Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liz Evans, Adjunct Researcher, English and Writing, University of Tasmania

In the 1990s, Melissa Auf der Maur played bass in two of the decade’s most notable rock bands: Hole and Smashing Pumpkins.

Her new book, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir, documents this wild chapter in her life, as she navigates the heightened emotions and destructive excesses of Courtney Love and learns to wrangle the controlling influence of Billy Corgan (of Smashing Pumpkins).

Ten years earlier, Kim Gordon’s career began during New York’s post-punk era. Her book, Girl In A Band (2015), recently re-released as a tenth anniversary edition, chronicles her time with Sonic Youth, and charts her role within an alternative scene that shaped and influenced independent music culture across the United States.

By the early 1990s, she was something of a godmother figure for Auf der Maur’s generation of women.

Review: Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir – Melissa Auf Der Maur (Atlantic); Girl in a Band – Kim Gordon (Faber)

Introverted individuals with distinct perspectives on the peculiar challenges of the rock industry, Gordon and Auf der Maur appear to have benefited from a stability missing in many of their peers.

As bass players, they avoided the spotlight until embarking on their solo projects. And with backgrounds in the visual arts, they each had access to independent creative identities away from the stage, which no doubt minimised the pitfalls of rock stardom.

As a music journalist throughout the 1990s, I interviewed many of the people in their stories, including Courtney Love, Billy Corgan, Dave Grohl, Thurston Moore and Kurt Cobain. I witnessed their complex politics and fierce power plays, some still ongoing.

Once or twice, I was personally impacted.

For example, a very high profile singer tried to persuade other women not to speak to me for my first book because my magazine profile of her was badly altered by a male editor. Another musician blamed me for publishing personal details in an interview after I’d given her full copy approval.

It was, as Auf der Maur says, a time of “messy humanity”, low-level trust, and delicate egos.

It was also, as she points out, the last analogue decade: a time before the music scene was transformed by the internet, when rock culture appeared to be finally embracing powerful women and female agency. But in my experience, and as each of these books reveals, it was never that straightforward.

Musical callings and romantic dreams

An artistic free spirit raised in Montreal by unorthodox, creative parents, Melissa Auf der Maur first saw Hole and Smashing Pumpkins within a fortnight of each other in July 1991. Both bands played at the legendary punk club, Les Foufounes Électriques, where she worked part-time while studying photography.

More impressed by Hole’s calm, centred bassist, Jill Emery, than the band’s infamous, volatile frontwoman, Auf der Maur was truly starstruck by Corgan. She introduced herself to him after he was bottled on stage by her roommate. Watching him play, she experienced a “new musical calling”. Four months later, she travelled to a Pumpkins show in Vermont and spent the night “soul fucking” him in his motel room.

“I am you and you are me,” she remembers Corgan saying to her, in what sounds like a rock-starry show of narcissism towards an impressionable fan. But for Auf der Maur, who occasionally veers into grandiose claims, the encounter was a “romantic dream come true” and “a turning point […] musically, personally and cosmically”.

More tellingly perhaps, though she describes Corgan as eventually exerting “more influence on my life than anyone other than my parents”, Auf der Maur didn’t question his patriarchal power dynamic for many years – despite being in one of rock’s most notorious female-fronted bands.

But Corgan’s hold extended to his former girlfriend, Courtney Love, long after she left him for Kurt Cobain. When Hole’s second bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died from an overdose, it was Corgan who decided Auf der Maur should be the replacement.

The Hole drama

Life in Hole was nothing if not dramatic – and Auf der Maur’s account harbours no illusions about the difficulty of working with a grieving, traumatised widow.

But her empathy and compassion keep her story from collapsing into the critical terrain so often provoked by the outspoken, uncontained Love who attracted considerable vitriol, particularly after becoming involved with Kurt Cobain.

