Year 12 exams are finishing around Australia and celebrations are beginning. Thousands of students will mark the end of high school in coming weeks with “schoolies”.

This is an important rite of passage for many young Australians. About 20,000 school leavers are expected to party at Surfers Paradise in one of the main schoolies celebrations. Other festivals are planned for Lorne in Victoria, Victor Harbor in South Australia, Byron Bay in New South Wales, Bali and Fiji.

I am an expert in young people’s health and safety at large-scale events. What steps can you take to stay safe at schoolies and make sure you have a great time?

1. Plan ahead

Having a plan can reduce stress and help keep everyone on track.

Know where you’ll be staying and how you’ll get there and back from the main events. Check to see if there are free bus services and how to access them.

The schoolies websites can also help you plan where to get food, water, charge your phones and seek medical help.

2. Plan what you bring

Don’t take too many valuables. When you’re thinking about your outfit, think about where you phone will go so it is safe. A bum bag can be a great way to keep things secure.

Believe it or not the main reasons for using the medical tent is twists and sprains of ankles and cuts and blisters from shoes – so take comfortable footwear that is good for dancing and walking around.

3. Stay in groups

You will have already decided who you are going to hang out before you go. So stick with your friends and look out for each other. Avoid going anywhere alone, especially at night, and always organise a meet up spot if you do get separated or your phone dies.

Before you go, talk with friends about how you will support each other. Is someone designated as a non-drinker for the evening? Do you want to organise an hourly check-in on a group chat?

4. Stay in safe places

Only attend official events and parties. These areas are well lit and there is security and medical assistance available if you or your friends need it.

5. Know your limits

Think about how many drinks you can have beforehand – understand your limits and carry some water and snacks.

If you are feeling like you need a rest, you could try the nearest chill out tent. It’s a great way to make new friends and there are free drinks and snacks

If you are considering taking pills, go and visit the drug checking site. Drug checking is free and confidential and will let you know what you are taking to stay safe.

What if something scary or unexpected happens?

There are peer-support programs at schoolies to help you if you are upset or stressed.

On the Gold Coast, you can look out for Red Frogs or the Schoolies Support Team, who are there to support young people at events where alcohol is consumed.

In South Australia, there is the Green Team, who are young people from Christian backgrounds. The Green Team will stay with you while you are looking for your friends, walk you back to your tent and they know where all the free eating spots are.

In main schoolies areas there will also be police walking around and security guards, depending on the event. All of these people are there to give judgment-free support – so you will not get into trouble if you ask for help for yourself or one of your friends.

If a friend gets too drunk or has taken something and needs support, take them to a quieter spot with good lighting and stay with them. If you can, get someone else to go and find some help from the medical tent. Try and lay your friend on their side so that they can vomit, especially if they are passed out. Don’t try and give them water or more to drink, just make sure they are comfortable while someone is getting help.

If something scary happens – yell out and try and attract attention. Move into a well lit place if you can. Remember to trust your instincts and find a safe place.

Once you feel safe, tell event staff or police what happened – it helps them to look out and make sure it doesn’t happen again. You can also call 000 at any time.

Remember, schoolies is your event. With some simple planning you can make it a week you will always remember for the best reasons.

Alison Hutton, Professor of Nursing, Western Sydney University

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

The Albanese government will develop and legislate a “Digital Duty of Care” to place the onus on platforms to keep people safe and better prevent online harms, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has announced.

In a speech to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday night, Rowland said a change of approach was needed.

“To date, the Online Safety Act has been a crucial tool for incentivising digital platforms to remove illegal content, usually applied remedially and case by case. However, it does not, in a fundamental sense, incentivise the design of a safer, healthier, digital platforms ecosystem.

"What’s required is a shift away from reacting to harms by relying on content regulation alone, and moving towards systems-based prevention, accompanied by a broadening of our perspective of what online harms are.”

The change would bring Australia into line with the United Kingdom and European Union approaches. Platforms would have to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harms, underpinned by risk assessment and risk mitigation and informed by safety-by-design principles.

A duty of care was “a common law concept and statutory obligation that places a legal obligation to take reasonable steps to protect others from harm. It is a proven, workable and flexible model,” Rowland said.

“This, as part of a growing global effort, will deliver a more systemic and preventative approach to making online services safer and healthier.

"Where platforms seriously and systemically breach their duty of care we will ensure the regulator can draw on strong penalty arrangements,” Rowland said.

The duty of care model was recommended by a review of the Online Safety Act, which went to the government last month. The government brought forward the statutory review of the act by a year to ensure online safety laws were up to date.

The government says legislating a duty of care will mean tech platforms will need to continually identify and mitigate potential risks as technology and services alter.

The changes will support the existing complaint and removal schemes for illegal and harmful material. under the Online Safety Act.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

For more than a millennium, many Andean peoples used an object called a “khipu” (also spelled “quipu” and pronounced “key-poo”) to record and communicate information.

Khipus were made with cords or strings with knots tied into them. And experts understand that many, but not all, of these knots were used to represent numbers.

In a new study published today, I make a numeric connection between two important khipus from history – the first being being the largest khipu ever known and the other one of the most complex.

What were khipus used for?

While khipus were used in earlier times, they were especially important to the Inca Empire, which lasted from around 1438 CE to 1532 CE (when the empire was conquered by the Spanish). Since the Inca did not leave any written records, khipus are understood to have been their main system of communication and record-keeping.

Khipus were commonly made from either cotton or fibres sourced from camelids (the group of animals that includes camels, llamas and alpacas). These materials could be dyed or left naturally coloured. Some khipus even include plant fibres, while several incorporate human hair.

It seems specially-trained khipu makers (“khipukamayuqs”) made very deliberate decisions when constructing these record-keeping tools. These decisions related to the colours used, the direction of spin and ply of the cord fibres, the spacing and type of the cord attachments, and the structure and position of the knots.

Early Spanish chroniclers wrote about the khipu’s various numeric applications, which included recording storehouse inventories, population censuses and tax and tribute obligations.

A new numeric connection

For more than a century, researchers have been studying khipu features in hopes that patterns may emerge from a collective view. In recent decades their data have been digitised, which is now freely available via the Open Khipu Repository and the Khipu Field Guide.

For my research, I analysed the data from two khipus found in northern Chile and first recorded by ethno-mathematician Marcia Ascher and anthropologist Robert Ascher in the 1970s. One of these is the largest khipu ever found – spanning more than five metres in length and comprising more than 1800 cords (see the picture below). The other khipu (pictured in the header image) has almost 600 cords in complicated arrangements.

I noticed both khipus used red/white “divider” cords to separate groups of either tens or sevens. The larger khipu was divided into ten groups, with each group having seven cords. The smaller khipu was divided into seven groups, with each group having ten cords (and many subsidiary cords).

After examining and manipulating the data, I realised the smaller and more complex khipu is a summary and reallocation of the information in the larger khipu. In other words, the two khipus record the same data, but represent it differently.

This is the most complicated numeric connection between khipus made to date. It was only possible because of the availability of data and digital tools that make searching for patterns easier – and which wouldn’t have been available to Marcia Ascher back in the 1970s.

