In his just-released memoir, historian and former diplomat Lachlan Strahan recalls being picked up from his Melbourne primary school by a neighbour on November 11 1975, the day Gough Whitlam was sacked as prime minister. His politically active mother “was so upset she didn’t trust herself behind the wheel”.

Journalist Margo Kingston was a teenager and not political at the time. She remembers going to bed that night, pulling the covers over her head and listening on the radio. The next day, she organised a march around her Brisbane school.

Fifty years on, the Dismissal is one of those “memory moments” for many Australians who were adults or even children when it happened. They can tell you what they were doing when they heard the news. It was an event that embedded itself in the mind, like news of US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination more than a decade earlier.

This was a life-changing day for many who worked in Canberra’s Parliament House. For Labor politicians and staffers, it bordered on bereavement. Excitement and elation fired up the other side of politics. Those of us in the parliamentary press gallery knew we had front-row tickets for the biggest show in our federation’s history.

The Dismissal didn’t come out of nowhere. It followed extraordinarily tense weeks of political manoeuvring, after the opposition, led by Malcolm Fraser, blocked the budget in the Senate in mid-October, and Whitlam refused to call an election.

Pressure points were everywhere. Would Whitlam give in? Would some Liberal senators crack? What would happen if there was no resolution before the government’s money ran out? Would Governor-General John Kerr intervene?

On the morning of Remembrance Day, Whitlam prepared to ask Kerr for an election. Not a general election, but an election for half the Senate – a course that would have little or no prospect of solving the crisis. But Whitlam had fatally misjudged the man he’d appointed governor-general. Kerr was already readying himself to dismiss the prime minister. He gave Whitlam his marching orders at Government House at 1 pm.

That afternoon Whitlam, eyes flashing, deployed his unforgettable rhetoric on the steps of parliament house. “Well may we say God Save the Queen, because nothing will save the governor-general”, he told the crowd, denouncing Fraser as “Kerr’s cur”.

Demonstrators were pouring into Canberra; shredders were revving up in parliamentary offices. That night at Charlie’s restaurant, a famous Canberra watering hole, the Labor faithful and journalists gathered. Many still in shock and emotional, patrons were packed cheek by jowl.

On parliament’s steps, Whitlam had urged the crowd to “maintain your rage and enthusiasm through the campaign” (an exhortation later taken to apply more generally). In the subsequent weeks, Labor supporters did so. I spent much of the election campaign in the media contingent travelling with Whitlam: it felt like there was momentum for him.

The feeling was, of course, totally deceptive, in terms of the election’s outcome. As the opinion polls had shown before the sacking the voters, who had enthusiastically embraced the “It’s Time” Whitlam slogan and promise in 1972, had lost faith in Labor three years on.

Whitlam’s had been an enormously consequential, reforming government. It transformed Australia, with landmark changes in health, education, welfare and social policy. It inspired the baby boomers. But it had been shambolic administratively, disorganised and corner-cutting. Some ministers had run riot. Whitlam was charismatic and visionary, but he lacked one essential prime ministerial quality: the ability to run a well-disciplined team. Then, as things started to go wrong, the government’s media enemies became feral.

A combination of how he ran his government and how that government ended made Whitlam in later years both an example to be avoided by subsequent Labor governments and a martyr in Labor’s story.

Despite his huge electoral mandate, Fraser’s road to power in part defined how he was seen as prime minister, especially in his early years. Some believed it made him more cautious; many in the media viewed him in more black-and-white terms than the reality.

Kerr paid a high price. Leaving aside the partisans, many observers condemned his actions, particularly on two grounds: that he had intervened prematurely and, most damning, that he had deceived Whitlam, rather than warning him he’d be dismissed if he continued to hold out. Kerr’s fear (probably reasonably-based) that if he alerted him, Whitlam would ask Buckingham Palace to remove him, didn’t convince critics. He was branded as dishonourable and cowardly.

Even Fraser eventually thought Kerr should have warned Whitlam. Journalist Troy Bramston, who has just published a biography of Whitlam, uncovered a never-published obituary Fraser wrote of Whitlam decades after the tumultuous events.

Fraser wrote he had come to the view “the Governor-General should have consulted the Prime Minister more freely. He thought he must protect the Monarch to make sure the Queen could not become involved in domestic political battles fiercely fought. It was the cautious approach but, on reflection, I think there was a higher duty to consult the Prime Minister of the day and to warn of the consequences that could follow.”

Kerr’s personal behaviour, notably being drunk at the Melbourne Cup in 1977, ensured he became a figure of ridicule as well as a political target. Fraser took care in appointing the next governor-general. He chose a widely respected, unifying figure in Zelman Cowen.

The Dismissal left fractures in our politics for years and its legacies forever. But Labor recovered faster than many had expected (despite Whitlam being trounced again in 1977). It was back in office in under a decade.

Our constitutional arrangements remained basically the same, with the governor-general retaining the reserve powers to dismiss a government. There was one change, however: Fraser ran a successful referendum to prevent recalcitrant state governments from stacking the Senate by appointing rogue candidates to fill upper house vacancies. That loophole had enabled the blocking of supply. The Dismissal did not push Australia towards a republic.

Could we see a repeat? Who knows what may have happened by the time we reach the 100th anniversary. But as far ahead as we can see, the events of 1975 have inoculated the system against a rerun. And, as many have pointed out, to have the combination of three such characters as Whitlam, Fraser and Kerr, and similar circumstances, would be impossibly long odds.

The main characters are dead. Some of those still around from the time maintain their rage, which has lasted through the many years, long after that election campaign.

David Solomon, Whitlam’s press secretary in 1975, says: “I haven’t changed. I’ve become, in fact, even more concerned about what Kerr did, the more information we have about why Kerr acted as he did and the material that he had before him when he decided to do this.”

And what of the views of the young? Frank Bongiorno, professor of history at the Australian National University, says today’s students find the events “fascinating in the way political science and history students did in the late 1970s.

"But the high-stakes game that played out is a bit like ancient history for them. They would see it as if it was like contemplating Pericles of Athens or Caesar of Rome.”

Gough would be pleased enough with the comparison to Caesar Augustus. He did like to quote Neville Wran’s joking compliment: “It was said of Caesar Augustus that he found Rome brick and left it marble. It will be said of Gough Whitlam that he found the outer suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane unsewered, and left them fully flushed.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

This week the Labor government announced it is poised to introduce a bill to parliament that will impose regulatory obligations on major subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services operating in Australia.

The legislation will require services such as Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video (any with at least one million Australian subscribers) to support the production of new local drama, as well as children’s, documentary, arts and educational programming.

They can choose to do so in one of two ways. They can either invest at least 10% of their total expenditure for Australia, or 7.5% of their total revenue generated in Australia in the year prior.

In 2024 the market leader, Netflix, reported a local revenue of A$1.3 billion and expenses of $1.25 billion. This would equate to spending A$125 million via the expenditure model, or AU$97.5 million via the revenue model. It’s unclear how the method of determining a model will be decided.

The quota will also apply to Stan and Paramount+ if they meet the subscriber threshold. This is the case even though these services have ownership ties to the commercial broadcasters Nine and Ten, which already have their own content obligations.

