist or exercise physiologist, who can perform an assessment and prescribe you a list of stretches specific to your individual needs.

As you can see, it really isn’t too much of a stretch to become more flexible.

Lewis Ingram, Lecturer in Physiotherapy, University of South Australia; Grant R. Tomkinson, Professor of Exercise and Sport Science, University of South Australia, and Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Using the largest gravitational wave detector ever made, we have confirmed earlier reports that the fabric of the universe is constantly vibrating. This background rumble is likely caused by collisions between the enormous black holes that reside in the hearts of galaxies.

The results from our detector – an array of rapidly spinning neutron stars spread across the galaxy – show this “gravitational wave background” may be louder than previously thought. We have also made the most detailed maps yet of gravitational waves across the sky, and found an intriguing “hot spot” of activity in the Southern Hemisphere.

Our research is published today in three papers in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Ripples in space and time

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space and time. They are created when incredibly dense and massive objects orbit or collide with each other.

The densest and most massive objects in the universe are black holes, the remnants of dead stars. One of the only ways to study black holes is by searching for the gravitational waves they emit when they move near each other.

Just like light, gravitational waves are emitted in a spectrum. The most massive black holes emit the slowest and most powerful waves – but to study them, we need a detector the size of our galaxy.

The high-frequency gravitational waves created by collisions between relatively small black holes can be picked up with Earth-based detectors, and they were first observed in 2015. However, evidence for the existence of the slower, more powerful waves wasn’t found until last year.

Several groups of astronomers around the world have assembled galactic-scale gravitational wave detectors by closely observing the behaviour of groups of particular kinds of stars. Our experiment, the MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array, is the largest of these galactic-scale detectors.

Today we have announced further evidence for low-frequency gravitational waves, but with some intriguing differences from earlier results. In just a third of the time of other experiments, we’ve found a signal that hints at a more active universe than anticipated.

We have also been able to map the cosmic architecture left behind by merging galaxies more accurately than ever before.

Black holes, galaxies and pulsars

At the centre of most galaxies, scientists believe, lives a gargantuan object known as a supermassive black hole. Despite their enormous mass – billions of times the mass of our Sun – these cosmic giants are difficult to study.

Astronomers have known about supermassive black holes for decades, but only directly observed one for the first time in 2019.

When two galaxies merge, the black holes at their centres begin to spiral towards each other. In this process they send out slow, powerful gravitational waves that give us an opportunity to study them.

We do this using another group of exotic cosmic objects: pulsars. These are extremely dense stars made mainly of neutrons, which may be around the size of a city but twice as heavy as the Sun.

Pulsars spin hundreds of times a second. As they rotate, they act like lighthouses, hitting Earth with pulses of radiation from thousands of light years away. For some pulsars, we can predict when that pulse should hit us to within nanoseconds.

Our gravitational wave detectors make use of this fact. If we observe many pulsars over the same period of time, and we’re wrong about when the pulses hit us in a very specific way, we know a gravitational wave is stretching or squeezing the space between the Earth and the pulsars.

However, instead of seeing just one wave, we expect to see a cosmic ocean full of waves criss-crossing in all directions – the echoing ripples of all the galactic mergers in the history of the universe. We call this the gravitational wave background.

A surprisingly loud signal – and an intriguing ‘hot spot’

To detect the gravitational wave background, we used the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. MeerKAT is one of the most sensitive radio telescopes in the world.

As part of the MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array, it has been observing a group of 83 pulsars for about five years, precisely measuring when their pulses arrive at Earth. This led us to find a pattern associated with a gravitational wave background, only it’s a bit different from what other experiments have found.

The pattern, which represents how space and time between Earth and the pulsars is changed by gravitational waves passing between them, is more powerful than expected.

This might mean there are more supermassive black holes orbiting each other than we thought. If so, this raises more questions – because our existing theories suggest there should be fewer supermassive black holes than we seem to be seeing.

The size of our detector, and the sensitivity of the MeerKAT telescope, means we can assess the background with extreme precision. This allowed us to create the most detailed maps of the gravitational wave background to date. Mapping the background in this way is essential for understanding the cosmic architecture of our universe.

It may even lead us to the ultimate source of the gravitational wave signals we observe. While we think it’s likely the background emerges from the interactions of these colossal black holes, it could also stem from changes in the early, energetic universe following the Big Bang – or perhaps even more exotic events.

The maps we’ve created show an intriguing “hot spot” of gravitational wave activity in the Southern Hemisphere sky. This kind of irregularity supports the idea of a background created by supermassive black holes rather than other alternatives.

However, creating a galactic-sized detector is incredibly complex, and it’s too early to say if this is genuine or a statistical anomaly.

To confirm our findings, we are working to combine our new data with results from other international collaborations under the banner of the International Pulsar Timing Array.

Matthew Miles, Postdoctoral Researcher in Astrophysics, Swinburne University of Technology and Rowina Nathan, Astrophysicist, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Miss, miss, can I play with your robot?”

The question comes from a young local school girl standing in front of our stall at Barunga Festival, 80 kilometres southeast of Katherine in the Northern Territory. She points at our broken robot. We are hot, tired and getting ready to pack up, and explain to her that it is no longer working.

She insists she would like to play with it anyway. So we concede. In five minutes, she has fixed it and returns a fully functional robot.

Not for the first time, we wonder about the new discoveries and innovations humanity is missing out on because remote and rural children are not given genuine opportunities to engage and follow careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

For the past four years, we have been on the road with STEM outreach in remote communities. We have recently returned home from this year’s trip. Our work shows these children don’t have to miss out.

Fewer opportunities

STEM skills are becoming core competencies for most job types and are identified as a key tool for long-term economic growth and global competitiveness.

Australia will need 312,000 additional technology workers by 2030 to meet industry demand.

Filling this gap is made harder by the fact that in Australia, 15-year-old students from remote areas lag behind in science by an average of 1.5 years, compared to those from metropolitan areas. They also perform significantly below the international average in mathematics.

A major factor responsible for this is that remote students have fewer career and education opportunities, poorer access to resources and a fragmented network of contacts for career advice.

It is also harder for rural and remote schools to obtain staff who are adequately qualified to teach STEM subjects. Remote children don’t have access to the same STEM experiences as city kids, who can visit their local – and large – science museums. For remote children, even basic activities such as the classic volcano experiment (using baking soda and vinegar) can be a novelty.

But this does not indicate a lack of talent for STEM.

A full day STEM extravaganza

We have worked on STEM engagement and outreach in remote areas of the Amazon, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and northern Australia.

For the past four years, our Radicle Centre team from Charles Darwin University has been delivering STEM engagement and outreach to remote and rural communities and schools in the Northern Territory. During our roadshow, undergraduate and postgraduate students from STEM fields join our crew, sharing their passion for science and technology.

Our roadshow has visited the same schools since 2020. Each year, we offer STEM workshops that are contextualised to students’ experiences and environment. For example, the workshops usually portray fauna, flora and stories from the Northern Territory.

It is a full school day STEM extravaganza! In 2024, we engaged with over 400 children from nine remote and rural schools and communities in the Northern Territory.

These kinds of outreach programs can play an important role in rural and remote areas by building, supporting, and maintaining STEM capability – provided they recognise, respect, and tailor their content to the local context.

Teachers welcome our visits, as in most cases there are very few opportunities for STEM activities at their schools.

Despite this lack of opportunity, many children who live in these parts of the world seem to have a knack for science and technology. From a wind-powered Christmas tree complete with lights created by school students in the Kikori Region of Papua New Guinea, to a super-fast miniature solar car designed by two school students from the Northern Territory – we are consistently wowed by the talent in remote regions.

A holistic approach is needed

Many children we have met every year confidently tell us they would like to become scientists, engineers or IT professionals. Which leads to a complex question: what is next for them?

Fewer rural and remote students attend university than those living in cities. And those who leave home to attend university face financial, personal and social challenges.

To truly support remote students who are undertaking university STEM courses, there is a need for a more holistic approach.

In Brazil, for example, university students from remote locations are offered a full assistance package that includes free accommodation and meals at university, as well as a stipend, and social and psychological support. Such approaches are few and far between in Australia.

Building an inclusive STEM workforce requires a long-term commitment from individuals, industry and the government.

Diversity drives innovation. The lack of support for rural and remote students to follow careers in STEM has wide implications.

It can be personally devastating for those that have potential but were never given the chance to develop it. But it also comes at a high cost to our society, which is deprived of a diverse STEM workforce and consequently will never benefit from the discoveries and innovations that our remote youth could make, if given the opportunity.

Carla Eisemberg, Senior Lecturer in STEM Pathways, Charles Darwin University and Sarah Ruth Sutcliffe, Manager - CDU Radicle Centre, Charles Darwin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s a common myth that only food of animal origin, such as meat, seafood, eggs and dairy, can give you food poisoning.

But many plant-based foods, such as burgers, salads or desserts, can also contain disease-causing microbes (pathogens), yet appear perfectly fine.

As we head into the warmer months, here’s what you need to think about to keep you and your party guests safe from food-borne illness if you’re serving plant-based food.

With a little preparation, you can make your next summer barbecue or picnic memorable for all the right reasons.

It’s a risky time of year

Summer means get-togethers with families and friends, at the beach, in the park and at home – in the heat, sometimes without access to refrigeration, or with food left out on the table.

And plant-based foods will likely be on the menu, such as burgers, salads and fruit.

There’s often no easy way to tell if food is safe to eat. It doesn’t have to look spoiled, with telltale signs it’s gone bad, such as unpleasant changes in smell or texture. So even if a food doesn’t look or smell “off” it can still make you or your guests sick.

Depending on the food’s available nutrients, acidity, water content and how it has been processed and stored, plant-based food can still provide the right conditions for pathogens to grow, yet look perfectly fine.

So let’s take a look a look at an Australian barbecue, with a spread including plant-based burgers, salads and fruit.

1. Burgers

Vegan barbecue items such as lentil burgers and processed plant-based patties contain high levels of protein and moisture. This may promote the growth of bacteria if they’re are not properly cooked or stored.

For example, a study in Finland tested vacuum sealed vegetarian sausages and found a high proportion contained Clostridium botulinum spores. This is the organism that causes botulism, a rare illness affecting the nervous system that can be fatal if untreated.

2. Salads

Starchy salads, such as ones containing potato, pasta or rice, are prone to contamination by Bacillus cereus, a species of bacteria widespread in the environment. It produces heat-stable spores that survive cooking. The bacteria then multiply when the food is stored in warm temperatures.

Leafy greens and raw sprouts, such as alfalfa, are also often implicated in outbreaks of illnesses caused by Escherichia coli (or E. coli for short) and Salmonella because these items are usually eaten raw.

Salads and other dishes that require lots of handling during preparation can also be contaminated with pathogens in the kitchen.

For example, many people naturally carry Staphylococcus aureus in their nose. These bacteria can end up in food and produce toxins if the cook doesn’t wash their hands properly before handling food.

People who handle food are also often linked to foodborne outbreaks of norovirus due to poor hand hygiene.

These pathogens generally cause gut symptoms such as vomiting and/or diarrhoea that will get better in about a few days to a week. However, some people will have severe or life-threatening complications. For example, shiga toxin produced by E. coli is a frequent cause of haemolytic uraemic syndrome, a serious condition that can lead to permanent kidney damage or death.

3. Fruit

While many people are familiar with the food safety risks of desserts containing custard or cream, fewer may be aware of the risks associated with the humble fruit platter.

Fruit platters can be risky as cutting the fruit can transfer bacteria naturally present on the peel or rind to the internal surfaces.

In 2018, 22 cases of listeriosis were linked to eating cantaloupes (rockmelons) supplied by an Australian grower. Last year in the United States, a deadly outbreak of salmonellosis was also traced to eating contaminated cantaloupes.

Frozen berries have also been implicated in multiple outbreaks of hepatitis A in Australia and overseas in recent years.

What can I do?

If you’re preparing plant-based food for a barbecue or picnic this summer, here’s how to minimise the risk of making you or your guests sick:

• before handling food wash your hands well, separate raw and cooked food, and work with clean utensils and surfaces. This is to avoid contaminating food yourself, and to avoid contamination between foods

• cook items such as plant-based burgers and vegetarian sausages until piping hot

• after cooking starchy foods such as rice, pasta and potatoes, transfer them to a shallow container to cool on the counter. Then place the container in the fridge. Don’t put these starchy items in the fridge hot because this raises the temperature inside the fridge, which could allow faster growth of microbes

• avoid buying damaged or bruised fruit and vegetables, and store cut fruit in the fridge

• transport food to an event in an insulated bag or ice box containing ice bricks and take it out only when it is time to serve

• once food has been served, leftovers should be covered and returned to the fridge or an insulated container. If the food has been out of the fridge for four hours or longer (including storage, preparation, transport and serving), throw it out.

It is also worth considering how much food you really need. It’s easy to over-cater, creating leftovers that can make you sick if not stored correctly.

Sarah McLean, Lecturer in Environmental Health, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On Tuesday, Commonwealth Bank announced it was planning to move customers using one of its legacy accounts to its newer “Smart Access” account.

The catch? That migrated customers would then be charged a $3 “assisted withdrawal fee” whenever they took money out at a bank branch, post office or over the phone.

The move sparked uproar, with politicians on both sides immediately calling for a rethink of the decision.

On Wednesday, they got one, sort of. Commonwealth Bank announced it would pause the account changes for six months for the “10%” of affected individuals it said would be worse off under the change.

The spat has drawn attention to the fight over what’s fair in the effort to keep cash and bank branches alive for the Australians who still rely on them.

Clearly, letting the banks charge their own extra fees is a political non-starter. But the government has some other ideas, including a cash mandate for essentials and a possible new rural services levy to keep branches open.

Why is it so important to keep bank branches open and cash access alive, particularly in the regions? How might a levy work, and what are the alternatives?

Losing access hurts the regions

Since 2017, more than 2,000 bank branches have closed across Australia. Many of the losses have been in rural areas.

Demographic changes and population decline in rural areas, a shift to digital banking and a continued fall in cash use all mean there is simply far less foot traffic.

Branches themselves are costly to maintain. In addition to rent, wages and security costs, it is expensive to move cash around the country – often prohibitively so for the more remote reaches of Australia.

Rural bank branch closures can have significant social and economic impacts on rural communities, disadvantaging them in comparison to those in urban areas.

Of particular concern are vulnerable groups who may lack reliable transportation options or adequate internet access.

Losing a local banking presence can also have serious impacts on small businesses. Credit access is constrained if credit assessors based in urban areas fail to understand the needs of rural businesses.

Some businesses are highly dependent on cash and need access to branches to manage their cash “float” (used for providing change and covering minor expenses).

Reliable access to cash is also particularly important for businesses based in remote regions who may have unstable network access (needed to operate EFTPOS machines), or in sectors such as tourism.

A rural services levy

Last month, it was revealed that Treasury was considering a new levy on Australia’s banks to help fund regional banking.

Under the proposal, the levy paid by each bank would depend on the number of regional branches and ATMs it maintained, relative to its household deposits.

Preliminary estimates reported in the Australian Financial Review suggest the banks with large regional networks would be the biggest beneficiaries of such a scheme, as you’d expect.

This includes Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, estimated to receive about $200 million a year under the proposal. NAB and Rabobank could also be net beneficiaries due to their large agribusiness presence.

Banks with an online-only presence, such as ING and Macquarie, would predictably be among the biggest losers, a group which also includes Commonwealth and Westpac.

It’s estimated these banks could pay individual levies north of $60 million a year. For Westpac, it could be more than $100 million.

Could there be unintended consequences?

Some have expressed concerns that imposing such a penalty on online-only banks would further stifle competition in what is already a noncompetitive sector.

Between them, Australia’s big four banks currently control more than 75% of the mortgage and deposit market.

There’s also a broader risk that bank levies get passed on to customers in the form of higher mortgage rates or lower interest rates on deposits.

Research examining a levy imposed on German banks in 2011 found that on average, regional banks raised their lending rates by around 0.14% in response. That’s equivalent to more than half of the typical 0.25% move in the RBA cash rate.

Lessons from around the world

Australia isn’t the only country struggling with the challenges of regional banking.

Direct levies are rare. However, a variety of other policies focused on regulatory mandates have aimed to provide and maintain access to banking in regional areas.

India has experimented with mandates to maintain branch networks in smaller towns and rural areas.

In the US, the Community Reinvestment Act requires banks to meet the needs of regional communities, otherwise they face limits on expansion.

In Canada and the UK, banks are required to consult with communities before closing branches and must provide alternatives, such as mobile banking.

In South Africa, there is a combination of mandated services in remote areas and incentives that see banks earning points under a formal economic inclusion and empowerment framework.

Leaning on the post office

Across several countries, the post office has played a crucial role in providing basic banking services, similar to the Bank@Post program run by Australia Post.

In consultation with communities, expanding the Bank@Post program could be one of the most viable ways to support regional banking into the future.

Expanding banking services could further offer a “win-win” for Australia Post. Its own branches are also dealing with lower foot-traffic as fewer letters are sent.

The UK’s banking hub system, in which major banks are members of a not-for-profit company and operate through the Post Office, offers one possible framework for such an expansion.

Lee Smales, Associate Professor, Finance, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia’s economic growth remains in the slow lane, at only 0.3% for the September quarter, keeping Australia close to recession territory.

However, the national accounts data released on Wednesday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) puts growth slightly higher than the snailish 0.2% recorded the previous quarter.

Although growth is painfully slow, this could well be seen by next year as the turning point when the trend started to move into positive territory.

Slowest growth in 4 years

The annual rate of growth, 0.8% since September 2023, is the slowest since 2020.

Most of it was driven by public-sector spending and investment. The main government spending was for energy rebates, plus social benefits including the National Disability Insurance Scheme and aged care. Public investment included roads, hospitals and imports of defence equipment.

Gross domestic product (GDP) per head of population continues to fall, for the seventh consecutive quarter. Were it not for immigration, Australia’s growth would be going backwards – what many commentators call a per capita recession.

Cost of living still hurting

This means that average Australians’ standard of living, as measured by GDP, continues to decline. Not that GDP is the only thing that matters. GDP is limited – it only measures the dollar value of goods and services produced in Australia.

Thirty-six years ago, feminist economist Marilyn Waring wrote If Women Counted, pointing out that GDP did not measure the value of unpaid work (mostly by women) and nature.

That said, most people would prefer economic growth in their pockets, rather than living standards going backwards. It is why cost-of-living pressures – despite inflation falling – continue to bite. The government will be desperately hoping this statistic turns around before the election.

There is some good news for households in the ABS release. Disposable income rose, due to wages growth and income tax cuts. So households were able to save more, with the saving ratio growing from 2.4% to 3.5%. That is, more Australian families can set money aside for the future. It’s not yet at pre-COVID levels but heading in the right direction.

Productivity drops

Australia’s productivity, as measured by GDP per hour worked, declined by 0.8% over the year to September 2024. This is a worry. The most effective way to lift living standards over the longer term is to improve productivity.

Neither government nor academic economists agree on why our productivity has dropped, and solutions remain elusive. Some of them involve increasing investment in skills and training, and more effective use of capital resources.

On that latter element, there may be relief down the track. The good news is that business investment in machinery, equipment and software remained high. In comments released with Wednesday’s figures, the ABS said:

the last time we saw sustained levels of investment this high was during the mining construction boom between 2012 and 2014.

Other things being equal, more business investment in capital should give rise to higher productivity.

Australia’s slow GDP growth largely reflects high interest rates. By keeping interest rates high, the Reserve Bank of Australia makes it more expensive for businesses to borrow money to hire new staff or buy new equipment.

This puts the brakes on business growth, pulls the economy downwards, and helps control inflation. That is what the Reserve Bank is aiming for. Inflation has indeed fallen, to its lowest rate since the March quarter in 2021.

In that sense the low growth number for September may be good news for borrowers. The RBA won’t be as fearful of cutting interest rates and overheating the economy - there is little chance of that.

Stephen Bartos, Professor of Economics, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Charles Dickens is often mistakenly credited with inventing modern Christmas. But his writing did give us a unique insight into the ways both ordinary and elite Victorians celebrated the festive season.