Auf der Maur is also more forgiving than drummer Patty Schemel, who paints a harsher picture of the ambitious, tempestuous singer in her brilliant memoir, Hit So Hard. But she was very aware of her marginalised position as Love’s “good girl” in the autocratic Hole. She had no artistic freedom in the band and eventually grew frustrated with her unfulfilling situation.

After five years in Love’s orbit, Auf der Maur wanted out. By 1998, the singer’s Hollywood film career had catapulted her into a different stratosphere of celebrity culture, further widening the existing chasm between her and her band members.

And the glamour and excitement of big festival billings and hit records were not enough to prevent the bass player from feeling ultimately “disillusioned and disconnected”.

Her decision to quit was compounded when she fell in love with ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, now with the Foo Fighters. His long-running rift with Love had previously made him “off-limits”.

But before she was released from her restrictive contract with Hole, Corgan was back in touch, asking her to replace D’arcy Wretzky in Smashing Pumpkins for a year of intensive touring. Wretzky’s sudden departure is glossed over in the book as a “touchy subject”, though she played with the Pumpkins for 11 years, and was reputedly a friend of Auf der Maur.

I remember Wretzky as a quietly intelligent individual with a striking stage presence, but Corgan’s domineering personality and punishing work ethic apparently proved too much for her.

And Auf der Maur makes no secret of Corgan’s ruthlessness. At her first rehearsal, he issued her with three rules: “One, you can’t make a mistake. Two, you can’t get sick. And three, there are no days off.”

Away from Grohl, who was also on the road with his band, she was bound to a gruelling schedule at the hands of a man she now saw as a moody overachiever. In response, she began to change her perspective.

Corgan’s partner at the time was the gifted photographer Yelena Yemchuk, who, Auf der Maur notes, had become “a bit of a kept woman”. Knowing Grohl wanted marriage and children, she witnessed Yemchuk with “her beautiful talent trapped in the bell jar of Billy’s world” with growing alarm.

As the two women became close, together they realised they needed to “step out of the shadows of these bigger, more successful men” and forge their own paths.

With the culmination of the Pumpkins world tour in 2001, Auf der Maur was 29 and finally ready for a new direction. She left her relationship with Grohl and turned down Corgan’s invitation to collaborate on a new project. She finishes her book with a glimpse into her next chapter: motherhood, and a grounded life of artistic ventures in upstate New York.

It’s more of a beginning than an end.

Feminism and challenges with men

The first time I interviewed Kim Gordon was over the phone in 1990. At the time, she was the bass player with Sonic Youth, the seminal no wave band she co-founded with her husband, singer/guitarist Thurston Moore, in 1981. Hinting at what I suspected was sometimes a lonely situation, she told me that while the band’s relationship was essentially a beautiful one, her male colleagues could be “so non-communicative”.

Three years later, I had a second, longer conversation with Gordon in her New York apartment for my aforementioned book, during which she elaborated on her original theme. Being in a band with men could be challenging, she said, because “there are some really boring aspects to it” and “no matter how much of a new man someone thinks they are, they’re just not!”

Gordon’s experience is summed up by both the content and title of her acclaimed memoir. With a new foreword by her friend, celebrated American writer, Rachel Kushner, and an additional closing chapter where Gordon reflects on the intervening decade, the latest version of the book is testament to its ongoing relevance for feminism, popular culture and music history.

Infused with the visceral, embodied sensuality of her artistic perspective, Gordon’s memoir details her upbringing in Los Angeles with her schizophrenic brother, Keller, whose moods clouded her early life, and whose death in 2023, aged 74, she recounts in the new edition.

It charts her pivotal move to New York as a 27-year-old in 1980, her involvement with the city’s post punk arts and music scene, her relationship with Moore and their resulting career with Sonic Youth.

Crucially, it details her influence in the Riot Grrrl movement, and her side projects, Free Kitten, with best friend Julie Cafritz, and fashion label, X-Girl, with Daisy von Furth, all of which afforded her the female companionship she lacked in Sonic Youth.

