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Avian influenza viruses have infected the world’s birds for millennia. We first became aware of them in the 19th century, when mass deaths of poultry triggered interest in what was then called “fowl plague”.

But in 2021, something fundamental changed. As the world grappled with COVID lockdowns and economic chaos, the birds of the world were encountering a new strain, known formally as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 2.3.4.4.b. It spread easily and was capable of causing disease and death in a far wider number of bird species than previously seen before.

So far, it has triggered the culling of half a billion farmed birds and killed millions of wild birds. (This is a different strain to the HPAI H7 strains which have infected poultry farms in Australia).

If this new strain gets to Australia, carried on a migratory wild bird, it could pose similar risks to our unique wildlife. But we haven’t been sitting still. Australian researchers, governments, veterinarians and wildlife rehabilitators have been urgently preparing for its arrival.

Why is this strain so bad?

This strain has now made it to every part of the world bar Australia, New Zealand and Pacific nations. The virus killed many birds in the northern hemisphere before crossing to the Americas. In South America it proved particularly lethal, infecting and killing massive numbers of birds and marine mammals such as sea lions.

Many strains of bird flu are “low pathogenicity”, meaning they tend not to cause severe disease. But these strains can evolve into highly pathogenic strains if they spill over from wild birds into poultry, as we’re seeing with the current outbreaks in poultry farms in Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT.

Prior to 2024, Australia had experienced eight previous outbreaks of H7 HPAI in poultry, all of which were eradicated by culling poultry and isolating farms.

This new H5N1 2.3.4.4.b strain is much more worrying for our wildlife, because it transmits very easily between wild birds. It has proven it can kill mammals, including marine mammals, predators and scavenger species that eat birds.

It also poses a real threat to our poultry industries. If H5N1 2.3.4.4b were to enter Australia, we could see more outbreaks in domestic poultry, which in turn could affect the supply of chicken and eggs – both very popular sources of animal protein in Australia.

Given the virus is present worldwide, including in Antarctica, you might wonder why it hasn’t made it to Australia yet.

Avian influenza travels most easily in waterfowl such as ducks. Australia’s waterfowl are not migratory and only travel short distances between Australia and countries to the north.

But Australia is on the path of several flyways from Asia, along which millions of shorebirds migrate every year in spring. Some seabirds also migrate from the Atlantic.

How are we preparing?

The devastation the virus has caused overseas has given Australia time to prepare.

We can’t stop wild birds from migrating here. But we can slow the spread and protect at-risk wildlife from other threats such as invasive predators, giving them the best chance to survive the virus if it arrives.

Around Australia and on our sub-Antarctic islands, a network of veterinarians, researchers, government officials, rangers and wildlife rehabilitators is on alert looking for sick birds with signs, such as respiratory illness.

If a bird showing these signs is spotted, they will call the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline (1800 675 888). Members of the public are also encouraged to report sightings.

Other plans for the virus include:

• restricting human movements in and out of virus-affected areas, where appropriate
• surveillance to see how the virus is moving with wildlife
• triage and clinical responses to the virus, including euthanasia for dying birds.

We have created information toolboxes to help wildlife managers and carers to manage risk and reduce transmission if the virus is confirmed here. These include improving baseline biosecurity, clearing away carcasses, restricting human movement to reduce spread, and euthanasing dying birds.

For threatened species, we can explore the merits of vaccination trials for captive birds. New Zealand authorities are trialling this method.

But such vaccination must ultimately serve the welfare interests of wildlife. There are many complexities to consider.

Globally, vaccination of free-ranging wild birds has occurred for just one species – the endangered Californian condor, considered particularly at risk because of its low numbers.

Black swan event?

Overseas, waterfowl, shorebirds and seabirds have proven especially susceptible to the virus. Avian predators are also at risk if they eat sick birds or their carcasses.

Specific data on Australian species are limited, but at least one local species, the black swan, has been found to be highly vulnerable to the virus because they lack some protective genes.

The sheer variation of our ecosystems might offer some protection. We have many transient bodies of water, such as Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre. If the virus arrived during a period of drought, it could have a different impact than if it arrived during flooding rains, which fill lakes and encourage movement of wild waterfowl.

Because this strain is very new, we don’t know yet what the long term outcome will be.

It’s possible birds which survive an infection will become immune and survive to breed. But some species and populations may not be able to survive this first assault.

This threat is new territory for Australia. Many of the other animal diseases we worry about and prepare for only attack one species, such as African swine fever, or only affect non-native wildlife (such as foot and mouth disease). But this strain of bird flu has attacked over 500 bird species and is infecting a growing number of mammal species.

What can you do? Keep an eye out for any sick or dead birds – and call the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline if you do. 

Tiggy Grillo, COO, Wildlife Health Australia; Adjunct Lecturer, Charles Sturt University and Simone Vitali, Wildlife Health Australia Program Manager (Emergencies); Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Murdoch University

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

The condition of Australia’s environment continues to decline. Many Australians wonder if it’s possible to reverse this depressing trajectory – and our landmark assessment released today shows the answer is yes.

Our report, launched today by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, demonstrates how repairing Australia’s landscapes is not only achievable and affordable, it’s in the national interest.

Using the best available science and expert advice, we identified 24 actions worth A$7.3 billion each year over 30 years, which could repair much of the past two centuries of degradation.

For context, the investment amounts to about 0.3% of Australia’s gross domestic product. It’s also far less than the estimated $33 billion a year Australians spend on their pets.

This report is the most comprehensive of its kind undertaken in this country. It is a tangible, practical pathway which challenges the notion that repairing our continent is a task too big and expensive to tackle.

The strong case for repair

Australia’s population is projected to grow to 37 million by 2052. Earth’s population will reach ten billion in the same period. Global food demand will increase and competition for land will intensify.

Climate change makes the environmental repair task more pressing. The Australian continent has already warmed almost 1.5°C since records began. We have experienced shifts in rainfall patterns, droughts, bushfires, flooding and more. Extreme weather is predicted to become even more frequent and severe.

About half Australia’s land surface has been significantly modified since European settlement, and at least 19 ecosystems are collapsing due to climate change and other pressures.

And the capacity of agricultural landscapes to maintain productivity has significantly declined, and they are becoming less able to support native species and ecosystems.

Our key findings

Our assessment focuses on five key landscape components identified as degraded in successive State of the Environment reports: soils, inland water, native vegetation, threatened species and coastal environments.

We defined objectives for each component, and actions to meet them, based on public policy ambitions and expert advice. We then sourced data to identify where in the landscape each action is required, and the spending it would entail. Independent experts reviewed our findings.

Our blueprint identifies 24 practical actions needed now to repair Australia’s degraded landscapes. See the below infographic for full details.

The list includes:

• applying lime and gypsum to agricultural soils to improve productivity

• remediating high-risk gullies

• encouraging landholders to restore vegetation along the banks of rivers, streams, lakes and wetlands

• restoring 13 million hectares of degraded native vegetation

• addressing key threats and restoring habitat for threatened species

• maintaining or improving the condition of degraded salt marsh ecosystems.

We estimate investment of $7.3 billion each year (in 2022 dollars) is needed from 2025 to 2054 to deliver these all actions. That includes:

• $580 million to repair the productive base of agricultural soils

• $2.9 billion to fix fragmented, degraded river systems

• $1.7 billion to restore ecosystems to at least 30% of their pre-1750 extent

• $1.2 billion to mitigate imminent extinction risk and ensure medium-term survival of Commonwealth-listed threatened species

• $35 million to maintain and improve estuary health

• $640 million in transaction costs (such as legal fees, data and compliance)

• $250 million a year to maintain the improvements (such as monitoring, and management of pests, weeds and fire).

How will Australia pay for this?

We cannot accurately measure the true cost of environmental degradation to the environment, people and the economy. But evidence suggests these costs far outweigh the cost of nature repair.

Our report proposes measures for Australia that are feasible and fiscally responsible.

And they also address multiple objectives. For example, restoring native vegetation across 13 million hectares would also abate almost one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent – equal to 18% of Australia’s net emissions over the next 30 years.

Through carbon markets, private landholders could be paid to regenerate native vegetation. Our analysis shows this could generate 7% to 15% of the investment needed.

The investment we propose would also support employment and jobs in the short- and long-term. This would promote a strong circular flow of income, generating government revenue in the form of income tax, GST and associated revenues.

A broad range of financing mechanisms is needed to enact this plan. As a starting point, we suggest:

• significantly increased public investment for stewardship programs, Indigenous land managers and threatened species recovery

• revenue-neutral changes to the tax system to encourage conservation and remove subsidies that degrade the environment

• public investment in the federal government’s green bond program, which will enable investors to back public projects that contribute to environmental repair

• using markets and other emerging private sector solutions to encourage conservation on private land

• fundraising via philanthropy.

Indigenous Australians are key

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been stewards of Country for more than 60,000 years and have continuing cultural connections to land and waters.

We propose four key measures to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples leading roles in managing and repairing landscapes:

• increase Indigenous ownership and management of land and water

• recognise the value of traditional knowledge in areas such as managing species and using fire to maintain the health of Country

• establish and improve programs to employ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to repair and manage Country, such as expanding Indigenous ranger programs and providing resources and long-term funding

• ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are supported to generate meaningful, commercially sustainable employment and businesses on Country through land and water ownership.

A healthier, more resilient Australia

All Australians are stewards of this unique land and seascape. It is our responsibility to ensure nature is preserved for its own sake, and for current and future generations.

Our plan expands on successful efforts to conserve the environment. It won’t fix everything – for instance, it did not address air quality, urban settlements or marine environments.

But the actions we propose – if done together, at scale, and built into broader public policy reforms – will leave our landscapes healthier and more resilient.

Australians don’t have to choose between a healthy environment and a productive economy – we can have both.

The report underpinning this article was prepared by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists with input from more than 60 experts. See the report for the full list of contributors.

Jamie Pittock, Professor, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University; Bradley J. Moggridge, Professor of Science and Associate Dean (Indigenous Leadership and Engagement), University of Technology Sydney, and Martine Maron, Professor of Environmental Management, The University of Queensland

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

If not the root of all evil, chemical pollution is surely responsible for a good chunk of it. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes when reading the news and the latest research.

From hormone disruptors in our rivers and drugs in our drinking water, to PFAS and microplastics just about everywhere, it seems there’s plenty to worry about.

The list of potential health effects is also scary. Pollution is linked to infertility, cancer, reduced immune function, and more.

So it’s not surprising many people feel chemicals are intrinsically bad, though that’s not the case. But how worried should we really be, and can we reduce the risks?

In the air we breathe

Globally, pollution is a serious problem – particularly air pollution.

The Lancet Commission on pollution and health estimates pollution is responsible for about 9 million deaths a year and economic losses in the trillions of dollars.

The burden of disease falls heavily on developing countries, but even in Australia air pollution causes significant harm.

Fortunately, we can monitor air pollution, even at home. We know what levels are dangerous, and how to reduce exposure. But what about things we can’t monitor, or know less about?

The water we drink

In June, the Sydney Morning Herald implied tap water throughout Australia was contaminated with alarming levels of PFAS. But the levels detected fall within Australia’s drinking water guidelines. They just happen to exceed the United States’ new safety thresholds, which don’t come in for five years.

PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a group of highly persistent chemicals characterised by carbon-fluorine bonds.

Although PFAS in your water sounds awful, we don’t know if water is the main route of exposure or what the actual risks are.

PFAS is also in dust, cookware, waterproof clothing, cosmetics, and other consumer products.

The presence of PFAS is an emotive subject, thanks to films such as Dark Waters and documentaries like How to Poison a Planet.

Found everywhere from Mount Everest to the ocean depths, PFAS have been associated with negative health effects including cancer and reduced immune response.

What is generally missing from both research papers and news reports is context – details on the dose and duration of exposure needed to cause such effects.

The levels of PFAS needed to cause health effects tend to be orders of magnitude higher than those typically found in the environment. So while it’s not great that we’ve polluted the entire planet with these compounds, the health risks for most of us are likely to be low.

New technologies are being developed to reduce PFAS in water and soil.

But given their widespread distribution and extreme persistence, we should perhaps reevaluate PFAS risks and regulations (as the National Health and Medical Research Council is doing).

If you want to reduce your exposure, you can consider using water filters and avoid non-stick pans and other products that contain PFAS.

Many non-stick pans now boast they are PFAS-free. Sadly this is not always the case. Ceramic pans can be a good, PFAS-free option, but these are actually silica-based and may not last as long.

And the food we eat

Everyone knows pesticides give you cancer right? Well, actually no. This is another area where public perception has jumped ahead of the science.

The usual suspect, glyphosate, is usually claimed to cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But this is a catch-all term covering more than 60 different types of lymphoma, which can vary significantly.

Multiple independent regulatory agencies worldwide list glyphosate as non-carcinogenic. A study of more than 54,000 people who applied pesticides for a living found no link to cancer.

Small amounts of pesticide residue are permitted on our food, but concentrations are in the parts per trillion (for reference, a trillion seconds is 31,710 years).

The evidence suggests parts per trillion of pesticides do not increase the risk of cancer in people. But if you want to reduce your exposure anyway, washing and cooking vegetables and washing fruit is a good way to go.

Microplastics are everywhere

Microplastics (plastic particles less than 5mm in diameter) are now found everywhere from the top to the bottom of the planet.

They have been reported in food and drink, including salt, seafood, various meats and plant-based proteins, fruit and vegetables as well as bottled and tap water.

Again, it sounds scary – but several reports of microplastics in food and blood have been firmly criticised by other scientists. The widely (mis)reported claim that we eat a credit card’s worth of microplastic each week was debunked by YouTuber Hank Green.

The World Health Organization recently concluded evidence of the health effects of microplastics is insufficient. However, they also make the point that this is not the same as saying microplastics are safe. We need more data to understand the risks.

Avoiding plastic bottles and food packaging can reduce exposure, as can having hard floors rather than carpets, and regular vacuuming.

We need new recycling technology to reduce plastic waste. Ultimately, we may need to wean ourselves off plastic entirely.

Where to from here?

I am not suggesting we should not worry about pollution – we should. But just because something is present does not automatically mean it is causing harm. To my mind, air pollution is the biggest worry so far, with more proven health effects than microplastics or PFAS.

Scary headlines generate clicks, views and likes but they rarely reflect the science.

We must understand relative exposure and the nuances of risk assessment. We need sensible debate, evidence-based approaches and new techniques for monitoring and assessing the impacts of, low (parts per trillion) pollutant concentrations.

This should help prevent and mitigate potentially harmful exposures in future.

Oliver A.H. Jones, Professor of Chemistry, RMIT University

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

Greater stick-nest rats (or “stickies” as they are affectionately named) are one of Australia’s most adorable small native mammals.

These guinea-pig sized rodents build large communal nests which can be a metre high and 1.5 metres wide, using their sticky urine to glue sticks and leaves together. Remnants of their nests from thousands of years ago have been found in caves, with plant fragments protected by the urine. They live in arid, almost waterless parts of Australia, and live on fruit and succulents.

The greater stick-nest rat once roamed across the Nullarbor, from northern Victoria through to Exmouth in Western Australia. But their nests weren’t enough to protect them from feral cats and foxes. By the 1930s, they had been driven to extinction on the Australian mainland. A tiny population of 1,000 survived only on the Franklin Islands, offshore from Ceduna in South Australia. A related species, the lesser stick-nest rat, has likely gone forever.

Our new research on surviving stick-nest rats has found something unusual – these rodents are chowing down on one of Australia’s worst invasive plants, African boxthorn.

For the stick-nest rats, though, this plant spells opportunity.

Of island refuges and thorny bushes

To look at, the Franklin Islands don’t seem like prime wildlife territory. But these low-lying, shrub covered islands in the Nuyts Archipelago suit the greater stick-nest rat just fine. Conservationists used these survivors to seed new populations on two other South Australian islands, Reevesby and Saint Peter Islands, as well as a feral-proof fenced reserve in Western Australia.

Their total numbers have now grown to about 3,000, enough for its status on the international Red List of threatened species to be moved from endangered to vulnerable.

But is this sustainable? Can offshore islands and onshore fenced reserves free of foxes and cats keep stick-nest rats safe indefinitely?

To find out, we investigated what food the animals prefer in one of their newer homes, Reevesby Island in South Australia’s Spencer Gulf.

To our surprise, we found these rats seemed most at home amongst African boxthorn, an invasive weed of national significance. Even more unexpectedly, they were turning up their noses at the native vegetation around them in favour of this noxious weed.

Why was this surprising? Of all the weeds in Australia, African boxthorn is one of the worst. Native to South Africa, this shrub defends itself against giraffes and other herbivores with spines up to 15 centimetres long.

In Australia, birds and small mammals feed on its berries and transport its seeds to new areas. Mature plants can grow up to 5 metres tall, forming impenetrable thickets armoured with large thorns. On farms, it disrupts livestock movements, blocks access to water sources and takes over land. In natural areas, it can offer a safe haven for rabbits.

But none of this fazes the greater stick-nest rat. On Reevesby, we found stick-nests deep inside the boxthorn, well-manicured entrances to other nests in thickets too dense to see into, and large amounts of poo pellets showing the native rodents were feeding in the area.

The boxthorn bed and breakfast?

So, were the animals just living in the boxthorn, or did they use it as a food source as well? To find out, Annie Grace Kraehe spent a week surveying vegetation and collecting poo samples from around their nests. She then spent months sifting through the samples and identifying plant fragments under a microscope.

The work was worth it because it gave us a clear answer: African boxthorn makes up just over half of the stick-nest rat’s diet on the island, despite making up only a tenth of the available vegetation. They were also using the thorny branches in their nests.

What does this mean for conservation?

The difference between hero and villain is often a matter of perspective. The same can be said for boxthorn.

Stick-nest rats appear to love boxthorn for the same reasons we hate it. Its famous thorns and dense growth offer excellent cover for a small furry mammal. Prey animals such as rodents don’t like to venture far for a meal if they can avoid it, so they make like Hansel and Gretel and eat the house.

It’s not unknown for invasive weeds to benefit some native species, especially when the ecosystem is already disturbed.

Research on little penguin colonies in Tasmania has found the birds seem to benefit from the dense growth and fearsome thorns of African boxthorn, which provides better protection against predators compared to native vegetation.

Similarly, invasive blackberry and lantana are often hated due to the way they form impenetrable thickets which push out native plants. But lantana and blackberry have been found to provide critical habitat and food sources for bandicoots, blue wrens, antechinuses and bush rats.

In fact, these food-providing protective thickets have made it possible for these species to thrive in severely disturbed ecosystems, such as the suburbs of Adelaide and Melbourne.

Costs and benefits

Does this mean we should avoid eradicating boxthorn if small endangered mammals survive nearby? We can’t say either way for now.

