It is very difficult to take Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s nuclear announcement seriously. His proposal for seven nuclear power stations is, at present, legally impossible, technically improbable, economically irrational and environmentally irresponsible.

Given the repeated community objections to much more modest nuclear proposals, such as storage of low-level radioactive waste, there is almost certainly no social licence for nuclear power stations.

Dutton promises that, if elected, he would make nuclear power a reality within a little over ten years. Given the enormous obstacles even to turn the first sod, this seems like a pipe dream.

Here’s why.

Legal Status: Seemingly Impossible

Some 25 years ago, the Howard Coalition government legislated a ban on nuclear energy in its environment laws. Coalition governments have been in power federally for most of the time since, but have made no attempt to repeal the ban.

Even a sweeping victory in the forthcoming federal election would not give the Coalition the Senate majority necessary to change the ban in the next term of parliament. As is usually the case, only half the Senate will be elected, so simple arithmetic shows no prospect of a Coalition majority. The only possibility would be negotiating with the crossbench.

Of the seven nuclear power stations Dutton is proposing to build on the site of old coal stations, five would be in the eastern states: two in Queensland at Tarong and Callide, two in New South Wales at Mount Piper and Liddell, and one in Victoria at Loy Yang.

Each of these states have their own laws banning nuclear power. The eastern premiers have made clear they will not change their laws. Even Dutton’s Queensland Liberal National Party colleagues, who face a state election in October, do not support the plan.

So the proposal does not satisfy current laws and there is no realistic possibility of these changing in the timeframe Dutton would need to get the first reactors built (he says the first would be operating by the mid-2030s).

Dutton could try to bypass the states by building on Commonwealth land. But this would mean missing the supposed benefit of locating reactors next to existing transmission lines at old coal plant sites.

Cost: Astronomical

Cost is a huge problem. Dutton has promised nuclear will deliver cheap power. But CSIRO’s latest GenCost study on the cost of different power generation technologies shows there is no economic case for nuclear power in Australia. Nuclear power would cost at least 50% more than power produced by renewables and firmed with storage.

This estimate is conservative – in reality nuclear would likely cost even more, as GenCost relies on the nuclear industry’s cost estimates. All recent projects have gone way over budget.

The three nuclear power stations being built in western Europe are all costing two to four times the original budget estimate.

It is true a renewables-dominated grid will require more storage, which means building more grid batteries and pumped hydro schemes. It is also true we’ll need to expand our existing 40,000 kilometres of transmission lines by 25% to get renewable electricity to consumers.

But even when we add these extra costs, and even when we accept industry figures, nuclear still cannot compete with solar farms or wind turbines. CSIRO costs nuclear at between A$8 and $17 billion for a large-scale reactor.

There are no private investors lining up to build nuclear. Overseas, nuclear has always been heavily bankrolled by the taxpayer. Dutton’s plan would either require a huge spend of public money or a major increase to power bills. In the United Kingdom, for example, the government has assured the developer of its Hinckley Point C reactor they will be able to recoup the cost by charging higher rates for the power.

While Dutton is promoting nuclear as a way to avoid building expensive and often unpopular new transmission lines, this is not true. Several proposed reactors would need their own lines built, as coal transmission capacity is rapidly being taken up by renewables, as South Australia’s energy minister Tom Koutsantonis has pointed out.

Time: We’re Out Of It

Building a nuclear reactor takes years or even decades. Dutton has promised Australia would have its first nuclear power station operational in a decade, assuming his party is elected and their scheme implemented without delay in 2025.

This claim is wholly without merit. In 2006, the Coalition government commissioned a study on whether nuclear power was viable in Australia, which found it would likely take 15 years to build a reactor here. The timeframe today would be similar, because we don’t have a workforce with experience of building large nuclear reactors. We also don’t have the regulatory framework needed to give the community confidence nuclear power stations could be built and operated safely.

Even in the United States, the UK and France – three countries with long experience with nuclear – no recent project has been completed within ten years.

It defies logic to suggest we could start with a blank sheet of paper and build complex systems faster than countries with long-established industries and regulatory regimes.

Nuclear backers often point to examples in China and the United Arab Emirates, which have both built reactors within about a decade. But these countries do not tolerate the community objections which would be inevitable. In Australia, consultation, legal challenges and protests often delay far less controversial projects.

Why does this matter? Dutton’s push for nuclear isn’t happening in a vacuum. This is the crucial decade for action on climate change. As Australian climate scientist Joëlle Gergis has written, we are now paying the cost of long inaction on climate change in damage from more severe bushfires, floods and drought.

Let’s say the Coalition is elected and sets about making this plan a reality. In practice, this would commit us to decades more of coal and gas, while we wait for nuclear to arrive. We would break our Paris Agreement undertaking to make deep cuts to emissions, and keep making climate change worse. 

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

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

The world is becoming clogged with plastic. Particles of plastic so tiny they cannot be seen with the naked eye have been found almost everywhere, from the oceans’ depths to the mountain tops. They are in the soil, in plants, in animals and they are inside us. The question is: what harm, if any, are they causing?

When plastic trash is dumped in a landfill or the sea, it breaks down, very slowly. Sunlight and waves cause the surface of the plastic to become brittle, and particles are shed into the environment. Collectively known as “small plastic particles”, they range in size from five millimetres or smaller (microplastics) to less than one-thousandth of a millimetre (nanoplastics). The smallest can only be detected with special scientific instruments.

It remains unclear how microplastics and nanoplastics get inside living things, but several entry points have been suggested. For example, they might pass through the gut from food or drink contaminated with small plastic particles. Or they may be breathed in, or absorbed through the skin.

Our research suggests that, for some animals at least, nanoplastics are bad news. We injected plastic nanoparticles into chicken embryos. We found that the particles travelled quickly in the blood to all tissues, especially the heart, liver and kidneys. They were also excreted by the embryonic kidneys.

We noticed, too, that plastic nanoparticles tend to stick to a certain type of stem cell in the embryo. These cells are essential for the normal development of the nervous system and other structures. Any damage to stem cells could put the development of the embryo in jeopardy.

We suspect that the chicken embryo stem cells have substances on their surface, called “cell-adhesion molecules”, which stick to the polystyrene nanoparticles that we used. We are following up this finding, because when nanoplastics stick to cells and get inside them, they can cause cell death and even serious birth defects in chickens and mice.

Similar studies cannot, of course, be carried out on people, so it is not yet possible to say what the implications of our animal research are for humans. What we do know is that nanoplastics are found in the blood of human beings, in other bodily fluids and several major organs and key body tissues.

In recent years, microplastics and nanoplastics have been found in the brains, hearts and lungs of humans. They have been discovered in the arteries of people with arterial disease, suggesting they may be a potential risk factor for cardiovascular disease. And they have been detected in breast milk, the placenta and, most recently, penises.

Chinese researchers reported earlier this year that they had found microplastics in human and dog testes. More recently, another Chinese team found microplastics in all 40 samples of human semen they tested. This follows an Italian study that found microplastics in six out of ten samples of human semen.

Our fear is that microplastics and nanoplastics might act in a similar way to deadly asbestos fibres. Like asbestos, they are not broken down in the body and can be taken up into cells, killing them and then being released to damage yet more cells.

Reassuring, For Now

But there is a need for caution here. There is no evidence that nanoplastics can cross the placenta and get into the human embryo.

Also, even if nanoplastics do cross the placenta, and in sufficient numbers to damage the embryo, we would expect to have seen a big increase in abnormal pregnancies in recent years. That is because the problem of plastic waste in the environment has been growing enormously over the years. But we are not aware of any evidence of a corresponding, large increase in birth defects or miscarriages.

That, for now, is reassuring.

It may be that microplastics and nanoplastics, if they do cause harm to our bodies, do so in a subtle way that we have not yet detected. Whatever the case, scientists are working hard to discover what the risks might be.

One promising avenue of research would involve the use of human placental tissue grown in the laboratory. Special artificial placenta tissues, called “trophoblast organoids”, have been developed for studying how harmful substances cross the placenta.

Researchers are also investigating potentially beneficial uses for nanoplastics. Although they are not yet licensed for clinical use, the idea is that they could be used to deliver drugs to specific body tissues that need them. Cancer cells could, in this way, be targeted for destruction without damaging other healthy tissue.

Whatever the outcome of nanoplastics research, we and many other scientists will continue trying to find out what nanoplastics are doing to ourselves and the environment.

Michael Richardson, Professor of Animal Development, Leiden University and Meiru Wang, Postdoctoral Researcher, Molecular Biology and Nanotoxicology, Leiden University

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

Birds have been known to seek out pungent chemicals for various reasons. Some consume fermented fruits with gusto and suffer the ill effects. Others expose themselves to ants, but only the stinky kind. These ants produce useful antimicrobials and insect repellents.

In our recent research, my colleagues and I observed Norfolk Island green parrots applying chewed pepper tree bark and shoots to their feathers and skin during preening. We believe this is a rare example of a bird using plant matter to rid themselves of parasites. But there may be more to it. These birds do seem to be enjoying themselves.

For more than a century, scientists have puzzled over the purpose of anting. When birds engage in this behaviour, they either actively spread ants or simply allow ants to move through their feathers. In defence, the ants release formic acid. Could birds be getting high on the fumes?

Maybe pepper tree bark has more than medicinal effects too. It’s highly likely such self-medicating is stimulating.

Stimulating Substances

Both formic acid and piperine (from pepper trees) are pungent chemicals with proven medicinal, antimicrobial and insect-repelling qualities.

Our green parrots appeared extra animated while they busily snipped, chewed and rubbed the pungent pepper tree bark and foliage through their plumage.

Almost a century ago, in 1931, Prussian naturalist Alfred Troschütz noted of anting “the formic acid must have an especially agreeable effect”.

Then, in 1957, US ornithologist Lovie Whitaker concluded the bird she was studying “appeared to derive sensual pleasure, possibly including sexual stimulation” from anting. Her views were quickly dismissed and anting declared “strictly functional”. But is it?

The apparent ecstatic state reached by some anting birds is well known. People often come across Australian magpies with their feathers fluffed, body contorted, perhaps staggering and seemingly unable to respond normally — that is, to flee.

In humans, piperine (the key ingredient in pepper) is mildly stimulating. And several potentially hallucinogenic or mind-altering substances, notably formic acid, have been isolated from ant toxins.

Formic acid has been used to tone the muscles, increase muscular energy and ease the sense of fatigue. In 17th-century Europe, it was the “secret” ingredient in a popular tonic believed to improve wellbeing, calm digestion and increase sexual appetite.

Indigenous groups across southern California used red harvester ants for medicinal purposes as well as religious rituals. The ants were ingested alive, in massive quantities, to induce prolonged catatonic states punctuated by hallucinogenic visions.

Flying Under The Influence

Many birds become intoxicated after eating fermented fruits and berries. Their drunken state is often detected when they collide with windows or cars, get caught by cats while in a stupor, or suffer from alcohol poisoning.

In 2021, about half a dozen drunk red-winged parrots were handed in to Broome Veterinary Hospital in Western Australia after feasting on overripe mangoes. Many more never made it to the clinic.

The drunken reputation of the Kereru saw it voted in as New Zealand’s Bird of the Year in 2018. This pigeon is known for occasionally becoming tipsy, even falling out of trees.

All of these drunk parrots and pigeons lend themselves to jokes about party animals, but there is a deeper evolutionary context to such behaviour.

As fruit ripens it becomes sweeter and more nutritious. As it overripens, the sugar begins to ferment and the alcohol concentration increases.

Volatile compounds (alcohols) produced during fermentation can be carried in the air, helping birds locate the rich food source. Ethanol is also a source of energy in its own right and stimulates the appetite.

Fruit eaters including birds, our human ancestors and other animals may have come to associate the presence of ethanol with a sugar hit and mild pleasure. In turn, the fruit eaters reward the fruit or nectar producing plants by dispersing seeds, or facilitating cross-pollination.

This evolutionary explanation for an attraction to alcohol is sometimes referred to as The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, first suggested by US biologist Robert Dudley.

Eat, Drink And Be Merry

While some birds are inclined to imbibe, it seems most can handle their liquor. Like humans, their central nervous system may well reward moderate alcohol consumption, making them feel less fatigued, more relaxed and sociable.

Such pleasure-seeking may seem like an evolutionary dead end, but nature generally contrives to limit availability to alcohol. Stimulation is mild and cases of drunken excess are the exception. The latter often occur in situations where the fleshy fruits are in abundance, other food is scarce or conditions have produced unusually high sugar content, which yields an extra potent brew when it ferments. Often, the boozy casualties are young birds. Sound familiar? Just as well smart birds haven’t figured out how to distil alcohol.

Likening green parrots rubbing aromatic vegetation through their plumage to inebriated pigeons falling from trees may seem a stretch. But nature rewards behaviour that offers evolutionary advantage, often, it seems by tapping into animals’ pleasure centres. The pursuit of pleasure is an important, usually overlooked, aspect of animal behaviour, worthy of attention and further research.

Penny Olsen, Honorary Professor in Ecology and Evolution, Australian National University

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

As the world struggles to decarbonise, it’s becoming increasingly clear we’ll need to both rapidly reduce emissions and actively remove carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report considered 230 pathways to keep global warming below 1.5°C. All required CO₂ removal.

Some of the most promising CO₂ removal technologies receiving government funding in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia seek to increase the massive carbon storage potential of the ocean. These include fertilising tiny plants and tweaking ocean chemistry.

Ocean-based approaches are gaining popularity because they could potentially store carbon for a tenth of the cost of “direct air capture”, where CO₂ is sucked from the air with energy-intensive machinery.

But the marine carbon cycle is much harder to predict. Scientists must unravel the many complex natural processes that could alter the efficiency, efficacy and safety of ocean-based CO₂ removal before it can go ahead.

In our new research, we highlight a surprisingly important mechanism that had previously been overlooked. If CO₂ removal techniques change the appetite of tiny animals at the base of the food chain, that could dramatically change how much carbon is actually stored.

Plankton Dominate The Carbon Pump

Tiny marine life forms called plankton play a huge role in ocean carbon cycling. These microscopic organisms drift on the ocean currents, moving captured carbon throughout the seas.

Like plants on land, phytoplankton use sunlight and CO₂ to grow through photosynthesis.

Zooplankton, on the other hand, are tiny animals that mostly eat phytoplankton. They come in many shapes and sizes. If you put them in a lineup, you might think they came from different planets.

Across all this diversity, zooplankton have very different appetites. The hungrier they are, they faster they eat.

Uneaten phytoplankton – and zooplankton poo – can sink to great depths, keeping carbon locked away from the atmosphere for centuries. Some even sink to the seafloor, eventually transforming into fossil fuels.

This transfer of carbon from the atmosphere to the ocean is known as the “biological pump”. It keeps hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon in the ocean and out of the atmosphere. That translates to about 400ppm CO₂ and 5°C of cooling!

Picky Eaters

In our new research we wanted to better understand how zooplankton appetites influence the biological pump.

First we had to work out how zooplankton appetites differ across the ocean.

We used a computer model to simulate the seasonal cycle of phytoplankton population growth. This is based on the balance of reproduction and death. The model simulates reproduction really well.

Zooplankton appetites largely determine the death rate. But the model’s not so good at simulating death rates, because it doesn’t have enough information about zooplankton appetites.

So we tested dozens of different appetites and then checked our results against real-world data.

To get global observations of phytoplankton seasonal cycles without a fleet of ships, we used satellite data. This is possible even though phytoplankton are tiny, because their light-catching pigments are visible from space.

We ran the model in more than 30,000 locations and found zooplankton appetites vary enormously. That means all those different types of zooplankton are not spread evenly across the ocean. They appear to gather around their favourite types of prey.

In our latest research, we show how this diversity influences the biological pump.

We compared two models, one with just two types of zooplankton and another with an unlimited number of zooplankton – each with different appetites, all individually tuned to their unique environment.

We found including realistic zooplankton diversity reduced the strength of the biological pump by a billion tonnes of carbon every year. That’s bad for humanity, because most of the carbon that doesn’t go into the ocean ends up back in the atmosphere.

Not all of the carbon in the bodies of the phytoplankton would have sunk deep enough to be locked away from the atmosphere. But even if only a quarter did, once converted to CO₂ that could match annual emissions from the entire aviation industry.

The Ocean As A Sponge

Many ocean-based CO₂ removal technologies will alter the composition and abundance of phytoplankton.

Biological ocean-based CO₂ removal technologies such as “ocean iron fertilisation” seek to increase phytoplankton growth. It’s a bit like spreading fertiliser in your garden, but on a much bigger scale – with a fleet of ships seeding iron across the ocean.

The goal is to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and pump it into the deep ocean. However, because some phytoplankton crave iron more than others, feeding them iron could change the composition of the population.

Alternatively, non-biological ocean-based CO₂ removal technologies such as “ocean alkalinity enhancement” shift the chemical balance, allowing more CO₂ to dissolve in the water before it reaches chemical equilibrium. However, the most accessible sources of alkalinity are minerals including nutrients that encourage the growth of certain phytoplankton over others.

If these changes to phytoplankton favour different types of zooplankton with different sized appetites, they are likely to change the strength of the biological pump. This could compromise – or complement – the efficiency of ocean-based CO₂ removal technologies.

Moving Forward From A Sea Of Uncertainty

Emerging private-sector CO₂ removal companies will require accreditation from reliable carbon offset registries. This means they must demonstrate their technology can:

1. remove carbon for hundreds of years (permanence)
2. avoid major environmental impacts (safety)
3. be amenable to accurate monitoring (verification).

Cast against a sea of uncertainty, the time is now for oceanographers to establish the necessary standards.

Our research shows CO₂ removal technologies that change phytoplankton communities could also drive changes in carbon storage, by modifying zooplankton appetites. We need to better understand this before we can accurately predict how well these technologies will work and how we must monitor them.

This will require tremendous effort to overcome the challenges of observing, modelling and predicting zooplankton dynamics. But the payoff is huge. A more reliable regulatory framework could pave the way for a trillion dollar, morally imperative, emerging CO₂ removal industry.

Tyler Rohr, Lecturer in Southern Ocean Biogeochemical Modelling, IMAS, University of Tasmania; Ali Mashayek, Professor, University of Cambridge, and Sophie Meyjes, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge

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

Communications companies such as Starlink plan to launch tens of thousands of satellites into orbit around Earth over the next decade or so. The growing swarm is already causing problems for astronomers, but recent research has raised another question: what happens when they start to come down?

When these satellites reach the end of their useful life, they will fall into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up. Along the way, they will leave a trail of tiny metallic particles.

