Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kira Westaway, Associate Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

In 2009, when our team first found a human skull and jaw bone in Tam Pà Ling Cave in northern Laos, some were sceptical of its origin and true age.

When we published a timeline in 2012 for the arrival of modern humans in mainland Asia around 46,000 years ago based on the Tam Pà Ling evidence, the sceptics remained.

In short, the site was given a bad rap. One of the most interesting caves in mainland Southeast Asia was frequently overlooked as a possible route on the accepted path of human dispersal in the region.

However, in new research published today in Nature Communications, we report more human remains found in Tam Pà Ling – and a more detailed and robust timeline for the site. This shows humans reached the region at least 68,000 years ago, and possibly as long as 86,000 years ago.

Plenty of evidence, but hard to date

Our team of Laotian, French, US and Australian researchers has been excavating at Tam Pà Ling for many years. You can see a detailed, interactive 3D scan of the site here.

As we dug, we found more and more evidence of Homo sapiens at earlier and earlier times.

First there was a finger bone, then roughly 2.5 metres deeper, a chin bone, then part of a rib. In total, eight pieces were found in only 4.5 metres of sediment – which may not sound like a lot, but is huge in archaeological terms.

Surely, we thought, this would be enough for Tam Pà Ling to take its place among the early human arrival sites in Southeast Asia.

But a hurdle remained: the cave is hard to date. This has prevented its significance being recognised, and without a convincing timeline the cave’s evidence will not be included in the debate over early human movements.

Many common dating methods can’t be used

There are a few difficulties with dating Tam Pà Ling.

First, the human fossils cannot be directly dated as the site is a world heritage area and the fossils are protected by Laotian laws.

Second, there are very few animal bones and no suitable cave decorations, either of which might be used for dating.

And third, the entrance of the site is wide and steep. This means any charcoal found in the cave, which is useful for dating, may well have come from outside – so it has little relation to the age of the sediment inside.

This means the backbone of the timeline must be established by the dating of the sediment itself, using techniques such as luminescence dating.

Signals in buried minerals

Luminescence dating relies on a light-sensitive signal that builds up in buried sediment, resetting to zero when it is exposed to light.

This technique mainly uses two minerals: quartz and feldspar.

Quartz can only be used in the younger levels as it is limited by how much signal it can hold. In the deeper layers it can often underestimate the age, so in Tam Pà Ling we only used quartz to date the top three metres of the sediment.

For the lower levels (four to seven metres), we had to switch to dating using feldspar to fill in the gap in the age profile. Below six metres the feldspar grains started to weather and we had to resort to fine-grain dating, using tiny mineral grains all mixed together.

Dating teeth

Tam Pà Ling is relatively poor in animal evidence. Yet, eventually two teeth from a cow-like animal were unearthed at 6.5 metres deep that could be dated using two distinct techniques.

Uranium series dating works by measuring uranium, and the elements into which it transforms via radioactive decay, within the tooth. Electron spin resonance dating relies on measuring the number of electrons in tooth enamel.

Read more:
Old teeth from a rediscovered cave show humans were in Indonesia more than 63,000 years ago

Each technique offers an individual numerical age for the fossil. By combining the two, we obtained robust direct dates, which can complement the luminescence chronology.

A closer look at sediment

To make the dating as strong as possible, we used every technique we could, such as applying uranium series dating to a stalactite tip that had been buried in sediment.

We also began to support all our dating evidence with a very detailed analysis of the sediments to assess the origin of the fossils.

Micromorphology is a technique that examines sediments under a microscope to establish the integrity of the layers that buried the fossils.

This is a key component of the new chronology, as it helped establish that there was a fairly consistent accumulation of sediment layers over a long period.

By 2022, we had amassed an array of dating evidence that could be modelled to determine the exact age of each layer and the fossils they buried.

A stop on the route of human dispersal

Our updated chronology revealed humans were present in the vicinity of Tam Pà Ling Cave for roughly 56,000 years. It also confirmed that, far from reflecting a rapid dump of sediments, the site contains sediments that accumulated steadily over some 86,000 years.

The age of the lowest fossil, a fragment of a leg bone found seven metres deep, suggests modern humans arrived in this region between 86,000 and 68,000 years ago.

The evidence from Tam Pà Ling has pushed back the timing of Homo sapiens arrival in Southeast Asia. This suggests the mainland, along with the coastal and island locations, may have also been a viable dispersal route.

Read more:
A fossil tooth places enigmatic ancient humans in Southeast Asia

Tam Pà Ling is just a stone’s throw from Cobra Cave, where we found a tooth some 150,000 years old belonging to a Denisovan, the now-extinct human relatives otherwise known only from remains found in Siberia and Tibet. This suggests the site may lie on a previously used dispersal route among hominins.