We need to do more research to see if the greater stick-nest rat truly benefits from African boxthorn, and weigh any benefit against the damage boxthorn does to ecosystems. If, for instance, the boxthorn keeps growing on Reevesby Island, it could push out native plants and trigger an ecosystem collapse. In that scenario, boxthorn might go from benefit to threat.

What our research does show is how adaptable these social rodents are. That gives us hope for their re-establishment elsewhere – as long as feral predators are controlled or absent.

Annie Grace Kraehe, PhD candidate, Australian National University; Kathryn Hill, Research associate, plant ecophysiology, University of Adelaide; Robert S. Hill, Executive Dean, Faulty of Sciences, University of Adelaide, and Vera Weisbecker, Associate Professor, Flinders University

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

The past century of human-induced warming has increased rainfall variability over 75% of the Earth’s land area – particularly over Australia, Europe and eastern North America, new research shows.

The findings, by Chinese researchers and the UK Met Office, were published overnight in the journal Science. They provide the first systematic observational evidence that climate change is making global rainfall patterns more volatile.

Climate models had predicted this variability would worsen under climate change. But these new findings show rainfall variability has already worsened over the past 100 years – especially in Australia.

Past studies of the observational record either focused on long-term average rain, which is not systematically changing globally, or rainfall extremes where changes are hard to measure accurately. This study looks solely at variability, which refers to uneven timing and amount of rainfall.

The results are consistent with previous research, including ours. This means dry periods are drier than in the past, and rainy periods are wetter.

Alarmingly, the problem will worsen as global warming continues. This raises the risk of droughts and floods – a pertinent issue for Australia.

What the study found

The research shows a systematic increase in rainfall variability since the 1900s. Day-to-day rainfall variability increased by 1.2% per decade, globally. The trend was more pronounced in the latter half of the century, after 1950.

The increase in variability means rain is more unevenly distributed over time. It might mean a year’s worth of rain at a given location now falls in fewer days. It can also mean long, dry periods are interspersed by torrential downpours, or drought and flooding in quick succession.

The researchers examined observational data and found since the 1900s, rainfall variability has increased over 75% of the land areas studied. Europe, Australia and eastern North America were particularly affected. These are areas for which detailed and long-running observations are available.

In other regions, the long-term trend in rainfall variability was less prominent. The authors said that may be due to random changes in variability, or errors in the datasets.

The increase in daily rainfall variability occurred in all four seasons worldwide, although seasonal differences emerged at smaller, regional scales.

The authors say the increase is largely the result of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, which have created a hotter and more humid atmosphere, more intense rain events and greater swings between them.

They say the findings pose new challenges for weather and climate predictions, as well as for resilience and adaptation by societies and ecosystems.

How global warming affects rainfall

To come to grips with these findings, it helps to understand the factors that determine how much heavy rain a storm produces – and how these factors are being affected by global warming.

The first factor is how much water vapour is present in the air. Warm air can contain more moisture. Every degree of global warming creates a 7% increase in the average amount of water vapour over a given patch of the surface.

Scientists have known about this problem for a long time. Earth has warmed 1.5°C since the industrial revolution – equating to a 10% increase in water vapour in the lower atmosphere. So this is driving storms to become rainier.

Second is how strong the storm winds can get, and third is how easily large raindrops form from smaller cloud particles. More research is needed to understand how these factors are affected by climate change, but the current evidence is that together they further amplify increases in rainfall over short time intervals and for very extreme storms, while reducing the increases for weaker storms.

How does this fit in with Australian research?

The findings released overnight confirm research by us and others into rainfall variability in Australia.

Analysis of daily extreme rainfall totals across Australia in present and future simulations revealed future increases were likely to exceed expectations from many past studies. Rainfall is likely to increase more sharply in the most extreme events, and appears to do this nearly everywhere on the continent.

In 2022, we looked at rainfall hour-by-hour in Sydney using radar data. We found the maximum hourly rainfall increased by 40% in Sydney over the past two decades.

Our findings have major implications for Sydney’s preparedness for flash flooding. More intense downpours are likely to overwhelm stormwater systems designed for past conditions. But it is not clear how much of this remarkable regional increase in severe rains is due to climate change, or how widespread it is.

Increasing variability also means a greater risk of drought. Climate models suggest rainfall variability in many parts of Australia will keep increasing, unless greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly reduced.

A change in only a handful of heavy rainfall days can make or break a drought in Australia. This means even small changes in variability can bring more devastating droughts in the future as dry periods become drier.

Heeding the warning

Policymakers can often be overly focused on whether their part of the world is becoming wetter or drier overall. But as this new research shows, it’s variability they should be worried about.

This volatility might come in the form of worse droughts. Or it might mean much bigger increases in extreme rainfall and flooding.

The variability will challenge governments and communities in many ways, from managing scarce water resources to coping with natural disasters. We should start preparing for these future challenges now.

And as this dire global problem worsens, the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming, becomes ever more pressing.

Steven Sherwood, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney and Anna Ukkola, ARC DECRA Fellow, UNSW Sydney

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

In the past week, Earth’s record for the hottest day was broken twice. Sunday July 21 was declared Earth’s hottest day since records began, when average surface temperature reached 17.09°C. On Monday the record fell again, when average temperatures reached 17.16°C – and Tuesday was almost as hot.

The declarations were made by Copernicus, the European climate change service. They made international headlines – especially in the northern hemisphere, which has been experiencing extreme summer heat.

Determining the global average temperature on any given day is complex. It involves thousands of observations using high-tech equipment and in some cases, sophisticated computer models.

So let’s take at look at how scientists take the planet’s temperature, and what these broken records mean.

How we know it’s hot

The global average surface temperature is the main indicator used to track how the climate is changing, and the measure used under the Paris Agreement.

It is derived from a combination of both the average temperature of air just above the land surface and in the upper layer of the ocean.

Several organisations develop estimates of Earth’s average surface temperature using a variety of methods. Aside from Copernicus, they include national organisations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan.

All datasets produced by these agencies point to a very clear warming trend since 1900.

Most datasets are based on directly observed temperatures from weather stations on land and floats on the ocean, both of which contain thermometers. Satellites in space are also used to gather inferred estimates.

The advanced methods used today, and the many thousands of observations, mean daily temperature data is far more accurate than in years past. The further back in time we go, the more uncertain the estimates of global average surface temperatures.

What is Copernicus?

The Copernicus Climate Change Service is part of the European Union’s Earth observation program. To generate its temperature estimates, Copernicus uses not just observations, but a computer model simulation.

The model simulates temperatures at two metres above the land surface everywhere across the globe. The results are combined with an estimate of oceans’ average surface temperature derived from direct observation and satellite information.

Copernicus’ use of information from a model simulation means its method differs slightly from other datasets. However, the method is well regarded and provides global estimates of average surface temperatures within a couple of days.

Unpicking the temperatures

We know the climate is changing at a rapid pace. But why is this record daily heat occurring now?

As the graph above shows, the global average surface temperature follows a distinct seasonal cycle. Temperatures in July are typically about 4°C higher than in January.

The difference comes down to the larger land masses of North America, Europe and Asia, as compared to those in the southern hemisphere.

Land warms up much more quickly than the ocean. By July each year, northern hemisphere land masses have usually heated substantially, while the southern hemisphere oceans are still slowly cooling. This means very high average global temperatures are only possible in northern summer and not the southern.

Still, the record high temperatures of this week are well beyond those seen before 2023. This is partly due to an El Niño – which typically brings hotter-than-average temperatures – and other factors such as high solar activity and reduced air pollution from falling shipping emissions.

Increased solar activity means the Earth receives more energy from the sun, while reduced air pollution can mean more energy from the sun reaches Earth’s surface.

Crucially, these record-high temperatures would be all but impossible without the planetary warming caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Global carbon dioxide emissions hit record highs last year. This means we are likely to see more heat extremes and record high temperatures in coming decades.

What’s coming next

In April this year, experts declared the 2023/24 El Niño had ended. This is likely to lead to a slight cooling in global average surface temperature anomalies in coming months – albeit to levels still well above pre-industrial conditions. This is on top of the cooling as we move past the July peak discussed above.

Global average surface temperature is not the only indicator of global warming. For example, scientists also use sea level rise and glacier retreat to track climate changes. Other less formal observations, such as cherry blossoms in Japan blooming earlier, are also useful.

But no matter which indicator we use, the evidence is clear: Earth is getting hotter, and human activity is to blame.

The year 2023 was the hottest in modern records. There is a decent chance 2024 will be hotter still. Only when humanity greatly reduces its greenhouse gas emissions will the pace of record-breaking temperatures slow.

Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne

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

Banknotes and coins help shape our national identity. The images they display emphasise historical events, prominent personalities, or scientific, industrial and technological advances. Sometimes they highlight biodiversity, including distinctive plants and wildlife.

Our new research studied wildlife imagery on banknotes from across the globe. We wanted to find out how often native animals appeared, and which species were most commonly depicted.

Almost one in six of the 4,541 notes we analysed, from 207 countries, featured wildlife. We identified intriguing patterns of use in different countries, from mammals in Africa and birds in South America to marine life in island nations. Some countries readily embraced wildlife, while others neglected them altogether.

Our research highlights an opportunity to raise public awareness of wildlife more broadly. In particular, showcasing threatened species on banknotes may lift their profile. This should be part of a broader conversation effort that builds community support for protecting biodiversity.

What we found

We trawled through a book titled Standard Catalog of World Paper Money and recorded every image of native animals on banknotes between 1980 and 2017.

Our analysis showed a wide range of animals depicted on banknotes. In most cases we could identify the species.

Images of wildlife appeared on more than 15% of the 4,541 notes we reviewed, from 207 countries. We identified 352 individual species.

In total, we found 883 depictions of native wildlife on 689 banknotes from 92 countries. That leaves 115 countries with banknotes devoid of wildlife.

Birds (195 species) and mammals (96 species) were the most widely used across all countries, followed by fish (25 species), reptiles (15 species) and invertebrates (15 species), then frogs or toads (6 species).

Significant differences existed among countries and regions. For example, currency from African nations frequently featured mammals.

In contrast, banknotes in South and Central American nations often featured birds. This reflects the higher diversity of birds in these tropical rainforest regions.

Island nations frequently depicted marine wildlife such as swordfish, whale sharks and green turtles. But they also included land-based species found only on these islands.

The results suggest that for many countries, native wildlife is valued and forms part of their national identity.

Some nations have started to make explicit links between animals depicted on their currency and their values and aspirations.

In South Africa, the Reserve Bank links the iconic “big five” native animals on their banknotes to its core values:

• rhino: protecting a shared future and accountability
• African buffalo: unity and cohesion through open communication
• African savanna elephant: stability, confidence and the building of social bonds to preserve respect and trust
• lion: leadership and guidance to achieve excellence
• leopard: independence, integrity and honour.

What about Australian currency?

Just two of the Australian notes in the series we analysed depicted wildlife. The $5 note has an eastern spinebill, while the $10 note has a sulphur-crested cockatoo.

However, more banknotes have been issued since we conducted our analysis. In 2019 the Reserve Bank added a bird to each banknote denomination, as well as an accompanying plant (typically an Acacia species). These images are part of the latest banknote security features, as follows:

• $5 eastern spinebill

• $10 sulphur-crested cockatoo

• $20 laughing kookaburra

• $50 black swan

• $100 Australian masked owl.

Depicting threatened species

Almost a third (30%) of all wildlife depicted represented threatened species. For most groups of animals this is higher than the proportion of species currently listed as threatened with extinction. Species on banknotes include the critically endangered black rhinoceros, blue-throated macaw and hawksbill turtle.

In 2012, Fiji introduced a range of threatened species on their banknotes to raise awareness of their plight. So popular is their so-called “flora and fauna currency”, the community often refers to the notes by the species depicted on them, rather than the denomination. We have observed locals saying an item for sale costs a kulawai (red-throated lorikeet), rather than $5, or one nanai (Fijian cicada), instead of $100.

Australia could certainly do more to raise the prominence of our unique and threatened wildlife on its currency. Images currently used depict iconic and recognisable species – and not those most in need of conservation attention.

There is some evidence, albeit limited, to suggest featuring threatened species on banknotes may be used to aid their protection. For example, magazines published by conservation groups tend to use images of popular, attractive or well-known animals (“charismatic fauna”) that may or may not be threatened, to raise awareness and funds. Recent research analysing social media has also shown that sharing wildlife imagery led to direct conservation action.

And researchers have suggested advertisers using wildlife images should pay a fee, such as a royalty, which could then be spent on conservation efforts.

Looking beyond banknotes

Showcasing species on currency is an opportunity to foster national pride and raise awareness of each nation’s unique fauna. But for threatened species, there is no guarantee this will ultimately lead to their protection.

The depiction of animals on banknotes should be accompanied by other efforts to raise public awareness of their plight, such as education campaigns, public policy initiatives and fundraising drives.

More research is needed into the public impact of wildlife imagery on banknotes and how this might translate into conservation gains.

The authors wish to acknowledge the significant contribution made by Beaudee Newbery in collating and analysing the wildlife depictions on global banknotes as part of his research at Griffith University.

Guy Castley, Associate Professor, School of Environment and Science, Griffith University and Clare Morrison, Lecturer in Ecology, Griffith University

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

The human eye registers three colours of light: red, green and blue. But pigeons (and many other animal species) can also see a fourth colour, ultraviolet.

The “four-dimensional” colour space pigeons see may contain millions more colours than ours. To a pigeon, for example, many flowers show patterns that are invisible to us.

Despite the long history of close association between our species, we might say humans and pigeons live in quite different worlds. If different species effectively live in different worlds, does that mean our biology constructs reality?

The question of whether reality exists outside or inside our heads has troubled philosophers for millennia. In a recent paper, my colleague André Sant’Anna and I propose a pragmatic way to resolve this dilemma, based on inquiry and action.

How many worlds are there?

There is a long tradition in philosophy called “realism”. In the realist view, there is just one world with pre-given features that are independent of the mind observing them – and discovering these features is the job of science.

But if something is entirely independent of our minds, how can we know it with our minds? Isn’t this a contradiction in terms?

So there is an equally long history of philosophical argument that the features of reality somehow depend on experience. These thinkers claim that reality does not come pre-carved (at what Plato famously described as a natural set of “joints”). There are as many worlds as there are sets of experiences, and each set of experiences creates a unique perspective (or what Edmund Husserl called a “life-world”).

This deep dispute over the nature of reality and worlds has arisen in almost every generation of philosophers.

How do our bodies shape our experience of the world?

There is an increasingly popular alternative to traditional realism called “enactivism”, which draws inspiration from cognitive science.

Enactivism made its debut in 1990, in a book by Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson called The Embodied Mind. Bringing together scientific biology, Husserl’s life-worlds and Buddhist philosophy, the authors theorised that just as a living creature grows and repairs its own body, it “enacts” its own environment as having features of importance to itself, such as food or danger.

As Thompson later wrote,

a cognitive being’s world – whatever that being is able to experience, know, and practically handle – is conditioned by that being’s form or structure.

The limits of the life-world

On the face of it, though, enactivism leaves certain important questions unanswered.

First, how do species successfully interact with each other when their perceptual capacities seem to put them in quite different life-worlds? For instance, during the first world war, a pigeon named Cher Ami heroically carried a message that saved the lives of 200 British soldiers despite being shot down by enemy fire, for which he was awarded a gold medal.

Second, it seems scientists should be able to investigate how different species’ different bodies create different perceptual experiences. But if all species – including ourselves – are “locked up” in their own life-worlds, such inquiry is impossible.

These two issues are what we set out to resolve in our recent paper.

Do shared experiences and actions create reality?

We propose a new alternative to the dilemma of understanding reality as either pre-given or located in subjective individual experiences, drawing on the ideas of pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce. We argue for an inquiry-based realism, whereby reality depends on our minds but is still public and objective.

As we explain it, reality is grasped through pragmatic agreement. This means individuals align their expectations about what others will do in similar lived situations.

So, for instance, although a WWI soldier and a pigeon with their different eye structures perceive a shooting enemy quite differently, they pragmatically agree that he is dangerous when they both move away. As we saw with Cher Ami, humans and pigeons can also agree on the supreme importance of reaching “home base” with a delivery.

This highlights a key characteristic of pragmatist philosophy. It does not define cognition as a kind of consciousness, an idea that has led to apparently insoluble philosophical problems.

Rather, pragmatists view knowledge of reality as implicit in what we can do, most especially what we can do with others.

Pragmatic agreement with other species

Of course, there will be many matters on which different species do not currently have pragmatic agreement. For instance, while humans and pigeons both understand the danger of an enemy firing a gun, it would be lost on a dung beetle happily feeding in the same WWI trench.

But we should not hastily conclude from this that reality must always be plural. Peirce’s inquiry-based account of reality expresses an optimistic hope that over time we can find ways to bring species into ever greater pragmatic agreement.

What is required is that we put ourselves into the same environments, do similar things, and develop shared goals. Thus Peirce defined truth as “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate”.

We believe our account provides a nuanced and original vision of reality for enactivism. It allows creatures’ unique perceptual powers a role in shaping their own reality, but it also allows that reality is objective, in a different way than traditional realism.

We are arguably only beginning to understand how to understand the realities in which non-human animals live. Peirce’s philosophy shows us how such understanding can be achieved over time. And if we can manage to increase our pragmatic agreement with other species, we stand to receive many gifts in widening the reality in which we ourselves live.

Catherine Legg, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Deakin University

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

New Zealand was once home to giant flightless birds called moa. They had grown accustomed to life without predators. So the arrival of humans in the mid-13th century presented a massive – and ultimately insurmountable – challenge to their existence.

Moa were unable to cope with even low levels of hunting by people. All nine species of moa were driven to extinction soon after first contact with humans. These moa populations collapsed and disappeared so swiftly it seemed impossible to trace their declines, until now.

In our new research, we reconstructed patterns of population decline, range contraction and extinction for six moa species. We simulated interactions of moa with humans and their surroundings using hundreds of thousands of scenarios. Then we validated these simulations against information from fossils.

We found all six species collapsed and converged on the cold, isolated mountains of New Zealand’s North and South Islands. These happen to be the same sites where the last of New Zealand’s flightless birds can be found today.

The Polynesian colonisation of New Zealand

Oceanic islands tend to be hotspots of biodiversity, harbouring some of the most bizarre evolutionary marvels on Earth. They include daisies the size of trees, elephants the size of great Danes, and countless species of flightless birds.

Unfortunately, islands are also hotspots of extinction. This is particularly true for oceanic islands in the Pacific, which were among the last areas on the planet to have been settled and transformed by humanity.

Human expansion across the Pacific began some 4,000 years ago, when people set out on extraordinary sea voyages from Taiwan. They first headed south into the Philippines, and then onto some of the most isolated islands on the planet.