A long road to regulation

Major streaming services have been left to operate unregulated in Australia for more than a decade.

The European Union imposed a 30% European-content catalogue quota on streaming services operating in the EU back in 2018. It also provided the option for member states to impose additional investment obligations, levies and promotion requirements on these services.

Similarly, Canadian broadcast regulations were updated in 2023 to require online streaming services to contribute to and promote Canadian content.

In Australia, there have been eight official inquiries into whether, and how, to regulate streaming services. We’ve also seen a 2022 Labor election promise to act on this, a formal commitment in the government’s 2023 Revive National Cultural Policy, and a promised (and subsequently missed) July 2024 deadline.

During these long periods of uncertainly, streamers banded together to lobby hard against multiple proposed models.

Hope for a flailing sector

Rather than regulating streaming services, since 2016 consecutive federal governments instead opted for scaling back licence fees and local content obligations for commercial broadcasters. This has resulted in a significant decline in Australia’s screen production sector.

This week’s announcement provides assurance about how much money streaming giants will have to consistently inject back into the local industry. Early estimates suggest the legislation could guarantee contributions of more than A$300 million per year.

It’s also good news the legislation explicitly identifies and supports key genres of locally-produced content (drama and children’s, documentary, arts and educational programming), rather than letting the streamers decide.

Research has found Australian drama is facing an uncertain future – as is children’s content, which is no longer supported by broadcast TV regulation and has subsequently deteriorated.

The framework’s emphasis on specifically “local” programs is also promising. It will hopefully delineate the creation of Australian stories, rather than allowing streamers to meet their obligations by pumping out offshore productions made in Australian studios.

But some questions remain

What we won’t know until the bill is introduced is what this means for exactly how much content SVOD services will be required to make. Will they have to make a minimum number of local productions, or certain hours’ worth?

As part of their licensing requirements, commercial television broadcasters have long had to produce and screen a certain number of hours of new Australian content to reach a certain number of points per genre.

While these conditions have been relaxed in recent years, this model provided our production sector with a scale and consistency that could sustain jobs, nurture talent and provide industry training.

Currently, it’s unclear whether Netflix and its competitors could meet their obligations with a handful of titles per year. We might see a few big-budget productions popping up sporadically, rather than a larger quantity overall. What good is that for our flailing production sector?

We also don’t know whether there’s anything in the legislative package to ensure that what gets made by these streamers as part of their obligations will actually reach viewers via their algorithmically-personalised interfaces. A spokesperson for Save Our Arts said the collective would like to see “algorithmic prominence addressed so Australian content is not made then buried. It must be discoverable.”

Finally, as much as this overdue regulation is good news, it will no doubt leave broadcasters reeling. Last year, Free TV, the peak body for commercial free-to-air stations, argued the introduction of such legislation “risks creating unintended costs for local broadcasters”.

Broadcasters will struggle to compete with the high per-hour production spends streamers can afford. They will also face increased competition for production labour and facilities.

As is usually the case with such things, the devil is in the details.

Alexa Scarlata, Lecturer, Digital Communication, RMIT University

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

The jerseys might be red or blue, green and gold, or black and white – but rugby league’s future is decidedly brown.

As the New Zealand Kiwis and Toa Samoa prepare to clash for the Rugby League Pacific Championship’s Pacific Cup on Sunday, it’s clear the top calibre Pacific players have catapulted the game to another level.

The throngs of Pacific fans behind them – including superstar Toa Samoa supporter Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – are bringing their own force as this thrilling competition draws to a close.

That energy was on full display as Toa Samoa fended off Mate Ma'a Tonga in Brisbane two weeks ago, while the PNG Kumuls clinched their third straight Pacific Bowl with a commanding victory over Fiji Bati last week.

This weekend promises plenty more action: along with the men’s cup decider, the Kiwi Ferns will square off against the Australian Jillaroos in the women’s competition final on Sunday.

Launched by the National Rugby League (NRL), the Pacific Championships are the latest evolution of the Oceania Cup – which itself replaced the old ANZAC Test once played solely between Australia and New Zealand.

The shift reflects the code’s growing centre of gravity in the Pacific, where nations such as Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea are now driving the game’s expansion – on and off the field.

Pacific pride in the stands

It’s no secret that Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Australian athletes have become a major presence in professional rugby league, with Polynesian players now making up more than half of NRL contracts.

What hasn’t attracted as much attention, however, is the impact of their fans.

Almost 45,000 diehard Samoan and Tongan supporters packed Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium two weeks ago, creating an atmosphere the tier-one nations could only dream of.

As rugby league commentator Andrew Voss said on his morning show the day after the match:

What do we do with Samoa and Tonga? We have something here that is a jewel in the crown that rivals State of Origin.

It’s worth remembering the ancient rivalry between the island nations of Samoa and Tonga predates not only State of Origin, but also the Australian nation state itself.

When Mate Ma'a Tonga played the Kiwis at Eden Park on Sunday, Tongan fans – affectionately known as the “sea of red” – made up the clear majority of a record 38,144-strong crowd.

Their passionate support for a team that ultimately lost has seen the sea of red dubbed the “greatest show in sports”.

Pacific fans are arguably what make the game what it is today: unwavering in their support, patriotic to extremes and as visible as they are vocal. These fans have lifted rugby league up, rather than the other way around.

From our seats, as Māori and Pacific academics and sporting practitioners, Pacific rugby league not only rivals State of Origin, it has the potential to surpass it as a true global rivalry that extends beyond Australian states.

League loyalty comes home

As more elite Pacific players join the exodus away from the green and gold or black and white jerseys of their host nations – including Payne Haas, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, Jason Taumalolo and Isaiya Katoa, among others – it’s becoming even clearer the international game’s current growth depends heavily on Pacific talent.

The Australian Kangaroos will always be strong, with or without Pacific players: they have a seemingly endless conveyor belt of young people eager to play the game.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t feel the loss as their Origin superstars navigate their way back “home” to represent their heritage.

The real impact, however, may be felt most by the New Zealand Kiwis and New Zealand Rugby League as they work to redefine themselves. The Kiwis were once the first home-away-from-home for Pacific rugby league players.

Before Samoan and Tongan teams were playing test matches against tier-one nations, most of their NRL players had links to Aotearoa through birth or migration. This often led to them representing the Kiwis at the highest level.

Now, as Tongan and Samoan teams become serious contenders, New Zealand is likely to take the biggest hit. This isn’t a bad thing. If anything, it will open pathways for more Pacific athletes to earn higher honours.

But it does create uncertainty about what New Zealand and Australian teams might look like in a few years, after having had first choice of Pacific athletes for so long.

It’s clear the future of rugby league is brown – let’s nurture it.

Phil Borell, Senior Lecturer (Above the Bar), Aotahi School of Maori and Indigenous Studies, University of Canterbury and Dion Enari, Associate Professor, Ngā Wai a Te Tūī (Maori and Indigenous Research Centre) and School of Healthcare and Social Practice, UNITEC Institute of Technology

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

Modern beer production is a US$117 billion business in the United States, with brewers producing over 170 million barrels of beer per year. The brewing process is time- and energy-intensive, and each step generates large amounts of waste.