Writing in his magazine, Household Words, in December 1850, Dickens described the gifts and decorations on a typical Christmas tree in a middle-class household.

There were rosy cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves … there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, all kinds of boxes … there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation cards, bouquet-holders … imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, ‘There was everything, and more.’

“Everything, and more” may sound like a modern retail slogan, but many of these things can be made at home with things you already own. So if you’re looking to cut down on your consumption this year, you may benefit from recreating some Victorian DIY projects.

1. Cornucopias

In December 1848, a newspaper printed an illustration of Victoria and Albert’s Christmas tree. The image prompted a great deal of public interest, which has frequently been credited with popularising the Christmas tree in Britain.

Victoria and Albert’s tree includes a number of what Dickens refers to as “sweetmeat boxes”. These could be as simple as a box of sweets from a confectioner’s or a more elaborate lacquered miniature chest. Many families, though, would have had a simpler variation, like the cornucopia.

These could easily be made at home. The cornucopia was created by rolling a sheet of card or thick paper into a cone, glueing it and then knotting a ribbon across the opening. It can then be filled with small sweets and hung from the tree.

The cornucopia (Latin for “horn of plenty”) embodied the two sides of Victorian Christmas: thrift and indulgence. Easy and cheap to make, it embodied the values of economy and efficiency, but its contents promised the material luxuries of the festive season.

If you’re looking to cut down on waste, try recycling a newspaper or toilet roll as the base for your cornucopia.

2. Christmas wrapping

Want to capture the style of an early Victorian Christmas and save money? Get rid of the shop-bought wrapping paper. The tradition of wrapping presents only became widespread in the mid-to-late 19th century.

The rise of gift wrapping was closely related to the move from homemade to shop-bought gifts. Although shops would wrap purchases in white or brown paper, re-wrapping presents with your own paper was thought to make them more personal. As the historian Judith Flanders notes in Christmas: A Biography (2017):

Wrapping a gift … was a way of decontaminating it, both of marking that it had been removed from the world of the shop, and of associating care and the personal with otherwise mass produced items.

Try wrapping your gifts using recycled pieces of fabric and thread from the home for that personal touch.

3. Conversation cards

The “conversation cards” mentioned by Dickens were a popular Victorian Christmas amusement. The cards consisted of two illustrated decks: questions being asked by cartoon men, and answers provided by cartoon women. A man’s question card might ask: “Can you find a place in your heart for me?” A woman’s answer card might respond: “You do make me laugh.”

Male players could choose a particular card from their hand, to which female players would choose an appropriate answer. Alternatively, cards might be drawn blindly from the tops of the two decks for comic effect. These rules were not dissimilar to the modern game Cards Against Humanity. The “conversation” was primarily between the characters on the cards, but inevitably prompted conversation between players.

Victorian packs of the cards occasionally surface on auction sites (often for high prices), but homemade variations can be easily produced. Modern versions could expand the questions and answers to move beyond the romantic topics of the Victorians – or at least allow the female characters to ask some of the questions.

4. Celebrate Twelfth Night with a performance

Although modern retail culture would have us believe that Christmas is well under way by the end of November, Victorians were in no doubt that the 12 days of Christmas started, rather than ended, on December 25.

As a result, in some parts of the country (particularly London), Twelfth Night was just as celebrated as Christmas Day itself. Dickens saw his annual Twelfth Night party as an opportunity to perform his amateur magic show. He described the rehearsals in a letter of December 31 1842:

I have purchased … the entire stock in trade of a conjurer, the practice and display whereof is entrusted to me … if you could see me conjuring the company’s watches into impossible tea caddies, and causing pieces of money to fly, and burning pocket handkerchiefs without hurting ‘em – and practising in my own room, without anybody to admire – you would never forget it as long as you live.

The last thing many of us want to do in January is spend more money, and indeed Victorian celebrations of Twelfth Night tended to be restricted to those who could afford to take a full 12 days of Christmas off. But marking the occasion needn’t be expensive.

Charades was a popular Victorian Christmas and Twelfth Night entertainment, as was reading aloud. Performing all of A Christmas Carol might be a stretch, but there are shorter Christmas pieces in Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836). Reintroducing Twelfth Night would make a fitting end to a neo-Victorian Christmas.

Christopher Pittard, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Last week, Parliament passed sweeping reforms to Australia’s aged care system. These “once-in-a-generation” changes, set to begin next year on July 1, aim to improve how care is provided to older Australians at home, in their communities and in nursing homes.

The new Aged Care Act focuses on improving quality and safety, protecting the rights of older people and ensuring the financial sustainability of aged care providers.

A key change is the introduction of a new payment system, requiring wealthier people to contribute more for non-clinical services.

If you – or a loved one – are planning for aged care, here’s what the changes could mean for you.

What to expect from the home care overhaul

Over the past decade, there’s been a noticeable shift towards “ageing at home”. The number of Australians using home care has more than quadrupled, surpassing those in nursing homes.

To meet growing demand, the government is adding 107,000 home care places over the next two years, with a goal to reduce wait times to just three months.

Starting July 1 2025, Support at Home will replace the Home Care Packages program. The table below shows some of the key differences between these two programs.

Home Care Packages are currently delivered under four annual government subsidy levels, covering care and provider management costs. Under Support at Home, the number of home care budget levels will double to eight, with the highest level increasing to A$78,000.

This aims to provide more tailored support and accommodate those needing higher levels of care.

Under the new system, recipients will receive quarterly budgets aligned to their funding level and work with their chosen provider to allocate funds across three broad service categories:

• clinical care, such as nursing or physiotherapy

• independence support, including personal care, transport and social support

• everyday living assistance, such as cleaning, gardening and meal delivery.

Clinical care services will be fully government-funded, as these are crucial to supporting health and keeping people out of hospitals.

But recipients will contribute to the costs of independence and everyday living services under a new payment model, reflecting the government’s stance that these are services people have traditionally funded themselves over their lifetimes.

This will replace the basic daily fee and income-tested care fee that some people currently pay. Contributions will vary by income and assets (based on the age pension means test) and by service type.

Support at Home also includes additional funding for specific needs:

• older Australians with less than three months to live will receive priority access to $25,000 in funding over 12 weeks

• up to $15,000 will be available for assistive technologies and home modifications, eliminating the need to reserve home care budgets for these.

What if I or my loved one is already receiving a Home Care Package?

If you were receiving a package, on the waiting list, or assessed as eligible for one on September 12 2024, the government’s “no worse off” principle guarantees you won’t pay more under the new system.

Current recipients will have their Support at Home budget aligned with their existing package, and any unspent funds will roll over.

How nursing home fees will change

Australia’s nursing home sector is struggling financially, with 67% of providers operating at a loss. To ensure sustainability and support upgrades to facilities, the government is introducing major funding changes.

What stays the same?

The Basic Daily Fee, that everyone in nursing homes pays, set at 85% of the basic age pension (currently $63.57 a day or $23,200 annually), will not change.

What’s changing?

The government currently pays a Hotelling Supplement of $12.55 per day per resident to cover everyday living services like cleaning, catering and laundry ($4,581 annually).

From July 1 2025, this supplement will become means-tested. Residents with annual incomes above $95,400 or assets exceeding $238,000 (or some combination of these) will contribute partially or fully to this cost.

Currently, residents with sufficient means also pay a means-tested care fee between $0–$403.24 per day. This will be replaced by a “non-clinical care contribution”, capped at $101.16 daily and payable for the first four years of care. Only those with assets above $502,981 or incomes above $131,279 (or some combination of these) will pay this contribution.

Importantly, no one will pay more than $130,000 in combined contributions for Support at Home and non-clinical care in nursing homes over their lifetime.

Changes to accommodation payments

The way nursing home accommodation costs are paid is also changing from July 1 2025:

• residents who pay their room price via a refundable lump sum will have 2% of their payment retained annually by the provider, up to a maximum of 10% over five years. For example, a $400,000 lump sum payment would result in $360,000 being refunded if a person stays five years or more, with the provider keeping $40,000

• daily accommodation payments (a rent-style interest charge) will no longer remain fixed for the duration of a person’s nursing home stay. Instead, these payments will be indexed twice annually to the Consumer Price Index

• providers will be able to set room prices up to $750,000 without government approval, an increase from the current $550,000 limit.

People with lower means (those who are fully subsidised by the government for their accommodation costs) will not be affected by these changes.

What if I own my home?

The treatment of the family home in means testing for nursing home costs will remain unchanged.

Its value is only assessed if no “protected person” (such as a spouse) lives in it, and even then, it’s capped at $206,039 (as at September 20 2024).

What happens to current nursing home residents?

The new rules for contributions and accommodation will apply only to those entering nursing homes from July 1 2025.

Existing residents will maintain their current arrangements and be no worse off.

Feeling overwhelmed?

These reforms aim to improve care delivery, fairness and sustainability, with the government emphasising that many older Australians – particularly those with lower incomes and assets – will not pay more.

The government has provided case studies to illustrate how home care and nursing home costs will differ under the new system for people at various income and asset levels.

Still, planning for aged care can be daunting. For more tailored advice and support, consider reaching out to financial advisors, services, or online tools to help you navigate the changes and make informed decisions.

Anam Bilgrami, Senior Research Fellow, Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This week, the government announced details of planned reforms to allow more Australians to access free or low-cost financial advice through their super funds or advice firms.

The reforms will create a new class of financial adviser, who will only need a diploma. They’ll be allowed to provide personalised advice on a targeted range of financial decisions, particularly regarding retirement planning and life insurance.

Some groups have already raised concerns in the wake of the announcement. These include that lowering the required qualification level to a diploma could lead to lower quality advice, and that some funds could find ways to charge new fees for no service.

For the reforms to succeed, the government will need to ensure quality regulation – and importantly, that the underserved customers it is targeting end up getting true value for money.

A new class of adviser

Currently, superannuation funds can offer free advice to their own members. But this is very limited in scope and restricted to the offerings within a fund.

They can also refer members to receive more comprehensive paid advice, either from within the fund or an external provider.

Traditional financial advisers need at least a bachelor’s degree. The new class of advisers will be a kind of “para-professional” in the advice space, expected to have diploma-level qualifications.

They’ll only be allowed to provide advice on products issued by “prudentially regulated entities”. These include superannuation, life insurance and retirement income products.

For example, a young person could get personalised advice on whether opting into selected life insurances would be a better choice than having no life insurance. That decision could be especially significant for someone early in their career or with a super balance under $6,000.

Superannuation investment choices made at age 21 can also make a huge difference to retirement income at 71.

Funds will be able to charge for this advice individually, or else by collectively spreading costs across all members.

The ability to charge individual, one-off fees (not ongoing and no commissions allowed) could open up a path for this new class of adviser to work within traditional advice firms – within limits.

That may be a useful strategy to boost the numbers of graduates choosing financial advice roles more broadly as a career.

The problem to solve

Navigating Australia’s financial system is complex – not least when it comes to planning for retirement. Personal financial advice is important at all stages of life to increase inclusion and fairness, and improve financial outcomes.

Superannuation funds have an obligation under the Retirement Income Covenant to help members choose retirement income products, but have been without affordable advice options.

At an average annual fee of $5,500, comprehensive financial advice is simply out of reach for many.

Even if this cost was somehow brought down, affordability isn’t the only issue.

Many Australians are reluctant to approach traditional financial advice firms. Some find themselves turned away at first contact, with firms giving preference to higher-income, higher-net-worth clients.

The practice of denying service to some clients can be especially frustrating for those who are willing and able to pay the asking price.

But it makes sense when you consider the incentives many financial advice firms face. These include making competitive profits in a relatively highly regulated emerging profession, faced with a tight labour market.

Without an alternative trustworthy advice option, many Australians will end up financially excluded.

So what are we willing to pay for advice?

One report commissioned by the Financial Services Council found most Australians don’t want to pay more than $500 a year for financial advice, but that willingness to pay depends on the scope.

However, some recent trials offering more detailed retirement advice below the level of comprehensive advice, suggest there may be willingness to pay at around the $900 mark.

But both of these figures fall well short of the current estimated average cost of financial advice of $5,500.

The other option, using superannuation balances to pay advice fees up to a cap, has been problematic, with some advisers charging up to $20,000 from members’ super funds.

What are the risks?

One criticism is that having a lower qualification requirement risks leaving Australians with lower quality advice.

It’s true the diploma-level qualification is lower than the bachelor-level or higher required for professional financial advisers. But it is proportionate to the new targeted scope of advice offered.

It will be up to the government to carefully regulate the industry to ensure the new class of adviser only provides advice within their expertise and authorisation, complies with the best interests duty and meets other obligations.

Another criticism is that charging advice fees collectively across a super fund could mean some members subsidise others and effectively pay “fees for no service”.

But it’s important to note that collective charging is already in place for a number of services that only selected members utilise at any point in time. This includes switching asset allocations, providing advice within a fund and operating call centre services.

It also has some established guardrails to protect members.

The details of charging arrangements would fall into the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s remit as regulatory guidance.

Value for money

If they proceed, the true test of these reforms will lie in whether Australians feel they are getting trustworthy service at the right price point.

What will that value for money look like? My analysis suggests advice for $300 to $500 a year that gets the basics right – superannuation asset allocations, life insurances, beneficiary forms and basic retirement planning.

If costs can be kept under $1,000 for more detailed retirement planning, it will put pressure on traditional advice firms to justify charging more for a similarly restricted scope of advice.

If well priced and well implemented, the new class of adviser could serve many more Australians, helping to normalise accessible, affordable advice.

Di Johnson, Senior Lecturer, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

People whose ring finger is longer than their index digit tend to drink more alcohol, new research shows. But why is this so?

The answer lies in our understanding of sex differences. Some sex differences are influenced by social factors, but others have their roots in our biology.

There are marked differences between how much alcohol men and women drink, with men consuming far more. The reason for this and many other sex differences can be found in our exposure to sex hormones (testosterone and oestrogen) in the womb.

The male foetus secretes testosterone from his testes while smaller amounts from the mother’s bloodstream diffuse into both male and female foetuses. At the same time, the mother’s oestrogen also finds its way to both male and female foetuses. So males experience higher prenatal testosterone in relation to oestrogen than do females.

Testosterone causes what are known as “organisational” changes in the brain and other organs in the foetus. These changes are then activated further in boys by a surge in testosterone at puberty.

It is thought that a record of our testosterone and oestrogen difference is found in the relative lengths of our index and ring fingers (second and fourth fingers or 2D:4D). That is, your finger ratio, or 2D:4D, reflects your exposure to sex hormones in the womb, such that long fourth fingers indicate high testosterone and low oestrogen.

Comparisons across many species with five-digit limbs have shown that sex differences in digit ratio are widespread. In animal experiments where testosterone was added at the foetal stage this results in offspring with the male form of digit ratio in mice, rats and monkeys. These sorts of experiments are not ethical to conduct in humans, so it remains a subject of debate.

Compared with women, men show higher alcohol consumption and more deaths associated with alcohol abuse. Could this sex difference be influenced in the foetus by “organisational” changes brought about by testosterone and oestrogen? A study my colleagues and I conducted considered this question by relating digit ratios to alcohol consumption patterns.

Drinking habits

Participants were students from the Medical University of Lodz in Poland. Alcohol abuse is a growing cause of death in Poland. The number of cases annually has increased from 4.6 to 7.0 per 100,000 since the beginning of the decade. And men are nine times more likely than women to die from alcohol-related causes.

Our study included 169 women and 89 men who completed the alcohol use disorders identification test (Audit), which asks questions about people’s drinking habits. We found that participants with long ring fingers relative to their index fingers reported higher Audit scores and higher consumption of alcohol per week. The relationship was present in men and women, but it was stronger in men.

Several studies have now found a relationship between long ring fingers relative to index fingers and alcohol consumption. A large web-based survey of self-measured finger lengths reported that national averages and individual values of digit ratios predicted alcohol consumption.

Studies in Europe and Asia have found alcohol-dependent patients have very long ring fingers relative to index fingers. Our data supports these findings and extends them to people who are not dependent on alcohol.

Finger ratio reports provide a window into our very early development. On the plus side, a longer ring finger (relative to the index finger) is associated with a healthy heart and high performance in distance running, football, rugby, basketball, skiing and surfing.

On the minus side, it is related to autism, ADHD and internet addiction and prostate cancer. The link between relative second- and fourth-digit length and alcohol consumption is a further piece in the jigsaw that highlights the powerful effect of prenatal sex hormones on our behaviour and physiology.

John Manning, Professor, Sport and Exercise Science, Swansea University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When the police and intelligence agencies of the five nations of the Five Eyes intelligence community come together and release a report, it’s a significant event.

The report, released on December 6, is the first of its kind. It’s remarkable that it focuses on youth radicalisation, giving case studies of young teenagers being radicalised through involvement in online platforms.

As the Australian Federal Police (AFP) point out, every single one of the counter-terrorism cases in Australia this year have involved minors or very young adults. ASIO says about 20% of its priority counter-terrorism cases involve minors.

Over the past four years, the AFP and its police partners have conducted 35 counter-terrorism investigations involving minors, with the youngest child being just 12. Most have resulted in charges being laid. Two teenagers, aged 14 and 16, have been convicted.

Tragically, by the time a police investigation commences, it’s often difficult to avoid life-changing prosecution and legal action. So this report, involving the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, is a wake-up call. It asks for parents, teachers and others working with teenagers to pay attention to the signs of online radicalisation.

It’s a pity, to say the least, that the report doesn’t do a better job of spelling out these early warning signs (broken links and clumsy acronyms don’t help). But the intent is sincere and the need urgent.

How does Australia deal with this?

In Australia, community workers and police have long focused on three areas of observable behavioural change:

• changes in expressed ideology or belief

• changes in relationships, including forming new friendships and abruptly breaking up with old friends

• atypical changes in actions involving transgressive behaviour, such as getting into trouble at school or possibly with police.

When there is change occurring simultaneously across these domains, there’s a high likelihood of something going on in a young person’s life, such as grooming and radicalisation, which requires intervention.

Individually, these sorts of changes are common in the lives of teenagers. But all three at once, particularly when there is an escalating level of change over time, is a good indication that more attention needs to be taken.

Fortunately, Australia has good systems in place, particularly in the large states of Victoria and New South Wales, to receive help by reaching out through police but involving trained professionals like psychologists and youth workers.

Help can be given to, first of all, determine what might be going on, seeing what sort of problem there is, and, if need be, making early interventions.

With the help of the public these sorts of early interventions, even though they involve liaising with police, we can avoid engaging with the law-enforcement system and the laying of criminal charges.

From the case studies in the Five Eyes report, it’s clear it’s not just terrorist groups such as Islamic State that are the problem. Neo-Nazi and other far-right extremist groups pose a threat, as well extremist networks involving a seemingly strange mixture of religious or political or other beliefs.

How does radicalisation happen?

It’s important to understand that radicalisation is essentially a social process. It can involve peers coming together and exacerbating behaviour or egging each other on to more extreme actions.

But more often, it involves an adult preying on a minor and grooming them to do things for an organisation or cause that the young person has little idea about at the outset.

This kind of exploitation often follows parallel lines to child sexual exploitation. From the perspective of a young teenager, they experience somebody showing interest in them, treating them as important and offering friendship. It’s primarily that need for friendship and acceptance that enables predatory actors to exploit young people.

In the report, it’s also clear that when a young person is going through a period of trauma, experiencing a loss, or some other disturbance, they are particularly vulnerable.

In some cases, a lonely child who is not neurotypical is preyed on and their social awkwardness exploited, with the false promise of friendship used to take them into a dark and harmful place.

For young people who have grown up online, social media can form part of the dangerous environment that exposes them to recruitment and radicalisation.

But it is not social media in itself, nor even extremist content, that causes the problem. It’s the relationships they form online.

Consequently, while there is a logic in limiting the access of young teenagers to social media, we need to be careful not to cut off lines of communication and drive them underground.

The key priority for those involved in the lives of young people, whether parents or teachers, is to converse with them. Understand the gaming and social platforms young people are on, the people that they meet and the ideas they come across.

It also means adults can talk about children before they’re radicalised and too difficult to reach.