Tam Pà Ling continues to reveal pieces of the puzzle of the ancient human journey across the world. Only time will tell how many more it has in store.

Kira Westaway receives funding from Australian Research Council

Meghan McAllister-Hayward receives funding from Flinders University College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and the ARC Future Fellowship awarded to Associate Professor Mike Morley.

Mike W Morley receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council

Vito C. Hernandez receives funding from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences of Flinders University, and the ARC Future Fellowship grant of Associate Professor Mike Morley.

– ref. Bones, the ‘Cave of the Monkeys’ and 86,000 years of history: new evidence pushes back the timing of human arrival in Southeast Asia – https://theconversation.com/bones-the-cave-of-the-monkeys-and-86-000-years-of-history-new-evidence-pushes-back-the-timing-of-human-arrival-in-southeast-asia-206232

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cameron Webb, Clinical Associate Professor and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney

Wrangling head lice, and the children they infest, must be up there with the most challenging duties a parent or carer has to face.

Primary school-aged children, who seem to always be in close proximity to one another, are the most susceptible to lice.

But by exploiting the screen-sharing and selfie-taking habits of tweens and teens, these little parasites are finding more ways to spread.

And they’re no easier to kill off.

What are head lice and nits?

Head lice, known by their scientific name Pediculus humanus capitis, are tiny insects that are only found among the hair on a human’s head. They’re not found anywhere else on the planet.

They scuttle up and down shafts of hair. They have perfectly designed claws, that look a little like carabiners, allowing them to move about how a rock climber uses guide ropes. They’re agile on our hair, but clumsy once they’re off.

They don’t jump or fly. They move from head to head through direct physical contact.

Our hair is their home but our blood is their food. Head lice feed on the scalp and have specially designed mouth-parts to suck out blood up to a half dozen times a day. It means child with an average sized infestation of head lice may give up less than 0.01 ml of blood per day.

When it comes time to lay eggs, that we affectionately refer to as “nits”, the lice don’t want the more than 100 or so eggs they can produce in a lifespan just rolling off our heads. They “cement” their eggs to the shafts of hair. It’s some of the best “superglue” you can find!

Once laid, the eggs will hatch within a few days. Within a week, the lice are ready to lay more eggs. The adult lice can live for up to a month if conditions are right.

My child has head lice, should I be worried?

While closely related lice have been implicated in the spread of some of the most dangerous and deadly pathogens to human health, head lice are much more benign. They’re annoying but won’t make us sick.

Their bites may cause an itchy irritation to our skin. Our bodies react to the saliva they inject when they bite. In the same way we all vary in our reaction to mosquito bites, the same differences result from lice bites. Some people will hardly notice them, others will be driven wild with itchiness.

Health authorities in Australia do not consider head lice a risk of transmitting pathogens that are harmful to humans.

There is no doubt they’re annoying but perhaps the greatest health threat of head lice is to the health and well-being of parents responsible for their eradication.

Read more:
Here’s how you beat ‘indestructible’ head lice

Do we really need chemicals?

“Just kill them all, whatever it takes” is a common refrain among those trying to rid their children of the latest round of infestation.

There is a wide range of products available at your local pharmacy to treat head lice. These products should be registered with the Therapeutic Goods Administration and be assessed as both safe and effective to use. Most of these products are insecticides that kill the lice on contact.

However, evidence seems to be mounting that some of these insecticides aren’t working as well as they once did. Resistance in head lice to commonly used products may be the result of their excessive or incorrect use. The more lice that escape a treatment, the greater the chances of them developing resistance in much the same way bacteria are developing tolerance and resistance to commonly used antibiotics.

Head lice are still susceptible to alternative approaches. Products derived from Australian plants, such as tea tree or eucalyptus, may be better than insecticides. But these are still chemicals.

All these products should be used in accordance with the directions for safe use.

A range of products are marketed as “repelling” head lice. But there is little evidence these are a reliable way to avoid picking up head lice from your friends or family.

Is there a chemical-free approach?

A strong recommendation by health authorities in Australia is to skip the sprays, creams, and lotions and embrace the “conditioner and comb” or “wet comb” method and physically remove the lice.

This is not just good advice for those not wanting to avoid chemicals, it overcomes having to deal with insecticide-resistant lice.

The steps in this process are relatively straight forward.

To immobilise the lice, apply hair conditioner to the child’s damp hair. Then use a fine toothed “lice comb” to systematically work through the hair and remove adult lice. Regularly wiping the comb on tissues or paper towel will reveal the dispatched lice.

This approach works but must be repeated twice, about a week apart, to break the life cycle of the head lice.