These daring journeys required impressive seafaring vessels and navigational skills to cross thousands of kilometres of open waters.

Migration into central and east Polynesia was the final phase of these ancient voyages. It culminated in the colonisation of the New Zealand Archipelago in the mid-13th century by Polynesians, the ancestors of Māori.

People started fires, hunted animals and introduced invasive species – including Pacific rats. Accordingly, New Zealand’s unique biodiversity was decimated in one of the largest and most rapid collapses of native wildlife in the Pacific.

Range collapses and extinctions of moa

Moa disappeared within three centuries of human arrival. But they didn’t all go at once.

Our research suggests Mantell’s moa went first, within just 100 years. Almost another 100 years would pass before the extinction of any other moa species.

Mantell’s moa was especially vulnerable to extinction because of its slow population growth rate. Unfortunately, even low but sustained harvesting well exceeded the bird’s capacity to reproduce and compensate for these losses.

Other species were slightly more resilient. They benefited from attributes such as higher growth rates, larger ranges, bigger populations or better abilities to live at higher altitudes (far from people).

The stout-legged moa lasted the longest. It finally disappeared some three centuries after human arrival.

Our research suggests all moa disappeared from high-quality lowland habitats first. These were places favoured by people.

The rate of population decline then decreased as you go higher into the mountains and further away from the coastline.

It was previously thought the ranges of species under pressure would contract to their optimal or preferred habitats, where they were most abundant, rather than as far away from people as they could get.

Today’s flightless birds cling to moa refuges

Our research also took a closer look at the distribution of New Zealand’s living flightless birds.

It turns out ancient moa refuges now harbour populations of endangered native flightless birds including the takahē, weka and great spotted kiwi. Moa refuges were also the last mainland habitats for the critically endangered kākāpō.

These sites do not provide optimal habitat for living flightless birds either. Rather, they remain the most isolated and relatively untouched by humanity.

While New Zealand’s remaining flightless birds are no longer being hunted to extinction, threats to their survival still align with human activity.

Habitat loss and impacts of invasive species follows waves of European settlement across New Zealand, which gradually progressed from lowland sites to the less hospitable, cold and mountainous regions.

Efforts to conserve New Zealand’s remaining flightless birds can heed lessons from the ghosts of species past. The sad demise of the moa highlights the immense importance of isolated areas. If we are to prevent future extinctions, we need to protect and preserve these remote, wild places.

Our research also offers a new approach to understanding past extinctions, especially on islands where fossil and archaeological data are limited.

Damien Fordham, Associate Professor of Global Change Ecology, University of Adelaide; Jamie Wood, Senior Lecturer, Ecology and Evolution, University of Adelaide; Mark V. Lomolino, Professor emeritus, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and Sean Tomlinson, Research Associate, Ecology and Evolution, University of Adelaide

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

A greener games? Certainly that is what Paris promised when it made environmental sustainability, innovation and leadership central to its successful bid to host the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The Organising Committee promised “historic” progress on climate goals, halving the carbon footprint of previous games in Rio and London.

To achieve this, Paris will cut carbon emissions across travel, construction and operations such as catering and accommodation. All Olympic sites will connect to the public electricity grid, avoiding diesel electricity generation.

To enhance social, economic and environmental sustainability, new construction has been minimised by using existing and temporary venues.

All laudable objectives that align with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) goal of using the games to “inspire sustainable futures around the world”. Despite the bold claims, however, the way Paris has delivered its surfing event in Tahiti illustrates just how challenging it is to turn rhetoric into reality.

Olympic surfing on a Pacific atoll

Surfing debuted at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020-21. But an international surfing event is challenging to organise and run, and few cities can guarantee quality waves and ideal weather conditions for the duration.

While the Tokyo surfing ran smoothly, the wave quality on the Japanese east coast was not ideal for high-performance competition.

Initial reports suggested Paris was building an artificial wave pool. But such an energy intensive and costly facility would have been difficult to align with the host’s sustainability goals.

France’s Atlantic coast then became the favoured venue, but was later supplanted by Teahupo’o in Tahiti, French Polynesia, almost 16,000 kilometres from Paris.

While the IOC has been committed to a “one host city” model, recent policy changes in its Agenda 2020+5 allow for increased flexibility. Hosting the Olympics can now involve several cities and even regions or countries.

And it’s not hard to see why Teahupo’o became the preferred option. One of the world’s most challenging and dramatic surf breaks, it is already part of the pro surfing world circuit (although until recently it was deemed too dangerous for women, who were excluded from 2006 till 2022).

In 2024 it will showcase the spectacular, athletic nature of modern surfing against a stunning Polynesian island backdrop. Holding the event in Tahiti, it was claimed, would “bring a sense of belonging to overseas French territories”.

In the end, however, the choice of surfing venue has proved highly controversial, causing local and international protest.

Local versus global

Teahupo’o is a small settlement on the main island of Tahiti’s southwestern coast. Locals first became alarmed when leaked plans for an Olympic village revealed vast new infrastructure.

This included two-lane roads, a car bridge, electricity groundwork, coastal embankments, a floating pontoon for spectators and scaffolding for 200 officials.

Residents and environmental groups quickly responded, raising media attention and demanding greater transparency and public participation. As Teahupo’o mayor Roniu Poaru stated:

Our population accepts the Olympic Games, but that comes with conditions […] the goal is to preserve our environment.

Compromises were eventually reached. New infrastructure would be kept to a minimum, with competitors living on a cruise ship. Olympic staff, press and officials would be housed with residents or in local guesthouses.

With limited capacity for live spectators, viewing screens will be set up in the local town and in the capital, Papeeti.

Tower of trouble

The greatest concern, however, has been over the construction of a new aluminium judging tower to replace the existing structure, which was deemed unsafe by the Olympic organisers.

This involved drilling into the delicate coral reef, which scientists say could have dire consequences for the reef ecosystems.

A global petition was launched to stop the new tower. The International Surfing Association, which is responsible for developing and running Olympic surfing, said it would not support any new construction on the reef.

Despite this, the head of the Paris organising committee and President of French Polynesia were said to be “in lockstep together” and “united in their desire to see the judging tower built”. And so it was, albeit a scaled back version.

But many Tahitians remain upset at what they saw as a disrespectful process. Tahitian surfer Vahiné Fierro, who is representing France in the event, described the reef environment as “our temple”:

It’s a spiritual belief, living incarnation of our heritage, and our ancestral land.

Ironically, as our earlier research revealed, such beliefs express the very essence of surfing’s Polynesian origins, which the IOC has been so keen to showcase through surfing’s inclusion in the Olympics.

‘Greenwashing gold’

The controversy surrounding the surfing event at the Paris Olympics highlights the many challenges in delivering sustainable mega-events.

Many scholars and activists remain unconvinced by the IOC’s environmental claims, and have questioned whether the organisation is really “greenwashing gold”.

Indeed, the IOC continues to be highly selective about how it measures its operations to support various Utopian projections and environmental promises. And research evaluating Olympic sustainability between 1992 and 2020 has shown it has declined over time.

According to Georgina Grenon, the environmental excellence director for Paris 2024:

We want to show that another model is possible and create a legacy for major sporting events. We don’t claim to be perfect, but we want to show that we can do things differently.

Hosting the surfing event in Tahiti is certainly doing things differently. But it raises yet more questions about the IOC’s claims of leadership in environmental sustainability.

Belinda Wheaton, Professor, School of Sport, Health and Human Performance, University of Waikato and Holly Thorpe, Professor in Sociology of Sport and Gender, University of Waikato

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

As Paris prepares to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the sustainability of the event is coming under scrutiny.

The organisers have promoted Paris 2024 as the greenest Olympics ever, aiming to halve the carbon emissions of previous Olympics. They have drastically cut back on building new stadiums and venues, and have relied heavily on wood as a building material for new infrastructure and used low-carbon concrete. This approach has another benefit: it’s cheaper.

But hosting the world’s biggest sporting event, with thousands of athletes and millions of spectators, will still come at an environmental cost.

This has led to calls for a radical rethink of the Olympic Games, including for it to be scaled back. But longer term, Paris 2024’s sustainability efforts may create a lasting legacy for the city – and for future games.

The Greenest Games?

The vision for Paris 2024 is simple: “do more with less, do better and leave a useful legacy”.

These Games will be the first to align with the sustainability-focused New Norm plan outlined by the International Olympics Committee.

Hosting the Olympics is a huge undertaking. Previous Olympics have seen host cities spend billions on new stadiums and competition venues. But once the competition is over, many of these expensive buildings are little used – or even abandoned.

It’s also carbon intensive. Paris organisers intend to halve the emissions of London 2012 and Rio 2016, but even so, these games will add an estimated two million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere – the same as the annual emissions of a small country like Malta or the Bahamas. Paris won’t have the lowest emissions of recent Olympics – the COVID-affected, spectator-free Tokyo 2020 Games takes that title.

How are these games greener?

To make the Paris Games greener than they have been, organisers have come at the challenge from many directions.

First, authorities are using what they already have. Fully 95% of all Olympic infrastructure was already there. Temporary stadiums have been built near famous landmarks, to make use of the spectacular setting. But only one permanent venue has been built – the aquatics centre, built largely from carbon-storing timber, covered in solar panels and with an advanced water recycling system. After the games, it will become a community venue.

Athletes will certainly notice the focus on sustainability. The athletes’ village – which will be repurposed afterwards as social housing – has no built-in air conditioning. Instead, it was meant to rely on natural breezes and a geo-thermal cooling system. This move proved controversial, and many teams – including Australia’s – began planning to bring portable aircon to ensure athletes can sleep well during the summer nights. Organisers have changed course, and have moved to install 2,500 portable units.

Athletes and spectators will notice a change in their food. Over 60% of meal options will be vegetarian, helping to lower the carbon footprint.

The Olympic venues will be powered exclusively by renewable energy. This is a big change. Previous games have powered their venues with noisy generators, to ensure there are no power outages.

As part of a “circular economy” approach, 90% of the products used for Paris 2024 come from recycled materials or will be re-used later. The medals, for example, are of fully recycled metal, including an original piece of iron from the Eiffel Tower. Mattresses from the athletes’ village will be re-used by the French army. In the background, apps and checklists are being used to map and assess the carbon footprint of every aspect of games delivery.

So why are there still lingering concerns? Critics have pointed out these laudable efforts can only go so far.

About 50% of the emissions from the Paris Games will come from the travel and accommodation of athletes, officials and millions of spectators. These emissions – especially from air travel – are very hard to reduce. Organisers will use carbon offsets in a number of countries to compensate for these emissions. As our recent assessment of Brisbane’s 2032 Games shows, relying on offsets is not the most sustainable option compared with reducing emissions in the first place.

Are the Olympics compatible with a greener future?

Allegations of “greenwashing” have been levelled at some of the over-hyped credentials of the Paris Games. And more generally, critics have argued the Olympics in their current form are not compatible with a greener future. Some want the Olympics to adopt a decentralised model sharing hosting over multiple countries.

The World Cup will use this model in 2030, but still faces mounting criticism of the transport emissions necessary as teams and spectators traverse three continents.

Others have argued the games should be rotated on a roster of just three or four cities, which already have the appropriate infrastructure.

For their part, the International Olympic Committee has pointed to the power of the games to bring the world together in fractious times.

There are other benefits to the current system. Cities which host the Olympics Games have a rare opportunity to think bigger. In Paris, authorities have invested a whopping A$2.2 billion in infrastructure to clean up its long-polluted river – allowing it to be used for open-water swimming and triathlon in the Olympics and providing a cleaner river for Parisians to enjoy. As Olympic authorities focus on sustainability, host cities can use the Paris example and go further to become global role models.

We may well need novel forms of carbon accounting to quantify the legacy of hosting the Olympics. The new idea of Scope 4 emissions allows researchers to account for emissions avoided in the future due to Olympic initiatives. For example, the 415km of cycleways connecting Paris’s Olympic venues will be used by the public long after these games end.

The Paris Games may well be remembered not only for photo finishes and new records, but for the sustainability efforts of the organisers. While these games aren’t emissions-free, they are a substantial improvement over their predecessors. Let’s hope the organisers of future games, including Brisbane, pick up the baton.

Alexandre Urban contributed to this article

Tony Heynen, Program Coordinator, Sustainable Energy, The University of Queensland and Prabhakaran Vanaraja Ambeth, PhD student, The University of Queensland

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

Europe is in the midst of a heat wave, and while Olympic athletes in Paris for the 2024 Summer Games might be spared the worst of it, the weather will still be hot.

As global temperatures have risen, major sporting events like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup have had to adapt to high heat and extreme storms to keep athletes and fans safe and allow the games to go on.

Olympic organizers have moved events such as marathons to early mornings and even to cooler cities. FIFA, the governing body for world soccer, pushed the 2022 Men’s World Cup back from its usual time in June to late November so it could be held in Qatar.

The heat risks and the environmental impact of major sporting events have led some people to question whether these events should be held at all. But as someone who studies sport management and sustainability in an area I coined “sport ecology,” I believe that radical approach misses the benefits, including the Olympics’ ability to promote sustainable actions to the public worldwide.

How rising global heat affects the Olympics

Sports have good reason for caring about sustainability: Climate change can put athletes’ and fans’ health at risk and even put the future of some sports in doubt.

Winter sports face the greatest threats from climate change as temperatures rise and precipitation changes, dramatically shortening winter sports seasons in many areas. In 2022, the Beijing Winter Games had to artificially create snow so it could have ski runs at all. The International Olympic Committee has delayed its decision to select Winter Games host cities for 2030 and beyond because of the uncertainty of winter sports.

In the summer, global warming fuels extreme heat and storms that can affect the quality of the competition and the health of the athletes and spectators.

Major sport federations and leagues, as well as the Olympics, have responded to the risks by delaying competitions to cooler times of day or year, implementing water breaks and offering more player substitutions.

Organizers of the Tokyo Summer Games, held amid a fierce heat wave in 2021, had preemptively moved the marathon to Sapporo, more than 500 miles north of Tokyo, so athletes could run in cooler weather. They also delayed competitions during the Games to avoid extreme heat and excessive rain.

Olympic progress toward sustainability

Any large event like the Olympics can produce vast carbon emissions through its construction, transportation needs and energy use.

That impact, and the risks it creates for sports and their athletes, are why sustainability has been a pillar of the Olympic charter since 1996 and is a focus of its planning for the future. In 2012, the London Olympics pioneered a new international certification standard, ISO2012, which provides guidelines for any large event to make more sustainable choices, from construction to catering.

The 2024 Paris Games, from July 26 to Aug. 11, and Paralympic Games, Aug. 28 to Sept. 8, are certified to the latest standard, and organizers are taking many steps to reduce their climate impact.

The organizers plan to power the events’ operations with 100% renewable energy from wind and solar. They are using existing venues when possible, had new ones built with low-carbon concrete and recycled materials, and brought in thousands of seats made of recycled plastic.

All furniture and temporary buildings approved for the Games also must have a contractually guaranteed second life, rather than going into a landfill. All of the competition venues are on public transportation, allowing for fewer vehicles in the streets. Even the food is targeted for a 50% emissions cut compared with the average meal by increasing the use of plant-based foods. The Paralympics will use the same venues and housing in the weeks that follow.

That doesn’t mean the 2024 Olympics won’t have a large carbon footprint, however, particularly as many spectators and athletes arrive by plane. But the organizers are aiming for the construction and operations emissions to be half those of the London and Rio Games in 2012 and 2016.

World’s fair of sustainability

The Paris Olympic Games is an example of what large sporting events can do to reduce their impact on the environment and promote sustainability solutions to a global audience. Spectators will experience sustainability firsthand, and organizers will promote the Games’ sustainability efforts.

Such campaigns can influence people’s everyday behaviors and even increase their advocacy for sustainability in their home communities.

Suggestions to reduce the scale and size of sports events or even eliminate commercialized sports, ending spectator sports as we know them, overlook the ability of sports to influence and change human behavior.

Sustainability is a constantly evolving process of learning from the past to improve for the future.

The 2024 Olympics’ strategies, building on those used in previous events, and what Paris learns in carrying them out, will also help in planning for future events, including the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

In essence, the Olympic Games, the largest sporting event in the world, is a sport sustainability world’s fair. It highlights what is possible for a sporting event through collaborations with international corporations to reduce its environmental impact. And it influences others to follow suit, whether that is other sporting events, leagues and federations or spectators from around the world.

Brian P. McCullough, Associate Professor of Sport Management, University of Michigan

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

Giant panda reclining in cloudy hills eating bamboo, European bison picking their way through gloomy and lichen-draped forests and Cape mountain zebra roaming arid mountains. Ideas of how and where these species live are fixed in the public imagination, in conservation practice and even in some species’ names – but they may simply be stereotypes.

Species stereotypes can develop when research is carried out on a small, biased sample that isn’t representative of a species’ entire natural range. They often give an overly narrow, or just plain wrong, idea of what is needed for survival and breeding.

This problem is particularly acute after range declines, as something can’t be studied where it no longer exists. The idea that the giant panda is so often depicted as eating bamboo may be an artefact of them being restricted to “ecologically suboptimal refuges” rather than a quirk of evolution. In an ideal world, pandas would use a wider range of forest types and have a varied diet much more similar to other bears.

What this means for conservation is that protected areas may not be ideal for the species they are supposedly there to protect.

Similar to the common assumption that pandas prefer to live only on bamboo, there has long been a belief among conservationists that the critically endangered black rhino, given the choice, prefer to eat acacia trees.

But we thought that understanding of black rhino biology, including its diet, could also be a stereotype because habitat loss and the ongoing threat of poaching mean populations are mostly fenced into isolated reserves dotted across the species’ former range.

They are also an excellent test case for busting stereotypes because intensive anti-poaching monitoring has produced some of the most detailed information on births and deaths for any free-living species.

Rhinos struggling in their supposedly ideal habitat

We conducted research in three reserves across the Laikipia plateau in northern Kenya: Lewa, Ol Jogi and Ol Pejeta. This region’s upland savanna ecosystem is exceptional as it has maintained a community of large mammals that can mostly freely migrate. Black rhino however are fixed in place by special fences, and growing numbers mean that rhino are being moved to found new populations. The risk of new populations failing to establish themselves is heightened if the identification of new areas are based on a species stereotype.

Black rhinos are considered to mainly eat trees and to prefer acacia, distinctively thorny and often flat-topped. So when rhinos eat grass it’s taken as an indicator of poor habitat, or of competition with other tree and shrub browsers such as elephants.

The first hint of a stereotype was our finding that females in Ol Jogi have fewer calves and die younger than those in Lewa and Ol Pejeta. This was surprising because Ol Jogi should be an ideal habitat.

