The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Duignan, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Energy Storage , The University of Queensland

Your tongue is a salt detector – it dissolves the solid salt crystals sprinkled on your chips to create an intense flavour sensation.

But salt is way more important than just being a food additive.

Read more: Kitchen Science: A salt on the senses

Salt water is literally the most common substance on the surface of Earth, and it’s really important – for life and for the planet.

Here are five things that will surprise you about plain old salt water.

1. Salt water carries the electrical signals that make life possible

Salt water is made when a solid salt, such as table salt (sodium chloride), is added to water and breaks apart into individual freely moving particles called ions. There are many kinds of salt water, depending on which ions are present.

These ions act just like a balloon that’s been rubbed against your hair. They carry an electrical charge, and allow salt water to conduct electricity.

Your body uses salt water to send the electrical signals that cause your heart to beat and your brain to think. To do this, the body has special molecules called ion pumps that move these ions around. Many diseases are caused when these ion pumps malfunction.

It also matters which ions carry these signals. For example, replacing sodium with its closest elemental relatives on the periodic table gives either a treatment for bipolar disease in the case of lithium, or a lethal injection ingredient in the case of potassium.

2. Salt water acts as a conveyor belt to carry heat around the planet

As made famous by the movie The Day After Tomorrow, Europe and North America are kept warm by the Gulf Stream, a massive current of warm water flowing north from the tropics.

This current is driven by changes in the saltiness of ocean water. As the polar ice caps freeze in winter, the surrounding ocean water becomes saltier. Saltier water is heavier and so it sinks to the sea floor, stirring the ocean and driving these currents.

As climate change melts the ice caps, these currents may be disrupted. This will upset the flow of heat and nutrients around the world in complex ways.

3. Salt water can be used to suck carbon dioxide out of the air

To prevent the worst effects of climate change we need to extract carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air and store it on a huge scale. The ocean currently already does this, removing more than a quarter of all the CO₂ that humans put into the air.

CO₂ reacts with water to form ions that increase the ocean’s acidity – which is a major problem for animals that live in it.

But we could use this effect for our benefit. Deliberately exposing large volumes of air to water containing potassium ions (similar to salt water) can effectively capture CO₂ very cost-effectively. This could be done wherever power is cheap and there is somewhere to store the CO₂.

4. Building batteries that use salt water could solve energy storage problems

Wind farms and solar panels are very effective at capturing energy – but to address climate change we need new and cheaper ways to store energy.

Lithium ion batteries, the most commonly used technology, use lithium ions dissolved in a liquid to carry electricity back and forth between the positive and negative terminals of a battery. The liquid currently used is expensive, slows the charging of the battery, and can catch fire.

Replacing this liquid with salt water is a key goal of battery research – with expected benefits in cost and safety. These types of batteries are also easier to manufacture, important for meeting increasing battery demand.

Read more: Water-based battery a step up for renewable energy

5. But we still can’t predict even the simplest properties of salt water

Over the past century the importance of understanding salt water has been recognised – some of science’s greatest Nobel prizewinning minds have worked on this problem.

We’re still making exciting progress on this question today, in part by using powerful supercomputers and quantum mechanics to simulate how salt water behaves.

Unfortunately, our ability to predict the properties of salt water still has a long way to go. For example, extremely salty water can make a supersaturated solution which can be used to make hand warmers.

If this type of solution is left for long enough it will spontaneously form a solid salt, but our theoretical predictions for how long this will take are literally more than a quadrillion times too fast. The magnitude of this miscalculation tells us we’re missing something vital!

The study of simple salt water is a hard sell compared with more exciting science about black holes or curing cancer. But this doesn’t mean that it is any less important.

In fact, understanding salt water is vital for understanding our own bodies and our own planet. It may even be the key to saving them.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heather Douglas, Professor of Law, The University of Queensland

A domestic violence protection order is the most common legal response to domestic and family violence in Australia. Every year, Queensland courts issue about 25,000 orders to protect people from domestic violence.

But in a system originally intended to protect women from violence, our research shows that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) women are being swept up in domestic violence-related offences in disproportionate numbers compared with the overall population. Many are ending up in prison as a result.

How the domestic violence protection system works

To understand the problem, it first helps to define certain terms and how the domestic violence protection system works.

In Queensland, the “respondent” is the person who is issued with a domestic violence protection order and the “aggrieved” party is the person being protected by the order.

Most protection orders require respondents to stay away from the aggrieved or stop their violent behaviour toward the aggrieved. If the respondent breaches the conditions of the protection order, he or she can be charged with a criminal offence and possibly imprisoned.

Read more: How Aboriginal women with disabilities are set on a path into the criminal justice system

In our study, we examined Queensland court data on protection order applications and breaches for the year 2013-14. We found a dramatic over-representation of ATSI people – especially women – in the protection order system.

First, ATSI people make up just 4.2% of the Queensland population. Yet, our research found that ATSI people were respondents in 21% of domestic violence protection order applications.

We also found that police play a significant role in deciding who is issued with a protection order. In most applications in our study, police applied for the order on behalf of the aggrieved (79%). However, police were more likely to apply for a protection order if the aggrieved was an ATSI person (90%). When police are involved in this way, an order is much more likely to be made by the court.

In Queensland, ATSI people were also disproportionately charged with breaches of protection orders (34% of all charges) compared to their share of the population. And in the sentencing phase, 43% of ATSI people charged with breaches of protection orders were sent to prison.