‘Painfully protracted’ marriage breakdown

It also tells the more universal story of a painfully protracted marriage breakdown and a couple’s failed attempts to save their relationship, following Gordon’s discovery of Moore’s affair. The book refrains from specifying dates, but by the time she found out through texts and emails, her husband had been unfaithful for several years.

The woman in question, who is not named in the book, was Eva Prinz, who became Moore’s second wife in 2020. At the time of the affair, Prinz was married to her second husband. She had previously been involved with one of Sonic Youth’s collaborators.

An editor for an independent publisher, she had initially approached Gordon about a potential book project in the early 2000s, but Gordon had passed it onto Moore, with fateful consequences.

Sickened by Moore’s long-concealed infidelity with someone well known to their inner circle, Gordon was left to navigate the devastating impact on her family, her career and her sense of self. Given the pivotal nature of this episode, it seems fitting that she starts her story here, at the end of a significant personal and professional era, with Sonic Youth’s final performance in 2011.

According to Gordon, this last appearance in Sao Paulo, Brazil “was all about the boys”. Struggling to hide her misery, anxiety and anger on stage, while her ex regressed into an adolescent display of “rock star showboating”, she was tempted to verbalise her fury on stage. But she didn’t want to follow the unboundaried example of Courtney Love, who was then ranting and raving her way around South America on tour with Hole.

“I would never want to be seen as the car crash she is,” writes Gordon. “I didn’t want our last concert to be distasteful when Sonic Youth meant so much to so many people; I didn’t want to use the stage for any kind of personal statement, and what good would it have done anyway?”

Distance as power

Gordon is highly adept at balancing between strong emotion and careful restraint. Throughout her book, she considers herself honestly, but thoughtfully. She conveys a quiet self-possession and enigmatic presence, writing as she speaks: with intelligence and a guarded openness. It’s how I remember her: warm enough to gift me a pair of John Fluevog sandals straight from her own closet, yet somehow always slightly removed. As Kushner says in her introduction to the memoir, “distance is the power of her performance”.

Now 72, Kim Gordon has been a touring musician for almost 40 years. Having made multiple forays into the worlds of fashion, art and film, since Sonic Youth she has launched two experimental bands with male collaborators, Body/Head and Glitterbust, been nominated for two Grammy awards, and released three highly acclaimed solo albums as a formidable frontwoman with an all-girl band.

These days, Gordon performs as if her life depends on it. With her second chapter well underway, she’s on fire – and cooler than ever. Let’s hope a second memoir is in the works.

– ref. Girls in bands: two 90s rock icons on romance, ruthlessness and boring men – https://theconversation.com/girls-in-bands-two-90s-rock-icons-on-romance-ruthlessness-and-boring-men-275942

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne

Mohammed Massoud Morsi is a master storyteller and it is no surprise that the manuscript of his new novel won the prestigious 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award. He brings stories to light that unsettle stereotypes and show unremittingly the fault lines, hypocrisies and ethical dilemmas of lives lived under theocratic systems amid bloody political conflicts.

The Hair of the Pigeon – Mohammed Massoud Morsi (UWA Publishing)

Morsi is particularly acute and convincing when entering the worlds of young men out to prove themselves in situations likely to become far too desperate, deceptive and dangerous for them to survive.

In his previous novel, In the Palace of Angels (2019), a group of young Palestinian men on the Gaza strip head out to buy armaments from Israeli soldiers with a van full of hashish as payment. It can only go badly wrong. Morsi is also committed to the novel as an opportunity to move into the intimate souls of characters, and his portrayal of a Palestinian’s love for an Israeli soldier in this story becomes somehow a source of hope in a time of despair.

The Hair of the Pigeon is a more tightly plotted and intensely focused work. From the first page to the end, we are taken into a vortex of events surrounding the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2014, including imprisonment and torture under the Syrian regime and on to the horrors and trials of asylum seekers crossing Europe in the next six years of the novel’s arc.

