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More than 200 Australian birds are now threatened with extinction – and climate change is the biggest danger

Up to 216 Australian birds are now threatened – compared with 195 a decade ago – and climate change is now the main driver pushing threatened birds closer to extinction, landmark new research has found.

The Mukarrthippi grasswren is now Australia’s most threatened bird, down to as few as two or three pairs. But 23 Australian birds became less threatened over the past decade, showing conservation actions can work.

The findings are contained in a new action plan released today. Last released in 2011, the action plan examines the extinction risk facing the almost 1,300 birds in Australia and its territories. We edited the book, written by more than 300 ornithologists.

Without changes, many birds will continue to decline or be lost altogether. But when conservation action is well resourced and implemented, we can avoid these outcomes.

The Numbers Tell The Story

The 216 Australian birds now at risk of extinction comprise:

• 23 critically endangered
• 74 endangered
• 87 vulnerable
• 32 near-threatened.

This is up from 134 birds in 1990 and 195 a decade ago.

We assessed the risk of extinction according to the categories and criteria set by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in its Red List of threatened species.

As the below graph shows, the picture of bird decline in Australia is not pretty – especially when compared to the global trend.

What Went Wrong?

Birds are easily harmed by changes in their ecosystems, including introduced species, habitat loss, disturbance to breeding sites and bushfires. Often, birds face danger on many fronts. The southeastern glossy black cockatoo, for example, faces no less than 20 threats.

Introduced cats and foxes kill millions of birds each year and are considered a substantial extinction threat to 37 birds.

Land clearing and overgrazing are a serious cause of declines for 55 birds, including the swift parrot and diamond firetail. And there is now strong evidence climate change is driving declines in many bird species.

A good example is the Wet Tropics of far north Queensland. Monitoring at 1,970 sites over 17 years has shown the local populations of most mid- and high-elevation species has declined exactly as climate models predicted. Birds such as the fernwren and golden bowerbird are being eliminated from lower, cooler elevations as temperatures rise.

As a result, 17 upland rainforest birds are now listed as threatened – all due to climate change.

The Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 – which were exacerbated by climate change – contributed to the listing of 27 birds as threatened.

We estimate that in just one day alone – January 6, 2020 – about half the population of all 16 bird species endemic or largely confined to Kangaroo Island were incinerated, including the tiny Kangaroo Island southern emu-wren.

Some 91 birds are threatened by droughts and heatwaves. They include what’s thought to be Australia’s rarest bird, the Mukarrthippi grasswren of central west New South Wales, where just two or three pairs survive.

Climate change is also pushing migratory shorebirds towards extinction. Of the 43 shorebirds that come to Australia after breeding in the Northern Hemisphere, 25 are now threatened. Coastal development in East Asia is contributing to the decline, destroying and degrading mudflat habitat where the birds stop to rest and eat.

But rising seas as a result of climate change are also consuming mudflats on the birds’ migration route, and the climate in the birds’ Arctic breeding grounds is changing faster than anywhere in the world.

The Good News

The research shows declines in extinction risk for 23 Australian bird species. The southern cassowary, for example, no longer meets the criteria for being threatened. Land clearing ceased after its rainforest habitat was placed on the World Heritage list in 1988 and the population is now stable.

Other birds represent conservation success stories. For example, the prospects for the Norfolk Island green parrot, Albert’s lyrebird and bulloo grey grasswren improved after efforts to reduce threats and protect crucial habitat in conservation reserves.

Intensive conservation efforts have also meant once-declining populations of several key species are now stabilising or increasing. They include the eastern hooded plover, Kangaroo Island glossy black-cockatoo and eastern bristlebird.

And on Macquarie Island, efforts to eradicate rabbits and rodents has led to a spectacular recovery in seabird numbers. The extinction risk of nine seabirds is now lower as a result.

There’s also been progress in reducing the bycatch of seabirds from fishing boats, although there is much work still to do.

Managing Threats

The research also examined the impact of each threat to birds – from which we can measure progress in conservation action. For 136 species, we are alarmingly ignorant about how to reduce the threats – especially climate change.

Some 63% of important threats are being managed to a very limited extent or not at all. And management is high quality for just 10% of “high impact” threats. For most threats, the major impediments to progress is technical – we don’t yet know what to do. But a lack of money also constrains progress on about half the threats.

What’s more, there’s no effective monitoring of 30% of the threatened birds, and high-quality monitoring for only 27%.

Nevertheless, much has been achieved since the last action plan in 2010. We hope the new plan, and the actions it recommends, will mean the next report in 2030 paints a more positive picture for Australian birds.

Stephen Garnett, Professor of Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University and Barry Baker, University associate, University of Tasmania

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

Photos from the field: leaving habitats unburnt for longer could help save little mammals in northern Australia

Environmental scientists see flora, fauna and phenomena the rest of us rarely do. In this series, we’ve invited them to share their unique photos from the field.

Native small mammals such as bandicoots, tree-rats and possums have been in dire decline across Northern Australia’s vast savannas for the last 30 years – and we’ve only just begun to understand why.

Feral cats, livestock, wildfires, and the complex ways these threats interact, have all played a crucial role. But, until now, scientists have struggled to pinpoint which factor was the biggest threat.

Our new research points to fire. In the most comprehensive study of small mammals and the threats they face in northern Australia, we found the length of time a habitat is left unburnt determines the number of different mammal species present, and their abundance.

This is important because Northern Australia’s tropical savanna is one of the most fire-prone regions on the planet. Our findings suggest we need to change the way we manage wildfires so we can help native wildlife come back from the brink.

The Last Mammal Stronghold

The remote and breathtakingly beautiful Northern Kimberley is the only place in mainland Australia where there have been no mammal extinctions. Instead, it’s a stronghold for species that are now extinct or in decline elsewhere in northern Australia, such as golden-backed tree-rats, brush-tailed rabbit-rats and northern quolls.

It’s also home to species found nowhere else in Australia, such as the monjon (the world’s smallest rock-wallaby), the hamster-like Kimberley rock rat, and the enigmatic scaly-tailed possum.

But wildfires are a significant threat to these small mammals, as well as many other plants and animals, with many officially listed as endangered or vulnerable.

Fire is a fundamental part of savanna ecology, and up to 50 million hectares burn each year. This means only a small proportion of the landscape remains unburnt for longer than four years.

This fire-proneness is driven by the monsoon climate. Wet season rainfall causes grass to grow rapidly, and a prolonged dry season causes these grasses to dry out, creating fuel. Lightning and other ignition sources from the mid to the end of the dry season from August to December result in frequent and massive high-intensity wildfires. Climate change may be exacerbating this threat.

Fire managers, largely led by Indigenous rangers as well as state government agencies and conservation organistations, use low intensity prescribed burning in the early dry season, when vegetation is moist and conditions are cooler. This produces patchy fire scars that limit the spread of the inevitable wildfires later in the dry season.

There’s ample evidence this approach is highly effective. And yet, mammals continue to decline, and scientists have been criticised for not having the answers.

What We Found

We’ve been studying small mammals in the Northern Kimberley for the last ten years, amassing the one of the largest datasets for any study in northern Australia.

Our work confirms the critical role of feral cats and livestock (such as buffaloes, horses, cattle and donkeys) in mammal declines. Sites with more cats and livestock had fewer native mammals.

However, the most vital factor was vegetation that remained unburnt for four or more years – whether from wildfires or prescribed burns. Sites with longer unburnt vegetation, including with fruiting shrubs and trees, had far more mammals.

We also tested an age-old debate in fire management: does pyrodiversity create greater wildlife diversity?

Pyrodiversity refers to the number of patches within a landscape, with different times since the last fire, and is something fire managers try to achieve.

However, we found pyrodiversity had a negative influence on mammals. Unburnt vegetation was the only attribute that explained the higher abundance and diversity of small mammal species.

What’s more, the benefits for small mammals increase with the size of the unburnt patch – bigger is better. These longer unburnt patches provide critical resources such as food from fruiting trees and shrubs, and shelter including tree hollows and hollow logs. They also help small mammals to evade feral cats.

A Conundrum For Fire Managers

Our findings present fire managers with a conundrum. While it’s vital to mammals, large unburnt patches are often targeted because they burn more easily and are often viewed as being risky.

We’re not suggesting there should be no prescribed burning or that current fire management has adverse effects on small mammals. In fact, we need around 25% of savannas to be burnt under milder fire-weather conditions each year to maintain longer unburnt vegetation and, therefore, achieve the best results for mammals.

However, our study does suggest fire management needs to be more nuanced than simply reducing wildfires. We mustn’t lose sight of the need to look at longer term fire patterns.

Fire management in northern Australia is already highly sophisticated. Advances in fire scar and landscape mapping mean we have tools at our disposal to take a more strategic approach.

For example, we can identify refuge areas for mammals, as well as areas that are naturally less fire prone. We can decrease the randomness of prescribed burning by focusing on recently burnt areas and landscape features, such as rivers and cliffs, that maximise the stopping power of strategic fire scars.

Indeed, ideas for more strategic fire management, with ecologically meaningful management targets, have been championed for some time, and are being further refined.

But monitoring and reporting on this needs to become more widespread, and coordinated across different fire-managed areas. New fire reporting tools, such as the Savanna Monitoring and Evaluation Reporting Framework, will help make this happen.

We realise achieving this across northern Australia’s vast and remote landscapes is a formidable and expensive undertaking. But it’s essential adequate and targeted monitoring is embedded within fire management programs, so we can better track wildlife responses. 

Ben Corey, Adjunct Research Associate, Charles Darwin University; Ian Radford, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Charles Darwin University, and Leigh-Ann Woolley, Adjunct Research Associate, Charles Darwin University

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

Australia’s Black Summer of fire was not normal – and we can prove it

The Black Summer forest fires of 2019–2020 burned more than 24 million hectares, directly causing 33 deaths and almost 450 more from smoke inhalation.

But were these fires unprecedented? You might remember sceptics questioning the idea that the Black Summer fires really were worse than conflagrations like the 1939 Black Friday fires in Victoria.

We can now confidently say that these fires were far from normal. Our new analysis of Australian forest fire trends just published in Nature Communications confirms for the first time the Black Summer fires are part of a clear trend of worsening fire weather and ever-larger forest areas burned by fires.

What Did We Find?

Our study found that the annual area burned by fire across Australia’s forests has been increasing by about 48,000 ha per year over the last three decades. After five years, that would be roughly the size of the entire Australian Capital Territory (235,000 hectares).

We found three out of four extreme forest fire years since states started keeping records 90 years ago have occurred since 2002.

And we found that the fire season is growing, moving out of spring and summer into autumn and winter.

These trends are almost entirely due to Australia’s increasingly severe fire weather and are consistent with predicted human-induced climate change.

Our study is based on satellite and ground-based estimates of burnt forest area, and trends of nine wildfire risk factors and indices that relate to characteristics of fuel loads, fire weather, extreme fire behaviour, and ignition.

We have focused here only on the most dangerous forest fires, not the fires affecting Australia’s savanna across the tropical north.

Fire Burns Much More Land Than 25 Years Ago

Before the 1990s, Australia’s forest fires were infrequent, though damaging. A given area would burn at an interval between 20 to over 100 years.

The exception were rare summers which would see severe and extensive fires, such as 1939. Overall, only a small fraction of the total forest area burned in any year.

This pattern of fire behaviour no longer exists.