New khipu clues

While the numbers in these two khipus are counting and allocating something, we don’t yet know what that was. Why would it be necessary to have two khipus recording the same information in two different ways? We can only speculate.

Perhaps the larger khipu recorded the collection of different amounts of food crops from the community, while the other recorded how these foods were distributed between those in need, or between storehouses. Both ways of looking at the numbers would have been important to the people who used these khipus.

Experts believe only a tiny fraction of the khipus made throughout history have survived. This is partly because the institutions that used them eventually either became obsolete or used other means of recording after the conquest, combined with a climate that was less than ideal for textile preservation.

Today, about 1,600 khipus remain, residing mainly in collections in the Americas and Europe. Fewer than half of these have had their features digitally saved in research databases.

Through continued digitisation efforts, we hope to discover more khipu clues – and make new numeric connections that add to our understanding of ancient Andean peoples.

Karen Thompson, Research Data Specialist, The University of Melbourne

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

The iconic sound of an orchestra tuning is highly recognisable, even for those who’ve never set foot in a concert hall. Many of us first heard it while watching a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Have you ever wondered why the oboe begins the tuning? How is the starting note decided? With access to electronic tuning devices, along with advancements in materials and manufacturing enabling instruments to better sustain their pitch, is the tuning ritual still needed? What is the purpose, beyond building excitement or signalling the conductor’s entrance?

Whether or not professional orchestras’ tuning rituals are required, there is something inherently comforting about it for audiences.

Enter the oboe

The earliest orchestras, in the Baroque era, comprised a non-standard set of instruments. One combination could have been a harpsichord, a few string players (violin, viola, viola da gamba), one or more wind instruments, and perhaps even timpani.

As the number of string players grew in the orchestra, the flute replaced the quiet recorder.

The oboe brought complex, contrasting overtones, plus a limited yet stable tuning range controlled mostly by a pair of “fixed” reeds.

These factors made the oboe the practical choice as the tuning instrument in the Baroque era.

By the 1800s, the size and instrumentation were much like the modern orchestra. An order was added to the tuning ritual, with each “family” of instruments taking its turn to tune with the oboe.

When a fixed-pitch instrument, such as an organ, was included with the orchestra, the oboe would be tuned to it before the ritual began.

These tuning traditions continue today.

Constantly retuning

The tuning ritual heard by the audience is just the tip of the iceberg. Many instruments need micro-tuning adjustments throughout a performance.

Tuning can also slip, which may be caused when string or brass instruments need to use a mute. The mute lowers the volume and adds a different tonal quality, but it can also slightly alter the pitch of the instrument.

Tuning is also affected by changes in temperature or humidity as the instrument warms while being played or cools due to external changes.

Consider the weather during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics – it would have been challenging to keep the instruments in tune in the rain and extreme humidity.

Depending on the instrument, sometimes when the pitch slips it cannot be adjusted mid-performance.

In a recent concert I conducted at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, the yidaki was slightly out of tune after being perfectly in tune two hours earlier in rehearsal. The difference? The yidaki’s wood was affected by a sudden drop in temperature when a thunderstorm came through mid-concert.

Pipe organs suffer the same fate at the mercy of the weather with their large, metal components.

What makes an ‘A’?

The traditional tuning note is A. This stems from the open A string being common to all orchestral string instruments.

The oboist plays a long A when instructed by the concert master – usually the lead violinist – who stands and indicates to the oboist and then to each section of the orchestra when it’s time to tune.

The string players tune their A strings, from which they can tune their other strings. In turn, other sections of the orchestra also tune to A. When the tuning ends and the instruments are silent, the orchestra is ready to perform.

This all seems straightforward, but there are variations on what an A should sound like. An audio frequency of A=440 hertz (Hz) is considered standard or “concert” pitch, although this is a fairly modern concept.

Tuning forks were invented in Europe in the early 1700s, around the same time as the emergence of orchestras. Based on tuning forks and organs remaining from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Beethoven’s tuning fork, historians have identified concert pitches ranging from 395 to 465Hz.

Efforts to standardise concert pitch at A=440Hz arose in the 19th century, further reinforced in the 20th century.

Today, the pitch used may be decided by historically informed performance, adopting the likely tuning from when the music was composed. Giuseppe Verdi, for instance, campaigned for Italy to adopt concert pitch A=432Hz. Using the slightly lower tuning for Verdi’s Messa da Requiem is justifiable, allowing for the choir to execute extended high passages more comfortably.

In the 1960s, conductor Herbert von Karajan decided the Berlin Philharmonic sounded “brighter” when tuned to A=443–444Hz. This trend continues today for several prominent orchestras: The New York Philharmonic tunes to A=442Hz, and the Vienna Philharmonic to A=443Hz.

Changing rituals

Is the tuning ritual essential? It depends.

Earlier this year I saw Wicked. The orchestra tuned very quickly. Practicalities can trump ritual – especially on days with matinee and evening shows, each running almost three hours.

Symphony orchestras comprise mostly acoustic instruments. In contrast, modern musical theatre orchestras often include electronic instruments and a rhythm section, with synthesizers that don’t need tuning.

Compared with a large auditorium, a pit may have fewer temperature fluctuations. When needed, pit players use electronic tuning devices. Some play multiple instruments in each performance, which are tuned in advance and during the performance.

Despite contemporary advancements, the tradition of an orchestra tuning in the presence of an audience is a special, transcendent moment, unique to the live concert experience.

Kathleen McGuire, Senior Lecturer in Education (Music), National School of Education, Faculty of Education and Arts, Australian Catholic University

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

Imagine a number made up of a vast string of ones: 1111111…111. Specifically, 136,279,841 ones in a row. If we stacked up that many sheets of paper, the resulting tower would stretch into the stratosphere.

If we write this number in a computer in binary form (using only ones and zeroes), it would fill up only about 16 megabytes, no more than a short video clip. Converting to the more familiar way of writing numbers in decimal, this number – it starts out 8,816,943,275… and ends …076,706,219,486,871,551 – would have more than 41 million digits. It would fill 20,000 pages in a book.

Another way to write this number is 2^136,279,841 – 1. There are a few special things about it.

First, it’s a prime number (meaning it is only divisible by itself and one). Second, it’s what is called a Mersenne prime (we’ll get to what that means). And third, it is to date the largest prime number ever discovered in a mathematical quest with a history going back more than 2,000 years.

The discovery

The discovery that this number (known as M136279841 for short) is a prime was made on October 12 by Luke Durant, a 36-year-old researcher from San Jose, California. Durant is one of thousands of people working as part of a long-running volunteer prime-hunting effort called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS.

A prime number that is one less than some power of two (or what mathematicians write as 2 ^p – 1) is called a Mersenne prime, after the French monk Marin Mersenne, who investigated them more than 350 years ago. The first few Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31 and 127.

Durant made his discovery through a combination of mathematical algorithms, practical engineering, and massive computational power. Where large primes have previously been found using traditional computer processors (CPUs), this discovery is the first to use a different kind of processor called a GPU.