The central character and narrator is Ghassan, a teenager at the beginning of the novel living as a displaced Palestinian in the Yarmouk camp in Damascus.

He is the child of Salsabeel, raped at 16 and subsequently shamed by her community for “seducing” her rapist-teacher. Her own mother had committed suicide when she was an infant. Salsabeel was raised by a foster mother who hacked her foster daughter’s rapist to death with a kitchen cleaver when he was discovered in the act.

These details are important to the novel and they are indicative of the powerful mix of passion, crime, revenge, misogyny and shame in communities living and too often dying, under brutal prejudice and oppression. “The camp was full of many things, prejudice included,” writes Morsi, acknowledging the oppressed themselves were capable of turning violently on each other.

Senseless violence

Ghassan is in love with Sama, a young girl who keeps pigeons and sometimes quietly kills one of them by twisting its neck. In the alley their community has claimed for itself, a cast of memorable characters vie for love, dreams of success, a deal that might raise them out of poverty, or for victory in a football game. If life in this alley of jostling characters were to fill the novel it would be a satisfying experience for any reader.

But from 2011, when the Arab Spring uprising reaches the streets of Syrian cities, the alley in Yarmouk comes under attack and Ghassan finds himself imprisoned by the Assad regime. He is tortured, starved, beaten and forced to lie with corpses while the guards urge him to die.

This portrait of senseless prison violence is so unrelenting and presented so simply as an impossibly evil set of facts that it becomes the most heartbreaking passage in the novel. Orwell’s 1984 seems a fairy tale in comparison.

Beyond the prison, there is Ghassan’s journey across the Levantine Sea into Europe through Greece with his mother and a young girl thrown to him by a dying mother as hundreds drowned at sea. From here the novel takes many more turns, though always with some redeeming light despite the greyness of skies above Copenhagen, where they eventually settle.

Ghassan becomes a man capable of fixing almost any motor car, and of making deep friendships with other young men. Both these qualities become important to his survival.

But always, the fate of Sama is a source of inner suffering for him. While in his heart he must believe she is alive, he has no idea if she has made it out of that alley, where, he believes he witnessed her being raped by his best friend.

A shroud of questions about honour, revenge and forgiveness is flung over him, threatening to confound and smother his life. He must face these questions by bringing them out into the open before the end of the novel if he is to become a man who can see and face himself clearly.

I have been reading The Hair of the Pigeon alongside Julian Barnes’s “final” novel, Departure(s), and Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This, a book that brings up to date the ongoing genocidal devastation of Palestinian people in Gaza, challenging readers to reconsider their own attitudes, prejudices and actions.

Barnes, ill and meditating on arriving at the end of his writing life, remarks, “All writers want their words to have an effect. Novelists want to entertain, to reveal truth, to move, to provoke reverie. And beyond? Do they want their readers to act as a result of their words?”

A call to action

With a novel such as Morsi has written, the events recounted are so extreme, so distressing and so anchored in communal, theocratic, and political violence that it seems anaemic on the part of a reader not to put the book down and want to act in some way to reduce needless violence among all the sufferings we witness.

There are a difficult lessons in ethics, judgement, and balance that possibly a novel is ideally suited to bring home to us, though of course a novel can always at last be put aside as fiction.

Morsi pins beautifully the yearning at the heart of this novel when his character Ghassan reflects from the Yarmouk camp in Damascus: “… we had all been seeking a home – and home was maybe somewhere we were all going but had never been before”.

This strange and strangely touching novel of chaos, toughness and love is a document of its times. In the acknowledgements Morsi offers thanks to those who have entrusted him with their stories. He has taken these stories deeply seriously, unflinching in facing their details and he has felt them too with a wide range of contradictory emotions.

This novel’s encounter with undeniable evil enacted in the Assad regime’s prison system is set against more complex compromises, missteps, dishonesties and prejudices in those desperately exiled communities where characters can only seek relief from poverty, find self worth in work and hope for meaning in love.