Over the last 30 years, the areas affected by fire have grown enormously.

If we compare the satellite records from 1988–2001 to the period from 2002–2018, the annual average fire area has shot up by 350%.

If we include the 2019–20 Black Summer fires, that figure soars to 800% – an enormous leap.

We are seeing fires growing the most in areas once less likely to be affected by fire, such as cool wet Tasmanian forests unaccustomed to large fires as well as the warmest forests in Queensland previously kept safe from fire by rainfall and a humid microclimate. This includes ancient Gondwanan rainforests not adapted for fire.

More Extreme Fire Years And Longer Fire Seasons

Before 2002, there was just one megafire year in the 90 years Australian states have been keeping records – and that was 1939.

Since 2001, there have been three megafire years, defined as a year in which more than one million hectares burn.

Our fire seasons are also getting longer. Spring and summer used to be the time most forest fires would start. That’s no longer guaranteed.

Since 2001 winter fires have soared five-fold compared to 1988–2001 and autumn fires three-fold.

Overall, fires in the cooler months of March to August are growing exponentially at 14% a year.

What’s Driving These Changes?

Imagine a forest fire starts from a lightning strike in remote bushland. What are the factors which would make it grow, spread and intensify?

A fire will get larger and more dangerous if it has access to more fuel (dry grass, fallen limbs and bark), and if the fire starts when the weather is hotter, drier and windier. Topography also plays a role, with fire able to move much faster uphill.

To get a sense of the overall risk of forest fire, temperature, humidity, windspeed and soil moisture are combined into a single figure, the Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI).

As you might expect, this index has been steadily worsening over the past 40 years. The number of very high fire danger days in forest zones has been increasing by 1.6 days per decade.

So what does this mean for fire behaviour and spread?

In what we believe is a first, we have used 32 years of fire index data across Australia’s forest zones and compared the number of very high or severe fire danger days with areas subsequently burnt by fire.

We found a clear link, with a 300 to 500% increase in burnt area for every extra day of severe fire danger, and a 21% increase in burnt area for every extra day of very high fire danger.

Could fuel loads or prescribed burning be to blame? No. We looked for trends in these factors, and found nothing to explain the rise in burnt areas.

The main driver for the growing areas burnt by fire is Australia’s increasingly severe fire weather, accounting for 75% of the variation observed in the total annual area of forest fires. This is consistent with predictions from climate change scenarios that severe fire weather conditions will intensify due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Other fire weather risks are also growing. We’re seeing more higher atmospheric conditions which can lead to the formation of fire-generated thunderstorms (known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds).

These thunderstorms emerging out of fire plumes can spread burning embers further and whip up more dangerous winds for unpredictable fire behaviour on the ground, as well as generate lightning in the fire plume that can ignite new fires far ahead of the fire front.

Dry lightning is the primary natural cause of fire ignitions. Here too, the trends are worsening in southeast Australia. We are now seeing 50% more dry lightning in forest areas in recent decades (2000–2016) compared to the previous two (1980–1999).

Under most climate change scenarios, fire weather is predicted to keep on worsening.

Can We Predict Our Next Megafire?

So could we have predicted how bad and how widespread the Black Summer fires would have been, if we had examined fire danger index forecasts in mid-2019?

In short, yes.

The huge amount of bush that burned is entirely consistent with the 34 days of very high forest fire danger across the forest zones that summer. That’s in line with the long-range bushfire weather forecasts provided to fire agencies earlier in 2019.

This means that in future years, we will be able to broadly predict the area likely to burn each fire season by examining fire index forecasts.

We can also safely – and sadly – predict that more and more of Australia will burn in years to come, with increasing numbers of megafire years.

While many factors contribute to catastrophic fire events, our Black Summer was not an aberration.

Rather, it was the continuation of fire trends beginning more than two decades ago. It is now clear that human-induced climate change is creating ever more dangerous conditions for fires in Australia.

We need to be ready for more Black Summers – and worse.

Garry Cook, Honorary Fellow, CSIRO; Andrew Dowdy, Principal Research Scientist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Juergen Knauer, Research fellow, CSIRO; Mick Meyer, Post Retirement Fellow, CSIRO; Pep Canadell, Chief research scientist, Climate Science Centre, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere; and Executive Director, Global Carbon Project, CSIRO, and Peter Briggs, Scientific Programmer and Data Analyst, CSIRO

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

Australia’s biggest fossil fuel investment for a decade is in the works – and its greenhouse gas emissions will be horrifying

The controversial Scarborough gas project off Western Australia will cause a substantial rise in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when the world must rapidly decarbonise, new analysis released today shows.

The A$16 billion plan by Woodside Petroleum has been described as Australia’s biggest new fossil fuel investment in nearly a decade. The report, produced by Climate Analytics, a research organisation I help lead, is the first to examine the full climate impact of the entire expansion project.

The Morrison government has put the gas industry at the heart of its economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the Scarborough example shows, such projects makes it less likely the world will meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

The sheer scale of emissions from the expansion, and projects linked to it, will make achieving 2030 emissions targets much harder for Western Australia and, by extension, Australia and the world.

Emissions Worse Than We Thought

Woodside’s expansion proposal involves developing the Scarborough offshore gas field 375 kilometres off Australia’s northwest coast. It also includes a new pipeline to the company’s onshore Pluto processing facility on the Pilbara coast, and expansion of that facility.

Woodside last week announced it had approved the final investment decision on the developments. Chief executive Meg O'Neill said the project “supports the decarbonisation goals of our customers in Asia”.

Our study examines the full emissions implications of the expansion and associated projects, including domestic gas supply and a proposed project converting gas to hydrogen.

Estimates of the entire projects’ greenhouse gas implications are spread across several reports and documents. This report assembles these for the first time. The research was commissioned by the Conservation Council of Western Australia.

We examined the emissions from the gas facilities themselves, and emissions that will, or are likely to, occur as a result of the project. This second group of emissions includes locked-in domestic demand for natural gas and overseas export markets burning its product for energy.

We estimate that by 2055, the expansion and associated projects will emit 1.37 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases. Almost 20% is projected to be emitted in Western Australia and the rest would be emitted overseas where the exported gas will be burnt.

The total emissions we calculate is far more than the 878 million tonnes Woodside says the project will emit.

In a statement to The Conversation, a Woodside spokeswoman said its emissions figure was “correct and has been accepted by the federal regulator NOPSEMA”.

However the NOPSEMA report covers only the emissions that come from gas derived from the Scarborough gas field and not the emissions from the entire Pluto expansion. In contrast, Woodside’s greenhouse gas action plan is based on the entire Pluto expansion, including all aspects of the project we included in our calculations.

Woodside said Scarborough gas, used to generate electricity, could power ten cities the size of Perth for 30 years and the emissions would be around half those for the same electricity generated from coal.

However, we found that introducing Scarborough-Pluto gas into electricity grids of countries decarbonising in line with the Paris Agreement would raise greenhouse gas emissions by several hundred million tonnes between 2026 and 2040.

Questionable Emissions Reduction Plan

Woodside says its “greenhouse gas abatement program” shows how the company will offset a substantial amount of emissions. We believe that plan, approved by the WA government, is questionable on several counts.

For example, a Woodside project approved in 2006 at 12 million tonnes of LNG per year was later scaled down. However, Woodside’s plan for emissions reduction plan comes off the earlier high-emissions baseline.

Woodside proposes to reduce emissions reductions using carbon offsets (removing CO₂ from the atmosphere in one place to compensate for emissions made elsewhere). But there appears to be no guarantee these offsets would not have occurred as part of Woodside’s usual business operations.

Woodside says it plans to abate all emissions from the project by 2050. But most of this emissions reduction will not occur until after 2040, and depends on factors such as the availability of technology, government policy and the availability of carbon offsets for purchase.

Woodside has also not accounted for expected global increases in the price of carbon offsets. We calculate that by 2050, the cost of offsets could comprise between 21% and 71% of Woodside’s export revenue for liquified natural gas.

Bad News For Net-Zero

In May this year, the International Energy Agency said no new oil and gas fields can be developed if the world is to meet the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 and avert catastrophic global warming.

This, in our view, includes the Scarborough-Pluto expansion. Introducing gas from the project into electricity grids of importing nations would slow global decarbonisation efforts.

Big buyers of Australian gas, such as South Korea and Japan, are moving away from fossil fuels and towards green hydrogen and renewable energy. This suggests a softening, or even collapse, in demand for LNG this decade – a trend consistent with assessments by the International Energy Agency and Australia’s Reserve Bank.

For Woodside, the Scarborough-Pluto expansion is increasingly looking like a stranded asset. And the WA government’s support for the project, and the broader gas industry, means it’s missing out on massive, and growing, opportunities in renewable energy and green hydrogen exports.

Bill Hare, Adjunct Professor, Murdoch University

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

Labor’s 2030 climate target betters the Morrison government, but Australia must go much further, much faster

The Labor opposition has pledged to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 43% this decade based on 2005 levels, claiming the plan will create jobs, cut power bills, boost renewables and provide business certainty.

Labor says the policy would create 604,000 jobs – mostly in regional areas – unlock A$52 billion in private sector investment in Australian industry, and cause electricity prices to fall by $275 per household by 2025.

Announcing the policy on Friday, Labor leader Anthony Albanese said the plan was backed by comprehensive modelling. He said Labor has produced a policy Australia can be proud of, while the Morrison government was “frozen in time while the world warms around it”.

Labor’s emissions-reduction goal is a significant step up on what the Morrison government has offered – 26-28% over the same time frame. And it’s a firm step to build on in coming years.

But it falls short of what experts say is needed for Australia to do its share on emissions reduction under the Paris Agreement, and is less ambitious than the targets adopted by Australia’s international peers.

What The Science Says Is Needed

While Labor’s 2030 target is higher than the Coalition’s, and provides a solid foundation on which to build, it still falls well below what the science says is necessary.

Earlier this year an independent Climate Targets Panel - made up of high-profile Australian climate scientists and experts - examined the action required by Australia if it’s to act consistently with the Paris Agreement goals.

To do its share in limiting global warming to below 1.5℃ this century, Australia must cut emissions by 75% below 2005 levels this decade. Limiting warming to well below 2℃ this century would require a 50% emissions reduction in the same time frame.

The last official government review of Australia’s climate targets was conducted by the Climate Change Authority, and updated in 2015. It found that to act in line with the 2℃ goal, Australia should aim for 45–65% emissions reduction by 2030, based on 2005 levels.

Notably, the Coalition government ignored this recommendation when it set Australia’s 2030 target of 26-28%. This recommendation is also more ambitious than the target announced by Labor today.

The Global Picture

The Glasgow Climate Pact, agreed to at COP26 last month, called on nations to bring a stronger 2030 target to the next United Nations conference in November 2022. It said limiting global warming to 1.5℃ would require global emissions reduction of at least 45% below 2010 levels by 2030.

To play their part, wealthy nations need to cut emissions by much more than 45% this decade. This particularly applies to Australia – a skilled, wealthy, developed nation blessed with sunshine and wind.

While the Glasgow pact uses a baseline year of 2010 rather than Australia’s 2005, our national emissions were similar in both years. So Labor’s new 43% commitment approaches, but still falls short of, the Glasgow pact.

Pacific island countries have called on Australia to cut emissions by at least 50% by 2030. So again, Labor’s target comes close but does not actually fulfil what island states want to see from Australia to help ensure their survival.