GPUs were originally designed to speed up the rendering of graphics and video, and more recently have been repurposed to mine cryptocurrency and to power AI.
Durant, a former employee of leading GPU maker NVIDIA, used powerful GPUs in the cloud to create a kind of “cloud supercomputer” spanning 17 countries. The lucky GPU was an NVIDIA A100 processor located in Dublin, Ireland.

Primes and perfect numbers

Beyond the thrill of discovery, this advance continues a storyline that goes back millennia. One reason mathematicians are fascinated by Mersenne primes is that they are linked to so-called “perfect” numbers.

A number is perfect if, when you add together all the numbers that properly divide it, they add up to the number itself. For example, six is a perfect number because 6 = 2 × 3 = 1 + 2 + 3. Likewise, 28 = 4 × 7 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14.

For every Mersenne prime, there is also an even perfect number. (In one of the oldest unfinished problems in mathematics, it is not known whether there are any odd perfect numbers.)

Perfect numbers have fascinated humans throughout history. For example, the early Hebrews as well as Saint Augustine considered six to be a truly perfect number, as God fashioned the Earth in precisely six days (resting on the seventh).

Practical primes

The study of prime numbers is not just a historical curiosity. Number theory is also essential to modern cryptography. For example, the security of many websites relies upon the inherent difficulty in finding the prime factors of large numbers.

The numbers used in so-called public-key cryptography (of the kind that secures most online activity, for example) are generally only a few hundred decimal digits, which is tiny compared with M136279841.

Nevertheless, the benefits of basic research in number theory – studying the distribution of prime numbers, developing algorithms for testing whether numbers are prime, and finding factors of composite numbers – often have downstream implications in helping to maintain privacy and security in our digital communication.

An endless search

Mersenne primes are rare indeed: the new record is more than 16 million digits larger than the previous one, and is only the 52nd ever discovered.

We know there are infinitely many prime numbers. This was proven by the Greek mathematician Euclid more than 2,000 years ago: if there were only a finite number of primes, we could multiply them all together and add one. The result would not be divisible by any of the primes we have already found, so there must always be at least one more out there.

But we don’t know whether there are infinitely many Mersenne primes – though it has been conjectured that there are. Unfortunately, they are too scarce for our techniques to detect.

For now, the new prime serves as a milestone in human curiosity and a reminder that even in an age dominated by technology, some of the deeper, tantalising secrets in the mathematical universe remain out of reach. The challenge remains, inviting mathematicians and enthusiasts alike to find the hidden patterns in the infinite tapestry of numbers.

And so the (mathematical) search for perfection will continue.

John Voight, Professor of Mathematics , University of Sydney

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

Meta will make its generative artificial intelligence (AI) models available to the United States’ government, the tech giant has announced, in a controversial move that raises a moral dilemma for everyone who uses the software.

Meta last week revealed it would make the models, known as Llama, available to government agencies, “including those that are working on defence and national security applications, and private sector partners supporting their work”.

The decision appears to contravene Meta’s own policy which lists a range of prohibited uses for Llama, including “[m]ilitary, warfare, nuclear industries or applications” as well as espionage, terrorism, human trafficking and exploitation or harm to children.

Meta’s exception also reportedly applies to similar national security agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It came just three days after Reuters revealed China has reworked Llama for its own military purposes.

The situation highlights the increasing fragility of open source AI software. It also means users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – some versions of which use Llama – may inadvertently be contributing to military programs around the world.

What is Llama?

Llama is a collation of large language models – similar to ChatGPT – and large multimodal models that deal with data other than text, such as audio and images.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, released Llama in response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The key difference between the two is that all Llama models are marketed as open source and free to use. This means anyone can download the source code of a Llama model, and run and modify it themselves (if they have the right hardware). On the other hand, ChatGPT can only be accessed via OpenAI.

The Open Source Initiative, an authority that defines open source software, recently released a standard setting out what open source AI should entail. The standard outlines “four freedoms” an AI model must grant in order to be classified as open source:

• use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission
• study how the system works and inspect its components
• modify the system for any purpose, including to change its output
• share the system for others to use with or without modifications, for any purpose.

Meta’s Llama fails to meet these requirements. This is because of limitations on commercial use, the prohibited activities that may be deemed harmful or illegal and a lack of transparency about Llama’s training data.

Despite this, Meta still describes Llama as open source.

The intersection of the tech industry and the military

Meta is not the only commercial technology company branching out to military applications of AI. In the past week, Anthropic also announced it is teaming up with Palantir – a data analytics firm – and Amazon Web Services to provide US intelligence and defence agencies access to its AI models.

Meta has defended its decision to allow US national security agencies and defence contractors to use Llama. The company claims these uses are “responsible and ethical” and “support the prosperity and security of the United States”.

Meta has not been transparent about the data it uses to train Llama. But companies that develop generative AI models often utilise user input data to further train their models, and people share plenty of personal information when using these tools.

ChatGPT and Dall-E provide options for opting out of your data being collected. However, it is unclear if Llama offers the same.

The option to opt out is not made explicitly clear when signing up to use these services. This places the onus on users to inform themselves – and most users may not be aware of where or how Llama is being used.

For example, the latest version of Llama powers AI tools in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. When using the AI functions on these platforms - such as creating reels or suggesting captions – users are using Llama.

The fragility of open source

The benefits of open source include open participation and collaboration on software. However, this can also lead to fragile systems that are easily manipulated. For example, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, members of the public made changes to open source software to express their support for Ukraine.

These changes included anti-war messages and deletion of systems files on Russian and Belarusian computers. This movement came to be known as “protestware”.

The intersection of open source AI and military applications will likely exacerbate this fragility because the robustness of open source software is dependent on the public community. In the case of large language models such as Llama, they require public use and engagement because the models are designed to improve over time through a feedback loop between users and the AI system.

The mutual use of open source AI tools marries two parties – the public and the military – who have historically held separate needs and goals. This shift will expose unique challenges for both parties.

For the military, open access means the finer details of how an AI tool operates can easily be sourced, potentially leading to security and vulnerability issues. For the general public, the lack of transparency in how user data is being utilised by the military can lead to a serious moral and ethical dilemma.

Zena Assaad, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering, Australian National University

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

The social media platform TikTok has become a cultural phenomenon, influencing the behaviour and taste of its users in almost every area of life. From dance trends to skincare and make-up products, health hacks to fad diets, TikTok recommendations can go viral within minutes – and so can its health advice.

Some of the most searched educational videos on TikTok are on diet, exercise and sexual health.

“Fitspiration” is a popular social media hashtag aimed at motivating users to lead healthier lifestyles. “Fitspo” posts often include before and after images and or “aspirational” of photos of influencers with ideal body types. But numerous studies have found that many of these social media posts [can have a negative impact] on users’ mental health and promote or compound their body insecurities.

Social media has its upsides. For example it allows users to share their experiences of health issues. One study showed that 80% of cancer patients use social media to engage peers. But it can also help spread health misinformation.

