Ships transport around 80% of the world’s cargo. From your food, to your car to your phone, chances are it got to you by sea. The vast majority of the world’s container ships burn fossil fuels, which is why 3% of global emissions come from shipping – slightly more than the 2.5% of emissions from aviation.

The race is on to reduce these emissions, and quickly, to meet the Paris agreement targets. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we find out what technologies are available to shipping companies to reduce their carbon emissions – from sails, to alternative fuels or simply taking a better route.

“ We live in a world of information. The biggest challenge is knowing how to use it,” says Daniel Precioso, a data scientist at IE University in Madrid, Spain. He’s part of a team of researchers that developed a platform called Green Navigation, what he calls a “Google maps for the sea”. Pulling together publicly available data on wind, waves and ocean currents, it can suggest new routes to ship captains to optimise their journey from A to B and reduce carbon emissions.

Precioso presented the project in November 2024 in Dubai at the Prototypes for Humanity exhibition organised by Dubai Future Solutions as a showcase for young researchers designing solutions for global challenges.

Pressure mounting

Route optimisation software like Green Navigation is seen as a transition between the status quo and a future where ships will move to using alternative, greener fuels.

 The UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) has a target for zero emissions from shipping by 2050 and a strive target of 30% reductions by 2030 relative to 2008 levels.

In early April, IMO member states will meet to discuss a proposal to introduce a flat rate tax on carbon emitted by commercial shipping. If adopted, shipping companies would have to pay a levy, the price of which is still being worked out, for every tonne of carbon dioxide they emit. The money would sit in a fund run by the IMO, which would be used to help developing countries reduce maritime emissions.

The proposal is supported by 47 countries, and it’s being pushed particularly by island nations most at risk from climate change, and flag states, those countries such as the Bahamas, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, where a lot of international ships are registered.

What’s the alternative?

If the flat tax is adopted it would add an extra financial incentive for ships to reduce their emissions and potentially move to greener alternative fuels. But Alice Larkin, professor of climate science and energy policy at the University of Manchester in the UK, says unfortunately it’s not currently cost efficient to switch away from fossil fuels.

 The challenge is that when you’re moving away from something which was naturally the cheapest, easiest fuel to come by and to burn, then inevitably if all you’re doing is literally swapping the fuel for a different fuel that is much cleaner, then that is going to be more expensive, at least in the short term.

A number of alternative fuels are being explored, such as green hydrogen, biodiesel, biomethane and green ammonia. But Larkin says no alternative fuel is currently emerging as a frontrunner, making it difficult for shipping companies to know what to invest in and creating inertia in the transition to greener fuels.

She stresses the need to reduce emissions in the shorter term to help keep the world below 1.5 degrees of warming. Options include strategies like route optimisation, sail, or wind-assist technologies, or for ships to travel at a slower speed. Larkin and her colleagues modelled the potential impact from these technologies and found combinations of these technologies could reduce a ship’s emissions by up to a third.

Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly to hear conversations with Daniel Precisio and Alice Larkin.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

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

In his latest book, Peter Kirkpatrick retrieves from Australian cultural history the compelling figure of the “wild reciter”, as a reviewer in the 1920s termed amateur elocutionists.

From the late 19th century, men, women and children recited popular verses to audiences who shared in the mass appeal of poetry. Their performances could become histrionic or strident.

Review: The Wild Reciter: Poetry and Popular Culture in Australia, 1890 to the Present (Melbourne University Publishing)

Bush ballads by Henry Lawson and A.B. “Banjo” Paterson, as well as English and American classics and topical verses, formed the repertoire of public speakers, such as the “Tangalooma Tiger” – one of many eccentrics who frequented Sydney’s Domain, drawing large crowds.

Children who learned elocution as a form of self-improvement and social mobility would practise their craft at local events. In 1933, Nancy Turner from Lithgow performed James Elroy Flecker’s War Song of the Saracens at the first City of Sydney Eisteddfod. The Daily Telegraph reported that Turner

recited like a ferocious kitten, and screwed her eyes up tightly when she shouted “We have marched from the Indus to Spain and, by God, we will go there again”, as if she meant it.

“Light-years behind Taylor Swift in terms of high-class showbiz professionalism,” writes Kirkpatrick, “the wild reciter represents poetry’s neglected and – in the best possible sense of the word – vulgar past, offering a perspective that might also speak to its present and future as a demotic art.”

A privileged place

We turn to poetry for many of life’s significant moments. Weddings and funerals remind us that rhyming verse has a privileged place in human communication. The form is freighted with meaning and can express heightened emotion. Achingly earnest or spiritually intense, romantic or maudlin, poetic language affects us, even in popular usage such as greeting cards.

In these instances, we do not always hear “good” poetry. Aesthetic qualities are often ranked second to a poem’s timely message or the personal feelings of the poetic messenger.

George Orwell coined the phrase “good bad poems” in 1942 to describe 19th-century favourites, such as Rudyard Kipling’s If and the boys’ own imperial adventure poem Gunga Din. Orwell called such poems “vulgar”; these days we might call them clichéd (and racist). Yet he observed that they expressed emotions “which nearly every human being can share”.

Orwell also reminded his readers that poems are mnemonic devices. Many older Australians can still remember verses from their schoolrooms. According to historians Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa, those brought up around the first world war were a “poetry generation”. Many of those brought up in the aftermath of the second world war can recite verses from the school readers that used to structure their English literature classes.

Being able to recite as well as appreciate poetry was seen as a foundational educational skill, even if children mostly remembered stirring lines such as “the boy stood on the burning deck,” from Felicia Hemans’ Casabianca.

As political commentator Rory Stewart explains in his BBC podcast The Long History of Argument, speaking and arguing well have been seen for millennia as the key to a good education and the building blocks of democracy. Turn of the century experts, such as the American Alfred Ayres – the pen name of Thomas Embly Osmun (1826–1902) – advocated a modern style of verse performance.

Late Victorian elocution, Ayres wrote, was characterised by

orotunds, sostenutos, whispers and half-whispers, monotones, basilar tones and guttural tones, high pitches, middle pitches and low pitches, gentle tones, reverent tones, and all the rest of that old trumpery that has made many a noisy, stilted reader, but never an intelligent, agreeable one.

The old school of elocution, he argued, produced “readers occupied with the sound of their own voices”. Modern elocution, by contrast, sought to clarify “the art of speaking words in an intelligent, forcible, and agreeable manner”.

Appreciating the art of rhetoric may become ever more important in our “post-truth” world. In the age of artificial intelligence, literature professors like me are considering a return to oral assessments to verify our university students have read and understood the course readings, not just regurgitated a ChatGPT summary.

Songs and mass media

Kirkpatrick enjoys disrupting assumptions about high and low culture. He begins his book with Taylor Swift, whose 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department and subsequent world tour spawned events, media articles and academic conferences. He ends by speculating about who might be appointed as Australia’s first Poet Laureate, suggesting indie rock singers such as Nick Cave and Paul Kelly, or First Nations rapper The Kid Laroi, have a stronger hold on the public imagination than literary poets.

He has a soft spot for Evelyn Araluen’s bestselling collection Dropbear, but wonders how a First Nations poet would feel about a position intended to amplify the literature of the colonial state.

The most sustained focus on women’s writing in The Wild Reciter is reserved for Lesbia Harford’s “mortal poems”. Like the colonial Irish-Australian poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Harford set and sang her poems to Irish tunes. Whether Harford meant her poems to be sung by others remains an elusive question. But Kirkpatrick rightly notes that “we now hold song lyrics in our heads in the way that Harford’s generation held poems”.

Recurring poetic motifs, such as horses, allow Kirkpatrick to show how bush ballads contributed to emerging forms of 20th-century entertainment. Popular Australian themes would have a global influence, as modern technologies brought imagined communities together via radio, cinema and popular music. Kirkpatrick links Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River (1890) to Buffalo Bill and touring Wild West shows, and later to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games opening ceremony.

Identifying how poetry has interacted with different media challenges the common assumption that poetry is formal or stuffy: something confined to university study and highbrow poetry readings. Kirkpatrick argues, for example, that Kenneth Slessor’s appreciation of recorded music influenced his verse, as did his work as a cinema critic for the popular magazine Smith’s Weekly.

Radio programs provided opportunities for Ronald McCuiag’s light verse to reach audiences from the 1940s to the 1960s. John Laws, characterised by Bob Ellis as “the worst poet in the whole history of the entire universe”, was certainly advantaged by his long talkback radio career, which ensured a market for his five collections of poetry.

Kirkpatrick is adept at waspish summaries of bad poetry. Celebrity brought attention to Clive James’ poems – more, perhaps, than they deserved. “It’s not simply the earnestness of so many of his later poems that disables them,” writes Kirkpatrick: “the humorous ones are just as likely to disappoint.”

Popular poetry that Kirkpatrick doesn’t much care for receives little attention, and sometimes unkind assessment. He does not find Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian detective novel in verse, nearly as innovative as Porter or her admiring academic critics have claimed.

More than “any other kind of present-day reading or recitation”, Kirkpatrick enjoys slam poetry performances, but he finds them hard to critique. He views them as highly personal and ephemeral, based on his experience of the Bankstown Poetry Slam and the Australian Poetry Slam. His assessment mirrors cultural criticism of rap: “Slam comes from America and its missionary zeal talks with an American accent.”

Considering a contemporary Australian writer like Maxine Beneba Clarke might have revealed more complex oral poetry lineages here. Clarke’s poetry shifts confidently across performance and print; her work with schools demonstrates the ongoing vitality of poetry, and the importance of poetic education, for diverse youth communities.

Clarke’s poem Tik Tok Dance shows that the relationship between poetry and new media technologies, which Kirkpatrick traces impressively throughout the book, is constantly evolving.

“Changing the wor(l)d, verse by verse!” is the evocative catchline for the youth section of the Bankstown Poetry Slam. In February 2025, a Grand Slam billed as “Australia’s largest live poetry event” and starring the Irish–Indian “Instapoet” Nikita Gill was held at the Sydney Opera House, the heart of high culture.

Kirkpatrick is a poet and critic whose deep knowledge of poetry, literary magazines and media cultures is evident throughout. Each chapter in The Wild Reciter focuses on a different instance of popular poetry. Academic readers will recognise some chapters from their earlier publication in various books and journals.

Those professional critics might find the thin veil of scholarship in the book frustrating, but its entertaining style does not pretend to high theory, or even to much close reading. The Wild Reciter is a pacey, provocative romp through Australian literary history. Kirkpatrick enjoys a bon mot and his writing is amusing and sharp.

The figure of the public orator gets lost in some chapters – one concerns the Railroad, a magazine published by the Australian Railways Union. But it is a pleasure when the wild reciter returns in ever-new guises to thread together the multifarious parts of this enjoyable book, which returns poetry to the Australian people.

Anna Johnston, Professor of English Literature, The University of Queensland

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

Confronting images of dead seadragons, fish and octopuses washed up on South Australian beaches – and disturbing reports of “more than 100” surfers and beachgoers suffering flu-like symptoms after swimming or merely breathing in sea spray – attracted international concern last week.

Speculation about the likely cause ranged from pollution and algae to unusual bacterial infections or viruses. Today we can reveal the culprit was a tiny – but harmful – type of planktonic algae called Karenia mikimotoi.

The SA government sent us water samples from Waitpinga Beach, Petrel Cove Beach, Encounter Bay Boat Ramp and Parsons Headland on Tuesday. We studied the water under the microscope and extracted DNA for genetic analysis.

Our results revealed high numbers of the tiny harmful algal species – each just 20 microns in diameter (where one micron is one thousandth of a millimetre). While relatively common in Australian coastal waters, blooms of K. mikimotoi occur only sporadically. But similar harmful algal blooms and fish kills due to K. mikimotoi have happened in the past, such as the 2014 bloom in Coffin Bay, SA. And this latest one won’t be the last.

Harmful algal blooms

Single-celled, microbial algae occur naturally in seawater all over the world.

They are also called phytoplankton, because they float in the water column and photosynthesise like plants. “Phyto” comes from the Greek word for plant and “plankton” comes from the Greek word for wanderer, which relates to their floating movement with ocean currents and tides.

Like plants on land, the microalgae or phytoplankton in the ocean capture sunlight and produce up to half the oxygen in our atmosphere. There are more than 100,000 different species of microalgae. Every litre of seawater will normally contain a mixed group of these different microalgae species.

But under certain conditions, just a single species of microalgae can accumulate in one area and dominate over the others. If we are unlucky, the dominant species may be one that produces a toxin or has a harmful effect.

This so-called “harmful algal bloom” can cause problems for people and for marine life such as fish, invertebrates such as crabs, and even marine mammals such as whales and seals.

There are hundreds of different species of harmful algae. Each produces its own type of toxin with a particular toxic effect.

Most of these toxic chemical compounds produced by harmful algae are quite well known, including neurotoxins that affect the brain. But others are more complicated, and the mechanisms of toxicity are poorly understood. This can make it more difficult to understand the factors leading to the deaths of fish and other marine life. Unfortunately, the toxins from K. mikimotoi fall into this latter category.

Introducing Karenia mikimotoi

The species responsible for recent events in SA beaches, K. mikimotoi, causes harmful algal blooms in Asia, Europe, South Africa and South America, as well as Australia and New Zealand. These blooms all caused fish deaths, and some also caused breathing difficulties among local beachgoers.

The most drastic of these K. mikimotoi blooms have occurred in China over the past two decades. In 2012, more than 300 square kilometres of abalone farms were affected, causing about A$525 million in lost production.

Explaining the toxic effects

Microalgae can damage the gills of fish and shellfish, preventing them from breathing. This is the main cause of death. But some studies have also found damage to the gastrointestinal tracts and livers of fish.

Tests using fish gill cells clearly show the dramatic toxic effect of K. mikimotoi. When the fish gill cells were exposed to intact K. mikimotoi cells, after 3.5 hours more than 80% of the fish cells had died.

Fortunately, the toxin does not persist in the environment after the K. mikimotoi cells are dead. So once the bloom is over, the marine environment can recover relatively quickly.

Its toxicity is partly due to the algae’s production of “reactive oxygen species”, reactive forms of oxygen molecules which can cause the deaths of cells in high doses. K. mikimotoi cells may also produce lipid (fat) molecules that cause some toxic effects.

Finally, a very dense bloom of microalgae can sometimes reduce the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water column, which means there is less oxygen for other marine life.

The human health effects are not very well known but probably relate to the reactive oxygen species being an irritant.

K. mikimitoi cells can also produce “mucilage”, a type of thick, gluey substance made of complex sugars, which can accumulate bacteria inside it. This can cause “sea foam”, which was evident on beaches last week.

Unanswered questions remain

A question for many people is whether increasing water temperatures make blooms of K. mikimotoi more likely.

Another concern is whether nutrient runoff from farms, cities and aquaculture could cause more harmful algal blooms.

Unfortunately, for Australia at least, the answer to these questions is we don’t know yet. While we know some harmful algal blooms do increase when nutrient runoff is higher, others actually prefer fewer nutrients or colder temperatures.

We do know warmer water species seem to be moving further south along the Australian coastline, changing phytoplankton species abundance and distribution.

While some microalgal blooms can cause bioluminescence that is beautiful to watch, others such as K. mikimotoi can cause skin and respiratory irritations.

If you notice discoloured water, fish deaths or excessive sea foam along the coast or in an estuary, avoid fishing or swimming in the area and notify local primary industry or environmental authorities in your state.

Shauna Murray, Professor; Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney and Greta Gaiani, Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Life Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

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

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock since 1970 you will be aware of the five-day Glastonbury festival held every June (apart from “fallow” years to rest the land and the organisers), near Pilton in Somerset. Glastonbury is as much a pillar of the English summer as tennis at Wimbledon or opera at Glyndebourne.

It’s a white, middle-class rite of passage and an easy win for people wishing peer approval and the cultural capital that comes with the price of a ticket. It’s expensive and exclusive and the booking policy reflects its audience.

This year’s headliners include indie pop-rock darlings The 1975, angry girl supreme Olivia Rodrigo, old-school superstar Neil Young with his band the Chrome Hearts, with family favourite Rod Stewart filling the Sunday teatime “legend” slot.

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Other acts filling the 100-plus stages include Brat popster Charli XCX, English hip-hopper Loyle Carner, original bad boys The Prodigy (without original frontman Keith Flint, RIP) plus Raye, Doechii, Noah Kahan, Gracie Abrams, and old pros Alanis Morissette, En Vogue and Gary Numan.

With tickets costing £378.50 for Glastonbury 2025, are the 210,000 attendees getting value for money?

A Reddit thread titled “Glastonbury 2025 lineup, thoughts?”, gives a flavour of some commonly aired opinions. Disappointed customer praf973 “tried to get tickets but was unsuccessful. I’m not bitter, but the line up isn’t really looking that great.” Another commenter, Whilst-I-was-forced, declared: “Nothing to get excited about. It’s gone too commercial and sterile.”

Ok_Handle_3530 gave a different perspective: “This line-up looks … great, people are too hard to please.” ShankSpencer opined, “There are no good line-ups any more. No one young listens to bands any more, so there are no headline acts.”

The exceptionally popular festival sold out in 35 minutes this year even before the artists had been announced, raising the question: has Glastonbury become a victim of its own success?

Last year there were issues with overcrowding at some of the smaller stages creating issues for fans wanting to see acts such as the Sugababes. Some sets were even being stopped early because of crowd surges.

But what’s really behind these complaints about the lineup and are they justified? There’s been a changing of the guard as the veteran generation of performers from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s step back from performing because they have retired, are too ill or have died.

There doesn’t seem to be enough credible stadium acts from the 1990s onwards to fill their shoes, leading to a lack of enthusiasm for the current offerings. The new generation of acts have an opportunity to impress, but many of them don’t have the volume of hits that legacy acts such as Elton John or Paul McCartney provide – nor the cross-generational appeal.

There is also a growing sense that the cultural importance of the rock band is fading. Gen Z has far more in the way of distractions than previous generations with myriad forms of social media and digital entertainment. With so much competition for their attention, the tribal allegiances that bands used to command may feel dated and irrelevant to many younger people.

On their single Guys, one of this year’s headliners, The 1975 trill: “The moment that we started a band was the best thing that ever happened.” Perhaps lead singer Matty Healy’s love affair with the mythology of rock’n'roll is no longer widely shared.

Glastonbury has also been criticised for a lack of diversity. Clubbing magazine Mixmag made the point that in 2023, “the number of male acts playing this year’s Glastonbury Festival is nearly double that of female acts”.

Similarly, the festival’s lineup and audience are predominantly white and fail to adequately reflect the British music industry. Though there have been a few black bands and artists headlining over the years, it wasn’t until 2019 that the first solo black British performer headlined on the Pyramid stage, with an unforgettable set from London rapper Stormzy in a black Union Jack stab vest designed by Banksy.

For Glastonbury to move with the times, a more diverse booking policy is needed to widen the audience demographic and the festival’s appeal. Despite having enjoyed the event, mixed-heritage music journalist and academic Jenessa Williams noted: “I was still left with the feeling that certain punters saw black artists as a mockable novelty, a by-product to tolerate rather than truly a piece of the event’s heart and soul.”

And then there’s the issue of cost. According to a 2024 report, two-thirds of UK adults feel that music festivals are becoming too expensive. Popular music artists have had to pivot towards live events for income generation because of the poor returns from streaming compared to selling albums.

So are major tours and larger festivals such as Glastonbury sucking revenue out of the music economy? Research shows that while big high-profile event tours are making millions, at the other end of the spectrum grassroots venues – where new talent is incubated – are buckling under a lack of support and the prohibitive costs of running their operations.

Glastonbury won’t be making an appearance in 2026, the next fallow year for rest and recovery. This will create an opportunity for organiser Emily Eavis to reflect on some of the more problematical issues the festival faces, from diversity in the audience and artists, to the sustainability of the talent pipeline.

Maybe the last word should go to American rapper Azealia Banks commenting on this year’s festival lineup: “Glastonbury is kinda cooked.”

Adrian York, Senior Lecturer in Commercial Music Performance, University of Westminster

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

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest playwrights. A prolific and unabashedly autobiographical writer, Williams’ career spanned four decades of the 20th century.

The Glass Menagerie, which premiered in Chicago on December 26 1944, was the writer’s first major success. It won scores of national theatrical awards and catapulted Williams to enduring fame.

An engrossing new production of the classic play, currently running at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre, does more than simply revive the famous piece of theatre. It revitalises it for modern audiences.

A troubled family from St. Louis

The Glass Menagerie is a lyrical exploration of memory, longing and familial obligation.

Set in the 1930s in St. Louis, the play revolves around three adult members of the Wingfield family: Tom, a restless and possibly closeted young man torn between duty and desire; Laura, his painfully shy sister, whose physical disability and introversion leave her isolated from the world; and Amanda, their domineering but fragile mother who clings to faded Southern dreams.

The plot is simple, and draws direct inspiration from Williams’ troubled family life. The Wingfields are struggling to get by. They live in a cramped apartment, in the shadow of an absent patriarch who we hear “fell in love with long distances” a long time ago.

Amanda is desperate to secure a future for Laura. She pins her hopes on the arrival of a “gentleman caller”, convinced that marriage is the only hope for her daughter’s security.

When Tom – who is also the play’s narrator (a cutout for Williams himself) – invites a colleague to dinner, the overbearing Amanda seizes the opportunity to present Laura in the best possible light. Suffice to say, things do not end well.

Lifting lyricism to its highest level

Potted plot summaries don’t really do The Glass Menagerie justice.

As Liesel Badorrek, director of the new production at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre, points out, “Williams wanted to break with the prosaic realism that he felt had dominated the American theatre” and fashion a new, more symbolic approach to theatre, where memory and emotion take precedence over conventional forms of dramatic action.

According to Williams himself, his aim was to demonstrate

that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

To bring his vision to life, Williams combined heightened poetic dialogue, repeated musical motifs and unconventional stagecraft. In doing so, he intentionally blurred the lines between reality and memory, allowing the audience to experience the emotional truth of the characters, rather than a literal depiction of events.

This innovative approach to dramatic form was revolutionary at the time and became a hallmark of Williams’ mature work. As Arthur Miller once wrote:

The Glass Menagerie in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre’s history, but it broke new ground in another way. What was new in Tennessee Williams was his rhapsodic insistence that form serve his utterance rather than dominating and cramping it.

A fresh take with remarkable depth

Miller’s observations about poetic rhapsody and form are worth keeping in mind when discussing the Ensemble Theatre’s impressive take on The Glass Menagerie.

One of the great merits of the production is how it does justice to Williams’ formal innovations while also engaging the audience on an emotional level.

Making excellent use of expressionistic lighting (Verity Hampson) and sound design (Maria Alfonsine and Damian de Boos-Smith), Badorrek’s production strikes a fine balance between preserving the play’s delicate, dreamlike structure and grounding its characters in charged performances that feel immediate and often painfully real.

Deftly blending humour and pathos, the cast of four delivers strong performances that ensure the play’s vivid lyricism enhances (but does not overwhelm) its emotional core.

