Climate change is often communicated through scientific reports, statistics and policy discussions. However, these technical approaches can be inaccessible to the public, failing to capture the experiences of those most affected.

Climate narratives structured as stories that involve emotional engagement and personal anecdotes are more effective at mobilising communities, influencing policy and promoting pro-environmental actions across diverse audiences. By blending art with storytelling, illustrations can make complex environmental issues, such as climate justice, much more accessible to the general public.

Illustrations are not just artistic expressions. They can amplify the voices of affected communities and help make the case for climate justice. In an era where climate action is urgent, harnessing the power of illustration can be transformative. It can challenge dominant narratives while creating more inclusive and participatory ways of understanding climate action.

I have been collaborating with Puspita Bahari, an Indonesian fisherwomen’s movement to develop ways to communicate the effects of tidal floods and the importance of feminist solidarity. For my PhD research, I spent seven months carrying out fieldwork in three coastal villages in Demak, Central Java, Indonesia. This involved interviews, observations and creative workshops with the community.

By drawing on 38 women’s firsthand experiences, we have published an illustrated book: Tidal Floods: Women, Fisheries, and Climate Crisis in Indonesia (2024). This story about Indonesia’s fisherwomen explores the intersections of gender, environmental change, activism and the future of the country’s coastal regions. Here are five ways that collaborative illustrations can be used to tell female-led climate justice stories:

1. Intersectional narration

The effects of tidal flooding on Indonesian women vary depending on location, livelihood, age and disability status. Along the coastline, women in Indonesia are involved in selling fish, processing seafood and fishing at sea, alongside domestic work.

This book does not depict women as having a single, monolithic identity. Instead, the images portray their varied realities. These shape how they experience climate injustice and how pre-existing inequalities reproduce new climate injustices.

Intersectional narration is storytelling that captures how different aspects of identity overlap to shape people’s experiences in complex ways. Using this, various issues such as economic hardship, domestic violence, sexual reproductive health, physical and mental health can be better represented.

The image below illustrates these challenges. A woman with a disability is unable to use her wheelchair because the village is sinking. A pregnant woman struggles to access healthcare facilities. Fisherwomen face declining incomes due to environmental and economic pressures.

2. Body maps

To understand the complexity of climate impacts, I worked with women to draw body maps. As they annotated each picture, fisherwomen shared their embodied experiences of living with tidal floods as an everyday disaster.

Body mapping is an intimate cartographic process that involves tracing the body and visually exploring one’s lived experience. This method goes beyond textual and oral narratives. It helps women recall and record body memories that might otherwise remain unspoken.

Their body maps are not just research artefacts. They have been translated into powerful visuals so their personal stories can be shared in this book. The picture above illustrates one fisherwoman’s daily struggles, physical and physiological burdens – so the image reveals the complex, gendered, and intersectional effects of tidal floods.

3. Historical context

Certain pictures show how the coastal landscapes are rapidly changing and how villages are sinking at an alarming rate. This historical context is not only drawn from women’s oral narratives but also from past photo albums shared by the community.

The picture below illustrates the landscape change over 20 years, from rice fields to tidal floodwaters.

4. Movement and agency

Beyond documenting vulnerabilities and the social, ecological and economic effects of climate change on women, this book shows how these women have agency. This manifests in various ways, from small acts of resilience to broader feminist solidarity.

When they work together as a community, women can adapt through collective action. This includes planting crops, building cooperatives and holding demonstrations. Stories can play a role in moving beyond positioning women not just as victims but as people with valuable knowledge and the ability to assert their agency and drive sustainable climate action.

5. Reflection and collective ownership

In an era defined by uncertainty and rapid change, the ability to pause and reflect on climate justice is more valuable than ever. Certain images actively encourage readers to reflect on more tech-driven and infrastructure-focused responses to the climate crisis.

The final pages include questions that prompt critical thinking about the links between gender, climate justice and activism. For example, “what do you think will happen if we do not address the climate crisis?”

Rather than extracting knowledge from women, especially those in Global South countries, this book is co-created. Fisherwomen’s voices and narratives are central to the storytelling process. By reclaiming conversations about climate change that are often dominated by international forums, we can hear and learn from the people who are most affected. And hopefully inspire more climate advocacy and grassroots action.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Andi Misbahul Pratiwi, PhD Candidate, School of Geography, University of Leeds

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

Throughout the 1990s, I was a music journalist in London. I profiled hundreds of rock bands at the start of their careers, including Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails and the Foo Fighters. I can’t imagine a better way to have spent my twenties. But I witnessed a downside. For many musicians, success was a shock, and nearly everyone I knew struggled with aspects of it at times.

Most were affected by the obvious pitfalls of sex, drugs and alcohol, and some didn’t survive. A lot had trouble reconciling their artistic values with the rigorous demands of a cutthroat business, despite their ambitions. Women, including Björk, Tori Amos and Kim Gordon, described their battles with structural misogyny across the industry. And, in a world that rewards performance and persona, many had trouble establishing healthy relationships and holding onto a sense of identity.

The psychological pressures of fame have since intensified. Social media poses a constant threat to personal privacy, and, for better or worse, parasocial relationships are on the rise. But a recent batch of celebrity memoirs, all set in the pre-digital age, support my observations from the 1990s. Famous people lead peculiar lives, and success has always carried a cost.

‘I don’t know who I am’

The most tragic of these accounts is From Here to the Great Unknown, a collaboration between Elvis Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley, and her oldest daughter, Riley Keough. According to Keough’s preface, her mother worked on the memoir for several years, battling with self-doubt before asking her daughter to help. A month later, in January 2023, Presley died aged 54 of a cardiac arrest due to a small bowel obstruction following bariatric surgery.

Still grieving, Keough decided to complete the project alone. The result is essentially an edited transcript of Presley’s memoir tapes interwoven with her own recollections of her beloved mother. Intermittently intimate, it reads less like a biography, and more like a late-night conversation, painting a vivid, although incomplete picture of a lonely, unreachable woman whose greatest loves were her children.

At times, the lack of detail is frustrating. There is nothing here about the impact of Presley’s parents’ divorce, barely any information regarding her third and fourth marriages to actor Nicolas Cage and producer/guitarist Michael Lockwood respectively, and very little about the devastating sexual abuse allegations concerning her second husband, Michael Jackson. No doubt this is partly due to the consideration of surviving family members as well as the content of the tapes, but it does raise questions of editing and craft.

Nevertheless, the narrative offers a moving insight into the worst legacy of superstardom, chronicling the dysfunctional childhood, troubled adolescence and heartbreaking adulthood of someone who was born into privilege, but spent her life seeking validation.

Growing up between the wildly undisciplined environment of Graceland with her loving but volatile father, and a strained home life in California with her mother, Priscilla, who she says “didn’t want me”, Presley was only nine when Elvis died. By then, she was already on track to becoming a textbook problem child.

During adolescence, she endured a spell in rehab, suffered brutal physical violence from her mother’s partner, was subjected to sexual exploitation by an older boyfriend, and made her first suicide attempt. At 17, she found a way out when she fell in love with musician Danny Keough. Presley decided she wanted to have children, and according to Riley, she “absolutely meant to trap my dad”.

With Riley and her younger brother Ben, Presley found happiness, but she was still young and family life was hard to maintain. When Michael Jackson decided she should be with him instead, she embarked on one of the most intriguing celebrity relationships in modern history until his drug dependency drove them apart. The book offers some fascinating insights into the couple’s strong connection, which outlived their marriage by years.

But after Jackson, although Presley had another two husbands, she never found security. “I don’t know who I am,” she states in the book. “I never really got the chance to uncover my own identity. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have a childhood.”

When her son Ben committed suicide in 2020 at the age of 27, she was finally overwhelmed by her lifelong sense of failure and purposelessness. Unable to face a funeral, she kept Ben’s body in her home for two months in a temperature-controlled room before laying him to rest at Graceland. In many ways, she never recovered from his death.

Keough, who, somewhat unconvincingly, describes her childhood as “perfect” and “amazing”, says her mother wanted to tell her story in order to understand herself and to be understood by others, “in full, for the first time in her life”. The extent of Presley’s personal tragedy, of not being seen, known or witnessed within a world of luxury, lies in these words.

Watching from the wings

While Presley’s memoir conveys the destructive side of inherited fame, media consultant Elliot Mintz’s book, We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me looks at the peculiar allure of stardom for those in the wings.

The story begins in the wake of John Lennon’s murder, a tragedy directly born of fame. The opening pages tell how Mintz, at the time a broadcaster and close associate of John and Yoko, has been summoned to the Dakota building in Manhattan to compile an inventory of John’s belongings. But while this laborious task is testament to Yoko’s faith in him, Mintz has not been personally informed of John’s death, which is odd. He hears about the shooting from his mother, who has seen a television report, and rushes to the airport in a panic to catch a plane to New York. During the flight, he discovers “my best friend is gone” when an air steward explains why she’s crying.

This incongruity typifies the memoir. Graciously told with an old-fashioned charm, the book is presented as an intimate portrayal of life with an extraordinary couple. Yet it’s more a study of dysfunctional interpersonal dynamics where the rich and famous hold sway.

As an adolescent, Mintz was isolated and cursed with a stutter. He developed fantasy relationships with TV talk show hosts, and confesses that “my only friends were on the airwaves”. During the 1970s, he lived in the bohemian haven, Laurel Canyon, and worked in broadcasting, which is how he became part of Lennon and Ono’s personal entourage.

Mintz’s first encounter with Yoko was for a phone interview on his LA radio show during which he cleverly avoided asking the artist about her famous husband. Impressed, Yoko began calling at all hours of the day and night from New York, with John soon joining in.

Gradually, the couple began to trust him. A useful Hollywood contact who comes across as easily flattered into compliance and servitude, he installed a red light on his bedroom ceiling that flashed whenever the phone rang. He hired private investigators at his own expense to help Yoko secure personal details of potential business associates, and after playing the couple’s controversial third album on his radio show, he lost his job.

But aside from an all-expenses trip to Japan, where he acted as John’s minder under Yoko’s orders, the couple never paid him a cent, despite their constant demands.

Aware of his status as unpaid assistant, Mintz nevertheless regarded the Lennons as close friends, and even family. But he is never clear about what he meant to them on a purely personal level, and the one time he introduced them to a girlfriend, it didn’t go well. “Whatever magic happened between me, Yoko and John when we got together, it couldn’t be recreated as a party of four”, he says, with unsettling acceptance.

The most revealing, and disturbing, moment in the book is after a party, during which John subjected Yoko to the cruel humiliation of having loud sex with another guest in an adjoining room. Worried about the aftermath, Mintz tries to imagine a world in which the “magical couple” are no longer together, but is unable to bear the thought.

Tellingly, he also fears for himself.

I wondered whether my friendships with them could survive a split. Who would get custody of me? How could I possibly remain friends with just one of them? Or would I end up being abandoned by them both?

In the end, Mintz’s expectation that “the three of us would grow old together” was shattered by John’s murder. He has since maintained a connection with Yoko, but ends his book asking whether the sacrifices he made for the couple were worth the nine years he spent in their company. Interestingly, aside from wondering whether he might have married and had a family, or ended up in a less glamorous career, he doesn’t provide an answer.

‘I was who I was my whole life’

For a more straightforward, firsthand account of fame, Cher: The Memoir, Part One is hard to beat. A big, bold, engaging story of grit and determination that charts the initial rise of Cheryl Sarkisian from poverty and hardship towards becoming the “global icon” known as Cher, this book has all the right ingredients for a blockbuster celebrity biography.

Tracing the first four decades of the superstar’s life, from her birth in 1946 to the brink of her acting profession in 1980, this hefty volume focuses on Cher’s turbulent upbringing and the earlier stages of her singing and entertainment career. It includes her chequered marriages to Sonny Bono, with whom she found success as the pop duo Sonny and Cher, and musician Gregg Allman, as well as her relationships with record label boss David Geffen, and Gene Simmons of Kiss.

Ever the performer, when Cher first agreed to publish a memoir, her main concern was how to replicate the authenticity of her voice. Famously dyslexic, she hired a ghostwriter, but was unhappy with the first attempt because it didn’t sound like her. Two more ghostwriters were found, and the book was rushed out in four months.

Regardless, certain critics have bemoaned the flatness of tone. But while Cher’s distinctive, sassy style would have been hard to capture on the page, no doubt the writers were aiming for coherence. Given the rich, eventful nature of her life, this can’t have been easy. Cher’s memoir is a true adventure story.

Left in the care of children’s homes and extended family members as an infant, Cher experienced a wildly insecure childhood with her beautiful but unstable mother, the aspiring actress, Georgia Holt. Together with her half-sister, Gee, Cher moved home and switched schools constantly, had a string of father figures, and was a teenager by the time she met her biological dad, Johnnie Sarkisian, a heroin addict.

Despite such a difficult start, Cher didn’t buckle. Instead, she developed a fierce independence, a free spirit and a strong sense of self, and from a young age, was determined to achieve the singing and acting career that eluded her mother.

“I guess I was who I was my whole life,” she says, recalling the time she impressed her family with a song at the age of five.

Perhaps inevitably, given the mostly terrible male role models of her childhood, Cher’s marriages were her biggest downfall. Sonny Bono turned out to be pathologically controlling, cheated her out of her money and engaged her in a bitter custody battle over their child, Chas. David Geffen came to the rescue, arranging lawyers and supporting her back to independence, and for a while she was happy with him. But then she fell for Gregg Allman, who suffered from chronic addiction issues, and lied about his habits even after their son, Elijah Blue, was born.

While the book details her divorce from Sonny and outlines the negative episode with Allman, it skims over the breakdown of her other relationships, maintaining the upbeat survivor mode that has become so consistent with her public image. And yet, when it comes to her career, her reflections are occasionally revealing.

“It’s hard when people see you in a certain light and don’t think you can do anything beyond that,” she says of her struggle to be considered for serious acting roles back in 1980. “I was used to that my whole life, but it didn’t make it any less painful.”

Even for Cher, it seems fame and success have not been straightforward.

Cher: The Memoir, Part Two is due for publication in November 2025.

Liz Evans, Adjunct Researcher, English and Writing, University of Tasmania

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

We have a natural fascination with time – how landscapes have been carved over millennia, how our bodies grow and sag with age, how the stars traverse the sky each night. Scientists probe the layers beneath our feet to understand the secrets of our past. Geologists and palaeontologists sample ice, rock and fossils to reconstruct past climates and species and archaeologists pick through ancient “dustbins” (middens) in excavation sites to reimagine our historical dinner time.

Similarly, most living things produce records of their own existence in layered body tissues – often in the form of daily or yearly growth bands. The most familiar of these so-called biochronologies are tree rings, which form every year in response to seasonal cycles in temperature and rainfall.

Dendrochronology – the art of tree-ring counting – allows us to precisely date trees. Based on the rings in its trunk, a bristlecone pine in eastern California known as Methuselah is said to be the world’s oldest living thing at 4,856 years old.

It’s not just the number of rings, either – their width tells us whether the tree was thriving in a particular year, or suffering due to drought. Chemical compounds locked into the wood offer clues about atmospheric changes, including those produced by volcanic eruptions.

Let’s not not stop at trees – your own tooth cement, nails and hair are forming chemical and visual records of your own life experience right now, storing traces of food, drink and drugs you have consumed. They can also produce “stress marks” during trauma or pregnancy, when a mother literally breaks her own body tissues to grow and nourish her baby.

Elsewhere in the natural world, some of the more surprising examples of biochronologies include whale earwax, narwhal tusks, bird feathers and the bony plates (scutes) on turtle shells.

Recent studies, for instance, have applied forensic analyses of whale earwax to explore their stress levels during historic whaling days. Narwhal tusks, meanwhile, have helped explain how declining Arctic sea ice has affected their diet and exposure to pollution.

The importance of otoliths

In my lab, we work with aquatic animals – from fish scales and ear bones to squid eyes and beaks. Like decoding a biological black box, we analyse chemical constituents in the growth layers to reconstruct a detailed picture of the individual’s prior health, diet and movements.

Some biochronologies are more “fickle”, forming layers at unpredictable rates, including the eye lenses of fish and turtle scutes. Others, such as bird feathers, are shorter lived due to periodic moulting. Yet they all share the important feature of serial growth, producing valuable archives that we can probe to build a picture of the animal’s life.

Probably the best known biochronometer in the animal world – and my own personal obsession – is the fish otolith, or ear bone (Ancient Greek: oto is ear and líthos is stone). We humans have tiny ear stones (otoconia), whose primary function is to maintain balance, but fish otoliths are also crucial for hearing, as well as featuring specific properties that make them particularly valuable markers of biochronology.

Unlike “normal” bones, fish otoliths are composed of calcium carbonate crystals and are metabolically inert, meaning they never get broken down and rebuilt. Instead they keep growing – even during periods of starvation – producing daily and annual growth bands.

These beautiful crystalline structures are also highly resistant to degradation and vary in shape between species. This enables scientists to use a combination of “otolith atlases” and artificial intelligence to identify popular choices of fish from otoliths left behind in ancient human middens, as well as in the contemporary stomach contents or poop of predators such as seals, albatrosses and squid.

Otoliths have driven my research for almost two decades. I’ve been fascinated by animal migration and the ecological and evolutionary processes underpinning these long and dangerous journeys ever since taking a “movement ecology” class at the University of Edinburgh with the brilliant Professor Victoria Braithwaite in 2003.

I decided I wanted to track marine animals myself, and my lab now primarily uses otolith and eye lens chemistry to reconstruct fish habitat use and growth rates, and the temperatures they experienced through their lives. We are now also investigating how well these same structures track reproductive events, chronic stress and exposure to pollution.

And we are working with international teams to understand how hypoxia (low oxygen zones or “dead zones”) affect fish growth and reproduction. Ultimately, this data allows us to connect stressful events in a fish’s past to its lifetime health and survival, which is important for predicting a species’ persistence.

For example, a recent study used otolith-derived metabolic rates of Atlantic bluefin tuna to show their vulnerability to future climate change. Meanwhile in California, we used otolith chemistry to understand the impact of dams on salmon migration and survival, revealing that – on many rivers - dams have made it impossible for salmon to escape into the mountains during summer, which is essential for enabling them to resist the increasingly severe droughts afflicting the region.

Conservation

Fisheries managers read the rings on millions of otoliths each year to track individual cohorts and look for warning signs of overfishing, but I would argue that biochronologies are still underused in this field. For example, fisheries managers could use otoliths to track the movements of juveniles too small to be tagged (those under 4cm long), since chemical markers make it possible to identify where they grew up. This would allow these managers to earmark productive or struggling “nursery habitats” for protection or improvement, respectively.

We consistently find that rivers and estuaries play a critical role in the survival and growth of valuable species such as salmon, sea bass and anchovies. Juvenile fish often have such high natural mortality rates – often only 1% survive to their first birthday – that even small improvements to their survival can result in large boosts in abundance and make wild fisheries more sustainable.

As such, let’s keep up the momentum to clean and restore our rivers and beaches, and to embrace monitoring tools such as biochronologies to learn which actions produce the biggest benefits. Next time you think about banging the glass at an aquarium, just remember that the fish inside are listening – and recording you too.

Anna Sturrock, Senior Lecturer, School of Life Sciences, University of Essex

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

Have you ever asked someone how their day was, or been chatting casually with a friend, only to have them tell you a horrific story that has left you feeling distressed or emotionally exhausted yourself?

This is called “trauma dumping”. It’s when someone shares something traumatic or distressing without checking in first if the person they’re talking to has the capacity or willingness to take on that information.

Trauma dumping is not new, and you’ve probably experienced it (or inadvertently done it yourself) at some stage in your life.

But now, with the rise of social media platforms such as TikTok, the risk of experiencing trauma dumping has increased exponentially.

People often turn to TikTok for support or validation. And because TikTok’s algorithm is based on attention, it’s not uncommon for highly emotional stories to gather traction and go viral.

My colleagues and I wanted to understand more about trauma dumping on TikTok. In a recent study, we found people often share their trauma on TikTok. And this is usually done without a trigger warning.

TikTok and mental health

It’s estimated around 75% of the population have experienced a traumatic event at some point in their lives. This could include exposure to abuse or neglect in childhood, violence, natural disasters, the death of a loved one, or any other event which is unexpected, distressing, and causes long-term impacts on physical or mental health.

TikTok can be an important source of support and validation, especially for young people who have faced trauma, and who may not have sufficient support offline.

Previous research has shown TikTok provides a platform for talking about things like body image concerns, seeking support and information about gender and sexual diversity, and tackling stigma.

But while TikTok can be a great place for community, support and validation, at the same time it can be a hotbed for trauma dumping.

Importantly, sharing trauma on social media runs the risk of exposing other users to vicarious traumatisation, which is when a person is traumatised by someone else’s trauma.

Vicarious trauma is most common in people who work in “frontline” jobs, such as paramedics or therapists, who deal with trauma regularly. However, anyone can be at risk. Factors including personal experiences, personality traits (such as empathy), support systems and coping strategies all play a role in whether someone might experience vicarious trauma.

In our study, we set out to explore the top videos on TikTok with one or more of five hashtags related to trauma: #traumatok, #trauma, #traumatized, #traumatic and #traumabond.

We looked the most viewed 50 videos from each hashtag. At the time we carried out our analysis in December 2022, these 250 videos had a total of 296.6 million likes, 2.3 million comments and 4.6 million shares.

#TraumaTok

We found the majority of videos (about 67%) were from people sharing their trauma. In many cases severe trauma was discussed, including child maltreatment, violence and death.

Our study also showed some videos (about 22%) were from people who claimed to be “experts” in trauma. They were using the platform to speak about the symptoms and treatment for trauma-related mental health conditions.

Worryingly, most “experts” (84%) did not disclose their credentials. And only a small proportion (2%) said they were licensed psychologists, counsellors or medical professionals (who are trained to provide evidence-based treatment or advice for mental health).

The remaining videos were either more general mental health content with a mix of hashtags such as “anxiety” and “depression”, or were meant to be humorous, using memes or jokes about trauma.

One of the most concerning things we found in our study was that only 3.7% of videos had some form of trigger warning. A trigger warning, often a verbal statement by the creator, text within the video or a caption, is meant to alert the audience that potentially distressing content is discussed in the video.

One of the limitations of our study was that we didn’t look at users’ experiences of viewing these videos. We also didn’t explore discourse on the app, such as comments and video replies.

We can’t say for sure what it’s like for people, especially young people or people with lived experience of trauma, to watch and interact with these videos. Exploring this should be a focus for future research.

Trigger warnings are important

None of this is to say that sharing stories, even traumatic ones, should never happen. In fact, we know support from others is essential for healing from trauma. This can be facilitated, among other avenues, through sharing stories on social media.

But to make this safer for everyone, TikTok should encourage trigger warnings, and creators should use them on videos where trauma is shared. This can give users the option to “opt out” and scroll on if they think they might not have the capacity to listen at that time.

For people consuming videos on TikTok and other platforms, it’s important to be wary of misinformation and think critically about the information they see, seeking further advice from other sources.

If you feel distressed by content you see on social media, seek support from a health-care professional.

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

Alix Woolard, Senior Research Fellow, The Kids Research Institute Australia

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

Almost half of Australians wish they read more: in our recent research, 54.9% of those who have read a book in the past year, and 49.8% of those who haven’t, told us they read less than they intend to.

So, what’s stopping them?

Common difficulties include getting distracted, finding books they want to read, feeling motivated to read and not feeling like they’re in the right mood to read.

The good news is behavioural science, the study of human behaviour, can offer strategies to help us read more often. The key is to identify the barriers that stop us from reading – and use behavioural tactics tailored to them.

We surveyed a diverse range of 1,622 Australians aged 16 years and older, in August 2024. Our research, done in partnership with Australia Reads, used behavioural science to understand how people read for recreation. We counted print, digital and audio books, but not newspapers or magazines.

We asked participants about their current reading behaviours and their motivations, capabilities, opportunities and barriers related to reading. We broke down the activity of “reading” into a journey involving five specific behaviours: finding books, choosing books, getting books, starting to read, and continuing to read.

People may go back and forth between stages in their reading journey, and even be at different stages for different books. After investigating the specific barriers people experience at different stages we’ve devised ten useful tactics, to help you read more often.

If you want to read, but get distracted by other activities (or scrolling)

1. Try different formats, like audiobooks and ebooks, to incorporate reading at a more convenient time or place. For example, you could listen to an audiobook when you cook dinner.

2. Engage with shorter material or different genres to reduce the perceived effort of reading. (For example, graphic novels, short stories, or novellas.)

3. Place books in visible places, such as next to the bag you grab before you catch the train, or set reminders to read.

4. Try setting up a regular reading time, such as before bed or on public transport. Most importantly, find a time that is convenient and works with your life.

If you’re rarely in the mood to read

5. Remember, there’s a book for every mood. Find material that feels engaging in the moment, even if it means starting a new book or trying a different genre than you’re used to.

6. Read for enjoyment rather than as a chore – stop reading books if you aren’t enjoying them (give yourself permission to not finish a book even if you usually do), and select books based on your mood and interests, rather than what you think you should be reading.

7. Implement a reading buddy system with a friend or family member to make reading more social and encourage each other.

If you’re unsure what you like to read, or unmotivated by your usual reading material

8. Try shorter, more accessible books to find the types of genres and stories you enjoy. Pay attention to the parts of the books you enjoyed to help you find other similar books.

9. Use book subscriptions or curation services to help find books you might enjoy.

10. Try asking a friend, a librarian or a bookseller for recommendations.

How Australians read for leisure

Recreational reading can ebb and flow during different life stages and according to competing priorities. Just 17.3% of those we spoke to cited reading books as their top leisure activity.

But half (49.9%) of them read books as one of their leisure activities. Overall, reading was ranked fourth: behind watching TV and movies (80.9%), social media and internet browsing (61.2%), and eating and drinking out (55.1%).

Our participants who had read a book in the past year told us their top motivations to read were that it helps them relax and unwind (49.2%), brings pleasure and enjoyment (46.3%), and helps to keep their brain active (34.7%).

It can take a while to feel engaged with a new book, especially if you’re coming back to reading after a bit of a slump. While most people we surveyed felt engaged in 30 minutes or less, around 15% needed up to 60 minutes to feel engaged with a book, and roughly 5% needed over an hour.

It can be easy to feel distracted when you’re not yet engaged. But give yourself time, especially when starting a new book, to connect with it.

The most important thing if you want to read more is to try to understand what’s getting in your way. Then, you can try something to specifically address that barrier.

Breanna Wright, Research fellow, BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University; Alyse Lennox, Senior Research Officer, BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University, Monash University, and Fernanda Mata, Research Fellow, BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University

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

The mere mention of Leonardo da Vinci evokes genius. We know him as a polymath whose interests spanned astronomy, geology, hydrology, engineering and physics. As a painter, his Mona Lisa and Last Supper are considered works of mastery.

Yet one great achievement that frequently goes unrecognised is his studies of human anatomy. More than 500 years after his death, it’s time this changed.

Leonardo is thought to have been born on April 15 1452 in Anchiano, a small hamlet near the town of Vinci, close to Florence. His mother was a 16-year-old peasant girl called Caterina di Meo Lippi, and his father was Ser Piero da Vinci, a 26-year-old notary.

Being illegitimate, the young Leonardo was only permitted an elementary education in reading, writing and arithmetic. He was also barred from becoming a notary, but this worked out to his advantage. Instead of being constrained by life as an officiate, he was free to be creative and explore the world of nature, satisfying his insatiable appetite for knowledge.

The human anatomy became one of his great interests. This was seeded during his time as an apprentice in Andrea del Verrocchio’s bottega (studio) in Florence, where studying the human form was crucial for achieving realistic depictions.

Creating detailed anatomical drawings required precise sketching skills and the ability to accurately depict the structures being studied. As Leonardo’s fascination grew, he would delve deeper into anatomy as a discipline.

Pioneers

This traces back to the 2nd-century Greek physician Galen of Pergamum, whose anatomical descriptions were mostly based on insights he had gained through dissecting animals and studying wounded gladiators. However, he did no human dissections – they were illegal during his time – and many of his extrapolations from animal to human anatomy were wrong.

It wasn’t until the 14th century that anatomy and medical science advanced thanks to the start of systematic human cadaver dissections. The physician Mondino de Liuzzi, who practised the first public dissections of human cadavers at the University of Bologna, published the first modern anatomical text, Anathomia Corporis Humani, in 1316.

The text was mostly descriptive in nature, like that of Galen, lacking drawings to illustrate anatomy. Subsequent texts on the subject during the 14th and early 15th centuries did contain drawings, but these were basic and unrealistic.

Leonardo advanced this discipline through his remarkable observational skills, knowledge of perspective and, most notably, his outstanding drawing abilities. His anatomical sketches were unlike anything seen before. For example, his sketches of the muscles of the arms and human skull are comparable to illustrations in today’s medical anatomy texts.

According to Leonardo’s biographer, Giorgio Vasari, the artist “was one of the first who, with Galen’s teachings, began to bring honour to medical studies and to shed real light upon anatomy, which had until that time been shrouded in the deepest shadows of ignorance”.

Leonardo was the first to depict a detailed study of the human spine, showing its natural curvature and correctly numbered vertebrae. He drew and described nearly all the bones and muscles of the body in beautiful detail, as well as investigating their biomechanics.

His studies on the heart combined both experimentation and observation. Using an ox’s heart to understand blood flow though the aortic valves, Leonardo poured molten wax into the surrounding cavities to make a wax cast, from which a glass model of the heart was made. He then pumped water mixed with grass seeds through this model to visualise the flow pattern. From this experiment, he concluded that the vortex-like flow of blood through the aortic valves was responsible for closing them during each heartbeat.

Over 450 years later, in 1968, scientists used dyes and radiography methods to observe this blood flow and prove that Leonardo was correct. A study in 2014 using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) also demonstrated that he had provided a strikingly precise depiction of these vortex-like flows.

Shortcomings

Leonardo may have dissected around 30 human corpses during his lifetime. Most took place at the Santa Maria Nuova hospital in Florence, and later at the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome. The fact he didn’t have more human cadavers to study probably helps to explain why he also got things wrong.

In addition, Leonardo was very influenced by Galen, through his readings of both Mondino de Liuzzi and the Persian writer Avicenna (c980-1037), while also dissecting animals such as dogs, cattle and horses to fill in human anatomical gaps.

This approach is evident in his study of the male and female reproductive system, as I found when carrying out a detailed review of his work in this area. Misconceptions included the presence of three channels in the penis for semen, urine and “animal spirit”. The prostate gland is also missing in all his sketches of the male reproductive system. Meanwhile, he made the uterus spherical (derived from cow dissections), and similarly misrepresented the fallopian tubes and ovaries.

Even then, Leonardo still got a lot right. He correctly depicts the position of the foetus in the uterus, and the umbilical cord anatomy. He also correctly argued that penile erections were caused by blood engorgement and not by air or “vital spirits” flowing into the penis, as suggested by Galen.

Where he got things wrong, Leonardo’s shifting focus may also have played a part. His restlessness, disorganised notes and unfinished work suggest ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Equally, this may also explain his boundless curiosity and incredible creativity.

Despite his shortcomings, Leonardo’s anatomical studies were centuries ahead of their time, rivalling modern standards. His work in this area might have been more appreciated had he published it in a book: he had planned one, and is said to have been collaborating with the Renaissance physician and professor, Marc’Antonio della Torre.

Unfortunately, this was cut short with Marc’Antonio’s death in 1511. Leonardo died in 1519 at the age of 67, and while his gifts to the world have received endless attention, his important contributions to anatomy remain overshadowed, and deserve greater recognition.

Michael Carroll, Reader / Associate Professor in Reproductive Science, Manchester Metropolitan University

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

The 2025 Academy Awards could shape up to be a big one for stop-motion animation. Australian director Adam Eliott’s Memoir of a Snail (2024) has raked in a nomination for Best Animated Feature Film, alongside Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024).

Coincidentally, this recognition comes in what is already an historic year for stop motion. A century ago, on February 8 1925, The Lost World hit cinemas. This film is widely considered the first feature-length stop-motion production, as well as the first “creature feature”.

Audiences were captivated as they watched animated dinosaurs share the screen with live actors. The animators positioned and photographed miniature dinosaurs made of rubber, one frame at a time, to create moving sequences that accompanied full-scale shots with human actors.

This method drew from earlier works such as Georges Méliès’s 1902 short film A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune).

Dynamation: the beginnings

After animating on The Lost World, stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien went on to animate King Kong (1933) and the lesser-known Mighty Joe Young (1949), where he mentored Ray Harryhausen.

Harryhausen himself would later design and animate some of the most celebrated stop-motion sequences of all time, including the famous skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and the fictional Rhedosaurus from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953).

The blend of animated miniatures and live actors become known as Dynamation, as Harryhausen pushed to create ever-more integrated and dynamic sequences in which animated puppets “interacted” with real actors.

Back then it wasn’t possible to review animation as it was being shot; you could only see the puppet as it was in the moment. Sequences were shot on celluloid film, and animators had to wait for the film to develop before they could see the results.

The famous skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts required Harryhausen to remember the movements of seven skeletons and line up a fight sequence with two pre-recorded actors, one frame at a time. He would often work for months before being able to review his work.

In Eastern Europe, filmmakers such as Karel Zeman were also combining live action with miniature special effects and stop motion – extending a long history of Eastern European puppet theatre into cinema.

In 1958, Zeman brought Jules Vernes’ whimsical vehicles and underwater worlds to the screen in his feature film Invention for Destruction (Vynález zkázy).

Zeman’s work went on to influence famous animators such as Jan Švankmajer and Terry Gilliam.

Technology advances

In the 1970s, Phil Tippet and others working at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) – a studio founded by George Lucas – pushed the medium further through the development of “go-motion”.

This invention used a custom-made control rig that precisely moved a puppet while it was being photographed – resulting in a subtle motion blur that emulated live-action movement.