According to a study published last week by a team of American researchers, this satellite rain may dump 360 tonnes of tiny aluminium oxide particles in the atmosphere each year. The aluminium will mostly be injected at altitudes between 50 and 85 kilometres, but it will then drift down to the stratosphere – home to Earth’s protective ozone layer.

What does that mean? According to the study, the satellite’s contrail could facilitate ozone-destroying chemical reactions. That’s not wrong, but as we will see the story is far from simple.

How Does Ozone Get Destroyed?

Ozone loss in the stratosphere is caused by “free radicals” – atoms or molecules with a free electron. When radicals are produced, they start cycles that destroy many ozone molecules. (These cycles have names Dr Seuss would admire: NOx, HOx, ClOx and BrOx, as all involve oxygen as well as nitrogen, hydrogen, chlorine and bromine, respectively.)

These radicals are created when stable gases are broken up by ultraviolet light, which there is plenty of in the stratosphere.

Nitrogen oxides (NOx) start with nitrous oxide. This is a greenhouse gas naturally produced by microbes, but human fertiliser manufacturing and agriculture has increased the amount in the air.

The HOx cycle involves hydrogen radicals from water vapour. Not much water vapour makes it into the stratosphere, though events like the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai underwater volcanic eruption in 2022 can sometimes inject large amounts. Water in the stratosphere creates numerous small aerosol particles, which create a large surface area for chemical reactions and also scatter more light to make beautiful sunsets. (I will come back to both of these points later.)

How CFCs Made The ‘Ozone Hole’

ClOx and BrOx are the cycles responsible for the most famous damage to the ozone layer: the “ozone hole” caused by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons. These chemicals, now banned, were commonly used in refrigerators and fire extinguishers and introduced chlorine and bromine to the stratosphere.

CFCs rapidly release chlorine radicals in the stratosphere. However, this reactive chlorine is quickly neutralised and locked up in molecules with nitrogen and water radicals.

What happens next depends on aerosols in the stratosphere, and near the poles it also depends on clouds.

Aerosols speed up chemical reactions by providing a surface for them to occur on. As a result, aerosols in the stratosphere release reactive chlorine (and bromine). Polar stratospheric clouds also remove water and nitrogen oxides from the air.

So in general, when there are more stratospheric aerosols around we are likely to see more ozone loss.

An Increasingly Metallic Stratosphere

The details of the specific injection of aluminium oxides by falling satellites would be quite complex. This is not the first study to highlight the growing stratospheric pollution from re-entering space junk.

In 2023, researchers studying aerosol particles in the stratosphere detected traces of metals from spacecraft re-entry. They found that 10% of stratospheric aerosols already contain aluminium, and predicted this will increase to 50% over the next 10–30 years. (Around 50% of stratospheric aerosol particles already contain metals from meteorites.)

We don’t know what effect this will have. One likely outcome would be that the aluminium particles seed the growth of ice containing particles. This means that there would be more smaller, cold, reflective particles with more surface area on which chemistry can occur.

We also don’t know how aluminium particles will interact with the sulfuric acid, nitric acid and water found in the stratosphere. As a result, we can’t really say what the implications will be for ozone loss.

Learning From Volcanoes

To really understand what these aluminium oxides mean for ozone loss, we need laboratory studies, to model the chemistry in more detail, and also look at how the particles would move around in the atmosphere.

For example, after the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai eruption, the water vapour in the stratosphere quickly mixed around the southern hemisphere, and then moved toward the pole. At first, this extra water caused intense sunsets, but a year later, these water aerosols are well diluted across the whole southern hemisphere and we no longer see them.

A global current called the Brewer-Dobson circulation moves air up into the stratosphere near the equator and back down again at the poles. As a result, aerosols and gases can only stay in the stratosphere for at most six years. (Climate change is speeding up this circulation, which means the time that aerosols and gases are in the stratosphere is shorter.)

The famous eruption of Mt Pinatubo in 1991 also created beautiful sunsets. It injected more than 15 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide in to the stratosphere, which cooled the Earth’s surface by a little over half a degree Celsius for around three years. This event is the inspiration for geoengineering proposals to slow down climate change by deliberately putting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere.

Many Questions Remain

Compared to Pinatubo’s 15 million tonnes, 360 tonnes of aluminium oxide seems like small potatoes.

However, we don’t know how aluminium oxides will behave physically under stratospheric conditions. Will it make aerosols that are smaller and more reflective – thus cooling the surface, much like stratospheric aerosol injection geoengineering scenarios?

We also don’t know how aluminium will behave chemically. Will it create ice nuclei? How will it interact with nitric and sulfuric acid? Will it release locked-up chlorine more effectively than current stratospheric aerosols, facilitating ozone destruction?

And of course, the aluminium aerosols won’t stay in the stratosphere forever. When they eventually fall to the ground, what will this metal contamination do in our polar regions?

All these questions need to be addressed. By some estimates, more than 50,000 satellites may be launched between now and 2030, so we had better address them quickly.

Robyn Schofield, Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Environment and Sustainability), The University of Melbourne

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

Heat domes, like the one sending temperatures soaring from the Midwest to New England and across the eastern U.S. in June 2024, occur when a persistent region of high pressure traps heat over an area. A heat dome can linger for days to weeks, leaving the people, crops and animals below to suffer through stagnant, hot air that can feel like an oven.

Typically, heat domes are tied to the behavior of the jet stream, a band of fast winds high in the atmosphere that generally runs west to east.

Normally, the jet stream has a wavelike pattern, meandering north and then south and then north again. When these meanders in the jet stream become bigger, they move slower and can become stationary. That’s when heat domes can occur.

When the jet stream swings far to the north, air piles up and sinks. The air warms as it sinks, and the sinking air also keeps skies clear since it lowers humidity. That allows the sun to create hotter and hotter conditions near the ground.

If the air near the ground passes over mountains and descends, it can warm even more. This downslope warming played a large role in the extremely hot temperatures in the Pacific Northwest during a heat dome event in 2021, when Washington set a state record with 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 Celsius), and temperatures reached 121 F in British Columbia in Canada, surpassing the previous Canadian record by 8 degrees F (4 C).

The Human Impact

Heat domes normally persist for several days in any one location, but they can last longer. They can also move, influencing neighboring areas over a week or two. The heat dome that started in Texas and Mexico in June 2023 spread into the Southwest in July.

On rare occasions, the heat dome can be more persistent. That happened in the southern Plains in 1980, when as many as 10,000 people died during weeks of high summer heat. It also happened over much of the United States during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

A heat dome can have serious impacts on people, because the stagnant weather pattern that allows it to exist usually results in weak winds and an increase in humidity. Both factors make the heat feel worse – and become more dangerous – because the human body is not cooled as much by sweating.

The heat index, a combination of heat and humidity, is often used to convey this danger by indicating what the temperature will feel like to most people. The high humidity also reduces the amount of cooling at night. Warm nights can leave people without air conditioners unable to cool off, which increases the risk of heat illnesses and deaths. With global warming, temperatures are already higher, too.

One of the worst recent examples of the impacts from a heat dome with high temperatures and humidity in the U.S. occurred in the summer of 1995, when an estimated 739 people died in the Chicago area over five days.

This article, originally published June 22, 2022, has been updated.

William Gallus, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Iowa State University

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

Forget pizza delivery, the latest use for drones may surprise you even more.

In the tropics, my colleagues and I have used drones to map a vital ecological indicator – the temperature at which lizards thrive. This innovative technique could revolutionise our understanding of reptile conservation in a changing climate.

We’ve all been out on a warm day and have looked to find some shade, or grabbed an extra layer of clothing on a cold day. But imagine that your daily life is dependent on keeping your body within the “perfect” temperature range. This is what life is like for cold-blooded species like lizards.

Cold-blooded animals are dependent on ideal temperatures for life. So, for their conservation, researchers need a way to analyse the quality of the heat conditions they live in. This is even more important given how people are modifying landscapes through activities such as deforestation and the ever-growing threat of climate change which means cold-blooded creatures have less shade.

Our study species is no stranger to such pressures. The Bay Islands anole, Anolis bicaorum, is a lizard found on the island of Utila, north of mainland Honduras in Central America.

The island is undergoing significant development resulting in the conversion of the lizard’s favoured forest habitat to urbanised areas. This lizard, a critically endangered species according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is only found on this small island and is under threat from this habitat loss.

A previous study of mine found that the thermal environment is a vital factor in determining the number of individuals of this species. So, it is important to measure this as the basis for successful conservation strategies.

Traditionally, measuring a lizard’s thermal environment has been a laborious and costly affair. It involves deploying 3D-printed lizard replicas which are equipped with special thermometers to log the nearby temperature of the forest.

While these replicas provide valuable data points, their limited number due to expense – typically around 20 per study plot – restricts the scope of analysis. This scarcity of data makes it difficult to assess thermal suitability across entire landscapes, a crucial factor for conservation planning. This is where my team’s recent research using drones comes in.

If the forest canopy plays a crucial role in regulating a lizard’s body temperature, we wondered whether we could predict those temperatures by using equations based on canopy characteristics.

To test this, we first needed to collect canopy data. And we used drones to do that.

Drones have transformed data collection, allowing us to gather detailed canopy metrics across entire study areas. We used a drone to hover a few metres over each plot, capturing high-resolution images.

From these images, we extracted data on two important factors: the percentage of greenness (indicating canopy cover) and texture indices (representing variation in the canopy structure).

By combining this detailed drone-based canopy data (greenness and texture) with ground-based air temperature measurements, we aimed to predict the temperature an A. bicaorum lizard would reach on the island of Utila.

And we found that it works, for this particular lizard, and in this environment at least. By using the drone data and coupling it with air temperature and machine learning models, we can predict the temperature of A. bicaorum at solar noon, the sun’s highest point, across the entire survey plot.

This method allows us to create continuous, high-resolution maps of temperatures across entire landscapes. And this level of detail is far more relevant to the movement patterns of individual lizards compared to the limited data points collected with traditional methods.

Why This Is Important

A double threat looms for cold-blooded creatures worldwide: climate change and habitat loss. These factors are rapidly transforming the planet’s thermal environment, potentially squeezing the suitable habitat available for cold-blooded species. The consequences could be far-reaching, affecting the fitness and energy expenditure of countless animals.

Our drone-based approach allows us to map ecologically significant thermal data across vast landscapes, at resolutions relevant to individual animals and populations. This level of detail far surpasses the limitations of traditional ground-based methods.

The next step for our research is to test this method across different species and habitats. We also need to incorporate 3D data into our analysis, allowing us to map thermal variations throughout the day, not just at peak sunlight at solar noon. This will provide a more comprehensive picture of how different species use their thermal environment.

Our work opens a new window into understanding how human activities and climate change affect species like the A. bicaorum lizard, particularly those in forests where suitable thermal environments are crucial for their survival.

Emma Higgins, Lecturer in Ecology, University of South Wales

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

Another year, another movie with a shark in the leading role.

The new French thriller film Under Paris is currently ranked second in Australia’s Top 10 list and has broken records as one of Netflix’s most watched non-English films. It follows a giant shark that appears in Paris’s Seine river, seemingly out for blood.

For decades, filmmakers have placed sharks alongside some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Blake Lively, Jason Statham and Roy Schneider. Shark movies can make hefty profits, too. The Meg (2018) made more than US$157 million globally (about A$235 million).

But the shark “characters” in these films are far from something to be admired or appreciated. Indeed, the film industry has helped galvanise a kind of collective villainisation of these creatures.

As was neatly summarised in a paper published in the journal Marine Policy:

contemporary narratives widely presented in popular mainstream media have attached an utterly negative connotation to sharks, propagating an unsubstantiated and fabricated image of them as voracious predators.

The effects of these narratives can linger long after viewers have left the cinema.

Jaws, The Start Of It All

While it’s often thought Steven Spielberg’s 1975 hit movies Jaws started the shark movie trend, there were a handful of similar prior examples, including She Gods of Shark Reef (1958) and Shark! (1969).

That said, Jaws was certainly the first of these to become a blockbuster, with a gross worldwide earning of more than US$470 million (about A$704 million). For the few who haven’t seen it, the film is based on a white shark shown to be intentionally hunting and eating people at a seaside American tourist town.

In 2014, social scientist Christopher Pepin-Neff proposed a phenomenon called the “Jaws effect” which suggests people’s beliefs about sharks today – and even Australian policies concerning shark bite mitigation – can be linked back to this storyline.

These beliefs, Pepin-Neff says, include the idea that sharks intentionally bite and hunt humans, that human-shark interactions always lead to fatal outcomes and that once a shark gets a taste for humans it needs to be culled so it won’t continue to seek out human prey.

Jaws may have not been the first shark movie, but it is arguably the biggest and likely influenced movies that followed.

Many shark films now include even larger sharks than the six-metre one depicted in Jaws. Under Paris, for instance, portrays a seven-metre mako, while the shark in The Meg is supposed to be some 23 metres (larger than what real megalodons were thought to be).

These films don’t seem to be letting up, either. There’s currently an “untitled shark thriller” being filmed in Australia, along with potential discussions of a sequel to Under Paris.

Fact Or Fiction?

Some elements of shark films are true to fact. For instance, the size of the shark in Jaws was factually accurate, as was the portrayal of an incident in which surfer Bethany Hamilton lost her arm to a tiger shark in Hawaii in the film Soul Surfer (2011). Even so, creative licence is used liberally in the “sharksploitation” subgenre.

Statistically, shark bites are very rare and have even been described by experts as “statistical anomalies”. In 2023, the Florida Museum of Natural History counted a total 120 shark bites globally, of which 69 were “unprovoked”.

These bites tend to occur in the United States and Australia, which makes them even rarer in other countries where sharks reside, such as New Caledonia, Brazil and Egypt. Unsurprisingly, no shark bites have occurred in the Seine. And only five unprovoked bites have been reported in France since 1580.

Nonetheless, research shows people are generally afraid of sharks and perceive the risk of shark bites as being higher than it is (in part due to media portrayals).

Sharks are apex predators in their ecosystems and their presence is essential for healthy oceans, so exaggerated portrayals in media are far from trivial. It is important the public views sharks as more than human-eating machines.

Are There Any Friendly Fish Films?

In 2021, I conducted an analysis of 109 shark movies and found only one which did not include any potentially threatening interactions with shark characters.

This was the Disney film Finding Dory (2016), which has a whale shark character named Destiny. Whale sharks are filter-feeding fish that pose little-to-no threat to humans. This may be why Destiny got a positive edit.

Despite this, the official trailer for the 2012 Norwegian film Kon-Tiki implies a whale shark is at one point attacking a boat. The full movie scene is less dramatic and emphasises the shark’s curious side, in a more true-to-life depiction. But it still shows the shark swimming quickly towards the raft, which is inaccurate since we know whale sharks swim very slowly.

Even in Finding Nemo (2003) and Shark Tale (2004), the “friendly”, “vegetarian” shark characters of Bruce and Lenny are covertly portrayed as potentially threatening.

In my recent analysis of 638 “creature features” films – a subgenre of horror movies featuring non-human creatures – I found sharks to be the most commonly depicted non-human species (with snakes and spiders not far behind).

Is It All Bad News?

The saying “all publicity is good publicity” probably isn’t true in the case of sharks.

The trophy hunting of white sharks increased following the release of Jaws in 1975 – something Director Steven Spielberg himself says he “regrets”. And while it’s hard to say how much such portrayals have impacted the species’ image and conservation, we can expect they have.

We might find a silver lining in the fact Jaws also turned many people into shark fans and inspired a new wave of shark scientists. We’re also seeing the legacy of Peter Benchley, the author of the original 1974 Jaws novel, live on through the Peter Benchley Ocean Awards aimed at celebrating figures in ocean conservation.

Overall, however, negative portrayals continue to largely outweigh any positive or educational content. If only sharks had a really good PR team.

Brianna Le Busque, Lecturer in Environmental Science, University of South Australia

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

Workers who were made redundant in coal-fired power plants between 2010 and 2020 saw their incomes plummet by 69% in the year after they lost their jobs.

This was the staggering finding of research by Dan Andrews, Elyse Dwyer and Lachlan Vass at the e61 Institute reported by The Conversation in 2023.

Andrews, Dwyer and Vass called for a national discussion about support for workers made redundant by Australia’s energy transition.

On Wednesday, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton offered his own form of support, saying the Coalition’s plan to put nuclear power plants on the sites of former coal-fired stations would help retain jobs in regions that had provided Australia with energy for decades.

But where replacement jobs can’t be easily found for former fossil fuel industry workers, an important question remains: which workers need specially targeted support? That’s what we set out to discover.

Our Jobs Study, Based On A Real Coal Mine

Some displaced coal miners and coal-fired power station workers will find new jobs easily.

As an example, there’s plenty of demand for electricians, meaning targeting support towards them makes little sense.

But others could be unemployed for years, or the rest of their lives.

To find out which displaced workers are most at risk of long-term unemployment, Rojan Joshi and I applied ten years of national job advertisement data to the hypothetical case of an actual New England coal mine closing.

The coal mine is real. It employs 766 people. The largest groups of employees are miners, truck drivers and fitters. Most live locally.

We modelled what would have happened if the mine had closed seven years ago.

The job advertisement data gave us an idea of how long it would take those workers to find new jobs, based on their occupations and whether they were willing to relocate within New South Wales or move interstate.

What Happened Depended On Who Would Move

The results were mixed. Motor mechanics, metal fabricators, truck drivers and electricians would have had the easiest time finding new jobs, followed by shotfirers (they handle explosives), mechanical engineers and fitters.

Those who would have struggled the most to find new jobs were drillers, production managers, coal miners themselves, mine deputies and mining engineers.

But it all depended on whether they were willing to move.

Of workers not prepared to relocate, 28% of those in the 12 biggest occupations would have found a new job within one year, 35% within two years, 39% within three years and 43% within four years.

Put differently, most workers – 57% – wouldn’t have a new job without relocating, even after four years.

Of workers willing to relocate within the state, 52% would have found a job in one year, 67% in two years, 85% in three years and 100% in four years.

Of those willing to relocate anywhere in Australia, 99% would have found a new job in one year and 100% in two years.

Different occupations were impacted in different ways. The results suggested the government should focus on helping people relocate and pay particular attention to drillers, production managers, miners, mine deputies and mining engineers.

What We Need To Know To Better Support Workers

Providing broader support to those who might not need it risked diluting the support available to those who needed it the most. It also risked deadening the incentives for workers who are able to find new jobs to do so.

But there are four limitations of our study to keep in mind.