Blazey Best’s Amanda is in equal measure maddening and charming, a true tour de force. Her verbal sparring with Danny Ball’s Tom was an early high point of the evening. One particularly striking moment was staged entirely in silhouette – elongated shadows stretching across the stage’s backdrop.

That said, to me the true standouts were Bridie McKim and Tom Rogers, whose interpretations of Laura and the gentleman caller, Jim, lifted the entire production.

In particular, McKim, who has called for greater disability representation in Australian theatre, brings remarkable depth and dynamism to the role of Laura. She imbues Laura with vulnerability and, crucially, strength.

McKim and Rogers breathe new life into this 81-year old staple of the dramatic canon. Their performances render Williams’ work fresh and contemporary, ensuring the play feels as urgent today as it would have in its post-war heyday.

Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

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

Wine drinking in ancient Troy was not restricted to the upper classes, as has long been supposed – something our new research has established for the first time. Colleagues at the University of Tübingen and I have discovered that wine was also enjoyed by the common folk, independent of upper-class celebrations and religious rituals.

In the late 19th century, German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) excavated the ancient city of Troy. He was hoping to discover the residence of Priam, the king of the city besieged by the Greek army under Agamemnon, as immortalised by Homer in the Iliad.

Among Schliemann’s most outstanding achievements was – alongside the identification of the site of Troy itself – undoubtedly the discovery of the so-called “treasure of Priam”.

The find included several hundred gold and silver objects. But during his excavations, Schliemann was captivated by a more humble item mentioned in the Iliad – the depas amphikypellon (two-handed drinking cup). He discovered numerous cylindrical, double-handled goblets thought to be the cup mentioned in the epic tale.

Schliemann believed the vessels had been used either for ritual wine offerings to the Olympian gods or, more likely, by the royal elite for drinking. The characteristic double handles, he suggested, allowed the vessels to be passed easily between participants seated next to each other.

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Despite fierce opposition to many of his interpretations in contemporary archaeological research, Schliemann’s hypotheses on the drinking customs of the early bronze age elite have become an enduring narrative.

Further archaeological excavations at Troy (in modern Turkey) were led by the University of Tübingen between 1987 and 2012. Since then, my colleagues and I have been analysing the results, focusing on architectural findings and the vast array of artefacts uncovered.

Over time, scientific methods have played an increasingly important role, with a particular focus on the analysis of organic residues in vessels (ORA). This method has proven particularly valuable, as it provides insights into what the early bronze-age inhabitants of Troy prepared in their cooking pots and enjoyed from their drinking vessels.

Drilling into Troy’s wine culture

Excavations over the past 150 years have shown that use of the two-handed drinking cup spanned from Greece in the west to Mesopotamia in the east.

They were produced in various forms between BC2500 and 2000. Likely inspired by now-lost metal prototypes, except for one silver example in the British Museum, these ceramic vessels were often made on the potter’s wheel, a technological innovation introduced from the near east during this period.

Many of the double-handled goblets have been found not only in settlements but also in graves. This is an indicator of their special significance in cult and ritual. Written sources also suggest that wine was regarded as particularly precious during this time, though these are generally from distant geographical regions. It has therefore been inferred that only the social elite, through their control of long-distance trade, had access to it.

For many inland and eastern Anatolian settlements, this may have been true. However, Troy, like many other sites in the Aegean and western Asia Minor, was located in a region particularly favourable for the cultivation of wine, which means it would have been more widely available.

So it’s hardly surprising that two-handed vessels have been found not only in Troy’s fortified citadel with its monumental buildings, but also in areas of the outer settlement. It led us to wonder – does this mean that farmers, craftsmen and others could also consume it on special occasions, or even in their daily lives?

To address this question, it was first necessary to prove scientifically that the goblets were actually used for drinking wine. Just because they might seem suitable for it doesn’t provide proof. To this end, two fragments from the collections of the Institute of Classical Archaeology in Tübingen were analysed for organic residues by Dr Maxime Rageot.

Two grams of ceramic material was drilled from the inner walls of the vessel, and the collected ceramic powder was then treated with solvents to extract lipid and resin compounds. After further chemical processing, these were heated to a maximum of 380°C and then analysed. Several aldaric acids were identified in both specimens. Namely, succinic, fumaric, pyruvic, malic and – in significant quantities – tartaric acids.

The latter can be interpreted as a grape marker, since such concentrations are not documented in other fruits available in the Mediterranean. The identification of succinic and pyruvic acids, commonly associated with fermentation markers, suggests the presence of wine (or vinegar) derived from ripe grapes.

So Schliemann was right: the depas amphikypellon was certainly used for wine consumption. Whether this was tied to religious practices, rituals and public banqueting, or simply drinking wine as part of everyday life, remains uncertain.

However, when it comes to who consumed it, our analysis results necessitate a correction of the conventional archaeological perspective. It seems that not only the elite enjoyed drinking wine – but also the common folk. For a counter-test, two simple cups, commonly found by the hundreds in early bronze-age Troy, were also sampled. The results were striking: the exact same organic residues were identified in both specimens.

Wine for all?

In archaeology, it is often the seemingly insignificant small finds that, when viewed in a broader context, have a profound impact. Based on organic residues –imperceptible to the naked eye and detectable only at a molecular level – the role of wine consumption in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC must be fundamentally reconsidered, at least in the case of Troy.

Here, wine was far from being reserved solely for the rich and powerful. The two-handed depas amphikypellon wasn’t a status symbol for the elite – it was a widely appreciated drinking vessel. Furthermore, for everyday drinking, it seems any type of vessel would do, with no particular one set aside for the task.

Whether and to what extent a shift in perspective can be expected at other sites of the Aegean and Anatolian early bronze age can, of course, only be definitively answered through comparable biomolecular analyses. After all, as in so many cases, it wouldn’t be surprising if Troy turned out to be the exception that challenges the norm.

Stephan Blum, Research associate, Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Medieval Archaeology, University of Tübingen

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

In our guides to the classics, experts explain key literary works.

Ask someone when they first read Jane Eyre, and they will no doubt remember: the voice of its protagonist leaps off the page as if to grab you by the forearm, pulsating with life.

Passionate, determined, and fiercely protective of her claim to happiness, Jane possesses a strength of character that utterly belies the plainness and penury of her beginnings.

Even those who haven’t read this novel, first published in 1847, are likely to associate it with popular representations of governesses and madwomen, which Jane Eyre helped enshrine as icons of the Victorian era.

Narrated from the first-person point of view, Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece is a landmark in the novel of interiority, the history of feminism, and the representation of religion and race.

Brontë’s early life

Jane Eyre is subtitled, “An Autobiography,” and the events of the novel – at once domestic and strange, familiar and fantastical – are deeply shaped by the experiences of its author. Born in Yorkshire to a prickly curate father, Charlotte Brontë was surrounded by death as a child. She lost her mother at the age of five, followed by two older sisters when a typhoid outbreak swept through their boarding school.

From then on, Charlotte remained at home with her other siblings – Anne and Emily, and her ne’er-do-well brother Branwell. Together, they lost themselves in the creation of a fictional world called “Glass Town,” which they catalogued meticulously in tiny paper booklets.

After failing disastrously as a schoolteacher and governess (which Charlotte relates in trenchant letters to family and friends), she and her sisters sought to make a career out of their childhood passion.

In the space of two years, they would publish Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, three undeniable classics in what one critic has dubbed a second “Northumbrian Renaissance.”

A child’s eye

The early chapters of Charlotte’s novel take us deep into the mind of Jane Eyre, an orphan who has been reluctantly accepted into the household of a wealthy aunt. Though only ten years old, Jane is treated worse than a servant, abused by her cousins and constantly reminded her existence is an unwanted burden.

The family nicknames her “Madame Mope,” but Jane is anything but sullen. On the contrary, she harbours within her the spirit of a “rebel slave,” desperately seeking love but unwilling to abase herself in pursuit of her aunt’s (or indeed anyone’s) approval.

When Jane is wrongfully accused of attacking her vicious cousin, she is locked in the “red-room,” the bedchamber of her dead uncle. She burns with fear and resentment, and the room becomes a potent allegory for the psychological misery inflicted upon children.

Hope seems to arrive in the prospect of a charity school for orphans, but Jane’s restless spirit stands poised to chafe against its gospel of Christian meekness. In her interview for admission, the director recounts for Jane’s edification the example of

a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread-nut to eat, or a verse of a Psalm to learn he says: ‘Oh! The verse of a Psalm!’[… and] gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety.

Unimpressed by the child’s craven obeisance, Jane remarks simply, “Psalms are not interesting.”

The scenes at Lowood School, an institution for the poor, are drawn from Charlotte’s own knowledge of the boarding school that killed her sisters. The children are half-starved and beaten while their zealous benefactor espouses the virtues of poverty. Jane’s only solace is a kindly teacher and the ethereal student Helen Burns, who possesses Christ-like powers of submission.

The death of Helen from typhus points to the impossibility of moral perfection in a bleak and fallen world. While Jane admires her friend, she quickly sees that her own path will involve a different kind of suffering and resistance.

An unconventional courtship

Jane is often described as “plucky” or “spunky,” a quality best revealed by her energetic self-reliance. A self-made woman, she spends the next eight years at Lowood educating herself so she can seek out better opportunities elsewhere.

After advertising in the local newspaper, she gets hired to be governess at Thornfield Hall, a large estate with a mysterious proprietor. At this point in the novel, the tone shifts from social criticism to gothic romance, as Jane falls deeply in love with the owner of the estate, Edward Rochester.

The unconventional courtship between the star-crossed (and class-crossed) lovers is one of the novel’s chief delights. Rochester is world-weary and emotional, a dissipated aristocrat who becomes captivated by Jane’s frankness and inner strength. Jane sees glimmers of a finer nature beneath Rochester’s brutish façade, but resists the temptation to become his plaything or ornament.

In a daring renovation of the courtship plot, Brontë depicts Rochester as the needier and more flirtatious of the two. To secure Jane’s interest, he is not above pretending to be engaged to another woman or dressing as a female gypsy to ascertain the true nature of her feelings.

Jane, however, refuses to sacrifice her personal dignity at the altar of romantic love. When Rochester asks her to remain his ward’s governess after he marries his supposed fiancée, Jane bursts forth:

Do you think I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart!

In a move that scandalised some of Brontë’s critics, Rochester responds warmly to Jane’s principled self-defense and immediately proposes marriage, explaining, “My bride is here […] because my equal is here.”

Madwomen and missionaries

Most people are familiar with the phrase “the madwoman in the attic,” but few know it comes not from the novel but from a pioneering work of feminist criticism inspired by Brontë’s example.

In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar placed the incredible plot twist at the heart of Jane Eyre – that Rochester is secretly married to a mixed-race madwoman from the West Indies, who is confined to the third floor of his house – at the heart of a new symbology of writing by women.

“By projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women (who are suitably punished in the course of the novel or poem),” they write, “female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them.”

Bertha Mason, the madwoman, thus becomes a monstrous double of Jane – a transgressive woman of violent temper who demonstrates what happens when women are oppressed by unequal marriages or violate social norms.

The invention of Bertha is a brilliantly lurid device to keep Rochester and Jane apart. But it has not always sat well with readers.

In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the Dominican writer Jean Rhys retells the story from Bertha’s perspective, humanising the bestial other. In place of the “clothed hyena” that Jane observes, Rhys shows how Bertha’s subjection to colonial schemes of exploitation and domination is as much responsible for her madness as any racial or genetic traits. Instead of Jane, it is Bertha who complains of injustice.

Brontë further develops the colonial contexts of Jane Eyre in the novel’s final section, when, after the collapse of her engagement to Rochester, Jane takes up residence with an earnest missionary and his sisters. Here, Jane finally finds herself in a community of equals, except it lacks the romantic dimension of her relationship with Rochester.

When the missionary, St. John Rivers, proposes marriage to Jane, it is because he judges her to be the perfect help-meet for his religious labours in India, not because he desires her erotically. Where Rochester was excessively sensual (we are made aware that he married Bertha for sex as well as money), St. John is coldly ambitious — not a bad man, per se, but one who sees his spiritual destiny as incompatible with the life of the heart.

Through the colonial activities of both men, Brontë associates the wider British empire with masculine egoism and derogation from equality between the sexes. Such a place, she suggests, is likely to produce “revolted slaves” not unlike her heroine Jane.

A radical solution

The most famous line of Jane Eyre – “Reader, I married him” – encapsulates how this sometimes dispiriting novel moves inexorably toward maturity and fulfilment.

While still considering St. John’s proposal, Jane hears Rochester’s voice beckoning to her through the ether – a moment of occult indulgence that recalls the more mythopoetic style of Charlotte’s sister, Emily. Fortunately, the voice inspires Jane to return to Thornfield, where she finds that Bertha has burned the house to the ground, killing herself in the process, and leaving Rochester blinded and maimed.

A sombre mood prevails as the two lovers reacquaint themselves, but Jane resumes her teasing manner when she realises that Rochester has become insecure toward her because of his disabilities, not because his passion has cooled.

In contrast to her scepticism about St. John’s mission, Jane delights in the possibility of serving as Rochester’s caretaker and nurse because she is motivated by love rather than duty.

In a culture where most people, but women especially, were encouraged to sublimate their desires to the goals of more powerful men, Jane Eyre offers a radical solution. By marrying a man who has become her physical and financial dependent – but who remains an equal romantic partner – Jane can enjoy both power and femininity, which for many Victorians was an improbable combination.

As Jane puts it,

I hold myself supremely blest – blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine.

Her confident assertion of dignity, of integrity, and of moral and social equality is as relevant to our own time as it was to hers.

Matthew Sussman, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Sydney

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

Every day, users ask search engines millions of questions. The information we receive can shape our opinions and behaviour.

We are often not aware of their influence, but internet search tools sort and rank web content when responding to our queries. This can certainly help us learn more things. But search tools can also return low-quality information and even misinformation.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have entered the search scene. While LLMs are not search engines, commercial web search engines have started to include LLM-based artificial intelligence (AI) features into their products. Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Overviews are examples of this trend.

AI-enhanced search is marketed as convenient. But, together with other changes in the nature of search over the last decades, it raises the question: what is a good search engine?

Our new paper, published in AI and Ethics, explores this. To make the possibilities clearer, we imagine four search tool models: Customer Servant, Librarian, Journalist and Teacher. These models reflect design elements in search tools and are loosely based on matching human roles.

The four models of search tools

Customer Servant

Workers in customer service give people the things they request. If someone asks for a “burger and fries”, they don’t query whether the request is good for the person, or whether they might really be after something else.

The search model we call Customer Servant is somewhat like the first computer-aided information retrieval systems introduced in the 1950s. These returned sets of unranked documents matching a Boolean query – using simple logical rules to define relationships between keywords (e.g. “cats NOT dogs”).

Librarian

As the name suggests, this model somewhat resembles human librarians. Librarian also provides content that people request, but it doesn’t always take queries at face value.

Instead, it aims for “relevance” by inferring user intentions from contextual information such as location, time or the history of user interactions. Classic web search engines of the late 1990s and early 2000s that rank results and provide a list of resources – think early Google – sit in this category.

Journalist

Journalists go beyond librarians. While often responding to what people want to know, journalists carefully curate that information, at times weeding out falsehoods and canvassing various public viewpoints.

Journalists aim to make people better informed. The Journalist search model does something similar. It may customise the presentation of results by providing additional information, or by diversifying search results to give a more balanced list of viewpoints or perspectives.

Teacher

Human teachers, like journalists, aim at giving accurate information. However, they may exercise even more control: teachers may strenuously debunk erroneous information, while pointing learners to the very best expert sources, including lesser-known ones. They may even refuse to expand on claims they deem false or superficial.

LLM-based conversational search systems such as Copilot or Gemini may play a roughly similar role. By providing a synthesised response to a prompt, they exercise more control over presented information than classic web search engines.

They may also try to explicitly discredit problematic views on topics such as health, politics, the environment or history. They might reply with “I can’t promote misinformation” or “This topic requires nuance”. Some LLMs convey a strong “opinion” on what is genuine knowledge and what is unedifying.

No search model is best

We argue each search tool model has strengths and drawbacks.

The Customer Servant is highly explainable: every result can be directly tied to keywords in your query. But this precision also limits the system, as it can’t grasp broader or deeper information needs beyond the exact terms used.

The Librarian model uses additional signals like data about clicks to return content more aligned with what users are really looking for. The catch is these systems may introduce bias. Even with the best intentions, choices about relevance and data sources can reflect underlying value judgements.

The Journalist model shifts the focus toward helping users understand topics, from science to world events, more fully. It aims to present factual information and various perspectives in balanced ways.

This approach is especially useful in moments of crisis – like a global pandemic – where countering misinformation is critical. But there’s a trade-off: tweaking search results for social good raises concerns about user autonomy. It may feel paternalistic, and could open the door to broader content interventions.

The Teacher model is even more interventionist. It guides users towards what it “judges” to be good information, while criticising or discouraging access to content it deems harmful or false. This can promote learning and critical thinking.

But filtering or downranking content can also limit choice, and raises red flags if the “teacher” – whether algorithm or AI – is biased or simply wrong. Current language models often have built-in “guardrails” to align with human values, but these are imperfect. LLMs can also hallucinate plausible-sounding nonsense, or avoid offering perspectives we might actually want to hear.

Staying vigilant is key

We might prefer different models for different purposes. For example, since teacher-like LLMs synthesise and analyse vast amounts of web material, we may sometimes want their more opinionated perspective on a topic, such as on good books, world events or nutrition.

Yet sometimes we may wish to explore specific and verifiable sources about a topic for ourselves. We may also prefer search tools to downrank some content – conspiracy theories, for example.

LLMs make mistakes and can mislead with confidence. As these models become more central to search, we need to stay aware of their drawbacks, and demand transparency and accountability from tech companies on how information is delivered.

Striking the right balance with search engine design and selection is no easy task. Too much control risks eroding individual choice and autonomy, while too little could leave harms unchecked.

Our four ethical models offer a starting point for robust discussion. Further interdisciplinary research is crucial to define when and how search engines can be used ethically and responsibly.

Simon Coghlan, Senior Lecturer in Digital Ethics, Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne; Damiano Spina, Senior Lecturer, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University; Falk Scholer, Professor of Information Access and Retrieval, RMIT University, and Hui Chia, PhD Candidate in Law, The University of Melbourne

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

There is a Fox News headline that goes like this:

Transgender female runner who beat 14,000 women at London Marathon offers to give medal back

Read about the event elsewhere and it turns out the athlete was also beaten by thousands of people and it was a participation medal. While the Fox News headline is true, it is framed to potentially elicit a negative reaction.

Misinformation is on the rise. We’re told we need to think critically when we read things online, but how can we recognise such situations? And what does it mean to think critically anyway?

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is based on the idea that if all ideas are equal, then all ideas are worthless. Without this assumption, there can be nothing to be critical of.

When we think critically, we focus on the quality of our reasoning and the factors that can influence it. In other words, thinking critically primarily means being critical of your own thinking.

Importantly, critical thinking is not strongly correlated with intelligence. While some believe intelligence is basically fixed (though there is debate around this), we can learn to think critically.

Other factors being equal, there’s also no evidence thinking critically is an innate ability. In fact, we have evidence critical thinking can be improved as a skill in itself, and it is transferrable to other contexts.

The tools of argumentation

Many factors can affect the quality of your thinking. They include things like cognitive biases (systemic thinking errors), prior beliefs, prejudices and worldviews, framing effects, and how much you know about the subject.

To understand the quality of our reasoning, we can use the concepts and language of argumentation.

People often think “arguments” are about conflicting views. A better way to understand argumentation is to view it as a way of making our thinking visible and accessible to each other.

Arguments contain premises, those things we think are true about the world, and conclusions, which is where we end up in our thinking. Moving from premises to conclusions is called inferring, and it is the quality of these inferences that is the concern of critical thinking.

For example, if I offer the premises

P1: All Gronks are green

P2: Fred is a Gronk

Then you have already inferred the conclusion

C: Fred is green

You don’t even need to know what a Gronk is to make that inference.

All our rational judgements and decisions are made up of chains of inferences. Constructing, evaluating and identifying types of arguments is the core business of critical thinking.

How can we improve our critical thinking skills?

To help us get better at it, we can understand critical thinking in three main ways.

First, we can see critical thinking as a subject we can learn. In this subject, we study how arguments work and how our reasoning can be influenced or improved. We also learn what makes for good thinking by using ideas like accuracy, clarity, relevance, depth and more. These are what we value in good thinking. By learning this, we start to think about how we think, not just what we think about.

Second, we improve our critical thinking by using what we’ve learned in real situations. This helps us build important thinking skills like analysing, justifying, evaluating and explaining.

Third, we can also think of critical thinking as a habit or attitude – something we choose to practice in our everyday lives. This means being curious, open-minded and willing to question things instead of just accepting them. It also means being aware of our own biases and trying to be fair and honest in how we think.

When we put all three of these together, we become better thinkers – not just in educational contexts, but in life.

Practical steps to improving critical thinking

Since critical thinking centres on the giving and taking of reasons, practising this is a step towards improvement. There are some useful ways to do this.

1. Make reasoning – rather than conclusions – the basis of your discussions with others.

When asking for someone’s opinion, inquire as to why they think that. And offer your thinking to others. Making our thinking visible leads to deep and meaningful conversations in which we can test each other’s thinking and develop the virtues of open-mindedness and curiosity.

2. Always assess the credibility of information based on its source and with a reflection on your own biases.

The processes of our thinking can shape information as we receive it, just as much as the source can in providing it. This develops the virtues of carefulness and humility.

3. Keep the fundamental question of critical inquiry in mind.

The most important question in critical thinking is: “how do we know?”. Continually testing the quality of your inquiry – and therefore thinking – is key. Focusing on this question gives us practice in applying the values of inquiry and develops virtues such as persistence and resilience.

You are not alone!

Reasoning is best understood as a social competence: we reason with and towards each other. Indeed, to be called reasonable is a social compliment.

It’s only when we have to think with others that we really test the quality of our thinking. It’s easy to convince yourself about something, but when you play in the arena of public reasoning, the bar is much higher.

So, be the reasonable person in the room.

That doesn’t mean everyone has to come around to your way of thinking. But it does mean everyone will get closer to the truth because of you.

Use online resources

There are many accessible tools for developing critical thinking. Kialo (Esperanto for “reason”), brings together people from around the world on a user-friendly (and free) platform to help test our reasoning in a well-moderated and respectful environment. It is an excellent place to practice the giving and taking of reasons and to understand alternative positions.

The School of Thought, developed to curate free critical thinking resources, includes many that are often used in educational contexts.

There’s also a plethora of online courses that can guide development in critical thinking, from Australian and international universities.

Peter Ellerton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Education; Curriculum Director, UQ Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland

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

Jason, a 42-year-old father of two, has been battling back pain for weeks. Scrolling through his phone, he sees ad after ad promising relief: chiropractic alignments, acupuncture, back braces, vibrating massage guns and herbal patches.