This technique allowed for more realistic animation and was used in productions such as Dragon Slayer (1981) and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

In the 1980s, however, Star Wars began a trend towards photorealism and audiences became more scrutinising of visual effects. Harryhausen’s creatures in Clash of the Titans (1981) appeared especially hammy and outdated even for the time.

The CGI scare

In the early 90s, Phil Tippet and colleagues at ILM, in the pursuit of perfecting the craft, developed test dinosaur sequences for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). Tippet animated the original test sequences in stop motion.

Also at ILM, Dennis Muren was experimenting with a new kind of animation for creatures made entirely using computer software. These were the early days of computer-generated imagery (CGI).

When Tippet saw an early Jurassic Park test of CGI dinosaur footage, he said to Steven Spielberg “I’m extinct”.

Nonetheless, once it was decided the dinosaurs would be created with CGI, Tippet continued working on the film. He used a dinosaur-shaped physical rig, which allowed changes to the rig’s position to translate to CGI movements onscreen. Stop-motion animators were helpful in this process because “CGI animators” as we know them didn’t yet exist.

Amid a CGI-induced scare, Tim Burton and Henry Selicks’ The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) became the first fully stop-motion animated feature to be produced by a major studio. This film proved stop motion could be achieved at a Hollywood scale.

Stop motion took a backseat to CGI in the years that followed. Pixar’s Toy Story (1995), the world’s first fully CGI animated feature, cemented CGI as the way of the future.

The only other noteworthy stop-motion cinematic release came at the turn of the century, when DreamWorks teamed up with Aardman Animations to produce Chicken Run (2000), following a number of successful stop motion shorts, starting with Wallace and Gromit’s A Grand Day Out in 1989.

The comeback

Eventually, innovations in digital cameras and motion control paved the way back to stop motion, giving us films such as Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) and The Corpse Bride (2005).

Working on Coraline (2008), Laika studios introduced 3D printing technology for a sophisticated form of replacement animation, in which different body and facial pieces are swapped to create character movements and expressions.

Traditionally, this technique was achieved by carving individual wooden models and swapping them out between capturing frames. This is how filmmaker George Pal made his Puppetoons films in the 1930s.

Embracing new tech brought stop motion back onto the world stage, with studios such as Laika leading the charge. Since then, we’ve seen the release of features including ParaNorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014), Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), Missing Link (2019) and Guillermo del Toro’s Academy Award-wining Pinnoccio (2022).

A new era of stop-motion features

Despite huge developments in CGI, audiences still appreciate the painstaking work of bringing inanimate objects to life frame by frame.

There are more stop motion films being made than ever before, with independent filmmakers and students creating quality sequences for a fraction of what it cost 30 years ago.

Some directors use the medium for its connection with real materials, and out of respect for the art form. Phil Tippet spent more than 30 years on his stop motion feature Mad God (2021) – an experimental and intense horror magnum opus that embodies the materiality of stop motion.

Wes Anderson says his approach to stop motion in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) was “very much about bringing to life the [characters’] performance.”

In Pinocchio (2022), Guillermo del Toro tells the touching story of a puppet, using real puppets, in which imperfection and human frailty are emphasised.

We’re also seeing the return of stop-motion creature effects, such as with Disney’s Star Wars series Skeleton Crew (2024–25), in which live action is once again integrated with stop-motion puppets.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is now pushing audiences and creators to question what they value in animation, cinema and art more generally.

If AI could generate high-quality films with a stop-motion aesthetic, would we value them as much as those productions that were laboured over for years on end? The recent Oscar nominees may hold the answer.

Jack McGrath, Lecturer in Animation, University of Newcastle

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

Fewer young Australians are drinking. And when they do drink, they are drinking less and less often than previous generations at the same age.

It’s a trend happening all around the world.

The proportion of young people who drink infrequently is growing in the long term. In 2001, 13.6% of Australians aged 18–24 drank less than once a month. That’s since increased to 20%, or one in five.

The proportion of young people who’ve never consumed a full glass of alcohol has also more than doubled since 2001, from 7.5% to 16.3%.

But for many, abstinence is not necessarily the goal. An interest in mindful drinking means trends that encourage moderation – including “zebra striping” and “damp drinking” – have taken off on social media.

So, what are these strategies for cutting down? And are they really something new?

What is ‘zebra striping’?

“Zebra striping” means alternating between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. It effectively halves alcohol consumption for most people. This reduces the risk of intoxication because it gives your body time to process the alcohol.

The term is new but the concept of alternating drinks has long been a cornerstone of harm-reduction strategies.

A UK study commissioned by a zero-alcohol beer brand found that 25% of pub goers alternate between alcoholic and non-alcoholic beer. While commercial research like this requires cautious interpretation, it does highlight a growing appetite for moderation.

Is it different to ‘damp drinking’?

The rise of “damp drinking” is another shift from all-or-nothing approaches to alcohol. In a recent survey, close to 40% of drinkers want to drink less compared to 6.5% who say they want to quit altogether.

Going “damp” – rather than completely “dry” – means reducing alcohol without cutting it out altogether.

Having a drink is reserved for special occasions, but generally doesn’t feature in everyday life. This is also known as being “99% sober”.

It’s an approach that resonates with many young people who are “sober curious”, but do not want to completely abstain from alcohol.

Moderation can be a sustainable strategy for people who are not dependent on alcohol. Sometimes even people who were dependent can achieve moderation, usually after a period of abstinence. In the past, the consensus was that people who were dependent on alcohol should only aim for complete abstinence.

Strict sobriety goals can increase risk of relapse. This is referred to as the abstinence violation effect, which can sometimes lead to a cycle of binge drinking and guilt when people feel they’ve failed.

Moderation strategies, such as damp drinking or zebra striping, are more likely to foster self-compassion and gradual change.

So what’s behind this cultural shift?

In part, popular wellness trends have promoted alcohol-free living as a positive and aspirational lifestyle.

But health concerns are only part of the answer.

Young people especially face increasing social and economic pressures, and may be more focused on professional and personal growth than previous generations.

Studies show many view excessive drinking – and accompanying anxiety and hangovers – as incompatible with their ambitions and desire to stay in control.

Adding to this, social media can make what you do more visible to others – and serve as a permanent record. So some young people are more careful with behaviours that might lead to regret.

The increasing availability of better-tasting zero-alcohol drinks helps, too.

Zero-alcohol beer and wine, and mocktails, offer a way to participate socially without the drawbacks of alcohol consumption. These alternatives have reduced the stigma once associated with abstaining or drinking less in social settings.

This shift is also underpinned by a changing narrative around alcohol. Unlike older generations who often associated drinking with celebration and bonding, younger people are more likely to question the role of alcohol in their lives.

Binge drinking, once seen as a rite of passage, simply may not be as “cool” anymore.

Finding support for change

Given the health risks associated with drinking, such as cancer, liver disease and mental health issues, it’s great news more young people are reducing their drinking.

But four in ten young people (42%) are still consuming alcohol at risky levels.

The Australian national alcohol guidelines try to balance the social benefits and the health risks of drinking.

If you drink within the guidelines – no more than ten drinks a week and no more than four in any one day – you have a one in 100 chance of dying from an alcohol- related illness like cancer or heart disease.

If you drink above those guidelines the risk of these issues exponentially increases.

If you are looking to change your relationship with alcohol, self-reflection is a vital first step. Key questions to consider include:

• is alcohol negatively impacting my health, relationships or work?
• do I struggle to enjoy social occasions without drinking?

Alcohol and other drug support organisations such as Hello Sunday Morning and Smart Recovery offer free, evidence-based, digital support and resources for people looking to change their drinking.

These services emphasise harm reduction and self-compassion, encouraging individuals to set realistic goals and achieve lasting change.

Katinka van de Ven, Alcohol and other drug specialist, UNSW Sydney and Nicole Lee, Adjunct Professor at the National Drug Research Institute (Melbourne based), Curtin University

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

Throughout her life, the “Damsel of Cyprus” (born circa 1177) was used as a political and diplomatic tool in the conflicts of men. She was the daughter of Isaac Komnenos, the emperor of Cyprus. Her own name was never recorded, although historians have suggested it may have been either Beatrice or Maria.

While the princess was often powerless, the small snippets of evidence that we have about her present the life of a young woman with the resolve and tenacity to survive and thrive. She’s one of the many women I’ve come across during my research into elite women’s experiences of confinement across 11th to 13th-century medieval Europe.

As a child, the princess and her brother were used as hostages in a war that her father was involved in. Isaac was captured while fighting in Armenia and given into the custody of Bohemond III, the prince of the Greek city of Antioch (which was in what is now Turkey). A ransom of 60,000 gold coins was set. After paying half the ransom, Isaac was released and he gave his children as hostages into Bohemond’s custody as surety for the remaining ransom payment.

The ransom was then supposedly stolen by pirates. Isaac argued that this was a ploy invented by Bohemond and refused to repay it. This left his children in custody for two years until Bohemond, realising that Isaac would never repay the ransom, released them. The princess was seven years old at the time of her release. After the death of her brother, she was Isaac’s sole heir.

In 1191, the princess was again taken captive as a result of one of her father’s conflicts, this time by Richard I of England. Isaac had attempted to capture Richard’s ship, which carried the king’s sister, Joanna of Sicily, and his future wife, Berengaria of Navarre. In retaliation, Richard laid siege to Cyprus.

Isaac eventually fled from Richard’s forces. According to 12th-century English chronicler, Roger of Hoveden, when Richard captured the castle that the princess was hiding in, she went out to meet the king and surrendered. A brave move from a young girl who was only around 14 or 15 years old.

Isaac, who loved his daughter dearly, despite having previously offered her as ransom collateral, soon surrendered and was imprisoned. Richard placed the princess into the custody of his new wife and sister “to be cared for and educated in their customs”. Although she was treated as a ward of the two queens, in reality she was a captive.

Freedom or control? The travels of the princess

A new chapter of the princess’s life began. She travelled with the two queens to Acre (in modern-day Israel), Rome, Pisa, Genoa, Marseilles, Aragon (on the Iberian Peninsula) and Poitou, in west-central France.

The historian Annette Parks has suggested that this offered an “odd kind of freedom” for the princess, travelling further than she ever had before and quite possibly crossing paths with the likes of the queen mother of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine. But despite her relative “freedom” in accompanying the two queens, these travels were not at the princess’s own discretion, and her movements were controlled.

After Richard’s own capture by the Holy Roman Emperor, the agreement for his release included his consenting to the marriage of both the princess and Eleanor of Brittany (who was also in Richard’s custody) to the sons of Leopold V of Austria.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

The two women began to travel to Austria together in 1193 only to turn around part way through the journey, as the death of Leopold brought an end to the agreement. The princess may then have accompanied Joanna of Sicily during her second marriage to Raymond VI of Toulouse in 1196.

With Richard’s death in 1199, the princess was finally freed and went on to make two advantageous marriages. First, to Raymond VI, the same man who had been married to Joanna of Sicily until her death also in 1199. Second, to Thierry of Flanders after the annulment of her first marriage. Raymond had repudiated the princess in favour of a stronger marriage alliance with Leonor, the daughter of Alfonso II of Aragon.

It was during this second marriage that the princess briefly becomes visible in the historical record again.

In 1204 Thierry attempted to reclaim Cyprus through the rights of his wife. By this point, the political circumstances of Cyprus had changed and a new king had been installed. Thierry and the princess’s attempt was unsuccessful and the two were forced to flee, after which they disappear from the record for good.

The Damsel of Cyprus had almost no control over her life. But the record shows instances in which her own strength and tenacity were able to shine through. From facing King Richard in surrender, to forming advantageous marriages when she had no networks of her own, she navigated the circumstances that captivity brought upon her and she found ways to survive and retain her status as an elite woman. I would even speculate that the attempt to reclaim Cyprus was at the princess’s instigation, in an effort to regain her home.

As a young girl with no say over much of her life, the Damsel of Cyprus is a reminder of how medieval women continued to find ways to overcome the limitations placed on them.

Leticia Jeeval Pala, PhD Candidate, history, Nottingham Trent University

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

Many of us take pleasure in listening to music. Music accompanies important life events and lubricates social encounters. It represents aspects of our existing identity, as well as our hopes and dreams. It expresses emotions that cannot be explained with words. Music also distracts us from boredom and difficulty and helps us escape into another world.

Music seems to have a magical power: a wand to be waved that makes life feel better. But what if the power was not in the music itself? In fact, the power of music comes from our choices in what to listen to and the human agency we express in this act.

It can be seen as a placebo effect where the music is endowed with special powers by our minds. The qualities of the music are important. But as with all art, it is how we uniquely perceive the song that makes our experience powerful.

My research has shown most of us operate on autopilot when it comes to choosing music, often assuming previous music selections will have the same effect even under very different circumstances.

Stepping out of autopilot and being more intentional in the songs we chose can move from hoping the music will make you feel good, to knowing it will and seeing how it does.

Choose the right music for you

The way we experience music is personal. There is no one song that is going to make everyone feel the same.

Think about trying to pick a song to make you feel happy, or to listen to when you’re happy. If the power was in the musical qualities of the song itself, Pharrell Williams’ Happy might work. The song has several uplifting musical features: a simple but catchy melody; an energising rhythm emphasised by the singer clicking along; a lively tempo; and words that repeat the key idea.

It’s similar to Psy’s Gangnam Style, Katrina and the Waves’ Walking on Sunshine or ABBA’s Waterloo.

But just because these songs sound happy, do they make you feel happy? Would they make it into your personal top five pleasure-inducing tracks?

Your song selections are different to your friends because of the personal associations you have with them, including your personal taste. That’s why AI can’t generate the right songs for you if you ask it for “happy songs”.

You would be better off to start by looking at your own playlists and frequently played tracks to identify which ones actually make you feel good, personally.

Understanding meaning

It’s important to distinguish between pleasure-inducing tracks and meaningful songs.

Meaningful songs are linked to a range of emotions, identities, histories and social connections – but only some of those are pleasure inducing. Others connect to poignant and beautiful feelings such as grief and loss, whether that is missing home or missing people and creatures we love. This poignancy is distinct from hedonism, which is happiness without negative affect.

If you’re experiencing grief, for example, there may be a beauty in remembering your loved one, but it is connected to the pain of their absence. Choosing pleasure-inducing songs operates as an aesthetic distraction to take our mind away from the pain, which is a different (not necessarily worse or better) choice.

Sometimes meaning doesn’t come with a beautiful purpose. Like the love song that becomes the breakup song. Or the favourite artist whose death renders a song poignant rather than uplifting. Then the song may help with emotional processing, or it may not, it can just fulfil a desire for rumination – a thought we keep circling around without discharging the intensity or our perspective on it.

It might seem obvious that these events will change the way we feel when we listen to a song. But it can be surprisingly difficult to let go of music we love.

Sad songs can be enjoyable and/or a beautiful way of connecting to emotional experiences. But they can also intensify our negative emotions, which doesn’t always lead to resolution.

Being conscious and intentional in music choices is important, especially if you’re tending to ruminate. During down times in life, it is worth checking in after listening to make sure the song is helping you process and resolve, and not just intensify and maintain a negative state you would rather leave behind.

Finding what you love

But most days you are safe to let your instincts guide you. After all, there’s nothing more pleasurable than spending time listening to a banger.

In technical speak, we call these “preferred songs” – songs that might not be personally meaningful, or fill you with joy exactly, but they are just great tracks. Music you love, appreciate and rate.

But even identifying preferred songs is still personal. Despite what many people think, it’s very difficult to get agreement about what makes a good song. But it’s not difficult to identify the songs that you think are great. In fact, it’s a super fun thing to do.

Katrina McFerran, Professor and Head of Creative Arts and Music Therapy Research Unit; Director of Researcher Development Unit, The University of Melbourne

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

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

Are animals smart? – Deron

It’s a fascinating question that intrigues millions of pet owners, animal lovers, veterinarians and scientists all over the world: Just how smart are animals?

Scientists once believed a brain with billions of neurons was a requirement for intelligence. After all, that’s why you’re able to think – neurons are the nerve cells in the brain that connect and transmit messages to each other.

For the record, the human brain has about 86 billion neurons. For comparison, dogs and cats have less than one billion.

Yet the more that scientists like me study animal emotion and cognition – the ability to learn through experiences and thinking – the more we find that humans are not very special at all. Many nonhuman species can do these things too.

Right now, there’s no agreement on how to decide whether a particular animal species is intelligent. But most scientists who study animal cognition have observed that many animals are able to solve problems, use tools, recall important information about their environment and recognize themselves in the mirror.

Toolmaking bears and crows

Memory is a marker of intelligence. Of all animals, humans possess the most accurate and sophisticated memory. But elephants can recognize as many as 30 traveling companions at a time. They also learn to migrate away from drought-prone areas, based on memories of earlier droughts.

That kind of recall – known as episodic memory – is the ability to remember an event, including when and where it occurred. Until recently, scientists thought only humans had it. But now researchers have learned that some birds, cats, rats, monkeys and dolphins have it too.

Animals may not remember every experience – neither do people – but they do recall things critical to their survival. For example, birds know where they stored food. Monkeys know the presence of a predator.

Scientists once thought tool use was an exclusively human ability, but that’s not so. Chimpanzees use sticks to catch termites and stones to crack nuts open. Crows can even manufacture tools. By bending a wire, they can make a hook to retrieve a food reward that’s otherwise out of reach.

Researchers presented eight captive brown bears with this food challenge: Three objects – a large log, a small log and a box – were placed in an outdoor enclosure. A food reward was suspended above them. Six of the eight bears were able to move the logs and box into positions that enabled them to fetch the reward. Essentially, they used the three objects as tools.

Dolphin, chimpanzee communication

Language is another measure of intelligence. People, of course, have enormously sophisticated communication skills. But dolphins have complex dialects in the form of crackles, squeaks and whistles. Many researchers say the noises are a language. Chimpanzees and gorillas have used sign language to express emotions and ask for things from people.

Self-awareness – the ability to recognize yourself as an individual – signals intelligence. Babies don’t recognize themselves in the mirror until they are about a year and a half old. Up until then, they probably think the mirror image they see is another baby.

Many other species, including dolphins, ravens and elephants, recognize themselves in the mirror. Researchers put a red dye mark on chimpanzees under anesthesia; once awake, the chimps saw their reflection in a mirror. Instead of touching the red mark on their reflection in the glass, they touched the red mark on themselves, indicating self-recognition.

Just because animals can’t do certain things, it doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent. After all, humans can’t fly like a bird or swim like a fish. Nor is there a need for us to have the incredible sense of smell a dog has. We’d be sniffing hundreds of different smells from miles away – the scents from perfumes and pollution, gardens and garbage. From an evolutionary standpoint, that wouldn’t help us much. Plus, we’d get sick of it very quickly.

But all animals, including humans, have developed a wide range of capabilities so they can succeed in the environment they live in. Put simply, we’re all using our brains. Now that’s intelligent.

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

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

Leticia Fanucchi, Clinical Assistant Professor of Veterinary Clinical Sciences, Oklahoma State University

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

Most Australians can look forward to a comfortable retirement. More than three in four retirees own their own home, most report feeling comfortable financially, and few suffer financial stress.

But our new Grattan Institute report paints a sobering picture for one group: retirees who rent in the private market. Two-thirds of this group live in poverty, including more than three in four single women who live alone.

Retirees who rent often have little in the way of retirement savings: more than half have less than A$25,000 stashed away. And a growing number of older Australians are at risk of becoming homeless.

But our research also shows just how much we’d need to boost Commonwealth Rent Assistance to make housing more affordable and ensure all renters are able to retire with dignity.

Today’s renters, tomorrow’s renting retirees

Home ownership is falling among poorer Australians who are approaching retirement.

Between 1981 and 2021, home ownership rates among the poorest 40% of 45–54-year-olds fell from 68% to just 54%. Today’s low-income renters are tomorrow’s renting retirees.

Age pensioners need at least $40,000 in savings to afford to spend $350 a week in rent, together with the Age Pension and Rent Assistance. That’s enough to afford the cheapest 25% of one-bedroom homes in capital cities.

But Australians who are renting as they approach retirement tend to have little in the way of retirement savings. 40% of renting households aged 55-64 have net financial wealth less than $40,000.

Rent assistance is too low

Our research shows that Commonwealth Rent Assistance, which supplements the Age Pension for poorer retirees who rent, is inadequate.

The federal government has lifted the maximum rate of Rent Assistance by 27% – over and above inflation – in the past two budgets. But the payment remains too low.

A typical single retiree needs at least $379 per week to afford essential non-housing costs such as food, transport and energy.

But we found a single pensioner who relies solely on income support can afford to rent just 4% of one-bedroom homes in Sydney, 13% in Brisbane, and 14% in Melbourne, after covering these basic living expenses.

With Rent Assistance indexed to inflation, rather than low-income earners’ housing costs, the maximum rate of the payment has increased by 136% since 2001, while the rents paid by recipients have increased by 193%.

A boost is needed

Our analysis suggests that to solve this problem, the federal government should increase the maximum rate of Rent Assistance by 50% for singles and 40% for couples.

The payment should also be indexed to changes in rents for the cheapest 25% of homes in our capital cities.

These increases would boost the maximum rate of Rent Assistance by $53 a week ($2,750 a year) for singles, and $40 a week ($2,080 a year) for couples.

This would ensure single retirees could afford to spend $350 a week on rent, enough to rent the cheapest 25% of one-bedroom homes across Australian capital cities, while still affording other essentials.

Similarly, retired couples would be able to afford to spend $390 a week on rent, enough to rent the cheapest 25% of all one- and two-bedroom homes.

Unlikely to push up rents

One common concern is that increasing Rent Assistance will just lead landlords to hike rents. But we find little evidence that this is the case.

International studies suggest that more than five in six dollars of any extra Rent Assistance paid would benefit renters, rather than landlords.

In Australia, there’s little evidence that recent increases in Rent Assistance have pushed up rents.

Our analysis of NSW rental bond lodgement data suggests areas with higher concentrations of Rent Assistance recipients did not see larger rent increases in the year after the payment was boosted.

That’s not surprising. Rent Assistance is paid to tenants, not landlords, which means tenants are likely to spend only a small portion of any extra income on housing.

Since rates of financial stress are even higher among younger renters, we propose that any increase to Rent Assistance should also apply to working-age households.

Boosting Rent Assistance for all recipients would cost about $2 billion a year, with about $500 million of this going to retirees.

These increases could be paid for by further tightening superannuation tax breaks, curbing negative gearing and halving the capital gains tax discount, or counting more of the value of the family home in the Age Pension assets test.

Brendan Coates, Program Director, Housing and Economic Security, Grattan Institute; Joey Moloney, Deputy Program Director, Housing and Economic Security, Grattan Institute, and Matthew Bowes, Associate, Housing and Economic Security, Grattan Institute

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

There are many difficulties in converting any biological research into a medicine that will treat patients. Because of the complexity involved, these difficulties apply especially to translating cell research in the laboratory to a successful treatment for heart failure, where the heart is unable to pump blood around the body properly.

The definitive treatment for heart failure is a heart transplant – a difficult and costly procedure. Pills are prescribed for the condition, but they only delay death and are not effective in changing the cause of the disease.

Fifteen to 20 years ago, scientists started enthusiastically exploring the use of heart muscle precursor cells grown in the laboratory to transplant to the failing heart in the hope that they might make new heart muscle. Although results in animal tests were positive, they all failed in humans. Included in the failures was the one that my colleagues and I conducted.

We’d had success with animal studies and even some positive results in small groups of patients. Buoyed by these results, we organised a randomised controlled trial – the gold standard for medical studies in humans.

Our study was funded by the European Commission and entailed a massive effort by a large group of researchers across Europe. The result was that the therapy, which entailed injecting bone marrow cells into the heart muscle of patients who had had a heart attack, did not work.

I was therefore surprised to read recently that an article in Nature on this subject had an enthusiastic reception in the press. It was variously described as “groundbreaking”, “remarkable” and a “major breakthrough”.

The authors of the article report growing patches of heart muscle in the lab from precursor cells and then applying those patches to the hearts of monkeys that had had an induced heart attack, producing heart failure.

A woman who’d had a heart attack in 2016 also had the procedure. Three months later, she had a heart transplant, allowing the researchers to analyse her heart.

As this was the only case of a human receiving this treatment, and the procedure had failed, as the heart was removed from the patient, the title of the Nature article is perhaps too wide in its scope: Engineering heart muscle allografts for heart repair in primates and humans.

It is noted that a senior author of the article declares that he has shares in the company that will commercialise any success. This conflict may have been declared, but it is still a potential conflict.

Heart arrhythmia

The article does not discuss previous attempts to use heart muscle precursor cells for treating heart failure in humans. In particular, the pioneering work in Paris of the surgeon Philippe Menasché who in 2003 reported in the Lancet that he had injected heart muscle precursor cells into the myocardium (heart muscle) of a patient with apparent success.

He then published the results of a study where he repeated the same procedure in a larger group. The study was not successful. Menasché noted that some of the patients suffered from cardiac rhythm abnormalities following the procedure.

There was much discussion in the field that the junctions between the transplanted cells and the patient’s own heart muscle cells might give rise to abnormal electrical activity that would unpredictably produce potentially fatal heart rhythm change.

Because of the history of failure of cell therapy in human trials after positive tests in lab animals, the objective reader should regard results from animal experiments with scepticism.

John Martin, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, UCL

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

Late last year, rumours swirled online that HomeSafeID, a private Australian pet microchip registry, had stopped operating.

On Feburary 5 2025, a notice appeared on the HomeSafeID website, ostensibly from the site’s administrator. It states the website “is likely to go offline” soon due to unpaid bills. This means the database of information stored on HomeSafeID would also go offline.

There has been no official word from HomeSafeID as to the status of the company. HomeSafeID did not respond when The Conversation reached out for comment.

According to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), the company is still registered and no insolvency notice has been published. However, it’s possible HomeSafeID has stopped operating or will do so in the near future.

If this happens, any pet with a HomeSafeID registered microchip would no longer have searchable microchip details. If these pets become lost, vets and shelters will have no way of finding or verifying their owner.

The situation is a symptom of a bigger problem with pet microchip registries in Australia – a lack of national oversight.

Why should you microchip your pet?

If your pet goes missing, their microchip is key to you being reunited. Vets and shelters can scan a stray animal’s microchip, search one of the seven microchip registries in Australia, find the pet owner’s details and contact them. Pet microchips significantly increase the likelihood lost pets will be reclaimed by their owners.

In fact, microchipping pets is a legal requirement in all states and territories of Australia except the Northern Territory, although it is required in the City of Darwin. In New South Wales, fines for failing to microchip your pet range from A$180 to $880.

If HomeSafeID does go offline, many pets will have microchips that don’t connect to a database any more, making them essentially useless.

It’s difficult to estimate the scale of the problem, but it could affect hundreds of thousands of pets, including ones adopted from RSPCA Queensland.

According to ASIC, RSPCA Queensland was a part-owner of HomeSafeID until 2020. A spokesperson for the charity told The Conversation it has no current partnership with HomeSafeID, and “don’t know the extent of how many animals are affected”. Yesterday, RSPCA Queensland issued advice for pet owners to check their registration details.

Where are microchip details stored?

There are currently seven registries in Australia. Five are privately owned, including HomeSafeID, and two are owned by state governments, in NSW and South Australia. Pets microchipped in those states are meant to be registered with the state registry.

The five private registries jointly fund a website called Pet Address, which allows you to search the five private databases to find where your pet’s details are stored.

However, Pet Address doesn’t cover the state registries – these have to be searched separately. Only NSW vets and “authorised identifiers” (such as shelters) can access the pet owner details stored in the NSW registry.

If a pet is moved to another state but their owner doesn’t update the registry, their microchip won’t be readable in the new location by non-NSW vets and shelters.

There are currently no rules, regulations or even guidelines around how private pet microchip registries should operate in Australia. If a microchip database were to cease operating, there is no safety net to ensure information is automatically moved to another database.

What can I do to make sure my pet’s microchip is up to date?

Given current uncertainty around the HomeSafeID registry, pet owners across Australia should check their pets’ microchip numbers and find out which database they’re registered in.

If you don’t already know your pet’s microchip number, vets and shelters can use a microchip scanner to find that number for you. Then, you can run it through Pet Address or the SA and NSW registries where relevant, to find out which database the number is registered on.

If your pet’s microchip is currently with HomeSafeID, it might be prudent to move your pet’s details to another database. You can do this by contacting one of the other microchip registries and applying to register with their database (this may involve a small fee).

Australia needs national coordination on pet microchipping

Given it’s mandatory to microchip dogs and cats, it might seem strange there are no regulations or guidelines around how microchip registries should operate. However, this is a symptom of a much bigger issue.

There is almost no national leadership or collaboration on companion animal issues in Australia. Pets are firmly the domain of state governments, with the federal government only really involved in the export and import of companion animals.

There are, however, avenues for national coordination. The renewal of the Australian Animal Welfare Strategy is one, and the national Animal Health Committee is another.

Regardless of who takes responsibility, it’s clear a round table on pet microchipping is urgently required to prevent hundreds of thousands of pets walking around with microchips that don’t work anymore.

Otherwise, lost pets may find themselves at shelters and pounds unnecessarily, and animals that might have otherwise been returned home could end up being adopted, or worse, euthanised.

Bronwyn Orr, Veterinarian, Southern Cross University

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

Lung cancer cases are increasing in people who have never smoked, especially in women, a new study by the World Health Organization’s cancer agency has found.

The findings, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, reveal that lung adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer among non-smokers, accounts for nearly 60% of lung cancer cases in women compared to 45% in men.

About 2.5 million new lung cancer cases were diagnosed worldwide in 2022 – an increase of 300,000 since 2020. The study suggests that environmental factors, particularly air pollution, along with genetic predisposition and immune responses, may be driving this rise in non-smoking-related lung cancer.

One of the most significant risk factors for lung cancer in non-smokers is genetic mutations, especially mutations in the EGFR gene. This gene provides instructions for producing a protein on the surface of cells involved in growth and division.

Mutations in this gene drive uncontrolled cell division and tumour growth. They are found in 50% of lung adenocarcinomas in non-smoking Asian women and 19% in non-smoking western women – compared with 10–20% in non-smoking men.

Advances in genetic testing have made it easier to detect these mutations. However, rising exposure to air pollution, which is known to trigger EGFR mutations – may also be contributing to their increasing prevalence.

Other genetic changes that drive tumour growth include mutations in the genes ALK and ROS1, which are found in about 5% of lung cancer cases in non-smokers. These mutations are more often seen in younger non-smoking women, particularly in Asia. Thankfully, improved screening programmes, especially in east Asian countries, have helped detect these mutations more frequently.

Mutations in TP53, a crucial tumour-suppressing gene, also appear to be more commonly found in non-smoking women than in men. This gene prevents cells from becoming cancerous, and its mutation leads to out-of-control cell growth. The hormone oestrogen can interact with TP53 mutations, making lung cancer more likely to develop in women over time.

Another gene that is worth mentioning is KRAS. Mutations in this gene are usually associated with smoking-related lung cancer, however, they are increasingly being found in non-smokers – particularly women.

Recent studies suggest that exposure to tiny particles in the air, or PM2.5 (so-called because they are 2.5 micrometres or smaller) may be responsible for these mutations in non-smoker women.

Since PM2.5 levels continue to rise in many towns and cities, exposure to these particles could be another factor not only in lung cancer but also in other types of cancers in women.

In addition to genetic predisposition, hormone fluctuations may influence tumour growth in women. Oestrogen receptors are found in lung tissue, and experimental studies suggest that oestrogen promotes tumour growth. Studies have shown.) that women who receive hormone-replacement therapy (HRT), have a lower risk of lung cancer compared with women not on HRT, suggesting that natural oestrogen cycles may provide some level of protection.

Chronic inflammation

Beyond genetics and hormones, chronic inflammation could also explain why lung cancer is rising among non-smoking women.

Women are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases than men, and problems with the immune system can play a role in cancer. Persistent inflammation can cause repeated damage to tissues, leading to changes in DNA and promote abnormal cell growth, all of which raise the risk of cancer.

Women with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus have a higher chance of getting lung cancer, possibly because of long-lasting inflammation in the lungs. Inflammatory molecules – like interleukin-6 and tumour necrosis factor-alpha – can exacerbate the cancer by helping tumour cells survive and spread.

Autoimmune diseases have been increasing globally, probably because of environmental changes, changes in diet and shifts in gut microbiomes (the constellation of microorganisms that live in our guts and play an important role in our health). Because women are disproportionately affected by autoimmune conditions, they may be more vulnerable to chronic inflammation-driven cancer.

As life expectancy increases, more women are accumulating years of immune system activation, leading to a higher risk of developing inflammation-related lung cancer. In addition, things like pollution, household chemicals and work-related exposures can make immune system problems worse, increasing the risk of cancer even more.

Air pollution has long been recognised as a significant factor in lung cancer risk, but emerging evidence suggests that women may be particularly vulnerable. Studies show that women’s lung anatomy and function make them more susceptible to the harmful effects of pollutants. Women’s lungs are smaller than men’s, with narrower airways, which might cause more fine particles, like PM2.5, to get trapped in their lungs.

Additionally, oestrogen has been shown to amplify inflammatory responses when exposed to pollutants, potentially making lung tissue more prone to damage that can lead to lung cancer.

Women are more exposed to air pollution than men, but in a different way. While men often face pollution from factory work, women spend more time indoors where toxic fumes from cooking and heating are more common.

Air pollution in the home, especially from things like wood, coal and kerosene, can raise the risk of lung cancer. Women working in places such as textile factories, beauty salons and hospitals are also more exposed to harmful chemicals that can damage the lungs. In rapidly growing cities, women are often in areas with high traffic and factory pollution.

More significant

Women are biologically more likely than men to develop certain genetic mutations that increase the risk of lung cancer. However, factors like rising pollution, changes in hormone levels, immune system imbalances and longer life expectancy are making these risks even more significant.