There are good resources available, including training and networks of early responders. For these to work, parents and friends need to pay attention and speak up when they have concerns.

Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia is on the cusp of a once-in-a-generation transformation, as our energy systems shift to clean, renewable forms of power. First Nations peoples, the original custodians of this land, must be central to – and benefit from – this transition.

That is the key message of the federal government’s new First Nations Clean Energy Strategy, launched on Friday. The government has committed A$70 million to help realise its aims.

I was part of a committee that helped guide the government on the strategy. It involved more than a year of consultation with First Nations communities across Australia, plus input from industry and state and territory governments.

Australia has pledged to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Of the renewable energy infrastructure needed to achieve this, about half will be developed on First Nations land.

First Nations peoples have cared for Country for 65,000 years. Australia’s renewable energy transition must be on their terms. The strategy released today will guide this process – so let’s take a look at what it contains.

1. Get clean energy into First Nations communities

The strategy emphasises the need to establish renewable energy in First Nations communities and make homes more energy-efficient. Electricity supply to these communities is often limited, unreliable and more expensive than elsewhere in Australia.

Many remote communities across northern Australia also rely on back-up diesel power for much of the day. This is a highly polluting source of energy and hugely expensive to service.

Some remote communities use pre-paid electricity cards to access energy. This is expensive and those who cannot afford to pay often “self-disconnect” from the supply.

And remote First Nations houses – many of which are poorly built and insulated – can become dangerously hot which causes significant health problems.

2. Enable equitable partnerships

Equitable partnerships between First Nations peoples, industry and governments allow First Nations people to consent to projects on their terms. It also reduces risks, costs and delays for proponents.

The strategy aims to increase the capacity of First Nations peoples to actively take part in decisions about clean energy projects and policies.

First Nations people should have access to culturally appropriate advice and resources. This will arm them to better understand the opportunities and risks of, say, a solar farm proposed near their community.

It also means helping First Nations people participate in and benefit from projects – for example through skills training or help negotiating agreements.

3. Ensure First Nations people benefit economically

In times of significant economic change, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have usually been left behind. This time, history must not repeat.

Acceleration in Australia’s clean energy industry will create major economic and employment opportunities. First Nations peoples must be supported to seize them. For instance, First Nations peoples comprise just 1.9% of Australia’s clean energy workforce, which presents an enormous opportunity for increased participation.

Actions identified in the strategy include supporting First Nations energy businesses, including ensuring access to financial support. Other measures include developing a First Nations workforce by building on success stories such as the Indigenous Ranger program.

Recognition of Aboriginal land rights has led to a vast estate owned or managed by Indigenous people. The majority is in remote areas in northern Australia, far from population centres. But the Indigenous estate in south-eastern Australia is not insignificant and will prove vital in the new clean energy economies.

4. Put Country and culture at the centre

The strategy calls for First Nations peoples’ connection to land and sea Country, and their cultural knowledge and heritage, to be respected during the clean energy transition.

It acknowledges that clean energy harnesses the natural elements – such as sun, wind and water – and First Nations peoples’ knowledge of Country, developed over millennia, can greatly improve the way projects are designed and implemented.

It says governments and the clean energy industry must become more “culturally competent” so they can work collaboratively with First Nations peoples.

Towards autonomy and self-determination

Actions in the strategy are designed to complement the Closing the Gap agreement, which aims to close the health and life expectancy gap between First Nations peoples and non-Indigenous Australians. Closing the Gap targets include:

• realising economic participation and development
• social and emotional wellbeing
• access to information and services so First Nations people can make informed decisions about their lives.

Several priorities identified in the strategy are already in place, to some degree.

For example, the Capacity Investment Scheme – under which the government underwrites the risk of investing in new renewable energy projects – requires proponents to demonstrate First Nations engagement and commitments.

And New South Wales’ Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap requires energy proponents to meet First Nations targets for employment and procurement.

However, much work is needed to translate the new strategy into real benefits on the ground, and to realise the aspirations of First Nations peoples for autonomy and self-determination.

A hopeful initiative

First Nations peoples are already highly vulnerable to the damaging effects of climate change. It threatens to make their Country unlivable, leading to a new wave of dispossession. For that reason and others, we need the clean energy transition to work.

The strategy is an optimistic and hopeful initiative. Done right, it will ensure the continent’s original custodians benefit socially and economically from the enormous changes ahead.

Over the last 60 years, various government policies in Australia have sought to boost First Nations economic development. But the efforts have been stymied by a lack of capacity and resources.

If this new strategy is to succeed, further funding and ongoing monitoring is needed to ensure its aims are achieved.

As Australia bids to host the United Nations climate change conference in 2026, in partnership with Pacific nations, we must show a commitment to elevating the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples around the world – including on home soil.

Heidi Norman, Professor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, Convenor: Indigenous Land & Justice Research Group, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Recently, a landmark coronial inquiry into the deaths of four Indigenous women from domestic and family violence in the Northern Territory released its findings after a year-long investigation.

The coroner aimed to understand the systemic responses to an “epidemic of violence that is our national shame”, to then propose improvements to prevent future deaths.

This is not the first inquiry of its kind in the NT. This raises questions of what will be different this time and what actions will be taken.

Simultaneously, the government released its response to the Senate Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and children. Mentioned quietly amid a flurry of end-of-year bills, it said little of substance that will help save Indigenous women’s lives.

In a year when domestic and family violence has often been at the centre of public discussion, there’s still a lack of political appetite to help Indigenous women.

Coronial constraints

Judge Elisabeth Armitage delivered 35 recommendations to guide efforts in preventing future deaths from domestic violence in the NT. These were all informed by evidence presented during the inquiry.

However, while these recommendations will be submitted to the attorney-general and relevant agencies under the Coroner’s Act, there’s nothing to guarantee they’ll be implemented.

The agencies must report back to the coroner within three months on their response to the recommendations. But as with all coronial inquests, whether or not they’re enacted is up to the government.

Understanding the limitations of the Coroner’s Act is crucial. There have been myriad previous recommendations in the NT and across the country that have seen inconsistent follow-through and a lack of accountability in tracking their effectiveness in preventing deaths over time.

Anticipating this outcome, Armitage announced she would conduct a second major inquiry into domestic, family and sexual violence in August 2025. It will investigate eight deaths, allegedly related to domestic violence, since June 2024 in the NT. It will further be an opportunity, she said, to assess progress in implementing her recommendations from this inquest.

No new action

At the same time, the federal government responded to the murdered and missing Indigenous women and children senate inquiry. It “noted” the recommendations.

It was a disappointing re-announcement of a commitment of $4.4 billion in “new” funding to gender-based violence. This was previously announced in response to a rapid review that included $3.9 billion to support frontline legal assistance services.

The latter has already been widely critiqued as not being “new” funding but anticipated expenditure to maintain existing services.

They also reiterated that they released the first ever Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Action Plan to support the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. The action plan also included a $194 million investment.

An inaugural National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Family Safety Plan also has government support. To be launched in 2025, it would be informed by the work of the Senate inquiry.

Amid all this, there is nothing mentioned about any new funding commitments for Indigenous women and children in response to the inquiry.

Indeed, Greens Senator Dorinda Cox, who helped to establish the inquiry, expressed disappointment that the government has only addressed two of the ten recommendations.

With 12 Indigenous women having lost their lives to violence nationally between June and early November 2024, the pressing question remains: where is the national outrage? Moreover, where is the action?

Sceptism instead of support

Despite there being ready engagement and attention to domestic violence deaths generally by the Australian public, the deaths of Indigenous women are rarely seen in the national headlines.

The profound impact of death on families and communities is also unseen. Some communities suffer more than others.

Although some may grow weary of this issue, we can’t look away. The statistics reveal Indigenous women are seven times more likely than non-Indigenous women to be killed by a violent partner.

The ramifications of these deaths extend beyond loss of life. They affect children, leading to further systemic failures that have historically let down Indigenous women.

As families are left to cope with their loss, they often receive minimal support for their specific needs. In their grief, they typically form support groups with others who have faced similar tragedies, while navigating police and court systems.

Often, these systems didn’t protect their loved ones.

While victim services for those who have lost a loved one to murder exist, their support is limited and they are not culturally grounded to Indigenous communities. This can force families to seek help from nonspecialist services or forgo assistance altogether.

Our research highlights that the systems designed to protect vulnerable people respond inadequately to Indigenous women. Cripps (one of the authors of this piece) reviewed the cases of 151 Indigenous women lost to intimate partner violence. Through coronial data she found, like Judge Armitage, that many of these deaths are entirely preventable.

Soon to be released research by Longbottom (also an author of this piece) identified multiple systemic failures that contribute to reduced support, which in turn puts the lives of Indigenous women at increased risk. These include lack of training, inconsistent application of domestic violence guidelines and delayed service responses.

Significant delays from emergency personnel compound the issue further. Responses to calls for help are incorrectly downgraded to welfare checks, even when an active protection order exists.

During the NT inquiry, it was revealed that police records frequently included notations suggesting a woman “may make false allegations”. Armitage highlighted that such remarks not only undermine the credibility of the victims, but also adversely affect the urgency and effectiveness of subsequent police responses.

This pattern of behaviour reflects a broader issue within the system that often prioritises scepticism over immediate support for women in risky and vulnerable situations.

Follow the evidence

Our research highlights the importance of Indigenous communities leading response development. Families’ stories enhance these responses, while Indigenous experts provide supporting evidence, and services ensure effective operational support.

Carceral measures, such as increased policing, are ineffective. This underscores the need for a place-based, culturally grounded approach that connects with Indigenous communities, not punishes them.

Aligning with the NT coroner’s findings, our research emphasises the urgent need for systemic reform.

However, we believe the coroner’s recommendations, along with those from the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, do not sufficiently address the existing issues. Governments often can and do selectively choose the recommendations they are going to implement, despite evidence to do otherwise.

Responding to domestic and family is complex. Preventing deaths demands sustainable, evidence-based reforms that are both accountable and adaptable to local situations.

These reforms must be shaped by the voices of those with direct experience, ensuring their insights guide policies and interventions. It’s crucial that systems are open to scrutiny and feedback, continuously evolving to meet the needs of those affected.

Everyone has a responsibility to act. Our women’s lives are at stake and we must commit to creating a society where they are protected and valued. Inaction is not an option.

Kyllie Cripps, Director Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, CI ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women (CEVAW), School of Philosophical, Historical & International Studies (SOPHIS), School of Social Sciences (SOSS), Faculty of Arts, Monash University and Marlene Longbottom, Associate Professor, Indigenous Education & Research Centre, James Cook University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When Finlay Browne died at just 16 years old, “Down syndrome” was listed on his death certificate as a cause of death.

But Finlay did not die of Down syndrome. A coroner found earlier this year that the teenager died due to complications from a bowel obstruction, and noted “issues concerning the adequacy of care and treatment” provided at his local hospital.

Since Finlay died his family have spoken out many times about the need to improve health care for people with an intellectual disability.

But sadly Finlay is not alone. Our new study published in The Lancet Public Health shows Australians with disability are around four times more likely to die than people without disability.

Our research

We looked at census data from more than 15 million Australians aged 0–74 between 2011–20, and analysed death certificate information of those who died during this period (around 463,000 people).

We found people with disability are dying of conditions such as cancer, heart disease, chronic lung conditions and diabetes at a much higher rate than the rest of the population.

Men with disability are dying at almost four times the rate of men without disability. Meanwhile, women with disability are dying at almost five times the rate of their non-disabled peers.

While our study drew on large data sets and used complex statistical techniques, we are conscious that the dots on our graphs represent many premature and preventable deaths of people like Finlay.

Why the disparity?

The diseases causing the early deaths of many Australians with disability are generally more common among people living in disadvantaged circumstances. We know poverty, poor-quality housing and exclusion from the health system contribute to early death. These circumstances are more common among Australians with disability compared to the overall population.

People with disability face the same issues as many other Australians when trying to access good health care, such as lack of availability, rising costs and long wait times. But they also face additional challenges. For example:

• buildings where health services are located are not always accessible to people with disability

• people with disability sometimes experience discrimination by health-care staff including GPs, nurses and hospital staff

• people with disability often see multiple health professionals for the same health conditions and report a lack of communication between health professionals treating them.

Unfortunately the results of our study are not surprising. People with disability, families and advocacy organisations have spoken for many years about poor health outcomes for people with disability, as well as early deaths that, with the right action, could have been prevented.

The recent Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability heard directly from people with disability about the impacts of poverty, poor housing and discrimination in the health system on health and wellbeing.

What can we do?

Our study is the first of its type and size in Australia, which is telling.

Historically, understanding patterns in causes of death has informed our public health priorities. But up until now, patterns in causes of death for people with disability have largely not been prioritised, gathered or analysed. With inadequate data, public health efforts have systematically neglected people with disability.

Yet poorer health outcomes for people with disability are not inevitable.

We need to see concerted, coordinated action across metropolitan, regional and rural Australia to prevent more unnecessary deaths. As a nation, we need to tackle the conditions in which many people with disability live – starting with poverty and the lack of affordable, accessible housing.

We also need to make health care more accessible and affordable for people with disability.

But, none of this will be enough if we don’t confront discrimination in health care head on. This will involve making changes in policies, processes and systems at all levels of health care that adjust for the needs of people with disability.

We also need to think about whether our general disease prevention strategies, some of which have been hugely successful, are reaching people with disability. For example, are people with disability able to access routine screening in the same way as others? Or are they missing out?

Ultimately, we need to debunk the myth that poor health is part and parcel of having a disability. What is inevitable is that Australians with disability will keep dying before their time unless we take action, and make the health and wellbeing of people with disability a national priority.

Yi Yang, Research Fellow, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne; George Disney, Research Fellow, Social Epidemiology, The University of Melbourne, and Kirsten Deane, Deputy Director, Melbourne Disability Institute, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) impacts the ability to maintain attention to tasks. Often, it also involves impulsive behaviour – saying or doing things without stopping to think first – as well as hyperactivity.

ADHD is the most common developmental disorder in childhood, affecting 5–8% of children worldwide.

Not all children and adolescents with ADHD need medication, particularly if they are functioning well at school and at home. Children with ADHD can also be supported with behavioural and educational strategies, as well as by working on the associated problems that commonly occur alongside ADHD, such as learning difficulties, emotional problems like anxiety, social challenges and autism spectrum disorder.

However, around four in five children with ADHD are prescribed medication.

One of the most common concerns parents have about ADHD medication is their child’s appetite and weight. So what can families expect? And how can parents optimise their child’s calories and nutrition?

Medication can reduce symptoms

Decades of research shows stimulant medication is the most effective way to reduce the main symptoms of ADHD. It can improve the ability to sustain attention and complete tasks, and reduce impulsive behaviours.

Two stimulants are approved to treat ADHD: methylphenidate (known by brand names such as Ritalin) and dexamphetamine (known by brand names such as Vyvanse). Both come in short- and long-acting forms.

These medicines work well in about 80% of patients and often improve the child’s school performance, relationships and self-image.

But they don’t suit all children. A minority become irritable, withdrawn or socially blunted. They may start finding it’s hard to have fun, for example.

If parents observe these or other negative effects, they can stop the medication. The child will return to their normal self by the next day, and their clinician and parents can consider alternatives.

The most common side effect of stimulant medication is reduced appetite. This happens in most children who take stimulants, for the hours the medication is active. This often means they are not hungry during the school day and have little or no lunch.

How can you boost your child’s food and nutrition intake?

When starting on stimulants, some children lose weight.

But they usually regain this over time as they get used to a different pattern of eating that includes a similar amount of daily calories. This might include:

• eating a hearty breakfast before the medication kicks in. Stimulant medications typically take about 30 to 60 minutes to start working (long-acting medications have a slower onset than short acting)

• eating enjoyable snacks throughout the day, such as muesli bars or chips

• having a substantial after-school snack. Some kids have a mini meal when they get home from school, and then another main meal at around 7pm.

Nutrition and energy-dense breakfasts or after school snacks could include a full cream milk smoothie with banana, protein powder and peanut or almond butter.

High-calorie powdered food supplements – which are rich in protein and essential vitamins and minerals – in milk are another option. These are available from the chemist or supermarket.

If the child’s ADHD symptoms are only problematic at school, they will only need to take the medication on school days, and not on weekends or school holidays. They can catch up with eating on non-medication days.

It’s also important to use the dose that achieves maximal benefit with tolerable side effects. The aim is often to reduce the child’s symptoms to close the levels of children without ADHD.

Using these strategies, most children can maintain a healthy weight while they take stimulant medication.

What if my child is still losing weight?

Occasionally, weight loss is more problematic, and alternate solutions need to be considered.

These might include:

• using a short-acting medication (these usually last for 3–4 hours) to just cover the mornings. Or adding an afternoon dose, after the child’s appetite has returned and they have eaten lunch

• trying one of the non-stimulant ADHD medications, such as atomoxetine (Strattera) or guanfacine (Intuniv). These are not usually as effective as the stimulants, but can be helpful to reduce ADHD symptoms. They have their own side effects, but do not suppress appetite

• using a lower dose of the stimulant (aiming to provide some benefits with fewer side effects) in combination with a non-stimulant medication.

What about children’s height?

The other potential growth side effect of stimulant medication is on children’s height. There is some evidence that if a child takes stimulant medication consistently for many years, particularly in higher doses, they may lose 1–2 cm off their adult height.

However, it would be unusual for ADHD medication to stunt growth so much that a child has to stop taking it. Optimising nutrition is the best way to prevent this.

What else do doctors and parents look out for?

Children and adolescents with ADHD who are treated with medication need to be monitored regularly. They should have appointments with their prescribing doctor (usually a paediatrician) or GP at least every six months to monitor the treatment’s effectiveness and side effects.

Their medical review is likely to include a discussion of academic, social and emotional functioning – sometimes with the aid of questionnaires completed by teachers and parents – and a physical check-up including measurement of height, weight and blood pressure.

Whether or not a child with ADHD takes medication, it’s important in all cases to pay attention to lifestyle factors that can influence their health, including their sleep, nutrition, exercise and use of electronic devices.

Daryl Efron, Associate Professor, Department of Paediatrics, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s that time of year again … and we’ve invited 30 of our writers, from fields as disparate as wildlife ecology and mathematics to literature and politics, to share their best books of of 2024. Of course, best books lists are subjective, relying on what people have read and remembered. But we always love finding out which books lingered for our writers.

This year, the Books & Ideas team set ourselves the hard (but fun) task of picking our own best books too.

Suzy Freeman-Greene’s best book was Hazzard and Harrower: the letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham (NewSouth): four decades of correspondence between two fiercely intelligent writers as vivid, felt and dramatic as a fine novel. (Honorable mention: Samantha Harvey’s Orbital).

James Ley’s pick was Blue Lard (NY Review Books) by dissident Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin. It is not for the faint-hearted: a bizarre and baffling mashup of science fiction and alternative history, cut with outrageous grotesquery and irreverent parodies of classic Russian literature. (Honourable mention: Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake.)

And Jo Case’s best book was Liars (Picador), Sarah Manguso’s electric, vividly poetic fragmented divorce novel (the standout in a fertile 2024 genre): a masterclass in balancing cold precision and blazing emotion. (Honourable mention and close second: Fiona McFarlane’s inventive fictional riff on true crime, Highway 13.)

We’d love to hear your best books of 2024 too – please share them in the comments at the end of this article.

Dennis Altman

There are many ways of reading Jock Serong’s Cherrywood (Fourth Estate), and it helps to know Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree and the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. Regardless, Serong has created a magical world, illuminated by language that is both lyrical and straightforward. Central to the story is the history of a stack of timber, sourced mysteriously from somewhere in the Caucasus, which links two periods of time, divided by 70 years, all flowing together in a wonderful mix of realism and fantasy.

Dennis Altman is vice chancellor’s fellow and professorial fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University.

Robyn Arianrhod

I’ve enjoyed several recent books, including Dava Sobel’s fresh retelling of Marie Curie’s story – and my pick, Jim Baggott and John L. Heilbron’s challenging but compelling Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement (Oxford University Press). This detailed history of quantum theory includes a terrific explanation of the mysterious “Bell inequality” – which enabled experimenters to prove Einstein’s “spooky” concept of entanglement is real – and a fascinating glimpse into key players’ personal, political and philosophical responses to their bizarre quantum discoveries.