For example, a 2023 survey conducted by Dublin City University found that 57% of Gen-Z and Millennial TikTok users are influenced by, or regularly adopt, nutrition trends from the platform. The same research also found that only 2.1% of the analysed nutrition content on TikTok proved to be accurate when compared to public health guidelines.

But this could be about to change. The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced a year-long partnership with TikTok to provide users with reliable, science-based evidence.

Healthcare professionals are already trying to raise levels of health literacy on social media, however. Doctors and specialists are publishing videos to educate users about melanoma and dark skin, for instance. These resources are much needed because, although melanoma is rarer in people with dark skin tones, the five-year survival rate is only 66%, compared to 90% in non-Hispanic whites. This is because melanoma is often diagnosed much later in people with darker skin.

Other cancer topics, such as laryngeal cancer, stomach cancer, thyroid cancer and breast cancer also show increased interaction from users. But while there are plenty of patient perspectives, there are far fewer and lower-quality resources from healthcare professionals.

A 2022 study found that of the most popular articles posted on social media in 2018 and 2019, on the four most common cancers, one in every three contained false, inaccurate or misleading information. And most of that misinformation about cancer was potentially harmful. For example, by promoting unproven treatments.

Stories shared by patients writing on social media about their cancer journeys can be powerful, particularly for users going through similar experiences. But they can also be scary – and are occasionally untrue.

Difficult subjects

Content about potentially embarrassing or intimate health issues have become popular on social media, which is often the first port of call when experiencing symptoms or after initial diagnosis.

Videos about anal fissures have attracted a significant number of views, while posts sharing experiences of intrauterine contraceptive devices have highlighted common side-effects that can help inform the contraceptive decisions of other users.

IVF is a valuable and growing discussion topic on social media, but more engagement is needed from experts to ensure the medical accuracy of advice and guidance.

Creating a force for good

Similarly, social media information on neurodevelopmental conditions, such as autism and ADHD, have seen a huge increase in viewer traffic. Celebrities, in particular, have used social media platforms to talk about their own diagnoses and urge or inspire others to seek help. For example, Tom Stoltman, the current reigning and three times World’s Strongest Man, has spoken openly about his autism diagnosis and how it can be a superpower.

The growing challenges around mental health diagnoses are a double-edged sword on social media. The availability of information can help understanding of conditions – but it can also fuel self-diagnoses, which are increasing and can cause strain on healthcare systems and potential harm to patients.

Various studies highlight the issue of health misinformation on social media. One study showed that X (formerly Twitter) had the highest level of misinformation. Many of the studies assessing social media health content show that less than 30% is medically accurate.

So, while social media health posts can be beneficial for those looking for patient perspectives, it’s important that users are also able to access high-quality, medically accurate resources from qualified professionals.

Hopefully, the WHO and TikTok collaboration will help to facilitate and promote more engagement from healthcare professionals on social media.

Adam Taylor, Professor and Director of the Clinical Anatomy Learning Centre, Lancaster University

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

An inspiring celebration of the rich heritage of embroidery, Stitched: Scotland’s Embroidered Art has opened its doors at Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios.

Curator Emma Inglis adeptly pulls together a showcase spanning 200 years from 1720-1920, exemplifying the detail, skill and craft in often-overlooked gems gathered from National Trust properties across Scotland.

Located beneath Dovecot’s working tapestry studio, the vividly painted gallery rooms provide a warm backdrop to the motifs, symbolic depictions, complex compositions and extensive colour palettes of an array of embroidered textiles. The collection of 80 exquisite pieces features everything from bed hangings to ornate armchairs, intricate firescreens, tablecloths, cushions and even tea cosies.

Some pieces have been taken out of storage and have undergone meticulous textile restoration specifically for Stitched. Others, normally buried in the vast rooms of lavish Scottish castles and houses, are given the opportunity to shine and share their stories. These works include works from Newhailes House near Musselburgh, Drum Castle in Banchory, House of Dun near Montrose, and Weaver’s Cottage in Kilbarchan.

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

The chosen pieces are accompanied by engaging histories, focusing on their practical function as well as how they were made and the women who made them. Singling out these items in an exhibition powerfully re-evaluates what was commonly dismissed as “women’s work”, focusing on the craft and skill involved.

From Scotland’s grandest houses to more humbler homes, the pieces in this exhibition are unified by the desire to create something decorative and civilising. Whether that’s a firescreen embroidered with exotic parrots by Lady Augusta Gordon of the House of Dun, or the golden embroidered leaf motifs stitched into a wool carpet by a Dundonian watchmaker’s wife in the mid-19th century, this is a fascinating opportunity for visitors to witness the craft and invention of the women who created ornate stitched patterns.

There is also a sense that this is just the start of unearthing many of the stories behind the the pieces and the exceptional skills that created them. From wealthy women who could afford the materials and time to master the intricate stitches of contemporary trends, to self-taught embroiderers who came from far more modest backgrounds, there is much to explore and untangle from their stitches.

An exquisite floral bedcover originally embroidered in the 1740s by Lady Anne Gordon of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, but left unfinished, is a stunning example. Rediscovered in the 1880s by Ishbel, Lady Aberdeen, who was keen to revive embroidery skills, the task was given to a talented local embroiderer, May Sandison.

The daughter of an Aberdeenshire crofter who learned embroidery at her mother’s knee, Sandison later went on to lead the local Methlick School of Needlework. A great supporter of traditional crafts, Lady Aberdeen created the school “for the training and employment of girls in the district who do not desire to go out into the world, but who want to earn some money at or near home”. Sandison’s work to complete the piece followed the traces of the stems and leaves set out by Anne Gordon more than 140 years before.

Such fine, intricate work was not expected from the hands of rural working-class women. A local newspaper noted that the 1894 Home Industries Exhibition was “a really marvellous display when one considers that the women who execute such dainty work are taken from the ranks of the peasantry”.

The Stitched exhibition is an ideal opportunity to engage new audiences and drive interest in the National Trust for Scotland properties from which so many of these beautiful things been borrowed. In the Dovecot’s gallery spaces, these textiles feel almost freshly minted, pulling the visitor into other worlds and histories.

Indian embroidered curtains created in the 1720s borrowed from the House of the Binns in West Lothian reveal the unique plant-based colour from the locality of their making. They present an example of the visual trends of the time and the desire for beautiful, professionally stitched textiles in Scotland.

Examples from Lady Aberdeen’s needlework school include embroidered panels and a stunning gold thread table cover, copied from an Italian original. These sit alongside a pair of fine Chinese silk embroidered hangings purchased for Newhailes House just outside Edinburgh.

Inglis pleasingly connects many of the textiles to their people, whether that is the embroiderer themselves, or those who commissioned, collected, owned and used the items. This gives a strong sense of the context of this craft at various times throughout the last 200 years, reflecting the shifting fashions for stitch styles, technique, colour and materials.

Showcasing these archival embroidered textiles underscores the growing interest and market for embroidered textiles, as well as an increasing visibility in the arts. An appreciation of this slow, meticulous craftwork also highlights how this quiet domestic mode of expression has more recently become a less-quiet vehicle for women’s activism, reigniting excitement around the use of stitch.