His GP told him to “stay active”, but what does that even mean when every movement hurts? Jason wants to avoid strong painkillers and surgery, but with so many options (and opinions), it’s hard to know what works and what’s just marketing hype.

If Jason’s experience sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Back pain is one of the most common reasons people visit a doctor. It can be challenging to manage, mainly due to widespread misunderstandings and the overwhelming number of ineffective and uncertain treatments promoted.

We assessed the best available evidence of non-drug and non-surgical treatments to alleviate low back pain. Our review – published today by the independent, international group the Cochrane Collaboration – includes 31 Cochrane systematic reviews, covering 97,000 people with back pain.

It shows bed rest doesn’t work for back pain. Some of the treatments that do work can depend on how long you’ve been in pain.

Is back pain likely to be serious?

There are different types of low back pain. It can:

• be short-lived, lasting less than six weeks (acute back pain)
• linger for a bit longer, for six to twelve weeks (sub-acute)
• stick around for months and even years (chronic, defined as more than 12 weeks).

In most cases (90-95%), back pain is non-specific and cannot be reliably linked to a specific cause or underlying disease. This includes common structural changes seen in x-rays and MRIs of the spine.

For this reason, imaging of the back is only recommended in rare situations – typically when there’s a clear suspicion of serious back issues, such as after physical trauma or when there is numbness or loss of sensation in the groin or legs.

Many people expect to receive painkillers for their back pain or even surgery, but these are no longer the front-line treatment options due to limited benefits and the high risk of harm.

International clinical guidelines recommend people choose non-drug and non-surgical treatments to relieve their pain, improve function and reduce the distress commonly associated with back pain.

So what works for different types of pain? Here’s what our review found when researchers compared these treatments with standard care (the typical treatment patients usually receive) or no treatment.

What helps for short-term back pain

1. Stay active – don’t rest in bed

If your back pain is new, the best advice is also one of the simplest: keep moving despite the pain.

Changing the way you move and use your body to protect it, or resting in bed, can seem like to right way to respond to pain – and may have even been recommended in the past. But we know know this excessive protective behaviour can make it harder to return to meaningful activities.

This doesn’t mean pushing through pain or hitting the gym, but instead, trying to maintain your usual routines as much as possible. Evidence suggests that doing so won’t make your pain worse, and may improve it.

2. Multidisciplinary care, if pain lingers

For pain lasting six to 12 weeks, multidisciplinary treatment is likely to reduce pain compared to standard care.

This involves a coordinated team of doctors, physiotherapists and psychologists working together to address the many factors contributing to your back pain persisting:

• neurophysiological influences refer to how your nervous system is currently processing pain. It can make you more sensitive to signals from movements, thoughts, feelings and environment

• psychological factors include how your thoughts, feelings and behaviours affect your pain system and, ultimately, the experience of pain you have

• occupational factors include the physical demands of your job and how well you can manage them, as well as aspects like low job satisfaction, all of which can contribute to ongoing pain.

What works for chronic back pain

Once pain has been around for more than 12 weeks, it can become more difficult to treat. But relief is still possible.

Exercise therapy

Exercise – especially programs tailored to your needs and preferences – is likely to reduce pain and help you move better. This could include aerobic activity, strength training or Pilates-based movements.

It doesn’t seem to matter what type of exercise you do – it matters more that you are consistent and have the right level of supervision, especially early on.

Multidisciplinary treatment

As with short-term pain, coordinated care involving a mix of physical, occupational and psychological approaches likely works better than usual care alone.

Psychological therapies

Psychological therapies for chronic pain include approaches to help people change thinking, feelings, behaviours and reactions that might sustain persistent pain.

These approaches are likely to reduce pain, though they may not be as effective in improving physical function.

Acupuncture

Acupuncture probably reduces pain and improves how well you can function compared to placebo or no treatment.

While some debate remains about how it works, the evidence suggests potential benefits for some people with chronic back pain.

What doesn’t work or still raises uncertainty?

The review found that many commonly advertised treatments still have uncertain benefits or probably do not benefit people with back pain.

Spinal manipulation, for example, has uncertain benefits in acute and chronic back pain, and it likely does not improve how well you function if you have acute back pain.

Traction, which involves stretching the spine using weights or pulleys, probably doesn’t help with chronic back pain. Despite its popularity in some circles, there’s little evidence that it works.

There isn’t enough reliable data to determine whether advertised treatments – such back braces, vibrating massage guns and herbal patches – are effective.

How can you use the findings?

If you have back pain, start by considering how long you’ve had it. Then explore treatment options that research supports and discuss them with your GP, psychologist or physiotherapist.

Your health provider should reassure you about the importance of gradually increasing your activity to resume meaningful work, social and life activities. They should also support you in making informed decisions about which treatments are most appropriate for you at this stage.

Rodrigo Rossi Nogueira Rizzo, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Neuroscience Research Australia and Aidan Cashin, NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, Neuroscience Research Australia

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

Alzheimer’s disease is usually associated with old age. But around 5%-10% of all Alzheimer’s cases occur in people under the age of 65. Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease progresses more rapidly and often strikes people in the prime of their lives. Treatment options remain limited.

But new data from a recent clinical trial suggests that a previously discontinued experimental drug, called gantenerumab, could help. The study found that gantenerumab reduced the buildup of amyloid plaques – one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease – in the brain. This may help slow cognitive decline in people with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Early-onset Alzheimer’s is often linked to genetic mutations in three specific genes. These mutations cause the brain to produce excessive amounts of amyloid beta, a protein that clumps together to form plaques. These plaques disrupt brain function, leading to memory loss.

Early-onset Alzheimer’s advances quickly – and the rapid decline is devastating. That’s why researchers are racing to find treatments that can slow the disease.

The recent clinical trial was a randomised, placebo-controlled study to evaluate gantenerumab’s effects on people with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Researchers monitored changes in the participants’ cognitive abilities, and also used brain imaging and blood biomarkers (the presence of specific proteins in the blood which are linked to Alzheimer’s), to track the disease’s progress throughout the study.

The trial included 73 participants with rare inherited genetic mutations known to cause early-onset Alzheimer’s. These participants were either asymptomatic or had mild Alzheimer’s symptoms at the start of the study.

The results were intriguing. In a subgroup of 22 participants, who hadn’t had any cognitive issues at the start of the study, taking the treatment for an average of eight years reduced the risk of developing symptoms from a nearly 100% likelihood, to 50%. Brain scans also showed a notable decrease in amyloid buildup.

Immune defenders

Gantenerumab is a monoclonal antibody – a lab-engineered protein designed to attach to amyloid beta in the brain. By binding to these plaques, it signals the immune system to clear them away. This may potentially slow Alzheimer’s progression.

The drug works by engaging microglial cells. These are the brain’s primary immune defenders. Microglia constantly monitor the brain for damage and remove harmful substances, including amyloid beta. However, in people with Alzheimer’s disease, microglia often fail to clear plaques efficiently. Gantenerumab enhances this natural defence mechanism by tagging amyloid plaques, making them easier for the microglia to recognise and break down.

Amyloid beta is thought to play a central role in Alzheimer’s by triggering inflammation, interfering with cell communication and ultimately killing neurons. By removing these plaques, gantenerumab may help to protect brain function. However, it doesn’t reverse existing damage – which is why early intervention is critical.

An advantage of gantenerumab is that it can cross the blood-brain barrier – the protective shield that blocks many drugs and harmful substances from reaching the brain. This allows it to act directly on amyloid plaques, making it more effective than some earlier treatments that struggled with drug delivery.

But as promising as these results are, gantenerumab isn’t without risks.

A major concern is amyloid-related imaging abnormalities. These are swelling or small spots of bleeding in the brain that show up on MRI scans. This is a common side-effect of amyloid-targeting therapies.

In this latest trial, 53% of participants experienced these amyloid-related imaging abnormalities, including small brain bleeds in 27% of participants, brain swelling in 30% of participants and iron deposits from bleeding in 6%. While no participants had major brain haemorrhages or died from the treatment, these side-effects remain a serious concern – requiring regular monitoring through brain scans.

Another limitation is the modest cognitive benefit observed in the trial. While gantenerumab reduced amyloid plaques, the extent to which this translates into meaningful improvements in memory and thinking skills remains unclear.

Gantenerumab is also expensive to manufacture, which could make widespread access difficult if it gains regulatory approval. As this is an experimental drug, we do not currently know how much it would cost. But other similar anti-amyloid therapies, such as donanemab, currently cost around £25,000 per patient per year.

The study also had a small sample size and only focused on a rare genetic form of early-onset Alzheimer’s. More research is needed to see how these results may apply to the wider dementia community.

The future of treatment

Although the trial was terminated early after the study’s sponsor pulled out, these findings contribute to the ongoing debate over the causes of Alzheimer’s disease.

According to the amyloid hypothesis, the buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain is the main cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Clearing these plaques will slow the disease’s progression. The success of the Alzheimer’s drugs lecanemab, donanemab and now gantenerumab, lend themselves to this theory.

This study also underscores the importance of early diagnosis. Amyloid-targeting therapies appear to work best in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, before significant brain damage occurs. Advances in biomarker testing – including blood tests and brain scans – could help identify at-risk people sooner. This would improve the effectiveness of drugs such as gantenerumab.

Although gantenerumab is not a cure and was discontinued by its manufacturer in 2022 because it failed to demonstrate efficacy in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, this new data could perhaps lead to gantenerumab being manufactured again. It also represents another step forward in the fight against Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s research is advancing faster than ever before. Whether a success or a setback, each new study adds to our understanding of the disease and brings us closer to more effective treatments. For now, the gantenerumab trial offers a hopeful sign that scientists are making progress in slowing the course of this devastating condition.

Rahul Sidhu, PhD Candidate, Neuroscience, University of Sheffield

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

A recent BBC investigation questioned the accuracy of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) self-tests – rapid at-home tests for men worried about prostate cancer. The BBC analysed five of these tests using one blood sample and found varying results: one positive, three negative, and one unreadable.

PSA blood tests measures levels of PSA, a protein produced by the prostate gland. All men have some PSA in their blood but a raised level can suggest a problem with the prostate, including cancer.

In the UK, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men. One in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime.

Unlike many other cancers, there is no national screening programme for prostate cancer and the NHS doesn’t offer routine PSA testing. But anyone who has a prostate and is over 50 years old – or over 45 and from a high-risk group – can request PSA testing on the NHS. A doctor may also request testing if they think a patient has prostate cancer symptoms or want to monitor a diagnosed prostate condition.

A faster and potentially more convenient alternative is self-testing. Currently, anyone over the age of 18 can buy a PSA self-testing kit for home use. With no proactive NHS screening programme, home testing is on the rise to catch prostate cancer early – even before there are any symptoms. By catching fast-growing cancers early, treatment can prevent them from spreading and causing serious problems.

As with COVID self-testing, the PSA home kits use test cassettes. You use a lancet (small needle) to prick your finger to get a few drops of blood, put the blood into a pipette and then drip this on to the test cassette along with a buffer solution. Depending on the test kit, a positive or negative result is displayed in five-to-ten minutes.

This might sound convenient, but some users find the detailed instructions for home PSA tests difficult to follow, which can lead to errors. A review found the information provided with self-tests is generally inadequate.

But as the BBC report showed, even when used correctly, PSA home tests can give varying results.

Not a cancer test

Positive tests or high PSA levels may cause men to worry unnecessarily. PSA tests are not blood tests for prostate cancer, and a PSA test can neither diagnose nor rule out prostate cancer. Rather, higher levels of PSA indicate a potential problem with the prostate.

In many men, this could be caused by a benign prostatic hyperplasia – an enlarged prostate. This is a non-cancerous condition affecting 8% of men in their fifties, where the prostate gland grows larger. It can cause urinary problems, such as difficulty in starting pee, a weak urine stream and frequent or urgent urination. The likelihood of developing an enlarged prostate increases with age.

An inflamed prostate (prostatitis) can also cause raised PSA, as can urine infections – and even vigorous exercise and sexual activity.

In some cases, rapid home tests can give a false negative result, offering false reassurance for users who should go on to have further tests for cancer.

Another drawback of home-testing kits is that there is no medical professional to refer a test user for further checks or to help interpret results. For example, a normal PSA level doesn’t mean the person testing is cancer-free: PSA levels can be normal even in someone with prostate cancer.

Tests are not a GP substitute

While rapid at-home PSA tests can be unreliable, other types of PSA self-testing kit allow you to collect the blood sample in a small tube, then send it to a laboratory for testing. Getting these results can take a few days but can offer a more detailed PSA value, compared with rapid at-home tests. But again, these lab tests can neither diagnose nor rule out prostate cancer.

Whatever the method of testing, high PSA levels should be followed up with a doctor who can order more tests and scans to check for cancer.

Many men might find the Prostate Cancer UK online risk checker useful. It asks three main questions about age, ethnicity and family history.

The older a man is, the higher their risk of prostate cancer. Men of black ethnic heritage have double the chance of developing prostate cancer, while those with a close relative – father or brother – who has had prostate cancer are also at increased risk.

The online risk checker also provides useful resources, information to take to the doctor, and contact details for specialist nurses.

If a man is experiencing any symptoms of prostate problems, falls into a higher risk group, has genetic risk factors, has a positive PSA home-test, or just has concerns about prostate cancer, it’s always best to check with the doctor – they can provide more support, information and further testing.

Dipa Kamdar, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University

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

A lot of dog owners believe that they can tell what their dogs are feeling. They believe that they can assess their dog’s emotions no matter the context.

Yet newspapers frequently publish stories about dogs who attack “out of nowhere”, where owners claim there were “no signs” prior to the attack. A recent US study has found the answer may lie with humans – as it turns out, we’re not very good at interpreting dogs’ emotions.

Previous research has shown that experience with dogs affects how successful people are in assessing a dog’s emotional state. As a psychologist, the more I know about dogs and the more I study and observe them, the better I become in assessing their behaviour. However, even experts can struggle to get it right.

In the recent US study, researchers looked at how successful people are at assessing dogs’ emotions from looking at pictures. The images showed the dogs in different postures such as submissive or anxious. Sometimes the context around the dog was positive (for example, the owner approaching the dog with a lead) and sometimes the context around was negative (a person about to scold the dog).

The study found that the context influenced whether people assessed the dog’s behavioural response as positive or negative even though the posture and other signals didn’t change.

Research also suggests we have the tendency to misinterpret some facial expressions of dogs. A 2018 University of Lincoln study examined how children aged three to five years old and their parents interpret dogs’ facial expressions.

Participants were shown pictures of dogs, for example showing bare teeth, which signals high levels of distress. The children especially misinterpreted that as a smiling and happy dog. The study also showed that interventions, which educated participants on how to interpret dogs’ behavioural signals, increased their understanding of dogs’ stress signals (though this was mostly true in the adults).

We tend to anthropomorphise and attribute human emotions to our dogs. A good example of this is the so-called guilty look. You often see videos on social media in which a dog avoids eye contact with humans, for example turning its head slightly to the side.

If this happens after the dog has done something they shouldn’t have, the owner may classify this as indicative of shame or guilt. In reality, dogs avoid eye contact as a kind of deescalation behaviour. It indicates that they do not want a confrontation. Perhaps the owner has already reacted to the mishap. Or the dog has learned to expect a reaction from the owner in certain situations. Insecure or fearful dogs also often avoid eye contact because they feel threatened or intimidated. However, this behaviour has little to do with shame.

Another classic misconception is that a dog that wags its tail is a happy and friendly dog. In reality, a wagging tail only means that the dog is aroused. To assess the dog’s emotional state, you also have to consider the position of the tail. If it is standing upright, then this is more a sign of a tense dog. If it is positioned lower and the movement of the tail is relaxed and wide from left to right, then it is probably a friendly signal.

We anthropomorphise dogs because we have evolved a human-specific way to interpret others’ emotions. If we see a person who pulls up the corners of their mouth and smiles, then we understand them to be happy or at least cheerful. That leads to problems if we apply that system to interpret other species’ emotional expressions.

So how can we analyse dogs’ emotional expression in an objective way? One approach that scientists use is a technical method called DogFACS. In this method, each facial muscle is assigned a movement on the surface of the face. Facial movements are documented by numbers and analysed separately from each other.

In 2013 University of Portsmouth researchers went to dog shelters across the UK and filmed dogs for two minutes each. They then analysed the dogs’ behaviour, including their facial expressions.

The animal shelter told the researchers how long it took for the filmed dogs to be adopted by new owners. Neither barking nor wagging tails influenced the adoption rate, but only a specific eyebrow movement: the so-called puppy dog eyes look. The more often the dogs raised their eyebrows and produced the puppy dog eyes, the quicker they were rehomed. Nothing else had an effect. This could be because the puppy dog eyes resemble a facial movement that we produce when we are sad and makes us want to care for the dog.

In fact my 2019 study showed that the facial muscle anatomy of dogs has evolved for facial communication with humans. My team compared the facial muscle anatomy of dogs and wolves and demonstrated that the facial muscles of dogs and wolves are identical – except for one muscle, the levator anguli oculi medialis. This muscle is responsible for the lifting of the inner eyebrow in dogs.

We may not be much good at reading dogs’ emotions but as the University of Lincoln study shows, we can learn to be.

Juliane Kaminski, Associate professor of comparative Psychology, University of Portsmouth

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

Australia has a gender problem. Despite social, economic and political reform aimed at improving opportunities for women, gender gaps are increasing and Australia is falling behind other countries.

The World Economic Forum currently places Australia 24th among 146 countries, down from 15th in 2006. At the current rate of change, the forum suggests it will take more than 130 years to achieve gender equality globally.

Australia has taken important steps forward in some areas, while progress in other areas remains painfully slow. So how far have we come since 2000, and how much further do we have to go?

The good stuff

There are now more women in the labour market, in parliament, and leading large companies than at any other time.

Over the past 25 years, there have been major social and political milestones that indicate progress.

These include the appointment of Australia’s first female governor-general in 2008 and prime minister in 2010, the introduction of universal paid parental leave in 2011, a high-profile inquiry into workplace sexual harassment in 2020, and new legislation requiring the public reporting of gender pay gaps in 2023.

Timeline of equality milestones

• 2000

  Child Care Benefit introduced, subsidising cost of children for eligible families

• 2008

  First female Governor-General (Dame Quentin Bryce)

• 2010

  First female Prime Minister elected (Julia Gillard)
  
  First Aboriginal woman from Australia elected to UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (Megan Davis)
  
  Australia’s first national paid parental leave scheme

• 2012

  Julia Gillard misogyny speech
  
  Workplace Gender Equality Act becomes law, Workplace Gender Equality Agency established

• 2013

  Dad or Partner Pay Leave commenced

• 2016

  First Indigenous woman elected to House of Representatives (Linda Burney)

• 2017

  Launch of Women’s Australian Football League
  
  #metoo movement spreads globally to draw attention to sexual harassment and assault

• 2020

  Respect@Work National Inquiry into sexual harassment in the Australian workplace chaired by Kate Jenkins released.

• 2021

  Grace Tame named Australian of the Year for her advocacy in sexual violence/harassment campaigns
  
  Independent review into Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces launched

• 2022

  National plan to end violence against women is finalised

• 2023

  Closing the Gender Pay Gap Bill passes parliament

• 2024

  Superannuation on government-funded paid parental leave from July 1, 2025
  
  Parental leave to be increased to 26 weeks from July 2026.

There are, however, other areas where progress is agonisingly slow.

Violence and financial insecurity

Women are more likely to be in casual and part-time employment than men. This is part of the reason women retire with about half the superannuation savings of men.

This is also linked to financial insecurity later in life. Older women are among the fastest-growing groups of people experiencing homelessness.

The situation for First Nations women is even more severe. The most recent Closing the Gap report indicates First Nations women and children are 33 times more likely to be hospitalised due to violence compared with non-Indigenous women.

They are also seven times more likely to die from family violence.

Improving outcomes for Indigenous women and children requires tackling the long-term effects of colonisation, removal from Country, the Stolen Generations, incarceration and intergenerational trauma. This means challenging not only gender inequality but also racism, discrimination and violence.

At work, the latest data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency suggests the gender pay gap is narrowing, with 56% of organisations reporting improvements.

On average, though, the pay gap is still substantial at 21.8% with women earning only 78 cents for every $1 earned by men. This totals an average yearly shortfall of $28,425.

There are also some notable organisations where the gender pay gap has widened.

The burden of unpaid work

Another measure of inequality that has proved stubbornly slow to change is women’s unequal responsibilities for unpaid domestic and care work.

Without real change in gender divisions of time spent on unpaid housework and care, our capacity to move towards equality in pay gaps and employment is very limited.

Australian women undertake almost 70% of unpaid household labour. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics time use data show that of those who participate in domestic labour, women spend an average of 4.13 hours per day on unpaid domestic and care work, compared with men’s 2.14 hours.

This gap equates to more than a third of a full-time job. If we add up all work (domestic, care and paid), mothers have the longest working week by about 10 hours. This has changed very little over time.

These charts, based on analyses of data from the Households, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) study, show what drives this gap.

Women respond to increased demand for care and domestic work by doing more, while men do not. Parenthood significantly increases the time women spend on unpaid care and housework, while also reducing their time in employment.

Men increase their time in unpaid care after a birth, but the jump is minor compared with women, and there is no change to men’s employment hours.

Not surprisingly given these patterns, parenthood is associated with substantial declines in women’s employment hours, earnings, career progression, and mental health and wellbeing.

The way forward

Current policy priorities primarily incentivise women to remain in employment, while continuing to undertake a disproportionate share of unpaid family work, through moving to part-time employment or making use of other forms of workplace flexibility. This approach focuses on “fixing” women rather than on the structural roots of the problem.

There is limited financial or cultural encouragement for men to step out of employment for care work, or reduce their hours, despite the introduction of a two-week Dad and Partner Pay scheme in 2013 and more recent changes to expand support and access.

Fathers who wish to be more actively involved in care and family life face significant financial barriers, with current schemes only covering a basic wage. If one member of the family has to take time out or reduce their hours, it usually makes financial sense for this to be a woman, given the gender earning gap.

The benefits of enabling men to share care work will not only be improvements for women, but will also improve family relationships and outcomes for children.

Research shows relationship conflict declines when men do more at home. Time spent with fathers has been found to be especially beneficial for children’s cognitive development.

Fixing the gender problem is not just about helping women. It’s good for everyone.

Gender inequality costs the Australian economy $225 billion annually, or 12% of gross domestic product.

Globally, the World Bank estimates gender inequality costs US$160.2 trillion. We can’t afford to slip further behind or to take more than a century to fix the problem.

This piece is part of a series on how Australia has changed since the year 2000. You can read other pieces in the series here.

Janeen Baxter, Director, ARC Life Course Centre and ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow, The University of Queensland

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

Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to muzzle his former employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, once director of global public policy at Meta, seem to have created a bestseller.