Recent research suggests that HPV, a virus, may also contribute to lung cancer in women, underscoring the need for further study and preventative measures.

Understanding the roles of immune, hormonal, genetic and viral factors is key to spotting lung cancer early, creating more effective treatments and developing better ways to prevent it.

Pinar Uysal-Onganer, Reader in Molecular Biology, University of Westminster

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

The mere mention of Leonardo da Vinci evokes genius. We know him as a polymath whose interests spanned astronomy, geology, hydrology, engineering and physics. As a painter, his Mona Lisa and Last Supper are considered works of mastery.

Yet one great achievement that frequently goes unrecognised is his studies of human anatomy. More than 500 years after his death, it’s time this changed.

Leonardo is thought to have been born on April 15 1452 in Anchiano, a small hamlet near the town of Vinci, close to Florence. His mother was a 16-year-old peasant girl called Caterina di Meo Lippi, and his father was Ser Piero da Vinci, a 26-year-old notary.

Being illegitimate, the young Leonardo was only permitted an elementary education in reading, writing and arithmetic. He was also barred from becoming a notary, but this worked out to his advantage. Instead of being constrained by life as an officiate, he was free to be creative and explore the world of nature, satisfying his insatiable appetite for knowledge.

The human anatomy became one of his great interests. This was seeded during his time as an apprentice in Andrea del Verrocchio’s bottega (studio) in Florence, where studying the human form was crucial for achieving realistic depictions.

Creating detailed anatomical drawings required precise sketching skills and the ability to accurately depict the structures being studied. As Leonardo’s fascination grew, he would delve deeper into anatomy as a discipline.

Pioneers

This traces back to the 2nd-century Greek physician Galen of Pergamum, whose anatomical descriptions were mostly based on insights he had gained through dissecting animals and studying wounded gladiators. However, he did no human dissections – they were illegal during his time – and many of his extrapolations from animal to human anatomy were wrong.

It wasn’t until the 14th century that anatomy and medical science advanced thanks to the start of systematic human cadaver dissections. The physician Mondino de Liuzzi, who practised the first public dissections of human cadavers at the University of Bologna, published the first modern anatomical text, Anathomia Corporis Humani, in 1316.

The text was mostly descriptive in nature, like that of Galen, lacking drawings to illustrate anatomy. Subsequent texts on the subject during the 14th and early 15th centuries did contain drawings, but these were basic and unrealistic.

Leonardo advanced this discipline through his remarkable observational skills, knowledge of perspective and, most notably, his outstanding drawing abilities. His anatomical sketches were unlike anything seen before. For example, his sketches of the muscles of the arms and human skull are comparable to illustrations in today’s medical anatomy texts.

According to Leonardo’s biographer, Giorgio Vasari, the artist “was one of the first who, with Galen’s teachings, began to bring honour to medical studies and to shed real light upon anatomy, which had until that time been shrouded in the deepest shadows of ignorance”.

Leonardo was the first to depict a detailed study of the human spine, showing its natural curvature and correctly numbered vertebrae. He drew and described nearly all the bones and muscles of the body in beautiful detail, as well as investigating their biomechanics.

His studies on the heart combined both experimentation and observation. Using an ox’s heart to understand blood flow though the aortic valves, Leonardo poured molten wax into the surrounding cavities to make a wax cast, from which a glass model of the heart was made. He then pumped water mixed with grass seeds through this model to visualise the flow pattern. From this experiment, he concluded that the vortex-like flow of blood through the aortic valves was responsible for closing them during each heartbeat.

Over 450 years later, in 1968, scientists used dyes and radiography methods to observe this blood flow and prove that Leonardo was correct. A study in 2014 using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) also demonstrated that he had provided a strikingly precise depiction of these vortex-like flows.

Shortcomings

Leonardo may have dissected around 30 human corpses during his lifetime. Most took place at the Santa Maria Nuova hospital in Florence, and later at the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome. The fact he didn’t have more human cadavers to study probably helps to explain why he also got things wrong.

In addition, Leonardo was very influenced by Galen, through his readings of both Mondino de Liuzzi and the Persian writer Avicenna (c980-1037), while also dissecting animals such as dogs, cattle and horses to fill in human anatomical gaps.

This approach is evident in his study of the male and female reproductive system, as I found when carrying out a detailed review of his work in this area. Misconceptions included the presence of three channels in the penis for semen, urine and “animal spirit”. The prostate gland is also missing in all his sketches of the male reproductive system. Meanwhile, he made the uterus spherical (derived from cow dissections), and similarly misrepresented the fallopian tubes and ovaries.

Even then, Leonardo still got a lot right. He correctly depicts the position of the foetus in the uterus, and the umbilical cord anatomy. He also correctly argued that penile erections were caused by blood engorgement and not by air or “vital spirits” flowing into the penis, as suggested by Galen.

Where he got things wrong, Leonardo’s shifting focus may also have played a part. His restlessness, disorganised notes and unfinished work suggest ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Equally, this may also explain his boundless curiosity and incredible creativity.

Despite his shortcomings, Leonardo’s anatomical studies were centuries ahead of their time, rivalling modern standards. His work in this area might have been more appreciated had he published it in a book: he had planned one, and is said to have been collaborating with the Renaissance physician and professor, Marc’Antonio della Torre.

Unfortunately, this was cut short with Marc’Antonio’s death in 1511. Leonardo died in 1519 at the age of 67, and while his gifts to the world have received endless attention, his important contributions to anatomy remain overshadowed, and deserve greater recognition.

Michael Carroll, Reader / Associate Professor in Reproductive Science, Manchester Metropolitan University

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

Have you ever asked someone how their day was, or been chatting casually with a friend, only to have them tell you a horrific story that has left you feeling distressed or emotionally exhausted yourself?

This is called “trauma dumping”. It’s when someone shares something traumatic or distressing without checking in first if the person they’re talking to has the capacity or willingness to take on that information.

Trauma dumping is not new, and you’ve probably experienced it (or inadvertently done it yourself) at some stage in your life.

But now, with the rise of social media platforms such as TikTok, the risk of experiencing trauma dumping has increased exponentially.

People often turn to TikTok for support or validation. And because TikTok’s algorithm is based on attention, it’s not uncommon for highly emotional stories to gather traction and go viral.

My colleagues and I wanted to understand more about trauma dumping on TikTok. In a recent study, we found people often share their trauma on TikTok. And this is usually done without a trigger warning.

TikTok and mental health

It’s estimated around 75% of the population have experienced a traumatic event at some point in their lives. This could include exposure to abuse or neglect in childhood, violence, natural disasters, the death of a loved one, or any other event which is unexpected, distressing, and causes long-term impacts on physical or mental health.

TikTok can be an important source of support and validation, especially for young people who have faced trauma, and who may not have sufficient support offline.

Previous research has shown TikTok provides a platform for talking about things like body image concerns, seeking support and information about gender and sexual diversity, and tackling stigma.

But while TikTok can be a great place for community, support and validation, at the same time it can be a hotbed for trauma dumping.

Importantly, sharing trauma on social media runs the risk of exposing other users to vicarious traumatisation, which is when a person is traumatised by someone else’s trauma.

Vicarious trauma is most common in people who work in “frontline” jobs, such as paramedics or therapists, who deal with trauma regularly. However, anyone can be at risk. Factors including personal experiences, personality traits (such as empathy), support systems and coping strategies all play a role in whether someone might experience vicarious trauma.

In our study, we set out to explore the top videos on TikTok with one or more of five hashtags related to trauma: #traumatok, #trauma, #traumatized, #traumatic and #traumabond.

We looked the most viewed 50 videos from each hashtag. At the time we carried out our analysis in December 2022, these 250 videos had a total of 296.6 million likes, 2.3 million comments and 4.6 million shares.

#TraumaTok

We found the majority of videos (about 67%) were from people sharing their trauma. In many cases severe trauma was discussed, including child maltreatment, violence and death.

Our study also showed some videos (about 22%) were from people who claimed to be “experts” in trauma. They were using the platform to speak about the symptoms and treatment for trauma-related mental health conditions.

Worryingly, most “experts” (84%) did not disclose their credentials. And only a small proportion (2%) said they were licensed psychologists, counsellors or medical professionals (who are trained to provide evidence-based treatment or advice for mental health).

The remaining videos were either more general mental health content with a mix of hashtags such as “anxiety” and “depression”, or were meant to be humorous, using memes or jokes about trauma.

One of the most concerning things we found in our study was that only 3.7% of videos had some form of trigger warning. A trigger warning, often a verbal statement by the creator, text within the video or a caption, is meant to alert the audience that potentially distressing content is discussed in the video.

One of the limitations of our study was that we didn’t look at users’ experiences of viewing these videos. We also didn’t explore discourse on the app, such as comments and video replies.

We can’t say for sure what it’s like for people, especially young people or people with lived experience of trauma, to watch and interact with these videos. Exploring this should be a focus for future research.

Trigger warnings are important

None of this is to say that sharing stories, even traumatic ones, should never happen. In fact, we know support from others is essential for healing from trauma. This can be facilitated, among other avenues, through sharing stories on social media.

But to make this safer for everyone, TikTok should encourage trigger warnings, and creators should use them on videos where trauma is shared. This can give users the option to “opt out” and scroll on if they think they might not have the capacity to listen at that time.

For people consuming videos on TikTok and other platforms, it’s important to be wary of misinformation and think critically about the information they see, seeking further advice from other sources.

If you feel distressed by content you see on social media, seek support from a health-care professional.

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

Alix Woolard, Senior Research Fellow, The Kids Research Institute Australia

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

Coles is reducing its product range by at least 10%, a move that has sparked public backlash and renewed discussions about the role of supermarkets in the cost-of-living crisis.

In cutting the range of items on offer Coles is moving closer to Aldi and Costco’s strategy to grow exclusive brands and limit product range.

The goal is to boost profitability by reducing costs, increasing sales, and increasing control over the supply chain.

Coles is unlikely to cut traditional brands, especially those from companies with significant market power like Coca-Cola or Nestle. In a battle between giants, the status quo is likely to prevail.

Smaller suppliers are likely to bear the load as they struggle to renew contracts and face increased competition from home brands.

To fully understand the reasons behind this move and its impact on the cost of living, insights from psychology, finance, and supply chain management come in handy.

Why cut back on brands?

The Coles move is all about profitability.

Over the past decade, competition in the Australian supermarket sector has intensified. Coles’ market share declined from 31% to 25% between 2013 and 2023, while Woolworths’ share fell from 41% to 37%.

This shift reflects the rise of Aldi, which now holds approximately 10% of the market, and its strong position in the home brand space.

To boost profitability with a smaller customer base, Coles needs to find ways to enhance its earnings. This can be achieved by raising prices, cutting costs, or increasing the market share of its home brands.

Raising prices vs cutting costs

Raising prices is not a viable option, as consumers are already struggling with high food prices inflation and the rising cost-of-living. However, there is room to cut costs.

One approach is to squeeze suppliers, but again this is unlikely to be effective. The consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), is holding an inquiry into concerns that the supermarkets are using their market power to the disadvantage of their suppliers and consumers.

Additionally, as producers exit unprofitable businesses, supermarkets risk supply chain disruptions due to increased market concentration among surviving suppliers.

Another strategy is to reduce complexity. The more product variety there is, the more complicated and expensive it becomes to manage. Tasks such as stocking shelves, adjusting prices, maintaining inventory, managing delivery schedules, and disposing of expired products all contribute to higher costs.

Anna Croft, Coles’ operations and sustainability officer, explained the strategy when telling investors in November that 13 basic table salts could be cut to five.

Simplifying the product range can also boost sales. When faced with too many options, consumers can experience “choice overload”. A widely recognised study in psychology found that people are more likely to make a purchase when presented with a limited selection rather than an extensive array of choices.

Shifting to home brands

Simplifying the range will likely focus on items where Coles has a home brand. Home brands now account for 33.5% of Coles’ sales, with 6,000 products. About 1,100 were added over the past year.

This move is a response to competitors like Aldi and Costco. While Coles and Woolworths manage over 25,000 items in their stores, Aldi limits its offering to about 1,800 products.

Coles is focusing on its home brands to better compete with non-branded offerings from Aldi. In its report to the ACCC, the supermarket highlights its investment in expanding its own-brand range to provide more affordable prices, up to 40% cheaper than similar proprietary brands.

While consumers may have fewer choices, it is expected that they will benefit from better prices.

This shift towards home brands is not exclusive to Australia. In the United States, private label sales hit a record in 2023 across a range of items from beauty products to general merchandise. In the United Kingdom, home brand products now account for over half of supermarket sales.

Have we been here before?

Almost 10 years ago, Woolworths and Coles started a significant move to adjust their price positioning in response to the competition. Along with Metcash (IGA), they reduced product ranges in 2015–16 by 10% to 15% to simplify the weekly grocery shop for consumers.

At that time, the culling of products put suppliers under pressure (as now) while consumers were ambivalent: some wanted more brand variety and others preferred less.

As history repeats itself, it will be interesting to see if Woolworths and Metcash will follow the latest move from Coles and how customers, suppliers, and the ACCC will react this time.

Flavio Macau, Associate Dean - School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

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

On the vast expanse of the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia, two very different creatures live side by side – but not always peacefully.

One is the southern hairy-nosed wombat, a slow-moving nocturnal digger that loves its underground burrows. The other is the European rabbit: a small and speedy invader that has spread across the continent, often wreaking environmental havoc and creating its own networks of tunnels.

How do we know where these semi-subterranean creatures live, and how many there are? The answer is from the sky.

In new research published in Australian Mammalogy, we show a way to detect wombats and rabbits using satellites that take pictures of our planet from space. By studying high-resolution images from the likes of Google Earth and Bing Maps, we can spot the telltale signs of the burrows and warrens these creatures dig into the ground.

Why is it any of our business where wombats and rabbits live?

Knowing where wombats and rabbits live is important for conservation.

Wombats are unique Australian marsupials that need protection. Rabbits are an invasive species that often damage the land, eating too much vegetation and eroding soil.

Finding their warrens can help scientists and wildlife managers to understand where they live. This in turn helps to make better decisions about protecting native species and controlling pests.

How do you spot a warren?

Imagine looking down at the world from the window of an aeroplane. You might easily see rivers and roads, and even buildings.

But would you spot a hole in the ground? That’s the challenge we faced in our study of satellite images.

As it turns out, wombat warrens are relatively easy to spot. They are quite large and have clear trails leading in and out. The digging leaves mounds of lighter-coloured soil.

Rabbit warrens are trickier to find. They are smaller, lack trails, and can blend in with bare patches of dirt.

How well did we do?

By comparing satellite images with surveys conducted on the ground, we figured out we could accurately detect about 82% of wombat warrens from the photos. We weren’t quite as good at rabbit warrens: we could only spot 49%. Small rabbit warrens were particularly easy to miss.

One complicating issue was the fact that wombats and rabbits sometimes share the same burrow. Usually it’s the smaller, sneakier rabbits taking advantage of the large and sturdy tunnels dug by wombats.

This makes it even harder to figure out exactly who is living where. We could recognise shared warrens when we inspected them on the ground, but so far we can’t distinguish them from satellite photos.

What’s next?

Our research shows we can use satellites to map burrowing animal populations without ever setting foot in the outback. This saves time and money, and also reduces the the risk of disturbing wildlife while conducting research.

In the future, with higher-resolution satellite images and better software – using tools like machine learning – we may be able to detect and count burrows and warrens automatically. This could be a big change for wildlife conservation and pest control.

So next time you look up at the sky, remember that somewhere out there a satellite might be taking a picture of a sleepy wombat’s home – or a rabbit plotting its next move.

Natarsha McPherson, PhD Candidate in Spatial Ecology, University of Adelaide

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

Lithium-ion batteries are part of everyday life. They power small rechargeable devices such as mobile phones and laptops. They enable electric vehicles. And larger versions store excess renewable energy for later use, supporting the clean energy transition.

Australia produces more than 3,000 tonnes of lithium-ion battery waste a year. Managing this waste is a technical, economic and social challenge. Opportunities exist for recycling and creating a circular economy for batteries. But they come with risk.

That’s because lithium-ion batteries contain manufactured chemicals such as PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. The chemicals carry the lithium – along with electricity – through the battery. If released into the environment, they can linger for decades and likely longer. This is why they’ve been dubbed “forever chemicals”.

Recently, scientists identified a new type of PFAS known as bis-FASIs (short for bis-perfluoroalkyl sulfonimides) in lithium-ion batteries and in the environment. Bis-FASIs have since been detected in soils and waters worldwide. They are toxic – just one drop in an Olympic-size swimming pool can harm the nervous system of animals. Scientists don’t know much about possible effects on humans yet.

Bis-FASIs in lithium-ion batteries present a major obstacle to recycling or disposing of batteries safely. Fortunately, we may have come up with a way to fix this.

There’s value in our battery wastes

Currently, Australia only recycles about 10% of its battery waste. The rest is sent to landfill.

But landfill sites could leak eventually. That means disposal of battery waste in landfill may lead to soil and groundwater contamination.

We can’t throw away lithium-ion batteries in household rubbish because they can catch fire.

So once batteries reach the end of useful life, we must handle them in a way that protects the environment and human health.

What’s more, there’s real value in battery waste. Lithium-ion batteries contain lots of valuable metals that are worth recycling. Lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel are critical and finite metal resources that are in high demand. The recoverable metal value from one tonne of lithium-ion battery waste is between A$3,000 and $14,000.

What does this mean for recycling of batteries?

Battery recycling in Australia begins with collection, sorting, discharging and dismantling, before the metal is recovered.

Metal recovery can be done via mechanical, high-temperature, chemical or biological methods. But this may inadvertently release bis-FASI, threatening recycling workers and the environment.

Pyrometallurgy is the most common technique for recycling lithium-ion batteries. This involves incinerating the batteries to recover the metals. Bis-FASIs are incinerated at the same time.

Yet PFAS chemicals are stable and can withstand high temperatures. The exact temperature needed to destroy PFAS is the biggest unknown in lithium-ion battery recycling.

Determining this temperature was the focus of our research.

The solution is hot – very hot!

We teamed up with chemistry professor Anthony Rappé at Colorado State University in the United States. We wanted to work out the temperature at which bis-FASIs can be effectively incinerated.

But figuring this out is tricky, not only because of the danger of working with high temperatures.

The inside of incinerators is a hot mess. Molecules get torn apart. Some recombine to form larger molecules, and others interact with ashes produced during the burning process. This could produce toxic new substances, which then exit through a smokestack into the air outside.

To make matters worse, it’s not possible to measure all the substances that bis-FASIs break down into, because many of them are unknown.

To help, we applied the science of quantum mechanics and solved the problem on a computer without ever going into the lab. The computer can accurately simulate the behaviour of any molecules, including bis-FASIs.

We found that at 600°C, bis-FASI molecules start to separate into smaller fragments. But these fragments are still PFAS chemicals and could be more harmful than their parent chemicals.

As a consequence, the absence of bis-FASIs in stack exhaust is not enough to deem the process safe. Much higher temperatures of 1,000°C and above are needed to break down bis-FASIs completely into harmless products. This is likely to be much higher than temperatures currently used, although that varies between facilities.

Based on these findings, we built an innovative model that guides recyclers on how to destroy bis-FASIs during metal recovery by using sufficiently high temperatures.

How do we avoid future risks?

We are now collaborating with operators of high-temperature metal recovery and incineration plants to use our model to destroy PFAS in batteries.

Recycling plants will have to use much higher temperatures to avoid problematic fumes and this will require more energy and financial investment.

After our new guidance is implemented, we will test the recovered metals, solid residues, and exhausts to ensure they are free from PFAS.

While we can tackle the PFAS problem now, it remains an expensive undertaking. Metal recovery processes must be upgraded to safely destroy bis-FASIs. Ultimately, consumers are likely to foot the bill.

However, sending lithium-ion battery waste to landfill will damage the environment and be more expensive in the long run. Landfilling of bis-FASI-containing waste should therefore be avoided.

Clearly, the battery recycling rate must improve. This is where everyday people can help. In the future, manufacturers should avoid using forever chemicals in batteries altogether. Development of safer alternatives is a key focus of ongoing research into sustainable battery design.

Jens Blotevogel, Principal Research Scientist and Team Leader for Remediation Technologies, CSIRO and Naomi Boxall, Senior Research Scientist in circular economy, CSIRO

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

If you are a parent of a school student, you may have received a form seeking permission to use your child’s image on school social media accounts.

It’s very common for schools to share photos of smiling students on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. This may be to celebrate the start of term, student achievements, or performances and events at the school.

Schools need permission from parents to publish or disclose students’ personal information, including photos and videos, on any online platform.

But research suggests families can lack support and information to provide fully informed consent.

Why do schools post photos online?

Our recent study showed one of main reasons schools post on social media is they believe it is what parents want. This is part of marketing their school as a positive place to learn.

But some parents take a more cautious approach to social media and don’t necessarily want photos of their children made public online.

There is significant community concern about children’s online privacy and their digital footprint or the information trail about them.

Last month, the Australian Federal Police warned parents about sharing images of their children online, especially back-to-school photos. It recommended parents blur or obscure the logo of the child’s school. Police also noted how background features can identify a school or child’s location.

The AFP has seen non-explicit pictures of children and young people become the target of highly sexualised and inappropriate comments or role play.

The risks also go beyond other people identifying your child online. Photos of children shared online can be used to train AI models or create deepfakes that are increasingly being used in cases of cyber bullying and cyber abuse.

What are the rules in Australia?

The Australian Privacy Act and related Australian Privacy Principles, say consent to share personal information should be current, clearly explained and specific.

This is why schools need to ask parents at the start of each year, but how they do this will depend on the state education department or individual school.

Here are three questions to consider before you sign.

1. What is the school asking you for?

While approaches vary, it is common for schools to ask for several types of permission in one bundle.

For example, they may ask if they can use photos and videos of your child in the school newsletter, school website, annual report, online learning platforms, traditional news media as well as social media.

So the locations where your child’s information and photo may be shared are quite different in terms of privacy and your child’s digital footprint.

For example, this could involve a photo of your child doing a class activity shared on a secure education app, or a video of your child on a public Facebook page.

Parents have the right to consent and/or decline the use of their children’s information for specific purposes. If you can’t do this on the form, you can contact the school.

2. What does the school post?

Before providing or declining consent, you may want to take a closer look at the kinds of posts the school shares. This includes:

• the quantity of information shared (number of photos or videos shared, and how often)

• strategies used to protect children’s privacy (no names or locations, or photos in which children are not clearly identifiable or faces are obscured)

• the purpose of the posts (can you see the value and benefit of sharing information?).

Think about whether the school’s approach fits with your family’s approach to social media and what you share.

3. How does your child feel?

Research shows children as young as eight are developing an understanding of the risks of sharing personal information online.

Understanding how your child feels about their school’s social media is important in making an informed decision about consent. It also helps teach them about making decisions about their digital footprint.

You could ask your child:

• are they aware of the school social media sites?

• how does having their photo taken, or not, at school make them feel?

• are they asked when their photo is taken, and are they told where it will be used or shared?

These forms can seem routine or presented as if it’s not a big deal. But if you have any questions or concerns you should talk to your school. Schools can help you with more information and can also forward feedback to education departments. This is particularly important as we navigate the changing nature of social media and the potential impacts on children.

Karley Beckman, Senior Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Learning, University of Wollongong and Tiffani Apps, Senior Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Learning, University of Wollongong

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

Late last year, ChatGPT was used by a Victorian child protection worker to draft documents. In a glaring error, ChatGPT referred to a “doll” used for sexual purposes as an “age-appropriate toy”. Following this, the Victorian information commissioner banned the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in child protection.

Unfortunately, many harmful AI systems will not garner such public visibility. It’s crucial that people who use social services – such as employment, homelessness or domestic violence services – are aware they may be subject to AI. Additionally, service providers should be well informed about how to use AI safely.

Fortunately, emerging regulations and tools, such as our trauma-informed AI toolkit, can help to reduce AI harm.

How do social services use AI?

AI has captured global attention with promises of better service delivery. In a strained social services sector, AI promises to reduce backlogs, lower administrative burdens and allocate resources more effectively while enhancing services. It’s no surprise a range of social service providers are using AI in various ways.

Chatbots simulate human conversation with the use of voice, text or images. These programs are increasingly used for a range of tasks. For instance, they can provide mental health support or offer employment advice. They can also speed up data processing or help quickly create reports.

However, chatbots can easily produce harmful or inaccurate responses. For instance, the United States National Eating Disorders Association deployed the chatbot Tessa to support clients experiencing eating disorders. But it was quickly pulled offline when advocates flagged Tessa was providing harmful weight loss advice.

Recommender systems use AI to make personalised suggestions or options. These could include targeting job or rental ads, or educational material based on data available to service providers.

But recommender systems can be discriminatory, such as when LinkedIn showed more job ads to men than women. They can also reinforce existing anxieties. For instance, pregnant women have been recommended alarming pregnancy videos on social media.

Recognition systems classify data such as images or text to compare one dataset to another. These systems can complete many tasks, such as face matching to verify identity or transcribing voice to text.

Such systems can raise surveillance, privacy, inaccuracy and discrimination concerns. A homeless shelter in Canada stopped using facial recognition cameras because they risked privacy breaches – it’s difficult to obtain informed consent from mentally unwell or intoxicated people using the shelter.

Risk-assessment systems use AI to predict the likelihood of a specific outcome occurring. Many systems have been used to calculate the risk of child abuse, long-term unemployment, or tax and welfare fraud.

Often data used in these systems can recreate societal inequalities, causing harm to already-marginalised peoples. In one such case, a tool in the US used for identifying risk of child mistreatment unfairly targeted poor, black and biracial families and families with disabilities.

A Dutch risk assessment tool seeking to identify childcare benefits fraud was shut down for being racist, while an AI system in France faces similar accusations.

The need for a trauma-informed approach

Concerningly, our research shows using AI in social services can cause or perpetuate trauma for the people who use the services.

The American Psychological Association defines trauma as an emotional response to a range of events, such as accidents, abuse or the death of a loved one. Broadly understood, trauma can be experienced at an individual or group level and be passed down through generations. Trauma experienced by First Nations people in Australia as a result of colonisation is an example of group trauma.

Between 57% and 75% of Australians experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime.

Many social service providers have long adopted a trauma-informed approach. It prioritises trust, safety, choice, empowerment, transparency, and cultural, historical and gender-based considerations. A trauma-informed service provider understands the impact of trauma and recognises signs of trauma in users.

Service providers should be wary of abandoning these core principles despite the allure of the often hyped capabilities of AI.

Can social services use AI responsibly?

To reduce the risk of causing or perpetuating trauma, social service providers should carefully evaluate any AI system before using it.

For AI systems already in place, evaluation can help monitor their impact and ensure they are operating safely.

We have developed a trauma-informed AI assessment toolkit that helps service providers to assess the safety of their planned or current use of AI. The toolkit is based on the principles of trauma-informed care, case studies of AI harms, and design workshops with service providers. An online version of the toolkit is about to be piloted within organisations.

By posing a series of questions, the toolkit enables service providers to consider whether risks outweigh the benefits. For instance, is the AI system co-designed with users? Can users opt out of being subject to the AI system?

It guides service providers through a series of practical considerations to enhance the safe use of AI.

Social services do not have to avoid AI altogether. But social service providers and users should be aware of the risks of harm from AI – so they can intentionally shape AI for good.

Suvradip Maitra, PhD Student, Australian National University; Lyndal Sleep, Senior lecturer, Queensland Centre for Domestic and Family Violence Research, CQUniversity Australia; Paul Henman, Professor, Digital Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Queensland, and Suzanna Fay, Associate Professor in Criminology, The University of Queensland

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

Last week, Google quietly abandoned a long-standing commitment to not use artificial intelligence (AI) technology in weapons or surveillance. In an update to its AI principles, which were first published in 2018, the tech giant removed statements promising not to pursue:

• technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm
• weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people
• technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms
• technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.

The update came after United States President Donald Trump revoked former President Joe Biden’s executive order aimed at promoting safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of AI.

The Google decision follows a recent trend of big tech entering the national security arena and accommodating more military applications of AI. So why is this happening now? And what will be the impact of more military use of AI?

The growing trend of militarised AI

In September, senior officials from the Biden government met with bosses of leading AI companies, such as OpenAI, to discuss AI development. The government then announced a taskforce to coordinate the development of data centres, while weighing economic, national security and environmental goals.

The following month, the Biden government published a memo that in part dealt with “harnessing AI to fulfil national security objectives”.

Big tech companies quickly heeded the message.

In November 2024, tech giant Meta announced it would make its “Llama” AI models available to government agencies and private companies involved in defence and national security.

This was despite Meta’s own policy which prohibits the use of Llama for “[m]ilitary, warfare, nuclear industries or applications”.

Around the same time, AI company Anthropic also announced it was teaming up with data analytics firm Palantir and Amazon Web Services to provide US intelligence and defence agencies access to its AI models.

The following month, OpenAI announced it had partnered with defence startup Anduril Industries to develop AI for the US Department of Defence.

The companies claim they will combine OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1 models with Anduril’s systems and software to improve US military’s defences against drone attacks.

Defending national security

The three companies defended the changes to their policies on the basis of US national security interests.

Take Google. In a blog post published earlier this month, the company cited global AI competition, complex geopolitical landscapes and national security interests as reasons for changing its AI principles.

In October 2022, the US issued export controls restricting China’s access to particular kinds of high-end computer chips used for AI research. In response, China issued their own export control measures on high-tech metals, which are crucial for the AI chip industry.

The tensions from this trade war escalated in recent weeks thanks to the release of highly efficient AI models by Chinese tech company DeepSeek. DeepSeek purchased 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips prior to the US export control measures and allegedly used these to develop their AI models.

It has not been made clear how the militarisation of commercial AI would protect US national interests. But there are clear indications tensions with the US’s biggest geopolitical rival, China, are influencing the decisions being made.

A large toll on human life

What is already clear is that the use of AI in military contexts has a demonstrated toll on human life.

For example, in the war in Gaza, the Israeli military has been relying heavily on advanced AI tools. These tools require huge volumes of data and greater computing and storage services, which is being provided by Microsoft and Google. These AI tools are used to identify potential targets but are often inaccurate.

Israeli soldiers have said these inaccuracies have accelerated the death toll in the war, which is now more than 61,000, according to authorities in Gaza.

Google removing the “harm” clause from their AI principles contravenes the international law on human rights. This identifies “security of person” as a key measure.

It is concerning to consider why a commercial tech company would need to remove a clause around harm.

Avoiding the risks of AI-enabled warfare

In its updated principles, Google does say its products will still align with “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights”.

Despite this, Human Rights Watch has criticised the removal of the more explicit statements regarding weapons development in the original principles.

The organisation also points out that Google has not explained exactly how its products will align with human rights.

This is something Joe Biden’s revoked executive order about AI was also concerned with.

Biden’s initiative wasn’t perfect, but it was a step towards establishing guardrails for responsible development and use of AI technologies.

Such guardrails are needed now more than ever as big tech becomes more enmeshed with military organisations – and the risk that come with AI-enabled warfare and the breach of human rights increases.

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.

Year 12 is arguably the most important year of school. It is full of exams, milestones and decisions.

It is both the culmination of formal learning and the gateway to what lies beyond. It is an end and beginning all in one.

Unsurprisingly, many Year 12s find it to be a demanding and stressful time. So, what mindsets and habits can you set up now to give yourself the stamina and support you need for the year ahead?

Put your exams in context

The academic focus of Year 12 is an obvious source of stress for many students. While this is natural, there are many things you can do to put all the assignments and assessments in context.

Remember Year 12 should always be framed as preparing students for life after school. It is about working out where you want to go – be it further study or work – and then keeping open as many possible pathways to get you there.

While students might have a particular career goal in mind, there are always many options and they don’t all hinge entirely on your ATAR.

Know what the entrance requirements are for your preferred option (such as getting into a particular course at university), but also research other pathways if you don’t get your desired grades or preferences.

There are always alternative ways into your dream course or field of study. A TAFE diploma can unlock entrance to a bachelor’s degree and a bachelor of arts can open entry into postgraduate law. Many universities also offer early entry schemes that don’t rely on Year 12 grades or ATAR rankings.

Most of all, try to avoid thinking there is only one right path. It is about finding the right path for you at this point in time.

Don’t study all the time

While study is going to play a large role this year, it is important to make time for your mental, physical and emotional wellbeing. This will help give you stamina to face your study workload and the other demands of the year.

For example, playing sport or making art can help to enhance cognition, reduce stress and improve self-confidence.

Work out a schedule that allows time for study, rest and the things you enjoy. This could also include catch-ups with friends, walking your dog or cooking dinner with your family.

Remember that it is recommended teenagers get 8-10 hours of sleep per day. If you don’t get enough sleep, it makes it harder to think, learn and regulate your emotions.

And while it might be unpopular, it is also important to avoid excessive screen time. This can also help your sleep and decrease stress.

Create habits that can make you less reactive to technology. For example, put your phone on “do not disturb” mode when you are studying, and try to avoid screens at least an hour before bed.

You’re not alone

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

This may be from teachers or school guidance officers, or it may be from parents, older siblings or friends. Reach out to trusted people early if you are worried or anxious, and support your fellow Year 12s to do the same.

Look for signs in yourself and others that could suggest at-risk mental health.

This might be difficulty concentrating, inability to sleep or significant changes in mood and behaviour. Seeking help early can help avoid these issues escalating.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.

Steven Lewis, Associate Professor of Comparative Education, Australian Catholic University

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

Remember cassettes? If you’re old enough, you might remember dropping one into a player, only to have it screech at you when you pressed “play”. We’ve fixed that problem. But why would we bother?

Before the iPod came along, people recorded their favourite tunes straight from the radio. Some of us made home recordings with our sibling and grandparents – precious childhood snippets.

And a few of us even have recordings from that time we travelled to a village in Vanuatu, some 40 years ago, and heard the locals performing in a language that no longer exists.

