Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tingrei Tan, Sydney Horizon Fellow and ARC Future Fellow, Quantum Control Laboratory, University of Sydney

For almost a century, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has stood as one of the defining ideas of quantum physics: a particle’s position and momentum cannot be known at the same time with absolute precision. The more you know about one, the less you know about the other.

In a new study published in Science Advances, our team demonstrates how to work around this restriction, not by breaking physics but by reshaping uncertainty itself.

The result is a breakthrough in the science of measurement that could power a new generation of ultra-precise quantum sensors operating at the scale of atoms.

Moving uncertainty around

The uncertainty principle makes clear there will always be a minimum amount of uncertainty in measurements. But you can think of it like air in a balloon: the air cannot escape, but you can freely move it around inside.

Similarly, when measuring position and momentum, the total amount of uncertainty is fixed. But we can redistribute it between the two.

Traditionally, this trade-off means making a choice. You can measure position precisely but lose information about momentum, or vice versa.

Our work takes a different approach. We push the uncertainty into a sensing range that is unimportant.

To understand this, let’s try another analogy: imagine a clock with only one hand. If it’s the hour hand, we know the hour exactly but only roughly know the minutes. If it’s the minute hand, we can read minutes precisely but do not know the hour.

We apply this same idea to quantum measurements. We redistribute the uncertainty so that we can simultaneously track small changes in position and momentum around a chosen point, even if we do not know the absolute location of the point itself.

With this, we can detect very tiny changes in both position and momentum at once, beyond the limit of any classical sensor.

Using error-correcting codes for quantum sensing

How did we do this? We repurposed techniques originally designed to protect quantum computers from noise to enhance the precision of measurement devices. This idea was first proposed in a theoretical study in 2017.

We performed our experiment using a trapped ion. This is a single electronically charged atom held in place and controlled with electric and magnetic fields.

We prepared the ion in “grid states”, a kind of quantum state originally developed for error-corrected quantum computing. We then used these states as a sensor to measure tiny signals, in a way similar to how one would detect errors in a quantum computer.

This crossover between quantum computing and quantum sensing is the key idea behind our work.

Our experiment showed we can measure an uncertainty in a signal corresponding to half a nanometre, roughly about the size of an atom.

We can also measure extremely small forces, measured in yoctonewtons – that’s a trillionth of a trillionth of a newton. That’s like measuring the weight of about 30 oxygen molecules.

Why does it matter?

Being able to measure extremely small signals has profound implications. Counterintuitively, measuring the minuscule can help us improve our understanding on the grandest scale.

Quantum sensors already help gravitational-wave observatories detect cosmic events such as colliding black holes. Our work opens the door to even greater sensing capabilities, potentially deepening our understanding of astrophysical objects.

This experiment is still within the confines of a physics laboratory. It’s not a gadget you’ll see in the shops tomorrow. But we are confident this new way to make precision measurements will lead to a whole generation of ultra-sensitive quantum sensors.

Tingrei Tan receives funding from Australian Research Council, US Office of Naval Research, US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Wellcome Leap.

Christophe Valahu receives funding from Australian Research Council, US Office of Naval Research, US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Wellcome Leap.

– ref. A new twist on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle can sharpen quantum sensors – https://theconversation.com/a-new-twist-on-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle-can-sharpen-quantum-sensors-265761

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole L. Asquith, Professor, University of Tasmania, Queensland University of Technology

In the coming week, the Tasmanian parliament will consider two bills that will cement Tasmania as the Rainbow Isle.

The laws, which have bipartisan support, will provide compensation for those historically convicted of homosexuality and cross-dressing offences. They also expand hate crime provisions to LGBTQIA+ people.

This is nation-leading reform to enforce the rights of LGBTQIA+ people. Tasmania is the first jurisdiction in the country to offer compensation for those affected by these now-abolished crimes.

This is especially significant given the state’s fraught history of criminalising homosexuality and cross-dressing up until the end of the last century.

The redress scheme comes after Australia-first gender recognition laws in 2019, and the official recognition of asexual and agender people in all of the Tasmanian government’s activities with community since 2023.

The government is also pursuing sentencing reforms to give judges the power to impose tougher sentences for hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people (and others). These changes go beyond those in other states by allowing courts to take “demonstrated hostility” into account.

A violent, traumatic history

Tasmania has not always been a leader in advocating for the rights of LGBTQIA+ people.

By 1990, most Australian states had decriminalised homosexuality, with South Australia leading the change in 1975.

But it was not until 1997, under significant national and international pressure, that Tasmania decriminalised male same-sex relationships. Same-sex relationships between women were never criminalised.

Before 1997, relationships between men in Tasmania were punishable by up to 21 years in prison, which was the harshest penalty in the western world. Tasmania was also the only Australian state to criminalise cross dressing.

It’s estimated approximately 100 men were convicted for “unnatural sexual intercourse” and “gross indecency” between 1945 and the mid-1980s.

In 1991, the Australian government had signed onto the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This enabled people to submit complaints about rights violations in their home countries to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Tasmanian man Rodney Croome, along with his partner at the time, Nick Toonen, submitted the first Australian complaint to the commission in 1994. Their local efforts to change Tasmania’s punitive laws on male same-sex relationships had been unsuccessful.

In Toonen vs Tasmania, the commission found the state of Tasmania had violated his right to privacy and distinguished between people on the basis of sexual activity, sexual orientation and identity. Both these things meant gay men were not equal under the law.

This paved the way for the landmark federal Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act, which overrode the Tasmanian law criminalising homosexuality.

A High Court ruling in Croome vs Tasmania followed. It found the Commonwealth government had the power under an international treaty to enact legislation decriminalising homosexual acts in Tasmania.

The United Nations case also mandated anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination laws, which set an international precedent for the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships across the world.

A rainbow transformation

As the current legislation was tabled in parliament, advocacy group Equality Tasmania noted that many victims of the state’s former laws suffered loss of employment, housing, family and friends.

Many left the state forever. All lived with the trauma of public ignominy and criminal stigma. Some still do.

According to legal scholar Allen George, the homosexual and cross dressing expungement laws offer a form of “therapeutic justice”.

Therapeutic justice is justice that considers not just the law, but the social conditions as well, especially those that affect the wellbeing of victims.

While there is no compensation adequate for the harms caused by the now-abolished laws, advocates say the redress scheme will help make up for the pain and loss victims experienced, and:

send a message that the Tasmanian government is taking responsibility for the injustice its predecessors inflicted.

Croome, who is now a LGBTQIA+ rights activist, says Tasmania has been transformed from “Bigots Island to the Rainbow Isle”.

Victim-survivors can have their charges, convictions or both expunged under existing legislation, and will automatically receive a payment.

They will be eligible for $15,000 for a charge, $45,000 for a conviction, and $75,000 if they were sentenced to detention or psychiatric care.

These amounts were supported by expert advice to a 2024 inquiry by the Tasmanian parliament’s Gender and Equality Committee after it reviewed similar schemes in Europe and Canada.

Could other states follow?

This redress for past harms could lead to similar law reform across Australia.

Other states and territories are likely to consider following Tasmania’s lead and enact redress schemes for those arrested under their former anti-gay laws.

The Commonwealth may also consider redress for harms inflicted in the past.

Read more:
An inquiry has recommended Australia legislate a Human Rights Act. Here’s why we need one

The Tasmanian reform may also initiate an overdue debate in Australia about how we as a nation respond to past injustices and work towards the prevention of human rights violations.

This case highlights the patchwork of inconsistent LGBTQIA+ rights across the country. This inconsistency may only be resolved by a comprehensive, national Bill of Rights or Human Rights Act.

This broader agenda will extend Australian governments’ consideration of the human rights of all Australians.

The authors would like to thank Rodney Croome for his insights and knowledge of historical and contemporary LGBTQIA+ law reform

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Tasmania will compensate people for historical LGBTQIA+ convictions. Could others follow suit? – https://theconversation.com/tasmania-will-compensate-people-for-historical-lgbtqia-convictions-could-others-follow-suit-265956

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

With Anthony Albanese now having his long-awaited meeting with United States President Donald Trump locked in and announced by the White House, the prime ministerial attention will turn to managing an unpredictable encounter.

Having the October 20 face-to-face in Washington presents both more opportunities and extra risks than if it had been on the sidelines of this week’s United Nations leaders’ week.

Trump has not gone out of his way for the convenience of the Australian prime minister. Albanese, already scheduled to attend a round of international summits, will have to make a special trip to the US to see the president (just short of a year after Trump’s election).

Being in Washington will presumably enable the PM to speak to a range of administration figures.

But being in the White House makes it more of an “occasion”, encouraging Trump to be performative, positively or negatively. And if it comes with a room full of journalists, it can turn into a circus.

Albanese will put Australia’s core interests – primarily AUKUS (currently being reviewed by the Americans), regional security, and tariffs – to the fore in the discussion. One issue will be whether the Americans renew efforts for Australia to lift its defence spending. The government has recently come out with a range of defence initiatives – will there be more heading towards October 20?

Albanese will hope his obvious differences with the president – notably on Palestine and climate change – can be sidelined. Those two issues have been highlighted by the prime minister at the UN this week.

Australia, with a clutch of other countries, announced formal recognition of Palestine.

Albanese is promoting Australia’s push for investment for green energy and Australia is lobbying other countries to pressure Turkey to withdraw so we and Pacific countries can host the UN climate conference (COP) next year. Albanese told a news conference there was no outcome on the COP yet.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who is also in New York, described the COP as “the biggest trade fair in the world”. Bowen is an enthusiast for obtaining the conference but some others around the government believe it could be more trouble than it is worth.

The COP, which would be held in Adelaide and attract tens of thousands of people, is a potential logistical nightmare, given there would be little more than a year to organise it and co-ordination with the Pacific countries would be testing.

Trump has attacked the decision on Palestine, seeing it as rewarding terrorism.

His attitude on climate was summed up in his line to the UN General Assembly: “If you don’t get away from this green energy scam, your country is going to fail”. He denounced renewables as a “joke”.

Asked whether his claims on climate and energy could affect investment and public perceptions in Australia, Albanese was dismissive. “President Trump gave a speech. He’s entitled to give that speech and to put his views. I don’t think that there are any views that he hasn’t said before.”

Centrally, Albanese in Washington will be wanting and needing to establish a good personal relationship with Trump.

In his rambling UN address, Trump said “I only do business with people I like”. It was a joke – sort of, but not really.

After the October meeting had been confirmed, Albanese (who later had a word with Trump at the president’s gala reception for world leaders) was inclined to lord it over journalists, who’d pursued him for months about when a meeting would happen. “As I’ve said, President Trump agreed to a meeting some time ago. We had another chat about it on the phone [recently],” he said. The prime minister wanted to make it all seem smooth and under control, but organising the October 20 get-together has been a nightmare for Australian officials, Albanese’s office and the Australian ambassador in Washington, Kevin Rudd.

In coming days Albanese, who goes to the United Kingdom for the second leg of his trip, will be able to get some tips on handling Trump from Keir Starmer. The British Labour prime minister has built a personal rapport with Trump, who quips amiably about their political differences.

For all the challenges of the Trump meeting, Albanese is likely to go into it confident. Since his triumphant election win, he seems very sure of himself about most things.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. View from The Hill: Albanese’s Trump meeting is in the diary – now it’s a matter of managing it – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-albaneses-trump-meeting-is-in-the-diary-now-its-a-matter-of-managing-it-265854

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland

If you believe that the end of the world is at hand, then you really need to know what the rapture is. Simply put, the rapture is the belief that, at any moment, Jesus Christ will descend from heaven to the sky and “rapture” all those who truly believe in Him into heaven. Those among the faithful who have already died will rise from the dead and also be translated into heaven.

Evangelical Christians on TikTok have been predicting the rapture will come this week. When the rapture happens, believers think the rest of us will be left behind, not knowing where many of those we know have gone. For this reason, it is often known as “Left Behind theology”.

For the followers of Left Behind theology within conservative Evangelical Protestantism, significant parts of the Bible – the books of Revelation and Daniel in particular – refer to events that are yet to happen at the end of the world. These are the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and God’s final judgement of all humanity into the saved and the damned.

But for the rapture in particular, the First Book of Thessalonians (4.16–17) in the New Testament is the crucial text:

For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up [raptured] in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.

Tribulation

The rapture is the first of two ideas that Left Behind theology has added to the traditional Christian story of the end of the world. The second is the Tribulation.

According to most Left Behind theologians, the rapture will be followed by a period of seven years of Tribulation on earth, based on some complicated calculations around the text of Daniel 9.24–27.

This is the age of the Antichrist, the son of Satan – a human figure soon to reveal himself.

He will be a global earthly ruler opposed to Christ and pretending to be him. He it is who is called in the Bible “the beast rising out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads” (Revelation 13.1), “the little horn” (Daniel 7.8), and “the lawless one” (2 Thessalonians 2.3) whose number is 666 (Revelation 13.18).

Christians who have been raptured into heaven are immune from these seven years of natural disasters, wars, famine and the persecutions of the Antichrist.

The kingdom upon earth

After the seven years of the Tribulation, Christ will return with his saints to fight and defeat Satan, the Antichrist, and his forces at the battle of Armageddon.

Most followers of Left Behind theology believe that Christ will then set up his kingdom upon earth and reign from Jerusalem for a millennium or a thousand years. He will govern the earth with his Christian followers, along with those Jews who have recognised Christ as the Messiah during the time of the Tribulation.

The eventual conversion of the Jews during this time explains, in part at least, the commitment to and support of many Evangelical Protestant Christians to the continuation of the State of Israel until the time of Tribulation when the Jews convert to Christianity.

At the end of the thousand years, Satan will be released and there will be a final but short rebellion against God, after which Satan will be defeated. Then God will judge everyone for eternal happiness in heaven or eternal misery in hell.

A relatively recent innovation

In the history of Christian thought, the idea of the rapture before the Tribulation is a relatively recent innovation.

We can date it to the 1830s and the theology of the Anglican John Nelson Darby (1800–82), a member of the Protestant Plymouth Brethren, and the founder of the group still known as the Exclusive Brethren. But it was popularised in Protestant circles in the United States by its inclusion in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909.

The Bible of C.I. Scofield (1843–1921) was the main source for the idea of the rapture until The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey (1929–2024) in 1970, a work that has sold over 28 million copies and has been translated into 54 languages. “Someday,” declared Lindsey,

a day that only God knows is coming to take away all those who believe in Him. He is coming to meet all true believers in the air. Without benefit of science, space suits, or interplanetary rockets, there will be those who will be transported into a glorious place more beautiful, more awesome, than we can possibly comprehend.