While Meta’s legal action successfully prevented Wynn-Williams (who worked there from 2011–17) from promoting her memoir, Careless People, her publisher has continued to promote it without her.

In the week of its release, the book sold 60,000 copies in the United States. In the United Kingdom, it sold 1,000 copies a day for the first three days.

“This early success is a triumph against Meta’s attempt to stop the publication of this book,” Joanna Prior, CEO of publisher Pan Macmillan, told the Guardian last week.

The court order that prevents Wynn-Williams from promoting her memoir may also prevent her from responding to requests from lawmakers in several countries to discuss her time at the company, formerly known as Facebook, and “issues of public concern”, her lawyers believe.

Requests have come from members of the US Congress, the parliament of the UK, the parliament of the European Union and other sources, reports CNN.

This comes as Zuckerberg, the founder, chairman and CEO of Meta, has committed the company, as Trump’s second term begins, to “free expression”. “Too much harmless content” is being censored, he says. In practice, this means getting rid of fact-checkers, in favour of a Community Notes program like the one on X, which Zuckerberg cites as a model.

Meta claims Wynn-Williams, a former diplomat born in New Zealand who convinced the company to create her global position, has broken a non-disparagement agreement: signed, it says, after she was dismissed for poor performance. Last week, it called the book

a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.

A true insider account

Last year, tech journalist Kara Swisher, in her memoir Burn Book, summed up Zuckerberg as “one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology” – interestingly, given this memoir’s title. She also referred to Facebook as “anti-social media”.

There have been other books about the company too, such as Facebook: the Inside Story by tech journalist Steven Levy in 2020 and An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang in 2021.

Some of the company’s misdeeds were discussed in these books. But whereas they are based on interviews with unnamed sources, Wynn-Williams, a senior insider, has put her name to them. She refers to the protagonists by their first names, reflecting the rapport they once shared.

From shark attack to Facebook

Careless People starts with Wynn-Williams’ story of narrowly surviving a shark attack as a child, despite the complacency of her family and the local doctor. This may be to indicate her strength and resolve. Or perhaps it is a metaphor for the viciousness and indifference she would later encounter at Facebook.

She was initially a big fan of the company, which she saw as a potential force for good. An example of the good work of Facebook in its early days was a randomised control experiment before the 2010 US midterm elections. Some subscribers were sent a message at the top of their newsfeed encouraging them to vote, with a link to polling places and an “I voted” button they could click. This led to an additional 340,000 voters.

Every employee joining Facebook was given a Little Red Book written by Zuckerberg. As Wynn-Williams comments, the book represents “core principles from the supreme leader” who she calls “another MZ channeling his own peculiar form of Maoist zeal”.

Over time, Wynn-Williams’ admiration for Zuckerberg would wane. Her book is also rather unflattering about Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg’s then deputy. The Lean In author is described as drawing people in “like moths to a flame” and expecting female staff to spend evenings helping to promote her book. This was particularly galling, as her book was about empowering women in the workplace.

Sandberg was such a demanding boss, Wynn-Williams was sending her talking points for a meeting at Davos while giving birth. Her doctor was saying: “you should be pushing – but not pushing ‘send’!”

Losing faith and breaking things

Wynn-Williams started to question her faith in Facebook (which changed its name to Meta in 2021) when she realised parents working there did not allow their own teens to have mobile phones. “These executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds,” she writes.

In 2017, an internal memo revealed Facebook was offering advertisers the opportunity to target teenagers when their posts revealed low self esteem. For example, beauty products could be targeted to young women when they deleted a selfie. The company was increasingly adding features that were “addictive by design”, as they sought to maximise engagement at all costs.

The company was adopting an aggressive stance towards traditional media. Zuckerberg attacked one of his staff for “compromising with a dying industry rather than dominating it, crushing it”.

In its drive for global domination, Facebook thought, in the words of one senior colleague, that “the first billion users are the easy billion”. Beyond that, there were the technical problems of expanding into countries with low or poor internet coverage. There were also ethical questions about collaborating with autocratic governments.

Wynn-Williams was perturbed when Facebook told China it could help “promote safe and secure social order”.

A United Nations investigator described how Facebook played a critical role in spreading hatred of Rohingya and Muslims within Myanmar. In 2018, the chairman of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar told reporters that Facebook “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict” in the public, including “hate speech”.

She also worried about the role Facebook played in the first election of Donald Trump, in 2016. It allowed the Trump campaign to target misinformation to people it would most likely influence, she writes. The campaign also used it to discourage groups less attracted to Trump from voting. She was disgusted when Zuckerberg, rather than being upset about this, admired “the ingenuity” of Trump’s campaign.

After a meeting with President Barack Obama, Zuckerberg was furious at being accused, accurately, of not taking seriously the problem of untrue stories being widely promoted.

The author warns that, unlike the global leaders he increasingly mixed with, Zuckerberg (now aged 40) could stay in his current position “for another fifty years”. His potential longevity is compared to Queen Elizabeth II.

At one stage, Zuckerberg seemed to be musing about a presidential run. Unlike Elon Musk, Zuckerberg was born in the US, so is eligible. But as Levy put it in his book, “no country on Earth has a population as big as Facebook; the presidency would be a step down”.

Unanswered questions

Wynn-Williams feels this emphasis on maximising profits at all costs is unnecessary. Had they wished, the senior people at the company could have been incredibly rich while still displaying some basic human decency.

Meta’s famous slogan is “move fast and break things”. But increasingly, Wynn-Williams concluded one of the things being broken was community health.

The book is easy to read and the author writes engagingly. But unanswered questions remain. Readers may wonder why the author stayed at Meta as long as she did once she developed misgivings about its impact.

She mentions her serious health issues: she feared losing her health insurance. But surely she had been on a large salary package and could afford to look after herself. She may have been in denial, unwilling to admit her initial admiration for Zuckerberg had been misplaced. Her husband’s explanation was she suffered from Stockholm syndrome.

The book would be a more useful reference if it had a bibliography and an index. But it does reveal some important insights about the attitudes of some careless –but very powerful – people.

John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

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

Silicosis is an incurable but entirely preventable lung disease. It has only one cause: breathing in too much silica dust. This is a risk in several industries, including tunnelling, stone masonry and construction.

Just last week, ABC reported that 13 workers from tunnelling projects in Sydney have been diagnosed with silicosis. It’s yet another reminder that current diagnostic methods are limited. They often detect the disease only after the lungs already have significant damage.

Our new study, published in the Journal of Breath Research, provides the latest results on a breath test for detecting silicosis powered by artificial intelligence (AI). It’s non-invasive and measures dozens of molecules to identify silicosis in just minutes.

The test we’ve developed achieved over 90% accuracy in differentiating silicosis patients from healthy individuals. This is better than traditional lung function tests.

While our test is yet to be trialled in real-world clinics, our results so far suggest breath testing could become a crucial tool in workplace health screening. Early detection would prevent suffering and disease progression, and reduce healthcare costs.

Silicosis is a growing problem – but hard to detect

Currently, more workers in New South Wales, elsewhere in Australia and internationally are being diagnosed with silicosis at younger ages. The Australian government has responded by banning engineered stone, but that doesn’t address ongoing risks in other industries.

Patients with silicosis often describe a feeling like they are slowly being strangled, with every breath becoming more difficult over time. In advanced stages, silicosis can be fatal unless patients can access a lung transplant.

The only way to stop the progression of silicosis is removing affected workers from further silica exposure. This is why diagnosing patients in the early stages – before irreversible lung damage occurs – is critical.

However, this isn’t easy to achieve. Lung function testing and chest X-rays only identify the problem once irreversible lung damage has occurred. In some cases, patients also need CT scans and invasive biopsy to confirm diagnosis. But CT scans, although much higher resolution, also rely on visible signs of silicosis.

And these methods are costly and take time, making it harder to easily screen the thousands of workers who could be at risk.

This is where breath testing comes in.

How breath tests can detect disease

Human breath contains hundreds of volatile organic compounds – small gas molecules that come from metabolic processes in the body, as well as the environment.

The composition of these molecules changes in response to physiological conditions like disease. However, volatile organic compounds are often present in extremely low concentrations – we need highly sensitive technology to detect them reliably.

Our team has developed tools that can detect volatile organic compounds at concentrations as low as parts per trillion. This is equivalent to detecting a single drop of liquid diluted in multiple Olympic-sized swimming pools.

This level of sensitivity allows us to identify very small biochemical changes in breath. AI is key to this approach. Our machine learning model analyses breath samples to tell apart healthy individuals and those with silicosis.

This builds on our previous work using AI to analyse blood plasma for early Parkinson’s disease detection with high accuracy and interpretability, which allows us to determine the chemical features that contribute the most to model accuracy. Interpretability refers to the ability to understand and explain how the AI model arrives at its predictions, providing insights into which data inputs are most important.

Now, we have applied similar methods to breath analysis. Thanks to the sensitivity of our test, we could potentially detect silicosis at very early stages.

How well does it work?

In our new study, the breath test was trialled on 31 silicosis patients and 60 healthy controls. The AI-powered model successfully distinguished silicosis cases with over 90% accuracy.

The test takes less than five minutes per sample, making it feasible for large-scale health screening. Additionally, the test doesn’t require subjects to fast or undergo any special preparation beforehand.

An important question in breath analysis is whether external factors, such as diet or smoking, influence test results. Our study included smokers and non-smokers in both silicosis and healthy control groups, and the test maintained high accuracy.

Our results show great promise, but there are challenges to overcome. The test relies on highly sensitive instrumentation that, while compact (less than a cubic metre), still requires technical expertise to operate.

Currently, breath samples are collected in clinics and transported to a lab for analysis. We hope future iterations could allow for testing in workplace settings, creating routine screening programs. Further validation in larger, diverse worker populations is also necessary before full implementation.

The next phase of research will involve refining the AI model and expanding real-world testing to thousands of silica-exposed workers who might be at risk.

While routine medical evaluations will still be necessary for at-risk workers, the addition of breath analysis could enable more continuous monitoring than what is currently practical. It could help detect silicosis earlier, before the symptoms become irreversible, reducing long-term health risks.

Acknowledgements: Aruvi Thiruvarudchelvan and Jeff Gordon also contributed to this research.

William Alexander Donald, Professor of Chemistry, UNSW Sydney; Deborah Yates, Conjoint Professor, Medicine & Health, UNSW Sydney, and Merryn Baker, PhD Candidate in Analytical Chemistry, UNSW Sydney

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

Roblox is one of the world’s most popular online platforms for children, offering a variety of “experiences” including games and virtual spaces. Most of the experiences are free, but offer upgrades, bonuses and random items in exchange for cash.

What do kids make of it? In new research, we interviewed 22 children aged seven to 14 (and their parents) from November 2023 to July 2024. Some 18 of the 22 played Roblox.

In the interviews, we gave children an A$20 debit card to spend however they liked, to help us understand children’s decision-making around spending. While four children purchased non-digital items with their debit card (such as bicycle parts, toys and lollies), 12 children made purchases in Roblox.

We found children greatly value their Roblox purchases – but complain of “scary” and complex transactions, describe random reward systems as “child gambling”, and talk of “scams” and “cash grabs”, with the platform’s inflexible refund policy providing little recourse.

What is Roblox?

Created in 2006, Roblox bills itself as “the ultimate virtual universe that lets you create, share experiences with friends, and be anything you can imagine”. There are 380 million monthly active users globally.

Around 42% of Roblox players are under 13 years old. In 2024, a study found Australian players aged four to 18 spent an average 137 minutes a day on it.

Roblox has come under fire in recent years, particularly for the prevalence of grooming and child abuse on the platform. Despite parental controls, many feel that it’s still not doing enough to protect children.

Much of Roblox’s US$3.6 billion revenue in 2024 was generated via in-game microtransactions, particularly through purchases of its virtual currency Robux.

Free to play – but plenty to pay for

It’s free to play Roblox. But Roblox and Roblox creators (people who make the platform’s “experiences”) make money via in-game purchases.

In Roblox experiences, players can purchase all sorts of things – cosmetic items to change the appearance of player avatars, functional items to use in games, and passes which give access to games or VIP experiences.

Some Roblox games also offer random reward mechanics such as lootboxes, which offer players a chance-based outcome or prize (sometimes via monetary purchases).

Lootboxes were banned for users under 15 in Australia in 2024. However, we found many of Roblox’s most popular games still have random reward mechanics for sale to accounts under 15 years of age.

In response to questions from The Conversation, a Roblox spokesperson wrote:

As a user-generated content platform, we provide our developer community with tools, information and guidelines that apply to aspects of gameplay within their games and experiences, including the recent classification update relating to paid random items. We take action on reports of developers not following guidelines or not using our tools properly to meet local compliance requirements.

Concerns about children’s digital game spending often focus on the idea that engaging with random reward mechanics might later lead to problem gambling.

While this remains the subject of ongoing research, our research shows Roblox’s spending features already harm children now. Children already feel misled or deceived.

Random rewards and ‘child gambling’

Many of Roblox’s most popular games, such as Adopt Me!, Blox Fruits and Pet Simulator 99, include random reward features. Players can purchase items of random rarity, and can often use or trade these items with other players.

One child in our study explained that playing these games is “literally just child gambling”.

Random reward mechanics are confusing for children who may not have a strong understanding of statistics or risk. This caused conflict in the families we spoke to, when children were disappointed or upset by not receiving a “good” reward.

Our research echoes earlier work identifying harms to children from monetised random reward systems.

‘Scary’ virtual currencies

Roblox also uses virtual currencies, which must be purchased using “real” currency. For instance, A$8.49 or US$5.00 will purchase 400 Robux to spend in games.

Some popular Roblox games then have their own virtual currency. Players must first convert real-world money into Robux, then convert the Robux into a game’s currency of “diamonds” or “gems”.

Some children we spoke to had sophisticated ways to handle these conversions – such as online Robux calculators or mental maths. However, other children struggled.

An 11-year-old described navigating nested virtual currencies as “scary”. A 13-year-old, when asked how much they thought Robux cost in Australian dollars, said, “I can’t even begin to grasp that.”

Virtual currencies make it difficult for children to discern the true price of items they want to buy in digital games. This leads to children spending more than they realise in games – something that concerns them.

Children referred to many of these in-game spending features and outcomes as “scams”, “tricks” and “cash grabs”. Although children value their in-game purchases, and parents use in-game spending to teach values around saving and spending money responsibly, these features ultimately harm children.

Current protections are not enough

Digital games have demonstrated benefits for childrens’s education, social lives and identity development. Children also value the items they purchase in digital games. However, efforts to make money from games aimed at children may have significant financial and emotional impact.

Our research does not suggest monetisation features should be barred from children’s games. But our findings indicate that policy regarding children’s digital safety should try to minimise harm to children as a result of their digital spending.

In particular, we conclude that monetised random reward mechanics and virtual currencies are not appropriate in children’s games.

Other countries have struggled to regulate lootboxes effectively. Current legislation, such as the Australian classification changes introduced last September, which ban lootboxes for players under 15, is not fit for purpose. Roblox is currently rated PG on Google Play store and 12+ on the Apple App Store, despite many of its most popular games including paid chance-based content.

Our interviews also found that parents feel lost navigating the complexities of these games, and are extremely anxious about how their children are being monetised.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has argued that the way forward for children’s safety online is “safety by design”. In this approach, digital service providers must design their services with the safety of users as a top priority.

In our conversations with children, we found this is not currently the case – but could be a good starting point.

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

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

In Australia, it’s estimated almost one in five boys (18.8%) experience child sexual abuse. And at least one in 16 men (6.1%) experience sexual violence after age 15.

However, many boys and men don’t tell others about these experiences. Studies show men are less likely to disclose sexual abuse and assaults than women.

It also takes boys and men longer to first disclose sexual abuse or assaults. On average, men wait 21 years before telling anyone about being abused.

This is a problem because talking to others is often an important part of understanding and recovering from these traumatic experiences. When boys and men don’t discuss these experiences, it risks their mental health problems and isolation becoming worse and they don’t get the support they need.

We wanted to understand what prevents boys and men from telling others about sexual abuse and assaults (or “sexual trauma”). So we conducted a systematic review, where we pooled together evidence from a range of studies on the topic.

We found 69 relevant studies, which included more than 10,500 boys and men who had experienced sexual trauma from around the world. Studies were published in 23 countries across six continents, with most studies from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Two studies were published in Australia.

Our new findings offer clues as to how we can break down the barriers preventing men and boys from discussing sexual trauma.

Upending masculine identities

We found across countries and cultures, boys’ and men’s sexual trauma affected their masculine identities. This included feeling as though they are not “real men”, or that they’re weak for having been targeted and assaulted.

In one study, a participant explained:

Sexual abuse to a man is an abuse against his manhood as well.

Almost universally, boys and men suffered intense feelings of shame and guilt about being victimised, and many blamed themselves for years to decades.

Many boys and men said they were worried others would think they were gay if they disclosed being abused or assaulted. This harmful stereotype reflects widespread homophobic attitudes as well as mistaken beliefs about survivors of abuse and assaults.

Sexual abuse against boys and men has been long been overlooked, dismissed and misunderstood. The taboo nature of the issue was felt by participants. As a therapist who supported male survivors of abuse said in one study:

We don’t have a cultural place for men as victims.

LGBTQIA+ men face additional barriers to disclosure. Some experienced distress surrounding concerns abuse or assaults somehow cause, or contribute to, their sexualities. Many also reported receiving unsupportive and homophobic responses when they disclosed abuse and assaults to others. This includes their stories being minimised and dismissed, or suggestions they must have consented given their attraction to other men.

Stigma if they do tell

In many cases, boys and men who tried to tell others about their sexual trauma were met with stigmatising and unhelpful responses. Some were blamed, told they were making it up, or even mocked.

Others were discouraged from speaking out about their experiences again. In some countries, people tell boys and men not to talk about being abused or assaulted because this is seen as bringing shame on themselves and their families.

Boys and men who were assaulted by women were often told their experiences can’t be classified as abuse or assaults, or aren’t bad enough to warrant support.

Understanding why men don’t talk

Many of these barriers to disclosure are linked to harmful myths about sexual abuse and assaults among boys and men. These include mistaken beliefs that men are not abused or assaulted, and that only gay men are abused or assaulted.

What’s more, many people believe experiencing sexual abuse or assaults is at odds with socially-held ideas about how men “should” behave: for example, constantly demonstrating physical strength, dominance, self-reliance and toughness.

These strict ideas about what it means to be a man appear to prevent many boys and men from disclosing sexual trauma, and impact how others respond when they do disclose.

It can also mean boys and men try to bury their difficulties after sexual trauma because they feel they’re expected to be unemotional and cope with their problems independently.

What can we do better?

We know having experienced sexual trauma is closely linked to significant mental health problems in boys and men. These include substance abuse and addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and even suicide.

Receiving unsupportive and stigmatising responses when they try to seek help only makes these issues worse, and adds to cycles of silence and shame.

We must break down barriers that stop boys and men disclosing these traumatic experiences. Doing so could save lives.

Helping boys and men disclose sexual trauma isn’t just about encouraging them to come forward. We need to make sure other people are prepared to respond safely when they choose to speak up.

There are many ways to raise awareness of the fact sexual abuse and assault happens to boys and men. For example, television shows such as Baby Reindeer helped put this issue at the forefront of conversation. Public health campaigns that explicitly bring boys and men into discussions about sexual trauma can also be helpful.

We also need to do more to make sure boys and men who experience sexual trauma have suitable places to go for support. Australia has some services doing vital work in this space, such as the Survivors & Mates Support Network. However, more funding and support is crucial so men across the country have safe spaces to discuss and recover from their experiences.

The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

Vita Pilkington, Research Fellow, PhD Candidate in men's experiences of sexual trauma, The University of Melbourne; Sarah Bendall, Professorial Fellow in Youth Mental Health, The University of Melbourne, and Zac Seidler, Associate Professor, Centre for Youth Mental Health, The University of Melbourne

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

The Labor government used this week’s budget to announce it plans to ban non-compete agreements for employees on less than A$175,000 per year, a move that will affect about 3 million Australian workers.

Describing them as “unfair”, a media release by federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers said non‑compete clauses “are holding back Australian workers from switching to better, higher‑paying jobs”. Banning non-compete clauses could lift the wages of affected workers by up to 4%, the government has said.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry quickly called the measure “heavy-handed”, arguing that very few employees, according to businesses, turn down employment due to non-compete clauses.

However, research I did with colleagues from Melbourne and Monash universities showed very few employees signing a new job contract ever think about the end of the relationship and what might happen after.

Workers often accept non-compete clauses with little understanding or regard for their practical implications.

What the law currently says

The current law says contractual clauses that stop departing workers from taking a new job in their preferred line of work, often for long periods of time, are – in principle – unenforceable.

That is, however, unless a court says a particular non-compete clause is “reasonably required” to protect a “legitimate interest”.

Therein lies the problem: it is hard to predict when, where or under what circumstances a court will find a particular clause is “reasonably required”.

Our research concluded this uncertainty favoured employers with greater nous and resources.

These employers have the advantage over employees, who are rarely willing or able to go to court arguing their non-compete clause is invalid.

This has a chilling effect on the mobility of employees. In other words, these clauses make it harder for workers to change jobs.

That’s detrimental to labour market competition and can hold back knowledge-sharing and economic growth.

Global efforts to ban non-compete clauses

In California, non-compete clauses have long been banned. Many economists have identified this as among the key reasons for the success of the Californian knowledge economy. This example also featured in a submission I made (with researcher Caitlyn Douglas) to a 2024 Treasury review into non-compete clauses in Australia.

US research from 2021 also found non-compete clauses can hinder labour mobility. They can impede fundamental freedoms such as freedom of employment and freedom of general competition.

In 2024, under President Biden, the US Federal Trade Commission banned non-competes clauses across the US.

However, the ban has been blocked due to legal challenges in the US Federal Court. It’s also been reported the Trump administration may kill off these reforms altogether.

The UK government proposed in 2023 limiting non-competes to a maximum of three months.

Holding employees back

Unlike in some countries, Australian law does not require employers to compensate their ex-employee for loss of income during their non-compete period.

This means that if workers comply and do not work in the field they’re most skilled for, they will take a serious financial hit for months or more.

This is another detrimental effect of non-compete clauses. They really hurt if the worker in question is lower paid and has very specific skills (such as hairdressers or dental assistants).

In that respect, Labor’s mooted ban on such clauses for employees on less than $175,000 is well conceived.

Courts will usually only enforce a non-compete clause if its terms are reasonable to protect a legitimate interest, such as trade secrets an employee has learned during their employment.

However, it’s mostly higher-ranked employees that have access to really significant trade secrets, such as technical information, confidential business plans or pricing structures.

Higher paid employees are also more often the “public face of the business”. A court might decide it’s fair to say such workers can’t leave and the next day turn up as the main face of a competing business.

And the new government proposal won’t leave employers without any recourse against employees who take their genuine trade secrets and pass them on to their new employers. They will still be able to sue for breach of confidence.