Labor’s 43% target also brings us closer to, but not into line with, our major allies. Over the same time frame, the United States is aiming for a 50-52% reduction, Japan 46% and New Zealand 50%. The United Kingdom plans to reduce emissions by 68% below 1990 levels, and the European Union 55%.

And special treatment afforded Australia under the Kyoto protocol – the precursor to the Paris Agreement – means the country is uniquely advantaged. We are allowed to count emissions from land use change in the base year from which emissions reduction is measured – something most countries don’t do.

Because of this, an Australian commitment to 43% below 2005 levels - a year when land use emissions were high - involves far less real-world emissions reduction than that of our international peers.

Building On The Work Of Others

Thanks to the head-start gifted by the states and territories, Australia could achieve emissions reduction far beyond the target set by Labor with just a modest amount of federal effort.

The Morrison government may claim Australia’s woeful 2030 target is “fixed”, but state and territory commitments made it redundant long ago.

The two most populous states – New South Wales and Victoria – both plan to halve their emissions over the same period. South Australia and the ACT intend to outperform even that, and Tasmania is already at net-zero emissions.

Even in Western Australian – where energy sector emissions have grown by two-thirds since 2005 as a result of unrestrained gas expansion – the state government announced yesterday it will establish a process to set emissions reductions targets in line with its net-zero goal.

Assuming state targets are only met and not exceeded, Australia’s emissions would fall by 34% from 2005 levels by 2030 with no effort from the federal government whatsoever.

In 2019, the Business Council of Australia loudly opposed Labor’s 2030 target of 45% below 2005 levels in 2030. In the context of increased state and territory ambition, it has now adopted this target as its own. Far from being “economy-wrecking” or other such hyperbole, such a target is in fact a humble but important additional effort that builds on existing state and territory action.

As has been shown time and again – most recently just yesterday in research the Climate Council commissioned from Deloitte Access Economics – good climate policy is good economic policy, and will drive job creation in regional areas.

Setting a stronger 2030 target is important for driving investment in the clean energy economy of the future. Australia is well-placed to take advantage of a world shifting toward net-zero emissions, and it makes no sense to delay the inevitable transition. This is especially so when Australia is so acutely vulnerable to climate impacts.

Go Further, Faster

Announcing the policy on Friday, Albanese said the planned emissions reduction was consistent with that of Canada, which has a comparable economy.

If Labor wins government at next year’s election, Australia could “go to international climate conferences and not be in the naughty corner”, Albanese said. “I wanted to make sure we have a policy that doesn’t leave people behind, that supports industry, supports jobs and gets the balance right.”

There’s no question that Labor’s target is inadequate. But it provides a solid framework for further action in the next decade.

Any federal government that implements meaningful policy to reduce emissions will quickly realise it’s in Australia’s interests to go further, faster. Doing so will leave households better off, grow jobs in regional Australia, and ensure we play a role in the global effort to avert climate catastrophe.

Wesley Morgan, Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute and Climate Council researcher, Griffith University

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

Most Australian households are well-positioned for electric vehicles – and an emissions ceiling would help

Many people believe Australia’s shift to electric vehicles is stuck in the slow lane – another strollout, rather than a rollout. But while federal policies are still lacklustre, most Australians themselves are ready for the shift, according to our recent research.

We found most car-owning households will be able to charge their cars in their garage or driveway. Electric vehicles are also getting more attractive as purchase costs fall and battery range rises.

Australia’s world-beating solar uptake is another plus. Many of our three million solar households would be able to effectively charge their cars for free at daytime.

Surveys have found 56% of Australians would consider going electric with their next car purchase, while the share of consumers who would not purchase an electric car is declining quickly.

Will Electric Vehicles Come Suddenly Or Slowly?

The shift will not be sudden and disruptive but gradual, as people trade in their old petrol clunkers for sleek new electric vehicles. Many will buy an electric car for everyday driving, while holding onto a petrol or diesel SUV for longer trips. No weekends need be sacrificed.

About half of Australia’s car-owning households live in houses with off-street parking and own more than one car. These households will be the first to shift to electric cars.

Almost all owners charge their electric vehicles at home. For most houses with off-street parking, charging a vehicle is as simple as getting an electrician to check your wiring and install an outlet in your garage or near your driveway. In most cases installation isn’t expensive.

Some households will install a small charger on the wall of their garage to speed up the charging process, which will mean they can completely charge their electric vehicle overnight.

But what about range anxiety and sticker shock, two issues many consumers cite?

While surveys still show drivers worry about battery range for electric vehicles, the underlying technology is improving year by year. As batteries get better and cheaper, these issues will fade into memory. Technology isn’t standing still.

This year, for instance, electric vehicles came on market in Australia with a battery range of up to 650km, and on average 400km. That’s more than enough for common weekend round trips, such as Melbourne to Phillip Island (280km), Sydney to Kiama (260km), or Brisbane to Sunshine Coast (200km).

While everyone knows running an electric vehicle is cheaper than petrol or diesel – due to much cheaper energy and vastly reduced maintenance costs – the upfront cost has to date been a deterrent. That, too, is changing.

The cost of an electric car is falling. Price parity in many market segments should be reached by the mid 2020s. That means one-car households who currently rely on utes or 4WDs for weekend trips will be able to easily switch in time to contribute to our target of net-zero by 2050 target.

Not only that, but our research has found the number of public electric vehicle chargers has soared to more than 2500 standard chargers. There are now almost 500 fast chargers, which can get your electric vehicle back to 80% charged in under an hour.

How Can We Shift To Electric Vehicles Faster?

For us to reach net zero by 2050, we need electric vehicles to make up an increasing share of Australia’s cars. The federal government is belatedly embracing the technology as part of the new 2050 target.

While Australia is increasingly ready to shift, at present electric vehicles still make up less than 1% of new car sales. By contrast, Norway will sell its last fossil fuel-powered car next year if current trends hold.

At present, many manufacturers have skipped Australia entirely to focus on more attractive markets, leaving us with a limited range and older models.

So what needs to happen? As our report explains, the best way to bring down prices and increase the variety of electric vehicles is for the federal government to introduce an “emissions ceiling” on new vehicles.

This ceiling would limit the average emissions from vehicles and encourage manufacturers to bring Australia’s electric vehicle range up to par with the rest of the world.

Do these policies work? In a word, yes. Countries with emissions ceilings in place have a much wider range of electric vehicles for sale. Last year there were only 31 zero-emissions vehicles for sale in Australia, compared to more than 130 in the United Kingdom.

If we had an emissions ceiling in place, drivers would find it easier to switch to electric vehicles, as more choice brings cheaper cars and a wider range. Of course, no one would be forced to shift. Those who want to wait for an electric ute or SUV will be able to.

While people who own detached homes with off-street parking will find it easier to switch to electric cars, Australians who rent or live in apartments may find it harder or more expensive to get a charger installed at home.

Once homeowners with offstreet parking begin to shift to electric vehicles, charging will get easier for everyone else. Why? Because the increase in electric vehicles will prompt commercial operators to add more and more public chargers in accessible locations. The federal government’s Future Fuels and Vehicles Strategy also has plans to close gaps in the network.

If you want a glimpse of the future, look at South Korea. There, companies are building ultra-fast charging stations as a replacement for petrol stations, offering recharging in under 20 minutes and a cafe to fill the time. In the near future we’ll use clean, fume-free charging stations like these in the same way we use petrol stations today.

As a bonus for switching, the air in our cities will become ever cleaner, and traffic noise will plummet.

Even if our leaders drag their feet on electric cars, we don’t need to. Australians are ready to swap petrol for electric. And we’ll never look back.

Ingrid Burfurd, Senior Associate, Transport and Cities Program, Grattan Institute, Grattan Institute

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

Australia has a heritage conservation problem. Can farming and Aboriginal heritage protection co-exist?

Rio Tinto’s destruction of the 46,000 year old Juukan Gorge rock shelters has led to recommendations by the Parliamentary Inquiry on how Australia can better conserve Aboriginal heritage sites.

Around the time the recommendations were made, Queensland’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act faced an important test when a pastoralist who cleared 500 hectares of bushland at Kingvale Station in Cape York was charged with failing to protect Aboriginal cultural heritage.

The charges were eventually dismissed but the prosecution, the first of its kind in Queensland, highlights weaknesses in the law.

Like related legislation in other Australian states and territories, Queensland’s law requires landholders to conserve Aboriginal heritage sites or risk prosecution.

But the law has been criticised by many Aboriginal people and heritage specialists for allowing destructive development by removing any ability for government to independently assess how proposed clearing would affect Aboriginal heritage.

Under the “duty of care” provisions in the Act, Aboriginal heritage must be protected even if it is not known to landholders. However, as the Kingvale clearing case heard, if Aboriginal heritage is not known, how can it be shown to have been lost?

What We Learned From The Kingvale Clearing Case

In 2013, the former Newman government in Queensland removed protection for the environment by introducing the Vegetation Management Act which enabled clearing of what they deemed as “high value agricultural projects” in Cape York.

The World Wildlife Foundation argued this would see large areas of forest and bushland destroyed. Advocates for the new Act argued primary producers are “acutely aware of their responsibility to care for the environment”.

In opening up new areas of Cape York to clearing, this legislation posed new threats to heritage sites. In this context the landholder of Kingvale decided he did not need to assess cultural heritage when clearing 500 hectares.

At the conclusion of the hearing into this case, Judge Julie Dick of the Cairns District Court instructed the jury to return a not-guilty verdict, exonerating the landholder, as the offence could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt.

The landholder’s legal team noted in the media if their defendant had been found guilty, every landholder (including freeholders) who had cleared land, built a fence or firebreak, ploughed a paddock, or built a road or airstrip since 2003 would potentially be guilty of a criminal offence.

The defendant argued the ramifications of the legal case were significant

for the rest of Queensland […] anyone who mowed a lawn or cut down a tree since 2003 would be automatically liable.

In our view, this is hyperbole. Section 21 of the Act makes explicit a person’s right to enjoy the normal and allowed use of their land to the extent they don’t harm Aboriginal heritage.

Further, a person doesn’t commit an offence if they take into account the nature of the activity and the likelihood of it causing harm. Mowing the lawn is quite different to clearing 500 hectares of native vegetation.

The setting of this activity is also important. Kingvale Station is located 100 kilometres west of the national heritage listed Quinkan Country. Heritage studies in similar landscapes across Cape York have identified scarred trees, artefact scatters, stone arrangements and cultural burial places.

Based on our heritage experience across Queensland, it would be surprising not to find Aboriginal heritage sites at Kingvale.

To reduce heritage risks, we assess the potential impacts of an activity, and talk with relevant Aboriginal groups about their sites and heritage values. Archaeologists and anthropologists also develop models to predict where unknown sites are likely to be found.

Can Farming And The Conservation Of Aboriginal Heritage Co-Exist?

The best way to conserve heritage is for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians to work together to identify, document, and protect places. An important example is the discovery of human remains from a mortuary tree west of St George, southern Queensland.

The site was discovered during fence clearing by the landholder, who contacted the police. We worked with the landholder who has supported the Kooma nations people to conserve the mortuary tree and enable it to remain on country.

A further example from Mithaka Country saw a spectacular stone arrangement discovered by a pastoral station manager, who notified the native title holders.