Solid components such as used grains and yeast from this waste end up in landfills, where harmful compounds can leach into the soil. Brewing wastewater that makes it into aquatic ecosystems can contaminate streams and lakes, decrease oxygen levels in those environments and threaten organisms.

To keep this waste from going into the environment, scientists like me are exploring how to manufacture beer brewing waste into useful products. I’m a chemist, and my research team and I are interested in figuring out how to recycle and repurpose brewery waste into tiny particles that can be used to make new types of prescription drugs.

The brewing process

The brewing process takes raw cereal grain – usually from barley – and converts its starch and proteins into simpler chemicals by malting. Brewers initiate this process by adding water, which wakes the seed from dormancy, and then keeping the seeds at a controlled temperature to sprout the grain.

During this time, important enzymes are released that can convert the starch and proteins in the grains to fermentable sugars and amino acids. They then heat up the resulting product, called the malt, to dry it out and stop further sprouting. After this malting process, they add hot water and mash the malt to release the compounds that give the beer its iconic flavor.

The brewers then separate the sweet malt extract, called wort, and the leftover solid is removed as waste, called brewer’s spent grains. About 30% of the weight of the raw grain ends up as spent grain waste. This waste is either used as animal feed or discarded. About 30 million tons of spent grain is generated annually.

Brewers add a cone-shaped flower of the Humulus lupulus plant, called hops, to the wort, then boil and clarify it. The hops flower is the key ingredient that gives beer its bitterness and aroma. The undissolved hops and proteins get collected during clarification to form hot trub, the second major waste from breweries. Roughly 85% of the hops are removed as waste material.

The clear wort is then cooled and fermented by adding yeast. The yeast filtered out after fermentation, called brewer’s spent yeast, forms the third type of waste that breweries generate. The spent yeast is one of the major byproducts of the brewing industry. This waste has a large quantity of water and solid material: 100 liters of beer generate 2 to 4 kilograms (4.4 to 8.8 lbs.) of spent yeast.

Finally, the fermented beer is filtered before entering the production line, where the beer is bottled for consumption. The wastewater generated at this last stage forms the filtration waste. A medium-size brewery generates about 8 tons of dense sludge and five to seven times – or 40 to 56 tons – of wastewater as filtration waste monthly. Several tons of waste from breweries remain largely underused due to their low economic value.

The brewery waste problem

These wastes have several compounds, such as carbohydrates, proteins, amino acids, minerals and vitamins that can potentially be repurposed. Scientists have tried to reuse the wastes in creative ways by creating biofuels and vegan leather using either some compounds extracted from the waste or the entire waste.

Breweries can send their solid wastes to farms that repurpose it as soil fertilizer, compost or animal feed, but a major fraction of it industrywide is discarded as landfill. The wastewater is discharged into the sewage lines, which can challenge sewage treatment systems, as they contain more than 30 times higher pollutants than the typical residential sewage.

Although breweries are becoming more aware of their waste and moving toward sustainable approaches, demand for beer has continued to rise, and a large amount of waste remains to be dealt with.

Repurposing waste in nanoparticles

In my research, I’m interested in determining whether compounds from brewery waste can help create nanoparticles that are compatible with human cells but fight against bacteria. Nanoparticles are extremely tiny particles that have sizes in the range of one-billionth of a meter.

In medicine, when the same antibiotics are used over and over, bacteria can evolve resistance against them. One potential use of nanoparticles is as an active component in certain antibiotic drugs. These nanoparticles could also work as disinfectants and cleaning chemicals.

My team and I developed nanoparticles coated with some of the compounds found in brewery waste – an invention which we have since patented but are not actively commercializing. We created the particles by adding waste from any stage of brewing to a metal source.

When we added a chemical containing silver – for example, silver nitrate – to the waste, a combination of processes converted silver compound into nanoparticles. One process is called reduction: Here, compounds found in the brewery waste undergo a chemical reaction that converts the silver ions from the silver nitrate to a metallic nanoparticle.

The other process, called precipitation, is similar to how chalky soap scum forms in your sink when soap reacts with minerals such as calcium in hard water. Oxide and phosphate from the brewery waste combine with a silver ion from the silver nitrate, causing the silver to form a solid compound that makes up the nanoparticle’s core.

The organic compounds from the brewing waste such as proteins, carbohydrates, polyphenols and sugars form a coating on the nanoparticles. This coating prevents any other reaction from happening on the surface of these particles, which is very important for making the nanoparticles stable for their applications. These nanoparticles prepared from brewery waste were made of three components: silver metal, silver oxide and silver phosphate.

Environmentally friendly processes that reduce the use of hazardous chemicals and minimize harmful side products are known as green chemistry. Because our procedure was so simple and did not use any other chemicals, it falls into this green chemistry category.

Nanoparticle safety

My colleague Neha Rangam found that the coating formed by the brewery waste compounds makes these nanoparticles nontoxic to human cells in the lab. However, the silver from these nanoparticles killed Escherichia coli, a common bacterium responsible for intestinal illness around the world.

We found that a special type of nanoparticle containing high amounts of silver phosphate worked against E. coli. It appeared that this silver phosphate nanoparticle had a thinner coating of the organic compounds from the brewery waste than silver metal and oxides, which led to better contact with the bacteria. That meant enough silver could reach the bacteria to disrupt its cellular structure. Silver has long been known to have an antimicrobial effect. By creating nanoparticles from silver, we get lots of surface area available for eliminating bacteria.

Several nanoparticles have been in clinical trials and some have been FDA approved for use in drugs for pain management, dental treatment and diseases such as cancer and COVID-19. Most research into nanoparticles in biotechnology has dealt with carbon-based nanoparticles. Scientists still need to see how these metal nanoparticles would interact with the human body and whether they could potentially cause other health problems.

Because they’re so tiny, these particles are difficult to remove from the body unless they are attached to drug carriers designed to transport the nanoparticles safely. Before doctors can use these nanoparticles as antibacterial drugs, scientists will need to study the fate of these materials once they enter the body.

Some engineered nanoparticles can be toxic to living organisms, so research will need to address whether these brewery waste-derived nanoparticles are safe for the human body before they’re used as a new antibacterial drug component.

Alcina Johnson Sudagar, Research Scientist in Chemistry, Washington University in St. Louis

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

There’s an optimal strategy for winning multiple rounds of rock, paper, scissors: be as random and unpredictable as possible. Don’t pay attention to what happened in the last round.

However, that’s easier said than done.

To find out how brains make decisions in a competitive setting, we asked people to play 15,000 games of rock, paper, scissors while recording their brain activity.

Our results, now published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, found that those who were influenced by previous rounds really did tend to lose more often.

We also showed that people struggle to be truly random, and we can discern various biases and behaviours from their brain activity when they make decisions during a competition.

What we can learn from a simple game

The field of social neuroscience has mostly focused on studying the brains of individual people. However, to gain insight into how our brains make decisions when we interact with each other, we need to use a method called hyperscanning.

With this method, researchers can record the brain activity from two or more people while they are interacting with each other, providing a more real-world measure of social behaviour.

So far, most research has used this method to investigate cooperation. When cooperating with someone else, it’s useful to act as predictably as possible to make it easier to anticipate each other’s actions and intentions.