First, we looked at only one coal mine in New England. Different mines have different workforces, as do coal-fired power stations fed by those mines.

Second, some mines have fly-in-fly-out workers. We picked a mine that did not.

Third, we didn’t examine retraining and re-skilling. Some workers who struggle to find a job in their existing occupation might be able to retrain and get a job in another one.

Fourth, we didn’t examine wages. People who would have found new jobs might not have been able to find them at the same pay.

Despite these limitations, our results make clear that supporting workers who lose their jobs as a result of Australia’s energy transition will be complex.

Government forecasts predict a fall in Australia’s coal exports of 50% to 80% over the next two decades. By 2035, the two biggest remaining coal-fired power plants in NSW and the biggest in Victoria are scheduled to have closed.

If we want the energy transition to benefit Australians, we need to pay closer attention to those it could leave behind.

Adam Triggs, Visiting research fellow, Australian National University

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

On the weekend, an area 20km off the Illawarra coast south of Sydney became Australia’s fourth offshore wind energy zone. It’s the most controversial zone to date, with consultation attracting a record 14,211 submissions – of which 65% were opposed.

The zone’s declaration has inflamed fierce debate over the pathway to decarbonisation, particularly in industrial regions. The Illawarra hosts heavy industries such as Australia’s largest steel manufacturer, BlueScope Steel.

In response to the announcement, National Party Leader David Littleproud declared Australia doesn’t need “large-scale industrial windfarms”. He argues the focus should instead be on household solar and battery storage.

So what is the role of offshore wind in our future energy mix? Here we argue offshore wind energy has three main advantages: scale, availability and proximity. It’s just what Australia needs.

1. Scale

Offshore wind has substantial energy-production potential. A single 100-turbine project is capable of generating up to 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of energy and the Illawarra zone could contain two projects (2.9GW).

To put this in perspective, Eraring, Australia’s largest coal-fired power station near Lake Macquarie in New South Wales, also produces 2.9GW.

Because offshore wind is more consistent than either onshore wind or rooftop solar, it is the most practical way to provide time-sensitive renewable energy grid security for large energy users.

This high-capacity, consistent energy source is particularly crucial for Australia’s industrial decarbonisation efforts. BlueScope Steel, for example, estimates it will need approximately 15 times its current energy consumption to transition to green steel-making operations in the Illawarra region.

2. Availability

Offshore wind blows more consistently than onshore wind. We can quantify this by comparing so-called “capacity factors”.

The capacity factor is the actual output of a power station over a given period of time, divided by the theoretical power that could be generated if the plant operated at full output for the same period of time.

Onshore wind has a capacity factor of 30%, meaning 1GW of onshore wind farms can be relied upon to deliver 0.3GW of output at any time.

Offshore wind has a capacity factor of at least 50%.

For reference, coal plants in Australia, due to their age and condition, have a capacity factor of 60% and this falls further every year.

It is a common myth that coal is reliable. The reliability of Australian coal fired generators is currently at an all time low and falling.

The Coalition’s plan for nuclear power plants announced on Wednesday might look like an alternative answer to the energy availability challenge. But the plan relies on coal in the meantime and coal-fired power plants have a limited lifespan. It’s highly unlikely those nuclear power stations could be built in time to take over from coal.

The International Atomic Energy Agency publishes a step-by-step guide to going nuclear. This internationally recognised manual says it takes 10–15 years for a country to go from initial consideration of the nuclear power option to operation of its first nuclear power plant.

So the first big problem with nuclear in Australia is, how do we ensure we have reliable power for the five to ten year gap between when most of the coal exits and the first nuclear power plant could possibly be commissioned?

3. Proximity

Most of Australia’s population and industry is near the east coast. Placing electricity generation near to where it is needed is more efficient. It also avoids having to construct many kilometres of new overhead electricity transmission lines to connect onshore wind farms far inland.

Australia is leading the world in the uptake of home solar panels and batteries. This is definitely worthwhile. But contrary to Littleproud’s suggestion, it’s not the whole solution to Australia’s decarbonisation effort. For example, it won’t solve the problem of the need to electrify heavy industry.

BlueScope has stated that to decarbonise its current steel-making operations, it will need 15 times more electricity. This is the equivalent of the solar exported by a staggering 3.6 million homes – more than one-third of the total number of homes connected to the National Electricity Market.

Putting this into perspective, the Illawarra region has 130,000 homes. By our calculations, the BlueScope steelworks currently uses the same amount of electricity each day as the total solar exported by 240,000 homes – assuming generous export of 10kWh per home and Bluescope’s daily use of 240,000 kWh of energy.

Even if the Illawarra had enough homes exporting solar power to electrify BlueScope’s operations, getting this electricity to where it’s needed is technically impossible. Home solar systems are connected to the lowest capacity part of the energy grid – the wires in the street. We simply don’t have the capacity to move gigawatts of power from rooftop solar to large energy users such as steel and aluminium plants.

Australia Needs Large-Scale Energy, Including Wind

Australia needs large-scale electricity generation. The Coalition has recognised this, and is now promoting large nuclear power plants as well as small modular reactors.

The clean energy transition requires multiple renewable energy sources to meet different needs. There is no “one size fits all” solution – and there is clearly an important role for offshore wind in this mix.

We can expect to see Australia’s first offshore wind farms operating in Victoria’s Gippsland by the end of the decade.

The Coalition remains committed to the Gippsland project. But it has signalled its intention to scrap proposed offshore wind zones in the Illawarra and Hunter, if elected.

This decision would have flow-on effects. An industry is emerging around the pipeline of potential wind energy projects. The latest announcement will almost certainly heighten tensions surrounding the already bitter debates raging in our communities.

Navigating The Contested Waters Of Offshore Wind

It is common for the media and politicians to frame energy debates as a blunt binary of support versus opposition for different options, such as offshore wind. Yet genuine progress requires respectful dialogue and a commitment to finding common ground.

For the Illawarra, we argue much greater attention must be paid to the methods, models and outcomes of community engagement. We need to involve the community in constructive conversations about the nature, scale and scope of our future energy mix, which may include offshore wind.

Independent scientific research can provide the evidence base for such crucial decisions about the future of our communities and industries.

Ty Christopher, Director Energy Futures Network, University of Wollongong and Michelle Voyer, Principal Research Fellow, University of Wollongong

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

Each year, millions of Muslims from across the world embark on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The mass migration is unparalleled in scale, and pilgrims face numerous health hazards.

Mecca is considered the holiest city for Muslims. And Hajj is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, making it a mandatory religious duty for Muslims to perform at least once in their lifetime if they are physically and financially capable.

The 2024 Hajj pilgrimage has been overshadowed by disaster/tragedy, with the death of at least 900 pilgrims, mostly due to heat exhaustion and related complications.

This Isn’t The First Deadly Disaster During Hajj

One of the most devastating incidents occurred in 2015 during the ritual of “Rami al-Jamarat” in Mina, near Mecca. This ritual involves pilgrims throwing stones at pillars symbolising the devil. On that day, overcrowding and the movement of large groups of pilgrims in opposite directions led to a deadly crowd crush. More than 2,400 pilgrims lost their lives, making it one of the deadliest disasters in the history of Hajj or any mass gathering.

Another mass casualty event occurred in 1990, in the Al-Ma'aisem pedestrian tunnel near Mecca, which led to the holy sites. A combination of ventilation failure and an enormous influx of pilgrims caused a suffocating crush inside the tunnel; 1,426 pilgrims died.

There have also been other incidents during the Hajj pilgrimage over the years. In 1994, a stampede near the Jamarat Bridge resulted in the deaths of around 270 pilgrims. The 1998 Hajj saw 118 pilgrims killed in another stampede.

Over the past half-century, more than 9,000 people have died in mass religious gatherings, with more than 5,000 of these occurring during the Hajj in Saudi Arabia. India follows with at least 2,200 deaths across nearly 40 tragic events. These two countries are hotspots for such tragedies.

Why Is The Hajj Pilgrimage So Risky?

With millions of pilgrims converging in a confined area, the potential for overcrowding and crowd-crush accidents is high. This situation is worsened by the high emotion and passion associated with the pilgrimage. Pilgrims perform rituals with intense devotion and enthusiasm, which can sometimes lead to overexertion.

Another factor is the age of the pilgrims. Many are elderly, having saved for years to afford this spiritual journey. Their advanced age makes them particularly vulnerable to the harsh conditions and physical demands of the pilgrimage. The intense heat, prolonged periods of walking, and sheer physical strain of performing the rituals can exacerbate existing health issues and lead to new complications.

The extreme congestion of people also amplifies health risks, particularly from infectious diseases. Communicable diseases such as SARS, avian influenza and meningococcal disease have posed significant threats during Hajj in the past.

High Temperatures Make Mass Gatherings Riskier

A study documenting deaths and injuries at mass gatherings up to 2019 shows that, while the 1980s saw most fatalities at sporting events, such events are now rare, while fatalities during religious pilgrimages, particularly in India and Saudi Arabia, are becoming more common.

While most Hajj fatalities have been due to crowd crushes and stampedes, a new threat has emerged: extreme climate. Saudi Arabia’s climate can be brutal. During this year’s pilgrimage, temperatures soared to 50°C.

Saudi Arabia is warming at a rate 50% higher than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. The decade from 2010 to 2019 was the warmest on record, with more frequent and severe heatwaves. This rising temperature, combined with higher humidity, makes conditions increasingly unbearable without artificial cooling.

The timing of the Hajj pilgrimage, dictated by the lunar Islamic calendar, means it shifts approximately 10 to 11 days earlier each year in the Gregorian calendar. This means Hajj can occur in different seasons over a 33-year cycle. Currently, Hajj is being held during the summer months, leading to extreme heat risks.

Saudi Arabia has also experienced an increase in extreme rainfall events in recent years, particularly towards the end of summer and into the fall. These torrential downpours and thunderstorms have caused significant flooding in regions such as Mecca and Jeddah.

As climate patterns continue to evolve, the occurrence of such rainfall could align with the Hajj season, creating additional hazards for pilgrims.

What Can Be Done To Mitigate The Risks?

Unlike concerts or sporting events, the Hajj pilgrimage cannot be rescheduled or relocated. Being outdoors is an integral part of Hajj.

It’s crucial for pilgrims to perform the Hajj rituals correctly for their pilgrimage to be accepted. According to Islamic teachings, the Hajj must be conducted with precise adherence to its rituals and timings. Any deviation or omission can render the pilgrimage invalid.

The Saudi Ministry of Health has implemented various measures, including encouraging vaccinations, health checks and educational campaigns urging pilgrims to stay hydrated, use umbrellas and avoid prolonged sun exposure.

The ministry deployed thousands of paramedics and set up field hospitals to manage the crisis. Cooling measures such as misting systems and portable water stations were used.

Yet the extreme heat proved overwhelming, indicating more needs to be done. Educational campaigns can do more to raise awareness among (especially non-local) pilgrims and health-care workers about heat risks and preventive measures.

The introduction of new technologies such as smart bracelets for monitoring pilgrims’ health could further enhance medical responses.

Milad Haghani, Senior Lecturer of Urban Mobility, Public Safety & Disaster Risk, UNSW Sydney

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

Recent public health threats such as COVID, and the current bird flu outbreak in Victoria, show we can’t separate human health from the natural environment. Our research examining the link between lead exposure in house sparrows and children is another sobering reminder of this shared health burden.

Birds have long been considered sentinels for environmental health – hence the proverbial “canary in the coal mine”. Urban sparrows are particularly useful sentinels, because they tend to live in the same places as humans.

Our study focused on the lead-mining cities of Broken Hill in New South Wales and Mount Isa in Queensland, where lead exposure in children is a major health concern.

We found blood-lead levels in sparrows were a predictable indicator of blood-lead levels in children. The findings demonstrate the importance of paying attention to the health of the environment and the animals around us.

Sparrows: Our Constant Companions

The house sparrow is an introduced species to Australia. They inhabit most of eastern Australia and much of the Northern Territory and South Australia. They are particularly common in places where humans live.

Sparrows have a home range similar to the size of a small urban neighbourhood. Most pollutants they pick up are from within this range, so we expected patterns of exposure in sparrows to reflect those of children in the same area.

The physiology of house sparrows and children is, of course, very different. But their behaviours make them similarly susceptible to lead exposure.

Both are exposed to lead in soil and dust; a child while crawling and playing, a sparrow while foraging. Both are also exposed within a defined area – typically the home, backyard or immediate neighbourhood.

What We Found

At Broken Hill, we measured lead in blood samples from hundreds of sparrows captured at more than 40 sites. The birds were then released.

We compared our data to recent data on children’s blood-lead levels at Broken Hill. We found blood-lead levels in sparrows were much higher than in children. This is not surprising. Sparrows forage in soil, which is an important source of lead contamination.

What was surprising, however, was the strong correlation between lead exposure in sparrows and those of children living nearby. Where blood lead levels were highest in sparrows, they were also highest in children.

This raised an interesting question. Could sparrows be used to predict lead exposure risks in humans? We tested this idea in Mount Isa, another lead-mining city with a similar dry, dusty natural environment to Broken Hill.

We tested lead levels in sparrows at Mount Isa and used the results to predict lead levels in children nearby. Based on the sparrow data, we expected about a quarter of Mount Isa children would have blood-lead levels above the Australian intervention guideline.

Our prediction was right. The most recent data shows about a quarter of Mount Isa children exceeded this guideline between 2016 and 2018.

What’s Behind These Links?

The next step was to confirm sparrows and children were exposed to lead from the same sources in the environment. This can be determined by examining lead “isotopes”, or types of atoms, found in blood and the environment.

We measured these isotopes in sparrow blood samples and found most lead originated from the Broken Hill ore deposit. As anticipated, the highest contributions of ore lead (more than 80%) were detected in sparrows caught near mining operations where emissions of lead were highest. This decreased with distance from the operations.

Previous research at Broken Hill found the same trends for children – a significant component of the lead originated from the Broken Hill ore in children with elevated blood-lead levels.

Yet we also found evidence that, at least in Broken Hill, the correlation between lead exposure in children and sparrows wasn’t as strong as it once might have been.

Over the past three decades, a series of targeted environmental interventions have effectively lowered blood-lead levels in the Broken Hill community. This has led to greater variability in levels of lead exposure among local children.

Recent monitoring indicates children living within the same neighbourhood, and even the same street, often have very different blood-lead levels. This was rarely the case for sparrows caught from a single site.

Why? Possibly because sparrows are active over a much larger area than children. So, targeted efforts to minimise lead exposure in children – such as remediating their home environment – have little impact on sparrows.

Sparrows are also notorious trespassers. Mining land, empty lots, backyards, and ceiling cavities: nothing is off limits. These spaces pose limited risk to people and have largely avoided the full extent of lead remediation measures. Yet they still account for a lot of land and likely provide an ongoing source of exposure for animals such as sparrows.

So while interventions have reduced lead exposure in children, sparrows show us that lead contamination remains widespread in Broken Hill.

What This Means For Humans

Our research highlights the close connections between human and animal health in polluted urban environments. But it’s not all bad news. Outbreaks of death and disease in birds can spur action to prevent harm to humans.

For example, in Western Australia’s port town of Esperance in 2006, mass bird deaths were traced to lead poisoning from a nearby ore stockpiles. A clean-up ensued, preventing health impacts for the community.

Perhaps more importantly, our research shows humans are not separate from the environment and the animals around us – and we cannot escape the consequences when natural systems are modified or destroyed.

Max M Gillings, PhD Candidate, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University; Mark Patrick Taylor, Chief Environmental Scientist, EPA Victoria; Honorary Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, and Simon Griffith, Professor of Avian Behavioural Ecology, Macquarie University

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

Australia contains some of the world’s most biologically diverse and carbon-dense native forests. Eucalypts in wet temperate forests are the tallest flowering plants in the world and home to an array of unique tree-dwelling marsupials, rare birds, insects, mosses, fungi and lichen, many of which have not even been catalogued by scientists. Yet our country remains in the top ten list globally for tree cover loss, with almost half of the original forested areas in eastern Australia cleared.

This loss has been devastating for Australia’s native plants and animals and contributes to global warming through vast amounts of carbon emissions. The global biodiversity and climate change crises are inextricably linked – we cannot solve one without the other.

Earth’s ecosystems, such as forests, coastal wetlands and tundra, contain enormous amounts of carbon. But deforestation and degradation by humans is likely to send global warming past 1.5°C, even if we achieve net-zero fossil fuel emissions. Protecting native forests is a critical way to prevent emissions, which must be achieved in parallel with a rapid transition to clean energy.

What is being overlooked in current international climate policy under the Paris Agreement is the crucial role of biodiversity in maintaining healthy ecosystems and their integrity, which keeps carbon stored in forests, not the atmosphere. Healthy ecosystems are more stable and resilient, with a lower risk of trees dying and lower rates of carbon emissions.

The way we currently count carbon stores risk creating incentives to plant new trees rather than protect existing forests. Yet old-growth forests store vastly more carbon than young saplings, which will take decades or even centuries to reach the same size.

On January 1 this year, both Victoria and Western Australia ended native forest logging in state forests. This is a good start. But the rest of Australia is still logging native forests. Extensive land clearing continues for agriculture and urban development, as well as native forest harvesting on private land.

Two States Down, More To Go

The end of native timber logging in two states is a chance for new approaches to our forests, which recognise the contribution of biodiversity to healthy forest ecosystems, as well as endangered species protection and clean water supplies.

Ending native forest logging isn’t entirely simple. In Victoria, consultation on the future of state forests is ongoing. The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council is due to release its final recommendations in July.

The Victorian government has also put in place a Forestry Transition Program to help forest contractors find alternative work in forest and land management. Some of these transition programs are proving controversial.

In Western Australia, around 2.5 million hectares of the state’s south-west forests will be protected under a new Forest Management Plan. Protection of these landscapes is critical, as they have been hit by another die-back event due to drought and record heat.

These forests hold significant cultural and ecological value. Known in Noongar as “djarilmari”, they are vital habitats for diverse plants and animals, including endemic species such as the ngwayir (western ringtail possum) and the giant jarrah trees.

What About Other States And Territories?

In New South Wales, the government is looking into proposals for a Great Koala National Park, which would bring together state forests from the Clarence Valley to south of Coffs Harbour. But with no decision yet made, logging continues along both the north and south coasts, which were also hard hit by the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20.

In Tasmania, native forest logging fell sharply between 2012 and 2019. This cut emissions by around 22 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, equivalent to almost a quarter of Australia’s transport emissions.

Recent policy changes protecting giant trees will help protect some patches of forests. But native forest logging is set to expand in other areas, including clear felling of old-growth rainforest and tall wet eucalypt forest.