But it was the series of Left Behind books (1995–2007) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, with over 65 million books sold, along with its movie franchise, that has most popularised the idea of the rapture and the Tribulation that follows it.

To many of us, the world appears a place of tribulation. “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” as John Donne (1572–1631) eloquently put it.

The idea of the rapture seems to reflect the utopian dream of many that they may be translated from this Earth to a better place until they can return to a world of justice, compassion and decency that seems so absent from the present one.

Philip C. Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What is the rapture, and why does TikTok believe the end is coming? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-rapture-and-why-does-tiktok-believe-the-end-is-coming-265748

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Carson, 2024 Oxford University visiting research fellow RIJS; Professor of Political Communication., La Trobe University

Twenty-one years after Facebook’s launch, Australia’s top 25 news outlets now have a combined 27.6 million followers on the platform. They rely on Facebook’s reach more than ever, posting far more stories there than in the past.

With access to Meta’s Content Library (Meta is the owner of Facebook), our big data study analysed more than three million posts from 25 Australian news publishers. We wanted to understand how content is distributed, how audiences engage with news topics, and the nature of misinformation spread.

The study enabled us to track de-identified Facebook comments and take a closer look at examples of how misinformation spreads. These included cases about election integrity, the environment (floods) and health misinformation such as hydroxychloroquine promotion during the COVID pandemic.

The data reveal misinformation’s real-world impact: it isn’t just a digital issue, it’s linked to poor health outcomes, falling public trust, and significant societal harm.

Misinformation and hydroxychloroquine … and floods

Take the example of the false claims that antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a viable COVID treatment.

In Australia, as in the United States, political figures and media played leading roles in the spread of this idea. Mining billionaire and then leader of the United Australia Party, Clive Palmer, actively promoted hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment. In March 2020 he announced he would fund trials, manufacture, and stockpile the drug.

He placed a two-page advertisement in The Australian. Federal Coalition MPs Craig Kelly and George Christensen also championed hydroxychloroquine, coauthoring an open letter advocating its use.

We examined 7,000 public comments responding to 100 hydroxychloroquine posts from the selected media outlets during the pandemic. Contrary to concerns that public debate is siloed in echo chambers, we found robust online exchanges about the drug’s effectiveness in combating COVID.

Yet, despite fact-checking efforts, we find that facts alone fail to stop the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories about hydroxychloroquine. This misinformation targeted not only the drug, but also the government, media and “big pharma”.

To put the real-world harm in perspective, public health studies estimate hydroxychloroquine use was linked to at least 17,000 deaths worldwide, though the true toll is likely higher.

The topic modelling also highlighted the personal toll caused by this misinformation spread. These include the secondary harm of the drug’s unavailability (due to stockpiling) for legitimate treatment of non-COVID conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, leading to distress, frustration and worsening symptoms.

In other instances, we saw how misinformation can hurt public trust in institutions and non-government organisations. Following the 2022 floods in Queensland and New South Wales, we again saw that despite fact-checking efforts, misinformation about the Red Cross charity flourished online and was amplified by political commentary.

Without repeating the falsehoods here, the misinformation led to changes in some public donation behaviour such as buying gift cards for flood victims rather than trusting the Red Cross to distribute much-needed funds. This highlights the significant harm misinformation can inflict on public trust and disaster response efforts.

Misinformation ‘stickiness’

The data also reveal the cyclical nature of misinformation. We call this misinformation’s “stickiness”, because it reappears at regular intervals such as elections. In one example, electoral administrators were targeted with false accusations that polling officials rigged the election outcome by rubbing out votes marked with pencils.

While this is an old conspiracy theory about voter fraud that predates social media and it is also not unique to Australia, the data show misinformation’s persistence online during state and federal elections including the 2023 Voice referendum.

Here, multiple debunking efforts from electoral commissioners, fact-checkers, media and social media seem to have limited levels of public engagement compared to a noisy minority. When we examined 60,000 sentences on electoral topics from the past decade, we detected just 418 sentences from informed or official sources detected 418 sentences from informed sources.

Again, high-profile figures such as Palmer have played a central role in circulating this misinformation. The chart below demonstrates its stickiness.

Curbing misinformation

Our study has lessons for public figures and institutions. They, especially politicians, must lead in curbing misinformation, as their misleading statements are quickly amplified by the public.

Social media and mainstream media also play an important role in limiting the circulation of misinformation. As Australians increasingly rely on social media for news, mainstream media can provide credible information and counter misinformation through their online story posts. Digital platforms can also curb algorithmic spread and remove dangerous content that leads to real-world harms.

The study offers evidence of a change over time in audiences’ news consumption patterns. Whether this is due to news avoidance or changes in algorithmic promotion is unclear. But it is clear that from 2016 to 2024, online audiences increasingly engaged with arts, lifestyle and celebrity news over politics, leading media outlets to prioritise posting stories that entertain rather than inform. This shift may pose a challenge to mitigating misinformation with hard news facts.

Finally, the study shows that fact-checking, while valuable, is not a silver bullet. Combating misinformation requires a multi-pronged approach, including counter-messaging by trusted civic leaders, media and digital literacy campaigns, and public restraint in sharing unverified content.

Andrea Carson has received funding from Meta to research misinformation and from the ARC to study political trust.

Justin Phillips received research funding from Meta to study misinformation.

– ref. Facebook data reveal the devastating real-world harms caused by the spread of misinformation – https://theconversation.com/facebook-data-reveal-the-devastating-real-world-harms-caused-by-the-spread-of-misinformation-265742

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa M. Given, Professor of Information Sciences & Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, RMIT University

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, today outlined an updated list of platforms that may fall under the social media age restrictions that will take effect later this year.

While Australians expected platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to be included, this new list demonstrates the legislation’s reach is even broader.

Which platforms will be required to restrict access for under 16s?

When the legislation was first introduced, the government explained it would use the definition of social media outlined in Australia’s Social Media Services Online Safety Code.

The law, which comes into effect on December 10, will restrict people under 16 from holding accounts on many social media platforms.

Recently, the eSafety Commissioner introduced self-assessment guidance for companies to determine whether their platforms would be considered age-restricted.

Under this guidance, companies will be required to restrict access to platform accounts for users under 16 where:

• material is accessible to, or delivered to, Australian users
• users can post material
• users can link to, or interact with, other users
• online social interaction is the sole, or significant, purpose of the platform.

The eSafety Commissioner has written to an “initial list” of 16 companies (including Facebook, TikTok and YouTube) advising they may fall under the social media definition that requires age restrictions.

However, the commissioner also reached out to several other platforms. These included messaging and gaming platforms WhatsApp, Discord and Twitch. Also on the list were software sharing platform GitHub, dating app company Match (which owns Tinder), message board Reddit and image-sharing platform Pinterest, among others.

What does this mean for platforms designed to engage children?

Lego Play and Roblox were also included. These platforms host games and creative tools used by many children under 16.

Earlier this month, Roblox (which has more than 380 million users globally) committed to new safety measures to address risks posed by online grooming.

The new measures include making children’s accounts private by default and ensuring adults are prevented from engaging with child users without parental consent.

However, Roblox has now been flagged as likely to meet the definition of an age-restricted platform. It may need to block children under 16 from having accounts.

Will some platforms be excluded from age restrictions?

The self-assessment guidance also outlines specific circumstances in which social media platforms can be excluded from the restrictions. Under the legislation, services are excluded where the sole or primary purpose is to enable:

• communication by messaging, email, voice or video calling
• playing online games
• sharing information about products or services
• professional networking or professional development
• supporting education (including between educational institutions and students/parents)
• supporting health (including between healthcare providers and people accessing services).

These exclusions require self-assessment by individual platforms. This is why the eSafety Commissioner has asked companies to make their case, in writing, and provide evidence as to why they believe they should be exempt.

WhatsApp, for example, may argue its primary purpose is communication by messaging. Lego Play may argue it is mainly an educational tool.

Companies will only have a few weeks to make their case for exclusion before the restrictions are in place.

What happens next?

In the coming weeks, we will learn more about which platforms will be included – and excluded – from age restrictions. But today’s list is only a start. There will likely be others identified through the self-assessment process.

What’s not yet clear is what happens when there is conflict over a platform’s self-assessment.

The eSafety Commissioner has flagged she is already “bracing for legal challenges” on this point. She explained the focus will first be on platforms with the greatest number of users and, therefore, the highest potential for harm.

So Australians may have some clarity about which platforms fall under – or outside – the legislation on December 10. However, some uncertainty is likely to continue well into 2026.

Lisa M. Given receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Association for Information Science and Technology.

– ref. Social media age restrictions may go further than you thought. Here’s how – https://theconversation.com/social-media-age-restrictions-may-go-further-than-you-thought-heres-how-265969

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lister Staveley-Smith, Professor at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), The University of Western Australia

Most of the ordinary matter in the universe is hydrogen. But surprisingly, less than 20% of this hydrogen sits inside galaxies. The rest lies in the vast spaces between them – the so-called intergalactic medium.

This cosmic reservoir is thought to fuel the birth of new stars, as gas slowly falls into galaxies over billions of years. Yet much of that material doesn’t stay put: supernova explosions and powerful outflows from supermassive black holes can fling gas back out into intergalactic space.

The push-and-pull between inflows and outflows is central to understanding how galaxies grow and change over cosmic time. Probing this balance is one of the aims of the WALLABY survey, carried out using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.

A new discovery from WALLABY, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, sheds new light on the cosmic cycle of matter into, through and out of galaxies.

What is WALLABY?

Despite its name, WALLABY isn’t about animals. It’s a somewhat contrived acronym – Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind surveY – for a large survey of neutral hydrogen (the atomic form of hydrogen) across nearly half the southern sky. The ASKAP telescope is sensitive enough to detect hydrogen in and around galaxies up to a billion light years away.

Because it’s a “blind” survey, WALLABY doesn’t target known galaxies. Instead, it scans huge patches of sky – each night covering an area about 150 times the size of the full Moon.

A galactic bridge

We then use automated algorithms to search for signs of hydrogen in the resulting data. One such search revealed an unusual gas bridge linking two otherwise unremarkable galaxies on the outskirts of the Virgo cluster, in the constellation Virgo. The bridge, at least 160,000 light years long, likely formed through tidal interactions between two dwarf galaxies known as NGC 4532 and DDO 137.

These tides are the cosmic equivalent of Earth’s ocean tides, but on a vastly larger scale and made of hydrogen rather than water. Gas pulled from the galaxies now stretches between them, filling the surrounding intergalactic space.

Such bridges are hard to detect because they contain few stars. But we have a local example: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, are joined by a 70,000-light-year-long gas bridge.

An extraordinary tail

The newly discovered bridge also helps explain a long-standing puzzle: an enormous gas tail streaming away from the dwarf galaxies NGC 4532 and DDO 137, first detected more than 30 years ago with the Arecibo telescope. This tail is ten times longer than the bridge and is the largest ever observed from a galaxy system.

New observations suggest that while tidal forces created the bridge and the envelope of gas around the galaxies, the spectacular tail was produced by another process.

As the pair of galaxies plunges into the Virgo cluster, they encounter extremely hot, thin gas that fills the cluster. The galaxies’ motion through this medium produces ram pressure – much like the resistance felt when cycling into a strong headwind – which strips gas from them and sweeps it out behind.

Remarkably, the gas density required for this effect is only around ten atoms per cubic metre, a value consistent with new measurements from the eROSITA X-ray telescope. Thanks to the galaxies’ high infall speed – more than 800 kilometres per second – this sparse medium is enough to create the vast tail.

The bigger picture

These two galaxies are just a fraction of the 200,000 WALLABY expects to detect by the end of its survey. Each discovery adds to our picture of how gas flows in and out of galaxies, enriching the intergalactic medium and shaping galactic evolution.

Together, they will help astronomers untangle the so-called baryonic cycle – the continuous recycling of matter between galaxies and the space around them.

Lister Staveley-Smith receives research funding from ICRAR, the Western Australian government, and the University of Western Australia.

– ref. What a newly discovered gas bridge between galaxies tells us about the cosmic cycle of matter – https://theconversation.com/what-a-newly-discovered-gas-bridge-between-galaxies-tells-us-about-the-cosmic-cycle-of-matter-265760

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn Arianrhod, Affiliate, School of Mathematics, Monash University

The Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton, who was born 220 years ago last month, is famous for carving some mathematical graffiti into Dublin’s Broome Bridge in 1843.

But in his lifetime, Hamilton’s reputation rested on work done in the 1820s and early 1830s, when he was still in his twenties. He developed new mathematical tools for studying light rays (or “geometric optics”) and the motion of objects (“mechanics”).

Intriguingly, Hamilton developed his mechanics using an analogy between the path of a light ray and that of a material particle. This is not so surprising if light is a material particle, as Isaac Newton had believed, but what if it were a wave? What would it mean for the equations of waves and particles to be analogous in some way?

The answer would come a century later, when the pioneers of quantum mechanics realised Hamilton’s approach offered more than just an analogy: it was a glimpse of the true nature of the physical world.

The puzzle of light

To understand Hamilton’s place in this story, we need to go back a little further. For ordinary objects or particles, the basic laws (or equations) of motion had been published by Newton in 1687. Over the next 150 years, researchers such as Leonard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange and then Hamilton made more flexible and sophisticated versions of Newton’s ideas.

“Hamiltonian mechanics” proved so useful that it wasn’t until 1925 – almost 100 years later – that anybody stopped to revisit how Hamilton had derived it.

His analogy with light paths worked regardless of light’s true nature, but at the time, there was good evidence that light was a wave. In 1801, British scientist Thomas Young had performed his famous double-slit experiment, in which two light beams produced an “interference” pattern like the overlapping ripples on a pond when two stones are dropped in. Six decades later, James Clerk Maxwell realised light behaved like a rippling wave in the electromagnetic field.

But then, in 1905, Albert Einstein showed some of light’s properties could only be explained if light could also behave as a stream of particle-like “photons” (as they were later dubbed). He linked this idea to a suggestion made by Max Planck in 1900, that atoms could only emit or absorb energy in discrete lumps.

Energy, frequency and mass

In his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, where light dislodges electrons from certain metals, Einstein used Planck’s formula for these energy lumps (or quanta): E = hν. E is the amount of energy, ν (the Greek letter nu) is the photon’s frequency, and h is a number called Planck’s constant.

But in another paper the same year, Einstein introduced a different formula for the energy of a particle: a version of the now-famous E = mc ². E is again the energy, m is the mass of the particle, and c is the speed of light.

So here were two ways of calculating energy: one, associated with light, depended on the light’s frequency (a quantity connected with oscillations or waves); the other, associated with material particles, depended on mass.

Did this suggest a deeper connection between matter and light?