– ref. Despots, brutality and the quest for a home: The Hair of the Pigeon explores suffering and love – https://theconversation.com/despots-brutality-and-the-quest-for-a-home-the-hair-of-the-pigeon-explores-suffering-and-love-277741

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Bongiorno, Director, Vice-Chancellor’s Centre for Public Ideas, University of Canberra

“Australia is the small house,” the architect Robin Boyd reflected in his book Australia’s Home in 1952. “Ownership of one in a fenced allotment is as inevitable and unquestionable a goal of the average Australian as marriage”.

Yet when Robert Menzies retired as prime minister in 1966, the rapid rise of home ownership was barely mentioned in the press as part of his legacy. This is despite the fact that during his lengthy prime ministership (December 1949 – January 1966), home ownership expanded from about half of all homes to more than seven in ten. The rest were a mix of private and government rentals.

The policy changes introduced under Menzies transformed Australia’s social and cultural attitudes towards housing. They left behind a legacy that’s still legible now, for better and for worse.

Politics and policy share a love-hate relationship, but we can’t have one without the other. In this six-part series, we’re chronicling how policies have shaped Australia’s prime ministers, for better or worse, and what it means for how politicians tackle today’s big challenges.

‘Homes material, homes human and homes spiritual’

The question of how to accommodate Australians had featured with increasing prominence in policy debate between the wars. Homelessness had been a feature of the Depression. Social reformers had campaigned for slum abolition and better workers’ housing. State governments began establishing agencies devoted to building public housing in the 1930s.

Home-building was limited during the Depression era and non-existent during the war. By 1945, the desire of many couples to commence normal married life after years of delay and the initiation of a large immigration program inevitably produced a housing shortage.

Labor’s Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement envisaged public housing as a central feature of housing provision, while recognising that many people would, as opportunity arose, provide for themselves.

The newly-formed Liberal Party had other ideas. They made much of Labor government minister John Dedman’s criticism of the idea of creating “little capitalists” through home ownership.

In “The Forgotten People”, a broadcast Menzies delivered while in the political wilderness in 1942, he spoke of “homes material, homes human and homes spiritual”.

The rise of the DIY suburb

After Menzies won office in 1949, government policy favoured home ownership over public housing.

Initially, however, there was not a great deal the government could do due to shortages of labour and materials, and the ten-year duration of the 1945 agreement with the states.

Some people refused to wait, borrowed to buy a block of land, and used their weekends and summer evenings – and the labour of family and friends – to build for themselves. A few formed cooperatives, such as that which became the basis for the suburb of Lalor in Melbourne.

In 1955, when novelist Patrick White published The Tree of Man, his story of a couple carving their home out of a colonial wilderness was a theme being reprised, in more genteel circumstances, by new generations on the expanding suburban frontier.

In time, private contractors and larger companies such as A.V. Jennings – which became the largest of them all through its attractive designs, display villages and canny marketing – came to replace most of the do-it-yourself activity.

The remarkable scene in the 1966 film They’re a Weird Mob of the construction of a Sydney home by a group of jolly building workers, including new Italian migrant Nino Culotta, was completely of its time.

Homes were most commonly made of “brick veneer” or “fibro”. Suburbia generated its own iconography and, in time, a good deal of nostalgia.

The Hills Hoist would be prominent in each. A metal rotary clothesline pioneered in Adelaide by Lance Hill, it became a symbol of Australia, instantly evocative of the postwar ideal – and increasingly the reality – of an Australian home on a quarter-acre block.

A very suburban nation

In Canberra at The Lodge, Bob and Pattie Menzies, and their daughter Heather before her marriage in 1955, lived as first suburban family in this very suburban nation. Tourist buses would stop outside in the hope of spotting them on the verandah. Weekends were for mushrooming in fields nearby.

Canberra itself grew from a country town into a flourishing city under the impact of both public and private housing construction, as civil servants relocated and settled in its soon sprawling suburbs.