The Ol Jogi landscape is classic East African savanna, with rocky outcrops standing proud above wooded grassland. In the dry season the green of the dominant acacia trees stands out against the straw-coloured grass and the red-brown earth. Acacia makes up a higher proportion of the trees here than on the other two reserves, so why should the black rhino population be struggling? By picking up dung and sequencing the plant DNA found within it, we have uncovered at least part of the story.

Rhinos actually prefer grass

The idea for this research was that how an animal’s diet changes from season to season can uncover what its preferred diet would be. For a savanna herbivore, there is far more to eat in the wet season so we expect that they should focus on finding the best food available. In contrast, in the dry season they should eat whatever they can get their teeth into.

In the wet season, we found that black rhino consistently ate less acacia and more grass. The more acacia a rhino ate in the dry season, the larger the shift away from it in the wet season. Together, this suggests that grass is actually a preferred food and acacia functions as a “fallback food”.

Importantly for conservation, females with larger seasonal dietary shifts, which were restricted to acacia in the dry season, bred more slowly. Most of the acacia-eating, diet-shifting, slow-breeding females live on Ol Jogi, whereas rhinos on the other two reserves could consume more grass year-round and breed more often.

The heavy reliance of Ol Jogi rhino on acacia as a fallback food, which leads to slower breeding, and the historically overlooked importance of grass, can at least partly explain why the population does not perform as well. This is crucial for black rhino conservation because habitats are deemed suitable or not largely based on the availability of trees, and particularly acacia.

Conservation may be incorrectly estimating how many rhinos reserves can support, and risk identifying areas where rhino will breed slowly, and be at risk of dying out, as prime habitat. Money and effort may be wasted by trying to conserve this iconic species in the wrong places.

More widely, many species are confined to small parts of their historic range. We cannot just assume that they have clung on in optimal habitat, where they live now may just be a historical accident. Conservation needs to explicitly test where and how species do best, or it may squander its limited resources and the best chances we have to prevent extinctions.

Nick Harvey Sky, Postdoctoral researcher, Chr. Michelsen Institute and Susanne Shultz, University Research Fellow, University of Manchester

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

Many plants, from crops to carnations, cannot bear fruit or reproduce without bees, beetles, butterflies and other insects to pollinate them. But the population of insect pollinators is dropping in the U.S., due in part to pesticides, climate change, invasive plants and diminished habitats. Rachel Mallinger, assistant professor of entomology at the University of Florida, explains why these insects are in decline and how homeowners can create yards and gardens that are good for pollinators.

The Conversation has collaborated with SciLine to bring you highlights from the discussion that have been edited for brevity and clarity.

What kind of insects pollinate?

Rachel Mallinger: A lot of different insects pollinate. Insects visit flowers for many purposes, often for food, to get nectar or to get pollen. Sometimes they’ll visit flowers to mate or to lay eggs or as refuge. Bees are the primary pollinators for a lot of plants, but flies, wasps, beetles and butterflies also play an important role.

How ecologically critical are insect pollinators?

Mallinger: A small percentage of flowering plants are pollinated primarily by wind, but new research suggests that as much as 90% require animal pollinators. Although birds, bats and other mammals also pollinate, insects are the main pollinators for the vast majority of those plants.

Without insects and their pollination, these plants would not be able to reproduce, and we would see a dramatic decline in plant diversity and abundance. Without insect pollinators, these plants wouldn’t produce the seeds and the fruit that feed many animals – including people.

Have insect pollinator populations declined?

Mallinger: Recent studies have shown pretty dramatic declines in insects generally, and this has been shown even in conservation lands. So we think that in highly developed areas, insect declines are probably even more dramatic.

I study primarily native wild bees. Here in North America, we have between 4,000 and 5,000 species. For many species, we don’t know if they’re declining. Of the ones that we do have some information on, it’s estimated that about half are declining and about a quarter are imperiled and potentially on the road to going extinct.

The insect pollinators that tend to be most at risk are ones that are specialists – those that require really unique, specialized food or nesting resources. Also ones that already have a limited range. For example, maybe they are found only on islands or in a small area.

What about the economic importance of insect pollinators?

Mallinger: Crops pollinated by animals, primarily insects, make up about one-third of our agricultural production in terms of acreage. A study in the state of Georgia found over US$360 million per year in crop pollination services provided by insects in that state alone.

What do insect pollinators need to be healthy?

Mallinger: Aside from pollen and nectar, some insect pollinators require additional food sources. For example, butterflies in the caterpillar stage need foliage from their host plants.

Other insect pollinators, like wasps and flies, are carnivores in the larval stage, so during that time they need to eat small arthropods – like spiders and centipedes – and insects.

Beyond that, they need nesting habitat. The majority of our insect pollinators nest below ground, and so they need ground that is relatively undisturbed, bare and accessible. Other pollinators nest in woody debris, stems and reeds. And some pollinators, like butterflies, just lay their eggs on host plants.

Additionally, pollinators need environments that are free from toxins. So they need environments that are not regularly sprayed with pesticides, including insecticides.

What stressors are leading to declines in insect pollinator populations?

Mallinger: I would say there are five main stressors.

Land use change is one. This can be the conversion of wild lands to agriculture or to development.

Climate change is another stressor. It changes the average temperature that these pollinators are experiencing and increases the chance of extreme temperatures and weather events. Hurricanes and flooding can be really detrimental and destroy the habitat for pollinators.

Third, pesticides and other chemicals in our environment that are toxic.

Invasive plants can be really detrimental for pollinators. They can take over an area and replace the native plants that pollinators depend on. That’s four.

And finally, pathogens and parasites.

All five of these stressors can interact. For example, climate change may increase the likelihood of invasive plant species, pathogens and parasites thriving. Land use change can also increase the likelihood of invasive species.

What can homeowners do to help pollinators?

Mallinger: Planting a diversity of flowering plants for pollinators is one of the best things you can do. Aim to have at least three plants flowering at any given time, and look for a diversity of flower colors and shapes. Different pollinators have different preferences. You can have flowers that are yellow, blue, purple, pink, red and white.

In terms of floral shapes, plant some flowers that are flat and are accessible for pollinators with small mouthparts. And also plant some flowers with medium-length tubes, and some with long tubes.

Focus on native plants and try to seek out plants that might not just be the common types that you find in the big box stores. Go to native plant nurseries and seek out resources online.

Additionally, try to have nesting habitat in your garden. If the space allows, have some woody debris around for the pollinators that nest above ground. This can include things like logs, stems and reeds. Also manage your area to be as chemical-free as possible. This includes reducing pesticide use.

Keep in mind that many pollinators that nest below ground are not aggressive and are solitary. It’s just one individual pollinator and her nest.

Watch the full interview to hear more.

SciLine is a free service based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.

Rachel Mallinger, Professor of Entomology, University of Florida

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

Activities associated with cocaine trafficking threaten two-thirds of the most important landscapes in Central America for 196 forest bird species, including 67 migratory species. This is the key takeaway from a study that colleagues and I published in June 2024 in the journal Nature Sustainability.

Our findings suggest that there is real potential for drug-related deforestation to negatively affect populations of migratory birds. Many of these species are unusually concentrated in winter in Central America, which has a comparatively smaller area than their summer breeding regions in North America.

For 1 in 5 migratory species that travel to Central American forests annually, including familiar birds like the Baltimore oriole, more than 50% of their global population winters in areas that are becoming more attractive to traffickers. For half of migratory species, at least 25% of their populations winter in these areas.

As examples, an estimated 90% of the endangered golden-cheeked warbler population spends winters in these vulnerable landscapes, along with 70% of Philadelphia vireos and 70% of golden-winged warblers.

Why it matters

Nearly half of Earth’s migratory bird species are declining, and 1 in 5 species are at risk of extinction. Since 1970, North America alone has lost 3 billion breeding birds – more than 25% of its total population. Birds perform many important ecological roles, including eating insects, pollinating plants and dispersing seeds, and their presence often is a reliable measure of the overall health of an ecosystem.

The illicit drug trade is a major driver of forest loss in Central America. Drug traffickers cut down tropical forests to create landing strips and roads, and to establish farms and ranches. They use these businesses to launder their profits into the legal economy.

These activities, in turn, often lead to further forest loss, development and criminal activities. In some Central American countries, so-called narco-deforestation is estimated to account for nearly one-third of all deforestation.

A growing body of evidence suggests that current drug policies and interdiction strategies, which focus almost exclusively on drug suppliers, are making narco-deforestation worse. Traffickers may respond to interdiction efforts by shifting activities to more remote and intact forested areas – zones that are especially important for wildlife.

Indeed, one recent study showed that U.S.-led interdiction efforts within the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor – a patchwork of protected areas that runs from Mexico to Panama – pushed traffickers into zones with the highest densities of jaguars in Central America.

How we did our work

More than 1 million birdwatchers have submitted data to eBird, a global participatory science initiative that collects observations to document bird distribution, abundance, habitat use and trends. This information helps scientists understand in detail how numbers of birds in particular locations change through the year, and to diagnose and mitigate key threats to bird populations.

In our study, we combined eBird data on bird abundance and distribution with previously published information on changes in the likelihood that landscapes would experience cocaine trafficking in the future. We summarized these changes as a measure of “suitability” for drug-related activities.

Suitability, in this case, was estimated from social and environmental features that have been shown to be attractive to narco traffickers. For example, areas that are forested, far from roads and sparsely populated are more likely to conceal activities than heavily used areas near towns.

What’s next

Our study adds to existing evidence that drug interdiction efforts may push trafficking activities into increasingly remote and forested areas, many of which provide important habitat for migrating birds. Narco-trafficking is just one reminder that the futures of humans and nature are tightly intertwined.

To avert negative consequences for people and nature, governments could consider expanding or strengthening measures to help local communities monitor and protect their land. Research shows that community control often is an effective way to conserve natural areas, reduce poverty and protect wildlife.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Amanda D. Rodewald, Professor of Natural Resources and the Environment, Cornell University

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

Domestic cats will do almost anything to avoid contact with water. Not so for their wild cousins, though. Lions, tigers and jaguars have had to adapt to water and sometimes take the plunge for survival.

And this is what we observed on the late evening of 1 February 2024. Our research team in Uganda filmed two male lions swimming in a waterway in the Queen Elizabeth National Park. But what was unusual was the distance and the danger: the lions swam an estimated 1.5km across the Kazinga Channel, which connects two lakes in the park. The channel has a high density of hippos and Nile crocodiles, which are known to attack lions.

The footage, caught on a high-resolution thermal camera, shows the lions making three attempts across the 6 metre deep channel (and returning to shore), before starting to swim towards the south of the park.

The swim is as remarkable in illustrating the physical strength of the animals, as it is a symptom of a deeper problem – of male lions having to take extraordinary risks to find lionesses.

We are four researchers with over 50 years of combined experience in conservation, big cat ecology, and the complexities of people and wildlife living together. One of us (Alexander) led the field team that filmed this event.

Our long-term research in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park shows that sex ratios for lions there are flipped towards males at a 2:1 ratio. A healthy lion population would be female dominated instead. From monitoring these male lions almost daily, our field team has observed them swimming across this channel seven times in the space of a year.

In our new scientific paper we suggest that the male lions are making the risky swims, braving crocodiles and hippos, to find females. They are not always successful in finding mates, and when they get battered by resident males, they swim back to their own territory. There is also a small chance that the lions are swimming to avoid a human community located at the only formal crossing point connecting the two parts of the park, a narrow, 40-metre-long bridge near a village.

Park managers and conservation NGOs in the park now need to find innovative ways to stabilise the female population and stem the decline of lions overall.

Big cats and water regularly mix

Some big cats have a strong affinity for water. Jaguars in the Brazilian Pantanal and the western Brazilian Amazon regularly catch and kill caimans (the South American cousin of the African Nile crocodile). Another population on the beaches of Costa Rica’s Tortuguero National Park hunts sea turtles.

Asiatic tigers have been filmed swimming across rivers in India and Russia, playing in pools, and hunting in water. One study even shows water is a key factor in their welfare.

When it comes to African lions, one population is particularly fond of swimming in and even hunting in water – the lions of Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Especially during the flood season, resident lions regularly swim short distances across channels or wade across inundated floodplains.

Braving crocodile and hippo encounters is almost a daily occurrence, and even cubs as young as two months old are forced to take to the water as the prides navigate their waterlogged territories in search of hunting opportunities. While they don’t particularly enjoy these crossings, they have adapted to their flooded homes out of necessity. Most of these crossings, though, are less than a few hundred metres.

Lions in Tanzania and Zambia’s Victoria Falls have also been known to swim a few hundred metres.

But we could find no evidence of lions anywhere in Africa or Asia engaging in long distance swims.

The footage of the two male lions swimming across the Kazinga channel is therefore remarkable.

Long swim tells a bigger story

The swimming behaviour points to an increasing global trend: animals are taking greater risks to find mates, food and new homes.

In South Africa, biologists tracked a 352km journey of an 18-month-old male leopard as he crossed three countries in his attempt to find territory. He was eventually killed in a snare in eSwatini.

A mountain lion in the US, P22, crossed a 10-lane freeway in Los Angeles.

And a herd of Asian elephants was recently documented crossing nearly 500km across farms and rural towns in southern China, likely to find a new home with better access to food.

To connect or to manage

Conservation practitioners and the public are often left with two choices: let wildlife move and hope for the best, or help them get where they need to be.

Monarch butterflies migrate tremendous distances between North and Central America with no conservation intervention. In some places, like the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation area, which encompasses 36 formally protected areas between Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia, lions may still be able to move freely between national parks in areas of low human density.

Once human populations reach a certain threshold, however, conflict between people and lions may arise. Maintaining corridors requires action to reduce conflict and keep corridors open.

The other option is to actively help wildlife get to habitats and mates that will ensure their populations persist. For example, management authorities moved lions between populations, and even culled them, in South Africa to manage their populations.

In other areas, conservationists have reintroduced lions or restored them to parts of their range. But they can only do so in fenced or heavily managed parks.

The challenge for Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park is how to restore the female population. A combination of bad luck and human threats led to unnatural losses of females including two recent poisoning events, and even an electrocution event where three lionesses were killed. Any lion conservation strategy has to keep the people that live closely with them in mind.

Orin Cornille, Bosco Atukwatse and Luke Ochse contributed to the research on which this article is based.

Alexander Richard Braczkowski, Research Fellow at the Centre for Planetary Health and Resilient Conservation Group, Griffith University; Christopher J. O'Bryan, Assistant Professor of Planetary Health, Maastricht University; Duan Biggs, Professor and Chair, Southwestern Environmental Science and Policy, Northern Arizona University, and Robynne Kotze, Research Coordinator, The Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, University of Oxford

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

Reading labels in the supermarket, you may have wondered where your apples come from – but have you ever thought about why you’re eating apples in the first place? Author Sally Coulthard’s new book gives you the answer to this question – and to many more you’d never thought to ask.

From the birthplace of the apple in the Tian Sian mountains of Kazakhstan to the modern mass-production of popular varieties like Pink Ladies, Coulthard gives a step-by-step account of how apples became one of the best-known fruits in the world.

Apples might seem a typically British fruit but, like rhubarb or commercial strawberries, the apples we eat today are not native to Britain. They are actually the result of global trade and migration going back thousands of years.

The earliest apples in Britain were the wild crab variety, which are too small and sour to bring much pleasure – although they were later used for making cider and verjuice (a highly acidic juice). We have the Romans, Normans and medieval monks to thank for our sweet apples. They carefully brought over cuttings and saplings of their favourite fruit, and from there they spread across the globe.

If there’s one thing that defines the history of the apple, it’s variety. Ever heard of an Early Julien, or maybe a Teuchat’s Egg? How about a Flushing Spitzenburgh? By the late 19th century, nearly 1,500 varieties were recognised in Britain alone. Throughout history, gardeners went mad for finding and creating different kinds, crossbreeding hundreds of new apples across the world.

Unfortunately, if you want to try a Bedfordshire Foundling or a Catshead today, you’re out of luck. Through steady commercialisation, most of these varieties have been lost to history, and today’s consumers have at best seven types to choose from in British shops.

A loss of biodiversity

In 1618, gardener William Lawson wrote about an apple tree “which I have knowne these forty yeeres, whose age before my time I cannot learne, it is beyond memory, tho I have enquired of divers aged men of 80 yeeres and upwards”. Lawson’s story would be familiar to most people in his time, for whom centuries-old apple trees were a normal sight.

For us, the landscape is very different. The hardest part of Coulthard’s history to swallow is the loss of diversity over the past hundred years. A shocking 80% of traditional orchards have been destroyed in this time, which a recent National Trust study has described as an equivalent landmass to Isle of Wight.

While the Trust has promised to plant 4 million blossoming trees by 2030 to provide food for pollinating insects, the fate of British apples very much hangs in the balance.

Coulthard shows that our orchards are actually a casualty of post-world war attempts at increasing food security; with old trees making way for vegetable and grain crops. Ironically, it’s meant that today less that 40% of the apples bought in the UK are produced here, which is costing the environment through transport emissions.

The recent election brought promises of increased food security from all parties, although it remains to be seen how this will play out.

Still, The Apple reminds us that nothing is new under the sun, as four-time prime minister William Gladstone (1809-98) once pleaded with British farmers to grow more apples when faced with the same issue of foreign apple imports overtaking in the market. There was even a Gladstone apple named after him – maybe there’ll be a Starmer next?

If we do return to British-only apple production, we might also regain some of the seasonal food habits and traditions which made apples special in the first place. The apple tree only produces fruit from early autumn to winter in the northern hemisphere, which is why so many of our winter traditions centre around apples. Some of these we still have, like apple-bobbing around Halloween, while others are mostly forgotten, like the traditional “lambswool” drink of ale mixed with roasted apples.

Even to me, a historian of tomatoes (coincidentally first called “love apples” in English) the idea of a 300-page book on just apples seemed a little daunting. Thankfully, Coulthard’s lively and engaging style makes it a real treat, and an easy read for any history lover.

Even if you know nothing about British history, The Apple makes sure to provide plenty of context for each twist and turn. And as each chapter ends with a deeper history of 12 apple recipes – from homely apple pie to powerful applejack liquor – it leaves you with plenty of food for thought.

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Serin Quinn, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Warwick

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

Physical inactivity is a killer. When we become inactive, we lose muscular strength. When we lack muscular strength, we may be more likely to experience a host of health issues, including cognitive decline, poor mental health, musculoskeletal conditions, have a fall, get seriously injured, become hospitalised, and develop diabetes, heart disease, dementia, frailty, functional disability and even some forms of cancer.

The weakness caused by sedentary lifestyles places an unsustainable burden on carers and healthcare systems.