Women are typically much less likely to be respondents in domestic violence cases and charged with breaches of a protection order. However, of the women imprisoned for breaches in our study, 69% of them were ATSI women.

The causes for violence in ATSI communities

The Queensland data tell a familiar story about the over-representation of ATSI people in the criminal justice system in Australia, especially the prison system. The reasons for this are largely linked with how Indigenous peoples were treated after colonisation – their loss of land, the removal of their children and the lack of recognition of their laws.

The breakup of kinship systems, destruction of ATSI culture, social and economic exclusion, homelessness and drug and alcohol abuse have followed for many. Studies show that discrimination against ATSI people is also rife, and discrimination by the police and magistrates remains a problem.

Read more: Three charts on: Australia’s booming prison population

In Queensland, ATSI women are not only disproportionately targeted for domestic violence offences, they are also more likely to be victims of domestic violence compared with other women.

In another study on domestic violence in ATSI communities, Dr Heather Nancarrow interviewed people who worked in the justice system (including ATSI individuals) and found interconnected reasons that might help explain this.

First, ATSI women may be more likely to be involved in fights with family members and living in a situation of “chaos”, with a lack of rules, lack of priority given to court orders and more generalised fear of police. Her research also suggests that police often apply for protection orders on behalf of ATSI people, even when the orders aren’t wanted.

Read more: FactCheck Q&A: are Indigenous Australians the most incarcerated people on Earth?

ATSI women are also less likely to have access to family protection services in remote areas, leading many to fight back as a means of self-defence in domestic violence incidents.

When these women fight back, they may not fit with stereotypical expectations of how a victim should behave: for example, vulnerable, blameless and weak. This might result in police applying for a protection order against them or charging them with breaching an order.

Many strategies have been put forth to address the over-representation of ATSI people in the justice system. Of urgent concern to us is the plight of ATSI women being incarcerated in ever-increasing numbers in a system originally introduced to protect women from violence.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Byrne, Professor of Molecular Oncology, University of Sydney

I’m a regular biomedical scientist, although in one sense I’m perhaps a bit different, in that I really like the process of writing.

From speaking with colleagues and teaching postgraduate students about the process of scientific writing for more than ten years, I estimate that eight or nine of every ten biomedical researchers would say they don’t like writing.

Now, while I do like writing, that’s not to say I find it easy. When I’m in the thick of getting my thoughts onto the page, terms such as “bloodbath” and “fight to the death” flood my mind.

Read more: Bored reading science? Let’s change how scientists write

I have images of fighting a slippery dragon, trying to break its back. I feel as if I’m fighting my own ideas or whatever I’m trying to write, and there’s only one possible outcome: breaking these ideas down, whatever the cost.

And remember, I like writing, so imagine what it’s like for the majority of scientists who don’t.

To illustrate what can go wrong with the writing process, I’m going to refer to an old fairy tale: Sleeping Beauty.

A fairy tale

This is the story of a princess who was cursed to fall into a deep sleep, along with her family and everyone else living in the castle. They sleep for 100 years, and during this time a thick thorny forest grows up around the castle, shielding it from view.

One day, a prince who has heard about the sleeping beauty arrives on horseback, with a sword. With great difficulty, he cuts his way through the forest to eventually reach the castle. He finds the princess, wakes her up, and they presumably live happily ever after.

So what has this got to do with scientific writing? Well, scientific results and ideas can be viewed as something valuable, and yet they can be wrapped up in forests of words that lack structure and overuse complex language.

Read more: How not to write about science

Sometimes this just reflects a lack of training, but there can also be an assumption that scientific ideas deserve to be discovered by those who are clever enough.

This means readers are expected to hack their way through the word forest, if they’re really committed to understanding the results.

The only problem with this approach is that it doesn’t consider the sheer number of papers that scientists need to read. Most researchers and academics can’t keep up with their fields, so if a paper is hard to understand, or unclear, researchers may simply put it down and pick up the next one in the pile.

Expecting too much of the reader can lead to a paper sinking within the literature and effectively falling asleep.

The ‘sleeping beauties’ of science

In fact, a “sleeping beauty” is now a recognised type of academic paper. A sleeping beauty experiences what is also termed “delayed recognition”, sleeping within the literature for up to 100 years until another paper known as the “prince” recognises its value.

The sleeping beauty goes on to be highly cited and influential, sometimes in a different field. Researchers now study sleeping beauties and their princes, as a kind of extreme example of how science works – or doesn’t, depending on your perspective.

It’s generally assumed that sleeping beauties describe ideas that were ahead of their time. But I wonder whether some of these papers might have also been asleep in their forests of words.

After all, we only know about these scientific sleeping beauties through their awakening, in the same way that without the prince’s determination, the story of Sleeping Beauty may never have been told. It is very difficult to know how many other ideas may be lying dormant in the literature, wrapped in their forests of words.

What can we do about this? We need to recognise that to avoid the word forest, the research team needs to hack through their ideas and lay these out as clearly as possible.

This is really difficult, and learning how to do this takes years of practice and effort. As researchers and academics, we need to talk about this process and embrace it.

We expect that professional sportspeople will push themselves to the limit, and be supported to do this. Scientists are essentially intellectual athletes, so we need to talk about the virtue of pushing ourselves to the limit when writing, how to do this, and what kind of support we need.

Read more: Informed Aussies less likely to want a prostate cancer test

Many features of scientific life, such as crowded work environments, and generally measuring quantity over quality, do not favour the truly difficult process of hacking through our ideas so others can understand them.