All are now engaging with researchers to investigate the site’s history.

Dozens of other examples around the state illustrate collaborative approaches to heritage conservation. But more effective legislation is urgently needed in response to Kingvale’s failed prosecution.

How Can We Improve Cultural Heritage Protection?

The Juukan Gorge case highlighted how Australia has a problem protecting its Aboriginal cultural heritage. The final report of the parliamentary inquiry into the disaster made several recommendations that could help pave a way forward.

Instances like Kingvale emphasise more work needs to be done. The Queensland government needs to act now to address the glaring problem with its heritage legislation.

Heritage management investment will also help. Victoria provides an example of how to improve Aboriginal heritage management. A standout action is the roll-out of a Certificate IV in Aboriginal cultural heritage management, with over 500 Aboriginal graduates to date.

This program is decentralising heritage management and empowering Aboriginal people across Victoria, building a level of professionalism rarely seen in other states.

Establishing treaties and agreements similar to those in Canada and New Zealand could go a long way to enable First Nations people in Australia to authoritatively protect their respective cultural heritage sites.

Heritage conservation will remain challenging, particularly in resource-rich states like Queensland. But we can do better.

Judge Dick’s ruling, while frustrating for the effort to conserve heritage, is crucial as it highlights weaknesses in the law.

This trial, along with the Juukan Gorge incident, may represent a critical tipping point in the struggle to protect Aboriginal cultural heritage in Queensland and across Australia.

The authors wish to thank Jamin Moon for his consultation in the writing of this article.

Michael Westaway, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland; Joshua Gorringe, General Manager Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, Indigenous Knowledge; Kelsey M. Lowe, Senior Research Fellow, The University of Queensland; Richard Martin, Senior lecturer, The University of Queensland, and Ross Mitchell, Common Law holder and director of Kooma Aboriginal Corporation Native Title PBC, Indigenous Knowledge

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

3 reasons the announcement to dump radioactive waste in South Australia is extremely premature

Radioactive waste from nuclear medicine facilities around Australia will be trucked to and buried near the South Australian town of Kimba, the federal government announced this week.

The site, Napandee, comprises 211 hectares of government-acquired land, with radioactive waste set to be stored for over 100 years in deep trenches.

The announcement comes after six years of consultation with the local community – but, as federal Resources Minister Keith Pitt noted, the problem of managing radioactive waste has been on the national agenda for 40 years.

There is a good reason it has taken so long: storing radioactive waste is a complex issue.

Radioactive waste is extremely hazardous to people and the environment. It emits radiation, which can pollute water, kill wildlife and cause a number of deadly human health issues such as cancer. Even waste with low potency levels needs to be stored away for centuries, so the community should be assured the repository is well designed and properly managed.

Currently, radioactive waste – which results from the radiation needed to perform diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment – is scattered in dedicated storage facilities in hospitals across the country, but the majority is secured safely at Lucas Heights in Sydney.

While Pitt is celebrating what he regards as a resolution, there are three reasons this announcement is premature.

1. Legislative And Regulatory Hurdles

Twenty years ago, The Olsen government of SA passed legislation to prevent radioactive waste being brought into the state. When the Howard government proposed storing radioactive waste in the state soon after, the subsequent Rann government strengthened that legislation.

This means the new proposal will require the current SA government to repeal or amend the current law. This will be difficult, as Premier Steven Marshall runs a minority government and, with an MP defecting in October, he’s likely to struggle to get the support he needs.

There is also a regulatory hurdle. A proposal such as this needs the approval of the regulator, the Australian Radiation Protection And Nuclear Safety Authority (ARPANSA), which will assess the proposal to determine whether it ensures the safety of people and the natural environment.

ARPANSA took the previous proposal by the Howard government very seriously. The process included public hearings at which the Director of ARPANSA was assisted by two scientists – I was one and the other was a Canadian expert in radioactive waste management.

It became clear in the assessment process that the federal government had made no attempt to calculate the risk of transporting radioactive waste from the various sites where it’s now stored to the more secure centralised facility. It simply asserted that the risk was minimal.

ARPANSA was not impressed by this data-free approach. Faced with opposition by the state government and questions raised by the regulator, the federal government withdrew the proposal.

2. The Waste Is More Dangerous

The second serious hurdle is that “intermediate level” waste from a nuclear reactor temporarily stored at Lucas Heights will be sent there.

The new Napandee facility will mostly store the comparatively benign “low-level waste”. This includes residues from nuclear medicine, scientific research and industrial applications. Once buried in deep trenches, this poses relatively little risk to humans or wildlife.

Intermediate level waste is much nastier and demands much greater levels of security. It contains long-lived radioactive isotopes that need to be isolated and contained for periods of thousands of years – effectively permanent disposal. This is generally seen as requiring engineered underground containment facilities, rather than the near-surface repositories used for low-level waste.

No such facility to safely, and permanently, house this waste has been built in Australia, and the regulator will undoubtedly require assurances it could be safely constructed and managed.

It will also be much more difficult to justify transporting this waste along the roads of three states, given it’s now securely held at Lucas Heights. Transporting nuclear waste comes with risks of accidents or possible theft by terrorists of the dangerous material.

There seems to be no point moving intermediate waste from its temporary storage in Lucas Heights, to temporary storage in Napandee.

3. No Consent From Traditional Owners

The third hurdle for the proposal is the opposition of the Barngarla Traditional Owners, who have made clear they do not support the proposal for radioactive waste to be stored on their land.

After the consultation process in SA, a ballot showed 60% of the local residents supported the proposal. But the the Barngarla people say they have not been included in consultations.

In previous decades, our governments have ridden roughshod over the wishes of Traditional Owners and imposed developments they did not want. Today, the Australian public is generally more respectful of the wishes of Traditional Owners.

There will certainly be legal challenges to the government’s scheme. But even if the Barngarla people don’t have the law on their side, they have the moral authority. It will be politically difficult for any government to justify going ahead with a scheme that is totally opposed by the relevant Indigenous group.

The storage of radioactive waste is the extreme example of an issue that demands long-term thinking. Finding a site must involve serious discussion with Traditional Owners as well as current landholders. There is no need to rush, as the intermediate-level waste is securely held in temporary storage at Lucas Heights.

Ian Lowe, Emeritus Professor, School of Science, Griffith University

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

There’s an enormous geothermal pool under the Latrobe Valley that can give us cheap, clean energy

About 650 metres beneath the Latrobe Valley, the heart of Victoria’s coal country, lies a little-known, naturally hot 65℃ pool of water in an enormous aquifer.

This aquifer is a source of geothermal energy – a renewable source of heat or electricity that is, so far, being used to heat an aquatic centre in the town of Traralgon. They chose it – over natural gas, coal-fired power or even emissions-free solar and wind – because geothermal energy is now the cheapest option for heating.

The hot aquifer was first reported as long ago as 1962, when government geologist J.J. Jenkin noted many “occurrences of high temperature waters in East Gippsland”. We now know the hot water underlies about 6,000 square kilometres of Gippsland, from Morwell in the west to Lakes Entrance in the east, and holds the equivalent of A$30 billion of heat at today’s natural gas price.

But with natural gas flowing from Bass Strait, and vast reserves of brown coal in the Latrobe Valley, there has been little incentive to develop alternative energy sources. With the coal era now drawing to a close, it’s time we made better use of this vast, clean source of energy to help cut national emissions and ease the energy transition.

Geothermal Energy Around The World

The core of the Earth is about the same temperature as the surface of the sun. That vast internal heat is like a hotplate warming natural groundwater from below. Beneath the Latrobe Valley, thick coal layers act like a blanket, which makes the underlying aquifers hotter than aquifers in other locations.

The result is unusually hot natural water without needing to burn any fossil fuels – emissions free. At deeper depths we can capture natural steam, and use it to turn turbines for a generator.

In many parts of the world, natural hot water already provides sustainable, low emissions heat to a wide range of residential and industrial consumers.

In carrying out a recent global scan of energy production from hot aquifers, I learned large parts of suburban Paris are heated by geothermal energy from a hot (56–85℃) aquifer between 1,600 and 1,800m beneath the city.

In the Netherlands, industrial scale greenhouses are replacing their natural gas heating systems with geothermal heat from aquifers, 1,800-2,200m below the surface.

Beijing is one of the world’s leading urban centres using geothermal energy. Wells as deep as 2,600m produce up to 70℃ water for many industrial purposes, from winter heating for hotels and factories, to greenhouse cultivation, to public geothermal bathing pools visited by as many as 50,000 people per day.

On a smaller scale, a town in Hungary circulates natural hot water (64–72℃ from 1,450–1,700m depth) through a network of distribution pipes. And Perth, Western Australia, uses natural hot water (40–52℃ from 750–1,150m) to heat at least 14 leisure and aquatic centres.

Importantly, in almost every case, the water itself is returned to the aquifer after delivering its heat. In other words, water is not consumed in the production of geothermal energy, making it renewable and sustainable.

When compared to geothermal systems around the world, it’s obvious natural hot water beneath the Latrobe Valley, at only 650m depth, is a truly world class geothermal energy resource that has, until now, been largely overlooked.

A Cheaper Alternative To Gas

It’s a lot cheaper to drill a 650m bore than a 1,500m or deeper bore. This means it’s cheaper to produce geothermal energy in the Latrobe Valley than many places where geothermal energy already provides economic advantage.

In fact, geothermal heat is very likely a much cheaper alternative to natural gas. Since Australia began exporting liquified natural gas out of Queensland in 2015, the wholesale price of natural gas in eastern Australia has roughly tripled and is projected to rise further and remain high.

The higher price of natural gas affects the economy across the whole of Australia. The federal government estimates 40% of energy Australian households use is for heating and cooling, and a further 23% is for water heating. A 2019 report commissioned by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency found 52% of energy used by the nation’s industrial sector is consumed as heat.

But there are other long-term benefits the geothermal energy resource could deliver to the Latrobe Valley.

Victoria’s heavy reliance on natural gas for heat also presents a huge challenge for the state to meet its legislated greenhouse gas emission reduction targets of net zero by 2050.

Under this plan, the remaining coal-fired power plants in the Latrobe Valley are all scheduled to close in the coming years and decades, requiring support for workers to be reskilled.

Producing geothermal energy from hot aquifers can help on both fronts: by avoiding greenhouse-gas emissions and by reemploying skilled workers into new industries.

What’s Next?

I’m working closely with a number of stakeholders – including the Latrobe City Council, the Latrobe Valley Authority, the Geological Survey of Victoria, local businesses and community groups – to help realise the potential of this massive, undervalued source of clean energy.

We seek to better understand and sustainably develop this resource to help Australia meet it’s emissions reduction targets, and to bring the price of energy down.

This includes projects such as mapping, investigating the potential for power generation from deeper hotter rocks, and identifying and clearing policy and regulatory barriers.

The lessons we learn in the Latrobe Valley will carry across to other parts of Victoria and Australia – such as the Mornington Peninsula, Otway coast, and the Great Artesian Basin spanning NSW, Queensland and South Australia – where hot water is known to lie deeper, but still very accessible.

Graeme Beardsmore, Senior Fellow in Crustal Heat Flow, The University of Melbourne

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

Who invented video games?

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

Who invented video games? TJ, age 7, Worcester, Massachusetts

Some people just love to play. Give them a ball, or a pen, or a pile of leaves and they’ll find a way to play with it. In fact, enough people love to play that just about any time someone invents something new, people find a way to play with it.

