The Great Southern Australian Coastal Upwelling System is an upward current of water over vast distances along Australia’s southern coast. It brings nutrients from deeper waters to the surface. This nutrient-rich water supports a rich ecosystem that attracts iconic species like the southern bluefin tuna (Thunnus maccoyii) and blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda).

The environmental importance of the upwelling is one reason the federal government this week declared a much-reduced zone for offshore wind turbines in the region. The zone covers one-fifth of the area originally proposed.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of a research publication that revealed the existence of the large seasonal upwelling system along Australia’s southern coastal shelves. Based on over 20 years of scientific study, we can now answer many critical questions.

How does this upwelling work? How can it be identified? Which marine species benefit from the upwelling? Does the changing climate affect the system?

Where do the nutrients come from?

Sunlight does not reach far into the sea. Only the upper 50 metres of the water column receives enough light to support the microscopic phytoplankton – single-celled organisms that depend on photosynthesis. This is the process of using light energy to make a simple sugar, which phytoplankton and plants use as their food.

As well as light, the process requires a suite of nutrients including nitrogen and phosphorus.

Normally, the sunlight zone of the oceans is low in nitrogen. Waters deeper than 100m contain high levels of it. This deep zone of high nutrient levels is due to the presence of bacteria that decompose sinking particles of dead organic matter.

Upwelling returns nutrient-rich water to the sunlight zone where it fuels rapid phytoplankton growth. Phytoplankton production is the foundation of a productive marine food web. The phytoplankton provides food for zooplankton (tiny floating animals), small fish and, in turn, predators including larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds.

The annual migration patterns of species such as tuna and whales match the timing and location of upwelling events.

What causes the upwelling?

In summer, north-easterly coastal winds cause the upwelling. These winds force near-surface water offshore, which draws up deeper, nutrient-enriched water to replace it in the sunlight zone.

The summer winds also produce a swift coastal current, called an upwelling jet. It flows northward along Tasmania’s west coast and then turns westward along Australia’s southern shelves.

Satellites can detect the areas of colder water brought to the sea surface. Changes in the colour of surface water as a result of phytoplankton blooms can also be detected. This change is due to the presence of chlorophyll-a, the green pigment of phytoplankton.

From satellite data, we know the upwelling occurs along the coast of South Australia and western Victoria. It’s strongest along the southern headland of the Eyre Peninsula and shallower waters of the adjacent Lincoln Shelf, the south-west coast of Kangaroo Island, and the Bonney Coast. The Bonney upwelling, now specifically excluded from the new wind farm zone, was first described in the early 1980s.

Coastal upwelling driven by southerly winds also forms occasionally along Tasmania’s west coast.

Coastal wind events favourable for upwelling occur regularly during summer. However, their timing and intensity is highly variable.

On average, most upwelling events along Australia’s southern shelves occur in February and March. In some years strong upwelling can begin as early as November.

Recent research suggests the overall upwelling intensity has not dramatically changed in the past 20 years. The findings indicate global climate changes of the past 20 years had little or no impact on the ecosystem functioning.

What are the links between upwelling, tuna and whales?

The Great Southern Australian Coastal Upwelling System features two keystone species – the ecosystem depends on them. They are the Australian sardine (Sardinops sagax) and the Australian krill (Nyctiphanes australis), a small, shrimp-like creature that’s common in the seas around Tasmania.

Sardines are the key diet of larger fish, including the southern bluefin tuna, and various marine mammals including the Australian sea lion (Neophoca cinerea). Phytoplankton and krill are the key food source for baleen whales. They include the blue whales that come to Australia’s southern shelves to feed during the upwelling season.

Unlike phytoplankton and many zooplankton species that live for only weeks to months, krill has a lifespan of several years. It does not reach maturity during a single upwelling season. It’s most likely the coastal upwelling jet transports swarms of mature krill from the waters west of Tasmania north-westward into the upwelling region.

So the whales seem to benefit from two distinct features of the upwelling: its phytoplankton production and the krill load imported by the upwelling jet.

Seasonal phytoplankton blooms along Australia’s southern shelves are much weaker than other large coastal upwelling systems such as the California current. Nonetheless, their timing and location appear to fit perfectly into the annual migration patterns of southern bluefin tuna and blue whales, creating a natural wonder in the southern hemisphere.

Jochen Kaempf, Associate Professor of Natural Sciences (Oceanography), Flinders University

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

If you’re a young person in Australia, you probably know new social media rules are coming in December. If you and your friends are under 16, you might be locked out of the social media spaces you use every day.

Some people call these rules a social media ban for under 16s. Others say it’s not a “ban” – just a delay.

Right now we know the rules will definitely include TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Reddit, X, YouTube, Kick and Twitch. But that list could grow.

We don’t know exactly how the platforms will respond to the new rules, but there are things you can do right now to prepare, protect your digital memories, and stay connected.

Here’s a guide for the changes that are coming.

Download your data

TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and most other platforms offer a “download your data” option. It’s usually buried in the app settings, but it’s powerful.

A data download (sometimes called a “data checkout” or “export”) includes things like:

• photos and videos you’ve uploaded

• messages and comments

• friend lists and interactions

• the platform’s inferences about you (what it thinks you like, who you interact with most, and the sort of content it suggests for you).

Even if you can’t access your account later, these files let you keep a record of your online life: jokes, friendships, cringey early videos, glow-ups, fandom moments, all of it.

You can save it privately as a time capsule. Researchers are also building tools to help you view and make sense of it.

Downloading your archive is a smart move while your accounts are still live. Just make sure you store it somewhere secure. These files can contain incredibly detailed snapshots of your daily life, so you might want to keep them private.

Don’t assume platforms will save anything for you

Some platforms may introduce official ways to export your content when bans begin. Others may move faster and simply block under-age accounts with little warning.

As one example, Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads – has begun to flag accounts they think belong to under-16s. The company has also provided early indications that it will permit data downloads after the new rules comes into effect.

For others the situation is less clear.

Acting now, while you can still log in normally, is the safest way to keep your stuff.

4 ways to stay connected

Losing access to the platform you use every day to talk with friends can feel like losing part of your social world. That’s real, and it’s okay to feel annoyed, worried, or angry about it.

Here are four ways to prepare.

1. Swap phone numbers or handles on non-banned platforms now.

Don’t wait for the “you are not allowed to use this service” message.

2. Set up group chats somewhere stable.

Use iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, or whatever works for your group and doesn’t rely on age-restricted sign-ups.

3. Keep community ties alive.

Many clubs, fandom spaces, gaming groups and local communities are on multiple sites or platforms (Discord servers, forums, group chats). Get plugged into those spaces.

4. Don’t presume you’ll be able to get around the ban.

Teens who get around the ban are not breaking the law. There is no penalty for teens, or parents who help them, if they do get around the ban and have access to social media under 16.

It’s up to platforms to make these new laws work. Not teens. Not parents.

Do prepare, though. Don’t assume you will be able to get around the ban.

Just using a VPN to pretend your computer is in another country, or a wearing rubber mask to look older in an age-estimating selfie, probably won’t be enough.

A note for adults: take big feelings seriously

Most people recognise the social connections, networks and community enabled by social media are valuable – especially to young people.

For some teens, social media may be their primary community and support group. It’s where their people are.

It will be difficult for some when that community disappears. For some it may be even worse.

The ideal role of trusted adults is to listen, validate and support teens during this time. No matter how older people feel, for young people this may be like losing a large part of their world. For many that will be really hard to cope with.

Services like Headspace and Kids Helpline (1800 55 1800) are there to support young people, too.

How to keep your agency in a frustrating situation

A lot of people will find it frustrating that we’re excluding teens, rather than forcing platforms to be built safer and better for everyone. If you feel that way, too, you’re not alone.

But you aren’t powerless.

Saving your data, preparing alternative communication channels, and speaking out if you want to are all ways to:

• own your digital history

• stay connected on your own terms

• make sure youth voices inform how Australia thinks about online life going forward.

You’re allowed to feel annoyed. You’re also allowed to take steps that protect your future self.

If you lose access, you’re not gone – just changing channels

Social media bans for teens will create disruption. But they won’t be the end of your friendships, creativity, identity exploration, or culture.

It just means the map is shifting. You get to make deliberate choices about where you go next.

And whatever happens, the online world isn’t going to stop changing. You’re part of the generation that actually understands that, and that’s a strength, not a weakness.

Daniel Angus, Professor of Digital Communication, Director of QUT Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology and Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University

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

On Friday, thousands packed into Melbourne’s Federation Square for a free Amyl and the Sniffers show. Within minutes, fences buckled, the perimeter was breached, and the gig was cancelled over crowd crush fears.

It was gutting for fans – but it’s also the latest episode in a much longer fight over what, or who, Federation Square is really for.