Head lice eggs are less susceptible to treatment, no matter what treatment you choose. As all the eggs will hatch within a week or so, repeating treatments again and targeting the adult lice before a new batch of eggs is laid will provide the best results.

The secret to effective eradication of the infestations is patience and persistence. Perhaps a new practice in mindfulness?

Read more:
Curious Kids: what’s the point of nits?!

Will our household ever be free of them?

Head lice are a normal part of life for young children. It doesn’t matter how clean and tidy your house is, you’ll inevitably have to deal with an infestation.

Frequent washing of bed sheets, towels, and vacuuming floors won’t keep them away. Head lice don’t survive long out of our hair so you’re unlikely to pick them up from carpet, furniture, or even sharing hats. They don’t float around in swimming pools either.

If a child has persistent infestations and has an adverse reaction to the head lice, consult your local health professional. There are some alternative options, including some medications, that may also assist in reducing the bite reactions as well as the infestation itself.

Cameron Webb and the Department of Medical Entomology, NSW Health Pathology, have been engaged by a wide range of insect repellent and insecticide manufacturers to provide testing of products and provide expert advice on mosquito biology. Cameron has also received funding from local, state and federal agencies to undertake research into mosquito-borne disease surveillance and management.

– ref. ‘Help, my kids keep getting head lice!’ Here’s how to break the cycle of nits – https://theconversation.com/help-my-kids-keep-getting-head-lice-heres-how-to-break-the-cycle-of-nits-207024

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lynda Goldsworthy, Research Associate, University of Tasmania

Amid the challenges of climate change, resource extraction and pollution, the survival of species and ecosystems depends on setting aside protected areas. But plans to establish marine protected areas in East Antarctica have stalled.

Next week, the 27-member Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources will gather at a special meeting in Santiago, Chile, to try to break the deadlock. There’s much at stake, given the seemingly implacable opposition from China and Russia. China appears more concerned about fishing for krill than conservation, while Russia’s objections are less clear.

The need for Antarctic marine protected areas was first discussed in response to the 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development. The formal plan was adopted three years later, in 2005. While China had not yet joined the commission at that time, it was a member when the commission reaffirmed this commitment in 2011.

These areas were meant to protect a representative suite of Antarctic marine environments, such as unique seafloor communities, deepwater canyons, and highly productive coastal and oceanic food webs. They were to be developed, assessed and agreed on the basis of the best available science.

Read more:
A krill aquarium, climate research, and geopolitics: how Australia’s $800 million Antarctic funding will be spent

Slow progress on Antarctica’s marine parks

So far, two marine protected areas have been agreed by the commission: South Orkney Islands Southern Shelf in 2009; and the Ross Sea Region in 2016. Since then, the commission has been unable to agree on any further proposals, including the East Antarctic Region marine protected area. This was first proposed by Australia in 2011. It’s the oldest of those proposed but not yet agreed. The commission has also been unable to adopt the research and monitoring plans or the reviews of the existing marine protected areas.

This year, the United Nations agreed to a treaty on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. This treaty will be up for adoption at a final conference session on June 19-20, 2023.

This treaty sets a global target of 30% of the global oceans to be in marine protected areas by 2030. This will be the likely yardstick against which the Commission’s future performance will be measured. So far, the commission’s marine protected area achievement is just 4.7% of the area of Southern Ocean that it is responsible for.

Of the 27 member countries of the commission, 21 have formally committed their support for the East Antarctic Region marine protected area. Only China and Russia have repeatedly opposed this and other proposals. They are now challenging the commission’s consensus agreement to establish the marine protected area network in Antarctica.

The shrinking East Antarctic Region Marine Protected Area

The proposed East Antarctic Region marine protected area initially consisted of seven distinct areas designed to protect the diversity of environments in the region. Since then, Australia and its partners, now numbering 17, have granted many compromises in the quest for consensus. The number of distinct areas has been reduced to three and fishing is allowed unless explicitly excluded.

To specifically accommodate China’s concerns about future krill fishing, Australia sacrificed the unique and special Prydz Bay region. That’s despite the fact China’s krill fishing aspirations could be more than adequately met from the rest of the region. Nonetheless, Russia and China continue to withhold consensus on this proposal.

Increasingly, the rhetoric opposing marine protected areas is centred around an argument that invokes a “balance” between “conservation” (in this case, the establishment of marine protected areas), and “rational use” (in this case the right to fish). On both legal and practical grounds, the conservation versus rational use argument centres on the very core of the international agreement that covers the oceans of the region, the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

The convention was agreed in 1980 to protect all Antarctic species from potential over exploitation. Its objective was – and remains – clearly centred on conservation in the region. Fishing is allowed, as long as the species and ecosystems of the region are conserved. The convention states that its objective “is the conservation of Antarctic marine living resources”. It identifies those resources as “populations of fin fish, molluscs, crustaceans and all other species of living organisms, including birds” and clarifies that “conservation” includes “rational use”, if such rational use can be conducted with minimal impact on the ecosystem.