Delving into archives is an excellent way to kindle interest in forgotten textures, pattern and colour in textile design. The histories embedded in these archives have the potential to inspire the next generation of timeless, long-lasting materials, prompted by designers’ need to challenge the overconsumption of modern fast fashion and interiors.

In an industry of opaque supply chains, highlighting the stories and people behind these exceptional works echoes the move to shift the current narrative around textiles. Stitched offers a rare opportunity to enjoy embroidered pieces whose stories can be traced back through history, reminding us of the integrity of handmade crafts designed to be cherished – and to last.

Collette Paterson, Programme Director - Textiles, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

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

Once every spring, a few days after the full moon, corals of the great barrier reef release eggs and sperm simultaneously – a phenomenon so spectacular it can be seen from space.

Not only does the Moon’s gravitational attraction interact with the Sun to cause our tides (ebb and flow), its orbit around Earth generates different Moon phases of varying luminosity. Scientists think the Moon’s light at a certain point each spring may provide a cue to corals that the conditions are right to release eggs and sperm.

The Moon’s cycle indirectly affects some animal behaviour during high and low tides, of course, by excluding them from fertile foraging areas such as coastal mudflats. But the sunlight that is reflected off the Moon also has a direct influence on animal behaviour. For example, to those animals that rely on vision for foraging, moonlight is a resource. To others that are at risk of being killed at night, it is a menace.

A recent study found moonlight seems to affect mammals’ behaviour even in one of the darkest places on Earth: the floors of tropical forests.

Footage from camera traps in the undergrowth showed small mammals, such as rodents and armadillos, seemed to avoid predators by being less active on moonlit nights. In response, their hunters, including the ocelot wild cat, also become less active.

So, moonlight in the tropics seemed to create a natural “resting phase” for wildlife. However, a few species that are dependent on vision for foraging and predator avoidance, including the African elephant shrew (Petrodromus tetradactylus), showed increased nocturnal activity in moonlight.

Across the world, here are five animal species that have fascinating behavioural responses to moonlight.

1. Mayflies in Africa

Much like the corals, the mayflies (Povilla adusta) of Lake Victoria in eastern Africa synchronise their mating with the Moon.

These insects emerge in great numbers from their aquatic larval stage (which lasts four to five months) two days after a full moon. As sexually mature adults (the imago stage), this type of mayfly lives for only one to two hours, so they are in a great hurry to display, copulate and lay eggs before they die. Using the Moon’s cycle as a timer helps them ensure that potential mates will be around – then the moonlight also helps them fulfil their urgent tasks.

2. Nightjars

Nightjars are birds that hunt for flying insects at dusk and dawn. My research team monitored European nightjars (Caprimulgus europaeus) in flight (both foraging and migrating) for a year using accelerometers, a type of motion sensor.

During a full moon, nightjars extended their foraging time into the night, probably enabling them to catch more insects in the moonlight.

These birds stayed in the local area during full moons, when they have this increased time to feed. Then, about 12 days into the waning Moon, during spring and autumn migration, nightjars departed on their long flights to and from Europe and southern Africa, as feeding opportunities were disappearing.

The Moon also dictates when nightjars lay their eggs. These birds make sure their eggs hatch under a full moon, so they have the best foraging conditions when their chicks need food the most.

3. Swifts

The black swift (Cypseloides niger) builds its nests on ledges and niches in remote cliff faces in the western US and Canada. Its migration was little known until 2012 when, using tracking devices called light-level geolocators, scientists showed that swifts breeding in the Rocky mountains migrate to the Amazon of western Brazil.

Scientists already knew European swifts (Apus apus) fly continuously for the ten months of the year when they’re not breeding, including their migration between Europe and tropical Africa.

In a 2022 study to test if this applies to black swifts as well, scientists put multi-sensor data loggers on the birds. The black swifts not only remained airborne for their eight months of migration and wintering, they also showed an unexpected behaviour.

During the ten days around each full moon during the non-breeding period, they ascended to high altitudes (3-4,000 metres) after dusk and remained there throughout the night. In contrast, around each new moon, they remained at relatively low altitudes.

The flight acceleration data showed the swifts flew more actively during the brighter times when they were at high altitude, compared with when they were flying in darkness – suggesting they captured more insects (and use more energy) around the time of each full moon.

By a stroke of fortune, a lunar eclipse occurred during the study, on the night of January 20-21 2019, when five black swifts were soaring high in moonlight. As the Moon became eclipsed by the shadow of the Earth, all swifts responded by descending rapidly.

4. Barn owls

Barn owls (Tyto alba) come in two colours – red and white. Their main prey, field voles, detect owls more easily in moonlight and respond by freezing briefly.

A 2019 study found that in moonlight, if it is a red owl, the chance of a field vole escaping is pretty good.

However, if it is a white owl, the vole is blinded by the moonlight reflecting off the owl’s feathers, and freezes for a longer time. White owls are therefore more successful than red owls in catching voles during a full moon, meaning their young run a lower risk of starvation.

5. Dung beetles

The African dung beetle (Scarabaeus zambesianus) collects elephant dung that it forms into balls in which to raise and feed its young. It then rolls these balls away from the dung pile to avoid competition from other beetles. The most efficient way out is along a straight line.

When the Sun and its polarisation pattern (not visible to humans) is unavailable after twilight, dung beetles use the much dimmer polarisation pattern around the Moon to maintain this straight escape line – but this is much more effective under a full moon.

Using polarisation camera lens filters, researchers in a 2003 study of dung beetles were able to shift the direction of the full moon’s polarisation pattern, inducing the beetles to shift their direction.

In contrast, on dark nights around a new Moon, the beetles were unable to maintain straight paths and moved in meandering tracks.

Anders Hedenström, Professor of Theoretical Ecology, Lund University

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

Few plant families are as iconic as the resilient, spiky cactus, thriving in the driest deserts and as well as decorating our offices and homes. Their success in both environments comes down to extreme adaptations for surviving with little water – whether braving the brutal sun or enduring weeks of neglect from busy “plant parents”. But there’s much more to the around 1,850 cacti species than their ruggedness. Here are six surprising facts about this succulent plant family that you may not know.

Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Essential for clean air, yes, but simple organisms. A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: they are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine. This blossoming field of science is too delightful to do it justice in one or two stories.

This article is part of a series, Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenge the way you view plantlife.

1. Cacti are no loners

Cacti are often depicted as desert loners, but are in fact deeply connected to their ecosystem. Even the formidable Sonoran saguaros that tower 40ft above the desert sand depend on “nurse plants” when young, which shelter seedlings from harsh conditions. When fully grown, cacti also depend on pollinators for reproduction, with different species relying on bees, birds, moths and even bats.

Meanwhile, cacti flowers, fruits and water-filled tissues provide food and hydration to desert animals. Some woodpeckers drill nest holes into cacti stems, then return the next year to live in them. Even in death, cacti serve. Their decaying stems create nutrient-rich shelters for insects and arachnids.