It’s important to remember that in the story of Sleeping Beauty, many people fell asleep in the castle. Also, scientific papers are not just about their authors, but also about the public funds and the many supporting resources that make them possible.

We can’t afford the risk that our results and ideas fall asleep. Humanity doesn’t have the next 100 years to wait.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Son Vivienne, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, RMIT University

In recent months, there has been much heated discussion about the way gender-neutral pronouns (they, them, theirs) are being introduced as alternatives to the more conventional “he” and “she” in offices, schools and public institutions.

Earlier this year, for instance, Qantas encouraged staff to adopt gender-inclusive language with customers, using the term “partner” instead of “husband” or “wife”.

The Victorian state government backed a similar initiative for public servants and launched a “They Day” campaign on the first Wednesday of each month to encourage awareness of gender-neutral pronouns.

And last year, the Australian Defence Force issued a guide with recommendations on how to appropriately address gender-diverse members of the force.

Some critics argue that these language changes are radical and politically motivated, and are being forced upon unwilling employees.

After the ADF launched its guide on gender-neutral language choices, The Telegraph claimed the organisation was banning the use of “him” and “her” – an assertion the ADF quickly dismissed.

Australian universities were also forced to defend the launch of similar guides for staff and students after another Telegraph story accused them of banning the words “mankind” and “manpower”.

There’s been vocal opposition to these moves from Liberal leaders, as well. The new deputy leader, Josh Frydenberg, dismissed “They Day” as “political correctness gone mad”, while Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton decried “invading the minds of young people with this sort of garbage message.”

Increasing acceptance in society

Guides for respectful and inclusive language protocols are not new, nor are they aimed at erasing existing gender-specific pronouns.

The debate over gender-neutral language actually dates back to the mid-1980s, when ungendered job titles became more popular (for example, “firefighters” instead of “firemen”) and the pronouns “he/she” or “they” began appearing in texts instead of default “he” when the gender of the person being referred to is not known.

In recent years, the use of the pronoun “they” to refer specifically to non-binary people has become increasingly accepted by media outlets. The Washington Post, for example, updated its style guide in 2015 to include singular “they” for people who identify as neither male or female. The New York Times has introduced the new honorific Mx. And the Associated Press followed with its own change to the venerable AP Stylebook last year.

Not only does incorporating gender-neutral pronouns into the public sphere allow for more inclusivity, it can also bring standardisation to government functions, such as official documents and surveys (such as the census).

This enables more accurate self-identifications and brings greater visibility to previously unseen (and uncounted) groups of gender-diverse people.

The 2016 census was the first to allow an option for gender other than male or female on a special online form. The ABS provided the online form to a pilot group of 30,000 households to test their reactions. Gender-diverse people outside the pilot group were also able to access the form, but only if they sought it out on their own.

In total, 1,260 people in Australia were counted as gender diverse, but the ABS acknowledges this was probably lower than the actual figure due to fear of stigma and lack of widespread awareness over the new self-identifying option.

Still, the ABS found people in the pilot were over 50 times as likely as those outside the pilot to identify as gender diverse. Arguably, this suggests that simply offering the new option will provide an incentive for all gender-diverse people to choose how they are categorised and counted.

Higher counts in other surveys

Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s increasing acceptance of gender diversity among young people. In the US, a 2017 report by GLAAD indicated that 12% of Millennials (aged 18-35) identify as transgender or gender non-conforming – double the percentage of people in Generation X (people aged 35-51).

In 2016, research by the trend-forecasting Innovation group also found that 56% of American Gen Zers (aged 13-20) know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns.

In our 2016 national survey of more than 1,200 young people aged 16-35, we found a proliferation of gender-diverse identities on online platforms like Tumblr, where discussion of gender non-conformity is the norm and the possibility of curating multiple identities is routine.

Overall, 20% of our participants identified as non-binary or chose to define their own gender identities as “other” than male or female.

Slowly adapting bureaucracy

Despite these changes, some workplaces, schools and social service providers have been slow to embrace change and provide exclusive spaces for gender-diverse people.

For example, bathrooms remain overwhelmingly binary and inflexible. Part of the problem are inconsistencies in the laws and policies at the state and national level and between organisational stakeholders. For example, sporting bodies such as AFL, NRL and Cricket Australia defer to individual venues to make decisions on gender-neutral spaces.

There are obstacles to accommodating gender diversity in official identification documents, as well. In Australia, we have a mix of approaches for gender registration, with passports and marriage certificates dealt with at the Commonwealth level, while birth certificates are issued by states and territories.

Gender-diverse people have been able to choose an “X” category in passports since 2013 (with supporting documentary evidence from a doctor or psychologist). But changing one’s gender on birth certificates is still only possible in ACT, NSW and SA. (It’s also currently being debated in Queensland.)

These difficulties in reconciling different forms of identification can act as barriers to employment, accessing medical treatment and higher education and travelling internationally.

Social change can be facilitated by making new categories available, whether that’s in architectural design (gender-neutral bathrooms) or digital infrastructures (non-binary options for official documents and surveys).

Using the pronoun “they” or allowing for more gender options in the public sphere isn’t political correctness gone awry. It’s just a small shift in the evolution of how we understand, categorise and define gender.

Most people inhabit multiple identities during their lives, such as daughter, student, professional and mother. The contradictions between some of these categories are evident in our online profiles – for example, we display a different version of ourselves on LinkedIn compared with Facebook or Instagram.

Gender is just another type of identity. We shouldn’t restrict this to binary terms, but rather embrace the diversity of all the perfectly valid “in-betweens”.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

In the early hours of Friday morning, the Liberal preselectors of Wentworth delivered their new prime minister a humiliating public slapdown.

