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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 Albanese government will develop and legislate a “Digital Duty of Care” to place the onus on platforms to keep people safe and better prevent online harms, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has announced.

In a speech to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday night, Rowland said a change of approach was needed.

“To date, the Online Safety Act has been a crucial tool for incentivising digital platforms to remove illegal content, usually applied remedially and case by case. However, it does not, in a fundamental sense, incentivise the design of a safer, healthier, digital platforms ecosystem.

"What’s required is a shift away from reacting to harms by relying on content regulation alone, and moving towards systems-based prevention, accompanied by a broadening of our perspective of what online harms are.”

The change would bring Australia into line with the United Kingdom and European Union approaches. Platforms would have to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harms, underpinned by risk assessment and risk mitigation and informed by safety-by-design principles.

A duty of care was “a common law concept and statutory obligation that places a legal obligation to take reasonable steps to protect others from harm. It is a proven, workable and flexible model,” Rowland said.

“This, as part of a growing global effort, will deliver a more systemic and preventative approach to making online services safer and healthier.

"Where platforms seriously and systemically breach their duty of care we will ensure the regulator can draw on strong penalty arrangements,” Rowland said.

The duty of care model was recommended by a review of the Online Safety Act, which went to the government last month. The government brought forward the statutory review of the act by a year to ensure online safety laws were up to date.

The government says legislating a duty of care will mean tech platforms will need to continually identify and mitigate potential risks as technology and services alter.

The changes will support the existing complaint and removal schemes for illegal and harmful material. under the Online Safety Act.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

For more than a millennium, many Andean peoples used an object called a “khipu” (also spelled “quipu” and pronounced “key-poo”) to record and communicate information.

Khipus were made with cords or strings with knots tied into them. And experts understand that many, but not all, of these knots were used to represent numbers.

In a new study published today, I make a numeric connection between two important khipus from history – the first being being the largest khipu ever known and the other one of the most complex.

What were khipus used for?

While khipus were used in earlier times, they were especially important to the Inca Empire, which lasted from around 1438 CE to 1532 CE (when the empire was conquered by the Spanish). Since the Inca did not leave any written records, khipus are understood to have been their main system of communication and record-keeping.

Khipus were commonly made from either cotton or fibres sourced from camelids (the group of animals that includes camels, llamas and alpacas). These materials could be dyed or left naturally coloured. Some khipus even include plant fibres, while several incorporate human hair.

It seems specially-trained khipu makers (“khipukamayuqs”) made very deliberate decisions when constructing these record-keeping tools. These decisions related to the colours used, the direction of spin and ply of the cord fibres, the spacing and type of the cord attachments, and the structure and position of the knots.

Early Spanish chroniclers wrote about the khipu’s various numeric applications, which included recording storehouse inventories, population censuses and tax and tribute obligations.

A new numeric connection

For more than a century, researchers have been studying khipu features in hopes that patterns may emerge from a collective view. In recent decades their data have been digitised, which is now freely available via the Open Khipu Repository and the Khipu Field Guide.

For my research, I analysed the data from two khipus found in northern Chile and first recorded by ethno-mathematician Marcia Ascher and anthropologist Robert Ascher in the 1970s. One of these is the largest khipu ever found – spanning more than five metres in length and comprising more than 1800 cords (see the picture below). The other khipu (pictured in the header image) has almost 600 cords in complicated arrangements.

I noticed both khipus used red/white “divider” cords to separate groups of either tens or sevens. The larger khipu was divided into ten groups, with each group having seven cords. The smaller khipu was divided into seven groups, with each group having ten cords (and many subsidiary cords).

After examining and manipulating the data, I realised the smaller and more complex khipu is a summary and reallocation of the information in the larger khipu. In other words, the two khipus record the same data, but represent it differently.

This is the most complicated numeric connection between khipus made to date. It was only possible because of the availability of data and digital tools that make searching for patterns easier – and which wouldn’t have been available to Marcia Ascher back in the 1970s.

New khipu clues

While the numbers in these two khipus are counting and allocating something, we don’t yet know what that was. Why would it be necessary to have two khipus recording the same information in two different ways? We can only speculate.

Perhaps the larger khipu recorded the collection of different amounts of food crops from the community, while the other recorded how these foods were distributed between those in need, or between storehouses. Both ways of looking at the numbers would have been important to the people who used these khipus.

Experts believe only a tiny fraction of the khipus made throughout history have survived. This is partly because the institutions that used them eventually either became obsolete or used other means of recording after the conquest, combined with a climate that was less than ideal for textile preservation.

Today, about 1,600 khipus remain, residing mainly in collections in the Americas and Europe. Fewer than half of these have had their features digitally saved in research databases.

Through continued digitisation efforts, we hope to discover more khipu clues – and make new numeric connections that add to our understanding of ancient Andean peoples.

Karen Thompson, Research Data Specialist, The University of Melbourne

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

The iconic sound of an orchestra tuning is highly recognisable, even for those who’ve never set foot in a concert hall. Many of us first heard it while watching a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Have you ever wondered why the oboe begins the tuning? How is the starting note decided? With access to electronic tuning devices, along with advancements in materials and manufacturing enabling instruments to better sustain their pitch, is the tuning ritual still needed? What is the purpose, beyond building excitement or signalling the conductor’s entrance?

Whether or not professional orchestras’ tuning rituals are required, there is something inherently comforting about it for audiences.

Enter the oboe

The earliest orchestras, in the Baroque era, comprised a non-standard set of instruments. One combination could have been a harpsichord, a few string players (violin, viola, viola da gamba), one or more wind instruments, and perhaps even timpani.

As the number of string players grew in the orchestra, the flute replaced the quiet recorder.

The oboe brought complex, contrasting overtones, plus a limited yet stable tuning range controlled mostly by a pair of “fixed” reeds.

These factors made the oboe the practical choice as the tuning instrument in the Baroque era.

By the 1800s, the size and instrumentation were much like the modern orchestra. An order was added to the tuning ritual, with each “family” of instruments taking its turn to tune with the oboe.

When a fixed-pitch instrument, such as an organ, was included with the orchestra, the oboe would be tuned to it before the ritual began.

These tuning traditions continue today.

Constantly retuning

The tuning ritual heard by the audience is just the tip of the iceberg. Many instruments need micro-tuning adjustments throughout a performance.

Tuning can also slip, which may be caused when string or brass instruments need to use a mute. The mute lowers the volume and adds a different tonal quality, but it can also slightly alter the pitch of the instrument.

Tuning is also affected by changes in temperature or humidity as the instrument warms while being played or cools due to external changes.

Consider the weather during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics – it would have been challenging to keep the instruments in tune in the rain and extreme humidity.

Depending on the instrument, sometimes when the pitch slips it cannot be adjusted mid-performance.

In a recent concert I conducted at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, the yidaki was slightly out of tune after being perfectly in tune two hours earlier in rehearsal. The difference? The yidaki’s wood was affected by a sudden drop in temperature when a thunderstorm came through mid-concert.

Pipe organs suffer the same fate at the mercy of the weather with their large, metal components.

What makes an ‘A’?

The traditional tuning note is A. This stems from the open A string being common to all orchestral string instruments.

The oboist plays a long A when instructed by the concert master – usually the lead violinist – who stands and indicates to the oboist and then to each section of the orchestra when it’s time to tune.

The string players tune their A strings, from which they can tune their other strings. In turn, other sections of the orchestra also tune to A. When the tuning ends and the instruments are silent, the orchestra is ready to perform.

This all seems straightforward, but there are variations on what an A should sound like. An audio frequency of A=440 hertz (Hz) is considered standard or “concert” pitch, although this is a fairly modern concept.

Tuning forks were invented in Europe in the early 1700s, around the same time as the emergence of orchestras. Based on tuning forks and organs remaining from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Beethoven’s tuning fork, historians have identified concert pitches ranging from 395 to 465Hz.

Efforts to standardise concert pitch at A=440Hz arose in the 19th century, further reinforced in the 20th century.

Today, the pitch used may be decided by historically informed performance, adopting the likely tuning from when the music was composed. Giuseppe Verdi, for instance, campaigned for Italy to adopt concert pitch A=432Hz. Using the slightly lower tuning for Verdi’s Messa da Requiem is justifiable, allowing for the choir to execute extended high passages more comfortably.

In the 1960s, conductor Herbert von Karajan decided the Berlin Philharmonic sounded “brighter” when tuned to A=443–444Hz. This trend continues today for several prominent orchestras: The New York Philharmonic tunes to A=442Hz, and the Vienna Philharmonic to A=443Hz.

Changing rituals

Is the tuning ritual essential? It depends.

Earlier this year I saw Wicked. The orchestra tuned very quickly. Practicalities can trump ritual – especially on days with matinee and evening shows, each running almost three hours.

Symphony orchestras comprise mostly acoustic instruments. In contrast, modern musical theatre orchestras often include electronic instruments and a rhythm section, with synthesizers that don’t need tuning.

Compared with a large auditorium, a pit may have fewer temperature fluctuations. When needed, pit players use electronic tuning devices. Some play multiple instruments in each performance, which are tuned in advance and during the performance.

Despite contemporary advancements, the tradition of an orchestra tuning in the presence of an audience is a special, transcendent moment, unique to the live concert experience.

Kathleen McGuire, Senior Lecturer in Education (Music), National School of Education, Faculty of Education and Arts, Australian Catholic University

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

Imagine a number made up of a vast string of ones: 1111111…111. Specifically, 136,279,841 ones in a row. If we stacked up that many sheets of paper, the resulting tower would stretch into the stratosphere.

If we write this number in a computer in binary form (using only ones and zeroes), it would fill up only about 16 megabytes, no more than a short video clip. Converting to the more familiar way of writing numbers in decimal, this number – it starts out 8,816,943,275… and ends …076,706,219,486,871,551 – would have more than 41 million digits. It would fill 20,000 pages in a book.

Another way to write this number is 2136,279,841 – 1. There are a few special things about it.

First, it’s a prime number (meaning it is only divisible by itself and one). Second, it’s what is called a Mersenne prime (we’ll get to what that means). And third, it is to date the largest prime number ever discovered in a mathematical quest with a history going back more than 2,000 years.

The discovery

The discovery that this number (known as M136279841 for short) is a prime was made on October 12 by Luke Durant, a 36-year-old researcher from San Jose, California. Durant is one of thousands of people working as part of a long-running volunteer prime-hunting effort called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS.

A prime number that is one less than some power of two (or what mathematicians write as 2 p – 1) is called a Mersenne prime, after the French monk Marin Mersenne, who investigated them more than 350 years ago. The first few Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31 and 127.

Durant made his discovery through a combination of mathematical algorithms, practical engineering, and massive computational power. Where large primes have previously been found using traditional computer processors (CPUs), this discovery is the first to use a different kind of processor called a GPU.

GPUs were originally designed to speed up the rendering of graphics and video, and more recently have been repurposed to mine cryptocurrency and to power AI.
Durant, a former employee of leading GPU maker NVIDIA, used powerful GPUs in the cloud to create a kind of “cloud supercomputer” spanning 17 countries. The lucky GPU was an NVIDIA A100 processor located in Dublin, Ireland.

Primes and perfect numbers

Beyond the thrill of discovery, this advance continues a storyline that goes back millennia. One reason mathematicians are fascinated by Mersenne primes is that they are linked to so-called “perfect” numbers.

A number is perfect if, when you add together all the numbers that properly divide it, they add up to the number itself. For example, six is a perfect number because 6 = 2 × 3 = 1 + 2 + 3. Likewise, 28 = 4 × 7 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14.

For every Mersenne prime, there is also an even perfect number. (In one of the oldest unfinished problems in mathematics, it is not known whether there are any odd perfect numbers.)

Perfect numbers have fascinated humans throughout history. For example, the early Hebrews as well as Saint Augustine considered six to be a truly perfect number, as God fashioned the Earth in precisely six days (resting on the seventh).

Practical primes

The study of prime numbers is not just a historical curiosity. Number theory is also essential to modern cryptography. For example, the security of many websites relies upon the inherent difficulty in finding the prime factors of large numbers.

The numbers used in so-called public-key cryptography (of the kind that secures most online activity, for example) are generally only a few hundred decimal digits, which is tiny compared with M136279841.

Nevertheless, the benefits of basic research in number theory – studying the distribution of prime numbers, developing algorithms for testing whether numbers are prime, and finding factors of composite numbers – often have downstream implications in helping to maintain privacy and security in our digital communication.

An endless search

Mersenne primes are rare indeed: the new record is more than 16 million digits larger than the previous one, and is only the 52nd ever discovered.

We know there are infinitely many prime numbers. This was proven by the Greek mathematician Euclid more than 2,000 years ago: if there were only a finite number of primes, we could multiply them all together and add one. The result would not be divisible by any of the primes we have already found, so there must always be at least one more out there.

But we don’t know whether there are infinitely many Mersenne primes – though it has been conjectured that there are. Unfortunately, they are too scarce for our techniques to detect.

For now, the new prime serves as a milestone in human curiosity and a reminder that even in an age dominated by technology, some of the deeper, tantalising secrets in the mathematical universe remain out of reach. The challenge remains, inviting mathematicians and enthusiasts alike to find the hidden patterns in the infinite tapestry of numbers.

And so the (mathematical) search for perfection will continue.

John Voight, Professor of Mathematics , University of Sydney

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

Meta will make its generative artificial intelligence (AI) models available to the United States’ government, the tech giant has announced, in a controversial move that raises a moral dilemma for everyone who uses the software.

Meta last week revealed it would make the models, known as Llama, available to government agencies, “including those that are working on defence and national security applications, and private sector partners supporting their work”.

The decision appears to contravene Meta’s own policy which lists a range of prohibited uses for Llama, including “[m]ilitary, warfare, nuclear industries or applications” as well as espionage, terrorism, human trafficking and exploitation or harm to children.

Meta’s exception also reportedly applies to similar national security agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It came just three days after Reuters revealed China has reworked Llama for its own military purposes.

The situation highlights the increasing fragility of open source AI software. It also means users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – some versions of which use Llama – may inadvertently be contributing to military programs around the world.

What is Llama?

Llama is a collation of large language models – similar to ChatGPT – and large multimodal models that deal with data other than text, such as audio and images.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, released Llama in response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The key difference between the two is that all Llama models are marketed as open source and free to use. This means anyone can download the source code of a Llama model, and run and modify it themselves (if they have the right hardware). On the other hand, ChatGPT can only be accessed via OpenAI.

The Open Source Initiative, an authority that defines open source software, recently released a standard setting out what open source AI should entail. The standard outlines “four freedoms” an AI model must grant in order to be classified as open source:

• use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission
• study how the system works and inspect its components
• modify the system for any purpose, including to change its output
• share the system for others to use with or without modifications, for any purpose.

Meta’s Llama fails to meet these requirements. This is because of limitations on commercial use, the prohibited activities that may be deemed harmful or illegal and a lack of transparency about Llama’s training data.

Despite this, Meta still describes Llama as open source.

The intersection of the tech industry and the military

Meta is not the only commercial technology company branching out to military applications of AI. In the past week, Anthropic also announced it is teaming up with Palantir – a data analytics firm – and Amazon Web Services to provide US intelligence and defence agencies access to its AI models.

Meta has defended its decision to allow US national security agencies and defence contractors to use Llama. The company claims these uses are “responsible and ethical” and “support the prosperity and security of the United States”.

Meta has not been transparent about the data it uses to train Llama. But companies that develop generative AI models often utilise user input data to further train their models, and people share plenty of personal information when using these tools.

ChatGPT and Dall-E provide options for opting out of your data being collected. However, it is unclear if Llama offers the same.

The option to opt out is not made explicitly clear when signing up to use these services. This places the onus on users to inform themselves – and most users may not be aware of where or how Llama is being used.

For example, the latest version of Llama powers AI tools in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. When using the AI functions on these platforms - such as creating reels or suggesting captions – users are using Llama.

The fragility of open source

The benefits of open source include open participation and collaboration on software. However, this can also lead to fragile systems that are easily manipulated. For example, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, members of the public made changes to open source software to express their support for Ukraine.

These changes included anti-war messages and deletion of systems files on Russian and Belarusian computers. This movement came to be known as “protestware”.

The intersection of open source AI and military applications will likely exacerbate this fragility because the robustness of open source software is dependent on the public community. In the case of large language models such as Llama, they require public use and engagement because the models are designed to improve over time through a feedback loop between users and the AI system.

The mutual use of open source AI tools marries two parties – the public and the military – who have historically held separate needs and goals. This shift will expose unique challenges for both parties.

For the military, open access means the finer details of how an AI tool operates can easily be sourced, potentially leading to security and vulnerability issues. For the general public, the lack of transparency in how user data is being utilised by the military can lead to a serious moral and ethical dilemma.

Zena Assaad, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering, Australian National University

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

The social media platform TikTok has become a cultural phenomenon, influencing the behaviour and taste of its users in almost every area of life. From dance trends to skincare and make-up products, health hacks to fad diets, TikTok recommendations can go viral within minutes – and so can its health advice.

Some of the most searched educational videos on TikTok are on diet, exercise and sexual health.

“Fitspiration” is a popular social media hashtag aimed at motivating users to lead healthier lifestyles. “Fitspo” posts often include before and after images and or “aspirational” of photos of influencers with ideal body types. But numerous studies have found that many of these social media posts [can have a negative impact] on users’ mental health and promote or compound their body insecurities.

Social media has its upsides. For example it allows users to share their experiences of health issues. One study showed that 80% of cancer patients use social media to engage peers. But it can also help spread health misinformation.

For example, a 2023 survey conducted by Dublin City University found that 57% of Gen-Z and Millennial TikTok users are influenced by, or regularly adopt, nutrition trends from the platform. The same research also found that only 2.1% of the analysed nutrition content on TikTok proved to be accurate when compared to public health guidelines.

But this could be about to change. The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced a year-long partnership with TikTok to provide users with reliable, science-based evidence.

Healthcare professionals are already trying to raise levels of health literacy on social media, however. Doctors and specialists are publishing videos to educate users about melanoma and dark skin, for instance. These resources are much needed because, although melanoma is rarer in people with dark skin tones, the five-year survival rate is only 66%, compared to 90% in non-Hispanic whites. This is because melanoma is often diagnosed much later in people with darker skin.

Other cancer topics, such as laryngeal cancer, stomach cancer, thyroid cancer and breast cancer also show increased interaction from users. But while there are plenty of patient perspectives, there are far fewer and lower-quality resources from healthcare professionals.

A 2022 study found that of the most popular articles posted on social media in 2018 and 2019, on the four most common cancers, one in every three contained false, inaccurate or misleading information. And most of that misinformation about cancer was potentially harmful. For example, by promoting unproven treatments.

Stories shared by patients writing on social media about their cancer journeys can be powerful, particularly for users going through similar experiences. But they can also be scary – and are occasionally untrue.

Difficult subjects

Content about potentially embarrassing or intimate health issues have become popular on social media, which is often the first port of call when experiencing symptoms or after initial diagnosis.

Videos about anal fissures have attracted a significant number of views, while posts sharing experiences of intrauterine contraceptive devices have highlighted common side-effects that can help inform the contraceptive decisions of other users.

IVF is a valuable and growing discussion topic on social media, but more engagement is needed from experts to ensure the medical accuracy of advice and guidance.

Creating a force for good

Similarly, social media information on neurodevelopmental conditions, such as autism and ADHD, have seen a huge increase in viewer traffic. Celebrities, in particular, have used social media platforms to talk about their own diagnoses and urge or inspire others to seek help. For example, Tom Stoltman, the current reigning and three times World’s Strongest Man, has spoken openly about his autism diagnosis and how it can be a superpower.

The growing challenges around mental health diagnoses are a double-edged sword on social media. The availability of information can help understanding of conditions – but it can also fuel self-diagnoses, which are increasing and can cause strain on healthcare systems and potential harm to patients.

Various studies highlight the issue of health misinformation on social media. One study showed that X (formerly Twitter) had the highest level of misinformation. Many of the studies assessing social media health content show that less than 30% is medically accurate.

So, while social media health posts can be beneficial for those looking for patient perspectives, it’s important that users are also able to access high-quality, medically accurate resources from qualified professionals.

Hopefully, the WHO and TikTok collaboration will help to facilitate and promote more engagement from healthcare professionals on social media.

Adam Taylor, Professor and Director of the Clinical Anatomy Learning Centre, Lancaster University

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

An inspiring celebration of the rich heritage of embroidery, Stitched: Scotland’s Embroidered Art has opened its doors at Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios.

Curator Emma Inglis adeptly pulls together a showcase spanning 200 years from 1720-1920, exemplifying the detail, skill and craft in often-overlooked gems gathered from National Trust properties across Scotland.

Located beneath Dovecot’s working tapestry studio, the vividly painted gallery rooms provide a warm backdrop to the motifs, symbolic depictions, complex compositions and extensive colour palettes of an array of embroidered textiles. The collection of 80 exquisite pieces features everything from bed hangings to ornate armchairs, intricate firescreens, tablecloths, cushions and even tea cosies.

Some pieces have been taken out of storage and have undergone meticulous textile restoration specifically for Stitched. Others, normally buried in the vast rooms of lavish Scottish castles and houses, are given the opportunity to shine and share their stories. These works include works from Newhailes House near Musselburgh, Drum Castle in Banchory, House of Dun near Montrose, and Weaver’s Cottage in Kilbarchan.

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The chosen pieces are accompanied by engaging histories, focusing on their practical function as well as how they were made and the women who made them. Singling out these items in an exhibition powerfully re-evaluates what was commonly dismissed as “women’s work”, focusing on the craft and skill involved.

From Scotland’s grandest houses to more humbler homes, the pieces in this exhibition are unified by the desire to create something decorative and civilising. Whether that’s a firescreen embroidered with exotic parrots by Lady Augusta Gordon of the House of Dun, or the golden embroidered leaf motifs stitched into a wool carpet by a Dundonian watchmaker’s wife in the mid-19th century, this is a fascinating opportunity for visitors to witness the craft and invention of the women who created ornate stitched patterns.

There is also a sense that this is just the start of unearthing many of the stories behind the the pieces and the exceptional skills that created them. From wealthy women who could afford the materials and time to master the intricate stitches of contemporary trends, to self-taught embroiderers who came from far more modest backgrounds, there is much to explore and untangle from their stitches.

An exquisite floral bedcover originally embroidered in the 1740s by Lady Anne Gordon of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, but left unfinished, is a stunning example. Rediscovered in the 1880s by Ishbel, Lady Aberdeen, who was keen to revive embroidery skills, the task was given to a talented local embroiderer, May Sandison.

The daughter of an Aberdeenshire crofter who learned embroidery at her mother’s knee, Sandison later went on to lead the local Methlick School of Needlework. A great supporter of traditional crafts, Lady Aberdeen created the school “for the training and employment of girls in the district who do not desire to go out into the world, but who want to earn some money at or near home”. Sandison’s work to complete the piece followed the traces of the stems and leaves set out by Anne Gordon more than 140 years before.

Such fine, intricate work was not expected from the hands of rural working-class women. A local newspaper noted that the 1894 Home Industries Exhibition was “a really marvellous display when one considers that the women who execute such dainty work are taken from the ranks of the peasantry”.

The Stitched exhibition is an ideal opportunity to engage new audiences and drive interest in the National Trust for Scotland properties from which so many of these beautiful things been borrowed. In the Dovecot’s gallery spaces, these textiles feel almost freshly minted, pulling the visitor into other worlds and histories.

Indian embroidered curtains created in the 1720s borrowed from the House of the Binns in West Lothian reveal the unique plant-based colour from the locality of their making. They present an example of the visual trends of the time and the desire for beautiful, professionally stitched textiles in Scotland.

Examples from Lady Aberdeen’s needlework school include embroidered panels and a stunning gold thread table cover, copied from an Italian original. These sit alongside a pair of fine Chinese silk embroidered hangings purchased for Newhailes House just outside Edinburgh.