However, we were interested in decision-making during competition where unpredictability can give you a competitive advantage – such as when playing rock, paper, scissors.

How do our brains make decisions, and do they keep track of the previous actions of both ourselves and the other person?

To investigate this, we simultaneously recorded the brain activity from pairs of players as they played 480 rounds of rock, paper, scissors with each other on a computer. From the resulting 15,000 total rounds across all participating pairs, we discovered that players were not good at being unpredictable when deciding which option to play next.

Even though the best strategy is randomness, most people had a clear bias where they overplayed one of the options. More than half of the players favoured “rock”, followed by “paper”, and “scissors” was favoured least.

In addition, people tended to avoid repeating choices – they went for a different option on their next round more often than would be expected by chance.

Real-time decisions

We could predict a player’s decision about whether to choose “rock”, “paper”, or “scissors” from their brain data even before they had made their response. This means we could track decision-making in the brain, as it unfolds in real time.

Not only did we find information in the brain about the upcoming decision, but also about what happened in the previous game. The brain had information about both the previous response of the player and their opponent during this decision-making phase.

This shows that when we make decisions, we use information about what happened before to inform what to do next: “they played rock last time, so what’s my move?”

We can’t help but try to predict what’ll happen next by looking back.

Importantly, when trying to be unpredictable, it’s not helpful to rely on past outcomes. Only the brains of those who lost the game had information about the previous game – the brains of the winners did not. This means overreliance on past outcomes really does hinder one’s strategy.

Why does this matter?

Who hasn’t wished they knew what their opponent would play next? From simple games to global politics, a good strategy can lead to a decisive advantage. Our research highlights our brains aren’t computers: we can’t help but try to predict what’ll happen next, and we rely on past outcomes to influence our future decisions, even when that might be counterproductive.

Of course, rock, paper, scissors is one of the simplest games we could use – it made for a good starting point for this research. The next steps would be to move our work into competitive settings where it’s more strategic to keep track of past decisions.

Our brains are bad at being unpredictable. This is a good thing in most social contexts and could help us during cooperation. However, during competition, this can hinder us.

A good takeaway here is that people who stop overanalysing the past may have a better chance at winning in the future.

Denise Moerel, Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience, Western Sydney University; Manuel Varlet, Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience, Western Sydney University, and Tijl Grootswagers, ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience, Western Sydney University

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

Last week, artificial intelligence (AI) music company Udio announced an out-of-court settlement with Universal Music Group (UMG) over a lawsuit that accused Udio (as well as another AI music company called Suno) of copyright infringement.

The lawsuit was brought forward last year by the Recording Industry Association of America, on behalf of UMG and the other two “big three” labels: Sony Music and Warner Records.

The lawsuit alleged Udio – which offers text-to-audio music generating software – trained its AI on UMG’s catalogue of music.

But beyond agreeing to settle, the pair have announced a “strategic agreement” to create a new product, to be trained exclusively on UMG’s catalogue, that respects copyright. We don’t have any details about the product at this stage.

In any case, the agreement puts both Udio and UMG in powerful positions.

Uncertainty remains

Some notable copyright campaigners have trumpeted the outcome as a success for creators in the fight against “AI theft”. But since it’s a private settlement, we don’t actually know how compensation for artists will be calculated.

To seasoned observers, the agreement between UMG and Udio mainly reflects the realpolitik of music big business.

In a panel discussion at last year’s SXSW festival in Sydney, Kate Haddock, partner at the law firm Banki Haddock Fiora, anticipated many lawsuits between copyright holders and AI companies would end in private settlements that may include equity in the AI companies.

Such settlements and strategic partnerships will help major labels set the ground rules for developing AI-music ecosystems. And it seems they are becoming common. Last month, Spotify announced a deal with UMG, Sony and Warner to produce “responsible AI products” across a range of applications. Again, we have little detail as to what this will look like in practice.

Such arrangements could allow music giants to benefit financially from non-infringing uses of AI, as well as getting a cut from uses that attract a copyright payment (such as fan remixes).

How does this affect creators?

According to Drew Silverstein, co-founder and chief executive of AI-powered platform Amper Music:

the real headline is that with one of the biggest rights-holders now actively engaging with generative AI music products, smaller players can’t afford to sit on the sidelines.

However, any vision of how such a settlement might serve smaller individual creators remains murky.

Even with AI companies agreeing to do deals to get training data (rather than helping themselves to it), there’s no straightforward model for how attribution and revenue can be equitably distributed to creators whose work was used to train an AI model, or who opt in for future use of their works in generative AI contexts.

Several emerging companies such as ProRata are claiming to develop “attribution tracing” technologies that can mathematically trace the influence on an AI-generated output back to its sources in the training data. In theory, this could be used as a way to divide royalties, just as streaming services count the number of plays on a track.

However, such approaches would assign extraordinary economic power to algorithms that regular stakeholders don’t understand. These algorithms would also be contentious by their nature. For instance, if an output sounded like 1950s bebop, there is no “right way” to decide which of the thousands of bebop recordings should be credited, and how much.

A more blunt but practical approach has been used by Adobe’s Firefly image-AI suite. Adobe pays artists an “AI contributor bonus”, calculated in proportion to the revenue their work has already generated. This is a proxy measure because it doesn’t directly capture any value a work brings to the AI system.

When it comes to generative AI, it’s hard to find attribution and revenue solutions that aren’t highly arbitrary, difficult to understand, or both.

The results of this are systems that risk being easily exploited and inequitable. For example, if there’s a payment structure, attribution tracing could encourage artists to create music that maximises the likelihood of attracting attributions.

Artists are already struggling to understand complex rules of success defined by powerful digital platforms. AI seems poised to exacerbate these problems by “industrialising” the sector even further.

Music as a public good

As it stands, individual artists don’t have clear, globally agreed protection from having their work used to train AI models. Even if they’re able to opt out in the future, generative AI is likely to present major power imbalances.

A model legitimately trained on a catalogue as vast as UMG’s – a giant tranche of the world’s most significant recorded music – will have the ability to create music in many different styles, and with a wealth of conceivable applications. This could transform the musical experience.

To understand what risks being lost, academic research is now reinvigorating a view of music when considered at the scale of AI, as a collectively produced shared cultural good, sustained by human labour. Copyright isn’t suited to protecting this kind of shared value.

The idea that copyright provides an incentive for creators to produce original work is faltering with AI–recording industry licensing deals. Looking for other ways to support original music might be the solution we need.

Oliver Bown, Associate Professor, UNSW Sydney and Kathy Bowrey, Professor, Faculty of Law, UNSW Sydney

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

More than 1.4 million people are employed in Australian retail and fast food businesses. Sadly, it’s not always a happy or safe place to work.

A union survey of more than 4,600 frontline workers found 87% had experienced customer verbal abuse in 2023 – consistent since 2016.

But incidents have become more frequent: in 2023, 76% of those who’d been abused experienced it daily, weekly or monthly, compared with 54% just two years earlier.

Retailers have spent millions on beefed up staff security measures, including body-worn cameras.

The lead up to Christmas is a notoriously bad time for customer violence and abuse against workers. On Thursday, a large collective of retail groups launched a national “Be Kind in Retail” campaign, urging shoppers to be compassionate and patient over Christmas.