In selecting Dave Sharma, 42, former Australian ambassador to Israel and now a partner in an accountancy firm, as the candidate for the October 20 byelection, the preselectors have on all accounts chosen the best candidate.

But Scott Morrison had made it known he wanted a woman, a preference that’s been embarrassingly rejected. Katherine O’Regan, who was supposed to come out the winner, ran fifth.

Moreover, on Thursday it was learned that John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull were both encouraging Sharma to stay in the contest. So the two former prime ministers managed to do over the current prime minister.

The Wentworth Liberals, whose local member and PM was cut down, have had their revenge. The question now is whether the electors will also take theirs. Sharma has the potential to be an excellent MP. But he lives way outside the electorate, so he’ll start with a disadvantage against the high profile Kerryn Phelps, who is set to run as an independent.

This week has recalled the worst of Labor’s days. Morrison’s attempt to move things on from the coup didn’t cut it, just like Julia Gillard found her wheels spinning when she tried to dig her government out of various bogs.

In a highly provocative move, Turnbull has been busy from New York lobbying to have cabinet minister Peter Dutton’s parliamentary eligibility referred the High Court, to determine whether an interest in a child care business through a trust could see him in breach of the constiution’s troublesome section 44.

Turnbull explained in a tweet:

The point I have made to @ScottMorrisonMP and other colleagues is that given the uncertainty around Peter Dutton’s eligibility, acknowledged by the Solicitor General, he should be referred to the High Court, as Barnaby was, to clarify the matter.

Morrison brushed this aside, saying the public didn’t want the “lawyer’s picnic” to continue. But wishing it away won’t resolve a legitimate question that needs to be answered.

Never mind that Turnbull can be accused of malice; that he wasn’t worried about Dutton’s situation months ago, or that his government voted against referral.

Post coup, we are in a new era. A spurned Turnbull is off the leash. So also is former Liberal deputy Julie Bishop who, when asked about her stance, was coy.

“If there’s a vote on that matter then I’ll make my mind up at that time, but of course we want clarity around the standing of all the members of parliament,” she said. Backbencher Bishop has been reborn as outspokenly independent.

An unhappy “ex” is dangerously liberated to cause trouble, whether they’re inside or outside parliament. Tony Abbott has been the model.

Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce was also freelancing, accusing Turnbull of “an active campaign to try and remove us as the government”.

Turnbull’s quitting parliament has already delivered a major blow to his successor by triggering the byelection that, at worst, could put Morrison into minority government.

The legal opinion that Turnbull commissioned from the Solicitor-General during the leadership crisis has left sufficient uncertainty about Dutton’s eligibility to enable Turnbull to pursue the man who moved against him.

As we saw in the citizenship cases, this High Court takes a narrow view of section 44. Dutton might be on solid ground – as he insists and the Solicitor General’s opinion supports. But doubt remains – as that opinion also concedes.

Labor is set to have a fresh try next week to refer Dutton to the court. The Herald Sun reports that two Liberals are considering voting with the opposition, a threat they’re making to push the government to take the matter into its own hands. The internal unease will be hard for Morrison to manage.

Bloodied by his unsuccessful power grab, Dutton is also still locked in an altercation with former Border Force chief Roman Quaedvlieg about ministerial interventions on visas.

Holes have been shot in Quaedvlieg’s claims. But Dutton went over the top when he used parliamentary privilege to accuse Quaedvlieg – sacked for helping his girlfriend get a job – of “grooming” a girl 30 years his junior. Even his colleagues did a double take at the term.

Dutton’s Canberra troubles can’t be helping him in his battle to hold his very marginal Queensland seat of Dickson, where GetUp has him in its sights.

All in all, Dutton is a marked man. If he survives to serve in the next parliament, it will be remarkable. That he remains in cabinet in this one is notable.

Normally someone who’d caused so much damage to the party and himself would now be on the backbench. But Dutton had hardly warmed a seat there, after the first challenge, then he was back in Home Affairs following the second one.

Here is a paradox: he is damaged goods, but too powerful to cast aside. Or rather, his right wing support base is too strong for him to be relegated.

If Morrison wasn’t able to keep the lid on the controversies around Dutton, he was a little more successful in containing the insurgency from some of the women over bullying and low female representation.

He headed off backbencher Lucy Gichuhi’s threat to name the bullies. “The Prime Minister has taken up the issue,” she tweeted after their meeting.

Morrison’s pitch to the women was that he’d work with them and the whips internally. It is believed some complaints about behaviour have been made to the whips. The Minister for Women, Kelly O’Dwyer, has proposed the Liberal party organisation should have an independent and confidential process to operate when concerns are raised.

The recent events have sparked a few calls in the party for quotas, but there is minimal chance of the Liberals following Labor down that path.

The Wentworth outcome, however, could produce another round in the war over gender representation.

All week the Liberals struggled to answer the key question: why was Turnbull deposed? It took Nationals leader Michael McCormack to give the brutal response on Thursday. McCormack identified three factors – ambition, Newspolls, and opportunity. “People take those opportunities and we’ve got a new prime minister,” he said.

And the view from the voters? As one Liberal MP says, they’ve got the baseball bats out.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Ross, Researcher at Sydney University Physics Education Research Group, University of Sydney

The new Higher School Certificate (HSC) physics syllabus for NSW will contain no mention of the contributions of female physicists to the field. Not teaching students about their contributions to the field denies young women role models, and denies all students important knowledge about physics.