Native forest logging is slated to end in 70,000 hectares of south-east Queensland state forests at the end of this year, under a longstanding Native Timber Action Plan. But logging and widespread land clearing continues elsewhere in the state, ensuring Australia’s place in the top 10 deforestation hotspots.

Can Ending Native Forest Logging Help The Climate?

We’ll need to go further and ban logging in all native forests in Australia to help meet our net-zero emissions target, while meeting timber demand from better-managed and increased plantations.

Stopping native forest logging avoids the emissions released when forests are cut and burned. It would also allow continued forest growth and regrowth of previously logged areas, which draws down carbon from the atmosphere and increases the amount held in the forest ecosystem.

The natural biodiversity of our native forests makes them more resilient to external disturbances such as climate change. These forests have larger and more stable carbon stocks than logged areas, newly planted forests and plantations.

If we compare forests protected for conservation with those harvested for commodity production in the Victorian Central Highlands, research shows conservation delivers the greatest climate benefits through continued forest growth and accumulating carbon stocks.

There are growing calls to create the Great Forests National Park to the north and east of Melbourne, which would protect a further 355,000 hectares and more than double protected forests in the Central Highlands.

Net Zero: Deep, Rapid, Sustained Cuts Needed

The world’s nations are aiming to reach “net zero” by mid-century. Meeting this target will require deep and rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions as well as pulling carbon out of the atmosphere into land sinks, especially forests.

The land sector is unique in that it can be both a source (logging, agriculture) and a sink (forest regrowth, for instance) for carbon. The natural way forests take up carbon can be increased through natural regrowth or plantations.

Unfortunately, the current approach, based on IPCC guidelines, to counting this type of natural carbon storage can lead to perverse outcomes.

The carbon sink from forest regrowth only counts towards the “removals” part of net zero when it results from changes we make, such as ending native forest logging. It doesn’t count if it’s regrowth after a natural event such as a bushfire. It’s important to count only human-induced changes in our climate targets.

Tree planting, on the other hand, can be counted towards net-zero targets, despite the fact that newly planted trees will take centuries to sequester as much carbon as found in an old-growth forest.

This type of accounting – known as flow-based accounting – can mean a premium is placed on planting and maintaining young forests with high carbon uptake rates, overlooking the substantial benefits of protecting larger trees in native forests.

That is, this approach favours carbon sequestration (the process of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in wood) over carbon storage (the total carbon stocks already contained in a forest).

A comprehensive approach to forest carbon accounting would recognise both flows of carbon (as sequestration) and carbon stocks (as storage) contribute to the benefits that native forests offer for reducing emissions.

Carbon Accounting Needs More Clarity

This becomes a problem when forests and fossil fuels are included in a net accounting framework, such as the one used in Australia’s national greenhouse gas inventory.

In net accounts, emissions (from fossil fuel and land sectors) within a year are added to removals, which includes the sequestration of carbon into forests and other ecosystems.

Because this type of accounting only counts the flows of carbon – not existing stocks – it omits the climate benefits of protecting existing forests, whose stored carbon dwarfs the amount Australia emits from fossil fuels each year.

But if we separated out targets for the fossil fuel and land sectors, we could properly treat forest carbon stocks as an asset, giving us incentives to protect them.

Another problem with net accounting is it treats all carbon as equivalent, meaning a tonne of carbon sequestered in trees compensates for a tonne of carbon from burned fossil fuels. This has no scientific basis. Carbon dioxide emissions are effectively permanent, as the buried carbon we dig up and burn stays in the atmosphere for millennia, while carbon in trees is temporary in comparison.

As trees grow, their carbon storage compensates for earlier logging and clearing emissions, which is an important climate benefit. But we’re not comparing apples and apples – forest carbon doesn’t compensate for fossil fuel emissions.

Logging Bans Are Important – But No Substitute For Ending Oil And Gas

While ending the clearing and logging of native vegetation is vital for both climate and biodiversity, it’s no substitute for preventing emissions from fossil fuels.

To make this clearer, we must urgently set separate targets for emissions cuts for fossil fuels and increased carbon removal in the land sector. This will ensure phasing out fossil fuel use is not delayed by planting trees, and that the carbon stocks of biodiverse and carbon-dense native forests are protected.

Kate Dooley, Research Fellow, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne

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

When you graph electricity demand in power grids with lots of solar panels, it looks a bit like a duck, with high points in the morning and evening (when people are relying on the grid) and a big dip in the middle of the day (when many people use their own solar instead and need less from the grid). This is known as the “duck curve”. While it sounds cute, it’s become a significant challenge for energy utilities worldwide.

That’s because solar stops supplying power to the grid just before the evening surge in demand, when people get home from work. That puts more strain on the grid, and props up the case for the fossil fuel generators, creating economic challenges for utilities.

In the United States, California is showing there is a clear solution – use grid-scale batteries to store excess solar power for use later that evening.

This year, the Golden State has enough battery storage to begin pushing gas out of the grid in the evenings.

This should embolden Australian authorities, who have begun building large-scale battery storage to soak up cheap solar.

What Does California’s Experience Show Us?

Authorities in California have been wrestling with the duck curve for years. The state is an economic giant – the fifth largest economy in the world – and has one of the world’s largest state grids, with a large and mature solar market.

In 2019, large-scale batteries started appearing in California’s grid. The sector has seen tremendous growth, soaring 1,250% in five years, from 770 million watts to 10 billion watts). We can now see the results. The famous duck curve is being reshaped. Abundant solar is being shifted to the evening peak.

Solar and batteries are a natural fit. Pairing them offers a win-win model for future energy grids, turning cheap but time-limited electricity from solar into a much more versatile commodity: electricity on demand.

For two hours on one evening this April, batteries set a new record, becoming the largest source of power on the grid by discharging about 6.7 billion watts of power.

What Can Australia Learn?

California’s rapid scaling of utility-scale battery storage is due to ambitious procurement mandates and a market structure permitting batteries to help meet energy needs. Utility-scale battery storage in the US is concentrated in Texas and California, with some form of energy storage policies adopted in another 16 states.

The state’s rapid ramp-up of battery storage is a good sign for Australia. With large solar farms and millions of rooftop solar arrays, Australian energy market operators have become familiar with the duck curve.

Last year, renewables supplied close to 40% of power to our main grid, the National Energy Market, covering eastern and southern states, and Western Australia’s largest grid, the South West Integrated System. Ten major coal-fired power stations have retired in the last decade.

At the end of 2023, Australia had 2,600 million watts of utility-scale battery storage. But there’s a lot more in the wings – 11 billion watts are under construction.

Even so, more has to be done. Australia’s market operator forecasts 20% of renewable energy production will be spilled or curtailed – that is, not make it to the grid – by 2050. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Timing is going to be crucial. We need new generation, storage and backup capacity in place before more coal plants can be retired.

How Much Storage Is Enough?

Cleaning up the electric grid is a huge job. We will need a lot of energy storage, which can be provided by batteries, pumped hydro and even abandoned mineshafts. Grid batteries have the advantage of being here, now. You can install them in a matter of weeks. By contrast, building new pumped hydro will take years.

If we overestimate the role of energy storage, we risk destabilising the grid. But if we underestimate it, we could slow investment and delay the shift to clean energy.

As California is demonstrating, battery storage can play a significant role in grid reliability by balancing supply and demand fluctuations and providing backup power during outages, while also integrating intermittent renewable energy sources effectively. But it’s no silver bullet – it has inherent limitations.

Assessing storage capacity is complicated by its finite nature, with duration a key factor determining its capacity contribution. Home batteries provide up to two hours of dispatchable energy, meaning discharging at their maximum power capacity. For grid-scale installations, shallow storage offers up to 4 hours, medium storage 4–12 hours, and deep storage over 12 hours.

Adding big batteries isn’t as simple as plugging one in and charging it from the sun. They make it easier to bring more renewable power into the grid by soaking up solar or wind which might have otherwise not been used. But their value to the grid can change significantly depending on where you place it and the time of day.

To maximise their use, we could, for instance, build large batteries in regions rich in renewables and make the most of scarce capacity on transmission lines or build them near areas with high energy demand to help manage peak demand by boosting network capacity.

California requires energy storage systems to provide full power for at least 4 hours. But in Australia, most large batteries can only last 2 hours or less, as they are designed to meet short-term energy needs.

This is beginning to change, with growing interest in longer-lasting storage to boost long-term grid reliability. Deep storage projects planned or under way in Australia’s National Electricity Market include Snowy 2.0, which would have 7 days of storage supply.

New South Wales and Western Australia are accelerating the rollout of longer duration grid batteries, such as NSW’s Richmond Valley Battery Energy Storage System (8 hours duration) and WA’s Tesla-Neoen battery (4 hours).

Over the next few years, we can expect to see demand soar for longer-duration electricity storage. Once built, these batteries and other technologies will help Australia, too, banish the duck curve.

Authorities need to set clear timelines for fossil fuel plant closure and invest in new power sources to replace it, as well as boosting storage. 

Asma Aziz, Senior Lecturer in Power Engineering, Edith Cowan University

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

Late last night, Virgin Australia flight VA 148 set out from Queenstown in New Zealand bound for Melbourne. Not long after takeoff, the right engine of the Boeing 737-800 jet started emitting loud bangs, followed by flames.

The pilot flew on with the remaining engine, bringing the plane’s 73 passengers and crew to a safe emergency landing at nearby Invercargill airport.

Virgin Australia says the dramatic turn of events was caused by a “possible bird strike”. Queenstown Airport played down the likelihood of bird strike, saying “no birds were detected on the airfield at that time”.

While we don’t know exactly what happened, bird strike is a common and real risk for aircraft. It can damage planes, and even lead to deaths.

How Common Are Bird Strikes?

A bird strike is a collision between an aircraft and a bird. (Though the definition is sometimes expanded to include collisions on the ground with land animals including deer, rabbits, dogs and alligators.)

The first bird strike was recorded by Orville Wright in 1905, over a cornfield in Ohio.

Now they happen every day, with some seasonal variability due to the migratory patterns of birds.

Perhaps the most famous migratory bird strike occurred in 2009, when US Airways Flight 1549 encountered a flock of migrating Canadian geese shortly after taking off from LaGuardia Airport in New York. Both of the plane’s engines failed, and captain Sully Sullenberger was forced to pilot it to an unpowered landing in the Hudson River.

Between 2008 and 2017, the Australian Transport Safety Board recorded 16,626 bird strikes. In America, the Federal Aviation Administration reported 17,200 bird strikes in 2022 alone.

Where Do Bird Strikes Happen, And What Are The Effects?

According to the International Civil Aviation Organization, 90% of bird strikes happen near airports. In general, this is while aircraft are taking off or landing, or flying at lower altitudes where most bird activity occurs.

The effect of bird strike depends on many factors including the type of aircraft. Outcomes may include shutting down an engine, as may have happened with the Virgin Australia flight. This plane was a Boeing 737-800, which has the capability to fly on a single engine to an alternate airport.

In smaller aircraft, particularly single-engine aircraft, bird strikes can be fatal. Since 1988, 262 bird strike fatalities have been reported globally, and 250 aircraft destroyed.

How Do Manufacturers And Pilots Defend Against Bird Strike?

Most bird strikes occur early in the morning or a sunset when birds are most active. Pilots are trained to be vigilant during these times.

Radar can be used to track flocks of birds. However, this technology is ground-based and not available worldwide so it can’t be used everywhere.

The two largest manufacturers of passenger jets, Boeing and Airbus, use turbofan engines. These use a series of fan blades to compress air before adding fuel and flame to get the thrust needed to take off.

Bird strike in one of these engines can cause severe damage to the fan blades, causing the engine to fail. Engine manufacturers test the safety of these engines by firing a high-speed dead chicken at them while the engine is operating at full thrust.

The Australian Government’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority circular on wildlife hazard management outlines what airports should do to keep birds and animals away from the vicinity of the airport. One technique is to use small gas explosions to mimic the sound of a shotgun to deter birds from loitering near the runway. In areas with high bird populations, airports may also use certain grasses and plants that do not attract the birds.

Correction: an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that frozen chickens, rather than fresh ones, are used to test engines for bird strike.

Doug Drury, Professor/Head of Aviation, CQUniversity Australia

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

Our planet was born around 4.5 billion years ago. To understand this mind-bendingly long history, we need to study rocks and the minerals they are made of.

The oldest rocks in Australia, which are some of the oldest on Earth, are found in the Murchison district of Western Australia, 700 kilometres north of Perth. They have been dated at almost 4 billion years old.

In a new study, we have found evidence of rocks of a similar age near Collie, south of Perth. This suggests the ancient rocks of Western Australia cover a far greater area than we knew, buried deep in the crust.

The Ancient Continental Crust

The ancient crust of Australia is crucial for understanding the early Earth, because it tells us about how the continental crust formed and evolved.

Continental crust forms the foundation of landmasses where humans live, supporting ecosystems, and providing essential resources for civilisation. Without it there would be no fresh water. It is rich in mineral resources such as gold and iron, making it economically significant.

However, exploring the ancient continental crust is not easy. Most of it is deeply buried, or has been intensely modified by its environment. There are only a few exposed areas where researchers can directly observe this ancient crust.

To understand the age and composition of this hidden ancient crust, scientists often rely on indirect methods, such as studying eroded minerals preserved in overlying basins, or using remote sensing of sound waves, magnetism or gravity.

However, there may be another way to peer into the deep crust and, with luck, even sample it.

Dragging Crystals Up From The Depths

The crust of our planet is frequently cut by dark fingers of magma, rich in iron and magnesium, which can stretch from the upper crust all the way down to Earth’s mantle. These structures, known as dykes, can come from depths of at least 50 kilometres (much deeper than even the deepest borehole, which stretches a mere 12 kilometres).

These dykes can pick up tiny amounts of minerals from the depths and transport them all the way up to the surface, where we can examine them.

In our recent study, we have uncovered evidence of ancient buried rock by dating grains of zircon from one of these dykes.

Zircon contains trace amounts of uranium, which over time decays to lead. By precisely measuring the ratio of lead to uranium in zircon grains, we can tell how long ago the grain crystallised.

This method showed that the zircon crystals from the dyke date back 3.44 billion years.

Titanite Armour

The zircons are encapsulated in a different mineral, called titanite, which is more chemically stable than zircon in the dyke. Think of a grain of salt, trapped inside a hard-boiled sugar sweet, dropped into a cup of hot tea.

The stability of the titanite armour protected the ancient zircon crystals through changes in the chemical, pressure and temperature conditions as the dyke travelled upward. Unshielded zircon crystals in the dyke were strongly modified during the journey, obliterating their isotopic records.

However, the grains armoured in titanite survived intact to provide a rare glimpse into Earth’s early history.

The dyke, itself dated to around 1.4 billion years old, has offered up a unique window into ancient crust that would otherwise have remained hidden. We also found similar ancient zircon grains further north in sand from the Swan River, which runs through Perth and drains the same region, further corroborating the age and origin of these ancient materials.

The results extend the known area of ancient crust, previously recognised in the Narryer area of the Murchison district.

One reason it’s important to understand the deep crust is because we often find metals at the boundaries between blocks of this crust. Mapping these blocks can help map out zones to investigate for mining potential.

Remnants Of Deep Time

So next time you pick up a rock and some mineral grains rub off on your hand, spare a thought for how long those grains might have been around.

To come to grips with the time scale, imagine the history of our planet was a year long. Earth formed from swirling dust 12 months ago. Any handful of sand you pick up around Perth will contain a grain or two from about ten months ago. Most of Australia’s gold formed seven months ago, and land plants arrived only one month ago.

Two weeks ago, dinosaurs showed up. All of humanity has come in the past 30 minutes. And you? Soberingly, on this scale, your life would last about half a second.

Chris Kirkland, Professor of Geochronology, Curtin University

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

It’s hard to imagine now, but for almost 1,000 years, pregnant women in England could avoid the death penalty just by virtue of being pregnant. A pregnant woman sentenced to death would receive a stay of execution until the baby was born. It was called “pleading the belly” and often resulted the death sentence being reduced to a less severe penalty once the pregnancy was over.

Of course, anyone could say they’re pregnant without actually being with child. So how did courts determine whether it was true?

It was standard practice to assemble all-female juries, called “juries of matrons”, to determine whether a woman was pregnant and could therefore avoid hanging for capital offences. These were also features of Australia’s colonial legal system, with juries of matrons being used in trials until the early 1900s.

Exploring the history of these juries reveals how the roles of women in our legal systems have changed over time. It also shows a shift in beliefs about who is an expert in the female body, and who gets to make decisions about it.

Highly Regarded Medical Experts

All-female juries existed as early as 1140 in England and persisted until 1931. Their role in the courts was highly regarded. They were medical experts. If they found the woman was “quick with child” (pregnant), their findings were not disputed.

In addition to determining whether a woman was pregnant, they helped evaluate inheritance claims, examined females to determine whether they bore the physical marks of witchcraft, and decide whether a woman accused of infanticide had given birth. They provided expert medical testimony for the courts but were not necessarily midwives.

These women were respectable, law-abiding women. Similar to their male counterparts, serving on a jury was a high-status privilege. There is evidence that from 1233 until 1435 in Newcastle upon Tyne, an official pool of matrons existed. They held an appointed position in the court.

Australia’s First Civilian Jury

Historically, we tend think of juries as only being comprised of males, yet these all-female juries also existed in colonial America and in Australia and New Zealand until the early 1900s. In fact, Australia’s first civilian jury was an all-female jury of matrons.

In 1789, Ann Davis was found guilty of stealing items of clothing. This theft was a capital offence. She “pleaded the belly”.

An all-female jury of matrons was convened to assess her claims, marking the first time a civilian jury was used in Australia. More than 200 years ago, the 76-year-old forewoman of that jury found, “Gentlemen! She is as much with child as I am”. Her plea unsuccessful, Davis became the first woman hung in Australia.

Another notable example of pleading the belly was Elizabeth McGree in South Australia. In 1883 she was charged with killing a man. The “powerfully built man” had been drinking with her husband that evening. After the husband passed out drunk, the man left the house, only to return in the early hours of the morning.

The forensic evidence demonstrated he kicked in the door, strangling McGree while also attempting to rape her. McGree’s 12-year-old son hit the man on the head with a hammer in an effort to stop the assault. After the initial blow, McGree started to beat the man with the hammer (who got up after her son’s first blow and wandered outside, promising not to touch her again) and stabbed him with a knife.