Inglis pleasingly connects many of the textiles to their people, whether that is the embroiderer themselves, or those who commissioned, collected, owned and used the items. This gives a strong sense of the context of this craft at various times throughout the last 200 years, reflecting the shifting fashions for stitch styles, technique, colour and materials.

Showcasing these archival embroidered textiles underscores the growing interest and market for embroidered textiles, as well as an increasing visibility in the arts. An appreciation of this slow, meticulous craftwork also highlights how this quiet domestic mode of expression has more recently become a less-quiet vehicle for women’s activism, reigniting excitement around the use of stitch.

Delving into archives is an excellent way to kindle interest in forgotten textures, pattern and colour in textile design. The histories embedded in these archives have the potential to inspire the next generation of timeless, long-lasting materials, prompted by designers’ need to challenge the overconsumption of modern fast fashion and interiors.

In an industry of opaque supply chains, highlighting the stories and people behind these exceptional works echoes the move to shift the current narrative around textiles. Stitched offers a rare opportunity to enjoy embroidered pieces whose stories can be traced back through history, reminding us of the integrity of handmade crafts designed to be cherished – and to last.

Collette Paterson, Programme Director - Textiles, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

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

Once every spring, a few days after the full moon, corals of the great barrier reef release eggs and sperm simultaneously – a phenomenon so spectacular it can be seen from space.

Not only does the Moon’s gravitational attraction interact with the Sun to cause our tides (ebb and flow), its orbit around Earth generates different Moon phases of varying luminosity. Scientists think the Moon’s light at a certain point each spring may provide a cue to corals that the conditions are right to release eggs and sperm.

The Moon’s cycle indirectly affects some animal behaviour during high and low tides, of course, by excluding them from fertile foraging areas such as coastal mudflats. But the sunlight that is reflected off the Moon also has a direct influence on animal behaviour. For example, to those animals that rely on vision for foraging, moonlight is a resource. To others that are at risk of being killed at night, it is a menace.

A recent study found moonlight seems to affect mammals’ behaviour even in one of the darkest places on Earth: the floors of tropical forests.

Footage from camera traps in the undergrowth showed small mammals, such as rodents and armadillos, seemed to avoid predators by being less active on moonlit nights. In response, their hunters, including the ocelot wild cat, also become less active.

So, moonlight in the tropics seemed to create a natural “resting phase” for wildlife. However, a few species that are dependent on vision for foraging and predator avoidance, including the African elephant shrew (Petrodromus tetradactylus), showed increased nocturnal activity in moonlight.

Across the world, here are five animal species that have fascinating behavioural responses to moonlight.

1. Mayflies in Africa

Much like the corals, the mayflies (Povilla adusta) of Lake Victoria in eastern Africa synchronise their mating with the Moon.

These insects emerge in great numbers from their aquatic larval stage (which lasts four to five months) two days after a full moon. As sexually mature adults (the imago stage), this type of mayfly lives for only one to two hours, so they are in a great hurry to display, copulate and lay eggs before they die. Using the Moon’s cycle as a timer helps them ensure that potential mates will be around – then the moonlight also helps them fulfil their urgent tasks.

2. Nightjars

Nightjars are birds that hunt for flying insects at dusk and dawn. My research team monitored European nightjars (Caprimulgus europaeus) in flight (both foraging and migrating) for a year using accelerometers, a type of motion sensor.

During a full moon, nightjars extended their foraging time into the night, probably enabling them to catch more insects in the moonlight.

These birds stayed in the local area during full moons, when they have this increased time to feed. Then, about 12 days into the waning Moon, during spring and autumn migration, nightjars departed on their long flights to and from Europe and southern Africa, as feeding opportunities were disappearing.

The Moon also dictates when nightjars lay their eggs. These birds make sure their eggs hatch under a full moon, so they have the best foraging conditions when their chicks need food the most.

3. Swifts

The black swift (Cypseloides niger) builds its nests on ledges and niches in remote cliff faces in the western US and Canada. Its migration was little known until 2012 when, using tracking devices called light-level geolocators, scientists showed that swifts breeding in the Rocky mountains migrate to the Amazon of western Brazil.

Scientists already knew European swifts (Apus apus) fly continuously for the ten months of the year when they’re not breeding, including their migration between Europe and tropical Africa.

In a 2022 study to test if this applies to black swifts as well, scientists put multi-sensor data loggers on the birds. The black swifts not only remained airborne for their eight months of migration and wintering, they also showed an unexpected behaviour.

During the ten days around each full moon during the non-breeding period, they ascended to high altitudes (3-4,000 metres) after dusk and remained there throughout the night. In contrast, around each new moon, they remained at relatively low altitudes.

The flight acceleration data showed the swifts flew more actively during the brighter times when they were at high altitude, compared with when they were flying in darkness – suggesting they captured more insects (and use more energy) around the time of each full moon.

By a stroke of fortune, a lunar eclipse occurred during the study, on the night of January 20-21 2019, when five black swifts were soaring high in moonlight. As the Moon became eclipsed by the shadow of the Earth, all swifts responded by descending rapidly.

4. Barn owls

Barn owls (Tyto alba) come in two colours – red and white. Their main prey, field voles, detect owls more easily in moonlight and respond by freezing briefly.

A 2019 study found that in moonlight, if it is a red owl, the chance of a field vole escaping is pretty good.

However, if it is a white owl, the vole is blinded by the moonlight reflecting off the owl’s feathers, and freezes for a longer time. White owls are therefore more successful than red owls in catching voles during a full moon, meaning their young run a lower risk of starvation.

5. Dung beetles

The African dung beetle (Scarabaeus zambesianus) collects elephant dung that it forms into balls in which to raise and feed its young. It then rolls these balls away from the dung pile to avoid competition from other beetles. The most efficient way out is along a straight line.

When the Sun and its polarisation pattern (not visible to humans) is unavailable after twilight, dung beetles use the much dimmer polarisation pattern around the Moon to maintain this straight escape line – but this is much more effective under a full moon.

Using polarisation camera lens filters, researchers in a 2003 study of dung beetles were able to shift the direction of the full moon’s polarisation pattern, inducing the beetles to shift their direction.

In contrast, on dark nights around a new Moon, the beetles were unable to maintain straight paths and moved in meandering tracks.

Anders Hedenström, Professor of Theoretical Ecology, Lund University

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

Few plant families are as iconic as the resilient, spiky cactus, thriving in the driest deserts and as well as decorating our offices and homes. Their success in both environments comes down to extreme adaptations for surviving with little water – whether braving the brutal sun or enduring weeks of neglect from busy “plant parents”. But there’s much more to the around 1,850 cacti species than their ruggedness. Here are six surprising facts about this succulent plant family that you may not know.

Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Essential for clean air, yes, but simple organisms. A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: they are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine. This blossoming field of science is too delightful to do it justice in one or two stories.

This article is part of a series, Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenge the way you view plantlife.

1. Cacti are no loners

Cacti are often depicted as desert loners, but are in fact deeply connected to their ecosystem. Even the formidable Sonoran saguaros that tower 40ft above the desert sand depend on “nurse plants” when young, which shelter seedlings from harsh conditions. When fully grown, cacti also depend on pollinators for reproduction, with different species relying on bees, birds, moths and even bats.

Meanwhile, cacti flowers, fruits and water-filled tissues provide food and hydration to desert animals. Some woodpeckers drill nest holes into cacti stems, then return the next year to live in them. Even in death, cacti serve. Their decaying stems create nutrient-rich shelters for insects and arachnids.

2. They survive in tropics and freezing mountains

With their thick and spiny exteriors, cacti appear in popular culture as the archetypal desert plant – from the backdrops in classic Westerns movies to the harsh landscapes of crime drama Breaking Bad. And certainly, arid and semi-arid environments support the greatest number of cactus species.

But some cacti are found in tropical rainforests, where they don’t tend to grow in soil, but on tree branches in the shaded and humid canopy. Others are found high in the Andes, where temperatures regularly fall below freezing, and sometimes form cushion-like structures. One unique species, the lava cactus (Brachycereus nesioticus), is found only on the Galapagos Islands. This cactus colonises dried lava flows, providing the foundation for an entire ecosystem.

3. The mysterious mistletoe cactus

All but one species of cactus are restricted to the Americas. The exception is the mistletoe cactus, Rhipsalis baccifera, which is found in the African tropics, Madagascar and Sri Lanka, where it grows drooping from other plants.

Scientists don’t know exactly how it got to these distant places. One hypothesis argues that birds transported mistletoe cactus seeds in their guts, but we don’t know which bird could have done this. Fruit-eating birds rarely fly over oceans without defecating along the way. In any case, why have no other cacti made similar crossings?

Another theory suggests the mistletoe cactus dates back to when the Americas and Africa were part of the supercontinent Gondwana. But the timing doesn’t add up, since cacti are thought to have evolved about 100 million years after Gondwana split.

Alternatively, 16th-century sailors might have transported them. But given the tight quarters and need for practical cargo, why would sailors prioritise a cactus? Perhaps simply because it’s beautiful.

4. The unexpected threat of climate change

Cacti emerged over millions of years as arid ecosystems expanded, evolving striking adaptations – including those succulent water-storing tissues and spines – that helped them survive in extreme environments. These traits have made them symbols of resilience and rugged beauty. You might therefore think a hotter, drier Earth would favour cacti, but they are more fragile than it would seem.

Many species are finely tuned to specific conditions. As climates shift, they may struggle to adapt, meaning hundreds of species are threatened in the near future. For instance, the tropical dry forests of the Chaco in Argentina, which host cactus species including Stetsonia coryne and Echinopsis terscheckii, are increasingly vulnerable to wildfires, which are exacerbated by invasive grasses and prolonged droughts.

5. Cacti are supercharged by moderate climes, not deserts

The flip side of extinction is speciation, the formation of new species. Cacti have some of the fastest rates of speciation in plants, though it varies widely within the family. One genus boasts over 100 species, whereas others have only one, such as the tiny Blossfeldia liliputiana in the Andes.

My recent research using machine learning suggested a surprising pattern: the fastest rates of speciation happen in moderate, Goldilocks climates. These places are neither too harsh nor too mild, such as having a moderate daily temperature fluctuation of about 10°C.

This discovery highlights a hidden sensitivity in cacti. Even Arizona’s mighty saguaros have struggled under recent heatwaves. As for the question of why arid and semi-arid places contain a high diversity of cacti, it may be due to their remarkable ability to exploit diverse ecological niches, such as through unique pollinator relationships.

6. Psychedelic cacti shaped ancient and modern cultures

Some cacti produce the powerful psychedelic compound mescaline, which causes vivid hallucinations and altered states of consciousness upon consumption. Andean cultures have consumed the high-elevation San Pedro cactus for mental and physical healing for thousands of years. Researchers even found traces in a mummified child victim (whose head was transformed into a “trophy head”, possibly as a spiritual sacrifice, between 450 and 100BC). Similarly, various Native American cultures have consumed the spineless peyote for millennia, and religious consumption is now protected in law.

More recently, Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book, The Doors of Perception, in which he recalls a mescaline experience, profoundly influenced the counterculture of the 1960s, even providing the name for the band The Doors.

Timothy Leary, the controversial Harvard professor fired for experimenting with psychedelics, read this book and became friendly with Huxley. Leary went on to be described by former US President Richard Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America” for his leading role in the 1960s psychedelic movement.

Today, research suggests mescaline may hold therapeutic promise. A 2021 survey of 452 people found that among those with depression, anxiety, PTSD or drug use disorder, nearly two-thirds reported improvement after taking mescaline, even without taking it for that purpose.

Far from just being desert survivors, cacti are sensitive, interconnected and downright mysterious. With many species under threat from extinction, it is crucial to protect these remarkable plants, preserving their evolutionary legacy.

Jamie Thompson, Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology, University of Reading

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

While ancient Greece is one of the best known cultures of antiquity, there are no surviving historical narratives covering events between 1200 and 760BC. This period has traditionally been viewed as a “dark age” on account of the lack of preserved written sources after much of the Mediterranean suffered a societal and political collapse.

The Greek iron ages occurred within this period. But, because of the lack of documents, till now historians have been working with a timeline, which uses pottery styles from Athens as its basis. Devised in the late 50s and 60s by the historians Nicolas Coldsteam and Vincent Desborough, it has been widely held that the iron ages begun in 1025 and ended in 700BC.

The “Greek renaissance”, from 760BC to 700 BC, emerged in the iron ages’ last period, known as the late geometric. This was a time of rapid economic and demographic growth that saw the adoption of alphabetic writing, the emergence of the Greek city-states, panhellenic sanctuaries and the establishment of Greek colonies abroad.

Such huge strides in 60 years, means that the period is considered extraordinary. However, new research from Assiros and Sindos in northern Greece, as well as Zagora on the Cycladic island of Andros suggests that this timeline of the Greek iron age is wrong. My recent work with the archaeologist Bartłomiej Lis on protogeometric pottery from the site of Eleon supports this view.

Together, our research indicates that the Greek dark ages could have been shorter and the Greek renaissance much longer than previously thought. This shows that Greek society was more resilient to the societal collapse that preceded the iron age than previously believed.

New pottery samples

Our study centres on a vessel discovered in 2013 by a team of archaeologists from the Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia and the Canadian Institute of Greece in a shrine dating to the last half of the 12th century BC in the ancient town of Eleon. This vessel, found crushed on the shrine’s floor, features distinct sets of concentric circles pivoting around a central axis (a type of compass-like device) on its surface. A vase like this being discovered in a such an early context is unprecedented in central Greece.

The vessel’s concentric circles are characteristic of the protogeometric style that Coldsteam and Desborough’s believed to have emerged in Athens during the last half of the 11th century BC.

Coldsteam and Desborough established dates for the Greek iron ages through careful documentation of Greek pottery fragments in the Near East (an area covering roughly that of the modern Middle East). These fragments were found at sites which had been destroyed and levelled during historically attested wars.

So, using Near Eastern and Egyptian historical records of these incidents and by identifying the specific styles of the pottery fragments, Coldsteam and Desborough were able to give them specific dates. These were the protogeometric (1025-900BC), early geometric (900-850BC), middle geometric (850-760BC) and late geometric (760-700BC). The last being equivalent to the Greek renaissance.

Our research challenges this timeline and argues instead for an origin of the Protogeometric style during the 12th century BC in northern Greece and so proposes a new start date for the iron ages.

Our argument is supported by petrographic (analysis of thin sections of the pottery under a microscope) and chemical analyses conducted on the vase that show conclusively that it was imported from the lower Axios Valley. This happens to be the region where two other studies found results similarly challenging Coldsteam and Desborough’s chronology of the early iron age between 2000s and 2020s.

As well as bolstering the revised timeline, our research introduces an added layer of complexity into the debate because the vessel from Eleon was found within a layer of Mycenaean pottery dating to the 12th century BC.

In the conventional chronology, Mycenaean-style pottery was produced from the 16th to 11th century BC and was succeeded by the protogeometric style towards the end of the 11th century BC. As Athens was believed to be the centre responsible for creating the protogeometric style, no examples of it should be found in contexts earlier than the late 11th century BC.

The discovery at Eleon suggests that the protogeometric and mycenaean styles co-existed for a 100 years, rather than occurring one after each other. This means that the dark ages of Greece, could be much shorter than previously believed since the late geometric – and so the Greek renaissance, which saw the introduction of the alphabet – would begin over 100 years earlier.

The revised chronology emerging from our study proposes news dates for the iron age periods with most beginning around one hundred years earlier that believed. For instance, the protogeometric would begin around 1,150BC and end around 1,050BC instead of beginning 1025BC and ending 900BC. By moving all the start dates of the earlier periods forward, the late geometric becomes much longer since it would begin around 870BC rather that 760BC.

So, with its new start date of 870BC and its fixed end date of 700BC, the Greek renaissance spanned almost 200 years. It is certainly much less impressive then to consider all the strides of the period happening in two centuries instead of four decades.

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Trevor Van Damme, Assistant Professor in the Archaeology and History of the Ancient Mediterranean, University of Warwick

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

The author John Steinbeck said: “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” Many others have claimed they formulated breakthroughs and innovations in dreams. Recent studies on the science of sleep suggest these claims are supported by modern science.

A 2024 study suggests that sleep can help us make more rational, informed decisions, and not be swayed by a misleading first impression. To show this, researchers at Duke University in the US had participants take part in a garage-sale game. In the experiment, participants rummaged through virtual boxes of unwanted goods. Most items in the box weren’t worth much, but a few special objects were more valuable. After searching through several boxes, participants were asked to pick their favourite box and would earn a cash reward equivalent to the value of the items in the box.

When participants had to decide on a box right away, they tended to judge the boxes not by their entire contents, but rather by the first few items. In other words, these participants were unduly influenced by the first information they encountered and didn’t factor in later information into their decision.

When participants slept and made their decision the next day, they made more rational choices, and the position of the valuable items in the box did not seem to influence their decision.

Problem-solving in the sleeping brain

When we are stuck on a difficult problem, it can feel like we have reached an impasse. A 2019 study found that when they gave the sleeping brain cues, in the form of sounds tied to an unsolved problem, it seemed to help participants to solve that problem the next day.

In this experiment, participants were given a set of puzzles to solve. While solving the puzzle, a unique sound was played in the background. At the end of the testing session, researchers gathered all of the puzzles that participants were unable to solve. While the participants were asleep, the researchers played back sounds associated with some of the unsolved puzzles.

The next morning, the participants came back to the lab and tried to solve the puzzles that they failed to complete the night before. The solving rate was higher for puzzles that were cued during the night, suggesting that the sound cues triggered the sleeping brain into working on a solution for that puzzle.

One of the ways that sleep might help us solve problems is by discovering insights into the relationships between objects and events. A study published in 2023 tested this idea.

The researchers had participants learn associations between four different items (one animal, one location, one object and one food), related to an event the researchers described to them. Some of the associations were obvious pairings, for example, item A was directly paired with item B. Others were only indirectly linked to the rest of the event, for instance, item D was never directly paired with items A or C.

The research team found that after a night’s sleep, participants were better able to uncover the indirect associations (they discovered the subtle link between item A and D), compared to staying awake. This suggests sleep gave the participants insight into the underlying event structure.

Dreaming your way to creativity

Thomas Edison, who helped invent the light bulb, often used daytime naps to help spur his creativity even though he claimed not to sleep more than four hours a night.

When Edison went for his daytime naps, he fell asleep with a ball in his hand.

As he fell asleep, his hand relaxed, and the ball fell to the ground. The noise of the ball hitting the floor startled Edison awake. He, and other famous thinkers including Salvador Dali, claimed that it was that transitional state, the moment between wake and sleep, that fuelled their creativity.

In 2021, French scientists put Edison’s claim to the test. They had participants attempt to solve a maths problem. Unknown to the participants, the problem had a hidden rule that would allow them to solve the problem much faster.

After working on the problem, they had participants fall asleep like Edison did. Each participant held a cup in their hand that they would drop if they fell asleep.

After this delay, participants were re-tested on the maths problem. They found that those participants who drifted off into a light sleep were better able to discover the hidden rule, compared with participants who remained awake, or who entered into deeper stages of sleep while still holding the cup.

During this twilight period between wake and sleep, many of the participants reported hypnagogia, dream-like imagery that is common during sleep onset.

In 2023, a different set of researchers investigated whether the content of hypnagogia was at all related to the three creatives tasks centred on a tree theme that their participants performed right before going to sleep. For example, listing all the creative, alternative uses they could think of for a tree. They found that creative problem-solving was enhanced when the hypnagogic imagery involved trees, suggesting imagery helped them to solve the problem.

So it turns out that Edison was right, sleep onset really is a creative sweet spot, and sleeping on it works.

Dan Denis, Lecturer in Psychology, University of York

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

This weighty book of lush interior shots selected and presented by Steven Brindle is a rare and delightful treat. London: Lost Interiors is an opportunity to glimpse inside the homes of London from a time well before it was common to photograph them – Victorian, Edwardian and early 20th century London. On top of that, about half the homes in it no longer exist, not to mention the fading and remodelling of the insides of those that do.

Popular ideas of what interior design in England was like between 1880 and 1940 come predominantly from period TV shows like Downton Abbey or Jeeves and Wooster. But these do not tell us how houses that were decorated and redecorated at the time genuinely looked.

Brindle’s book shows that historical decor trends are far more complex, more varied, and more particular than we might assume. For a start, the designers, architects and inhabitants were far more international that you would expect.

London: Lost Interiors taps into our growing fascination with other people’s homes, a fascination more recently supercharged by Instagram and other visual social media. The boundary between the public sphere and the private home is changing, since now complete strangers might “know us” through the way we choose and arrange things – our cushions, or recently, even the inside of the fridge.

Brindle makes the point that for those who lived in these homes too, interior style was a statement of identity aimed at their social world, which is smaller than an Instagram audience in many cases but critical to status and position nonetheless. Some of the later images in the book first appeared in the new print publications focused on lifestyle and fashion, like Country Life. Others, perhaps surprisingly, were taken purely for the pleasure of their owners, as a pleasing record of a home in its ideal state.

I like the idea of someone looking at a photograph of a space they actually inhabit. Brindle’s book offers valuable insight into how photography makes people conscious of their appearance and conscious of style. These are not snaps of a life lived. They are studies of the stage set for fashionable society life of lounging and dining.

Take the sitting room of 26 Grosvenor Square, light plays over comfortable chairs angled for conversation and optimal views of the giant palms and frescoes. Polished candle sticks await their cue. No humans present, and no sign of their recent activity. No personal bits and bobs. No mess.

What cannot be overlooked is the lack of “ordinary” lower middle-class and working-class homes in this book. London’s Museum of the Home in Shoreditch, which opened in the 1930s, offers a broader view of changing and varied home styles. But as Brindle points out, few photographs would have been taken of most people’s homes in the period because it was very expensive to do so.

One chapter focuses on “the middle class world”, but acknowledges that only 10% to 15% of Victorian and Edwardian people occupied this strata and they were closer to the landed gentry in economic capital than the middle class of today.

He also notes that these homes were labour intensive: crammed, polished, buffed, orderly and spotless. We may yearn for the grandeur, craftsmanship and commitment to style evident in these pages, but the sheer volume of stuff was only really manageable with staff.

For me, as a scholar of fashionable identities, this book is a seductive yet sobering reminder of how much our aesthetic ideals are shaped by mythologies of the “good life” that depend on having servants.

But something like our fascination with past elites and exotic style is also visible in these photographs from Victorian, Edwardian and early 20th century London. Interior elements demonstrate foreign travel, knowledge of new innovations and quirky, individual or eccentric taste. Politics aside, I wasn’t expecting to see the wealth of niche ideas that pepper these pages once you actually start focusing on individual images.

One “middle-class” home in Belgravia has walls sheathed in black velvet, and, below a dado rail, a spectacular wall-covering of overlapping fans. Another celebrates new lighting technology with a chain of bare electric lightbulbs set below a traditional painterly figurative frieze.

The pared-back minimalism of the 1920s and 1930s is all the more shockingly modern when seen, not in a commercial space or an architect’s house, but in the homes of people previously used to the “womb-like spell” of clutter and burgeoning decoration of the decades before.

Modernism’s break with the past in this book is as alarmingly refreshing as it might have been way back then. Take 5 Connaught Place, designed by Serge Chermayeff in 1937 for the extraordinarily sleek, sparse elegance we might expect of Le Corbusier, set within a Georgian London terrace.

In short, if you are captivated by curated, maximalist clutter, or less-is-more modernism, or indeed any of the distinctive and subtle, idiosyncratic visual languages in between, there is plenty of relevant history here to educate, complicate, delight and inspire. Brindle offers an intelligent and detailed text that brings the kaleidoscopic of pictures to life, invoking compelling stories of class and modern life along the way.

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Vanessa Brown, Senior Lecturer Visual and Material Culture, Nottingham Trent University

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

Today, we know of more than 5,000 exoplanets: planets outside our solar system that orbit other stars. While the effort to discover new worlds goes on, we’re steadily learning more about the exoplanets we’ve already detected: their sizes, what they’re made of and whether they have atmospheres.