This thread was picked up in 1924 by Louis de Broglie, who proposed that matter, like light, could behave as both a wave and a particle. Subsequent experiments would prove him right, but it was already clear that quantum particles, such as electrons and protons, played by very different rules from everyday objects.

A new kind of mechanics was needed: a “quantum mechanics”.

The wave equation

The year 1925 ushered in not one but two new theories. First was “matrix mechanics”, initiated by Werner Heisenberg and developed by Max Born, Paul Dirac and others.

A few months later, Erwin Schrödinger began work on “wave mechanics”. Which brings us back to Hamilton.

Schrödinger was struck by Hamilton’s analogy between optics and mechanics. With a leap of imagination and much careful thought, he was able to combine de Broglie’s ideas and Hamilton’s equations for a material particle, to produce a “wave equation” for the particle.

An ordinary wave equation shows how a “wave function” varies through time and space. For sound waves, for example, the wave equation shows the displacement of air, due to changes in pressure, in different places over time.

But with Schrödinger’s wave function, it was not clear exactly what was waving. Indeed, whether it represents a physical wave or merely a mathematical convenience is still controversial.

Waves and particles

Nonetheless, the wave-particle duality is at the heart of quantum mechanics, which underpins so much of our modern technology – from computer chips to lasers and fibre-optic communication, from solar cells to MRI scanners, electron microscopes, the atomic clocks used in GPS, and much more.

Indeed, whatever it is that is waving, Schrödinger’s equation can be used to predict accurately the chance of observing a particle – such as an electron in an atom – at a given time and place.

That’s another strange thing about the quantum world: it is probabilistic, so you can’t pin these ever-oscillating electrons down to a definite location in advance, the way the equations of “classical” physics do for everyday particles such as cricket balls and communications satellites.

Schrödinger’s wave equation enabled the first correct analysis of the hydrogen atom, which only has a single electron. In particular, it explained why an atom’s electrons can only occupy specific (quantised) energy levels.

It was eventually shown that Schrödinger’s quantum waves and Heisenberg’s quantum matrices were equivalent in almost all situations. Heisenberg, too, had used Hamiltonian mechanics as a guide.

Today, quantum equations are still often written in terms of their total energy – a quantity called the “Hamiltonian”, based on Hamilton’s expression for the energy of a mechanical system.

Hamilton had hoped the mechanics he developed by analogy with light rays would prove widely applicable. But he surely never imagined how prescient his analogy would be in our understanding of the quantum world.

Robyn Arianrhod does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. 100 years before quantum mechanics, one scientist glimpsed a link between light and matter – https://theconversation.com/100-years-before-quantum-mechanics-one-scientist-glimpsed-a-link-between-light-and-matter-261551

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

United States President Donald Trump is well advanced in his systematic campaign to undermine the American media and eviscerate its function of holding him and others in power to account.

Since the late 18th century this function has often been called the fourth estate. It’s the idea the media is a watchdog over the other three estates which, in modern democracies, are parliament, the executive government and the judiciary.

In the US, Trump has had considerable success in weakening the other three.

His Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress, and they have shown no sign of wishing to restrain him.

He has stacked the executive government with cronies and ideological fellow travellers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr (and his anti-vaccination agenda) as secretary of health, a brief stint by Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary.

He has secured the support of the Republican Party to stack the Supreme Court with politically aligned judges who have routinely struck down lower court decisions against Trump, most notably in the matter of deporting migrants to countries other than their homelands.

Pulling funding, applying pressure

The fourth estate’s turn started in March, when Trump stripped federal funding from Voice of America, a public broadcasting service with a global reach, because it was “anti-Trump” and “radical”.

These cuts also hit two other projections of American soft power, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.

In July, he cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in a move that ended all federal support for National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting service and their member stations.

Now he has turned to the private sector media. He does not have the power to cut their funding, so he is taking a different approach: financial shake-downs and threats to the foundations of their business.

In October 2024, even before he was elected, Trump sued the Paramount company for US$10 billion (about A$15 billion). He alleged an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign had been “deceptively edited” by the CBS television network, a Paramount subsidiary.

In February 2025, after he had been sworn in as president, Trump upped the ante to US$20 billion (A$30 billion).

The case was considered by lawyers to have no legal merit, but at that time, Paramount was anxious to merge with Skydance Media, and this was subject to regulatory approval from the Trump administration.

So Paramount was vulnerable to, how shall we say? Blackmail? Extortion? Subornation?

A busy, dangerous July

On July 2, Paramount settled with Trump for US$16 million (A$24 million), which ostensibly is to go towards funding his presidential library.

On July 17 Paramount’s CBS network announced its longtime Late Show would be cancelled from May 2026 after its presenter Stephen Colbert, an outspoken critic of Trump, condemned the corporate cave-in. The Trump administration approved the merger shortly after.

Subsequently the House of Representatives Judiciary and Energy and Commerce committees announced an investigation into whether the $16 million settlement constituted a bribe.

Also in July, Trump sued Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for defamation arising from an article linking Trump to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. He claimed the now-familiar amount of US$10 billion (A$15 billion) in damages.

Legal experts in the US say Trump has next to no chance of winning. In the US, public figures who sue for defamation have to prove that the publisher was motivated by malice, which means they published either knowing the material to be untrue, or not caring whether it was true or not.

This case is never likely to end up in court, nor is it likely that Trump will see a red cent of Murdoch’s money. The two men need each other too much. To borrow a phrase from the Cold War, they are in a MAD relationship: Mutually Assured Destruction.

Coming to heel, one by one

Rupert Murdoch was a guest at Windsor Castle at the recent banquet given for Trump by King Charles.

Considering Murdoch’s bitter history with the Royal Family, it is difficult to imagine Buckingham Palace inviting him without Trump’s urging. It may have been a sign of rapprochement between the two men.

Meanwhile Trump has set his sights on The New York Times, suing it for defamation and claiming US$15 billion (A$27 billion).

Referring to the Times’ endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, he said it had become a “mouthpiece for the Radical Left Democrat Party”.

This case faces the same difficulties as his suit against the Wall Street Journal. The question is whether the Times will stand its ground or whether, like Paramount, it caves.

Among the big three US newspapers, the Times is the only one so far not to have been intimidated by Trump. The other two, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, refused to endorse a candidate at the election on instructions from their owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong respectively, both of whose wider business interests are vulnerable to Trumpian retribution.

Read more:
Two of the US’s biggest newspapers have refused to endorse a presidential candidate. This is how democracy dies

The Post’s decision was condemned as “spineless” by its celebrated former editor Marty Baron.

Now Disney is in the firing line. It owns another of the big four US television networks, ABC. On September 17, it pulled its late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Kimmel had responded to White House accusations that leftists were responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, saying:

we hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.

In what had all the hallmarks of a preemptive buckle, ABC and two of its affiliate networks took Kimmel off air indefinitely after Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said his agency might “take action” against the network because of Kimmel’s comments.

Kimmel is returning to TV, but the damage is already done.

Read more:
Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is the latest sign we’re witnessing the end of US democracy

Over at cable network MSNBC, its senior political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired after he had uttered on air the blindingly obvious statement that Kirk’s own radical rhetoric may have contributed to the shooting that killed him.

This cable network is no longer part of the main NBC network, so it can’t be said that NBC itself has yet come to heel.

Within 24 hours of Brendan Carr’s veiled threat, Trump stripped the veil away and made the threat explicit. Trump said of the national networks:

All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed, they’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat party. I would think maybe their licence should be taken away.

Whether cancelling a licence would breach the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, is a question that might ultimately come before the Supreme Court. Given the present ideological proclivities of that court, the outcome would be by no means certain.

So Trump now has two out of three national newspapers, and two out of the big four national television networks, on the run.

Only one national newspaper and two national networks to go, and one of those is Murdoch’s Fox News, Trump’s most reliable cheerleader.

Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Lawsuits, cancellations and bullying: Trump is systematically destroying press freedom – https://theconversation.com/lawsuits-cancellations-and-bullying-trump-is-systematically-destroying-press-freedom-265848

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Beard, Associate Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Australia free of measles in 2014.

Historically, high childhood measles vaccination coverage and thorough follow-up of suspected cases have helped prevent outbreaks.

But in the last six weeks, a growing outbreak in Queensland – along with cases and clusters in Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales – shows measles can still spread here.

In 2021, no cases were recorded in Australia. But case notifications have continued to climb since, with 57 reported in 2024 and 122 so far in 2025 – and it’s only September. Some of these cases are in children too young to be vaccinated, but most are in adults.

So, what’s going on? Is Australia at risk of losing its herd immunity with lower vaccination rates? Let’s unpack the evidence.

What is herd immunity?

Measles is one of the most contagious human diseases. Symptoms generally include red sore eyes, a runny nose, cough and fever. The distinctive rash usually doesn’t appear until a few days into the illness, meaning the infection may spread to others before measles is suspected.

An unvaccinated person with measles will on average transmit the virus to 12–18 people in a non-immune population. This reproductive rate is six times higher than the original strain of COVID-19.

For this reason, the WHO recommends at least 95% of the total population receive two doses of the measles vaccine in childhood.

This is to create “herd immunity”.

This means a large proportion of the population is immune, either through vaccination or previous infection, protecting the most vulnerable – including those who can’t get vaccinated.

The measles vaccine contains a very weakened form of measles virus. So it can’t be given to people whose immune systems will struggle to contain it, for example, those undergoing chemotherapy.

The measles “herd immunity threshold” is 93–95% in the total population. It is higher for measles than many other diseases because it is so contagious.

If immunity falls below this level, infection may start to spread more widely and large outbreaks can occur.

How do vaccines work in Australia?

Australia has had a nationally funded measles vaccination program since 1972.

The measles vaccine is recommended in two doses, either in combination with mumps and rubella (as MMR vaccine) or with varicella to also prevent chickenpox (the MMRV vaccine).

Under the National Immunisation Program, children get the first dose (MMR) at 12 months and the second (MMRV) at 18 months of age.

Infants as young as six months can safely receive the MMR vaccine for free in certain cases, such as when travelling to countries where measles is occurring.

This currently includes many countries across the world, including in North America and the United Kingdom.

Are vaccination rates going down?

In Australia, immunisation rates in Australia had been increasing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2002, the proportion of five year-olds who’d had two doses of the measles vaccine was just 82%. By the time the pandemic arrived, in 2020, this had risen to 96.8% – and was 94% among two year-olds.

However, since 2020 rates of “fully vaccinated” young children – meaning they have had most recommended vaccines – have fallen year on year.

The proportion of two year-olds who’d had two doses of the measles vaccine fell to 93% in 2023.

The timeliness of measles vaccination has also fallen. Around one in three children now get their first dose late. This means more children are at risk of catching measles at a younger age, when the disease tends to be more serious.

These trends are concerning.

In terms of overall herd immunity, the impacts at this stage may be relatively small. But measles immunity gaps are much greater in some parts of Australia, such as the north coast of New South Wales and the Gold Coast in Queensland.

Measles immunity is also lower in some adults, because vaccination rates were lower when they were children. A second dose of measles vaccine was not added to the National Immunisation Program until 1992.

Read more:
Why people born between 1966 and 1994 are at greater risk of measles – and what to do about it

Why is coverage dropping?

There is a mix of reasons vaccination coverage has been falling in Australia since the COVID-19 pandemic.

These include an increase in questions about the need for, safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

The enormous rise in false and misleading information can sow doubt about the benefits of recommended vaccines.

Concerns about vaccination should be addressed in a respectful way, making use of accurate and up-to-date information, such as that available on the Sharing Knowledge About Immunisation (SKAI) website.

But we also need to minimise practical barriers to accessing vaccination, such as the cost, or difficulty making or getting an appointment.

To maintain herd immunity, we need to ensure all adults under 60 and children from one year are two dose measles vaccinated.

In Australia, free catch-up measles vaccination is available for anyone born after 1966 who doesn’t have proof of two doses of measles vaccine.

Amid a global resurgence of measles and more cases in travellers, supporting international efforts to boost immunisation rates in all countries is critical. This will further reduce the chance of outbreaks here.

We would like to thank Zoe Croker for assistance in drafting this article.

Kristine Macartney administers Australian and NSW Government funding to the NCIRS and NCIRS receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance.

Frank Beard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. New measles cases in Queensland show ‘herd immunity’ is more important than ever – https://theconversation.com/new-measles-cases-in-queensland-show-herd-immunity-is-more-important-than-ever-265850

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Strong, Associate Professor, Music Industry, RMIT University

Last week, Spain joined Ireland, Slovenia, Iceland and the Netherlands in announcing it will not take part in Eurovision 2026 if Israel is allowed to participate. Other countries such as Belgium and Finland have indicated they are considering withdrawing. Boycotting countries would not send an act, pay to participate or be able to vote.

Spain is one of Eurovision’s “big five” competitors. The broadcasters from Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy make the largest financial contributions to the contest, and their acts are guaranteed a spot in the grand final each year.

The addition of one of the big five to the boycott raises the stakes for the contest. The inclusion of Spain will likely increase the legitimacy of the protest and put pressure on countries to declare their position.

Spain’s announcement coincided with a United Nations inquiry calling the events unfolding in Gaza a genocide. In supporting the Spanish broadcaster’s decision, the country’s culture minister Ernest Urtasun equated allowing Israel to continue to compete with looking away from the atrocities being committed.

He said

if Israel takes part, and if we don’t manage to get it thrown out, then we’ll have to take steps [such as withdrawing]. I don’t think we can normalise Israel’s participation in international forums as if nothing’s happened.

Previous controversies

Germany, another of the big five, has been critical of the boycott. On Saturday, their culture minister Wolfram Weimer referred to the foundations of Eurovision, designed to unify people through song after the second world war, to argue against excluding Israel.

He said

It’s precisely because Eurovision was born on the ruins of war that it should not become a scene of exclusion.

Austria, the host for 2026, has similarly made an appeal to the peaceful and collaborative nature of the event in a plea for countries to not drop out.

However, the hosts may find themselves with an easier job if Israel does not compete. The previous two events have been marred by significant controversy. Pro-Palestinian protesters were on the streets in host cities Basel, Switzerland, in 2025, and Malmo, Sweden, in 2024, and were subject to at times violent crackdowns by police.

In the arena, there were reports of tensions between the Israeli delegation and those from other countries, and fans tried to stage protests during the Israeli performance.

Who decides on who participates?

Israel is a member of the body that organises Eurovision, the European Broadcasting Union, an alliance of public service media organisations. Australia’s SBS is an associate member.

Broadcasters decide on who the act will be for their country (sometimes using a public vote), and help fund the event. The EBU has the final call on which countries can take part, and what songs can be performed, including demanding changes to songs deemed too political.