Challenges for reform

The proposed reforms are well supported by authoritative legal and economic research.

The federal government will have to consider carefully how to make sure the prohibition cannot be easily circumvented.

And they’ll have to ensure these reforms don’t make it more likely judges will find restraints valid for those on more than A$175,000. Labour and knowledge mobility remain crucially important for them too.

Another key challenge will be ensuring a ban doesn’t encourage practices or clauses restricting competition to emerge or become too prevalent.

That could include “garden leave” clauses. These give a departing employee a long notice period, during which they are paid but do not work and are isolated from their employment (and instead “doing the gardening” at home).

The risk is that if employers can no longer include non-compete clauses in contracts, they might use long garden leave provisions more often.

Although it is good that “garden leave” employees get paid during that period (unlike during a non-compete term), they are still isolated from their work, stagnating in their skills and unable to move to new employment.

William van Caenegem, Professor of Law, Bond University

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

Playgrounds can host a variety of natural wonders – and, of course, kids! Now some students are not just learning about insects and spiders at school — they are putting them on the map and even discovering and naming new species.

Studies indicate insect populations are declining, and species are going extinct every week in Australia. But scientists have only described about a third of Australia’s estimated total of insect species.

This means around 150,000 of our insect species do not have formal scientific names. We know little about where they are and what they do in ecosystems — vital information for stopping biodiversity loss.

So, our team developed the citizen science project Insect Investigators.

We took scientists to 50 regional schools across three states to learn about insects and other arthropods such as spiders. Students of all ages got to survey insect diversity, search for new species, and engage with entomologists and taxonomists throughout the school year.

Students helped name new species, including several species of parasitoid wasp.

Some of the scientific names include Apanteles darthvaderi (Back Plains State School students thought the wasp had gone to the “dark side” because of the way the wasp “sucks the life out of caterpillars”), Mirax supremus (named after the pinnacle science class at Beerwah State High School), and Coccygidium mellosiheroine, which means “honey-coloured hero” (named by students collaborating from several Queensland schools, who considered the wasp a hero as it attacks a crop pest).

Our latest paper on the project is now published. We learned hands-on citizen science increased students’ interests in insects, nature and science.

How many insects?

Around 1,800 students and more than 70 teachers collected insects in or near their schools.

Teachers sent samples to the project team, which sorted and sent a selection of specimens to be DNA barcoded. This method involves sequencing a small section of the genome to tell different species apart.

The specimens were then sent to experts around Australia, who are working to describe any new species collected.

The students collected more than 12,000 insect specimens, including 5,465 different species – many of which are probably not described.

It will take years to identify all the species and work out how many are new to science, but we already know 3,000 had not been recorded in the Barcode of Life DNA database (BOLD).

Good for insects, good for learning

Getting to know insects as part of this citizen science project was great for kids’ active learning and developing an appreciation of the natural world.

Students said they felt more interested in insects, nature and science, and it inspired them to spend more time outdoors.

“I learnt there are many insect and plant species… that I haven’t seen before and how in different ecosystems you can find different insects,” said a student from South Australia.

When students are engaged, it’s no surprise teachers enjoy their jobs more too — and this is exactly what we found. The more enthusiastic the students were about nature and science experiences through the project, the more interested the teachers were in teaching these topics.

One teacher reported “students gained an understanding of the work of scientists, how to participate in research, protocols to follow, and gained a huge interest in insects!”

What did students get out of it?

After the insect survey was completed, we asked 118 students and 22 teachers in nine of the schools about what they experienced, and how they see insects and nature now.

Students said the chance to find a new species, as well as discovering and catching insects they had not seen before, were highlights of Insect Investigators.

Experiencing a hands-on learning style, outside in nature, was also mentioned as a benefit of the program.

Many students said they now wanted to spend more time outdoors, act and encourage others to protect nature, and pay more attention to insect conservation and science classes. This implies the experience and discovery associated with hands-on citizen science has motivated greater engagement with nature and science.

The potential of school-based citizen science

Insect surveys offer an accessible way for students to actively learn about science and nature. Insects are virtually everywhere and by photographing them, students can observe natural insect behaviour – without the need to collect them.

The iNaturalist App and Atlas of Living Australia facilitate citizen scientists to explore nature around them. We’ve also created resources for teachers who want to introduce lessons on insects into their school homepage.

It’s never too early to develop science literacy skills and give children the chance to develop their curiosity, critical thinking and problem solving.

Connecting schools and scientists is a great way to engage young learners and foster connections to nature. It has the added bonus of inventorying our natural world which is vital to conserving Australia’s biodiversity.

Andy G Howe, Research Fellow (Entomology), University of the Sunshine Coast; Erinn Fagan-Jeffries, Wasp biodiversity group leader, University of Adelaide; Patrick O'Connor, Professor in Natural Resource Economics, University of Adelaide, and Trang Nguyen, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Adelaide

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

Two windswept beaches 80km south of Adelaide have been closed to the public after locals reported “more than 100” surfers fell ill on the weekend. Their symptoms included “a sore throat, dry cough and irritated eyes” or blurred vision. Dead sea dragons, fish and octopuses have also washed up on the beaches.

Water samples have been taken for testing and health authorities suspect toxins from an algal bloom may be to blame.

But the “mysterious foam” in the water is a health hazard in its own right.

My research shows people should not go in the sea when it is foaming. These bacterial smoothies can contain more harmful pathogens than a sewage treatment plant – and you wouldn’t go swimming in sewage.

Beware of sea foam

Sea foam doesn’t look dangerous. But looks can be deceiving. This foam is likely to contain a mixture of many different types of microbes and pollutants.

On beaches with lots of sea foam, people should avoid all contact with the water – and definitely avoid surfing or breathing in the contaminated water droplets in the air.

I have been studying sea foams since 2003. In 2021, my PhD student Luke Wright and I published research on our discovery of infectious disease-causing microbes in the sea foams of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

Named Nocardiae, these microbes are filamentous bacteria that can cause foaming in wastewater treatment plants, particularly when there’s a high load of fats, oils and greases. We now know the bacteria can cause foaming in the sea too.

We detected 32 strains of Nocardiae in samples of sea foam from beaches at Noosa and south to Caloundra.

Some of these species were new to science. So we named them Nocardia australiensis and Nocardia spumea (“spumea” meaning froth or foam).

Nocardiae bacteria are known to cause skin, lung and central nervous system infections in both humans and animals. But the infection usually only takes hold in people with weakened immune systems. The bacteria can cause abscesses in the brain, lungs and liver.

The incubation time can range between one and six months, depending on the strain of bacteria and the health status of the person involved.

This means it will take some time for people to get infected and show symptoms. Long-term medical monitoring is required to detect the condition, as it can be masked by other disease-causing microbes such as the infectious agent that causes tuberculosis.

Where is the sea foam coming from?

During heavy winds, microbial spores from the soil can end up on the surface of the ocean.

If the water is polluted with floating fats and grease as well as asphaltene, motor oil and hydrocarbons, these spores soon form bacterial colonies or biofilms that go forth and multiply.

That’s because these microbes use pollution as a food source. Seawater is increasingly polluted by runoff from farmland or hard surfaces such as roads. Everything washed into the stormwater drains out to sea. During heavy storms accidental overflow from sewage systems can also occur, as Rockhampton has experienced in the past.

Algae is another food source for these microbes, as they can crack open algae cells to access the nutritious oils inside. Sea foams have been observed in northern France during algal blooms.

Warm water makes matters worse, as the warmth increases the survival rate for Nocardiae. In our laboratory on the Sunshine Coast, we were able to replicate a foaming event. We found foaming started at water temperatures of 24°C and above.

What can be done about it?

Reducing stormwater pollution will reduce the growth of sea foams. Any potential incident of infections of these surfers can raise awareness of the problem.

But sea foam can also be found in pristine environments such as national parks, where it is mostly due to oils leached from trees. We proved this fact at Noosa National Park.

In my experience on the Sunshine Coast, the council and other local authorities have been very receptive to advice on how to fix the problem. They have supported our research and also completed major upgrades at sewage treatment plants over the last 20 years.

Once there’s an outbreak in the environment it is very difficult to control. That’s because ocean is an open system, as opposed to the closed system of a sewage treatment plant, where operators can use special chemicals or mechanical equipment to break the foam down. In open sea it’s impossible. So we just have to wait for it to go away.

In this case, teams of researchers from different disciplines should come together to explore the issue. Microbiologists, marine scientists, meteorologists and chemists should team up to find out what’s going on. Ocean currents should be followed to determine where the pollutants end up.

Sea foam is a global issue

Earlier this month Tropical Cyclone Alfred whipped up sea foam all the way along the coast from South East Queensland to northern New South Wales. I was horrified to see footage of people playing in the thick, sticky sea foam, blissfully unaware of the dangers.

But the problem is not confined to Australia, sea foam can be found at polluted beaches all over the world. Examples include India and Turkey.

I have been telling this story ever since I first observed it on the Sunshine Coast in 2003. Every time there’s a major sea foam event, the media is interested. But research support is also needed in the gaps in between. We scientists need to monitor the shorelines continuously.

As long as humanity continues to produce pollution, the problem will increase. It will also worsen as the world warms, because sea foams like it hot.

Ipek Kurtböke, Associate Professor in Microbiology, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

More than 8,000 continental islands sit just off the coast of Australia, many of them uninhabited and unspoiled. For thousands of species, these patches of habitat offer refuge from the threats they face on the mainland.

Coastal islands are also a valuable resource for ecologists studying how communities of plants colonise new habitats and change over time.

Now, we have created a new publicly available database known as A-Islands, which draws on decades of plant surveys (where botanists visit a particular location and record the plants found there).

This unique collection of surveys draws on data about more than 6,500 plant species from over 850 islands. Some vast islands stretched for kilometres, while others were as small as a tiny apartment.

Our new research, published in the Journal of Vegetation Science, provides new insights into how Australia’s coastal islands have changed over time, and can help with plant monitoring and conservation efforts as the climate warms.

Scaling steep cliffs, jumping from helicopters

We built A-Islands by painstakingly digitising plant surveys from old books and records, and speaking with botanists and organisations all over Australia.

A-Islands is made up of 1,350 island botanical surveys dating back to the 1940s, from over 135 different sources. We are still adding more.

The stories of how the data was collected were fascinating. In some cases, people camped on islands for weeks, making sure they’d recorded every living organism they could.

Some scaled steep cliffs from small boats or even jumped from helicopters to access remote islands, and record the plants they found there.

Australia’s islands punch above their weight

As we collated the surveys, we realised Australia’s coastal islands were punching above their weight for species diversity.

Despite making up less than 1% of Australia’s land area, at least 25% of Australia’s plant species inhabit these coastal islands.

These islands’ climates are almost as diverse, spanning coral atolls in tropical north Queensland to the cold and windswept rocky isles off the southern tip of Tasmania.

While some species of plants have colonised hundreds of Australian islands, most inhabit just a few isles.

These plant communities are the backbone of island ecosystems and provide havens for many endangered animals.

A rare resource for scientists

Many of the islands featured in A-Islands have been surveyed more than once over the last 100 years.

Most data in the ecological sciences tends to provide a snapshot in time of the species that might be at a location.

In contrast, A-Islands can tell us how the plant communities have changed over decades.

This is surprisingly rare in ecological studies but essential if scientists are to predict vegetation changes in the future as the climate changes.

A new idea

Many people think of plant communities as static and unchanging.

However, A-Islands shows that on these small coastal islands, mainland species are migrating to the island, persisting for a time, and then going extinct and being replaced by other species.

This concept of species constantly changing at a particular location is called species turnover. In theory, the types of species in an island community will change over time but the number of species remains, on average, the same over the long term.

The data in A-Islands not only confirms this has happened at an unprecedented number of archipelagos, but also suggests a new idea: some types of species “turnover” faster than others.

Species like grasses and small herbs tend to come and go from islands more frequently than longer lived taller species.

Islands can be climate refuges

Data sets such as A-Islands will become even more essential as the climate changes. Islands are at the forefront of biodiversity loss, and over half of the known global plant extinctions have occurred on islands.

Uncovering these underlying trends in species community change will be crucial for predicting how plant communities everywhere respond to climate change over the coming centuries.

These islands will be important climate refuges, buffered from the hottest temperatures by the surrounding ocean and protected from mainland pressures. They will be vital plant habitats in the future.

The A-Islands dataset forms a crucial baseline for defining what species have inhabited our pristine island environments over time.

It can also help scientists work out where to prioritise surveys they’ll need to do as the climate changes.

David Coleman, Post-doctoral Researcher in Plant Ecology, Macquarie University and Julian Schrader, Lecturer in Plant Ecology, Macquarie University

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

There is something special about sharing baked goods with family, friends and colleagues. But I’ll never forget the disappointment of serving my colleagues rhubarb muffins that had failed to rise. They were dense, rubbery and an embarrassment to the reputation of chemists as good cooks (#ChemistsWhoCook feeds on social media are full of delicious food).

The cause of my failure was an imbalance between the acidity of rhubarb and the chemical raising agents I used in baking.

Both baking powder and baking soda can play a role in giving baked goods their bubble-filled texture and taste. They are sold side-by-side in the supermarket, and have similar uses. But what’s the difference between them and how can we use those differences to our advantage?

What’s in the box?

A quick look at the packaging shows the difference between the two products.

Baking soda contains one ingredient: sodium hydrogen carbonate, also known as sodium bicarbonate or simply bicarb. Baking soda is well known for its uses in cleaning, cooking and deodorising.

Baking powder is typically a mixture of three ingredients: baking soda, an acid, and a starch derived from corn, rice or wheat. The starch makes it easier to measure the powder and also prevents the acid and base from reacting prematurely in the pantry. Baking powder is used exclusively for cooking.

The common ingredient in both products is the baking soda. This salt can be purified from natural sources, or can be prepared synthetically.

The acid is the key

Baking soda is a base, which means it can chemically react with acids. This fizzy reaction produces bubbles of carbon dioxide, water and a mix of new salts. Baking soda can also release carbon dioxide gas when it is heated at temperatures above 80°C.

When you mix baking soda into a cake batter, you will see some initial chemical activation by food acids. This causes bubbles to form and the mixture to rise.

The acids come from other ingredients in the mix, such as yogurt, buttermilk, or the rhubarb in my failed muffins. Too much acid, and the majority of the carbon dioxide will be released at this batter stage.

Once you place the mixture in the hot oven, the high temperature will form further carbon dioxide bubbles. This thermal activation forms a new salt, sodium carbonate, which can give a residual taste and “soapy” mouthfeel if there’s too much of it left in the final product.

Mixing baking powder into a cake batter will also result in chemical activation to form bubbles. The baking soda in the mixture will react with the acid included in the baking powder mix, as well as any acidic ingredients in the batter.

The type of acid included in the baking powder can subtly change the way the baking powder behaves. The more soluble the acid in the batter, the faster the carbon dioxide will form bubbles.

Recipes that ask for both baking powder and baking soda are likely looking to do two things: neutralise an abundance of food acid from another ingredient, and provide time-delayed, temperature-activated rising.

Baking soda can also increase the surface browning of food by enhancing the Maillard reaction. This class of reactions results in delicious chemical transformations in roasted coffee, seared steaks, baked bread and more.

Meanwhile an excess of baking soda can change the appearance of foods, for example turning blueberry anthocyanins green in muffins or pancakes.

Can I substitute baking powder and baking soda?

Baking (like chemistry) is a precise science. It’s best not to substitute baking soda for baking powder or vice-versa: they have subtly different chemical effects.

If you really need a substitution, the general rule is that you need three times the baking powder for the equivalent quantity of baking soda (so, if the recipe asks for a teaspoon of baking soda, you’d add three teaspoons of baking powder).

But it’s not a precise conversion: it doesn’t take into account the key role of acid that’s already in the baking powder. This could affect the final acid-base balance in your recipe.

You can compensate by adding an acid such as cream of tartar or citric acid. But it can be difficult to get the relative quantities of acid and base correct. These acids are also likely to promote immediate release of carbon dioxide, with less left to activate in the oven – potentially leading to a dense bake.

You definitely shouldn’t substitute baking powder for baking soda when cleaning. The acid in the baking powder will neutralise any cleaning activity of the sodium bicarbonate, while the starch may leave a sticky, streaky mess.

It’s best to keep both baking powder and baking soda in your pantry for their distinct uses. Be sure to share whatever delicious treats you bake with others, as well as sharing your new knowledge of the bubbly chemistry contained within.

Nathan Kilah, Senior Lecturer in Chemistry, University of Tasmania

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

New figures show shocking numbers of Australian kids are not achieving basic swimming skills.

Royal Life Saving Australia data estimates 48% of Year 6 students cannot swim 50 metres and tread water for two minutes. For those in high school, the results are even more worrying. Teachers estimate 39% of Year 10 students still cannot meet the same benchmark.

These skills are based on minimum swimming and water safety standards children should achieve to have fun and stay safe in the water. They are a key strategy to reduce the risk of drowning.

While this research indicates we may no longer be a nation of swimmers, there’s still plenty parents, schools and governments can do. And if your child’s lessons have fallen behind, it is not too late to catch up.

Why are we seeing this?

This latest research builds on previous worries about Australian children’s swimming skills. During COVID, there were concerns children would not come back to lessons after lockdowns.

While participation in lessons post-lockdowns has been promising, some pools have had difficulty finding qualified staff.

In 2023, Royal Life Saving Australia also cautioned about 100,000 children in late primary school were unlikely to return to swimming lessons before they started high school.

It’s not too late

If you have stopped lessons with your children – or if you never started – it is not too late to go to the pool.

Research comparing children between the ages of three and eight indicates the optimum age to begin formal swimming lessons is around five to seven years.

But children can still learn to become safe and competent swimmers in later primary years and into high school. We know this because adults can, and do learn to swim later in life.

Research also suggests older children may learn to swim more quickly than younger children, so they may need fewer lessons to attain skills than their younger counterparts.

Make sure lessons are regular

If you have an older child starting swimming lessons it’s important to maintain regular classes.

For example, a 2018 study on a group of 149 Latino children in the United States aged three to 14 showed those who had learned the most skills had the highest attendance – attending at least ten lessons over an eight-week period.

If weekly lessons are too difficult, you could consider holiday intensive programs and supplement this with informal practice in the water. Research shows informal swimming – such as playing – can help children build their swimming skills if they are also having lessons.

There are barriers to regular lessons

We know some families find it difficult to commit to swimming lessons. On top of the cost, there may not be a local pool available or enough instructors.

These barriers disproportionately impact people from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and those living in rural and remote areas. Royal Life Saving survey respondents from these groups were more likely to report their school-aged children had never attended swimming lessons.

Schools also find it hard

Schools can help by offering swimming lessons at key points. For example, two weeks of daily lessons when children are in Year 2 is a common model in New South Wales public schools.

In Tasmania, children in Years 3, 4 and 5 have a mandatory requirement to attend swimming lessons. There is optional attendance for those in Year 6 if they are identified as being at high risk.

But schools also report challenges in teaching kids how to swim.

Swimming lessons are expensive, schools are short-staffed and dealing with a crowded curriculum. This is why 31% of surveyed schools don’t offer swimming education.

For some children, who are behind in their swimming skills – or who cannot swim at all – a short burst of school lessons may not be enough to catch them up.

We need to do more

Schools still have a vital role to play in ensuring children are not missing out on developing these minimum, lifesaving skills. So Australian governments need to prioritise swimming as one of the few sports you can learn that will help to save your life.

Royal Life Saving Australia says the following four measures would help prevent drownings:

1. increased funding for existing school and vacation swimming programs

2. increased grants targeting people with vulnerabilities to drowning, including those from refugee, migrant, and regional communities, as well as for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

3. increased access to lifesaving programs in high schools

4. building and refurbishing public swimming pools and swim schools.

Rates of fatal drowning in Australia are increasing. They were up 16% on the ten-year average in 2024. We have just had a particularly horrific summer where 104 people drowned, a number that is higher than both last summer and the five-year average. Swimming skills are more important than ever.

Amy Peden, NHMRC Research Fellow, School of Population Health & co-founder UNSW Beach Safety Research Group, UNSW Sydney

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

If you peruse the philosophy section of your local bookshop, you’ll probably find a number of books on Stoicism – an ancient philosophy enjoying a renaissance today. But where are the Epicureans?

Both philosophical schools were popular in the ancient world. However, while stoic works such as Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Seneca’s letters still fill the shelves, alongside contemporary takes such as The Daily Stoic (2016), Epicureanism largely remains a historical curiosity.

Today, the Greek thinker Epicurus (341–270 BCE) is mostly remembered as the originator of the term “epicurean”, which describes someone devoted to sensual enjoyment, particularly of fine food and drink.

And while it’s true Epicurus argued pleasure is the highest human good, there’s a lot more to Epicureanism than merely savouring a glass of Shiraz with haute cuisine.

Philosophers in the garden

Epicurus was born on the island of Samos to Athenian parents. He studied philosophy in Athens before travelling to the island of Lesbos to establish a philosophical academy.

Upon returning to Athens in 306 BCE, he bought a tract of land and began a philosophical community known as the Garden.

The Garden was radically different from other philosophical communities at the time. While Plato’s Academy generally trained the children of the Athenian elite, and Aristotle tutored nobles such as Alexander the Great, Epicurus’ Garden was far more inclusive. Women and slaves were welcome to join the dialogue.

The community led a frugal life and practised total equality between men and women, which was uncommon at the time. In this atmosphere, noblewomen and courtesans, senators and slaves, all engaged in philosophical debate.

While many early Epicureans have disappeared from the annals of history, we know of some women, such as Leontion and Nikidion, who were early proponents of Epicurean thought.

Philosophy as a way of life

It isn’t just the Garden’s inclusivity that gives it contemporary appeal, but its entirely unique notion of what constitutes a philosophical life.

According to Epicurus, a philosopher wasn’t someone who taught or wrote philosophical tracts. A philosopher was someone who practised what the French philosopher Pierre Hadot describes, in his work on Epicureanism, as “a certain style of life”.

Epicureanism was a daily practice, rather than an academic discipline. Anyone who strove to live a philosophical life was part of the Epicurean community and was considered a philosopher.

The concept of philosophy Epicurus promoted was more egalitarian and all-encompassing than the narrow definition we often see used today.

The pursuit of pleasure

But what did it mean to be a practising Epicurean? Epicurus conceived of philosophy as a therapeutic practice. “We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives,” he wrote.

This process of healing involves developing an inner attitude of relaxation and tranquillity known as anesis in Ancient Greek. To do this, Epicureans sought to turn their minds away from the worries of life and focus instead on the simple joy of existence.

According to Epicurus, unhappiness comes because we are afraid of things which should not be feared, and desire things which are not necessary and are beyond our control.

Most notably, he rejected the idea of an afterlife, arguing the soul did not continue to exist after death. He also argued it was wrong to fear death as it

gives no trouble when it comes [and] is but an empty pain in anticipation.