Robyn Arianrhod is an affiliate in the School of Mathematics at Monash University and author of Vector (New South).

Michelle Arrow

Lauren Samuelsson’s witty, illuminating history of the Australian Women’s Weekly’s food pages A Matter of Taste (Monash University Publishing) reveals their influence on how Australians cooked, ate and entertained in the 20th century. It’s also a fascinating account of changing gender roles: food was largely women’s domestic responsibility and could be a chore, but also provided a space of creativity. This is a view of Australia’s past from the kitchen bench, rather than the driver’s seat of the family car. I’ll bet your mum would love it for Christmas.

Michelle Arrow is professor of history, Macquarie University.

Jumana Bayeh

The Sunbird by Sara Haddad (University of Queensland Press) is a short book, a novella, designed to be read in one sitting. It was written after the Gaza war commenced and conveys an urgency to tell the Palestinian story. It focuses on Nabila Yasmeen, a Palestinian woman who lives in Australia because she was exiled from her native Palestine during the 1948 Nakba. The Sunbird jumps across time (1948 and 2023) and space (Palestine and Australia) to capture Nabila’s ongoing displacement and her relentless desire to go home.

Jumana Bayeh is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University.

Hugh Breakey

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (Allen Lane) makes two key claims. First, the kids are not alright: compared to earlier generations, Gen Z has almost twice the chance of serious mental health disorders and related episodes. Second, a major cause is the smartphone. Problems arise not only from what happens on smartphones, but what doesn’t happen. Children need unsupervised play, physical risk-taking and relationships with actual peers. Haidt recommends social media be banned for those under 16, but he also urges parents to recognise that social media is not the only source of teenage mental health concerns.

Hugh Breakey is deputy director, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Griffith University.

Mridula Nath Chakraborty

In The Distaste of the Earth (Penguin India), Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, author of Funeral Nights (2021), continues his fabulist storytelling about mythic archetypes, against the backdrop of his beloved Khasi Hills rainforests. Subverting the tragic star-crossed lovers folktale of Manik Raitong the Wretched and Khasi Queen Liang Makaw, Nongkynrih extends oral storytelling traditions to create an utterly irreverential narrative. Part poetry, part philosophy and part critique, this is a fascinating glimpse into a world weary of humankind and wise in its Aesop-like vision of our contemporary moment.

Mridula Nath Chakraborty is senior lecturer, Monash Intercultural Lab, Monash University.

Intifar Chowdhury

I don’t usually pick up memoirs by those who know they’re about to die – they’re unbearably sad. But Alexei Navalny’s Patriot (Bodley Head) is a darkly comedic exception. Surviving a Federal Security Service (FSB) assassination attempt, Navalny returned to Russia to defy Vladimir Putin, knowing the Kremlin wouldn’t let him go. They didn’t. Written from prison, Patriot immortalises his unshakeable hope for a “beautiful Russia”. With sharp wit and boundless courage, Navalny’s story transcends borders, reminding us of the enduring power of resistance. His voice and vision live on.

Intifar Chowdhury is a youth researcher and lecturer in government at Flinders University.

Tom Doig

My discovery of 2024 was Children in Tactical Gear (University of Iowa Press) by Peter Mishler, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. It’s a technicolour nightmare of whiteboards and bullets, plastic and product placement. Mainly free verse, there are moments of fixed rhyme and metre – which I usually hate. But I love this: “he stands with me, / barefoot, in a whirlpool / of trash, my dark hair collecting / ballistic ash.” The collection is a bleak, pitiless vision of corporate, consumerist America. It would make a perfect Christmas gift.

Tom Doig is an investigative journalist and lecturer in creative writing, University of Queensland

Charmaine Papertalk Green

One favourite pick for 2024 is Anita Heiss’ Dirrayawadha (Simon & Schuster Australia), a groundbreaking Wiradyuri nation historical novel set at the time of Wiradyuri–colonial contact in rural New South Wales. This book is a reminder to Australia of the truth-telling needed to wipe away the historical colonial amnesia narratives curated to make Aboriginal people invisible – nullius. This book invites deep listening to a Wiradyuri and Australian story, carrying forward resilience, memory and Country.

Charmaine Papertalk Green is a visual artist and poet, and research fellow, School of Allied Health, Western Australian Centre for Rural Health, University of Western Australia.

Nick Haslam

Eighty-five years after his death, is there anything left to say about Freud? Andrew Blauner’s fine collection On the Couch: Writers Analyse Sigmund Freud (Princeton University Press) answers an emphatic yes. A dream-team of leading writers consider subjects ranging from Freud’s first scientific paper (on eel testicles) to the shadowy figure of his wife Martha, and his love of dogs. The book offers lucid, deeply personal reflections on the complicated legacies of psychoanalysis. Is it a failed system, a model of radical doubt, or a humanising corrective to a culture of shallowness and artificiality?

Nick Haslam is professor of psychology, University of Melbourne.

Alexander Howard

Elfriede Jelinek’s The Children of the Dead (Yale University Press), originally published in 1995, is now available in English for the first time, in a masterful translation by Gitta Honegger. It’s a haunting exploration of Austria’s Nazi past and its failure to confront the Holocaust. Hypnotic and unsettling, Jelinek’s darkly satirical novel yokes avant-gardism and popular culture together, offering an unflinching reckoning with history. With antisemitism and the far-right on the rise in Europe, it feels more urgent and relevant than ever.

Alexander Howard is senior lecturer, English and Writing, University of Sydney.

Tony Hughes d'Aeth

The book I most enjoyed this year was Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman (Giramondo). An elliptical meditation on the indignity of ageing and the inevitability of death might not be everyone’s recipe for a relaxing summer read. Yet Abe Quin, Castro’s alter ego, has a downbeat charm, with his limpid turns of phrase, self-deprecation and seething hatred of hypocrisy. In Castro’s work, there is a bleakness teetering on the edge of farce and a pathos bubbling through quotidian reverie, but the situations bounce back on the springs of his irony. Then the humour drops away and we meet a man reflecting on his life with astonishing candour.

Tony Hughes d'Aeth is chair of Australian literature, University of Western Australia.

Allanah Hunt

Murriyang: Song of Time by Stan Grant (S&S Bundyi) is a book you will remember for a lifetime. Grant writes with such deep reverence and reflection around ideas of time, spirituality, history, philosophy and physics. The sections on Grant’s father, Wiradjuri leader Uncle Stan Grant Sr, are the book’s true heart, making me reflect on my own relationship with my parents with deeper understanding. Grant’s book is about building a bridge of love: with parents, with community, even with those who espouse racist ideologies.

Allanah Hunt is lecturer, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, University of Queensland.

Andy Jackson

Anthologies are so diverse, a reader’s enthusiasm often wanes at certain points. But Woven, edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu (Magabala Books), is a breathtaking exception. This collection of 15 collaborations between First Nations poets from Australia and overseas is consistently compelling and formally ingenious, with lyrical, political punch. Joy Harjo with Ali Cobby Eckermann, Tony Birch with Simon J. Ortiz, and Raelee Lancaster with essa may ranapiri are standouts. But all the conversations in the book brilliantly enhance solidarities, while allowing differences to cohabit with care.

Andy Jackson is a poet and creative writing lecturer, University of Melbourne.

Philip Johnson

I first read Alice Driver’s reporting on slaughterhouse workers in the US South in the New York Review of Books in 2021. Life and Death of the American Worker (Atria/One Signal Publishers) is the book-length investigation I’ve waited for since. From Arkansas, but reporting for years from Mexico and Central America, Driver was uniquely equipped to get to know the Spanish-speaking workers who prop up the US meat industry. When Covid hit, she was immersed in this world. She offers incredible insights into the expendable lives powering an “essential” industry.

Philip Johnson is lecturer, College of Business, Government and Law at Flinders University. He researches crime and violence in the Americas.

Natalie Kon-yu

In Tell Me Everything (Viking), Elizabeth Strout demonstrates why she is one of the best living writers in the Anglophone world. It’s hard to summarise the plot – there is some narrative tension about a court case, a hard death and a love story – but these are not the point of the book. If there is a point, it is that there is a multitude of conflicting stories within us – and all of them shape us, whether we know it or not.

Natalie Kon-yu is associate professor, creative writing and literary studies, Victoria University.

John Long

Stanley Tucci’s What I Ate in One Year (Fig Tree) is exactly what we all need in these strange times. While Tucci’s prose immediately piques your curiosity about Italian cooking, it dives much deeper than just food. My favourite parts are the unexpected moments of profound humanity as he reflects on the value of family, friendships, mortality and the downsides of being famous. Tucci’s year is exposed in this engrossing, humorous, heartwarming book. A delicious memoir of gastronomy, love, loss, death and pasta. Oh yes, and more pasta!

John Long is strategic professor in palaeontology, Flinders University.

Julienne van Loon

I loved Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice (Text Publishing) for its formal experimentation and for its post-critique flavour. How does de Kretser do both those things and write such a page turner? It’s a disturbing read and a thoughtful one. Disturbing because distrust, betrayal and other familiar exclusionary tactics reproduce themselves in the world of the narrator. Thoughtful because de Kretser urges us to look at the relationship between theory and practice with clear-sightedness and care.

Julienne van Loon is associate professor in creative writing, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

Peter Mares

The most recent data shows CEOs of Australia’s top listed companies take home 55 times average adult earnings. Yet such inequalities rarely feature in public policy. The focus is on tackling disadvantage and increasing opportunity, without addressing entrenched privilege and unequal outcomes. Poverty is a politically safe topic, argues Ingrid Robeyns. Inequality raises uncomfortable questions about societal structures, political choices and power differences. In a democratic society, we should argue about how much inequality is (un)reasonable. Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth (Allen Lane) can help that conversation.

Peter Mares is adjunct senior research fellow, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University.

Vijay Mishra

We have been told authors die in the act of writing. What strikes me about Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Jonathan Cape), is his engagement with death in its very materiality, its corporeality, as he describes what it is like to be confronted, after the fatwa, with a second death. Written without sentimentality or accusation, this is an extraordinary account that makes us think of death not as a theoretical premise that informs the act of writing, but a living reality for an author who dared to challenge age-old assumptions.

Vijay Mishra is emeritus professor of English and comparative literature, Murdoch University.

Lynda Ng

This year, the Booker judges overlooked a piercing reflection on racial identity in favour of a novel set on a space station. While we may like to believe the existential threat of climate change will ultimately overturn racial politics, Percival Everett’s James (Mantle) forces us to consider the ethics of embracing such a post-racial fantasy. Everett’s reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn imbues the runaway slave Jim with ingenuity, agency and gravitas. His scintillating prose elicits a long overdue reckoning with the literary canon.

Lynda Ng is lecturer in world literature (including Australian literature), University of Melbourne.

Julian Novitz

Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings (Picador) follows Dave Win from his youth in 1960s England through to the era of Brexit turmoil and pandemics. While the history is sweeping, the novel focuses on significant yet understated moments, particularly those that reflect on Dave’s close relationship with his resilient mother and his entanglement with a wealthy family encountered while a scholarship student at boarding school. Hollinghurst’s preoccupations are on display: class, sexuality, race and power, generational shifts, legacies and memories. Dave is an excellent lens for exploring these concerns and perhaps Hollinghurst’s most engaging protagonist to date.

Julian Novitz is senior lecturer, writing, department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology.

Edwina Preston

My pick is British historian William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury). After hearing him speak about this book in Melbourne a few weeks ago, I purchased and devoured it. It is, in written form, a reflection of Dalrymple’s erudition and passion: a vastly and methodically researched resetting of cultural truths that puts India at the centre of South-East Asian culture and religion, and positions India’s Golden Road as every bit as important as the Silk Road.

Edwina Preston is a novelist and PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.

Carl Rhodes

Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration (Polity) is an indictment of the loss of community and identity in a world drowning in information and all-too-easy clickbait answers. Narrative, in Han’s words, no longer “anchors us in being”. Storytelling has been reduced to political pitches and advertisements. We are left with “storyselling” where dissemination and manipulation lock us into the moment like a just-swiped selfie. Is all hope gone? It would be hard to describe Han’s book as positive. But The Crisis of Narration offers a provocative, novel and insightful way to reconsider politics and community in the age of information.

Carl Rhodes is dean and professor of organisation studies at UTS Business School.

Euan Ritchie

Observing wildlife and communing with nature brings immense joy to my life. Bill Bailey – extraordinarily talented multi-instrumentalist, actor and quirky comedian – is also known for his adoration of animals. So, it’s unsurprising I was instantly drawn to My Animals and Other Animals: A Memoir of Sorts (Quercus). A quick skim of the contents hooked me. With stories like Radioactive Sea Lice, Hissing Cockroaches and The Chicken that Went Bad, I simply had to read on. Complete with gorgeous drawings, it’s the delightful, heartwarming romp you’d expect.

Euan Ritchie is professor in wildlife ecology and conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University.

Matthew Sharpe

Future historians will puzzle about how, in 2024, a twice-impeached convicted felon facing indictment for his role in insurrectionary violence was returned to office by popular vote. John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke (Farrar Straus Giroux) will be a work of reference, as it is for anyone today trying to understand “how America cracked up”. Ganz’s scope is sweeping, his prose incisive. He shows that Trump did not come from nowhere. MAGAism is the product of over three decades of radicalisation on the right. Ganz does not preach; he simply reports, leaving readers to draw the links between then and now.

Matthew Sharpe is associate professor in philosophy, Australian Catholic University.

Elfie Shiosaki

Award-winning writer Nam Le’s form-breaking book of poetry, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (Scribner Australia), is a bracing reckoning with identity and representation, each poem a distinct vantage point from which to examine the violence of identity, with both clarity and ambiguity. With unpredictable and destablising movement, Le masters language, its form and its register, only to break it, demonstrating the power of language to erase identity on one hand and resist erasure on the other.

Elfie Shiosaki is associate professor, The Centre for Social Policy Research, Australian National University

Emma Shortis

In the endless stream of hot takes on American politics, Nick Bryant’s The Forever War (Viking) is a breath of fresh air. This beautifully written book reminds us that Trump is both symptom and cause, both new and old. The Forever War meticulously makes sense of the unresolved contradictions of American history, unpicking tired mythology to clearly argue that Trump – and his support – is the product of that inescapable history.

Emma Shortis is adjunct senior fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University.

Wanning Sun

Ying Qian’s Revolutionary Becomings (Columbia University Press) is a fascinating study of how Chinese documentary cinema shaped the revolutionary politics of the 20th century. It traces the emergence of early documentaries about colonial war and transnational revolutionary networks. The author analyses how documentary impacted political and social change during the Mao and post-Mao periods. She is deeply empathetic to revolutionaries’ aspirations and actions, but insists on learning hard lessons from China’s revolutionary past. It promises to be rewarding reading, likely to stimulate scholars, documentary-makers and cinema lovers alike.

Wanning Sun is professor of media and cultural studies, University of Technology Sydney.

Jen Webb

Dominique Hecq’s Volte Face (Liquid Amber Press) is an exquisite collection of prose poems: poems written in sentences and paragraphs rather than lines, while obeying the grammar of poetry rather than prose. The book is crammed with luscious words and impossible juxtapositions that, articulated (by the poet) and contemplated (by the reader), seem entirely true. This work is a “fugue of language”, whose poems eschew reportage. Instead, they work through gestures of recognition, instances of spotting something unexpected from the corner of the eye.

Jen Webb is distinguished professor of creative practice, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra.

Jo Case, Deputy editor, Books & Ideas, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

So, you’ve enjoyed a picnic in the sunshine. Or you’ve sat on the grass for a twilight concert. But you’ve come away with itchy and scratchy skin.

Could you have an allergy to grass? Or is something else going on?

Grass has tiny hairs

One possible reason we get a rash is the physical structure of grass itself.

Blades of grass are covered in tiny “hairs” (called trichomes), which you can view under a microscope.

These help protect the grass from being eaten by insects or animals, damaged by ultraviolet rays or losing too much water.

Trichomes can also cause tiny scratches to the skin and the skin reacts by becoming red and may feel itchy.

Some species of grass are also firmer or stiffer so may feel more “scratchy” when people sit on them.

Skin is a complex organ and is linked to the immune system. When irritated, the skin and immune system recognise something is happening and release complex chemicals that can cause redness and itching.

People with dry, red, itchy skin conditions often find their skin is extra sensitive to grass and other irritants like fertilisers or sprays. For example, if you have eczema (also called dermatitis) your skin looks and feels dry, as your skin barrier is damaged.

Could it be an allergy?

Grass allergy involves aero-allergens, that is, the grass pollen in the air. Symptoms include runny or a stuffy nose, itchy nose and eyes and even itchy ears.

If you have these symptoms allergy specialists may perform a skin prick test to identify particular aero-allergen triggers.

After the allergist takes your detailed history, drops of various allergens are placed on the forearm, along with a positive and negative control. A sterile lancet pricks the skin through the drop. After 15 minutes the test is read, with positive reactions showing a “wheal and flare” response (a lump like a mosquito bite and redness). The allergist then interprets the findings.

But, in the absence of hay fever-like symptoms, dermatologists may perform allergy patch testing to investigate contact allergies (dermatitis) to specific plants, for example Compositae.

In a patch test the dermatologist places a series of small chambers (or sticky dots) on the back, each one containing a different potential allergen. The test takes several days to produce results. If a reaction develops under a test chamber, the dermatologist may confirm allergic contact dermatitis.

But definitive results are tricky as these two allergy tests can’t tell you if your rash is from physical irritation – such as the tiny scratches – rather than an allergy.

How can I avoid it?

The best way to reduce physical irritation problems with grass it to limit contact. This could involve simple things like wearing long sleeves or pants, or sitting on a rug or towel.

Many Australians do have dry skin, but do not often realise how dry it is. So, applying a basic thick moisturiser to the face and body skin can help place a barrier between the grass and the skin. Sunscreen is also recommended when outdoors.

For people who have dry, red or itchy skin conditions or those who experience itchiness when sitting on the grass, taking antihistamines a minimum of 30 minutes before you sit on the grass may help lessen the itchiness.

How can I calm my skin?

If you do develop a an irritant rash, here are a few tips. You could try

• taking an antihistamine

• rinsing skin with tepid water

• washing off the potential irritants with a non-soap-based bland body cleanser can be helpful. Then, re-apply a layer of thick, bland, fragrance-free moisturiser.

If none of these measures help, see a pharmacist for advice on using an appropriate strength cortisone cream which may help reduce the symptoms.

Be aware of more serious signs of an allergic reaction. If in addition to red bumps and itchiness, other symptoms such as shortness of breath, cough, wheeze, chest tightness or facial swellings develop while sitting on the grass, people may need urgent medical care.

Deryn Lee Thompson, Lecturer in Nursing, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher got a big shock last election in his Sydney seat of Bradfield. Teal candidate Nicolette Boele pushed the result to preferences, leaving her within striking distance for next year’s poll. She has been further helped by the redistribution.

Now the usually mild-mannered Fletcher, a moderate within the Liberal party, has apparently decided no-holds-barred attack is the best form of defence as he and other Liberals fight the teal wave again. But he’s at risk of alienating and insulting the voters he needs to get on side.

In an address to the Sydney Institute on Monday, Fletcher prosecuted two points. He claimed the teals “are a giant green left con job”. And he maintained a minority government would be bad for the country.

There are arguments both ways about minority government. The case Fletcher makes about the teals, however, is hyperbolic.

The teals, he argues, “are very much in the tradition of front groups established by left-wing political operatives which are designed to lure votes away from the Liberal Party by tricking voters about their bona fides”.

The “look and feel” of the campaigns run by teal candidates, including slogans, t-shirts, and videography - “was extremely slick” and “highly consistent across multiple electorates”.

So too were their key campaign issues – “climate change, an anti-corruption commission and the treatment of women in politics.

"Of course it is not an accident that these issues were deployed across multiple campaigns. They were chosen through expensive polling work across the country.”