Our team has now provided tentative evidence for a sulphur-rich atmosphere on a world that’s 1.5 times the size of Earth and located 35 light years away. If confirmed, it would be the smallest known exoplanet with an atmosphere. The potential presence of the gases sulphur dioxide (SO₂) and hydrogen sulphide (H₂S) in this atmosphere hint at a molten or volcanic surface.

In our solar system, we have two distinct categories of planets – the small rocky ones, including Earth and Mars, and the gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn. However, exoplanets span a great spectrum of sizes. Our solar system lacks a planet whose size falls into the range between Earth and Neptune, but it turns out that’s the most common type of planet we have seen around other stars in our galaxy.

The ones closer to Neptune’s size are called sub-Neptunes and the ones closer to Earth’s size are called super-Earths. L 98-59 d is a super-Earth, slightly bigger and heavier than the Earth. The composition of the atmospheres of these planets is still an open question, one that we are only starting to explore with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021.

L 98-59 d was discovered in 2019 with Nasa’s Tess space telescope. Most exoplanets, including L 98-59 d, have been detected using the “transit method”. This measures the tiny dips in starlight when the planet passes in front of the star. This dip is more pronounced for larger planets and enables us to figure out the size of a planet.

Even JWST can’t separate these tiny planets from their host stars – as they orbit their stars too closely. But there is a way to “see” the planet’s atmosphere from this entangled light. When a planet passes in front of its star, some of the starlight filters through a planet’s atmosphere, hitting the gas molecules or atoms present there, on its way to us on Earth.

Every gas modifies the light in its own signature manner. From the light we receive from that star system, we can infer what the composition of that atmosphere might be. This is called transmission spectroscopy, a proven technique that has previously been used to confirm the presence of CO₂ in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

I am part of an international team of scientists who used JWST to observe one transit of L 98-59 d across the disc of its host star. We then obtained the transmission spectrum of the atmosphere of the exoplanet from these observations. This spectrum hinted at the possible presence of an atmosphere filled with sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide.

This discovery was surprising, as it stands out in stark contrast to the atmospheres of rocky planets in our own solar system, where water vapour and carbon dioxide are much more prevalent. Earth’s atmosphere, for example, is rich in nitrogen and oxygen, with trace amounts of water vapour. Meanwhile, Venus has a thick atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. Even Mars has a thin atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide.

We then used computer models that incorporate our understanding of planetary atmospheres and the light coming from L 98-59 d to come up with a potential picture of the composition of this planet’s atmosphere. The absence of common gases such as carbon dioxide and the presence of SO₂ and H₂S suggests an atmosphere shaped by entirely different processes to those we’re familiar with in our solar system. This hints at unique and extreme conditions on L 98-59 d, such as a molten or volcanic surface.

Additional observations will be necessary to confirm the presence of these gases. JWST observations had previously spotted signs of SO₂ on an exoplanet, but this was a gas giant, not a potentially rocky world such as L 98-59 d.

Exo-volcanoes?

The potential presence of SO₂ and H₂S raises questions about their origin. One explosive possibility is volcanism driven by tidal heating, much like what is observed on Jupiter’s moon Io. The gravitational pull of the host star on this planet stretches and squeezes it as it goes along its orbit. This motion can heat up the centre of the planet, melting its interiors and producing extreme volcanic eruptions and possibly even oceans of magma.

Combined with its close proximity to the star (one year on this planet is seven and half Earth days), truly hellish temperatures can be reached on the surface. If future observations support the presence of such an atmosphere, not only would it be the smallest exoplanet to have a detected atmosphere, but also a crucial step towards understanding the nature of such planets.

Detecting atmospheres on small, rocky planets is exceptionally difficult, as the planets are very small compared to the host stars, and also as intense radiation from their host stars often strips the atmospheres away. These observations, while tantalising, are only from a single transit. That means instrumental noise and other factors prevent us from making statistically strong claims. Future JWST observations will be key in confirming or refuting our analysis.

L 98-59 d may not be a candidate for life as we know it, but studying its sulphurous atmosphere and potential volcanism provides valuable insight into worlds around other stars. Extreme worlds like these help us understand the diversity of planetary evolution across the galaxy.

Agnibha Banerjee, PhD Student, The Open University

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

Does your superannuation fund also provide you with insurance? Many of us are automatically enrolled without even realising. Now, the way super funds handle such claims has been thrust into the spotlight.

Australia’s corporate watchdog – the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) – has put our $3.9 trillion superannuation sector on notice, launching legal action against one of the country’s largest industry super funds.

On Tuesday, ASIC alleged that Cbus – which manages more than $85 billion on behalf of more than 900,000 Australians – was too slow to process millions of dollars in death and disability payouts, leaving many families in prolonged financial uncertainty.

ASIC Deputy Chair Sarah Court said in a statement:

We allege Cbus failed its members and claimants at their most vulnerable time, and we are taking this case to protect all those vulnerable Australians trying to access the financial support to which they are entitled.

In response, Cbus apologised for the delays and announced a new compensation program for affected members.

But at a press conference on Wednesday, Court said the way claims are handled remains a “broader issue” in the superannuation industry. She indicated the regulator may take further actions against other funds early next year.

If true, this raises some urgent questions. Are Australia’s big super funds doing enough to protect and look after their members at the times it matters most? And what are your rights?

The case against Cbus

ASIC’s allegations centre on Cbus’s handling of a number of death benefits and total and permanent disability (TPD) insurance claims.

The regulator alleges that since September 2022, more than 10,000 members were impacted by significant delays in processing and payment of claims – 6,000 of whom by more than a year.

This allegedly resulted in a financial loss to members of about $20 million.

ASIC also alleges that the trustee for Cbus – United Super – failed to report the situation to ASIC within the 30-day timeframe required by law, and didn’t “take all reasonable steps” to ensure its reports were not materially misleading.

The case comes at a bad time for Cbus. The superannuation giant’s high senior staff turnover, links to embattled union CFMEU, and other governance concerns have led some analysts, such as those at Morningstar, to raise questions about whether Cbus is equipped to manage the complex needs of its members effectively.

A safety net at risk

Many Australians are automatically enrolled in life and disability insurance through their superannuation. This is designed to offer a financial safety net for members and their families in times of hardship.

These benefits can provide crucial support if a member dies, faces terminal illness, or becomes unable to work due to disability. For those counting on this support, delayed claims can cause immense financial and emotional distress, particularly during already vulnerable times.

ASIC’s scrutiny of Cbus signals a deeper problem – the risk that some funds are prioritising administrative convenience and cost savings over timely management of claims.

A wake-up call for the industry

ASIC’s lawsuit against Cbus underscores a critical point: that super funds must act in the best interests of their members at every stage, from managing contributions to paying out insurance claims.

Super policy reform discussions often centre on encouraging members themselves to save more for retirement. That approach is too one-sided.

If a broader regulatory crackdown goes ahead, it could become a turning point. Funds will be prompted to re-evaluate their governance practices, reinforce their claims management procedures, and make sure they operate with more transparency and accountability.

For superannuation members, it serves as a reminder to stay informed and engaged with their super funds, understanding their rights and expectations.

What should I know about my rights?

If you have insurance through your super, understanding your entitlements and the claims process is crucial.

Here are some key steps to ensure a smoother claims experience:

1. Review your coverage: Super funds usually offer life, total and permanent disability (TPD), and income protection insurance. Check your super statement or fund portal to confirm your coverage details. If unclear, contact your fund for a breakdown of benefits.

2. Understand the claims process: Each fund has its own procedures for handling claims, often involving medical assessments, proof of death, or evidence of disability. Knowing what documentation is required in advance can help prevent delays.

3. Ask for clear timelines: Request an estimated timeline when you submit a claim. Although funds must process claims within a reasonable time, delays can happen. A responsive fund should provide updates on your claim’s progress.

4. Escalate delays if necessary: If your claim is taking longer than expected, contact your fund’s claims team. If their response is unsatisfactory, consider filing a formal complaint. For unresolved issues, you can escalate to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA), which assists in mediating disputes.

5. Hold your fund accountable: As a super member, you have the right to prompt and fair treatment. ASIC’s action against Cbus highlights the importance of regulatory oversight, but members also play a role in holding their funds accountable. Don’t hesitate to advocate for your rights if you feel your claim is mishandled.

Natalie Peng, Lecturer in Accounting, The University of Queensland

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

Some 2.3 million of U.S. adults over 65 – more than 4% – have a diagnosis of dementia. But even without a diagnosis, a certain amount of cognitive decline is normal as age sets in.

And whether it’s due to fear of cognitive decline or noticing lapses in cognition when we are stressed, many of us have had moments when we thought we could use an extra cognitive boost.

The good news is research has shown that people can make changes throughout adulthood that can help prevent or delay cognitive decline and even reduce their risk of dementia. These include quitting smoking and properly managing blood pressure.

In addition to these lifestyle changes, many people are turning to brain-training games, which claim to optimize your brain’s efficiency and capacity at any age. The makers of brain-training apps and games claim their products can do everything from staving off cognitive decline to improving your IQ.

But so far these claims have been met with mixed evidence.

We are cognitive neuroscientists who focus on brain health across the adult lifespan. We study how the brain informs cognition and the ways we can use brain imaging to understand cognitive and brain-training interventions. We aim to understand how our brains change naturally over time as well as what we can do about it.

Ongoing research shows what actually happens to the brain when it is engaged in new learning, offering a window into how people can sustain their brain health and how brain-training games can play a role. We believe these studies offer some strategies to train your brain the right way.

Brain training fact vs. fiction

Brain training is a set of tasks, often computerized, based on well-known tests to measure a type of cognition, but in a gamified manner.

Most brain-training games were designed to help participants master one or more specific skills. One example is a game that shows you a letter and number combination, where sometimes you must quickly identify whether the letter is even or odd, while other times you must switch to deciding whether the letter is a consonant or vowel. The game may increase in difficulty by requiring you to accomplish the task within a set time limit.

Such games are designed to require a high level of attention, fast processing speed and a flexible mind to alternate between the rules, known as executive functioning.

But it turns out that the specific skills learned in these games often do not translate to more general, real-world applications. Whether brain games meet their end goal of lasting cognitive improvement across a number of areas is still highly debated among psychologists. To make such claims requires rigorous evidence that playing a specific game improves cognitive or brain performance.

In 2016, in fact, the Federal Trade Commission issued a US$50 million penalty to one of the most popular brain-training games at the time, Lumosity, for misleading consumers into thinking that they could achieve higher levels of mental performance at work or at school and prevent or delay cognitive decline by using its product.

If improving on a brain game helps the player get better only at that or highly similar games, maybe game developers need a different approach.

Put some challenge into it

In a study dubbed the Synapse Project, in which one of us, Ian McDonough, helped assess the final outcomes, one group of participants were tasked with engaging in a new activity with which they had little experience. They were assigned to either digital photography or quilting. Though these activities were not games, they were meant to be engaging, challenging and done in a social environment.

Another group was assigned activities that involved little active learning, such as engaging in themed activities related to travel or cooking, or more solitary activities such as solving crossword puzzles, listening to music or watching classic movies. These groups met for 15 hours a week over 14 weeks. All participants were tested at the beginning and end of the study on various cognitive abilities.

Those assigned to the new, challenging activities showed significant gains in their memory, processing speed and reasoning abilities relative to those assigned to the less challenging activities. None of the participants were directly trained on these cognitive tests, which means that the challenging activities enhanced skills that transferred to new situations, such as remembering a list of words or solving abstract problems.

Brain scans of participants showed that over the course of the study, those engaged in the more challenging activities increased their neural efficiency. In other words, their brains didn’t have to work as hard to solve problems or recall information.

The study also showed that the more time participants spent on their projects, the bigger their brain gains and the better their memory was at the end of the 14 weeks.

One difference between the types of activities engaged in the Synapse Project and traditional brain training is whether activities are done in a group or alone. Although other studies have found a benefit to social interaction, the Synapse Project found no difference between the social and solitary activities in the low-challenge group. So, challenge rather than the social components seems to be the driver of maintaining cognitive and brain health.

What you can do to maintain a healthy brain

You might be thinking it’s time to take up digital photography or quilting. But in the end, it’s not about those specific tasks. What matters most is that you challenge yourself, which often comes naturally when doing something new.

The new learning that often is accompanied by a sense of effort – and sometimes frustration – requires accessing the resources in the frontal lobe, which manages thinking and judgment, and the parietal lobe, which processes attention and combines different sensory inputs. These regions constantly talk to each other to keep the mind adaptable in all kinds of situations and prevent the brain from going into “habit mode.”

Where does this leave us? Well, on the one hand, games touted as “training your brain” may not be the best solution compared with other routes to improving cognition.

Ironically, you might already be training your brain by playing effortful games that are not marketed as “brain training.” For example, games such as Tetris or real-time strategy games such as Rise of Nations have shown improvements in players’ cognition. Research has even shown that playing Super Mario 64 can result in increases in brain volume in regions such as the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain.

While little evidence suggests that any brain-training game or program globally improves cognition, some may improve specific aspects of it. As with other activities, challenge is key.

If you’re a word person, try a numbers-based game. If you love math, consider a word game or puzzle. Choosing a task that makes you feel uncomfortable gives you the best shot at maintaining and even improving your cognition. Once you start feeling a sense of ease and familiarity, that’s a sign that it’s time to switch tasks, change the game or at least add some challenge by advancing to a new level of difficulty that feels just beyond your reach.

Ian McDonough, Associate Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York and Michael Dulas, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York

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

The federal government has quietly shelved plans to introduce local requirements for Australian screen content on streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+.

In October, Federal Arts Minister Tony Burke flagged quotas were being delayed until after the United States election, amid concerns new rules might be seen as a violation of Australia’s 2004 free trade agreement.

This is something the government should have foreseen and addressed. The Australian screen industry petitioned the government back in 2017 to commit to a “cultural carve out” when negotiating free trade agreements to support the maintenance of a unique Australian culture.

Last week, Burke confirmed these local content requirements have been postponed indefinitely.

A decade of can-kicking

In Australia, commercial broadcasters and pay-TV platforms have been required to meet local content quotas as part of their licensing arrangements for decades.

Broadcasters have to show at least 55% Australian content between 6am and midnight on their primary channel, and have to meet certain genre quotas. Foxtel’s drama channels must spend at least 10% of their program expenditure on Australian drama programs.

Streaming platforms have never faced the same obligations.

Following a determination made by then-Communications Minister Richard Alston in 2000, streaming services continue to be defined by government as “online services”.

As such, they operate outside of official broadcast regulation. They have no formal obligation to invest in Australian content production.

The production and broadcast sectors have long expressed concerns about the low amounts of local content on streaming services and their lack of commissioning requirements.

Policymakers have held eight official inquiries into the best approach for regulation in Australia since 2017.

These have consistently recommended subscription video on demand companies invest part of their revenue earned in Australia in new Australian content.

In 2022, the Morrison government proposed a two-tier system where large streamers would report annually about their spending on and provision of Australian content. If they were investing less than 5% of their revenue, a formal investment requirement would be triggered.

Screen Producers Australia dubbed this scheme “weak” and has since lobbied streamers be required to spend a minimum of 20% of their local revenues on Australian content.

With the matter still undecided, in the final week of their election campaign the Labor government made a pledge to develop an arts agenda that would, among other promises, promote Australian creators on streaming platforms.

In January 2023, the government’s new National Cultural Policy included a formal commitment to ensuring continued access to local stories and content by introducing requirements for Australian screen content on streaming platforms.

This was to commence no later than July 1 2024. This is the plan which has now been shelved.

Supporting the local sector

At the same time as past governments ran multiple redundant inquiries into how to regulate streaming services, they have also scaled down licence fees and local content obligations for commercial broadcasters since 2016.

This has had devastating results for the production of Australian drama and kids TV. Locally-made Australian children’s television content decreased by more than 84% between 2019 and 2022.

Subscription video-on-demand services have maintained they don’t need to be regulated because they are committed to producing content in Australia.

The Australian operator Stan has steadily built a suite of original productions since it launched in 2015, but it took US-based services like Netflix and Prime Video more than two years from launch to start commissioning new content.

Their commitment to the local sector has largely manifested in off-shore productions set in the US, like Netflix’s Clickbait; adaptations of books and TV classics, like Prime’s Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and Netflix’s Heartbreak High; and distributing existing Australian content to international subscribers.

More recently we have seen big-budget original concepts set in Australia, like Territory from Netflix and Last Days of the Space Age from Disney+.

These offerings have tended to be flashy, sporadic, and last only one season.

What does this mean for Australian producers and audiences?

With the introduction of local content requirements still up in the air, independent producers remain in a precarious and unsustainable position.

Australian audiences also have no guarantee the streaming services they pay to subscribe to will spend some of that money commissioning and distributing locally made content.

The government could be coming up with other solutions like better resourcing the public service broadcasters, embedding cultural specificity requirements into funding models, and addressing the very worrying impact of flexible content quotas for broadcasters.

But, after a decade of debate, an informed election promise was made. Locking down some kind of local content requirement for streaming services is within arm’s reach and long overdue.

Alexa Scarlata, Research Fellow, Media & Communication, RMIT University

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

The Australian government has announced a plan to ban children under the age of 16 from social media. With bipartisan support, it’s likely to be passed by the end of the year.

While some experts and school principals support the ban, the move has also been widely challenged by social media experts and children’s mental health groups.

In a press conference on Friday, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland suggested the ban would include platforms such as TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. An exemption would be considered for some services, such as YouTube Kids.

Some media reports raised concerns about online games like Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox falling under the ban, because people can communicate with others on these platforms. Platforms like Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network would potentially be in scope, too.

A government spokesperson told Australian Community Media that a new, robust definition of “social media” would be forthcoming in the legislation. Games and messaging platforms are likely to be exempt, but we don’t know for sure at this stage.

As experts in children’s online play, we argue it would be a mistake to ban children from social games. Games are crucial to children’s social lives and learning, and for their personal growth and identity development.

What do young people gain from games?

Games are widely popular, and 93% of Australian children aged 5–14 play videogames regularly. Two-thirds of children in Australia aged 9–12 play Minecraft at least once a month. Children and young people feel overwhelmingly positive about their online gameplay.

In a recent study by the eSafety Commissioner, over three-quarters of young gamers indicated that “gaming had helped them with skill development, such as learning something new, using digital technologies, solving problems and thinking faster”.

Minecraft has received particular attention for fostering creativity, collaboration and socially connecting young people.

In 2021, the Minecraft: Education Edition was being used in schools in 115 countries, including Australia. This version of the game contains free lessons on various subjects. In a study across six schools in Queensland, researchers found children who learned with Minecraft: Education Edition “overwhelmingly identified themselves as better mathematics students”.

Games offer rich spaces for play, which is critical for children’s identity formation, social lives and imagination. For instance, playing as a different character in an online game is an important form of playful identity exploration for children. (It’s valuable for adults, too.)

Two decades of research have also shown us that children derive enormous social benefits from playing digital games with other people. In a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center, 78% of teenagers said online games help them feel more connected to their friends.

A UNICEF review of research literature from earlier this year concluded that videogames can boost children’s wellbeing by making them feel competent, empowered and socially connected to others.

This is particularly important for vulnerable children. For instance, Autcraft, a parent-created Minecraft server for neurodivergent children, has been enormously successful in providing children with a comfortable and safe digital space to socially connect with their peers.

What about the risks?

However, games are not always safe spaces for young people.

Gaming culture is pervasively misogynistic, and games have played a role in mainstreaming far-right ideology by promoting meritocratic, racist and discriminatory ideologies.

Gaming platforms like Roblox – where over half of players are under the age of 13 – have also come under fire for not doing enough to protect their users from online grooming and child abuse material.

Increasingly, we’re also seeing the gamblification of games. In recent years, predatory monetisation models such as gambling-like lootboxes have become normalised.

In Australia, the Classification Board recently banned “in-game purchases with an element of chance” for children under 15. According to the definition, these are “mystery items players can use real money to buy, without knowing what item they will get”.

Incidentally, this decision demonstrates the ineffectiveness of blanket ban approaches. According to our yet-to-be-published research, numerous games with paid chance-based features such as lootboxes remain available on storefronts like Apple’s App Store, despite not complying with the new regulations.

A ban can’t make children’s online lives better

Just as all internet use isn’t bad, all games aren’t bad either. Parents may feel overwhelmed and under-informed about the videogames their children play, but bans can be easily circumvented. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has expressed concerns that “some young people will access social media in secrecy”.

The risk is that a ban will take away the onus on these platforms to make them safer for children. Why design for users who aren’t legally allowed to be on the platform?

The government should be working in partnership with social media and online gaming platforms to ensure they are designed in children’s best interests, while allowing children the freedom to play and to access safer and richer digital lives.

Marcus Carter, Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney and Taylor Hardwick, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney

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

If you experience trauma during childhood, there’s a greater chance you’ll use substances such as alcohol, tobacco and other drugs later. But what does the evidence say about vapes?

Our new study is the first to investigate the links between childhood trauma and vaping habits in Australian teens. Those who’d had traumatic experiences before the age of 12 were more likely to have tried vaping, vape regularly or intend to in the future.

Despite bans on importing and selling vapes containing nicotine, labelling loopholes have meant they’ve continued to be readily available. A study of 423 vapes confiscated from New South Wales retailers in 2022 found 98.8% contained nicotine.

While quitting nicotine is challenging for most people, our research suggests young people with histories of trauma may face extra challenges – and require tailored support.

Trauma and substance use

For people who experience trauma in early life, the consequences can extend far beyond the event itself. Trauma is a form of psychological harm caused by experiences that pose a significant threat to your life or to others’ lives. These may include emotional, physical and sexual abuse, or exposure to natural disasters and serious accidents.

Research links childhood trauma to negative physical and mental health outcomes. This includes higher rates of substance use and addiction.

The reasons for this are complex and may involve a range of factors, including social and environmental influences. For example, young people who have experienced trauma are more likely to have been exposed to substance use by people around them.

But trauma also affects the brain’s development and this may influence whether we are more likely to use substances.

Traumatic experiences can lead to greater impulsivity and risk-taking behaviour. Trauma can also disrupt how we deal with stress, heightening our response to future stressors.

Self-medication is risky for a developing brain

People who have experienced childhood trauma are more likely to have difficulty identifying, understanding and expressing emotions (known as alexithymia). This is why we often talk about substance use as self-medication – a way to cope with emotional pain and stress.

But self-medicating is particularly problematic for young people. The adolescent brain is still developing, so it is more susceptible to the harmful effects of nicotine, alcohol and other drugs.

Young people become addicted to nicotine faster than adults – and stronger cravings may make it harder for them to quit.

We found a link between early trauma and teen vaping

A handful of studies have found consistent links between childhood trauma and vaping. But research has focused mostly on adults, rather than asking teenagers about vape use. There was only one study about trauma and vaping in Australia and it looked at adult women.

But we know young people in Australia are being exposed to vapes early – and that the number of teens who vape is rising.

Our new study examined self-report surveys from 2,234 Year 7 and 8 students from 33 schools across New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia, collected as part of the Health4Life study. The surveys assessed trauma history at age 12 and vape use three years later.

We found those who’ve had a traumatic experience by age 12 are more likely, at age 15, to say they’ve tried vaping (64%), vape regularly (63%) or intend to vape in the future (44%).

Challenges for quitting

Our new findings highlight an even younger group of Australians at-risk for vaping and becoming addicted to nicotine. Many may already be addicted.

Nicotine is highly addictive and quitting can often take multiple attempts due to difficult withdrawal symptoms. People often require a combination of behavioural support – such as counselling – and pharmacological supports, which might include nicotine replacement therapy or therapeutic vapes.

Current guidelines for GPs highlight a lack of research about how to support adolescents to quit. Available evidence is based on research with adults or is focused on tobacco smoking.