In recent years, Russia and China have both argued that there is too much emphasis on conservation. They state that there needs to be a re-balancing between fishing and conservation. In constructing this argument, they are engaging in a wilful reinterpretation of the convention – and ignoring the significant time dedicated by the commission to fisheries management.

A reliance on consensus

The commission, like the rest of the Antarctic Treaty System, makes decisions on the basis of consensus. This means that some decisions take may take quite some time to be agreed, but the strength of consensus is that all parties are then committed to the final result.

Consensus is built on trust and good faith. But consensus will be undermined when agreement is withheld in bad faith, or used as a means to achieve other objectives. The actions of one or a few that withhold consensus, or who negotiate in bad faith, could, if not confronted, undermine all decision-making in the commission, including decisions on sustainable fisheries.

Now is not the time for endless compromise

We must not continue compromising for an apparent “quick win”. The East Antarctic Region marine protected area has been evaluated by the commission’s scientific committee, and the commission has repeatedly reached the point where only Russia and China withhold agreement. It is this behaviour that needs to be explicitly challenged, not the marine protected area proposal itself.

These nations need to explain their specific concerns, and in the spirit of consensus, provide workable alternatives that meet their obligations under the conventions and accommodate the aspirations of all members.

Australia has held many discussions with China and Russia over the years to help resolve their issues. With China, these discussions have been thorough and cordial, and it is clear this nation has a deep and comprehensive understanding of the marine protected area proposal. Several bilateral meetings have also been held with Russia; however, it remains unclear what their specific objections are, particularly as they are no longer fishing.

There are no obstacles to China agreeing to the East Antarctic Region marine protected area proposal now. They have agreed to two large Antarctic marine protected areas in the past. The East Antarctic marine protected area poses no substantive obstacle to China’s aspirations in the region, including their stated desire to harvest krill.

There is much at stake at this upcoming special meeting, including the reputation of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. The protection of the Antarctic requires that a way forward on marine protected areas be found.

Read more:
Australia wants to install military technology in Antarctica – here’s why that’s allowed

Marcus Haward receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre.

Lynda Goldsworthy and Tony Press 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. Can next week’s special meeting in Chile break the deadlock over East Antarctica’s marine park proposal? – https://theconversation.com/can-next-weeks-special-meeting-in-chile-break-the-deadlock-over-east-antarcticas-marine-park-proposal-206531

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simone Driessen, Assistant Professor in Media & Popular Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam

“It must be exhausting, always rooting for the anti-hero”, sings Taylor Swift on her latest album Midnights. Yet, the stadiums of her Eras super tour are filled with a crowd that feels anything but exhausted: social media overflows with footage of both Swift and her fans having a great time.

Until the Nashville shows. When the 1975’s lead singer, Matty Healy, attended all three concerts of the newly single Swift, her fans started to vocally worry that the two were dating.

Problematic Matty Healy

A romance between Swift and Healy felt unpalatable to many of her fans. Healy’s messy, amoral rock stardom, and frequent instances of public controversy, collided with Swift’s carefully crafted good girl image.

Swift’s fans took offence at what they believed was Healy’s sexist, racist and antisemitic behaviour. In an episode of The Adam Friedland Show podcast, for instance, Healy was recorded laughing along with racist jokes ridiculing rapper Ice Spice. On stage, he was seen doing what looked like an offhand Nazi salute while giving Kanye West a shout-out.

Healy perhaps assumes his fans understand him to be joking, but also does not seem to care much. If politics have become a joke – so Healy seems to think – you might as well joke about them. In the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino describes Healy as a post-woke celebrity, a persona switching between tenderness and trollishness.

His attitude irked Swift’s fans. Their rumoured relationship felt like a political oxymoron to them: how could a progressive, feminist celebrity like Swift fall for someone so problematic? Some fans accused Swift of performative activism: perhaps she, herself, had really not cared all along.

Social media filled with tweets from fans urging Swift to break up with Healy, followed by articles in Forbes, Rolling Stone, Buzzfeed and the Guardian, in which journalists, too, argued about Swift’s relationship with Healy.

In every iteration, their relationship was decidedly framed in political terms: by dating Healy, Swift condoned his hurtful statements and actions.

Breaking her silence

American celebrity has become an increasingly politicised institution in the last decade. When Donald Trump announced his run for the presidency in 2015, many celebrities opposed him. Swift stayed quiet at the time, which led to confusion about her political viewpoints. It facilitated the hijacking of Swift’s persona by the alt-right, who believed she had an “Aryan spirit”.