Fletcher cites as compelling evidence of the teals being a “green left con job” the fact these community movements appeared in Liberal seats, with no sign of them in Labor electorates.

And evidence the teal campaign was designed to “dupe” Liberal voters was that a third of the successful new teal MPs  – that is, two of six – “was the daughter or niece of a long time Liberal MP, with the same name”.

“The strategy was clear: to appeal to traditional Liberal voters who would never vote Labor but who were disenfranchised with the Coalition.”

“The intention was to get people to think, ‘That nice teal candidate could almost be a Liberal. I’ll vote for her.’”

This was “trickery, backed by big money,” according to Fletcher.

Yes, the teals had some big (Climate 200) money, very big, in some instances; yes, they shared some common campaign approaches, and ran on similar issues. And yes, they pitched to disillusioned Liberal voters.

But none of that amounts to “trickery”. The community candidates push in Liberal seats was a loose movement, candidates “networked”, gaining strength from sharing experience and resources. That’s different from a plot or some sort of conspiracy.

The specific teal geography and issues were substantially a reaction against the performance of the Liberal Party and Scott Morrison. This manifestation of the community candidate movement  also grew off the back of the successful push by Cathy McGowan, a regional “community candidate” elected on a different platform, who dislodged an unpopular Liberal in 2013 in Indi.

Fletcher’s reference to the two successful relatives of one-time Liberal MPs just draws attention to the fact that in other days, those women (Allegra Spender, Kate Chaney) might well have been attracted to the Liberal Party. Of course some voters thought they “could almost be a Liberal”.

Fletcher also claims the teals “exploited” the preferential voting system. If we had first past the post voting none of the teals would have won, he said. Indeed. But if we had had first past the post voting, many Liberals would have lost in many elections. Does he want to change the voting system?

He complains the teals were helped by Labor and Greens supporters voting “tactically”. “Left wing voters saw a chance to unseat a Liberal incumbent and voted in large numbers to do so.” No doubt. But if the Liberals had been a more acceptable alternative, they would have had a stronger primary vote and not been so susceptible to being undermined in heartland seats.

Among other lines of attack, Fletcher says the teals have voted with the Greens a lot in parliament. They’ve both “made little difference”, because it’s not a hung parliament, and “made it easier for Labor to govern”, because there are few times when Labor’s majority is on a knife-edge in divisions in parliament.

He says the teals reduce scrutiny of the government because they are allocated question time slots that cut the number of opposition questions, and  shadow ministers have less opportunity for a run of questions. From my observation, the teals’ questions are often sharper than most of those from the opposition.

Fletcher is on stronger, though much-contested, ground on the issue of majority versus minority government.

He argues minority government “leads to chaotic processes” and makes it “virtually impossible to achieve  substantive reform”.

“The stability of the two party system is a good thing.  It has delivered many benefits to Australia.  Stable majority government is a foundational requirement for achieving any serious reform and advancing our nation’s prosperity.”

Anthony Albanese  would agree with him. But critics would counter that minority government can lead to compromise and better outcomes.

“Majority government is at real risk in Australia – in large measure due to the cynical green left con job perpetrated by the political operatives behind the teal movement and their big money backers,” Fletcher says.

Majority government is at “real risk” at this election. The reason is not because all those voters are “conned” but because they have become increasingly fed  up with sub-optimal performances from the major parties. 

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Publishing is one of many fields poised for disruption by tech companies and artificial intelligence (AI). New platforms and approaches, like a book imprint by Microsoft and a self-publishing tech startup that uses AI, promise to make publishing faster and more accessible than ever.

But they also may threaten jobs – and demand a reconsideration of the status and role of books as cultural objects. And what will be the impact of TikTok owner ByteDance’s move into traditional book publishing?

Microsoft’s 8080 Books

Last week, Microsoft announced a new book imprint, 8080 Books. It will focus on nonfiction titles relating to technology, science and business.

8080 Books plans “to test and experiment with the latest tech to accelerate and democratize book publishing”, though as some sceptics have noted, it is not yet entirely clear what this will entail.

The first title, No Prize for Pessimism by Sam Schillace (Microsoft’s deputy chief technology officer) arguably sets the tone for the imprint. These “letters from a messy tech optimist” urge readers to embrace the disruptive potential of new technologies (AI is name-checked in the blurb), arguing optimism is essential for innovation and creativity. You can even discuss the book with its bespoke chatbot here.

Elsewhere, in the self-publishing space, tech startup Spines aims to bring 8,000 new books to market each year. For a fee, authors can use the publishing platform’s AI to edit, proofread, design, format and distribute their books.

The move has been condemned by some authors and publishers, but Spines (like Microsoft) states its aim is to make publishing more open and accessible. Above all, it aims to make it faster, reducing the time it takes to publish to just a fortnight – rather than the long months of editing, negotiating and waiting required by traditional publishing.

TikTok is publishing books too

Technological innovations are not just being used to speed up the publishing process, but also to identify profitable audiences, emerging authors and genres that will sell. Chinese tech giant and owner of TikTok, ByteDance, launched their publishing imprint 8th Note Press (initially digital only) last year.

They are now partnering with Zando (an independent publishing company whose other imprints include one by actor Sarah Jessica Parker and another by the Pod Save America team’s Crooked Media) to produce a fiction range targeted at Gen Z readers. It will produce print books, to be sold in bookshops, from February.

8th Note Press focuses on the fantasy and romance genres (and authors) generating substantial followings on BookTok, the TikTok community proving invaluable for marketing and promoting new fiction. In the United States, authors with a strong presence on BookTok have seen a 23% growth in print sales in 2024, compared to 6% growth overall.

Access to Tiktok’s data and the ability to engineer viral videos could give 8th Note Press a serious advantage over legacy publishers in this space.

Hundreds of AI self-publishing start-ups

These initiatives reflect some broader industry trends. Since OpenAI first demoed ChatGPT in 2022, approximately 320 publishing start-ups have emerged. Almost all of them revolve around AI in some way. There is speculation that the top five global publishers all have their own proprietary internal AI systems in the works.

Spotify’s entry into the audiobook market in 2023 has been described as a gamechanger by its CEO, and is now using AI to recommend books to listeners. Other companies, like Storytel and Nuanxed, are using AI to autogenerate audiobook narration and expedite translations.

The embrace of AI may produce some useful innovations and efficiencies in publishing processes. It will almost certainly help publishers promote their authors and connect books with invested audiences. But it will have an impact on people working in the sector.

Publishing houses have been consistently reducing in-house staff since the 1990s and relying more heavily on freelancers for editorial and design tasks. It would be naïve to think AI and other emergent technologies won’t be used to further reduce costs.

We are moving rapidly towards a future where once-important roles in the publishing sector – editing, translation, narration and voice acting, book design – will be increasingly performed by machines.

Spines’ CEO and co-founder, Yehuda Niv, has said, when queried, “We are not here to replace human creativity”. He emphasised his belief this automation will allow more writers to access the book market.

Storytel and Nuanxed have both suggested the growth of audiobook circulation will compensate for the replacement of human actors and translators. Exactly who will benefit the most from this growth – authors or faceless shareholders – remains to be seen.

Side hustles, grifts and ‘easy’ writing

I appreciate Schillace’s genuine, thoughtful optimism about AI and other new technologies. (I will admit to not having read his book yet, but did have a stimulating conversation with its bot.) But my mind is drawn back to the techno-utopianists of the 19th century, like Edward Bellamy.

In his 1888 novel, Looking Backward, Bellamy speculates on a future in which art and literature flourishes, once advanced automation has freed people from the drudgery of miserable labour, leaving them with more time for cultural pursuits.

The inverse seems to be occurring now. Previously important and meaningful forms of cultural work are being increasingly automated.

I could be shortsighted about this, of course. The publishing disruption is just getting underway, and we’ve already made some great strides towards dispensing with the admittedly often quite miserable labour of writing itself.

Soon after the launch of ChatGPT, science-fiction magazines in the US had to close submissions, due being inundated with AI-generated short stories, many of them almost identical. Today, there are so many AI-assisted books being published on Amazon, they have had to limit self-publishing authors to just three uploads per day.

AI-assisted publishing enterprises range from side hustles focusing on republishing editions of texts in the public domain, to grifts targeting unsuspecting readers and writers. All these schemes are premised on the idea writing can be rendered easy and effortless.

The use of AI may have other, delayed, costs though.

Can AI be a ‘thinking partner’?

When I was younger, writing and publishing a lousy short story just obliterated my time and personal relationships. Now I can do so with a one-sentence prompt, if I have a mind to – but apparently, this will destroy a lake somewhere.

Of course, as the No Prize for Pessimism bookbot takes pains to remind me, using AI in the writing process needn’t be a matter of lazy auto generation. It can be used for generative drafting, which is then revised, again and again, and integrated into the text.

AI can operate as a “thinking partner”, helping the writer with ideation and brainstorming. The technology is in its infancy, after all: there is bound to be some initial mess. But whatever way it is used, AI will help writers get to publication faster.

8080 Books’ charter offers a lot of rhetorical praise for the form of the book. We are told that books “matter”, that they impart “knowledge and wisdom”, that they “build empathy”. 8080 Books also wants to “accelerate the publishing process” and see less “lag” between the manuscript submission and its arrival in the marketplace. It wants books that are immediate and timely.

Slow can be good

But what is a book if it arrives easily and at speed? Regardless of whether it is AI-generated or AI-assisted, it won’t be quite the same medium.

For much of their history, books have been defined by slowness and effort, both in writing and the journey towards publication. A book doesn’t always need to be up to date or of the moment.

Indeed, the hope might be that the slowness and effort of its production can lead to the book outlasting its immediate context and remaining relevant in other times and places.

Greater speed and broader access may be laudable aims for these publishing innovations. But they will also likely lead to greater disposability – at least in the short term – for both publishing professionals and the books themselves.

Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australian Year 4 students have achieved their best ever result in a major international assessment of maths and science. Year 8 students, who also did the test, held steady.

The results from the 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) were released on Wednesday night.

What is TIMSS?

TIMSS runs every four years and has been going since 1995. In 2023, more than 650,000 students from 64 countries did the test.

It isn’t possible to test every Year 4 or Year 8 student (that would take too long and cost too much) so we take a sample. In Australia, this included 13,912 students from 559 Australian schools.

The test was done completely online. It included traditional test items such as multiple choice and short written responses. There were also interactive items where, for example, students could replicate a science experiment in a series of animated on-screen activities.

Students and schools also did questionnaires to give researchers more information about the context in which they are learning.

TIMSS is one of three international assessments in which Australia participates, along with the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which looks at Year 4 students’ reading comprehension skills, and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which looks at 15-year-olds’ skills in maths, science and reading.

This is on top of Australia’s NAPLAN testing of basic literacy and numeracy skills for years 3, 5, 7 and 9.

What has changed?

A lot of the improvement at Year 4 was due to a significant increase in the percentage of very high performing students. These are students who perform at advanced levels for their year level.

In 2023, one in every eight Australian Year 4 students were very high performers in maths and one in every six were very high performers in science.

This contributed to lifting the proportion of students achieving the Australian-set “National Proficient Standard” (where students have to demonstrate more than elementary skills expected at that year level). This has increased by 11 percentage points in Year 4 maths and 12 percentage points in Year 4 science since 1995.

The performance of Year 8 students has not changed significantly since 1995 or since the last test in 2019.

How did we go compared to other countries?

Countries who did the test include the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Finland and Germany but not China or India.

Singapore was the top performing country overall in both subjects and age groups.

Only four countries outperformed Australia in Year 4 science, while seven countries outperformed us in Year 8 science. In maths, eight countries were ahead in Year 8 and 14 in Year 4.

Boys are outperforming girls

At both Year 4 and Year 8, Australian boys had a higher score than Australian girls in both maths and science. The gender gap in Year 4 maths was one of the largest of the participating countries.

Our improvement at Year 4 since 2019 was also stronger for boys than girls. At Year 8, girls’ performance declined in this time.

Across the board, there was a greater proportion of very high performing boys than girls. For example, one in six Year 4 boys were very high performers in maths compared to one in ten girls.

Previous international assessments have shown girls have less confidence than boys in maths. We also know a students’ self-belief is linked to their achievement.

So we’ll be looking at the student questionnaire responses over the coming months to see if there are any gender differences attitudes and beliefs about science and maths.

What does this mean?

It is worth noting COVID lockdowns happened between 2019 and 2023 tests. Despite these challenges, Australian students have managed to either maintain a good result (at Year 8) or improve (at Year 4).

The strength of the improvement at Year 4 in science suggests efforts to promote STEM in early education are beginning to see results.

We might see this flow through to the middle years when TIMSS is next tested in 2027. This is when the Year 4 group from 2023 will be in Year 8.

By 2027, we would also expect to see the effect of the updated Australian Curriculum that began to roll out in 2023. This has a greater focus on mastering key skills in maths. So we would hope to see an improvement in maths achievement at the lower end of the scale, alongside the strong results of our very high performers that we saw in 2023.

Nicole Wernert, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Council for Educational Research

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Year 12 exams are finishing around Australia and celebrations are beginning. Thousands of students will mark the end of high school in coming weeks with “schoolies”.

This is an important rite of passage for many young Australians. About 20,000 school leavers are expected to party at Surfers Paradise in one of the main schoolies celebrations. Other festivals are planned for Lorne in Victoria, Victor Harbor in South Australia, Byron Bay in New South Wales, Bali and Fiji.

I am an expert in young people’s health and safety at large-scale events. What steps can you take to stay safe at schoolies and make sure you have a great time?

1. Plan ahead

Having a plan can reduce stress and help keep everyone on track.

Know where you’ll be staying and how you’ll get there and back from the main events. Check to see if there are free bus services and how to access them.

The schoolies websites can also help you plan where to get food, water, charge your phones and seek medical help.

2. Plan what you bring

Don’t take too many valuables. When you’re thinking about your outfit, think about where you phone will go so it is safe. A bum bag can be a great way to keep things secure.

Believe it or not the main reasons for using the medical tent is twists and sprains of ankles and cuts and blisters from shoes – so take comfortable footwear that is good for dancing and walking around.

3. Stay in groups

You will have already decided who you are going to hang out before you go. So stick with your friends and look out for each other. Avoid going anywhere alone, especially at night, and always organise a meet up spot if you do get separated or your phone dies.

Before you go, talk with friends about how you will support each other. Is someone designated as a non-drinker for the evening? Do you want to organise an hourly check-in on a group chat?

4. Stay in safe places

Only attend official events and parties. These areas are well lit and there is security and medical assistance available if you or your friends need it.

5. Know your limits

Think about how many drinks you can have beforehand – understand your limits and carry some water and snacks.

If you are feeling like you need a rest, you could try the nearest chill out tent. It’s a great way to make new friends and there are free drinks and snacks

If you are considering taking pills, go and visit the drug checking site. Drug checking is free and confidential and will let you know what you are taking to stay safe.

What if something scary or unexpected happens?

There are peer-support programs at schoolies to help you if you are upset or stressed.

On the Gold Coast, you can look out for Red Frogs or the Schoolies Support Team, who are there to support young people at events where alcohol is consumed.

In South Australia, there is the Green Team, who are young people from Christian backgrounds. The Green Team will stay with you while you are looking for your friends, walk you back to your tent and they know where all the free eating spots are.

In main schoolies areas there will also be police walking around and security guards, depending on the event. All of these people are there to give judgment-free support – so you will not get into trouble if you ask for help for yourself or one of your friends.

If a friend gets too drunk or has taken something and needs support, take them to a quieter spot with good lighting and stay with them. If you can, get someone else to go and find some help from the medical tent. Try and lay your friend on their side so that they can vomit, especially if they are passed out. Don’t try and give them water or more to drink, just make sure they are comfortable while someone is getting help.

If something scary happens – yell out and try and attract attention. Move into a well lit place if you can. Remember to trust your instincts and find a safe place.

Once you feel safe, tell event staff or police what happened – it helps them to look out and make sure it doesn’t happen again. You can also call 000 at any time.

Remember, schoolies is your event. With some simple planning you can make it a week you will always remember for the best reasons.

Alison Hutton, Professor of Nursing, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The federal parliament has passed legislation to ban people under 16 from having an account with some social media platforms.

In doing so, it has ignored advice from a chorus of experts – and from the Australian Human Rights Commission, which said the government rushed the legislation through parliament “without taking the time to get the details right. Or even knowing how the ban will work in practice.”

The ban is, however, backed by 77% of Australians, according to a new poll. It won’t take effect for at least 12 months.

So what will happen before then?

What’s in the final bill?

The legislation amends the current Online Safety Act 2021 and defines an “age-restricted user” as a person under age 16. However, it does not name specific platforms that will be subject to the ban.

Instead, the legislation defines an “age-restricted social media platform” as including services where:

1. the “sole purpose, or a significant purpose” is to enable “online social interaction” between people
2. people can “link to, or interact with” others on the service
3. people can “post material”, or
4. it falls under other conditions as set out in the legislation.

The legislation does note that some services are “excluded”, but does not name specific platforms. For example, while services providing “online social interaction” would be included in the ban, this would not include “online business interaction”.

While it remains unclear exactly which social media platforms will be subject to the ban, those that are will face fines of up to A$50 million if they don’t take “reasonable steps” to stop under 16s from having accounts.

While there are reports YouTube will be exempt, the government has not explicitly confirmed this. What is clear at the moment is that people under 16 will still be able to view the content of many platforms online – just without an account.

The legislation does not mention messaging apps (such as WhatsApp and Messenger) or gaming platforms (such as Minecraft), specifically. However, news reports have quoted the government as saying these would be excluded, along with “services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users”. It is unclear what platforms would be excluded in these cases.

In passing the final legislation, the government included additional amendments to its original proposal. For example, tech companies cannot collect government-issued identification such as passports and drivers licenses “as the only means” of confirming someone’s age. They can, however, collect government-issued identification “if other alternative age assurance methods have been provided to users”.

There must also be an “independent review” after two years to consider the “adequacy” of privacy protections and other issues.

What now for the tech companies?

As well as having to verify the age of people wanting to create an account, tech companies will also need to verify the age of existing account holders – regardless of their age. This will be a significant logistical challenge. Will there be a single day when every Australian with a social media account has to sign in and prove their age?

An even bigger concern is how tech companies will be able to verify a user’s age. The legislation provides little clarity about this.

There are a few options social media platforms might pursue.

One option might be for them to check someone’s age using credit cards as a proxy linked to a person’s app store account. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said previously that this strategy would be included in the age verification trials that are currently underway. YouTube, for example, has previously enabled users to gain access to age-restricted content using a credit card.

However, this approach would exclude access for people who meet the age requirement of being over 16, but do not hold credit cards.

Another option is to use facial recognition technology. This technology is among the various strategies being trialled for the government to restrict age for both social media platforms (for ages under 16) and online pornography (for ages under 18). The trial is being run by a consortium led by Age Check Certification Scheme, based in the United Kingdom. The results won’t be known until mid-2025.

However, there is already evidence that facial recognition systems contain significant biases and inaccuracies.

For example, commercially available facial recognition systems have an error rate of 0.8% for light-skinned men, compared to nearly 35% for dark-skinned women. Even some of the best performing systems in use currently, such as Yoti (which Meta currently offers to Australian users ahead of a global rollout) has an average error of almost two years for people aged 13 to 16 years old.

What about the digital duty of care?

Earlier this month the government promised to impose a “digital duty of care” on tech companies.

This would require the companies to regularly conduct thorough risk assessments of the content on their platforms. And, companies would need to respond to consumer complaints, resulting in the removal of potentially harmful content.

This duty of care is backed by experts – including myself – and by the Human Rights Law Centre. A parliamentary inquiry into the social media ban legislation also recommended the government legislate this.

It remains unclear exactly when the government will fulfil its promise to do just that.

But even if the duty of care is legislated, that doesn’t preclude the need for more investment in digital literacy. Parents, teachers and children need support to understand how to navigate social media platforms safely.

In the end, social media platforms should be safe spaces for all users. They provide valuable information and community engagement opportunities to people of all ages. The onus is now on the tech companies to restrict access for youth under 16.

However, the work needed to keep all of us safe, and to hold the tech companies accountable for the content they provide, is only just beginning.