In the field of linguistics, such recordings are beyond priceless – yet often out of reach, due to the degradation of old cassettes over time. With a new tool, we are able to repair those tapes, and in doing so can recover the stories, songs and memories they hold.

A digital humanities telescope

Our digital archive, PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) contains thousands of hours of audio – mainly from musicological or linguistic fieldwork. This audio represents some 1,360 languages, with a major focus on languages of the Pacific and Papua New Guinea.

The PARADISEC research project was started in 2003 as a collaboration between the universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and the Australian National University.

Like a humanities telescope, PARADISEC allows us to learn more about the language diversity around us, as we explained in a 2016 Conversation article.

Lubing the screech

While many of the tapes we get are in good condition and can be readily played and digitised, others need special care, and the removal of mould and dirt.

We work with colleagues at agencies such as the Solomon Islands National Museum, for whom we recently repaired a set of cassettes that were previously unplayable and just screeched. We’ll be taking those cassettes, now repaired and digitised, back to Honiara in February and expect to pick up more for further treatment.

Screeching happens when a tape is dried out and can’t move through the mechanism easily. The screeching covers the audio signal we want to capture.

In 2019, my colleague Sam King built (with the help of his colleague Doug Smith) a cassette-lubricating machine while working at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This machine – likely the first of its kind in Australia – allowed us to play many previously unplayable tapes.

Last year, Sam built two versions of an updated machine called the LM-3032 Tape Restorator for PARADISEC, improving on the previous model. Between hand building some parts, 3D printing others and writing code for the controllers, it took him more than a year.

Preserving culture and heritage

The LM-3032 Tape Restorator works by applying cyclomethicone (a silicone-based solvent used in cosmetics) to the length of a tape. This leaves behind an extremely thin film of lubrication that allows smoother playback, making digitisation possible. See more details here.

Tests have shown this process has no negative long-term effects on the tape. In fact, tapes treated with this method five years ago still play without issues.

This technological wizardry allows us to salvage precious analogue recordings before it’s too late. For many languages, these may be the only known recordings – stored on a single cassette, in a single location, and virtually inaccessible. Some of the primary research records digitised by PARADISEC have survived long periods of neglect in offices, garages and attics.

The audio below is from a tape that was kept at Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley for 40 years. It features beautiful singing in the local Walmajarri language, with guitar accompaniment. The first seven seconds are from the untreated tape, while the rest is from the treated version.

Our experience has shown community members truly value finding records in their own languages, and we’re committed to making this process easier for them.

Here’s one testimonial from E’ava Geita, Papua New Guinea’s current acting Solicitor General. In 2015, Geita was overjoyed to hear digitised records capturing PNG’s Koita language:

If only you witnessed and captured the reaction in me going through the recordings at home! It is quite an amazing experience! From feeling of awe to emotion to deep excitement! The feeling of knowing that your language has been documented or recorded in a structured way, kept safely somewhere in the world, hearing it spoken 50–60 years ago and by some people you haven’t seen but whose names you only hear in history is quite incredible. It is most heartwarming to know that it is possible to sustain the life of my language. Thank you once again for the opportunity to listen to the records.

Acknowlegement: I’d like to thank Sam King for the technical information provided in this article.

Nick Thieberger, Associate Professor in Linguistics and a Chief Investigator in the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, The University of Melbourne

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

Late last week, American company Boom Supersonic flew faster than the speed of sound with its XB-1 supersonic demonstrator aircraft. It’s now the first piloted non-military aircraft to break the sound barrier since the Concorde was retired from service in 2003.

It’s the first step in Boom’s ambitious goal to have supersonic airliners carry passengers by 2029.

But what exactly is supersonic travel? There are good reasons why it’s not more common, despite the hype.

What is supersonic flight?

The Mach number is defined as a plane’s speed divided by the speed that sound waves move through the air. To “break the sound barrier” means to fly faster than the speed of sound, with Mach numbers greater than 1.

The Mach number is an important ratio: as a plane flies, it disturbs the air in front of it. These disturbances move at the speed of sound. In supersonic flight these disturbances combine to form shock waves around the vehicle.

When people say you can see a fighter jet before you hear it, they’re referring to supersonic flight: fighter jets can travel at around Mach 2.

The sound from the fighter jet is trapped inside its shock wave; until the shock wave moves to your position on the ground, you won’t hear the plane.

The allure of supersonic travel

For efficiency reasons, most passenger jets cruise slightly slower than the speed of sound, at around Mach 0.8 (this is subsonic flight).

Boom plans to build an airliner called Overture that can fly at Mach 1.7. Flying supersonically can drastically decrease flight times. The company claims a trip from New York to Rome on Overture could take just four hours and 40 minutes, instead of eight hours.

Boom isn’t the only company working on this lofty goal. American firm Spike Aerospace is also developing a supersonic business jet, with the tagline “delivering the world in half the time”.

This is the value proposition of supersonic passenger travel.

In limited ways, it did already exist in the 20th century. However, due to timing, bad luck and the laws of physics, it didn’t continue.

Remember the Concorde?

Designs for supersonic airliners began in the mid-20th century, and by the 1970s we had supersonic passenger flight.

There was the little-known Russian Tupolev-144 and Concorde, a Franco-British supersonic airliner operated by British Airways and Air France from 1976 to 2003.

Concorde had a capacity of up to 128 passengers and cruised at Mach 2. It regularly travelled from London to New York in around three hours. The flights were expensive, mainly shuttling business people and the rich and famous.

Why supersonic passenger flight didn’t take off

Concorde was designed in the 1960s when it seemed like supersonic passenger transport was going to be the next big thing.

Instead, the Boeing 747 entered commercial service in 1970. Cheap, large and efficient airliners like it blew Concorde out of the water.

Designed to cruise efficiently at supersonic speeds, Concorde was extremely fuel inefficient when taking off and accelerating. Concorde’s expensive, “gas guzzling” nature was a complaint levelled against it for most of its lifetime.

A catastrophic 1973 Paris air show crash of the competing Russian airliner, Tupolev Tu-144, also shifted public perception on supersonic flight safety at a time when many airlines were considering whether or not to purchase Concordes.

Only 20 Concordes were manufactured out of the planned 100. It is still disputed today whether Concorde ever made money for the airlines who operated it.

Noise is a real problem for supersonic flight

Remember the fighter jets? When a plane travels supersonically, its shock waves propagate to the ground, causing loud disturbances called sonic booms. In extreme cases they can shatter windows and damage buildings.

In the early 1970s, sonic boom concerns led the United States government to ban supersonic passenger flight over land in the US. This hurt the Concorde’s potential market, hence its only two regular routes were trans-Atlantic flights principally over the water.

The Concorde was also a very loud plane at take off, since it needed a lot of thrust to leave the ground.

The future of supersonic travel

A future for supersonic travel relies on solving some or all of the issues Concorde faced.

NASA and Lockheed Martin’s Quesst project aims to show sonic boom can be dissipated to manageable levels. They plan to fly their X-59 supersonic aircraft over US cities and gauge responses from citizens.

Quesst aims to use the geometry of the X-59, with a long elongated nose, to dissipate sonic booms to a weak “thump”, hopefully allowing supersonic airliners to travel over land in the future.

Spike Aerospace’s Spike S-512 Diplomat concept also aims to be a “quiet” supersonic aircraft with a less disruptive sonic boom.

Can Boom surpass Concorde?

Boom Supersonic don’t plan to fly supersonically over land. Their plan is to fly over land at Mach 0.94, which they claim will allow 20% faster overland travel than standard passenger airliners, even subsonically.

They also claim the design of their engines will ensure Overture is no louder than modern subsonic airliners when it takes off.

In terms of gas guzzling, they plan to use up to 100% sustainable aviation fuel to reduce emissions and their carbon footprint.

Concorde was made of aluminium using design tools available in the 1960s. Modern design methods and modern aerospace materials such as titanium and carbon fibre should also allow Overture and similar craft to weigh much less than Concorde, improving efficiency.

While Boom are currently receiving a lot of interest, with orders from many airlines, Concorde did have similar commitment before it become available. Most of it didn’t eventuate.

Additionally, Concorde was the product of an analogue era when the idea of flying to London or New York for the day for an important business meeting seemed like a necessary thing. In a world of remote work and video meetings, is there still a need for a supersonic airliner in the 2020s?

For now, supersonic airliners like Overture are likely to remain in the realm of the rich and famous, like Concorde did. But with modern technological advances, it will be interesting to see whether supersonic passenger travel once again becomes reality – or even goes mainstream. Only time will tell.

Chris James, UQ Amplify Senior Lecturer, Centre for Hypersonics, School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, The University of Queensland

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

Picture writing the numbers 1 to 5 in a horizontal line, from smallest to largest. Where did you put 1? If you placed 1 on the left and 5 on the right, you share this preference with most humans.

Humans are not alone in this preference. Some other primates, and even some birds, also order small-to-large quantities from left to right. Although, some animals do prefer to order quantities from right to left.

This is known as the mental number line, and it shows how brains typically organise information. But why do our brains do this?

To investigate how and why brains order numbers, it’s sometimes useful to step back in time. How did a common ancestor of humans and insects order information? To find out, we can compare the results of humans and bees: we last shared a common ancestor more than 600 million years ago.

Two recent studies on bees have revealed a lot about how tiny brains order numbers.

One study, conducted by a team in Europe, showed that bees prefer to order lower numbers on the left and higher numbers on the right, just like many humans. Our new study, led by Jung-Chun (Zaza) Kuo and her supervisory team, has explored how numbers and space interact in the bee brain.

‘Number’ and ‘space’

As humans, we link the concepts of “space” and “number”. This means there is a logic to how we order numbers (typically from left to right in ascending order: 1, 2, 3, 4 … and so on).

Studies have shown humans may also have a vertical – bottom to top – preference when processing numerical information efficiently.

There may also be educational influences, especially due to language and writing direction. Some languages, like English, write from left to right. Others, such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew or Arabic, can be written in other directions. Writing direction can influence how we prefer to order numbers.

Meanwhile, honeybees are efficient learners and show evidence of being tiny mathematicians. In past research, they have been shown to add and subtract, understand the concept of zero, use symbols to represent numbers, order quantities, categorise numbers by odd or even, and show evidence of linking numbers to spatial information like size.

The competency bees show around numbers makes them an ideal animal to look at how number and space interact in a miniature brain.

How did we test bees in our study?

We gave freely flying bees sugar water for visiting an image of three circles printed on a card: this was our “reference number”. The card was hung in the centre of a large circular screen, with a drop of sugar water on a platform underneath it.

As the bees repeatedly visited the reference number, they learned an association between the number three, the centre of the circular screen, and a reward. In between visits, bees took the sugar water back to their hive to be made into honey.

After bees had learned to associate number (three) and space (middle) with a reward, we tested them on numbers higher and lower than three, to see if they had linked space and number.

We showed bees images of a higher number (four circles) and a lower number (two circles). Two identical images of four shapes were shown simultaneously on the left and right sides of the screen. If bees preferred the larger number on the right, they would fly to the quantity of four presented on the right more than when four was presented on the left.

We did the same for the smaller number of two shapes. If bees preferred four circles on the right and two circles on the left, that would reveal they have a left-to-right mental number line, like humans.

We also tested if bees had a preference to order numbers upwards or downwards, and found no preference for linking space and number vertically. However, bees did prefer options that were towards the bottom of the circular screen.

So, how does the bee mental number line work?

The study by the European team found bees have a consistent left-to-right mental number line. This means they prefer to order lower numbers on the left and higher numbers on the right.

Our study has confirmed bees prefer to order higher numbers on the right. But we also found bees preferred to visit the right side of the screen. The preference of bees to order numbers from left-to-right and to visit the right side of the circular screen interacted in an intriguing way.

The bees in our study showed a preference for higher numbers on the right, but not for lower numbers on the left. This could be because the right-side bias we observed cancelled out the preference for smaller numbers on the left.

Taken together, the findings of both studies confirm that bees do possess a left-to-right mental number line and also that they have a bias towards the right side of their visual space.

Our team suggests such biases – for example, how most humans are right-handed – may be an important part of how brains make sense of ordering information in the world.

The birds and the bees (and the apes)

By looking at the behaviours of animals, we can sometimes learn more about ourselves.

These two recent studies on bees show there is a complex interaction between ordering numbers and how spatial relationships are processed by an insect brain.

We now know that the preference to order numbers from left to right exists in several very different animal groups: insects, birds and apes. Perhaps evolution has landed on this preference as an advantageous way to process complex information.

Scarlett Howard, Lecturer, School of Biological Sciences, Monash University and Adrian Dyer, Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, Monash University

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

We are in a rapidly changing visual culture where it is increasingly inadequate to take images at face value.

There is an ever-increasing prevalence of image manipulation and AI imagery. And in the attention economy, our attention has become a precious, sought-after resource. Images participate in this redirection of our attention with an endless production line of new, stimulating content to maximise user engagement.

In this environment, there is an increasing demand to prioritise visual literacy with the same rigour as we do with writing and reading.

We need to look more closely at images – to practise slow looking.

What is it you’re looking at?

The act of slow looking involves taking a pause and thoroughly describing what you see.

Often, we jump to the image’s meaning by identifying its contents. But it is important to discern what the image actually “looks like” and how this influences its reading.

The aim of looking slowly is not just to verify what is real, fake or AI. After all, there will become a time when it is too difficult and time-consuming for the average person to determine every AI-generated image without a watermark or label.

While the ability to detect whether something is AI is one important skill, this should not be the only reason to practise slow looking. To only determine if it is fake or real can ignore what an AI image can also tell us about our cultural climate.

In December, Madonna shared a deepfake of her embracing the Pope from digital artist RickDick.

Satirical images of the pope have a long history. As early as the 16th century, artists depicted the head of the Catholic Church alongside the profane as a means of critique and provocation.

RickDick’s deepfakes, in their eerie sense of realness, prove a new means to continue to satirise and provoke viewers in the digital age. We can deduce on close inspection that these images of Madonna and the Pope are not real photographs, but we can look even further to also discern what nevertheless gives these AI images their potency.

Fake or not, the lifelike, intimate embrace of the two icons probes an old but ongoing friction between perceived acts of blasphemy in pop culture and the sacred authority of the church.

The act of slow looking develops visual literacy. It examines why certain images go viral, why some move us above others and what they say about our reality, values or beliefs.

Beginning to look slowly

To begin this practice, imagine you are trying to describe an image to a friend who cannot see it. What’s happening in the image? What is its scale? What colours are used? How is it made? Where and how are you viewing it – on your phone, a billboard or poster?

Adopt a questioning stance to spot possible biases or blind spots – your own, or of the creator of the image. What is possibly missing from the image? Whose perspective is it or isn’t it showing?

This process can be significantly enhanced through using your hands: draw or paint what you see. It doesn’t need to be expensive or time-consuming. Nor do you need to be “good” at it. Drawing on a scrap piece of paper with an old ballpoint pen you have on your desk for even just a few minutes can connect the mind and body into a deep awareness of your visual field.

Pick anything to draw from your immediate surroundings or screens. This is all about the process: it is not the goal to have a finished artwork.

Key details that weren’t apparent before will emerge through this creative practice and help you analyse how an image works, why it is or isn’t engaging and what are its multiple possible meanings.

Slowing down

That we should look more slowly in our fast-paced, oversaturated visual culture is not a new concept, especially in the art community.

Numerous galleries such as London’s Tate Gallery, the National Gallery of Australia , and most recently Ipswich Art Gallery’s 2024 Arriving Slowly exhibition host “slow looking” events to initiate this practice.

These events often take the form of a guided tour and provide prompts to build the viewer’s analytical skills, with the additional benefit of building a communal engagement to look slowly together.

We are all creators and consumers of images. It is important for all of us to reflect on where our attention is being directed, and why, in the constant flood of images.

We have a shared responsibility in how we examine images. Now, more than ever, our visual literacy would benefit from creative practices to slow us down. At both individual and collective levels, we should prioritise looking intently at how our images remember the past, define our present, and envision the future.

Sienna van Rossum, PhD Candidate, Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University

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

As students and teachers prepare to go on holidays, there’s a disagreement raging over a new school funding deal for 2025.

Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria have all refused to sign up to the Albanese government’s offer for the next round of funding. This offer would see the federal government contribute 22.5% towards government school funding, up from 20%. But these state governments think it should be 25% instead.

As the disagreement rolls into next year, many Australians may not realise the federal government hasn’t always contributed to school funding.

The federal government has only been funding schools for 60 years. And it would not have happened if not for a Soviet satellite, an Australian prime minister and some science labs.

Schools have historically been funded by the states

Before 1964, the federal government resisted involvement in school education.

Legislation between 1872 and 1895 made colonial and then state governments responsible for government schools. Government funding for non-government schools was abolished as a result. So all independent schools, including Catholic parish schools, had to rely on fees and philanthropy.

But this all changed during the 1963 federal election campaign and the subsequent States Grants Act of 1964.

Enter the space race

In 1957 something dramatic happened.

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik. The then Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies called it a “spectacular act of technology and propaganda”. But others bluntly argued it signalled the failure of the West to keep up with science education. As American physicist George Henry Stine reportedly said: “Unless the US catches up fast we’re dead”.

Fortunately, Menzies had already commissioned Sir Keith Murray from the United Kingdom to review the state of Australia’s universities in 1956.

The Murray report, tabled a month before Sputnik, warned of weaknesses in Australian science education.

In a foreshadowing of concerns about students’ STEM skills today, the Murray report showed the number of students studying physics and maths was low. First year failure rates in university science courses were high because the students were not properly prepared at school. Science teachers were insufficiently trained. The curriculum was outdated and facilities and equipment were either inadequate or nonexistent.

In other words, in the age of Sputnik, science education was not good enough.

This was especially the case in girls’ schools (again echoed in today’s concerns about a gender gap in science achievement). Girls usually studied biology if they studied science at all, as science was seen as “better suited to boys”. The number of women who became science teachers was very small and there was little financial incentive to do so.

Schools had no labs to teach science

By far one of the greatest problems for Australia was the lack of suitable laboratories in schools to teach science.

The problem was so acute, headmaster R.L. Robson (from elite Sydney boys school Shore) and CSR chair F.E. Trigg established The Industrial Fund, to raise money to build science laboratories in “schools of standing”. The fund successfully raised £623,000 to support 37 projects in large private boys’ schools between 1958 and 1964. No girls’ schools were funded.

Menzies was well aware of The Industrial Fund because he was regularly invited to open the new buildings.

So, not only did Menzies understand the importance of science education for national defence in a post-Sputnik world, he was aware of Australian education failings from the Murray report. He was also reminded of a way to fix this, every time he opened a new science laboratory.

The 1963 election

Then a domestic political opportunity presented itself.

In 1963, the federal executive of the Labor Party reversed a NSW State Labor Party decision to support government aid for science to non-government schools. This gave Menzies a unique and timely electoral window to differentiate his party.

In the election campaign of 1963 Menzies proposed to build science laboratories in high schools “without discrimination”.

Historians have long argued Menzies’ policy shift was all about courting the Catholic vote in the tight 1963 election (which he ultimately won).

But the States Grants Act also went beyond Catholic schools. Students benefited regardless of whether they attended a state school or not and whether they were boys or girls. In the end, more than 500 schools either received assistance to build a lab or were recommended to receive it.

From labs to libraries and beyond

Commonwealth assistance to schools expanded rapidly in the late 1960s.

In 1968, the federal government began a grants program for school libraries. Per capita grants were introduced for private schools in 1969 and for public schools from 1972.

What had begun as a specific scheme to improve science education grew into an ongoing commitment to support school education in general.

As today’s school funding wars continue into 2025, it is worth remembering the unusual history behind the federal government’s involvement. And how for some, it is not a natural funding source for the school system.

Meanwhile, increasing students’ skills and engagement with science has been a concern in Australia for more than six decades.

Jennifer Clark, Adjunct Professor of History, University of Adelaide

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

The nave of Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire is, until February 26 2025, home to three monumental ambassadors from the sea, sculpted by artist Tessa Campbell Fraser.

In Campbell Fraser’s immersive art installation, three sculpted sperm whales (the largest of the toothed whales), hang from the cathedral ceiling. Toothed whales have teeth instead of the keratinous baleen that blue whales and others use to feed on tiny animals, such as krill. Sperm whales, which feed mainly on squid, are the largest predators alive today.

Their ecology is strange, but impressive. They are socially sophisticated, massive-brained, far-wandering, deep-diving and loud. Sperm whale clicks are the loudest biologically produced sound ever recorded.

Whales use these strange vocalisations to echolocate as they hunt for prey and to communicate to each other. In this installation, Campbell Fraser has creatively employed sperm whale clicks to vibrate paint on the banners that hang alongside the whales in the cathedral, serving as a visual representation of sperm whale “codas”. These repetitive patterns of clicks, lasting a few seconds, have intrigued researchers since they were first recorded off North Carolina, US, in the 1950s.

We now know that groups of sperm whales are organised into “vocal clans” based on unique coda repertoires. These whale call signatures have probably been learned culturally, but scientists are yet to understand what they mean.

While carrying out her research, Campbell Fraser referenced a multidisciplinary research collaboration that’s seeking to translate whale calls using artificial intelligence. Already, that project has discovered that sperm whale codas are far more complex than previously thought.

The three whale sculptures (which are between three and five metres long) are made, in part, from “ghost gear” – this is abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing gear, collected at sea by British charity Ghost Fishing UK. Floating ghost gear, which includes fishing nets, can kill or entangle marine life such as whales.

At the opening of the exhibition, Campbell Fraser recounted reports of stranded sperm whales whose stomachs were filled with plastic debris. One sperm whale that was found dead in Pas-de-Calais, France, had 25kg of debris, including nets and rope, in its stomach.

Despite this lethal backstory, Campbell Fraser’s method of construction gives the whales an ephemerality and lightness. This seems at odds with their mass in real life, for sperm whales can weigh 45 tonnes, but it is apt considering they are nearly weightless in water. This has allowed baleen whales to evolve such massive bodies. Blue whales are the largest animals to have ever lived, despite feeding almost exclusively on tiny krill.

Using netting in these sculptures represents, on one level, the increasing effects of humans on the ocean and whales. On another level, it hints at the long entanglement between human history and whales. Our spiritual, cultural and intellectual links with whales are represented through rich intersections of art and science.

One famous literary example is the 1851 novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, which artfully weaved descriptions of whale biology with the human story of pre-industrial whaling. This theme is also explored by our colleague Philip Hoare in his book Leviathan (2009).

Unfortunately, people have negative effects on the oceans. The consequences of pollution, overfishing and climate change are widespread and increasing. Even in the furthest corners of the sea, whales may encounter humans or be affected by our influence, through climate change, noise and plastic pollution.

Our research has shown how whale foraging areas in the remote western Antarctic peninsula overlap with an increasing fishery for Antarctic krill which now requires urgent and careful management to ensure its sustainability for people and whales.

Through an unprecedented compilation of over 1,000 tracks from eight whale species globally, we have produced a world-first map of “whale superhighways” – the blue corridors whales use as they migrate across oceans. This map also highlights how these extensive migrations expose whales to a mosaic of threats at various scales. As a result, protecting whales requires coordinated effort at local and global scales.

The art of acoustics

Of course, scale is a key consideration in the design of cathedrals. Winchester is a particularly fine example – at 170m, it is the longest medieval cathedral in the world.

On February 6, four composer-performers from the University of Southampton’s department of music will perform a specially commissioned, site-specific piece called Echolocations. The music will approach this intersection of art and scientific research from another angle, in part by responding to the expansive acoustics of the cathedral.

Vocalist Liz Gre and pianist Ben Oliver, with live electronics performed by Pablo Galaz and Drew Crawford, will work with this acoustic to evoke the vast aquatic distances across which whales communicate. And inspired by the ghost netting in Campbell Fraser’s sculptures, the music will address the threat that ongoing human activities are having on marine ecosystems via noise pollution.

We are polluting the oceans with plastic and sonic garbage. It sometimes seems we will be incapable of action until whale song ends up a digitally rendered collective memory.

But this performance inspires the same qualities of imagination that enable us to conceive of building the gothic medieval wonder of the cathedral’s nave, conquer oceans to build global trade networks, mine the ocean floor and use machine learning to understand whale song. This level of imagination will be vital in creating a new set of sustainable relations with the rest of the planet.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Ryan Reisinger, Associate Professor in Marine Biology and Ecology, University of Southampton and Drew Crawford, Associate Professor, Department of Music, University of Southampton

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

Most people love love, but not everyone loves Valentine’s Day.

When it was first invented in the 1300s in medieval Europe, this holiday was a celebration of romantic love, the coming of spring and the freedom to choose a partner, rather than having one chosen for you.

Today that ancient and optimistic message remains but is often buried under a pile of consumer goods – chocolates, cards, stuffed animals, plastic toys, expensive dinners and roses that cost so much more than you think.

The archetypical image of this holiday is Cupid shooting a person with an arrow that makes them go mad with physical desire.

Yet love is one of the richest and most diverse human emotions. There are many ways to experience love – so this holiday, as a scholar of mindfulness and communication, I encourage you to try out a practice of “metta,” or loving-kindness.

What is loving-kindness?

Loving-kindness, or metta, is the type of love praised and practiced by Buddhists around the world, and it is very different from romantic love. It is described as “limitless” and “unbounded” love.

In the ancient Pali language, the word “metta” has two root meanings. The first is “gentle,” in the sense of a gentle spring rain that falls on young plants without discrimination. The second is “friend.” A metta friend is a true friend – someone who is always there for you without fail and without demanding anything in exchange, or someone who supports you when you’re in pain and who is happy for you when you’re happy, without a tinge of jealousy.

Metta is a kind of love that is offered without any expectation of return. It is not reciprocal or conditional. It does not discriminate between us and them, or worthy and unworthy. To practice metta meditation is to give the rarest gift: a gift that does not demand a return.

The Buddha describes how to practice this love in an early discourse called the “Karaniya Metta Sutta.”

A group of monks approach the Buddha complaining about the spirits living in the forest causing nearby villagers to suffer. The Buddha advises against fighting or driving them away. Instead, he encourages practicing boundless love toward them, wishing them happiness, peace and ease.

The monks do as recommended, practicing loving-kindness meditation for several weeks. Over time, noticing how happy the monks became, the spirits began to practice loving-kindness, too, because they also wanted to be happy. The practice changed the spirits’ behavior, and they stopped harassing the villagers.

How to practice loving-kindness

In the fifth century, a Sri Lankan monk named Buddhaghosa composed an important meditation text called the Visuddhimagga, or “The Path of Purification.” This text is sacred to Theravada Buddhists.

Buddhaghosa provides instructions for how to practice loving-kindness meditation. Contemporary teachers adapt and modify these instructions. However, the general format of this meditation tends to be consistent.

Loving-kindness meditation begins with a practice of mindfulness in order to calm the mind and body and to remember to come back to the now.

Next, this meditation involves softly reciting several traditional phrases and visualizing an audience who will receive loving-kindness as these words are spoken. The phrases are:

• May I/you/they/we be filled by loving-kindness

• May I/you/they/we be safe from inner and outer dangers.

• May I/you/they/we be well in body and mind.

• May I/you/they/we be at ease and happy.

Traditionally, the meditation starts with yourself – the pronoun will be “I.” Then, the meditation involves picturing a beloved person – and it does not even have to be a person; it can be a pet or an animal – and directing loving-kindness to them. The pronoun in the meditation will change to “you.”

After this, the meditation involves directing loving-kindness to a wider circle of friends and loved ones – the pronoun will change to “they.” Finally, the meditation involves gradually including more and more people in your well wishes: the folks in your community and town, people everywhere, animals and all living beings, and the whole Earth, and the pronoun will change to “we.”

Many versions of this meditation invite practitioners to express metta for people who have caused them difficulty, including to someone seen to be an “opponent.”

However, teachers including the Zen master, poet and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh recommend practicing this type of metta meditation only once you are well established in directing loving-kindness at yourself and those you are close to.

Why practice loving-kindness meditation?

Clinical research shows that loving-kindness meditation has a positive effect on mental health. It could help lessen anxiety and depression, increase life satisfaction and improve self-acceptance; it could also reduce self-criticism.

There is also evidence that loving-kindness meditation increases a sense of connection. Practicing loving-kindness could increase happiness while strengthening feelings of kinship with all living beings, a few of the benefits of metta meditation described by the Buddha in the Karaniya Metta Sutta.

So if you’re feeling disconnected from others, ill at ease or just disenchanted with a holiday that has become overrun by capitalism on this Valentine’s Day, you might consider trying loving-kindness meditation.

Jeremy David Engels, Liberal Arts Endowed Professor of Communication, Penn State

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

The colours of rubies and emeralds are so striking that they define shades of red and green – ruby red and emerald green. But have you ever wondered how they get those colours?

I am an inorganic chemist. Researchers in my field work to understand the chemistry of all the elements that make up the periodic table. Many inorganic chemists focus on the transition metals – the elements in the middle of the periodic table. The transition metals include most of the metals you are familiar with, like iron (Fe) and gold (Au).

One feature of compounds made with transition metals is their intense colour. There are many examples in nature, including gemstones and paint pigments. Even the colour of blood comes from the protein haemoglobin, which contains iron.

Investigating the colours of compounds containing transition metals leads you into some really amazing science – that’s part of what drew me to study this field.

Rubies and emeralds are great examples of how a small amount of a transition metal – in this case, chromium – can create a beautiful colour in what would otherwise be a fairly boring-looking mineral.

Minerals and crystals

Both rubies and emeralds are minerals, which is a type of rock with a consistent chemical composition and a highly ordered structure at the atomic level.

When this highly ordered structure extends in all three dimensions, the mineral becomes a crystal.

With a theory developed by physicists in the 1920s called crystal field theory, scientists can explain why rubies and emeralds have the colours they do. Crystal field theory makes predictions about how a transition metal ion’s structure is affected by the other atoms surrounding it.

Rubies are mainly made up of the mineral corundum, which is composed of the elements aluminium and oxygen in a regular, repeating array. Each aluminium ion is surrounded by six oxygen ions.

Emeralds are mainly made up of the mineral beryl, which is made from the elements beryllium, aluminium, silicon and oxygen. Beryl’s crystal structure is more complicated than corundum’s because of the additional elements in the formula, but each aluminium ion is again surrounded by six oxygen ions.

Pure corundum and beryl are colourless. The brilliant colours of rubies and emeralds come from the presence of very small amounts of chromium. The chromium replaces about 1% of the aluminium in the corundum or beryl crystal when a ruby or emerald forms underground at a high temperature and pressure.

But how can one element – chromium – create the red colour of a ruby and green colour of an emerald?

Colour science

Rubies and emeralds have the colours they do because, like many substances, they absorb some colours of light. Most visible light, like sunlight, is composed of all the colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. These colours make up the visible light spectrum, which is easy to remember as ROY G BIV.

One of the main reasons why objects have a colour is because they absorb one or more of these visible colours of light. If a substance absorbs, for instance, red light, it means that the red light gets trapped in the substance and the other colours reflect back to your eyes. The colour you see is the sum of the remaining light, which will be in the green-to-blue range. If a substance absorbs blue, it will look red or orange to you.

Unlike the colourless aluminium ion, the chromium ion absorbs blue and green light when surrounded by the oxygen ions. The red light is reflected back, so that’s what you see in rubies.

In an emerald, even though the chromium is surrounded by six oxygen ions, there is a weaker interaction between the chromium and the surrounding oxygen ions. That’s due to the presence of silicon and beryllium in the beryl crystal. They cause the emerald to absorb blue and red light, leaving the green for you to see.

The ability to tune the properties of transition metals like chromium through changing what is surrounding it is a core strategy in my field of inorganic chemistry. Doing so can help scientists understand the basic science of metal-containing compounds and the design of chemical compounds for specific purposes.

You can take delight in the amazing colours of the gemstones, but through chemistry, you can also see how nature creates those colours using an endless variety of complex structures made with the elements in the periodic table.

Daniel Freedman, Dean of the College of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics & Management, University of Wisconsin-Stout

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

Beyoncé appeared visibly astonished to hear her album Cowboy Carter had won best country album at this year’s Grammy Awards. Onstage, the singer offered a heartfelt reflection on musical genre:

I think sometimes genre is a code word to keep us in our place as artists and I just want to encourage people to do what they’re passionate about and stay persistent.

Beyoncé’s speech built on a more pointed critique of genre found in one of the tracks from her album, SPAGHETTII.

The track opens with a soundbite from Linda Martell, a pioneering Black country music singer who enjoyed commercial success in the 1960s, but whose career was marred by both overt racial abuse and accusations she didn’t “sound black”. In the soundbite, Martell says:

Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? […] In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand, but in practice, well, some may feel confined.

This description of confinement was echoed in 2024, when the Country Music Association Awards controversially excluded Cowboy Carter from the nomination process due to insufficient radio airplay, as per the award rules.

Media reports claimed some country radio stations refused to play, or were slow to play, Beyoncé’s new album because they didn’t recognise her as a country artist.

Debates about the usefulness of genre have been around for a while, and won’t disappear anytime soon. Beyoncé’s Grammy win presses us to consider the relevance of genre in the modern music world – and the extent to which these rigid definitions can be justified.

Is ‘genre’ useful in music?

On one level, genre is a simple and necessary mechanism for categorising different types of music. Genre encodes various aspects of music, including instrumentation, the time period it originates from, its emotional character, and the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic conventions it employs.

Terms such as jazz, rock, country, R&B, metal, hip-hop, folk and EDM are rich in meaning, and are routinely used as identity markers for performers – and for award categories at events like the Grammys. They also help us discuss our musical preferences, and teach and learn about music in educational settings.

At the same time, these terms remain fluid and contested. Research tracking the rise and fall of musical genres highlights the power genres have in shaping our understanding and experience of music.

Consider rock as an example. In the early 1950s, radio disc jockeys popularised the term rock'n'roll to describe a distinct style that drew from genres including rhythm and blues, gospel and country music, but which differed from each of these in character and function.