New federal laws have made therapeutic vapes – those used to manage nicotine dependence – available with a prescription to those under 18. However, this is subject to state and territory laws.

Other challenges

Having a history of trauma can also compound the challenges of quitting.

We know family and social support are strong protective factors for young people – for example in seeking help to quit smoking.

But this support is less likely to be available to children who’ve experienced violence and abuse, given the most likely perpetrators are their own family.

Childhood trauma can also lead to distrust of health-care professionals.

Beyond GPs and counsellors, young people exposed to early trauma will likely need specialised psychological support to develop healthier coping strategies.

What young people need

We need a mix of universal and targeted prevention strategies.

In 2022-23 we developed a universal, school-based prevention program, known as the OurFutures Vaping Program. It is currently being evaluated among more than 5,000 students in New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland, and refined in response to student and teacher feedback.

We also need strategies that recognise childhood trauma as a risk factor for vaping, and focus on harm reduction. We need to do more to reduce rates of childhood trauma too, using evidence-based methods to disrupt cycles of abuse.

Consistent and culturally safe methods can help identify young people with trauma histories early and ensure they have access to comprehensive support and trauma-informed care.

Not all young people who are exposed to trauma will experience negative outcomes, but many will – and Australia needs to be better equipped to respond.

Amy-Leigh Rowe, Postdoctoral Researcher in Mental Health and Substance Abuse, University of Sydney; Lauren Gardner, Senior Research Fellow & Program Lead of School-Based Health Interventions, University of Sydney, and Siobhan O'Dean, Postdoctoral Research Associate, The Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, University of Sydney

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

Myopia in children is on the rise. The condition – also known as shortsightedness – already affects up to 35% of children across the world, according to a recent review of global data. The researchers predict this number will increase to 40%, exceeding 740 million children living with myopia by 2050.

So why does this matter? Many people may be unaware that treating myopia (through interventions such as glasses) is about more than just comfort or blurry vision. If left unchecked, myopia can rapidly progress, increasing the risk of serious and irreversible eye conditions. Diagnosing and treating myopia is therefore crucial for your child’s lifetime eye health.

Here is how myopia develops, the role screen time plays – and what you can do if think your child might be shortsighted.

What is myopia?

Myopia is commonly known as nearsightedness or shortsightedness. It is a type of refractive error, meaning a vision problem that stops you seeing clearly – in this case, seeing objects that are far away.

A person usually has myopia because their eyeball is longer than average. This can happen if eyes grow too quickly or longer than normal.

A longer eyeball means when light enters the eye, it’s not focused properly on the retina (the light-sensing tissue lining the back of the eye). As a result, the image they see is blurry. Controlling eye growth is the most important factor for achieving normal vision.

Myopia is on the rise in children

The study published earlier this year looked at how the rate of myopia has changed over the last 30 years. It reviewed 276 studies, which included 5.4 million people between the ages of 5–19 years, from 50 countries, across six continents.

Based on this data, the researchers concluded up to one in three children are already living with shortsightedness – and this will only increase. They predict a particular rise for adolescents: myopia is expected to affect more than 50% of those aged 13-19 by 2050.

Their results are similar to a previous Australian study from 2015. It predicted 36% of children in Australia and New Zealand would have myopia by 2020, and more than half by 2050.

The new review is the most comprehensive of its kind, giving us the closest look at how childhood myopia is progressing across the globe. It suggests rates of myopia are increasing worldwide – and this includes “high myopia”, or severe shortsightedness.

What causes myopia?

Myopia develops partly due to genetics. Parents who have myopia – and especially high myopia – are more likely to have kids who develop myopia as well.

But environmental factors can also play a role.

One culprit is the amount of time we spend looking at screens. As screens have shrunk, we tend to hold them closer. This kind of prolonged focusing at short range has long been associated with developing myopia.

Reducing screen time may help reduce eye strain and slow myopia’s development. However for many of us – including children – this can be difficult, given how deeply screens are embedded in our day-to-day lives.

Green time over screen time

Higher rates of myopia may also be linked to kids spending less time outside, rather than screens themselves. Studies have shown boosting time outdoors by one to two hours per day may reduce the onset of myopia over a two to three year period.

We are still unsure how this works. It may be that the greater intensity of sunlight – compared to indoor light – promotes the release of dopamine. This crucial molecule can slow eye growth and help prevent myopia developing.

However current research suggests once you have myopia, time outdoors may only have a small effect on how it worsens.

What can we do about it?

Research is rapidly developing in myopia control. In addition to glasses, optometrists have a range of tools to slow eye growth and with it, the progression of myopia. The most effective methods are:

• orthokeratology (“ortho-K”) uses hard contact lenses temporarily reshape the eye to improve vision. They are convenient as they are only worn while sleeping. However parents need to make sure lenses are cleaned and stored properly to reduce the chance of eye infections

• atropine eyedrops have been shown to successfully slow myopia progression. Eyedrops can be simple to administer, have minimal side effects and don’t carry the risk of infection associated with contact lenses.

What are the risks with myopia?

Myopia is easily corrected by wearing glasses or contact lenses. But if you have “high myopia” (meaning you are severely shortsighted) you have a higher risk of developing other eye conditions across your lifetime, and these could permanently damage your vision.

These conditions include:

• retinal detachment, where the retina tears and peels away from the back of the eye

• glaucoma, where nerve cells in the retina and optic nerve are progressively damaged and lost

• myopic maculopathy, where the longer eyeball means the macula (part of the retina) is stretched and thinned, and can lead to tissue degeneration, breaks and bleeds.

What can parents do?

It’s important to diagnose and treat myopia early – especially high myopia – to stop it progressing and lower the risk of permanent damage.

Uncorrected myopia can also affect a child’s ability to learn, simply because they can’t see clearly. Signs your child might need to be tested can include squinting to see into the distance, or moving things closer such as a screen or book to see.

Regular eye tests with the optometrist are the best way to understand your child’s eye health and eyesight. Each child is different – an optometrist can help you work out tailored methods to track and manage myopia, if it is diagnosed.

Flora Hui, Honorary Fellow, Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences, Melbourne School of Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne

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

Life in the digital world can be rewarding. It’s convenient to order groceries for pickup, share photographs or music, and keep in touch with family and friends, no matter the distance. However, it can also be draining. The feeling of being constantly “on” and productive has driven people to reconsider their balance in the saturated digital world.

More than 70% of American adults are concerned about how technology affects their mental health and personal relationships. This worry is reinforced through media that point to people’s unhealthy habits with social media and phones.

What to do? There is a fuzzy line between healthy and unhealthy digital consumption. Some folks feel the need to fully disconnect from the digital world to understand this boundary. The idea of digital detoxing is gaining popularity. This practice involves intentionally unplugging from digital technologies in the pursuit of balance and digital well-being. Nearly half of Americans report that they are making a conscious effort to regularly step away from their screens.

But is this attempt enough? It’s no surprise that 62% of Americans confess to feeling addicted to their devices and the internet. Despite people’s best efforts to unplug and strike a balance, research indicates that digital detoxes often fall short.

Digital well-being is subjective. We research technology and consumer behavior. Our recent research studied the digital detox journey, where people take a much-needed break from digital consumption, aiming to uncover what supports or sabotages those seeking digital well-being. Our findings highlighted four key strategies to improve the outcome of this journey toward achieving a healthier digital balance: replacement practices, social bonds, mindfulness and digital well-being as a journey.

1. Finding replacement practices

We found that feelings of withdrawal during a digital detox are quite common. For many, reaching for their phones and scrolling has become such a ritual that they often don’t realize they are doing it. Many turn to their devices when bored or stressed, much like an adult pacifier. As a result, finding an alternative to distract your mind and occupy your hands can be crucial during a digital detox.

These replacement practices often involve hobbies or activities that result in play. As adults, people sometimes forget what it feels like to have fun. By separating fun from your task list and engaging in play for its own sake, you can significantly reduce stress levels and boost your digital well-being.

2. Shoring up social bonds

Humans are inherently social creatures. Indeed, tools such as email, text messages and social media offer ways to enhance social connections. This innate desire for connection, however, combined with people’s reliance on technology, can lead to feelings of FOMO – fear of missing out – and anxiety during a digital detox.

The average adult now spends 70% less time with friends than they did two decades ago. Digital devices offer connection, but pieces of the experience are missing, such as the joy of in-person contact and trust in others that can be difficult to get online. So while we’re a more connected society, relationships suffer and people are more lonely than ever.

Therefore, during a digital detox it is vital to fill your cup with community, whether through existing friendships or by creating new ones. We recommend engaging in a digital detox alongside others, because FOMO may rear its ugly head if your friend pulls out their phone during a night out.

3. Emphasizing mindfulness

In today’s fast-paced environment, finding a moment to pause can feel nearly impossible. Many experience solitude deprivation, meaning people often don’t have moments to be alone with their own thoughts. Yet, the ability to just be can allow time for reflection, helping you consider what makes you happy and healthy. Finding moments where you can step away – to be still and silent – can provide a much-needed recharge.

With adults spending about 90% of their time indoors, breaking the routine and heading outside can offer a more holistic perspective on both personal and global well-being. In our study, yoga and meditation were common ways that detoxers found moments to become more aware of their own thoughts, which helped foster more intentional behaviors.

4. Viewing digital well-being as an ongoing journey

Ultimately, digital well-being is a journey. It is not a checklist that, once completed, means you are fulfilled.

Unfortunately, a single detox isn’t enough to cure digital imbalance. Instead, a successful detox often leaves people feeling introspective and curious. Our research participants shared that relapses are common, especially if they don’t set and monitor ongoing goals. Importantly, your needs change and evolve over time. In other words, what works now might not be what you need in the future.

Willpower just isn’t enough. We recommend identifying specific goals for yourself related to your own digital well-being. These aren’t productivity goals but goals to be unproductive. The aim is to unplug in more fulfilling ways. Whether planning a weekly game night with friends or taking a 10-minute walk without your phone, making time to unplug is worth it in the long run.

Researchers still have more to learn to help support digital wellness. We should remember, though, that individual differences play a crucial role in this equation, meaning that the journey to achieving digital harmony is uniquely personal. Thus, as people navigate their tech-saturated lives, it’s clear that finding the right balance is a complex, highly individualized process.

The digital detox journey can be challenging, but many people discover it to be rewarding in the end. People are not machines, however, so recognizing your limits and finding ways to reconnect with yourself and others during a detox can significantly enhance your sense of humanity and digital well-being.

Kelley Cours Anderson, Assistant Professor of Marketing, College of Charleston and Karen Anne Wallach, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Alabama in Huntsville

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

Not every plant is your friend. Not every plant is good. I know this because I’ve been researching the history of poison gardens and have planted a modest one in my small Sydney backyard.

A poison garden contains only toxic plants, which could kill humans if consumed in varying quantities. The concept of a poison garden grew from the 16th to 17th century history of herbalist or apothecary gardens, where plants and herbs were grown for medicinal purposes, mostly by doctors and monks.

These early gardens flourished at a time when herbals, hefty reference books on medicinal plants, were produced. An example is John Gerard’s 1500-page book The Herball (1597), which included English plants and herbs but also exotics collected from the “new world” (colonised countries such as the Caribbean islands). Within these apothecary medicinal gardens, specialist planting areas were sometimes allocated to exotic carnivorous, aquatic or poisonous plants.

Italy’s Padua Botanical Garden, dating to 1545, includes poisonous plants. Such gardens were established for reasons of natural history, botanical education and medicine but also as places of spectacle or intrigue. And there was a lot of intrigue in 16th and 17th century Italy and France, with flourishing small poisons businesses, usually run by women. Catherine Monvoisin, for instance, had a thriving consultancy as a poison supplier in Paris, until she was tried for providing lethal poisons in a murder plot and executed in 1680.

Most poisonous plants have qualities of cure and of medicinal care … but they are also dangerous. This is what Greek philosopher Plato called pharmakon – the idea that plants can cure, but they can also kill if the dose is high enough. The trick is knowing those thresholds.

To honour the medieval tradition, my poison garden is planted in a circular, raised garden bed, hip-height. There is, of course, nothing illegal about growing plants that contain high levels of poison compounds. Poisonous plants are potted up in many living rooms and suburban backyards.

Bunnings sells Dieffenbachia (known as dumbcane) as indoor plants. But eating their leaves can swell your tongue and limit speech, they can even cause death by asphyxiation if too much is eaten. Plant stores sell azaleas like they’re going out of fashion but all parts of the plant can cause nausea and vomiting if eaten, and death if too much is ingested. I have both plants at home.

In my designated poison garden, the centrepiece is the brugmansia (also known as angel’s trumpet), a leafy shrub of the nightshade family with with exquisite hanging trumpet-shaped flowers.

Its cousin, the datura, is known as the devil’s trumpet. Brugmansia stimulates psychoactive hallucinations if eaten. Its seeds and leaves are potentially poisonous and can cause confusion, fast heart beats, paralysis, tremors and even death.

Henbane is another highly toxic nightshade, with holly-green leaves. Mine hasn’t flowered yet but, in small doses, it relieves vomiting. My mugwort has leaves almost like continental parsley and in small amounts can treat menstrual and digestive complaints.

Hellebore is commonly grown as public landscaping across Australian cities because it is hardy and has gorgeous purple and deep red flowers. Hellebore has been said to treat mental health but can cause toxicity if too much is taken. My hellebore has creamy flowers. Finally, I have wormwood, which deters mosquitoes with its poisonous oils.

I’m interested to see how these poisonous plants might flourish together in one garden bed. The poison garden is intended to remind myself, family and friends that plants are not always “good” and deserve absolute respect, with a pinch of fear.

The world’s most toxic garden

The Duchess of Northumberland, Jane Percy, understands poisons. She has built the world’s most renowned poison garden. Her garden, at Alnwick Castle on the north-east coast of England, hosts plants that kill. This extreme poison garden, with locked gates, round-the-clock security and tours conducted by guards, receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

The duchess has around 100 toxic plants, including hemlock and foxglove, which has fine hairs that cause painful rashes, and hogweed, which can burn human skin.

She has deadly nightshade, which looks like honeysuckle but has shiny black berries that can be fatal if consumed. Wolfsbane, with its pretty purple flowers sprouting up and down the stem, is one of the most lethal plants in her garden and can kill you (its toxic roots affect the human heart and nervous system, if eaten). Perhaps the most poisonous plant is ricin, also known as the castor bean or castor oil plant. She also has cannabis, which she needed a permit to grow. The cannabis plants are securely caged and padlocked.

I met the duchess in mid-August. She had just bought her very first Australian poison plant to add to her collection. It is gympie gympie, known as the “suicide plant” because it causes such awful skin itch and intolerable pain.

The duchess and I discussed the cure/kill paradox. Many people think consuming plants can only be healthy, virtuous and good for you. But most plants are potent, few are completely benign, and if you get the wrong dose, you can become very sick or even die.

One day, she tells me, around 30 people fainted in her poison garden due to the henbane.

“You can’t sniff henbane when it’s in full flower because it can make you faint. And we have a big bench in the poison garden [where people sit], sometimes you’ll go in and find someone out for the count.”

I love the duchess’ candour. As humans, we think we have plants under control, especially in our constructed gardens. But plants have different ideas.

Women have been closely connected with plants through the millennia. It was women who historically ran the domestic kitchens and gardens, other than the odd male apothecary. Not to mention the vast swathe of First Nations women herbalists across time. Only those traditional women really knew the limits of plant compounds, the tipping point.

Across France, during the early 16th and 17th centuries, there was an epidemic of poisoning for power, revenge and money. The famous Affair of the Poisons during the late 1600s was a murder scandal among the aristocracy during the reign of French King Louis XIV. Thirty-six people, mostly women, were charged with poisoning – including Catherine Monvoisin – and subsequently executed.

Italy also has a history of plant poisoners. The first century Roman poison-maker, Locusta, was known to use Atropa belladonna as her poison of choice, learning her skills from Empress Agrippina the Younger. These doses were not always intended to kill, but to cause her victims to suffer.

The powerful Italian apothecarist Caterina Sforza (1463–1509) first discovered chloroform. She is known for her invisible inks, recipes to whiten skin and to dye hair black, and a poison made of distilled scorpions. Sforza also grew an apothecary garden in Ravaldino and worked the herbs with the advice of her own personal apothecary assistant, Lodovico Albertini. She was accused of poisoning the pope but later exonerated.

In Sweden, similar activities were at play with Queen Christina of Sweden (1629–1662) who employed a poisoner, Nicolo Egidi, known as Exili, who had knowledge of poisonous plants and of alchemy.

The Duchess of Northumberland has no such malign purposes. When she started the garden in 1995, she wanted to make something a bit different. She thought, “OK let’s do kill rather than cure”. Her approach is one of educating people about plants’ different capacities.

Before she designed her garden, the duchess travelled to Padua to see the famous world-class apothecary garden the Medici family built in 1545. This garden, still open to the public and now a world heritage site, is the oldest botanical garden in the world.

Her poison garden shares information about the darker side of plants. Drug safety groups educate young visitors on the toxicology and harm of plants, including drugs such as cannabis and opium.

The day-to-day operation of a poison garden is not trivial. Hers has security systems, cameras and guards. Some of the beds are gardened by staff wearing full hazmat suits. There is a skull and crossbone symbol on the entrance gate. “You have to police it,” says the Duchess. “You can’t just let people roam around. And we tell the stories of how the plants kill.”

Though in truth, she says, “the plant doesn’t kill without man’s intervention, usually”.

At 66, the duchess, who insists on being called “just Jane”, looks almost fairy-like, with flawless English skin. Today, she spends half her time near Soutra Aisle in Scotland. Soutra Aisle was an old hospital town where, during the Middle Ages, soporific sponges – laced with henbane, opium and hemlock – were used to anaesthetise patients. The rest of the time she stays at Alnwick Castle.

Matriarchal knowledge

There is also a poison garden at the Blarney Castle in Ireland. Australia does not boast any public poison gardens but Felicity McDonald runs a witches’ garden in the Mitta Valley, Victoria. Although it is not a poison garden, Felicity does have a lot of poisonous plants – hemlock, wormwood, hellebore, hogweed, datura, rhubarb, hydrangeas, foxglove, yew and more.

McDonald stresses poisonous plants should only be accessed under supervision. “Being a witch’s garden, we have plants that heal, however some of these plants have contradictions which could make you very sick or result in death.” She guides groups around the garden – school groups, senior citizens, families and Wiccans (people who follow pagan rituals and crafts) – describing plants’ medicinal and poisonous qualities.

I ask McDonald if there is a matriarchal knowledge associated with women and plants, especially poisonous ones. Yes, she says, and it is all about control. Reducing a woman to home duties, she says, denied her power. “But ancient Egyptians worshipped Isis, goddess of healing and magic. In Celtic Britain, the goddess Brigid was responsible for healing, poetry and smithcraft. And in Norse countries, Eir was the goddess associated with medical skill.” So while women had little influence in the public political sphere, they exercised power in the realms of herbs and healing.

McDonald notes that even the humble hydrangea is highly poisonous. The leaves and flowers contain cyanide and can cause vomiting and nausea if consumed by humans and pets.

Both McDonald and the duchess note the number of women with traditional expert plant knowledge has declined over recent centuries. I ask the duchess whether she mourns this loss of plant-related matriarchy. She answers, “A matriarch implies a strong woman who is a leader but often the best poisoners were acting quietly behind the scenes; tending to their gardens; weeding, drying herbs.”

People are scared of poisonous plants. To some extent, for good reason. But I’ve been surprised by friends’ responses to my new poison garden. They react as though I’ve really and truly gone too far this time.

I have only five poisonous plants in it and they are all benign … so long as they are not eaten in any way or touched with bare hands. It would not be wise to drink even a single drop of the flower nectar. I have other hallucinatory plants in the wider garden that can also work as cures if taken mildly, but are potentially poisonous if taken in large quantities. I have sourced some plants from friends, some from rare garden suppliers who sell “ceremonial” plants and some from my local garden store. None of these are illegal or part of an underground network.

It’s important to remember that there are poisonous plants all around us – hydrangeas, oleander, rhubarb, daffodils. You need a permit, security and insurance to have a poison garden that is open to the public. My garden is private and carefully signposted, so it is no more illegal than my neighbour’s daffodils or the hellebore growing in the council landscaping across the road.

Still, I recently experienced a pounding headache, a slight racing of the heart and nausea. I remembered I’d been pulling dead leaves off my poison plants (I hate wearing garden gloves) and had forgotten to wash my hands when I came inside. I’m pretty sure they made me sick. It’s a reminder to take care, because plants are serious.

Prudence Gibson, Lecturer and researcher in Plant Humanities, UNSW Sydney

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

On Sept. 20, 2024, a newspaper in Montana reported an issue with ballots provided to overseas voters registered in the state: Kamala Harris was not on the ballot. Election officials were able to quickly remedy the problem but not before accusations began to spread online, primarily among Democrats, that the Republican secretary of state had purposefully left Harris off the ballot.

This false rumor emerged from a common pattern: Some people view evidence such as good-faith errors in election administration through a mindset of elections being untrustworthy or “rigged,” leading them to misinterpret that evidence.

As the U.S. approaches another high-stakes and contentious election, concerns about the pervasive spread of falsehoods about election integrity are again front of mind. Some election experts worry that false claims may be mobilized – as they were in 2020 – into efforts to contest the election through tactics such as lawsuits, protests, disruptions to vote-counting and pressure on election officials to not certify the election.

Our team at the University of Washington has studied online rumors and misinformation for more than a decade. Since 2020, we have focused on rapid analysis of falsehoods about U.S. election administration, from sincere confusion about when and where to vote to intentional efforts to sow distrust in the process. Our motivations are to help quickly identify emerging rumors about election administration and analyze the dynamics of how these rumors take shape and spread online.

Through the course of this research we have learned that despite all the discussion about misinformation being a problem of bad facts, most misleading election rumors stem not from false or manipulated evidence but from misinterpretations and mischaracterizations. In other words, the problem is not just about bad facts but also faulty frames, or the mental structures people rely on to interpret those facts.

Misinformation may not be the best label for addressing the problem – it’s more an issue of how people make sense of the world, how that sensemaking process is shaped by social, political and informational dynamics, and how it begets rumors that can lead people to a false understanding of events.

Rumors – not misinformation

There is a long history of research on rumors going back to World War II and earlier. From this perspective, rumors are unverified stories, spreading through informal channels that serve informational, psychological and social purposes. We are applying this knowledge to the study of online falsehoods.

Though many rumors are false, some turn out to be true or partially true. Even when false, rumors can contain useful indications of real confusions or fears within a community.

Rumors can be seen as a natural byproduct of collective sensemaking – that is, efforts by groups of well-meaning people to make sense of uncertain and ambiguous information during dynamic events. But rumors can also emerge from propaganda and disinformation campaigns that lead people to misinterpret or mischaracterize their own and others’ experiences.

Evidence, frames and (mis)interpretations

Prior research describes collective sensemaking as a process of interactions between evidence and frames. Evidence includes the things people see, read and hear in the world. Frames are mental schema that shape how people interpret that evidence.

The relationship between evidence and frames flows in two directions. When people encounter novel events or new evidence, they try to select the best frame from their mental filing cabinets. The selected frame then determines what evidence they focus on and what evidence they exclude in their interpretations. This evidence-frame view of collective sensemaking can help researchers understand rumors and disinformation.

Everyone has their own ways of interpreting events based on their unique experiences. But your frames are not yours alone. Frames are shaped, sometimes intentionally, by information from media, political leaders, communities, colleagues, friends, neighbors and family. Framing – the process of using, building, reinforcing, adapting, challenging and updating frames – can be a deliberate strategy of political communication.

Frames play a role in generating rumors, shaping how people interpret emerging events and novel evidence. False rumors occur when sensemaking goes awry, often due to people focusing on the wrong piece of evidence or applying the wrong frame. And disinformation, from this perspective, is the intentional manipulation of the sensemaking process, either by introducing false evidence or distorting the frames through which people interpret that evidence.