Lisa M. Given, Professor of Information Sciences & Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When Jiawei Shen first came to Australia, he bought a copy of that great western ideological text, the Bible. The doctrine that had shaped his life until then had come from the writings of the great Marxist thinkers – Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and of course, Mao Zedong.

It made sense, therefore, to study the source of the ideology that supposedly shaped this strange new world. Right near the beginning, in Genesis chapter 11, he found the intriguing story of the Tower of Babel, a myth on the origin of linguistic and cultural confusion.

It tells of a time when all people spoke the same language, and out of pride, they built a tower to the heavens so it would be seen from wherever they went. God realised if they continued to collaborate, nothing could stop them:

If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.

The tower was abandoned – and the people scattered across the earth, with many different languages.

Many years later, when Shen contemplated the way his life and his wife’s life had been shaped by ideology and circumstance, he remembered the lesson of the Tower of Babel

Settling in Bob Hawke’s Australia

In June 1989, when student demonstrations in Beijing resulted in the Tiananmen Square massacre, Jiawei Shen was in Australia. As all affected Chinese citizens were granted asylum by then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, he was able to settle in Sydney.

He was soon joined by his wife, fellow artist Lan Wang, and their baby daughter, Xini. While Lan Wang worked as a cleaner, Jiawei Shen started his Australian career by drawing portraits for tourists at Circular Quay. Most art competitions are by invitation only, but in 1993 when he entered the open-entry Archibald Prize with a portrait of Professor John Clarke, his work was hung.

He soon became an Archibald favourite. The smooth, almost photographic finish that characterised his style made him a popular artist for portrait commissions. In 1995, he was awarded the Mary MacKillop Art Award. His interpretation of the future saint pleased the conservative hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1997, Shen and Wang bought a small fisherman’s cottage at Bundeena on the edge of the Royal National Park. After the changing political climate in China saw his art (which had been out of favour) come into fashion once more, Jiawei Shen considered the nature and impact of ideology.

He thought again of the story of Babel – and how it could be seen as a metaphor for what had happened to the original ideals of Communism.

On October 30 2017, exactly 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Shen began to paint his magnum opus, The Tower of Babel. The painting is so large it fills the walls of the three storey house that was built to contain it.

James Bradley’s documentary, Welcome to Babel, records both the painstaking process of making the painting – as well as the contradictions and commonalities of Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang’s lives in both China and Australia.

A vision to build the communist mansion

The painting itself (which remains in Shen’s possession) is divided into four parts, one for each wall: Utopia, Internationale, Gulag and Saturnus.

The images are drawn from both historic documents and copies of works of art made by artists identifying with Communism. Utopia, the first painting, starts with Lenin and the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution, which evolved into the tyranny of Stalin and, in China, Mao.

Portraits of the great men evolve into images based on the propaganda they spread about the new society they were creating. As their ideas spread around the world, they influenced many artists – such as Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – who came to admire the idealism of this brave new world.

Shen was a child of Mao’s revolution. Born in Shanghai in 1948, he was the son of loyal party members. In his childhood he knew “we were building the Communist mansion”. He still honours the idealism of the those thinkers who imagined a world where all can flourish.

His childhood within the Party is contrasted with Lan Wang’s experience of childhood as a daughter of a despised “Rightist”. Throughout the film, her sometimes tart observations give essential leavening to her husband’s heroic narrative.

The third wall, “Gulag”, shows the cost of unthinking ideology. He remembers being hungry in Mao’s Great Famine, when overeager Party figures falsified production numbers to please their leader and people starved. Wang remembers seeing the dead.

As with other students, they were both sent to work in the country alongside peasant farmers. But while Shen remembers this as “the happiest time in my life”, Wang was sent to a remote northern province where it was cold and people starved.

‘He didn’t experience the suffering’

Jiawei Shen’s career as an artist came from his time in the country when his painting, Standing Guard for our Great Motherland, attracted the attention of Madam Mao.

His status as a heroic worker artist ended after Mao’s death, and he became an art student. The same event also freed “children of the dogs” like Lan Wang, to be educated, and so she become an artist. Her painting is whimsical and decorative, with a sense of fantasy that is absent from her husband’s work.

Wang’s experiences, as well as Shen’s own time spent out of favour, colour the wall he calls Saturnus – the dark side of the revolution. The great art featured here is Goya’s Saturn devouring his son. Shen argues China’s Cultural Revolution and the French Revolution have a great deal in common, wherein “good intentions bring about the most evil results”.

The success of Welcome to Babel largely comes from the contrast between Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang’s approach to their new life. He is the showman, turning his memories, and those of others, into a giant collage – a painting that will be his legacy “for the people of China”.

Wang grows a small garden behind the imposing new house. “He is able to create this work because he didn’t experience the suffering,” she says.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 1974, when a local Sydney newspaper wrote on the success of two local artists, they were introduced using their husband’s names. Ruth Faerber, who has died aged 102, was named as “Mrs Hans (Ruth) Faerber of Castle Cove”.

This was later expanded to indicate the “housewife, mother of two is the wife of Hans Faerber, a design engineer”, before describing her prizewinning work and noting she was also the art critic of the Jewish Times.

Ever polite, always elegant, Faerber never vocally contested such categorisations. However, from girlhood until her extreme old age, she was first and foremost an artist.

A young interest in art

Ruth Levy was born in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra, on October 9 1922. After a less than pleasant experience at Sydney Girls High with an art teacher she later described as an “absolute whacko”, she became a boarding student at Ravenswood.

Here, she was inspired by her teacher Gladys Gibbons and introduced to printmaking as an art. When Ruth told her father she wanted to leave school and be an artist, he agreed on the condition that “you’ve got to be able earn your own living”.

She enrolled at Peter Dodd’s Commercial Art School. Dodd’s friends included the radical modernists Frank and Margel Hinder, recently arrived from the United States, giving the students a surprisingly radical art education.

Two years later, as the impact of World War II led to young women being encouraged to take the jobs of departed men, the 17-year-old worked as a junior commercial artist.

At the Market Printery she was introduced to photogravure printing and made her first experimental etching.

Ruth continued her studies at East Sydney Technical College. In 1944 she enrolled in Desiderius Orban’s Rowe Street Studio. The refugee Hungarian artist taught that rules were to be broken, that artists must experiment, and to have faith in her creativity.

These were lessons she never forgot.

Making a life as an artist

In 1946, Ruth married Hans Faerber, a young design engineer who had escaped from Germany in 1938.

Despite postwar cultural pressures prescribing that women should solely devote themselves to their families, Ruth continued to paint, turning the garage into her studio and running children’s art classes from home. She wanted to learn printmaking but in Sydney this was not possible: the only lithography course was limited to printing apprentices, and only men were eligible to apply.

In 1961 Joy Ewart donated her lithography press to create Sydney’s first public access print workshop at the Willoughby Arts Centre. Faerber became one of its most active participants.

In 1963, the year of her first solo exhibition, the family moved to a house on Sydney’s north shore. Her new studio was built into the base of the cliff. To provide safe access without the bother of planning permission, Hans removed the floor of the broom cupboard and placed a ladder down to the studio.

Faerber’s ability to disappear into a cupboard straight after dinner did sometimes disconcert her children and visitors, but it gave her time to make art as she worked through the night.

Continual experiments

By 1968 her prints had been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of NSW, but she knew she needed to learn more.

She received a scholarship for New York City’s Pratt Center. In New York, she saw Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art & Technology and remembered Orban’s dictum to constantly experiment. She started to use spray paint as a medium and to incorporate photographic images in her work. One print includes a newspaper photograph of Leonard Cohen, made after she saw him perform.

Her return to Australia saw continual experiments. She also began to write, becoming the art critic for the Australian Jewish News. Her reviews were characterised by a generosity of spirit, especially noticing artists at the beginning of their careers. Women and printmakers were favoured subjects.

One of the most significant costs for printmakers is the cost of imported handmade paper. In 1980, Faerber was invited to attend the first hand paper-making workshop at the Tasmanian School of Art’s Jabberwock Mill.

There she realised the possibilities of paper as a medium rather than as a surface.

She abandoned standard shapes. Her experiments with paper became irregular, then sculptural. Paper began to be made with different materials, including tapioca flour and cold tea. She found if she sprayed a paper sculpture with the kind of aerosol paint designed for cars, she could simulate an impression of aged stone.

While she kept a close eye on the latest technical developments, her best tools of trade were sometimes found in the home. Electric frying pans, food processors and a microwave oven were repurposed to make art. An ironing board with a mesh base was used as a press for making paper. She had a long fascination with archaeological sites, realising how fragile civilisations and human life may be.

As she became physically frail, Faerber changed her practice towards making digital prints, seeing how far she could stretch the new media to her ends.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I enjoyed Disney’s 2016 film Moana. My relatives and I attended the Reo Māori release here in Aotearoa, in a packed theatre of Māori language supporters. Watching the film in our own language was emotional and powerful.

Moana is a seagoing adventure portraying the courage of its Pacific characters. I see many aspects of Māori communities represented in the film: our elders, our voyaging history, our language and culture, our ability to adapt, our sense of spirituality and our hope.

I see the characters in my own whānau (extended family). My nephew is similar to the character of Māui, the demigod voiced by Dwayne Johnson. He’s a likeable “big-boned” fulla with a quick wit – an overly confident rascal who draws others to him with a playfulness that gets him into (and out of) trouble.

At the same time, movies like Moana – in which non-Indigenous creators try to tell Indigenous stories – raise sensitive questions about authenticity, cultural appropriation and veiled forms of continuing colonisation.

Disney’s bottom line is to develop characters and storylines that suit a global market and will ultimately be financially viable. Perhaps this is why it missed so many key characteristics of Māui as he is known to the Polynesian people.

In Moana, there is a mystique around Māui’s demigod status; he sits in the space between the gods and humanity. Like the Māui of Polynesia, he can shapeshift, wields a magic hook and is courageous.

Yet this Hollywood Māui would have no chance against the Māui of Polynesia, who is not a god to be worshipped, but a spirit – a set of characteristics identified through the actions of a person. Māui’s spirit lives today and can be activated by his descendants to do extraordinary things.

A Māori view of Māui

Māui’s biggest muscles were in his head and stomach (where Māori believe the core being of a person is located). However, there is no record of him having an appearance that made him stand out in the community.

When Māui decided to rejoin his birth family as a young man, he lined up with his brothers, and his mother was unable to see a difference between the siblings’ physical builds. This is in contrast with his unusually large build in Moana.

He also wasn’t the playful, reckless larrikin depicted in Moana. He saw the world through clear eyes and calculated his way forward, courageously approaching challenges as opportunities to demonstrate his mastery.

He was innovative, intelligent, confident and resourceful – and most of what he did would benefit the whole community. That said, he could also be devious, cruel and jealous as he pushed to achieve his goals.

One of his names is “Māui-pōtiki”, or “Māui the youngest sibling”, which signals the characteristics of someone who challenged the status quo – a free thinker and a clever trickster.

Supernatural power leads to supernatural deeds

Māui faced a series of challenges. Some were forced on him, such as surviving his infancy. At birth he was presumed dead (or near death) and was abandoned to the sea. His grandfather rescued and raised him, teaching him skills, knowledge and karakia – the spiritual means to bend the laws of the universe in his favour.

He faced many challenges in his world, and his responses conveyed important social and life lessons. For instance, the days were too short and people were unable to complete their work before nightfall. So Māui’s answer was to slow the Sun’s journey across the sky. He convinced his sceptical brothers to help him and they went to the pit where the Sun rose each day.

Armed with plaited ropes, infused with spiritual power to hold the Sun, as well as the sacred jawbone of his ancestor (which he also used as a hook), they stationed themselves around the pit and waited.

As the Sun rose into the morning sky, the brothers pulled their ropes to form a tight net, trapping the Sun. Māui quickly climbed onto the Sun and began to beat him (the Sun is personified and thought to be masculine in Māori belief) with his ancestor’s jawbone.

Dazed and battered, the Sun asked Māui the reason for the attack, who then gave him an ultimatum: “Slow your movement across the sky (or I’ll be back)!” The Sun, from fear and injury, slowed down, providing a useful length of daylight for the people.

While violence may not be a justifiable approach to change, there’s still much to learn from this incident. When you need to get something done, you should have a plan, build a team, make use of the resources available to you, be courageous and go for it.

Stories spread across the seas

Māui is credited with many other exploits. He hauled islands up across the Pacific. He spoke with the gods and creatures of the Earth. He even brought fire to the world from the goddess Mahuika and came close to conquering death.

Each story contains layers of knowledge, explaining important aspects of the world and human behaviour. This information was so significant that these stories have been passed down through generations for hundreds of years – spread with our voyaging ancestors across the Pacific, the largest continent in the world.

As such, Māui pops up in stories all across Polynesia, reaching into Melanesia and Micronesia. While the tales about the character, attitude, aptitude and mana (the spiritual lifeforce) are similar, variations exist across Polynesia.

Moana aims to entertain and speak to us and our children. Perhaps the sequel will now reawaken Māui-based discussions on marae (Māori communal spaces) and other Pacific forums. Or perhaps the spirit of Māui will see this “harmless rascal” persona as a launch pad to galvanise his descendants into addressing the ills that face them today.

Kia ara ake anō te kawa a Māui – let the spirit of Māui arise. And enjoy the movie.

Mike Ross, Head of School, Te Kawa a Māui, School of Māori Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For coral reefs, climate change is an existential threat. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has endured seven mass bleaching events over the past 25 years. Five have occurred in the past eight years.

But amid the story of decline, something curious is happening. Surveys from the air and on water show a few reef groups, such as the Ribbon Reefs in the far north and the Swains and Pompey reefs in the south, are consistently escaping severe bleaching while their neighbouring reefs suffer.

But how? In our new research, we found their survival is due to cold water. That is, most of these reefs are periodically bathed in cooler water even as other parts of the reef bake in marine heatwaves. This stems from the phenomenon called upwelling, where cooler waters from the deep mix with warm surface waters. These reefs are likely to be buffered from the worst of climate change.

While the world’s oceans are heating up steadily, the deeper waters remain cooler than surface waters. Our modelling suggests cold currents could protect these vital refuges at least into the 2080s, even if continued high emissions lead to sea surface temperatures 2-3°C hotter than now. Safeguarding these refuges offers the best chance to preserve some of the reef’s rich array of species and – potentially – to allow corals to adapt to new heat regimes and eventually repopulate degraded reefs.

Where are these refuges from heat?

Coral reefs are very sensitive to heat. When marine heatwaves strike, heat stress can make coral polyps bleach by expelling their symbiotic algae. These colourful “zooxanthellae” algae provide coral energy and nutrition from photosynthesis in exchange for shelter. Bleached coral can recover if given a reprieve. But if the heat stress continues, it can die.

Climate change is loading the dice for more heat, more often. This is why we are now seeing parts of the Great Barrier Reef record the worst coral loss in 39 years.

In our research, we looked at why some reefs are less affected by heat. We found upwellings of cool water are protecting them. The reefs are climate refuges – areas where local conditions allow species to survive while other areas become unlivable.

We define these cooler refuges as areas where average summer sea surface temperatures are at least 1°C cooler than nearby regions. These safer zones lie along the ends of the northern and southern Great Barrier Reef and run over 200 kilometres along the continental shelf, where coral reefs are densely packed.

Off northern Australia in the eastern Torres Strait lie the Ribbon Reefs. These climate refuges are located near a steep continental slope with deep channels.

On the southern reefs, a key refuge is the Swains and Pompeys reef complex, 135 km offshore from Mackay. These reefs lie right on the continental drop off where the East Australian Current raises cold water closer to the surface.

When strong tidal currents flood through narrow reef channels, cooler water from the deep can be drawn up over the continental shelf and mixed with warm surface water, acting like a cold bath for the fringing reefs and giving relief to coral.

These effects can last up to a week or more, if conditions are right, and can occur several times over a summer. Currents can trap these cooler waters behind a long, skinny ribbon reef, giving sustained relief.

Will these refuges vanish?

To detect these refuges, we looked for unusually cool water in satellite temperature maps and ocean models. Then we ran these models forward in time, to see if these life-sustaining cool flows would persist in the 2050s under a high emissions scenario, and again in the 2080s. The good news: currents of cool water will continue at least to 2080.

This is because even as surface waters warm and marine heatwaves arrive more often, the currents carrying cooler water to the surface in these refuge reefs will continue. But if climate change continues unchecked, even deeper waters will warm to a level that coral cannot tolerate.

What about changes in ocean currents? At present, the South Equatorial Current carries warm water westward toward the Barrier Reef but then splits into the north-flowing Gulf of Papua Current and the south-flowing East Australian Current.

Our research found the location of the split is steadily moving southward. This could change where current-dependent larvae of coral and coral-eating crown of thorns starfish end up. But our modelling shows these changes won’t greatly affect upwellings over our time period.

Protecting these refuges is vital

If we keep these refuge reefs as intact as possible, we may be able to preserve more of the reef’s staggering biodiversity. If these corals find ways of adapting to the new heat regimes, it might be possible to use them to replenish harder hit reefs. Scientists in the collaborative Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program are already exploring ways to make coral better able to tolerate heat.

Overfishing, damage from shipping and crown of thorns outbreaks also pose threats to these remote reefs. We should protect them as best we can. That’s not to say we should give up on tackling threats to the reef more broadly – only that these reefs are particularly valuable.

Climate change poses the largest threat to coral. Every living thing has temperature limits and adaptation can only go so far. The corals of the Red Sea evolved to tolerate hotter water. But they had thousands of years to do so, while today’s climate is changing far faster. Other researchers have found coral refuges would break down when warming goes past 3°C.

Could coral on these more protected reefs adapt fast enough to take advantage of cool upwellings? If so, could heat-adapted coral larvae repopulate worse-hit areas? We don’t know yet. If they could, some version of the Great Barrier Reef might survive.

But if global warming continues unchecked, these reefs, too, could feel the heat. Sharply reducing emissions is our best option to control global warming and help the Great Barrier Reef endure into the next century.

Chaojiao Sun, Research Group Leader, physical oceanographer, CSIRO and Craig Steinberg, Physical Oceanographer, Australian Institute of Marine Science

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Summer is a wonderful time for families to go the beach and for small children to get to know the water and the sand.

But aside from being a place to relax, my new research shows how the beach provides many ways to teach young children about science.

My ‘beach kinder’ research

I research science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning in bush kinders. These are programs where preschool children regularly go into the natural environment with their daycare centre or kinder/preschool, to gain an appreciation for nature.

Educators do not take any toys, balls or games, so children are reliant only on what is available in nature for play.

Bush kinders often happen in parks, forests and gardens but educators and researchers are increasingly looking at the benefits of education around beaches. These “blue spaces” provide children with wide open spaces to learn through play.

But so far there has been little research on educational benefits of beach learning in early childhood settings.

Last year, I observed a “beach kinder”: where childhood educators and four- and five-year-old children went to the beach along Victoria’s Surf Coast. They were spending between three and five hours per week at the beach for a term as part of their regular kinder/preschool program.

What I noticed was how many opportunities the beach provides to teach little kids about science. Here are a three examples families can try on their next visit to the beach.

1. Rockpool life

When the tide is low, the ocean can expose a wide range of plant and animal life. Small fish, crabs, starfish, sea plants and maybe even an octopus can be found in rockpools. You can ask your child:

How many different animals can you see?

You can also search for barnacles that look like small volcanoes or periwinkles – the little snails that live in the splash zone. You can talk about how animals can sometimes be very small or hiding – just because we can’t see them does not mean they are not there.

You can talk to children about how these small animals survive as the tide rises and falls. For example, crabs bury themselves in the sand away from the water or other types of shellfish can shut their shells tightly to keep the water out. If possible, gently lift one for a look and then replace it just as gently.

You can explain life cycles and simple biology as you walk among the rockpools. For example, sea turtles lay their eggs on sandy beaches, then the baby turtles make their way to the sea where they mature into adults.

2. Sticky sand

Sand is an amazing thing to play with and it changes, depending on where you are on the beach.