The EBU have pushed the deadline for countries to commit to taking part in the May 2026 competition from early October to mid-December, as it continues a consultation process with broadcasters over Israel’s inclusion.

Governments recognise the contest’s utility as a form of diplomacy, and the countries that are participating in the Eurovision boycott have all strongly criticised Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The actions of the broadcasters who have said they will boycott the event reflect their nations’ positions. National broadcasters are unlikely to ignore national policies and relationships when acting in an area like this that will attract international attention.

Russia’s removal from the 2022 contest is being used as a precedent for the EBU sanctioning a country. In announcing their decision to block Russia from participating, the EBU stated

in light of the unprecedented crisis in Ukraine, the inclusion of a Russian entry in this year’s Contest would bring the competition into disrepute.

In response, Russia has announced plans to revive the Intervision song contest, the USSR’s cold war era answer to Eurovision, further deepening a reemerging political divide.

However, using Eurovision as a sanction may be more effective with Israel. Israel’s participation in international cultural events such as Eurovision is an effort at cultural diplomacy. These platforms allow Israel to present itself as progressive and cool.

In particular, Israel’s use of queer performers at Eurovision has been criticsed as “pinkwashing” – displaying support for the LGBTQIA+ community to construct an image of tolerance and morality.

While the UN declaration that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza already makes that image hard to maintain, condemnation from cultural institutions keeps the issue in the spotlight.

Where to for Australia?

Pressure has been building on Israel politically over the last 24 months. This week Australia recognised Palestine as a state. However, the destruction of Gaza continues, with renewed offensives on a desperate population.

Calls are beginning for Australia to join the boycott.

While this would be a decision made by SBS, which is officially independent from the government, there will be many factors influencing what they do. A boycott could create diplomatic tensions. There may also be backlash for SBS amid efforts to combat antisemitism which critics say risks conflating antisemitism with legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and constraining free speech on Gaza.

But some Australians are holding small hope that maybe SBS can show the way forward for our government and sanction Israel – even if just at a song contest.

Catherine Strong is affiliated with the Defend Dissent Coalition.

– ref. Countries are threatening to boycott Eurovision over Israel’s inclusion. How will Australia respond? – https://theconversation.com/countries-are-threatening-to-boycott-eurovision-over-israels-inclusion-how-will-australia-respond-265747

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

The US government has announced controversial guidance on the prevention and treatment of autism in children.

New health recommendations aim to discourage pregnant women from taking the painkiller paracetamol – also known as acetaminophen and by the brand name Tylenol – to prevent autism.

The recommendations also include using the drug leucovorin to treat speech-related difficulties that children with autism sometimes experience.

So what is leucovorin and what does the science say about its ability to treat autism?

What is leucovorin?

Leucovorin is a form of folic acid, a B vitamin our bodies usually get from foods such as legumes, citrus fruits and fortified grains.

The medication is most often used in cancer treatment. It’s typically used alongside the chemotherapy drug fluorouracil, a cancer treatment that stops cancer cells from making DNA and dividing. Leucovorin enhances the effects of fluorouracil.

Leucovorin is also used to reduce the toxic side effects of methotrexate, another chemotherapy drug.

Methotrexate works by blocking the body’s use of folate, which healthy cells need to make DNA. Leucovorin provides an active form of folate that healthy cells can use to make DNA, thereby “rescuing” them while methotrexate continues to target cancer cells.

Because methotrexate is also used to treat the skin condition psoriasis, leucovorin can also be used as a rescue agent during treatment for this autoimmune condition.

Why is folate important?

Because folate is essential for making DNA and other genetic material, which cells need to grow and repair properly, it’s especially important during pregnancy.

This is because insufficient folate is linked to the development of spina bifida, a condition where a baby’s spine does not develop correctly. For this reason, women are advised to take folic acid supplements before conception and during the early months of pregnancy.

Folate is also important for supporting the production of red blood cells and overall brain function.

Why is it being considered to treat autism?

The recommendation to use leucovorin to treat autism seems to stem from a theory that low levels of folate in the brain can lead to a condition called cerebral folate deficiency.

Children with cerebral folate deficiency don’t usually display symptoms for the first two years. Then they show signs of speech difficulties, seizures and intellectual disability.

As the signs of autism are similar and it usually presents at around the same age, some people have proposed a link between cerebral folate deficiency and autism.

What does the evidence say?

So can giving children folate, in the form of leucovorin, help them to function better with autism? The evidence says maybe yes, and here’s what we know so far.

A review of the evidence in 2021 analysed the results of 21 studies that used leucovorin for autism or cerebral folate deficiency. Children who took the drug generally had improved autism symptoms. But the authors also said more studies were needed to confirm the findings.

Since then, a small 2024 study involved about 80 children aged two to ten years with autism. Half took a daily maximum dose of 50mg of folinic acid (similar to leucovorin), the other half took a placebo. Children given folinic acid showed more pronounced improvement when compared with those who took the placebo.

A similar 2025 study examined the same dose of folinic acid given to Chinese children with autism. Those given folinic acid had greater improvement in a type of social skill known as social reciprocity when compared with children given placebo.

While promising, none of these trials are at the level to change medical practice. We’d need further, larger studies before doctors can make a proper recommendation.

Like all drugs, leucovorin has side effects. The most serious or common are severe allergic reactions, seizures and fits, and nausea and vomiting.

In a nutshell

Overall, the latest health recommendations are not yet backed by sufficient evidence.

While the US Food and Drug Administration will now allow doctors to prescribe leucovorin to treat autism symptoms, the Australian government should not change its prescribing guidance.

Support for people with autism should continue to follow evidence-based best practice until the data from clinical trials of leucovorin is more robust.

Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd (a medical device company) and was previously a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. He is a member of the Haleon Australia Pty Ltd Pain Advisory Board. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design and testing.

Jasmine Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What is leucovorin, the drug the Trump administration says can treat autism? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-leucovorin-the-drug-the-trump-administration-says-can-treat-autism-265849

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoe Goodall, Research Associate, HHAUS research group, Swinburne University of Technology

Sharehousing has traditionally been a rite of passage for many young people and students in Australia, but is also increasingly common among all age groups.

Conflicts with landlords – over issues such as repairs, leaks or mould – are too often part of the renting experience. Our new research explores how renting is complicated for sharehouses – where relationships between housemates can vary from a tight-knit group of friends who share everything and care for each other, to renting a room from a stranger.

Our paper, published today in the journal Housing, Theory and Society, is based on interviews with 25 sharehouse tenants in Melbourne.

We found that achieving “housing justice” is often no simple matter for people living in a sharehouse. Problems with housing conditions, between housemates, and the landlord or real estate agent, can overlap and compound each other.

When faced with these issues, sharehouse tenants can pursue legal action, attempt to negotiate, move out, or just put up with it. But these strategies can cause problems for tenants, especially when not not everyone in the sharehouse agrees on the way forward.

Mould and other housing problems

Many participants spoke about living – currently or previously – in poor-quality housing. One enduring theme that emerged was the problem of mould.

Penelope (all names changed to protect identities) said she’d lived in a sharehouse that was “decrepit” and

excessively damp and mouldy, to the point where all of our furniture and clothes and stuff started to get mould on it.

She considered taking the landlord to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) but “didn’t end up getting all the way to VCAT, because it’s extremely difficult.”

In the end, Penelope and her housemate had to leave the house

very urgently because our stuff was starting to get ruined.

They were temporarily homeless, while the landlord and real estate agent “got away with it” and continued to rent out the house.

Lucas, meanwhile, described the futility of trying to negotiate with property managers who would not respond to maintenance requests, meaning he had to put up with “untenable” housing:

There’s definitely been times where I’ve just felt like, all I have to do is grit my teeth and take it. Because otherwise, I’m just gonna lose.

Sharing as a source of both solidarity and conflict

Housemate relationships are at the heart of sharehousing.

One positive aspect of these relationships is that they may help build solidarity when experiencing problems with housing quality or other conflicts with the property manager.

One participant, Sarah, told of how her housemate successfully secured compensation from their property manager after the landlord started major renovations while she and her housemates were still living there. Seeing her housemate gain compensation enabled her to do the same.

On the other hand, relationships with housemates can complicate attempts to achieve justice.

Stacey, another interviewee, reported how efforts to negotiate with a property manager eventually led to “internal conflict within the house”, and how one housemate became hostile during the process.

Another interviewee, Tayler, also experienced problems with a landlord who was also his housemate, which intensified the conflict.

One participant, Jess, had also experienced domestic violence from a housemate.

I had to, I left before the lease was up. Like I moved back in with my parents because it was so bad. But I continued paying rent because […] I just didn’t want to deal with the further consequences of that.

While Jess was able to move out in this scenario, others described how this wasn’t possible due to a shortage of affordable housing. For example, Janet described how she’d prefer to move out rather than confront a housemate, but didn’t always have the option:

I’ve only left when I’ve had the capacity to do so. Often I’ve had to stay quite a lot longer than I would have liked to, because [I] don’t have the option to move, can’t afford it or nothing available.

Relationships and regulations

Regulations surrounding renters and landlords are framed in a way that assumes there are two parties in a dispute: the tenant and the property owner.

This renders the relationships within sharehousing invisible. Yet, there is clear evidence they impact the way tenancy disputes are managed and addressed.

For example, one interviewee named May was invited to move into a sharehouse by her friend. However, the friend’s property manager said May could not move in if she brought her cat (which is illegal in Victoria).

This shows how sharehousing depends on relationships between housemates and relationships with the property manager. May was aware of the need to put up with this to secure housing:

renters aren’t in a position of power. So, you kind of have to play the game just to have a roof over your head.

Relationships matter when we think about renting problems. While this research focused on sharehousing, there are implications for other renter households especially where conflict or even family or intimate partner violence occur.

Our future research will look at possible policy solutions to better capture the nuances of sharehousing in Australia.

Zoe Goodall has received funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), the Victorian government, the Brian M. Davis Charitable Foundation, Kids Under Cover, and YWCA Australia. She is a recipient of an Australian government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Deb Batterham has received funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) and the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council (ARC). She previously worked for Launch Housing which is a provider of Specialist Homelessness Services and is a registered Community Housing provider.

– ref. Managing mould, housemates, and landlords: new research reveals sharehousing horror stories – https://theconversation.com/managing-mould-housemates-and-landlords-new-research-reveals-sharehousing-horror-stories-265851

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Wood, Professor, The Children’s Hospital at Westmead Clinical School, University of Sydney

United States President Donald Trump has urged pregnant women to avoid paracetamol except in cases of extremely high fever, because of a possible link to autism.

Paracetamol – known as acetaminophen or by the brand name Tylenol in the US – is commonly used to relieve pain, such as back pain and headaches, and to reduce fever during pregnancy.

Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration today re-affirmed existing medical guidelines that it’s safe for pregnant women to take paracetamol at any stage of pregnancy.

Paracetamol is classified as a Category A drug. This means many pregnant women and women of childbearing age have long used it without increases in birth defects or harmful effects on the fetus.

It’s important to treat fevers in pregnancy. Untreated high fever in early pregnancy is linked to miscarriage, neural tube defects, cleft lip and palate, and heart defects. Infections in pregnancy have also been linked to greater risks of autism.

How has the research evolved in recent years?

In 2021 an international panel of experts looked at evidence from human and animal studies of paracetamol use in pregnancy. Their consensus statement warned that paracetamol use during pregnancy may alter fetal development, with negative effects on child health.

Read more:
Take care with paracetamol when pregnant — but don’t let pain or fever go unchecked

Last month a a group of researchers from Harvard University examined the association between paracetamol and neurodevelopmental disorders including autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in existing research.

They identified 46 studies and found 27 studies reported links between taking paracetamol in pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders in the offspring, nine showed no significant link, and four indicated it was associated with a lower risk.

The most notable study in their review, due to its sophisticated statistical analysis, covered almost 2.5 million children born in Sweden between 1995 and 2019, and was published in 2024.

The authors found there was a marginally increased risk of autism and ADHD associated with paracetamol use during pregnancy. However, when the researchers analysed matched-full sibling pairs, to account for genetic and environmental influences the siblings shared, the researchers found no evidence of an increased risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability associated with paracetamol use.

Siblings of autistic children have a 20% chance of also being autistic. Environmental factors within a home can also affect the risk of autism. To account for these influences, the researchers compared the outcomes of siblings where one child was exposed to paracetamol in utero and the other wasn’t, or when the siblings had different levels of exposure.

The authors of the 2024 study concluded that associations found in other studies may be attributable to “confounding” factors: influences that can distort research findings.

A further review published in February examined the strengths and limitations of the published literature on the effect of paracetamol use in pregnancy on the child’s risk of developing ADHD and autism. The authors noted most studies were difficult to interpret because they had biases, including in selecting participants, and they didn’t for confounding factors.

When confounding factors among siblings were accounted for, they found any associations weakened substantially. This suggests shared genetic and environmental factors may have caused bias in the original observations.

Working out what causes or increases the risk of autism

A key piece to consider when assessing the risk of paracetamol and any link to neurodevelopmental disorders is how best to account for many other potentially relevant factors that may be important.

We still don’t know all the causes of autism, but several genetic and non-genetic factors have been implicated: the mother’s medication use, illnesses, body mass index, alcohol consumption, smoking status, pregnancy complications including pre-eclampsia and fetal growth restriction, the mother and father’s ages, whether the child is an older or younger sibling, the newborn’s Apgar scores to determine their state of health, breastfeeding, genetics, socioeconomic status, and societal characteristics.

It’s particularly hard to measure the last three characteristics, so they are often not appropriately taken into account in studies.

Other times, it may not be the use of paracetamol that is important but rather the mother’s underlying illness or reason paracetamol is being taken, such as the fever associated with an infection, that influences child development.

Read more:
Autism is not a scare story: What parents need to know about medications in pregnancy, genetic risk and misleading headlines

I’m pregnant, what does this mean for me?

There is no clear evidence that paracetamol has any harmful effects on an unborn baby.

But as with any medicine taken during pregnancy, paracetamol should be used at the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible time.

If you’re pregnant and develop a fever, it’s important to treat this fever, including with paracetamol.

If the recommended dose of paracetamol doesn’t control your symptoms or you’re in pain, contact your doctor, midwife or maternity hospital for further medical advice.

Remember, the advice for taking ibuprofen and other NSAIDS when you’re pregnant is different. Ibuprofen (sold under the brand name Nurofen) should not be taken during pregnancy.

Nicholas Wood previously received funding from the NHMRC and has held a Churchill fellowship.