In 2018, Swift broke her silence and spoke out in support of progressive values. Swift’s statements were more explicit than the political flirtations of other celebrities: she named specific conservative politicians she opposed in a 2018 Instagram post, urging her audiences to not vote for them.

In an interview with Vogue from 2019, she said “rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male.”

The song You Need To Calm Down added a catchy sound to Swift’s newfound political voice. Through her politicisation, Swift gained new fans. Although not everybody believed her sudden change of heart, most applauded her for it.

Swift emphasised the importance of developing a political and social consciousness, potentially offering white women a blueprint out of political passivity and into action.

The politics of cultural consumption

When Swift’s audiences fight over the meaning of her stardom, and in extension debate the political values of her fandom, they are confronting the question of what a “good” pop star really looks like.

To those critical of Swift’s associations with Healy, this has to be a socially engaged, politically responsible celebrity who leads by example. The anti-Healy sentiment signals a craving for a star who legitimises rather than forecloses our desire for a better, more just and fair world.

Though celebrities can form an important source of joy, there are dangers in outsourcing our politics onto their individual, albeit, charming shoulders.

A framework in which Healy symbolises all things bad, with Swift personifying all things good, obstructs a more structural engagement with the issues at stake here. It falls into a trap of individualisation: presenting sexism, racism and antisemitism as individual character traits rather than historically anchored structures of violence.

In this narrative, getting rid of Healy would somehow allow Swift’s audiences to see Swift as whole again – as morally and politically pure, somehow not implicated in these structures of oppression Healy so carelessly embeds in his persona.

To focus solely on political evaluations of individual celebrities like Swift and Healy paves the way for a situation shaped by anti-politics, in which policymakers and political institutions get a free pass.

If individual celebrities are framed as the rotten apples causing moral and political chaos, it would mean that inequality and oppression could be solved by simply tossing those individuals out rather than focusing on the crucial need to fight misogyny, racism and antisemitism in structural, sustainable manners.

A month after the concerts in Nashville, Swift released a song with Ice Spice. On her Instagram and Twitter, she expressed her love for the young, talented rapper.

Not long after, Healy was seen kissing a security guard at his own concert. The internet let out a collective sigh of relief. Some fans celebrated the break-up as a victory; the fruit of their digital labor. Entertainment Weekly reported the two had come to realise they are not compatible. A day later, The Daily Mail wrote the two had actually never really dated.

But none of this seemed to matter much to those who had been arguing about the two for weeks now. Their relief and happiness about Swift being politically virtuous remained. Now that this issue had been resolved, the internet could finally go back to being a gathering place for uplifting concert videos from Swift’s Eras tour.

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. Rooting for the anti-hero: how fans turned Taylor Swift’s short relationship with Matty Healy into a political statement – https://theconversation.com/rooting-for-the-anti-hero-how-fans-turned-taylor-swifts-short-relationship-with-matty-healy-into-a-political-statement-207108

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Naish, Professor in Earth Sciences, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

The slow-down of the Southern Ocean circulation, a dramatic drop in the extent of sea ice and unprecedented heatwaves are all raising concerns that Antarctica may be approaching tipping points.

The world has now warmed by 1.2℃ above pre-industrial levels (defined as the average temperature between 1805 and 1900) and has experienced 20cm of global sea-level rise.

Significantly higher sea-level rise and more frequent extreme climate events will happen if we overshoot the Paris Agreement target to keep warming well below 2℃. Currently, we are on track to average global warming of 3-4℃ by 2100.

While the recent Antarctic extremes are not necessarily tipping points, ongoing warming will accelerate ice loss and ocean warming, pushing Antarctica towards thresholds which, once crossed, would lead to irreversible changes – with global long-term, multi-generational repercussions and major consequences for people and the environment.

The Earth system is designed to reach equilibrium (come into balance) in response to climate heating, but the last time atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) were as high as they are today (423ppm) was three million years ago.

Read more:
Antarctic alarm bells: observations reveal deep ocean currents are slowing earlier than predicted

It took a millennium for the world’s climate to adjust to this. When it did, Earth’s surface was 2℃ warmer and global sea-levels were 20m higher due to Antarctic ice-sheet melting. Back then, even our earliest human ancestors were yet to evolve.

The evolution of humankind could only begin after CO₂ levels dropped below 300ppm, about 2.7 million years ago. Since then, Earth’s average temperature has fluctuated between 10℃ during ice ages and 14℃ during warmer inter-glacial periods.