The societal adoption of rock'n'roll as a “new” genre wasn’t just driven by the features present in the music, but by its resonance with a teenage audience for whom it signalled rebellion, associations with sexuality and a merging of different American music cultures.

Just as Elvis Presley came to embody the genre, divergent practices gave rise to new and adapted terminology. “Rockabilly” (a style that combines elements of country and rock'n'roll) entered the lexicon. Rock'n'roll simply became “rock” and numerous adjectives such as “folk”, “psychedelic”, “progressive”, “punk”, “classic” and “hard” were attached to make sense of the continually evolving style.

I’d argue the music of Elvis Presley has little in common with the stoner rock band Kyuss, yet we group them in the same broad musical taxonomy.

Research has revealed significant inconsistencies in how people use and understand music genre terminology. Nonetheless, genre labels have historically been considered useful tools to communicate meaningful information about musical experiences.

So, what’s Beyoncé’s problem with genre?

Problems can arise for musicians when genres don’t simply describe musical practices, but work to control or distort them. Record labels have a profit imperative that incentivises artists to create music that’s easily categorised into well-established genres.

The risk this incentive poses to creativity has traditionally been offset by audiences demanding new and diverse music – alongside a flourishing independent musical culture that either ignores or is overtly antagonistic towards the generic preferences of large record labels.

That said, musicians are also pushed to adhere to narrow definitions of genre due to search functions in streaming services and methodologies used by music charts.

For example, the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) charts’ code of practice lists six genre charts: core classical, country, crossover/classical, dance, hip hop/R&B, and jazz and blues. And while the ARIAs have a range of mechanisms to track record sales, the codification of these genres inevitably influences Australian musicians who wish to make a living from their music.

Beyond this, powerful cultural associations with certain genres can make their boundaries difficult to cross. Sometimes genre boundaries are rightly inflexible – particularly those associated with regional music-making or First Peoples’ cultures.

Cowboy Carter however, represents a rediscovery and celebration of Black country musicians. It draws attention to how these musicians were neglected because they didn’t align with prevailing assumptions about the genre.

The fact that Beyoncé’s choice to explore country music was in any way contentious emphasises this point. The foray by The Beatles’ drummer Ringo Starr into country music was, by contrast, uncontroversial.

Genre as a framework is, ultimately, necessary. It’s impossible to discuss music without some way of making sense of it all. Listeners, however, should recognise that rigid genre definition can distort creativity. They should also reflect on whether it may be distorting their listening habits, too.

Timothy McKenry, Professor of Music, Australian Catholic University

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

History has repeated in the rock category at this week’s 67th Grammy Awards. Best rock performance was awarded to the Beatles for their song Now and Then, while the Rolling Stones took home best rock album for Hackney Diamonds.

The Beatles’ track, finished and released by the fab four’s remaining members with the assistance of artificial intelligence, has been recognised by the Recording Academy 55 years after the band broke up. This comes as their eighth Grammy win and 27th nomination since their 1962 debut.

The Beatles’ long time rivals, the Rolling Stones, have received many accolades over their six decade career, including five Grammys. Their 24th studio album includes cameos from other legacy artists like Elton John and Stevie Wonder.

These victories are historic – but they also reveal a broader truth about rock music’s biggest institutions. The same artists who defined the genre decades ago continue to dominate its highest honours, leaving little space for contemporary acts to break through.

The new wave

The past year has seen a resurgence in rock. Streaming services and radio have reflected a rise in the popularity of the genre and reunions of rock’s most popular bands are making headlines.

This renewed enthusiasm toward rock has brought newcomers to the genre, including an emergence of new popular talent.

Newer rock talent was present at the Grammys, with St Vincent (who broke out in 2006) winning Best rock song and Fontaines D.C. receiving their first best rock album nomination since their debut in 2014.

Both of these artists have been recognised for breathing new life into the rock genre. With a willingness to confront discomfort and vulnerability coupled with distinctive guitar work and production choices, St. Vincent has been positioned as a trailblazer in modern rock.

Fontaines D.C’s nominated album Romance has been praised by critics for its energetic embrace of a diverse musical palette with compelling lyrics, a sound which has grabbed the attention of those outside and within the rock audience.

But they were up against a nominee pool largely composed of long career legacy acts such as Green Day, Pearl Jam, Jack White and the Black Crowes, who all broke out in the last millennium.

Along with the Beatles’ and the Rolling Stones’ wins, this reflects a trend in rock’s institutional recognition, where industry awards, hall of fame inductions, and media retrospectives continue to reaffirm the same monumental figures – often to the exclusion of artists shaping rock today. This phenomenon is a symptom of the rock canon, otherwise known as “the best of all time”.

The old canon

The rock canon is a set of artists, albums and songs that have been collectively deemed as the genre’s greatest.

This canon was solidified by the late 1960s and 1970s and is sustained predominantly by media outlets and awards organisations like the Grammys. Publications that rank “the best” also help shape the rock canon by repeatedly spotlighting the same classic albums and artists.

To be considered “the best” in rock, artists typically need to meet an (often unwritten) criteria of long-term critical acclaim, commercial success and influence on future generations. Artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones meet this criteria, frequently appearing in the top ranks of “best of” lists and maintaining their position at the top of the rock hierarchy.

But the Grammy wins for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones raise concerns about how rigid this canon remains. Artists who enter the rock canon rarely leave it, making it difficult for newcomers to garner the same levels of critical and commercial success. It has also been criticised for its preferential treatment towards whiteness and masculinity.

If the canon represents the highest levels of artistic quality in rock, its inability to change poses concerns for the future of the genre.

Australia has not remained untouched by these issues. While the Grammys are an American institution, the rock canon’s influence extends globally.

Australian institutions such as Triple J’s Hottest 100 of All Time have demonstrated this influence, showing us that the canon plays a role in shaping Australian music culture. Artists like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin often appear on these lists, voted on by Australian listeners. Local audiences overwhelmingly favour a more standard, mainstream canon of older international rock acts over our own Australian talent.

The preference towards artists who have long been in the canon in today’s “best of” lists makes it harder for local artists – particularly those from marginalised backgrounds – to gain widespread recognition.

Crafting a vital genre

The Grammy success of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones reflects both the strength and the stagnation of rock’s institutional gate-keeping.

On one hand, these wins celebrate artists whose influence has endured for generations. On the other, they reveal how difficult it is for new acts to gain recognition when institutions continue looking backward rather than forward.

As rock continues its resurgence, the vitality of the genre may rely on expanding a more inclusive definition of greatness: one that makes room for innovation and diversity, not just nostalgia.

Will future Grammy ceremonies still be awarding the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, or will we finally see rock’s institutions evolve?

Charlotte Markowitsch, PhD Candidate in Popular Music Studies, RMIT University

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

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

Where does black fall on the colour spectrum? – Utsav, age 17, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

People love the rainbow of ROYGBIV colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Human eyes perceive visible light as this array of colours.

You may notice that some colours you can perceive aren’t part of the classic rainbow, though. Where is black, for example?

I’m an associate professor of colour science, a field that combines physics and perception. Colour scientists are interested in learning more about human vision and applying that knowledge to make colour systems – such as in cameras, screens or lighting systems – work better.

To understand where black falls on the colour spectrum, first consider what light actually is.

Light is radiation visible to the human eye

Light is energy called electromagnetic radiation. It’s made up of a stream of energy particles called photons.

Each photon has its own energy level. There are two characteristics you can use to describe a photon. Its frequency is how fast it vibrates back and forth – or oscillates – as it travels. And its wavelength is the distance between those oscillations in space.

As photons with wavelengths within a range of about 400–700 nanometres stream into your eyes, your brain perceives them as light. Scientists call these photons visible radiation. You perceive photons with different wavelengths as different colours.

Photons outside that range of wavelengths are invisible to human eyes. Shorter wavelength energy includes ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma radiation, while longer wavelength energy includes infrared and radio waves.

Shades and intensities

Colour perception is also affected by the quantity of photons – what physicists call the power – at different visible wavelengths. More photons means more powerful light, which looks brighter. A very vivid colour consists mostly of photons of similar wavelength. For example, a pure red may consist of photons that all share the same wavelength near 620 nanometres.

A stream of photons with a wider range of wavelengths will appear as a paler, less saturated colour. White light, such as natural daylight, consists of photons with wavelengths spread fairly evenly across a wide range of the visible spectrum. LEDs and other electric light sources are not quite as uniform across the spectrum, but they still appear white or achromatic, meaning without colour.

Mixtures of wavelengths combine and appear as new colours. The human visual system interprets pure red light and pure green light combined as yellow. Add in pure blue, and this mix of radiation appears white. Scientists and engineers take advantage of this quality in display devices, which are able to create a huge range of perceived colours by mixing the primary colours red, green and blue.

Black on the Colour spectrum

While there’s no black in a rainbow, photons anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum can be seen as black. Or in some cases, they can’t be seen at all!

Radiation within the visible spectrum can appear black if it is low in power – more specifically, lower in power than its surroundings.

Additionally, radiation outside the visible range of wavelengths appears black to our eyes. For example, infrared radiation appears black because it is invisible to humans.

Perception is subjective

Our eyes detect the wavelength and power of the light, but our brains interpret it. So colour perception always depends on the context.

People are good at adapting to a wide range of light levels, from sunlight to starlight. So our perception of colour and brightness depends on what’s around and what we’ve been looking at recently. If you step from outdoor daylight into a dark theatre, at first you probably perceive the whole environment as black, and you may even have trouble finding your way.

However, your visual system immediately begins to adapt to the low light level. Soon, visual details begin to emerge. What appeared black now has different levels of lightness and colour.

Consider the optical illusion that consists of a light rectangle next to a dark rectangle. Each rectangle contains a circle. The circles appear to be different shades but in fact are identical. Against the light background, the circle is dark enough to appear black. Surrounded by the black background, it becomes clear that the circle is merely dark grey. Even when you know the circles are the same, it’s hard to believe because the effect of the surrounding background is so strong.

You might be asking yourself, how dark must a colour be to appear black? Another way to ask the question is, how low in power must the physical light be in order to look black?

For a visual answer, look at a gradient from dark grey to black. Where in the gradient is the boundary, or threshold, at which you call it black? What if you dim your display or view the screen in a much brighter or much darker environment? Probably the best answer for how dark it must be is, “It depends.”

Colour perception is a fascinating topic, and we colour scientists are continuing to uncover details of how the human visual system works while also applying our knowledge to many other useful things, including dyes, cameras, printers, LED lighting systems and AR/VR displays.

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

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

Michael J. Murdoch, Associate Professor of Colori Science, Rochester Institute of Technology

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

Bennett’s tree kangaroos, one of Australia’s most mysterious marsupials, have long eluded researchers. Our new study, published in Australian Mammalogy today, has achieved a breakthrough: using thermal drones to detect these rare animals with unprecedented efficiency.

Tree kangaroos are found only in the tropical rainforests of Australia and New Guinea. Unlike their ground-dwelling relatives, they spend their lives in treetops, feeding on leaves and vines. Their dependence on rainforest trees makes them vulnerable to deforestation and climate change.

Alarmingly, 12 of the 14 species of tree kangaroos are listed as threatened. Yet we know little about their numbers or habits due to difficulties studying them in dense rainforest.

Our new findings mark a significant step forward, offering hope for improved conservation of these elusive, near-mythical creatures. Thermal drones, which detect animals by their body heat, may help to unravel the mysteries of tree kangaroos and guide efforts to protect them.

Rugged, dense rainforests

Bennett’s tree kangaroos inhabit Australia’s most rugged and densely vegetated rainforests north of the Daintree River in Far North Queensland. They rarely descend from their vine-covered treetop roosts, which can be up to 40 metres high.

Traditional survey methods like spotlighting (that is, methodically using flashlights) or handheld thermal cameras (using infrared sensors to detect warm bodies) often fail to detect tree kangaroos, as these tools are limited to what can be seen from the ground.

As a result, there have been no systematic surveys of Bennett’s tree kangaroos. Population estimates rely on outdated observations and anecdotal evidence, leaving their conservation status unclear.

We need robust population estimates to detect shifting population trends and prevent population declines. This requires new monitoring methods to help us find these elusive animals.

Hotspots in the treetops

Thermal drones are just what they sound like – drones equipped with infrared cameras that detect heat signatures from the air.

Warm-blooded animals like tree kangaroos stand out against the cooler rainforest background, even when partially hidden by foliage. This technology offers a powerful advantage over traditional methods, allowing researchers to scan large areas from above and see past vegetation.

In our study, we conducted three drone flights at the Daintree Rainforest Observatory, Cape Tribulation, during the morning and evening.

To our surprise, we detected six Bennett’s tree kangaroos in under an hour of flight time – an unprecedented result. These included a solitary animal, a pair, and a group of three, all consistent with known home range sizes for the species.

By comparison, traditional ground surveys often require several nights of survey effort to spot a single animal. The drones not only made detection easier but also allowed us to closely observe the animals’ behaviour, such as feeding on specific plant species, without disturbing them.

Shedding light on a hidden species

Our findings suggest Bennett’s tree kangaroos are thriving in Cape Tribulation’s lowland rainforest.

While this is encouraging, further systematic surveys are needed to assess how population density varies with forest type, elevation and other factors.

Another intriguing discovery was the tree kangaroos’ diet. Using the drone’s colour zoom camera, we identified the vines and leaves they were eating. Mile-a-minute vine (Decalobanthus peltatus) and fire vine (Tetracera daemeliana) were popular choices on the menu.

These observations deepen our understanding of the species’ habitat needs and could inform future conservation efforts.

Conservation research methods must prioritise minimising stress on wildlife. The tree kangaroos showed no signs of disturbance, continuing to forage after briefly pausing to look at the drone.

This non-invasive approach is a promising alternative to traditional methods, like radio tracking (where a tag is attached to the animal), which can disrupt natural behaviours.

Craning for a better view

Despite showing promise, drone-based wildlife monitoring has its challenges. Regulations require drone operators to maintain visual line of sight with their drone. This can be difficult in a rainforest due to the height and density of the canopy.

To overcome this, we remotely operated our drone from a 47-metre-high canopy crane designed for research. This extra height allowed us to maintain a clear view while surveying a larger area.

However, canopy cranes are rare – there’s only one in tropical Australia. Expanding this approach will require alternative strategies, such as using mountaintops or canopy walkways as vantage points.

Our study is just the beginning. The next step is designing methods to estimate population densities more accurately – not only for Bennett’s tree kangaroos but also other tree kangaroo species in the remote mountains of New Guinea. By identifying individual tree kangaroos based on their unique fur markings, we aim to also study their social structure and sex ratios.

Thermal drones have the potential to revolutionise conservation efforts for hard-to-study wildlife. They offer a powerful tool to monitor populations and guide management decisions.

For the rare and remarkable Bennett’s tree kangaroo, this technology could make the difference between obscurity and security.

Emmeline Norris, PhD Candidate, Conservation Biology, James Cook University

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

Restless legs syndrome (RLS), also known as Willis-Ekbom Disease, is a neurological condition that affects about 7% of people.

Typical symptoms include an irresistible urge to move your legs, alongside sensations of aching, crawling, creeping, itching, pulling or throbbing. Until the age of 35, the condition is equally common in men and women, but after that age, RLS affects twice the number of women than men.

Each person’s condition is categorised as mild, moderate, severe or very severe according to the international rating scale, which measures the effects of RLS on limb discomfort and sleep disruption, as well as frequency of symptoms.

RLS symptoms have a 24-hour cycle known as a circadian rhythm. Symptoms tend to peak at night, coinciding with the body’s increase in melatonin release. Melatonin reduces dopamine – the brain chemical that affects movement and mood – to help us sleep but, because dopamine helps control muscles, low dopamine levels can cause involuntary movements.

There is no test for RLS. Diagnosis is based on symptoms and medical history. Primary RLS runs in families – there are genetic links to a number of chromosomes. RLS has an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern, meaning you only need one “defective” copy to present with symptoms. Some cases, however, develop with no known cause.

Other people may develop “secondary” RLS as a result of other conditions, such as iron deficiency anaemia, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, underactive thyroid gland, and fibromyalgia. While primary RLS is more common than secondary, the latter is usually more severe and progresses more rapidly.

Risk factors

Age seems to be a risk factor for RLS. In 2000, a study found that 10% of adults aged 30 to 79 have RLS, increasing to 19% of those over the age of 80. However, understanding of the condition has improved since that study was conducted, so it’s likely these figures are higher – particularly in children, where some RLS symptoms have been confused with “growing pains” or ADHD in the past.

Women have an increased chance of developing RLS. Approximately one in five women will suffer from restless legs at some point, and some studies suggest as many as one in three women are affected. Women are more likely to suffer from other comorbidities that affect the central nervous system, such as anxiety, depression and migraine, which may be linked to the development of RLS.

Pregnancy is another risk factor. The further you are through the trimesters, the higher your chance of being affected BY RLS – with 8%, 16% and 22% of women suffering through their respective first, second and third trimesters. Multiple pregnancies increase the risk of pregnancy-related RLS, and research has found that women who’ve given birth may have a higher incidence of RLS in later life, compared with women of the same age who haven’t given birth.

Obesity is also considered a risk factor for RLS. One study showed that each 5kg/m² increase in body mass index increased the likelihood of developing RLS by 31%.

Triggers and treatments

Research has shown smoking and alcohol consumption seem to make RLS worse, so lifestyle changes such as stopping smoking and drinking alcohol can help manage symptoms.

Research has also found that exercise and stretching is beneficial for symptom relief or reduction – although study participants suggest that morning exercise is more effective for improving symptoms, while evening exercise can make restless legs worse. Patients with secondary forms of RLS, lower BMI and less severe cases of the condition may benefit the most from lifestyle changes to manage symptoms.

Also, treatment of underlying issues can also alleviate or reduce some of the symptoms. For instance, iron deficiency anaemia reduces dopamine levels, which can lead to restless legs. Iron supplements may benefit some sufferers – but the evidence is mixed so supplements won’t help everyone.

In terms of medication, research has found that neurological therapies, such as the anticonvulsant Gabapentin – usually prescribed as a treatment for epilepsy – can improve symptoms and overall quality of life for those suffering with restless legs. These therapies target nerve cells in the brain, reducing their activity.

Other medicines – known as dopamine agonists – activate dopamine receptors in the brain to control movement. They are primarily used as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease and are effective in managing symptoms of RLS. However, they can disturb your sleep pattern and may increase impulse control disorders, and are not recommended during pregnancy or breastfeeding as they can inhibit lactation.

While there may not be a cure for RLS, there is hope for sufferers – and options for managing and reducing symptoms.

Adam Taylor, Professor of Anatomy, Lancaster University

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

Could the bacteria in your mouth predict whether you are at risk of dementia? Emerging research suggests that the bacteria living on your tongue and gums may affect how the brain works and how it changes as we age. In turn, this could affect whether someone ages normally or develops dementia.

Scientists are uncovering surprising connections between the oral microbiome, which is the bustling ecosystem of bacteria in our mouths, and brain health. A new study my colleagues and I conducted suggests that certain bacteria may help memory and thinking skills, while others could be early warning signs of a decline in brain function.

This raises the possibility that diet and treatments that change our oral bacteria could one day play a role in helping to preserve brain health as we age.

For our investigation, we analysed saliva samples from 115 adults over 50 years old. Among these people, 52% had healthy brain function, and the other 48% had early signs of decline in memory and other brain functions.

We examined the bacteria in these samples and showed that people who had large numbers of two groups of bacteria called Neisseria and Haemophilus performed better in brain health tests. In particular, people with these bacteria had better memory, and better ability to pay attention and perform complex tasks.

These people also had higher levels of the ion nitrite in their mouths. Nitrite is made by bacteria when they break down nitrate, which is a natural part of a vegetable-rich diet.

Bacteria can also break down nitrite to produce nitric oxide, which improves circulation, including blood flow to the brain. This suggests that eating lots of nitrate-rich vegetables, such as leafy green spinach and rocket, could boost levels of healthy bacteria and help improve brain health, which might be especially important as people age.

We are now investigating whether nitrate-rich beetroot juice can improve brain function in older adults by hijacking bacteria in the mouth.

On the other hand, a different group of bacteria may be causing more harm than good. Our study found two groups of bacteria that are potentially linked to worse brain health.

One group called Porphyromonas, which is often associated with gum disease, was more common in people with memory problems than people who were healthy.

A second group called Prevotella was linked to low nitrite, which in turn could mean poorer brain health. Prevotella was also more common in people who carry the gene APOE4, which is associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s.

These findings suggest that some bacteria might play a detrimental role in changes in brain health as people age. It also raises the question of whether routine tests to measure levels of these bacteria could be used to detect very early signs of declining brain health as part of dental checkups in the future.

Profound implications

The implications of this research are profound. If certain bacteria support brain health while others contribute to decline, then treatments to change the balance of bacteria in the mouth could be part of a solution to prevent dementia.

Encouraging the growth of nitrite-producing bacteria like Neisseria, while reducing Prevotella and Porphyromonas, could help maintain brain function as we age. This could be achieved through dietary changes, probiotics, oral hygiene routines, or even targeted treatments that reshape the microbiome.

While we’re still in the early stages of understanding the intricate links between the mouth bacteria and the brain, our findings provide a strong rationale for further research.

If future studies confirm that the oral microbiome plays a role in maintaining a healthy brain, then by paying closer attention to the bacteria in our mouths we may unlock new possibilities for detecting and potentially delaying dementia.

In the meantime, the best advice is to keep your teeth clean, see the dentist regularly and eat food with lots of nitrate, like leafy green vegetables, to keep feeding the good bacteria in your mouth.

Joanna L'Heureux, Postdoctoral Researcher, Public Health and Sport Sciences, University of Exeter

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

The Albanese government is trying once more to legislate wide-ranging changes to the way federal elections are administered.

The 200-page Electoral Reform Bill, if passed, would transform the electoral donation rules by imposing donation and spending caps, increasing public funding, and improving transparency.

As noble as it sounds, the bill in its current form would undermine Australian democracy by favouring established parties over independent candidates and other new players.

Competitive disadvantage

The proposed donation caps are a case in point.

Donors could give A$20,000 per year, per recipient, to a branch of a party or candidate for electioneering purposes. In practice, that means donors could give no more than $20,000 per year to an independent but could contribute $180,000 to the Labor Party via each of its state and federal branches, or $160,000 to the Liberal Party (which has one less branch than the ALP).

The donation cap would reset annually and after each federal election, allowing a single donor to give $720,000 to the Labor Party in one election cycle or $640,000 to the Liberals, but no more than $20,000 to an independent who declares their candidacy in the year of an election.

Avoiding the American road

There are welcome components in the bill. Faster disclosure and lower donation thresholds would make the system more transparent. Given the large amount of undisclosed funding – “dark money ” – currently propping up political parties, this would be a significant improvement.

But democracy is not cheap.

Last year, the Financial Times reported Donald Trump and Kamala Harris spent a combined US$3.5 billion (A$5.6 billion) on their presidential races. This kind of money helps to sustain an American two-party system largely immune to challengers.

Australian campaigns look nothing like this, but there has been increased interest in the money spent in particular seats in recent years.

Former Labor minister Kim Carr revealed in his recent book Labor spent $1 million to defeat the Greens in the Melbourne electorate of Batman in 2018, while the LNP reportedly spent $600,000 campaigning to retain the affluent electorate of Fadden in 2023.

The bill before Parliament would cap election spending at $800,000 in each lower house seat. But the major parties could promote their generic party brand or a frontbench MP (in a seat other than their own) without affecting their capped spending.

These unfair discrepancies would reward the major parties while kneecapping independents whose first hurdle is to get their name “out there”.

Haunted by billionaires

The government argues its bill limits the influence of “big money” in politics, namely mining boss Clive Palmer, who spent $117 million at the last election.

For the Coalition, it is the community independents and their Climate 200 supporters who represent a kind of money “without precedent in the Australian political system” according to departing MP Paul Fletcher.

Rather than getting big money out of politics, this bill would make the major parties’ own funding pipelines the only money that matters.

The bill recognises “nominated entities” whose payments to associated political parties would not be limited by donation caps. Independents would not have this privilege.

Meanwhile, the long delay before the commencement of the bill in 2026 would give wealthy donors time to get their ducks in order. They could amass their own war chests before the new laws are due to come in to force and then register them as nominated entities at a later date.

Who pays? The taxpayer, of course!

Parties and candidates with more than 4% of the primary vote currently receive public election funding. The Hawke government introduced this measure as a “small insurance” against corruption.

The bill would raise the return to $5 per vote, which would mean an extra $41 million in funding, on top of the $71 million handed over after the 2022 election. Most of this money would go to the major parties.

The windfall would come with no extra guardrails or guidelines about how those funds could be spent. There are no laws to guarantee truth in political advertising at the federal level. Voters may well be paying for more political advertising that lies to them.

Closed consultations

Labor’s current strategy is to seek Coalition support for these changes to the rules of democracy.

Special Minister of State Don Farrell claims to have consulted widely on the design of the bill, but that came as news to independents David Pocock and Kate Chaney when asked about it last week.

The government’s haste and secrecy suggest it wants neither the bill nor its motives closely scrutinised.

Australians care about the quality of their democracy. Polling research by the Australia Institute last November showed four in five Australians expect electoral changes to be reviewed by a multi-party committee.

That’s what is needed for this bill. To do otherwise would threaten the integrity of Australian elections – or invite a High Court challenge that may overturn the entire system if the court rules freedom of political expression is at stake.

Democracy matters. The rules must not be changed on a whim.

Joshua Black, Visitor, School of History, Australian National University

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

History has repeated in the rock category at this week’s 67th Grammy Awards. Best rock performance was awarded to the Beatles for their song Now and Then, while the Rolling Stones took home best rock album for Hackney Diamonds.

The Beatles’ track, finished and released by the fab four’s remaining members with the assistance of artificial intelligence, has been recognised by the Recording Academy 55 years after the band broke up. This comes as their eighth Grammy win and 27th nomination since their 1962 debut.

The Beatles’ long time rivals, the Rolling Stones, have received many accolades over their six decade career, including five Grammys. Their 24th studio album includes cameos from other legacy artists like Elton John and Stevie Wonder.

These victories are historic – but they also reveal a broader truth about rock music’s biggest institutions. The same artists who defined the genre decades ago continue to dominate its highest honours, leaving little space for contemporary acts to break through.

The new wave

The past year has seen a resurgence in rock. Streaming services and radio have reflected a rise in the popularity of the genre and reunions of rock’s most popular bands are making headlines.

This renewed enthusiasm toward rock has brought newcomers to the genre, including an emergence of new popular talent.

Newer rock talent was present at the Grammys, with St Vincent (who broke out in 2006) winning Best rock song and Fontaines D.C. receiving their first best rock album nomination since their debut in 2014.

Both of these artists have been recognised for breathing new life into the rock genre. With a willingness to confront discomfort and vulnerability coupled with distinctive guitar work and production choices, St. Vincent has been positioned as a trailblazer in modern rock.

Fontaines D.C’s nominated album Romance has been praised by critics for its energetic embrace of a diverse musical palette with compelling lyrics, a sound which has grabbed the attention of those outside and within the rock audience.

But they were up against a nominee pool largely composed of long career legacy acts such as Green Day, Pearl Jam, Jack White and the Black Crowes, who all broke out in the last millennium.

Along with the Beatles’ and the Rolling Stones’ wins, this reflects a trend in rock’s institutional recognition, where industry awards, hall of fame inductions, and media retrospectives continue to reaffirm the same monumental figures – often to the exclusion of artists shaping rock today. This phenomenon is a symptom of the rock canon, otherwise known as “the best of all time”.

The old canon

The rock canon is a set of artists, albums and songs that have been collectively deemed as the genre’s greatest.

This canon was solidified by the late 1960s and 1970s and is sustained predominantly by media outlets and awards organisations like the Grammys. Publications that rank “the best” also help shape the rock canon by repeatedly spotlighting the same classic albums and artists.

To be considered “the best” in rock, artists typically need to meet an (often unwritten) criteria of long-term critical acclaim, commercial success and influence on future generations. Artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones meet this criteria, frequently appearing in the top ranks of “best of” lists and maintaining their position at the top of the rock hierarchy.

But the Grammy wins for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones raise concerns about how rigid this canon remains. Artists who enter the rock canon rarely leave it, making it difficult for newcomers to garner the same levels of critical and commercial success. It has also been criticised for its preferential treatment towards whiteness and masculinity.

If the canon represents the highest levels of artistic quality in rock, its inability to change poses concerns for the future of the genre.

Australia has not remained untouched by these issues. While the Grammys are an American institution, the rock canon’s influence extends globally.

Australian institutions such as Triple J’s Hottest 100 of All Time have demonstrated this influence, showing us that the canon plays a role in shaping Australian music culture. Artists like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin often appear on these lists, voted on by Australian listeners. Local audiences overwhelmingly favour a more standard, mainstream canon of older international rock acts over our own Australian talent.

The preference towards artists who have long been in the canon in today’s “best of” lists makes it harder for local artists – particularly those from marginalised backgrounds – to gain widespread recognition.

Crafting a vital genre

The Grammy success of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones reflects both the strength and the stagnation of rock’s institutional gate-keeping.

On one hand, these wins celebrate artists whose influence has endured for generations. On the other, they reveal how difficult it is for new acts to gain recognition when institutions continue looking backward rather than forward.

As rock continues its resurgence, the vitality of the genre may rely on expanding a more inclusive definition of greatness: one that makes room for innovation and diversity, not just nostalgia.

Will future Grammy ceremonies still be awarding the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, or will we finally see rock’s institutions evolve?

Charlotte Markowitsch, PhD Candidate in Popular Music Studies, RMIT University

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

In 1877 the American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) achieved notoriety when he exhibited his recent views of the river Thames at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. He gave his paintings musical titles: Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875) and Nocturne in Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (circa 1872-5).

The view of Battersea Bridge includes Chelsea Church and the then newly constructed Albert Bridge. The lights of Cremorne Pleasure Gardens twinkle in the distance, while fireworks explode in the pale sky above.

The painting is remarkable for its intense, light blue tonality suggestive of evening, the time of day sometimes known as “the blue hour”. Painting from memory, Whistler thinned his paint with copal (a tree resin), turpentine and linseed oil. This created what he called a “sauce”, which he applied in thin, transparent layers, wiping it away until he was satisfied. He left areas of the dark preparatory layer unpainted to create the illusion of the bridge. Inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, he exaggerated its height.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books, films and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

All this was lost on the critics, however. The author Oscar Wilde reviewed the exhibition and wrote that the Battersea Bridge Nocturne was “worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute”.

A few years earlier Whistler had exhibited another view of the Thames, Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea (1871), at the Dudley Gallery in London. The critic for The Times summed up Whistler’s intention, observing that the painting was:

So closely akin to music that the colours of the one may and should be used, like the ordered sounds of the other; that painting should not aim at expressing dramatic emotions, depicting incidents of history or recording facts of nature, but should be content with moulding our moods and stirring our imaginations, by subtle combinations of colour.

Whistler’s paintings were first compared to music as early as 1863 when the French critic Paul Manz described his haunting portrait, The White Girl (1872), as a “symphony in white”. Whistler adopted the title retrospectively, creating a series of three aesthetic mood paintings or “symphonies”, featuring young women in flowing white dresses.

Press and public alike were puzzled by the artist’s insistence that his paintings lacked any specific narrative or moral message.

When he witnessed the abstraction of Whistler’s latest Nocturnes at the Grosvenor Gallery, the leading English art critic John Ruskin published a venomous review. “I have seen, and heard much of Cockney impudence before now,” he wrote, “but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

Whistler’s retort

Whistler sued Ruskin for libel and used the ensuing two-day trial to defend his views on art. He referred to his paintings throughout proceedings in musical terms, as “arrangements”, “symphonies” or “nocturnes”. When asked what the Battersea Bridge painting was intended to represent, he replied:

I did not intend it to be a ‘correct’ portrait of the bridge. It is only a moonlight scene … As to what the picture represents, that depends upon who looks at it. To some persons it may represent all that is intended; to others it may represent nothing.

Whistler won the court case, but was awarded only a farthing in damages, resulting in his bankruptcy. Undaunted, the following year (1878) he published The Red Rag, in which he articulated his aesthetic theory:

Art should be independent of all clap-trap – should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works “arrangements” and “harmonies”.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

In 1885 he delivered his, now famous, 10 o’clock Lecture. In it reiterated his aesthetic theory. “Nature,” he wrote, “contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music”. He urged artists not to copy nature slavishly, as Ruskin had recommended, but to approach it more like a musician, waiting for that moment when:

The evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us.

It is then, he argued, that nature “sings her exquisite song to the artist alone”.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Frances Fowles’ suggestion:

Whistler was not the only artist of this period to view his art as the equivalent of music. His work anticipated symbolism, a literary and artistic movement that rejected naturalistic representation in favour of more abstract concerns, such as the connections between words, colours and musical notes.

The relationship between colour, rhythm and sound was central to the work of French artist Paul Signac (1863-1935), who worked in a pointillist technique (applying dots of colour), and assigned his paintings opus numbers and tempos. The Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Čiurlionis (1875-1911), too, fused music and colour and gave his artworks musical titles.

Frances Fowle, Personal Chair of Nineteenth-Century Art, History of Art, University of Edinburgh

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

The Albanese government is trying once more to legislate wide-ranging changes to the way federal elections are administered.

The 200-page Electoral Reform Bill, if passed, would transform the electoral donation rules by imposing donation and spending caps, increasing public funding, and improving transparency.

As noble as it sounds, the bill in its current form would undermine Australian democracy by favouring established parties over independent candidates and other new players.

Competitive disadvantage

The proposed donation caps are a case in point.