A city that avoided gathering spaces

Melbourne’s uneasy relationship with civic squares goes back to the 1830s, when surveyor Robert Hoddle laid out the city grid without a major central square. This was a deliberate design choice to avoid the open plazas that elsewhere had become magnets for dissent and mass protest.

In the 19th and 20th century there were repeated failed attempts to retrofit a proper city square.

Proposals for a grand Parliament forecourt, for example, were abandoned in 1929 amid fears it would be used for protest.

City Square eventually opened in 1968 as a temporary design after the City of Melbourne acquired the land across from Town Hall. However, by 1997 it was carved up and sold off for the Westin hotel development, with much of its original design features (including a small waterfall) razed.

Federation Square, opened in 2002 on decking above rail yards, meant to fix our critical civic space gap. A publicly owned, privately operated space, the square blurred public place and commercial asset.

A focus on tourism and entertainment resulted in a square that often struggled to draw people in outside of events and beyond its surrounding venues, such as ACMI and NGV Australia.

In 2017, Fed Square’s management accepted a bid from Apple to demolish an existing building to erect their own flagship store within the square. This triggered fierce community backlash.

In response, Heritage Victoria listed Fed Square on the state heritage register – the youngest place ever to be listed. This limited development in the square, effectively putting a stop to the demolition plans.

The Heritage Council recognised the square as “the most important public square in Victoria”.

This flashpoint triggered a state government review into the square’s management, after which Fed Square was incorporated into the new Melbourne Arts Precinct Corporation in 2019. This brought a renewed emphasis on cultural programming. The irony, however: it has worked almost too well.

When you truly activate civic space, people show up. The Amyl gig proved relevant, exciting events draw crowds. But even with perfect crowd management, Fed Square – or any of Melbourne’s existing squares – simply couldn’t safely accommodate a crowd that size.

Lessons from Friday night

Fed Square has limited entry points and rigid borders: ideally, civic squares should have porous edges with lots of opportunities for spillover, or surrounding streets that can be closed to absorb crowds.

Melbourne’s rigid grid makes this difficult. As such, much of Melbourne’s public life has long been pushed into edge spaces – laneways, riverbanks, footpaths and markets, the State Library lawn (originally designed as a fenced off ornamental space, now inadvertently our most successful protest space following the removal of the picket fence).

This constraint has bred its own cultural innovation: Melbourne’s famed laneway culture emerged partly from necessity. And these diffuse, in-between spaces are genuinely valuable for everyday public life, not just mass gatherings.

But Friday shows we still need more opportunities for large-scale assembly. Other cities with established grids have managed it: Midtown Manhattan closed parts of Broadway to traffic; Barcelona’s Superilles (superblock) program created pedestrianised networks and new public squares within dense neighbourhoods.

Melbourne needs both large gathering spaces for moments like Friday night, and a diffuse network of everyday public spaces. That means seizing opportunities to create new civic plazas from major transport projects and renewal sites, protecting existing spaces like the State Library lawn and City Square from further privatisation, and challenging car dominance by closing more streets – temporarily or permanently.

If our only response to Friday night is tightening controls at Fed Square without also bolstering this diffuse cultural infrastructure – through planning protections, fairer regulation and investment in small venues (like Amyl and the Sniffers did themselves) – we will have missed the point.

Re-imagining public space

After a vexed history, rooted in a colonial planning logic that wanted to minimise gathering, Fed Square is slowly becoming the vibrant civic space people wanted. But we haven’t built the infrastructure to support that success.

People want to gather, but activating civic space without accommodating for growing demand is setting ourselves up for failure. We can’t just program better events; we need flexible crowd management systems, surrounding streets that can absorb overflow, and more public spaces.

Most importantly, we need to support the entire ecosystem – from Fed Square’s big stages to the small venues that quietly hold up Melbourne’s cultural life every night, and continue to carve out opportunities for public life.

Friday night proved Melburnians are hungry for public gathering. Now we need the civic infrastructure to match that appetite.

Rachel Iampolski, PhD Candidate, Centre for Urban Research RMIT, RMIT University

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

When the Amyl and the Sniffers’ free show at Federation Square was cancelled on Friday night due to safety concerns, the band worked quickly to turn this disappointment around.

Using their performance fee, they placed A$35,000 across the bars of seven prominent grassroots music venues around Melbourne.

Many celebrated the band giving back to spaces that had nurtured them in their infancy, while providing much needed support to a struggling sector.

However, the gesture raises questions as to why these spaces are not already supported. And why are musicians – rather than governments, audiences or the community at large – the ones that need to step in?

Grassroots venues are struggling

Independent, grassroots music venues have been doing it tough. Australia has lost 1,300 venues and stages in the past five years.

Music venues have always been precarious. But inflation and exorbitant insurance costs have made running a venue exceedingly difficult.

Audience behaviours have also changed. Punters today attend more major events at the cost of attendance for smaller venues.

Audiences are also drinking less. This is an existential challenge for these venues, whose primary revenue stream is alcohol sales.

Despite this significant shift in the market, venues appear reluctant to change their business practices.

James Young of Melbourne’s Cherry Bar recently praised the same large arena tours that often draw punters away from grassroots venues for stimulating increased drinking in CBD venues, revealing the priorities of these spaces.

Meanwhile, owners of The Tote and The Last Chance Rock & Roll Bar have decried the lack of government support, while begging punters to come to more shows.

Such responses do not consider the fundamental ways in which the market for live music has changed, or whether live music should be subject to the market at all.

Is a commercial model fit for purpose?

Australian grassroots music venues largely conform to a market-based model of alcohol consumption that cross-subsidises cultural activities like live performances.

Live music may often attract considerable audiences, and young people are spending more on entertainment and leisure – particularly for major concert events. But grassroots music venues often use music as a “loss leader” to promote increased liquor sales.

Such a business model may have been lucrative in the 1980s and 90s. But as audience behaviours have changed, a rethink is needed.

In much of northern Europe and France, there is a strong precedent of nonprofit venues receiving operational subsidies from municipal governments to avoid reliance on alcohol sales.

These models maintain strong public support thanks to disciplined and professional advocacy from the sector. Advocacy has also increased in the United Kingdom through the work of the UK Music Venue Trust.

Having made significant progress on a big ticket levy aimed at supporting grassroots venues, the Music Venue Trust has also encouraged many small venues in the UK to transition to nonprofit corporate structures. As nonprofits, these venues become eligible for greater public funding and tax exemptions.

France’s Scene de Musiques Actuelles (Contemporary Music Venue) model also promotes engagement with disadvantaged communities, facilitating greater accessibility and diversity in return for public subsidies.

This stands in stark contrast to Australia’s alcohol-dependent, market-based approach, which often attracts a homogeneous audience that may not reflect contemporary, multicultural Australia.

Structural reform

Grassroots music venues require structural reform to reduce their reliance on alcohol sales.

Such reform could involve nonprofit structures, such as Lazy Thinking in Dulwich Hill, soon to be incorporated as a registered charity eligible for tax-deductible donations. Charity status also reduces tax obligations on wages and salaries.

Other reforms involve who owns the building itself.

Commercial rents and overheads are exorbitantly expensive. Insecurity of tenure is a recurring problem for venues, such as in the case of The Curtin Hotel in Melbourne and The Crown & Anchor in Adelaide.

In the UK, Music Venue Properties operates as a collectively-owned community benefit society. Through crowd-sourcing shares and donations from passionate live music fans, the organisation is able to purchase the freeholds to grassroots music venues. Through this, they can protect them in perpetuity and offer long-term cultural leases to their operators.

Apart from some additional top-up funding from government, the scheme requires little regulation or intervention to be successful.

Other successful non-government initiatives include voluntary ticket levies, such as in Germany and Wales.

Such community-led reforms are possible in Australia, but require an acknowledgement of the many important non-market roles venues perform and some (literally) sober thinking about how best to support them.

Musicians save the day, again

Amyl’s act of generosity towards seven of Melbourne’s grassroots music venues might have been unprecedented, but it was not surprising. The band is known for their commitment to crowd safety, community spirit and generosity towards fans.

But should the band have been the ones to make it up to the city? Particularly in a chronically underfunded arts and cultural ecosystem that requires musicians to cope with the rising costs of doing the work they love.

Musicians, venues, governments and other industry stakeholders need to work together to ensure that this ecosystem is valued for what happens on stage, rather than just what’s exchanged over the bar.

Sam Whiting, Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow in Music Industries and Cultural Economy, RMIT University and Megan Sharp, Lecturer in Sociology, The University of Melbourne

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

In February 1975, a gang of scruffy Sydney rockers released their first two albums: High Voltage and TNT. A year later, songs from both records were repackaged into AC/DC’s first international album, also titled High Voltage.

AC/DC’s sound was forged in suburban garages and sticky-carpet pubs, part of Australia’s mid-70s pub rock explosion. The era saw Australian pub rock find its confidence to break from British and American influences. Cheap venues like pubs made live music accessible, while a growing youth culture wanted songs about their own lives.