McGree was found guilty, despite the forensic evidence, largely because she allowed the man to drink liquor at the house with her husband. She was sentenced to hang.

Once found guilty, she pleaded the belly and a jury of matrons was called. They determined she was “quick with child”, and she dodged the noose. She later gave birth to her child in Gladstone Prison. Her death sentence was commuted to ten years.

If the pregnancy resulted in birth, a reprieve from the noose was fairly common. This raised the concern among men that women might falsely plead the belly to avoid a capital offence. They worried a jury of matrons, being “naturally” sympathetic, might grant them a reprieve from death.

While there is scant evidence this was the case, to address this concern, the laws around pleading the belly stipulated this plea could only be made once. If a pregnant woman was granted a reprieve from death to have the baby, she could be executed for any future crime – even if pregnant.

Women “Too Irrational” For Courts

By the late 1800s, suspicion that juries of matrons were “soft” and that women were abusing the belly plea merged with concerns that women were “too irrational, too burdened by suckling infants, too sexually ignorant or too easily corrupted by sexual knowledge” to have a role in courts.

These concerns, along with the rise of medical professionals and the invention of the stethoscope, shifted the balance of power away from the jury of matrons and towards male medical officers.

Who had expert knowledge of the female body shifted. Until this point, women determined whether the foetus was alive by examining the women and feeling for signs of foetal movement or “quickening”. Quickening was considered the moment the foetus becomes animated with a soul, and thus fully human.

Now, the stethoscope could detect a foetal heartbeat. This was considered a more reliable method of establishing pregnancy.

The jury of matrons disappeared from the courts in Australia. It was another 50 years before women in Australia would be allowed to serve on juries. Progress, in terms of female representation, is rarely linear.

Juries of matrons were an extraordinary example of women having an official role in a justice system otherwise dominated by men. The examples of women pleading the belly provide a glimpse the role and interactions women had in Australia’s early legal systems.

Alice Neikirk, Program Convenor, Criminology, University of Newcastle

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

Alphonse Mucha’s body of work is full of contradictions.

He is most often identified with late 19th-century Paris, but was in fact Moravian (Czech). His vision for the purpose of art was for the betterment of humanity and creation of utopia, but his most famous artworks are advertisements. His style typifies Art Nouveau, a movement at its peak between the 1890s and 1910s, but his career spanned several decades from the late 1800s until his death in 1939.

Born in 1860 in what is now the Czech Republic, Mucha trained in Paris. He worked as an illustrator in Paris and Prague, and exhibited work in the Paris Salon before rising to fame with his poster works and branching out into other media. After several visits to the United States, he returned to his homeland in 1910 and remained there until his death in 1939.

A new exhibition of his work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the largest of its kind seen in Australia with over 200 pieces on display, shows the full breadth of Mucha’s work and his commitment to the transformative power of art across media.

Art And Ideals

The twin concerns of Mucha’s art are beauty and identity, specifically, national identity.

This may provide the biggest surprise to viewers who recognise his work, showing the extent of his productivity over so many decades and multiple media. Not only did Mucha compose his iconic posters and design jewellery, but he created murals for Czech municipal buildings and a portfolio of designs for interiors.

Significantly, he also designed postage stamps and banknotes in 1918 for the newly-formed Republic of Czechoslovakia.

His work is suffused with his utopian ideals and vision for a better world. For Mucha, art was for all. He believed in the power of art to make the world kinder and more beautiful. Such was the popularity of his posters that people removed them as soon as they were put up, to keep for themselves.

His works define the Art Nouveau (“new art”) style of the late 1800s, full of dynamic natural forms or shapes. The vines and flowers that decorate and frame Mucha’s artworks are also found in art, architecture and interior design.

To compose these works, Mucha used photographs of models as figure studies, which fill a wall of the exhibition. These photographs include Mucha himself posing with his daughter Jaroslava, a frequent collaborator and artist in her own right.

Celebrity And Brand Development

After the internationally-renowned actor the “Divine” Sarah Bernhardt, commissioned Mucha for a last-minute poster design, his own celebrity increased. Mucha began work on the poster for Bernhardt’s play, Gismonda, on Boxing Day 1894, and it was ready by New Year’s Day 1895. So began a fruitful relationship between the two.

Bernhardt, herself a sculptor, was rendered in larger-than-life sized posters for many of her plays, which convey the drama and tragedy of her performances, including roles as Hamlet and Lorenzo de’ Medici. When Bernhardt saw the Gismonda poster, she declared “You have made me immortal”.

Adjacent to these images conveying the glamour of celebrity and consumerism, the exhibition includes several works that highlight Mucha’s engagement with spirituality, Freemasonry and mysticism.

A curious juxtaposition in another room shows Mucha’s involvement with advertising alongside his famous rendering of seasons or artforms as allegorical figures. Where series of richly-decorated images show beautiful young women with glistening gold and silver, the largest and most eye-catching work is an advertisement for Nestlé.

By depicting lissom women in a recognisable style, products grabbed attention without necessarily being depicted, as with JOB cigarettes or Moët & Chandon.

The Slav Epic And National Pride

Since his teen years, Mucha had a sense of patriotism, expressed first through amateur dramatics and later through his artworks.

This patriotic fervour is best encapsulated in the monumental Slav Epic, 20 canvases tracing pivotal episodes in Slavic history. The work was intended to educate and inspire the Slavic people to build a peaceful future and learn from their past. It is crowned with a golden Christ-like figure to embody the new republic.

Given the fragility of the Slav Epic works to travel beyond their current home in the town of Moravský Krumlov, the Art Gallery of New South Wales instead provides digital projections set to music.

It offers a chance to experience the grandeur of the works, the richness of the colours and imagery, all treated with Mucha’s eye for detail.

A final display shows both the links to Japanese art in Mucha’s works and the broader taste for Japonisme during the late 1800s. The same influence is seen beyond this exhibition in Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, with their use of flowing black lines or a limited palette. There are also manga, showing the legacy of Mucha’s artworks now reflected back in Japanese art and album covers. Groups like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane reproduced or appropriated Mucha posters, drawing on their iconic status and melding it with a psychedelic sensibility.

This exhibition offers more than just beautiful things. It provide the viewer with a glimpse of art that uplifts, and a balm for a world in upheaval, as it did 100 years ago.

Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until September 22.

Will Visconti, Teaching staff, Art History, University of Sydney

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

“Dad, I’m hungry.”

“Hi, hungry. I’m Dad.”

If you haven’t been asleep for the past 20 years, you’ll probably recognize this exchange as a dad joke.

The term dad joke is credited to a June 20, 1987, editorial in the Gettysburg Times. Writer Jim Kalbaugh praised fathers’ telling of groan-inducing jokes to their children – or, importantly, to others in front of their children.

The practice, Kalbaugh wrote, was “one of the great traditions of fatherhood worth preserving.”

The term stayed remarkably dormant until the internet age: The first entry in Urban Dictionary was in 2004 by a contributor named Bunny; it debuted on Twitter in 2007; joke compilation books were published under the theme starting in 2013 in the U.K. and 2016 in the U.S.; and the Oxford English Dictionary added it to its entry for “dad” in 2014.

The popularity of the term speaks to its resonance. But why do so many dads embrace this form of corny joke telling?

A (Beer) League Of Its Own

To better understand dad jokes, let’s start with what they aren’t.

As folklorists who study humor, we’re used to analyzing what are called joke cycles: jokes that spread that share the same structure or topic.

Elephant jokes and light bulb jokes are examples of joke cycles. (How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.)

But dad jokes don’t have a uniform structure. Nor do they center on a specific topic, such as parenting.

Furthermore, dad jokes are not transgressive; they are not sexist, racist, scatological, profane or political. They punch neither up nor down. For these reasons, they don’t involve any sort of risk of offending people; the dad joke is almost the opposite of stand-up comedy.

In addition to being “safe,” dad jokes are generally bad, lame, groan-inducing and so forth. But so are plenty of other jokes – all you have to do is turn on the TV and watch a sitcom to find them.

‘Daaaaaaad!’

So, what makes a dad joke a dad joke?

It might be best to think of the dad joke not as a kind of joke but as a kind of performance, one that involves a teller – the dad – and an audience: his kids, friends of his kids, his spouse.

Say a family is out to dinner. Over breadsticks, a daughter might say, “Dad, you need a haircut.” Then dad responds with an unexpected punchline: “I usually get them all cut.”

Abruptly, dad has shifted the mood from casual conversation to joke. Because it’s a harmless quip, no one can recoil in indignation.

The only rule broken is the taboo against telling a bad joke. The child feels vicarious embarrassment for dad’s display of lameness. For his part, the dad knows perfectly well that it was a poor joke – but he doesn’t care.

Soft Power Plays

There’s a reason they’re called dad jokes and not father jokes.

“Father” retains the seriousness and stature of a patriarch and all of the power imbalances that accompany it: physical dominance, discipline and dependence. In contrast, “dad” implies affection and care. He’s still a male authority figure, but without the toxicity that patriarchy can often imply.

We see the dad joke, then, as an occasion for the dad to assert his fatherly privilege over his family and anyone else within earshot.

It’s a win-win situation for the dad. If the joke gets a laugh, well, good.

But if the joke doesn’t get a laugh … that’s good, too: Dad has intentionally invited this possibility, which is technically known as “unlaughter” and refers to jokes that create embarrassing and socially awkward situations. In this case, the way he flusters his children is his reward.

He’s commanding the room, as a patriarch would, but doing so in the gentlest, most playful way possible.

Telling corny jokes, of course, is not limited to fathers: Most of us are guilty of going for the joke we know will be met with an eye roll and a headshake.

Dad jokes are comfortable jokes for comfortable situations among friends and family. They might elicit a disapproving glare, but they ultimately bring people closer together.

They represent a dad at his most annoying, but also at his best: warm, silly and loving.

Ian Brodie, Professor of Folklore, Cape Breton University and Moira Marsh, Librarian for Anthropology, Folklore and Sociology, Indiana University

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

The ancestors of Alaska Native people began using local copper sources to craft intricate tools roughly 1,000 years ago. Over one-third of all copper objects archaeologists have found in this region were excavated at a single spot, named the Gulkana Site.

This is the site I’ve studied for the past four years as a Ph.D. student at Purdue University. In spite of its importance, the Gulkana Site is not well known.

To my knowledge, it isn’t mentioned in any museums. Locals, including Alaska Native Ahtna people, who descend from the site’s original inhabitants, might recognize the name, but they don’t know much about what happened there. Even among archaeologists, little information is available about it – just a few reports and passing mentions in a handful of publications.

However, the Gulkana Site was first identified and excavated nearly 50 years ago. What gives?

Archaeology has a data management problem, and it is not unique to the Gulkana Site. U.S. federal regulations and disciplinary standards require archaeologists to preserve records of their excavations, but many of these records have never been analyzed. Archaeologists refer to this problem as the “legacy data backlog.”

As an example of this backlog, the Gulkana Site tells a story not only about Ahtna history and copperworking innovation, but also about the ongoing value of archaeological data to researchers and the public alike.

What Happens After An Excavation?

In the United States, most excavations, including those that have happened at the Gulkana Site, occur through a process called Cultural Resource Management. Since the 1960s, federal regulations in the U.S. have required archaeological excavations prior to certain development projects. Regulations also require that records of any finds be preserved for future generations.

One estimate suggests that this process has created millions of records in the legacy data backlog. Archaeological data is complex, and these records include many file formats, varying from handwritten maps to pictures and spatial data.

The problem is worst for datasets that were created before computers were in common use. Research suggests that archaeologists are biased toward digital datasets, which are easier to access and use with modern methods. Ignoring nondigital datasets means not only abandoning the product of decades of archaeological work, it also silences the human experiences those datasets are meant to preserve. Once a site is excavated, this data is the only way the people who lived there can tell their story.

Archaeologists aren’t sure how to resolve this problem. Many solutions have been proposed, including the creation of new data repositories, making new use of existing datasets whenever possible, and increasing collaboration with other disciplines and with public stakeholders. One of the more creative solutions, the Vesuvius Challenge, recently made headlines for awarding its US$700,000 grand prize to a team that successfully used artificial intelligence to read ancient text.

Digital Archaeology Excavates Old Data

Of course, such a complicated problem has no single miracle cure. In my work with the Gulkana Site, I’m employing many of these suggestions through a newer form of archaeology that some researchers are calling digital public archaeology. It combines digital archaeology, which uses computers in archaeological research, with public archaeology, which honors the public’s interest in the past.

For me, archaeology looks different than what people might expect. Instead of spending my days excavating in some fabulous location, my work involves being parked at a computer for hours on end. I dig through old information instead of digging up new information.

As a digital archaeologist, I apply modern methods like AI to bring new life to decades-old data about the Gulkana Site. I write software that converts 50-year-old handwritten excavation notes into a digital map that I can analyze with a computer.

Although it is less glamorous, this work is arguably more important than excavation. Excavation is merely a data collection technique; on its own, it can’t reveal much about a site. This is why there is still much to learn about the Gulkana Site, even though it was excavated decades ago.

Analysis is the way archaeologists learn about the past, and computers make more methods available to us than ever before. In my work, I use computational mapping techniques to study the copper artifacts recovered from the Gulkana Site. Studying where these objects were found will help us understand if they were used by all people at the Gulkana Site or reserved for a select few.

Connecting Archaeology To Communities Today

I am also a public archaeologist; I believe that the past is made meaningful through the people connected to it. This means that my study of the Gulkana Site would be insufficient were it conducted solely by me, alone at my computer 3,000 miles away from Alaska. Instead, I have designed my research in collaboration with descendants of the people who lived at the Gulkana Site to ensure my research holds value to them, not just to archaeologists.

In my research, this means embedding opportunities for youth involvement throughout my project. Each year, I travel to Alaska to host a course about archaeology, Ahtna history, and technology in collaboration with Ahtna leadership and the local school district.

In the course, we take field trips to archaeological sites and the Ahtna Cultural Center. Kids learn about the artifacts found at the Gulkana Site and have an opportunity to make their own. Ahtna leaders share cultural knowledge with students. At the end of the course, students integrate what they’ve learned into a video game about the Gulkana Site.

The goal of my research is to bring new life to the Gulkana Site through digital methods and outreach. My experiences demonstrate that even a site excavated 50 years ago can reveal more to help us better understand the past. Perhaps more importantly, it can also help the next generation gain experience with technological skills and connect with their heritage. Old archaeological data is still meaningful in the digital age – we just have to pay attention to it.

Emily Fletcher, Ph.D. Candidate in Archaeology, Purdue University

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

Neanderthals, the closest cousins of modern humans, lived in parts of Europe and Asia until their extinction some 30,000 years ago.

Genetic studies are revealing ever more about the links between modern humans and these long-gone relatives – most recently that a rush of interbreeding between our species occurred in a relatively short burst of time around 47,000 years ago. But one mystery still remains.

The Homo sapiens genome today contains a little bit of Neanderthal DNA. These genetic traces come from almost every part of the Neanderthal genome – except the Y sex chromosome, which is responsible for making males.

So what happened to the Neanderthal Y chromosome? It could have been lost by accident, or because of mating patterns or inferior function. However, the answer may lie in a century-old theory about the health of interspecies hybrids.

Neanderthal Sex, Genes And Chromosomes

Neanderthals and modern humans went their separate ways somewhere between 550,000 and 765,000 years ago in Africa, when Neanderthals wandered off into Europe but our ancestors stayed put. They would not meet again until H. sapiens migrated into Europe and Asia between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Scientists have recovered copies of the full male and female Neanderthal genomes, thanks to DNA from well-preserved bones and teeth of Neanderthal individuals in Europe and Asia. Unsurprisingly, the Neanderthal genome was very similar to ours, containing about 20,000 genes bundled into 23 chromosomes.

Like us, they had two copies of 22 of those chromosomes (one from each parent), and also a pair of sex chromosomes. Females had two X chromosomes, while males had one X and one Y.

Y chromosomes are hard to sequence because they contain a lot of repetitive “junk” DNA, so the Neanderthal Y genome has only been partially sequenced. However, the large chunk that has been sequenced contains versions of several of the same genes that are in the modern human Y chromosome.

In modern humans, a Y chromosome gene called SRY kickstarts the process of an XY embryo developing into a male. The SRY gene plays this role in all apes, so we assume it did for Neanderthals as well – even though we haven’t found the Neanderthal SRY gene itself.

Interspecies Mating Left Us With Neanderthal Genes

There are lots of little giveaways that mark a DNA sequence as coming from a Neanderthal or a H. sapiens. So we can look for bits of Neanderthal DNA sequence in the genomes of modern humans.

The genomes of all human lineages originating in Europe contain about 2% Neanderthal DNA sequences. Lineages from Asia and India contain even more, while lineages restricted to Africa have none. Some ancient Homo sapiens genomes contained even more – 6% or so – so it looks like the Neanderthal genes are gradually fading out.

Most of this Neanderthal DNA arrived in a 7,000-year period about 47,000 years ago, after modern humans came out of Africa into Europe, and before Neanderthals became extinct about 30,000 years ago. During this time there must have been many pairings between Neanderthals and humans.

At least half of the whole Neanderthal genome can be pieced together from fragments found in the genomes of different contemporary humans. We have our Neanderthal ancestors to thank for traits including red hair, arthritis and resistance to some diseases.

There is one glaring exception. No contemporary humans have been found to harbour any part of the Neanderthal Y chromosome.

What Happened To The Neanderthal Y Chromosome?

Was it just bad luck that the Neanderthal Y chromosome got lost? Was it not very good at its job of making males? Did Neanderthal women, but not men, indulge in interspecies mating? Or was there something toxic about the Neanderthal Y so it wouldn’t work with human genes?

A Y chromosome comes to the end of the line if its bearers have no sons, so it may simply have been lost over thousands of generations.

Or maybe the Neanderthal Y was never present in interspecies matings. Perhaps it was always modern human men who fell in love with (or traded, seized or raped) Neanderthal women? Sons born to these women would all have the H. sapiens form of the Y chromosome. However, it’s hard to reconcile this idea with the finding that there is no trace of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (which is limited to the female line) in modern humans.

Or perhaps the Neanderthal Y chromosome was just not as good at is job as its H. sapiens rival. Neanderthal populations were always small, so harmful mutations would have been more likely to accumulate.

We know that Y chromosomes with a particularly useful gene (for instance for more or better or faster sperm) rapidly replace other Y chromosomes in a population (called the hitchhiker effect).

We also know the Y chromosome is degrading overall in humans. It is even possible that SRY was lost from the Neanderthal Y, and that Neanderthals were in the disruptive process of evolving a new sex-determining gene, like some rodents have.