Lack of activity comes at a terrible price. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the cost of physical inactivity to public healthcare systems between 2020 and 2030 will be around US$300 billion (approximately £232 billion). In 2022, the UK government said lack of physical activity was associated with one in every six of the country’s deaths.

Historically, people became less active as they grow older. But now, younger people, especially those involved in sedentary work such as desk jobs, are becoming inactive, physically weak, taking more long-term sick leave, and retiring earlier.

Sedentary working conditions can lead to mental fatigue, aches and pains, and may even be a contributing factor to the all-time high of economic inactivity in the UK. Large employers – those with at least 1,000 employees – spend around £2 million annually on sickness absence.

Strength training is one of the most effective types of exercise for physical and mental health – and it’s one of two main recommendations listed on WHO’s physical activity guidelines. Unfortunately, strength training is also the physical activity that people are least likely to stick with.

For desk workers, taking strength breaks – such as body weight squats at your desk – has been shown to immediately increase blood flow, improve brain function including mental arousal and concentration, and reduce the feelings of fatigue.

However, in my experience as a clinical exercise physiologist, people tend to think they are not young, fit, energetic, or active enough to start strength training. But research has found the opposite to be true. Starting strength training, at any age and at any fitness level, leads to increased energy levels and spontaneous increases in physical activity.

Other barriers to getting started with strength training include a lack of time, a lack of specialist knowledge, and uncomfortable commercial gym spaces. These barriers are [exacerbated for women] who are more likely to have caring responsibilities, leaving little time to focus on strength training for health.

If we know the importance of strength, and strength training, and we know the barriers holding people back from participating, why do we continue to fall short in the global challenge of improving physical activity levels? Why is there a shortage of successful programmes in real-world settings?

My latest research found that people in the 40-60 year-old age bracket knew the benefit of having muscular strength and of participating in strength training, but lacked the practical know-how to participate. They called for an increase in support on where to find the details they need to feel confident enough to start with strength training.

Currently, they are left googling and hoping that the information they find is credible and evidence-based. Research participants also felt that the workplace was a missed opportunity to offer strength training support.

Keeping a healthy workforce

Do employees think that simply handing out free gym passes as part of their employee wellbeing package somehow overcomes the barriers of time (and childcare) we face when trying to get to the gym after work and knowing what to do when we get there?

Employers will need to put in more effort if they want to avoid the consequences of sedentary working conditions. We can’t wait until people reach a health crisis to intervene. We need to provide proactive and practical support for people to take care of their health while at work.

It makes sense that employers would want to provide the time and space for their employees to get their strength training session in during the workday. This could look like hiring an exercise physiologist or strength coach to come into the office or even using technology to deliver strength sessions virtually and on-demand to employees who work from home. Programmes could even gamify participation to build camaraderie within and between departments or companies.

What’s more, building this healthy habit now is likely to lead to more people taking that habit well into their retirement years – keeping people stronger, more active, more independent and healthier for longer.

Providing strength training support for 30 minutes, twice per week seems like a small sacrifice for a healthier, happier, more productive, and resilient workforce.

If you’re looking for the easiest way to improve physical activity levels, health, and office culture all at the same time, then look no further. Implementing strength training in the workplace seems like a pretty strong investment to me.

Ashley Gluchowski, University Fellow and Clinical Exercise Physiologist, School of Health & Society, University of Salford

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

Exercising before bed has long been discouraged as the body doesn’t have time to wind down before the lights go out.

But new research has found breaking up a quiet, sedentary evening of watching television with short bursts of resistance exercise can lead to longer periods of sleep.

Adults spend almost one third of the 24-hour day sleeping. But the quality and length of sleep can affect long-term health. Sleeping too little or waking often in the night is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.

Physical activity during the day can help improve sleep. However, current recommendations discourage intense exercise before going to bed as it can increase a person’s heart rate and core temperature, which can ultimately disrupt sleep.

Nighttime habits

For many, the longest period of uninterrupted sitting happens at home in the evening. People also usually consume their largest meal during this time (or snack throughout the evening).

Insulin (the hormone that helps to remove sugar from the blood stream) tends to be at a lower level in the evening than in the morning.

Together these factors promote elevated blood sugar levels, which over the long term can be bad for a person’s health.

Our previous research found interrupting evening sitting every 30 minutes with three minutes of resistance exercise reduces the amount of sugar in the bloodstream after eating a meal.

But because sleep guidelines currently discourage exercising in the hours before going to sleep, we wanted to know if frequently performing these short bursts of light activity in the evening would affect sleep.

Activity breaks for better sleep

In our latest research, we asked 30 adults to complete two sessions based in a laboratory.

During one session the adults sat continuously for a four-hour period while watching streaming services. During the other session, they interrupted sitting by performing three minutes of body-weight resistance exercises (squats, calf raises and hip extensions) every 30 minutes.

After these sessions, participants went home to their normal life routines. Their sleep that evening was measured using a wrist monitor.

Our research found the quality of sleep (measured by how many times they woke in the night and the length of these awakenings) was the same after the two sessions. But the night after the participants did the exercise “activity breaks” they slept for almost 30 minutes longer.

Identifying the biological reasons for the extended sleep in our study requires further research.

But regardless of the reason, if activity breaks can extend sleep duration, then getting up and moving at regular intervals in the evening is likely to have clear health benefits.

Time to revisit guidelines

These results add to earlier work suggesting current sleep guidelines, which discourage evening exercise before bed, may need to be reviewed.

As the activity breaks were performed in a highly controlled laboratory environment, future research should explore how activity breaks performed in real life affect peoples sleep.

We selected simple, body-weight exercises to use in this study as they don’t require people to interrupt the show they may be watching, and don’t require a large space or equipment.

If people wanted to incorporate activity breaks in their own evening routines, they could probably get the same benefit from other types of exercise. For example, marching on the spot, walking up and down stairs, or even dancing in the living room.

The key is to frequently interrupt evening sitting time, with a little bit of whole-body movement at regular intervals.

In the long run, performing activity breaks may improve health by improving sleep and post-meal blood sugar levels. The most important thing is to get up frequently and move the body, in a way the works best for a person’s individual household.

Jennifer Gale, PhD candidate, Department of Human Nutrition, University of Otago and Meredith Peddie, Senior Lecturer, Department of Human Nutrition, University of Otago

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

For many people, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee is the start of a great day. But caffeine can cause headaches and jitters in others. That’s why many people reach for a decaffeinated cup instead.

I’m a chemistry professor who has taught lectures on why chemicals dissolve in some liquids but not in others. The processes of decaffeination offer great real-life examples of these chemistry concepts. Even the best decaffeination method, however, does not remove all of the caffeine – about 7 milligrams of caffeine usually remain in an 8-ounce cup.

Producers decaffeinating their coffee want to remove the caffeine while retaining all – or at least most – of the other chemical aroma and flavor compounds. Decaffeination has a rich history, and now almost all coffee producers use one of three common methods.

All these methods, which are also used to make decaffeinated tea, start with green, or unroasted, coffee beans that have been premoistened. Using roasted coffee beans would result in a coffee with a very different aroma and taste because the decaffeination steps would remove some flavor and odor compounds produced during roasting.

The carbon dioxide method

In the relatively new carbon dioxide method, developed in the early 1970s, producers use high-pressure CO₂ to extract caffeine from moistened coffee beans. They pump the CO₂ into a sealed vessel containing the moistened coffee beans, and the caffeine molecules dissolve in the CO₂.

Once the caffeine-laden CO₂ is separated from the beans, producers pass the CO₂ mixture either through a container of water or over a bed of activated carbon. Activated carbon is carbon that’s been heated up to high temperatures and exposed to steam and oxygen, which creates pores in the carbon. This step filters out the caffeine, and most likely other chemical compounds, some of which affect the flavor of the coffee.

These compounds either bind in the pores of the activated carbon or they stay in the water. Producers dry the decaffeinated beans using heat. Under the heat, any remaining CO₂ evaporates. Producers can then repressurize and reuse the same CO₂.

This method removes 96% to 98% of the caffeine, and the resulting coffee has only minimal CO₂ residue.

This method, which requires expensive equipment for making and handling the CO₂, is extensively used to decaffeinate commercial-grade, or supermarket, coffees.

Swiss water process

The Swiss water method, initially used commercially in the early 1980s, uses hot water to decaffeinate coffee.

Initially, producers soak a batch of green coffee beans in hot water, which extracts both the caffeine and other chemical compounds from the beans.

It’s kind of like what happens when you brew roasted coffee beans – you place dark beans in clear water, and the chemicals that cause the coffee’s dark color leach out of the beans into the water. In a similar way, the hot water pulls the caffeine from not yet decaffeinated beans.

During the soaking, the caffeine concentration is higher in the coffee beans than in the water, so the caffeine moves into the water from the beans. Producers then take the beans out of the water and placed them into fresh water, which has no caffeine in it – so the process repeats, and more caffeine moves out of the beans and into the water. The producers repeat this process, up to 10 times, until there’s hardly any caffeine left in the beans.

The resulting water, which now contains the caffeine and any flavor compounds that dissolved out from the beans, gets passed through activated charcoal filters. These trap caffeine and other similarly sized chemical compounds, such as sugars and organic compounds called polyamines, while allowing most of the other chemical compounds to remain in the filtered water.

Producers then use the filtered water – saturated with flavor but devoid of most of the caffeine – to soak a new batch of coffee beans. This step lets the flavor compounds lost during the soaking process reenter the beans.

The Swiss water process is prized for its chemical-free approach and its ability to preserve most of the coffee’s natural flavor. This method has been shown to remove 94% to 96% of the caffeine.

Solvent-based methods

This traditional and most common approach, first done in the early 1900s, uses organic solvents, which are liquids that dissolve organic chemical compounds such as caffeine. Ethyl acetate and methylene chloride are two common solvents used to extract caffeine from green coffee beans. There are two main solvent-based methods.

In the direct method, producers soak the moist beans directly in the solvent or in a water solution containing the solvent.

The solvent extracts most of the caffeine and other chemical compounds with a similar solubility to caffeine from the coffee beans. The producers then remove the beans from the solvent after about 10 hours and dry them.

In the indirect method, producers soak the beans in hot water for a few hours and then take them out. They then treat the water with solvent to remove caffeine from the water. Methylene chloride, the most common solvent, does not dissolve in the water, so it forms a layer on top of the water. The caffeine dissolves better in methylene chloride than in water, so most of the caffeine stays up in the methylene chloride layer, which producers can separate from the water.

As in the Swiss water method, the producers can reuse the “caffeine-free” water, which may return some of the flavor compounds removed in the first step.

These methods remove about 96% to 97% of the caffeine.

Is decaf coffee safe to drink?

One of the common solvents, ethyl acetate, comes naturally in many foods and beverages. It’s considered a safe chemical for decaffeination by the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have deemed methylene chloride unsafe to consume at concentrations above 10 milligrams per kilogram of your body weight. However, the amount of residual methylene chloride found in roasted coffee beans is very small – about 2 to 3 milligrams per kilogram. It’s well under the FDA’s limits.

OSHA and its European counterparts have strict workplace rules to minimize methylene chloride exposure for workers involved in the decaffeination process.

After producers decaffeinate coffee beans using methylene chloride, they steam the beans and dry them. Then the coffee beans are roasted at high temperatures. During the steaming and roasting process, the beans get hot enough that residual methylene chloride evaporates. The roasting step also produces new flavor chemicals from the breakdown of chemicals into other chemical compounds. These give coffee its distinctive flavor.

Plus, most people brew their coffee at between 190 F to 212 F, which is another opportunity for methylene chloride to evaporate.

Retaining aroma and flavor

It’s chemically impossible to dissolve out only the caffeine without also dissolving out other chemical compounds in the beans, so decaffeination inevitably removes some other compounds that contribute to the aroma and flavor of your cup of coffee.

But some techniques, like the Swiss water process and the indirect solvent method, have steps that may reintroduce some of these extracted compounds. These approaches probably can’t return all the extra compounds back to the beans, but they may add some of the flavor compounds back.

Thanks to these processes, you can have that delicious cup of coffee without the caffeine – unless your waiter accidentally switches the pots.

Michael W. Crowder, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Miami University

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

“Core on deck!”

For two months, whenever I heard that cry, I would run up to the deck of the JOIDES Resolution to watch the crew pull up a 30-foot (10-meter) cylindrical tube filled with layered, multicolored rock and sediment drilled from the seafloor beneath our ship.

In the winter of 2022, I spent two months cruising the south Aegean Sea on board the International Ocean Discovery Program’s JOIDES Resolution as part of IODP Expedition 398. My geologist colleagues and I used this former oil exploration ship to drill deep into the seafloor and reveal the volcanic history of the area off the coast of Santorini, Greece.

As a scientist who studies the chemistry of volcanic rocks, I use my expertise to correlate volcanic sediments to the eruption that caused them and to understand the conditions that magma experienced both at depth underneath a volcano and during an eruption.

Our expedition’s drilling of the seafloor revealed a massive but previously unknown volcanic eruption that took place more than 500,000 years ago. This discovery expands our understanding of the volcanic activity in the chain of volcanoes comprising the South Aegean Volcanic Arc, which will allow for a more accurate hazard analysis of this region.

Building a more complete volcanic history

Archaeologists have long been fascinated with the late Bronze Age eruption of Santorini around 1600 BCE. This eruption is associated with the decline of the Minoan civilization on the nearby island of Crete. Geologists also have significant interest in the region, due to the volatility of the volcanic and seismic activity in this area that is home to about 15,000 residents and attracts around 2 million tourists per year.

Although there’s significant on-land documentation of the Santorini volcano, scientists know that this record is incomplete. On land, erosion, vegetation and additional eruptive events often cover or obscure older volcanic deposits, resulting in a fragmentary history. The deep-sea drilling enabled by the IODP’s JOIDES Resolution gives researchers access to a geologic record rarely preserved on land.

Following a volcanic eruption, pyroclastic materials – pieces of rock and ash formed during the eruption – settle through the water column to collect on the seafloor. There, clays and biological material, such as the shells of tiny marine organisms, rain down continuously, capping the volcanic rock deposits. This process preserves a record of an individual eruption as a single layer. Layers build with time, with each successive volcanic event creating a near-continuous chronologic record of the volcanic history of the region.

Expedition 398’s mission was to access this deep-sea record in order to document the extensive history of eruptions in each area of concentrated volcanic activity.

IODP Expedition 398

IODP Expedition 398 collected drill cores to better understand the volcanic history and recurrence interval of the Santorini, Christiana and Kolumbo volcanoes in this region. The JOIDES Resolution crew drilled 12 sites to a maximum depth of 2,950 feet (900 meters) below the seafloor. We recovered more than 11,000 feet (3,356 meters) of total core over 780 cores.

As technicians cut the core into 4½-foot (1½-meter) sections, scientists would gather to see what material had been recovered. After bringing the cores to surface pressure, the team would split them lengthwise, photograph them, analyze them for physical properties such as magnetic susceptibility, and describe the material. Core describers measure and record the geologic composition of each rocky unit contained within.

As the geochemistry lab lead, I took small samples of multiple layers of volcanic rock and ash to dissolve into solution and analyze for their trace element composition. During an eruption, magma crystallizes and mixes with elements in the water and rock it comes into contact with. The resulting chemical changes in the magma are unique to the conditions of that particular eruption. So once I figure out the chemical composition of the deposit samples, I can fingerprint their volcanic origin.

Our discovery: The Archaeos Tuff

During the expedition, our group of researchers discovered a thick, white pumice layer at multiple sites, in several different basins. Shipboard biostratigraphy dated each occurrence of the layer to the same age: between 510,000 and 530,000 years ago. Geochemical correlations suggested the composition was the same across drill holes as well.

Finding the same layer across these basins allows our research team to model how big the eruption that caused it might have been. We used seismic data collected during the expedition to determine that the bulk volume of the volcanic sediment is about 21 cubic miles (90 cubic kilometers), with thicknesses up to 490 feet (150 meters) in some places. In addition, we determined that this layer of volcanic rock was spread over 1,100 square miles (3,000 square kilometers) of this region in the southern Aegean Sea.

Our team named this deposit the Archaeos Tuff, from the Greek word archea for ancient. The name reflects the rock’s Greek origin, as well as the fact that it was significantly older than much of the volcanic activity we know about on land.

Based on the Archaeos Tuff’s characteristics, we can understand the nature of the volcanic eruption that formed it. Its thickness and distribution over a wide area suggest that the Archaeos Tuff is the result of a single, high-intensity eruption. The numerous vesicles, or tiny holes, in the rock indicate that a large amount of gas was released at the same time as the liquid magma. These little gas bubbles paint a picture of a powerful eruption in which a great deal of volatile gas was released quite quickly.

Yet despite its evident size and ferocity, this eruption did not correlate with any previously known on-land deposits or large eruptions. The relative lack of on-land material suggests a mainly submarine eruption. Once we knew what we were looking for, our team was able to match our newly discovered deep-sea layer of volcanic sediment to a few small, previously uncorrelated on-land deposits on Santorini, Christiana and Anafi islands. The presence of these deposits indicates some breach of the sea surface during the eruption, which again fits with our picture of an energetic eruption.

Further study of the Archaeos Tuff’s composition and age confirmed the unique nature of the rock deposit left by this eruption. Based on the data we collected, our team believes the Archaeos Tuff is the result of an eruption six times bigger than the Bronze Age Minoan eruption, leaving behind rock deposits 30 times thicker. The presence of such a large volcanic deposit tells us that the South Aegean Volcanic Arc is more capable of producing large submarine volcanic eruptions than scientists previously recognized.

Identifying the Archaeos Tuff expands what we know about volcanic processes in the south Aegean Sea. It suggests a greater propensity for hazardous submarine volcanism than previously realized – and that officials need to reevaluate volcanic hazards to the surrounding population.

Molly Colleen McCanta, Associate Professor of Petrology and Planetary Geoscience, University of Tennessee

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

At first glance, Netflix’s popular Japanese animation Delicious in Dungeon is a strangely food-obsessed dungeon-crawler fantasy tale.

Upon a closer look, however, it reveals itself as a striking parody of the popular “gourmet genre”. The series invites us to think critically about how food traditions are created and conformed to.

It also reminds us that food is highly political and that the “culinary nationalism” we see around the world – and particularly in Japan – is more complicated than most people realise.

A culinary high fantasy

Delicious in Dungeon was initially released as a comic book in 2014, before being adapted for TV by Japanese animation studio Trigger. Its distribution by Netflix this year has given the seinen (meaning “youth”) anime a global audience.

Despite being a dungeon crawler, the series has an unusually explicit focus on food. Our group of heroes must keep themselves fed while on their epic quest. Specifically, they must embrace (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) danjon meshii: slaying monsters and eating them.