Economic struggles and social change gave the music grit and honesty. This mix of independence, energy, and realism turned pub rock into a symbol of Australian identity.

Two figures defined AC/DC’s identity in 1975. Lead singer Bon Scott’s raspy howl turned songs into bawdy stories of lust, luck, and life on the road. Angus Young, in his now-iconic schoolboy uniform, blasted riffs that felt like jolts of live current.

Homegrown rock

AC/DC’s roots were in Scotland. Brothers Malcolm and Angus Young migrated to Sydney in the 1960s, while frontman Bon Scott grew up in Fremantle after emigrating as a child. Together they channelled those migrant, working-class roots into the raw energy that defined pub rock.

Songs like Rock ’n’ Roll Singer spoke directly to working-class kids who saw themselves in the band.

Their songs are built around tight, driving guitar riffs – short, repetitive, and instantly recognisable – that create rhythm and momentum rather than melody. This stripped-back sound, powered by Angus Young’s guitar and Phil Rudd’s steady drumming, makes the music physical and direct.

The vocals are equally dynamic. Scott delivered lyrics with grit and humour, capturing emotion through tone and attitude rather than complexity.

The band came from suburban Australia, but their songs avoided specific local references. Unlike bands tied to national imagery, AC/DC’s identity was built on the myth of rock and roll itself.

Australia’s pop culture in the 1970s was defined largely by imports: Hollywood films, British television, American records. For a homegrown band to make international waves was rare.

AC/DC broke decisively into the American and British markets in the 1970s. Highway to Hell (1979) reached number 17 on the US Billboard 200 and number 8 in the UK, earning platinum status and cementing their international fame.

Outsiders and rebels

In Australia, AC/DC’s rise in the mid-1970s was fast, loud and built from the ground up. Formed in 1973, they started playing pubs and quickly earned a reputation for their relentless live shows.

The band’s raw energy, driving rhythm and defiant attitude fit perfectly with the emerging pub rock circuit, a network of working-class venues that became the heart of Australian music culture.

They were promoted heavily by radio stations like 2JJ (later Triple J). Mainstream commercial radio was initially slower to support them. High Voltage and TNT sold strongly, helped by national touring and constant live exposure rather than airplay alone.

In the mid-1970s, AC/DC faced moral and media backlash rather than formal government censorship, though the effect was similar in shaping their rebellious image.

Their lyrics, stage antics and raw sexuality drew criticism from music journalists, radio programmers and conservative commentators, who saw them as crude and offensive.

Some stations refused to play songs like The Jack (1975) because of its sexual innuendo and suggestive lyrics (the titular “jack” is Australian slang for a venereal disease).

Scott’s shirtless performances, drag and swagger on shows like Countdown provoked complaints from parents and conservative groups. Newspapers occasionally branded the band “obscene” or “disgusting”, framing them as bad influences on youth.

A cultural marker

High Voltage is now a cultural marker. The lightning-bolt logo and the sight of Angus sprinting in a school blazer are now shorthand for Australian rock.

It is a testament to their enduring cultural power that, 50 years on, AC/DC stand as the only Australian band to score number one albums in five consecutive decades.

AC/DC’s success defies industry trends. They built one of the world’s biggest fan bases without relying on remixes or collaborations. For decades they resisted digital streaming and still resist greatest hits compilations.

The release of High Voltage in 1975 coincided with broader cultural shifts. Australia was emerging from decades of conservative governments. The newly elected Whitlam government poured A$14 million dollars (worth $122 million today) into the arts, and another 50% on top of that the following year, and established youth radio station 2JJ.

AC/DC were part of a wave of creativity that insisted Australia had something to say, and it didn’t need polishing for overseas approval.

AC/DC’s debut captured a moment when Australian culture stopped waiting for validation and started exporting itself with confidence. AC/DC showed that a band from Australia could storm the global stage. In doing so, they lit the path for a nation’s cultural confidence.

Jo Coghlan, Associate Professor, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, University of New England

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

It’s happened to you countless times: You’re waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a little mountain range where an image should be. It’s the placeholder icon for a “missing image.”

But have you ever wondered why this scene came to be universally adopted?

As a scholar of environmental humanities, I pay attention to how symbols of wilderness appear in everyday life.

The little mountain icon – sometimes with a sun or cloud in the background, other times crossed out or broken – has become the standard symbol, across digital platforms, to signal something missing or something to come. It appears in all sorts of contexts, and the more you look for this icon, the more you’ll see it.

You click on it in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint when you want to add a picture. You can purchase an ironic poster of the icon to put on your wall. The other morning, I even noticed a version of it in my Subaru’s infotainment display as a stand-in for a radio station logo.

So why this particular image of the mountain peaks? And where did it come from?

Arriving at the same solution

The placeholder icon can be thought of as a form of semiotic convergence, or when a symbol ends up meaning the same thing in a variety of contexts. For example, the magnifying glass is widely understood as “search,” while the image of a leaf means “eco-friendly.”

It’s also related to something called “convergent design evolution,” or when organisms or cultures – even if they have little or no contact – settle on a similar shape or solution for something.

In evolutionary biology, you can see convergent design evolution in bats, birds and insects, who all utilize wings but developed them in their own ways. Stilt houses emerged in various cultures across the globe as a way to build durable homes along shorelines and riverbanks. More recently, engineers in different parts of the world designed similar airplane fuselages independent of one another.

For whatever reason, the little mountain just worked across platforms to evoke open-ended meanings: Early web developers needed a simple shorthand way to present that something else should or could be there.

Depending on context, a little mountain might invite a user to insert a picture in a document; it might mean that an image is trying to load, or is being uploaded; or it could mean an image is missing or broken.

Down the rabbit hole on a mountain

But of the millions of possibilities, why a mountain?

In 1994, visual designer Marsh Chamberlain created a graphic featuring three colorful shapes as a stand-in for a missing image or broken link for the web browser Netscape Navigator. The shapes appeared on a piece of paper with a ripped corner. Though the paper with the rip will sometimes now appear with the mountain, it isn’t clear when the square, circle and triangle became a mountain.

Users on Stack Exchange, a forum for developers, suggest that the mountain peak icon may trace back to the “landscape mode” icon on the dials of Japanese SLR cameras. It’s the feature that sets the aperture to maximize the depth of field so that both the foreground and background are in focus.

The landscape scene mode – visible on many digital cameras in the 1990s – was generically represented by two mountain peaks, with the idea that the camera user would intuitively know to use this setting outdoors.

Another insight emerged from the Stack Exchange discussion: The icon bears a resemblance to the Microsoft XP wallpaper called “Bliss.” If you had a PC in the years after 2001, you probably recall the rolling green hills with blue sky and wispy clouds.

The stock photo was taken by National Geographic photographer Charles O’Rear. It was then purchased by Bill Gates’ digital licensing company Corbis in 1998. The empty hillside in this picture became iconic through its adoption by Windows XP as its default desktop wallpaper image.

Mountain riddles

“Bliss” became widely understood as the most generic of generic stock photos, in the same way the placeholder icon became universally understood to mean “missing image.” And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they both feature mountains or hills and a sky.

Mountains and skies are mysterious and full of possibilities, even if they remain beyond grasp.

Consider Japanese artist Hokusai’s “36 Views of Mount Fuji,” which were his series of paintings from the 1830s – the most famous of which is probably “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” where a tiny Mount Fuji can be seen in the background. Each painting features the iconic mountain from different perspectives and is full of little details; all possess an ambiance of mystery.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the landscape icon on those Japanese camera dials emerged as a minimalist reference to Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest mountain. From some perspectives, Mount Fuji rises behind a smaller incline. And the Japanese photography company Fujifilm even borrowed the namesake of that mountain for their brand.

The enticing aesthetics of mountains also reminded me of the environmental writer Gary Snyder’s 1965 translation of Han Shan’s “Cold Mountain Poems.” Han Shan – his name literally means “Cold Mountain” – was a Chinese Buddhist poet who lived in the late eighth century. “Shan” translates as “mountain” and is represented by the Chinese character 山, which also resembles a mountain.

Han Shan’s poems, which are little riddles themselves, revel in the bewildering aspects of mountains:

Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is a blue sky.
The rooms are all vacant and vague.
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the center nothing.

The mystery is the point

I think mountains serve as a universal representation of something unseen and longed for – whether it’s in a poem or on a sluggish internet browser – because people can see a mountain and wonder what might be there.

The placeholder icon does what mountains have done for millennia, serving as what the environmental philosopher Margret Grebowicz describes as an object of desire. To Grebowicz, mountains exist as places to behold, explore and sometimes conquer.

The placeholder icon’s inherent ambiguity is baked into its form: Mountains are often regarded as distant, foreboding places. At the same time, the little peaks appear in all sorts of mundane computing circumstances. The icon could even be a curious sign of how humans can’t help but be “nature-positive,” even when on computers or phones.