But there is one ultra-cheap solution, trialled since 2020, which our three-part study has now confirmed seems to significantly reduce customers’ intention to verbally abuse workers.

A name and a story

In late 2017, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) union launched its “No One Deserves a Serve” campaign to reduce abuse of frontline staff.

Later, as part of this initiative, the union bought 500,000 adhesive plastic “under badges”, which were handed out for free from early 2020 to retail staff to stick to existing name badges.

An under badge is a small personal identifier attached below a name tag that can convey a short humanising message in a few words. Examples include “I’m a mother” or “I’m a son”.

The badges were trialled with retailers such as Woolworths, Target, Big W and KFC.

Around 2020, lead author Gary Mortimer’s daughter came home from her job at a supermarket wearing one of these under badges.

Surprisingly however, there’s been little research done into the evidence behind low-cost solutions to customer abuse, and whether such badges really could help curb customer abuse. So, we decided to investigate.

What our research found

In our recently published study, we began by speaking with 17 supermarket workers in late 2024, who had participated in the “No One Deserves a Serve” campaign.

Some said they’d felt awkward about wearing phrases like “I’m a son”.

But overall, participants said under badges seemed to reduce verbal abuse, created opportunities to chat and increased customers’ empathy.

A 39-year-old supermarket worker said:

[Customers] treat us like dirt. I recall this old fellow coming in and carrying on […] and then he just calms down when he sees that I’m a mother. He starts talking about his kids when they were younger. It was like I suddenly became a real person, not just a worker.

Another 22-year-old worker said:

I think badges made customers see us as equals.

Interestingly, none of the workers interviewed were still wearing their under badge. It was not always unclear why; one participant told us it had fallen apart, while others may have been lost.

How did almost 1,000 customers respond?

We also ran two experiments with a total of 940 customers.

First, we created a scenario where we described a poor service experience, which elicited anger.

We then presented artificial intelligence (AI) generated images of fictional retail workers. Some had just their name badge, while others disclosed personal information such as “I’m a daughter” on an under badge.

We then asked 600 respondents how likely a “reasonable” customer would be to shout, complain aggressively, become verbally abusive, or argue with the worker.

While the under badge didn’t completely deter verbal abuse, there was a statistically significant reduction in customers’ intention to engage in verbal abuse when the additional badge saying “I’m a mum/dad/daughter/son” was also worn.

Finally, we replicated the experiment with 340 different customers. We changed the under badges to read, “I’m a local”.

The same procedures were used, and we again confirmed that any form of self-disclosure – that is, revealing something about our “personal story” – reduced customer abuse.

How humanisation can reduce customer abuse

Two theories can help explain why revealing something about ourselves fosters greater levels of respect and empathy in others.

The first, social penetration theory describes the way we move from shallow, to deeper relationships with others.

It suggests we assess the “rewards” and “costs” attained from interacting with other people. Social rewards may include being liked. Social costs emerge from feelings of vulnerability.

The second, social exchange theory, suggests when the social rewards are greater than the costs of the interaction, exchanges will continue.

However, for self disclosure to work, these theories suggest the information shared must be perceived as “more than what is expected”, possibly of a personal nature.

This “extra” personal disclosure tips the balance in favour of the customer, simply: “I’ve learned something about this worker, without having to divulge anything in return.”

Our research demonstrates when workers disclose personal information, a social exchange takes place. Customers see the worker as a human – not just an extension of the retail brand.

Trying to keep retail workers safer

Over the five years since the badges launched, we’ve observed far fewer worn in shops. However, the SDA told The Conversation it is still sharing them and they are still available.

But it’s something businesses of all sizes could experiment with. Looking online to gauge current costs, we found it could cost as little as 17 cents per badge (plus GST) for a large business with 10,000-plus employees, to 43 cents for a smaller order of fewer than 1,000 badges.

It seems a small price to help remind customers that retail workers deserve to be treated as equals.

Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology; Maria Lucila Osorio Andrade, Profesor investigador, Tecnológico de Monterrey, and Shasha Wang, Senior lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

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

At its height, the Roman empire covered some 5 million square kilometres and was home to around 60 million people. This vast territory and huge population were held together via a network of long-distance roads connecting places hundreds and even thousands of kilometres apart.

Compared with a modern road, a Roman road was in many ways over-engineered. Layers of material often extended a metre or two into the ground beneath the surface, and in Italy roads were paved with volcanic rock or limestone.

Roads were also furnished with milestones bearing distance measurements. These would help calculate how long a journey might take or the time for a letter to reach a person elsewhere.

Thanks to these long-lasting archaeological remnants, as well as written records, we can build a picture of what the road network looked like thousands of years ago.

A new, comprehensive map and digital dataset published by a team of researchers led by Tom Brughmans at Aarhus University in Denmark shows almost 300,000 kilometres of roads spanning an area of close to 4 million square kilometres.

The road network

The Itiner-e dataset was pieced together from archaeological and historical records, topographic maps, and satellite imagery.

It represents a substantial 59% increase over the previous mapping of 188,555 kilometres of Roman roads. This is a very significant expansion of our mapped knowledge of ancient infrastructure.

About one-third of the 14,769 defined road sections in the dataset are classified as long-distance main roads (such as the famous Via Appia that links Rome to southern Italy). The other two-thirds are secondary roads, mostly with no known name.

The researchers have been transparent about the reliability of their data. Only 2.7% of the mapped roads have precisely known locations, while 89.8% are less precisely known and 7.4% represent hypothesised routes based on available evidence.

More realistic roads – but detail still lacking

Itiner-e has improved on past efforts with improved coverage of roads in the Iberian Peninsula, Greece and North Africa, as well as a crucial methodological refinement in how routes are mapped.

Rather than imposing idealised straight lines, the researchers adapted previously proposed routes to fit geographical realities. This means mountain roads can follow winding, practical paths, for example.

Although there is a considerable increase in the data for Roman roads in this mapping, it does not include all the available data for the existence of Roman roads. Looking at the hinterland of Rome, for example, I found great attention to the major roads and secondary roads but no attempt to map the smaller local networks of roads that have come to light in field surveys over the past century.

Itiner-e has great strength as a map of the big picture, but it also points to a need to create localised maps with greater detail. These could use our knowledge of the transport infrastructure of specific cities.

There is much published archaeological evidence that is yet to be incorporated into a digital platform and map to make it available to a wider academic constituency.

Travel time in the Roman empire

Itiner-e’s map also incorporates key elements from Stanford University’s Orbis interface, which calculates the time it would have taken to travel from point A to B in the ancient world.

The basis for travel by road is assumed to have been humans walking (4km per hour), ox carts (2km per hour), pack animals (4.5km per hour) and horse courier (6km per hour).

This is fine, but it leaves out mule-drawn carriages, which were the major form of passenger travel. Mules have greater strength and endurance than horses, and became the preferred motive power in the Roman empire.

What next?

Itiner-e provides a new means to investigate Roman transportation. We can relate the map to the presence of known cities, and begin to understand the nature of the transport network in supporting the lives of the people who lived in them.

This opens new avenues of inquiry as well. With the network of roads defined, we might be able to estimate the number of animals such as mules, donkeys, oxen and horses required to support a system of communication.