In 2020, we saw these dynamics at work in a rumor about Sharpie pens in Arizona. In the lead-up to the election, President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly alleged that the election would be rigged – setting a powerful frame for his followers. When voters noted that the Sharpie pens provided by election officials were bleeding through their ballots, many interpreted their experiences through the frame of a “rigged election” and became concerned that their ballots would not be counted.

Some people shared those experiences online, where they were soon amplified and given meaning by others, including online influencers. Concerns and suspicions grew. Soon, members of Trump’s family were repeating false claims that the bleed-through was systematically disenfranchising Republican voters. The effect was circular and mutually reinforcing. The strategic frame inspired misinterpretations of evidence – real bleed-through falsely seen as affecting ballot counting – that were shared and amplified, strengthening the frame.

Social media sensemaking

Collective sensemaking is increasingly taking place online, where it is profoundly shaped by social media platforms, from features such as repost and like buttons to algorithmic recommendations to the connections between accounts.

Not so long ago, many people hoped that the internet would democratize information flows by removing the historical gatekeepers of information and disrupting their ability to set the agenda – and the frames – of conversation. But the gatekeepers have not been erased; they have been replaced. A group of newsbrokering influencers have taken their place, in part by gaming the ways online systems manipulate attention.

Many of these influencers work by systematically seeking out and amplifying content that aligns with prevailing political frames set by elites in politics and media. This gives creators the incentive to produce content that resonates with those frames, because that content tends to be rewarded with attention, the primary commodity of social media.

These dynamics were at work in February 2024, when an aspiring creator produced a man-on-the-street video interviewing migrants to the U.S. that was selectively edited and captioned to falsely claim to show undocumented migrants planning to vote illegally in U.S. elections. This resonated with two prominent frames: the same rigged-election frame from 2020 and another that framed immigration as harmful to the U.S.

The video was shared across multiple platforms and exploded in views after being amplified by a series of accounts with large followings on X, formerly Twitter. X CEO Elon Musk commented with an exclamation point on one post with the embedded video. The creator soon found himself on Fox News. He currently has hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram and continues to produce similar content.

Interactions between influencers and online audiences result in content that fits strategic frames. Emerging events provide new evidence that people can twist to fit prevailing frames, both intentionally and unintentionally. Rumors are the byproducts of this process, and online attention dynamics fuel their spread.

Collective sensemaking and election 2024

Heading into the 2024 election, false and misleading claims about election integrity remain widespread. Our team has tracked more than 100 distinct rumors since the beginning of September. The machinery for quickly converting perceived evidence from elections into widely shared rumors and conspiracy theories is increasingly well oiled.

One concerning development is an increase in so-called election integrity organizations that seek to recruit volunteers who share the rigged-election frame. The groups aim to provide volunteers with tools to streamline the collection and amplification of evidence to support the rigged-election frame.

One worry is that these volunteers may misinterpret what they see and hear on Election Day, generating additional rumors and false claims about election integrity that reinforce that increasingly distorted frame. Another is that these false claims will feed lawsuits and other attempts to contest election results.

However, we hope that by shedding light on some of these dynamics, we can help researchers, journalists, election officials and other decision-makers better diagnose and respond to rumors about election integrity in this cycle. Most importantly, we believe that this collective sensemaking lens can help us all to both empathize with well-meaning people who get caught up in sharing false rumors and see how propagandists manipulate these processes for their gain.

Kate Starbird, Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington and Stephen Prochaska, Graduate Research Assistant, Center for an Informed Public, University of Washington

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

Today, while we hear a fair bit from wellness experts and commentators about the importance of boundaries — whether related to “doomscrolling” with our phones, overwork or relationships — it’s not always easy to heed this advice for our own good.

My research into Irish folklore and traditional women’s craft reminds me that in this context, instead of advice coming through news stories, medical journals or TikTok gurus, people often received warnings through oral folklore and storytelling.

In many cases, these folklore tales contain elements of the supernatural or otherworldly encounters intended to scare or unsettle someone towards good patterns of behaviour — as part of a larger theme of passing down embodied knowledge relevant to specific places.

Here’s a look at Irish folklore surrounding women’s craft in time for Halloween, a time of the year when boundaries between worlds are said to be thin.

Forms of knowledge

Oral histories allow a glimpse into the lives, histories and forms of knowledge of people who are often not reflected within larger national histories that have privileged written records.

As part of my doctoral research on female-led craft advocacy organizations in Ireland, I worked closely with the Irish National Folklore Archive’s Schools’ Collection folklore archive, which includes digitized notebooks containing folkloric tales collected by school-aged children from their families and neighbours.

This folklore and oral history is a fascinating repository of traditional and alternative forms of knowledge, much of which deals with many of the same issues we are facing today — such as how to structure and utilize the limited number of hours in a day.

‘It was not right to wait up late spinning’

In 1930s rural Ireland, 60-year old Kate Corcoran provided an oral recollection of a folktale commonly told as a warning to women not to overexert themselves by sitting up too late at night at the spinning wheel.

“Once upon a time there lived an old woman who used to be up very late spinning. One night after all the rest had gone to sleep she remained at the wheel. When she had finished she looked up to the fire and saw an old woman spinning in the corner. She saw another old hag under the bed spinning. She turned around and saw another at the backdoor. She knew at once that they were fairies and that it was not right to wait up late spinning. She put out the light and went to bed. From that time forth she never waited up late spinning.”

In Irish folklore, fairies — or the Good People (na Daoine Maithe), as they prefer to be called — are mischievous beings that can intervene into the lives of humans, and not always for the better.

Despite the helpful nature of the fairies, this folktale is a warning for the spinner to ensure she is getting enough rest at the end of a long day. Another version of the same tale takes things startling further: in this case, a dozen fairies enter the home of the spinner, and when she fails to offer an acceptable beverage to her guests, they threaten to make water from her blood.

Working sheep fleeces

Irish folklore is filled with these sorts of hidden daily frameworks that set the pace of daily life, especially in rural areas. An alternative example documented in a craft survey of Ireland, in about 1950, is the assertion that one should not spin sheep fleece into yarn until all the animals are asleep, hinting towards the labour expected of a woman on a farm that involved caring for children, maintaining the household, gathering eggs, milking cows and producing many of the textiles to be utilized in the home.

As I argue in my research, this form of thinking intimates a form of reciprocity between humans and animals that takes into considerations craft production within wider ecological systems.

Spinning yarn was work, but it was a form of work that occurred at the end of the day, when all other tasks were complete. Pragmatically, as well, waiting until later in the evening to work the fleeces ensured that the cottage’s central hearth would have had ample time to radiate heat and warm the natural oils of the fleece, making it easier to work.

This sort of knowledge is often forgotten and lost, but forms an essential part of a community’s intangible cultural heritage. The perpetuation of oral folklore ensures this priceless knowledge gets passed down.

Wise women’s knowledge

The focus of my doctoral research was on the Irish Homespun Society (IHS), a female-led craft advocacy group which set out to “keep women spinning in their homes” as the motto went. Muriel Gahan, the leading figure of the IHS, left urban Dublin and travelled into the Irish hinterlands in the 1930s and 1940s to meet and support rural women who were still producing cottage-made textiles on farms.

Gahan’s recollections of her time in the western county of Mayo also provide another glimpse of the discursive connection with the fairy realm that permeates these records. As she noted in her diary upon meeting a rural spinner:

“We knew she was a fairy when we saw her. Unlike other women, she was dressed in a shawl and a scarlet petticoat with a white cloth tied round her head. Her face, rosy red, was seamed with a thousand wrinkles, and smiles ran out of her eyes and round her mouth. When she spoke, her deep voice echoed down the valley.”

Worlds of tradition and modernity

The time period during which Gahan was supporting rural female textile workers was also the moment when they were being increasingly pushed from paid work through the industrialization and mechanization of textile work in small factories.

Scholars such as political theorist Silvia Federici and historian Joanna Bourke have explored the ways in which women’s labour opportunities have been “enclosed” — subsumed under other ownership and control — in the shift towards industrial capitalist modes of production.

In Ireland, one form that this took was the emergence of small spinning factories which were owned and operated primarily by men, while women stayed on the farms to care for the children and animals.

The “fairy” encountered by Gahan was a woman caught between the worlds of tradition and modernity, and the support offered by the Irish Homespun Society was intended to preserve and protect an endangered craft tradition and its skilled artisans.

Slowing down with story

Today, especially post-COVID-19, as in times before, women are the subject of admonitions or warnings to set boundaries or manage time as to not become overwhelmed under the mountain of daily tasks.

In our busy, hyper-connected lives, perhaps a bit of attention to spinning folklore could do us all a bit of good, even if it is only to force us to slow down with a nice warm drink and a selection of Irish legends and stories this Halloween season.

Brandi Goddard, Assistant Lecturer, History of Art, Design & Visual Culture, University of Alberta

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

René Magritte is renowned for his humorous yet enigmatic art, foremost of which is the iconic bowler-hatted man. But despite his significant contribution to Surrealism – and the fame of his works – the evolution of his artistic practice isn’t widely known.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Magritte exhibit marks the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in Australia, opening almost exactly 100 years after André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.

The exhibition unveils four decades of Magritte’s unique artistic vision, with more than 100 works from collections across Australia, Belgium, Japan and the United States.

The man beyond the bowler hat

Magritte was born in 1898 in Lessines, Belgium. He developed a strong passion for painting early on. At just 16, he enrolled in the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he received traditional artistic training. He also worked as a graphic designer in his early career to support himself financially, creating various advertisements for magazine covers and posters.

Magritte was driven to explore and enhance his artistic practice beyond the Belgian art scene’s conservative aesthetics and limited opportunities for experimentation.

He found inspiration in magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues depicting avant-garde works. His earliest known self-portrait exemplifies his early influence by Cubism. It is a double-sided work, with one side featuring a painted portrait of Georgette Berger (who later became Magritte’s wife) playing the piano.

However, it was Magritte’s encounter with surrealist artworks (particularly Italian artist Giorgio De Chirico’s Le Chant d’amour, with its dreamlike atmosphere) which greatly impacted his practice.

From the mid-1920s, Magritte began to develop personal and poetic images featuring familiar objects rendered realistically yet set in unexpected combinations. He also introduced motifs that would appear throughout his career, such as curtains, toys, clouds and boulders. His first solo exhibition at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels signalled his allegiance to Surrealism.

Art as a process of reasoning

The Magritte exhibition foregrounds the artist’s work in the context of Belgian Surrealism, emphasising how he was influenced by fellow writers, philosophers and artists in Brussels.

Among these figures was the poet Paul Nougé, the founding figure of Belgian Surrealism in 1926. Nougé introduced a more scientific and rationalist perspective to the Belgian movement, differentiating it from its Parisian counterpart.

Parisian Surrealism was fascinated by psychoanalysis, focusing on the irrational and the unconscious. Belgian Surrealism, meanwhile, directed its attention towards consciousness, rationality and the search for meaning. This methodology clashed with the convictions of Parisian surrealists.

Although Magritte worked with the Parisian surrealists from 1927 to 1930 while living in Paris, he maintained a degree of independence. He considered his artistic practice as a process of reasoning.

While in Paris, Magritte developed his word-pictures, as seen in The Literal Meaning and the famous The Treachery of Images (more familiarly known as Ceci n'est pas une pipe, or This is not a pipe), which today is regarded as a landmark in the history of European modern art.

His approach relied on Nougé’s reflection on the nature and status of words and images, pointing to the arbitrary nature of language. In these works, Magritte invites us to take part in a linguistic game, making us question the relationship between an object, its name and its representative image.

Back in Brussels, Magritte explored what he considered philosophical “problems” through rigorously, almost mathematically, constructed paintings. He sought to reconcile the object represented and “the thing attached to it in the shadow of consciousness” through the mediation of the canvas.

In The Human Condition, he addresses the “problem of the window” as an object to look through and as a metaphor for traditional perspectival painting, revealing the way we perceive external realities through our own internal conceptualisation.

‘Sunlit Surrealism’ and lesser-known works

The Magritte exhibit also highlights some surprising and much lesser-known works. By the mid-1930s, the artist had gained significant recognition in Europe and beyond. However, the onset of World War II prompted him to question the relevance of Surrealism as a response to the war.

He sought new approaches to Surrealism. With “Sunlit Surrealism” he looked at images evocative of happiness, adopting an impressionist style characterised by feathery brushstrokes reminiscent of Auguste Renoir, as depicted in A stroke of luck.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, Magritte returned to the realistic style that defines his work. In his art series The Dominion of Light, he creates a paradoxical image. We view the qualities of light from opposite times of day, highlighting the ambiguity created by the coexistence of light and dark.

A continuing legacy

Magritte also influenced the next generation of artists associated with pop art and conceptual art, including those well beyond his time.

Today, his influence is evident in popular visual culture, from Pedro Almodóvar’s 2009 film Broken Embraces, to Beyoncé’s music video for Mine, which references The lovers.

Magritte’s work continues to be relevant, with its exploration of perception and the porous relationship between images and reality. This theme is highly pertinent in the age of AI, where the line between the artificial and real seems increasingly blurred.

More than 50 years after his death, Magritte continues to encourage us to reflect on how we perceive, experience and describe the world around us.

Victoria Souliman, Lecturer, French and Francophone Studies, University of Sydney

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

The year is 50 BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely. One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders.

So begins the Asterix comic series, which positions Julius Caesar as the power-lusting dictator of the mighty Roman Empire who conquered all of Gaul. All except, of course, for one heroic village, where Asterix, Obelix and Dogmatix are among the Gauls (or Gaul dogs) frustrating Rome’s hapless legions.

Well, that’s the comic book version.

But who really were the Gauls? And why were they such a problem for Rome?

The Gauls are the most famous group of Celtic peoples who occupied most of the lands west of the Rhine, thus causing this area to be known in antiquity as Gaul.

They sported long blonde or reddish dreadlocks (often washing their hair in lime-water and pulling it back to the nape of the neck), handlebar moustaches on the men, colourful shirts and striped coats. The ethnonym Galli is believed to derive from a Celtic root gal- meaning “power” or “ability”, and has been linked to the Irish word gal, meaning “bravery” or “courage”.

Fearsome warriors

From the fifth to third centuries BCE, the Celtic tribes of central Europe were among the continent’s most fearsome warriors.

From their heartlands around what is now the Czech Republic (Bohemia derives its name from the powerful Boii Gallic tribe), they conquered the British Isles, all of France and Belgium (Gaul proper) and parts of Spain. They also conquered the fertile alluvial plains of what became known to Romans as Cisalpine Gaul, meaning “Gaul this side of the Alps”.

The Gauls even conquered lands as far afield as in present-day Turkey. The descendants from these once mighty peoples still live in Ireland (Gaelic comes from the word Gaul), Wales and Brittany.

The Gauls had a very warlike reputation. They produced tall and muscular warriors who often wore helmets that, according to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, sometimes had horns attached or “images of the fore-parts of birds or four-footed animals”. He also wrote that:

The women of the Gauls are not only like the men in their great stature but they are a match for them in courage as well.

Gauls fought with long broad-swords, barbed spears, and chariots drawn by two horses. They fastened the severed heads of their enemies about the necks of their horses.

Possessing huge quantities of alluvial gold, Gallic nobles wore heavy necklaces (known as “torcs”) of solid gold and consumed untold amounts of imported wine, fabulously enriching Italian merchants.

Their acts of bravery were immortalised by lyric poets called bards, and they put great stock in their shamans, called druids, who also presided over regular human sacrifices.

In 387 BCE, Gallic raiders from Cisalpine Gaul sacked Rome. They only failed to take the Capitol because of a hostile incursion into their own homelands, forcing them to break camp and return – not before, however, exacting a crippling price in gold from the profoundly humiliated Romans.

The Romans were so impressed with Gallic military kit they resorted to wholesale plagiarism. The iconic armour of Roman republican legionaries was largely of Celtic origin.

Rome rallies against the Gauls

In 295 BCE, the Senones (a Gallic tribe) inhabiting the Adriatic coastline south of Cisalpine Gaul were part of an alliance soundly defeated by the Roman Republic in the battle of Sentinum.

This represented a watershed moment on the road to Roman hegemony in the Italian peninsula.

In 232, against the backdrop of renewed hostilities with the Cisalpine Gauls, leading Roman politician Gaius Flaminius passed legislation redistributing land won from the Senones (following their final defeat in 283) among Romans from the lower property classes.

To ease Roman colonisation, the same Flaminius in 220 commissioned the construction of the Via Flaminia, a paved speedway from Rome all the way to Rimini, at the doorstep of Cisalpine Gaul.

Fearing the same fate as the Senones, the Cisalpine Gauls united against Rome, aided by some Transalpine Gauls.

By 225, this alliance became strong enough to invade peninsular Italy, ravage Tuscany, and threaten Rome itself.

This famously triggered the Romans to muster all Roman and Italian manpower at their disposal (about 800,000 draftable men, according to ancient the historian Pliny).

Being now superior in every respect, the Romans and their Italian allies decisively defeated the Cisalpine Gauls in 223 and 222. The Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus even managed to kill a Gallic king in single combat.

The vanquished Cisalpine Gauls then joined the feared Carthaginian general Hannibal, who at the time posed a great risk to Rome and defeated its forces in many battles. They joined Hannibal en masse after he crossed the Alps to invade Italy in 218.

But Hannibal failed to vanquish Rome and was later defeated. The Roman conquest of Cisalpine Gaul continued after Roman forces defeated Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal at the Metaurus River in 207.

To secure their rich holdings in Cisalpine Gaul and the land corridor to their Spanish provinces, the Romans subsequently conquered first Liguria and next southern Gaul, incorporated as the Province of Transalpine Gaul. The area was so thoroughly colonised it is still known today as La Provence (“the province”).

Caesar’s self-interested war on the Gauls

Julius Caesar, eager to amass glory and wealth, subjugated all of Gaul in less than a decade (from 58 to 50 BCE).

He sold this outright aggression to the Senate and people in Rome as a war waged in defence of tribes allied with Rome, a necessary pre-emptive strike of sorts.

In addition to enslaving perhaps up to one million Gauls, Caesar proudly claimed to have killed well over another million, a staggering casualty rate considered by Pliny the Elder “a prodigious even if unavoidable wrong inflicted on the human race”.

Caesar got away with mass murder because he shamelessly played into lingering feelings of metus Gallicus, or “Gallic fear”.

The Roman fear of Gauls was heightened by the so-called Cimbric War that took place in earlier years, when a formidable confederacy of Germanic and Gallic tribes inflicted a series of costly defeats upon Rome, threatening Italy itself.

But Rome would triumph in the end. Under the leadership of Gaius Marius, the Romans destroyed these tribes in 102/101 BCE in Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul.

Turned into a Roman province in the final stages of this war, Cisalpine Gaul eventually became so heavily Romanised it was incorporated into Roman Italy proper in 42 BCE.

An earlier version of this story included a picture of a statue incorrectly described as depicting Julius Caesar. It was, in fact, his successor Augustus. The picture has been removed.

Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, Associate Professor of Ancient History, The University of Melbourne

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

This is the next article in our ‘Light and health’ series, where we look at how light affects our physical and mental health in sometimes surprising ways. Read other articles in the series.

It’s spring and you’ve probably noticed a change in when the Sun rises and sets. But have you also noticed a change in your mood?

We’ve known for a while that light plays a role in our wellbeing. Many of us tend to feel more positive when spring returns.

But for others, big changes in light, such as at the start of spring, can be tough. And for many, bright light at night can be a problem. Here’s what’s going on.

An ancient rhythm of light and mood

In an earlier article in our series, we learned that light shining on the back of the eye sends “timing signals” to the brain and the master clock of the circadian system. This clock coordinates our daily (circadian) rhythms.

“Clock genes” also regulate circadian rhythms. These genes control the timing of when many other genes turn on and off during the 24-hour, light-dark cycle.

But how is this all linked with our mood and mental health?

Circadian rhythms can be disrupted. This can happen if there are problems with how the body clock develops or functions, or if someone is routinely exposed to bright light at night.

When circadian disruption happens, it increases the risk of certain mental disorders. These include bipolar disorder and atypical depression (a type of depression when someone is extra sleepy and has problems with their energy and metabolism).

Light on the brain

Light may also affect circuits in the brain that control mood, as animal studies show.

There’s evidence this happens in humans. A brain-imaging study showed exposure to bright light in the daytime while inside the scanner changed the activity of a brain region involved in mood and alertness.

Another brain-imaging study found a link between daily exposure to sunlight and how the neurotransmitter (or chemical messenger) serotonin binds to receptors in the brain. We see alterations in serotonin binding in several mental disorders, including depression.

What happens when the seasons change?

Light can also affect mood and mental health as the seasons change. During autumn and winter, symptoms such as low mood and fatigue can develop. But often, once spring and summer come round, these symptoms go away. This is called “seasonality” or, when severe, “seasonal affective disorder”.

What is less well known is that for other people, the change to spring and summer (when there is more light) can also come with a change in mood and mental health. Some people experience increases in energy and the drive to be active. This is positive for some but can be seriously destabilising for others. This too is an example of seasonality.

Most people aren’t very seasonal. But for those who are, seasonality has a genetic component. Relatives of people with seasonal affective disorder are more likely to also experience seasonality.

Seasonality is also more common in conditions such as bipolar disorder. For many people with such conditions, the shift into shorter day-lengths during winter can trigger a depressive episode.

Counterintuitively, the longer day-lengths in spring and summer can also destabilise people with bipolar disorder into an “activated” state where energy and activity are in overdrive, and symptoms are harder to manage. So, seasonality can be serious.

Alexis Hutcheon, who experiences seasonality and helped write this article, told us:

[…] the season change is like preparing for battle – I never know what’s coming, and I rarely come out unscathed. I’ve experienced both hypomanic and depressive episodes triggered by the season change, but regardless of whether I’m on the ‘up’ or the ‘down’, the one constant is that I can’t sleep. To manage, I try to stick to a strict routine, tweak medication, maximise my exposure to light, and always stay tuned in to those subtle shifts in mood. It’s a time of heightened awareness and trying to stay one step ahead.

So what’s going on in the brain?

One explanation for what’s going on in the brain when mental health fluctuates with the change in seasons relates to the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine.

Serotonin helps regulate mood and is the target of many antidepressants. There is some evidence of seasonal changes in serotonin levels, potentially being lower in winter.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in reward, motivation and movement, and is also a target of some antidepressants. Levels of dopamine may also change with the seasons.

But the neuroscience of seasonality is a developing area and more research is needed to know what’s going on in the brain.

How about bright light at night?

We know exposure to bright light at night (for instance, if someone is up all night) can disturb someone’s circadian rhythms.

This type of circadian rhythm disturbance is associated with higher rates of symptoms including self-harm, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and lower wellbeing. It is also associated with higher rates of mental disorders, such as major depression, bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD).

Why is this? Bright light at night confuses and destabilises the body clock. It disrupts the rhythmic regulation of mood, cognition, appetite, metabolism and many other mental processes.

But people differ hugely in their sensitivity to light. While still a hypothesis, people who are most sensitive to light may be the most vulnerable to body clock disturbances caused by bright light at night, which then leads to a higher risk of mental health problems.

Where to from here?

Learning about light will help people better manage their mental health conditions.

By encouraging people to better align their lives to the light-dark cycle (to stabilise their body clock) we may also help prevent conditions such as depression and bipolar disorder emerging in the first place.

Healthy light behaviours – avoiding light at night and seeking light during the day – are good for everyone. But they might be especially helpful for people at risk of mental health problems. These include people with a family history of mental health problems or people who are night owls (late sleepers and late risers), who are more at risk of body clock disturbances.

Alexis Hutcheon has lived experience of a mental health condition and helped write this article.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Jacob Crouse, Research Fellow in Youth Mental Health, Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney; Emiliana Tonini, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, and Ian Hickie, Co-Director, Health and Policy, Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney

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

You had a great night out, but the next morning, anxiety hits: your heart races, and you replay every conversation from the night before in your head. This feeling, known as hangover anxiety or “hangxiety”, affects around 22% of social drinkers.