An education system which simultaneously claims to praise women in STEM, yet erases them from a physics syllabus cannot be seen as thorough. This needs to be fixed before long lasting damage is done to Australia’s next generation of scientists.

Read more: New study says the gender gap in science could take generations to fix

Physics has a multitude of female physicists to celebrate. These outstanding women could inspire passion in young female students, while providing all students with a broader perspective of the universe we all call home.

Complete deletion, really?

In 2018, NSW introduced a new HSC physics syllabus, which focuses on complex topics such as thermodynamics and quantum physics, and requires a more technical understanding of physics concepts. It focuses on the physics itself and its modern usage, rather than how we discovered and developed physics in the first place.

The outgoing syllabus includes more background and the history of the development of physics. The discoveries women have contributed to the field are taught in this syllabus, but it fails to identify a single woman by name in the 47 scientists mentioned 93 times.

The new syllabus has 25 scientists mentioned 56 times. But no women are referred to by name, nor are any contributions women have made to physics included.

This new syllabus focuses completely on male physicists and their work. Women have been and continue to be told physics is primarily a male endeavour.

You can’t be what you can’t see

Science is filled with interesting characters, insights and discoveries. Teaching about a scientist or their work celebrates their contributions, highlights their efforts and recognises how they influenced and developed knowledge.

The new syllabus fails to provide female role models. Role models are important because they foster pro-science aspirations and attitudes. This is true for both women and men, but young girls miss out if we only provide students with male role models.

Read more: The hunt for the Superstars of STEM to engage more women in science

This syllabus conveys the message that female physicists aren’t significant enough to mention. This is not only incorrect, but discouraging to female students. When we focus entirely on male scientists, we devalue women and their work in this field.

Remarkable female scientists

There are many examples of outstanding women that could have been included in the syllabus. Each have made major contributions to their field. Students would benefit greatly from learning about these women (plus many others) and their work in physics lessons. Here are four examples of bad-arse female physicists:

Ruby Payne-Scott

Australia’s own Ruby Payne-Scott was one of the first radio astronomers in the world. Payne-Scott was at the forefront of radio astronomy in the 1940s. She developed techniques that have defined the field and her work made Australia the global leader it is today. Payne-Scott even discovered three types of radiation bursts coming from the sun.

Professor Marie Curie

Dual Nobel laureate, Professor Marie Curie started the field of radioactivity. Her work included the discovery of two new radioactive elements, which was only possible because of her impeccable experimental skills. Her research of radioactivity is still influencing physics. Her notebooks are still radioactive and will likely be for the next 1,500 years.

Dr Rosalind Franklin

Dr Rosalind Franklin’s unique approach to X-Ray crystallography was the first successful research delving into the structure of our cells. This helped us understand the double helix structure of DNA. Her work was revolutionary but has been attributed to Watson and Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for the discovery.

Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell-Burnell

Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered an entirely new type of star called pulsars on a radio telescope she essentially made herself while she was a PhD student. These rapidly rotating neutron stars changed what astronomers thought possible and is still an active area of research. Bell-Burnell originally called them LGM for Little Green Men as she did not want to rule out the fact the source could have come from alien life forms.

Read more: Gender inequalities in science won’t self-correct: it’s time for action

Teaching our students women have had and continue to have no role in physics is not only incorrect, it’s harmful. We need equal representation to normalise women in physics and encourage their engagement and further study. A syllabus that correctly represents people in the field of physics can help reduce unconscious bias and demonstrate to young women there’s a place for them in this field.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirsty Volz, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland

The Great Australian Dream, underpinned by private home ownership, is a concept from the 19th and 20th centuries. Our housing stock was, and continues to be, designed and built for people who lived in previous centuries. The result is housing that discriminates and excludes, and that is becoming increasingly unaffordable. We need 21st-century housing that responds to the needs of 21st-century living.

The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) report on 21st-century housing careers points to factors that are unique to 21st-century lives and which have direct impacts on housing. The greatest of these impacts is the risk society, a term originally defined by sociologist Ulrich Beck. As the AHURI report observes:

Change within economic and social structures has eroded the certainties of the previous Fordist or industrial society and resulted in a process of “individualisation” where individuals and households are increasingly confronted by the risks – and opportunities – of a rapidly changing social and economic environment.

Read more: Explainer: the financialisation of housing and what can be done about it

These risks come in many forms: limited opportunities for ongoing employment, an ageing population and the uncertainty of old age, or separation and divorce from a partner. All these factors can significantly alter housing circumstances.

Without digging too deeply into the literature on Australian housing in the 21st century, it seems obvious that workforce casualisation and the gig economy are incompatible with 30-year bank loans for a fixed asset such as a house. Existing approaches to housing, from apartments to detached dwellings, are too inflexible. Instead, we need options for housing that are more flexible and can accommodate the risks associated with 21st-century living.

This might go some way to explaining the popularity of the Tiny House Movement. Tiny houses provide the flexibility required in 21st-century lives. They are mobile, can be packed away and stored, and are assets that can be liquidated much more easily than a house.

Read more: Interest in tiny houses is growing, so who wants them and why?

However, small living is not for everyone. There are design-led solutions for flexible housing that don’t require people to move into cramped quarters.

So what does this housing look like?

Two examples of flexible housing can be found in Brisbane.

One Room Tower (2017) in West End, designed by Phorm architecture + design with Silvia Micheli and Antony Moulis, is an addition to an existing inner-city house. Instead of adding to the house in the traditional manner, One Room Tower is a detached pavilion carefully designed with an open layout. The extra space can be adapted to provide many different uses to suit the needs of its inhabitants.