Far away from the waters’ edge, have your child take a handful of dry sand and watch what happens as it slips through small hands. Walk closer to the water and do the same thing. Ask your child:

Have you ever wondered why dry and wet sand are so different?

You can explain how the water in the sand actually acts like glue, making the sand grains stick together. This lets us talk to young children about chemistry and how different materials interact with each other.

Try making sandcastles with wet sand and dry sand and see the difference.

Is one version harder to work with than the other other? What happens if you mix wet and dry sand together?

3. Watching the waves

The waves can teach us about floating, sinking and the force of water.

Children can have a lot of fun using pieces of seaweed or small sticks as boats, letting them bob up and down on small waves. They can even have “seaweed races” learning about how waves can move materials around.

Sea waves and ocean currents are really important as some marine animals such as dolphins and turtles use waves to move around. In fact, some animals migrate thousands of kilometres to and from breeding grounds.

You can then replace the seaweed pieces with shells and ask your child to observe what happens:

Why does the seaweed stay on top of the water, but the shell goes underneath?

Talk about how the shell is heavier than the water and so will sink. This helps them understand the physics of floating and sinking as well as the patterns associated with wave motion.

This summer when you’re at the beach, think about all the science happening around you. This could include the animals and habitats you encounter, as well as all the many, changes things happening with the sand and surf.

Chris Speldewinde, Research fellow, Research for Educational Impact Institute, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One of the biggest scientific mysteries is where life on Earth started.

Research has often focused on the role of deep-sea hydrothermal vents – those towering structures on the ocean floor constantly pumping out a melange of organic and inorganic material. Within these plumes are minerals called iron sulfides, which scientists believe could have helped trigger early chemical reactions that created life.

These same minerals are also found in hot springs today, such as the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park in the United States. Hot springs are bodies of groundwater heated by volcanic activity beneath Earth’s surface.

Our new research adds to a small but growing body of evidence that ancient versions of these hot springs could have played a pivotal role in the emergence of life on Earth. This helps bridge the gap between competing hypotheses regarding where life could have emerged.

Geochemistry to biology

Carbon fixation is the process by which living organisms convert carbon dioxide, in the air and dissolved in water, into organic molecules.

Many life forms, including plants, bacteria and microorganisms known as archaea, have different pathways for achieving this. Photosynthesis is one example.

Each of these pathways contains a cascade of enzymes and proteins, some of which contain cores made of iron and sulfur.

We can find proteins with these iron-sulfur clusters in all forms of life. In fact, researchers propose they date back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor – an ancient ancestral cell from which scientists propose life as we know it evolved and diversified.

Iron sulfides are minerals that form when dissolved iron reacts with hydrogen sulfide – the volcanic gas that makes hot springs smell like rotten eggs.

If you look closely at the structure of these iron sulfides, you will find that some of them look incredibly similar to iron-sulfur clusters.

This connection between iron sulfides and carbon fixation has led some researchers to propose that these minerals played a crucial role in the transition from early Earth geochemistry to biology.

Our newly published research expands on this knowledge by investigating the chemical activity of iron sulfides in ancient land-based hot springs which have similar geochemistry to deep-sea vents.

Custom-built chamber

We custom-built a small chamber that would allow us to simulate hot spring environments on early Earth.

Then we spread synthesised iron sulfide samples through the chamber. Some were pure. Others were dosed with other metals commonly found in hot springs. A lamp above these samples simulated sunlight on the early Earth’s surface. Different lamps were used to mimic lighting with different amounts of ultraviolet radiation.

Carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas were constantly pumped through the chamber. These gases have been shown to be important for carbon fixation in deep-sea vent experiments.

We found that all of the iron sulfide samples synthesised were capable of producing methanol, a product of carbon fixation, to varying extents. These results showed that iron sulfides can facilitate carbon fixation not only in deep-sea hydrothermal vents but land-based hot springs too.

Methanol production also increased with visible light irradiation and at higher temperatures.

Experiments with varying temperatures, lighting and water-vapour content demonstrated that iron sulfides likely facilitated carbon fixation in land-based hot springs on early Earth.

An ancient pathway

Additional experiments and theoretical calculations revealed that the production of methanol occurred through a mechanism called a reverse water-gas shift.

We see a similar reaction in the pathway some bacteria and archaea use to turn carbon dioxide into food. This pathway is called the “acetyl-CoA” or “Wood-Ljungdahl” pathway. It is proposed to be the earliest form of carbon fixation that emerged in early life.

This similarity between the two processes is interesting because the former happens on dry land, at the edge of hot springs, while the latter takes place in the wet environment inside cells.

Our study demonstrates methanol production in a wide range of conditions that could have been found in early Earth’s hot springs.

Our findings expand the range of conditions where iron sulfides can facilitate carbon fixation. They show it can happen both in the deep sea and on land – albeit via different mechanisms.

As such, we believe these results support the current scientific consensus suggesting that iron-sulfur clusters and the acetyl-CoA pathway are ancient and likely played an important role in the emergence of life – regardless of whether it happened on land or at the bottom of the sea.

Quoc Phuong Tran, PhD Candidate in Prebiotic Chemistry, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Earlier this year, a caver was poring over satellite images of the Nullarbor Plain when he came across something unexpected: an enormous, mysterious scar etched into the barren landscape.

The find intrigued scientists, including my colleagues and I. Upon closer investigation, we realised the scar was created by a ferocious tornado that no-one knew had occurred. We outline the findings in new research published today.

Tornadoes are a known threat in the United States and elsewhere. But they also happen in Australia.

Without the power of technology, this remarkable example of nature’s ferocity would have gone unnoticed. It’s important to study the tornado’s aftermath to help us predict and prepare for the next big twister.

Australia’s tornado history

Tornadoes are violent, spinning columns of air that drop from thunderstorms to the ground, bringing wind speeds often exceeding 200 kilometres an hour. They can cause massive destruction – uprooting trees, tearing apart buildings and throwing debris over large distances.

Tornadoes have been reported on every continent except Antarctica. They most commonly occur in the Great Plains region of the United States, and in the north-east region of India–Bangladesh.

The earliest tornado observed by settlers in Australia occurred in 1795 in the suburbs of Sydney. But a tornado was not confirmed here by Western scientists until the late 1800s.

In recent decades, documented instances in Australia include a 2013 tornado that crossed north-east Victoria and travelled up to the New South Wales border. It brought winds between 250–300 kilometres an hour and damaged Murray River townships.

And in 2016, a severe storm produced at least seven tornadoes in central and eastern parts of South Australia.

It’s important for scientists to accurately predict tornadoes, so we can issue warnings to communities. That’s why the Nullarbor tornado scar was useful to study.

A whirlwind mystery

The Nullarbor Plain is a remote, dry, treeless stretch of land in southern Australia. The man who discovered the scar had been using Google Earth satellite imagery to search the Nullabor for caves or other karst features.

Karst is a landscape underlain by limestone featuring distinctive landforms. The discovery of the scar came to the attention of my colleagues and I through the collaborative network of researchers and explorers who study the Nullarbor karst.

The scar stretches from Western Australia over the border to South Australia. It lies 20 kilometres north of the Trans-Australian Railway and 90 kilometres east-north-east of Forrest, a former railway settlement.

We compared satellite imagery of the site over several years to determine that the tornado occurred between November 16 and 18, 2022. Blue circular patterns appeared alongside the scar, indicating pools of water associated with heavy rain.

My colleagues and I then travelled to the site in May this year to examine and photograph the scar and the neighbouring landscape.

Our results have been published today in the Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science.

What we found

The scar is 11 kilometres long and between 160 and 250 metres wide. It bears striking patterns called “cycloidal marks”, formed by tornado suction vortexes. This suggests the tornado was no ordinary storm but in the strong F2 or F3 category, spinning with destructive winds of more than 200 kilometres an hour.

The tornado probably lasted between seven and 13 minutes. Features of the scar suggest the whirling wind within the tornado was moving in a clockwise direction. We also think the tornado moved from west to east – which is consistent with the direction of a strong cold front in the region at the time.

Local weather observations also recorded intensive cloud cover and rainfall during that period in November 2022.

Unlike tornadoes that hit populated areas, this one did not damage homes or towns. But it left its mark nonetheless, eroding soil and vegetation and reshaping the Earth’s surface.

Remarkably, the scar was still clearly visible 18 months after the event, both in satellite images and on the ground. This is probably because vegetation grows slowly in this dry landscape, so hadn’t yet covered the erosion.

Predict and prepare

This fascinating discovery on the Nullarbor Plain shows how powerful and unpredictable nature can be – sometimes without us knowing.

Only three tornadoes have previously been documented on the Nullarbor Plain. This is likely because the area is remote with few eye-witnesses, and because the events do not damage properties and infrastructure. Interestingly, those three tornadoes occurred in November, just like this one.

Our research provides valuable insights into the tornadoes in this remote and little-studied region. It helps us understand when, and in what conditions, these types of tornadoes occur.

It also emphasises the importance of satellite imagery in identifying and analysing weather phenomena in remote locations, and in helping us predict and prepare for the next big event.

And finally, the results are a stark reminder that extreme weather can strike anywhere, anytime.

This article has been amended to clarify that a reference to early tornado observations relates only to the period after British colonisation.

Matej Lipar, Adjunct Research Fellow, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The just-ended COP-29 in Baku, and the election of Donald Trump, have put the global response to climate change in the spotlight. Meanwhile back home, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen this week reported Australia is on track to meet its 2030 target to reduce emissions as part of the Paris Climate Agreement.

But the government won’t say whether it will reveal its 2035 target before the election. It points out it is awaiting advice from the Climate Change Authority. The head of that authority, former New South Wales Liberal treasurer Matt Kean, joins the podcast to talk about COP, Australia’s energy transition, and the challenge of preparing that advice on the 2035 target.

Kean says COP left him more encouraged than he’d expected:

I arrived at COP incredibly pessimistic. It was on the back of Trump’s election victory where he basically called climate change a hoax. He said his energy policy was going to be “drill, baby, drill”. And it was clear that there was going to be an absence of American leadership in the climate discussion over the next four years. So, I arrived with not high hopes.

But I left optimistic and positive, and the reason for that is that this is the world’s most important climate conference. It’s the world’s biggest climate conference. It brings together people from all over the globe, be it governments at the national level or sub-national level, businesses, private enterprise, NGOs. And the message that I received from all those actors is, yes, there is a setback, but the effort required and the determination to continue the trajectory that we were on was very, very clear.

It’s an opportunity to collaborate and come up with new ways to solve this challenge. I mean, the world coming together in a global effort to limit global warming by 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels is one of the great challenges of our times. No country alone is going to solve it, and my message to your listeners is this: the fight for a cleaner, safer and better planet by tackling dangerous climate change is bigger than one election cycle in one country at one point in time.

Australia had hoped to get the nod during COP to host (together with Pacific countries) the 2026 COP but a decision has been deferred until June. Kean describes where things are up to and why it’s an important event not just for Australia’s reputation but also for its economy:

I was led to believe that there was a strong indication that other countries might pull out of the race. But clearly that didn’t happen. We arrived in Baku to hear the president of Turkey making a strong and forceful argument as to why Turkey should be the host of that COP. And I think that caught a few people by surprise, to be honest.

But […] hopefully, Australia will be chosen as the country that can host this world-class huge event which will bring lots of economic benefits.

Over 70,000 people descended on Baku. So, regardless of the importance of bringing people together to collaborate and try and solve this challenge, it is a huge economic boon for the city and the country that hosts it. I mean, I can’t think of many events that could attract 70,000 people to Australian shores.

On the Climate Change Authority’s progress report, released this week, Kean highlights a key opportunity for new renewable energy capacity:

Take, for example, one of the recommendations around using more business rooftops to meet our energy needs. Australia has the potential for an extra 28GW of solar capacity using the commercial and industrial rooftops of Australia. That’s bigger than the size of the New South Wales energy system alone.

[The Australian Energy Market Operator] predicts only 5% of the commercial and industrial customer demand will be met by rooftop solar and batteries and that’s compared to 50% for households. So we’ve got a huge opportunity to install more capacity into the grid, ensure that our system is more reliable and able to manage the exit of these unreliable coal fired power stations without adding a huge cost to consumers.

On when Australians will learn about our 2035 targets, and his authority’s advice on them, Kean says Australia will need to submit its targets before next year’s COP, but is coy about when the authority’s advice will be coming:

Let me firstly say what matters most is the quality of the target and the strength of the evidence and analysis that underpin it. So we want to give the Australian people confidence that Australia’s next target is ambitious, achievable and in our national interest.

As far as we’re aware, all countries intend to submit their next targets before the next climate conference in 2025. We will provide our advice in plenty of time for Australia to submit before then.

I’m not going to be rushed by domestic political timetables. I’m an independent voice in this process and as I said, what matters most is the quality of the target and the strength of the evidence and analysis that underpin it.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When Jiawei Shen first came to Australia, he bought a copy of that great western ideological text, the Bible. The doctrine that had shaped his life until then had come from the writings of the great Marxist thinkers – Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and of course, Mao Zedong.

It made sense, therefore, to study the source of the ideology that supposedly shaped this strange new world. Right near the beginning, in Genesis chapter 11, he found the intriguing story of the Tower of Babel, a myth on the origin of linguistic and cultural confusion.

It tells of a time when all people spoke the same language, and out of pride, they built a tower to the heavens so it would be seen from wherever they went. God realised if they continued to collaborate, nothing could stop them:

If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.

The tower was abandoned – and the people scattered across the earth, with many different languages.

Many years later, when Shen contemplated the way his life and his wife’s life had been shaped by ideology and circumstance, he remembered the lesson of the Tower of Babel

Settling in Bob Hawke’s Australia

In June 1989, when student demonstrations in Beijing resulted in the Tiananmen Square massacre, Jiawei Shen was in Australia. As all affected Chinese citizens were granted asylum by then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, he was able to settle in Sydney.

He was soon joined by his wife, fellow artist Lan Wang, and their baby daughter, Xini. While Lan Wang worked as a cleaner, Jiawei Shen started his Australian career by drawing portraits for tourists at Circular Quay. Most art competitions are by invitation only, but in 1993 when he entered the open-entry Archibald Prize with a portrait of Professor John Clarke, his work was hung.

He soon became an Archibald favourite. The smooth, almost photographic finish that characterised his style made him a popular artist for portrait commissions. In 1995, he was awarded the Mary MacKillop Art Award. His interpretation of the future saint pleased the conservative hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1997, Shen and Wang bought a small fisherman’s cottage at Bundeena on the edge of the Royal National Park. After the changing political climate in China saw his art (which had been out of favour) come into fashion once more, Jiawei Shen considered the nature and impact of ideology.

He thought again of the story of Babel – and how it could be seen as a metaphor for what had happened to the original ideals of Communism.

On October 30 2017, exactly 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Shen began to paint his magnum opus, The Tower of Babel. The painting is so large it fills the walls of the three storey house that was built to contain it.

James Bradley’s documentary, Welcome to Babel, records both the painstaking process of making the painting – as well as the contradictions and commonalities of Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang’s lives in both China and Australia.

A vision to build the communist mansion

The painting itself (which remains in Shen’s possession) is divided into four parts, one for each wall: Utopia, Internationale, Gulag and Saturnus.

The images are drawn from both historic documents and copies of works of art made by artists identifying with Communism. Utopia, the first painting, starts with Lenin and the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution, which evolved into the tyranny of Stalin and, in China, Mao.

Portraits of the great men evolve into images based on the propaganda they spread about the new society they were creating. As their ideas spread around the world, they influenced many artists – such as Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – who came to admire the idealism of this brave new world.

Shen was a child of Mao’s revolution. Born in Shanghai in 1948, he was the son of loyal party members. In his childhood he knew “we were building the Communist mansion”. He still honours the idealism of the those thinkers who imagined a world where all can flourish.

His childhood within the Party is contrasted with Lan Wang’s experience of childhood as a daughter of a despised “Rightist”. Throughout the film, her sometimes tart observations give essential leavening to her husband’s heroic narrative.

The third wall, “Gulag”, shows the cost of unthinking ideology. He remembers being hungry in Mao’s Great Famine, when overeager Party figures falsified production numbers to please their leader and people starved. Wang remembers seeing the dead.

As with other students, they were both sent to work in the country alongside peasant farmers. But while Shen remembers this as “the happiest time in my life”, Wang was sent to a remote northern province where it was cold and people starved.

‘He didn’t experience the suffering’

Jiawei Shen’s career as an artist came from his time in the country when his painting, Standing Guard for our Great Motherland, attracted the attention of Madam Mao.

His status as a heroic worker artist ended after Mao’s death, and he became an art student. The same event also freed “children of the dogs” like Lan Wang, to be educated, and so she become an artist. Her painting is whimsical and decorative, with a sense of fantasy that is absent from her husband’s work.

Wang’s experiences, as well as Shen’s own time spent out of favour, colour the wall he calls Saturnus – the dark side of the revolution. The great art featured here is Goya’s Saturn devouring his son. Shen argues China’s Cultural Revolution and the French Revolution have a great deal in common, wherein “good intentions bring about the most evil results”.

The success of Welcome to Babel largely comes from the contrast between Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang’s approach to their new life. He is the showman, turning his memories, and those of others, into a giant collage – a painting that will be his legacy “for the people of China”.

Wang grows a small garden behind the imposing new house. “He is able to create this work because he didn’t experience the suffering,” she says.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tell a man he shouldn’t think of a pink elephant and he can’t get that beast out of his mind!

This quote, from Curt Siodmak’s 1974 novel City in the Sky, describes how hard it can be to suppress our thoughts. “Don’t think of a pink elephant” has become a classic example of how difficult it can be to intentionally avoid visualising.

Research suggests many of you, having read about a pink elephant, will have imagined seeing one.

However, some people, like us, have aphantasia – we cannot visualise. So we are a little confused at the idea other people can imagine seeing things that aren’t there.

In a new study, we have found evidence the pink elephant problem is not universal. Some people – including people with aphantasia – can block involuntary visual thoughts from their minds.

What is aphantasia?

People with aphantasia cannot voluntarily imagine seeing things in our mind’s eye. So if you ask us not to think about a pink elephant, we won’t visualise one, because we can’t.

Aphantasia is typically described as a deficit. When people first learn they have aphantasia they are often upset, as they realise other people can do things they cannot. It might be nice to imagine seeing the characters described in a book, for example, or to visualise an absent loved one.

However, deficits are often balanced by benefits. There are suggestions people with aphantasia (or aphantasics, as we’re sometimes called) may have a heightened resistance to involuntary intrusive thoughts.

Another way to look at it is that aphantasics are one portion of a natural diversity of human minds, with people having different capacities to visualise. Where aphantasics have no capacity, most people would have an average ability, and a small number of people would have an extremely strong ability to visualise.

Vivid mental imagery and involuntary visualisations

In our new study, we looked at links between the intensity of people’s visual imaginations and their tendency to visualise, even when they try not to. People with vivid visual imaginations were more likely to have involuntary visualisations, and we could predict these outcomes by measuring brain activity.

Some people might enjoy being able to imagine seeing detailed scenes whenever they wish. However, this seems to come at the cost of not being able to shut down these experiences.

Most people have less vibrant imagery, but they seem to be more able to suppress these thoughts.

Do aphantasics have peaceful minds?

Aphantasics are unlikely to have involuntary visualisations. Does that mean they have peaceful minds?

In our study people who reported having weak imagery were less likely to imagine seeing things they were trying not to think about. However, they were more likely to report mind-wandering.

If this describes aphantasics, instead of visualising things we are told not to think about, we may turn our minds to other thoughts, such as what’s for dinner. So we would not have more peaceful minds, just a resistance to think about things we are trying to put out of mind.

If aphantasics do not visualise, do they have daydreams?

From our own experience, we can confirm at least some aphantasics have minds that wander. But when our minds wander, neither of us imagines seeing things. Our experiences are different.

When Derek’s mind wanders he imagines hearing and engaging in purely audio conversations. As daydreaming is typically associated with vision, he did not realise until very recently these imagined conversations could be described as his experience of daydreaming.

Loren cannot visualise or imagine hearing things. She experiences her thoughts as different sensations of texture and imagined feelings of movement – and these are what she experiences when her mind wanders.