For example, how many journeys were required to communicate the death of an emperor (often not in Rome but in one of the provinces) to all parts of the empire?

Some inscriptions refer to specifically dated renewal of sections of the network of roads, due to the collapse of bridges and so on. It may be possible to investigate the effect of such a collapse of a section of the road network using Itiner-e.

These and many other questions remain to be answered.

Ray Laurence, Professor of Ancient History, Macquarie University

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

I was lucky to encounter The Rocky Horror Picture Show early in life, when my mother tracked the DVD down at our local video store so we could watch it together from the comfort of our apartment.

My initial experience lacked some of the context and traditions which, over the last 50 years, have cemented Rocky Horror’s status as the quintessential cult film.

Ironically, in my mother’s case, introducing her child to Rocky Horror required her to remove it from the very setting which gave the film its social significance in the first place: the movie theatre.

While “cult cinema” remains a somewhat nebulous categorization, scholarship consistently ties the term directly to the social situation of audiences receiving films. For cult cinema studies vanguards like Danny Peary, a movie doesn’t achieve cult status by simply inspiring a collective fan base. A cult film is born through ritualistic traditions of audience attendance that must occur in a public, social screening setting like a movie theatre.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show — the Hollywood-funded screen adaptation of Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien’s successful British stage musical — owes its cult success to independent, repertory cinemas.

Second life after box office flop

Considered a box office flop upon its 1975 release, the film soon found its second life as a midnight movie at New York City’s Waverly Theatre the following year.

At late night screenings, Rocky Horror drew audiences who were attracted to the film’s eclectic use of pastiche and radical depictions of queer sexuality.

Marking its 50th anniversary this year, the film continues to inspire a loyal following. Costumed fans still flock to local theatres, props in hand, to participate in performed traditions of audience participation, some of which have now been passed down for half a century.

Cult films and independent cinemas

One might argue that Rocky Horror’s expansion beyond the raucous, rice-strewn aisles of midnight movie screenings into personal, domestic settings (for example, my childhood living room) signals the precarious existence of both cult cinema and independent theatres.

Indeed, the two phenomena have become increasingly codependent. On the one hand, the Rocky Horror experience cannot be authentically replicated at home, since the exciting novelty of cult film screenings lies in the somewhat unpredictable nature of public, collective viewing practices.

The survival of Rocky Horror as we’ve come to know it hinges on the continued existence of independent cinemas, which provide settings for inclusive self expression and queer celebration that corporate cinema chains are less hospitable to.

In turn, cult cinema’s ephemeral quality makes it resistant to the allure of private, individualized entertainment, hailed by technological developments like VHS and DVD and of course, most recently, online streaming services.

Movie-viewing changes

Throughout my time as the programmer for a non-profit repertory cinema in Victoria, B.C. in the face of post-pandemic attendance declines and online streaming competitors — not to mention Cineplex’s continued monopoly over the Canadian theatrical exhibition landscape — I saw first-hand the economic necessity of screening Rocky Horror.

When independent cinemas are looking for consistent sources of revenue, cult films like Rocky Horror are top of the list.

In my past cinema experience, the only other films that regularly had comparative popularity are now also considered cult titles: the early-aughts favourite The Room and more recently the Twilight movies.

Human experiences, together

Programming The Rocky Horror Picture Show for five years also revealed for me cult cinema’s important relationship to chance. One of the more embarrassing moments of my programming career came when a projectionist unknowingly screened an unappetizingly sepia-toned version of Rocky Horror to a sold-out theatre audience. What remains a mortifying mistake still, I think, captures the essential element of humanness that remains integral to public moviegoing traditions.

Cult cinema exemplifies the adventurous nature of collective viewing. While Rocky Horror screenings traditionally encourage the audience’s self-expression, as with all cinema, each showing is a unique occurrence. This reminds us that it’s sometimes beneficial to suspend our expectations (colour grading aside) of how a film is meant to be seen.

Cult cinema: a paradox of time

In my doctoral research, I examine how moving images continually influence our lived relationship to time. Cinema is, at its heart, a medium of time, since its signature illusion of lifelike movement is created by displaying a collection of still images (or pixels) in a process of successive duration. Film theorist Mary Ann Doane observes that cinema’s unique ties to temporality have profoundly structured many essential aspects of modern human experience.

Cult cinema poses an intriguing paradox with regards to time. At cinemas, we typically aspire to give films our undivided attention. We derive meaning — and hopefully, pleasure — through a concentrated and cohesive understanding of what is occurring on the screen in front of us.

Conversely, showings of Rocky Horror and other cult films require different levels of presence and engagement. The average theatrical Rocky Horror viewer’s focus is divided dramatically between virtual, onscreen space and the physical environment of the theatre, including the audience’s expressions.

Consequently, the spectator’s perception vacillates between the film as an unchanging record of time passed (what Doane calls “cinematic time”) and the more contingent, unpredictable nature of “real” time perceived from and within our physical bodies.

The audience’s movie

Perhaps the magic of cult cinema is formed where these two temporal frequencies meet: when Rocky Horror’s cinematic time occurs in tandem with the delightful unpredictability of a live audience.

This sentiment was maybe best articulated by the actor Barry Bostwick, who played the role of Brad Majors in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in a documentary interview:

“The reason people think [Rocky Horror is] the greatest cult movie of all time is because it’s their movie, they own it. It’s as if they make it every time they go to the theatre.”

Amy Anderson, PHD Student in Art History & Visual Studies, University of Victoria

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

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is a podcast from The Conversation celebrating 250 years since Jane Austen’s birth. In each episode, we’ll be investigating a different aspect of Austen’s personality by interrogating one of her novels with leading Austen researchers. Along the way we’ll visit locations important to Austen to uncover a particular aspect of her life and the times she lived in.

As well as a sharp eye and an even sharper wit, Jane Austen was also, at times, in possession of a sharp tongue.

The burning of most of Austen’s letters by her sister Cassandra after her death has long been considered an unforgiveable act of literary vandalism. We know from her novels and the letters that did survive, that Austen did not suffer fools. She mercilessly exposed idiots, sycophants and narcissists to most enjoyable and satisfying effect. These letters probably contained evidence of Austen at her most shocking, for even the loftiest minds cannot fail to be entertained by a delicious piece of neighbourly tittle-tattle.

At a time when women were still considered chattels with very little agency, two pastimes could provide great relief from the interminable boredom that threatened to thwart an agile young mind: walking and gossip. Preferably at the same time. Or at the very least over a nice cup of tea sipped daintily from bone china in the presence of buns as large as one’s face.

Gossip in the world of Jane Austen served several important functions: entertainment, intel, communication, miscommunication and control. As reputations were fiercely guarded, one piece of misdirected or unfounded gossip could leave a young woman’s honour in tatters. Deployed strategically, that was often precisely the point.

Gossip is a subject which Austen explores in all these forms in her first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Published in 1811, it follows the lives of two very different sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, as they navigate the vagaries of love and romance in reduced circumstances after the death of their father.

In the first episode of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, Jane Wright visits Sally Lunn’s tearoom in Bath – where Austen herself often took tea – with Andrew McInnes of Edge Hill University, whose work examines the notion of the “Romantic ridiculous”.