The appearance was of individualism, thrift and self-reliance, amid a sense of sameness. The reality was that governments, including that of Menzies, had their fingerprints over pretty much every new picket fence in the country.

The federal government funded war service homes for former service personnel. Bank regulation, the lending of the government-owned Commonwealth Bank, and federal financial support for building society loans helped ensure a good supply of cheap funds for aspiring homeowners. The Commonwealth provided incentives for state governments to sell housing to private buyers built under a new mid-1950s housing agreement.

And there were financial incentives for renters to buy the homes in which they were living. In 1964 the Menzies government also introduced a grant for first-home buyers, prefiguring later schemes of this kind.

Still, public housing remained an important aspect of housing provision. It was probably essential in sustaining the viability of Australia’s large immigration program, ensuring that both poorer “old” Australians and newcomers had access to housing, even if for many it might be a stepping stone to homeownership.

The South Australian Liberal and Country League government of Tom Playford used cheap and plentiful public housing, provided by the state’s Housing Trust, to attract both industry and workers.

Shaping 75 years of housing policy

The national policy shift in the 1980s away from mass public provision and towards public housing as welfare has been one feeder of the long-standing inability of governments to ensure that sufficient affordable housing is available for those who need it. In shifting the balance to private provision, the Menzies government had done some of the groundwork for this later, unfortunate change.

All the same, the achievements of the Menzies government in housing policy were considerable, and its housing legacy has a reasonable claim to being considered its most significant for how Australians have lived over the last three quarters of a century.

Unfortunately, its emphasis on supply, as well as its sharp focus on helping the owner-occupier rather than the speculator or investor, have been treated as too radical for modern governments to emulate. The depth of the crisis that this has induced finally seems to be shifting their appetite for such political risk.

– ref. Robert Menzies fostered Australia’s love of home ownership, but the romance is souring – https://theconversation.com/robert-menzies-fostered-australias-love-of-home-ownership-but-the-romance-is-souring-276631

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan R. Goodman, Assistant Research Professor, Psychiatry, University of Cambridge

Until a few years ago, no one had heard of bixonimania. Then, in 2024, a group of scientists posted findings online announcing the condition, which they claimed affected the eyes after computer use. However, the scientists had made it up – not just the work, but the authors’ names, affiliations, locations and funding, which was the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad.

Large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini treated it as real anyway, and in doing so, helped turn a fictional disease into a legitimate-sounding health concern.

Bixonimania is not an isolated case. Being deceived – whether you are a person or an AI model – is concerningly common, in science and beyond. Whether we’re talking about AI hallucinations, state-backed disinformation or just everyday lies, humans have a remarkable knack for naivety, owing to our biases and increasing need to outsource learning to others. These are problems we – individually and collectively – urgently need to better understand and overcome.

Our shared fascination with deception may help explain the popularity of The Traitors, a TV programme built around the tension between trust and suspicion, where contestants must decide who among them is deceiving the group.

The show captures something intrinsic to being human: the persistent threat of being unsure about whether we’re placing trust effectively. Yet in the modern era of mass digital communication and AI, we’re now almost constantly faced with a similar threat, often without realising it.

At a recent event at the Cambridge Festival, we aimed to highlight this risk through a Traitors-themed science event. Four panellists presented work, all of which could have been a lie. The audience was asked to vote on which of the presenters was deceiving them and why.

We deliberately made the presenters and their work outlandish. From their varying backgrounds and with varying accents, the panellists presented their work in global health, climate, media and astrophysics. Some dressed formally, while one – a Nigerian researcher presenting her work on immigration in a healthcare context – wore clothes linked to her ethnic identity.

We were interested in exploring which of these signals – accent, gender, ethnicity, and dress and presentation style – influenced the audience’s decisions. Both content and presentation styles influenced them, but the signals they relied on led them to the wrong conclusions, rating the traitors as more credible than honest researchers.