The show’s creators use a range of visual and narrative tropes borrowed from the Japanese “gourmet” genre. Typically, works in this genre (including books, movies, shows, comics and more) feature a careful discussion of ingredients, a demonstration of their preparation and an evaluation on the final product.

The order in which this happens can vary depending on the specific work. For example, the popular Netflix show Midnight Diner typically provides the full recipe at the end of each episode.

Although the ingredients and method of preparation shown in Delicious in Dungeon are … unusual … the show still follows this pattern to a T. Whether the characters are making a mandrake and bat meat kakiage, or a basilisk egg omelette, they discuss the ingredients, prepare the meal and react as they eat it.

Even the characters who are the most uncomfortable with having to eat monsters have moments of eye-watering happiness when they taste the delicious flavours.

Conversations about food

By talking explicitly and consistently about food taboos (such as “must you eat the monsters you kill?”) and food values (such as “food should be shared with others”), Delicious in Dungeon draws our attention to a number of ideas that usually hide beneath the surface.

What is “natural” to eat? Why are some food practices considered taboo? And who gets to decide?

Our “foodways” – our cultural and social practices regarding the creation and consumption of food – are where community, connection and in-group/out-group dynamics are formed.

Food is constantly at the centre of battles of authenticity, tradition and values (never mind issues of scarcity and sustainability). As described by Japanese literature academic Tomoko Aoyama in her book Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature:

the seemingly simple and ordinary may turn out to be surprisingly complex, once we pay attention to it […] Food has been discovered, invented, classified, and scrutinised, as well as enjoyed, consumed and devoured.

Policing tradition and authenticity

Since the early 2000s, various arms of the Japanese government have been on a quest to define (and protect) “authentic” Japanese food.

One eyebrow-raising example was a 2006 program created for the certification of authentic Japanese restaurants outside Japan. It has since been largely replaced by Japan’s non-governmental, non-profit Organisation to Promote Japanese Restaurants Abroad and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries promotion of businesses that use Japanese ingredients.

Perhaps the most significant change in Japanese food tradition was the successful UNESCO Intangible Heritage bid of 2013, which saw washoku enshrined as a “traditional dietary culture”.

The term washoku (“wa” meaning Japanese and “shoku” meaning food) emerged during the modern Meiji period (1868–1912) to describe food from Japan alongside a sudden influx of European foods. But it was an everyday term of no special significance; there was no uniform opinion of what “Japanese” food was.

After the bid, a previously undefined range of food practices carried out by millions of people was reduced to a single meal which includes a serve of white rice with multiple side dishes.

Washoku is essentially an “invented tradition” that was only recently awarded cultural significance and repackaged for an international audience. As Japanese culinary scholar Eric Rath explains:

Washoku is an idealised dietary lifestyle focusing on food popularised from the 1960s onwards, meant to impress audiences outside Japan and guide domestic eating habits.

In fact, many elements of modern Japanese cuisine didn’t become mainstream until the past 100 years. For instance, the vast majority of Japan’s population rarely ate pure white rice before the 1950s. It was the rice rationing of the wartime government that introduced white rice into people’s daily fare.

Before this period, there was massive variation in food practices and the types of food eaten depended on the region and climate. Generally speaking, however, a “traditional” Japanese diet from pre-modern times included single-pot meals combining millet and barley (sometimes mixed with rice) and local vegetables.

Another example of a dish considered purely Japanese, but which isn’t, is ramen.

Ramen was developed in the early 1900s by Chinese immigrants in Japan, to serve to blue-collar workers. It underwent several changes and adjustments before it became the rich dish we know and love today.

Eating with your eyes

Regardless of the historical reality, our shared imagination of “Japanese food” continues to thrive in fictional worlds and the gourmet genre.

Netflix in particular has engaged with the genre through older hits such as Midnight Diner and more recent releases such as The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House.

A number of novels translated from Japenese to English such as The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai can also be understood as part of this trend.

When we see the characters in Delicious in Dungeon debate how to best prepare their dishes, or gasp in pleasure at the wonders on their palates, we’re actually seeing a parody of the gourmet genre and a critique of culinary nationalism.

So the next time you encounter the words “traditional” next to food, you might want to ask yourself: what is this person trying to sell me – and why?

Laura Emily Clark, Lecturer in Japanese, University of New England

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

After Thursday’s announcement that cabinet ministers Linda Burney and Brendan O'Connor were stepping down from the frontbench, all public attention came on to the reshuffle to be unveiled on Sunday.

Behind the scenes, however, something else is preoccupying the government. Ahead of the June quarter inflation figure out on Wednesday, the collective holding of breath is palpable. That number, and its consequences, could affect the government’s political fortunes for months.

The markets expect inflation to increase from the previous quarter’s 3.6% annual figure. If that happens, days of debilitating public speculation will follow, about whether the Reserve Bank at its August 5–6 meeting will raise interest rates or decide, in light of an economy that’s crawling along the ground, to hold them steady.

Australia’s inflation rate has come down from 7.8% in the December quarter of 2022 to the March quarter’s 3.6%. But a turn upwards, even relatively small, would get people worried.

Who’d want the job of bank governor Michele Bullock right now? If rates were hiked in August, Bullock would take a heap of flak. But, unlike the government, she doesn’t face an election. Critics, especially the opposition, would accuse the government of fuelling inflation with its budget cost-of-living measures, although Treasury has estimated they reduce inflation.

The Westpac forecast for the June quarter is an annual rate of 3.8%. Inflation is being fed by rises in petrol prices, insurance and rents.

This week the markets’ expectation of an August rate rise is still relatively low. So for the government, there is an encouraging chance of dodging the bullet – and the ire of home buyers.

On the other hand, the bank has made it clear it won’t be deterred in its fight against inflation. Bullock said after the board’s June meeting: “We need a lot to go our way if we are going to bring inflation back down to the 2–3% target range. The board does need to be confident that inflation is moving sustainably toward target and it will do what is necessary to achieve that outcome.”

The government points out that as inflation falls, it doesn’t necessarily come down in a straight line. However, its earlier expectation (or hope) that by the end of this year inflation could be within the bank’s target range must be in doubt, although Treasurer Jim Chalmers wouldn’t concede that.

An August rate rise would be a heavy blow for the government, but even if that is avoided, the crucial rate fall it is looking for is a long time away. And how much political advantage an eventual single rate decrease would bring is likely limited, after home buyers have faced more than a dozen increases.

The latest Freshwater Strategy poll, published this week in the Australian Financial Review, shows voters in a funk of pessimism, which will take a lot of turning around.

More than half (56%) think the country is headed in the wrong direction; fewer than three in ten (29%) believe it is going the right way. Some 50% say the economy will have worsened a year from now; just over one in five (21%) believe it will have improved.

Meanwhile Sunday’s reshuffle will aim at removing barnacles as well as giving an opportunity for a refresh of the team.

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles is expected to be moved, in an effort to neutralise what has been a fraught issue for Labor.

Giles, a Victorian left winger who was a solicitor for asylum seekers and reacted emotionally to Labor’s 2015 embrace of turning back boats, was always likely to strike trouble in this post. Then the High Court decision forcing the release of a batch of immigration detainees put him into a spotlight that often had him looking near frozen.

There has been speculation his senior minister, Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil, may also be shifted. O'Neil’s performance has been lacklustre. Anyway her behemoth department is too large and unwieldy, ranging from cyber security to border control. Administratively, it performs poorly.

What Albanese should do is break up Home Affairs, and elevate the immigration minister into cabinet. But that would be radical.

The obvious replacement for Burney is Malarndirri McCarthy, assistant minister in the Indigenous portfolio, who was formerly a member of the Northern Territory parliament. It would be a big step up for her, in an area where Labor appears to have lost its way since last year’s failed Voice referendum.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion the government in recent months hasn’t wanted Indigenous affairs policy to the fore, especially in the run up to the August Northern Territory election. Or perhaps it simply hasn’t been able to work up a plan. The referendum left the government dispirited and with a vacuum, and Burney exhausted.

A changing of the ministerial guard does (or should) provide an opportunity to draw a line under the referendum debacle, and embark on a policy refresh.

Late next week Albanese will attend the Garma festival in northeast Arnhem Land. Garma is far more than a cultural gathering. It is an occasion that brings together Indigenous leaders, as well as politicians and others with a stake in or connection to Indigenous affairs.

One attendee this year will be Danielle Wood, the head of the Productivity Commission, which next week will release its latest update on the Closing the Gap results. It doesn’t take that report to tell us that on many fronts, the gap is yawning.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy is one of the Productivity Commission’s new policy areas of focus; it will be consulting on a research plan in coming months.

The commission is not the only specialist economic player working in Indigenous affairs. The Treasury also has a unit devoted to this policy area. Chalmers himself is taking an increasing interest.

The involvement of economic departments and agencies is vitally important to achieving progress, for a couple of reasons. One is that the bureaucracy supporting Indigenous policy hasn’t been nearly as strong as required. Another is that if communities could be given a lot more economic sustainability, that could help alleviate (albeit not solve) some of the social problems.

As things stand, if he disappeared off the scene today, Albanese would have only a failed legacy in Indigenous affairs. He needs to use the months ahead and (assuming) a second term to turn that into some substantial positive achievements. We know from history it won’t be easy.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

The internet, a vast and indispensable resource for modern society, has a darker side where malicious activities thrive.

From identity theft to sophisticated malware attacks, cyber criminals keep coming up with new scam methods.

Widely available generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools have now added a new layer of complexity to the cyber security landscape. Staying on top of your online security is more important than ever.

The rise of dark LLMs

One of the most sinister adaptations of current AI is the creation of “dark LLMs” (large language models).

These uncensored versions of everyday AI systems like ChatGPT are re-engineered for criminal activities. They operate without ethical constraints and with alarming precision and speed.

Cyber criminals deploy dark LLMs to automate and enhance phishing campaigns, create sophisticated malware and generate scam content.

To achieve this, they engage in LLM “jailbreaking” – using prompts to get the model to bypass its built-in safeguards and filters.

For instance, FraudGPT writes malicious code, creates phishing pages and generates undetectable malware. It offers tools for orchestrating diverse cybercrimes, from credit card fraud to digital impersonation.

FraudGPT is advertised on the dark web and the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Its creator openly markets its capabilities, emphasising the model’s criminal focus.

Another version, WormGPT, produces persuasive phishing emails that can trick even vigilant users. Based on the GPT-J model, WormGPT is also used for creating malware and launching “business email compromise” attacks – targeted phishing of specific organisations.

What can we do to protect ourselves?

Despite the looming threats, there is a silver lining. As the challenges have advanced, so have the ways we can defend against them.

AI-based threat detection tools can monitor malware and respond to cyber attacks more effectively. However, humans need to stay in the mix to keep an eye on how these tools respond, what actions they take, and whether there are vulnerabilities to fix.

You may have heard keeping your software up to date is crucial for security. It might feel like a chore, but it really is a critical defence strategy. Updates patch up the vulnerabilities that cyber criminals try to exploit.

Are your files and data regularly backed up? It’s not just about preserving files in case of a system failure. Regular backups are a fundamental protection strategy. You can reclaim your digital life without caving to extortion if you are targeted by a ransomware attack – when criminals lock up your data and demand a ransom payment before they release it.

Cyber criminals who send phishing messages can leave clues like poor grammar, generic greetings, suspicious email addresses, overly urgent requests or suspicious links. Developing an eye for these signs is as essential as locking your door at night.

If you don’t already use strong, unique passwords and multi-factor authentication, it’s time to do so. This combination multiplies your security, making it dramatically more difficult for criminals to access your accounts.

What can we expect in the future?

Our online existence will continue to intertwine with emerging technologies like AI. We can expect more sophisticated cyber crime tools to emerge, too.

Malicious AI will enhance phishing, create sophisticated malware and improve data mining for targeted attacks. AI-driven hacking tools will become widely available and customisable.

In response, cyber security will have to adapt, too. We can expect automated threat hunting, quantum-resistant encryption, AI tools that help to preserve privacy, stricter regulations and international cooperation.

The role of government regulations

Stricter government regulations on AI are one way to counter these advanced threats. This would involve mandating the ethical development and deployment of AI technologies, ensuring they are equipped with robust security features and adhere to stringent standards.

In addition to tighter regulations, we also need to improve how organisations respond to cyber incidents and what mechanisms there are for mandatory reporting and public disclosure.

By requiring companies to promptly report cyber incidents, authorities can act swiftly. They can mobilise resources to address breaches before they escalate into major crises.

This proactive approach can significantly mitigate the impact of cyber attacks, preserving both public trust and corporate integrity.

Furthermore, cyber crime knows no borders. In the era of AI-powered cyber crime, international collaboration is essential. Effective global cooperation can streamline how authorities track and prosecute cyber criminals, creating a unified front against cyber threats.

As AI-powered malware proliferates, we’re at a critical junction in the global tech journey: we need to balance innovation (new AI tools, new features, more data) with security and privacy.

Overall, it’s best to be proactive about your own online security. That way you can stay one step ahead in the ever-evolving cyber battleground.

Bayu Anggorojati, Assistant Professor, Cyber Security, Monash University; Arif Perdana, Associate Professor in Digital Strategy and Data Science, Monash University, and Derry Wijaya, Associate Professor of Data Science, Monash University

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

In a country like Australia, we all expect that when we get old, we’ll be able to rely on a robust aged care system. But aged care providers can’t find staff and a crisis is brewing.

If the problem isn’t fixed, there are serious risks to quality and access to services for older people who need support. There are also broader social, economic and political consequences for undervaluing the rapidly expanding health and social assistance workforce.

Aged care employs around 420,000 people. Around 80% of those are front line staff providing care and demand for them is increasing rapidly.

Australians are ageing

The number of people aged 80 and over is projected to double by 2050. At the same time, informal family care is becoming less available. In the next 25 years, twice as many aged care staff will be needed.

Currently, about 1.4 million older people receive aged care services, including basic and more intensive home care and residential care.

Health care and social support job vacancies and ads are the highest of any industry. Between 30,000 and 35,000 additional direct aged care workers a year are already needed. By 2030 the shortfall is likely to be 110,000 full time equivalent workers.

Why don’t enough people want to work in aged care?

Despite recent pay increases, it is difficult to attract and retain aged care workers because the work is under-valued.

The Australian workforce is undergoing profound change. A generation ago, manufacturing made up 17% of the workforce. Today it has fallen to 6%. By contrast, the health care and social assistance workforce has doubled from 8% to 16%.

Manufacturing jobs were mainly secure, full-time, reasonably paid jobs dominated by male workers.

By contrast, jobs in aged care are often insecure, part-time and poorly paid, dominated by women, with many workers coming from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Since moving to take over aged care in the 1980s, the federal government has over-emphasised cost constraint through service privatisation, activity-based funding and competition, often under the cover of consumer choice.

The result is a highly fragmented and poorly coordinated aged care sector with almost 3,200, often small and under-resourced providers centrally funded and regulated from Canberra.

This has led to high levels of casualisation, low investment in training and professional development, and inadequate supervision, particularly in the home care sector.

Aged care is facing a perfect storm. Demand for care and support staff is increasing dramatically. The sector is poorly coordinated and difficult to navigate. Pay and conditions remain poor and the workforce is relatively untrained. There are no minimum standards or registration requirements for many front-line aged care staff.

What are the consequences?

An understaffed and under-trained aged care workforce reduces access to services and the quality of care and support.

Aged care providers routinely report it is difficult to attract staff and they can’t meet the growing demand for services from older people.

Staff shortages are already having an impact on residential care occupancy rates falling, with some regional areas now down to only 50% occupancy.

That means older people either don’t get care or they are at increased risk of neglect, malnutrition, avoidable hospital admissions and a poorer quality of life.

Inevitably, lack of aged care workers puts pressure on hospital services when older people have nowhere else to go.

What needs to be done?

Addressing these challenges requires a multifaceted approach. Australia will need a massive increase in the number of aged care workers and the quality of the care they provide. Wages have to be competitive to attract and retain staff.

But better pay and conditions is only part of the story. Unless aged care becomes a career the community recognises, values and supports, it will continue to be difficult to train, attract and retain staff.

The recent Royal Commission on Aged Care Quality and Safety highlighted the need for a more skilled workforce, emphasising the importance of ongoing professional development for all staff.

To date the federal government’s aged care workforce initiatives have been underwhelming. They are a limited and piecemeal rather than a coherent workforce strategy.

In the short term, skilled migration may be part of the solution. But progress to bring in skilled aged care workers has been glacial. Currently only about 1% of providers have agreements to bring in staff from overseas. At best, overseas migration will meet only 10% of the workforce shortfall.

Registration, qualifications and training for direct care work have to become mandatory to make sure care standards are met.

Much more significant and systematic incentives and support for training will be needed. Supervision, career progression and staff development will also have to be dramatically improved if we are to attract and retain the workforce that is needed.

“Learn and earn” incentives, including scholarships and traineeships for aged care, are needed to attract the future workforce.

At the same time, a much broader investment in upskilling the entire workforce through continuing professional development and good quality supervision is necessary.

Like manufacturing a generation ago, aged care needs to become valued, skilled, secure and well-paid employment if it is going to attract the staff that are needed to avoid a looming crisis.

Hal Swerissen, Emeritus Professor of Public Health, La Trobe University

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

The world’s best golfers make playing look so effortless, it’s hard to imagine what’s going on inside their minds. But modern neuroscience allows us to do exactly that. My team’s new study shows how different parts of an expert golfer’s brains are activated when they putt their ball into the hole.

Putting is a crucial part of golf. Using their putter when the ball is on (or just off) the green, golfers gently roll their ball towards the hole. Good putting distinguishes the most successful players in any tournament, as it can make up 40-50% of the total number of strokes on each round (on average, around 1.8 putts per hole). Winning a tournament can often come down to holing a final, dramatic putt.

Our team focused on what makes golfers good at putting, particularly the mental processes required to do it consistently well. Putting’s structured routine makes it easy to study and analyse. Before each putt, golfers enter a preparation phase where they stand still with the putter just behind the ball (a position called the “address”). This period can provide insights into the mental and physical processes involved in preparing to putt.

To explore these mental processes, we measured brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain. This offers an accurate way to measure the timing of brainwaves as they happen, making it ideal for sports research.

Scientists categorise brainwaves based on their frequency ranges (measured in Hertz), which are associated with different functions. The brainwaves researchers mainly explore in putting are the theta band (4 -7 Hz: associated with concentration and error detection in motor tasks), the alpha band (8-12 Hz: attention and arousal control), and the beta band (12-30 Hz: associated with motor preparation).

In our study, published in the Journal of Frontiers in Psychology, myself and colleagues tried to see if there were differences in brain activity between successful (when the ball goes into the hole) and unsuccessful putts.