2. They survive in tropics and freezing mountains

With their thick and spiny exteriors, cacti appear in popular culture as the archetypal desert plant – from the backdrops in classic Westerns movies to the harsh landscapes of crime drama Breaking Bad. And certainly, arid and semi-arid environments support the greatest number of cactus species.

But some cacti are found in tropical rainforests, where they don’t tend to grow in soil, but on tree branches in the shaded and humid canopy. Others are found high in the Andes, where temperatures regularly fall below freezing, and sometimes form cushion-like structures. One unique species, the lava cactus (Brachycereus nesioticus), is found only on the Galapagos Islands. This cactus colonises dried lava flows, providing the foundation for an entire ecosystem.

3. The mysterious mistletoe cactus

All but one species of cactus are restricted to the Americas. The exception is the mistletoe cactus, Rhipsalis baccifera, which is found in the African tropics, Madagascar and Sri Lanka, where it grows drooping from other plants.

Scientists don’t know exactly how it got to these distant places. One hypothesis argues that birds transported mistletoe cactus seeds in their guts, but we don’t know which bird could have done this. Fruit-eating birds rarely fly over oceans without defecating along the way. In any case, why have no other cacti made similar crossings?

Another theory suggests the mistletoe cactus dates back to when the Americas and Africa were part of the supercontinent Gondwana. But the timing doesn’t add up, since cacti are thought to have evolved about 100 million years after Gondwana split.

Alternatively, 16th-century sailors might have transported them. But given the tight quarters and need for practical cargo, why would sailors prioritise a cactus? Perhaps simply because it’s beautiful.

4. The unexpected threat of climate change

Cacti emerged over millions of years as arid ecosystems expanded, evolving striking adaptations – including those succulent water-storing tissues and spines – that helped them survive in extreme environments. These traits have made them symbols of resilience and rugged beauty. You might therefore think a hotter, drier Earth would favour cacti, but they are more fragile than it would seem.

Many species are finely tuned to specific conditions. As climates shift, they may struggle to adapt, meaning hundreds of species are threatened in the near future. For instance, the tropical dry forests of the Chaco in Argentina, which host cactus species including Stetsonia coryne and Echinopsis terscheckii, are increasingly vulnerable to wildfires, which are exacerbated by invasive grasses and prolonged droughts.

5. Cacti are supercharged by moderate climes, not deserts

The flip side of extinction is speciation, the formation of new species. Cacti have some of the fastest rates of speciation in plants, though it varies widely within the family. One genus boasts over 100 species, whereas others have only one, such as the tiny Blossfeldia liliputiana in the Andes.

My recent research using machine learning suggested a surprising pattern: the fastest rates of speciation happen in moderate, Goldilocks climates. These places are neither too harsh nor too mild, such as having a moderate daily temperature fluctuation of about 10°C.

This discovery highlights a hidden sensitivity in cacti. Even Arizona’s mighty saguaros have struggled under recent heatwaves. As for the question of why arid and semi-arid places contain a high diversity of cacti, it may be due to their remarkable ability to exploit diverse ecological niches, such as through unique pollinator relationships.

6. Psychedelic cacti shaped ancient and modern cultures

Some cacti produce the powerful psychedelic compound mescaline, which causes vivid hallucinations and altered states of consciousness upon consumption. Andean cultures have consumed the high-elevation San Pedro cactus for mental and physical healing for thousands of years. Researchers even found traces in a mummified child victim (whose head was transformed into a “trophy head”, possibly as a spiritual sacrifice, between 450 and 100BC). Similarly, various Native American cultures have consumed the spineless peyote for millennia, and religious consumption is now protected in law.

More recently, Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book, The Doors of Perception, in which he recalls a mescaline experience, profoundly influenced the counterculture of the 1960s, even providing the name for the band The Doors.

Timothy Leary, the controversial Harvard professor fired for experimenting with psychedelics, read this book and became friendly with Huxley. Leary went on to be described by former US President Richard Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America” for his leading role in the 1960s psychedelic movement.

Today, research suggests mescaline may hold therapeutic promise. A 2021 survey of 452 people found that among those with depression, anxiety, PTSD or drug use disorder, nearly two-thirds reported improvement after taking mescaline, even without taking it for that purpose.

Far from just being desert survivors, cacti are sensitive, interconnected and downright mysterious. With many species under threat from extinction, it is crucial to protect these remarkable plants, preserving their evolutionary legacy.

Jamie Thompson, Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology, University of Reading

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

While ancient Greece is one of the best known cultures of antiquity, there are no surviving historical narratives covering events between 1200 and 760BC. This period has traditionally been viewed as a “dark age” on account of the lack of preserved written sources after much of the Mediterranean suffered a societal and political collapse.

The Greek iron ages occurred within this period. But, because of the lack of documents, till now historians have been working with a timeline, which uses pottery styles from Athens as its basis. Devised in the late 50s and 60s by the historians Nicolas Coldsteam and Vincent Desborough, it has been widely held that the iron ages begun in 1025 and ended in 700BC.

The “Greek renaissance”, from 760BC to 700 BC, emerged in the iron ages’ last period, known as the late geometric. This was a time of rapid economic and demographic growth that saw the adoption of alphabetic writing, the emergence of the Greek city-states, panhellenic sanctuaries and the establishment of Greek colonies abroad.

Such huge strides in 60 years, means that the period is considered extraordinary. However, new research from Assiros and Sindos in northern Greece, as well as Zagora on the Cycladic island of Andros suggests that this timeline of the Greek iron age is wrong. My recent work with the archaeologist Bartłomiej Lis on protogeometric pottery from the site of Eleon supports this view.

Together, our research indicates that the Greek dark ages could have been shorter and the Greek renaissance much longer than previously thought. This shows that Greek society was more resilient to the societal collapse that preceded the iron age than previously believed.

New pottery samples

Our study centres on a vessel discovered in 2013 by a team of archaeologists from the Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia and the Canadian Institute of Greece in a shrine dating to the last half of the 12th century BC in the ancient town of Eleon. This vessel, found crushed on the shrine’s floor, features distinct sets of concentric circles pivoting around a central axis (a type of compass-like device) on its surface. A vase like this being discovered in a such an early context is unprecedented in central Greece.

The vessel’s concentric circles are characteristic of the protogeometric style that Coldsteam and Desborough’s believed to have emerged in Athens during the last half of the 11th century BC.

Coldsteam and Desborough established dates for the Greek iron ages through careful documentation of Greek pottery fragments in the Near East (an area covering roughly that of the modern Middle East). These fragments were found at sites which had been destroyed and levelled during historically attested wars.

So, using Near Eastern and Egyptian historical records of these incidents and by identifying the specific styles of the pottery fragments, Coldsteam and Desborough were able to give them specific dates. These were the protogeometric (1025-900BC), early geometric (900-850BC), middle geometric (850-760BC) and late geometric (760-700BC). The last being equivalent to the Greek renaissance.

Our research challenges this timeline and argues instead for an origin of the Protogeometric style during the 12th century BC in northern Greece and so proposes a new start date for the iron ages.