This small icon holds so much, and yet it can also paradoxically mean that there is nothing to see at all.

Viewing it this way, an example of semiotic convergence becomes a tiny allegory for digital life writ large: a wilderness of possibilities, with so much just out of reach.

Christopher Schaberg, Director of Public Scholarship, Washington University in St. Louis

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

Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, millions of people have started using large language models to access knowledge. And it’s easy to understand their appeal: Ask a question, get a polished synthesis and move on – it feels like effortless learning.

However, a new paper I co-authored offers experimental evidence that this ease may come at a cost: When people rely on large language models to summarize information on a topic for them, they tend to develop shallower knowledge about it compared to learning through a standard Google search.

Co-author Jin Ho Yun and I, both professors of marketing, reported this finding in a paper based on seven studies with more than 10,000 participants. Most of the studies used the same basic paradigm: Participants were asked to learn about a topic – such as how to grow a vegetable garden – and were randomly assigned to do so by using either an LLM like ChatGPT or the “old-fashioned way,” by navigating links using a standard Google search.

No restrictions were put on how they used the tools; they could search on Google as long as they wanted and could continue to prompt ChatGPT if they felt they wanted more information. Once they completed their research, they were then asked to write advice to a friend on the topic based on what they learned.

The data revealed a consistent pattern: People who learned about a topic through an LLM versus web search felt that they learned less, invested less effort in subsequently writing their advice, and ultimately wrote advice that was shorter, less factual and more generic. In turn, when this advice was presented to an independent sample of readers, who were unaware of which tool had been used to learn about the topic, they found the advice to be less informative, less helpful, and they were less likely to adopt it.

We found these differences to be robust across a variety of contexts. For example, one possible reason LLM users wrote briefer and more generic advice is simply that the LLM results exposed users to less eclectic information than the Google results. To control for this possibility, we conducted an experiment where participants were exposed to an identical set of facts in the results of their Google and ChatGPT searches. Likewise, in another experiment we held constant the search platform – Google – and varied whether participants learned from standard Google results or Google’s AI Overview feature.

The findings confirmed that, even when holding the facts and platform constant, learning from synthesized LLM responses led to shallower knowledge compared to gathering, interpreting and synthesizing information for oneself via standard web links.

Why it matters

Why did the use of LLMs appear to diminish learning? One of the most fundamental principles of skill development is that people learn best when they are actively engaged with the material they are trying to learn.

When we learn about a topic through Google search, we face much more “friction”: We must navigate different web links, read informational sources, and interpret and synthesize them ourselves.

While more challenging, this friction leads to the development of a deeper, more original mental representation of the topic at hand. But with LLMs, this entire process is done on the user’s behalf, transforming learning from a more active to passive process.

What’s next?

To be clear, we do not believe the solution to these issues is to avoid using LLMs, especially given the undeniable benefits they offer in many contexts. Rather, our message is that people simply need to become smarter or more strategic users of LLMs – which starts by understanding the domains wherein LLMs are beneficial versus harmful to their goals.

Need a quick, factual answer to a question? Feel free to use your favorite AI co-pilot. But if your aim is to develop deep and generalizable knowledge in an area, relying on LLM syntheses alone will be less helpful.

As part of my research on the psychology of new technology and new media, I am also interested in whether it’s possible to make LLM learning a more active process. In another experiment we tested this by having participants engage with a specialized GPT model that offered real-time web links alongside its synthesized responses. There, however, we found that once participants received an LLM summary, they weren’t motivated to dig deeper into the original sources. The result was that the participants still developed shallower knowledge compared to those who used standard Google.

Building on this, in my future research I plan to study generative AI tools that impose healthy frictions for learning tasks – specifically, examining which types of guardrails or speed bumps most successfully motivate users to actively learn more beyond easy, synthesized answers. Such tools would seem particularly critical in secondary education, where a major challenge for educators is how best to equip students to develop foundational reading, writing and math skills while also preparing for a real world where LLMs are likely to be an integral part of their daily lives.

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

Shiri Melumad, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Pennsylvania

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

Spotify is haemorrhaging artists. In the last few months alone a handful of indie bands have exited the streaming platform. If that includes some of your favourite musicians, you may be wondering how best to support them.

Among the artists leaving the platform is indie band Deerhoof. They reacted to the news that Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek had used his venture capital firm to lead a €600 million (£528 million) investment in Helsing, a German defence company specialising in AI. Their statement said: “We don’t want our music killing people.”

This sentiment chimes with the attitudes of the many listeners who cancelled their Spotify subscriptions after the platform ran recruitment ads for ICE, the US’s controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The exodus reflects a general concern that major tech companies are too cosy with the Trump administration. Spotify’s US$150,000 (£114,000) donation to Trump’s inauguration ceremony was cited by Canadian musician Chad VanGaalen as one of the reasons for his departure from the platform.

But these protests are as much driven by a recognition of ongoing structural problems with music streaming business models as they are with recent events. Music streaming platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music allocate revenue to artists on a pro-rata basis. This means that artists on each platform are entitled to a proportion of the overall revenue from streaming. This percentage is calculated by identifying the proportion of their streams that represent the total number of streams on the platform.

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There is therefore no direct financial relationship between listeners and the artists that they listen to. This is an opaque structure that fuels musicians’ sense that they are not receiving fair remuneration.

The number of songs on Spotify and similar platforms has grown exponentially in recent years. By Spotify’s own admission, the growth in revenue from music streaming has resulted in a deluge of AI-generated content, with 75 million spam tracks being removed over 12 months in 2024-25.

Despite this success, it can be assumed that many such tracks remain undetected and that there are therefore significant amounts of money being given to fake musicians at the expense of real artists. Spotify’s openness to some AI content, exemplified by the continuing presence of the AI band Velvet Sundown in its catalogue, does not assuage artists’ concerns.

The bundling of different types of content can make the allocation of payments to musicians much more complicated. While Spotify’s music and podcast revenue streams are separate, its audiobooks have been bundled into its premium subscription. The effect of this change in 2024 has been to lower the royalty rate of the songwriters whose music appears on its platform. Around the same time the company decided to remove payments for songs that were streamed less than 1,000 times. This is likely to disproportionately affect artists struggling to get a foothold in the music industry.

Despite all this, overall revenue continues to grow. Spotify claims that the US$10 billion it paid to the music industry in 2024 was the largest ever annual payment by any retailer. Annual rises in the price point of its subscription in the last two years means that its growth will likely sustain. That its latest quarterly figures revealed an operating profit of US$680 million seem to bear this out. This improvement in Spotify’s finances exacerbates musicians’ feeling that they are not getting their fair share.

Where to go next

So where can you go if you decide to leave Spotify? Given that its main competitors also use the pro-rata payment model and offer the same menu of unlimited music, then probably not to them.

Some streamers have experimented with user-centric models of payment whereby listeners pay directly the artists of the songs they stream. This, though, has had limited success, with Deezer capping its scheme to 1,000 streams per person per month, while Tidal ended its own experiment after two years.

There are, though, smaller platforms which deploy user-centric models of payment. Sonstream was popular for a while with independent artists, but at the time of writing its website has only basic functionality.

Resonate is a cooperative with a pay-for-play user-centric model which gives artists and rights-holders 70% of revenue, with the remaining 30% being ploughed back into the business. But the one that appears to come closest to combining an “artists-first approach” with a critical mass of musicians and listeners is Bandcamp. Each time a user purchases something on the platform, 82% of that transaction goes to the artist and/or their label. These payments have amounted to US$1.6 billion to date for not only streamed music, but cassettes, CDs, vinyl records and t-shirts too.

This last observation reflects a wider trend within the music industry and among listeners. That is that the encroachment of algorithms and AI on the curation and listening of music has led many to ditch streaming platforms altogether. This has encouraged artists to be more innovative, with many experimenting with other means of distributing their music, including selling CDs and downloads directly, and setting up their own DIY digital platforms.

For Spotify and other streaming platforms there is then a wider existential question about the extent to which it is possible to construct an economically viable business model that satisfies listeners while ensuring that musicians receive fair remuneration for their creativity.

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Andrew White, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King's College London

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

A group of friends sit around a table sharing stories and sipping mead. The men sport beards and the women sip from drinking horns – but these aren’t Vikings, they’re modern-day hipsters.

The 21st century has seen a revival of mead, a fermented alcoholic drink made from water and honey. In the past 20 years or so, hundreds of new meaderies have sprung up around the world.

These meaderies often draw on Viking imagery in their branding. Their wares are called things like Odin’s Mead or Viking Blod and their logos include longships, axes, ravens and drinking horns. A few even have their own themed Viking drinking halls. This is part of what might be called the “Viking turn”, the renewed pop culture vogue for the Vikings in the past 20 years, which has made them the stars of a rash of films, TV shows, video games and memes.