Was The Neanderthal Y Chromosome Toxic In Hybrid Boys?

Another possibility is that the Neanderthal Y chromosome won’t work with genes on other chromosomes from modern humans.

The missing Neanderthal Y may then be explained by “Haldane’s rule”. In the 1920s, British biologist J.B.S. Haldane noted that, in hybrids between species, if one sex is infertile, rare or unhealthy, it is always the sex with unlike sex chromosomes.

In mammals and other animals where females have XX chromosomes and males have XY, it is disproportionately male hybrids that are unfit or infertile. In birds, butterflies and other animals where males have ZZ chromosomes and females have ZW, it is the females.

Many crosses between different species of mice show this pattern, as do feline crosses. For example, in lion–tiger crosses (ligers and tigons), females are fertile but males are sterile.

We still lack a good explanation of Haldane’s rule. It is one of the enduring mysteries of classic genetics.

But it seems reasonable that the Y chromosome from one species has evolved to work with genes from the other chromosomes of its own species, and might not work with genes from a related species that contain even small changes.

We know that genes on the Y evolve much faster than genes on other chromosomes, and several have functions in making sperm, which may explain the infertility of male hybrids.

So this might explain why the Neanderthal Y got lost. It also raises the possibility that it was the fault of the Y chromosome, in imposing a reproductive barrier, that Neanderthals and humans became separate species in the first place.

Jenny Graves, Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Vice Chancellor's Fellow, La Trobe University

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

If we were to watch the Sun rise every morning, we would notice that its location appears to shift a little each day.

During springtime in the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun appears on the horizon farther north each day. Annually, around June 20 or 21, this motion appears to stop in what is known as the summer solstice. During that time, the Earth’s axis is angled toward the Sun, and the intensity of sunlight on the Northern Hemisphere is greatest.

As a historian of astronomy, I am interested in the role astronomical events had on ancient people and continue to have in modern times. My ancestors lived on the Central Mexican Plateau, where for many Indigenous cultures, both past and present, the rising and setting of the Sun during equinoxes and solstices were sacred events.

North American Solstice Rituals

The significance of the summer solstice to the Indigenous peoples of Mexico largely depended on regional agricultural cycles. The summer solstice was not acknowledged in the ritual calendar of the Aztecs. This may be because in the basin of Mexico the rainy season begins in early May, and there was little agricultural activity in June.

In the Sierra Madre Occidental range northwest of the basin, however, the rainy season begins in late June. The Wixárika people of the region celebrate the summer solstice with the festival of Namawita Neixa, marking the beginning of their planting season. The Wixárika are subsistence farmers who grow primarily maize, beans and squash. They are known for their annual pilgrimages into the Wirikuta desert, which they believe is the birthplace of the Sun.

For many of the Indigenous peoples of the U.S. and Canada, the summer solstice is associated with a ceremonial Sun dance. The ceremony is thought to have originated with the Sioux people and spread throughout the Great Plains in the early 19th century after being adopted by neighboring tribes.

This time period also coincided with the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands, resulting in extreme cultural changes, where bison hunting and communal land use were replaced with sedentary life and farming on individual plots of land.

Suppression Of Indigenous Culture

In 1883, the U.S. government began a campaign to suppress the Sun dances, designating them as offenses for which penalties included imprisonment. The dominant culture at the time did not consider Indigenous rituals and beliefs as genuine religion – it was thus believed that they could not be afforded the protections of the First Amendment.

In the struggle for religious freedom and to preserve their traditions, many tribal leaders presented the dances as social events and celebrations of national holidays, most notably the Fourth of July. In other tribal communities, the dances were held in secret.

It wasn’t until 1934 that the U.S. government partially reversed its policy and allowed the dance to be performed again, although still prohibiting some ritual aspects.

In 1972, almost a century after the initial suppression, the Lakota Sun Dance was held once again at the Pine Ridge Reservation in its full traditional form. Six years later, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, acknowledging the right of Native Americans to participate in traditional ceremonies, access sacred sites, and possess sacred objects.

Ritual To Resistance

In modern times, Indigenous people are dealing with many other challenges that include environmental degradation and cultural appropriation.

In the Wirikuta desert of north-central Mexico, increased industrial farming has resulted in accelerated extraction of groundwater and the reduction of biodiversity. The Wixárika people are becoming increasingly concerned about the effect this is having on their traditional lifestyle.

Around the summer solstice of 2023, a special pilgrimage was made by members of a regional Wixárika council to pray for rain, protection of their sacred lands and “renewal of the world.” The region has been experiencing recent heat waves and droughts. After the ceremony, the council released a public statement in which it petitioned the Mexican government for protections for their way of life and the environment.

In the U.S., a new struggle surrounds the Sun dance: In the 1980s, nonnative entrepreneurs started the commercialization of Indigenous products and practices. This includes the organization of ceremonies and dances for profit, which are usually devoid of history and cultural context. The profits rarely trickle back into the communities, many of which struggle for basic resources. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1 in 3 Indigenous Americans live in poverty.

In response, during an international convention of Sioux people in June 1993, a unanimous Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality was passed, calling on all Indigenous peoples to resist the exploitation and abuse of their sacred traditions. This has led to limiting the participation of many Sun dances to tribal members. Today, Native Americans are still actively working to preserve their culture and spirituality.

Both the words “solstice” and “resist” derive from the Latin verb sistere, which means “to stop” or “to stand still.” Interestingly, some acts of resistance by Indigenous peoples to preserve their traditional ways of life revolve around the solstice.

The Wixárika people are asking the outside world to stop industrial practices that are damaging the environment. The Sioux are demanding a stop to the exploitation of their sacred traditions.

Jason E. Ybarra, Teaching Assistant Professor, West Virginia University

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

In our fast-paced world, convenience can often come at the cost of nutrition. This shift has led to an increased reliance on ultra-processed foods.

But diets high in ultra-processed foods are increasingly being linked to numerous health issues – including obesity, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular diseases. The poor nutritional profile of ultra-processed foods, which often lack essential nutrients and fibre, plays a significant role in these health risks.

There’s also growing evidence that ultra-processed foods may affect how our immune system works. This may explain why some studies have linked ultra-processed foods with inflammatory bowel disease and potentially autoimmune diseases.

Ultra-processed foods (such as packaged snacks, sugary drinks, instant noodles and ready-to-eat meals) often contain emulsifiers, microparticles (such as titanium dioxide), thickeners, stabilisers, flavours and colourants. While research on humans is limited, studies on mice have shown that these ingredients alter the gut microbiome (the community of microorganisms living in the intestines) in several ways. These many microbiome changes can in turn affect the way the immune system functions.

The Microbiome And The Immune System

Studies on mice have shown exposure to low concentrations of emulsifiers can weaken the gut’s mucus barrier. This can make it easier for microbes (including harmful ones) to cross in and out of the gut. Changes in the mucus barrier’s integrity also correlated with higher levels of inflammatory markers. These are signs the body’s immune system is activated.

The lack of fibre typical of diets high in ultra-processed foods may also affect the gut barrier’s integrity. The gut’s microbes need to digest fibre in order to produce short-chain fatty acids. These molecules help maintain the integrity of the intestinal barrier and regulate immune responses by dampening inflammation and helping produce T cells – a type of immune cell that attacks pathogens. Without these molecules, the integrity of the intestinal barrier may weaken and inflammation may increase.

Ultra-processed foods are also linked to changes in the gut microbiome’s composition. Diets high in saturated fats, sugars, salt and additives (such as emulsifiers) have all been shown to decrease the abundance of beneficial bacteria that help maintain the gut barrier in mice. There was also an increase in harmful bacteria that triggered inflammation.

Additionally, ultra-processed foods can turn on harmful genes in normally benign gut bacteria. This could potentially lead to chronic inflammation.

Real-World Evidence

Observational studies in humans appear to support these findings.

Research has shown a link between diets high in ultra-processed foods and signs of systemic inflammation, changes in gut microbiome diversity, increased production of gut molecules that cause inflammation and decreased production of beneficial short-chain fatty acids.

For example, one trial showed that a diet high in ultra-processed foods led to higher calorie intake and weight gain compared to a diet without any ultra-processed foods that was matched for calories and sodium levels. Over time, highly ultra-processed diets may contribute to obesity and chronic inflammation. Both factors are closely linked to alterations in the gut microbiome – including decreased microbial diversity and increased gut permeability – which may subsequently affect immune function.

Other research has shown that consuming a lot of salt – common in ultra-processed foods – can increase the number of T cells the body generates, which may increase inflammation. A high-salt diet was also linked with lower levels of beneficial Lactobacillus bacteria in the gut. These bacteria help maintain good gut health by inhibiting harmful bacteria and supporting the gut barrier.

Another study found that when people avoided ultra-processed foods, they had significantly lower levels of systemic inflammation and a healthier gut microbiome compared to when they were following their usual diet. It’s not clear how many ultra-processed foods their normal diets included, however.

It’s important to note that these are observational studies, which can only show a correlation and cannot prove causation. There may very well be other factors (aside from diet) influencing these findings.

More research is needed to fully elucidate why ultra-processed foods are so harmful. But the current evidence linking ultra-processed foods to poor health, particularly concerning gut health and immune function, is compelling. As ultra-processed foods become a more significant part of global diets, understanding how they affect our health is crucial.

Samuel J. White, Associate Professor & Head of Projects, York St John University and Philippe B. Wilson, Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor: Innovation and Knowledge Exchange, York St John University

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

Do you suffer from low back pain that recurs regularly? If you do, you’re not alone. Roughly 70% of people who recover from an episode of low back pain will experience a new episode in the following year.

The recurrent nature of low back pain is a major contributor to the enormous burden low back pain places on individuals and the health-care system.

In our new study, published today in The Lancet, we found that a program combining walking and education can effectively reduce the recurrence of low back pain.

The WalkBack Trial

We randomly assigned 701 adults who had recently recovered from an episode of low back pain to receive an individualised walking program and education (intervention), or to a no treatment group (control).

Participants in the intervention group were guided by physiotherapists across six sessions, over a six-month period. In the first, third and fifth sessions, the physiotherapist helped each participant to develop a personalised and progressive walking program that was realistic and tailored to their specific needs and preferences.

The remaining sessions were short check-ins (typically less than 15 minutes) to monitor progress and troubleshoot any potential barriers to engagement with the walking program. Due to the COVID pandemic, most participants received the entire intervention via telehealth, using video consultations and phone calls.

The program was designed to be manageable, with a target of five walks per week of roughly 30 minutes daily by the end of the six-month program. Participants were also encouraged to continue walking independently after the program.

Importantly, the walking program was combined with education provided by the physiotherapists during the six sessions. This education aimed to give people a better understanding of pain, reduce fear associated with exercise and movement, and give people the confidence to self-manage any minor recurrences if they occurred.

People in the control group received no preventative treatment or education. This reflects what typically occurs after people recover from an episode of low back pain and are discharged from care.

What The Results Showed

We monitored the participants monthly from the time they were enrolled in the study, for up to three years, to collect information about any new recurrences of low back pain they may have experienced. We also asked participants to report on any costs related to their back pain, including time off work and the use of health-care services.

The intervention reduced the risk of a recurrence of low back pain that limited daily activity by 28%, while the recurrence of low back pain leading participants to seek care from a health professional decreased by 43%.

Participants who received the intervention had a longer average period before they had a recurrence, with a median of 208 days pain-free, compared to 112 days in the control group.

Overall, we also found this intervention to be cost-effective. The biggest savings came from less work absenteeism and less health service use (such as physiotherapy and massage) among the intervention group.

This trial, like all studies, had some limitations to consider. Although we tried to recruit a wide sample, we found that most participants were female, aged between 43 and 66, and were generally well educated. This may limit the extent to which we can generalise our findings.

Also, in this trial, we used physiotherapists who were up-skilled in health coaching. So we don’t know whether the intervention would achieve the same impact if it were to be delivered by other clinicians.

Walking Has Multiple Benefits

We’ve all heard the saying that “prevention is better than a cure” – and it’s true. But this approach has been largely neglected when it comes to low back pain. Almost all previous studies have focused on treating episodes of pain, not preventing future back pain.

A limited number of small studies have shown that exercise and education can help prevent low back pain. However, most of these studies focused on exercises that are not accessible to everyone due to factors such as high cost, complexity, and the need for supervision from health-care or fitness professionals.

On the other hand, walking is a free, accessible way to exercise, including for people in rural and remote areas with limited access to health care.

Walking also delivers many other health benefits, including better heart health, improved mood and sleep quality, and reduced risk of several chronic diseases.

While walking is not everyone’s favourite form of exercise, the intervention was well-received by most people in our study. Participants reported that the additional general health benefits contributed to their ongoing motivation to continue the walking program independently.

Why Is Walking Helpful For Low Back Pain?

We don’t know exactly why walking is effective for preventing back pain, but possible reasons could include the combination of gentle movements, loading and strengthening of the spinal structures and muscles. It also could be related to relaxation and stress relief, and the release of “feel-good” endorphins, which block pain signals between your body and brain – essentially turning down the dial on pain.

It’s possible that other accessible and low-cost forms of exercise, such as swimming, may also be effective in preventing back pain, but surprisingly, no studies have investigated this.

Preventing low back pain is not easy. But these findings give us hope that we are getting closer to a solution, one step at a time.

Tash Pocovi, Postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Health Sciences, Macquarie University; Christine Lin, Professor, Institute for Musculoskeletal Health, University of Sydney; Mark Hancock, Professor of Physiotherapy, Macquarie University; Petra Graham, Associate Professor, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Macquarie University, and Simon French, Professor of Musculoskeletal Disorders, Macquarie University

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

In 2012, I watched as the remaining members of the Beach Boys played together for their 50th anniversary. As they launched into When I Grow Up (to be a Man), I reflected on the experience of listening to elderly men sing about what they’ll be when they “grow up”, in a band whose name never allows them to grow old.

This contrast captured the essence of the Beach Boys’ story – one of both joy and sadness, of hits and misses, and of friendship and family.

The new Disney+ documentary, The Beach Boys, is a two-hour journey through the band’s musical history, from the early days as teens playing music in the Wilsons’ garage up to the mid-1970s.

But while there are some touching moments, overall it felt like a missed opportunity to tell the band’s story in a new way and from a more modern perspective.

A Six-Decade Long Legacy

The past few years have seen a number of box sets and re-releases of the Beach Boys’ music, as well as the publication of the band’s first official biography earlier this year. The new documentary feels like part of this wider effort to document the band’s legacy while the surviving members are still able to participate.

This version of the Beach Boys’ history is mostly sunny, celebrating the band’s successes, its journey to relevance – then irrelevance – and relevance again.

However, it brushes over some of the more complex and difficult stories. Perhaps this is partly why the documentary unexpectedly stops in the mid-1970s, ending on the redemption of the band after its Endless Summer compilation and the “Brian is Back” campaign, without fully explaining where and why he had gone in the first place.

As a result, it misses some important threads of their story, including the menacing influence of Brian’s psychologist, Eugene Landy, the deaths of Dennis and Carl Wilson, the 2000s revival as Brian Wilson returned to the stage, and the coming together and subsequent fallout after the 50th-anniversary tour. This is a difficult story to tell in two hours.

While there are highlights, such as the ending with a touching reunion of the surviving band members at Paradise Cove, the documentary ultimately feels rather similar to previous documentaries on the band’s legacy.

The Beach Boys’ story didn’t end in the mid-1970s. In many ways, they are more loved than ever. In the past 20 years, there has been renewed interest in their music through books, articles and podcasts.

The band is still influencing new music and young artists, from the Explorers Club, to She and Him, to the brilliant new Lemon Twigs album A Dream is All We Know.

The documentary could have included some of the diverse voices from this newer generation of musicians, writers and scholars to add a fresh, exciting perspective on how their music continues to resonate.

Dreaming Of An Endless Summer

Watching Mike, Al and Bruce tell much of the narrative in newly filmed interviews, it’s hard not to notice the absence of Brian. He appears almost entirely through archival clips like his departed brothers Dennis and Carl.

This year Brian lost his wife Melinda unexpectedly and, due to declining health, has since been placed under a conservatorship to ensure he is cared for. This absence, combined with images of Brian at the vibrant peak of his creativity, is bittersweet.

At the end of the documentary Carl Wilson recalls asking Brian, “Why did you think we succeeded?” To which Brian replied: “I think the music celebrated the joy of life in a real simple way.”

While this is true, the magic of the Beach Boys’ music also lies in its celebration of joyfulness despite great difficulties, and the fierce desire to keep an endless summer alive. Their story is made stronger by the acknowledgement of the turbulent tides, as well as the perfect waves.

When I was researching the Beach Boys for my doctorate, one of the most interesting findings was that the word “now” was one of the most common words used in their lyrics, especially during the early-to-mid 1960s: “let’s go surfin’ now”; “now it’s dark and I’m alone, but I won’t be afraid”.

It’s a word that explains part of why their music still resonates: the Beach Boys’ songs exist in an endless present they created for themselves and made welcome to others. Historian David Leaf calls this the Beach Boys’ “California myth” and summed up its appeal:

For kids whose oceans and beaches were made by intersecting asphalt and fire hydrants, whose winters were filled with long, cold, snowy nights, California had to be the end of the rainbow.

For many, that end of the rainbow still exists in a Beach Boys’ record. This documentary may provide an opportunity for those new to their music and history to become curious about the rest of their story.

If you’d like to listen to some of the songs featured in the Beach Boys’ documentary, along with some lesser-known tracks, listen to this curated playlist of some favourites from their early-to-mid career. 

Jadey O'Regan, Lecturer in Contemporary Music, Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Co-author of "Hooks in Popular Music" (2022), University of Sydney

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

There’s something curious about the proposed merger between Chemist Warehouse and Sigma Healthcare.

Chemist Warehouse has about 550 retail pharmacies. Sigma has another 400.

Yet the law limits owners to just a handful of pharmacies per state. Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria allow just five, Western Australia and Tasmania allow four, and South Australia allows six.

The two families that control Chemist Warehouse initially enlisted spouses and cousins to run individual outlets. Once they ran out of relatives who were registered pharmacists and eligible to own pharmacies, they signed up franchisees using contracts that appear to give their head office a fair amount of control.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission describes its influence over franchised stores as “likely particularly strong”.

Large Conglomerates

If you don’t see that many Chemist Warehouse stores as you walk around each day, and you see even fewer Sigma, that could be because of the different storefront names they use, such as MyChemist, Amcal, Discount Drug Store and PharmaSave.