Our argument is supported by petrographic (analysis of thin sections of the pottery under a microscope) and chemical analyses conducted on the vase that show conclusively that it was imported from the lower Axios Valley. This happens to be the region where two other studies found results similarly challenging Coldsteam and Desborough’s chronology of the early iron age between 2000s and 2020s.

As well as bolstering the revised timeline, our research introduces an added layer of complexity into the debate because the vessel from Eleon was found within a layer of Mycenaean pottery dating to the 12th century BC.

In the conventional chronology, Mycenaean-style pottery was produced from the 16th to 11th century BC and was succeeded by the protogeometric style towards the end of the 11th century BC. As Athens was believed to be the centre responsible for creating the protogeometric style, no examples of it should be found in contexts earlier than the late 11th century BC.

The discovery at Eleon suggests that the protogeometric and mycenaean styles co-existed for a 100 years, rather than occurring one after each other. This means that the dark ages of Greece, could be much shorter than previously believed since the late geometric – and so the Greek renaissance, which saw the introduction of the alphabet – would begin over 100 years earlier.

The revised chronology emerging from our study proposes news dates for the iron age periods with most beginning around one hundred years earlier that believed. For instance, the protogeometric would begin around 1,150BC and end around 1,050BC instead of beginning 1025BC and ending 900BC. By moving all the start dates of the earlier periods forward, the late geometric becomes much longer since it would begin around 870BC rather that 760BC.

So, with its new start date of 870BC and its fixed end date of 700BC, the Greek renaissance spanned almost 200 years. It is certainly much less impressive then to consider all the strides of the period happening in two centuries instead of four decades.

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

Trevor Van Damme, Assistant Professor in the Archaeology and History of the Ancient Mediterranean, University of Warwick

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

The author John Steinbeck said: “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” Many others have claimed they formulated breakthroughs and innovations in dreams. Recent studies on the science of sleep suggest these claims are supported by modern science.

A 2024 study suggests that sleep can help us make more rational, informed decisions, and not be swayed by a misleading first impression. To show this, researchers at Duke University in the US had participants take part in a garage-sale game. In the experiment, participants rummaged through virtual boxes of unwanted goods. Most items in the box weren’t worth much, but a few special objects were more valuable. After searching through several boxes, participants were asked to pick their favourite box and would earn a cash reward equivalent to the value of the items in the box.

When participants had to decide on a box right away, they tended to judge the boxes not by their entire contents, but rather by the first few items. In other words, these participants were unduly influenced by the first information they encountered and didn’t factor in later information into their decision.

When participants slept and made their decision the next day, they made more rational choices, and the position of the valuable items in the box did not seem to influence their decision.

Problem-solving in the sleeping brain

When we are stuck on a difficult problem, it can feel like we have reached an impasse. A 2019 study found that when they gave the sleeping brain cues, in the form of sounds tied to an unsolved problem, it seemed to help participants to solve that problem the next day.

In this experiment, participants were given a set of puzzles to solve. While solving the puzzle, a unique sound was played in the background. At the end of the testing session, researchers gathered all of the puzzles that participants were unable to solve. While the participants were asleep, the researchers played back sounds associated with some of the unsolved puzzles.

The next morning, the participants came back to the lab and tried to solve the puzzles that they failed to complete the night before. The solving rate was higher for puzzles that were cued during the night, suggesting that the sound cues triggered the sleeping brain into working on a solution for that puzzle.

One of the ways that sleep might help us solve problems is by discovering insights into the relationships between objects and events. A study published in 2023 tested this idea.

The researchers had participants learn associations between four different items (one animal, one location, one object and one food), related to an event the researchers described to them. Some of the associations were obvious pairings, for example, item A was directly paired with item B. Others were only indirectly linked to the rest of the event, for instance, item D was never directly paired with items A or C.

The research team found that after a night’s sleep, participants were better able to uncover the indirect associations (they discovered the subtle link between item A and D), compared to staying awake. This suggests sleep gave the participants insight into the underlying event structure.

Dreaming your way to creativity

Thomas Edison, who helped invent the light bulb, often used daytime naps to help spur his creativity even though he claimed not to sleep more than four hours a night.

When Edison went for his daytime naps, he fell asleep with a ball in his hand.

As he fell asleep, his hand relaxed, and the ball fell to the ground. The noise of the ball hitting the floor startled Edison awake. He, and other famous thinkers including Salvador Dali, claimed that it was that transitional state, the moment between wake and sleep, that fuelled their creativity.

In 2021, French scientists put Edison’s claim to the test. They had participants attempt to solve a maths problem. Unknown to the participants, the problem had a hidden rule that would allow them to solve the problem much faster.

After working on the problem, they had participants fall asleep like Edison did. Each participant held a cup in their hand that they would drop if they fell asleep.

After this delay, participants were re-tested on the maths problem. They found that those participants who drifted off into a light sleep were better able to discover the hidden rule, compared with participants who remained awake, or who entered into deeper stages of sleep while still holding the cup.

During this twilight period between wake and sleep, many of the participants reported hypnagogia, dream-like imagery that is common during sleep onset.

In 2023, a different set of researchers investigated whether the content of hypnagogia was at all related to the three creatives tasks centred on a tree theme that their participants performed right before going to sleep. For example, listing all the creative, alternative uses they could think of for a tree. They found that creative problem-solving was enhanced when the hypnagogic imagery involved trees, suggesting imagery helped them to solve the problem.

So it turns out that Edison was right, sleep onset really is a creative sweet spot, and sleeping on it works.

Dan Denis, Lecturer in Psychology, University of York

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

This weighty book of lush interior shots selected and presented by Steven Brindle is a rare and delightful treat. London: Lost Interiors is an opportunity to glimpse inside the homes of London from a time well before it was common to photograph them – Victorian, Edwardian and early 20th century London. On top of that, about half the homes in it no longer exist, not to mention the fading and remodelling of the insides of those that do.

Popular ideas of what interior design in England was like between 1880 and 1940 come predominantly from period TV shows like Downton Abbey or Jeeves and Wooster. But these do not tell us how houses that were decorated and redecorated at the time genuinely looked.

Brindle’s book shows that historical decor trends are far more complex, more varied, and more particular than we might assume. For a start, the designers, architects and inhabitants were far more international that you would expect.

London: Lost Interiors taps into our growing fascination with other people’s homes, a fascination more recently supercharged by Instagram and other visual social media. The boundary between the public sphere and the private home is changing, since now complete strangers might “know us” through the way we choose and arrange things – our cushions, or recently, even the inside of the fridge.

Brindle makes the point that for those who lived in these homes too, interior style was a statement of identity aimed at their social world, which is smaller than an Instagram audience in many cases but critical to status and position nonetheless. Some of the later images in the book first appeared in the new print publications focused on lifestyle and fashion, like Country Life. Others, perhaps surprisingly, were taken purely for the pleasure of their owners, as a pleasing record of a home in its ideal state.

I like the idea of someone looking at a photograph of a space they actually inhabit. Brindle’s book offers valuable insight into how photography makes people conscious of their appearance and conscious of style. These are not snaps of a life lived. They are studies of the stage set for fashionable society life of lounging and dining.