While for some people, it’s mild nerves, for others, it’s a wave of anxiety that feels impossible to ride out. The “Sunday scaries” may make you feel panicked, filled with dread and unable to relax.

Hangover anxiety can make even simple tasks feel overwhelming. Here’s why it happens, and what you can do about it.

What does alcohol do to our brains?

A hangover is the body’s way of recovering after drinking alcohol, bringing with it a range of symptoms.

Dehydration and disrupted sleep play a large part in the pounding headaches and nausea many of us know too well after a big night out. But hangovers aren’t just physical – there’s a strong mental side too.

Alcohol is a nervous system depressant, meaning it alters how certain chemical messengers (or neurotransmitters) behave in the brain. Alcohol relaxes you by increasing gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the neurotransmitter that makes you feel calm and lowers inhibitions. It decreases glutamate and this also slows down your thoughts and helps ease you into a more relaxed state.

Together, this interaction affects your mood, emotions and alertness. This is why when we drink, we often feel more sociable, carefree and willing to let our guard down.

As the effects of the alcohol wear off, your brain works to rebalance these chemicals by reducing GABA and increasing glutamate. This shift has the opposite effect of the night before, causing your brain to become more excitable and overstimulated, which can lead to feelings of anxiety.

So why do some people get hangxiety, while others don’t? There isn’t one clear answer to this question, as several factors can play a role in whether someone experiences hangover-related anxiety.

Genes play a role

For some, a hangover is simply a matter of how much they drank or how hydrated they are. But genetics may also play a significant role. Research shows your genes can explain almost half the reason why you wake up feeling hungover, while your friend might not.

Because genes influence how your body processes alcohol, some people may experience more intense hangover symptoms, such as headaches or dehydration. These stronger physical effects can, in turn, trigger anxiety during a hangover, making you more susceptible to “hangxiety.”

Do you remember what you said last night?

But one of the most common culprits for feeling anxious the next day is often what you do while drinking.

Let’s say you’ve had a big night out and you can’t quite recall a conversation you had or something you did. Maybe you acted in ways that you now regret or feel embarrassed about. You might fixate on these thoughts and get trapped in a cycle of worrying and rumination. This cycle can be hard to break and can make you feel more anxious.

Research suggests people who already struggle with feelings of anxiety in their day-to-day lives are especially vulnerable to hangxiety.

Some people drink alcohol to unwind after a stressful day or to make themselves feel more comfortable at social events. This often leads to heavier consumption, which can make hangover symptoms more severe. It can also begin a cycle of drinking to feel better, making hangxiety even harder to escape.

Preventing hangover anxiety

The best way to prevent hangxiety is to limit your alcohol consumption. The Australian guidelines recommend having no more than ten standard drinks per week and no more than four standard drinks on any one day.

Generally, the more you drink, the more intense your hangover symptoms might be, and the worse you are likely to feel.

Mixing other drugs with alcohol can also increase the risk of hangxiety. This is especially true for party drugs, such as ecstasy or MDMA, that give you a temporary high but can lead to anxiety as they wear off and you are coming down.

If you do wake up feeling anxious:

• focus on the physical recovery to help ease the mental strain

• drink plenty of water, eat a light meal and allow yourself time to rest

• try mindfulness meditation or deep breathing exercises, especially if anxiety keeps you awake or your mind races

• consider journalling. This can help re-frame anxious thoughts, put your feelings into perspective and encourage self-compassion

• talk to a close friend. This can provide a safe space to express concerns and feel less isolated.

Hangxiety is an unwelcome guest after a night out. Understanding why hangxiety happens – and how you can manage it – can make the morning after a little less daunting, and help keep those anxious thoughts at bay.

Blair Aitken, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Psychopharmacology, Swinburne University of Technology and Rebecca Rothman, PhD Candidate in Clinical Psychology, School of Health Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology

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

A team led by researchers at MIT in the United States has discovered large molecules containing carbon in a distant interstellar cloud of gas and dust.

This is exciting for those of us who keep lists of known interstellar molecules in the hope that we might work out how life arose in the universe.

But it’s more than just another molecule for the collection. The result, reported today in the journal Science, shows that complex organic molecules (with carbon and hydrogen) likely existed in the cold, dark gas cloud that gave rise to our Solar System.

Furthermore, the molecules held together until after the formation of Earth. This is important for our understanding of the early origins of life on our planet.

Difficult to destroy, hard to detect

The molecule in question is called pyrene, a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon or PAH for short. The complicated-sounding name tells us these molecules are made of rings of carbon atoms.

Carbon chemistry is the backbone of life on Earth. PAHs have long been known to be abundant in the interstellar medium, so they feature prominently in theories of how carbon-based life on Earth came to be.

We know there are many large PAHs in space because astrophysicists have detected signs of them in visible and infrared light. But we didn’t know which PAHs they might be in particular.

Pyrene is now the largest PAH detected in space, although it’s what is known as a “small” or simple PAH, with 26 atoms. It was long thought such molecules could not survive the harsh environment of star formation when everything is bathed in radiation from the newborn suns, destroying complex molecules.

In fact, it was once thought molecules of more than two atoms could not exist in space for this reason, until they were actually found. Also, chemical models show pyrene is very difficult to destroy once formed.

Last year, scientists reported they found large amounts of pyrene in samples from the asteroid Ryugu in our own Solar System. They argued at least some of it must have come from the cold interstellar cloud that predated our Solar System.

So why not look at another cold interstellar cloud to find some? The problem for astrophysicists is that we don’t have the tools to detect pyrene directly – it’s invisible to radio telescopes.

Using a tracer

The molecule the team has detected is called 1-cyanopyrene, what we call a “tracer” for pyrene. It is formed from pyrene interacting with cyanide, which is common in interstellar space.

The researchers used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to look at the Taurus molecular cloud or TMC-1, in the Taurus constellation. Unlike pyrene itself, 1-cyanopyrene can be detected by radio telescopes. This is because 1-cyanopyrene molecules act as small radio-wave emitters – tiny versions of earthly radio stations.

As scientists know the proportions of 1-cyanopyrene compared to pyrene, they can then estimate the amount of pyrene in the interstellar cloud.

The amount of pyrene they found was significant. Importantly, this discovery in the Taurus molecular cloud suggests a lot of pyrene exists in the cold, dark molecular clouds that go on to form stars and solar systems.

The complex birth of life

We are gradually building a picture of how life on Earth evolved. This picture tells us that life came from space – well, at least the complex organic, pre-biological molecules needed to form life did.

That pyrene survives the harsh conditions associated with the birth of stars, as shown by the findings from Ryugu, is an important part of this story.

Simple life – consisting of a single cell – appeared in Earth’s fossil record almost immediately (in geological and astronomical terms) after the planet’s surface had cooled enough to not vaporise complex molecules. This happened more than 3.7 billion years ago in Earth’s approximately 4.5 billion history.

For simple organisms to then appear so quickly in the fossil record, there’s just not enough time for chemistry to start with mere simple molecules of two or three atoms.

The new discovery of 1-cyanopyrene in the Taurus molecular cloud shows complex molecules could indeed survive the harsh conditions of our Solar System’s formation. As a result, pyrene was available to form the backbone of carbon-based life when it emerged on the early Earth some 3.7 billion years ago.

This discovery also links to another important finding of the last decade – the first chiral molecule in the interstellar medium, propylene oxide. We need chiral molecules to make the evolution of simple lifeforms work on the surface of the early Earth.

So far, our theories that molecules for early life on Earth came from space are looking good.

Maria Cunningham, Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of Physics, UNSW Sydney

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

Award-winning director Madeleine Hetherton-Miau’s latest offering is an evocative and hard-hitting documentary with a strong message. Mozart’s Sister investigates the life of Maria Anna Mozart, the older sister of the more famous Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The film portrays a sensitive and well-researched investigation into Maria Anna’s life – illuminating how the draconian attitudes that prevailed during her time condemned her to a lesser life than her brother, even though she was similarly talented.

It also reminds us of the importance of championing women musicians today, as “if we don’t encourage women now, it (discrimination) only repeats”.

Who was Maria Anna Mozart?

Maria Anna was the first-born child of Leopold Mozart. He himself was a musician and composer and had his daughter schooled in music from a very young age.

Maria showed amazing talent – a child prodigy in playing and composing. When Wolfgang was born, he quickly became engrossed in playing and composing music with his sister.

Mozart’s Sister features wonderfully poignant recreations of this childhood bond over music – emphasising the siblings’ playfulness and engagement with music in a noncompetitive way.

Leopold recognised his children’s prodigious talents. He soon had them travelling and playing concerts all over Europe, where they were lauded by the highest aristocracy. Maria Anna and Wolfgang were inseparable during this time and composed many works together.

Women musicians in the 18th century

But all of this came to an abrupt end with Maria Anna turned 15. As custom would dictate, it was considered unsuitable and unseemly for a girl of that age to perform in public, likening this form of public performance to that of a prostitute.

The film portrays the unfortunate fate that befell many 18th-century women who wanted to pursue a career in music. Regardless of their aptitude, these women would have no real career prospects. They were even banned from playing musical instruments deemed unseemly, including the violin and cello.

Composing and playing music was largely taken up by the nuns in monasteries. As Mozart’s Sister highlights, even though this was a time of enlightenment, this “enlightenment” was reserved for men – and white men at that. It definitely didn’t flow on to women.

Maria Anna was forced to stay home while Wolfgang continued pursuing music uninterrupted – and the rest is history.

The film ponders what it must have been like for her to be left at home, away from her brother (who was once her constant companion) and unable to play as she used to. Her life is poignantly illustrated through her diary entries, which are mainly filled with references to the weather, as though nothing else was happening for her.

Maria Anna eventually married, but continued to practice music each day. Upon her husband’s death – now a woman of means and a baroness in her 50s – she returned to solo concert performances.

A documentary on two levels

Mozart’s Sister is a documentary that functions on many levels.

On one level, it’s a biopic that portrays Maria Anna’s story through recreations of her childhood in Austria, with a voiceover narration and interviews highlighting her relationship with her brother. Much is shot on location in Austria and framed through the perspective of present-day museum curators and experts.

On another level, the film is a broader statement on the underrepresentation of female composers. I thought the director did an excellent job in portraying this duality through the juxtaposition of Maria Anna’s with the young British composer Alma Deustger. Deustger displayed many of the characteristics we could imagine Maria Anna having.

Like Maria Anna, Deustger is a brilliant modern-day composer with a deep appreciation for for composing and conducting. But unlike Maria, she has been able to pursue her passion and turn it into a career. I was particularly struck by the film’s closing, in which Deustger discusses writing her waltz based on the police sirens of New York.

Mozart’s Sister follows in a recent literary trend of discussions of appropriation – and of the overlooking of talented women in history who have been overshadowed by their more famous male counterparts. Anna Funder’s Wifedom and Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Trust are two other examples of this.

It is an interesting and provocative film that will appeal to classical music lovers, as well as those interested more broadly in the issue of female underrepresentation in the arts.

Mozart’s Sister is in cinemas from today.

Diane Charleson, Senior Lecturer in media School of Arts Australian Catholic University, Australian Catholic University

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

Wikipedia articles related to Australia are overwhelmingly centred on cities, new research has found, with negative aspects of a place sometimes “sanitised” in articles by editors – avoiding mention of discriminatory Australian government policies or violence against First Nations peoples.

Debate around central questions of Australian history and identity is sparking conflict between editors, with place names especially contentious. Only around 6% of Australian places are given their First Nation names on Wikipedia, along with an English one.

Yet while many parts of the nation are not represented, especially near the arid centre, a series of well-developed articles have been written about fictional places.

These include a 5,000-word article about Erinsborough, the fictional Melbourne suburb where TV soap Neighbours is set (edited by 252 people). Other articles about fictional places include Mount Thomas, the town where TV series Blue Heelers was set, and Summer Bay, the setting of TV soap Home and Away.

We analysed more than 35,000 entries about Australian places in the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, including more than half a million edits to these articles. We also interviewed 14 active editors of articles about Australia. Ours is the first project to analyse Australian Wikipedia entries.

We found many Wikipedia editors experienced burnout after being embroiled in disputes about contentious topics. The most controversial issues included republicanism, colonisation and place names.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia. But most editors can also override the edits of others. When editors repeatedly disagree about the content of a page, the result is an “edit war”.

In June 2023, for instance, the Queensland government officially renamed Fraser Island K’Gari. This decision sparked a year-long “edit war” about whether or not the relevant Wikipedia article should reflect this new name. The conflict finally ended in June 2024 with the decision to move the Fraser Island entry permanently to a new article named K’Gari.

Another contentious article is that on Barmah National Park. Analysis of the “talk” pages, which record all edits made, shows there has been a long-running dispute over whether horses in the national park should be considered “wild” or “feral”. More than half the edits made to the article have been reverted by other editors.

Why does this matter? Wikipedia is the world’s largest encyclopedia. The site and its associated platforms are core components of our knowledge ecosystem, used to train large language models like ChatGPT and a data source for Google infoboxes and voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa.

Understanding what Wikipedia says about Australia – and what is left out – is therefore crucial.

Places ignored

The Australian places represented on Wikipedia cluster around population centres. The further you move from the cities, the fewer articles there are. Across Australia’s arid centre, there are very few articles indeed.

When Europeans occupied Australia, they divided the landmass into colonies, parishes, cities, and later, states and suburbs. This largely ignored the ways of organising and naming places that existed in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies.

The divisions created by European settlers guide the creation, editing and reading of Wikipedia articles. First Nations’, ecological, and cosmopolitan senses of place struggle to find room within this nationalist structure.

Contested histories

Sometimes, writing about place is emotionally fraught. One editor, Gabriel (all participants’ names are pseudonyms), described the difficulty in writing about “really traumatic events”, such as the 1975 Tasman Bridge collapse, which are “still very raw in the memories of people that I know and love”.

At other times, there is outright omission of crucial historical context. The Katoomba article makes no mention of the 1957 forcible removal of Darug and Gundungurra peoples from Garguree, also known as The Gully, a tract of land in the middle of town.

The article describes Garguree, its status as an Aboriginal Place and its “long history of occupation by the Gundungurra and Darug” peoples. The removal of people from their homes to build a racetrack is entirely absent.

The editors we spoke to were mostly tech-savvy, white, educated men. By and large, they assumed other editors of Australian place articles were the same.

We spoke with one person who identified as a woman and one person who identified as non-binary. There were about 2,000 active Australian editors in the past month.

No editor we spoke to was a First Nations person. Previous research has shown the many barriers that inhibit First Nations people from editing Wikipedia.

Some editors told us they felt it was their responsibility to include First Nations’ perspectives, even though they met with heavy resistance. One, Lucas, had repeatedly tried to include First Nations place names, often unsuccessfully. He no longer edits Wikipedia. “I just ran out of energy for it,” he said.

David, another editor, described multiple (unsuccessful) campaigns to reflect the dual name of kunanyi/Mount Wellington on Wikipedia.

Gabriel said one or two editors “were going around removing Aboriginal place names from all the articles about Australia and Australian places”. This edit war resulted in formal dispute resolution and the banning of those editors.

Editors spoke of feeling pride in a place and wanting to write about it; the feeling of shame or defensiveness about settler-colonial history; and experiences of discomfort about what can and cannot be written about on Wikipedia.

If we are to navigate a world of digital saturation, it is crucial to understand how human beings play an important role in producing and maintaining digital infrastructure such as Wikipedia – and the subjective decisions they make along the way.

Heather Ford, Associate Professor, Communications, University of Technology Sydney; Francesca Sidoti, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Technology Sydney; Michael Falk, Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies, The University of Melbourne, and Tamson Pietsch, Associate Professor, Social & Political Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

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

Monologue performance is a technically demanding but deeply rewarding form of theatre. Monologues are the purest form of storytelling an actor can engage in.

Before I was a drama teacher and researcher, I was an actor on stage and television in Australia and in the United Kingdom.

As an actor, you are always having to prepare monologues as audition pieces. Here are some principles and techniques to help you with this process, to allow you to draw in your audience and strengthen your artistic expression.

Choosing your monologue

Successful characterisation in monologue acting depends on “casting” yourself well. This means choosing a text and a character that resonate with your own persona and emotional range.

Even if you decide you want to play someone with a completely different age, gender and life experience to your own, there should be something about this character that speaks to you: maybe it’s their sense of vulnerability, their love of life, their rage at unfair circumstances. The more you can relate to some specific aspect of this person, the easier it will be to access the emotional range to play them.

If you decide on a character from a well-known play, make sure you have an understanding of the whole text the piece comes from.

Finding the personality

As an actor, you should have a good grasp of your character’s personality and attitudes to life.

Look for clues in the monologue or the overall play that tell you something about this person’s inner psychology. Do they always agree with everyone, or are they always complaining? How do they talk about themselves, how do they talk about other people?

In a well-written play, dialogue is always filled with signals like these that actors rely on when creating characters.

Another useful approach is to develop a detailed backstory for the role you are playing. Performers often use journalling or visualisation to deepen their emotional connection with the person they are depicting.

Taking time to imagine these key “memories” can provide an emotional anchor when you want to access different parts of their personality. The audience will never know these choices you have made, but you will carry them within you, and they can add depth and dimension to your portrayal.

Making the character physical

Along with analysing your character’s psychology and motivations, spend time working on their physicality.

How does this person move through the world? Are they a daydreaming wanderer, or a short sharp stepper who is always in a hurry? Do they close themselves off from the world with hunched shoulders, or do they stand tall and project themselves outward?

These qualities might change throughout the monologue as your character moves through different thoughts and memories.

Making stage direction choices for a monologue can be one of the most challenging things to get right. Simple things such as walking downstage to talk directly to your audience, or sitting down at a particular moment, can add effective dynamics to your performance. But any choices you make must come from an inner impulse within your character. Movement needs to be motivated by some kind of shift in their thoughts.

Breaking down the monologue

To identify these shifts, break down your script into key “beats”. These are the moments in a text where your character starts talking about something new. You can use these to create shifts in movement, tone and pace.

Incorporating different beats into your piece is vital for keeping your audience’s interest. Every monologue should take the audience on a journey through a character’s inner life. Ensuring this journey includes some surprises or effective use of dramatic tension will help make your piece work as a solo performance.

Sit down with a pencil and mark down any point in the script where you think the character starts thinking or talking about something new. Once you have all these internal shifts marked out, decide if any of these could be played with a contrasting emotional tone and pace to create dramatic effect.

Who are you talking to?

Performing a piece on your own can be daunting as there are no other characters to respond to or generate reactions from. Understanding who your character is speaking to during the monologue means you can use your audience as an additional “actor”. Are they an ally or an enemy? Or are these private thoughts, with the audience as a witness to your inner mind?

Clarifying this relationship can help you make clearer choices in how you deliver your lines.

Give yourself time

There are many creative decisions to be made when preparing a monologue performance.

Make sure to give yourself enough time to make these decisions and to learn your lines by heart.

Experiment with lots of different choices when you are starting out and rehearse your piece as often as possible. This will help reduce nerves when it comes to your final performance as it’s difficult to focus on acting when your mind is racing trying to remember what to say next.

Once the hard work of preparation, experimentation and creative expression is done, there is no better feeling than nailing a solo performance!

Natasha Beaumont, Lecturer in Creative Arts, School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney

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

This article is part of The Conversation’s “Business Basics” series where we ask experts to discuss key concepts in business, economics and finance.

In economics, goods and services can be classified in different ways. You might be surprised to realise you already knew this, even without knowing their classification names.

Most goods and services are what we call normal goods. Normal goods are those that you purchase more of as your income increases.

For example, you might put healthier and more nutritious food in your trolley, buy more shoes and clothes, or spend more on outings at restaurants and events.

Normal goods still abide to what’s called the law of demand, which might feel like common sense: as the price of something goes up, the quantity of or frequency with which it is demanded will fall.

But there are some categories that violate our intuitions around supply and demand. And they do so for very different reasons. Meet Veblen and Giffen goods, the products that “break the rules”.

Needs and wants

Normal goods can be further divided into two types: necessity goods and luxury goods.

Broadly speaking, necessity goods are all those things we require for everyday life – food, housing, electricity and so on.

Luxury goods, on the other hand, are the those things we don’t necessarily need but are nice to have. Luxury houses, fancier cars, more expensive clothes and so on.

We become more able to afford luxury goods as we earn more. But as a result, they are also the first things we tend to cut when our income tightens.

For most of these products, something called the “law of demand” applies. That is, if their price increases, people buy less of them than they did before. Demand for them shrinks.

However, some types of good defy this “natural” principle.

Symbols of status and wealth

The first type are Veblen goods, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen. Sometimes they’re also called “snob” goods.

When these goods go up in price, demand for them actually increases.

Clear examples of Veblen goods are some forms of art, high-end designer clothes, exclusive cars and watches. The more expensive the good is, the more exclusive it is, and the more the consumers (who are attracted to it) want to purchase it.

It all centres on signalling status. Being seen to be able to purchase them can indicate someone has exquisite taste, or lots of money to spend.

Most times, Veblen goods are an example of what economists call “positional” goods. These are goods that are valued according to how they are distributed among people, and who exactly has them.

The satisfaction of purchasing a Veblen good comes from the sense of having it and being able to show it off, not necessarily from how useful it is.

Inferior goods

On the opposite side of normal goods are inferior goods. As our income increases, we tend to consume less of these goods.

Think, for example, of two-minute noodles or the bus service.

As your income increases, you may be able to afford more nutritious and healthier food and stop consuming cheaper food. You may be able to purchase a car or a bike and stop using public transport.

But within inferior goods, one rare kind offers another exception to the law of demand – Giffen goods.

Why does a rise in price cause demand to go up? Because for people on limited incomes, this limits their ability to buy substitutes.

Take examples such as wheat, rice, potatoes, or bread. If the price of any of these goes up, a consumer on low income may have less to spend on higher quality goods like meat and fresh vegetables, increasing their demand for the inferior good. 

María Yanotti, Lecturer of Economics and Finance Tasmanian School of Business & Economics, University of Tasmania

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

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky!

What causes windy weather? – Jake, aged 8, Melbourne.

Thank you for your great question, Jake.

Wind is just moving air, and air is a collection of different gases. It’s mostly one type of gas, called nitrogen, but also lots of others, including oxygen – which we need to live.

When air is under pressure, it starts to move – and that causes wind. I’ll explain what I mean by “under pressure”.

Imagine you are blowing up a balloon. As you blow more air into the balloon, the pressure builds inside. If the pressure gets too great, the balloon could pop because the air has nowhere to move.

Just like the balloon, we don’t like to be under pressure, either. Think of when your brother or sister or slightly annoying cousin gives you a great big bear hug. You feel pressure because you’re getting squeezed. Sometimes that can be nice, but when the squeezing gets too much the best way to get comfortable again is to break free and run. It’s the same with air: when it’s under pressure, it tries to escape.

When the air inside a balloon is under pressure and you take your fingers off the neck part of it, the air rushes out – often with a bit of an embarrassing farty noise. Well, that air rushing out is wind. (And, let’s be honest, it’s why another name for a fart is “breaking wind”.)

In the atmosphere, the same thing happens. When pressure builds up in one place, the air rushes to another place where there is less pressure.

But what is causing this pressure in the atmosphere?

Well, as the sun heats up the surface of the Earth, some areas get warmer and others stay cooler. On the whole globe, for instance, the North and South Poles are really cold. This is because sunbeams pass over the top, so not much sunlight actually hits the ground. Compare this to the equator, where temperatures are really warm, because the sunbeams are hitting it from directly above.

As you may know, warm air rises - just like when you see hot steam coming out the top of your kettle or a cooking pot at home.

My old teacher used to say: “You don’t get something for nothing, Andrew!” What he meant was that if air goes up in one place, it must come down in another place. That other place will be where the air is not rising, and that’s normally where the cool areas are.