This innovative design, which provides much-needed flexibility, recently won a Queensland Architecture Award.

Another example is in the suburb of Clayfield. Two Pavilion House (2014) was designed by Kirsty Volz and David Toussaint. The house is split into two pavilions joined by a communal outdoor space and an internal courtyard.

This design provides flexible modes of occupation: it can be occupied as a single detached three-bedroom dwelling, or as a two-bedroom house with a self-contained bedsit. The result is a house that can be occupied by a multigenerational family, provide rental income, incorporate a home office, or a second living area.

It’s not just room layouts that provide the flexibility in these houses. They require careful consideration in the design process to develop. Things to be considered include: the sequences of access (entering and leaving a house and/or room); the adjacencies of rooms, so as to maintain privacy, security and adequate fire separation; and the provision of services such as kitchens, bathrooms and laundries, some of which can be shared.

Both of these houses provide for flexible living arrangements while still complying with the requirements of building regulations.

One Room Tower and Two Pavilion House will both be open to the public on the weekend of October 13-14 as part of the Brisbane Open House event.

A regulatory rethink is needed too

A growing number of housing solutions are meeting the need for multigenerational housing, providing accommodation for ageing parents or adult children. Granny flats are a good example.

However, some of these solutions do not meet building regulations. It is a concern if these houses fail to provide adequate health and safety, fire separation, or security to protect belongings. Carefully designed, fit-for-purpose dwellings that safely provide options for multiple and varied occupancies are needed.

It is also time for some local authorities to re-evaluate regulations, and consider how these might safely match the need for flexible and adaptable accommodation.

Flexible, “loose fit” housing will provide greater diversity in accommodation. And, by doing so, it will be more inclusive of a broader cross-section of society – diverse housing for a diverse society.

Flexible housing also has the potential to be a design-led solution to housing affordability, by adapting housing to suit the needs of everyone in the risk society.

Existing housing stock is designed around the numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms that appeal to the market and so fails to be responsive to what people need from housing in the 21st century.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics and PLuS Alliance Fellow, UNSW

There’s a meme around official interest rates since the financial crisis, and it goes like this. Central banks have already cut them to nearly zero (or actually zero) but advanced economies are still languishing. Therefore cutting them further won’t achieve much.

There are a number of problems with it. One is that it’s a nice illustration of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy – “after this therefore because of this”. It ignores the counterfactual. Maybe we would have spent a decade in severe recession had it not been for the interest rate cuts.

But there might also be a grain of truth to the idea that cuts don’t do what they once did. It has led to a whole cottage industry exploring the “channels” through which cutting interest rates is meant to work.

Mortgage refinancing matters

One potentially important channel is through refinancing of mortgages. When interest rates drop it can be attractive for mortgage holders to refinance, take out some equity and spend it. This was a particularly big deal in the United States in both the run-up to, and the aftermath of, the financial crisis.

It has also been a big deal here, where refinancing is easy and for the last few decades many borrowers have had mortgage offset accounts.

A recent paper, now forthcoming at the Quarterly Journal of Economics (the highest-ranked journal among all the social sciences), examines the channel using data from across the United States.

The authors, from the University of Chicago, MIT and the Swiss National Bank, begin with the following fact. During the financial crisis there was a big drop in US house prices, but the drops were especially severe in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix. By contrast, in the previous (2001) recession house prices continued to grow across the country with little regional variation.

This means there were regional variations in embedded equity in one recession but not in the other.

Which means house prices matter

So far that’s just a mundane fact of US financial history. But the authors observe that to refinance a loan lenders typically insist on a minimum level of equity – a loan-to-value ratio – which gets recalculated.

That means they weren’t surprised to find that the sharp interest rate cuts in 2008 had the smallest effects in the most economically depressed parts of the country. Put another way, they had the smallest effects where they were needed the most.

Australia doesn’t have much negative equity, yet. But in one city (Sydney) prices are falling faster than elsewhere.

And negative gearing matters

A complication is that Australia allows “negative gearing”, the practice of renting out properties for a tax-effective loss and then selling them in an appreciating property market for a lightly taxed capital gain.

Rather than refinance for consumption, plenty of Australians have been refinancing to buy and negatively gear investment properties.

Read more: PolicyCheck: Negative gearing reform

But when prices fall that strategy no longer makes financial sense, pushing the buying of investment properties for negative gearing to a grinding halt.

This amplifies the fall in prices. In essence, negative gearing acts as a multiplier in the property market on the way up and on the way down. Right now, we are seeing the “down” in certain parts of Australia.

Which means it matters where you live

You’ve got to feel for central bankers, at least a little bit. Not only do they have to worry about employment, economic growth, the exchange rate and housing prices, they now also have to worry about how their interest rate decisions are affected by regional variations in the history of house prices.

Still, understanding the precise channels through which changes in interest rates affect real economic activity is crucial to determining good policy – and predicting what the Reserve Bank will do next.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Smith, Professor of Archaeology, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University

Imagine your grandfather was interviewed about his life, over many hours, some 80 years ago. Everything he says is written down, enough to fill more than 20 notebooks.

You’ve heard that those notebooks hold stories of your grandparents and their grandparents. Stories they would tell as they sat around a fire in the winter, by a river in summer. There are stories about the sports they played, the food they ate, their spirituality, how they celebrated important events. Stories about their songs, dances, artworks. Stories of the events that shaped them, many of which play out even now.