Christopher Strachey didn’t invent modern computers. He didn’t even see one until 1951, several years after others had first created the first ones. But he had been friendly with Alan Turing, who was one of the inventors of modern computers, when he was in college in England.

So when Strachey heard about the new Mark I computer installed at the University of Manchester in the U.K., he was able to ask Turing for a copy of the programming manual. He studied the manual, then got the chance to write a program for the computer. People were so impressed with his work that he soon had access to the computer whenever he had time off from his job as a teacher.

Strachey spent his school breaks working on a checkers-playing program, which was remarkably complicated for the time. It showed the board on a screen – a cathode-ray tube. Players wrote their moves on a teletype, a typewriter electronically connected to the computer, which both printed the moves on paper and sent them to the computer. The machine would “look ahead” at the different possible moves and countermoves, both to choose what it should do next and to make fun of players for particularly bad moves.

I call this game “M.U.C. Draughts” in my book “How Pac-Man Eats,” because Strachey never gave it a name. M.U.C. stands for Manchester University Computer and draughts is the British name for checkers. I think it’s the first video game. But there are lots of playful people out there, so someone else might have come first. Around the same time that Strachey was creating M.U.C. Draughts, A.S. (Sandy) Douglas created a game of tic-tac-toe, which was also displayed on a cathode-ray tube, for the University of Cambridge EDSAC computer. In the future we may find that other playful people made other video games for early computers.

People still play video game versions of board games and card games, but they’re usually not the first thing you think of when someone says “video games.” Generally people think about the video display showing a simulated space, with one or more features the player can control in that space – maybe gliding across the sky in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or the buildings and people in Civilization.

The next big step (that I know about) toward such games is now called Tennis for Two – though it didn’t have a name when it was created. William Higinbotham, Robert V. Dvorak and David Potter created it as a demonstration for the 1958 visitors’ day at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. They used an old-fashioned analog computer to create a side view of a tennis court, showing the ground, a net and a ball that would fly over the net. But after visiting day it got taken apart.

Spacewar! was another demonstration project, released in 1962 by a group of MIT engineers that included Steve “Slug” Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards and Martin Graetz. It took the computing world by storm.

Rolling Stone magazine even sponsored a “Spacewar! Olympics” in 1972 – an amazing level of publicity at a time when most people had never even seen a computer in person, much less played a video game.

Spacewar! is the first game to do all the things people today commonly expect a video game to do. It had a simulated space, with objects moving around. In this case it was outer space, with a backdrop of stars and a central sun that exerted gravity. There were elements that players controlled in that space, specifically two spaceships locked in battle. And there were visual flourishes, such as fire emerging from the backs of the ships whenever players used their thrusters to move around.

Video games first came into the home in 1972 with the release of the Magnavox Odyssey game console. Ralph Baer, Bob Tremblay, Bob Solomon, Bill Rush and other engineers at Sanders Associates were trying to figure out a way to play games on home televisions. They came up with the idea of a ball being hit back and forth: electronic ping-pong, the precursor to Pong, a game that became wildly popular.

From there video games became a growing force in world culture – powered by people who love to play.

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

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

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Professor of Computational Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

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

Have we made an object that could travel 1% the speed of light?

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

Have we made an object that could travel at at least 1% the speed of light? – Anadi, age 14, Jammu and Kashmir, India

Light is fast. In fact, it is the fastest thing that exists, and a law of the universe is that nothing can move faster than light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second) and can go from the Earth to the Moon in just over a second. Light can streak from Los Angeles to New York in less than the blink of an eye.

While 1% of anything doesn’t sound like much, with light, that’s still really fast – close to 7 million miles per hour! At 1% the speed of light, it would take a little over a second to get from Los Angeles to New York. This is more than 10,000 times faster than a commercial jet.

The Fastest Things Ever Made

Bullets can go 2,600 mph (4,200 kmh), more than three times the speed of sound. The fastest aircraft is NASA’s X3 jet plane, with a top speed of 7,000 mph (11,200 kph). That sounds impressive, but it’s still only 0.001% the speed of light.

The fastest human-made objects are spacecraft. They use rockets to break free of the Earth’s gravity, which takes a speed of 25,000 mph (40,000 kmh). The spacecraft that is traveling the fastest is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. After it launched from Earth in 2018, it skimmed the Sun’s scorching atmosphere and used the Sun’s gravity to reach 330,000 mph (535,000 kmh). That’s blindingly fast – yet only 0.05% of the speed of light.

Why Even 1% Of Light Speed Is Hard

What’s holding humanity back from reaching 1% of the speed of light? In a word, energy. Any object that’s moving has energy due to its motion. Physicists call this kinetic energy. To go faster, you need to increase kinetic energy. The problem is that it takes a lot of kinetic energy to increase speed. To make something go twice as fast takes four times the energy. Making something go three times as fast requires nine times the energy, and so on.

For example, to get a teenager who weighs 110 pounds (50 kilograms) to 1% of the speed of light would cost 200 trillion Joules (a measurement of energy). That’s roughly the same amount of energy that 2 million people in the U.S. use in a day.

How Fast Can We Go?

It’s possible to get something to 1% the speed of light, but it would just take an enormous amount of energy. Could humans make something go even faster?

Yes! But engineers need to figure out new ways to make things move in space. All rockets, even the sleek new rockets used by SpaceX and Blue Origins, burn rocket fuel that isn’t very different from gasoline in a car. The problem is that burning fuel is very inefficient.

Other methods for pushing a spacecraft involve using electric or magnetic forces. Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, is also much more efficient than chemical fuel.

Scientists are researching many other ways to go fast – even warp drives, the faster-than-light travel popularized by Star Trek.

One promising way to get something moving very fast is to use a solar sail. These are large, thin sheets of plastic attached to a spacecraft and designed so that sunlight can push on them, like wind in a normal sail. A few spacecraft have used solar sails to show that they work, and scientists think that a solar sail could propel spacecraft to 10% of the speed of light.

One day, when humanity is not limited to a tiny fraction of the speed of light, we might travel to the stars.

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

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

Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

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

How plankton helped create the Earth’s mountains 2 billion years ago

A world without the great mountain ranges – the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes – is unimaginable, but they were not always a part of the Earth’s geography. Mountains didn’t start forming widely until 2 billion years ago, half way through the planet’s history. Now our research has revealed how primitive life played a key role in their introduction to the planet.

While the formation of mountains is usually associated with the collision of tectonic plates causing huge slabs of rock to be thrust skywards, our study has shown that this was triggered by an abundance of nutrients in the oceans 2 billion years ago which caused an explosion of planktonic life.

Making Mountains

Mountains are not just a beautiful backdrop for recreation, they are essential to the way the world works, through their influence on weather, climate, the distribution of fresh water and the erosion of rock to make cultivable soil.

Before there were mountains, the plate movements that reshape the distribution of oceans and continents only occurred on a limited scale. But the movement of these plates are essential to making mountains. The pressure of one plate pushing against another – typically an ocean plate hitting a continental plate – causes slabs of ocean rock to break off and stack up on top of each other as they are pushed from behind.

Over millions of years the stack of rocks builds up, creating mountains, just as the Himalayas were built from ocean rocks between India and Eurasia, pushed northwards until the ocean disappeared and its remains were left piled high.

We know these mountains came originally from the ocean by the sea fossils found on the Tibetan plateau, thousands of metres above sea level. But piling up huge slabs of rock on such a scale needs serious lubrication, otherwise friction would stop them. That lubricant is carbon, which became part of the ocean rock when dead plankton fell to the ocean floor and became buried.

Plankton have lived in our oceans for over 3 billion years, but 2 billion years ago their numbers exploded when abundant nutrients entered the water. At the time, life was no more complex than their single cells. But the cells became much bigger, and they contained more carbon.

When they died they sank quickly and were buried in mud which created rock with unprecedented amounts of carbon, which was turned into graphite by heat and pressure. Graphite makes a great lubricant. Locks, hinges, gears, wheels and even zips all move more easily with graphite – and so do rocks.

Lubrication

The plentiful graphite that accumulated beneath the ocean floor had a profound effect, by lubricating the building of mountains. While it has long been known that tectonic processes were lubricated, our research shows that it was the sheer abundance of carbon in the ocean that played a crucial role in the thickening of the Earth’s crust that built its mountain ranges.

The process has continued since then, and other geological layers like salt have also played their part, but the graphite beds of 2 billion years ago were especially slippery, and some have been involved in making mountains more than once.

The biggest mountains on Earth, the Himalayas, are geologically young – about 50 million years old – but rocks made in a much older ocean slid over each other to help create them. They had already slid in the first millions of years after they formed, and then after a long dormancy they slid again to help the rise of the Himalayas. They may slide again in the distant future.

Long after mankind is gone, those ancient plankton will continue their influence on the planet. The mountains made 2 billion years ago are worn down now, but we can still see their roots in places like Scotland, for example.

Our study looked at 20 cases of mountain building around the world from that time, from Australia to China, South America to the Arctic and in north-west Scotland, where we can see the slip surfaces in graphite-bearing rocks in Harris, Iona and Gairloch, formed during earthquakes that accompanied the earliest mountain building. The island of Tiree is one of the flattest places in Britain, but the seabirds that run over its sandy beaches cross the foundations of huge, long-gone mountains.

Graphite Resources

In each of the 20 ancient mountain ranges that were studied, exceptional amounts of graphite were recorded. In many cases the graphite is abundant enough to have been mined as a resource.

Graphite is now a hot commodity, as it is needed in the batteries that are central to green technology (far more graphite is required than lithium in a lithium ion battery). Many of the largest graphite deposits in the world were formed about 2 billion years ago. The graphite that helped bring us mountains may prove critical to the planet once more, and play a key role in its preservation for future generations.

Without the carbon from countless cells of plankton, the distribution of tectonic plates may have evolved rather differently, and we would not have mountains as we know them. Ours is a planet fundamentally shaped by life.

John Parnell, Professor of Geology and Petroleum Geology, University of Aberdeen

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

A new exoplanet: meet GJ 367b, an iron planet smaller and denser than Earth

As our Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, small grains of dust and ice swirled around, left over from the formation of the Sun. Through time, they collided and stuck to each other. As they grew in size, gravity helped them clump together. One such rock grew into the Earth on which we live.

We now believe that most of the stars in the night sky are also orbited by their own planets. Astronomers have already found more than a thousand gas-giant planets – large, gaseous bodies similar in size to Jupiter. The focus now is on looking for rocky, Earth-sized planets. We expect that these will be similarly abundant but, being much smaller, they’re harder to find.

A new paper published in the journal Science documents the latest discovery of a small planet, assigned the catalogue number GJ 367b. This exoplanet was found by a team, of which I was a member, led by Dr Kristine Lam of the Institute of Planetary Research at the German Aerospace Center.

Members of the team noticed the first signs of GJ 367b in data from Nasa’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess. Among the millions of stars being monitored by this satellite, one showed a tiny but recurrent dip in its brightness. This is the tell-tale sign of a planet passing in front of its star every orbit (called a “transit”), blocking some of the star’s light. The dip was only 0.03% deep, so shallow that it’s near the limit of what can be detected. That means the planet must be small, comparable to Earth.