During the past 10,000 years of our present inter-glacial period, Earth’s greenhouse gas thermostat has been set at 300ppm of CO₂, maintaining a pleasant average temperature of 14℃. A goldilocks climate – not too hot, not too cold – but just right for human civilisation to flourish.

The Earth system is interconnected

Current global heating is taking the Earth system across a threshold humans have never experienced, into a climate where Antarctica’s ice shelves and marine ice sheets can no longer exist and one billion people, currently living near the coast, will be drowned by rising seas.

This will be a world where wildfires, heatwaves, atmospheric rivers, extreme rainfalls and droughts – such as those we have seen globally last summer – become commonplace.

The Earth system (oceans, atmosphere, cryosphere, ecosystems etc) is interconnected. This allows energy flow, enabling physical and ecological systems to remain in balance, or to regain balance. But connections can also mean dependencies, leading to reactions, amplifying feedbacks and consequences. Changes have roll-on effects, much like toppling dominoes.

Read more:
Antarctica’s heart of ice has skipped a beat. Time to take our medicine

Feedback loops – cyclical chain reactions that repeat again and again – can make the effects of climate change stronger or weaker, sometimes stabilising the system, but more often amplifying a response with adverse impacts.

Change is also not always linear. It can be abrupt and irreversible on human timescales if a threshold or tipping point is crossed.

Here, we outline one sequence of changes and consequences, including feedback loops and thresholds, using the example of global heating melting Antarctica’s ice sheets and the resulting sea-level rise.

We take a 50-year view into the future, as this is relevant for today’s policy makers but also sets in place much longer multi-generational consequences. While we focus on this example, there are many other Antarctic tipping points, including the effects of freshwater from ice-sheet melt on marine ecosystems and the effects of Antarctic change on Aotearoa’s temperature and rainfall patterns.

Antarctica in a warming world

Unless we change our current emissions trajectory, this is what to expect.

By 2070, the climate over Antarctica (Te Tiri o te Moana) will warm by more than 3℃ above pre-industrial temperatures. The Southern Ocean (Te Moana-tāpokopoko-a-Tāwhaki) will be 2℃ warmer.

As a consequence, more than 45% of summer sea ice will be lost, causing the surface ocean and atmosphere over Antarctica to warm even faster as dark ocean replaces white sea ice, absorbing more solar radiation and re-emitting it as heat. This allows warm, moist air in atmospheric rivers from the tropics to penetrate further south.

This accelerated warming of the Antarctic climate is a phenomenon known as polar amplification. This is already happening in the Arctic, which is warming two to three times faster than the global average of 1.2℃, with dramatic consequences for the permanent loss of sea ice and melting of Greenland’s ice sheet.

Antarctic tipping points

The warmed waters melt the ice shelves, which are floating tongues of ice that stabilise the Antarctic ice sheet, slowing down the flow of ice into the ocean.

Ice shelves can pass a tipping point when local ocean temperature thresholds are crossed, causing them to thin and float in places where they were once held in place by contact with the seabed. Melting at the surface also weakens ice shelves. In some cases, water on the surface fills up cracks in the ice and can then cause large areas to disintegrate catastrophically.

By 2070, heat in the ocean and atmosphere will have caused many ice shelves to break up into icebergs that will melt and release a quarter of their volume into the ocean as freshwater. By 2100, 50% of ice shelves will be gone. By 2150, all will have melted.

Without ice shelves holding back the ice sheet, glaciers will discharge at an even faster rate under gravity into the ocean. Large parts of the East Antarctic ice sheet and almost the entire West Antarctic ice sheet sit on rock in deep depressions below sea level.

They are vulnerable to an irreversible process called marine ice sheet instability (MISI). As the edges of the ice retreat into the deep basins, driven by the ongoing encroachment of warm ocean waters, the loss of ice becomes self-sustaining at an accelerating rate until it is all gone.

Another positive feedback, called marine ice cliff instability (MICI), means cliffs at the margins of the retreating ice sheet become unstable and topple over, exposing even taller cliffs that collapse under their own weight continuously like dominoes.

If global heating is not held below 2℃, ice-sheet models show global sea-levels will rise at at an accelerating rate up to 3m per century. Future generations will be committed to unstoppable retreat of the Greenland and marine sections of the Antarctic ice sheets, causing as much as 24m of global sea-level rise.

These changes highlight the urgency for immediate and deep cuts to emissions. Antarctica has to remain a stable ice-covered continent to avoid the worst impacts of rising seas.

Programmes around the world, including the Antarctic Science Platform, are prioritising research about future changes to the Antarctic ice sheet. Even if the news is not great, there is still time to act.

Timothy Naish receives funding from MBIE. He is a member of Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and co-leads an international research programme investigating Instabilities and Thresholds in Antarctica (INSTANT) for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). He has also been a lead author on IPCC assessment reports.