Then you learn that the wife of the person who wrote down your grandfather’s stories has locked the notebooks away. You and your family are not allowed to read them.

This is how it is for a number of Aboriginal people today, among them 81-year-old Vincent (Vince) Copley senior, co-author of this article.

Between 1939 and 1944, Vince Copley’s grandfather, Ngadjuri man Barney Waria, provided information about his people and culture to anthropologist-in-training Ronald Berndt. When Berndt died in 1990, 45 years and an illustrious career later, he’d published only one significant article about Barney Waria and the Ngadjuri people.

Four years after his death, Berndt’s wife and fellow anthropologist Catherine Berndt died. Her will, written in 1993 and following her husband’s wishes, stipulated a 30-year embargo on a subset of their extensive collection of papers. This embargo included the Barney Waria notebooks. As it stands, the embargoed material – stored in the Berndt Museum at the University of Western Australia – will not be accessible until 2024.

Vince Copley hopes to see these notebooks before he dies. He would like to be able to read them with his adult children, to give them a fuller picture of their Ngadjuri ancestry. He hopes they may trigger his own memories of his father’s side of the family.

Barney Waria was born in 1873 at Orroroo, on Ngadjuri Country in the mid-north of South Australia. He died in 1948. As far as is known, he was the last initiated Ngadjuri man. Vince’s father Frederick Warrior – the name was anglicised at some stage – was the eldest son of Barney. He died in an accident in 1938 when he was 30 and Vince was a baby.

Between 1936 and 1944, Barney Waria worked with three anthropologists: Norman Tindale, Charles Mountford, and Ronald Berndt. Berndt was in his early 20s when he met Waria for the first time, around 1939.

Important cultural knowledge

Over his lifetime, Berndt published 35 books and many articles. When he met Waria, however, he was just starting his anthropology studies. They met either at Berndt’s father’s house at Rose Park or at Light Square, in the Adelaide city centre, a gathering place for Aboriginal people from many different language groups.

In either 1942 or 1944, Berndt took the older Aboriginal man to visit the Aboriginal collection at the South Australian Museum. As they walked past the exhibits, Waria pointed out artefacts that were familiar. Berndt writes that at one point, Waria stopped and opened his arms wide as if to embrace the gallery of objects. Waria said:

It’s wonderful that we can look at all these things and know their meanings, wonderful to think of the power and the songs and the ritual associated with them, to think about all that has gone. But what they were lives only in the minds of a few of us!

It’s not clear what to make of Waria’s words, as he would have intended them. Lament? Pragmatic acceptance of a new reality? Something else?

What is clear, however, is that Waria was conscious that important Aboriginal cultural knowledge was disappearing. It is our view that he chose to work with anthropologists as one way of preserving that knowledge for his descendents. Much of Waria’s knowledge was recorded in Ronald Berndt’s field notes.

In the late 1950s, the Berndts moved to Perth, taking up senior roles at the University of Western Australia. In 1976 they founded an anthropology museum to hold their extensive collection of material. In 1992, after Ronald’s death, it was renamed the Berndt Museum.

Why an embargo?

Anthropologist John Stanton is the literary executor of Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s estate. Now retired, he was the couple’s protégé, and worked with them for many years. He became a curator of the Berndt Museum, and then director from 1980 to 2013. He remains on the Committee of the Professor Ronald M. and Dr Catherine Berndt Research Foundation.

Stanton says that neither Catherine nor Ronald Berndt trusted Australian governments to support Aboriginal interests. Thus the embargo on Berndt’s notes – placed during the time of the Mabo case and the eventual 1992 ruling that recognised native title – was a result of their concern that their material could be misused by a government.

In the pre-Mabo era, the embargo on Berndt’s field notes would have been viewed as a purely personal decision. It would not have crossed people’s minds to consult with Aboriginal people. Also, Ngadjuri people had been removed from their lands as a result of colonisation. At that time they were not widely recognised as an identifiable language group.

Today, universities actively pursue decolonised approaches. At the very least, they work in partnership with Indigenous people. Often, their work supports Indigenous self-determination. Within the academy, it is increasingly accepted that field notes should be available to the descendants of the fieldworker’s Indigenous teachers.

Stanton has confirmed that the notebooks containing Barney Waria’s interviews have been read by people outside the Berndt Museum on only two occasions. Both times, access was subject to South Australia Supreme Court writs. The first was during the controversy over the Hindmarsh Island Bridge which concerned the Ngarrindjeri people. The second was by an anthropologist from the South Australian Native Title Service in response to a Ngadjuri native title claim in 2011.

At present, native title claims are the only avenue for Aboriginal people to try to access the embargoed material. However, this is a flawed process. Families seek to find as many of the missing pieces of their traditional languages and cultures as they can. These cultural reasons tend to get lost in complicated and often combative legal processes.

Ronald Berndt may have decided it was best to avoid these confrontations by imposing the embargo. However, the descendants of the people whose lives and culture he documented have much more at stake than he did.

Unfairly withheld

Vince Copley contacted Stanton in November 2017 – a colleague emailed on his behalf – because he’d heard a rumour that the embargo had been lifted. Stanton emailed back saying he’d retired and a new associate director, Dr Vanessa Russ, was in charge. He acknowledged the difficulties for families, saying he was sorry that “we have been so hamstrung by Catherine Berndt’s will.”