Lam also wanted to learn about the planet’s mass. To do that, her team set about observing the host star at every opportunity with what’s called the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or Harps. This is an instrument attached to a 3.6-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. It was specially designed to find planets by detecting the slight shift in the wavelength of the host star’s light, caused by the gravitational pull of the planet. It took more than 100 observations to detect that shift, meaning that GJ 367b, besides being small, must also have a low mass.

Eventually, as observations with Harps accumulated, the researchers tied down the numbers: GJ 367b has a radius of 72% of Earth’s radius (to an accuracy of 7%), and a mass of 55% of Earth’s mass (to an accuracy of 14%). The measurements tell us this planet is denser than Earth. Whereas Earth has a core of iron surrounded by a rocky mantle, this planet is so dense that it must be nearly all iron, making it similar to Mercury.

Mercury orbits the Sun every 88 days. Blasted by fierce sunlight, the “daytime” side is bare rock heated to 430℃. GJ 367b is even more extreme. The recurrent transit dips tell us that it orbits its star in only eight hours. Being so close, the daytime side will be a furnace heated to 1,400℃, such that even rock would be molten.

So how did it come to be? It’s possible that GJ 367b was once a giant planet with a vast, gaseous envelope, like Neptune. Over time, that gaseous envelope would have boiled off, leaving only the bare core that we see today. Or perhaps, as it formed, collisions with other proto-planets (planets in the process of forming) stripped off a mantle of rock, leaving only the iron core.

GJ 367b is, of course, way too hot to be habitable. But it’s one of very few rocky, Earth-sized planets astronomers have found so far. Its discovery shows that we can both find Earth-sized planets around other stars and measure their properties. The task now is to find them further from their star, in the “habitable zone”, where the surface temperature would allow water to exist as a liquid.

This is harder. The further out from its star a planet is, the less likely it is to be seen transiting the star, and the longer the time between transits, making them harder to detect. Additionally, orbiting further out, the gravitational tug on the host star is reduced, making the signal harder to detect.

But GJ 367b’s host star is a red dwarf, a star much dimmer than the Sun. And, with less heating from starlight, the habitable zone around red dwarfs is much closer in. Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft has already found planets in the habitable zone of red dwarf stars, and Tess promises to find many more.

The next step is to ask whether such planets have atmospheres, what those atmospheres are made of, and whether they contain water vapour. Even there, answers may soon be forthcoming. We’ve already found water vapour in the atmospheres of gas-giant exoplanets, and the James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch imminently, will attempt to find water on smaller, rocky planets.

As exoplanet discoveries continue apace, it is becoming feasible that we could, before long, prove the existence of a planet that has an atmosphere and a rocky surface, on which water is running freely.

Coel Hellier, Professor of Astrophysics, Keele University

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

Love it or hate it, TikTok is changing the music industry

“Tik-a-Tok-a-Who?”, was Adele’s response to her management’s suggestion to promote her music to younger audiences on Tiktok, the video-sharing platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance.

“If everyone’s making music for the TikTok, who’s making music for my generation?”, she asked.

Adele might resist, but the platform has nonetheless been popularising and promoting her song Easy on me, with creators using it in almost one million videos in the first month after its release, making it viral on the app alone.

That’s because creator culture on TikTok is changing the way hits are made, how music is promoted, and how the world discovers music, even for those artists who choose not to engage with it.

TikTok Makes Hits

In early 2019, an unknown 19-year-old college drop-out from Atlanta, Georgia, made headlines around the world.

Living at his sister’s house and feeling bit lonely, in December 2018 he had bought a simple beat for US $30, recorded a song, half country and half rap, and posted it on Soundcloud and social media. The artist made news because Billboard magazine had removed the song from its country charts, after it took off in popularity, entering both the country and general Hot 100 charts.

The artist’s name was Lil Nas X and the song Old Town Road, which has since become the most successful song of all time, the first ever song to reach 15 times platinum. Much of this success can be credited to the song becoming an early TikTok “meme”, picked up by millions of users.

Old Town Road has become the origin story for a remarkable series of viral musical successes on TikTok. In each case artists have shot to popularity, because their songs were used by millions of TikTok users in their videos.

Virality on TikTok is powerful yet unpredictable. Some of 2021’s biggest global hits gained little traction when they were initially released to small audiences. Africa’s most successful pop song ever, CKay’s Love, Nwantiti, was released in 2019, but shot to fame only in 2021 and has now been used in more than 7 million TikTok videos.

Similarly, Australia’s Masked Wolf found himself in the spotlight in 2021, making Barrack Obama’s summer playlist and having been nominated for five ARIA awards. While his song Astronaut in the Ocean became a global hit more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, it was released two years prior by a small Australian label. It has since been used in more than 18 million TikTok videos.

And while many artists, like Lil Nas X, create for virality on TikTok, others go viral even when unaware of the platform. We spoke to Masked Wolf who admitted:

I never made Astro to be on TikTok. I didn’t even know what TikTok was when I released Astronaut.

But it is not just new songs. Old songs are making remarkable comebacks with entirely new audiences. When a man named Nathan Apodaca went viral after he posted a video of himself gliding down a highway on his long board, casually drinking cranberry juice from a bottle, he was lip-syncing to Dreams, the 1977 Fleetwood Mac hit. Dreams was subsequently used by millions of TikTok creators and re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 more than 40 years after its original release.

How It Works

Videos created on the TikTok app are short. Most videos are less than 15 seconds long (though videos of up to 60 seconds are possible). Music plays a big part in these videos, many show dance moves or lip syncing, though there are others where users talk, even giving financial advice. When users create their videos, they will usually choose a song and select a short clip, often the catchiest bits of a song, like the chorus or beat drop.

Users can upload their own sound clips, but the app will detect copyrighted material that its owners do not allow on the platform and mute the sound. Instead, the app has in recent years put together an extensive catalogue of music authorised by big music labels, who have come on board due to TikTok’s role in producing global hits.

Behind this virality are so-called challenges, in which often millions of users create their own versions of a visual story or dance move set to the same music clip, and promoted by the platform using hashtags. For example, in the #yeehaw challenge that brought Old Town Road to fame, people dressed in normal clothes and danced until the beat changed in the clip, when they would instantly transform into cowgirls or cowboys.

But videos on TikTok do not directly contribute to chart success. However, there is a direct correlation between a song going viral on TikTok and it gaining in popularity on music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube, all of which in turn contribute to the Billboard charts.

What It Means For Artists, Listeners And The Music Industry

In our research, we spoke to Ole Obermann, Global Head of Music for TikTok and ByteDance, about the impact for artists, the music industry and music lovers. Ole points to the diversity of music on TikTok and new opportunities for finding music far beyond one’s usual taste.

He also stresses TikTok’s role in discovering artists from all corners of the globe: “I do see a pretty profound impact on the global nature of music as a result of TikTok but also music streaming overall. It’s so much more possible for a song that comes out of Australia or India or Korea or Japan or Saudi Arabia. To end up becoming a global hit and to be listened to by audiences all over the world.”

The recent successes of Love Nwantiti and Astronaut in the Ocean are just two examples to make this point.

TikTok is an excellent platform for listeners to gain exposure to new and different music. TikTok’s self-learning algorithm serves up new videos as a seemingly endless stream, allowing users to be exposed to a large amount of new music quickly, given videos are very short. When a user likes a particular song, with a simple tap they can instantly watch more videos set to the same clip.

The music industry is also coming on board, convinced by the viral success the platform produces. Ole Obermann again:

I think the acceptance has come now because that’s what the fans want. And it’s a way to create more engagement with the music, but there was a lot of resistance for many years, because it was just not the way that the music industry has traditionally worked.

The initial resistance is not surprising, given TikTok presents a significant shift from the industry’s understanding of recorded music as something to be listened to, to be passively consumed. Engagement with music on TikTok is very different, because music becomes a material for creation, for creative expression.

Importantly, what we see today is likely only the beginning, both in terms of new forms of creative expression, and promoting and marketing music in new ways.

But success also attracts investment, and creating on TikTok will likely become more commercialised over time. So far much of the virality has happened organically. But music labels increasingly hire professional influencers to use their music, or work with consultants to make songs more “TikTokkable”, in an attempt to engineer the next viral trend.

It remains to be seen if this will crowd out organic creativity, or if artists will feel pressure to create for TikTok virality, as foreshadowed by Adele.

Kai Riemer, Professor of Information Technology and Organisation, University of Sydney and Sandra Peter, Director, Sydney Business Insights, University of Sydney

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

Mathematical discoveries take intuition and creativity – and now a little help from AI

Research in mathematics is a deeply imaginative and intuitive process. This might come as a surprise for those who are still recovering from high-school algebra.

What does the world look like at the quantum scale? What shape would our universe take if we were as large as a galaxy? What would it be like to live in six or even 60 dimensions? These are the problems that mathematicians and physicists are grappling with every day.

To find the answers, mathematicians like me try to find patterns that relate complicated mathematical objects by making conjectures (ideas about how those patterns might work), which are promoted to theorems if we can prove they are true. This process relies on our intuition as much as our knowledge.

Over the past few years I’ve been working with experts at artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepMind to find out whether their programs can help with the creative or intuitive aspects of mathematical research. In a new paper published in Nature, we show they can: recent techniques in AI have been essential to the discovery of a new conjecture and a new theorem in two fields called “knot theory” and “representation theory”.

Machine Intuition

Where does the intuition of a mathematician come from? One can ask the same question in any field of human endeavour. How does a chess grandmaster know their opponent is in trouble? How does a surfer know where to wait for a wave?

The short answer is we don’t know. Something miraculous seems to happen in the human brain. Moreover, this “miraculous something” takes thousands of hours to develop and is not easily taught.

The past decade has seen computers display the first hints of something like human intuition. The most striking example of this occurred in 2016, in a Go match between DeepMind’s AlphaGo program and Lee Sedol, one of the world’s best players.

AlphaGo won 4–1, and experts observed that some of AlphaGo’s moves displayed human-level intuition. One particular move (“move 37”) is now famous as a new discovery in the game.

How Do Computers Learn?

Behind these breakthroughs lies a technique called deep learning. On a computer one builds a neural network – essentially a crude mathematical model of a brain, with many interconnected neurons.

At first, the network’s output is useless. But over time (from hours to even weeks or months), the network is trained, essentially by adjusting the firing rates of the neurons.

Such ideas were tried in the 1970s with unconvincing results. Around 2010, however, a revolution occurred when researchers drastically increased the number of neurons in the model (from hundreds in the 1970s to billions today).

Traditional computer programs struggle with many tasks humans find easy, such as natural language processing (reading and interpreting text), and speech and image recognition.

With the deep learning revolution of the 2010s, computers began performing well on these tasks. AI has essentially brought vision and speech to machines.

Training neural nets requires huge amounts of data. What’s more, trained deep learning models often function as “black boxes”. We know they often give the right answer, but we usually don’t know (and can’t ascertain) why.

A Lucky Encounter

My involvement with AI began in 2018, when I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. At the induction ceremony in London I met Demis Hassabis, chief executive of DeepMind.

Over a coffee break we discussed deep learning, and possible applications in mathematics. Could machine learning lead to discoveries in mathematics, like it had in Go?

This fortuitous conversation led to my collaboration with the team at DeepMind.

Mathematicians like myself often use computers to check or perform long computations. However, computers usually cannot help me develop intuition or suggest a possible line of attack. So we asked ourselves: can deep learning help mathematicians build intuition?