Donors could give A$20,000 per year, per recipient, to a branch of a party or candidate for electioneering purposes. In practice, that means donors could give no more than $20,000 per year to an independent but could contribute $180,000 to the Labor Party via each of its state and federal branches, or $160,000 to the Liberal Party (which has one less branch than the ALP).

The donation cap would reset annually and after each federal election, allowing a single donor to give $720,000 to the Labor Party in one election cycle or $640,000 to the Liberals, but no more than $20,000 to an independent who declares their candidacy in the year of an election.

Avoiding the American road

There are welcome components in the bill. Faster disclosure and lower donation thresholds would make the system more transparent. Given the large amount of undisclosed funding – “dark money ” – currently propping up political parties, this would be a significant improvement.

But democracy is not cheap.

Last year, the Financial Times reported Donald Trump and Kamala Harris spent a combined US$3.5 billion (A$5.6 billion) on their presidential races. This kind of money helps to sustain an American two-party system largely immune to challengers.

Australian campaigns look nothing like this, but there has been increased interest in the money spent in particular seats in recent years.

Former Labor minister Kim Carr revealed in his recent book Labor spent $1 million to defeat the Greens in the Melbourne electorate of Batman in 2018, while the LNP reportedly spent $600,000 campaigning to retain the affluent electorate of Fadden in 2023.

The bill before Parliament would cap election spending at $800,000 in each lower house seat. But the major parties could promote their generic party brand or a frontbench MP (in a seat other than their own) without affecting their capped spending.

These unfair discrepancies would reward the major parties while kneecapping independents whose first hurdle is to get their name “out there”.

Haunted by billionaires

The government argues its bill limits the influence of “big money” in politics, namely mining boss Clive Palmer, who spent $117 million at the last election.

For the Coalition, it is the community independents and their Climate 200 supporters who represent a kind of money “without precedent in the Australian political system” according to departing MP Paul Fletcher.

Rather than getting big money out of politics, this bill would make the major parties’ own funding pipelines the only money that matters.

The bill recognises “nominated entities” whose payments to associated political parties would not be limited by donation caps. Independents would not have this privilege.

Meanwhile, the long delay before the commencement of the bill in 2026 would give wealthy donors time to get their ducks in order. They could amass their own war chests before the new laws are due to come in to force and then register them as nominated entities at a later date.

Who pays? The taxpayer, of course!

Parties and candidates with more than 4% of the primary vote currently receive public election funding. The Hawke government introduced this measure as a “small insurance” against corruption.

The bill would raise the return to $5 per vote, which would mean an extra $41 million in funding, on top of the $71 million handed over after the 2022 election. Most of this money would go to the major parties.

The windfall would come with no extra guardrails or guidelines about how those funds could be spent. There are no laws to guarantee truth in political advertising at the federal level. Voters may well be paying for more political advertising that lies to them.

Closed consultations

Labor’s current strategy is to seek Coalition support for these changes to the rules of democracy.

Special Minister of State Don Farrell claims to have consulted widely on the design of the bill, but that came as news to independents David Pocock and Kate Chaney when asked about it last week.

The government’s haste and secrecy suggest it wants neither the bill nor its motives closely scrutinised.

Australians care about the quality of their democracy. Polling research by the Australia Institute last November showed four in five Australians expect electoral changes to be reviewed by a multi-party committee.

That’s what is needed for this bill. To do otherwise would threaten the integrity of Australian elections – or invite a High Court challenge that may overturn the entire system if the court rules freedom of political expression is at stake.

Democracy matters. The rules must not be changed on a whim.

Joshua Black, Visitor, School of History, Australian National University

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

The highly pertinent case of a little-known independent candidate in the Victorian seat of Wannon has exposed a gaping hole in Australia’s electoral laws, which allow for misleading political advertisements in the lead-up to an election campaign. It’s all entirely legal and is already being exploited to try to shape the outcome of the coming federal election.

Conservative activist group Advance Australia has widely distributed digitally altered flyers attacking independent Alex Dyson, who is challenging senior frontbencher Dan Tehan.

It’s part of a campaign to damage Dyson’s electoral prospects after he helped slash the Liberal Party’s margin in the seat at the last election to less than 4%.

The material depicts Dyson ripping open his shirt in a “Superman” pose, to reveal a t-shirt bearing the official Greens party logo.

Dyson is not a Greens candidate. So why are the ads permissible? And what does it tell us about the urgent need for truth in political advertising laws to prohibit material that lies to voters?

Why are misleading ads allowed?

Section 329 of the Electoral Act prohibits the publication of material likely to mislead or deceive an elector in casting their vote.

But in a narrow interpretation by the Electoral Commission, the ban only applies after an election has been called by the prime minister.

That means the Wannon ad, and maybe countless others like them from across the political spectrum, could be distributed for months without repercussion.

Advance Australia has form when it comes to misleading material.

At the 2022 election, it displayed placards that falsely depicted independents David Pocock and Zali Steggall as Greens candidates.

In that case, the Electoral Commission ruled that because the corflutes were deployed during the campaign proper, they breached the electoral laws.

It is absurd and dangerous to democracy to have a law that only bans ads that mislead voters in casting their vote during the official election period, and allows them to proliferate unchecked at other times.

It should not be permissible to lie to voters just because of a technicality. In an era of permanent campaigning, voters can be influenced by political messages received well before a campaign officially starts.

Furthermore, there is little justification for allowing political parties to mislead while banning corporations from engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct. If consumers and shareholders are protected from fraudulent and dishonest claims, why not electors, who have the solemn task of deciding who runs the country?

How can the electoral laws be fixed?

There are available remedies to the problem, starting with reforming the Electoral Act. It should be clearly specified that the provision on misleading electors applies to any material calculated to affect the result of an election, regardless of when it is distributed.

Broader truth in political advertising provisions should also be introduced. This would cover a wider range of factually misleading ads beyond the existing narrow ambit of misleading a voter in the casting of their vote.

If the Electoral Commission determines the material is false or misleading to a material extent, it would order a withdrawal and a retraction.

Importantly, the laws would be confined to false or misleading statements of fact. Parties and other political players would still be free to express their opinions. Freedom of speech would not be impeded.

Parliamentary stalemate

The Albanese government has taken tentative steps to fix the problem. Truth in advertising laws introduced to parliament last year would have forced Advance Australia to retract and correct its dishonest flyers in Wannon.

However, the bill was pulled due to a lack of support.

Any doubters on the opposition benches should look to the experience in South Australia and the ACT, which have both enacted truth in advertising laws.

My research has shown these laws operate effectively in both jurisdictions.

What’s at stake

Spreading political lies has the potential to cause harm on multiple fronts.

The first is the damage to the candidate or political party in terms of their reputation and electoral prospects.

The second danger is to the integrity of the electoral process if lies cause people to switch their votes to such an extent that it changes election outcomes.

The spread of disinformation has become prevalent in an era of “fake news” and “alternative facts”, exacerbated by the rise of social media.

In 2024, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report ranked misinformation and disinformation as the most severe risk facing the world over the next two years.

False information can alter elections, affect voting participation, silence minorities, and polarise the electorate. It is time to reform our electoral laws to mitigate the significant dangers to our democratic system.

Yee-Fui Ng, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University

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

Galleries and art museums can be intimidating and alienating even for adults. Imagine it from a child’s point of view. Stern security guards in uniforms stationed the doors, bags checked, snacks banned and people hushed. It’s no wonder that kids groan when an excursion to the gallery comes up.

An increasing number of galleries are rethinking their approach, asking what it takes to be welcoming and engaging for the younger generation. Children should be welcomed and visible in gallery spaces. Their experiences now shape the citizens they will become in the future. Viewing art helps develop their identity and creativity, and a more nuanced understanding of the world.

The first step in making change is to recognise that children are current and active cultural citizens who can offer valuable perspectives, ideas and youthful energy. Through thoughtful design and programming, the younger generation is told their presence in the gallery is valued.

Here are some ways galleries are rising to the challenge and making children more welcome – and more valued – in our cultural spaces.

Setting the tone

The entrance to a gallery sets the tone for a young visitor. Are they greeted warmly and made to feel welcome, or does their arrival feel like an intrusion?

Some simple adjustments such as less intimidating bag checks, clear signage, and designated stroller parking create a more welcoming environment. Replacing uniformed security guards with friendly guides and training reception staff to acknowledge and engage with young visitors make a huge difference.

Inciting curiosity and interaction at the front door is another way to invite children into the space. Displaying eye-catching and intriguing sculptural works at the entry or in the foyer builds a sense of anticipation and interest.

The iconic water wall at the National Gallery of Victoria signals to children that there are wonders to touch and explore inside.

Children don’t come alone

Children come to galleries with parents, siblings, schools or community groups. Galleries that consider how these varied age groups move through the space can greatly enhance the overall experience.

Programming designed with the whole family in mind means parents and kids can share cultural experiences. Well designed workshops, interactive exhibits and events appeal to mixed aged groups.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales regularly stages all-ages concerts with popular DJs and live music, building positive associations with the gallery for the whole family.

Incorporating a variety of spaces and experiences extend the duration and frequency of family visits. Some children need low sensory sessions with reduced stimuli to enjoy their visit. Others can use adjacent outdoor spaces and robust sculpture gardens to burn off excess energy, share lunch or even splash in some pink water.

Is there a place for me?

Does your local gallery have a dedicated children’s gallery?

These spaces are designed with kids in mind, engaging the senses and creating participatory ways of experiencing art. The way children encounter the work helps young children learn about the diverse and creative approaches and perspectives of artists in an engaging context.

The interactive experiences and programming mean children can explore their imagination and creativity and form a personal connections with the arts.

What about the older kids? Can they see themselves in the gallery? Teens need to connect, collaborate and to be included in cultural narratives in ways that are relevant to them.

Programs tailored for teens, such as workshops or art-making sessions, move beyond passive observation and encourage self expression and participation.

Ambitious teen programs, like the out-of-hours teen parties in the National Gallery of Victoria or the youth council at the National Gallery of Australia, empower young people to interact with art and the institution in ways that are meaningful for them.

Exhibiting the best artwork from the year 12 graduating students is another effective way to demonstrate to teens their perspectives and presence matters. Seeing creative work by their age group displayed in a gallery builds confidence and demonstrates to older adults how much the younger generation have to contribute.

Growing lifelong learners

Galleries are unique learning environments, able to engage with and activate the school curriculum and develop essential skills like social and emotional capabilities and creative and critical thinking skills.

New institutions can consider how to meaningfully engage with children in the design phase, but even existing galleries can reconfigure and retrofit their spaces and exhibitions to enable kids to learn.

Specifically designed studios, creative technology, classrooms and presentation areas open the doors to cultural exploration. Positive exposure fosters a sense of stewardship ensuring that future generations value and support the arts.

Galleries are doing a great job welcoming kids but even more can be done. By embracing children as current cultural citizens, galleries can create a more inclusive, creative, and culturally aware society.

Intentionally designed spaces and programming ensure that children are not only welcomed but inspired to return – again and again – throughout their lives.

Naomi Zouwer, Visual Artist and Lecturer in Teacher Education, University of Canberra and Olivia Hamilton, Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching- RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design. Senior Lecture in Interior Design, RMIT University

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

Australian radio host Kyle Sandilands announced on air yesterday that he has a brain aneurysm and needs urgent brain surgery.

Typically an aneurysm occurs when a part of the wall of an artery (a type of blood vessel) becomes stretched and bulges out.

You can get an aneurysm in any blood vessel, but they are most common in the brain’s arteries and the aorta, the large artery that leaves the heart.

Many people can have a brain aneurysm and never know. But a brain (or aortic) aneurysm that ruptures and bursts can be fatal.

So, what causes a brain aneurysm? And what’s the risk of rupture?

Weakness in the artery wall

Our arteries need strong walls because blood is constantly pumped through them and pushed against the walls.

An aneurysm can develop if there is a weak part of an artery wall.

The walls of arteries are made of three layers: an inner lining of cells, a middle layer of muscle and elastic fibres, and a tough outer layer of mostly collagen (a type of protein). Damage to any of these layers causes the wall to become thin and stretched. It can then balloon outward, leading to an aneurysm.

Genetics and certain inherited disorders can cause weak artery walls and brain aneurysms in some people.

For all of us, our artery walls become weaker as we age, and brain aneurysms are more common as we get older. The average age for a brain aneurysm to be detected is 50 (Sandilands is 53).

Females have a higher risk of brain aneurysm than males after about age 50. Declining oestrogen around menopause reduces the collagen in the artery wall, causing it to become weaker.

High blood pressure can increase the risk of a brain aneurysm. In someone with high blood pressure, blood inside the arteries is pushed against the walls with greater force. This can stretch and weaken the artery walls.

Another common condition called atherosclerosis can also cause brain aneurysms. In atherosclerosis, plaques made mostly of fat build up in arteries and stick to the artery walls. This directly damages the cell lining, and weakens the muscle and elastic fibres in the middle layer of the artery wall.

Several lifestyle factors increase risk

Anything that increases inflammation or causes atherosclerosis or high blood pressure in turn increases your risk of a brain aneurysm.

Smoking and heavy drinking affect all of these, and nicotine directly damages the artery wall.

Sandilands mentioned his cocaine use in discussing his diagnosis. He said:

The facts are, a life of cocaine abuse and partying are not the way to go.

Indeed, cocaine abuse increases the risk of a brain aneurysm. It causes very high blood pressure because it causes arteries to spasm and constrict. Cocaine use is also linked to worse outcomes if a brain aneurysm ruptures.

Stress and a high-fat diet also increase inflammation. High cholesterol can also cause atherosclerosis. And being overweight increases your blood pressure.

A study of more than 60,000 people found smoking and high blood pressure were the strongest risk factors for a brain aneurysm.

Is it always a medical emergency?

About three in 100 people will have a brain aneurysm, varying in size from less than 5mm to more than 25mm in diameter. The majority are only discovered while undergoing imaging for something else (for example, head trauma), because small aneurysms may not cause any symptoms.

Larger aneurysms can cause symptoms because they can press against brain tissues and nerves.

Sandilands described “a lot of headache problems” leading up to his diagnosis. Headaches can be due to minor leaks of blood from the aneurysm. They indicate a risk of the aneurysm rupturing in subsequent days or weeks.

Less than one in 100 brain aneurysms will rupture, often called a “brain bleed”. This causes a subarachnoid haemorrhage, which is a type of stroke.

If it does occur, rupture of a brain aneurysm is life-threatening: nearly one in four people will die within 24 hours, and one in two within three months.

If someone’s brain aneurysm ruptures, they usually experience a sudden, severe headache, often described as a “thunderclap headache”. They may also have other symptoms of a stroke such as changes in vision, loss of movement, nausea, vomiting and loss of consciousness.

Surgery can prevent a rupture

Whether surgery will be used to treat a brain aneurysm depends on its size and location, as well as the age and health of the patient. The medical team will balance the potential benefits with the risks of the surgery.

A small aneurysm with low risk of rupture will usually just be monitored.

However, once a brain aneurysm reaches 7mm or more, surgery is generally needed.

In surgery to repair a brain aneurysm, the surgeon will temporarily remove a small part of the skull, then cut through the coverings of the brain to place a tiny metal clip to close off the bulging part of the aneurysm.

Another option is endovascular (meaning within the vessel) coiling. A surgeon can pass a catheter into the femoral artery in the thigh, through the aorta to the brain. They can then place a coil inside the aneurysm which forms a clot to close off the aneurysm sac.

After either surgery, usually the person will stay in hospital for up to a week. It can take 6–8 weeks for full recovery, though doctors may continue monitoring with annual imaging tests for a few years afterwards.

You can lower your risk of a brain aneurysm by not smoking, moderating alcohol intake, eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly and maintaining a healthy weight.

Theresa Larkin, Associate Professor of Medical Sciences, University of Wollongong and Jessica Nealon, Senior Lecturer in Medical Sciences (Neuroscience), University of Wollongong

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

You wake up exhausted from yet another hot night of tossing and turning, with very little sleep.

So you might be tempted to buy a “cooling blanket” after reading rave reviews on social media. Or you might have read online articles with taglines such as:

Stop waking up in a puddle of sweat with our roundup of the best cooling blankets – including a top-rated option from Amazon that ‘actually works’.

But what are cooling blankets? And can they help you get a restful night?

We know a cooler bedroom is best

First, let’s look at why a cooler environment helps us sleep better at night.

Our body’s internal temperature has a circadian rhythm, meaning it fluctuates throughout the day. A couple of hours before bed, it drops about 0.31°C to help you fall asleep. It will drop about another 2°C across the night to help you stay asleep.

During sleep, your internal temperature and skin work together to achieve a balance between losing and producing heat. Your skin has sensors that pick-up changes in the environment around you. If it gets too warm, these sensors let your body know, which may cause you to kick-off blankets or bed clothes and wake more often leading to poorer sleep quality.

Sleep quality is an important component of sleep health ensuring you get the physical, mental and emotional benefits that come from a good night’s sleep.

The ideal temperature for sleep varies depending on the season and type of bedding you have but falls between 17°C and 28°C. Keeping your sleeping environment within this range will help you to get the best night’s rest.

So what are cooling blankets?

Cooling blankets are designed to help regulate your body temperature while you sleep.

Different technologies and materials are used in their design and construction.

We’re not talking about hospital-grade cooling blankets that are used to reduce fever and prevent injury to the nervous system. These use gel pads with circulating water, or air-cooling systems, connected to automatic thermostats to monitor someone’s temperature.

Instead, the type of consumer-grade cooling blankets you might see advertised use a blend of lightweight, breathable materials that draw moisture away from the skin to help you stay cool and dry through the night. They look like regular blankets.

Common materials include cotton, bamboo, silk or the fibre Lyocell, all of which absorb moisture.

Manufacturers typically use a thread count of 300-500, creating air pockets that enhance airflow and moisture evaporation.

Some blankets feature a Q-Max rating, which indicates how cool the fabric feels against your skin. The higher the value, the cooler the fabric feels.

Others feature phase change materials. These materials were developed by NASA for space suits to keep astronauts comfortable during a spacewalk where temperatures are from roughly -157°C to 121°C. Phase change materials in cooling blankets absorb and hold heat producing a cooling effect.

Do they work?

If you believe online reviews, yes, cooling blankets can cool you down and help you sleep better in warmer weather or if you get too hot using normal sheets and blankets.

However, there is little scientific research to see if these consumer-grade products work.

In a 2021 study exploring sleep quality, 20 participants slept for three nights under two different conditions.

First, they slept with regular bed sheets in an air-conditioned room with the temperature set to their preference. Then, they used cooling bed sheets in an air-conditioned room where the temperature was set 3°C higher than their preference.

Participants reported good sleep quality in both conditions but preferred the warmer room with its cooling sheets.

This may suggest the use of cooling bedding may help provide a more comfortable night’s sleep.

But everyone’s cooling needs varies depending on things like age, health, body temperature, the space you sleep in, and personal preferences.

So while these products may work for some people who may be motivated to leave a good review, they may not necessarily work for you.

Are they worth it?

There’s a wide variety of cooling blankets available at different prices to suit various budgets. Positive customer reviews might encourage a purchase, especially for individuals experiencing disrupted sleep at night due to heat.

Yet, these cooling blankets have limited scientific research to show they work and to say if they’re worth it. So it’s up to you.

What else can I do if I’m a hot sleeper?

If a cooling blanket isn’t for you, there are other things you can do to stay cool at night, such as:

• using air conditioning or a fan

• placing a damp towel under or over you

• wearing lightweight or minimal sleepwear and avoiding thick or synthetic fabrics, such as nylon, that can trap heat

• if you usually share a bed, on hot nights, consider sleeping by yourself to avoid excess body heat from your partner.

On a final note, if you often struggle with hot, disturbed sleep, you can check in with your health-care provider. They can see if there is a medical explanation for your disturbed sleep and advise what to try next.

Linda Grosser, Research Associate, Behaviour-Brain-Body Research Centre, University of South Australia and Luana Main, Associate Professor in Applied Sport Science, Deakin University

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

Have you ever wondered how Australia’s many Indigenous languages relate to one another and how far back the connections go?

The Australian continent has been settled by Indigenous people for at least 50,000 years, but just how old are the languages spoken today and where did they originate? Our research provides some answers to these questions – and the answers throw up new and interesting puzzles.

There is a long-standing proposal that all the Indigenous languages of continental Australia come from one language, called Proto-Australian. This hypothesis is based on observations, going back to the 19th century, that many Indigenous languages show similarities in grammar and vocabulary.

However, without proper testing, it is not possible to know whether these similarities are best explained as inheritances from a single ancestor language or in some other way, such as borrowing, which would not require a single ancestor language.

Our recent research – the first evaluation of the Proto-Australian hypothesis – shows it is supported. Proto-Australian was most likely spoken about 6,000 years ago in the Top End of the Northern Territory. When it spread across mainland Australia it displaced all the other languages spoken before.

One big question is how this spread took place. Language spread is usually associated with population movements or economic and technological change. But there is no clear evidence for population movement or economic and technological change in the past 10,000 years.

This suggests we need to develop new models of how language spreads, and of Australian prehistory.

Language families

Relationships between languages are established by finding similar or shared words. Languages that share similar forms are members of a language family; languages that do not share those forms are not part of that family.

Language families can be grouped into hierarchies of mother and daughter language families. Within Australia, Proto-Pama-Nyungan (PPN), one of the daughter families of Proto-Australian is much more widespread than the others. It occupies 90% of the continent, the lighter area on Map 1.

The other daughter languages of Proto-Australian are called Non-Pama-Nyungan (NPN). Some of these form small families. Others, with no close relatives, are isolates, the white areas on Map 2.

The area with the most isolates has the greatest diversity. Within Australia, that area is the Top End. As a general principle, the area with the greatest diversity is the most likely homeland for a proto-language. Therefore, the Top End is the most likely homeland for Proto-Australian.

Though there is considerable diversity, we find similar words across both Proto-Pama-Nyungan and Non-Pama-Nyungan. In Proto-Pama-Nyungan, for example, the word for hand is marla. In Non-Pama-Nyungan languages, we find several variations:

Amurdak: mara

Bardi: marla

Gajirrabeng: marla

Ganggalida: marl

Gija: marla

Gooniyandi: marla

Kayardild: marl

Lardil: marl

Ngandi: mar

Nyulnyul: marl

Yawuru: marla

Finding similarities does not provide exact timelines for when the proto-language was spoken as a single language, but there are no reliable examples dating back more than 10,000 years.

Diversification is an inherent feature of language. With sufficient time all similarities will be lost. Given that the continent has been continuously occupied for at least 50,000 years, the prediction is that there would be many unrelated languages across Australia.

This prediction is borne out in two critical cases: Tasmania, which separated from the mainland 14,000 years ago, and the Tiwi Islands, which separated 6,000 years ago, thereby preventing language spread to either of these islands after these dates.

Neither the Tasmanian nor Tiwi languages are related to the mainland languages. This accords with the prediction from standard rates of language diversification that similarities should be lost.

Standard rates of diversification predict there should be many unrelated languages on the mainland. But this is not the case. This means that Proto-Australian must have spread continent-wide after the separation of the Tiwi Islands.

A big question

Why and how one language spread with such a success is a big question. Accompanying language spread, there would usually be evidence of social change. This social change might be population increase or movement; it might be economic or technological change. But there is no direct evidence for this.

Hypotheses about population movements can be evaluated against genetic studies, while hypotheses about population increase or economic and technological change can be evaluated against the archaeological record.

There is considerable variation in the genetics literature, but no suggestion of significant changes in the last 10,000 years.

One theory is that there was a single founding population, which differentiated between 33,000 and 10,000 years ago, with gene flow from the north-east to much of the rest of the continent during the last 10,000 years.

Another theory proposes a founding group at 50,000 years ago, which spread rapidly to all coastal areas by 45,000 years ago. This rapid spread was followed by ongoing in-situ diversification, with no evidence for significant population movements.

Yet another theory proposes divergence 26,000-35,000 years ago, with little evidence of migration.

There are also differing interpretations of the archaeological record. Variation in climate may have had effects on population levels, with significant increases during the last 10,000 years. But while the evidence supports significant fluctuations in land use over the last 10,000 years in various regions, it has also been argued that the evidence does not generally support either synchronised continent-wide fluctuations or unidirectional change.

The one example of a continent-wide change that offered an economic advantage was the introduction of the dingo 4,000-8,000 years ago. But it is very unlikely that one economic change would lead to continent-wide language replacement. Further, dingoes are native to the Tiwi Islands, suggesting that the spread of the dingo does not correlate with the spread of Proto-Australian.

A final puzzle is that language spread does not automatically lead to a total eclipse of pre-existing languages. In Europe, where Indo-European languages spread through trade and military might, some languages from before that time are still around – Basque and Sámi, for example. There are also traces of older languages in words and place names.

But in mainland Australia, there are only languages that are daughter languages of Proto-Australian. That is quite unusual. Therefore, we have a good question, but no good answers, which means our models need revision.

Mark Harvey, Conjoint Associate Professor, Linguistics, University of Newcastle and Robert Mailhammer, Professor of Linguistics, Western Sydney University

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

Western diets – high in processed foods and low in fibre – are associated with obesity, diabetes and heart disease. These diets don’t only harm our bodies, they also harm our gut microbiomes, the complex community of bacteria, fungi and viruses found in our intestinal tract that are important for our health.

Scientists, including my colleagues and me, are actively searching for ways to create healthy microbiomes to prevent chronic diseases. And my search has taken me to Papua New Guinea.

I have long been fascinated by this country, with its remote valleys almost untouched by the modern world until 1930, more than 800 languages, an ancient system of sustenance agriculture and entire communities living a non-industrialised lifestyle. This fascination kicked off a thrilling nine-year research project involving researchers from eight countries, which led to a paper published in the scientific journal Cell.

In previous research, my team studied the gut microbiomes of rural Papua New Guineans. We discovered microbiomes that are more diverse than their westernised counterparts, enriched in bacteria that thrive on dietary fibre, and with lower levels of inflammation-causing bacteria that are typically found in people who eat highly processed foods.

This information provided hints on how to perhaps redress the damage caused to our gut microbiomes.

The traditional diet in rural Papua New Guinea is rich in unprocessed plant-based foods that are full of fibre but low in sugar and calories, something I was able to see for myself on a field trip to Papua New Guinea. Determined to create something everyone could use to benefit their health, our team took what we saw in Papua New Guinea and other non-industrialised societies to create a new diet we call the NiMe (non-industrialised microbiome restore) diet.

What sets NiMe apart from other diets is that it is dominated by vegetables (such as leafy greens) and legumes (such as beans) and fruit. It only contains one small serving of animal protein per day (salmon, chicken or pork), and it avoids highly processed foods.

Dairy, beef and wheat were excluded from the human trial because they are not part of the traditional diet in rural Papua New Guinea. The other characteristic distinction of the diet is a substantial dietary fibre content. In our trial, we went for around 45g of fibre a day, which exceeds the recommendations in dietary guidelines.

One of my PhD students got creative in the kitchen designing recipes that would appeal to a person used to typical western dishes. These meals allowed us to develop a meal plan that could be tested in a strictly controlled study in healthy Canadian adults.

Remarkable results

We saw remarkable results including weight loss (although participants didn’t change their regular calorie intake), a drop in bad cholesterol by 17%, decreased blood sugar by 6%, and a 14% reduction in a marker for inflammation and heart disease called C-reactive protein. These benefits were directly linked to improvements in the participants’ gut microbiome, specifically, microbiome features damaged by industrialisation.

On a western diet low in dietary fibre, the gut microbiome degrades the mucus layer in the gut, which leads to inflammation. The NiMe diet prevented this process, which was linked to a reduction in inflammation.

The diet also increased beneficial bacterial metabolites (byproducts) in the gut, such as short-chain fatty acids, and in the blood, such as indole-3-propionic acid – a metabolite that has been shown to protect against type 2 diabetes and nerve damage.

Research also shows that low dietary fibre leads to gut microbes ramping up protein fermentation, which generates harmful byproducts that may contribute to colon cancer.

In fact, there is a worrying trend of increased colon cancer in younger people, which may be caused by recent trends towards high-protein diets or supplements. The NiMe diet increased carbohydrate fermentation at the expense of protein fermentation, and it reduced bacterial molecules in the participants’ blood that are linked to cancer.

The findings from our research show that a dietary intervention targeted towards restoring the gut microbiome can improve health and reduce disease risk. The NiMe diet offers a practical roadmap to achieve this, by providing recipes that were used in our study. It allows anyone interested in healthy eating to improve their diet to feed their human cells and their microbiome.

Jens Walter, Professor at the School of Microbiology, University College Cork

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

This week the World Health Organization (WHO) released new guidelines recommending people switch the regular salt they use at home for substitutes containing less sodium.

But what exactly are these salt alternatives? And why is the WHO recommending this? Let’s take a look.

A new solution to an old problem

Advice to eat less salt (sodium chloride) is not new. It has been part of international and Australian guidelines for decades. This is because evidence clearly shows the sodium in salt can harm our health when we eat too much of it.

Excess sodium increases the risk of high blood pressure, which affects millions of Australians (around one in three adults). High blood pressure (hypertension) in turn increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and kidney disease, among other conditions.

The WHO estimates 1.9 million deaths globally each year can be attributed to eating too much salt.

The WHO recommends consuming no more than 2g of sodium daily. However people eat on average more than double this, around 4.3g a day.

In 2013, WHO member states committed to reducing population sodium intake by 30% by 2025. But cutting salt intake has proved very hard. Most countries, including Australia, will not meet the WHO’s goal for reducing sodium intake by 2025. The WHO has since set the same target for 2030.

The difficulty is that eating less salt means accepting a less salty taste. It also requires changes to established ways of preparing food. This has proved too much to ask of people making food at home, and too much for the food industry.

Enter potassium-enriched salt

The main lower-sodium salt substitute is called potassium-enriched salt. This is salt where some of the sodium chloride has been replaced with potassium chloride.

Potassium is an essential mineral, playing a key role in all the body’s functions. The high potassium content of fresh fruit and vegetables is one of the main reasons they’re so good for you. While people are eating more sodium than they should, many don’t get enough potassium.

The WHO recommends a daily potassium intake of 3.5g, but on the whole, people in most countries consume significantly less than this.

Potassium-enriched salt benefits our health by cutting the amount of sodium we consume, and increasing the amount of potassium in our diets. Both help to lower blood pressure.

Switching regular salt for potassium-enriched salt has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke and premature death in large trials around the world.

Modelling studies have projected that population-wide switches to potassium-enriched salt use would prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths from cardiovascular disease (such as heart attack and stroke) each year in China and India alone.

The key advantage of switching rather than cutting salt intake is that potassium-enriched salt can be used as a direct one-for-one swap for regular salt. It looks the same, works for seasoning and in recipes, and most people don’t notice any important difference in taste.

In the largest trial of potassium-enriched salt to date, more than 90% of people were still using the product after five years.

Making the switch: some challenges

If fully implemented, this could be one of the most consequential pieces of advice the WHO has ever provided.

Millions of strokes and heart attacks could be prevented worldwide each year with a simple switch to the way we prepare foods. But there are some obstacles to overcome before we get to this point.

First, it will be important to balance the benefits and the risks. For example, people with advanced kidney disease don’t handle potassium well and so these products are not suitable for them. This is only a small proportion of the population, but we need to ensure potassium-enriched salt products are labelled with appropriate warnings.

A key challenge will be making potassium-enriched salt more affordable and accessible. Potassium chloride is more expensive to produce than sodium chloride, and at present, potassium-enriched salt is mostly sold as a niche health product at a premium price.

If you’re looking for it, salt substitutes may also be called low-sodium salt, potassium salt, heart salt, mineral salt, or sodium-reduced salt.

A review published in 2021 found low sodium salts were marketed in only 47 countries, mostly high-income ones. Prices ranged from the same as regular salt to almost 15 times higher.

An expanded supply chain that produces much more food-grade potassium chloride will be needed to enable wider availability of the product. And we’ll need to see potassium-enriched salt on the shelves next to regular salt so it’s easy for people to find.

In countries like Australia, about 80% of the salt we eat comes from processed foods. The WHO guideline falls short by not explicitly prioritising a switch for the salt used in food manufacturing.

Stakeholders working with government to encourage food industry uptake will be essential for maximising the health benefits.

Xiaoyue (Luna) Xu, Scientia Lecturer, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney and Bruce Neal, Executive Director, George Institute Australia, George Institute for Global Health

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

Mastercard has announced plans to remove the 16-digit number from their credit and debit cards by 2030 in a move designed to stamp out identity theft and fraudulent use of cards.

The numbers currently used to identify cards will be replaced with tokenisation and biometric authentication

In 2022, Mastercard added biometric options enabling payments to be made with a smile or wave of the hand.

Tokenisation converts the 16-digit card number into a different number – or token – stored on your device, so card information is never shared when you tap your card or phone or make payments online.

The first rollout of these numberless cards will be through a partnership with AMP Bank, but it is expected other banks will follow in the coming 12 months.

Why card security is important

There is nothing quite like the sinking feeling after receiving a call or text from your bank asking about the legitimacy of a card transaction.

In 2023-2024 the total value of card fraud in Australia was A$868 million, up from $677.5 million the previous financial year.

Credit card numbers and payment details are often exposed in major data breaches affecting large and small businesses.

Late last year, the US Federal Trade Commission took action against the Marriott and Starwood Hotels for lax data security. More than 300 million customers worldwide were affected.

Event ticketing company Ticketmaster was also hacked last year. The details of several hundred million customers, including names, addresses, credit card numbers, phone numbers and payment details were illegally accessed.

So-called “card-not-present fraud”, where an offender processes an unauthorised transaction without having the card in their physical possession, accounts for 92% of all card fraud in Australia. This rose 29% in the last financial year.

The Card Verification Value (CVV) (or three-digit number on the back of a credit card) aimed to ensure the person making the transaction had the physical card in their hands. But it is clearly ineffective.

Benefits of removing credit card numbers

Removing the credit card number is the latest attempt to curb fraud. Removing numbers stops fraudsters processing unauthorised card-not-present transactions.