Since the rowdy banquet scene in the 1958 film The Vikings, wild, boozy feasting has been a staple of the hyper-masculine pop culture Viking. This theme continues in the 21st century, from the History Channel’s Vikings TV series (2013-present) to games like Skyrim (2011) and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (2020).

But while modern media suggest that Vikings drank mead as often as water, history tells a slightly different story.

Three stories are foundational for the Viking association with mead. The first is the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which survives in a single manuscript written in Old English and now in the British Library.

The story it tells is set in southern Sweden and Denmark in the early 6th century, so the warrior culture and lifestyle that Beowulf idealises are actually of a period considerably earlier than the Viking age (usually dated from the later 8th century onward). It does share a great deal of its substance with later Viking notions of the good life and so, for good or ill, they have tended to be conflated.

Most of Beowulf’s action plays out around mead-halls – the power centres of lords such as the Danish king Hrothgar, where the leader would entertain his followers with feasts and drinking in return for their support and military service. This relationship, based upon the consumption of food and drink, but inextricably bound up with honour and loyalty, is the basis of the heroic warrior society that is celebrated by the poet. Not surprisingly, therefore, episodes in which mead is drunk are frequent and clearly emotionally loaded.

A second high-profile appearance of mead comes in Norse mythology. At the god Odin’s great hall, Valhöll, the Einherjar – the most heroic and honoured warriors slain in battle – feast and drink. They consume the unending mead that flows from the udders of a goat named Heiðrún who lives on the roof. Norse myth, it should be noted, is sometimes quite odd.

Lastly, another important myth tells of Odin’s theft of the “mead of poetry”. This substance was created by two dwarves from honey and the blood of a being named Kvasir, whom they had murdered. The mead bestows gifts of wisdom and poetic skill upon those who drink it.

The whole myth is long and complicated, but it culminates with Odin swallowing the mead and escaping in the form of an eagle, only to excrete some of it backwards when he is especially hotly pursued.

These are striking and impressive episodes that clearly demonstrate the symbolic and cultural significance of mead in mythology and stories about heroes of the Viking age. But that is far from proof that it was actually consumed on a significant scale in England or Scandinavia.

As far back as the 1970s, the philologist Christine Fell noted that Old English medu, (mead), and compound words derived from it appear far more frequently in strongly emotive and poetic contexts such as Beowulf than in practical ones such as laws or charters.

This contrasts strongly with the pattern of usage of other words for alcohol such as ealu (ale), beor (counter intuitively probably “cider”) or win (wine), which are far more frequently used in a functional and practical way. This led Fell to believe that the concentration on mead in the likes of Beowulf was a “nostalgic fiction”. Mead, she concluded, was a fundamental part of an idealised and backwards-looking imagined heroic world rather than something customarily drunk in the course of everyday life.

In 2007, a PhD candidate at the University of York demonstrated the same point in the Scandinavian sources: mjǫðr (“mead”) is far more common in the corpus of Eddic and skaldic poetry than it is in the saga stories of everyday life. Equally, both the word mjǫðr and compound words derived from it are used far less frequently in the sort of practical and purposeful contexts in which ǫl and mungát (the Old Norse words for ale) are plentiful.

The strong impression in both England and Scandinavia is that, by the time sources like Beowulf were written from the 10th century onward, the plentiful drinking of mead by a lord’s retinue was largely symbolic. It represented the contractual bonds of honour in an idealised warrior society.

This was more a poetic image than a reflection of frequent real-life practice. The standard drink at feasts, let alone at normal everyday household meals, was far more likely to be ale.

Mead was once a highly prized drink – probably the most desirable beverage well before the Viking age, as its honoured place in Valhöll and Hrothgar’s hall suggests. However, honey’s scarcity made mead expensive and hard to source in northern Europe. By the Viking age, exotic Mediterranean wine, mentioned as Odin’s drink in the Grímnismál, may have begun to replace mead as the elite’s preferred choice.

So what, then, for modern mead-drinking Viking enthusiasts? The point is not, of course, that Vikings or any other early medieval people never drank mead – some clearly did, if not perhaps quite so often as is sometimes alleged – but rather that it served more as a symbol of a story-filled heroic neverland. But that is arguably exactly how many of today’s mead-drinkers also use it.

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Simon Trafford, Lecturer in Medieval History, School of Advanced Study, University of London

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Set in the fictional Yorkshire village of Ramsden in 1916, The Choral inhabits a world where the war is distant – yet its shadow lies over every street. Many of the young men are gone to the front, their names echoing through the church and village hall. Those left behind hover between waiting and pretending that life continues as before.

The film reunites Alan Bennett’s pen and Nicholas Hytner’s direction for their fourth film together (The Madness of King George, The History Boys, The Lady in the Van). Bennett’s eye for endurance and small absurdities, his distinct blend of humour and heartbreak, lends the story a warmth which threatens but never fully falls into sentimentality.

Determined to keep something of the village’s heart intact, the local choir opens its doors to all. The remaining boys – “fodder for the mill, fodder for the front” – join with nervous energy and untested voices. Around them unfold the small dramas of youth: crushes, jealousies, the thrill of being noticed – all under the dark cloud of war.

At times, the film recalls early Downton Abbey: the lightness of routine belying a deeper unease as the order of things begins to tremble. Hytner’s direction keeps the tone measured, his pacing unhurried, the village life unfolding in laughter across fields, flirtation in the lanes, and the faint hum of something approaching.

Ralph Fiennes, in superb form, is characteristically restrained as Dr Guthrie, the new choirmaster whose time in Germany prompts quiet gossip and complicates his loyalties. Dressed in tweed with a pocket watch gleaming, he brings calm authority tinged with sorrow. Alongside the enemy across the Channel, Guthrie sees the human faces behind the rhetoric of war, and thus he is both insider and outsider.

Beneath his composure runs a conviction that compassion itself has become a form of dissent. When Jacob Dudman’s traumatised soldier laments “life’s fucking shit”, Guthrie replies simply: “So, sing.” It becomes the film’s credo: music as both defiance and survival, a way to hold despair at bay. That spirit finds its fullest expression in Mary (Amara Okereke), whose voice lifts through the air with a brilliance that soars towards the transcendent.

Disappointingly, in a story otherwise so attuned to compassion, the film’s portrayal of women feels thin. The women of Ramsden are treated as narrative currency, their sexuality quietly commodified and offered as recompense for men’s suffering. The Choral would struggle to pass even the most forgiving version of the Bechdel test: the few conversations between women are framed by men’s absence or desire.

The film hints at a worldview in which women and sex are treated as rites of passage, experiences the young men are owed before war denies them adulthood. Yet for all the attentiveness to male sorrow, its compassion remains finely tuned to the loss which binds the village, finding moments of truth despite its blind spots.

While the choir scenes are wonderful and the climactic performance is deeply moving, the film is most affecting in its quietest moments. Jubilant farewells at the railway station are almost immediately shadowed by trains bringing home the wounded. The innocence of departure meets the silence of return, and in between lies everything the village will lose.

When a young woman rejects a soldier newly home, Hytner captures the moment with painful clarity: the war has already cut him off from the life he fought to reclaim. The village photographer (Mark Addy) records the last flicker of innocence, freezing faces that might have stepped from the stanzas of Philip Larkin’s poem MCMXIV “grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark” – still radiant with a trust in life that history will soon betray.

The Choral is both elegy and celebration: a reminder that even in the quietest corners, song can sound like survival – the fragile note of hope that refuses to fade.

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Laura O'Flanagan, PhD Candidate, School of English, Dublin City University

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

Thousands of visitors each year explore the landscapes of the UK’s national parks on foot, through walking, rambling, hiking, mountaineering and, more recently, forest bathing.

Many of the earliest advocates for a national park system were notable walkers. They ranged from Lake District conservationists such as William and Dorothy Wordsworth to the ramblers who staged the Kinder Scout trespass in 1932 to demand greater access to the countryside.

I study the relationship between nature and culture in these national parks. As part of my research, I conduct semi-structured walking interviews with communities in the North York Moors national park to further understandings of this relationship. I am part of a wider research team who work with a diverse range of protected landscapes.

Walking, tied to public access and a growing environmental consciousness, grew as an organised leisure activity over the course of the 20th century alongside the development of ideas to protect the UK countryside. Many walkers, often young, working-class people who were members of rambling and hiking clubs, campaigned for greater access to and further protection of the countryside.

The popularity of walking was affirmed with the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949, which established England’s rights of way network and founded the UK’s national park system.

The North York Moors, in the north-east of England, was designated a national park in 1952, following this Act. The 1950s then saw a new wave of walkers to the park, encouraged by the increasing use of motor cars, the rise of walking clubs and the spread of youth hostels.