Debra Kennedy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. It’s OK to use paracetamol in pregnancy. Here’s what the science says about the link with autism – https://theconversation.com/its-ok-to-use-paracetamol-in-pregnancy-heres-what-the-science-says-about-the-link-with-autism-265768

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniel Thomas, Honorary Lecturer in Biological Sciences, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

Three million years ago, an extinct relative of todays’s great penguins – emperors and kings – lived in Aotearoa New Zealand.

We know this because our new study describes a spectacular fossilised skull of a great penguin found on the Taranaki coast.

Overall, it is 31% longer than the skull of an emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), which can be more than a metre tall and weigh upwards of 35 kilograms.

Compared to emperor penguins, however, the Taranaki great penguin had a much stronger and longer beak. It probably looked more like a king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus), only much bigger.

At the time, the world was warmer than today. But when the climate cooled, this penguin vanished.

We argue the cold wasn’t to blame because crested and little penguins in New Zealand weathered the same change and remained. Great penguins shifted south and today live in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. So what drove their ancient relative to extinction?

The sediments that now form beach-side cliffs in South Taranaki were deposited at a time when global temperatures were about 3°C above those of the pre-industrial era. Fossils from this period are transforming our understanding of how biodiversity might respond to rising temperatures.

For example, Aotearoa was home to box fish and monk seals, both of which are still (sub)tropical species today. In a strange contradiction, they coexisted with great penguins – now only found in much colder climates – in ancient New Zealand.

The northernmost breeding colonies of king penguins today are around latitude 46.1°S in the subantarctic Crozet Islands, where seawater temperatures reach 3-10°C. From there, it only gets colder towards the higher latitudes where emperor penguins live.

Three million years ago, Aotearoa’s great penguins extended as far north as 40.5°S, where South Taranaki was located then. They foraged in waters that were 20°C, much warmer than their relatives experience today.

This balmy existence ended with the Pleistocene ice ages around 2.58 million years ago. Ice extent and sea level shifted back and forward as temperatures fluctuated and ultimately ratcheted downwards. But why would such cooling eradicate giant penguins, which thrive under polar conditions today, from New Zealand?

Giant aerial predators

Fossil evidence for giant penguins in Aotearoa is limited and the exact reasons for their demise remain unclear. Even so, their sheer presence suggests they were less constrained by sea surface temperatures than previously thought. Another mechanism must be at play.

Up until about 500 years ago, Aotearoa was the hunting ground of the giant Haast’s eagle and the huge Forbes’ harrier. These were big raptors. They included large birds like moa in their diet. Their ancestors arrived from Australia inside the last three million years.

Based on what we see with living great penguins, the Taranaki great penguin almost certainly formed large exposed colonies along the coast. These could have been easy targets for a giant eagle or harrier hunting from the air.

By contrast, the smaller penguins still found in Aotearoa today have more cryptic breeding behaviour. They nest in burrows, natural crevices and dense vegetation, and tend to cross beaches at night, which may have helped them avoid aerial predators.

Predation on land is just one hypothesis, though, to help explain why these penguins became extinct in the region while others survived. Other possibilities include changes in the marine environment.

We know that reduced food availability can be devastating for penguins, but it is challenging to see why this would single out the great penguins.

Importantly, our study provides new insight into the habitat tolerances of great penguins. Both king and emperor penguins today can withstand temperatures up to 20°C higher than those they usually forage in.

Three million years ago, their relative experienced such warmth. As the world continues to warm, we need to remember that the geographic range of a species can change as circumstances change.

The marine ecosystem of Aotearoa will move into the habitable zone of many new species, making investigations of the last warm period more important than ever before.

We would like to acknowledge our research co-author Dan Ksepka from The Bruce Museum, Kerr Sharpe-Young for discovering the fossil, and Ngāti Ruanui and Ngāruahine for supporting the collection and research of fossils from their rohe.

Daniel Thomas has received funding from Massey University.

Alan Tennyson and Felix Georg Marx do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Close relatives of emperor penguins lived in NZ some 3 million years ago. What caused their extinction? – https://theconversation.com/close-relatives-of-emperor-penguins-lived-in-nz-some-3-million-years-ago-what-caused-their-extinction-265585

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eliza Middleton, Senior Ecologist, University of Sydney

Spring in Australia has arrived like a celebration. Magpies are warbling in the morning, wildflowers are bursting open across bushland, and the air is humming with life as tiny creatures have stirred back into action after the winter: bees darting between flowers, dragonflies skimming across ponds, and swarms of flying ants mating.

But we are largely blind to Australia’s insects, and more specifically, what has happened to them over years and decades. That’s because Australia – despite having some of the richest insect biodiversity on the planet – doesn’t have long-term datasets about insects. And because of this, we don’t have a coordinated way to know whether our native bees, butterflies, or even pest species are stable, declining, or booming.

But we can all help address this knowledge gap, and now is the perfect time of the year to do so.

Huge changes in insect numbers

Depending on where we look, and which insects we look at, we are seeing huge changes in insect populations.

For example, Europe’s long-running insect monitoring programs, such as the Krefeld study in Germany, have revealed dramatic declines in flying insect biomass, with losses of up to 75% over three decades.

The lack of similar monitoring programs and long-term data about insect populations in Australia is already having consequences. Take the bogong moth.

Once so abundant its migrations darkened the skies of eastern Australia, its numbers have plummeted by more than 99% in some areas in recent years. The mountain pygmy possum, an endangered species that depends on these moths for spring feeding, is now struggling to survive without its main food source.

This cascading effect is a stark reminder that when insect populations collapse, everything that depends on them – plants, animals, even people – can feel the impact.

Yet, we only noticed the bogong moth crash after it happened. Without consistent monitoring, we simply don’t have a baseline to detect change early – let alone prevent it.

Why spring matters for data collection

Spring is when insect life explodes into action. It’s when pollinators emerge to feed and breed, when decomposers such as beetles and flies begin their crucial work recycling nutrients, and when countless species begin to build the food webs that sustain ecosystems through the year.

Miss the spring data collection window, and you miss the moment when insect activity is at its peak. It’s like trying to understand traffic flow in a city by observing it at 3am instead of during peak hour.

Without good insect data, we can’t track shifts in emergence times that are changing due to warming temperatures (aphids are emerging up to a month earlier in the United Kingdom), or notice if key species are missing altogether.

That makes it harder to support agriculture, manage ecosystems, or respond to biodiversity loss in a meaningful way.

The need for a national monitoring network

For years Australian entomologists have been calling for a national insect monitoring network, one that collects regular, standardised data across ecosystems and seasons.

Without better baseline data, we simply lack the capacity to detect or respond to significant declines.

While not a fully fledged national network, initiatives such as Butterflies Australia demonstrate the potential of citizen science to contribute to long-term monitoring through standardised protocols and broad public participation.

Beyond conservation and risk detection, a national monitoring network would also play a critical role in discovering new species. Many of Australia’s invertebrates remain undocumented, and ongoing monitoring can lead to significant scientific discoveries.

One recent discovery came from a citizen science project where students helped identify a previously unknown wasp species in suburban Perth. This highlights the potential of a national-scale approach to not only track what we know, but also uncover what we don’t know.

What you can do

While Australia still lacks a national insect monitoring network, you can help fill the data gaps right now. Whether you’re a budding naturalist, a student, or simply curious about the life around you, there are ways to get involved in building the baseline scientists urgently need.

The Christmas Beetle Count runs every summer and involves taking photos of Christmas beetles to help researchers understand if their populations have declined. From this initiative, we have been able to see Christmas beetles that have not been observed in decades.

The Great Southern Bioblitz is a big citizen science project, where users of iNaturalist are encouraged to upload photos of all kinds of nature to the website. Its goal is to increase our knowledge of southern hemisphere nature.

If you’ve got kids and want to observe nature, the app Seek provides a safer environment for children to take photos and contribute to citizen science.

On a more local scale, you can join a local initiative run by some councils and environmental groups, such as Moth Night and the Sutherland Shire Beetle Hunt.

Insects are the unsung heroes of our ecosystems, pollinating crops, recycling nutrients, feeding birds, and much more. By getting involved in citizen science, you’re not just collecting data, you’re laying the groundwork for a national monitoring system Australia urgently needs, and ensuring we notice what’s changing before it’s too late.

Eliza Middleton received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is affiliated with Accounting for Nature, and is a forum member of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures.

Caitlyn Forster is affiliated with Invertebrates Australia.

– ref. Spring air is humming with insects. But we’re blind to what’s happening to them – https://theconversation.com/spring-air-is-humming-with-insects-but-were-blind-to-whats-happening-to-them-265200

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Harrison Brennan, Director, Sydney Policy Lab, University of Sydney

The upcoming social media ban for people aged under 16 continues to be hotly debated.

Bans in public policy are a blunt instrument with a mixed track record of success. Some issues are better suited to a ban than others.

So what determines the success or failure of banning and what can be done instead?

A brief history

Bans, differing in scope, method and duration, have featured in public policy over time and across a range of areas. These have mostly been aimed at preventing harm.

These can be blanket bans (such as recreational vaping), or efforts to strongly disincentivise certain things.

Gun control laws worked to disincentivise gun ownership. Following the national gun buyback scheme after the Port Arthur Massacre, there was not a single mass shooting in Australia for more than 20 years.

Australia was also the first country in the world to introduce plain packaging for tobacco products. The move aimed to discourage people from taking up smoking and reduce the appeal for those who already smoked.

A 2015 independent study found 25% of the decline in smoking prevalence was attributable to plain packaging.

Slow off the mark

In other areas, preventative action has been slow at state and federal levels.

For instance, when the Whitlam government first moved in 1973 to phase out tobacco advertising, the United Kingdom and United States had already banned it.

The connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer had been evident since the 1920s. Two studies had been published in the 1950s linking smoking to lung cancer, but the tobacco lobby had been searingly strong.

Today, Australians suffer the highest losses and greatest harm due to gambling per adult anywhere in the world.

But Australian governments have lacked the political will to do much about it, including banning gambling ads.

How do we change behaviour?

Something all these policies have in common is the aim to change people’s behaviour to reduce harm.

But key to this is establishing whether you need policy to change a population’s behaviour, or policy to change the behaviour of individual people, or both.

In the field of public health, for instance, the most important thing to work out is whether you are dealing with sick individuals (treating the person at high personal risk of disease) or a sick population (which means focusing on modifying environmental or societal factors causing disease across the population).

By focusing on solutions at the level of the individual, we have often led public policy astray by neglecting to address the broader picture.

So how can make policy for all of society?

We can learn a lot about societal solutions from a somewhat unlikely case study: reducing salt intake.

Salt is an essential micronutrient and a much-needed preservative. But high salt consumption is linked to elevated blood pressure and hypertension, largely due to the sodium contained in salts.

Many studies have researched peoples’ blood pressure problems and left it up to them to change their daily habits

But can we act at a population level instead?

In a community-wide salt replacement initiative in northern Peru, in which one of the authors of this article took part, we swapped regular salt for another salt containing potassium and less sodium.

We made this replacement in households, shops, bakeries. And with food street vendors, community kitchens and restaurants. It was a “mass replacement” for the entire population.

The result was not only reduced high blood pressure in all villages, including in young adults, but was also fewer new cases of hypertension. The reduced availability of salt led to better outcomes at the individual, population and system levels.

Social media, like salt, is also widely available and part of everyday life. Asking people not to use it for their own good is rarely effective in the face social pressure. This is why restricting access to those under 16 is a good example of policy to reduce harm at the population level.

Providing real alternatives

But as any parent or salty food fan will know, when you take something away, you need to offer something in its place.

The Peru study didn’t ban salt, it replaced it. When supermarkets phased out plastic bags, biodegradable or paper ones were provided instead. People trying to drink less can buy non-alcoholic alternatives.

For broad restrictions to be effective, there needs to be, among other things, an alternative: something that actually fulfils the deep, underlying human needs that were fuelling use in the first place.

This is a central challenge to the social media ban. If the desired replacement is real social connection, there needs to be a clear way to achieve it. Accessible and engaging after-school care has high potential in this regard.

Framing the debate

The way we talk about banning something also contributes to its effectiveness and public support.

Preventative action can be perceived as either prohibition or abolition.

Prohibition means stopping someone from doing something, potentially something they used to be able to do. That can create a sense of deprivation.

Alternatively, if people believe something is worth abolishing (not just prohibiting), they think it allows them to have greater freedom to live lives they value.

The ban on single-use plastics focuses on harm reduction for the environment. Although it took some 20 years for all states and territories to ban them, it’s been relatively uncontroversial. The benefits are significant and the substitutes feel good.

One of the challenges with the social media ban is the way it is seen (by adults and kids alike) as the adults taking something away from the kids, thereby prohibiting it.

Instead, the government could frame the ban differently. They could say by abolishing social media use for under 16 year olds, it gives kids the best possible childhood, free of online harm.

Overall, good public policy to reduce harm assesses whether the action should be individual or society-wide, offers an effective replacement and frames the change positively. As we head towards the December 10 implementation of the social media ban, these will be important factors for the government to consider.

Kate Harrison Brennan was an advisor to Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She has received funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation for the Australia Cares project at the Sydney Policy Lab. The Sydney Policy Lab has: a project with funding from a Social Determinants of Health Innovation Grant from the Ramsay Hospital Research Foundation; a partnership with SEED Futures, engaged on primary prevention in the early years; and a project with the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney on Beyond the Bell – rethinking after school hours in Australia. Kate serves on the Advisory Council of SEED Futures.

Jaime Miranda acknowledges having received funding support from the Academy of Medical Sciences, Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, Bloomberg Philanthropies (via University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health), FONDECYT, British Council, British Embassy and the Newton-Paulet Fund, DFID/MRC/Wellcome Global Health Trials, Fogarty International Center, Grand Challenges Canada, International Development Research Center Canada, Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, National Cancer Institute, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, National Health and Medical Research Council, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National Institute on Aging, National Institute for Health and Care Research, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institute of Mental Health, NSW Health, Medical Research Future Fund, Swiss National Science Foundation, UK Research and Innovation, Wellcome, World Diabetes Foundation and the World Health Organization.

He is affiliated with the following academic organisations: Professor at the Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, and founding Director of the CRONICAS Centre of Excellence in Chronic Diseases, both at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (Peru); Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK); Lown Scholar at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (USA); and Distinguished Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health (Australia). He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the InterAmerican Heart Foundation (IAHF); and member of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research at the World Health Organization.

– ref. Banning something to reduce harm is a tricky business. Here’s what works – https://theconversation.com/banning-something-to-reduce-harm-is-a-tricky-business-heres-what-works-265498

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Pate, Senior Lecturer in Physiotherapy, University of Technology Sydney

Most children bounce back from pain after an injury or illness. But for one in five – approximately 877,000 children in Australia – the pain continues.