The ones who received the most votes were the two “faithful” researchers (to use the language of The Traitors) – Ada, from the non-profit Development Media Initiative, and Sarah, an astrophysicist working in galactic archaeology.

Ada’s team had saved lives by sharing health information with communities in the global south through running ten radio broadcasts daily. The audience thought the results were implausibly impressive.

“Ada’s data is too good to be true,” one person reported in our questionnaire. She was also presenting work she hadn’t personally contributed to. Even though this is common in large collaborations, this distance led to perceptions of a lack of confidence, undermining her credibility.

Sarah, an astrophysicist, had presented her subfield of galactic archaeology – the study of the Milky Way’s formation history through the chemical signatures of ancient stars. Yet with only four minutes to speak, she was unable to convey significant depth. The audience read that as a lack of understanding.

The outlandishness of her field’s name also harmed perceptions of her legitimacy. “Galaxy [sic] archaeology is too cool a name to exist,” one audience member wrote.

By contrast, the two traitors, Jack and Joyce, received the fewest votes. Jack was an actor who created the persona of a climate researcher specialising in rain. Joyce presented her own work but falsified the results.

Interestingly, Joyce’s personal connection to her work – she is a Nigerian woman conducting research into Nigerian communities – helped to convince the audience of her authenticity. “Joyce’s presentation sounded very considered and genuine – the process of her research and recounts of her personal experiences sounded like she had lots of interest in the area,” one person wrote.

The event was meant to be fun and engaging. Yet we also wanted to illustrate the many ways people can misrepresent themselves, whether in science or beyond. Our traitors showed that lies don’t just have to be about who you are (Jack is an actor, not a researcher) but about what you say (Joyce is a researcher but falsified her results).

Misinformation has always existed. What’s new is the speed at which it spreads, the tools that generate it, and how convincingly it mimics the real thing.

Why maths isn’t enough

Our collective capacity to recognise false information is also at risk. This is because, as a society, we continue to promote the importance of hard science subjects at the expense of the critical thinking skills derived from studies of the arts, humanities and social sciences.

This can be seen, for example, in the 2023 UK governmental push to require all school students to take maths until age 18. No such push exists to promote and develop the critical thinking skills of young people. It’s easy to see how increasingly convincing falsehoods like bixonimania’s existence can be accepted as truth, especially when touted by AI models.

Tools are helpful. AI is a tool, the internet is a tool, the media is a tool. But it’s up to us to ensure that we are using them and not being manipulated by them.

In The Traitors, we have little to go on to determine what is true. Yet in the real world, we have the ability to check the truth of claims. With effective caution and critical thinking, it is entirely possible to determine what is trustworthy, but it requires thinking for ourselves. Trust is ours to give, and we need to learn to give it wisely.

– ref. The fake disease that fooled the internet — and what it says about all of us – https://theconversation.com/the-fake-disease-that-fooled-the-internet-and-what-it-says-about-all-of-us-280615

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Barter, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh

Recent findings from research we have been carrying out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern in Geneva suggest that we might be closing in on signs of undiscovered physics.

If confirmed, these hints would overturn the theory, called the Standard Model, that has dominated particle physics for 50 years. The findings suggest the way that specific sub-atomic particles behave in the LHC disagrees with the Standard Model.

Fundamental particles are the most basic building blocks of matter – sub-atomic particles that cannot be divided into smaller units. The four fundamental forces – gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force – govern how these particles interact.

The LHC is a giant particle accelerator built in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border. Its main purpose is to find cracks in the Standard Model.

This theory is our best understanding of fundamental particles and forces, but we know it cannot be the whole story. It does not explain gravity or dark matter – the invisible, so far unmeasured type of matter that makes up approximately 25% of the universe.

In the LHC, beams of proton particles travelling in opposite directions are made to collide, in a bid to uncover hints of undiscovered physics. The new results come from LHCb, an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider where these collisions are analysed.