Take the sitting room of 26 Grosvenor Square, light plays over comfortable chairs angled for conversation and optimal views of the giant palms and frescoes. Polished candle sticks await their cue. No humans present, and no sign of their recent activity. No personal bits and bobs. No mess.

What cannot be overlooked is the lack of “ordinary” lower middle-class and working-class homes in this book. London’s Museum of the Home in Shoreditch, which opened in the 1930s, offers a broader view of changing and varied home styles. But as Brindle points out, few photographs would have been taken of most people’s homes in the period because it was very expensive to do so.

One chapter focuses on “the middle class world”, but acknowledges that only 10% to 15% of Victorian and Edwardian people occupied this strata and they were closer to the landed gentry in economic capital than the middle class of today.

He also notes that these homes were labour intensive: crammed, polished, buffed, orderly and spotless. We may yearn for the grandeur, craftsmanship and commitment to style evident in these pages, but the sheer volume of stuff was only really manageable with staff.

For me, as a scholar of fashionable identities, this book is a seductive yet sobering reminder of how much our aesthetic ideals are shaped by mythologies of the “good life” that depend on having servants.

But something like our fascination with past elites and exotic style is also visible in these photographs from Victorian, Edwardian and early 20th century London. Interior elements demonstrate foreign travel, knowledge of new innovations and quirky, individual or eccentric taste. Politics aside, I wasn’t expecting to see the wealth of niche ideas that pepper these pages once you actually start focusing on individual images.

One “middle-class” home in Belgravia has walls sheathed in black velvet, and, below a dado rail, a spectacular wall-covering of overlapping fans. Another celebrates new lighting technology with a chain of bare electric lightbulbs set below a traditional painterly figurative frieze.

The pared-back minimalism of the 1920s and 1930s is all the more shockingly modern when seen, not in a commercial space or an architect’s house, but in the homes of people previously used to the “womb-like spell” of clutter and burgeoning decoration of the decades before.

Modernism’s break with the past in this book is as alarmingly refreshing as it might have been way back then. Take 5 Connaught Place, designed by Serge Chermayeff in 1937 for the extraordinarily sleek, sparse elegance we might expect of Le Corbusier, set within a Georgian London terrace.

In short, if you are captivated by curated, maximalist clutter, or less-is-more modernism, or indeed any of the distinctive and subtle, idiosyncratic visual languages in between, there is plenty of relevant history here to educate, complicate, delight and inspire. Brindle offers an intelligent and detailed text that brings the kaleidoscopic of pictures to life, invoking compelling stories of class and modern life along the way.

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

Vanessa Brown, Senior Lecturer Visual and Material Culture, Nottingham Trent University

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

Today, we know of more than 5,000 exoplanets: planets outside our solar system that orbit other stars. While the effort to discover new worlds goes on, we’re steadily learning more about the exoplanets we’ve already detected: their sizes, what they’re made of and whether they have atmospheres.

Our team has now provided tentative evidence for a sulphur-rich atmosphere on a world that’s 1.5 times the size of Earth and located 35 light years away. If confirmed, it would be the smallest known exoplanet with an atmosphere. The potential presence of the gases sulphur dioxide (SO₂) and hydrogen sulphide (H₂S) in this atmosphere hint at a molten or volcanic surface.

In our solar system, we have two distinct categories of planets – the small rocky ones, including Earth and Mars, and the gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn. However, exoplanets span a great spectrum of sizes. Our solar system lacks a planet whose size falls into the range between Earth and Neptune, but it turns out that’s the most common type of planet we have seen around other stars in our galaxy.

The ones closer to Neptune’s size are called sub-Neptunes and the ones closer to Earth’s size are called super-Earths. L 98-59 d is a super-Earth, slightly bigger and heavier than the Earth. The composition of the atmospheres of these planets is still an open question, one that we are only starting to explore with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021.

L 98-59 d was discovered in 2019 with Nasa’s Tess space telescope. Most exoplanets, including L 98-59 d, have been detected using the “transit method”. This measures the tiny dips in starlight when the planet passes in front of the star. This dip is more pronounced for larger planets and enables us to figure out the size of a planet.

Even JWST can’t separate these tiny planets from their host stars – as they orbit their stars too closely. But there is a way to “see” the planet’s atmosphere from this entangled light. When a planet passes in front of its star, some of the starlight filters through a planet’s atmosphere, hitting the gas molecules or atoms present there, on its way to us on Earth.

Every gas modifies the light in its own signature manner. From the light we receive from that star system, we can infer what the composition of that atmosphere might be. This is called transmission spectroscopy, a proven technique that has previously been used to confirm the presence of CO₂ in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

I am part of an international team of scientists who used JWST to observe one transit of L 98-59 d across the disc of its host star. We then obtained the transmission spectrum of the atmosphere of the exoplanet from these observations. This spectrum hinted at the possible presence of an atmosphere filled with sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide.

This discovery was surprising, as it stands out in stark contrast to the atmospheres of rocky planets in our own solar system, where water vapour and carbon dioxide are much more prevalent. Earth’s atmosphere, for example, is rich in nitrogen and oxygen, with trace amounts of water vapour. Meanwhile, Venus has a thick atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. Even Mars has a thin atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide.

We then used computer models that incorporate our understanding of planetary atmospheres and the light coming from L 98-59 d to come up with a potential picture of the composition of this planet’s atmosphere. The absence of common gases such as carbon dioxide and the presence of SO₂ and H₂S suggests an atmosphere shaped by entirely different processes to those we’re familiar with in our solar system. This hints at unique and extreme conditions on L 98-59 d, such as a molten or volcanic surface.

Additional observations will be necessary to confirm the presence of these gases. JWST observations had previously spotted signs of SO₂ on an exoplanet, but this was a gas giant, not a potentially rocky world such as L 98-59 d.

Exo-volcanoes?

The potential presence of SO₂ and H₂S raises questions about their origin. One explosive possibility is volcanism driven by tidal heating, much like what is observed on Jupiter’s moon Io. The gravitational pull of the host star on this planet stretches and squeezes it as it goes along its orbit. This motion can heat up the centre of the planet, melting its interiors and producing extreme volcanic eruptions and possibly even oceans of magma.

Combined with its close proximity to the star (one year on this planet is seven and half Earth days), truly hellish temperatures can be reached on the surface. If future observations support the presence of such an atmosphere, not only would it be the smallest exoplanet to have a detected atmosphere, but also a crucial step towards understanding the nature of such planets.

Detecting atmospheres on small, rocky planets is exceptionally difficult, as the planets are very small compared to the host stars, and also as intense radiation from their host stars often strips the atmospheres away. These observations, while tantalising, are only from a single transit. That means instrumental noise and other factors prevent us from making statistically strong claims. Future JWST observations will be key in confirming or refuting our analysis.

L 98-59 d may not be a candidate for life as we know it, but studying its sulphurous atmosphere and potential volcanism provides valuable insight into worlds around other stars. Extreme worlds like these help us understand the diversity of planetary evolution across the galaxy.

Agnibha Banerjee, PhD Student, The Open University

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