Clinicians call this chronic or persistent pain, meaning pain that lasts longer than three months. Chronic pain in children such as headaches or abdominal pain may be caused by an injury or underlying condition (for example, arthritis). But pain without a known cause is also common.

For a new report commissioned by Chronic Pain Australia, published on Sunday, we surveyed 229 children, young people and families about their experiences of living with chronic pain.

They told us chronic pain affects every aspect of their lives – from sport, school and friendships, to parents’ ability to work. But it often remains invisible.

What kids and families told us about chronic pain

The 2025 National Kids in Pain Report included 53 responses from children and young people who live with chronic pain and 176 responses from caregivers. The aim was to explore their experiences of chronic pain and how much it affected day-to-day life.

The report paints a stark picture: pain disrupts schooling, erodes friendships, reshapes family life, and places enormous strain on national productivity.

It revealed consistent issues, including:

• diagnosis delays: 64% of families had waited more than three years for a diagnosis, and many had never received one

• school disruption: 83% of children had missed classes because of pain, and more than half had fallen behind academically

• sleep and mental health: 84% struggled with sleep, while more than 80% experienced anxiety, low mood or other psychological impacts

• family and economic costs: almost half of carers had reduced work hours or left employment. One in five parents had resigned, and one in 20 were fired

• gender disparities: girls were disproportionately affected, representing 57% of cases.

The annual economic toll is conservatively estimated at A$15 billion. But perhaps most troubling is how long children waited for their pain to be believed.

One parent told us:

She first complained of pain when was eight, but we didn’t get a formal diagnosis until she was nearly 12. By then she had already missed so much school and was falling behind socially.

Families reported they were repeatedly dismissed, told it was anxiety (71%), “growing pains” (54%) or attention-seeking (35%).

These stigmatising responses can break trust in health-care systems and schools. One young person told us:

I wish someone had believed me earlier. Waiting years made everything worse – school, friends, even just believing in myself.

Invisibility has consequences

Chronic pain in Australia remains largely invisible because it is not formally recognised as a condition or tracked in national health data. This means it is not considered in how health services are planned and funding is allocated.

Although the World Health Organization recognised chronic pain as a distinct condition in 2019, Australia has yet to align with this recommendation.

In paediatric care, this leaves significant gaps.

There are only nine paediatric pain clinics across Australia, and none at all in Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

There are promising signs in New South Wales. New guidance in 2025 sets out how specialised paediatric pain services should deliver coordinated, culturally safe care and connect with schools. The next step is consistent implementation and shorter wait times, especially outside cities.

But federally, the government has moved away from a national plan to specifically manage pain, to a broader approach that focuses on chronic conditions. This risks further erasing pain from national health policy and planning.

Read more:
Australians are in more pain – and our new data shows it’s not just due to ageing

But we know what works

Parents and carers must often navigate referrals for specialists, waiting lists and school adjustments, while also juggling jobs and other children. Caregivers are frequently stressed and their work is disrupted.

But when care is coordinated – connecting health professionals with schools and giving families clear plans to manage pain – parents’ health and work outcomes improve.

International and Australian guidelines for managing chronic pain in children advocate a practical mix of approaches, including:

• age-appropriate movement with pacing (very gradually increasing physical activity)

• sleep support

• skills for managing flare-ups

• psychological therapies that reduce fear and build confidence, and in some instances can reduce pain and disability

• using medicines carefully when needed.

For schools, making “reasonable adjustments” is already a federal requirement under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and the Disability Standards for Education – even if the child does not have a formal diagnosis.

When clinics, families and schools work together on flexible timetables, safe places to rest, and ways to participate remotely, young people can keep learning and stay connected while recovery unfolds.

Recognising chronic pain

We already have evidence-based solutions to deliver better care for young people living with pain. What’s missing is national recognition of this experience and its impact.

Australia should follow the World Health Organization by classifying chronic pain as a distinct condition. This is the first step to fully recognising – and then addressing – paediatric pain.

Children and their carers want what any of us would want: to go to school, play sport, and live a life not dominated by pain.

Joshua Pate has received speaker fees for presentations on pain and physiotherapy. He receives book royalties.

Mark Hutchinson oversees program of work funded by NHMRC, MRFF, ARC, DSTG, DMTC, USDA, MLA, SIF and NIH. He is employed by Adelaide University. He is affiliated with the Australian Pain Solutions Research Alliance as chair of the board, he chairs the Safeguarding Australia through Biotechnology Response and Engagement (SABRE) Alliance advisory board, he is a Member of the Prime Minister’s National Science and Technology Council and he is a board member of Australia’s Economic Accelerator. He serves as an advisor to Alyra Biotech and to the Australian Wool Sustainability Scheme.

– ref. Not just ‘growing pains’: 1 in 5 Australian kids live with chronic pain, but it’s often invisible – https://theconversation.com/not-just-growing-pains-1-in-5-australian-kids-live-with-chronic-pain-but-its-often-invisible-265680

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steve Turton, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Geography, CQUniversity Australia

Australia’s worrying future under climate change was laid bare last week when the first National Climate Risk Assessment was released. It revealed extreme heat, fires, floods, droughts and coastal inundation already threatens lives and livelihoods – and will wreak further havoc in coming decades.

Much media attention focused on the effects in the continent’s south, where most Australians live. But the assessment found Northern Australia will be hardest hit on many fronts, including extreme heat.

This has major implications. Big plans are afoot to turn Northern Australia into Asia’s “food bowl”, as part of broader development for the region. It would involve building large-scale irrigation, dam and water infrastructure to increase agricultural production, create jobs and boost local economies.

But any discussion about transforming Northern Australia must confront the climate hazards threatening the region’s prosperity.

What’s the food bowl idea?

Northern Australia comprises roughly 53% of Australia’s land mass.

Turning the region into a food bowl would involve irrigating savannas and other ecosystems across northern parts of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. The concept dates back decades, but gained momentum in 2015 when the Abbott government released a national white paper on developing Northern Australia.

Efforts to bring the plan to fruition are continuing. In 2018 for example, CSIRO released analysis of Northern Australia’s water resources and agricultural potential. And last year, a business case was developed for a major irrigation area in Far North Queensland.

The vision has been criticised due to concerns about river ecosystems, economic feasibility and Indigenous rights.

A decade ago, I challenged the Northern Australia development agenda from a climate change perspective. While proponents pointed to a bright future for the north – with new roads, rail, dams and food production – I argued climate change may eventually make large parts of the region unlivable.

Since then, changes in climate across the north have confirmed many concerns I described.

More frequent and intense extreme weather poses the biggest climate risk for the region. Northern Australia is largely tropical and subtropical, so global heating effects will be more pronounced. This will force natural, social and economic systems into uncharted climate territory.

Research already shows people, food production and nature will be vulnerable to higher-intensity cyclones, more intense heatwaves, floods, droughts, bushfires and other climate harms.

The new climate risk report paints an even more dire future for the region.

Danger in store for the north

As the risk assessment made clear, the world is on track to heat by at least 2.7°C by the 2090s if we don’t change course. In light of this, the report says:

Northern Australia is likely to experience escalating challenges as its proneness to hazards increases as global temperature rise. This will put pressure on
health, critical infrastructure, natural species and ecosystems, and primary industries. It will also pose additional challenges to emergency responders.

Extreme weather events, including heatwaves, bushfires, flooding and tropical cyclones, will intensify safety and security risks, potentially resulting in loss of life, destabilisation of community structures, and increased migration away from high-risk areas.

The number of heatwave days is projected to increase across Australia – but particularly in the north.

Global heating is already affecting the production of some tropical tree crops, including mangoes and avocados. These crops need periods of cooler winter weather to flower and bear good fruit.

Livestock grazing is the economic lifeblood for many communities in the north’s tropical savannas. The risk assessment notes changes in temperature and water can worsen pasture for livestock. Increasing thermal stress in northern cattle herds is also a significant threat.

The risk assessment also raises concerns about other primary industries, many of which exist in the north. Changes in practices may buy more time. Much will depend on future carbon emissions.

Supply chains – such as storage, transport and distribution – are crucial for getting agricultural produce to consumers. Extreme weather, such as Cyclone Jasper in 2023, is already disrupting supply chains in the north. This will only worsen.

And an agriculture industry needs people. But the risk assessment says without action, some areas of the north may become unliveable and uninsurable. Floods, tropical cyclones and bushfires can leave communities isolated, and these and other hazards pose serious health risks.

What must happen now

Northern Australia has much to lose if carbon emissions keep rising and global heating continues. Adaptation and innovation may allow human communities and industries to survive for a while. But at some stage, crucial tipping points will be breached.

This will degrade the natural assets underpinning the north’s food, fibre and tourism industries.

Australia, like the rest of the world, must continue the journey to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This includes meeting Australia’s new pledge to reduce emissions by 62–70% below 2005 levels by 2035.

Unless global warming is dramatically curbed, Northern Australia is unlikely to prosper in the second half of this century – and grandiose plans to turn the region into a food bowl will turn to dust.

Steve Turton has received funding from the Australian Government.

– ref. Dangerous climate change threatens Northern Australia’s big ‘food bowl’ dreams – https://theconversation.com/dangerous-climate-change-threatens-northern-australias-big-food-bowl-dreams-265727

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rob Richardson, Senior Lecturer in Culinary Arts & Gastronomy, Auckland University of Technology

Come on, baby, light my fire.

We can be pretty sure Jim Morrison wasn’t referring to BBQ when he wrote those famous lyrics – but he may as well have been. As the weather starts to warm across the country, throngs of people will take to the great outdoors to bask in the sun, crack open a cold one and, inevitably, fire up the grill.

It’s a pattern we all know well. But it tends to overshadow another often overlooked pattern, concerning who is holding the tongs?

Traditional masculinity continues to have a stronghold on BBQ. Even as other forms of cooking are (unfairly) treated as “womens’ work”, cooking meat on an open flame is largely framed as an activity for men.

How might we explain these gendered dynamics?

Which came first, the human or the fire?

According to English anthropologist Richard Wrangham, the ability to control fire, and therefore cook food, was the key driver in human evolution. In Wrangham’s words, “we humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of fire”.

Gender division in food and cookery is nothing new. Our prehistoric ancestors structured their society around food. There’s a common perception these early societies were simply split into two groups of “man the hunter” and “woman the gatherer”.

Reality, however, was far more nuanced, with many experts suggesting communal wellbeing overrode distinct gender division. And increasing evidence suggests that, despite their child-rearing responsibilities, women would have hunted, just as men would have gathered.

Today, it is women who do the majority of household cooking in Australia.

The original barbies

In terms of food preparation, butchering predates cooking, and can be traced back to about 2.6 million years ago.

Filleting meat into smaller pieces made it easier to chew and digest large mammals such as mammoths, which allowed meat to become part of our diets early on. There is indirect evidence that homo erectus’ anatomy diverged from non-human primates some 1.9 million years ago because of this shift in diet.

While it’s unclear exactly when humans started to control and manipulate fire, evidence of cooking in the Levant region goes as far back as 780,000 years.

There was even an entire mammoth economy around the end of the last ice age (27,000 years ago), which involved procurement, carcass transport, butchery, food preparation and storage.

Meat was cold-smoked in smokehouses, allowing it to be consumed fresh, or stored long-term. But experts are divided as to who did the cooking. Did the hunters bring their catch back to the group to cook, or did they cook it at the kill site? The general consensus is it was probably both.

Why are BBQs such a sausage fest?

Not only do women do most of the cooking today, they also spend the most time hunting and gathering (from the supermarket). However, this gap is narrowing – particularly in certain demographics.

The genderisation of food remains strong in the retail industry, and extends to advertising and marketing. When did you last see an ad that showed a woman in charge of the BBQ?

Barbecue cookbooks consistently have covers featuring men. There’s not a single woman to be found on the covers of the top 50 best-selling BBQ and grilling books on Amazon.

And just as you’re more likely to see cake mixers on special for Mother’s Day, you’re more likely to see BBQ-related products on sale for Father’s Day.

This gender divide is also noticeable in the professional hospitality industry.

Chef Lennox Hastie of Sydney’s Firedoor restaurant is someone who knows a thing or two about fire. Hastie told us:

There’s no denying that, historically, fire has been wrapped up in a kind of rugged mythology – primal, elemental, often masculine. But some of the oldest, most enduring fire traditions have always been in the hands of women – it’s the industry that’s been slow to catch up. […] Fire doesn’t care who you are. It doesn’t respect ego. It requires attentiveness, intuition, patience – qualities that aren’t gendered.

Although deliberate fire starting, or arson, is a male dominated crime, there’s no evidence men are biologically wired, or pathologically driven, toward fire-setting.

Their over-representation in arson may be better explained by social, behavioural and psychological risk factors, including peer influence, antisocial personality traits, and a lack of emotional regulation.

Peacocking at the grill

Backyard BBQ as we know it is a relatively recent thing, gradually infiltrating our lifestyles in the 1950s and becoming firmly embedded with the introduction of the gas BBQ in the 1960s.

In many ways it is the modern equivalent of the Sunday roast; it fulfils the role of social and cultural ritual and reflects aspects of prestige, generosity and patriarchy. All of this plays into hegemonic masculinity, which frames men as the dominant sex in society: the provider, the carver, the griller.

In contrast, everyday cookery tends to be seen as domestic work, more in service of family wellbeing than a show of social status. It is an unpaid and often undervalued part of the invisible labour that still falls largely on woman.

It’s difficult to give precedence to just one of the multitude of theories that try and explain mens’ dominance over the BBQ. But there is a high chance historical social stereotypes and gendered expectations have a role to play.

Either way, best to keep a fire extinguisher handy.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Women do the most cooking at home. So why do men get to hog the BBQ? – https://theconversation.com/women-do-the-most-cooking-at-home-so-why-do-men-get-to-hog-the-bbq-260419

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Pickles, Professor of History, University of Canterbury

Jacinda Ardern’s second book released within four months, following her memoir, is a simple children’s story. Its title – Mum’s Busy Work – appears to still hold true, then, despite her no longer being prime minister.

Dedicated to her daughter Neve (the narrator of this tale), the “busy work” in fact refers to the big briefcase Ardern brings home nightly.

But the metaphor isn’t laboured in these 32 pages. It’s a book about emotions rather than events, dancing through the days of the working week that dictate Neve’s lifeworld.

Review: Mum’s Busy Work – Jacinda Ardern (Penguin Random House)

“First bloke” Clarke Gayford is there, doing the washing and being present when Neve wakes up on Tuesday and mum is already at work. All three go out for a Saturday picnic. Mum arrives home early on Friday to play hide-and-seek.