Successful putts show distinct brain patterns

We recruited 28 expert-but-amateur golfers (20 of whom were men) with an average age of 24.2 years to participate in a testing session. These participants each made 140 putts while wearing an EEG head system to record their brain activity.

We used two methods to analyse their brain activity. The first was “time-frequency analysis”, which examines how signal frequencies change over time. This allowed us to measure what was happening in the brain in the final three seconds before the player made contact with the ball for each putt.

The second was “movement-related cortical potentials”, which helps us understand how the brain plans, prepares and executes movements. In our case, the movement was the golfer beginning their the putting action.

Our study reveals that successful golf putts show distinct patterns of brain activity.

From the time-frequency analysis, we found successful putts were associated with changes in beta and theta brainwaves in the final three seconds before putting. Successful putts showed a more pronounced decrease in beta activity during preparation than unsuccessful ones. This suggests these golfers had better preparation when they went on to putt the ball into the hole.

Based on this finding, we would advise players to commit to their stroke and have a clear plan in mind, so they can experience the earlier onset of beta suppression. Crucially, they should not alter their plans just before putting the ball.

If they are not sure of what strategy to use – in other words, what direction they should aim the ball and how hard to hit it – we would recommend stepping away, then re-starting the process of hitting the putt with a clearer plan.

Commit to your stroke

In our study, successful putts also tended to show lower theta activity in the frontal region of the brain, especially just before contact between putter and ball. The higher theta activity during unsuccessful putts may indicate hesitation or the need to adjust the motor plan before execution.

Our findings emphasise the importance of committing to your stroke when putting. It’s common coaching advice, but now we have data to back up why it’s so crucial.

Our analysis of the movement-related cortical potentials also found differences in brain activity. Successful putts were associated with more efficient processing and less energy expenditure, compared with unsuccessful ones. So, successful putts cost the players less brainpower.

Many golfers report knowing what it “feels like” to putt well. It’s hard to replicate this feeling consistently, though. If you want to putt better, practise your skills so you can dependably perform the motor action and handle the pressure of competition.

This finding supports the “neural efficiency” theory in sports research, which says that experts have less neural activity when they complete a task related to their profession.

Across different sports, from archery to tennis, researchers have found experts are simply more efficient in their mental processing, which allows them to activate different parts of their brains when they play. In other words, practising a sport doesn’t just change your body – it can literally alter your mind.

Laura Carey, Lecturer in Health and Life Sciences, University of the West of Scotland

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

Iron ore is the key ingredient in steel production. One of the fundamental resources for the Australian economy, it contributes A$124 billion in national income each year.

This is not surprising, considering Western Australia is home to some of Earth’s largest iron ore deposits, and 96% of Australia’s iron ore comes from this state. Yet despite the metal’s significance, we still don’t know exactly how and when iron deposits formed within the continent.

In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we answer some of these questions by directly measuring radioactive elements in iron oxide minerals which form the basis of these resources.

We found that several of Western Australia’s richest iron deposits – such as Mt Tom Price and Mt Whaleback – are up to 1 billion years younger than previously understood. This redefines how we think about iron deposits at all scales: from the mining site to supercontinents. It also provides clues on how we might be able to find more iron.

Where does iron ore come from?

Billions of years ago, Earth’s oceans were rich in iron. Then early bacteria started photosynthesising and rapidly introduced huge amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere and oceans. This oxygen combined with iron in the oceans, causing it to settle on the sea floor.

Today, these 2.45-billion-year-old sedimentary rock deposits are called banded iron formations. They represent a unique archive of the interactions between Earth’s continents, oceans and atmosphere through time. And, of course, banded iron formations are what we mine for iron ore.

These sedimentary deposits have distinctive, rhythmic bands of reddish iron and paler silica. They were alternately laid down on the sea floor seasonally. Such remarkable rocks can be visited today in Karijini National Park, WA.

The iron content of these banded iron formations is generally less than 30%. For the rock to become economically viable to mine, it must be naturally converted by later processes to around 60% iron.

The nature of this rock conversion is still debated. In simplest terms, a fluid – such as water – will both remove silica and introduce more iron during an “upgrading” process which transforms the rock’s original makeup.

The geochronology (age dating) of this chemical transformation and upgrading is not well understood, largely because the tools required to directly date the iron minerals have only recently become available.

Previous age estimates for the Pilbara iron deposits were indirect but suggested they were at least 2.2 billion years old.

What did we find out?

You may think of iron ore as rusty, red-coloured dust. However, it’s typically a hard, heavy, steely-blue material. When crushed into a fine powder, iron ore turns red. So the red landscape we see across the Pilbara today is a result of the weathering of iron minerals from beneath our feet.

We extracted microscopic scale “fresh” iron minerals from drill core samples at several of the most significant Western Australian iron deposits.

Leveraging recent advancements in radiometric dating, we measured naturally occurring radioactive elements in the rocks. In particular, the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes in a sample can reveal how long ago individual mineral grains crystallised.

Using the newly generated iron mineral age data, we constructed the first-ever timeline of the formation of Western Australia’s major iron deposits.

We discovered that all major iron ore deposits in the region formed between 1.4 and 1.1 billion years ago, making them up to 1 billion years younger than previous estimates.

These deposits formed in conjunction with major tectonic events, especially the breakup and reemergence of supercontinents. It shows just how dynamic our planet’s history is, and how complex the processes are that led to the formation of the iron ore we use today.

Now that we know that giant ore deposits are linked to changes in the supercontinent cycle, we can use this knowledge to better predict the places where we are more likely to discover more iron ore.

Liam Courtney-Davies completed this research while at John de Laeter Centre, Curtin University.

Liam Courtney-Davies, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Colorado Boulder

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

Loneliness affects everyone at different times. Although it is well documented men are less likely than women to talk about feelings and to seek help, our research found men’s work arrangements can be a significant contributor.

We found loneliness was highest among men in their late 40s but it also occurred at other times, often shaped by how they perceived their careers and income.

This suggests the workplace and societal expectations around work are important in men’s experiences of loneliness.

Measuring loneliness

Our findings are based on an analysis of yearly data from 12,117 Australian men, aged 15 to 98, collected for over 19 years for the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.

We measured loneliness by examining men’s responses to a question asking whether they agreed with the statement: “I often feel very lonely”. The responses range from one (completely disagree) to seven (completely agree).

We then used statistical techniques to ensure we were measuring loneliness and not similar constructs, such as social isolation.

We also used methods that examined how much of men’s loneliness was uniquely due to their social relationships (for example, their romantic relationships or friendships), versus other aspects of their lives, such as their living situation or their working arrangements.

The role of work

Given loneliness is a social problem, we were not surprised to find problems in men’s social relationships, particularly their romantic relationships, friendships and family relationships were linked with loneliness. However, we were surprised to see work also played a significant role.

Men who were unemployed or in insecure jobs experienced more loneliness than those with stable employment. Job loss can impact a person’s identity and limits the social connections work typically provides. Unemployment also limits income, making it harder to afford social activities. Insecure “gig” work, with its often unpredictable and long hours spent alone, disrupts work-life balance and can isolate people.

Our research suggests societal expectations also worsen loneliness for some men. We measured the degree to which men agreed with the statement: “It is not good for a relationship if the woman earns more than the man”.

Men, particularly middle-aged men, who believed they should be the main breadwinners in a household were lonelier than those without this belief.

This suggests traditional views around work in the context of heteronormative relationships can be damaging to social connection.

This once mainstream view not only harms relationships but is also unrealistic when surviving on a single income is increasingly difficult for many households.

Improving men’s personal relationships is only one way to reduce male loneliness. The work sector and social pressures around work should also adapt.

Shifting social norms

Public stereotypes that make men feel solely responsible for household income need to shift. Public awareness and education campaigns can help shift gender norms and stereotypes by building knowledge and awareness, and may therefore reduce loneliness.

Helping men attain better work-life balance can help everyone. Such change, however, requires major cultural shifts which take time. A shorter term solution, particularly for men at retirement age, is volunteering.

Volunteering provides purpose and opportunities to socialise, although recent evidence suggests volunteering has not returned to pre-COVID levels.

How governments can help

Increasing casualisation of the workplace and the growth of the gig economy offer flexibility but also decrease job security. Our research shows job insecurity or unemployment rates contribute to male loneliness.

Government amendments to the Fair Work Act should help reduce job insecurity by allowing the Fair Work Commission to set fair minimum standards, including access to dispute resolution for “employee-like” workers, such as Uber drivers, who work through a digital platform.

Governments can also support activities of interest to men by ensuring regular funding for programs like Men’s Sheds or opportunities to work with animals.

Social prescribing – where a GP or other health worker links patients with resources and activities to improve health and reduce loneliness – can also involve men in roles which best fit their needs and interests.

How employers can help

Thankfully, workplaces can do a lot to reduce loneliness. A recent review suggests employers can:

1) Create opportunities for social connection, for example, dedicating time for non-work activities such as designing communal areas in offices to support connection.

2) Support flexible and remote, potentially isolated workers by fostering workplace connections using virtual spaces such as online dinners, while still encouraging work-life balance.

3) Foster a people focused culture by building employee autonomy, tolerating mistakes and providing mentoring opportunities.

The relationship between managers and workers is especially important for well-being, because managers can shape working conditions, model positive behaviour and improve staff knowledge, but few interventions target this area.

Marlee Bower, Research Fellow, Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, University of Sydney; Ferdi Botha, Senior Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne, and Mark Deady, Senior Research Fellow, Black Dog Institute, UNSW Sydney

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

Headlines are again warning of a new COVID variant in Australia. This time it’s LB.1, or as some experts have dubbed it, “D-FLiRT”.

Emerging evidence suggests LB.1 could be more transmissible than earlier Omicron subvariants, though there’s nothing to suggest it will cause more severe disease.

But before we look more closely at LB.1, how did we get here in the first place? The COVID virus is a crafty thing, continuing to evolve so it can keep infecting us.

From XBB to JN.1 to FLiRT to FLuQE

Our current COVID vaccines are based on XBB.1.5, a subvariant of Omicron. Along with other XBB subvariants, XBB.1.5 caused a wave of COVID cases around the world in 2023.

In August 2023, a new subvariant called JN.1 was discovered in Luxembourg. Until that point, new Omicron subvariants only had small genetic changes from their predecessors (called genetic drift).

However, JN.1 was unusual in that it was 41 mutations away from XBB.1.5 (big changes like this are called genetic shifts). Because of these changes, it was expected that JN.1 would take off, and indeed, JN.1 caused another wave of infections in Australia and around the world at the end of 2023 and the beginning of this year.

JN.1 then mutated further, giving us the “FLiRT” subvariants such as KP.1.1, JN.1.7 and KP.2.

Proteins including the spike protein (a protein on the surface of the virus which allows it to attach to our cells) are made up of amino acids, essentially molecular building blocks. When scientists “sequence” new variants, they work out the exact order of amino acids in the spike protein, as this can change the behaviour of the virus.

Each amino acid has its own letter abbreviation. The FLiRT variants were named for two genetic mutations to the spike protein. The sequence changed from phenylalanine (F) to leucine (L) at position 456 (genetic mutation F456L), and from arginine (R) to threonine (T) at position 346 (R346T).

Research yet to be peer-reviewed suggests these genetic changes gave the FLiRT subvariants better capacity to evade our immune responses, but slightly poorer ability to establish an infection once they get into our cells (sometimes called binding efficiency).

The FLiRT subvariants have themselves now mutated. Some of these new subvariants are called FLuQE, and include KP.3, which along with KP.2 is currently dominating around the world.

These are similar to the FLiRT subvariants with additional genetic mutations. One is called Q493E – hence the name FLuQE. Along with another mutation, F456L, these changes appear to have helped the virus regain some of its reduced ability to infect cells compared to FLiRT by increasing binding efficiency.

From FLiRT to LB.1

Reports suggest LB.1 was first detected in March 2024. LB.1 is similar to the FLiRT subvariants but with an additional mutation in the spike protein called S:S31del. The “del” refers to a deletion – a genetic change where a part of the virus’ genetic sequence is removed or lost during replication. In this case, the 31st amino acid (serine) in the spike protein is removed.

For this reason, it’s been given the nickname “D-FLiRT” or “DeFLiRT”. This also covers other variants carrying the same mutations as FLiRT but with this deletion, such as KP.2.3.

Preliminary results from a research group at the University of Tokyo, who conducted modelling and lab experiments with these emerging subvariants, indicate the transmissibility of LB.1 and KP.2.3 may be higher than both KP.2 and KP.3.

Should we be worried about LB.1?

LB.1 has been detected in multiple countries, including Australia, and is being monitored closely by bodies like the World Health Organization and the CDC.

In the United States, as of July 15, KP.3 accounted for about 37% of cases, KP.2 for 24% and LB.1 for another 15%, having been steadily rising over recent weeks.

KP.3 and its descendants such as KP.3.2 and KP.3.2.1 (FLuQE subvariants) are similarly dominating in Australia, accounting for at least 50% of cases. We don’t know what proportion of cases LB.1 is making up in Australia at present. It’s possible LB.1 infections are still negligible, but they may well grow over time.

While COVID cases appear to be declining after a recent wave in Australia, LB.1 may eventually out-compete KP.3, and between them, cause another wave of cases.

We are already seeing a bad season for respiratory viruses with both RSV and influenza cases higher than last year. So a variant with increased transmissibility could add to our winter woes.

The good news is there’s no evidence to suggest LB.1 causes any different symptoms or more severe illness than previous Omicron subvariants.

The current vaccines based on XBB.1.5 should still give some cross immunity against LB.1, and oral antivirals such as Paxlovid and Lagevrio should still work. We will likely be getting an updated vaccine based on KP.2, probably towards the end of the year. That should provide better protection against these new subvariants since genetically, they’re very similar to KP.2.

Adrian Esterman, Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of South Australia

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

Since 2020, the condition known as long COVID-19 has become a widespread disability affecting the health and quality of life of millions of people across the globe and costing economies billions of dollars in reduced productivity of employees and an overall drop in the work force.

The intense scientific effort that long COVID sparked has resulted in more than 24,000 scientific publications, making it the most researched health condition in any four years of recorded human history.

Long COVID is a term that describes the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These range from persistent respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath, to debilitating fatigue or brain fog that limits people’s ability to work, and conditions such as heart failure and diabetes, which are known to last a lifetime.

I am a physician scientist, and I have been deeply immersed in studying long COVID since the early days of the pandemic. I have testified before the U.S. Senate as an expert witness on long COVID, have published extensively on it and was named as one of Time’s 100 most influential people in health in 2024 for my research in this area.

Over the first half of 2024, a flurry of reports and scientific papers on long COVID added clarity to this complex condition. These include, in particular, insights into how COVID-19 can still wreak havoc in many organs years after the initial viral infection, as well as emerging evidence on viral persistence and immune dysfunction that last for months or years after initial infection.

How long COVID affects the body

A new study that my colleagues and I published in the New England Journal of Medicine on July 17, 2024, shows that the risk of long COVID declined over the course of the pandemic. In 2020, when the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2 was dominant and vaccines were not available, about 10.4% of adults who got COVID-19 developed long COVID. By early 2022, when the omicron family of variants predominated, that rate declined to 7.7% among unvaccinated adults and 3.5% of vaccinated adults. In other words, unvaccinated people were more than twice as likely to develop long COVID.

While researchers like me do not yet have concrete numbers for the current rate in mid-2024 due to the time it takes for long COVID cases to be reflected in the data, the flow of new patients into long COVID clinics has been on par with 2022.

We found that the decline was the result of two key drivers: availability of vaccines and changes in the characteristics of the virus – which made the virus less prone to cause severe acute infections and may have reduced its ability to persist in the human body long enough to cause chronic disease.

Despite the decline in risk of developing long COVID, even a 3.5% risk is substantial. New and repeat COVID-19 infections translate into millions of new long COVID cases that add to an already staggering number of people suffering from this condition.

Estimates for the first year of the pandemic suggests that at least 65 million people globally have had long COVID. Along with a group of other leading scientists, my team will soon publish updated estimates of the global burden of long COVID and its impact on the global economy through 2023.

In addition, a major new report by the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine details all the health effects that constitute long COVID. The report was commissioned by the Social Security Administration to understand the implications of long COVID on its disability benefits.

It concludes that long COVID is a complex chronic condition that can result in more than 200 health effects across multiple body systems. These include new onset or worsening:

• heart disease
• neurologic problems such as cognitive impairment, strokes and dysautonomia. This is a category of disorders that affect the body’s autonomic nervous system – nerves that regulate most of the body’s vital mechanisms such as blood pressure, heart rate and temperature.
• post-exertional malaise, a state of severe exhaustion that may happen after even minor activity — often leaving the patient unable to function for hours, days or weeks
• gastrointestinal disorders
• kidney disease
• metabolic disorders such as diabetes and hyperlipidemia, or a rise in bad cholesterol
• immune dysfunction

Long COVID can affect people across the lifespan from children to older adults and across race and ethnicity and baseline health status. Importantly, more than 90% of people with long COVID had mild COVID-19 infections.

The National Academies report also concluded that long COVID can result in the inability to return to work or school; poor quality of life; diminished ability to perform activities of daily living; and decreased physical and cognitive function for months or years after the initial infection.

The report points out that many health effects of long COVID, such as post-exertional malaise and chronic fatigue, cognitive impairment and autonomic dysfunction, are not currently captured in the Social Security Administration’s Listing of Impairments, yet may significantly affect an individual’s ability to participate in work or school.

A long road ahead

What’s more, health problems resulting from COVID-19 can last years after the initial infection.

A large study published in early 2024 showed that even people who had a mild SARS-CoV-2 infection still experienced new health problems related to COVID-19 in the third year after the initial infection.

Such findings parallel other research showing that the virus persists in various organ systems for months or years after COVID-19 infection. And research is showing that immune responses to the infection are still evident two to three years after a mild infection. Together, these studies may explain why a SARS-CoV-2 infection years ago could still cause new health problems long after the initial infection.

Important progress is also being made in understanding the pathways by which long COVID wreaks havoc on the body. Two preliminary studies from the U.S. and the Netherlands show that when researchers transfer auto-antibodies – antibodies generated by a person’s immune system that are directed at their own tissues and organs – from people with long COVID into healthy mice, the animals start to experience long COVID-like symptoms such as muscle weakness and poor balance.

These studies suggest that an abnormal immune response thought to be responsible for the generation of these auto-antibodies may underlie long COVID and that removing these auto-antibodies may hold promise as potential treatments.

An ongoing threat

Despite overwhelming evidence of the wide-ranging risks of COVID-19, a great deal of messaging suggests that it is no longer a threat to the public. Although there is no empirical evidence to back this up, this misinformation has permeated the public narrative.

The data, however, tells a different story.