As this happens and the air comes down, it hits the ground and starts to build up. When that air piles up too much, that pile of air will collapse and spread out, just like air rushing out of a balloon.

That air will rush towards the area that doesn’t have a big mound of air built up, and that will usually be a warm place where the air is rising.

You can feel this happening at the beach in summer, where the sun heats up the sand more than the water. As heat builds up the air rises over the land and starts to fall over the ocean. Soon there is more air over the ocean than the land, and a breeze starts as that air pile collapses.

So, put simply: wind is just air moving from one place where there is high pressure to another place where there is low pressure (a smaller pile of air).

Often, that’s from where it is cooler to where it is hotter. And, thankfully, it rarely makes that farty sound.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. They can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
* Tell us on Twitter

Please tell us your name, age, and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Andrew B. Watkins, Manager of Long-range Forecast Services, Australian Bureau of Meteorology

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

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky! You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

Hi my name is Dean and I am 7 years old. My question is: How and why do magnets stick together? – Dean, age 7, Vermont Sth.

Hi Dean!

This is a good question and a bit tricky to answer, but I’ll try my best.

Every magnet has two sides: a north pole and a south pole. We use these names because if you hang a magnet from a thread, the magnet’s north pole points (almost) towards the north direction.

This is because the Earth’s core (its centre) is a large, weak magnet. Your little, strong magnet lines up with Earth’s magnetic core, so it points north. That’s how a magnetic compass works.

Magnets don’t always stick together.

If you hold two magnets the wrong way around, they push apart - they repel! In other words, if you hold two magnets together so that like-poles are close together (two norths OR two souths), they repel. Try it! It feels like the magnets are surrounded by an invisible rubber layer pushing them apart. That invisible layer is called a magnetic field.

It’s only when you hold unlike-poles together (a north pointing to a south) that magnets stick together (they are attracted). Now, the magnetic field acts like a stretched rubber band pulling the magnets together. (Be careful; two strong magnets can pinch your skin).

So, why do magnets attract or repel?

You have probably heard of energy. Energy is needed to create movement.

A car that’s sitting still will start to move when the petrol inside it burns. That’s because petrol contains stored-up energy which is released when it burns.

When this stored-up energy is released, some of it changes into movement energy. Scientists call this stored-up energy “potential energy” and call movement energy “kinetic energy”.

When you start running, it’s because energy stored in your food is released and some of it changes into movement energy.

What’s this got to do with magnets? Well, the magnetic field that surrounds all magnets contains stored-up energy. But there’s a way to change the amount of stored-up energy surrounding the magnet. And the way you change it will tell you which way the magnet will move.

A rule to remember

Everything in the universe follows a rule. I will tell you the rule in a moment, but first I have to say that it’s not easy to explain why the universe follows this rule without complicated mathematics. The best I can say is “that’s just how the universe behaves”. (I’m sorry. I don’t like answers like that either).

The rule is: wherever there is stored-up energy in an object (and the object is not tied down or stuck in place), then the object will be pushed in the direction that causes the stored-up energy to decrease. The stored-up energy will be reduced and replaced by movement energy.

So if two magnets are pointing with unlike-poles together (north pole to a south pole), then bringing them closer together decreases the energy stored up in the magnetic field. They will be pushed in the direction that decreases the amount of stored-up energy. That is, they are forced together (this is called attraction).

If two magnets are pointing with like-poles together (a south pole to a south pole OR north to north), then stored-up energy will decrease if they move apart.

So our rule says the magnets will be pushed in the direction that decreases the amount of stored-up energy. That is, they are forced apart (repelled).

I should also say that when dropped objects are attracted to Earth and fall down, it’s NOT because of magnetism. It’s because of gravity. Earth is also surrounded by a gravitational field which also contains stored up energy.

Unlike magnetism, gravity never repels because gravity only points one way. There are no north and south poles for gravity.

Can I keep taking stored-up energy from the magnetic field forever?

No.

Once two magnets stick together, you’ll need to put some stored-up energy back into the field by pulling the magnets apart again. You can’t get energy for nothing.

The energy needed to pull the magnets apart comes from you, and you get it from the food you eat. And the plants or animals you eat get their energy from other plants and animals, or from the Sun. All energy comes from somewhere.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. They can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
* Tell us on Twitter

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Stephen G Bosi, Senior Lecturer in Physics, University of New England

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

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome: find out how to enter at the bottom. You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

Where do dreams come from? - Winifred, age 4, Selby, Victoria.

Hi Winifred. People have wondered about where dreams come from for a very long time. To be honest, scientists still don’t fully understand where dreams come from. But we have a few ideas.

Dreams are like imagining stuff while you are asleep, so you could say dreams come from your imagination. As you know, our imaginations can be very powerful – if you try imagining your favourite food, your mouth might even start watering.

Going to sleep is like putting a computer into “sleep” mode. The computer is not completely switched off, it just is not working as hard. When we go into sleep mode, we can rest and save our energy but we don’t fully turn ourselves off.

When we are asleep our brain does not switch off. It keeps working, but not as hard. But the part of the brain that helps us make decisions when we are awake? It is resting. That’s when our imagination can run wild.

Why do we dream?

People who have done research on why we dream have found most dreams people have tend to be about common stuff that happens in our lives (like playing with a friend).

Or we dream about stuff that might be important to us (like an upcoming party).

We think this is the same for animals who dream, too. Cats seem to commonly dream about chasing things, because that’s what cats think about doing a lot when they are awake.

Scientists have found out that when we dream about stuff, it might help us to remember that stuff better when we are awake. So maybe our dreams help us make stronger memories.

It’s a good idea for kids to get a good sleep each night to help you remember what you are learning about each day.

Solving problems

Other scientists think that maybe dreams help us to solve problems.

Let’s say you are learning how to ride a bike or a scooter. You might dream about riding. Maybe you are trying out different ways to ride, get the balance right, and not crash. It’s like you are practising while you are asleep. Then when you are awake, you might even have an idea about how to get better at riding.

But what about strange dreams? Well, it might be that our brain is just trying to make sense of some strange thoughts that come to us while we are asleep.

Maybe nightmares are the brain trying to replay scary experiences in an effort to make sense of them. Researchers have shown that some people might be able to make their bad dreams less scary if they imagine and write down different endings for their dreams and “practise” them before bed.

Some people think dreams might keep the mind busy and entertained, allowing the body to have a good rest.

The truth is, nobody really knows for sure where dreams come from. Maybe the answer will come to you in a dream.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. You can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
* Tell us on Twitter by tagging @ConversationEDU with the hashtag #curiouskids, or
* Tell us on Facebook

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Shane Rogers, Lecturer in Psychology, Edith Cowan University

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

Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

What makes a shooting star fall? – Katelyn, age 7, Adelaide.

Hi Katelyn,

Thanks for asking your fantastic question.

I’ll bet you’ve looked up at the night sky and seen lots of stars. They are beautiful aren’t they? Each star is a huge glowing ball of gas, just like the Sun. Stars look much smaller and fainter than our Sun because they are very far away.

Despite their name, shooting stars are not stars at all. They are tiny space adventurers who accidentally wander into our sky and get sucked toward us by the Earth’s gravity.

Let’s look at the journey of one of these adventurers. I’ll call her Gemma.

Once upon a time there was a tiny speck of dust — space dust — called Gemma. For many years she had spent her time wandering carefree through space and dancing around the planets and the stars.

One day, Gemma noticed a light in the distance. “What’s that?”, she wondered to herself. As she got closer, she saw a beautiful vision of a blue planet, hanging in space like a marble, covered with swirling colours of blue and white. “Wow! That’s the planet Earth,” she said to herself. “Just like I have read about in my books!” (In this story, specks of space dust read books just like you and me).

After spending so long floating through the darkness of space, Gemma felt a strange attraction towards this beautiful new distraction.

It wasn’t just the fascination of Earth. It felt like an invisible force was bringing her slowly closer and closer to this bright globe of light.

The pull of gravity

As Gemma flew closer, she realised that she was being pulled towards the Earth by the force of gravity. “I’ve read about this in my books,” she thought, remembering that gravity is the same force that keeps humans standing on the Earth instead of floating away. The bigger the planet, the stronger its gravity.

As she neared the planet, Gemma could now see the outline of the oceans and the clouds and the sun glinting off the sparkling water.

Suddenly, she noticed the blackness of space was turning into a beautiful blue sky. She had entered the atmosphere of Earth! She had read that the atmosphere was a thick blanket of air, more than 100 kilometres thick that wraps around the surface of our planet and allows all the animals and people to breathe.

As she encountered the air, Gemma felt the chill of deep space subside. She started to feel as warm as a summer’s day. As she jostled and bounced through the air like an aeroplane, she started to glow with an energy and light that she had not felt before. “This must be friction, making me warm — just like the friction when I rub my hands together!” she thought to herself. A lot of friction can make things glow, and Gemma started to glow brighter and brighter.

As her speed increased, Gemma felt like she was on a roller coaster. “Wheeeeeeee!!” she called out with excitement, as she rocketed towards the blue planet, shining like a beautiful, bright star.

All the children on Earth looked up and were very excited to see Gemma, the shooting star from outer space, racing down to join them on Earth. She was just as excited to see them, and to have new friends on this beautiful planet Earth.

Next time you see a shooting star, say hello to Gemma!

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Lisa Harvey-Smith, Professor and Australian Government’s Women in STEM Ambassador, UNSW Sydney

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

When a snake sheds its skin, why isn’t it colourful? Yahya, aged eight

Thanks for the question Yahya!

Snakes come in all sorts of colours and patterns, especially in Australia. Our prettiest snakes include the Jan’s banded snake, the black-striped snake and the broad-headed snake (but this one is endangered, which means there aren’t very many broad-headed snakes left in the world).

You can see each of these snakes in the photos I’ve taken below.

Snakes are well known for being able to shed their entire skin in one piece. But why isn’t the shed skin of a snake colourful, like the snake itself?

To answer your question, we should explore how snake skin and colour works.

All animals grow new skin over their lifetime. This replaces old skin, heals wounds and lets the animal grow bigger. Most animals, including humans, shed tiny pieces of dead skin all the time.

But snakes have to do it all at once, and this is because snake skin is quite different to a lot of other animals.

Snake skin is actually made up two main layers: the soft, colourful tissue (what scientists call the “dermis”), and hard, mostly see-through scales.

The dermis is filled with nerves, which is what we use to feel things touching us, as well as tiny grains called pigments, which is what gives skin its colour.

Scales sit on top of the snake’s soft dermis. These are much harder than the skin because scales are made of “keratin” — the same thing our fingernails and hair are made of.

In mammals, like us, the keratin grows from a single point and keeps on growing — think how your fingernails grow from the end of your finger. But in snakes, keratin grows all over, and is stuck on top of the soft dermis, protecting it like a thin shield.

While the keratin in snake (and lizard) scales is mostly see through, it also holds lots of tiny dark brownish black grains called “melanin”, which protects snakes from harmful sun rays. This means scales themselves are mainly either colourless or dark brownish black, depending on the snake.

But sometimes, like for Australian water pythons, the outer layer of scales can shine rainbow colours when the light hits it at the right angle.

So let’s say it’s time for a snake to shed its skin

First, it’ll grow a new layer of keratin scales underneath the old layer. When the new layer has finished growing, the snake rubs its body along rocks, plants and other rough things to peel the old layer of keratin off — often in a single, snaky piece.

Because all the brightly coloured pigments live in the soft dermis, and not the scales, the colour mainly stays on the snake, not the part it sheds.

But every so often, the shed skin can show dark brownish black stripes or blotches, because of melanin in the scales.

Have you ever touched a snake’s shed skin?

Since it’s made up of both the hard keratin scales and a bit of the softer dermis, it feels both rough and soft. And because it’s so stretchy, it can be much longer than snake itself!

Damian Lettoof will be taking questions from kids at the Perth launch of our new Curious Kids picture book Why Do Tigers Have Whiskers, published by Thames and Hudson.

Venue: Paperbird Books

Date: July 10, at 10:30am

Price: Free, but space is limited and bookings are essential.

If you’re a Curious Kid with a question you’d like an expert to answer, ask an adult to send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

Damian Lettoof, PhD Candidate, Curtin University

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

Curious Kids is a series for children. You can send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au. You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

Why do spiders have hairy legs? - Audrey, age 5, Fitzroy, Melbourne.

Good question, Audrey! Believe it or not, I have studied the hairy legs of spiders for years and can give you some definitive answers on this.

But before we talk about the spider’s fur, think about your very own hairs.

Why do we have hair?

First, there is the hair on your head, which protects you from the sun and rain. Then, there is smaller hair above your eyes – your eyebrows and eye lashes. These prevent dust from entering your eye.

And then have a closer look – you have all that very fine hair on your arms and legs, you can hardly see. What happens when you very, very gently touch this hair or blow at it? It tickles! This very fine body hair helps humans to feel if something is touching you.

In spiders, it is quite similar. Their body hair helps them to feel if something is touching them. Say you took a paintbrush and gently touched a spider with it (don’t do this without an adult there, of course, because some spiders can be dangerous). This touch will make the spider’s hairs bend. The spider will feel that something big is touching it and probably think “Oh dear, there is something that wants to eat me!” and run off.

Like you, spiders have different types of hairs. But spiders can do much more cool things with their hair then we can with ours (except, maybe that we are superior in styling our hair in a cool fashion).

Spidey senses

Have you ever seen a spider with ears? Well, no (that would actually look funny!) That’s because spiders use hairs on their legs to listen! Sounds unbelievable, but that’s how it is.

Does a spider have a nose? I’ve never seen one, and I have seen lots and lots of spiders. To smell, spiders use hairs.

Does a spider have a tongue? Nope. They use – you guessed it – hairs!

So spiders can feel, listen, smell and taste with their hairy legs. Pretty cool, right?

Some spiders can also use their hairs to grip onto a very flat surface – this is why you see spiders walking happily across a window, a ceiling or high up on a wall. (This is also how Spiderman does it, by the way).

Actually, not all spiders than can do that. Only the ones that have special Spiderman-hairs on their feet can do it. These Spiderman-hairs are tiny and have even tinier hairs on them – hairs on hairs. Scientists are trying to learn from these spiders and create Spiderman gloves. With such gloves you could climb up a skyscraper like a spider!

Show-off spiders

Spiders can be quite colourful. Do you know peacock spiders? Here is a picture of one:

The peacock spider’s colours come from special hairs on its legs and body and they are used to impress other peacock spider mates and find a partner. The peacock spider boy waves his coloured hairy legs in a funky dance to tell the spider girl, “I am the best guy you’ll ever find”. Such a show-off! Here’s how they look when they dance:

So you see, spiders need hairs for quite a lot of things in their life – and that is why they have hairy legs.

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Jonas Wolff, Research Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University

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

Australia’s new digital ID system promises to transform the way we live. All of our key documents, such as driver’s licences and Medicare cards, will be in a single digital wallet, making it easier for us to access a range of services.

The federal government is still developing the system, with a pilot expected to run next year. Known as the “Trust Exchange”, it is part of the Trusted Digital Identity Framework, which is designed to securely verify people’s identities using digital tokens.

Earlier this year, in a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra, Federal Minister for Government Services Bill Shorten, called the new digital ID system “world leading”. However, it has several privacy issues, especially when compared to international standards like those in the European Union.

So how can it be fixed?

What is Trust Exchange?

Trust Exchange – or TEx – is designed to simplify how we prove who we are online. It will work alongside the myID (formerly myGovID) platform, where Australians can store and manage their digital ID documents.

The platform is intended to be both secure and convenient. Users would be able to access services ranging from banking to applying for government services without juggling paperwork.

Think of the system as a way to prove your identity and share personal information such as your age, visa status or licence number — without handing over any physical documents or revealing too much personal information.

For example, instead of showing your full driver’s licence to enter a licensed premises, you can use a digital token that confirms, “Yes, this person is over 18”.

But what will happen to all that sensitive data behind the scenes?

Falling short of global standards

The World Wide Web Consortium sets global standards around digital identity management. These standards ensure people only share the minimum required information and retain control over their digital identities without relying on centralised bodies.

The European Union’s digital identity system regulation builds on these standards. It creates a secure, privacy-centric digital identity framework across its member states. It is decentralised, giving users full control over their credentials.

In its proposed form, however, Australia’s digital ID system falls short of these global standards in several key ways.

First, it is a centralised system. Everything will be monitored, managed and stored by a single government agency. This will make it more vulnerable to breaches and diminishes users’ control over their digital identities.

Second, the system does not align with the World Wide Web Consortium’s verifiable credentials standards. These standards are meant to give users full control to selectively disclose personal attributes, such as proof of age, revealing only the minimum personal information needed to access a service.

As a result, the system increases the likelihood of over-disclosure of personal information.

Third, global standards emphasise preventing what’s known as “linkability”. This means users’ interactions with different services remain distinct, and their data isn’t aggregated across multiple platforms.

But the token-based system behind Australia’s digital ID system creates the risk that different service providers could track users across services and potentially profile their behaviours. By comparison, the EU’s system has explicit safeguards to prevent this kind of tracking – unless explicitly authorised by the user.

Finally, Australia’s framework lacks the stringent rules found in the EU which require explicit consent for collecting and processing biometric data, including facial recognition and fingerprint data.

Filling the gaps

It is crucial the federal government addresses these issues to ensure its digital ID system is successful. Our award-winning research offers a path forward.

The digital ID system should simplify the verification process by automating the selection of an optimal, varied set of credentials for each verification.

This will reduce the risk of user profiling, by preventing a single credential from being overly associated with a particular service. It will also reduce the risk of a person being “singled out” if they are using an obscure credential, such as an overseas drivers licence.

Importantly, it will make the system easier to use.

The system should also be decentralised, similar to the EU’s, giving users control over their digital identities. This reduces the risk of centralised data breaches. It also ensures users are not reliant on a single government agency to manage their credentials.

Australia’s digital ID system is a step in the right direction, offering greater convenience and security for everyday transactions. However, the government must address the gaps in its current framework to ensure this system also balances Australians’ privacy and security.

Ashish Nanda, Research Fellow, Deakin Cyber Research and Innovation Centre, Deakin University; Jongkil Jay Jeong, Senior Research Fellow, Deakin Cyber Research & Innovation Centre, Deakin University, and Robin Doss, Director, Deakin Cyber Research & Innovation Centre, Deakin University

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

Student behaviour is one of the biggest issues facing Australian schools. A survey of Queensland teachers earlier this year found “managing student behaviour” was the main thing taking their time away from teaching.

Along with students talking out of turn, using their phones or not paying attention, there are regular reports of students being violent and abusive towards teachers. Australian classrooms are rated among the “least favourable” for discipline in the OECD.

Amid a push to include more classroom management training for teachers, what other approaches could we look at to improve behaviour?

What happens in Norway?

For several decades Norwegian school children have been assessed twice a year on their sense of personal order (being punctual, well-prepared and following up on homework) and social behaviour (showing care and respect for others).

In some schools this might involve following rules against throwing snowballs, eating in class or leaving school grounds.

Until Year 8, students receive comments and then they also get a grade (good, quite good or not so good).

Teachers in all subjects report to the child’s home base teacher who calculates an average, noting any poor examples of poor personal order and social behaviour. The overall report is shared with the student and parents receive a copy.

The goal, as specified in Norway’s Education Act, is to ensure a good and safe school environment and “social learning”. This means learning to behave around others through observing, modelling and imitating the behaviours of others.

This is on top of learning knowledge and skills.

Does it work?

Norwegian society takes these grades seriously. It has been part of the Norwegian schooling system since 1939.

Research on teachers and students describe it as a valued tool for dealing with students who disrupt the learning environment in the classroom.

Even when young adults apply for jobs after university or vocational study, employers can be interested in the grade received for order and behaviour at school. Students and their teachers are aware it can indicate trustworthiness and employability.

A not uncommon story repeated by Norwegian parents to their teenage children is “if you have a record of behaving poorly or arriving late at school it doesn’t bode well whether you want to work on a construction site, in an office or on a hospital ward”.

There are Norwegian critics of this approach. Some researchers argue behaviour grades can sometimes say more about who are the “teachers’ favourites”.

But despite some limited trials to refine Norway’s behaviour grading, there are currently no plans to remove it.

What about Australia?

There is some precedence for reporting on behaviour in Australia.

For example, Queensland public schools report about effort and behaviour against a five-point scale: excellent, very good, satisfactory, needs attention and unacceptable.

But assessment criteria and evidence for the reporting of student effort and behaviour seems to be a more subjective appraisal than reporting against other standards in the curriculum.

School is about more than maths and reading

Schools can teach students more than academic knowledge or vocational skills.

And while addressing behaviour in schools is complex (and will not be solved by any single thing), reporting on behaviour could provide a regular opportunity for Australian teachers, schools and parents to reflect on how a students is progressing.

Grading students could make students more accountable for how they interact with their peers and their teachers.

It could also help build their understanding of what is acceptable, not just in the classroom but in the community more broadly. For example, if there are specific rules about how you speak to others, whether you are safe in the playground and respectful in the classroom.

This type of social learning is important, because it can help teach students to be inclusive and responsible towards others. It can also help to create a safer school environment for all students and staff.

At the moment, there is a general requirement in the Australian Curriculum to teach students social and emotional skills across all subjects.

But it is up to state and territory education authorities to work out if and how students are assessed about this. This includes any reasonable adjustments for students with disability or other special needs.

Stephen Dobson, Professor and Dean of Education and the Arts, CQUniversity Australia and Corey Bloomfield, Senior Lecturer in Education, CQUniversity Australia

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

Type 2 diabetes affects 1.2 million Australians and accounts for 85-90% of all diabetes cases. This chronic condition is characterised by high blood glucose (sugar) levels, which carry serious health risks. Complications include heart disease, kidney failure and vision problems.

Diet is an important way people living with type 2 diabetes manage blood glucose, alongside exercise and medication. But while we know individualised, professional dietary advice improves blood glucose, it can be complex and is not always accessible.

Our new study looked at the impact of time-restricted eating – focusing on when you eat, rather than what or how much – on blood glucose levels.

We found it had similar results to individualised advice from an accredited practising dietitian. But there were added benefits, because it was simple, achievable, easy to stick to – and motivated people to make other positive changes.

What is time-restricted eating?

Time-restricted eating, also known as the 16:8 diet, became popular for weight loss around 2015. Studies have since shown it is also an effective way for people with type 2 diabetes to manage blood glucose.

Time-restricted eating involves limiting when you eat each day, rather than focusing on what you eat. You restrict eating to a window during daylight hours, for example between 11am and 7pm, and then fast for the remaining hours. This can sometimes naturally lead to also eating less.

Giving your body a break from constantly digesting food in this way helps align eating with natural circadian rhythms. This can help regulate metabolism and improve overall health.

For people with type 2 diabetes, there may be specific benefits. They often have their highest blood glucose reading in the morning. Delaying breakfast to mid-morning means there is time for physical activity to occur to help reduce glucose levels and prepare the body for the first meal.

How we got here

We ran an initial study in 2018 to see whether following time-restricted eating was achievable for people with type 2 diabetes. We found participants could easily stick to this eating pattern over four weeks, for an average of five days a week.

Importantly, they also had improvements in blood glucose, spending less time with high levels. Our previous research suggests the reduced time between meals may play a role in how the hormone insulin is able to reduce glucose concentrations.

Other studies have confirmed these findings, which have also shown notable improvements in HbA1c. This is a marker in the blood that represents concentrations of blood glucose over an average of three months. It is the primary clinical tool used for diabetes.

However, these studies provided intensive support to participants through weekly or fortnightly meetings with researchers.

While we know this level of support increases how likely people are to stick to the plan and improves outcomes, it is not readily available to everyday Australians living with type 2 diabetes.

What we did

In our new study, we compared time-restricted eating directly with advice from an accredited practising dietitian, to test whether results were similar across six months.