In fact, positive mentions of work are thin on the page. On Monday, mum tells Neve she doesn’t always like going to work; Neve thinks, “She looked really tired when she got home.”

There is a welcome chocolate treasure hunt in the prime minister’s office when Neve visits. While mum works at home on Sunday, Neve asks what her job is. Mum replies, “Looking after everyone, like you.”

The book ends with Monday rolling round again and Neve going from stomping her feet at the thought of daycare to dancing with mum in her “clippy-cloppy” work shoes. For Neve, this is mum’s real job: spending time with her, dancing, reading, playing and loving.

Work on her own terms

The pages are cleverly illustrated by Ruby Jones, best known for her TIME magazine cover after the 2019 terror attack in Christchurch. Her signature spare, colourful style captures Neve’s perspective and mood, from separation anxiety to love and joy.

Of course, Neve didn’t write the book. But, as Ardern notes at its end:

This book is based on the words and lessons taught to me by my daughter […] while I was the prime minister of New Zealand. May every child know that no matter what, they are our life’s greatest work.

There is an echo of C S Lewis in this, who said, “Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”

There’s also a hint of conservatism in Ardern’s insistence on labelling herself a “mum” as well as a professional politician. According to the blurb of her recent memoir, A Different Kind of Power, she also “considers her greatest roles to be those she will hold for life – being a mum and proud New Zealander”.

But this isn’t really a retreat. Ardern is subverting the issue of women and work on her own terms. She’s working through her experience of being “a working mother who juggled mum guilt” to open up a conversation and find a better way.

In the memoir, Ardern writes of her fear that the guilt she felt about being absent after Neve was born would have been reinforced by “guilt-inducing words” from her daughter.

It hadn’t been. What I felt – that constant ache that I should be with her more – had been created by me, all on my own. But tonight, Neve finally asked me the question I’d known would come eventually: “Mummy, why do you have to work so much?”

Having a working mum is OK

We have to remember that Ardern had only just learned she was pregnant when she became prime minister – at 37, New Zealand’s youngest in 150 years.

She was entering new leadership territory on the national and international stage, and was only the second world leader to give birth while in office (after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto 30 years earlier).

As women in paid work often do, she largely left the backdrop of juggling new motherhood with her public role out of the picture. Neve was kept out of the spotlight and Ardern separated her job from her family’s private lives.

When she took Gayford and baby Neve to the UN in 2018, it was maybe a signal of things to come. Now, with a memoir, this book and a documentary about her time in power just released, she is challenging that separation.

Feminist scholars call it an “androcentric” view of work, where women entering traditional workplaces have to conform to restrictive and dominant masculine culture, rather than being able to craft new selves.

Mum’s Busy Work responds to that in two ways. On the one hand, it is clearly positioned as an “inspiring and heartwarming” story about the relationship between a working mum and her daughter.

On the other, it belongs to the genre of children’s books that tackle the challenges of unconventional households, such as those with same-sex or sole parents, or those made up of blended families.

This one is about “celebrating the relationship between working mums and their children”. Message: even if your mum works and you go to daycare Monday to Friday and feel separated from her, you are still the most important thing to her.

It’s a book that will be enjoyed and appreciated by working parents who’ve been asked “where is your child?” and “are you still working?”. And by children, who will hear that having a working mum is OK, being a working mum is OK – and missing mum is OK, too.

Katie Pickles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In her new children’s book, Jacinda Ardern explores working ‘mum guilt’ through her daughter’s eyes – https://theconversation.com/in-her-new-childrens-book-jacinda-ardern-explores-working-mum-guilt-through-her-daughters-eyes-265465

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Coppola, Visiting Researcher, Cambridge Neuroscience, University of Cambridge

What gives rise to human consciousness? Are some parts of the brain more important than others? Scientists began tackling these questions in more depth about 35 years ago. Researchers have made progress, but the mystery of consciousness remains very much alive.

In a recently published article, I reviewed over 100 years of neuroscience research to see if some brain regions are more important than others for consciousness. What I found suggests scientists who study consciousness may have been undervaluing the most ancient regions of human brains.

Consciousness is usually defined by neuroscientists as the ability to have subjective experience, such as the experience of tasting an apple or of seeing the redness of its skin.

The leading theories of consciousness suggest that the outer layer of the human brain, called the cortex (in blue in figure 1), is fundamental to consciousness. This is mostly composed of the neocortex, which is newer in our evolutionary history.

The human subcortex (figure 1, brown/beige), underneath the neocortex, has not changed much in the last 500 million years. It is thought to be like electricity for a TV, necessary for consciousness, but not enough on its own.

There is another part of the brain that some neuroscientific theories of consciousness state is irrelevant for consciousness. This is the cerebellum, which is also older than the neocortex and looks like a little brain tucked in the back of the skull (figure 1, purple). Brain activity and brain networks are disrupted in unconsciousness (like in a coma). These changes can be seen in the cortex, subcortex and cerebellum.

What brain stimulation reveals

As part of my analysis I looked at studies showing what happens to consciousness when brain activity is changed, for example, by applying electrical currents or magnetic pulses to brain regions.

These experiments in humans and animals showed that altering activity in any of these three parts of the brain can alter consciousness. Changing the activity of the neocortex can change your sense of self, make you hallucinate, or affect your judgment.

Changing the subcortex may have extreme effects. We can induce depression, wake a monkey from anaesthesia or knock a mouse unconscious. Even stimulating the cerebellum, long considered irrelevant, can change your conscious sensory perception.

However, this research does not allow us to reach strong conclusions about where consciousness comes from, as stimulating one brain region may affect another region. Like unplugging the TV from the socket, we might be changing the conditions that support consciousness, but not the mechanisms of consciousness itself.

So I looked at some evidence from patients to see if it would help resolve this dilemma.

Damage from physical trauma or lack of oxygen to the brain can disrupt your experience. Injury to the neocortex may make you think your hand is not yours, fail to notice things on one side of your visual field, or become more impulsive.

People born without the cerebellum, or the front of their cortex, can still appear conscious and live quite normal lives. However, damaging the cerebellum later in life can trigger hallucinations or change your emotions completely.

Harm to the most ancient parts of our brain can directly cause unconsciousness (although some people recover) or death. However, like electricity for a TV, the subcortex may be just keeping the newer cortex “online”, which may be giving rise to consciousness. So I wanted to know whether, alternatively, there is evidence that the most ancient regions are sufficient for consciousness.

There are rare cases of children being born without most or all of their neocortex. According to medical textbooks, these people should be in a permanent vegetative state. However, there are reports that these people can feel upset, play, recognise people or show enjoyment of music. This suggests that they are having some sort of conscious experience.

These reports are striking evidence that suggests maybe the oldest parts of the brain are enough for basic consciousness. Or maybe, when you are born without a cortex, the older parts of the brain adapt to take on some of the roles of the newer parts of the brain.

There are some extreme experiments on animals that can help us reach a conclusion. Across mammals – from rats to cats to monkeys – surgically removing the neocortex leaves them still capable of an astonishing number of things. They can play, show emotions, groom themselves, parent their young and even learn. Surprisingly, even adult animals that underwent this surgery showed similar behaviour.

Altogether, the evidence challenges the view that the cortex is necessary for consciousness, as most major theories of consciousness suggest. It seems that the oldest parts of the brain are enough for some basic forms of consciousness.

The newer parts of the brain – as well as the cerebellum – seem to expand and refine your consciousness. This means we may have to review our theories of consciousness. In turn, this may influence patient care as well as how we think about animal rights. In fact, consciousness might be more common than we realised.

Peter Coppola does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Major theories of consciousness may have been focusing on the wrong part of the brain – https://theconversation.com/major-theories-of-consciousness-may-have-been-focusing-on-the-wrong-part-of-the-brain-264609

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dafydd Townley, Teaching Fellow in US politics and international security, University of Portsmouth

Following the shooting of his political ally, the far-right activist and commentator Charlie Kirk, on September 10, Donald Trump has signalled his intention to pursue his political enemies – what he refers to as the “radical left”. In the days following Kirk’s assassination, the US president took to social media to announce he was planning on designating the antifa movement a terrorist organisation.

Calling antifa a “SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER”, Trump also threatened to investigate any organisations funding antifa. And when Kirk’s widow, Erika, said she forgave the person who has been arrested for the murder, Trump said he did not. “I hate my opponent,” he told people at a memorial event for Kirk at the weekend.

But Trump’s decision to target his ideological opponents faces significant legal and constitutional issues.

It’s not the first time that Trump has threatened such action. In 2020, he threatened the same thing on social media in response to the widespread protests following the death of George Floyd. But just as is the case in the present day, there was no legal process to designate any domestic group as a terrorist organisation.

Trump also appears to have misunderstood what antifa is. He represents it as a defined organisation, when it is more like a broad ideology. Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University, New Jersey, described the movement as similar to feminism. “There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. There are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group,” he said.

Antifa is shorthand for “anti-fascist”. It has no centralised leadership or defined structure. Despite being able to mobilise to oppose far-right groups with protests and counter-demonstrations, the movement’s dispersed character hampers efforts to classify it as an organisation of any formal kind.

Plans to use Rico laws

One of the laws Trump has suggested that US attorney-general Pam Bondi could use against antifa is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act of 1970. This was passed by Richard Nixon to tackle organised crime, but its application has since been extended to investigate various other organisations and individuals. This has included Donald Trump himself, over alleged irregularities in Georgia during the 2020 presidential election.

Although it would be challenging, the Trump administration might try to use Rico laws to break up antifa’s network if the movement is classified as a terrorist organisation. Authorities could argue that specific individuals are engaged in a series of racketeering activities, including any acts of violence or other criminal behaviour linked to the movement. But this method would undoubtedly face considerable legal challenges.

If the US government finds a way to define antifa as a group and identify people as members – it’s not clear at the moment whether this might be possible – it would then be possible to seek out and attempt to prosecute anyone who facilitates their activities or gives them funds. But as David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, North Carolina, told the BBC this week: “Under the First Amendment, no one can be punished for joining a group or giving money to a group.”

Nevertheless, antifa activists may be subject to increased surveillance if the movement is proscribed. Such actions would mirror the FBI’s extra-legal counterintelligence programme (Cointelpro) that targeted the new left in America during the 1960s. Civil rights groups and Democrats would inevitably raise serious questions concerning executive overreach and possible violations of civil liberties.

Power grab

Labelling antifa as a terrorist group would allow the federal government to circumvent state-controlled law enforcement. It may seek to do so especially in Democrat states and cities where authorities might be hesitant to act against liberal or left-wing demonstrators. Federal agencies such as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security might be drafted in to lead investigations and prosecutions, superseding state authorities.

This consolidation of power would create further legal and political difficulties. While the Posse Comitatus Act is supposed to bar the use of federal military personnel for domestic law enforcement, there are exceptions. If the president invokes the Insurrection Act of 1807 it would give him the power to deploy troops to restore order.

Antifa’s classification as a terrorist organisation could have profound effects on the first amendment rights of large numbers of law-abiding US citizens. It would be a serious danger to American democracy if US citizens were unable to voice their protest and exercise their right to free speech because of this classification.

A decision to vilify anti-establishment rhetoric would set a dangerous precedent for silencing dissent and infringing fundamental constitutional rights in the US during the 21st century.

The administration’s position on domestic extremism has changed significantly with Trump’s plan to label antifa as a terrorist organisation. The political consequences are far-reaching, potentially setting important precedents for the balance between civil liberties and US national security. This could shift the focus more toward security and potentially harm individual freedoms.

But it’s unlikely that the Trump administration will be deterred by any constitutional considerations. This is an executive branch that has acted first and sought justification through the courts. There will be a lengthy legal process if Trump follows through on this. But by the time courts make their final decision, the damage will already have been done to the US political system.

Dafydd Townley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Going after ‘antifa’: Donald Trump’s plans to crush his political foes – https://theconversation.com/going-after-antifa-donald-trumps-plans-to-crush-his-political-foes-265686

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland

“Cut out all dairy. Ditch gluten. Never touch sugar again.” More than 20 million people have watched TikTok videos listing these kinds of rules under the banner of “anti-inflammatory diets.”

The promise is simple: avoid entire food groups and you’ll lose weight, banish bloating and transform your health.

But while the idea of eating to reduce inflammation has a scientific foundation, the social media version strips out nuance and risks becoming unnecessarily restrictive.

Let’s check what’s going on.

What is inflammation?

People often think of inflammation as something to avoid at all costs, but it’s actually a healthy and normal process that helps the body heal and defend itself against infections, injuries, or diseases. Without it, we wouldn’t recover from even small injuries.

Inflammation and the immune system work together: when the body notices injury or infection, the immune system starts to trigger inflammation, which brings immune cells, nutrients and oxygen to the affected area. This helps with healing.

Inflammation can be short-term (acute) or long-term (chronic). Acute inflammation is helpful and part of normal healing. For example, a scraped knee becomes red, swollen and warm as the skin repairs, or a sore throat swells while fighting infection.

Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, can be harmful. It occurs at a low level over time and is often unnoticed, but is linked with many chronic diseases including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.

What causes chronic inflammation?

Factors such as age, smoking, sedentary behaviour, obesity, hormonal changes, stress and irregular sleep patterns have all been linked with chronic inflammation.

Diet also plays a key role. A typical Western diet, which is high in ultra-processed foods such as packaged baked goods, soft drinks, fast food, processed meats and confectionery, and low in fresh fruits and vegetables, has been strongly linked with higher levels of inflammation.

Can anti-inflammatory diets help?

Yes. What we eat can influence inflammation in the body. Diets rich in fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, legumes and healthy fats – and low in highly processed foods and added sugars – are associated with lower levels of inflammation.

The Mediterranean-style diet is the most researched example. It’s packed with vegetables, fruits, wholegrains, nuts, seeds and olive oil, with moderate amounts of fish, chicken, eggs and dairy, and minimal red or processed meat and added sugars.

In 2022, researchers reviewed the best available evidence and found people following a Mediterranean-type diet had lower levels of inflammatory markers in their blood, suggesting it can help reduce chronic inflammation.

Growing research also suggests diets high in processed foods and low in fibre can change the balance of bacteria in the gut, which may contribute to low-level, chronic inflammation.

Where TikTok gets it right… and wrong

Right: probiotics may help

Many TikTok videos recommend probiotic supplements to lower inflammation, and there is emerging science to support this. A 2020 review of randomised controlled trials (the strongest form of evidence) found probiotics may reduce some inflammatory blood markers in both healthy people and those living with a health condition.

But while promising, researchers caution more studies are needed to determine which strains and doses are most effective.

Wrong: ‘avoid lists’ (gluten, dairy) without a medical reason

TikTok advice to avoid dairy or gluten to reduce inflammation isn’t backed by strong science for most people.