Chemist Warehouse isn’t even Australia’s biggest pharmacy group. That’s EBOS, which runs brands including Terry White, healthSAVE, Cincotta Discount Chemist, Mega Save Chemist, Max Value Pharmacy, BetterBuy Pharmacy, MyMedical Pharmacy and Good Price Pharmacy Warehouse.

And true competition is even harder to find than the presence of these conglomerates suggests.

What matters for genuine competition is who owns the chemists nearby.

When an independent inquiry examined pharmacy remuneration and regulation in 2017 it found instance after instance of all of the pharmacies in a town being owned by the same group, even where the branding was different and they seemed to be competing.

In Alice Springs all four were owned by the same group; in Karratha both were; in Broome it was three out of the four.

“We turned up to the first and said we were going to the next one afterwards,” the inquiry’s chair Stephen King said at the time. “They said: Why are you doing that? We own that one as well.”

‘Location Rules’ Keep Out Competition

Stores owned by a single owner are unlikely to compete on service, hours or price.

And bizarrely complicated location rules agreed to by the government and the Pharmacy Guild of Australia make it all but impossible for a new owner to come into a suburb or town and seriously compete.

It’d be taking a risk to summarise the rules (the handbook runs to 62 pages) but they broadly prevent a pharmacy that wants to fill prescriptions from setting up within 200 metres, 1.5 kilometres or 10 kilometres of an existing pharmacy, depending on whether it’s in a shopping centre, suburb or town.

If a competitor can’t come in and all the pharmacies in a particular location don’t compete, there’s little reason to expect them to discount. And most don’t, even though for the past eight years they have been able to.

Discounts Rare

Back when King produced his report and the government paid pharmacies an average of A$11.50 per prescription, King’s team reckoned their actual average dispensing costs were lower, for some as low as $7 per prescription.

So the health minister Sussan Ley allowed pharmacies to discount, passing on some of the fat to their customers, but only up to $1 per prescription.

Chemist Warehouse pharmacies discounted by the full dollar. Few others did.

(In New Zealand, where unlimited discounts are allowed, and the legislated payment per patient was NZ$5, Chemist Warehouse discounted prescriptions by the full $5, offering customers prescriptions for free.)

The Pharmacy Guild was unhappy about the right to discount and lobbied the government to phase it out, something it did in this year’s May budget.

Ripe For An ‘Uber’ Moment

The peculiar rules governing pharmacies ought to make them particularly profitable, except that they don’t, because pharmacies cost so much to buy. The benefit is baked into the price. King calls it the “taxi licence” phenomenon. The owners who sell get rich as a result of the rules, not the owners who buy.

Which gives new owners an even greater incentive to keep startups out.

Australia produces 1,400 pharmacy graduates a year. Many would like to own pharmacies and to offer discounts. Most will never get the chance. They are wage slaves, and they want the rules changed.

That’s how it was for years with taxis. The price of rides was high and the service was limited because of rules that choked competition. Until Uber.

All that needs to happen for pharmacies to face their own Uber moment is a change in the rules to allow unlimited discounting. The government could do it now if it wasn’t worried about a backlash from existing owners.

All it would then take would be one registered pharmacy developing a really good interface with nationwide near-instant delivery.

Machines Can Dispense Medicines

A few years ago the Productivity Commission recommended the government move away from pharmacies as the vehicle for dispensing medicines and trial machines supervised by qualified staff.

They are ubiquitous in Canada. An Australian study found they work well within hospitals.

There would still be a role for pharmacists, but in primary health care, doing some of the work doctors now do.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is wary about the proposed merger of Chemist Warehouse and Sigma Healthcare.

It says this is in part because they are also wholesalers and the combined group would have access to inside information on the pharmacists not in the group it supplied medicines to. It’ll decide by September.

Other decisions will matter more for service and prices. They concern discounting and location rules, and they’ll involve taking on existing owners.

Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

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

New ABC chair Kim Williams has said the public broadcaster should become a reimagined “National Campfire”, fostering a stronger sense of community togetherness and conversation in a world increasingly fragmented by social media.

Williams also said the ABC must understand its audiences better and warned against “self-congratulation”.

In his first speech as chair outlining his vision and priorities for the national broadcaster, Williams said the digital world had brought “a fragmentation and dislocation of effort at the ABC that is failing to deliver what we need”.

“It has altered the personality, chemistry and character of our national debates in sometimes, indeed often, negative ways. It is time for refreshed purpose,” he said, delivering the Redmond Barry Address at the State Library in Melbourne. “Our community and nation deserve better, renewed performance horizons.”

Williams said the ABC could be “an important source of national community and togetherness in a world in which social media increasingly drives a sense of singularity, self-focus and isolation”.

The ABC as a “national campfire” would be “a place where we all come together to share our ideas, dreams, friendship and our sense of common purpose to enable our country to face much of the darkness beyond, with confidence and strength.

"In this way, I see the ABC representing a ‘true north’ about ‘Australia’ and what ‘being an Australian’ means into the future.”

The fragmentation and dislocation needed to be replaced “with a common sense of purpose and a coherent sense of what sort of organisation we want to be”. This should be a “strong, confident, and modern national media enterprise”.

It should have a “consistent, well curated message and direction that will inspire conviction, grow audiences and attract committed, improved investment”.

The ABC must have a greater understanding of its audiences’ wants and behaviour and make some “tough assessments” about whether it was meeting their needs, interests and aspirations as well as it should.

Williams listed some of the priorities that stood out for him.

He said the ABC would always be first judged on the quality, integrity and reliability of its news and current affairs. “We need to be on a never ending quest to ensure those services are always striving to improve and remain as a relevant, stable ‘first partner ’ for Australians when it comes to objective reporting and thoughtful analysis and commentary on Australia and the world.”

Radio National should be a renewed standard bearer for the ABC’s “ethos, purpose and intellectual ambition”.

An increase in serious TV documentaries on national and international subjects of relevance was crucial for the ABC’s intellectual credibility and for meeting elements of its charter.

Expanded drama and comedy production and more coverage and coherent programming for the arts, expanded children and educational programming and more Australian content on iview were other priorities.

He also emphasised the importance of a revitalised ABC as “a respected agent of soft power diplomacy and programming in our region”.

“The continuing work of the ABC’s International Services team across the Pacific, in Indonesia and in other major Asian nations, is something of which all Australians can be proud.”

Williams warned against an excess of self-congratulation, which could take the place of “robust assessment of underperformance”.

“Well-run organisations must be honest about their performance. And if we’re honest, there are important areas for improvement.

"Therefore, I and my board colleagues believe strongly that the ABC must have a strong accountability framework that requires it to do better. We need to be tough-minded to achieve our goals and we need to measure performance reliably.”

Williams stressed that achieving goals would also take more investment. “I am confident that we at the ABC can make the case for it. The budgetary outlook is tight, however the rationale is plain,” he said.

He said that in addition to investment “we will need […] the courage to stand up for the principles and values that any great media or public organisation must possess.

"Those who would destroy liberal democracy always start by smashing through the gates of institutions like ours: the media, the universities, the publishers, the libraries and other sources of democratic strength. It happens in every revolution and putsch. The digital technology revolution is no different.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Earlier this month, Narendra Modi was elected India’s prime minister for the third consecutive time.

Despite being only the second Indian prime minister to win three elections in a row, the election saw Modi lose his parliamentary majority. After winning 303 seats in 2019, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party dropped to 240 seats, forcing it to form a coalition with other political parties to govern.

This development has raised questions about how Modi will govern moving forward. Modi has developed a cult following through his Hindu nationalist agenda, but his key coalition partners do not share his extreme nationalist outlook.

Some commentators have suggested Modi will have to moderate his divisive rhetoric, which has been criticised for dehumanising religious minorities and government critics.

However, early signs suggest that Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party will continue pushing his brand of authoritarian populism, undermining human rights and freedom of expression in the process.

The Prosecution Of Arundhati Roy

Soon after Modi’s re-election, Lieutenant Governor of Delhi and Bharatiya Janata Party member Vinai Kumar Saxena confirmed that the prosecution of prominent Indian writer and political activist Arundhati Roy, first proposed in 2023, will proceed.

Roy is known internationally as the Booker Prize winning author of The God of Small Things. Along with human rights scholar Sheikh Showkat Hussain, she has been charged under anti-terrorism legislation.

The charges concern “provocative” speeches Roy and Hussain delivered at a conference in 2010. In her speech, Roy argued that Kashmir was not a part of India. This has led the government to charge Roy under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for promoting separatist causes.

Violating Rights At Home And Abroad

This prosecution – 14 years later – may seem unusual, but it is not an isolated incident. In the broader context of Modi’s rule, Roy’s prosecution represents business as usual.

Since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014, Modi has pushed a Hindu ultra-nationalist ideology that does not tolerate dissent. Claiming Hinduism represents India’s “true” identity, Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party nationalists have targeted religious minorities and government critics, labelling them as threats to India.

People who have spoken out against Modi’s rule have been subjected to serious human rights abuses. Hate speech by members of the Indian government and its supporters against minorities is common. Police and nationalists have subjected minorities and government critics to violence and sexual assault with impunity. Protesters have had their houses bulldozed as punishment. News organisations have been raided.

Critics of Modi’s government are not safe overseas, either. The Indian government has been accused of transnational repression, where a government harasses and even kills opponents in other countries.

Journalists and human rights activists have had their Overseas Citizenship of India and their passports revoked. Online trolls have harassed overseas journalists.

In 2023, the Indian government faced allegations that it assassinated Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada and intended to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in the United States after they spoke out against the Modi government.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has called for the US State Department to list India as a Country of Particular Concern. This would require the State Department to identify India as a country that has “engaged in severe violations of religious freedom”. Despite the recommendation, this has not yet been done.

Why Prosecute Now?

Prosecuting critics under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act has become a common strategy. Adopted in the 1960s, and revised several times since, the act has been heavily criticised by human rights authorities, on the grounds that it is vague and undermines legal safeguards. It has become a key tool used to punish anyone who speaks out against the Indian government.

The decision to proceed with the prosecution of Roy and Hussain could be interpreted as a way for the Bharatiya Janata Party to show its continued relevance after losing so many parliamentary seats. According to Siddhartha Deb, prosecuting Roy is a means for Modi to show his “rabid attack dogs of Hindu nationalism” that his agenda will continue as usual.

Roy has been a critic of Modi’s Hindu-nationalist agenda since he took power. She has been targeted because she criticised a key element of this nationalist agenda: the claim that the Muslim-dominated region of Kashmir is part of India. She joins other journalists and activists who have been charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

Kashmir is historically disputed territory. In 2019, Modi stripped Kashmir of autonomy status. This furthered the Bharatiya Janata Party’s goal of bringing the disputed region under Indian rule.

Prosecuting Roy reinforces these nationalist goals. It clamps down on any attempt, past or present, to challenge the Bharatiya Janata Party’s narrative and its power to decide India’s identity.

The Future Of Freedom Of Expression In India

The ongoing persecution of government critics in India poses a serious threat to freedom of expression – a fundamental human right under international law.

Clamping down on freedom of expression will inhibit the discussion of political topics, as people engage in self-censorship for fear of speaking out. It will harm India’s democratic institutions by stifling debate and making it harder to hold the powerful to account. Western countries should play a greater role in pressuring Modi to drop the charges against Roy, Hussain and other government critics.

It seems, however, that Western countries are more interested in supporting Modi than criticising him. When Modi visited Australia in 2023, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did not publicly raise human rights concerns. He was more interested in securing a trade deal with India. Similar stories can be seen in other Western countries, such as the United States and France.

In Modi’s India, it seems, freedom of expression is only for approved views: you are either with his vision of India or against it. Despite losing his parliamentary majority, his authoritarian populist agenda is not over just yet.

Jamal Barnes, Lecturer, Criminology, Edith Cowan University

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

Investigation of a sacred area at Avon Downs in Jangga Country, Central Queensland, has uncovered evidence of stone tool production in a place that was traditionally restricted to women.

We detail our findings in newly published research in collaboration with archaeological expert Liz Hatte and Jangga Elders Colin McLennan and Marie Wallace.

Our excavation of the layered sediments at Avon Downs reveals a long history of raw stone extraction and tool making. In the short period of our study, we recorded about 1,500 stone artefacts on the surface and under the ground.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, as we expect more detailed evidence of tool production to be found beneath the site’s surface and in neighbouring areas.

By dating these artefacts, we have traced a 7,000-year history of continuous stone tool production by Aboriginal women – including objects traditionally associated with men. We are also the first team to ever date a sacred Aboriginal women’s area.

Hundreds Of Generations Of Tool Making

Using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence, we measured the age of individual sand grains within the artefact-rich layers of the hill slope. We were then able to date the artefacts by association.

The uncovered artefacts varied in age from about 430 years ago (before the first Europeans arrived) to some 7,000 years ago. This implies the site was used for stone tool production and possibly as a sacred women’s area for hundreds of generations.

Jangga Elders Colin McLennan and Marie Wallace have a shared memory extending as far back as at least six generations. They understand the site has always been forbidden to men, as it continues to be today.

While some of the relevant sacred knowledge remains restricted, we can report Jangga women came to Gaio Nanhi Bura (women’s sacred place) to give birth and perform associated ceremonies until the turn of the 20th century.

Some of the stone tools were used in sacred ways, such as for cutting the umbilical cord of newborn babies, says Wallace. Drill points, ochre and a grinding stone and muller are further evidence of everyday tool making and decoration.

The rare discovery of an unfinished axe, ready to be ground and polished, is also somewhat surprising, as axe making is typically associated with male crafters.

The site remains a direct link between modern Jangga women and their ancestors. Today’s Jangga women who have visited and worked on the site describe feeling a strong sense of peace and belonging, as well as the presence of their ancestors.

Railway Project Disruptions

Like many other Aboriginal sites in Australia, the Avon Downs Women’s Area has faced threats. It sits in the way of the North Galilee Basin Rail Project, which stretches from the Carmichael coal mine to the port at Abbot Point.

Planning for this project started in 2012, prompting cultural heritage surveys, assessments and negotiations with Traditional Owners.

In 2014, the sacred area at Avon Downs was revealed following a survey and consultations with Jangga Elders. The artefacts themselves, which had been partially hidden by thick spinifex grass, were discovered in 2020 during cultural heritage monitoring before the clearance of native forest.

After extended negotiations with the Carmichael project representatives, and some news coverage of the archaeological discoveries, a solution was found.

For the benefit of future study, the site was conserved as a protected portion inside the rail corridor – but not without any loss. This portion is a fragmented piece of a much larger complex of camp sites and knapping floors (areas where stone tools were shaped) – but there is no longer free access between these individual sites.

So while the railway project will not run directly through, it has still compromised the integrity of the area.

Protecting Sacred Area

Sacred Aborignal women’s sites are often difficult to protect in their entirety. It can be challenging to demonstrate their cultural value when the associated knowledge is restricted to a few members of the Aboriginal community.

The protection of these sites has been hampered by past misunderstandings of Aboriginal cultures, as well as racism, sexism and misogyny.

Throughout Australia, there are only a handful of examples where Aboriginal women have chosen to disclose secret information to protect sacred women’s sites for future generations.

When explaining the importance of protecting and recording Jangga traditional knowledge and culture, Wallace emphasised the Jangga people’s belief that such sacred places can even be dangerous:

You are not supposed to touch anything, or take away something. They can make you sick.

Jangga people maintain the sanctity of these areas in their collective memory, providing a seamless connection between living memory and the dated sequence of sediments and artefacts.

And while their current cultural traditions in the Avon Downs Women’s Area can be traced back to several hundred years, we may be able to extend this to several thousand as more archaeological evidence becomes available.

Irina Ponomareva, Adjunct Research Fellow in Griffith Center for Social and Cultural Research (GCSCR), Griffith University; Colin McLennan, Jangga Elder, Indigenous Knowledge; Justine Kemp, Senior Research Fellow in Geomorphology, Griffith University, and Marie Wallace, Jangga Elder, Indigenous Knowledge

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

In Australia, stroke is among the leading causes of death and permanent disability. Some 5% of deaths are due to stroke, while strokes cost the Australian health-care system A$6.2 billion annually.

Strokes occur when there’s a sudden loss of blood flow in the brain. This prevents the brain tissue from getting the oxygen and nutrients it needs, which can lead to damage to sections of the brain.

Timely stroke treatment can limit brain damage and improve outcomes for patients. But this depends on early recognition of the symptoms, which is not always easy.

Our team has developed a new smartphone app to screen a person’s facial expressions and detect whether they’ve had a stroke. We’ve recently published the results of a pilot study of this tool, and found it could identify if someone has had a stroke quickly and relatively accurately.

Scanning Facial Expressions

One of the earliest external symptoms of stroke can be found in facial expressions such as droop, where one side of the mouth is not activated when a person tries to smile.

However, paramedics responding to emergencies and hospital emergency department staff often miss stroke cases. Facial expressions are naturally different between people, and identifying subtle changes in a high-stress environment is challenging. This can become even more difficult if the patient is from a different ethnicity or cultural background.

With our smartphone app, a paramedic or other first responder asks the patient to try to smile, and “films” the patient’s face while they do so. An AI-based model then analyses the video recording, looking for similar signs as used by clinicians to identify stroke, namely the asymmetrical drooping of the mouth.

The app is designed for simplicity – the user just has to point the camera to the patient and press a button. To ensure the patient’s privacy, the video is analysed in real time and does not have to be stored. This device would only need a smartphone, so would be easy to deploy, and would be a cost-effective solution.

The idea is that first responders such as paramedics or nurses in the emergency department would have this app on their smartphones. When they first see a patient who has experienced a medical emergency, they can use the app to detect if the patient may have suffered a stroke in seconds. That way, treatment can be fast-tracked accordingly.

Our Pilot Study

We tested the tool on a small dataset, using video recordings of 14 people who had experienced a stroke, and 11 healthy controls.

We found it was 82% accurate, meaning it correctly identified a stroke 82% of the time. Our tool is not designed to replace comprehensive clinical diagnostic tests for stroke, but it could help identify people needing treatment much sooner and assist clinicians.

While these results are promising, we’re planning to continue to optimise the model. Our hope is the accuracy will improve as we build a bigger dataset, with recordings of more patients.

At this stage, the AI model has only been trained and developed on a small dataset, and the data lacks diversity in ethnicity and demographics. It will be essential to refine and test the app for people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Down the track, we plan to partner with clinicians, emergency departments and ambulance services to conduct clinical trials. We’ll need to test the effectiveness of this tool in the hands of the actual users, such as paramedics, to confirm it helps them look after their patients.