COVID-19 infections continue to outnumber flu cases and lead to more hospitalization and death than the flu. COVID-19 also leads to more serious long-term health problems. Trivializing COVID-19 as an inconsequential cold or equating it with the flu does not align with reality.

Ziyad Al-Aly, Chief of Research and Development, VA St. Louis Health Care System. Clinical Epidemiologist, Washington University in St. Louis

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

Reports in The Australian suggesting Treasurer Jim Chalmers has shelved his budget wellbeing framework, known as Measuring What Matters, are incorrect.

The framework is alive and well, and making steady (if slow) progress.

Also reported was the Coalition’s intention to scrap the framework if it wins the next election, with its treasury spokesman Angus Taylor quoted as saying the government should instead focus on “lower inflation and lower interest rates”.

The idea that we shouldn’t be thinking about broader measures of progress because we need to concentrate on what’s in front of us impoverishes our view of what’s possible.

It’s important to measure what matters

The cost of living is certainly paramount. But if all we ever do is address the issue immediately in front of us, we will forever stumble from one crisis to the next.

Actually, if we had had a wellbeing framework in place before the current cost of living crisis, it might have been less likely to develop.

Most of us would agree that the things in the government’s Measuring What Matters framework matter, such as security, prosperity and cohesiveness.

But some of the information in last year’s statement was dated, some dating back to the years before COVID.

The framework has two parts: a measurement dashboard and a statement.

The dashboard presents data on 50 “key indicators” the treasury believes should supplement (although not replace) the standard measures of economic progress.

The statement is a report of the outcomes presented in the dashboard and of government progress toward embedding the framework in decision-making.

Last month Treasurer Chalmers announced responsibility for the dashboard would move from the treasury to the Bureau of Statistics and that the Bureau would get extra funding to run an expanded general social survey every year to improve the quality and timeliness of the data.

The statement would remain the responsibility of the treasury but would be released only every three years instead of annually. The next would be published in 2026 incorporating the first results from the bureau’s new survey.

Framework already kicking goals

Discovering we don’t collect regular and timely data on these important measures and then funding the Bureau of Statistics to do so is a demonstration that the framework is already having an impact.

The critical test will be how it is used to improve decision-making.

It hasn’t yet resulted in any radical change, but the ambition is substantial.

Shifting the way governments make decisions and allocate resources is hard, and it was was never going to be accomplished in a single year.

By handing over the data side of things to the Bureau of Statistics, the treasury will now, hopefully, be able to focus more on embedding the framework into decisions, including budget decisions.

Prioritising prevention

One of the things the treasury team is working on is how to better prioritise early intervention and prevention programs for Australians at risk. Such measures are hard to justify under the old budget rules, but can they can improve outcomes and save the government money in the long run.

International and Australian studies have identified four key ways of ensuring the government is working to deliver the kinds of outcomes we expect from it:

1. holistic thinking and breaking down silos between types of wellbeing

2. a long-term focus that includes consideration of future generations

3. emphasis on prevention to tackle the root causes of problems

4. including the people most likely to be affected by decisions in their design.

They are directed towards delivering the kind of society we want to live in and to do it smartly and efficiently within a budget context.

According to the framework, that’s a society that is healthy, secure, sustainable, prosperous and cohesive. The government remains on the case.

Warwick Smith, Honorary Fellow, School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne

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

Vaping is in your news feed for its regulation, impact on public health and effects on young people.

So with growing awareness of the effects of vaping on health plus recent reforms to limit availability of vapes to pharmacies in Australia, many people will be thinking about quitting. They will also need support to do so.

That’s partly because so many vapes contain nicotine. Some 73% of Australians who currently vape said their last vape contained nicotine. This tends to be high-strength nicotine.

Mental health is another factor closely linked to vaping – whether people with mental health symptoms are likely to start vaping in the first place, how they fare when vaping, and whether they need additional support when trying to quit.

Here’s what we know about how mental health is connected to vaping and where to go for support to quit.

How are mental health and vaping linked?

An estimated 4.3 million Australians reported a mental health problem in the past 12 months. This includes anxiety and mood disorders (such as depression), which typically begin in adolescence to early adulthood.

We know vaping and mental health (including anxiety and depression) are linked. People who vape frequently are twice as likely to have a depression diagnosis compared with people who have never vaped.

Australia’s National Drug Strategy Household Survey also shows people with more mental distress related to anxiety and depression were four times as likely to have vaped than were those with low distress.

And for those already with a mental health problem, vaping is related to worse depression symptoms and physical health.

The relationship between nicotine-containing vapes and mental health is complicated. People in mental distress can be more likely to start vaping and people who vape are more likely to have mental health problems. What this doesn’t tell us is which comes first. So we need longer-term studies to find out more.

What about self-medicating with vapes?

Some people link using nicotine-containing vapes with managing mental health or stress. For instance, in an Australian survey including questions about the expected benefits of vaping:

• 61% of young adults who vaped feel it helps people calm down when tense or stressed

• 57% said it cheers people up when in a bad mood

• 50% said it helps people feel better if they’ve been feeling down.

In other studies, people who vape say it can be a way to address anxiety, depression or stress.

But rather than addressing these symptoms, vaping can increase them.

For instance, a study in the United States found vaping dependence was linked with increased symptoms of depression. We also know from smoking research that quitting can improve mental health.

Does mental health affect quitting?

The evidence related to mental health outcomes from vaping is in its early stages. And if people have a mental health condition, what this means for quitting is under-researched.

But we know stigma plays a role in both experiences of mental health and addiction, which may make asking for help to quit even more difficult.

We also know having a mental health condition can increase the odds of relapsing after trying to quit vaping.

So what works to quit?

We have little evidence and guidance for the best way to support people who vape to quit, generally. There’s even less evidence on how to support people with mental health conditions to quit.

There are quit vaping programs for people with mental health conditions. And as receiving mental health support does boost the odds of success in quitting tobacco smoking, this may also hold promise for quitting vaping.

Although the evidence is still growing, experts recommend quit plans consider someone’s severity of mental illness, the impact of nicotine use and withdrawal, and whether medications for their mental illness interact with ones used to help them quit vaping.

Cognitive behavioural therapy is a type of psychological therapy that looks at how thoughts, behaviours and emotions are connected. This is an effective approach to support people to quit smoking and its principles can be combined with quit medications to help people quit vaping. People with a mental health condition who vape can be offered cognitive behavioural therapy to help them quit, though specific evidence is still needed to show how well this works.

Psychologists and counsellors can also use motivational interviewing to highlight discrepancies between someone’s actions and values. For instance, this might be used to highlight the discrepancy between someone who wants to be healthy for their family (their value) but who vapes regularly (their action). This, combined with education, may motivate people to act and see a future without vaping.

Health providers and counsellors can offer brief advice on how to quit, extrapolating from what works for quitting smoking. Services such as Quitline can also help mental health providers deliver quit support.

How do I find out more?

If you or someone you know wants to quit vaping, whether or not there are mental health concerns, resources include:

• My QuitBuddy app
• Quitline or 13 7848
• Kids Helpline or 1800 55 1800
• 13YARN or 13 92 76
• Headspace or 1800 650 890
• ReachOut
• Beyond Blue or 1300 22 4636
• Head to Health or 1800 595 212.

More reading on the impact of vaping on adolescent mental health is also available.

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

Joshua Trigg, Researcher and Lecturer in Public Health, Flinders University; Anthony Venning, Associate Professor in Behavioural Health, Flinders University, and Lavender Otieno, Research Assistant and Behavioural Scientist, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University

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

Many people are drinking less sugary soft drink than in the past. This is a great win for public health, given the recognised risks of diets high in sugar-sweetened drinks.

But over time, intake of diet soft drinks has grown. In fact, it’s so high that these products are now regularly detected in wastewater.

So what does the research say about how your health is affected in the long term if you drink them often?

What makes diet soft drinks sweet?

The World Health Organization (WHO) advises people “reduce their daily intake of free sugars to less than 10% of their total energy intake. A further reduction to below 5% or roughly 25 grams (six teaspoons) per day would provide additional health benefits.”

But most regular soft drinks contain a lot of sugar. A regular 335 millilitre can of original Coca-Cola contains at least seven teaspoons of added sugar.

Diet soft drinks are designed to taste similar to regular soft drinks but without the sugar. Instead of sugar, diet soft drinks contain artificial or natural sweeteners. The artificial sweeteners include aspartame, saccharin and sucralose. The natural sweeteners include stevia and monk fruit extract, which come from plant sources.

Many artificial sweeteners are much sweeter than sugar so less is needed to provide the same burst of sweetness.

Diet soft drinks are marketed as healthier alternatives to regular soft drinks, particularly for people who want to reduce their sugar intake or manage their weight.

But while surveys of Australian adults and adolescents show most people understand the benefits of reducing their sugar intake, they often aren’t as aware about how diet drinks may affect health more broadly.

What does the research say about aspartame?

The artificial sweeteners in soft drinks are considered safe for consumption by food authorities, including in the US and Australia. However, some researchers have raised concern about the long-term risks of consumption.

People who drink diet soft drinks regularly and often are more likely to develop certain metabolic conditions (such as diabetes and heart disease) than those who don’t drink diet soft drinks.

The link was found even after accounting for other dietary and lifestyle factors (such as physical activity).

In 2023, the WHO announced reports had found aspartame – the main sweetener used in diet soft drinks – was “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (carcinogenic means cancer-causing).

Importantly though, the report noted there is not enough current scientific evidence to be truly confident aspartame may increase the risk of cancer and emphasised it’s safe to consume occasionally.

Will diet soft drinks help manage weight?

Despite the word “diet” in the name, diet soft drinks are not strongly linked with weight management.

In 2022, the WHO conducted a systematic review (where researchers look at all available evidence on a topic) on whether the use of artificial sweeteners is beneficial for weight management.

Overall, the randomised controlled trials they looked at suggested slightly more weight loss in people who used artificial sweeteners.

But the observational studies (where no intervention occurs and participants are monitored over time) found people who consume high amounts of artificial sweeteners tended to have an increased risk of higher body mass index and a 76% increased likelihood of having obesity.

In other words, artificial sweeteners may not directly help manage weight over the long term. This resulted in the WHO advising artificial sweeteners should not be used to manage weight.

Studies in animals have suggested consuming high levels of artificial sweeteners can signal to the brain it is being starved of fuel, which can lead to more eating. However, the evidence for this happening in humans is still unproven.

What about inflammation and dental issues?

There is some early evidence artificial sweeteners may irritate the lining of the digestive system, causing inflammation and increasing the likelihood of diarrhoea, constipation, bloating and other symptoms often associated with irritable bowel syndrome. However, this study noted more research is needed.

High amounts of diet soft drinks have also been linked with liver disease, which is based on inflammation.

The consumption of diet soft drinks is also associated with dental erosion.

Many soft drinks contain phosphoric and citric acid, which can damage your tooth enamel and contribute to dental erosion.

Moderation is key

As with many aspects of nutrition, moderation is key with diet soft drinks.

Drinking diet soft drinks occasionally is unlikely to harm your health, but frequent or excessive intake may increase health risks in the longer term.

Plain water, infused water, sparkling water, herbal teas or milks remain the best options for hydration.

Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Emily Burch, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Lecturer, Southern Cross University

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

The United States election will be held on November 5. On Sunday US time, President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential election contest and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris.

It’s not certain, but very likely Harris will now be the Democratic candidate to face former Republican president Donald Trump in November. During the Democratic presidential primaries held early this year, Biden won about 95% of all delegates to the August 19–22 Democratic convention. These delegates are likely to support Harris given Biden’s endorsement.

Since the debate with Trump on June 27 that was widely thought to have been a disaster for Biden, he has faced pressure to withdraw. In an Ipsos poll for US ABC News that was released before Biden’s withdrawal on Sunday, Democratic voters wanted Biden to withdraw by 60–39.

Following the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13 and the Republican convention from July 15–18, Trump’s lead over Biden in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of national polls had increased to 3.2 points from 1.9 points on July 13, the largest margin since the aggregate began in March. Vote shares were 43.5% Trump, 40.2% Biden and 8.7% for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I’ve written previously that the presidency is not decided by the national popular vote. Instead each state has a certain amount of Electoral Votes (EVs), mostly based on population, with each state awarding their EVs winner takes all. It takes 270 EVs to win. The EV system is likely to skew to Trump, so Biden was further behind than in the national polls.

Biden will continue as president until his term ends in January 2025. His net approval in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate is -17.7, with 56.2% disapproving and 38.5% approving. His net approval is worse than other previous presidents at this point in their term, except George Bush Sr and Jimmy Carter.

Trump’s net favourability in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate is -12.0, with 53.7% unfavourable and 41.7% favourable. His ratings are relatively unchanged since April. Unfortunately, FiveThirtyEight has no favourability ratings for Harris.

Will Harris win?

It’s too soon to analyse Harris vs Trump polls. Harris had not been a presidential candidate before today and name recognition of Biden explains his often better numbers than Harris. A recent national YouGov poll for CBS News gave Trump a five-point lead over Biden and a three-point lead over Harris.

There are two things that should advantage Harris. One is that economic data has improved, with inflation dropping and real earnings up. The other is that, while Biden would have been almost 82 by the election, Harris will only be 60 by then. Trump is 78, so the age split that was unfavourable to Biden will be favourable to Harris.

Nevertheless, nominating a candidate who has not been battle-tested in the primaries is very risky. When Harris ran for president in 2020, she withdrew from the contest in December 2019, before any primaries.

However, with Biden’s age of great concern to voters, and with him already behind Trump, switching to a new candidate could prove a sensible move for the Democrats. Changes in prime minister have worked for Australian parties in the past, with Malcolm Turnbull winning the 2016 federal election after replacing Tony Abbott, and Scott Morrison winning in 2019 after replacing Turnbull.

While Biden has been losing, US Senate polls in the presidential swing states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona suggest the Democratic candidates are winning, and doing much better than Biden. So perhaps Democrats just have a Biden problem.

US earnings up

In June, headline inflation dropped 0.1% after being unchanged in May and 12-month inflation dropped to 3.0%, the lowest it has been since June 2023. Core inflation was up 0.1% in June after increasing 0.2% in May and has increased 3.3% in the last 12 months, the smallest increase since April 2021.

The low inflation in May and June has boosted real (inflation-adjusted) earnings in those months, with real hourly earnings up 0.9% for May and June and real weekly earnings up 0.7%. In the 12 months to June, real hourly earnings are up 0.8% and real weekly earnings up 0.6%.

In June, a net 206,000 jobs were added, but the unemployment rate increased 0.1% to 4.1%. This is the highest unemployment rate since November 2021.

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.

In May, a multibillion-dollar UK-based multinational called Informa announced in a trading update that it had signed a deal with Microsoft involving “access to advanced learning content and data, and a partnership to explore AI expert applications”. Informa is the parent company of Taylor & Francis, which publishes a wide range of academic and technical books and journals, so the data in question may include the content of these books and journals.

According to reports published last week, the authors of the content do not appear to have been asked or even informed about the deal. What’s more, they say they had no opportunity to opt out of the deal, and will not see any money from it.

Academics are only the latest of several groups of what we might call content creators to take umbrage at having their work ingested by the generative AI models currently racing to hoover up the products of human culture. Newspapers, visual artists and record labels are already taking AI companies to court.

While it’s unclear how Informa will react to the rumblings of discontent, the deal is a reminder to authors to be aware of the contractual terms of the publishing agreements they sign.

What’s in the Informa deal?

Informa’s update stated four focus areas of the Microsoft deal:

• increasing Informa’s own productivity
• developing an automated citation tool
• developing AI-powered research assistant software (perhaps like a system being tested by online academic library JSTOR)
• giving Microsoft data access to “help improve relevance and performance of AI systems”.

Informa will be paid more than £8 million (A$15.5 million) for initial access to the data, followed by recurring payments of an unspecified amount for the next three years.

We don’t know exactly what Microsoft plans to do with its data access, but a likely scenario is that the content of academic books and articles would be added to the training data of ChatGPT-like generative AI models. In principle this should make the output of the AI systems more accurate, though existing AI models have faced heavy criticism, not only for regurgitating training data without citation (which can be viewed as a kind of plagiarism), but also for inventing false information and attributing it to real sources.

However, the update also says “the agreement protects intellectual property rights, including limits on verbatim text extracts and alignment on the importance of detailed citation references”.

The “limits on verbatim text extracts” mentioned likely pertains to the US doctrine of fair use, which permits certain uses of copyright-protected material.

Many generative AI companies are currently facing copyright infringement lawsuits over their use of training data, and their defences are likely to rely on claiming fair use.

The “importance of detailed citation references” may pertain to the concept of attribution in copyright. This is a moral right possessed by authors. It provides that the creator of the work should be known and attributed as the author when their work is reproduced.

How does scholarly publishing usually work?

Most academics do not receive payment or make any profit from most of their scholarly publishing. Rather, writing journal and conference papers is usually considered part of the scope of work within a full-time, tenured position. Publication builds an academic’s credibility and promotes their research.

The basic process often goes like this: an author researches and writes an original article and submits it to a journal publisher for peer review. Most peer reviewers and editorial board members also receive no payment for their work.

In fact, some journals may require authors to pay an “article processing charge” to cover editing and other costs. This can be thousands of dollars for an open access publication. Generally speaking, the more prestigious the publication, the higher the charge.

If an article passes peer review, the author will be asked to sign a publishing agreement. The terms may cover logistical arrangements such as when the article will be published, the format (print, online or both), and the division of royalties (if applicable). There will also be arrangements regarding copyright and ownership of the article.

An author usually must also grant exclusive rights to the publisher to distribute and publish the article. This may mean the author cannot publish the article elsewhere, and the publisher may also be able to sub-licence the article to a third party, such as an AI company.

Sometimes publishers require an author to assign copyright in the article to them via a permanent copyright transfer agreement.

Essentially, this means the author grants all of their authorial rights as copyright holder in the work to the publisher. The publisher can then reproduce, communicate, distribute or license the work to others as they wish.

It is possible to only assign limited rights, rather than all rights, and this is something authors should consider.

Content mining

It is vital that authors understand the implications of licensing and assignment and to contemplate precisely what they are agreeing to when they sign a contract. In light of the recent trend of publishers entering into agreements with generative AI companies, publishers’ AI policies should also be closely scrutinised.

In the US, a standard collective licensing solution for content use in internal AI systems has recently been released, which sets out rights and remuneration for copyright holders. Similar licences for the use of content for AI systems will likely enter the Australian market very soon.

The types of agreements being reached between academic publishers and AI companies have sparked bigger-picture concerns for many academics. Do we want scholarly research to be reduced to content for AI knowledge mining? There are no clear answers about the ethics and morals of such practices.

Wellett Potter, Lecturer in Law, University of New England

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