Inflammation from dairy or gluten typically only occurs in those with allergies or coeliac disease, in which case, medical dietary restriction is necessary. Cutting them out without cause risks unnecessary nutrient gaps.

For the general population, systematic reviews show dairy products often have neutral or even protective effects on inflammation.

Plus, foods such as yogurt, kefir and certain cheeses are rich in probiotics, which are helpful in reducing inflammation.

Many people believe cutting out gluten will lower chronic inflammation and avoid it to help with gut issues or fatigue.

But there’s little scientific evidence to back this up. In fact, wholegrain consumption has been shown to positively affect health status by improving inflammation.

A Mediterranean-style diet already avoids most processed, gluten-heavy foods such as cakes, pastries, white bread, fast food and packaged snacks. If you feel sensitive to gluten, this way of eating naturally keeps your intake low, without the need to cut out nutritious wholegrains that can benefit your health.

Who might benefit from an anti-inflammatory diet?

For people with certain medical conditions, an anti-inflammatory eating pattern can play a useful role alongside conventional care.

Research suggests potential benefits for conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, autoimmune conditions and arthritis, where chronic inflammation contributes to symptoms or disease progression.

Read more:
Could changing your diet improve endometriosis pain? A recent study suggests it’s possible

In these cases, dietary approaches should be guided by an accredited practising dietitian to ensure that changes are safe, balanced and tailored to individual needs.

The bottom line for healthy people

If you’re otherwise healthy, you don’t need to cut out entire food groups to reduce inflammation.

Instead, focus on balance, variety and minimally processed foods: essentially a Mediterranean-style eating pattern. Support your body’s natural defences with a colourful plate full of vegetables and fruit, enough fibre, healthy fats such as olive oil and nuts. No TikTok “avoid list” required.

Alongside a balanced diet, being physically active, getting good-quality sleep, drinking only minimal alcohol and not smoking all help the body keep inflammation in check. These healthy habits work together to strengthen the immune system and lower the risk of chronic disease.

Lauren Ball receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Health and Wellbeing Queensland, Heart Foundation, Gallipoli Medical Research and Mater Health, Springfield City Group. She is a Director of Dietitians Australia, a Director of the Darling Downs and West Moreton Primary Health Network and an Associate Member of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.

Emily Burch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Do TikTok ‘anti-inflammatory diets’ really work? – https://theconversation.com/do-tiktok-anti-inflammatory-diets-really-work-265089

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katy Bell, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney

Medical imaging is one of the biggest contributors of a hospital’s energy use. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) are particularly carbon intensive, partly due to their need to be constantly cooled. Hospital staff typically leave these machines running 24/7 because they’re often needed for emergency scans.

But do all machines really need to be kept on all of the time? Switching off medical imaging equipment when it isn’t needed would be an obvious way to save energy, costs and reduce carbon emissions.

Our study, published today in the Journal of Medical Radiation Sciences, shows it’s possible to safely do so, and the energy savings are significant.

What did we do?

To investigate the potential for carbon savings in medical imaging, we partnered with the New South Wales Health Net Zero clinical lead for imaging – a practising radiographer.

Together, we came up with a method to test whether changing which CT scanners are left running at certain times could lead to energy savings without compromising care.

We tested this at a large public hospital with three CT scanners. One of these was largely used only during regular daytime hours, but left on to run continuously for potential emergencies if the other two scanners were in use.

The goal was to see the impact of switching this “surplus” CT scanner off when it wasn’t needed – after hours and on weekends. We compared the scanner’s power use with a control period when it was left running continuously.

With the simple intervention of switching off this CT scanner when not in use, we reduced its energy consumption by 32%. This saved 140 kWh of energy in a single week – slightly more power than it takes to run an average Australian household.

There appeared to be no downsides, either. The radiographers reported no impacts on their workflow and there were also some financial savings for the hospital.

Encouragingly, the staff kept it up after the study. Radiographers at the hospital now regularly switch off the scanner when not in use. And radiographers at two other hospitals in the same local health district are now also switching off scanners overnight when they’re not in use.

Towards more sustainable healthcare

There’s no doubt we all must urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent further climate change impacts.

Health care is no exception – it currently contributes about 2 gigatonnes of global carbon emissions each year. Both the Australian Government and healthcare workers recognise that environmental sustainability is a priority.

This CT project was part of a larger program on sustainable healthcare.

Other projects in this program have found ways to reduce emissions from anaesthetic gases, optimise pharmaceutical waste, and reduce unnecessary use of pathology tests in emergency departments, non-sterile gloves in surgical inpatient wards, plastic in procedural packs, and single-use equipment in operating theatres.

In all of these projects we found opportunities to save money and carbon without negatively impacting patient care.

Frontline clinicians can see the unnecessary waste and environmental harm from current healthcare practices. They’re well placed to implement and sustain changes.

By partnering with researchers to generate the evidence base for others to use, we hope to achieve changes at scale. To date, our work has already proven we can move to net-zero health systems that still deliver high quality healthcare but take a smaller toll on the environment.

Katy Bell receives funding from NHMRC. She is an investigator with Wiser Healthcare and the Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Network.

Scott McAlister receives funding from NHMRC.

– ref. CT scanners secretly waste more energy than used by a typical household – but there’s a fix – https://theconversation.com/ct-scanners-secretly-waste-more-energy-than-used-by-a-typical-household-but-theres-a-fix-265582

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Darius von Guttner Sporzynski, Historian, Australian Catholic University

In today’s world, we barely think about picking up a fork. It is part of a standard cutlery set, as essential as the plate itself. But not that long ago, this now-ordinary utensil was viewed with suspicion, derision and even moral outrage.

It took centuries, royal marriages and a bit of cultural rebellion to get the fork from the kitchens of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) onto the dining tables of Europe.

A scandalous utensil

Early versions of forks have been found in Bronze Age China and Ancient Egypt, though they were likely used for cooking and serving.

The Romans had elegant forks made of bronze and silver, but again, mainly for food preparation.

Eating with a fork – especially a small, personal one – was rare.

By the 10th century, Byzantine elites used them freely, shocking guests from western Europe. And by around the 11th century, the table fork began to make regular appearances at mealtimes across the Byzantine empire.

In 1004, the Byzantine Maria Argyropoulina (985–1007), sister of Emperor Romanos III Argyros, married the son of the Doge of Venice and scandalised the city by refusing to eat with her fingers. She used a golden fork instead.

Later, the theologian Peter Damian (1007–72) declared Maria’s vanity in eating with “artificial metal forks” instead of using the fingers God had given her was what brought about divine punishment in the form of her premature death in her 20s.

Yet by the 14th century, forks had become common in Italy, thanks in part to the rise of pasta.

It was far easier to eat slippery strands with a pronged instrument than with a spoon or knife. Italian etiquette soon embraced the fork, especially among the wealthy merchant classes.

And it was through this wealthy class that the fork would be introduced to the rest of Europe in the 16th century by two women.

Enter Bona Sforza

Born in into the powerful families Sforza of Milan and Aragon of Naples, Bona Sforza (1494–1557) grew up in a world where forks were in use; more, they were in fashion.

Her family was used to the refinements of Renaissance Italy: court etiquette, art patronage, ostentatious dress for women and men, and elegant dining.

When she married Sigismund I, king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania in 1518, becoming queen, she arrived in a region where dining customs were different. The use of forks was largely unknown.

At courts in Lithuania and Poland, cutlery use was practical and limited. Spoons and knives were common for eating soups and stews, and the cutting of meat, but most food was eaten with the hands, using bread or trenchers – thick slices of stale bread that soaked up the juices from the food – for assistance.

This method was not only economical but also deeply embedded in courtly and noble dining traditions, reflecting a social etiquette in which communal dishes and shared eating were the norm.

Bona’s court brought Italian manners to the region, introducing more vegetables, Italian wine and, most unusually, the table fork.

Though her use of it was likely restricted at first to formal or court settings, it made an impression. Over time, especially from the 17th century onwards, forks became more common among the nobility of Lithuania and Poland.

Catherine de’ Medici comes to France

Catherine de’ Medici (1519–89) was born into the powerful Florentine Medici family, niece of Pope Clement VII. In 1533, aged 14, she married the future King Henry II of France as part of a political alliance between France and the Papacy, bringing her from Italy to France.

Catherine de’ Medici, introduced silver forks and Italian dining customs to the French court.

Like in the case of Bona Sforza, these arrived in Catherine’s trousseau. Her retinue also included chefs, pastry cooks, and perfumers, along with artichokes, truffles and elegant tableware.

Her culinary flair helped turn court meals into theatre.

While legends exaggerate her influence, many dishes now claimed as French, trace their roots to her Italian table: onion soup, duck à l’orange and even sorbet.

The ‘right’ way to eat

Like many travellers, the curious Englishman Thomas Coryat (1577–1617) in the early 1600s brought tales of fork-using Italians back home, where the idea still seemed laughably affected.

In England, using a fork in the early 1600s was a sign of pretension. Even into the 18th century, it was considered more masculine and more honest to eat with a knife and fingers.

But across Europe, change was underway. Forks began to be seen not just as tools of convenience, but symbols of cleanliness and refinement.

In France, they came to reflect courtly civility. In Germany, specialised forks multiplied in the 18th and 19th centuries: for bread, pickles, ice cream and fish.

And in England, the fork’s use eventually became a class marker: the “right” way to hold it distinguished the polite from the uncouth.

As mass production took off in the 19th century, stainless steel made cutlery affordable, and the fork became ubiquitous. By then, the battle had shifted from whether to use a fork to how to use it properly.

Table manners manuals now offered guidance on fork etiquette. No scooping, no stabbing, and always hold it tines down.

It took scandal, royal taste, and centuries of resistance for the fork to win its place at the table. Now it’s hard to imagine eating without it.

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski receives funding from the National Science Centre, Poland as a partner investigator in the grant “Polish queen consorts in the 15th and 16th centuries as wives and mothers” (2021/43/B/HS3/01490).

– ref. The thousand-year story of how the fork crossed Europe, and onto your plate today – https://theconversation.com/the-thousand-year-story-of-how-the-fork-crossed-europe-and-onto-your-plate-today-260704

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark A Gregory, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, RMIT University

Multiple people have died after a botched Optus network upgrade on Thursday prevented around 600 emergency calls to Triple Zero across Australia.

The deaths currently linked to the outage – which Optus only revealed to the public, emergency services and state/territory leaders on Friday evening at a press conference – include two men, aged 49 and 74, in Western Australia, and a 68-year-old woman in Adelaide.

The outage – plus Optus’s delayed response to it – has sparked fury and condemnation. “I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation in respect to communications worse than this,” South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas said.

This isn’t the first time a blunder by Optus has meant people in crisis have been unable to call emergency services. So what exactly went wrong? And what could be done to prevent a similar tragedy occurring again?

What happened?

Telecommunications companies routinely conduct network upgrades. Ideally, the upgrades should include a suite of tests performed beforehand as well as immediately afterwards. These tests can quickly identify any network or system problems. If a problem is identified, the upgrade can be reversed. Alternatively, what’s known as a failover system can be used if the upgrade will take some time to implement. A failover system is one that has not been upgraded.

On Thursday, Optus conducted a network upgrade. In the process of doing so it failed to identify a technical failure, which impacted Triple Zero calls.

Normal calls were still connecting during this Triple Zero outage. That’s because Triple Zero is a cooperative service that involves telecommunications companies, as well as the governments and emergency services in each state or territory. The Triple Zero core components are implemented separately, meaning any issue with them does not affect calls on the normal network.

The Telecommunications (Emergency Call Service) Determination 2019 sets out obligations on telecommunications companies to ensure they have arrangements in place for dealing with emergency calls. For example, they must provide access to the Triple Zero call service free of charge. They must also have what’s known as a “camp-on” mechanism in place. This allows your mobile phone to connect to another network to make Triple Zero calls if your network has failed.

On Friday afternoon, Optus CEO Stephen Rue apologised to the families of the people who died, as well as the broader community, for the outage.

“You have my assurance that we are conducting a thorough investigation and once concluded we will share the facts of the incident publicly”.

Not the first time

That might sound familiar. That’s because this isn’t the first time a telecommunications blunder of this kind has happened.

On March 1 2024, a Telstra network disruption resulted in 127 calls to Triple Zero failing – thankfully without fatal consequences. In that case, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) fined Telstra A$3 million.

On November 8 2023, Optus was responsible for another network meltdown which prevented more than 2,100 people from accessing Triple Zero. Optus also failed to conduct 369 welfare checks on people who had attempted to make an emergency call during the outage.

Nobody died as a result of that failure either. Optus, however, was hit with a A$12 million fine by the ACMA for breaching emergency call regulations. It was also subject to a formal review, commissioned by the Australian government and completed in April, which made 18 recommendations to prevent similar incidents occurring again.

These recommendations included establishing a “Triple Zero custodian” who would have oversight and overarching responsibility for the efficient functioning of the Triple Zero ecosystem. They also included more clearly and explicitly articulating precisely what is expected of network operators in regard to ensuring calls are delivered to Triple Zero, and requiring telecommunications companies to share real time network information detailing outages with emergency services and other relevant parties.

Following the most recent outage, federal Communications Minister Anika Wells said the Australian government has “accepted all recommendations from the previous Optus Outage Review and has fully implemented 12 of the 18 recommendations, with the remaining six underway”.

But the fact three people are dead because they couldn’t reach Triple Zero due to yet another network outage highlights the urgent need for more action.

Encouraging all telcos to lift their game

The federal government should consider even stronger minimum performance standards for telecommunications companies that provide the foundation for enforcement. These standards could stipulate, for example, minimum download and upload speeds. They could also require telecommunications companies to make a public notification about an outage within a specified time period – ideally as soon as they themselves are aware of it.

There should also be a mandated requirement for telecommunications companies to establish reasonable engineering practices to help prevent updates taking out part or the whole network. These practices could include automated testing before and after updates are carried out.

And while the ACMA will soon launch an investigation into this recent outage, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission could also investigate it. Specifically, the commission could look at whether the actions of Optus amounts to unconscionable conduct, and issue more severe fines.

This may serve to encourage Optus and other telecommunications companies to lift their game and better protect public safety.

This article has been amended to update the number of deaths linked to the outage after further investigation occurred over the weekend.

Mark A Gregory has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network grants program and the auDA Foundation. He is a life member of the Telecommunications Association.

– ref. Optus Triple Zero outage has left multiple people dead. A telecommunications expert explains what went wrong – and how to fix it – https://theconversation.com/optus-triple-zero-outage-has-left-multiple-people-dead-a-telecommunications-expert-explains-what-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it-265692