Dinesh Kumar, Professor, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, RMIT University; Guilherme Camargo de Oliveira, PhD Candidate, School of Engineering, RMIT University; Nemuel Daniel Pah, Visiting Associate Professor, STEM College, RMIT University, and Quoc Cuong Ngo, Research Fellow, School of Engineering, RMIT University

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

When women seeking financial help from the government-funded UNSW Tax and Business Advisory Clinic are asked whether they have ever been affected by family or domestic violence, most say they have.

In the past year this number has grown from 65% to over 80%.

And about 14% of the clinic’s clients say their tax debts are a result of intimate partner violence. These debts often arise from business debts, bankruptcy, corporate directorships and director penalty notices.

We know that economic abuse is a red flag for other forms of domestic violence. Economic abuse occurs in nearly all Australian domestic and family violence cases, affecting more than 2.4 million Australians and costing the economy an estimated A$10.9 billion a year.

Unfortunately, existing laws fall well short of protecting abuse victim-survivors from financial loss.

How Violent Partners Weaponise Tax

The perpetrators of violence can effectively weaponise the tax system by placing tax debts solely in the names of former partners, often because they have made them directors of companies or through family businesses operating through partnerships or trusts.

There is a policy assumption that family members benefit from family partnerships.

But this does not always hold in practice and can be problematic when there is economic abuse because Australian tax law requires victims report and pay tax on their “share” of the family partnership’s income.

The average tax debt at the tax clinic is about $90,000. This can result in debilitating financial burdens, exhausted savings, insecure housing and prolonged economic instability, well after abusive relationships end.

Change Is Needed

Australia has no specific strategy for relief of tax debts caused by financial abuse. There are “serious hardship” provisions in Australian taxation law, but these are outdated and in need of reform.

Usually people do not have the funds up front so the only way the Australian Taxation Office can collect debts from the abused partner is through (generally two-year) payment plans, offsetting future tax refunds, engaging external debt collectors and initiating bankruptcy proceedings.

To that end, the decision announced in this year’s budget to give the Tax Commissioner discretion not to offset against tax returns debts previously placed “on hold” is welcome.

It will provide short-term relief by enabling abuse victims to get their refunds instead of having it used by the Tax Office to reduce their debt.

Colleagues Christine Speidel, Leslie Book and I want this power extended to all forms of tax debts not just for tax debts that have been placed “on hold” especially where the taxpayer is known to have experienced financial abuse.

But this wouldn’t go far enough – the victim-survivors would still have the perpetrator’s tax debt hanging over them.

Where this happens, financial instability can drive women back into abusive relationships.

The US Shows What Can Be Done

Legislative reform to shift tax liability from abuse survivors to perpetrators is the key to helping solve the problem.

The United States has offered some form of “innocent spouse relief” since 1971. In 2011 it widened eligibility and removed a two-year time limit for requesting relief.

It is important to understand the US provisions apply because the country offers jointly filed “married” tax returns. In Australia tax returns are filed by individuals.

Australia’s laws would need to change to ensure abused women do not find themselves jointly liable. Any changes should also include debts incurred in the name of partnerships and company directors.

The US is the first and only country to do this, largely because of the advocacy of US low-income tax clinics over decades. Australia now has such clinics, funded as part of the Tax Office National Tax Clinic Program.

Australia’s adoption of US-style rules could provide a model for other jurisdictions, increase tax debt collection (as perpetrators are likely to have better capacity to pay than victims) and foster greater confidence in the Tax Office.

Most importantly, it would acknowledge that victim-survivors with tax debts should not bear responsibility for debts incurred by perpetrators.

For information and advice about family and intimate partner violence contact 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732). If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, contact 000. The Men’s Referral Service (1300 766 491) offers advice and counselling to men looking to change their behaviour.

Ann Kayis-Kumar, Founding Director of UNSW Tax and Business Advisory Clinic, UNSW Sydney

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

In 1971 on a family holiday, my father drove us to look at a huge concrete slab at Jervis Bay, on the South Coast of New South Wales. Still visible today, it was the foundation for what would have been Australia’s first nuclear power plant.

The project had just been cancelled by then-prime minister Billy McMahon who had recently replaced John Gorton. A Treasury analysis showed coal-fired power was much cheaper.

That long-ago episode is still relevant to Australia’s policy choices. Today, Opposition leader Peter Dutton revealed seven sites across Australia where the Coalition, if elected, would build nuclear power stations. Unsurprisingly, the plan has already run into opposition from state politicians, both Labor and the LNP.

The announcement answers a few basic questions about the Coalition’s nuclear plans. For example, Dutton said the plants would be Commonwealth-owned, and built at the site of decommissioned coal plants. But central issues remain unaddressed. Exactly what kind of reactors will be built? Who will build them? And how much they will cost?

As the Jervis Bay experience shows, nuclear energy can be a hard sell in Australia. Times have obviously changed since the 1970s, but significant political and economic barriers remain – and the problem of cost is still unsolved.

What The Coalition Has Revealed

The seven sites for nuclear power plants mooted by the Coalition are:

• Tarong and Callide in Queensland
• Liddell and Mount Piper in NSW
• Port Augusta in South Australia
• Loy Yang in Victoria
• Muja in Western Australia.

At a press conference in Sydney, Dutton said:

We know the government has [a] renewables only policy which is not fit for purpose. No other country in the world can keep the lights on 24/7 with the renewables only policy.

We want to utilise existing assets that we have got […] new poles and wires that are used at the moment on the coal-fired power station sites can be utilised to distribute the energy generated from the latest generation nuclear reactors.

Under the Coalition plan, the federal government would own and pay for the plants. In this respect, Dutton is following the precedent set by the Snowy Scheme – and more recently, by the National Broadband Network.

This is a welcome acknowledgement of the reality that, whatever technology we adopt, private investment is likely insufficient to manage the transition away from coal and gas in the electricity sector – let alone the massive electrification in other sectors needed to meet Australia’s 2050 emissions targets.

Dutton says he remains committed to the 2050 target for now, despite flagging the Coalition will abandon Australia’s 2030 emissions goal.

The Coalition says it will develop two “establishment projects” using either small modular reactors or larger plants. It claims the small reactors will start producing electricity by 2035, and the larger plants by 2037.

These timeframes are at odds with analysis by the CSIRO, which recently found reactors could not be operational in Australia until 2040 at the earliest.

The same report found construction of a large-scale nuclear power facility would cost at least A$8.6 billion, and possibly up to $17 billion. It said the electricity produced would be about 50% more costly than renewable energy.

On Wednesday, Dutton refused to provide a price tag for the Coalition policy. But he claimed it would be a “fraction” of Labor’s renewable energy policy.

Lessons From Jervis Bay

Dutton this week ruled out Jervis Bay as a nuclear reactor location, should the Coalition win the next federal election. But the 1970s experience still holds valuable lessons.

The Jervis Bay territory was ruled directly by the federal government – circumventing any potential state opposition. The Coalition faces a different battle with regards to its proposed sites.

Queensland LNP Leader David Crisafulli on Wednesday said he did not support Dutton’s plan for a nuclear power station in Central Queensland, and has previously ruled out lifting a state ban on nuclear power if elected in October.

NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns says building a nuclear reactor in the Hunter Valley is impossible under existing laws, and would disrupt the renewable energy transition.

Dutton pledged to work with state premiers to resolve such issues, and suggested financial incentives would be offered.

It’s unclear whether existing coal plant owners, including state-owned generators, will be willing to sell the sites to the federal government. However, Dutton said on Wednesday that, according to legal advice, the government could compulsorily acquire the sites if needed.

When Jervis Bay was on the table as a nuclear site, there was no question the federal government would build, own and operate it. The idea that something as crucial as a nuclear power plant might be entrusted to a state government, let alone a foreign corporation, was never entertained.

The national government was at the postwar height of its power and confidence. It employed the best and brightest, and was expanding the scope and scale of its activity. The Snowy Mountains Scheme, a massive engineering endeavour built under the Commonwealth’s defence power, was nearing completion.

Dutton says the government will own the proposed nuclear plants, but form partnerships with nuclear companies to build and operate them. But which companies?

Internationally, about 60 nuclear plants are under construction, mostly in Asia. The vast majority are Chinese and Russian designs, built by Chinese and Russian firms. Presumably, for national security reasons, that is not an option for Australia.

The only real contenders for large modern projects in Australia are South Korea’s KEPCO, and Electricity de France (EDF).

KEPCO built four plants at Barakah, in the United Arab Emirates, between 2009 and 2024. But no new orders for KEPCO plants outside South Korea have been announced since 2009.

EDF is building a reactor at Flamanville in France and two at Hinkley Point in the United Kingdom. The projects have suffered massive delays and cost overruns. The UK government is also struggling to organise finance for an additional EDF reactor proposed at the existing Sizewell plant.

And what about the so-called small modular reactors suggested by Dutton? This term is applied to two types of technology.

First, there are reactors of less than 100 megawatt capacity, which would be built in a factory and shipped to the required site where they would be installed as individual modules.

The most promising contender was the NuScale Voygr design, however its pilot project has been abandoned. Similarly, Rolls Royce has spiked its plans for a factory in Wales that would have progressed technology used in small modular reactors.

The term is also applied to cut-down versions of existing large-scale designs: reactors of 300 to 500 megawatt capacity compared to the traditional 1,000 to 1,500 megawatts. These are “modular” only in the sense that most parts are built in factories and assembled onsite.

The government of Ontario in Canada has announced plans for four such reactors to be built by GE-Hitachi, but no final commitment has been made.

Meanwhile, The Climate Crisis Continues

As the next federal election rolls closer, Dutton will come under pressure to reveal crucial details underpinning the Coalition’s nuclear plan – most importantly, how much it will cost.

Nothing announced by Dutton today changes the fact that nuclear energy is, according to reams of expert analysis, economically unfeasible in Australia. This is as true today as it was in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis continues to worsen. Solar panels, wind turbines and energy storage must be rolled out as rapidly as possible – and we must not allow Dutton’s policy detour to distract from the task.

John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

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

Earlier this week, Moderna announced positive results for its phase 3 clinical trial of a combined vaccine against COVID and influenza.

So what exactly did the trial find? And what sort of impact would a two-in-one COVID and flu vaccine have on public health? Let’s take a look.

Combination Vaccines Are Already Used For Other Diseases

Combination vaccines have been successfully used for several decades in Australia and around the world.

For example, the DTP vaccine, a shot that combines protection against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough), was first administered in 1948.

The DTP vaccine has since been further combined to offer protection against other diseases. A hexavalent vaccine, which protects against six diseases – diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae type b (an infection that can cause brain swelling) – is today part of routine childhood immunisation programs in Australia and elsewhere.

Another important combination vaccine is the MMR vaccine, given to children to protect against measles, mumps and rubella.

So What Did The Trial Find?

Moderna’s phase 3 trial included roughly 8,000 participants across two age groups. Half were adults aged 50 to 64. The other half were aged 65 and up.

In both age groups, participants were randomised to either receive the combined vaccine (called mRNA-1083) or a control. The control groups received a COVID vaccine and a suitable flu vaccine delivered separately.

The control group in the 50-to-64 age category were given the Fluarix flu vaccine, as well as Moderna’s mRNA COVID vaccine, Spikevax. The over-65 control group received Spikevax alongside Fluzone HD, an enhanced flu vaccine designed specifically for older adults.

The study evaluated safety, including any reactions after vaccination, and the protective immune response the vaccines produced.

Moderna reported the combined vaccine elicited a higher immune response in both age groups against COVID and three influenza strains, compared to the co-administered shots.

From a safety perspective, the combined vaccine was well tolerated. Adverse reactions were similar across the experimental and control groups. The most common side effects included muscle aches, fatigue and pain at the injection site.

While the trial results are promising, they are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, which means independent experts haven’t yet verified them. And further research may be required to test how the combined vaccine works in younger age groups.

What Are The Advantages Of Combined Vaccines?

We cannot overstate the importance of vaccines. Each year they prevent up to 5 million deaths around the world from a range of life-threatening infections.

At the same time, we can always do more to boost vaccination uptake, especially in areas with fewer resources and among vulnerable populations.

Combination vaccines have a variety of advantages. For example, the need for fewer injections reduces costs for health systems, decreases storage requirements and reduces the burden on parents. All of these things can be especially valuable in low-income countries.

Notably, research shows combination vaccines make it more likely people will take up routine vaccinations.

Two Important Diseases

Every year, particularly during the winter months, millions of people contract respiratory infections. Indeed, parts of Australia are reported to be facing rapid increases in flu cases at the moment.

According to the World Health Organization, globally, roughly 3 million to 5 million people experience severe influenza annually, and around 650,000 people will die from the disease.

COVID has resulted in more than 7 million deaths around the world to date.

As the COVID pandemic has continued, we’ve seen pandemic fatigue setting in, as some people appear to have become complacent about their COVID shots. A 2023 study in Australia found 30% of the surveyed population were hesitant about and 9% were resistant to taking COVID boosters.

Uptake of the flu vaccine, which many people are in the habit of getting annually, may be higher. That said, in Australia the current flu vaccine rates for 2024 are still fairly low: 53% for adults over 65 years, 26% for those aged 50 to 65, and lower for younger age groups.

A two-in-one COVID and flu vaccine could be an important public health tool to increase vaccine coverage against these two important diseases. Beyond protecting individuals’ health, this would have flow-on benefits for the economy and our health system.

Moderna said it will present its trial data at an upcoming medical conference and submit it for publication. The company has also said it will soon apply for regulatory approval, with the possibility of supplying the combined vaccine in 2025.

At the same time, Pfizer and BioNTech also have late-stage trials in progress for a combined COVID and flu vaccine. We will await further developments with interest.

Jaya Dantas, Deputy Chair, Academic Board; Dean International, Faculty of Health Sciences, and Professor of International Health, Curtin University

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

Redistributions are held to keep the number of enrolled voters in each seat roughly equal. In Australia, this equal population per seat is possible for a particular state or territory’s seats, but not for all seats in the House of Representatives.

ABC election analyst Antony Green said in June 2023 that all original states are entitled to at least five House seats, so Tasmania has five seats even though its population should only give it three.

Redistributions are needed when the population of a state increases or decreases relative to the overall Australian population, such that the state is entitled to either add a seat, or a seat is removed from that state.

A year after the first sitting of parliament following an election, the electoral commission determines state seat entitlements based on the latest available population data.

In June 2023, the Australian Bureau of Statistics published population estimates nationally and for all states. Green said these population estimates would require the loss of a seat in both Victoria and New South Wales, while Western Australia would gain a seat. The overall size of the House would fall from 151 to 150 seats since the 2022 election.

These changes occurred because, relative to Australia’s overall population, Victoria and NSW’s population decreased, mainly due to the COVID immigration shutdowns. WA’s population increased relative to Australia.

When states are to lose seats, lower-enrolment seats within that state are targeted for axing. States that gain seats have the new seat created in a high-enrolment area. Axing or creating seats causes knock-on effects to existing seats, which either have to absorb the axed seats, or pull back from created seats.

Redistributions also take place in states that haven’t had a change in House seat numbers for at least seven years, to correct inequalities in population dispersion within that state. There is currently a redistribution in progress for the Northern Territory, which has had two seats for a long time.

Changes From The Victorian, NSW And WA Redistributions

The determination of state seat entitlements began the redistribution process in Victoria, NSW and WA. On May 31, the electoral commission released draft redistributions for Victoria and WA, and on June 14 the NSW draft redistribution was released. I covered the Victorian and WA redistributions on May 31 and the NSW redistribution on June 17.

These redistributions are drafts, and it is expected to take a few more months before they are finalised. Changes can occur from the draft redistributions to the final ones. Until finalisation, redistributions cannot be used at an election.

In Victoria, the Labor-held seat of Higgins was abolished, while the new seat of Bullwinkel was created in WA. In NSW, North Sydney, held by teal independent Kylea Tink, was abolished. This means that unless MPs in abolished seats can win a different seat or become a senator, they will not be in the next parliament.

Using booth data, election analysts are able to estimate new margins for seats after a redistribution. Sometimes this results in a seat currently held by one party becoming a notional seat for another party. For example, a marginal Liberal-held seat may now include strong Labor booths that were previously in another seat, so it becomes a notional Labor seat.

According to estimates from William Bowe (The Poll Bludger), the newly created WA seat of Bullwinkel is notionally Labor by a 52.9–47.1 margin against the Liberals. All other WA seats will be held by their previous party, with the biggest change a 4.7-point lift in Labor’s Hasluck margin to 60.7–39.3.

However, I previously wrote that Labor would be worried about a large swing to the Coalition in WA, as WA has been historically weak for Labor but had over a 10% swing to Labor to be Labor’s best state at the 2022 federal election. If there is a large swing to the Coalition at the next election, Bullwinkel and Tangney (also on a 52.9–47.1 Labor margin) are vulnerable.

In Victoria, while Labor-held Higgins was abolished, Liberal-held Menzies will be notionally Labor by 50.7–49.3 after Labor gained 1.3 points, and the Liberal-held Deakin lineball at 50.0–50.0 after Labor gained 0.2 points. But Labor’s margin in Chisholm was reduced to 52.8–47.2, a 3.6-point swing to the Liberals.

Teal independent-held seats of Goldstein and Kooyong now take in areas that did not have a teal candidate at the previous election. The Poll Bludger’s estimates imply that Kooyong (held by Monique Ryan) will be harder for the teal to retain than Goldstein (held by Zoe Daniel).

In NSW, Tink’s North Sydney was abolished. The Poll Bludger’s estimates say Bennelong was the only change in notional party alignment, with a 1.1% swing to the Liberals barely putting them ahead of Labor. In Bradfield, the Liberal margin over a teal independent was reduced to 52.5–47.5, a 1.8-point swing to a teal. The Liberal-held Hughes swung 3.7 points to Labor, with the Liberals still ahead by 53.3–46.7.

The Redistribution’s Impact On The Next Election

I don’t think the changes to the electoral map will have a major impact on the next election, due by May 2025. If Labor loses, it’s likely that anger over the continued high cost of living will be far more important than the redistributions.

Analyst Kevin Bonham, using the draft redistributions, said his seat model would give Labor 79 of the now 150 House of Representatives seats if there was no two-party swing from the 2022 election, which Labor won by 52.1–47.9. This would be a one-seat gain for Labor from the current House.

Assuming no changes to the crossbench, Labor would have an even chance of retaining its majority with a 51.1–48.9 national two-party win, about where polls are now. The Coalition would need a 51.3–48.7 two-party split in its favour to win more seats than Labor, and a 53.4–46.6 split to win a majority.

Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

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