– ref. Antarctic tipping points: the irreversible changes to come if we fail to keep warming below 2℃ – https://theconversation.com/antarctic-tipping-points-the-irreversible-changes-to-come-if-we-fail-to-keep-warming-below-2-207410

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

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has categorically denied misleading the Senate over her prior knowledge of the Brittany Higgins’ interview, but refused to be drawn on what discussion she might have had with Higgins or her partner David Sharaz at the time.

Gallagher has, however, said she did not communicate anything about the interview, which was to be aired on The Project, to Anthony Albanese, Labor Senate leader Penny Wong, their staffs, or her own staff.

“I was provided with information in the days before the allegations were first reported, and I did nothing with that information,” she said in a statement to the Senate. “Absolutely nothing. I was asked to keep it to myself, and I did.”

Later, under concerted opposition interrogation, she declined – on the grounds of confidentiality – to say whether she had been supplied with the yet-to-be broadcast Project interview, as has been reported. She also warded off questioning about whether she had given feedback.

In a Senate estimates committee meeting in 2021, Gallagher said she’d had no knowledge. She was replying to Liberal then-minister Linda Reynolds’ claim a Labor senator had warned her two weeks before Higgins made her rape allegation of the then-opposition’s plan to use it politically.

Higgins alleged she was raped in Reynolds’ office by fellow staffer Bruce Lehrmann, which he denied. (Lehrmann was not named in The Project interview.)

Gallagher said in her statement: “I was shocked at the assertion made by Senator Reynolds with the clear implication that I was responsible or had some involvement with making that story public.

“That was not true. It was never true, and I responded to that allegation by saying no one had any knowledge.”

She said she explained to Reynolds the same night that she’d been given “a heads up about the allegations in the days before they became public, an explanation she accepted at the time”.

Gallagher also said she’d had no role in the payout the Commonwealth has made to Higgins.

Earlier, at the Labor caucus meeting, Anthony Albanese declared the caucus was “1000%” behind her.

Albanese heaped praise on Gallagher, who is also Minister for Women, telling her “we thank you, we honour you, we’re with you”.

He told caucus that “no government has done more to put women at the centre of policy making than what has happened under Katy Gallagher”.

He described her as “a person of extraordinary integrity”, saying the attack on her was unfair, unjustified, and unscrupulous. No backward step would be taken, he said.

À lire aussi :
View from The Hill: Brittany Higgins story continues its damaging trail, with no end in sight

Opposition leader Peter Dutton told the Coalition party meeting it was “an open and shut case” that Gallagher had misled the Senate

“It is increasingly clear that a group of Labor operatives conspired to maximise the damage. It was absolutely brazen. Labor used an alleged rape victim for political purposes.”

He said it was entirely appropriate for the opposition to put pressure on Labor to answer the questions.

Labor is attacking the Coalition for taking up this issue, arguing this will deter young women coming forward when they have been sexually assaulted. Albanese said “the real tragedy is the impact this will have on any woman contemplating coming forward”.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus condemned the leaking of private text messages between Sharaz and Higgins, in which they discussed Gallagher being altered before the Project interview went to air.

Answering a question from crossbencher Zali Steggall he said “I am deeply concerned about the apparent unauthorised publication of material produced as a result of a subpoena in the criminal trial of Mr Bruce Lehrmann.

“Material produced to a court in response to a subpoena is subject to an implied undertaking from the parties who receive it, that it won’t be used for purposes other than for those court proceedings.”

He said the police were examining a complaint about this. The Ten Network has taken the leak to the police.

Steggall said in a statement: “The media should not have a leave pass on people’s right to privacy.

“Media publication of leaked private material produced for a police investigation undermines trust and confidence in the criminal justice system for victims. This is not in the public interest.”

Reynolds on Tuesday began legal action against the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, alleging Plibersek had defamed her in comments this week about her handling of the Higgins matter.

Meanwhile former prime minister Scott Morrison told parliament he and Fiona Brown, a staffer in then-minister Reynolds office who dealt with the Higgins case, had different recollections about whether they had spoken about the matter

Morrison had told the House in 2021 that he had spoken with Brown, who by then was working in his office, but Brown told the Weekend Australian that he had not.

In a Tuesday statement, Morrison said: “While I believed my response to be accurate at the time, I cannot, obviously, fully discount that her recollection of those events now is the more accurate. However, I reject absolutely any suggestion of deliberate intent in any such possible inaccuracy in my response.”

Morrison at the weekend spoke to Brown – who had said in the interview that she had felt unsupported by Morrison and his office.

He told parliament, “It was and remains my strong view that Ms Brown did all she could to provide support to Ms Higgins at that time.”