We recruited 52 people with type 2 diabetes who were currently managing their diabetes with up to two oral medications. There were 22 women and 30 men, aged between 35 and 65.

Participants were randomly divided into two groups: diet and time-restricted eating. In both groups, participants received four consultations across the first four months. During the next two months they managed diet alone, without consultation, and we continued to measure the impact on blood glucose.

In the diet group, consultations focused on changing their diet to control blood glucose, including improving diet quality (for example, eating more vegetables and limiting alcohol).

In the time-restricted eating group, advice focused on how to limit eating to a nine-hour window between 10am and 7pm.

Over six months, we measured each participant’s blood glucose levels every two months using the HbA1c test. Each fortnight, we also asked participants about their experience of making dietary changes (to what or when they ate).

What we found

We found time-restricted eating was as effective as the diet intervention.

Both groups had reduced blood glucose levels, with the greatest improvements occurring after the first two months. Although it wasn’t an objective of the study, some participants in each group also lost weight (5-10kg).

When surveyed, participants in the time-restricted eating group said they had adjusted well and were able to follow the restricted eating window. Many told us they had family support and enjoyed earlier mealtimes together. Some also found they slept better.

After two months, people in the time-restricted group were looking for more dietary advice to further improve their health.

Those in the diet group were less likely to stick to their plan. Despite similar health outcomes, time-restricted eating seems to be a simpler initial approach than making complex dietary changes.

Is time-restricted eating achievable?

The main barriers to following time-restricted eating are social occasions, caring for others and work schedules. These factors may prevent people eating within the window.

However, there are many benefits. The message is simple, focusing on when to eat as the main diet change. This may make time-restricted eating more translatable to people from a wider variety of socio-cultural backgrounds, as the types of foods they eat don’t need to change, just the timing.

Many people don’t have access to more individualised support from a dietitian, and receive nutrition advice from their GP. This makes time-restricted eating an alternative – and equally effective – strategy for people with type 2 diabetes.

People should still try to stick to dietary guidelines and prioritise vegetables, fruit, wholegrains, lean meat and healthy fats.

But our study showed time-restricted eating may also serve as stepping stone for people with type 2 diabetes to take control of their health, as people became more interested in making diet and other positive changes.

Time-restricted eating might not be appropriate for everyone, especially people on medications which don’t recommend fasting. Before trying this dietary change, it’s best speak to the healthcare professional who helps you manage diabetes.

Evelyn Parr, Research Fellow in Exercise Metabolism and Nutrition, Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research, Australian Catholic University and Brooke Devlin, Lecturer in Nutrition and Dietetics, School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, The University of Queensland

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

The dingo was completely isolated from other canines on the Australian mainland for more than 5,000 years, until domestic dogs arrived on the scene. Subsequent concerns about livestock loss formed the basis of Australia’s “wild dog” (dingo) pest control programs, which continue today. Stretching 5,614km across Australia, the “dingo fence” or “dog fence” was built in the 1880s to keep dingoes away from livestock in the southeast.

Dingoes are protected as a threatened species in Victoria. But dingo–dog hybrids are considered pests, and therefore allowed to be killed.

Unfortunately, past research claimed to find evidence dingo-dog hybrids are common in the wild across eastern Australia. This research has been used to defend the trapping, poisoning and shooting of these animals in some parts of Australia, particularly Victoria.

But other studies and now our new genetic research show dingoes are not breeding with domestic dogs in the wild. Rather, they are maintaining their independence as a unique evolutionary branch.

Our research also highlights the precarious state of dingo populations in Victoria. We fear dingo genetic diversity will continue to decline as long as lethal control measures are used. Ironically, this could prompt dingoes to mate with dogs to survive.

Two tales of Victorian dingoes

Victoria has two main populations of dingoes: northwestern and eastern.

The northwestern population consists of as few as 40 dingoes and is protected.

But the eastern population of 2,640–8,800 dingoes is not fully protected. Lethal control measures are allowed on private land and on public land within 3km of a private land boundary. This “unprotection order”, introduced to safeguard livestock, was recently extended until 2028.

In 2022 alone, 683 dingoes were trapped and shot on public land as part of the Victorian wild dog program. But this number doesn’t include deaths from baiting programs, or farmers shooting dingoes on private land. Altogether, it’s estimated up to 1,500 dingoes are killed in eastern Victoria each year.

This means a substantial proportion of the eastern Victorian population is being killed every year. Even if population size is maintained despite culling, it may still reduce genetic diversity.

The threat of inbreeding

When a population shrinks, related individuals start to breed with each other. Inbreeding decrease litter size, increase deformities and pup deaths, and reduce resistance to diseases.

We think this is already happening in the northwestern population. Our research shows its genetic diversity is critically low. Recent observations of tail deformities underscore the potential consequences of low genetic diversity.

What we did and what we found

We obtained 434 frozen canine DNA or tissue samples for genetic analysis, from organisations around Australia.

The Victorian samples mainly came from the state’s wild dog program (2014–19). Other samples came from government officers, private landholders, conservation groups and dog owners.

Most (380) of the samples were originally collected in the field from free-ranging animals believed to be either pure dingoes or potential dingo–dog hybrids.

The remaining 54 samples came from domestic and captive animals. These were 39 domestic dogs, seven known hybrids born in captivity, and eight known “backcrossed” dingo–dog hybrid × dingo crosses born in captivity.

We found the free-ranging animals were all dingoes. They fell into one of three distinct groups: alpine, desert or mallee. They were distinct from the domestic dogs and known hybrids born in captivity.

The results also revealed low genetic diversity in all three dingo groups.

The isolated population in northwest Victoria is in particularly bad shape. Local extinction is probable in the near future. That’s why the unprotection order was lifted there.

If culling of the eastern population continues, it could soon follow suit.

Ongoing decline may prompt desperate measures

The ongoing unprotection order is likely to further diminish genetic diversity. As dingo numbers decline and options for mates become increasingly limited, this could force dingoes to mate with dogs.

In North America, hunting of red wolves decimated their populations, while the numbers of coyotes increased, forcing these two species to hybridise.

Mating with domestic dogs may actually increase dingo genetic diversity and allay concerns about inbreeding. But the implications will be profound, not just for the dingo itself, but for the ecosystem, Traditional Owners and even graziers. Balancing livestock protection against conservation of this iconic species is more crucial now than ever before.

In the next decade or so, Victorian dingoes may reach a “genetic cliff” where their genetic decline is irreversible. So it is essential to develop strategies that both support graziers and the unique dingo lineage.

Several non-lethal management strategies have been previously described. These need to be further developed with input from graziers, so they can be applied effectively across Victoria.

Treading a different path

Our research reveals dingoes remain genetically distinct from domestic dogs, despite more than 200 years of coexistence. This is consistent with recent research challenging previous claims about widespread interbreeding.

Unfortunately, our research also found low genetic diversity in all dingo populations. We are continuing to explore the genetic state of dingoes across Australia using new genomic approaches. This work promises to provide more insight into the decline of this iconic Australian animal.

In the meantime, we urge governments across Australia to consider the biological consequences of killing dingoes. It is becoming increasingly clear that “wild dog” control programs are contributing to their genetic decline.

Andrew Weeks, Associate Senior Research Scientist, The University of Melbourne and Collin Ahrens, Visiting Fellow - Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University

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

Bird strikes with aircraft pose a serious threat to human safety. The problem dates back to the early days of aviation, with the first death of a pilot recorded in 1912 when an aircraft crashed into the sea after striking a gull.

Since then, 795 lives have been lost to collisions between aircraft and birds, not to mention the countless bird fatalities.

As aircraft get faster, quieter, larger and more numerous, the risk of serious accidents increases accordingly. Every year, the aviation industry incurs damages worth billions of dollars.

To mitigate this problem, airports around the world implement wildlife hazard management, including dispersing flocks away from the runway, tracking local bird movements and managing potential food sources such as landfills and farms near the aerodrome.

In our recent study, we zoomed out from the local airport and examined seasonal and hemispheric trends in bird strikes.

We found they peak in late summer and autumn in both hemispheres, but the annual distribution differs between the northern and southern hemispheres. Seasonal trends in bird strikes were seemingly influenced by avian breeding and migration patterns.

Seasonal patterns

To assess seasonal patterns in bird strikes, we gathered information for individual airports from existing literature and online sources. Our dataset includes 122 airports in 16 countries and five continents.

For each hemisphere, we determined the time of year with the overall highest number of bird strikes and the spread of strikes through the year.

We found that bird strikes peaked in late August in the northern hemisphere and in early April in the southern hemisphere. Strikes were relatively more seasonal in the north, while they had a greater annual spread in the south.

For instance, strikes in New York or Oslo in the northern hemisphere were considerably higher in August compared to other times of the year, while in Wellington or Durban in the southern hemisphere, strikes occurred more consistently throughout the year.

Bird strikes peaked in the autumn season in each hemisphere. Autumn is generally when young birds fledge and take to the skies. There may be two explanations for why bird strikes are higher during this time of year.

1. For young birds, avoiding foreign objects in the flight path may be a learned behaviour. This would result in juveniles being struck at a higher rate.

2. The greater number of birds in the air during autumn due to the influx of fledglings may result in more strikes, with adults and juveniles being struck at random.

Links to bird migration

Seasonal peaks in bird strikes were more pronounced in the north compared to the south. Approximately 80% of the southern hemisphere’s surface is water and the solar energy absorbed by the oceans leads to a more stable thermal regime.

Conversely, the surface of the northern hemisphere is mostly land, leading to greater fluctuations in temperature. Birds migrate in response to these environmental factors and this influences global avian distributions and abundances.

The intensity of migration is, therefore, much stronger in the northern hemisphere compared to the southern hemisphere, where local bird abundances are more stable seasonally.

Our findings bridge a gap between aviation safety and macroecology. Airport authorities can use this information in several ways.

• Wildlife officers can optimise their bird strike mitigation efforts by allocating more resources in the autumn months, particularly in northern regions.

• Management plans for “problem” species such as gulls are often adapted from existing plans for similar species at other airports. Information on patterns in bird strikes may help in customising these plans to local bird behaviour.

• Bird strikes are a global issue, so better standardisation in reporting bird strike statistics could improve our ability to analyse them at a global scale.

Finally, with climate change altering the seasonal timing of cyclical events, such as avian breeding seasons and migration patterns, it may be crucial to forecast the impact of these changes on the seasonal trends in bird strikes.

To some degree, bird strikes may be inevitable. But with the cooperation of aviation authorities, scientists and policy makers, we may be able to minimise their frequency and intensity.

Tirth Vaishnav, PhD Candidate in Ecology and Biodiversity, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

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

The mental health benefits of exercise for adults are well known, easing depression and reducing anxiety.

Now, emerging research highlights its rising importance for children’s wellbeing. Staying active could be key to safeguarding and enhancing young people’s mental health.

Mood-boosting benefits

One in seven adolescents worldwide has a mental illness. As a result, parents and health-care providers are increasingly seeking effective prevention strategies.

Evidence is accumulating to suggest one surprisingly simple approach: physical fitness.

One recent study reveals even small improvements in fitness were linked to improved teen mental health. When adolescents improved their fitness by just 30 seconds on a running test, their risk of developing anxiety, depression, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) dropped by 7-8%.

This suggests something as straightforward as regular exercise could play a crucial role in protecting young people’s mental wellbeing.

For parents and health professionals looking to support adolescent mental health, encouraging participation in team sports could also be an especially effective strategy.

A study of more than 17,000 teenagers revealed a powerful link between sports and mental health: teens who participated in sports clubs were 60% less likely to experience depression compared to inactive kids.

This suggests team sports offer a unique environment for teens’ mental wellbeing, combining physical activity, social connection and structured routines.

Active kids do better in the classroom

Physical activity can also sharpen kids’ thinking and improve school performance: being active is associated with improvements in concentration, decision-making abilities, attention and academic performance.

Studies have also found positive links between physical activity and performance in maths and reading skills.

Even short ten-minute bouts of activity can have immediate positive effects on classroom performance.

Adding more physical activity to the school day — rather than cutting it for academic subjects — can not only boost students’ academic performance but also enhance their overall health and wellbeing.

Starting early: when and how

Age considerations

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, experts generally agree it’s never too early to encourage physical activity.

The World Health Organisation recommends children aged 3-4 should engage in at least 180 minutes of physical activity daily, with at least 60 minutes being moderate to vigorous intensity: activities that cause kids to huff and puff, such as running or playing sports.

For school-age children (five to 17 years), the recommendation is at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity daily, with activities that strengthen muscles and bones at least three times a week.

Getting started

The key to introducing fitness to children is to make it fun and age-appropriate. Here are some strategies:

1. Incorporate play: for younger children, focus on active play rather than structured exercise. Activities such as tag, hide-and-seek, or obstacle courses can be both fun and physically demanding.

2. Explore various activities: expose children to different sports and activities to help them find what they enjoy. This could include team sports, dance, martial arts, or swimming. Consider activities that are culturally relevant or significant to your family, as this can enhance their sense of belonging and interest.

3. Lead by example: children often mimic their parents’ behaviours, observing their actions. By being active yourself, you not only set a positive example but also encourage your children to do the same.

4. Make it a family affair: encourage physical activity by planning active family outings like hikes, bike rides, or trips to the park to foster a love of exercise in a fun and engaging way.

5. Limit screen time: Encourage outdoor play and physical activities as alternatives to sedentary screen time, fostering a healthier lifestyle and promoting wellbeing.

Potential risks and how to mitigate them

While the benefits of fitness for children are clear, it’s important to approach it safely. Some potential risks include:

1. Injuries from overexertion: children eager to push their limits can suffer from overuse injuries, such as sprains or strains. Encourage a variety of physical activities to prevent overuse injuries. Ensure adequate rest during training and competition, and promote proper a warm-up and cool-down.

2. Heat-related illness: children exercising in hot weather are at risk of heat exhaustion, with symptoms including dizziness and nausea. Emphasise hydration before, during and after exercise. Schedule activities during cooler times and provide shaded areas for breaks, teaching kids to recognise signs of overheating.

3. Improper technique and equipment: using incorrect form or inappropriate equipment can result in injuries and impede development. It’s essential to provide proper instruction, ensure equipment is size-appropriate, and supervise children during exercise. Programs should be designed to be safe and inclusive, accommodating children with disabilities, ensuring everyone can participate meaningfully without barriers.

4. Burnout: excessive exercise or pressure to perform can cause physical and mental burnout. This can lead to a loss of interest. To prevent burnout, it is important stick to national and international activity recommendations, ensure adequate rest, and encourage a balance between structured exercise and free play.

A love for movement and activity

The evidence is clear: fit kids are happier, healthier, and better equipped to handle life’s challenges.

By introducing fitness early and in an engaging, age-appropriate manner, we can set children on a path to lifelong physical and mental wellbeing.

Remember, the goal is to foster a love for movement and activity that will serve children well into adulthood.

Ben Singh, Research fellow, Allied Health & Human Performance, University of South Australia and Grace McKeon, Postdoctoral research fellow, UNSW Sydney

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

Unless you’re a moderator for a local community group discussing garbage collections or dog park etiquette, you are unlikely to fully understand the sheer volume and scale of abuse directed at people online.

But when social media moderation and community management is part and parcel of your daily work, the toll on people and their loved ones can be enormous. Journalists, often early in their careers, can be on the receiving end of torrents of abuse.

If they come from culturally or linguistically diverse backgrounds, that reluctance to report can be even higher than other colleagues.

There’s growing employer concern about how moderating confronting content can affect people’s wellbeing. Employers also have a duty to keep their staff safe at work, including online.

The ABC wanted to understand what this looked like in practice. Its internal survey data shows just how bad the problem has become for moderators who are employed to keep audience members safe when contributing to online discussions.

What did the ABC find?

In 2022, the ABC asked 111 staff who were engaged in online moderation as part of their jobs to self-report the frequency of exposure to potentially harmful experiences.

First it was important to understand just how long people were spending online moderating content. For those who had to moderate content every day, 63% they did it for less than an hour and a half, and 88% moderated for less than three hours.

The majority of staff surveyed saw potentially harmful content every week.

71% of moderators reported seeing denigration of their work weekly, with 25% seeing this daily.

Half reported seeing misogynistic content weekly, while more than half said they saw racist content weekly.

Around a third reported seeing homophobic content every week.

In the case of abusive language, 20% said they encountered it weekly.

It’s a confronting picture on its own, but many see more than one type of this content at a time. This compounds the situation.

It is important to note the survey did not define specifically what was meant by racist, homophobic or misogynistic content, so that was open to interpretation from the moderators.

A global issue

We’ve known for a few years about the mental health problems faced by moderators in other countries.

Some people employed by Facebook to filter out the most toxic material and have gone on to take the company to court.

In one case in the United States, Facebook reached a settlement with more than 10,000 content moderators that included U$52 million (A$77.8 million) for mental health treatment.

In Kenya, 184 moderators contracted by Facebook are suing the company for poor working conditions, including a lack of mental health support. They’re seeking U$1.6 billion (A$2.3 billion) in compensation.

The case is ongoing and so too are other separate cases against Meta in Kenya.

In Australia, moderators during the height of the COVID pandemic reported how confronting it could be to deal with social media users’ misinformation and threats.

A 2023 report by Australian Community Managers, the peak body for online moderators, found 50% of people surveyed said a key challenge of their job was maintaining good mental health.

What’s being done?

Although it is not without its own issues, the ABC is leading the way in protecting its moderators from harm.

It has long worked to protect its staff from trauma exposure with a variety of programs, including a peer support program for journalists. The program was supported by the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma Asia Pacific.

But as the level of abuse directed at staff increased in tone and intensity, the national broadcaster appointed a full-time Social Media Wellbeing Advisor. Nicolle White manages the workplace health and safety risk generated by social media. She’s believed to be the first in the world in such a role.

As part of the survey, the ABC’s moderators were asked about ways they could be better supported.

Turning off comments was unsurprisingly rated as the most helpful technique to promote wellbeing, followed by support from management, peer support, and preparing responses to anticipated audience reactions.

Turning off the comments, however, often leads to complaints from at least some people that their views are being censored. This is despite the fact media publishers are legally liable for comments on their content, following a 2021 High Court decision.

Educating staff about why people comment on news content has been an important part of harm reduction.

Some of the other changes implemented after the survey included encouraging staff not to moderate comments when it related to their own lived experience or identity, unless they feel empowered in doing so.

The peer support program also links staff others with moderation experience.

Managers were urged to ensure that self-care plans were completed by staff to prepare for high-risk moderation days (such as the Voice referendum). These includes documenting positive coping mechanisms, how to implement boundaries at the end of a news shift, debriefing and asking staff to reflect on the value in their work.

Research shows one of the most protective factors for journalists is being reminded that the work is important.

But overwhelmingly, the single most significant piece of advice for all working on moderation is to ensure they have clear guidance on what to do if their wellbeing is affected, and that seeking support is normalised in the workplace.

Lessons for others

While these data are specific to the public broadcaster, it’s certain the experiences of the ABC are reflected across the news industry and other forums where people are responsible for moderating communities.

It’s not just paid employees. Volunteer moderators at youth radio stations or Facebook group admins are among the many people who face online hostility.

What’s clear is that any business or volunteer organisation building a social media audience need to consider the health and safety ramifications for those tasked with maintaining those platforms, and ensure they build in support strategies.

Australia’s eSafety commissioner has developed a range of publicly available resources to help.

The author would like to acknowledge the work of Nicolle White in writing this article and the research it reports.

Alexandra Wake, Associate Professor, Journalism, RMIT University

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

The inspector of the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) has released her long-awaited report on the failure of the commission to investigate the Robodebt scandal.

The report finds the commissioner of the NACC committed “officer misconduct”. He failed to fully remove himself from the decision not to investigate the scandal.

In response, the NACC has agreed to appoint an “independent eminent person” to reconsider its decision not to investigate the Robodebt scandal.

It’s an embarrassing moment for the Commonwealth’s newly created anti-corruption watchdog.

But it’s also an opportunity for the NACC to do what the public expects of it: act decisively to protect public trust in government.

How did we get here?

The NACC was created in 2022 after a federal election campaign that often focused on transparency and integrity in government.

Earlier this year, the commission announced it would not be looking into the Robodebt scandal.

This was despite the Royal Commission into Robodebt referring six people to the commission for further investigation.

The commission is monitored by an inspector, independent of the commission and the government. After receiving hundreds of complaints, Inspector Gail Furness launched an investigation into why the NACC didn’t look into Robodebt.

The issue was the first big test for the oversight body.

The inspector is legally limited as to what it can look at, but its finding of “officer misconduct” offers a broader opportunity for NACC to change course.

Robodebt was a clear breach of the public trust, with thousands of Australians feeling betrayed by the way the Morrison government acted. NACC now has a second chance to look into the scandal.

Unique anti-corruption tradition

NACC’s decision not to investigate was a departure from a long history of anti-corruption oversight in Australia.

It has its roots in corruption scandals in the late 1980s in Queensland, Western Australia and New South Wales.

These scandals involved the vast misuse of public power and resources by powerful executive branch officials. The response was far-reaching.

In Queensland, explosive allegations of police and government involvement in gambling and corruption led to the creation of an inquiry led by Tony Fitzgerald.

This inquiry made a number of wide-ranging recommendations, including the creation of a commission. It would eventually would become today’s Crime and Corruption Commission.

In NSW, high-ranking ministers and police were caught embezzling funds and misusing public influence.

Public outrage led to the creation of Australia’s first anti-corruption commission, the powerful Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).

In parliament, the NSW premier explained that ICAC was established “independent of the Executive Government and responsible only to Parliament”.

He went on to argue that its role was not to prosecute crime, but instead to enforce the public trust and dispel a “cloud of suspicion” that hung over the NSW government.

In WA in the 1980s, allegations emerged that executive branch officials were using their control of public resources to enrich themselves and preserve their own power.

In response, a royal commission in the early 1990s made a number of recommendations, including the creation of an anti-corruption commission. The commission would be an “independent parliamentary agency” responsible to parliament in carrying out its oversight duties.

Since then, all ten Australian jurisdictions have adopted anti-corruption commissions. Many of these commissions are described as officers of parliament intended to investigate breaches of the public trust.

In all states and territories, excluding Victoria and (recently) South Australia, “breaches of the public trust” or “dishonest or improper” conduct can be investigated by these agencies. Anti-corruption agencies have therefore emerged as important guardians of public trust in government.

Anti-corruption amnesia

However, we seem to have forgotten this tradition in recent years.

In South Australia, a 2021 law strippedthe state’s intergrity body of the power to investigate “maladministration” and “misconduct” in public administration and confined its scope to criminal activity.

In Victoria, then-Premier Daniel Andrews downplayed the significant breaches of public trust found by Victoria’s anti-corruption agency as being merely “educational”.

Most recently, the NACC’s refusal to review the Robodebt scandal also suggests it is unaware of the traditional purpose of Australian anti-corruption oversight.

The Robodebt scandal rivals the scandals of the 1980s in its threat to public trust.

One submission to the Royal Commission report put it clearly:

I feel utterly betrayed by the government for this […] myself, and everyone else who turned up to every meeting they had to, jumped through every hoop and tried to do the right thing, were treated like criminals and cheats, when all the while it was the department’s scheme that was illegal.

The NACC now has the opportunity to change course and broadly inquire into the Robodebt scandal.

This includes more than just an inquiry into the referrals from the Robodebt Royal Commission. It can also look into the way that a scandal of this magnitude happened and how we can prevent it in the future.

Failing to ask these questions endangers what the WA Royal Commission 30 years ago described as the “trust principle”. It said:

institutions of government and the officials and agencies of government exist for the public, to serve the interests of the public.

The NACC has been given a second chance to serve the public through properly investigating Robodebt.

If it chooses to take it, it will signal that the commission understands it plays a key role in preserving one of the most valuable commodities in Australian democracy: trust in government.

William Partlett, Associate Professor of Public Law, The University of Melbourne

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