Instead of fearing punishment in the beyond, he said we should focus on the possibilities for pleasure in the here and now. But that doesn’t mean chasing every pleasure which comes our way; the task of the Epicurean is to understand which pleasures are worth pursuing.

The highest pleasures are not those which yield the highest intensity or last the longest, but those which are the least mixed with worry and the most likely to ensure peace of mind. In this vein, Epicurus sought to cultivate feelings of gratitude and appreciation for even the simplest everyday experiences.

While his critics cast him and his followers as unrestrained hedonists, he wrote in one letter that a single piece of cheese was as pleasurable as an entire feast.

For Epicureans, it is precisely the brevity of life that gives us such an exquisite capacity for pleasure. As one Epicurean Philodemus wrote:

Receive each additional moment of time in a manner appropriate to its value; as if one were having an incredible stroke of luck.

A philosophy for outsiders

Epicurus’ perennial appeal resides in how his philosophy gave strength and inspiration to outsiders. In the late 19th century, aesthetes such as critic Walter Pater and playwright Oscar Wilde praised Epicureanism as a way of life.

In Wilde’s letter De Profundis (From the depths) – written in 1897 while imprisoned in Reading Gaol on charges of indecency – he wrote that Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) had given him both intellectual and spiritual solace during his trial.

Pater, too, had faced discrimination at Oxford for having homosexual relationships. His novel is an evocative celebration of the possibilities of a life lived in the pursuit of sensual and spiritual beauty.

In one of his earlier texts, The Renaissance (1873), Pater paraphrases Victor Hugo, writing

we are all under a sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve […] we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. […] Our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.

This profoundly Epicurean sentiment, of a life lived in the interval, remains appealing to those who seek to turn their lives into a work of art.

Thomas Moran, Lecturer in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Film, University of Adelaide

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

This month marks a decade since Netflix – the world’s most influential and widely subscribed streaming service – launched in Australia.

Since then the media landscape has undergone significant transformation, particularly in terms of how we consume content. According to a 2024 Deloitte report, Australians aged 16–38 spent twice as much time watching subscription streaming services as free-to-air TV (both live and on-demand).

Part of the success of streaming services lies in their ability to provide content that feels handpicked. And this is made possible through the use of sophisticated recommender systems fuelled by vast amounts of user data.

As streaming viewership continues to rise, so too do the risks associated with how these platforms collect and handle user data.

Changing methods of data collection

Subscription streaming platforms aren’t the first to collect user data. They just do it differently.

Broadcasters have always been invested in collecting viewers’ information (via TV ratings) to inform promotional schedules and attract potential advertisers. These data are publicly available.

In Australia, TV data are collected anonymously via the OzTam TV ratings system, based on the viewing habits of more than 12,000 individuals.

Each television in a recruited household is connected to a metering box. Members of the household select a letter that corresponds to them, after which the box records their viewing data, including the program, channel and viewing time. But this system doesn’t include broadcasters’ video-on-demand services, which have been around since the late 2000s (with ABC iView being the first).

In 2016 a new system was launched to measure broadcast video-on-demand data separately from OzTam ratings.

However, it collected data in a rolling seven-day report, in the form of total minutes a particular program had been watched online (rather than the number of individuals watching, as was the measurement for TV). This meant the two data sources couldn’t be combined.

In 2018, OzTAM and Nielsen announced the Virtual Australia (VoZ) database which would integrate both broadcast TV and video-on-demand data. It took six years following the announcement for the VoZ system to become the industry’s official trading currency.

Streamers’ approach

Streaming platforms such as Netflix have a markedly different approach to acquiring data, as they can source it directly from users. These data are therefore much more granular, larger in volume, and far less publicly accessible due to commercial confidence.

In recent years, Netflix has shared some of its viewing data through a half-yearly report titled What We Watched. It offers macro-level details such as total hours watched that year, as well as information about specific content, including how many times a particular show was viewed.

Netflix also supplies information to its shareholders, although much of this focuses on subscriber numbers rather than specific user details.

The best publicly accessible Netflix data we have is presented on its Tudum website, which includes global Top 10 lists that can be filtered by country.

The main data Netflix doesn’t share are related to viewer demographics: who is watching what programs.

Why does it matter?

Ratings and user data offer valuable insights to both broadcasters and streaming services, and can influence decisions regarding what content is produced.

User data would presumably have been a significant factor in Netflix‘s decision to move into live content such as stand-up comedy, the US National Football League (NFL) and an exclusive US$5 billion deal with World Wrestling Entertainment.

Streaming companies also use personal data to provide users with targeted viewing suggestions, with an aim to reduce the time users spend browsing catalogues.

Netflix has an entire research department dedicated to enhancing user experience. According to Justin Basilico, Netflix’s Director of Machine Learning and Recommender Systems, more than 80% of what Netflix users watch is driven by its recommender system.

As noted in its privacy statement, Netflix draws on a range of information to provide recommendations, including:

• the user’s interactions with the service, such as their viewing history and title ratings
• other users with similar tastes and preferences
• information about the titles, such as genre, categories, actors and release year
• the time of day the user is watching
• the language/s the user prefers
• the device/s they are watching on
• how long they watch a particular Netflix title.

If a user isn’t happy with their recommendations, they can try to change them by editing their viewing and ratings history.

Personalised or predetermined?

The rise of streaming hasn’t only transformed how we watch TV, but also how our viewing habits are tracked and how this information informs future decisions.

While traditional broadcasters have long relied on sample anonymised data to measure engagement, streaming platforms operate in a landscape in which detailed user data can be used to shape content, recommendations and business decisions.

While personalisation makes streaming more appealing, it also raises important questions about privacy, transparency and control. How much do streaming platforms really know about us? And are they catering to our preferences – or shaping them?

Marc C-Scott, Associate Professor of Screen Media | Deputy Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching, Victoria University

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

Including pronouns in introductions, your email signature or your social media bio may seem like a minor detail. Pronouns are just small words we use in place of names all the time. But, like names, pronouns have personal significance. They say something about who we are.

Trans, nonbinary and gender-diverse people face many issues more pressing than pronouns, including health and educational disparities and disproportionately higher rates of abuse, violence and discrimination. Getting pronouns right is a simple thing everyone can do to show respect.

Linguistic shifts towards gender inclusivity are occurring worldwide, and the use of gender-neutral or inclusive pronouns is not a new nor exclusively Western phenomenon.

Chinese, one of the world’s oldest languages and spoken by more than one billion people, illustrates how languages adapt to reflect shifting understanding of gender. Its pronoun system may be on the cusp of significant change.

Developing pronouns

In my newly published research, I’ve explored what is happening with Chinese third-person pronouns.

The modern Chinese pronoun system is fascinating for two reasons.

First, gendered pronouns have only been part of the Chinese language for 100 years: the feminine pronoun 她 (she) was only adopted in the 1920s.

Second, although there are now distinct Chinese characters for “he”, 他, and “she”, 她, these are both pronounced tā in Mandarin. You can have a whole conversation about someone without revealing their gender.

The lack of gender-distinct pronouns in spoken Mandarin has prompted calls for written Chinese to follow suit. Queer Chinese speakers have proposed several gender-inclusive pronouns that would be pronounced tā, just like 他 (he) and 她 (she).

These include the romanised form “TA” and new Chinese characters 「⿰无也」 and 「⿰㐅也」. These new characters might look strange: they are written like this to clarify that they should be read as one Chinese character. Currently, they take up the space of two Chinese characters because they are not yet in Unicode and cannot be typed properly.

Other people hope to see the now-masculine 他 regain its original function as an ungendered pronoun.

What pronouns do queer Chinese speakers use?

To understand how Chinese pronouns are changing, I surveyed more than 100 queer Chinese speakers across 12 countries. I asked survey respondents, a third of whom were nonbinary or otherwise gender-diverse, about their pronoun preferences and perceptions. I also analysed how pronouns are used in a large database of contemporary Chinese texts.

My research found gender-inclusive pronouns accounted for about a quarter of first-choice pronouns, and nearly half of all pronouns used by survey respondents. TA was overwhelmingly preferred by gender-diverse individuals (70%), with the English “they” (20%) the next most popular option.

While cisgender and transgender men almost exclusively used masculine pronouns, cis and trans women showed significant openness to using gender-inclusive pronouns alongside feminine ones. After 她 (she), TA was the second most common pronoun for women (40%) and second most common overall (17%).

Notably, 他 (he) was not used by any women or gender-diverse people, except one who considered it gender-neutral. This suggests reviving its original ungendered usage may be difficult.

TA emerged as the most recognised gender-inclusive pronoun, with nearly all respondents (97%) familiar with it regardless of their age, gender, region or language background. In contrast, fewer than 8% had encountered the new character-based pronouns 「⿰无也」 or「⿰㐅也」 and no one reported using them.

What makes TA so popular?

Survey participants were overwhelmingly positive about TA, with 63% expressing favourable views. As one respondent explained:

The look and feel is good, it suits people’s everyday pronunciation habits, and doesn’t create issues with having to specify someone’s gender.

TA functions similarly to English singular “they”. It works in two ways: as a gender-neutral pronoun when gender is unknown (like saying “someone left their umbrella”), and as a gender-inclusive pronoun specifically including gender-diverse people.

Many survey respondents called TA “respectful” and “inclusive” but also simply “convenient”.

However, some respondents were concerned TA is “untraditional” and “pollutes the Chinese language”.

Practical considerations for using emerging Chinese pronouns also extend to the technical challenges of typing new Chinese characters. Before a new character can be typed on computers or phones, it needs to be officially encoded in Unicode, the global standard for digital text.

My research shows this requirement is strongly influencing which emerging Chinese pronouns can gain traction.

While some survey respondents hoped to see a gender-inclusive Chinese character adopted, they weren’t optimistic about 「⿰无也」or 「⿰㐅也」 becoming mainstream.

As one noted:

「⿰无也」is good, but it’s hard to type and it takes a long time to explain.

User-friendly and easily understandable

TA is currently the most popular emerging Chinese gender-inclusive pronoun, crucially because it mimics how people use tā in spoken Mandarin.

It is already part of people’s vocabulary, and already used (at least as a gender-neutral pronoun) by mainstream Chinese media and on online platforms.

Unlike other recently proposed pronouns, TA is versatile, user-friendly and easily understandable for queer and non-queer Chinese speakers alike. This makes TA a strong contender for widespread adoption into contemporary Chinese.

Like the introduction of a Chinese feminine pronoun 她 (she) in the 1920s, the emergence of TA as a gender-inclusive pronoun in the 2020s is about recognising a wider spectrum of identities.

Pronouns are not a political statement, just a personal statement. When you use someone’s correct pronouns, you’re saying, “I see you, and I respect who you are”. That’s something worth talking about, in any language.

Janet Davey, PhD Candidate, Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University

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

It took thousands of years to develop the world’s extraordinary range of domesticated farm animals – an estimated 8,800 livestock breeds across 38 farmed species.

But this diversity is dwindling fast. Advances in selective breeding and artificial insemination have fuelled the global spread of a small number of profitable livestock types. Their popularity has left ever more heritage breeds at risk of extinction.

Why does this matter? Each breed represents vital genetic diversity for the livestock species on which we rely, known as agrobiodiversity. As the number of breeds shrink, we lose their genetics forever.

There are bright spots amid the decline. Hundreds of passionate farmers are working hard to keep heritage breeds alive around Australia. As my new book shows, they do it primarily for love.

Which livestock breeds are disappearing – and why?

Cattle have experienced the highest number of extinctions, with at least 184 breeds lost globally.

Of all chicken breeds, one in ten is now extinct, and a further 30% are endangered.

Sheep are also rapidly losing diversity, with 160 breeds now extinct. The rise of synthetic materials has endangered the remaining breeds producing carpet wool in New Zealand and Australia, including the unique Tasmanian Elliottdale.

Pigs fare little better. Australia’s 2.5 million pigs are predominantly Large White, Landrace and Duroc crossbreeds, while none of the eight remaining purebred pig breeds in Australia currently has more than 100 sows registered with the Rare Breeds Trust. While not all sows are registered, we know breeds such as Tamworths are at dangerously low numbers.

How did this happen? Over the past century, the goal of animal husbandry has shifted from breeding hardy, multipurpose animals to increasing performance for economic gain. For livestock, performance means more of what humans value, such as pigs with extra ribs, prolific egg-laying hens and sheep with finer wool.

Huge sums have been spent on selective breeding and artificial insemination technologies. This, in turn, has made it possible for a small number of profitable livestock types to be farmed globally.

For instance, when you buy a roast chicken, it will likely be one of just two types of fast-growing broilers (meat chickens), the Ross or the Cobb. Their genetics are developed and trademarked by two multinational agribusinesses who dominate the global broiler market.

It’s hard to overstate how big the increases in production have been from reproductive technologies. In the dairy industry, for instance, milk yield per cow has doubled in the past 40 years. These volumes are around six times greater now than a century ago.

Holsteins, the top dairy breed, have become globally dominant. Almost 1.4 million of Australia’s 1.65 million dairy cows are Holsteins. But as Holstein numbers soar, other breeds dwindle. Many farmers have simply stopped rearing other breeds, leading to many becoming endangered or extinct.

For Holsteins themselves, this has come with a cost. Selective breeding for high milk volume has meant Holsteins suffer more medical issues such as metabolic diseases and frequent mastitis. They also have reduced fertility and longevity.

Researchers have found 99% of Holstein bulls produced by artificial insemination in the United States are descended from just two sires. This wide dissemination of limited bloodlines has led to the spread of genetic defects.

What is at stake?

Our food systems face growing threats. Genetic diversity provides a safeguard for livestock species against lethal animal diseases such as H5N1 bird flu and African swine fever.

If we rely on just a few breeds, we risk a wipe out. The Irish potato famine is a catastrophic example. In the 1800s, Irish farmers took up the “lumper” variety of potatoes to feed a growing population. But when fungal rot struck in the 1840s, it turned most of the crop to mush – and led to mass starvation.

Some breeds have very useful traits, such as resistance to particular pests and diseases.

Chickens and other birds die in swathes if infected by Newcastle disease, one of the most serious bird viruses. But breeds such as the hardy Egyptian Fayoumi survive better, while the European Leghorn – whose genetics are used in commercial egg-laying breeds – is highly susceptible.

Local breeds can also have better resistance to endemic pests. The Indian zebu humped cattle breed, for example, is less prone to tick infestation than crossbreeds.

Climate change is also making life harder for livestock, and some breeds are better adapted to heat than others.

For different cultural groups, local heritage breeds also have unique symbolic and culinary value.

While it’s well-known eating less meat would benefit ecosystems, animal welfare and human health, eating meat remains entrenched in our diets and the economy. Pursuing more sustainable and higher-welfare approaches to livestock production is crucial.

Some Aussie farmers love heritage breeds

A cohort of Australian farmers is working hard to conserve dozens of endangered livestock breeds such as Large Black pigs, Shropshire sheep and Belted Galloway cattle.

But these farmers are hampered by our reluctance as consumers to pay more to cover the cost of raising slower-growing breeds in free-range environments. Not only that, but meat processors are increasingly closing their doors to small-scale producers.

Why persevere? For four years, I’ve conducted ethnographic research with Australia’s heritage breed farmers. I found they were motivated by one of the most powerful conservation tools we have: love.

Of his endangered English Leicester sheep, one farmer told me:

I consider them to be family; they have been our family for over 150 years. I talk to them, and the rams in particular talk to me. Sorry if I sound like a silly old man, but you must talk to them. I gave myself a 60th birthday present by commissioning a large portrait of an English Leicester head, which hangs in our kitchen (I do not have a painting of my wife).

Love doesn’t often feature in agricultural research. But it is an important force. We know from wildlife conservation that humans will act to save what they love. This holds for livestock, too.

What can you do? If you eat meat or work with wool, seek out rare breeds and join organisations such as the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia and the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance who back farmers supporting breed diversity.

Catie Gressier, Adjunct Research Fellow in Agriculture and Environment, The University of Western Australia

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

We all recognise the benefits of regular aerobic or cardiovascular exercise to support our heart and lung health. Being active is also good for our social and mental health. And strength training promotes strong bones and muscles.

But as we age, we also need to train our balance to avoid falls.

Around one in three people aged 65 and over have a fall each year.

Falls are a common cause of disability and loss of independence in older age and can lead to an older person moving from living independently into living in a residential aged care facility. More than 6,000 older Australians die each year from falls.

But many falls are preventable. So exercise that targets balance and strength is crucial.

How much do we need to do?

International guidelines recommend all older people exercise to prevent falls, even if they’ve never fallen. Prevention is far better than cure.

Other guidelines recommend people aged 65 and over do “functional balance and strength training” on three or more days a week, to improve their ability to do day-to-day activities, stay independent, and prevent falls.

Since balance starts to decline at around age 50, it’s even better to start training balance before the age of 65.

In order to increase our muscle strength, we need to progressively lift heavier weights. Similarly, to boost our balance, we need to practise activities that progressively challenge it. This improves our ability to stay steady in difficult situations and avoid falling.

Functional training means doing a physical activity that imitates everyday activities, such as standing up out of a chair, or stepping onto a step.

When you practise the everyday activities necessary for living independently, you improve your ability to perform them. This reduces the likelihood of falling when doing those activities, and therefore helps you maintain your independence for longer.

What exercises can you do?

The best exercises to challenge our balance system and reduce the risk of falling are performed while standing, rather than seated.

For example, you can stand with your feet close together or on one leg (if it’s safe to do so) while also performing controlled upper-body movements, such as leaning and reaching. This is a functional balance exercise and it can be made progressively more challenging as your balance improves.

Here are some exercises you can practise at home:

Sit to stand

Practise standing up from a seated position ten times every hour or so. See if you can do it without using your arms for support. To increase the balance challenge, place a cushion under the feet.

Heel-raises

Rise up onto your toes and hold the position for a few seconds. Hold on to a bench or wall for support if you need to but gradually remove the support as your balance improves. To increase the balance challenge, try doing this with your eyes closed.

Heel-toe walking

Practise walking along an imaginary line, with one foot placed in front of the other. Hold on to a bench or wall for support if you need to but gradually remove the support as your balance improves.

Stepping in different directions

Practise quickly stepping forwards, sideways and backwards. Being able to move our feet quickly can help avoid a fall if you trip on something. If you are able, more challenging activities include stepping up or jumping onto a box.

Squats and lunges

Squats and lunges improve balance and leg strength. Add some hand weights to increase the challenge.

These examples and others can be found on the Safe Exercise at Home website.

Make it regular – and tailor it to your needs

It’s important that balance challenging exercises are performed regularly, at least three times per week. The benefits of exercise are lost if you stop doing them, so ongoing practice is important.

People of all abilities can safely undertake balance training exercise, however extra guidance and support is recommended for people who have physical limitations, are frail, or who are at a higher risk of falls.

For younger or fitter people, agility activities such as rapid stepping, dancing and running are likely to improve co-ordination and balance too.

So next time you are carrying out your exercise routine, ask yourself: what am I doing to improve my balance? Investing in balance training now can help you avoid falls, and lead to greater independence in older age.

Anne Tiedemann, Professor of Physical Activity and Health, University of Sydney; Cathie Sherrington, Professor, Institute for Musculoskeletal Health, School of Public Health, University of Sydney, and Geraldine Wallbank, Study Manager, PhD Candidate, Physiotherapist, University of Sydney

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

Getting a headache and feeling sick are common side-effects for many medicines. Indulging in risky sexual behaviour or pathological gambling – not so common.

But a BBC investigation has highlighted that some drug treatments for restless leg syndrome and Parkinson’s disease can lead to such risky behaviour.

Over 150,000 people in the UK live with Parkinson’s – a degenerative condition that affects the brain. The main part of their brain that is damaged is the area that produces dopamine, a chemical messenger that regulates movement. Less dopamine in the brain can lead to symptoms such as tremors, muscle stiffness, slow movements and problems with balance.

Another movement disorder is restless legs syndrome (RLS), which affects between 5% and 10% of people in the UK, US and Europe. Twice as many women as men have RLS among those aged over 35.

People with RLS feel they need to uncontrollably move their legs, and may experience a crawling, creeping or tingling sensation in them. Usually, the symptoms are worse at night when dopamine levels tend to be lower. Although the exact cause of RLS is unknown, it has been linked to genes, underlying health conditions, and an imbalance of dopamine.

One of the main treatments for movement disorders is a group of drugs called dopamine-receptor agonists, which include cabergoline, ropinirole, bromocriptine and pramipexole. Dopamine-receptor agonists increase the levels of dopamine in the brain and help regulate movement.

Dopamine is known as the “happy” hormone because it is part of the brain’s reward system. When people do something fun or pleasurable, dopamine is released in their brain. But using dopamine-receptor agonist drugs can elevate these feelings, leading to impulsive behaviour.

While common side-effects include headaches, feeling sick and sleepiness, these drugs are also linked with the more unusual side-effect of impulse-control disorders. These include risky sexual behaviour (hypersexuality), pathological gambling, compulsive shopping, and binge eating. Hypersexuality encompasses behaviour such as a stronger-than-usual urge to have sexual activity, or being unable to resist performing a sexual act that may be harmful.

Previous reported cases include a 53-year-old woman taking ropinirole and exhibiting impulsive behaviour such as accessing internet pornography, using sex chat rooms, meeting strangers for sexual intercourse, and compulsive shopping. Another case highlighted a 32-year-old man who, after taking ropinirole, started binge eating and gambling compulsively, such that he lost his life savings.

When the drug was first being prescribed in the early 2000s, it was thought that impulse-control disorders were a rare side-effect associated with these drugs. But in 2007, a UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) public assessment report advised that “healthcare professionals should warn patients that compulsive behaviour with dopamine agonists may be dose-related”.

Between 6% and 17% of people with RLS who take dopamine agonists develop some form of impulse-control disorder, while up to 20% of people living with Parkinson’s may experience impulse control disorders.

But the true figures may be even higher, as many some patients may not associate changes in behaviour with their medication, or may be too embarrassed to report it. Case reports show that in most instances, impulsive behaviour stops when the drug is stopped.

Lawsuits

There have been several individual and class-action lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies including GlaxoSmithKline, which produces ReQuip® (ropinirole), and Pfizer, which makes Cabaser® (cabergoline). Patients taking action against these companies claimed they were unaware of these impulsive behaviour side-effects.

For example, in 2012, a French court ordered GlaxoSmithKline to pay £160,000 in damages to Didier Jambart, after he experienced “devastating-side effects” when taking the firm’s Parkinson’s drug Requip. And in 2014, an Australian federal court approved a settlement against Pfizer for a class-action lawsuit regarding its Parkinson’s drug, Cabaser. 150 patients claimed they did not have warning of potential side-effects – including increased gambling, sex addiction and other high-risk activities – of taking Cabaser.

It is now clearer in the patient information leaflets given with all prescribed medication for movement disorders that impulsive behaviour can occur in some patients.

In 2023, the MHRA advised there had been increased reports of pathological gambling with a drug called aripiprazole. This antipsychotic drug, used in the treatment of schizophrenia and mania, partly acts as a dopamine-receptor agonist.