In recent email correspondence, Russ, an academic, artist and Ngarinyin/Gija woman from the Kimberley, has confirmed that the embargo continues. The university, she says, accepted the donations made by Berndt in their entirety, to secure the material for future generations, and has been working to conserve and share these collections. “Unfortunately this has included an embargo on the field notebooks. We acknowledge that we would therefore be breaking the law if we contravened the terms of the Will by providing access before 2024, but that this has caused some distress to Elders.”

The university, she says, is striving to ensure that future consultation will take into account all individuals and communities who through their heirs and ancestors provided information to the Berndts, “in order to find the best process and procedure for future research and teaching with this material post 2024.”

Our position is that the Berndts were not solely the owners of the intellectual property in the field notes. It was jointed owned by Aboriginal Elders, such as Barney Waria. Consequently, the field notes are being unfairly withheld from their descendants.

Recently, we published an article arguing that Berndt’s field notes are joint intellectual property. They could not have been produced by either Berndt or Waria by himself. Both men contributed to this intellectual soup. One shared his specialist knowledge. The other recorded this knowledge in a notebook. It is likely that Barney Waria’s knowledge was recorded verbatim in Berndt’s field notes.

Moreover, there is a further injustice behind the current situation, of which many Indigenous people are acutely aware. Academics achieve careers and financial security on the basis of Indigenous cultural knowledge. However, the Indigenous teachers who impart that specialist knowledge, and their descendants, receive meagre pickings.

Where to from here?

The question of who owns this sort of material is slowly being resolved in this country. However, for people like Vince Copley senior and his family, a solution to the Berndt embargo seems an impossibly long way off.

What reasonable expectations did Barney Waria have when he decided to talk to Berndt? It is likely that these expectations were based on his previous experiences with Norman Tindale and Charles Mountford. Their notebooks are readily available in libraries and museums.

The current situation undermines trust between Indigenous people and anthropologists. If the knowledge you impart to a researcher is likely to be kept from your descendants, why share it? The Berndt example demonstrates that intellectual property can be appropriated as soon as it is written down.

It is time that the University of Western Australia re-assessed the legal basis for the embargo. For Vince Copley and other descendants of the people who shared their specialist knowledge with Berndt – whose stories and culture are locked away – time is running out.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Britta Denise Hardesty, Principal Research Scientist, Oceans and Atmosphere Flagship, CSIRO

We know there is a lot of plastic in the ocean, and that turtles (and other endangered species) are eating it. It is not uncommon to find stranded dead turtles with guts full of plastic.

But we weren’t really sure whether plastic eaten by turtles actually kills them, or if they just happen to have plastic inside them when they die. Another way to look at it would be to ask: how much is too much plastic for turtles?

This is a really important question. Just because there’s a lot of plastic in the ocean, we can’t necessarily presume that animals are dying from eating it. Even if a few animals do, that doesn’t mean that every animal that eats plastic is going to die. If we can estimate how much plastic it takes to kill a turtle, we can start to answer the question of exactly how turtle populations are affected by eating plastic debris.

Read more: Eight million tonnes of plastic are going into the ocean each year

In our research, published today in Nature Scientific Reports, we looked at nearly 1,000 turtles that had died and washed up on beaches around Australia or were found in nets. About 260 of them we examined ourselves; the others were reported to the Queensland Turtle Stranding Database. We carefully investigated why the turtles died, and for the ones we examined, we counted how many pieces of plastic they had eaten.

Some turtles died of causes that were nothing to do with plastic. They may have been killed by a boat strike, or become entangled in fishing lines or derelict nets. Turtles have even been known to die after accidentally eating a blue-ringed octopus. Others definitely died from eating plastic, with the plastic either puncturing or blocking their gut.

Some turtles that were killed by things like boat strikes or fishing nets nevertheless had large amounts of plastic in their guts, despite not having been killed by eating plastic. These turtles allow us to see how much plastic an animal can eat and still be alive and functioning.

The chart below sets out this idea. If an animal drowned in a fishing net, its chance of being killed by plastic is zero – and it falls in the lower left of the graph. If a turtle’s gut was blocked by a plastic bag, its chance of being killed by plastic is 100%, and it’s in the upper right.

The animals that were dead with plastic in their gut, but had other possible causes of death have a chance of death due to plastic somewhere between 0 and 100% – we just don’t know, and they can fall anywhere in the graph. Once we have all the animals in the plot, then we can ask whether we see an increase in the chance of death due to plastic as the amount of plastic in an animal goes up.

We tested this idea using our turtle samples. We looked at the relationship between the likelihood of death due to plastic as determined by a turtle autopsy, and the number of pieces of plastic found inside the animals.

Unsurprisingly, we found that the more plastic pieces a turtle had inside it, the more likely it was to have been killed by plastic. We calculated that for an average-sized turtle (about 45cm long), eating 14 plastic items equates to a 50% chance of being fatal.

Read more: Pristine paradise to rubbish dump: the same Pacific island, 23 years apart

That’s not to say that a turtle can eat 13 pieces of plastic without harm. Even a single piece can potentially kill a turtle. Two of the turtles we studied had eaten just one piece of plastic, which was enough to kill them. In one case, the gut was punctured, and in the other, the soft plastic had clogged the turtle’s gut. Our analyses suggest that a turtle has a 22% chance of dying if it eats just one piece of plastic.

A few other factors also affected the animals’ chance of being killed by plastic. Juveniles eat more debris than adults, and the rate also varies between different turtle species.

Now that we know how much is too much plastic, the next step is to apply this to global estimates of debris ingestion rates by turtles, and figure out just how much of a threat plastic is to endangered sea turtle populations.