Are aphantasics resistant to trauma from re-living events?

Perhaps.

While our evidence suggests aphantasics are resistant to involuntary visualisations, more research will be needed to work out if we are resistant to reliving traumas, or if these will simply trigger different types of imagined experience.

What is clear is that Siodmak was wrong. If you tell people they shouldn’t think of a pink elephant, some of us will happily put that beast out of our minds, and turn our thoughts to other matters. What’s for dinner?

Derek Arnold, Professor, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland and Loren N. Bouyer, PhD Student, Neuroscience, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 1974, when a local Sydney newspaper wrote on the success of two local artists, they were introduced using their husband’s names. Ruth Faerber, who has died aged 102, was named as “Mrs Hans (Ruth) Faerber of Castle Cove”.

This was later expanded to indicate the “housewife, mother of two is the wife of Hans Faerber, a design engineer”, before describing her prizewinning work and noting she was also the art critic of the Jewish Times.

Ever polite, always elegant, Faerber never vocally contested such categorisations. However, from girlhood until her extreme old age, she was first and foremost an artist.

A young interest in art

Ruth Levy was born in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra, on October 9 1922. After a less than pleasant experience at Sydney Girls High with an art teacher she later described as an “absolute whacko”, she became a boarding student at Ravenswood.

Here, she was inspired by her teacher Gladys Gibbons and introduced to printmaking as an art. When Ruth told her father she wanted to leave school and be an artist, he agreed on the condition that “you’ve got to be able earn your own living”.

She enrolled at Peter Dodd’s Commercial Art School. Dodd’s friends included the radical modernists Frank and Margel Hinder, recently arrived from the United States, giving the students a surprisingly radical art education.

Two years later, as the impact of World War II led to young women being encouraged to take the jobs of departed men, the 17-year-old worked as a junior commercial artist.

At the Market Printery she was introduced to photogravure printing and made her first experimental etching.

Ruth continued her studies at East Sydney Technical College. In 1944 she enrolled in Desiderius Orban’s Rowe Street Studio. The refugee Hungarian artist taught that rules were to be broken, that artists must experiment, and to have faith in her creativity.

These were lessons she never forgot.

Making a life as an artist

In 1946, Ruth married Hans Faerber, a young design engineer who had escaped from Germany in 1938.

Despite postwar cultural pressures prescribing that women should solely devote themselves to their families, Ruth continued to paint, turning the garage into her studio and running children’s art classes from home. She wanted to learn printmaking but in Sydney this was not possible: the only lithography course was limited to printing apprentices, and only men were eligible to apply.

In 1961 Joy Ewart donated her lithography press to create Sydney’s first public access print workshop at the Willoughby Arts Centre. Faerber became one of its most active participants.

In 1963, the year of her first solo exhibition, the family moved to a house on Sydney’s north shore. Her new studio was built into the base of the cliff. To provide safe access without the bother of planning permission, Hans removed the floor of the broom cupboard and placed a ladder down to the studio.

Faerber’s ability to disappear into a cupboard straight after dinner did sometimes disconcert her children and visitors, but it gave her time to make art as she worked through the night.

Continual experiments

By 1968 her prints had been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of NSW, but she knew she needed to learn more.

She received a scholarship for New York City’s Pratt Center. In New York, she saw Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art & Technology and remembered Orban’s dictum to constantly experiment. She started to use spray paint as a medium and to incorporate photographic images in her work. One print includes a newspaper photograph of Leonard Cohen, made after she saw him perform.

Her return to Australia saw continual experiments. She also began to write, becoming the art critic for the Australian Jewish News. Her reviews were characterised by a generosity of spirit, especially noticing artists at the beginning of their careers. Women and printmakers were favoured subjects.

One of the most significant costs for printmakers is the cost of imported handmade paper. In 1980, Faerber was invited to attend the first hand paper-making workshop at the Tasmanian School of Art’s Jabberwock Mill.

There she realised the possibilities of paper as a medium rather than as a surface.

She abandoned standard shapes. Her experiments with paper became irregular, then sculptural. Paper began to be made with different materials, including tapioca flour and cold tea. She found if she sprayed a paper sculpture with the kind of aerosol paint designed for cars, she could simulate an impression of aged stone.

While she kept a close eye on the latest technical developments, her best tools of trade were sometimes found in the home. Electric frying pans, food processors and a microwave oven were repurposed to make art. An ironing board with a mesh base was used as a press for making paper. She had a long fascination with archaeological sites, realising how fragile civilisations and human life may be.

As she became physically frail, Faerber changed her practice towards making digital prints, seeing how far she could stretch the new media to her ends.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Children, especially toddlers and preschoolers, have an uncanny ability to surprise adults. And one of the more alarming discoveries parents can make is their child has stuck a small object, such as a Lego piece, up their nose.

Queensland Children’s Hospital recently reported more than 1,650 children with foreign objects up their nose had presented to its emergency department over the past decade. Lego, beads, balls, batteries, buttons and crayons were among the most common objects.

With the Christmas season approaching, it’s likely more of these small objects will be brought into our homes as toys, gifts or novelty items.

But why do children stick things like these up their nose? Here’s how natural curiosity, developing motor skills, and a limited understanding of risk can be a dangerous combination.

1. Kids are curious creatures

Toddlers are naturally curious creatures. During the toddler and preschool years, children explore their environment by using their senses. They touch, taste, smell, listen to and look at everything around them. It’s a natural part of their development and a big part of how they learn about the world.

Researchers call this “curiosity-based learning”. They say children are more likely to explore unfamiliar objects or when they don’t completely understand how they work. This may explain why toddlers tend to gravitate towards new or unfamiliar objects at home.

Unfortunately, this healthy developmental curiosity sometimes leads to them putting things in places they shouldn’t, such as their nose.

2. Kids are great mimics

Young children often mimic what they see. Studies that tracked the same group of children over time confirm imitation plays a vital role in a child’s development. This activates certain critical neural pathways in the brain. Imitation is particularly important when learning to use and understand language and when learning motor skills such as walking, clapping, catching a ball, waving and writing.

Put simply, when a child imitates, it strengthens brain connections and helps them learn new skills faster. Anecdotally, parents of toddlers will relate to seeing their younger children copying older siblings’ phrases or gestures.

Inserting items into their nose is no different. Toddlers see older children and adults placing items near their face – when they blow their nose, put on makeup or eat – and decide to try it themselves.

3. Kids don’t yet understand risk

Toddlers might be curious. But they don’t have the cognitive capacity or reasoning ability to comprehend the consequences of placing items in their nose or mouth. This can be a dangerous combination. So supervising your toddler is essential.

Small, bright-coloured objects, items with interesting textures, or items that resemble food are especially tempting for little ones.

What can I do?

Sometimes, it’s obvious when a child has put something up their nose, but not always. Your child might have pain or itchiness around the nose, discharge or bleeding from the nose, and be upset or uncomfortable.

If your child has difficulty breathing or you suspect your child has inserted a sharp object or button battery seek immediate medical care. Button batteries can burn and damage tissues in as little as 15 minutes, which can lead to infection and injury.

If your child inserts an object where they shouldn’t:

• stay calm: your child will react to your emotions, so try to remain calm and reassuring

• assess the situation: can you see the object? Is your child in distress?

• encourage your child to blow their nose gently. This may help dislodge the object

• take your child outside in the Sun: brief exposure for a minute or two might prompt a “Sun sneeze”, which may dislodge the object. But avoid sniffing, which may cause the object to travel further in the airways and into the lungs

• never try to remove the object yourself using tweezers, cotton swabs or other tools. This can push the object further into the nose, causing more damage.

If these methods don’t dislodge the item, your child is not distressed and you don’t suspect a sharp object or button battery, go to your GP. They may be able to see and remove the item.

Prevention is better

Preventing these incidents starts with keeping small, shiny, tempting objects out of reach of children, and teaching them not to place objects in their noses or mouths.

Supervision is key. Parents and caregivers can also be stringent about what they bring into their home. If there’s an alternative item, for example, a similar product that doesn’t need a button battery, consider buying that instead.

Curiosity is a hallmark of children and a key learning process in the early years. However, this curiosity, combined with a limited ability to identify danger, can be a risky combination. With awareness of the dangers, supervision, and appropriate action when incidents happen, parents can keep their children safe, while they explore the world.

Anna Girardi, Lecturer in Speech Pathology and Researcher at the Centre for Health Research, University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As federal parliament rushes to a close, it’s become clearer that a dedicated agency to enforce the nation’s various whistleblower protection laws will be an important priority for the 48th parliament, after the next election.

Widely recognised as the biggest missing link in Australia’s national integrity systems, such a body would support employees who speak up about wrongdoing. It would also help employers and regulators resolve claims of detrimental action. Finally, it would help make legal protections real by shouldering the huge costs of securing compensation for impacts suffered by those doing the right thing.

This month, the landmark parliamentary inquiry into the PwC scandal, led by Labor Senator Deborah O'Neill and Green Barbara Pocock, was unanimous in its clear imperatives for reform:

• Ensuring whistleblower protections apply across all sectors and types of organisations. Because they are “partnerships” rather than “corporations”, large audit, accounting and consulting firms are one example of employers that escape current protections.

• Aligning whistleblower protection laws across the public and private sectors. The inquiry noted at least ten federal laws provide different, confusing standards of protection across different entities and sectors.

• Greater practical support for whistleblowers. Key to this is the establishment of a Whistleblower Protection Authority, covering “both the public and private sectors”.

These calls should help focus the two efforts the federal government has underway to review existing laws. The first is a consultation by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus on fixing our failing public sector whistleblowing laws, which is yet to bear fruit. The second is a new statutory review of the main whistleblowing regimes that apply to the private sectors, overseen by Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones.

This week, federal independent MPs Andrew Wilkie, Helen Haines, David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie upped the ante by taking further steps towards their own Whistleblower Protection Authority bill.

This follows recommendations dating as far back as the Senate Select Committee on Public Interest Whistleblowing in 1994, and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services in 2017.

A body to protect whistleblowers could make a real difference

While any actual reform is unlikely before the next election, all these developments point to a growing consensus for action.

But with new integrity agencies coming under scrutiny, how do we expect a whistleblowing protection body – whether stand-alone or built into an existing body – to make a difference?

In a stark reminder of what is needed, Australian Taxation Office whistleblower Richard Boyle lost a bid earlier this month to have the High Court intervene in his six-year-long prosecution for speaking up against oppressive debt collection practices by his agency.

The High Court ruling demonstrated the gaping holes in federal whistleblowing laws. For example, they fail to cover reasonable preparatory or supporting actions that a whistleblower may need to undertake, not just the actual act of disclosure.

In a technical tactic to avoid the whistleblowing law, the ATO and Director of Public Prosecutions charged Boyle with improperly recording information - not with revealing it. This enabled them to pursue him criminally, despite having already sacked him for complaining too much.

In my view, far from serving any public interest, this prosecution was and is simply malicious. It should have been stopped long ago.

This loophole in the law needs to be fixed. But in addition, a whistleblower protection authority would have a crucial role to play as an extra check-and-balance, by acting as a block on any such prosecutions unless they truly are necessary.

And that is especially the case when agencies seek to punish whistleblowers after failing to first deal properly with their internal disclosures about wrongdoing. This situation applies not only to Richard Boyle, but also to Afghan Files whistleblower, David McBride.

In October, McBride won the right to appeal his five year, eight month prison sentence for providing defence documents to the ABC about the military justice response to alleged Afghan war crimes by Australian special forces.

The Commonwealth’s tactics in suppressing all evidence relating to his internal complaints about perceived injustices were central to his inability to raise a public interest defence as a whistleblower. These were never recognised by the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force for what they actually were: protected public interest disclosures.

Again, a whistleblower protection authority would ensure federal agencies honour the principles underpinning our whistleblower protection law. If they fail to recognise and manage internal disclosures properly, a whistleblower should then be entitled to raise a statutory public interest defence in a fair and open court.

Many agencies and companies fulfil their responsibility to have good whistleblowing policies. They are listening to whistleblowers and learning to properly support and protect them. These are fundamental goals of our laws.

Commonwealth public servants need particular protection

But as well as lots of loopholes and inconsistencies, there are too many agencies simply not implementing the laws, and doing nothing to support and compensate whistleblowers. This again proves why a dedicated enforcement agency is necessary.

The Robodebt scandal proved the problem on a wide scale. Despite Services Australia officers such as Jeannie-Marie Blake objecting to the scheme, none of their complaints were recognised for what they were: concerns about serious maladministration (or worse) requiring independent monitoring and rights to protection, under the Public Interest Disclosure Act.

Indeed, our research compiled for the attorney-general’s review of public sector protections highlighted that when a federal public servant raises concerns about wrongdoing, they are four times less likely to be recognised and protected as a whistleblower than in the New South Wales government. And seven times less likely than if the disclosure was made in the Queensland public service.

Small wonder, then, that protection and support does not flow, and that whistleblowers are left flailing for support and compensation for any damage done.

A whistleblower protection authority to change this situation, will only be as good as the powers and resources it is given, and the people tasked to lead it. The laws it enforces also badly need upgrading and simplification.

Thankfully, as momentum builds towards Australia’s next parliament, there is increased hope that within the next three years, this necessary reform will come to pass.

A J Brown, Professor of Public Policy & Law, Centre for Governance & Public Policy, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The federal government this week tasked an expert panel with making Australia’s largest grid, the National Electricity Market, fit for our changing energy system.

Reform is badly needed. Australia is trying to transition to renewable energy using rules established in 1998 – when the energy mix was dominated by coal-fired power and energy use was more predictable.

The review is welcome. But unless its scope is sufficiently broad, it risks failing to address all the issues plaguing Australia’s electricity system. Below, we outline three priorities for the panel to include in its work.

Getting this right is important. It could secure jobs, lower bills, shore up industries, and help Australia unlock its full potential in a net-zero economy.

An electricity system fit for the future

The National Electricity Market is both a wholesale electricity market (where electricity is bought and sold) and a physical power system (including generators, transmission lines, poles and wires). It operates everywhere in Australia except Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

The government-appointed panel is tasked with examining the wholesale market. Its remit covers matters such as:

• electricity reliability
• how the system interacts with governments’ renewable energy policies
• decarbonising electricity to reach Australia’s emissions reduction targets.
• how the reforms might be implemented.

This remit risks missing a window to expand Australia’s export economy.

Our research shows Australia’s energy grid needs to be double the size of what’s currently planned if we’re to expand industries that run on clean energy, and start exporting renewable energy and products. Such expansion would help Australia thrive in a net-zero world.

That’s why we recommend the expert panel expand its review to the following three areas.

1. Match design with economy-wide ambition

Every two years, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) releases a 20-year roadmap for Australia’s electricity market. It’s formally known as the Integrated System Plan.

Currently, the market operator must base the plan on a scenario “most likely” to eventuate. This constraint risks tracking towards an energy grid half the size of what Australia needs.

Instead, the plan should be based on what could, and should, be done to meet the country’s climate ambition, while ensuring reliability and affordability.

The federal government wants new industrial activity – and its policies to achieve this will profoundly transform the energy system. At the heart of the planned Future Made in Australia policy, for example, is an ambition to become a “renewable energy superpower”.

Such intentions and policies should be included in Australia’s energy system planning. The current review is an opportunity to do this.

2. Pair national and local plans

Heavy industries contribute around 44% of Australia’s total emissions. They can get to net-zero by investing in cleaner technology, matched by new investment in renewable energy generation, transmission and storage.

The demand for electricity in these sectors is set to rise, so the time to act is now.

To help manage this shift, we have previously advocated for new “net zero industrial precincts” – physical clusters of investment in renewable energy and low-carbon technology. Businesses could share resources, talent and clean energy, creating efficiencies and reducing costs.

But such precincts require an energy system that meets future demand. Any solutions proposed by the expert panel should address this need.

3. Supercharge energy performance

So-called “energy performance” is also key to the energy transformation. It involves energy efficiency, electrification, and managing when energy is used.

These measures can help lower energy costs for consumers, ensure reliable energy and reduce the need for expensive new power infrastructure.

The current rules for the National Electricity Market are ill-suited to a system where energy is generated and stored in diverse locations, such as car batteries, rooftops and community battery facilities.

This risks stalling the deployment of new technologies, driving up costs and missing opportunities for consumers to access cleaner, more efficient energy solutions.

Energy performance is currently managed across different governments, departments and energy system players. Responsibility vested in a single body can ensure effective oversight. And rules around energy performance should be updated to recognise the need to rapidly decarbonise and decentralise energy systems.

Australia powering ahead

There is no escaping the energy transition ahead. Getting the settings right will define Australia’s role in a decarbonised global economy.

It would also lower energy bills. Poorly designed energy markets too often result in consumers paying more than they need to.

The panel should be allowed to fully consider how best to align the national energy system with Australia’s renewable energy and climate ambitions.

Anna Skarbek, CEO, Climateworks Centre and Matthew Benetti, Policy Manager (Energy), Climateworks Centre

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Having finally stared down Greens resistance in the final sitting week of the year, the Albanese government looks set to tick off the last of its 2022 housing commitments in need of parliamentary approval.

Like most of Labor’s other housing measures, the Help to Buy and Build to Rent tax reform initiatives are rather narrowly targeted and quite modest in scale.

But although no one is claiming them as silver bullets, both can be fairly justified as sensible efforts to address widely perceived housing pressure points: namely, home ownership affordability and private rental housing quality.

How will Help to Buy work?

True to its name, Help to Buy is a mechanism to assist low to moderate income earners in accessing home ownership.

Other first home buyer assistance programs of course already exist. Nowadays, the most important is the Commonwealth’s Home Guarantee Scheme which enables access to low-deposit mortgages.

Created by former prime minister Scott Morrison, but expanded by his successor Anthony Albanese, this now offers such help to 50,000 households per year. This is well over a third of all first home buyers.

Importantly, though, Help to Buy is a more ambitious scheme that complements the guarantee program by targeting people on lower incomes.

It does this by setting lower income eligibility limits and by offering more substantial assistance to successful applicants. That combination means Help to Buy has the capacity to extend home ownership further down the income scale.

So whereas the Home Guarantee Scheme is mainly about enabling people to bring forward their first home acquisition, Help to Buy potentially enables home ownership for some people who were otherwise permanently excluded.

By taking a 30–40% stake, or “equity share”, in the acquired home, government reduces both the size of the buyer’s down payment and their mortgage loan.

Multibillion-dollar plan

This of course comes at a cost, because the government needs to fund that equity share.

The price tag for a four-year program involving 40,000 homes is estimated at $5.5 billion. But all that money and more will come back to government when homes purchased with support are sold.

The “and more” part is the proportionate share of any capital gain realised at sale.

So by comparison with the “something for nothing” first home buyer grant and stamp duty concession policies that drained more than $20 billion from government coffers during the 2010s, this is a relatively prudent and targeted use of public funds.

By offering a larger equity stake (40%) for newly built homes, the government is also justifiably looking to steer consumer choices in such a way that the scheme contributes to the wider policy objective of expanding new housing supply.

Similarly, by levelling the playing field for overseas funders of Build to Rent housing, ministers hope expanded investment will trigger a construction surge contributing to its overarching housebuilding target: 1.2 million new homes in the five years to 2029.

A lack of coherence

These initiatives are the latest in a wide-ranging array of housing initiatives taken forward during this term of government.

But other than the housing supply advocacy, there is little coherence or rationale that unites these measures.

Indeed, while promised in Labor’s 2022 platform, the National Housing and Homelessness Plan that would ideally serve that purpose remains under wraps.

It’s with this in mind that many have expressed frustration at the government’s low-profile approach to the plan’s development. This includes a perceived lack of enthusiasm to embed the plan in law.

In its commendable but slightly shapeless housing activism, the Albanese government’s record could be seen as resembling the Rudd government’s spirited housing policy revival from 2007–10.

In part, perhaps, because it similarly lacked a coherent overarching long-term strategy, that revival quickly dissipated – even under the successor Labor government, let alone once Tony Abbott took charge.

That is history we must hope is unrepeated.

Hal Pawson, Professor of Housing Research and Policy, and Associate Director, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.