Any drug that increases dopamine levels could theoretically be linked to impulse control disorders, and it is important to keep monitoring patients and their behaviour in such cases.

Not everyone will experience side-effects. Before you begin any course of treatment, your doctor or pharmacist should explain the potential side-effects – but it is also important to read the information leaflet with any medicine. And if you experience any impulsive behaviours with these medicines, speak to your doctor or pharmacist immediately.

Dipa Kamdar, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University

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

Ten million people are diagnosed with dementia worldwide each year – that’s more than ever. According to the Alzheimer’s Society approximately one million people in the UK are currently living with the disease. Studies predict this figure will rise to 1.6 million people by 2050.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia and leads to a decline in memory and thinking skills. This is a physical illness that causes the brain to stop working properly and gets worse over time. Identifying the onset of Alzheimer’s early can help patients and caregivers find the right support and medical care.

One way to detect Alzheimer’s early is by spotting changes to people’s use of language. This is because new speech problems are one of the first signs of a mental decline that could indicate the onset of this disease.

Here are five early, speech-related signs of Alzheimer’s disease to look out for:

1. Pauses, hesitations and vagueness

One of the most recognisable symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease is trouble remembering specific words, which can often lead to frequent or long pauses and hesitations. When a person with Alzheimer’s is struggling to remember a word, they may talk vaguely such as saying “thing”, or describing and talking around a word. For example, if someone is having trouble remembering the word dog, they may say something like “people have them as pets … they bark … I used to have one when I was a child”.

2. Using words with the wrong meaning

Trouble remembering the right word can be an early feature of Alzheimer’s. People with Alzheimer’s might replace a word they are trying to say with something related to it. For example, instead of saying “dog”, they might use an animal from the same category, saying “cat” for instance. In the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, however, these changes are more likely to be related to a broader or more general category such as saying “animal” instead of “cat”.

3. Talking about a task rather than doing it

Someone with Alzheimer’s may struggle with completing tasks. Instead of performing a task, they may talk about their feelings toward the task, express doubts, or mention past abilities. They might say, “I’m not sure I can do this” or “I used to be good at this”, rather than discussing the task directly.

4. Less word variety

A more subtle indicator of Alzheimer’s disease is the tendency to use simpler language, relying on common words. People with Alzheimer’s often repeat the same verbs, nouns and adjectives instead of using a broader vocabulary. They can also use “the”, “and” or “but” frequently to connect sentences.

5. Difficulty finding the right words

People with Alzheimer’s can have trouble thinking of words, objects or things that belong in a group. This is sometimes used as a cognitive test for the disease. For example, those with Alzheimer’s may struggle to name things in a specific category, such as different foods, different parts of the body or words that start with the same letter. This gets harder as the disease progresses, making these tasks increasingly challenging.

Age is the biggest risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s – the chance of developing the disease doubles every five years after the age of 65. However, one in 20 people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease are under the age of 65. This is referred to as younger – or early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

While forgetting words now and then is normal, persistent and worsening problems remembering words, speaking fluently, or using a variety of words could be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease. Identifying these signs early can be particularly important for people at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease as they age, such as people with Down Syndrome.

Sarah Curtis, Doctoral Candidate, Language use in Down Syndrome and Alzheimer's Disease, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University

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

A second man has died from Japanese encephalitis virus in New South Wales on March 6, the state’s health authorities confirmed on Friday. Aged in his 70s, the man was infected while holidaying in the Murrumbidgee region.

This follows the death of another man in his 70s in Sydney last month, after holidaying in the same region in January.

Japanese encephalitis virus has also been detected for the first time in mosquitoes collected in Brisbane’s eastern suburbs, Queensland health authorities confirmed on Saturday.

With mosquito activity expected to increase thanks to flooding rains brought by Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred, it’s important to protect yourself from mosquito bites.

What is Japanese encephalitis virus?

Japanese encephalitis is one of the most serious diseases that spreads via mosquitoes, with around 68,000 cases annually across Southeast Asia and Western Pacific regions.

The virus is thought to be maintained in a cycle between mosquitoes and waterbirds. Mosquitoes are infected when they feed from an infected waterbird. They then pass the virus to other waterbirds. Sometimes other animals, and people, can be infected.

Pigs are also a host, and the virus has spread through commercial piggeries in Victoria, NSW and Queensland. (But it poses no food safety risk.)

Feral pigs and other animals can also play a role in transmission cycles.

What are the symptoms?

Most people infected show no symptoms.

People with mild cases may have a fever, headache and vomiting.

In more serious cases – about one in 250 people infected – people may have neck stiffness, disorientation, drowsiness and seizures. Serious illness can have life-long neurological complications and, in some cases, the infection can be life-threatening.

There’s no specific treatment for the disease.

When did Japanese encephalitis get to Australia and why is it in Brisbane?

Outbreaks of Japanese encephalitis had occurred in the Torres Strait during the 1990s. The virus was also detected in the Cape York Peninsula in 1998.

There had been no evidence of activity on the mainland since 2004 but everything changed in the summer of 2021–22. Japanese encephalitis virus was detected in commercial piggeries in southeastern Australia during that summer.

This prompted the declaration of a Communicable Disease Incident of National Significance. At the time, flooding accompanying the La Niña-dominated weather patterns and a resulting boom in mosquito numbers, and waterbird populations, was thought responsible.

The virus has spread in subsequent years and has been detected in the mosquito and arbovirus surveillance programs as well as detection in feral pigs and commercial piggeries in most states and territories. Only Tasmania has remained free of Japanese encephalitis virus.

Human cases of infection have also been reported. There were more than 50 cases of disease and seven deaths in 2022.

Cases of Japanese encephalitis have already been reported from Queensland in 2025.

Due to concern about Japanese encephalitis virus and other mosquito-borne pathogens, health authorities around Australia have expanded and enhanced their surveillance programs.

In Queensland, this includes mosquito monitoring at a number of locations, including urban areas of southeast Queensland. Mosquitoes collected in this monitoring program tested positive for Japanese encephalitis virus, promoting the current health warnings.

Why is its detection in Brisbane important?

Up to now, scientists have thought the risk of Japanese encephalitis was likely greatest following seasons of above-average rainfall or flooding. This provides ideal conditions for waterbirds and mosquitoes.

But the activity of Japanese encephalitis virus over the summer of 2024–25 has taken many scientists by surprise. Before Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred arrived, there had been somewhat dry conditions with less waterbird activity and low mosquito numbers in many regions of eastern Australia.

However there has still been widespread Japanese encephalitis virus activity in Victoria, NSW and Queensland.

To date, Japanese encephalitis virus activity hasn’t extended to the coastal regions of southeast Queensland. The detection of the virus in suburban Brisbane may require authorities to rethink exactly where the virus may turn up next. Authorities are ramping up their surveillance to see just how widespread the virus is in the region.

Health authorities and scientists are also trying to understand how the virus moved from western areas of the state to the coast and what drives virus transmission in different regions.

There is currently no evidence the virus is active in coastal regions of northern NSW.

What can people do to protect themselves?

Avoiding mosquito bites is the best way to reduce the risk of Japanese encephalitis virus.

Cover up with long-sleeved shirts and long pants for a physical barrier against mosquito bites.

Use topical insect repellents containing DEET, picaridin, or oil of lemon eucalyptus. Be sure to apply an even coat on all exposed areas of skin for the longest-lasting protection.

Ensure any insect screens on houses, tents and caravans are in good repair and reduce the amount of standing water in the backyard. The more water there is around your home, the more opportunities for mosquitoes there are.

A safe and effective vaccine is available against Japanese encephalitis. Each state and territory health authority (for example Queensland, NSW, Victoria) have specific recommendations about access to vaccinations.

It may take many weeks following vaccination to achieve sufficient protection, so prioritise reducing your exposure to bites in the meantime.

Cameron Webb, Clinical Associate Professor and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney and Andrew van den Hurk, Medical Entomologist, The University of Queensland

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

One in six Australians have hearing loss and, for most adults, hearing starts to decline from middle age onwards.

Many of us, however, hesitate to seek help or testing for our hearing. Perhaps you’re afraid you’ll be told to wear hearing aids, and envision the large and bulky hearing aids you might have seen on your grandparents decades ago.

In fact, hearing aids have changed a lot since then. They’re often now very small; some are barely noticeable. And hearing aids aren’t the only option available for people experiencing hearing loss.

Why you shouldn’t ignore hearing loss

Acquired hearing loss can have a serious impact on our life. It is associated with or can contribute to:

• social isolation
• loneliness
• not being able to work as much, or at all
• memory problems
• trouble thinking clearly
• conditions such as dementia.

Hearing loss has also been associated with depression, anxiety and stress. A systematic review and meta-analysis found adults with hearing loss are 1.5 times more likely to experience depression than those without hearing loss.

A large population study in the US found self-reported hearing loss was associated with:

• higher levels of psychological distress
• increased use of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications, and
• greater utilisation of mental health services.

The good news is that doing something about your hearing loss can help you live a happier and longer life.

So why don’t people get their hearing checked?

Research has found adults with hearing loss typically wait ten years to seek help for their hearing.

Less than a quarter of those who need hearing aids actually go ahead with them.

Hearing declines slowly, so people may perceive their hearing difficulties aren’t concerning. They may feel they’re now used to not being able to hear properly, without fully appreciating the impact it’s having on their life.

Some people harbour negative attitudes to hearing aids or don’t think they’ll actually help.

Others may have overheard their partner, family or friends say negative things or make jokes about hearing aids, which can put people off getting their hearing checked.

Stigma can play a big part.

People often associate hearing loss with negative stereotypes such as ageing, weakness and “being different”.

Our recent research found that around one in four people never tell anyone about their hearing loss because of experiences of stigma.

Adults with hearing loss who experience stigma and choose not to disclose their hearing loss were also likely not to go ahead with hearing aids, we found.

What are my options for helping my hearing?

The first step in helping your hearing is to have a hearing check with a hearing care professional such as an an audiologist. You can also speak to your GP.

If you’ve got hearing loss, hearing aids aren’t the only option.

Others include:

• other assistive listening devices (such as amplified phones, personal amplifiers and TV headphones)
• doing a short course or program (such as the Active Communication Education program developed via University of Queensland researchers) aimed at giving you strategies to manage your hearing, for instance, in noisy environments
• monitoring your hearing with regular checkups
• strategies for protecting your hearing in future (such as wearing earplugs or earmuffs in loud environments, and not having headphone speakers too loud)
• a cochlear implant (if hearing loss is severe)

Hearing care professionals should take a holistic approach to hearing rehabilitation.

That means coming up with individualised solutions based on your preferences and circumstances.

What are modern hearing aids like?

If you do need hearing aids, it’s worth knowing there are several different types. All modern hearing aids are extremely small and discrete.

Some sit behind your ear, while others sit within your ear. Some look the same as air pods.

Some are even completely invisible. These hearing aids are custom fitted to sit deep within your ear canal and contain no external tubes and wires.

Some types of hearing aids are more expensive than others, but even the basic styles are discrete.

In Australia, children and many adults are eligible for free or subsidised hearing services and many health funds offer hearing aid rebates as part of their extras cover.

Despite being small, modern hearing aids have advanced technology including the ability to:

• reduce background noise
• direct microphones to where sound is coming from (directional microphones)
• use Bluetooth so you can hear audio from your phone, TV and other devices directly in your hearing aids.

When used with a smartphone, some hearing aids can even track your health, detect if you have fallen, and translate languages in real time.

What should I do next?

If you think you might be having hearing difficulties or are curious about the status of your hearing, then it’s a good idea to get a hearing check.

The earlier you do something about your hearing, the greater the likelihood that you can prevent further hearing decline and reduce other health risks.

And rest assured, there’s a suitable option for everyone.

Katie Ekberg, Senior Lecturer, College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University and Barbra Timmer, Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Audiology, The University of Queensland

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

This month marks a decade since Netflix – the world’s most influential and widely subscribed streaming service – launched in Australia.

Since then the media landscape has undergone significant transformation, particularly in terms of how we consume content. According to a 2024 Deloitte report, Australians aged 16–38 spent twice as much time watching subscription streaming services as free-to-air TV (both live and on-demand).

Part of the success of streaming services lies in their ability to provide content that feels handpicked. And this is made possible through the use of sophisticated recommender systems fuelled by vast amounts of user data.

As streaming viewership continues to rise, so too do the risks associated with how these platforms collect and handle user data.

Changing methods of data collection

Subscription streaming platforms aren’t the first to collect user data. They just do it differently.

Broadcasters have always been invested in collecting viewers’ information (via TV ratings) to inform promotional schedules and attract potential advertisers. These data are publicly available.

In Australia, TV data are collected anonymously via the OzTam TV ratings system, based on the viewing habits of more than 12,000 individuals.

Each television in a recruited household is connected to a metering box. Members of the household select a letter that corresponds to them, after which the box records their viewing data, including the program, channel and viewing time. But this system doesn’t include broadcasters’ video-on-demand services, which have been around since the late 2000s (with ABC iView being the first).

In 2016 a new system was launched to measure broadcast video-on-demand data separately from OzTam ratings.

However, it collected data in a rolling seven-day report, in the form of total minutes a particular program had been watched online (rather than the number of individuals watching, as was the measurement for TV). This meant the two data sources couldn’t be combined.

In 2018, OzTAM and Nielsen announced the Virtual Australia (VoZ) database which would integrate both broadcast TV and video-on-demand data. It took six years following the announcement for the VoZ system to become the industry’s official trading currency.

Streamers’ approach

Streaming platforms such as Netflix have a markedly different approach to acquiring data, as they can source it directly from users. These data are therefore much more granular, larger in volume, and far less publicly accessible due to commercial confidence.

In recent years, Netflix has shared some of its viewing data through a half-yearly report titled What We Watched. It offers macro-level details such as total hours watched that year, as well as information about specific content, including how many times a particular show was viewed.

Netflix also supplies information to its shareholders, although much of this focuses on subscriber numbers rather than specific user details.

The best publicly accessible Netflix data we have is presented on its Tudum website, which includes global Top 10 lists that can be filtered by country.

The main data Netflix doesn’t share are related to viewer demographics: who is watching what programs.

Why does it matter?

Ratings and user data offer valuable insights to both broadcasters and streaming services, and can influence decisions regarding what content is produced.

User data would presumably have been a significant factor in Netflix‘s decision to move into live content such as stand-up comedy, the US National Football League (NFL) and an exclusive US$5 billion deal with World Wrestling Entertainment.

Streaming companies also use personal data to provide users with targeted viewing suggestions, with an aim to reduce the time users spend browsing catalogues.

Netflix has an entire research department dedicated to enhancing user experience. According to Justin Basilico, Netflix’s Director of Machine Learning and Recommender Systems, more than 80% of what Netflix users watch is driven by its recommender system.

As noted in its privacy statement, Netflix draws on a range of information to provide recommendations, including:

• the user’s interactions with the service, such as their viewing history and title ratings
• other users with similar tastes and preferences
• information about the titles, such as genre, categories, actors and release year
• the time of day the user is watching
• the language/s the user prefers
• the device/s they are watching on
• how long they watch a particular Netflix title.

If a user isn’t happy with their recommendations, they can try to change them by editing their viewing and ratings history.

Personalised or predetermined?

The rise of streaming hasn’t only transformed how we watch TV, but also how our viewing habits are tracked and how this information informs future decisions.

While traditional broadcasters have long relied on sample anonymised data to measure engagement, streaming platforms operate in a landscape in which detailed user data can be used to shape content, recommendations and business decisions.

While personalisation makes streaming more appealing, it also raises important questions about privacy, transparency and control. How much do streaming platforms really know about us? And are they catering to our preferences – or shaping them?

Marc C-Scott, Associate Professor of Screen Media | Deputy Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching, Victoria University

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

Part of the world’s biggest mega-science facility – the SKA Observatory – is being built in outback Western Australia.

After decades of planning, countless hours of work, and more than a few setbacks, an early working version of the telescope has captured its first glimpse of the sky.

Using 1,024 of what will eventually be 131,072 radio antennas, the first SKA-Low image shows a tiny sliver of sky dotted with ancient galaxies billions of light-years from Earth.

This first snapshot shows the system works, and will improve dramatically in the coming months and years – and starts a new chapter in our exploration of the universe.

A glimpse of the universe

The SKA-Low telescope is currently under construction on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia, around 600 kilometres north of Perth. Together with the SKA-Mid telescope (under construction in South Africa), the two telescopes will make up the world’s largest and most sensitive radio observatory.

SKA-Low will consist of thousands of antennas spread across a vast area. It is designed to detect low-frequency radio signals from some of the most distant and ancient objects in the universe.

The first image, made using just 1,024 of the planned 131,000 antennas, is remarkably clear, confirming that the complex systems for transmitting and processing data from the antennas are working properly. Now we can move on to more detailed observations to analyse and verify the telescope’s scientific output.

Bright galaxies, billions of years old

The image shows a patch of the sky, approximately 25 square degrees in area, as seen in radio waves.

Twenty-five square degrees is an area of sky that would fit 100 full Moons. For comparison, it would be about the area of sky that a small apple would cover if you held it at arm’s length.

The dots in the image look like stars, but are actually some of the brightest galaxies in the universe. These galaxies are billions of light-years away, so the galaxies we are seeing now were emitting this light when the universe was half its current age.

They are so bright because each of these distant galaxies contains a supermassive black hole. Gas orbiting around black holes is very hot and moves very quickly, emitting energy in X-rays and radio waves. SKA-Low can detect these radio waves that have travelled billions of light years across the universe to reach Earth.

The world’s largest radio telescope

SKA-Low and SKA-Mid are both being built by the SKAO, a global project to build cutting-edge telescopes that will revolutionise our understanding of the universe and deliver benefits to society. (SKA stands for “square kilometre array”, describing the initial estimated collecting area of all the antennas and radio dishes put together.)

My own involvement in the project began in 2014. Since then I, along with many local and international colleagues, have deployed and verified several prototype systems on the path to SKA-Low. To now be part of the team that is making the first images with the rapidly growing telescope is extremely satisfying.

A complex system with no moving parts

SKA-Low will be made up of 512 aperture arrays (or stations), each comprised of 256 antennas.

Unlike traditional telescopes, aperture arrays have no moving parts, which makes them easier to maintain. The individual antennas receive signals from all directions at once and – to produce images – we use complex mathematics to combine the signals from each individual antenna and “steer” the telescope.

The advantages and flexibility of aperture arrays come at the cost of complex signal processing and software systems. Any errors in signal timing, calibration or processing can distort the final image or introduce noise.

For this reason, the successful production of the first image is a key validation – it can only happen if the entire system is working.

The shape of the universe and beyond

Once completed, SKA-Low promises to transform our understanding of the early universe.

The antennas of the full telescope will be spread across an area approximately 70 kilometres in diameter, making it the most sensitive low-frequency radio array ever built.

This unprecedented sensitivity to low-frequency radio signals will allow scientists to detect the faint signals from the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang – the so-called “cosmic dawn”. SKA-Low will be the first radio telescope capable of imaging this very early period of our universe.

It will also help map the large-scale structure of the universe. We expect the telescope will also provide new insights into cosmic magnetism, the behaviour of interstellar gas, and the mysterious nature of dark matter and dark energy.

The sensitivity and resolution of SKA-Low gives it a huge discovery potential. Seven out of the top 10 discoveries from the Hubble Space Telescope were not part of the original science motivation. Like the HST, SKA-Low promises to be a transformative telescope. Who knows what new discoveries await?

What’s next

SKA-Low’s commissioning process will ramp up over the course of the year, as more antenna arrays are installed and brought online. With each additional station, the sensitivity and resolution of the telescope will increase. This growth will also bring greater technical challenges in handling the growing complexity and data rates.

By the end of 2025, SKA-Low is expected to have 16 working stations. The increased volume of output data at this stage will be the next major test for the telescope’s software systems.

By the end of 2026, the array is planned to expand to 68 working stations at which point it will be the the most sensitive low-frequency radio telescope on Earth.

This phase will be the next big test of the end-to-end telescope system. When we get to this stage, the same field you see in the image above will be able to comprehensively map and detect up to 600,000 galaxies. I’m personally looking forward to helping bring it together.

Randall Wayth, SKA-Low Senior Commissioning Scientist and Adjunct Associate Professor, Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy, Curtin University

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

Deep observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an exceptionally large galaxy in the early universe. It’s a cosmic giant whose light has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us. We’ve dubbed it the Big Wheel, with our findings published today in Nature Astronomy.

This giant disk galaxy existed within the first two billion years after the Big Bang, meaning it formed when the universe was just 15% of its current age. It challenges what we know about how galaxies form.

What is a disk galaxy?

Picture a galaxy like our own Milky Way: a flat, rotating structure made up of stars, gas and dust, often surrounded by an extensive halo of unseen dark matter.

Disk galaxies typically have clear spiral arms extending outward from a dense central region. Our Milky Way itself is a disk galaxy, characterised by beautiful spiral arms that wrap around its centre.

Studying disk galaxies, like the Milky Way and the newly discovered Big Wheel, helps us uncover how galaxies form, grow and evolve across billions of years.

These studies are especially significant, as understanding galaxies similar to our own can provide deeper insights into the cosmic history of our galactic home.

A giant surprise

We previously thought galaxy disks form gradually over a long period: either through gas smoothly flowing into galaxies from surrounding space, or by merging with smaller galaxies.

Usually, rapid mergers between galaxies would disrupt the delicate spiral structures, turning them into more chaotic shapes. However, the Big Wheel managed to quickly grow to a surprisingly large size without losing its distinctive spiral form. This challenges long-held ideas about the growth of giant galaxies.

Our detailed JWST observations show that the Big Wheel is comparable in size and rotational speed to the largest “super-spiral” galaxies in today’s universe. It is three times as big in size as comparable galaxies at that epoch and is one of the most massive galaxies observed in the early cosmos.

In fact, its rotation speed places it among galaxies at the high end of what’s called the Tully-Fisher relation, a well-known link between a galaxy’s stellar mass and how fast it spins.

Remarkably, even though it’s unusually large, the Big Wheel is actively growing at a rate similar to other galaxies at the same cosmic age.

Unusually crowded part of space

What makes this even more fascinating is the environment in which the Big Wheel formed.

It’s located in an unusually crowded region of space, where galaxies are packed closely together, ten times denser than typical areas of the universe. This dense environment likely provided ideal conditions for the galaxy to grow quickly. It probably experienced mergers that were gentle enough to let the galaxy maintain its spiral disk shape.

Additionally, the gas flowing into the galaxy must have aligned well with its rotation, allowing the disk to grow quickly without being disrupted. So, a perfect combination.

A fortunate finding

Discovering a galaxy like the Big Wheel was incredibly unlikely. We had less than a 2% chance to find this in our survey, according to current galaxy formation models.

So, our finding was fortunate, probably because we observed it within an exceptionally dense region, quite different from typical cosmic environments.