The Lyke Wake Walk was created in 1955 by a local farmer and Cambridge graduate called Bill Cowley. It’s a 42-mile crossing of the North York Moors which became a popular charity walk in the 1960s and 1970s. This increase in walkers brought controversy at the time, especially among the farming population, because of the levels of erosion it was causing. At its peak, 10,000 people crossed the moors each year, not always on public rights of way. Challenge walks were very new back then and most of the people attempting it were inexperienced. Two mountain rescue teams were formed as a result of lost and distressed walkers.

Today, it is still a celebrated “challenge” walk undertaken by ramblers and runners. And 2025 marks the 70th anniversary of the first set of ramblers to successfully cross the park.

Walking through modern parks

The national park’s modern history is closely tied to two other long distance footpaths: the Cleveland Way and the Coast to Coast walk. Alec Falconer, one of the founding members of the Middlesbrough Rambling Club campaigned for a long distance walk around the periphery of the North York Moors. Thanks to his work, the Cleveland Way was established in 1969.

This was the country’s second largest trail at the time, following the establishment of the Pennine Way in 1965. Up to 2,000 hikers complete the whole trail each year.

Created by guidebook author Alfred Wainwright, the Coast to Coast walk is one of the UK’s most popular long-distance footpaths and runs across this national park. Some 6,000 people a year walk the trail, which brings many international visitors to the park. Restoration and conservation work is currently ongoing as this walk is upgraded to a national trail.

With the gradual expansion of tourism in the North York Moors since its national park designation in the 1950s and the increasing popularity of these footpaths, more pressure has been put on the landscape through walking. Paths have been eroded in places with the responsibility of maintenance falling upon the national park authority and landowners. A ranger I spoke to during a walking interview as part of my research commented on the condition of a footpath on Fylingdales Moor:

“I know this path very well … this used to be horrendously boggy and the park is doing a damn good job here … you are on the old smugglers trod route.”

Today, walking is one of the most popular activities in the park. Some 6.5 million people in 2024 visited the park for a short or long walk. The park offers an expansive network of public rights of way alongside extensive open access land.

Some paths make use of the park’s industrial heritage, using old rail tracks as walking routes, such as the Cinder Track which is a disused railway and now a footpath and cycle track through the park from Scarborough to Whitby.

Walking in this national park plays a vital role in supporting the wellbeing of nearby urban communities, such as Middlesborough and Scarborough. Residents from disadvantaged backgrounds access the park to improve their physical and mental health and the North York Moors National Park Authority aims to build on this through the growing popularity of NHS programmes which socially prescribe nature-based activities.

As a support worker from the local community told me: “Getting out here in that fresh air. It is relaxation and peacefulness. It brings a different mindset connecting with nature. I get something to take home.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more people have come to appreciate the importance of visiting the national park for health-related reasons. Not only for its extensive heather moorland, the largest in England and Wales, but also for its distinctive coastal villages and other special qualities of the park. Yet many who visit do not realise that the North York Moors landscape is not natural – much of the heather moorland is farmed and managed by private landowners for shooting and farming purposes.

In a time of ecological uncertainty, walking is a vital means of sensing and interpreting a countryside in transition – marked by biodiversity loss, a deepening climate crisis and emerging landscape recovery and rewilding projects that reimagine the relationship between people and land.

Through walking, new creative responses can emerge to address sustainability challenges, including social inequalities, climate and biodiversity emergencies, across the UK’s protected landscapes.

Many of the debates around walking that shaped the original designation of the UK’s national park system remain relevant today – particularly those concerning access and the right to roam, the balance between land conservation, protection and development and approaches to moorland management and land use.

Walking through the moors enable us to engage deeply, respectfully, and reflectively with these ongoing discussions and consider the future of the UK’s uplands.

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Tom Ratcliffe, Lecturer in Sustainability, Tourism and Heritage Management, York St John University

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

Touch is fundamental to how we perceive our own bodies and connect with others. A gentle brush stroke on our body can feel soothing, while a pinch or cut can be painful. We often think of touch as something we feel through our skin, but our eyes also play an important role in shaping what we experience.

One famous example is the rubber hand illusion. When people see a rubber hand being stroked while their own hidden hand is touched in the same way, they can start to feel as if the rubber hand is part of their body. This illusion shows how what we see can change what we feel.

But how does the brain actually do this? In our latest study, we measured brain activity to see how quickly the brain interprets what the eyes see when someone is touched.

We wanted to know how and when the brain works out whether the touch is pleasant or painful, threatening or safe, or whether it’s happening to our own body or someone else’s.

What happens in the brain when we see someone touched

We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain activity from the scalp with millisecond precision while participants watched hundreds of short videos showing different types of touch to a hand. These included soft strokes with a brush, presses with a finger, or sharp contact with a knife.

We then used machine learning to see whether patterns of activity in viewers’ brains could reveal what kind of touch they were seeing.

Within just 60 milliseconds of seeing a touch, the brain distinguished who and what was being touched. For example, it could tell whether the scene showed a hand from a first-person perspective (likely one’s own) or a third-person perspective (likely another’s), and whether it was a left or right hand.

By around 110 milliseconds, sensory information was being processed, such as how the touch might feel on the skin – soft and tingly from a brush stroke or sharp and painful from the tip of a knife.

A little later, around 260 milliseconds, the brain began to register emotional dimensions, such as whether the touch looked soothing, painful, or threatening. These findings show that, in just a fraction of a second, our brain transforms a simple image of touch into a rich sense of who is involved, what it might feel like, and whether it’s comforting or painful.

Why this matters for empathy and social connection

Our findings show that when we see someone being touched, our brains quickly interpret what that touch might feel like. This fits with the idea that the brain briefly “mirrors” what it sees in others, simulating their experience as if it were our own. This rapid, embodied response may form the basis of empathy, a process that helps us to recognise danger and connect socially.

Some people actually feel sensations such as tingling, pressure or pain when they watch others being touched – a phenomenon known as “vicarious touch”. Understanding how the brain instantly decodes observed touch may help explain why seeing an image of injury or pain can make some people physically cringe while others remain unaffected.

Our next step is to explore how these rapid brain responses differ between people who experience vicarious touch and those who do not, which could help explain individual differences in empathy.

In the long run, understanding how the brain sees and interprets touch could help explain problems with empathy, improve therapies that use touch or body awareness, and enhance immersion and social connection in digital environments such as virtual reality.

It reminds us that even seeing touch can help us feel closer to others.

Sophie Smit, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Neuroscience‬, University of Sydney 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.

You might think a honey bee foraging in your garden and a browser window running ChatGPT have nothing in common. But recent scientific research has been seriously considering the possibility that either, or both, might be conscious.

There are many different ways of studying consciousness. One of the most common is to measure how an animal – or artificial intelligence (AI) – acts.

But two new papers on the possibility of consciousness in animals and AI suggest new theories for how to test this – one that strikes a middle ground between sensationalism and knee-jerk scepticism about whether humans are the only conscious beings on Earth.

A fierce debate

Questions around consciousness have long sparked fierce debate.

That’s in part because conscious beings might matter morally in a way that unconscious things don’t. Expanding the sphere of consciousness means expanding our ethical horizons. Even if we can’t be sure something is conscious, we might err on the side of caution by assuming it is – what philosopher Jonathan Birch calls the precautionary principle for sentience.

The recent trend has been one of expansion.

For example, in April 2024 a group of 40 scientists at a conference in New York proposed the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. Subsequently signed by over 500 scientists and philosophers, this declaration says consciousness is realistically possible in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians and fishes) as well as many invertebrates, including cephalopods (octopus and squid), crustaceans (crabs and lobsters) and insects.

In parallel with this, the incredible rise of large language models, such as ChatGPT, has raised the serious possibility that machines may be conscious.

Five years ago, a seemingly ironclad test of whether something was conscious was to see if you could have a conversation with it. Philosopher Susan Schneider suggested if we had an AI that convincingly mused on the metaphysics of consciousness, it may well be conscious.

By those standards, today we would be surrounded by conscious machines. Many have gone so far as to apply the precautionary principle here too: the burgeoning field of AI welfare is devoted to figuring out if and when we must care about machines.

Yet all of these arguments depend, in large part, on surface-level behaviour. But that behaviour can be deceptive. What matters for consciousness is not what you do, but how you do it.

Looking at the machinery of AI

A new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that one of us (Colin Klein) coauthored, drawing on previous work, looks to the machinery rather than the behaviour of AI.

It also draws on the cognitive science tradition to identify a plausible list of indicators of consciousness based on the structure of information processing. This means one can draw up a useful list of indicators of consciousness without having to agree on which of the current cognitive theories of consciousness is correct.

Some indicators (such as the need to resolve trade-offs between competing goals in contextually appropriate ways) are shared by many theories. Most other indicators (such as the presence of informational feedback) are only required by one theory but indicative in others.

Importantly, the useful indicators are all structural. They all have to do with how brains and computers process and combine information.

The verdict? No existing AI system (including ChatGPT) is conscious. The appearance of consciousness in large language models is not achieved in a way that is sufficiently similar to us to warrant attribution of conscious states.