It also reduces the potential for financial damage of victims exposed in data breaches, if organisations are no longer able to store these payment details.

The storage of personal information is a contested issue. For example, the 2022 Optus data breach exposed information from customers who had previously held accounts with the telco back in 2018.

Removing the ability of organisations to store payment details in the first place, removes the risk of this information being exposed in any future attack.

While any efforts to reduce fraud are welcome, this new approach raises some new issues to consider.

Potential problems with the new system

Mastercard has said customers will use tokens generated by the customer’s banking app or biometric authentication instead of card numbers.

This is likely to be an easy transition for customers who use mobile banking.

However, the use of digital banking is not universal. Many senior consumers and those with a disability don’t use digital banking services. They would be excluded from the new protections.

While strengthening the security attached to credit cards, removing numbers shifts the vulnerability to mobile phones and telecommunication providers.

Offenders already access victims’ phones through mobile porting and impersonation scams. These attacks are likely to escalate as new ways to exploit potential vulnerabilities are found.

There are also concerns about biometrics. Unlike credit card details, which can be replaced when exposed in a data breach, biometrics are fixed. Shifting a focus to biometrics will increase the attractiveness of this data, and potentially opens victims up to ongoing, irreversible damage.

While not as common, breaches of biometric data do occur.

For example, web-based security platform BioStar 2 in the UK exposed the fingerprints and facial recognition details of over one million people. Closer to home, IT provider to entertainment companies Outabox is alleged to have exposed facial recognition data of more than one million Australians.

Will we really need cards in the future?

While removing the numbers may reduce credit card fraud, emerging smart retail technologies may remove the need for cards all together.

Smartphone payments are already becoming the norm, removing the need for physical cards. GlobalData revealed a 58% growth in mobile wallet payments in Australia in 2023, to $146.9 billion. In October 2024, 44% of payments were “device-present” transactions.

Amazon’s innovative “Just-Walk-Out” technology has also removed the need for consumers to bring a physical credit or debit card all together.

This technology is available at more than 70 Amazon-owned stores, and at more than 85 third-party locations across the US, UK, and Australia. These include sports stadiums, airports, grocery stores, convenience stores and college campuses.

The technology uses cameras, weight sensors and a combination of advanced AI technologies to enable shoppers in physical stores make purchases without having to swipe or tap their cards at the checkout line.

Such technology is now being offered by a variety of other vendors including Trigo, Cognizant and Grabango. It is also being trialled across other international retailers, including supermarket chains Tesco and ALDI.

While Just-Walk-Out removes the need to carry a physical card, at some point consumers still need to enter their cards details into an app. So, to avoid cards and numbers completely, smart retail tech providers are moving to biometric alternatives, like facial recognition payments.

Considering the speed at which smart retail and payment technology is entering the marketplace, it is likely physical credit cards, numberless or not, will soon become redundant, replaced by biometric payment options.

Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology and Cassandra Cross, Associate Dean (Learning & Teaching) Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology

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

Around 350 million people globally use dating apps, and they amass an estimated annual revenue of more than US$5 billion. In Australia, 49% of adults report using at least one online dating app or website, with a further 27% having done so in the past.

But while dating apps have helped many people find romantic partners, they’re not all good news.

In a recent review, my colleagues and I found using dating apps may be linked to poorer body image, mental health and wellbeing.

We collated the evidence

Our study was a systematic review, where we collated the results of 45 studies that looked at dating app use and how this was linked to body image, mental health or wellbeing.

Body image refers to the perceptions or feelings a person has towards their own appearance, often relating to body size, shape and attractiveness.

Most of the studies we included were published in 2020 onwards. The majority were carried out in Western countries (such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia). Just under half of studies included participants of all genders. Interestingly, 44% of studies observed men exclusively, while only 7% included just women.

Of the 45 studies, 29 looked at the impact of dating apps on mental health and wellbeing and 22 considered the impact on body image (some looked at both). Some studies examined differences between users and non-users of dating apps, while others looked at whether intensity of dating app use (how often they’re used, how many apps are used, and so on) makes a difference.

More than 85% of studies (19 of 22) looking at body image found significant negative relationships between dating app use and body image. Just under half of studies (14 of 29) observed negative relationships with mental health and wellbeing.

The studies noted links with problems including body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, depression, anxiety and low self-esteem.

It’s important to note our research has a few limitations. For example, almost all studies included in the review were cross-sectional – studies that analyse data at a particular point in time.

This means researchers were unable to discern whether dating apps actually cause body image, mental health and wellbeing concerns over time, or whether there is simply a correlation. They can’t rule out that in some cases the relationship may go the other way, meaning poor mental health or body image increases a person’s likelihood of using dating apps.

Also, the studies included in the review were mostly conducted in Western regions with predominantly white participants, limiting our ability to generalise the findings to all populations.

Why are dating apps linked to poor body image and mental health?

Despite these limitations, there are plausible reasons to expect there may be a link between dating apps and poorer body image, mental health and wellbeing.

Like a lot of social media, dating apps are overwhelmingly image-centric, meaning they have an emphasis on pictures or videos. Dating app users are initially exposed primarily to photos when browsing, with information such as interests or hobbies accessible only after manually clicking through to profiles.

Because of this, users often evaluate profiles based primarily on the photos attached. Even when a user does click through to another person’s profile, whether or not they “like” someone may still often be determined primarily on the basis of physical appearance.

This emphasis on visual content on dating apps can, in turn, cause users to view their appearance as more important than who they are as a person. This process is called self-objectification.

People who experience self-objectification are more likely to scrutinise their appearance, potentially leading to body dissatisfaction, body shame, or other issues pertaining to body image.

There could be several reasons why mental health and wellbeing may be impacted by dating apps, many of which may centre around rejection.

Rejection can come in many forms on dating apps. It can be implied, such as having a lack of matches, or it can be explicit, such as discrimination or abuse. Users who encounter rejection frequently on dating apps may be more likely to experience poorer self-esteem, depressive symptoms or anxiety.

And if rejection is perceived to be based on appearance, this could lead again to body image concerns.

What’s more, the convenience and game-like nature of dating apps may lead people who could benefit from taking a break to keep swiping.

What can app developers do? What can you do?

Developers of dating apps should be seeking ways to protect users against these possible harms. This could, for example, include reducing the prominence of photos on user profiles, and increasing the moderation of discrimination and abuse on their platforms.

The Australian government has developed a code of conduct – to be enforced from April 1 this year – to help moderate and reduce discrimination and abuse on online dating platforms. This is a positive step.

Despite the possible negatives, research has also found dating apps can help build confidence and help users meet new people.

If you use dating apps, my colleagues and I recommend choosing profile images you feel display your personality or interests, or photos with friends, rather than semi-clothed images and selfies. Engage in positive conversations with other users, and block and report anyone who is abusive or discriminatory.

It’s also sensible to take breaks from the apps, particularly if you’re feeling overwhelmed or dejected.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. The Butterfly Foundation provides support for eating disorders and body image issues, and can be reached on 1800 334 673.

Zac Bowman, PhD Candidate, College of Education, Psychology & Social Work, Flinders University

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

Many people looking to improve their health try to boost fibre intake by eating more vegetables.

But while all veggies offer health benefits, not all are particularly high in fibre. You can eat loads of salads and vegetables and still fall short of your recommended daily fibre intake.

So, which vegetables pack the biggest fibre punch? Here’s what you need to know.

What is fibre and how much am I supposed to be getting?

Fibre, or dietary fibre, refers to the parts of plant foods that our bodies cannot digest or absorb.

It passes mostly unchanged through our stomach and intestines, then gets removed from the body through our stool.

There are two types of fibre which have different functions and health benefits: soluble and insoluble.

Soluble fibre dissolves in water and can help lower blood cholesterol levels. Food sources include fruit, vegetables and legumes.

Insoluble fibre adds bulk to the stool which helps move food through the bowels. Food sources include nuts, seeds and wholegrains.

Both types are beneficial.

Australia’s healthy eating guidelines recommend women consume 25 grams of fibre a day and men consume 30 grams a day.

However, research shows most people do not eat enough fibre. Most adults get about 21 grams a day.

4 big reasons to increase fibre

Boosting fibre intake is a manageable and effective way to improve your overall health.

Making small changes to eat more fibrous vegetables can lead to:

1. Better digestion

Fibre helps maintain regular bowel movements and can alleviate constipation.

2. Better heart health

Increasing soluble fibre (by eating foods such as fruit and vegetables) can help lower cholesterol levels, which can reduce your risk of heart disease.

3. Weight management

High-fibre foods are filling, which can help people feel fuller for longer and prevent overeating.

4. Reducing diabetes risk and boosting wellbeing

Fibre-rich diets are linked to a reduced risk of chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes and colorectal cancer.

Recent research published in prestigious medical journal The Lancet provided some eye-opening stats on why fibre matters.

The researchers, who combined evidence from clinical trials, found people who ate 25–29 grams of fibre per day had a 15–30% lower risk of life-threatening conditions like heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes compared to those who consumed fewer than 15 grams of fibre per day.

So which vegetables are highest in fibre?

Vegetables are excellent sources of both soluble and insoluble fibre, along with essential vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

The following veggies are some of the highest in fibre:

• green peas
• avocado
• artichokes
• parsnips
• brussels sprouts
• kale
• sweet potatoes
• beetroot
• carrots
• broccoli
• pumpkin

Which vegetables are low in fibre?

Comparatively lower fibre veggies include:

• asparagus
• spinach (raw)
• cauliflower
• mushrooms
• capsicum
• tomato
• lettuce
• cucumber

These vegetables have lots of health benefits. But if meeting a fibre goal is your aim then don’t forget to complement these veggies with other higher-fibre ones, too.

Does it matter how I prepare or cook the vegetables?

Yes.

The way we prepare vegetables can impact their fibre content, as cooking can cause structural changes in the dietary fibre components.

Some research has shown pressure cooking reduces fibre levels more greatly than roasting or microwave cooking.

For optimal health, it’s important to include a mix of both cooked and raw vegetables in your diet.

It’s worth noting that juicing removes most of the fibre from vegetables, leaving mostly sugars and water.

For improved fibre intake, it’s better to eat whole vegetables rather than relying on juices.

What about other, non-vegetable sources of fibre?

To meet your fibre recommendations each day, you can chose from a variety of fibre-rich foods (not only vegetables) including:

• legumes and pulses (such as kidney beans and chickpeas)
• wholegrain flour and bread
• fruits
• wholegrains (such oats, brown rice, quinoa, barley)
• nuts and seeds (such as flaxseeds and chia seeds)

A fibre-rich day that meets a recommended 30 grams would include:

• breakfast: 1⁄2 cup of rolled oats with milk and 1⁄2 cup of berries = about 6 grams of fibre
• snack: one banana = about 2 grams
• lunch: two cups of salad vegetables, 1⁄2 cup of four-bean mix, and canned tuna = about 9 grams
• snack: 30 grams of almonds = about 3 grams
• dinner: 1.5 cups of stir-fried vegetables with tofu or chicken, one cup of cooked brown rice = about 10 grams
• supper: 1⁄2 a punnet of strawberries with some yoghurt = about 3 grams.

Bringing it all together

Vegetables are a key part of a healthy, balanced diet, packed with fibre that supports digestion, blood glucose control, weight management, and reduces risk of chronic disease.

However, the nutritional value of them can vary depending on the type and the cooking method used.

By understanding the fibre content in different veggies and how preparation methods affect it, we can make informed dietary choices to improve our overall health.

Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Emily Burch, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Lecturer, Southern Cross University

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

Competitive swimmers know that swimming underwater causes less drag resistance than swimming at the surface. Splashing around making waves isn’t the most efficient way to swim. Any energy spent creating waves is essentially wasted, as water is moved without providing forward thrust for the swimmer.

New research by my colleagues and I has found evidence that many air-breathing marine animals know this too – or rather they have evolved swimming behaviour that minimises wasted energy on long journeys.

We know a lot about how birds save energy on their migrations, such as flying in V formations, riding updrafts, or timing their departure for favourable winds. But it has been challenging to study these kinds of adaptations in marine animals, which are largely hidden from view, particularly during long-distance travel.

Whales and sea turtles, for example, often travel thousands of miles to breed or feed. These animals have evolved to minimise the energy costs of such long journeys, allowing them to conserve energy for reproduction and survival.

Using Fitbit-style accelerometer data, depth-loggers and video footage from animal-borne cameras, we collected detailed swim-depth measurements in free-living little penguins and loggerhead turtles. We compared these with satellite-tracking depth data for green turtles on long-distance migrations, and published data from whales, other species of penguins and migrating sea turtles from other populations.

Optimal depths

What we discovered was a remarkable similarity in relative swim depth across sea turtles, penguins and whales. When these air-breathing animals are travelling rather than feeding or evading predators, they swim at near-optimal depths to minimise energy waste. They swim just deep enough to avoid creating waves at the surface but not so deep that they expend extra energy travelling up and down to breathe.

This sweet spot for energy efficiency has long been established in physics. Experiments show that “wave drag” – additional drag from wave creation – is minimised once an object is at a depth of three times its diameter. For swimming animals, this diameter refers to their body thickness from back to chest.

Our research revealed that many marine animals, from little penguins (about 30cm long) to pygmy blue whales (nearly 20m long), travel at depths of around three body thicknesses under the surface. This shared strategy helps them save energy on their epic journeys across the oceans.

These findings are especially exciting because they span such a wide range of species, from birds to mammals and reptiles. They also have important implications for conservation. Knowing where animals travel and at what depths can help us design better conservation measures to protect them.

For example, understanding typical swim depths could help reduce the risk of boat strikes, which are a major threat to whales, or decrease accidental captures in fishing gear. Tracking animals to find out where they live and travel has become a key part of designing effective conservation measures. For marine animals, considering swim depth – essentially adding a third dimension – can also help to inform strategies to provide better protection.

Of course, not all swim depths are determined by energy efficiency alone. Animals may dive deeper to hunt for prey or avoid predators. But during long-distance migrations or shorter “commutes” to feeding areas, this energy-saving pattern emerges across many air-breathing species.

Collecting depth-tracking data from migrating animals has been notoriously difficult, but advances in technology are making it easier. We are thrilled that our work has contributed to uncovering this widespread adaptation, and we believe there will be much more to learn as tracking tools improve.

Historically, depth-tracking tags have prioritised recording the deepest and longest dives. They are often seen as the most dramatic or impressive aspects of animal dive behaviour. Our research highlights the importance of near-surface tracking too. This “ordinary” behaviour of swimming at just the right depth is no less impressive, given the energy savings it enables over vast distances.

Kimberley Stokes, Research Officer in Biosciences, Swansea University

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

I’m at the park with my daughter, who is jumping in and out of puddles, splashing, shrieking at me (Mum! Look what I can do!), as I read frantically, taking one-handed notes on my phone (Mum! Look at this!). Part of me wishes I could enjoy with her this moment of pleasure in movement. The other, more insistent part is thinking about this essay: where to start, what to say, how to sum up the extraordinary legacy of the book I’m re-reading, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which this year marks 100 years since its first publication in 1925. How am I supposed to write about this book?

If you were to read a synopsis, it might seem like a book purely for an academic specialist (which, admittedly, I am). One day in London in June 1923, an ageing rich woman, Clarissa Dalloway, prepares to give a party. Across town, a shell-shocked Great War veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, loses his grip on sanity. Between them oscillate other characters: Clarissa’s former lover Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s husband Richard and daughter Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s tutor Doris Kilman, Septimus’s wife Rezia, and his doctors Holmes and Bradshaw.

Like that other modernist monument, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows ordinary people through ordinary activities on an ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are filtered through their individual consciousnesses, threaded together with language, images and memories.

The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is demonstrated by the number of online parodies it inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a verified meme.

A new seam

On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of the manuscript she was drafting – then called “The Hours” – that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could write whatever she wanted to write because she owned her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond home.

Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to be self-published in this way. Being a small-press publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that would have been impossible if she was working with a mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do my scales”.

I recently co-hosted a conference here in Hobart, which included a panel on contemporary Tasmanian experimental writing. The writers who spoke that day talked of the struggle to place work that pushed the boundaries of form and genre. A hundred years after Woolf’s efforts to unearth what she called a new “seam”, commercial imperatives continue to constrain writers and their work.

Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion.

It sold moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year. Her biographer Hermione Lee records that in 1926 income from writing allowed Woolf and her husband Leonard to install a hot water range and toilet at their country home.

Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its challenge to the novel form and representation of time. Clarissa remembers the jolt of desire she felt as an 18-year-old for her friend Sally Seton, who kisses her on the terrace of her house at Bourton:

the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it – a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!

Clarissa, made “virginal” in middle age by illness and marital boredom, is surprised by this irrupting memory. She connects it to her sense of joy in life itself: “the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings […] collecting the whole of her at one point”.

Clarissa and Septimus Smith – though they never meet – are shadow versions of each other. Both have beaky noses, thin pale birdlike bodies, and histories of illness.

Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of the social system – what Woolf’s narrator ironises as the sister goddesses Conversion and Proportion.

“Worshipping proportion […] made England prosper”, because proportion forbids despair, illness, and emotional extremes. Conversion, the strong arm of Empire, “offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, the dissatisfied”. Conversion “loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will”. Together, they suck the life from those who cannot or will not comply with them.

For Septimus, who has witnessed the dreadful disproportion of the war, ordinary social life becomes a torturous pressure cooker, a “gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames”. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement emphasised this aspect of its experimentalism:

Watching Mrs Woolf’s experiment, certainly one of the hardest and very subtly planned, one reckons up its cost. To get the whole value of the present you must enhance it, perhaps, with the past.

Watching my daughter lark about is shadowed by the two surgeries she had in early childhood to correct her developmental hip dysplasia. I hear her screech with joy in the park, rocketing about freely; I hear her scream in pain in the hospital, encased in plaster from the midsection down. As Woolf knew, the past and the present are experienced within us simultaneously.

Doubled experience

“In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.”

Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now probably the most written-about 20th century English author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which criticised the educational, economic and social constraints that prevented women, in many instances, from writing anything at all.

Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. Feminist politics has progressed beyond Woolf, but she laid one of the foundation stones. In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot.

The same year Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, she also published her important collection of essays, The Common Reader. The first piece in that book, on the medieval letters of the Paston family, describes the illumination cast by these ordinary, non-literary pieces of writing:

Like all collections of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the fortunes of individuals. The family will go on, whether Sir John lives or dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes.

Mrs Dalloway encompasses this doubled experience of insignificance and blazing life. Woolf writes of the past emerging into the present day and the present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she called this her “tunnelling process, by which I tell the past in instalments, as I have need of it”.

In tunnelling through narrative, digging out caves behind her characters, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust – buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their significance, through repeated reference to the bells and clocks of London striking the hour.

This is why the opening line – and the novel as a whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop time. As she wrote of the Pastons’ letters: “There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.”

Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of different perspectives through a single shared moment in time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and moves through that individual’s memories.

Woolf wrote in her diary that “the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.” Daiches diagrammed these relations in time and space as a series of connected trees, arguing that they illustrated the novel’s concern with “the importance of contact and at the same time the necessity of keeping the self inviolable, of the extremes of isolation and domination”.

A legacy of inspiration

Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued to inspire. For second-wave feminism, Woolf was a touchstone. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an unparalleled position in the history of 20th century letters, inspiring the recovery of other contemporaneous women writers connected with the Bloomsbury group.

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or explicitly.

Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she throws a literary party.

Cunningham’s novel counterpoints, as Woolf did, the work of living with the work of art. The homemaker Laura Brown tries to bake a cake to equal a work of art, hoping “to be as satisfied and as filled with anticipation as a writer putting down the first sentence, a builder beginning to draw the plans.” Later, her delirious dying son Richard regrets what he views as the failure of his art to compete with simply living:

I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine trying to do that. What foolishness.

More recently, Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf (2023) and Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead (2024) have wrestled with Mrs Dalloway the character, and with Woolf’s legacy. Darling’s novel revives a new “Mrs” Dalloway, Winona, a wealthy Sydney suburban writer, wife and mother, who struggles to break through “to something more real” than the constraint of middle class domestication.

Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf explores a minor character from Mrs Dalloway, whom Woolf failed to make properly live: Daisy Simmons, Peter Walsh’s Anglo-Indian fiancee. In Woolf’s novel, Daisy exists entirely offstage. She is a romantic memory of Peter’s, “dark, adorably pretty”. Daisy, writes Cahill, is

trapped in the past, in a moment, a vignette, but not the kind that would enter a room, open a window, to a life inside, a life in the mind, as it does for Clarissa with a squeak of hinges on the very first page of Mrs Dalloway! Not a real girl, Daisy, too arch perhaps, the air not stirring for her, seeing as she has no present tense.

Cahill’s present-day narrator Mina, writing back to Woolf, sees Daisy as a fully fleshed character: a mixed-race woman living in Calcutta in the twilight of Empire, as the Indian independence movement grows in strength. In recovering Daisy’s rich personal and political history, narrated through letters to Peter, Cahill reclaims interiority for this marginalised character.

In her 1937 essay Craftsmanship, the BBC broadcast of which is the only surviving recording of her voice, Woolf wrote: “Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations.”

Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same event from different vantage points and through different filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee explained, for Woolf “the really important life was ‘within’”.

Peter remembers Clarissa’s theory of life, which is expounded on top of a bus going down Shaftesbury Avenue:

She felt herself everywhere; not here here here; […] but everywhere. […] so that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places […] since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death.

Late in the book, Septimus’s suicide is reported to Clarissa at the party. “Oh,” she thinks, “in the middle of my party, here’s death”. And in the middle of her party, Clarissa feels not only the disaster of death – “her disaster, her disgrace […] and she forced to stand here in her evening dress” – but the deep pulsing joy of life. “Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long.”

In certain lights – to paraphrase Michael Cunningham – Mrs Dalloway might look like the book of one’s own life, a book that will locate you, parent you, arm you for life’s changes. As an undergraduate, I was mesmerised by Woolf’s language and her grasp on the inner life.

Though Clarissa Dalloway is 52, Woolf turned 43 the year her novel was published. I’m turning 43 this year, too. Woolf, ravaged by long periods of illness and partially toothless, thought of herself as elderly. I do not, though I am no longer young. But to re-read this novel at this age reminds me to relish these long hours and short years: to sniff flowers, feel the lift of the gusting wind, jump and splash with my children, read the patterns made by the clouds. To seize the day.

Naomi Milthorpe, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Tasmania

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

The sound of a skateboard trick communicates a world of sensory information to skateboarders. The power of “skatesound” – the noises of the board and the environment it comes into contact with – is so distinct because it relates to an experience that is both heard and felt.

Despite the sound of skateboarding frequently being an issue of public complaint, many skaters find it therapeutic, calming and a source of joy.

The visually spectacular activity of skateboarding is often presented as an exciting, iconoclastic pursuit. Despite its inclusion in the last two summer Olympics, it remains sub-culturally distinct. Some skateboarding practices are perhaps even arcane and cult-like in their reverence for banal concrete steps and metal benches.

Research my colleagues and I conducted argues that the niche world of skateboarding endures because of its dense sensory culture – one that is heard and felt by skateboarders.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

For skateboarders, skatesound is an augmented experience of the world multilayered with insights about the body, movement and the texture of the city.

Imagine the skateboard itself as an amplifying tool, one that gives fine and detailed information about terrain, efficacy and possibility. It is as if the skateboard is an extended sensory appendage, to feel and hear the world at large.

The sounds of the city

A series of research on sport and sound has explored how physical ability can be enhanced by music, the motivation and communal experience of spectator chants and even hearing loss.

Our research in skateboarding highlights new areas of consideration. One of the most distinct issues relates to how skateboarders have a dynamic understanding of skateable urban spaces that are unknown to other street denizens.

What skateboarders hear is also what they feel – the sound of the pavements or office plazas becomes part of their sensory world. Skateboarders can hear the sound of a skateboard and be aware of not just the environment it is being ridden through, but also the embodied experience, “the feel” of it for the rider.

One middle-aged Canadian skateboarder told us that when she heard the sound of someone skateboarding it both gave her joy and a sense of connection to the rider. Sound might therefore tell us something of the shared community and bond skaters report. They connect with each other because they share such a wealth of specialised knowledge.

Generally, skateboarders love the sound of skateboarding, describing it with a range of adjectives as the “sound of freedom”, “happiness”, or simply “lovely”. Yet, they are also keenly aware that, by some, skateboarding is considered unpleasant noise.

The paradox of skatesound is that skateboarders are able to hold both opposing notions simultaneously. We collected numerous accounts of skateboarders deliberately avoiding certain locations and times so as not to disturb, startle and annoy other city users. Yet, their own experience of hearing skatesound unexpectedly while at work, or in the street below at home, was always met with excitement.

A universal among skateboarders is what we have termed the “head whip” – the immediate instinctual turn of the head to seek out the origin of skatesound. The association of this sound was reported as an invitation to adventure, a feeling of fraternity with an unseen but clearly heard member of the tribe.

A surprising feature of our research was that several participants reported some form of neurodiversity, either being on the autism spectrum or having ADHD. The sensory experience of skateboarding, of feeling what you see and hear, was reported in positive terms as a way to calm sometimes overpowering senses.

For these skaters, skatesound has become part of a full-body connecting experience engaging the physical, mental and emotional with the board and the world at large. It represents some form of craft and mastery of the chaos of everyday life.

For the past 15 years, the A-Skate foundation provided skateboarding opportunities for children on the autism spectrum in recognition of these therapeutic processes. A range of therapists worldwide are incorporating elements of skateboarding into their support of people’s needs, spanning anxiety to learning disabilities.

The art of skateboarding

Bridging the gap between skateboarder and non-skateboarder, artist Max Boutin’s Texturologies art installation (2022) enables those curious about the sensory world to get a no-risk taster.

Using dynamic sound, large visual screens and static boards that pulse with the skatesound being played underneath, Boutin’s art offers a sensory experience of the skateboarder’s unique relationship to urban space. As a consequence, hearing like a skateboarder becomes one of the simplest ways to feel like a skateboarder.

Boutin’s work advocates for the specific knowledge embedded in the act of skateboarding. It speaks of those who find joy and revelry in often neglected and unloved urban realms that have lost their enchantment to a public chaperoned endlessly into spaces of consumption.

As contempt for the city deepens, skatesound can allow us to feel our urban spaces in new ways.

Paul O'Connor, Senior lecturer in Sociology, University of Exeter

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

Marianne Faithfull, the London-born singer with an inimitable voice, has passed away at the age of 78. She was known for many things: she was a pop star, an actress and a muse. But she was probably best known for her voice.

When she first entered the world of pop in 1964, her high-pitched tones rang with mellifluous vibrato. As she grew older and lived an increasingly excessive lifestyle, she developed a rasp – a quality borne of her unique experiences.

Faithfull’s final musical releases were works that incorporated Romantic poetry in different ways. She Walks in Beauty (2021) is a spoken-word album of canonical Romantic poetry by the likes of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats. Songs of Innocence and Experience 1965-1995 (2022) is a chronological retrospective of her career which uses the name of William Blake’s poetry collection (1789) as its title.

As a PhD student focused on the legacy of Romanticism in 1960s and 1970s popular music, I’ve closely examined Faithfull’s engagement with Romantic literature throughout her career. These final two albums represent a beautiful culmination of her artistic journey, and are a testament to her unique voice and strong poetic influences.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Songs of Innocence and Experience 1965-1995, like Blake’s poetry collection, is broken up into the sections Innocence and Experience.

The Innocence portion of the album covers Faithfull’s youth, featuring early hits such as This Little Bird. Her early sound incorporated baroque pop instrumentation, including harps, harpsichord and horn arrangements (Come and Stay with Me), as well as folk styles with the acoustic guitar at the centre of the sound (Cockleshells).

Faithfull’s voice in this section portrays her as an “innocent” girl in pop stardom, as its high pitch and pure tone embody a sense of naivete that is also reflected in her lyrics about young love, such as in Come and Stay With Me:

We’ll live a life no one has ever known
But I know you’re thinking that I’m hardly grown
But oh thank God, at last and finally
I can see you’re gonna stay with me

There is a noticeable shift in the Innocence section of the album with the song Sister Morphine. As the song was made in collaboration with her then-boyfriend, Mick Jagger, it features a noticeably more rock sound in contrast to her previous pop productions. You can also hear subtle changes in Faithfull’s voice: it cracks and sounds strained in places.

The song’s lyrics (“Please, Sister Morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams”) reflect the darker side of the mythologised “swinging sixties” lifestyle and its drug culture, which Faithfull has come to symbolise.

Blake’s Songs of Innocence features a piper as the presiding narrator over the poems. In contrast, Songs of Experience is meant to be heard through the voice of an ancient bard, as established in Introduction to the Songs of Experience:

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees
Whose ears have heard,
The Holy Word
That walk’d among the ancient trees.

The Experience section of Faithfull’s album features music from Broken English (1979) and her re-recording of As Tears Go By, from Strange Weather (1987). The songs in this portion of the album exhibit her completely transformed voice: from piper to bard, it is deeper, raw and more weathered as a result of her struggles with addiction and bouts of illness. This brought a distinct edge to her music, marking a new phase in her career.

Beyond the qualities of her voice, Faithfull’s song selection reflects Blake’s notions of Experience. Strange Weather (“Will you take me across the Channel / London Bridge is falling down”) aligns with Blake’s London geographically and thematically, as both explore entrapment and decay. Faithfull’s depiction of societal monotony, as in “Strangers talk only about the weather / All over the world / It’s the same …” echo Blake’s “charter’d street(s)” and “mind-forg’d manacles”.

Faithfull’s connection to Romantic poetry is most overt in She Walks in Beauty, which she made with Warren Ellis (Australian composer and member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). In this album, she recites Romantic poetry set to Ellis’s music.

The poems she selected to recite are all by male poets and many feature voiceless female subjects, such as Byron’s She Walks in Beauty or Thomas Hood’s The Bridge of Sighs. On the album’s liner notes, Faithfull described how she related with these women, particularly Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.

The Lady of Shalott is a woman cursed to live alone in a tower near Camelot – unable to look directly at the world, forced to weave what she sees in the mirror. Faithfull uses the Lady to reflect on the pressure she felt to conform to the expectations imposed on her by the press and music industry. There is a parallel between the Lady’s forced isolation and her struggles with being controlled and defined by external forces, as she explained:

Do I identify with the Lady? Oh yeah, always. I’m nothing like the Lady of Shalott, but I guess I wanted to be … When Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics for As Tears Go By, he knew this poem. There’s a bit he always said he used from here, the thing about ‘it was the closing of the day’.

In the liner notes, Faithfull also mentioned that her love of poetry was thanks to her English teacher at St Joseph’s Convent in Reading, Mrs Simpson, and to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, an anthology of English poetry, which she had bought as a teenager.

Faithfull’s lifelong interest in literature came to fruition in her two final projects. They exemplify how she was a pop star, muse and chanteuse – and also a Romantic.

Stephanie Hernandez, PhD Candidate, Literature and Music, University of Liverpool

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

As night falls over Australia’s forests, grasslands and backyards, the hidden world of nocturnal insects stirs to life. In many ecosystems, overall insect activity actually peaks at night, especially in warmer regions of the world.

These nighttime creatures play essential roles in ecosystems, providing services such as pollination, waste decomposition, and pest control. Here are some of the remarkable insects that come out after dark – and why they matter.

Moths: the stars of the night shift

While their flashier daytime relatives, the butterflies, often steal the spotlight, moths are the hidden stars of the night shift.

An estimated 22,000 species of moth call Australia home, and most are nocturnal, although some are diurnal (day active) or crepuscular (active at dawn and dusk).

Many species feed on flower nectar using their long, straw-like mouthparts, transferring pollen between flowers as they go.

In the Snowy Mountains, for instance, scientists found moths carry pollen from 19 different plant species.

While some moths feed on a wide variety of plants, others have evolved highly specialised relationships with specific flowers.

For instance, more than 500 species of leaf flower trees (Phyllanthus) across tropical Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific are dependent on tiny leaf flower moths (Epicephala) for their pollination.

The trees’ flowers attract moths by producing nectar at night, when the moths are most active.

The larvae of moths, caterpillars, also play a vital role in ecosystems. For example, the larvae of Mallee moths (Oecophoridae) feed on dry leaves in the leaf litter, making them essential for the decomposition of tough, dry plant material.

Without their tireless work breaking down organic matter, leaf litter can accumulate to problematic levels.

Although most caterpillars feed on plant material, some have unusual diets. Trisyntopa neossophila caterpillars, for example, feeds on the faeces of parrots nesting in termite mounds.

Some caterpillars are even predators. The larvae of the brown scale moth (Mataeomera coccophaga), for instance, eats scale insects.

Moths and their larvae provide a fat and protein-rich food source for many animals, including humans.

Once so abundant they famously blanketed the 2000 Sydney Olympics, large bogong swarms have become increasingly rare, putting at risk species that depend on them for essential nutrients.

Busy night beetles

Seeing the tiny, flashing lights of fireflies dancing through the darkness on a summer night is a magical experience.

Fireflies are actually beetles in the family Lampyridae, and 25 species call Australia home.

Each firefly species uses its own distinctive flash pattern to communicate with potential mates.

When large numbers of the same species gather, they can synchronise their light pulses, creating a breathtaking light show.

The fireflies’ distinctive light is produced through a biochemical reaction involving a molecule called luciferin and an enzyme called luciferase. When these interact in the presence of oxygen, they emit light.

Adult fireflies do not eat but firefly larvae mostly eat snails, which helps keep snail populations under control.

Beetles in the scarab family are often active at night. Large numbers of Christmas beetles (Anoplognathus spp) flying around porch lights used to be a common sight, but numbers appear to be in decline.

Some native dung beetles, such as the five-horned dung beetle (Onthophagus pentacanthus), are also nocturnal. Hardworking dung beetles play a vital role by breaking down animal dung, helping to recycle nutrients and improve soil health.