Over plates of large brioche buns smothered with cinnamon butter, McInnes is here to help us understand Austen’s relationship with gossip. “Taking tea was one of the main ways women could get together and talk privately,” he explains. “And though Jane had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, she probably came here most with [her sister] Cassandra.”

In Sense and Sensibility, there’s a sense that Austen both despised and enjoyed gossip. “There is undoubtedly a double edge to Jane’s writing,” says McInnes, “in that she does say some of these gossiping characters are ridiculous, silly and pathetic. But a lot of the fun and amusement and comedy comes from those same characters gossiping and spreading the news and driving the plot forward.”

Later on in the episode, Anna Walker takes a deeper dive into the subject of gossip in Sense and Sensibility with two more Austen experts. Lucy Thompson is a lecturer in 19th-century literature at Aberystwyth University, whose work examines how surveillance played out during the Austen period. Joining her around the table is Katie Halsey, professor of English studies at the University of Stirling, where she researches Jane Austen and the history of reading.

As Halsey explains, there are “lots of different roles for gossip in the book … Sometimes Jane uses it to suggest that a character a bad person. Sometimes it’s used to carry the plot. Sometimes it’s used to misdirect and point us in the wrong direction. It’s very often used for comic effect.”

But Halsey also sees an undeniable “dark edge” to the gossip in the novel. Being the subject of gossip, as Austen well knew, could “damage your marital prospects and also leave you ostracised from society,” Thompson explains.

Listen to episode 1 of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re craving more Austen, check out our Jane Austen 250 page for more expert articles celebrating the anniversary.

Disclosure statement: Andrew McInnes, Lucy Thompson and Katie Halsey do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is hosted by Anna Walker with reporting from Jane Wright and Naomi Joseph. Senior producer and sound designer is Eloise Stevens and the executive producer is Gemma Ware. Artwork by Alice Mason and Naomi Joseph.

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

Anna Walker, Senior Arts + Culture Editor, The Conversation and Jane Wright, Commissioning Editor, Arts & Culture, The Conversation

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

In the opening scene of “It Might Get Loud,” a 2008 music documentary, musician Jack White appears surrounded by scrap wood and garbage. He hammers nails into a board, wraps wire around a glass Coca-Cola bottle as a makeshift guitar bridge, attaches a pickup, and plugs the contraption into a vintage Sears Silvertone amplifier – anything more modern or of better quality would never do.

White then uses his signature slide bar to play a distorted, electric riff on the rudimentary instrument. He declares, matter-of-factly, “Who says you need to buy a guitar?” and casually puffs a cigarette.

This scene of manufacturing innovation, crafting what is needed out of what is available, is a signature of The White Stripes, the influential rock band White co-founded in the late 1990s.

Drummer Meg White and guitarist/vocalist Jack White, originally Jack Gillis before taking Meg White’s name during their four-year marriage, make up The White Stripes. Hailing from Detroit, the band helped lead the garage rock revival, releasing six studio albums between 1999 and 2007.

Their recordings “Elephant,” “Get Behind Me Satan” and “Icky Thump” each won Grammys for Best Alternative Music Album. The White Stripes’ last televised performance together was “We’re Going to Be Friends” in 2009 on the final episode of “Late Night With Conan O'Brien.”

The band’s legacy of innovation has earned them a place in the Rock & Roll Hall Fame. They will be inducted in Los Angeles on Nov. 8, 2025, along with Outkast, Cyndi Lauper and Soundgarden.

As a professor who studies popular music as an expression of the human experience, I have written about a broad range of artists, from Townes Van Zandt and Maren Morris to Prince Paul and boygenius.

I find The White Stripes’ experiment in sonic complexity particularly impressive because it was created by just two performers. Their soundscape relied on instrumental and vocal manipulations of tone and timbre and on stylistic fusions of blues, folk music, garage rock and movements such as British punk and Dutch De Stijl art.

The White Stripes often expressed themes related to Detroit’s industrial struggle and innovation in their gritty, genre-bending sound and lyrical storytelling.

Battle between man and machine

Several songs directly reference Detroit icons. The jaunty 2001 single “Hotel Yorba,” which blends blues and folk while heavily featuring acoustic guitar, honors a Detroit hotel built in 1926. The music video was partially filmed outside the aging building, with indoor scenes filmed elsewhere.

Jack White said the band wanted to know more about the Hotel Yorba’s history but were chased out by an armed manager. In September 2025, the hotel was closed due to unsafe living conditions.

In contrast, the song “The Big Three Killed My Baby,” released in 1999, refers to Detroit’s major automakers at the time: Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. Infused with a punk style, the song discusses the conflict between gas and electric engines. With a tone of anguish, it serves as a biting critique of these companies’ lack of creativity and, as the song states, the use of “planned obsolescence,” which intentionally limits a product’s useful life cycle. The close of the song reveals that what has truly been killed is the consumer’s common sense.

The White Stripes relied heavily on timeless, vintage equipment, disavowing technological advancements and heavy-handed production techniques. But even their primitive instruments are seen as a foe in the struggle between man and machine.

“I always look at playing the guitar as an attack. … It can’t be this wimpy thing where you’re pushed around by the idea, the characters, or the song itself,” Jack White said in a 2010 interview. “It’s every player’s job to fight against all of that.”

Likewise, spontaneity, lack of set lists and real-time creativity were hallmarks of their performances.

A 2002 live performance of “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” begins with brief, chaotic, distorted guitar-wailing and a single, powerful strike of bass drum and cymbal. The performance features a blues-infused rock riff and sweet vocal melodies with high-pitched repetitions and steady cymbal beats punctuated by bass drum and tom hits. That’s the raw, unfiltered, unmitigated, underproduced, auto-tune-avoidant intensity and artistic sound for which The White Stripes strove.

A sound forged by punk and blues

The White Stripes had many influences, including the Flat Duo Jets, who shared their instrumentation of drum, guitar and vocals, and similarly fused styles such as ’50s rockabilly and blues-inspired punk. They were also heavily ensconced in the Detroit garage rock and punk scenes, which included bands such as The Detroit Cobras, The Dirtbombs, The Paybacks and Rocket 455. Each act was unique in how it deployed its creative foundations, mainly a primal, raw, electric sound with consistent, pounding rhythms and edgy vocal timbres.

This sonic layering and stylistic fusion is carried on by many of the artists of Jack White’s Third Man Records in Detroit. The label’s satellite locations in Tennessee and England also connect The White Stripes to the blues traditions of the Mississippi region and the punk scenes of London.

Acknowledged delta blues influences included Blind Willie McTell and Son House, whose “Grinnin’ in Your Face” – Jack White’s favorite song – maintains a powerful simplicity echoed throughout many White Stripes songs.

A folklike acoustic sound is mirrored in The White Stripes’ tracks “You’ve Got Her in Your Pocket” and “It’s True That We Love One Another.” Similar acoustic simplicity is heard in “Your Southern Can Is Mine,” “Apple Blossom” and “This Protector,” which use imperfections of intonation, melodic repetition, prescribed harmonic structures and soulful sounds.