With the team from DeepMind, we trained models to predict certain quantities called Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials, which I have spent most of my mathematical life studying.

In my field we study representations, which you can think of as being like molecules in chemistry. In much the same way that molecules are made of atoms, the make up of representations is governed by Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials.

Amazingly, the computer was able to predict these Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials with incredible accuracy. The model seemed to be onto something, but we couldn’t tell what.

However, by “peeking under the hood” of the model, we were able to find a clue which led us to a new conjecture: that Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials can be distilled from a much simpler object (a mathematical graph).

This conjecture suggests a way forward on a problem that has stumped mathematicians for more than 40 years. Remarkably, for me, the model was providing intuition!

In parallel work with DeepMind, mathematicians Andras Juhasz and Marc Lackenby at the University of Oxford used similar techniques to discover a new theorem in the mathematical field of knot theory. The theorem gives a relation between traits (or “invariants”) of knots that arise from different areas of the mathematical universe.

Our paper reminds us that intelligence is not a single variable, like the result of an IQ test. Intelligence is best thought of as having many dimensions.

My hope is that AI can provide another dimension, deepening our understanding of the mathematical world, as well as the world in which we live.

Geordie Williamson, Professor of Mathematics, University of Sydney

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

‘Strollout’ has gathered pace, romping home as the Macquarie word of the year. I’d have gone for ‘vax’ if on the list

In a break from the usual tradition, Macquarie asked the public to choose their word of the year in advance of the committee’s decision. The pundits were betting on a COVID-19 inspired word and the shortlist certainly contained possibilities related to the pandemic: “Delta”, “shadow pandemic”, and “strollout”. And they were right!

Macquarie’s other 16 possibilities included more obscure choices such as “humane washing” to describe “the misleading marketing of a product sourced from animals, deceptively giving the impression that the animals have been treated humanely” and “dry scooping” to describe the “practice of ingesting powdered pre-workout supplements or protein powder without mixing with water or milk as directed”.

Many of the wordsmiths I shared the list with had not heard of most of them. Neither had I. For example, “brain tickler” instead of nose swab.

Nor could we see ourselves using such terms as “hate-follow” (of sites whose content we disagreed with) or “front-stab” (as opposed to back-stab). We were offended by “menty-b” for mental breakdown and not that curious about “sober curious”.

And I’m too fond of proper baking to prepare a “dump cake” by combining the ingredients directly in the cake tin in which the cake is to be baked.

Macquarie has just announced the result of the committee’s AND the people’s choice: both chose “strollout”. Defined as a “blend of rollout and stroll”, the word refers to the “perceived lack of speed” in Australia’s vaccine rollout.

Strollout was mostly used in media coverage to criticise the government for Australia’s initially slow rollout of the vaccination program over the past year.

The Australian National Dictionary Centre had already chosen “strollout”, which originated here and later featured on American media.

Oxford Dictionaries had chosen “vax”, which would have been my choice, had it been on Macquarie’s list. Was “strollout” as ubiquitous as “vax”?

Avoiding the COVID-19 direct expressions such as “Delta”, Cambridge had also gone for a subtler but still pandemic-inspired word of the year with “perseverance”, which we can all relate to.

Other Words Of The Year

Collins Dictionary chose the non-COVID “NFT” (non-fungible token), which WAS on Macquarie’s list. An NFT is an ownership certificate for a chunk of digital data such as an image, a domain name, a tweet, or a video. It’s a one-off, not fungible or replaceable by any other piece of data. Christies sold a digital artwork for £50 million earlier this year. Merriam-Webster hasn’t announced its choice yet. Nor has the American Dialect Society, the first body to launch a Word of the Year competition in 1990. It announces its choice after the end of the year.

You may be surprised that Cambridge has chosen the abstract word “perseverance”. Doesn’t the Word of the Year have to be a neologism like “strollout”?

Well, no! Macquarie usually chooses newly coined words like the whimsical “milkshake duck”, and “mansplain”, which was chosen as Macquarie’s word of the decade.

What Criteria Do The Authorities Base Their Choice On?

As Rose Wild asks in The Times, does a word of the year mean:

a word we perceive to be most used, abused or overused? Or is it one that encapsulates something unique to this year’s mood or events — or can it be both? What’s the point of it?

How Is The Decision Made? Who Gets To Choose?

Merriam-Webster bases its decision on the frequency of words that are “looked up” in their online dictionary. As does Cambridge. Collins tracks word usage in its corpus database that covers social media and print publications such as newspapers, and uses its team of editors, lexicographers, and marketing and publicity staff.

The American Dialect Society’s choice is determined by a vote of independent linguists. The Australian National Dictionary Centre’s editorial staff chooses words that have been prominent in the Australian social and cultural landscape during the year, though the word is not always one that has originated in Australia.

Macquarie lists on its website a committee of language experts to make the choice.

Beyond The Word Of The Year

The American Dialect Society takes its mission seriously. It goes beyond Word of the Year to Word of the Decade; for the 2010s, it was the singular “they”. Its Word of the 20th Century was “Jazz” (Yay!), and its word of the past millennium was “she”.

The American Dialect Society also chooses words in several intriguing sub-categories. Some previous choices include most useful “they” (as a gender-neutral pronoun); most unnecessary “manbun”; most outrageous “gate rape” (airport patdown); most euphemistic “scooping technician” (a person whose job it is to pick up dog pooh); most productive “shaming” (as in “fat-shaming”); most likely to succeed “binge-watch” (many of us can confess to that), and most unlikely to succeed “sitbit” (a device that rewards a sedentary lifestyle), which is, of course, a pun on Fitbit. Some of us may be guilty of “sitbit”.

My favourite category is the most creative word. Apparently, the Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport provides a “recombobulation area” for passengers who have passed through security screening, so that they can get their clothes and belongings back in order.

Having been prevented from international travel by COVID-closed borders for nearly two years, oh, how I long to be recombobulated again, though not necessarily at the Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport.

Roslyn Petelin, Course coordinator, The University of Queensland

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

Up to half of Earth’s water may come from solar wind and space dust

Water is vital for life on Earth, and some experts say we should all drink around two litres every day as part of a healthy lifestyle. But beyond the tap, where does our water come from?

It flows from local rivers, reservoirs and aquifers. But where has that water originated from? Over geological time, Earth cycles water through living organisms, the atmosphere, rivers, oceans, the rocks beneath our feet, and even through the planet’s deep interior.

But what about before that? Where did Earth get its water in the first place? Scientists have long searched for answers to this question.

We studied tiny pieces of an asteroid to find out – and we think a rain of protons from the Sun may be producing water all the time on rocks and dust throughout the Solar System. In fact, up to half of Earth’s water may have been produced this way and arrived here with falling space dust.

The Water Puzzle

We know Earth’s water likely came from outer space early in our Solar System’s history. So, what was the primordial delivery service that gave Earth its water?

Water-rich asteroids are currently the best candidates for the delivery of water, as well as carbon-hydrogen compounds, which together make possible our beautiful habitable blue planet teeming with life.

However, water from asteroids contains a specific ratio of ordinary hydrogen to a heavier kind, or isotope, called deuterium. If all of Earth’s water were from asteroids, we would expect it to have this same ratio – but Earth water has less deuterium, so there must also be some other source of water in space with less deuterium.

However, the only thing we know of in the Solar System with lots of hydrogen but a lower ratio of deuterium than Earth is the Sun itself. This puts us in a bit of a pickle, as it’s hard to see how the hydrogen in Earth’s water could have come from the Sun.

Excitingly, we might finally have an answer to this conundrum.

Tiny Pieces Of Asteroid

Back in 2011, the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) sent the Hayabusa mission to take samples of the asteroid Itokawa and bring them back to Earth. In 2017, we were lucky enough to be allocated three extremely rare mineral particles from the sample, each about the width of a human hair.

Our aim was to study the outer surfaces of these dust particles in a brand new way to see if they have been affected by “space weathering”. This is a combination of processes which are known to affect all surfaces exposed in space, such as harmful galactic cosmic rays, micrometeorite impacts, solar radiation and solar wind.

We worked in a huge team involving experts from three continents, using a relatively new technique called atom probe tomography which analyses tiny samples at an atomic level. This let us measure the abundance and positions of individual atoms and molecules in 3D.

Near the surface of the Itokawa particles, we found a layer rich in hydroxide molecules (OH, containing one oxygen atom and one hydrogen) and, more importantly, water (H₂O, containing two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen).

This discovery of water was very unexpected! By everything we knew, these minerals from the asteroid should have been as dry as a bone.

How Solar Wind Makes Water

The most likely source of the hydrogen atoms required to form this water later is the solar wind: hydrogen ions (atoms with a missing electron) streaming through space from the Sun, then lodging in the surfaces of the dust particles.

We tested this theory in the lab by firing heavy hydrogen ions (deuterium) to simulate those in the solar wind at minerals like those in asteroids, and found that these ions react with the mineral particles and steal oxygen atoms to produce hydroxide and water.

Water created by the solar wind represents a previously unconsidered reservoir in our Solar System. And what’s more, every airless world or lump of rock across the galaxy could be home to a slowly renewed water resource powered by their suns.

This is fantastic news for future human space exploration. This life-giving water resource could potentially also be split into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel.

Back Down To Earth

So how does this revelation relate to the origin of Earth’s water?

When Earth and its oceans were forming, the Solar System was teeming with objects from kilometre-wide asteroids to micrometre-scale dust particles. These objects have been falling onto our planet (and others) ever since.

Scaling up from our small space-weathered grain, we estimated that a cubic meter of asteroid dust could contain as much as 20 litres of water. So with all the space dust that has fallen to Earth over the aeons, a lot of water from the Sun (with less deuterium) would have arrived alongside the heavier water from larger asteroids.

We calculated that around a 50:50 mix of water-rich dust and asteroids would be a perfect match for the isotopic composition of Earth’s water.

So, while sipping your next glass of water, ponder the curious thought that Earth derived up to half its water from the Sun.

Luke Daly, Lecturer in Planetary Geoscience, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow; Martin R. Lee, Head of the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow; Nick Timms, Associate Professor, Curtin University, and Phil Bland, ARC Laureate Fellow, Curtin University

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

You actually can teach an old dog new tricks, which is why many of us keep learning after retirement

Lorna Prendergast was 90 years old when she graduated with a master’s degree from the University of Melbourne in 2019. She said her message to others was, “You’re never too old to dream.”

Nor, obviously, too old to learn.

In the same year 94-year-old David Bottomley became the oldest person in Australia to graduate with a PhD from Curtin University. The great-grandfather said he wasn’t yet finished. “I have a great deal yet to work out,” he said, perhaps making him the ultimate lifelong learner.

Prendergast’s and Bottomley’s achievements are examples of the levels of learning some older adults are capable of. In 2019-20, around 73,000 Australian adults aged 60 or more were enrolled in vocational training, community education and university courses. That’s enough to populate a mid-size Australian city.

But the term “lifelong learning” has increasingly tended to focus on the period of compulsory education and training across working lives – that is, before retirement.

Professor of adult education, Stephen Billett, argues the concept of lifelong learning has come to be associated with lifelong education, which is more about the institutional provision of learning experiences.

Instead, he says, it should go back to its roots. Lifelong learning is a personal process based on the sets of experiences people have had throughout their lives.