Yet at the same time, there is no bar to AI systems – perhaps ones with a very different architecture to today’s systems – becoming conscious.

The lesson? It’s possible for AI to behave as if conscious without being conscious.

Measuring consciousness in insects

Biologists are also turning to mechanisms – how brains work – to recognise consciousness in non-human animals.

In a new paper in Philosophical Transactions B, we propose a neural model for minimal consciousness in insects. This is a model that abstracts away from anatomical detail to focus on the core computations done by simple brains.

Our key insight is to identify the kind of computation our brains perform that gives rise to experience.

This computation solves ancient problems from our evolutionary history that arise from having a mobile, complex body with many senses and conflicting needs.

Importantly, we don’t identify the computation itself – there is science yet to be done. But we show that if you could identify it, you’d have a level playing field to compare humans, invertebrates, and computers.

The same lesson

The problem of consciousness in animals and in computers appear to pull in different directions.

For animals, the question is often how to interpret whether ambiguous behaviour (like a crab tending its wounds) indicates consciousness.

For computers, we have to decide whether apparently unambiguous behaviour (a chatbot musing with you on the purpose of existence) is a true indicator of consciousness or mere roleplay.

Yet as the fields of neuroscience and AI progress, both are converging on the same lesson: when making judgement about whether something is consciousness, how it works is proving more informative than what it does.

Colin Klein, Professor, School of Philosophy, Australian National University and Andrew Barron, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

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On November 18 and 19 in Nashville, United States, auction house Julien’s will auction more than 450 items from the estate of Florian Schneider, the co-founder of German electronic band Kraftwerk.

It is difficult to overstate Kraftwerk’s profound impact on modern electronic music. They influenced artistic giants from David Bowie to New Order and Run-DMC, and defined what it means to be a musician in the age of machines.

What happens to this archive will affect how we understand a key chapter in music and cultural history.

Kraftwerk’s total artwork

Kraftwerk emerged in the 1960s in Düsseldorf, Germany. The young Schneider and his co-founder, Ralf Hütter, forged a modern, forward-looking aesthetic to counter pervasive post-war shame. Their music offered an answer to how Germany could rebuild a credible cultural identity after the atrocities of the Nazi era.

Rooted in Düsseldorf’s industrial grit, the band built a decades-long practice that both channelled and questioned the era’s technologies and anxieties – folding robots, assembly-line machines, driving, cycling and electronics into a new type of electronic music.

Beyond synthesisers, the Julien’s lot includes multiple vocoders (voice-coding processors that analyse speech and imprint its contours onto a synthesiser for “robot” vocals), outboard gear, studio furniture, posters, clothing and ephemera. It even includes Schneider’s Panasonic Panaracer road bike, seen in Kraftwerk’s Tour de France video.

This breadth matters. Kraftwerk embraced the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art in which the music, graphic design, outfits and tools belong to a single creative statement.

Public interest vs private trophies

Dispersing the pieces into private hands risks severing the links between the objects and their context. Archivists call this the “archival bond”, where records gain meaning through their relationships. In Kraftwerk’s case, the long-running commitment to Gesamtkunstwerk makes these linkages especially significant.

A spokesperson from the Schneider estate said the auction fulfils Schneider’s wish that his instruments “continue living”, and that they be “played and shared” – not left to gather dust.

That is a worthy goal. The worry is that a public auction is won by the highest bidder. There is no guarantee the winners will keep the items in working order, share them, or document them for future generations.

Money sharpens this concern. The collection has been valued at about US$450,000 (A$688,000), but sales will likely exceed this. Earlier this year, Julien’s David Lynch sale was first valued in the low hundreds of thousands but ultimately realised about US$4.25 million (A$6.8 million).

These prices will determine who has access to these instruments in the future, and items are more likely to become trophies for wealthy collectors than productive components in a working music studio.

Lessons from Orwell and Conan Doyle

History shows scholars and the public have objected when important collections were set to be dispersed.

In recent years, academics protested the sale of George Orwell’s Gollancz papers, which consisted of correspondence between Orwell and his publisher and offered unique insights into ideas that shaped his early novels including A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Inside the Whale (1940). As a result, the material was secured for University College London.

Similarly in 2004, Sherlockian scholar Richard Lancelyn Green led efforts to stop a Christie’s auction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s papers. Some United Kingdom members of parliament even tabled a motion arguing the collection should be kept intact for research. A large portion of the documents were secured by the British Library, who expressed regret the rest had been dispersed.

These examples suggest there is a strong public interest in preserving creators’ archives intact. And that calculus shifts when dealing with papers and correspondences, versus objects that demand specialised maintenance. The kind of knowledge a letter contains is not the same as that embedded in, say, an early vocoder.

The best outcome would be to keep Schneider’s archive intact in a public home, and ideally in conversation with Düsseldorf, where the work and its aesthetic were formed. A museum, library, or university could care for the collection, preserve its order and open it to researchers, artists, students and the public.

Preservation through use

There is a growing trend towards the idea of “preservation through use” for media archives. Like vintage cars that need their engines turned over, electronic instruments benefit from regular playing to keep their circuitry humming.

For artists and researchers, there is knowledge to be acquired through hands-on engagement that can’t be captured by documentation alone.

There are existing models that demonstrate how this can work. Pete Townshend of The Who donated his instrument collection to the University of West London, where it forms the Townshend Studio. Students and artists can play rare synthesisers under supervision.

In Melbourne, the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio at Federation Square offers public access to one of the largest collections of museum-grade electronic instruments in the southern hemisphere. It includes rarities such as an original theremin, built by Léon Theremin, and provides access to all, from those making music for the first time, to established touring artists.

What happens to Florian Schneider’s archive will set a precedent. How should collections like this be handled? How do we preserve digital artefacts, and which parts must stay together?

Given Kraftwerk’s role in electronic music and post-war German culture, there is a strong case for keeping the archive intact. This would help build public knowledge, spark new creativity and honour Schneider’s wishes. Once the items are dispersed, that benefit will be lost.

Prudence Rees-Lee, PhD Candidate, School of Design, RMIT University

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

Aspiring authors in Australia are among those who have been scammed by a global network of publishing houses using cloned websites and AI tools. Some boast testimonials using the images and names of real authors, or listing real books they didn’t publish as their own. Several target the Australian market, trading under names such as Melbourne Book Publisher, Sydney Book Publishing, Aussie Book Publisher and Oz Book Publishers.

I’m a publishing expert, and looking at what happened, I can spot red flags in how these publishers operated and targeted aspiring authors, vulnerable to exploitation in their desire for success.

David Tenenbaum, owner of trusted publishing house Melbourne Books, established in 2000 (and specialising in nonfiction), was the first to sound the alarm. He’d received calls from authors who believed they had been dealing with his business – but had actually been speaking to the similar-sounding Melbourne Book Publisher (which even gave out his ABN).

One of the scammed authors, “Andrea”, an aspiring fantasy romance novelist recovering from cancer, told the Guardian she had a video conference with a publishing executive, “Marcus Hale”, who outlined detailed publishing and promotion plans for her novel, down to getting “a presence on TikTok” and a launch at her local bookshop. She realised what had happened when she called Melbourne Books.

Both Andrea and another Australian author, Peter Ortmueller (who also dealt with Marcus Hale), found Melbourne Book Publisher on Facebook. Ortmueller, who lost A$150 he believed was a first down payment on a publishing package, said he thought it was a traditional publisher. Andrea lost A$88, which she was told would buy her an ABN.

Red flags and AI people

An expert from Deakin University’s Cyber Research and Innovation Centre, Ashish Nanda, identified some red flags about Melbourne Book Publisher, too. They told the Guardian they include “varying logos, claims on its website that it was established in 1999 yet a domain search showed it was only registered last month, and a fake 4.7 star rating on Trustpilot (the company has no reviews)”.

The Meet Our Team page on Melbourne Book Publisher’s site used “AI-created images of immaculately groomed white executives”, as did First Page Press. None of these people are known in Australian publishing circles, the Guardian reported. Some of these websites also list real books, which are for sale on Amazon (most of them self-published).

Other websites, Aussie Book Publisher and Oz Book Publishers, have fake testimonials using the images and names of real authors, like Australian children’s author Katrina Germein, who becomes “Sarah” on Aussie Books’ testimonial page.

A representative of Melbourne Book Publisher initially responded to the Guardian’s questions, but later ceased communication, removed some of their websites and altered elements of others.

The network of publishing houses appears to have international reach, including First Page Press, with offices in London and Melbourne, and BookPublishers.co.nz in New Zealand. The true scale of the operation is unknown.

Do you want self- or ‘traditional’ publishing?

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) recently issued a warning titled: “AI is making publishing scams more sophisticated”. They provided the following advice: “As a general rule, a cold approach from a company offering services to publish or promote your work should be interrogated carefully, especially if they are requesting payment from you.”