Besides its mysterious formation, the ultimate fate of the Big Wheel is another intriguing question. Given the dense environment, future mergers might significantly alter its structure, potentially transforming it into a galaxy comparable in mass to the largest ones observed in nearby clusters, such as Virgo.

The Big Wheel’s discovery has revealed yet another mystery of the early universe, showing that our current models of galaxy evolution still need refinement.

With more observations and discoveries of massive, early galaxies like the Big Wheel, astronomers will be able to unlock more secrets about how the universe built the structures we see today.

Themiya Nanayakkara, Lead Astronomer at the James Webb Australian Data Centre, Swinburne University of Technology

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

Late last week, corporate watchdog the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) issued a warning to lenders that provide high-fee small-amount loans – known as payday lenders – that they may be breaching consumer-lending laws.

Trying to provide effective protections to borrowers of these small loans is fiendishly difficult. People in financial hardship turn to payday loans, even though they are expensive. Lenders can charge high fees for such loans but may change products to avoid regulation.

If access to payday loans dries up, borrowers in need are likely to turn to other products. And so the cycle begins again.

The regulator’s report might be a prompt to government to think about other strategies.

What is payday lending and why is it a concern?

Payday lending is the name commonly given to loans of small amounts (under A$2,000) for short periods of time (16 days to one year) that promise quick credit checks and don’t require collateral.

They are called payday loans because the original idea was borrowers would pay them back when they got their next pay cheque. But often that is not how it works, and borrowers struggle to repay.

ASIC said the total value of small and medium loans provided to consumers in 2023–24 was $1.3 billion. An earlier study by Consumer Action Law Centre found 4.7 million individual payday loans were written over three years to July 2019.

Why do borrowers use (expensive) payday loans?

Small, short-term loans like payday loans have been around for a long time – and in part, they respond to a reality that, for many people, their income is not sufficient to give them buffers.

Payday loans can be used by borrowers who don’t have savings or credit cards to pay for one-off unexpected bills – a broken fridge, an emergency medical appointment or even utilities bills. But they can also be used to meet daily living expenses.

There are limited other practical options – for some types of bills, there are hardship schemes, but these are not always well-known. For one-off expenses, there are low and no-interest loan schemes but they can be quite restrictive. Free financial counselling may also help, but knowledge and access can be an issue.

Why were new laws dealing with payday loans introduced?

Payday lenders have typically charged very high fees. In 2013, concerns about the high cost of payday loans led to specific provisions to limit the fees that could be charged.

Nonetheless, regulators and consumer advocates remain concerned these kinds of loans lock borrowers into debt spirals because they keep accumulating and that lenders manage to avoid many of the restrictions.

Further reforms in 2022 introduced a presumption a loan is unsuitable if the borrower has already taken out two payday loans in the preceding 90 days. The reforms also prohibit payday lenders from offering loans where the repayments would exceed a prescribed proportion of a borrower’s income.

What did ASIC say?

ASIC said it found a trend of payday lenders moving borrowers who previously might have borrowed relatively small amounts ($700 to $2,000) to medium-sized loans ($2,000 to $5,000), which are not subject to the same consumer protections.

The regulator said small loan credit contracts fell from 80% of loans in the December quarter of 2022 to less than 60% of loans by the August 2023 quarter.

It said it was concerned by this approach and reminded lenders they were still subject to the reasonable lending regime. This effectively means not lending amounts that would be unsuitable for borrowers.

Why are payday lenders moving consumers to larger loans?

It’s a concern that lenders change products to avoid restrictive rules. But it is not altogether surprising.

One response from increasing restrictions on one form of credit might be that lenders decide to focus on other, less restricted, products like medium-sized loans – this is what ASIC seems to have found.

This is problematic if those larger loans are not meeting consumers’ needs and objectives (for instance, if they only needed a smaller amount), or complying with the loan would cause substantial hardship. It’s important to remind lenders that the responsible lending obligations apply to medium size loans, and for ASIC to take enforcement action where appropriate.

What might be a better approach?

The ASIC report highlights the increasing complexity of the National Consumer Credit Act regime – with the standard obligations complemented by specific and unique rules for a range of credit products. These include small amount credit, standard home loans, credit cards, reverse mortgages, and Buy Now Pay Later.

It’s worth thinking about whether a better strategy might be to go back to a simpler approach, where one set of rules applied to all consumer credit products. Regulatory exceptions and qualifications are minimised.

If access to payday loans becomes more restrictive, borrowers are likely to turn to other products. This means ASIC should also be looking at other products that are used to provide short-term small loans. These are likely to include buy now pay later schemes and pawn broking.

Buy now pay later products are subject to their own regulations, including responsible lending obligations. But pawn brokers aren’t covered by the Consumer Credit laws and are subject to little regulatory scrutiny. This is also something that should change.

We also need to consider whether there are financial inclusion options not dependent on lenders out to make a profit from borrowers struggling with the cost of living.

Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law (consumer protections and credit law), The University of Melbourne and Nicola Howell, Senior lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

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

In the Miles Franklin archive in the State Library of New South Wales there are two brown, cloth-bound volumes, titled, “When I was Mary-Anne, A Slavey”. The thick, handwritten pages are amended with glued paper inserts copied from the missing diary the author of My Brilliant Career kept for roughly a year between April 1903 and April 1904.

In an accompanying summary, on which Franklin based her 1904 letter to the Bulletin about the experience, she wrote:

Some people wonder what domestic servants have to complain about […] No one could understand the depth of the silent feud between mistress and maid without, in their own person, testing the matter …

There is a picture of Franklin in the archive too, dressed in her “get up”: a black-and-white tunic and apron, with a lacy parlour cap pinned atop her piled-up brunette hair. The photograph, taken in a studio in Melbourne, is captioned “yr little mary-anne”. She beckons you into her impersonation.

Along with the letters Franklin wrote or received during the year, the summary and photo authenticate her little known upstairs–downstairs experiment in Sydney and Melbourne, which she details in the manuscript. She cooked in flammable kitchens, plunged her hands into steaming washing up, and swept the dust that scattered behind her employers’ shoes.

In today’s Instagram culture, it is improbable that a celebrity like Franklin could work incognito and not be recognised. But this was the Edwardian era of the early 1900s, when a photograph was a special occasion and names were known more widely than faces. Franklin loved that a lady she’d once met at a government reception unknowingly flung her coat at her when she opened the door, and that she stoked the fire while guests discussed My Brilliant Career.

Bronte of the bush

Aged 21, Franklin dazzled Australia with her debut novel. Published in 1901, My Brilliant Career inspired young women to write to her about their own frustrations and dreams. She denied her novel was autobiographical, to little effect. She was compared to novelist Charlotte Bronte and to Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian–Parisian teen artist who declared in her memoir, “I am my own heroine”.

Despite Franklin’s later fervent wish that My Brilliant Career’s heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, would be forgotten, the book endured. It became a feminist literary classic, and in 1979 a film, produced by Margaret Fink and directed by Gillian Armstrong. Today, her cultural touchstone continues with her bequest of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and recent stage adaptations of My Brilliant Career. The Stella literary prize is named in her honour, after her first given name, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin.

Franklin’s iconic success is, however, misleading. Like many authors, she experienced fame and acclaim, but minimal royalties, in part due to an unfair contract for colonial authors with her Edinburgh publisher, William Blackwood and Sons. Books were also a luxury during the punishing Federation drought, which lasted from 1895 to 1902.

Franklin could have married. Her grandmother took every opportunity to remind her she was expected to wed. “Have you found anyone you like better than yourself?” she archly asked.

Instead, she disappeared into undercover journalism.

Stunt girl reporters

Franklin was likely inspired by the “gonzo” women journalists known as “girl stunt reporters”, who disrupted male-dominated journalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To prove their journalistic chops, they risked their safety and health to go undercover and expose factory exploitation and illegal abortion clinics. Most famously, New York reporter Nellie Bly feigned hysteria to gain admission to the city’s public women’s mental health institution for ten days in 1887. Their stories captivated audiences, as much as their daring.

American journalist Elizabeth Banks transported the trend to London, where she worked as a servant, leaving her poodle, Judge, with a friend. Her reports in “In Cap and Apron” for the Weekly Sun caused a sensation, and Banks’ memoir Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl was reviewed in Australia in late 1902 and early 1903.

Apart from Catherine Hay Thomson’s investigation of Kew Asylum and Melbourne Hospital in 1886, the “stunt girl reporter” only noticeably appeared in Australia in 1903.

That year, the fledgling New Idea magazine published a series of undercover articles, including about experiences such as working in a tobacco factory and applying for domestic service at an employment agency. Unlike Franklin, the New Idea journalist stopped there, while Franklin spent a full, gruelling year as a servant.

The “servant question” was an ideal local investigation. The newly federated Australia was growing due to the wool industry – “on the sheep’s back”. But in the cities, factories were an alternative engine for young women’s employment rather than domestic service. Fretting “mistresses” complained about the dearth of remaining girls available.

Servants retorted that if they were treated better, perhaps they would stay. One suggested scandalously that mistresses should give references about how they treat servants to prospective hires, pre-dating contemporary suggestions that owners and agencies should prove their fitness as landlords to tenants.

The debate around “the servant question” exposed Australia’s myth of equality. Franklin’s family was no exception. While drought drove her parents off their farm, Stillwater, to a plot in Penrith (then a rural town outside Sydney), they were cultured and educated. Franklin’s wealthy grandmother ran a station in the Snowy Mountains, on which Franklin based the elegant homestead, Caddagat, in My Brilliant Career. A governess or nurse was acceptable, she wrote in her accompanying summary to her manuscript, but “a servant raised considerable horror among my circle”.

Franklin was undeterred. As well as a new writing project, she needed money and a roof if she wanted to live in the city rather than at home. Suffragette Rose Scott, who called Franklin her “spirit child”, invited her to stay. But while Franklin appreciated the support, at times Rose was suffocating.

Revealing the independent streak that would define her life, Franklin wrote, “it was imperative I get work to sustain myself”.

‘This suppression!’

Franklin’s real servant pseudonym was “Sarah Frankling”, a play on her middle name and her surname. “Mary-Anne”, at the time a well known slang name for servants, was only used for the manuscript, to hide identities.

Franklin’s live-in domestic servant positions included kitchen maid, parlour maid and “general” servant. She worked in a terrace she dubbed a “cubby house”, an upmarket boarding house, a harbourside villa, a wealthy merchant home, and mansions in Sydney and Melbourne. Franklin stayed a maximum of two months at each post for a year in total, after which she planned to write.

Senator and High Court judge Richard Edward O’Connor and his large family were her most high-profile employer. Their mansion, Keston, which is close to the prime minister’s Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, and the boarding house around the corner survive, as does the terrace, near Bronte in the city’s eastern suburbs. All are now apartment buildings.

In the manuscript, Franklin recounts that she rapidly lost weight and felt her spirit become “suppressed” by the monotony and tiring nature of servant work. Depending on the number of staff and her duties, she hand-rolled heavy, wet clothes through a washing mangle; served pre-breakfast tea and toast in bed, which she thought was an obscene indulgence; cooked and served full hot breakfasts and dinners daily; waited on guests in the boarding house’s dining room, nicknamed “the zoo”; cleaned the guest rooms and parlours; and helped at high-society balls. She kept fires burning in winter and sweated through heavy housework and cooking in summer.

The hours were brutal. She usually woke at dawn, and only finished after the evening dinners were served, or if she was a kitchen maid, after she cleaned the mess away. Not all her employers offered a luxurious whole afternoon off per week. She worked through burns sustained on the job, and was brought to tears by a mistress who ordered her to change her carefully arranged hair. The house’s Irish cook opined that the mistress was threatened by Franklin’s “toy figure” and “fairy face”.

As the months passed at different employers, fatigue turned to anger, and loneliness to friendships with fellow servants. It is heartening to see a snobby young Franklin mature and change as she rubbed tired elbows with those she previously saw as beneath her status. She cheekily flirted with a lovestruck tradie, just as she traded Shakespearian quips with an intrigued young naval officer staying at the posh boarding house.

When Scott learned Franklin was working as a servant, she chided her for not refusing the conditions as an example to others. However, Franklin knew any insolence or objection meant instant dismissal, ruining her research and current livelihood.

Scott also misread Franklin’s long-term goal – writing the servant book. In her diary, Franklin recorded what she could not say out loud. She cynically noted that “to be sensitive would be unfortunate” for a servant. “The maid must not want for pleasure,” Franklin warned, “because she will have no time to gratify it”. Be presentable but not too pretty, she advised; be polite but not so fancy or fussy to refuse tiny, “ill-aired” servant quarters next to the laundry.

The servant year confirmed her lifelong views of marriage as stifling. Echoing My Brilliant Career, Franklin vented her feminist frustration in the diary entries. She wrote of the terrace’s “Mistress”: “sooth, when a woman of ordinary intelligence gives the whole of her time, brain and energy to the running of a miniature establishment”.

As for the husband, an irritated Franklin wrote that he was “boss of his own backyard and lord of his little suburban dining room”.

Biographers brush over servant year

Biographies of Miles Franklin have largely followed the traditional “cradle to grave” of her life, in which the critical servant year has been brushed over like a quick sweep of the biographical floor. One of Franklin’s first biographers, Marjorie Barnard, dismissed Mary-Anne as of little interest.

Jill Roe, author of the epic biography Stella Miles Franklin, read the existing Mary-Anne draft manuscript, describing it in her book as Franklin’s “social experiment”. Yet even Roe is succinct about Mary-Anne, compared to other years in Franklin’s eventful life. Roe lists Franklin’s known servant employers, admires her pluck and commiserates over it not being published due to concerns she had defamed her employers. (Franklin’s pseudonyms for her employers were chiffon thin, so easily identifiable.)

There were other intractable problems too with the manuscript, though Franklin may have edited another draft before submitting it for publication. The existing draft is overlong, unwieldy and inconsistent in its point of view. Franklin switches between “I” and later, “Mary-Anne”, as if she fully collapses into her servant life.

Despite her failure to find a publisher for her manuscript, Franklin continued her journalism. She began writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, which suited her fast writing style, and helped her earn money with a pen.

In 1908, Franklin joined the women’s trade union movement and advocated for working women, all the while working on her own novel, writing and resisting the status quo of the Edwardian era. She finally returned to literary acclaim with the award-winning All That Swagger in 1936, a colonial saga of a pioneering family, and another historical series she wrote under the pseudonym “Brent of Bin Bin”.

Upon her death in 1954, tributes reported that “Australian literature lost one of its great figures”.

The ‘servant question’ remains

Franklin’s investigation of the servant question now seems quaint. Appliances have changed from washing mangles and melting iceboxes to sleek stainless steel and glossy white machines that beep and hum in the background.

Yet demand for service remains. “Servants” are still in our lives; they just answer to an app rather than a bell. They clean our houses while we are out, or they are chefs on call who cook meals delivered by mobile waiters on electric bikes and scooters who brave traffic as they dash to door to door. Uber and Dido chauffeurs compete to pick us up from wherever we happen to be.

The exploitation remains, too. At the extreme, the Sri Lankan Embassy in Canberra has been ordered to pay $117,000 in back wages to its domestic servant, paid 90 cents an hour. More broadly, Fair Work last year moved to protect gig workers in the share economy, recognising its endemic lack of rights and risks.

Since Franklin’s Mary-Anne, low-wage service work has been revisited periodically by writers interested in social justice. In 1933, inspired by Jack London, George Orwell chronicled the months he spent impoverished and doing menial jobs in Down and Out in Paris and London.

In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich published the acclaimed Nickel and Dimed, about working and living on minimum wage. Elisabeth Wynhausen wrote an Australian version, Dirt Cheap: Life at the wrong end of the job market in 2005. Alexandrea J. Ravenelle brought the history full circle in 2019 with her collected stories of 80 gig economy workers in her book, Hustle and Gig. All these authors had similar conclusions to Franklin: low-wage service work is grinding and exploitative.

At its core, the servant question hasn’t changed at all since Franklin’s investigation over a hundred years ago.

Miles Franklin Undercover by Kerrie Davies is published by Allen & Unwin

Kerrie Davies, Senior Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney

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

Australia already has the highest gambling losses globally. Now, new data show that between 2015 and 2022, the number of Australian men involved in sports betting has increased substantially. And for younger men, the rate of betting has surged more than 60%.

The latest data from the comprehensive Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey shows that in 2015, 5.9% of all men bet on sports. By 2022, 9.3% of men did. This represents a 57.6% increase in seven years. And among men who gamble, almost a quarter bet on sports, up from 14% in 2015.

The HILDA survey follows about 17,000 people every year and collects information on various aspects of their lives. The survey asked several questions in 2015, 2018, and 2022 related to gambling – including gambling types, spending, and gambling harm.

As more men gamble on sports, spending on sports betting has also risen. In December 2022 prices, men’s typical average self-reported monthly spend sports betting climbed from A$85.95 in 2015 to almost $110 in 2022.

The rising trends in sports betting are especially concerning given evidence gambling is strongly associated with undesirable consequences such as poor social, financial and psychological outcomes.

Younger people are betting more

Underlying the increase in sports betting are notable differences across age groups, shown in the figure below.

The increase in sports betting over this period occurred mainly among younger Australians. In fact, the rate of sports betting jumped by between 62% and 66% in men aged 18 to 44.

Because younger people tend to gamble more online than in venues like a casino or the pokies, aggressive online advertising on social media and the use of betting apps make sports betting easier and more accessible.

In all three survey years, the prevalence of sports betting is lower among older age groups, especially people aged 45 and older. In 2022, for example, 2.7% of Australians 65 and older reported betting on sports, whereas 14.9% of people aged 25–34 did.

Gambling harm is becoming worse

There are also worrying trends regarding gambling harm.

Gambling harm is measured using the Problem Gambling Severity Index, which is constructed from responses to nine questions about the frequency of gambling-related risks or harms over a 12-month period. Respondents’ gambling behaviours are then classified as either “non-problem”, “low-risk”, “moderate-risk” or “high-risk”.

Among those men engaged in at least some sports betting, the proportion reporting high-risk gambling problems grew from 6.3% in 2015 to 8.7% in 2022. Based on 2022 population estimates from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this suggests that among male sports gamblers, just over 105,000 are high-risk gamblers – a significant minority.

And while more young men engage in sports betting, younger age groups are also increasingly likely to experience gambling harm. In 2022, almost one in five of all Australian men aged 18 to 34 reported at least some gambling harm.

What can be done?

Gambling behaviours are based on self-reported data so tend to be under-reported. The estimates reported in this article, although higher than existing estimates, are likely even higher in reality.

Living in the same household as a high-risk gambler negatively affects the health and well-being of other people in the household. The adverse effects of high-risk gambling therefore extend indirectly to many other Australians beyond the gambler.

The significant increase in sports gambling advertisements has coincided with more (especially younger) people engaging in this gambling type. Exposure to such advertising encourages earlier initiation of sports betting and more extreme betting behaviours.

Sports betting is done almost entirely online and younger people encounter advertising mostly online. This is one reason why younger groups are more at risk and why urgent intervention is required.

Initiatives to completely ban gambling advertisements have been proposed. Such measures have support from the public and from advocacy groups.

The findings reported here underscore the urgent need to protect younger Australians and in particular men, who are at greatest risk of gambling harm. To do so requires a reversal of the rising trend in sports betting. Banning sports betting advertising is one effective way this can be achieved.

Ferdi Botha, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research, The University of Melbourne

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

In a system of caves in the Atapuerca Mountains in Spain, nearly 50 years of systematic archaeological excavations have unearthed evidence of increasingly ancient human occupation.

The result of this systematic work has yielded human traces stretching from the Bronze Age to hundreds of thousands of years into the past – before modern humans like us (Homo sapiens) even existed.

In new research published in Nature, our team shares another find from Atapuerca: the earliest human remains ever found in Western Europe. We discovered fragments of face bones from a species of extinct human previously unknown in this region, dating from between 1.2 million and 1.4 million years ago.

Sima del Elefante

Back in 2022, during our annual field season, our team unearthed a series of bone fragments from a cave called Sima del Elefante (Pit of the Elephant). The fragments are from the left side of the mid-face of an adult human.

In 2008, a human jawbone more than 1.1 million years old had been found at the same site. The new fragments were found around two metres deeper than the jawbone, which suggests they are even older.

Since the discovery, our team has spent more than two years meticulously studying the remains. We wanted to find out which species of ancient human they belonged to, and understand the lives and environment of these long-extinct cousins.

Which species does the face belong to?

Evidence from the Gran Dolina site, not far from Sima del Elefante, has shown that a species of ancient humans known as Homo antecessor once populated the Atapuerca region. Direct dating of H. antecessor fossils has shown they lived in the region around 850,000 years ago.

The first question we asked about the new face fossil was whether it belonged to H. antecessor. This species had a relatively modern-looking face: quite vertical, rather than the strongly sloping shape often seen in older species.

The shape of our new face bones was not a match for H. antecessor, so what could it be?

We compared the remains to those of other earlier hominin groups, including ones from the Dmanisi site in the Republic of Georgia, which have been dated to around 1.8 million years ago. The Sima del Elefante face differs from the Dmanisi hominins, especially in the area around the nose.

However, it does share some similarities with Homo erectus, the first human species to spread from Africa to Asia, beginning around 2 million years ago, and now also found in Western Europe. The similarities include the lack of a projecting nose and the forward-projection of the midface.

However, key details about the Sima del Elefante face are still missing. For now, we are classifying it as Homo aff. erectus, which means it appears to be closely related to H. erectus but lacks some defining features.

Beyond the hominin fossils

At Sima del Elefante, we recovered stone tools and the remains of animals alongside the hominin fossils. The marks of use on the tools as well as the cut marks found in the animal remains suggest that this species practised butchery in the cave.

We also know, thanks to pollen and the remains of small animals, that the ancient humans lived in an environment dominated by a humid forest landscape.

Our discovery opens new possibilities for understanding the origins and population dynamics of the earliest human settlements in Western Europe.

From the fossils at Dmanisi, we know that hominins had left Africa at least 1.8 million years ago. Now, the Sima del Elefante finding tells us that within a few hundred thousand years, hominins had made it to the westernmost part of Europe. What’s more, the shape of their faces had evolved during that time.

The finding also raises questions about whether there were two populations of different hominins living in the Atapuerca region at the same time. Did H. antecessor and H. aff. erectus coexist? Or had H. aff. erectus died out by the time H. antecessor arrived?

If the latter is true, what drove one species to extinction while another flourished? In this second scenario, we need to consider the factors behind both the extinction of the species and their dispersal.

Earlier research has suggested that hominin populations were strongly affected by climate and other environmental conditions. Hominins may have spread into Europe when conditions were kind, and died out when the climate became less hospitable.

There is still much work ahead of us. Year after year, we return to Atapuerca to continue unearthing evidence that pieces together the story of our origins. Each new discovery is a step forward in understanding our past.

Laura Martín-Francés, Postdoctoral Fellow, PalaeoDiet Research Lab, Monash University

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