The result comes from studying the decay – a kind of transformation – of sub-atomic particles called B mesons. We investigated how these B mesons decay into other particles, finding that the particular way in which this happens disagrees with the predictions of the Standard Model.

An elegant theory

The Standard Model is built on two of the 20th century’s most transformative advances in physics; quantum mechanics and Einstein’s special relativity.

Physicists can compare measurements made at facilities such as the LHC with predictions based on the Standard Model to rigorously test the theory.

Despite the fact that we know the Standard Model is incomplete, in over 50 years of increasingly rigorous testing, particle physicists are yet to find a crack in the theory. That is, potentially, until now.

Our measurement, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, shows a tension of four standard deviations from the expectations of the Standard Model.

In real world terms, this means that, after considering the uncertainties from the experimental results and from the theory predictions, there is only a one in 16,000 chance that a random fluctuation in the data this extreme would occur if the Standard Model is correct.

Although this falls short of science’s gold standard – what’s known as five sigma, or five standard deviations (about a one in 1.7 million chance) – the evidence is starting to mount. Adding to this compelling narrative are results from an independent LHC experiment, CMS, that were published earlier in 2025.

Although the CMS results are not as precise as those from LHCb, they agree well, strengthening the case. Our new results have been found in a study of a particular kind of process, known as an electroweak penguin decay.

Rare events

The term “penguin” refers to a specific type of decay (transformation) of short-lived particles. In this case we study how the B meson decays into four other subatomic particles – a kaon, a pion and two muons.

With some imagination, one can visualise the arrangement of the particles involved as looking like a penguin. Crucially, measurements of this decay let us study how one type of fundamental particle, a beauty quark, can transform into another, the strange quark.

This penguin decay is incredibly rare in the Standard Model: for every million B mesons, only one will decay in this manner. We have carefully analysed the angles and energies at which these particles are produced in the decay, and precisely determined how often the process takes place. We found that our measurements of these quantities disagree with Standard Model predictions.

Precise investigations of decays like this are one of the primary goals of the LHCb experiment, and have been since its inception in 1994. Penguin processes are uniquely sensitive to the effects of potentially very heavy new particles that cannot be created directly at the LHC.

Such particles may still exert a measurable influence on these decays over the small Standard Model contribution. This kind of indirect observation is not new. For example, radioactivity was discovered 80 years before the fundamental particles that are responsible for it (the W bosons) were directly seen.

Future directions

Our studies of rare processes let us explore parts of nature that may otherwise only become accessible using particle colliders planned for the 2070s. There are a wide range of potential new theories that can explain our findings. Many contain new particles called “leptoquarks” that unite the two different types of matter: “leptons” and “quarks”.

Other potential theories contain particles that are heavier analogues of those already found in the Standard Model. The new results constrain the form of these models and will direct future searches for them.

Despite our excitement, open theoretical questions remain that prevent us from definitively claiming that physics beyond the Standard Model has been observed. The most serious question arises from so-called “charming penguins”, a set of processes present in the Standard Model, whose contributions are extremely tricky to predict. Recent estimates of these charming penguins suggest their effects are not large enough to explain our data.

Furthermore, a combination of a theory model and experimental data from LHCb suggests that the charming penguins (and therefore, the Standard Model) struggle to explain the anomalous results.

New data already collected will let us confirm the situation in the coming years: in our current work we studied approximately 650 billion B meson decays recorded between 2011 and 2018 to find these penguin decays. Since then, the LHCb experiment has recorded three times as many B mesons.

Further advances are planned for the 2030s to exploit future upgrades to the LHC and accrue a dataset 15 times larger again. This ultimate step will allow definitive claims to be made, potentially unlocking a new understanding of how the universe works at the most elementary level.

– ref. Our Large Hadron Collider results hint at undiscovered physics – https://theconversation.com/our-large-hadron-collider-results-hint-at-undiscovered-physics-272620