But what about aspiring authors who go in search of a publisher? What should they look for so they are not taken in by one of these scams?

To answer this question, it’s necessary to distinguish between traditional publishing and self-publishing. In traditional publishing, all upfront costs are paid by the publishing house. The author is expected to contribute time and energy to the book’s promotion, but does not pay for services like editing and design. Nor does the author pay for printing, or the production of an ebook.

The main income for traditional publishers is book sales, which only come after the initial investment has been made: the publisher assumes all upfront costs. This means traditional publishing is a financially risky business. Most of the books you see in brick-and-mortar bookshops were published by traditional publishers.

Meanwhile, self-publishing includes any publishing activity the author financially contributes to. Many self-publishing companies offer an array of services that can be packaged to suit the author’s needs, including editing, cover design, marketing, ebook production and printing.

Melbourne Book Publisher offered packages ranging from an “Advance Worldwide Plan” for A$1,495 to a “Premium Worldwide Plan” for $1,799.

Terms like “vanity publishing”, “subsidy publishing” and “hybrid publishing” are sometimes used – but these can be hard to distinguish from self-publishing.

There are no generally agreed upon definitions of these terms. For example, some so-called hybrid publishers operate exactly like predatory vanity publishers, while other times the term “hybrid publishing” is used by traditional publishing houses that have a side hustle facilitating a bit of self-publishing activity. Some may require authors to commmit to buying a certain number of copies to subsidise the print run.

My top 5 tips for avoiding scammers

My tips to help aspiring authors avoid a publishing scam vary. They depend on what you’re looking for: a traditional publishing arrangement or a self-publishing service. Of course, there is some grey area in between these categories, and there are more or less ethical actors in both.

1: Know what you’re looking for

Are you seeking a traditional publisher or a self-publishing service? If a publishing house asks for any financial contribution at all, this is a self-publishing service, as far as I’m concerned. If what you’re looking for is a traditional publisher, this is your sign to walk away!

2: Ask your bookshop about your publisher

If you’re still unsure whether it’s a traditional publisher or a self-publishing service, ask your local bookshop if they’ve ever stocked any books from that publishing house. If they regularly stock the publisher’s books, it’s a sign that it’s a traditional publisher. Or, if it’s a traditional publisher that also engages in a bit of hybrid publishing, they’re a respected operator who can get your books into bookshops.

3: Check an online registry of dodgy publishers

Perhaps you’re an aspiring author who is open to the idea of working with a self-publishing service. How do you distinguish between the legitimate operations and the scams?

Writer Beware is a website sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association that documents all types of unethical activity in the publishing industry. Searching this website for a company name can be an illuminating exercise.

It’s worth noting, though, that it would not have helped catch out scams like the one perpetrated by Melbourne Book Publisher. The increased availability of AI tools means scam websites can quickly be created with new AI-generated copy and images, making them harder to identify.

4: Evaluate the publisher’s other books

In the case of Melbourne Book Publisher, they claimed to have published books that were actually published by a different company.

Look for bookseller websites that include the publisher’s books and clearly identify the publisher by name. Some bookseller websites allow you to preview a book’s interior. This is an opportunity to evaluate the quality of the publisher’s editorial and design services.

Even better, search for book titles in library catalogues, including the catalogue of the National Library of Australia.

5: Work with someone local

When working with a self-publishing service or even hiring a freelance editor, it can be safer to work with someone local, rather than through a large online agency.

At least with someone local, there is the sense this person’s reputation in the local publishing industry is on the line. You can also check their bona fides by inquiring with other members of your writing community. Melbourne Book Publisher’s executives are not known in the Australian publishing community: this is a red flag.

Some state-based writers’ centres even feature a database of reputable local service providers for the writing and publishing industries.

Per Henningsgaard, Senior Lecturer, Professional Writing and Publishing, Curtin University

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

Pecans, America’s only native major nut, have a storied history in the United States. Today, American trees produce hundreds of million of pounds of pecans – 80% of the world’s pecan crop. Most of that crop stays here. Pecans are used to produce pecan milk, butter and oil, but many of the nuts end up in pecan pies.

Throughout history, pecans have been overlooked, poached, cultivated and improved. As they have spread throughout the United States, they have been eaten raw and in recipes. Pecans have grown more popular over the decades, and you will probably encounter them in some form this holiday season.

I’m an extension specialist in Oklahoma, a state consistently ranked fifth in pecan production, behind Georgia, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. I’ll admit that I am not a fan of the taste of pecans, which leaves more for the squirrels, crows and enthusiastic pecan lovers.

The spread of pecans

The pecan is a nut related to the hickory. Actually, though we call them nuts, pecans are actually a type of fruit called a drupe. Drupes have pits, like the peach and cherry.

The pecan nuts that look like little brown footballs are actually the seed that starts inside the pecan fruit – until the fruit ripens and splits open to release the pecan. They are usually the size of your thumb, and you may need a nutcracker to open them. You can eat them raw or as part of a cooked dish.

The pecan derives its name from the Algonquin “pakani,” which means “a nut too hard to crack by hand.” Rich in fat and easy to transport, pecans traveled with Native Americans throughout what is now the southern United States. They were used for food, medicine and trade as early as 8,000 years ago.

Pecans are native to the southern United States, and while they had previously spread along travel and trade routes, the first documented purposeful planting of a pecan tree was in New York in 1722. Three years later, George Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon, had some planted pecans. Washington loved pecans, and Revolutionary War soldiers said he was constantly eating them.

Meanwhile, no one needed to plant pecans in the South, since they naturally grew along riverbanks and in groves. Pecan trees are alternate bearing: They will have a very large crop one year, followed by one or two very small crops. But because they naturally produced a harvest with no input from farmers, people did not need to actively cultivate them. Locals would harvest nuts for themselves but otherwise ignored the self-sufficient trees.

It wasn’t until the late 1800s that people in the pecan’s native range realized the pecan’s potential worth for income and trade. Harvesting pecans became competitive, and young boys would climb onto precarious tree branches. One girl was lifted by a hot air balloon so she could beat on the upper branches of trees and let them fall to collectors below. Pecan poaching was a problem in natural groves on private property.

Pecan cultivation begins

Even with so obvious a demand, cultivated orchards in the South were still rare into the 1900s. Pecan trees don’t produce nuts for several years after planting, so their future quality is unknown.

To guarantee quality nuts, farmers began using a technique called grafting; they’d join branches from quality trees to another pecan tree’s trunk. The first attempt at grafting pecans was in 1822, but the attempts weren’t very successful.

Grafting pecans became popular after an enslaved man named Antoine who lived on a Louisiana plantation successfully produced large pecans with tender shells by grafting, around 1846. His pecans became the first widely available improved pecan variety.

The variety was named Centennial because it was introduced to the public 30 years later at the Philadelphia Centennial Expedition in 1876, alongside the telephone, Heinz ketchup and the right arm of the Statue of Liberty.

This technique also sped up the production process. To keep pecan quality up and produce consistent annual harvests, today’s pecan growers shake the trees while the nuts are still growing, until about half of the pecans fall off. This reduces the number of nuts so that the tree can put more energy into fewer pecans, which leads to better quality. Shaking also evens out the yield, so that the alternate-bearing characteristic doesn’t create a boom-bust cycle.

US pecan consumption

The French brought praline dessert with them when they immigrated to Louisiana in the early 1700s. A praline is a flat, creamy candy made with nuts, sugar, butter and cream. Their original recipe used almonds, but at the time, the only nut available in America was the pecan, so pecan pralines were born.

During the Civil War and world wars, Americans consumed pecans in large quantities because they were a protein-packed alternative when meat was expensive and scarce. One ounce of pecans has the same amount of protein as 2 ounces of meat.

After the wars, pecan demand declined, resulting in millions of excess pounds at harvest. One effort to increase demand was a national pecan recipe contest in 1924. Over 21,000 submissions came from over 5,000 cooks, with 800 of them published in a book.

Pecan consumption went up with the inclusion of pecans in commercially prepared foods and the start of the mail-order industry in the 1870s, as pecans can be shipped and stored at room temperature. That characteristic also put them on some Apollo missions. Small amounts of pecans contain many vitamins and minerals. They became commonplace in cereals, which touted their health benefits.

In 1938, the federal government published the pamphlet Nuts and How to Use Them, which touted pecans’ nutritional value and came with recipes. Food writers suggested using pecans as shortening because they are composed mostly of fat.

The government even put a price ceiling on pecans to encourage consumption, but consumers weren’t buying them. The government ended up buying the surplus pecans and integrating them into the National School Lunch Program.

While you are sitting around the Thanksgiving table this year, you can discuss one of the biggest controversies in the pecan industry: Are they PEE-cans or puh-KAHNS?

Shelley Mitchell, Senior Extension Specialist in Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Oklahoma State University

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