Learning After Retirement

According to David Istance, the nonresident senior fellow at the OECD’s Center for Universal Education, a result of this foreshortened view of lifelong learning is to downplay the considerable amount of formal learning taking place after retirement. This means learning like that done by Prendergast and Bottomley. Although much learning also happens in non-institutional settings.

For example, a Scottish study tracked the learning activities of almost 400 Glaswegians aged 60 or over. Using a broad definition of “learning”, researchers discovered an “active ageing” subset in the sample.

This active ageing group was:

socially and technologically engaged … “learner-citizens”, participating in educational, physical, cultural, civic and online activities.

Such findings are particularly significant for a country like Australia where the population is ageing, due to sustained low fertility and increasing life expectancy. The result is proportionally fewer children and a larger proportion of people aged 65 and over.

Over the past two decades, the population aged 85 and over has also increased, by 110% (more than doubled) compared with total population growth of 35%. In mid-2020 there were more than half a million of these “older olds” in Australia.

The nation could have 50,000 centenarians by 2050.

A Lifetime Of Complex Cognitive Activity

Brain researcher Perminder Sachdev says surviving into older age relies partly on “a lifetime of good effort”. Some of that effort is a solid education in our formative years and then ongoing purposeful learning.

Sachdev believes this builds better cognitive reserves and sets us up for a lifetime of more complex cognitive activity.

But what is “purposeful learning”? A Swedish review found older adults do formal learning to maintain or increase quality of life, including through learning new things and sharing knowledge, and to connect through social networks. They also see classes and courses as a means of developing coping skills that enhance individual autonomy, and as a way of stimulating their cognitive abilities to help stave off mental decline.

But numerous studies in recent decades have shown formal education is just the tip of the adult learning iceberg.

As the Glasgow study reveals, many older adults are continuing their learning in guises other than through formal courses. Communal examples include sewing groups, men’s sheds, bird-watching clubs, travel groups, and musical jam sessions.

Few of the participants are likely to perceive their activities in explicit learning terms, yet all four reasons for learning the Swedish study identified can be discerned within such groups.

As in the Glasgow research, the proportion of older people engaged in purposeful learning is likely to be a subset of the larger population. Nevertheless there needs to be official and community acknowledgement that a segment of older people has both the motivation and capacity to continue to learn, including into their 90s. These people are “active agers”.

According to Sachdev, the key to maximising healthy ageing is improving the quality of initial and ongoing education because this impacts positively on our brains.

This is not to say older adults should feel obliged to engage in “purposeful learning”. After all, they’re not a homogeneous group, and some may decide it’s not something they want to do.

David Istance intimates some may also subscribe to the outmoded mindset that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.

For older people who do want to continue to engage with the wider world and have the capacity to do so, however, we need to ensure “active ageing” is part of any “lifelong learning” agenda.

Let’s continue to promote older learning champions like Prendergast and Bottomley, not as outliers but as shining lights in a broader expanse of long-twinkling stars.

Darryl Dymock, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in Education, Griffith University

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

The Jenkins review has 28 recommendations to fix parliament’s toxic culture – will our leaders listen?

In the wake of Brittany Higgins’ shocking allegations about being raped in a ministers’ office by a colleague, Prime Minister Scott Morrison initiated multiple inquiries.

Arguably, the most significant was the independent review into parliamentary workplaces, headed up by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins and supported by Labor and the crossbench.

The review has been underway since March, speaking to current and former MPs and employees at parliament house and its associated workplaces - such as electorate offices and the press gallery. On Tuesday, the 450-page report, Set the Standard, was released.

As Jenkins observed, parliament house should be something “Australians look to with pride”.

This report represents a wholesale change strategy, and calls for leadership and accountability across a diverse parliamentary “ecosystem”. This new roadmap is grounded in the testimony and experiences of more than 1,700 contributors, including 147 former and current parliamentarians.

What Did The Report Find?

The report included a survey of current parliamentarians and people currently working at parliament house (such as staffers, journalists and public servants). More than 900 people responded.

It found more than 37% of people currently in parliamentary workplaces have personally experienced bullying in a parliamentary workplace. As one interviewee noted:

Frequently, like at least every week, the advice was go and cry in the toilet so that nobody can see you, because that’s what it’s like up here.

It also found 33% of people currently in parliamentary workplaces have personally experienced sexual harassment in a parliamentary workplace. As one interviewee reported:

Aspiring male politicians who thought nothing of, in one case, picking you up, kissing you on the lips, lifting you up, touching you, pats on the bottom, comments about appearance, you know, the usual. The point I make with that… was the culture allowed it, encouraged it.

The report notes a devastating impact on people as a result of these experiences. This included an impact on their mental and physical health, confidence and ability to do their job, as well as their future career, “these experiences also caused significant distress and shame”.

The Drivers Behind This Behaviour

A critical part of the report looks at the drivers which contribute to misconduct in parliamentary workplaces. Participants also described risk factors which interact with these drivers to endanger their workplaces.

The drivers include:

• power imbalances, where participants described a focus on the pursuit and exercise of power as well as insecure employment and high levels of power and discretion in relation to employment
• gender inequality, including a lack of women in senior roles
• lack of accountability, including limited recourse for those who experience misconduct
• entitlement and exclusion, or “a male, stale and pale monopoly on power in [the] building”

The risk factors include:

• unclear standards of behaviour, leading to confusion about the standards that apply
• a leadership deficit, such as a prioritisation of political gain over people management
• workplace dynamics, a “win at all costs” and high-pressure and high-stakes environment
• social conditions of work, including “significant” alcohol use and a “work hard, play hard” culture.
• employment structures and systems, such as a lack of transparent and merit-based recruitment.

Recommendations

There are 28 recommendations in the report.

They include a statement of acknowledgement from parliamentary leaders, recognising people’s experiences of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault in parliamentary workplaces, targets to increase gender balance among parliamentarians and a new office of parliament staffing and culture.

The report also wants to see the professionalisation of management practices for parliamentary staff and a code of conduct for parliamentarians and their staff. An independent commission would enforce these standards.

The report also calls for a new parliamentary health and well-being service.

Where To From Here

Two key press conferences – from Morrison and Jenkins – accompanied the release of the Set the Standard report. But the change expected by the report requires much more than words – it requires concerted action.

Parliament now needs to endorse and implement a number of key accountability mechanisms to ensure that, as an institution, it ensures all building occupants are safe and respected at work. These include the office on parliamentary staffing and culture and independent parliamentary standards commission.

In addition, the report calls on the parliament itself to continue reflecting and thinking through appropriate changes. For example, the parliamentary work schedule is shown to drive a workplace culture that values “presence and endurance” over remote working and flexibility. Sitting in the chamber at 9pm does not necessarily equal productivity, particularly when it is propped up – among political staffers – with alcohol.

There is no simple solution here. Some argue long hours in parliament house mean longer periods away from parliament, in the electorate, with families. Others argue the work day should end – as it does in other workplaces – before dinner. Jenkins recommends parliament does its own review of the sitting schedule. Hopefully this will create “buy in” from parliamentarians, but reviews like this have been undertaken before (and have not led to cultural change).

For this report to lead to meaningful change, everyone in all the many, varied parliamentary workplaces has to take responsibility for the systemic inequality that drives toxic workplace behaviour in the building.

Responsibility is not equally distributed though. Morrison may call for a bipartisan approach, but he currently leads the government responsible for instigating the inquiry and implementing its recommendations.

His challenge will be in convincing the electorate he means it when he says he wants to fix this “very, very serious problem”.

If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault, family or domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000. International helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org.

Sonia Palmieri, Gender Policy Fellow, Australian National University

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

His spirit will return to Country. Vale David Dalaithngu, the actor who shaped Australian cinema

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article includes names and images of people who have died.

I opened #Blackfulla Twitter to find my feed awash with tributes to the life of David Dalaithngu and a deep shared sadness for his passing. As I scrolled, I witnessed a wave of grief and mourning – but also a commemoration of his life and the absolute joy his performances brought.

A member of the Mandjalpingu clan, Dalaithngu was raised on Country in Ramingining Arnhem Land. For many, he was the first Indigenous person we saw on the television or big screen.

To lose him, at only 68 years old, we are reminded how fragile our existence is and how short our lives can be as Indigenous people.

A Rich And Varied Career

Growing up in the 1970s, seeing Indigenous people on the television was rare. I remember the first time I saw Dalaithngu in the film Walkabout (1971). The storyline was indicative of the era, and Dalaithngu’s name was misspelt in the credits.

Regardless, his performance was brilliant.

He next played Billy in Mad Dog Morgan (1976) and Fingerbone Bill in Storm Boy (1976). He was lauded by his Storm Boy co-stars for his ability to perform as if there were no cameras at all. It would be fair to say for many non-Indigenous people during this era, in Australia and internationally, their only exposure to Indigenous culture was through his performances.

In 1977, he starred in The Last Wave. A sci-fi drama drawing on mysticism and the dichotomy of urban vs “tribal” identities, it is not a film without problems. But it sparked for me a love of sci-fi I still have today.

In 1986, Dalaithngu starred in Crocodile Dundee showing his comedy chops playing alongside Paul Hogan.

His sense of humour was second to none. He often mocked the stereotypes about who we are or who we are imagined to be by white folk.

His performance in Crocodile Dundee secured him as a household name across Australia, and, in 1987, he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for his services to the arts.

A Political Actor

As Dalaithngu matured, so too did the Australian film industry. He increasingly took on weighty and political roles.

In 2002, he featured in Mimi, from the then little-known director Warwick Thornton, poking fun at white art collectors who purchase Indigenous art for its investment potential.

Also in 2002, he starrted in Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof-Fence and, in his first collaboration with Rolf de Heer, The Tracker, for which Dalaithngu won multiple acting awards.

Later, he starred in notable films including The Proposition (2005), Ten Canoes (2006) and Charlie’s Country (2014).

Charlie’s Country, which Dalaithngu wrote with de Heer, captures the complexities of living in a settler society and the often violent and discriminatory policies and practices Indigenous people face here.

Set in Dalaithngu’s own Country in Ramingining, in one scene, Charlie and his bestie “Black Pete” (Peter Djigirr) kill a wild buffalo to eat.

They live without adequate finances to buy food from shops. This is a very real situation for many Indigenous communities in Australia.

The local policeman confiscates Charlie’s gun: it is not registered; he doesn’t have a license for hunting on his own Country. Charlie, who describes himself as a hunter, then makes himself a spear. The police also confiscate the spear, claiming it is a “dangerous weapon.”

For this performance, Dalaithngu won one of the world’s most prestigious acting awards, the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard for Best Actor.

A True Leader

Dalaithngu paved the way for Indigenous actors in the industry, and was unforgettable. He was an actor who could not be constrained. Your eye was drawn him in every role he took on.

In 2019, in recognition of his contributions as an actor, and to the wider Indigenous screen industry, mob awarded him a NAIDOC Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sadly he was too sick to attend so he recorded a message for us all. He said,

Never forget me. While I am here, I will never forget you.

Although incredibly sick, Dalaithngu wanted to make one more film, and he did. The documentary, My name is G (2020), is an intimate story of his own life.

He reflects on the end of his life and tells us, “my spirit will return back to my Country”. So it has.

From all of us mob, Vale Uncle.

Bronwyn Carlson, Professor, Indigenous Studies and Director of The Centre for Global Indigenous Futures, Macquarie University

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