The harder edges of punk and garage rock are equally present in the opening riffs of the songs “Icky Thump,” “Blue Orchid,” “Fell in Love With a Girl” and midway through “Seven Nation Army.”

Meg White’s tom and bass drum pulsations – as recognizable and definitive of The White Stripes’ sound as Jack White’s electrified blues riffs – are heard in the openings of the songs “Jimmy the Exploder,” “Little Cream Soda,” “The Hardest Button to Button,” “Astro” and even “Seven Nation Army,” which became a popular sports arena staple.

More than a mere look backward, The White Stripes served as a catalyst of progress, raising the stature of the underground Detroit sound to the world’s stage.

Read more of our stories about Detroit and Michigan.

Nathan Fleshner, Associate Professor of Music Theory, University of Tennessee

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

There can be no doubt that any conversation about British girlbands of the last 30 years would be dominated by Spice Girls.

In whichever corner of the globe you are, they were the defacto pop force of the late 1990s – and their impact has been long-lasting. From Adele to Beyonce Knowles-Carter, many contemporary world-class artists cite them as an inspiration.

However, new BBC documentary series Girlbands Forever focuses on many other girlbands who have emerged in British pop music from the early ’90s (Eternal) to the present day (Little Mix). It takes a broadly chronological overview, charting their development, releases and eventual splits in almost forensic detail.

As both a girlband fan and researcher, I was, though, disappointed that it offers little discussion of the impact these artists have had on their fans. Also absent from discussion is the link to queer audiences – something many girlband members have made specific reference to themselves.

One celebratory theme that is strong throughout this three-episode series is diversity and sisterhood. Eternal, All Saints, Atomic Kitten, Sugababes and Little Mix were all made up of racially diverse singers. And as each girlband passed the baton to the next generation, both media and society seemed more and more at ease with this concept.

Other topics of discussion include changes in the media (from newspapers to gossip magazines to reality television to social media) and society more broadly (rave culture, “Cool Britannia” and changing governments). This grounds the girlband discussions in a wider context.

Particular attention is paid to Little Mix as the girlband who won TV talent show The X Factor in 2011 – yet no mention is made that Girls Aloud did it nearly ten years earlier, when they won Popstars The Rivals in 2002.

Indeed, the fact Girls Aloud are not mentioned at all in the series is a glaring omission. While Little Mix faced abuse from anonymous social media trolls and the Spice Girls were constantly targeted by ’90s tabloid newspapers, Girls Aloud were the defining girlband of the celebrity gossip magazine era in the mid-2000s. Experts such as author Michael Cragg have written about the band’s impact on pop culture, and fans are likely to be disappointed by their omission.

The absence of a band which produced superstar (and later X Factor judge) Cheryl Cole highlights another area which a future series could go into: the solo career struggles and successes of these girlband members. Cole had two solo no.1 albums, and joins Spice Girl Geri Halliwell as one the most successful British female artists of all time.

The success of girlbands has always nurtured rich careers in the entertainment industries for its individual members. Both Jade Thirlwall and Perrie Edwards of Little Mix had top-five albums in the same month recently. Spice Girl Mel B is an international TV icon, judging talent shows on multiple continents; Atomic Kitten Natasha Hamilton has established her own record label; and Eternal’s Louise Redknapp had a top-10 album in 2025.

Spice Girl Melanie C and the All Saints’ offshoot Appleton (composed of sisters Natalie and Nicole Appleton) have been seen in the studio this year, with projects rumoured for 2026.

There are also plentiful non-music projects to mention. Many girlband members go on to support charities and philanthropic causes. Halliwell recently received an honorary doctorate from my university, Sheffield Hallam, for her work advancing rights for women and children on projects with the United Nations and Royal Commonwealth Society for Literacy. And Mel B has received awards for raising awareness of domestic abuse.

But for every number-one record and charity ambassadorship role, there is a member who may have not had the same luck. All Saints star Melanie Blatt, for example, has taken on a “chef residency” at a London pub which, while no bad thing, feels rather different to filming television shows in LA, or the solo efforts of her Girls Aloud and Spice Girls peers.

In contrast to the documentary’s omissions, I am glad it spotlights the brilliance of Atomic Kitten stalwarts Jenny Frost and Natasha Hamilton, who were quintessential noughties pop stars and gay icons.

In lieu of much Spice Girls and Girls Aloud discussion, their energy and charisma brings a welcome feeling of personal nostalgia – and a reminder of why the world needs fantastic popstars. Their cheeky charm, which first won me over 25 years ago, still makes me smile today.

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Joel Gray, Associate Dean, Sheffield Hallam University

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

If you’ve ever wondered why the giraffe has such a long neck, the answer seems clear: it lets them reach succulent leaves atop tall acacia trees in Africa.

Only giraffes have direct access to those leaves, while smaller mammals must compete with one another near the ground. This exclusive food source appears to allow the giraffe to breed throughout the year and to survive droughts better than shorter species.

But the long neck comes at a high cost. The giraffe’s heart must produce enough pressure to pump its blood a couple of metres up to its head. The blood pressure of an adult giraffe is typically over 200mm Hg – more than twice that of most mammals.

As a result, the heart of a resting giraffe uses more energy than the entire body of a resting human, and indeed more energy than the heart of any other mammal of comparable size. However, as we show in a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the giraffe’s heart has some unrecognised helpers in its battle against gravity: the animal’s long, long legs.

Meet the ‘elaffe’

In our new study, we quantified the energy cost of pumping blood for a typical adult giraffe and compared it to what it would be in an imaginary animal with short legs but a longer neck to reach the same treetop height.

This beast was a Frankenstein-style combination of the body of a common African eland and the neck of a giraffe. We called it an “elaffe”.

We found the animal would spend a whopping 21% of its total energy budget on powering its heart, compared with 16% in the giraffe and 6.7% in humans.

By raising its heart closer to its head by means of long legs, the giraffe “saves” a net 5% of the energy it takes in from food. Over the course of a year, this energy saving would add up to more than 1.5 tonnes of food – which could make the difference between life and death on the African savannah.

How giraffes work

In his book How Giraffes Work, zoologist Graham Mitchell reveals that the ancestors of giraffes had long legs before they evolved long necks.

This makes sense from an energy point of view. Long legs make the heart’s job easier, while long necks make it work harder.

However, the evolution of long legs came with a price of its own. Giraffes are forced to splay their forelegs while drinking, which makes them slow and awkward to rise and escape if a predator should appear.

Statistics show giraffes are the most likely of all prey mammals to leave a water hole without getting a drink.

How long can a neck be?

The energy cost of the heart increases in direct proportion to the height of the neck, so there must be a limit. A sauropod dinosaur, the Giraffatitan, towers 13 metres above the floor of the Berlin Natural History Museum.

Its neck is 8.5m high, which would require a blood pressure of about 770mm Hg if it were to get blood to its head – almost eight times what we see in the average mammal. This is implausible because the heart’s energy cost to pump that blood would have exceeded the energy cost of the entire rest of the body.

Sauropod dinosaurs could not lift their heads that high without passing out. In fact, it is unlikely that any land animal in history could exceed the height of an adult male giraffe.

Roger S. Seymour, Professor Emeritus of Physiology, University of Adelaide and Edward Snelling, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria

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