Lacewings and mantisflies

Lacewings belong to an ancient group of insects (Neuroptera) named for the delicate, lace-like net pattern of veins on their wings.

Most adult lacewings are nocturnal predators, feeding on smaller insects using their hollow, scissor-shaped mouthparts to catch and suck the nutrients from their prey.

Several lacewing species are effective pest controllers and are used in agriculture to manage pests such as aphids and mealybugs.

Mantid lacewings, also known as mantisflies, resemble a strange hybrid between a mantis and a fly but are actually in the same group as lacewings.

The larvae of mantisflies are poorly studied, but most species are believed to be predators of insects, although some are predators of spider eggs. By eating other insects, mantisflies may play a role in controlling pest populations.

Protecting these night shift workers

Artificial lights at night are causing serious disruption to insects on the night shift.

Insects often become disoriented, flying in endless circles around bright lights, burning energy they cannot afford to lose. This confusion can lead to exhaustion or death.

Artificial lighting at night can also disrupt nocturnal insect reproduction. And, predators such as owls and bats may learn to hunt around artificial lights where prey becomes more concentrated and vulnerable.

The exact reasons why nocturnal insects are drawn to light remain unclear, but recent research suggests that some nocturnal insects use light to maintain stable, level flight by orienting their bodies so light hits their upper surface.

This system works well when the only lights present at night are the Moon and stars, but fails when artificial lights disrupt the night.

We can help protect nocturnal insects by:

• turning off unnecessary outdoor lights at night, especially during summer when many insects are breeding
• using motion-activated lights to reduce light pollution
• reducing or eliminating the use of insecticides in our gardens.

Small changes can make a big difference to help protect the insects working hard overnight to keep our ecosystems healthy.

Tanya Latty, Associate Professor, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

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

Gaming is no longer a niche activity reserved for a select few – it’s a global pastime enjoyed by people of all ages, backgrounds and interests. In fact, studies show 81% of Australians engage in some form of gaming.

But for those who don’t consider themselves “gamers”, it can be hard to know where to start. The idea of picking up a complex, console-focused title might feel intimidating.

But fear not. Whether you’re looking for a game that’s mentally stimulating, addictive enough to help kill time, or simply something everyone can enjoy, there are plenty of options. Here are our top picks for beginners.

1. Real Bird Fake Bird

Since Wordle’s meteoric rise in 2022, we’ve seen a wave of daily browser games, including Tradle, Vulture’s Cinematrix and the New York Times’ Connections.

The Melbourne-based developers behind the critically acclaimed Scrabble-esque Gubbins have created the newest addition to this list: Real Bird Fake Bird.

The premise is simple. Each day you’re given a topic, and are supposed to guess whether seven different things are “real” or “fake” examples of that topic. For instance, Adele is a real example of a Grammy winner, but “sun condemnation” is a fake example of a yoga pose.

Sounds simple, right? It’s harder than it seems. The lists often have devilish examples of fakes that seem real, and real things that seem fake, leaving you second-guessing.

And just like with Wordle, you can share your score with friends once you’ve made all seven guesses. It’s a great way to spend a minute of your day.

You can play Real Bird Fake Bird through any device that can access a browser.

2. Balatro

Then there’s a hypnotic re-imagining of the card game poker, Balatro, (playable everywhere).

Each round involves playing poker hands to hit a points target, but these hands can be upgraded and augmented by a deck of “jokers” that favour particular poker hands or combinations of cards. Hands swiftly ascend to scoring tens of thousands (if not millions) of points per hand, in a near-perfect gameplay loop that combines card-game logic with the immersive flow of games like Tetris.

Balatro, largely developed by a single, anonymous developer, was one of 2024’s biggest hits. It sold more than 3,500,000 copies, won best indie game and best mobile game at the Game Awards 2024, and even secured a surprise nomination for game of the year.

This is the gaming equivalent of an anonymous independent filmmaker getting a nod for Best Picture at the Oscars.

3. The Case/Rise of the Golden Idol

This recommendation is targeted at mystery lovers. If you, or someone you know, can’t get enough of films like Knives Out (2019) or mystery books like The Thursday Murder Club, then the Golden Idol series (2022 and 2024) may be the perfect fit.

Each level shows the moment of a crime and it’s up to the player to interact with the characters and environment to fill in the blanks on a file explaining what happened.

With simple controls and a retro art style recalling the classic LucasArts adventure games, much of the joy in the Golden Idol games comes from the devious logic puzzles the cases provide.

One case revolves around placing the locations of all the house guests at an estate party, while another involves interpreting an entire language made out of dance moves. Combine these puzzles with a delightful sense of humour and a slightly mystical meta-narrative and these games will keep your inner detective occupied for hours.

The original and sequel are both Netflix games, and are available through Netflix on mobile and tablet.

4. Mouthwashing

Heavily inspired by the films Alien (1979) and The Shining (1980) – and not for the faint-of-heart – Mouthwashing (2024) is perfect for horror fans who want to dip their toes into the gaming world.

The cargo spaceship Tulpar is deliberately crashed by its captain mid-voyage. Unable to call for help, its five crew members can do nothing but wait for rescue. They open the hold in search of food or medicine, but instead find millions of bottles of mouthwash. Lost in space with minimal supplies, the crew begin to turn on each other – and wonder why their beloved captain crashed the ship in the first place.

A haunting story of human fallibility, Mouthwashing tells its tale through “walking sim” gameplay: the player simply wanders around the wreck of the Tulpar, interacting with objects and characters, without any complicated controls.

With a compelling cast, gorgeously surreal art direction and a focus on dread and despair (rather than jump scares), Mouthwashing is a wonderful introduction to the renaissance happening in horror games right now.

The game is available for PC via Steam (A$19) and can be completed in 2-3 hours.

5. Wingspan

For those who have endless bird facts on hand, can identify a bird at a glance and look forward to the Aussie Bird Count each year, Wingspan is the perfect game.

The goal of this competitive, card-driven board game (which also has a videogame version) is to attract the best birds to various habitats by gathering food and laying eggs. Each player also has a randomly determined individual goal, which they can use to score extra points, making Wingspan very re-playable.

The best aspects of the game include the beautiful art and the delightful facts on each bird card. There is even an Oceania expansion, so you can gather and admire Australian birds, too!

Wingspan can be purchased online or at major board game retailers. You can play the videogame version with friends via Steam.

Although Wingspan was released in 2018, last year its publisher, Stonemaier Games, also released Wyrmspan – a spiritual successor which focuses on hatching dragons instead of birds. Wyrmspan is more complex than Wingspan, though, and offers a steeper learning curve for less-experienced board game players.

Acknowledgement: we would like to acknowledge the contributions of Mads Mackenzie to this article, director of the upcoming game Drăculești and co-director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival.

Marcus Carter, Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney; Finn Dawson, PhD Candidate, Media and Communications, University of Sydney; Ryan Stanton, PhD Candidate, Media and Communications, 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.

In December 1972, the same month the Whitlam government was first elected, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 1975 as International Women’s Year (IWY). This set in train a series of world-changing events, in which Australia was to play a significant part.

The aim of IWY was to end discrimination against women and enable them to participate fully in economic, social and political life. Fifty years later, such participation has become an indicator of development and good governance. But the full promise of International Women’s year has yet to be fulfilled, hampered by pushback and the scourge of gender-based violence.

‘The greatest consciousness-raising event in history’

Dubbed “the greatest consciousness-raising event in history”, the UN’s first World Conference on Women took place in Mexico City in June 1975. Consciousness-raising had been part of the repertoire of women’s liberation. Now it was taken up by government and intergovernmental bodies.

The Mexico City conference was agenda-setting in many ways. The Australian government delegation, led by Elizabeth Reid, helped introduce the world of multilateral diplomacy to the language of the women’s movement. As Reid said:

We argued that, whenever the words “racism”, “colonialism” and “neo-colonialism” occurred in documents of the conference, so too should “sexism”, a term that had not to that date appeared in United Nations documents or debates.

Reid held the position of women’s adviser to the prime minister. In this pioneering role, she had been able to obtain government commitment and funding for Australia’s own national consciousness-raising exercise during IWY.

A wide range of small grants promoted attitudinal change – “the revolution in our heads” – whether in traditional women’s organisations, churches and unions, or through providing help such as Gestetner machines to the new women’s centres.

IWY grants explicitly did not include the new women’s services, including refuges, women’s health centres and rape crisis centres. Their funding was now regarded as an ongoing responsibility for government, rather than suitable for one-off grants.

IWY began in Australia with a televised conversation on New Year’s Day between Reid and Governor-General John Kerr on hopes and aspirations for the year. On International Women’s Day (March 8), Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s speech emphasised the need for attitudinal change:

Both men and women must be made aware of our habitual patterns of prejudice which we often do not see as such but whose existence manifests itself in our language and our behaviour.

The Australian postal service celebrated the day by releasing a stamp featuring the IWY symbol, showing the spirit of women breaking free of their traditional bonds. At Reid’s suggestion, IWY materials, including the symbol, were printed in the purple, green and white first adopted by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1908 and now known as the suffragette colours.

Policy power

Inside government, Reid had introduced the idea that all Cabinet submissions needed to be analysed for gender impact. After the Mexico City conference, this idea became part of new international norms of governance.

Following the adoption at the conference of the World Plan of Action, the idea that governments needed specialised policy machinery to promote gender equality was disseminated around the world.

Given the amount of ground to be covered, IWY was expanded to a UN Decade for Women (1976–85). By the end of it, 127 countries had established some form of government machinery to advance the status of women. Each of the successive UN world conferences (Copenhagen 1980, Nairobi 1985, Beijing 1995) generated new plans of action and strengthened systems of reporting by governments.

The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was a high point. Its “platform for action” provided further impetus for what was now called “gender mainstreaming”. By 2018, every country recognised by the UN except North Korea had established government machinery for this purpose.

The global diffusion of this policy innovation was unprecedented in its rapidity. At the same time, Australia took the lead in another best-practice innovation. In 1984, the Commonwealth government pioneered what became known as “gender budgeting”. This required departments to disaggregate the ways particular budgetary decisions affected men and women.

As feminist economists pointed out, when the economic and social division of labour was taken into account, no budgetary decision could be assumed to be gender-neutral. Governments had emphasised special programs for women, a relatively small part of annual budgets, rather than the more substantial impact on women of macro-economic policy.

Standard-setting bodies such as the OECD helped promote gender budgeting as the best way to ensure such decisions did not inadvertently increase rather than reduce gender gaps.

By 2022, gender budgeting had been taken up around the world, including in 61% of OECD countries. Now that it had become an international marker of good governance, Australian governments were also reintroducing it after a period of abeyance.

Momentum builds

In addition to such policy transfer, new frameworks were being adopted internationally. Following IWY, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was adopted in 1979. CEDAW became known as the international bill of rights for women, and has been ratified by 189 countries. This is more than any other UN Convention except that on the rights of the child.

All state parties to CEDAW were required to submit periodic reports to the UN on its implementation. Non-government organisations were encouraged to provide shadow reports to inform the questioning of government representatives. This oversight and dialogue relating to gender equality became part of the norm-building work of the UN.

However, this very success at international and regional levels helped fuel “anti-gender movements” that gathered strength after 1995. No more world conferences on women were held, for fear there would be slippage from the standards achieved in Beijing.

In Australia, the leveraging of international standards to promote gender equality has been muted in deference to populist politics. It became common to present the business case rather than the social justice case for gender-equality policy, even the cost to the economy of gender-based violence (estimated by KPMG to be $26 billion in 2015–16).

The battle continues

Fifty years after IWY, Australia is making up some lost ground in areas such as paid parental leave, work value in the care economy, and recognition of the ways economic policy affects women differently from men.

However, all of this remains precarious, with issues of gender equality too readily rejected as part of a “woke agenda”.

The world has become a different place from when the Australian government delegation set out to introduce the UN to the concept of sexism. In Western democracies, women have surged into male domains such as parliaments. Australia now has an almost equal number of women and men in its Cabinet (11 out of 23 members).

But along with very different expectations has come the resentment too often being mobilised by the kind of populist politics we will likely see more of in this election year.

Marian Sawer, Emeritus Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University

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

It all begins innocently – a late-night peek at your favourite social media site before bed. You catch a headline that grabs your attention with “breaking news” you can’t afford to miss.

Like following digital breadcrumbs, one click leads to another. Before you know it, you’re tumbling down a rabbit hole of endless updates and emotionally charged social media posts. Two hours later, your shoulders are tense, your stomach is in knots, but you can’t put your phone down.

This endless scrolling through bad news – known as “doomscrolling” – sneaks up on us.

It’s important to stay in touch with what’s happening in the world. Being informed helps us make better decisions, engage meaningfully in our communities, and respond effectively to changes that affect our lives and those around us.

But just like a healthy diet, we must be smart about our news consumption to avoid it taking a toll on our health.

The good news is there are proven ways to stay informed without letting it take over your life. Research shows setting clear boundaries around your news consumption can make a huge difference. So, how can you strike the right balance?

How to set boundaries with news consumption

It’s worth considering why you feel compelled to stay constantly informed. Ask yourself: “will this information change what I can do about it?”.

Often, we scroll not because the information is actionable, but because we are trying to gain a sense of control in an uncertain world.

Research shows scrolling through negative news can disrupt your sleep and increase anxiety. To make sure your media consumption is intentional, there are a few steps you can take.

Be picky with the news sources you read. Choose a few trusted outlets instead of letting social media algorithms decide what you see. It’s like sticking to a balanced meal plan, but for your mind.

While engaging with the news, pay close attention to how you’re feeling. When you notice physical signs of anxiety or emotional distress, that is your cue to take a break.

Set aside time earlier in the day with clear boundaries around your news consumption: maybe with your morning coffee or during your lunch break, whatever works for your schedule. Consider implementing a “digital sunset”, too. This is a cut-off time for news and social media, ideally an hour or two before bedtime, to give your mind time to process what you have learned without disrupting your sleep.

The world will always be there, but you will be in a better head space to process what is happening.

You don’t have to feel helpless

Taking breaks from consuming news is not burying your head in the sand – it’s practising self care. Studies have shown that people who set healthy boundaries around news consumption are often better equipped to engage meaningfully on important issues and take constructive action when needed.

When you check the news, be an active consumer. Instead of endless scrolling:

• choose one or two in-depth articles to read thoroughly

• discuss the news with colleagues, friends and family to process your feelings

• look for solution-focused news stories that highlight positive change

• take meaningful action on issues you care about.

There are also various apps and tools that can help you form healthier digital habits. Productivity apps use various approaches to help you stay focused, providing ways to snap you out of mindless scrolling.

News curation apps and apps that allow you to save articles to read later can help you establish a balanced news diet, and remove the urgent need to read everything immediately.

Many smartphones now come equipped with screen time management features, such as Apple’s Screen Time or Android’s Digital Wellbeing. You can use these to monitor your scrolling habits and to manage how much time you spend on social media or news apps.

One useful feature is to block apps from use during certain times of day or after you’ve used them for a set amount of time.

Stay mindful, stay engaged

Staying informed doesn’t mean staying constantly connected. By mindfully setting boundaries and using supportive tools, you can keep up with important events while protecting your wellbeing.

If you’re trying productivity apps and other tools, start small. Choose one tool that resonates with you rather than trying everything at once. Set realistic goals that fit your life, and use these apps’ insights to understand your habits better.

Pay attention to what triggers your doomscrolling and adjust your settings accordingly. Remember, these tools work best when combined with offline activities you enjoy.

The goal isn’t to disconnect completely, but to find a sustainable balance between staying informed and maintaining peace of mind. With thoughtful boundaries and the right support tools, you can stay engaged with the world while keeping your mental health intact.

Lisa Harrison, Lecturer in Digital Communications, Flinders University

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

Shiyue Wu, a member of Francesco Perono Cacciafoco’s research team at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), who is currently developing intensive fieldwork in Alor Island to document and preserve endangered languages, discovered and first documented Kape during a Language Documentation fieldwork in August 2024 and therefore actively contributed to this study.

As of 2025, more than 7000 languages are spoken across the world. However, only about half of them are properly documented, leaving the rest at risk of disappearing.

Globalisation has propelled languages such as English and Chinese into the mainstream, and they now dominate global communication.

Parents today prefer their children learn widely-spoken languages. Meanwhile, indigenous languages, such as Copainalá Zoque in Mexico and Northern Ndebele in Zimbabwe, are not even consistently taught in schools.

Indigenous people generally did not use writing for centuries and, therefore, their languages do not have ancient written records. This has contributed to their gradual disappearance.

To prevent the loss of endangered languages, field linguists – or language documentarists – work to ensure that new generations have access to their cultural heritage. Their efforts reveal the vocabulary and structure of these languages and the stories and traditions embedded within them.

My research team and I have spent over 13 years documenting endangered Papuan languages in Southeast and East Indonesia, particularly in the Alor-Pantar Archipelago, near Timor, and the Maluku Islands. One of our significant and very recent discoveries is Kape, a previously undocumented and neglected language spoken by small coastal communities in Central-Northern Alor.

Not only is the discovery important for mapping the linguistic context of the island, but it also highlights the urgency of preserving endangered languages by employing Language Documentation methods.

The discovery of Kape

In August 2024, while working with our Abui consultants, Shiyue Wu, my Research Assistant at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, discovered a previously-ignored, presumably undocumented Papuan language from Alor, ‘Kape’.

At the time, she was gathering information about the names and locations of ritual altars known as ‘maasang’ in the Abui area, with assistance from our main consultant and several native speakers. In Central Alor, every village has a ‘maasang’.

During conversations about the variants in altar names across Alor languages and Abui dialects, some speakers mentioned the name of the ‘maasang’ (‘mata’) in Kape—a language previously unrecorded and overlooked in linguistic documentation.

‘Kape’ translates to ‘rope’, symbolising how the language connects its speakers across the island, from the mountains to the sea. Geographically and linguistically, it is associated with Kabola in the east and Abui and Kamang in Central Alor.

At this stage, it is unclear whether Kape is a distinct language or a dialect of Kamang, as the two are mutually intelligible. Much of Kape’s basic lexicon (the collection of words in one language), indeed, shares cognates (related words among languages) with Kamang.

However, Kape is spoken as the primary (native) language by the whole Kape ethnic group of Alor, and the speakers consider themselves an independent linguistic and ethnic community. This could serve as an element for regarding Kape as a language.

Kape also shows connections with Suboo, Tiyei, and Adang, other Papuan languages from Alor Island. The speakers, known as ‘Kafel’ in Abui, are multilingual, fluent, to some extent, in Kape, Kamang, Bahasa Indonesia, Alor Malay, and, sometimes, Abui.

So far, no historical records have been found for Kape, though archival research may reveal more about its origins. Based on its typology and lexical characteristics, Kape appears as ancient as other languages spoken in Alor. Like many Papuan languages, it is critically endangered and requires urgent documentation to preserve its legacy.

Documenting languages: An ongoing challenge

Language Documentation aims to reconstruct the unwritten history of indigenous peoples and to guarantee the future of their cultures and languages. This is accomplished by preserving endangered, scarcely documented or entirely undocumented languages in disadvantaged and remote areas.

External sources, like diaries by missionaries and documentation produced by colonisers, can help reconstruct some historical events. However, they are insufficient for providing reliable linguistic data since the authors were not linguists.

My research team and I document endangered languages, starting with their lexicon and grammar. Eventually, we also explore the ancient traditions and ancestral wisdom of the native speakers we work with.

We have contributed to the documentation of several Papuan languages from Alor Island, especially Abui, Kula, and Sawila. These languages are spoken among small, sometimes dispersed communities of indigenous peoples belonging to different but related ethnic clusters.

They communicate with each other mostly in Bahasa Indonesia and Alor Malay. This is because their local languages are almost never taught in schools and are rarely used outside their groups.

Over time, in addition to documenting their lexicons and grammars, we worked to reconstruct their place-names and landscape names, oral traditions, foundation myths, ancestral legends and the names of plants and trees they use.

We also explored their traditional medical practices and local ethnobotany, along with their musical culture and number systems.

Safeguarding Kape is not just linguistically relevant. Its preservation and documentation are not just about attesting its existence – they also contribute to revitalising the language, keeping it alive, and allowing the local community to rediscover its history, knowledge, and traditions to pass down to the next generations.

This journey has just begun, but my team and I – with the indispensable collaboration from our local consultants and native speakers – are prepared to go all the way towards its completion.

Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, Associate Professor in Linguistics, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

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

In 2024, researchers from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham excavated a huge expanse of a quarry floor in Oxfordshire filled with hundreds of dinosaur footprints.

Dating to the Middle Jurassic period (around 166 million years ago), the extensive trackways are part of what has been described as a huge “dinosaur highway”. They form the largest dinosaur tracksite in the UK today. It’s among the largest in the world.

The tracks were made as dinosaurs walked across mudflats surrounded by warm tropical lagoons. As the feet of the giant animals, some up to 10 tonnes, pressed on the mud, they left behind both an impression of the foot and in some cases a large rim of displaced mud around the track.

The surface was then rapidly flooded and the tracks were filled in and buried by a clay-rich mud, which acted to preserve them. Over time and further burial these sediments turned into rock. Unlike body fossils, tracks give us a glimpse into a moment in the life of the dinosaur.

The size, shape and position of the tracks can tell us how these dinosaurs moved, their body size and speed, where they lived, and how they interacted with their environment and with each other.

Smaller finds, including shells, teeth and plant matter, help to build a more complete picture of this lost environment of Middle Jurassic Oxfordshire.

How it began

Dinosaur science itself began with the discoveries of fossil bones in Oxfordshire and recognition that they belonged to new creatures. Megalosaurus, an apex predator in the Middle Jurassic, was the first dinosaur to be scientifically named and described in 1824 from fossils found in slate quarries in the village of Stonesfield.

Remains of three other dinosaurs are also known from sites in the county, including the 18m-long sauropod Cetiosaurus.

In 1997, extensive trackways were discovered in Ardley Quarry, north Oxfordshire, including those likely belonging to the large carnivorous dinosaur Megalosaurus – a member of a dinosaur grouping known as theropods – as well as numerous larger tracks made by sauropods. These trackways were recorded and then reburied for the construction of an energy recovery facility.

Further discoveries at the smaller Ardley North quarry led to the trackway’s surface being designated as a site of special scientific interest in 2010, in light of a planned extension of quarrying activity into the neighbouring Dewars Farm.

Early in 2022, quarry worker Gary Johnson felt “unusual bumps” as he was stripping back a layer of clay from the ground in his digger to expose the rocky quarry floor. On inspection he realised that these were regularly spaced and could be a trackway.

Dewars Farm and Duns Tew quarry manager, Mark Stanway, contacted the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. As more and more of the surface was exposed, the significance of the site became clear and, in collaboration with University of Birmingham and quarry operators Smiths Bletchington, a plan was formed for a major excavation.

In June 2024, together with Dr Emma Nicholls from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and Professor Richard Butler from the University of Birmingham, we led a team of more than 100 staff, students and volunteers for a week long excavation of the quarry surface.

Together, we painstakingly uncovered and cleaned out the overlying clay from around 200 footprints, took more than 20,000 images of individual footprints for photogrammetry – a technique that uses photographs to create 3D models of objects and landscapes. Using computer software, we were then able to build detailed 3D models of the site using aerial drone photography – documenting the footprints in unprecedented detail for future research.

We identified at least five separate trackways. One of these was probably made by Megalosaurus and four by giant herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs. The longest trackway stretches for more than 150 metres.

Further excavations

Data analysis continues, but the trackways are already yielding insights into how these dinosaurs moved – including their speeds, how large they were and if and how they interacted. Each Megalosaurus track (a classic three-toed track) is around 65cm in length, with a stride length of about 2.7 metres and the dinosaur could have been up to 9 metres in length.

The sauropod tracks may have been made by a dinosaur called Cetiosaurus, reaching up to 18 metres in length, and weighing 10 tonnes or more. The longest sauropod trackway at Dewars Farm has tracks that are up to one metre long but the different trackways have tracks of different sizes indicating different species or different-sized individuals at the site. The spacing of the prints suggest that the sauropod and Megalosaurus were walking at similar speeds, about 5km per hour – roughly an average adult human walking speed.

Where trackways intersect, we can determine which animal passed through the area first. In this case, the theropod came after the sauropod, whether it was mere moments, days or weeks between these tracks, we don’t know.

Dewars Farm is still a working quarry with no public access and will remain so in the medium term. However, we are actively working with Smiths Bletchington and Natural England on options for preserving the site for the future. Perhaps most exciting is that the ongoing quarrying of the overlying limestone (for use as crushed and graded aggregate) will only uncover more of the trackway surface.

We are further planning exploratory visits and hope to return for another excavation in summer 2025. It is very likely that the number, length and extent of the trackways will only increase and there may well be unexpected discoveries still to come.

Kirsty Marie Edgar, Professor of Micropalaeontology, University of Birmingham and Duncan Murdock, Collections Manager, Earth Collections, Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford

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

For anyone involved in architecture, it’s no surprise that a film focusing on a visionary architect and his profession demands the epic dimensions of cinematography, drama and 215-minute running time of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. This week the film was nominated in ten Oscar categories including best picture, best director and best actor.

Despite architects being present in film from the early stages of cinema, architecture’s role in society has rarely been at the epicentre of the narrative.

Notable exceptions are King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949), where the architect is a vessel for Ayn Rand’s hymn to individualism; Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect (1987), which looks at the political stance of architects; and last year’s Megalopolis, where the architect is the ultimate coordinator of everyday life. But I never felt these films grasped the reality of architecture’s complex obligations or the challenges beyond designing.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

The Brutalist tells the story of the fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrian Brody) who, after surviving the Holocaust and forced separation from his wife (Felicity Jones), emigrates to Philadelphia to work in the furniture shop of his prosperous cousin (Alessandro Nivola).

Unexpectedly, Tóth is tasked with refurbishing the study of a wealthy industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who despite his initial negative reaction, hires him to design an enormous library in memory of his mother.

In the process, Van Buren takes Tóth under his wing and helps him bring his wife to the US. The commission of the building is a joyous moment, but as the process of design and construction throws up challenges, the tension escalates.

Epic films usually depict the rise and fall of their protagonist, but The Brutalist explores the interconnected fates of the architect and his buildings. Tóth is aware of what is at stake. Once at the top of his game in Hungary, he is ostracised for his modernism which is considered anti-German by the Nazis. He is also condemned for being a Jew.

But Van Buren gives Tóth a second chance after a news story praises the building and he discovers the Hungarian’s previous work and his connection to the radical German Bauhaus movement.

From that point onward, we would expect that Tóth has gained his client’s trust. His joy at getting the authorities’ approval for the building is soon punctured by the obsessive Van Buren hiring consultants to check his work and keep tabs on the budget. Soon Tóth is beset by other problems as a railway accident delays the arrival of materials causing a hiatus.

Restarting the project is accompanied by constant concerns for health and safety and the pressures of any other potential delays. Tóth is also experiencing problems in his personal life, but Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s screenplay is driven by the challenges of realising his vision for this new groundbreaking building.

The Brutalist demonstrates the intrinsic role the client plays and how the architect is beholden to them – in this case necessitating the negotiation of a tricky relationship with the demanding Van Buren. As Italian architect Aldo Rossi writes in his book The Architecture of the City, “the architecture that is going to be realised is always an expression of the dominant class”.

And the dominant class wants things done their way. Tóth is even ready to sacrifice his fee to realise his vision. He needs the building to make a name for himself at a time when capitalism is producing unprecedented opportunities for architectural expression.

It is the period about which American architect Philip C. Johnson proclaims: “the battle for modern architecture has been won”. Think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax tower or Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments, or Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center to reveal how the US became the main proponent of this ambitious expansive style.

A memorable scene in the cavernous marble quarries of Carrara in Italy is both magnificent and ominous. The sheer scale that renders humans the size of ants underscores the clash between nature and power, in the level of extraction required for materials, and the exploitation of people and planet to satisfy the egos of two competing masculinities.

In the past, “What does an architect do?” was a question I often was asked by clients who wanted me to justify my fee. This is a question I now ask my students to reveal their own perceptions and values.

Architecture is one of the three main fine arts of antiquity. However, beyond the artistry and the aesthetics, its role has been developing to meet the needs of its time. In a post-war world, architects were compelled to go beyond efficiency; they needed to create an identity and capture the public’s imagination, while creating buildings with market value.

Architects take many aspects into consideration. Tóth draws beautifully, has knowledge of materials and technology, reads the landscape and understands the environment. He also manages the budget and has to promote himself in a world that mocks his accent and others him as a foreigner – architecture has a long way to go when it comes to inclusivity.

US modernism is full of immigrant architects who either moved there very young like Estonian Louis Kahn and Finn Eero Saarinen, or by accepting teaching positions like Germans Walter Gropius and Mies Van der Rohe did after the closure of the Bauhaus.

So The Brutalist needs its three and half hours to tell the saga of an immigrant architect’s life and the long arduous years it takes to complete a cherished project. As an architect in a digital era, it made me nostalgic for paper, charcoal drawings and physical models. And wish that architects had a filmmaker’s power to complete the construction of a building like a speeded-up film montage.

Phevos Kallitsis, Associate Head Academic, School of Architecture Art and Design, University of Portsmouth

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

Have you ever taken the time to stop and listen to nature? Deeply, quietly and patiently?

If not, don’t worry, there’s still time to learn. Deep listening is a skill that can be developed.

There’s much more to it than simply recognising the call or song of a particular species. To listen deeply to nature is to become aware of behaviours, relationships and patterns of interaction between multiple species, and to learn from what we hear.

This is what Indigenous people have been doing for many thousands of years, in Australia and overseas.

Under the supervision and guidance of Indigenous knowledge holders of Karulkiyalu Country, my PhD research, explores ways to embed this Indigenous approach to deep listening in Australia’s education system.

The project builds on previous work showing positive results for student and teacher wellbeing, as well as an increased understanding of and desire to care for the natural world.

What is deep listening?

If you’d like to try deep listening, take some time to visit a natural place and find a quiet spot where you won’t be disturbed. Turn off your electronic devices.

Close your eyes, and extend your sense of hearing into the landscape around you. Try focusing your listening in each direction, then above and even below. How far you can hear?

At first you will hear the voices of individual creatures, perhaps one then another. After a while, you may begin to notice interactions and patterns of communication between them. Be curious. Does one respond to another? How, and why?

Hearing all the interconnected activity going on around you in that moment can help you comprehend the living system as a whole.

What can we learn from nature by listening?

People often simplify complex relationships down to perceptions of either cooperation or competition.

But listening to nature affirms that cooperative partnerships play a far greater role than meets the eye. Relationships between species that accommodate each other’s needs are ubiquitous throughout the biosphere.

For instance, multiple species of birds forage efficiently and safely in mixed flocks, by communicating and alerting each other to information about food and threats. This practice of foraging collectively is so worthwhile it’s encountered the world over.

Listening to the animated twittering of these flocks – which continually communicates and affirms each bird’s location – reminds us how beneficial cooperation can be. More importantly, cooperation is most advantageous when it embraces diversity.

Addressing the existential threats facing humanity will require cooperation and collaboration on a massive scale. Many of these threats are interlinked. They tend to resist independent solutions and need to be tackled together.

So there is an urgent need to embrace and celebrate our differences. Listening to mixed-species flocks reminds us that diversity can be a source of great strength.

Lessons about competition

Listening can also tell us about competitive interactions, particularly between members of the same species.

In the morning twilight of the breeding season, songbirds join the dawn chorus – singing with repertoire and behaviours not heard at other times of day or year. It’s also clear they are listening to each other.

At dawn, songbirds use formal vocal interactions to negotiate their most essential relationships. These include defining home ranges, establishing and maintaining pair bonds, acknowledging neighbours and affirming community identities.

In this way, the dawn chorus is a sonic expression of a widespread principle in nature: that while the potential for competition exists, life-threatening aggression is risky, inefficient and costly.

Many animals have developed specialised behaviours to sort out their relationships and status while minimising the risks of serious harm. For instance “boxing” kangaroos engage in scrapping or sparring rather than injurious fighting.

While these physical behaviours are found widely throughout the animal world, songbirds have evolved their own trick: they use song to negotiate their interactions. Listening to them singing at dawn reminds us that competitive behaviours and aggression are not advantageous. Negotiation, mutual acknowledgement and respect are more successful ways of living.

Educational possibilities from listening

Learning through deep listening was integral to the education system in Australia for thousands of years. It allowed First Nations peoples to understand the ecological community around them and how to live with these groups of species.

In this education system, Country and Earth-Kin, (such as plants and animals) were both central knowledge holders and teachers. Humans (primarily grandparents) provided support for childrens’ learning from these knowledge holders. In this way children came to know, understand and care for land.

People and Country flourished through this way of learning. Australia became home to the longest continuing cultures in human history.

Research is demonstrating how this old teaching and learning method can work in modern schooling. More than 120 educators across the ACT are involved in the Country as Teacher project. Cultivating a practice of deep listening to Earth-Kin and Country helped teachers and students develop an improved sense of wellbeing, as well as knowledge and understanding of the places they live.

The research argues that teachers first need to cultivate their own practice of listening. Then they can embed this process in their approach to education. By slowing down, developing nuanced awareness, following curiosity, listening empathically to other beings and opening to being affected emotionally, teachers can cultivate their own deeper sense of care, appreciation and understanding. From their personal listening journey, educators can then facilitate these experiences for their students.

Deep listening to Earth-Kin or Country as Teacher offers an old and new pathway to return to a valuable and important way of being for our schools and society.

This path offers us the chance to come to appreciate and care for the ecological communities of the Earth. Through listening we can learn the ways in which species across the Earth adapt, survive and thrive, providing guidance for our own cultures as we confront increasing social and environmental uncertainty.

This article was written in collaboration with acoustic ecologist Andrew Skeoch. 

Monty Nixon, PhD Student in Education, University of Canberra

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