Michelle Grattan ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

– ref. Katy Gallagher says she didn’t alert Albanese or Wong to the pending Brittany Higgins’ interview – https://theconversation.com/katy-gallagher-says-she-didnt-alert-albanese-or-wong-to-the-pending-brittany-higgins-interview-207627

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tessa Copp, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, University of Sydney

Many women who want to have children and are getting older worry about their fertility. The “egg timer” blood test is marketed as an empowering way to give women insights to help them plan when to have children.

Online companies are now also selling the test directly to consumers to do at home, promoting the test as a way for women to decide when to have a baby, even if they aren’t thinking of having one any time soon.

But it can’t reliably predict the likelihood of pregnancy or how long it would take to get pregnant.

Despite this, egg timer testing is promoted to women not undergoing IVF as a way to assess their current and future fertility.

Our analysis of Australian and New Zealand fertility clinic websites found some claimed the test could predict a woman’s chance of conceiving or identify women at risk of early menopause.

What can and can’t the test do?

The test measures the level of anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) in the blood and is known clinically as an AMH test.

AMH is produced by follicles in the ovaries (little fluid-filled sacs that contain immature eggs) and helps follicles and eggs grow during the menstrual cycle. Because the number of follicles in the ovaries drops with increasing age, the level of AMH also falls.

The AMH level indicates the number of eggs in the ovaries, or ovarian reserve.

It is often used in IVF treatment, as it can suggest how many eggs a woman may get when her ovaries are stimulated with fertility drugs.

But it can’t tell you anything about egg quality. Women with low AMH levels have the same chance of conceiving as women with normal AMH levels.

It also can’t reliably predict menopause timing for individual women.

Because of this, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists strongly discourages AMH testing in women who are not seeking fertility treatment. It states the test:

should not be ordered or used to counsel women who are not infertile about their reproductive status and future fertility potential.

No similar guidance has been published by the relevant colleges in Australia.

Read more:
Women’s fertility: does ‘egg timer’ testing work, and what are the other options?

Who gets AMH tests and why?

The test isn’t Medicare-subsidised. Most AMH tests are paid for privately by consumers, costing around A$80-$120. Because of this, data on current test usage is not publicly available.

To find out how many women in Australia are accessing AMH testing and why, we conducted the first investigation into its use in Australia.

We surveyed a representative sample of 1,773 women aged 18 to 55, recruited through the Life in Australia national study.

We asked them if and how they had heard about AMH testing, whether they had ever had an AMH test, their main reason for testing and how they accessed the test.

Our results, published today, show 13% of the women had heard about AMH testing and 7% had had an AMH test.

The majority had the test for medically indicated reasons, such as during infertility investigations (51%), or to find out if a medical condition had affected their fertility (11%). This included having had chemotherapy or radiotherapy, endometriosis, thyroid issues, and others.

Read more:
Young people with cancer should have affordable options to preserve their fertility

Concerningly, one-third reported having had the test for other reasons. This included gaining insights into their fertility or inform their reproductive life planning (30%).

Most women who had an AMH test first heard about it from their GP or fertility specialist, suggesting doctors are currently the main drivers of test uptake.

However this may change with the recent emergence of direct-to-consumer AMH testing in Australia, as online companies increase their marketing.

What are the downsides of having an AMH test?

Getting the test to inform you about your fertility may lead you to make choices based on a false premise.

If you get a normal or high AMH result, it may give a false sense of security about delaying pregnancy, when age is the most important factor of female fertility.

If you receive a low result, it may cause unwarranted anxiety about not being able to conceive. This may cause pressure to conceive earlier than desired, or create a sense of urgency and haste towards fertility treatment, such as egg freezing.

To make informed decisions about AMH testing, women need clear, evidence-based information. We have developed and are currently testing an evidence-based information guide to assist with this.

Can other tests tell me about my fertility?

Unfortunately, there is no reliable test of a woman’s fertility.

But it’s important to know a woman’s age is the greatest predictor of her chance of pregnancy. The only real way to know your fertility is by trying to get pregnant when you are ready.

Read more:
Women are often told their fertility ‘falls off a cliff’ at 35, but is that right?

Tessa Copp is supported by an NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellowship (2009419). She is on the Scientific Committee of the Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference.

Jenny Doust receives funding from Centre of Research Excellence on Women and Non-communicable Diseases (CRE-WaND) NHMRC APP1153420.

Karin Hammarberg works part-time for the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority.

– ref. Don’t believe the hype. ‘Egg timer’ tests can’t reliably predict your chance of conceiving or menopause timing – https://theconversation.com/dont-believe-the-hype-egg-timer-tests-cant-reliably-predict-your-chance-of-conceiving-or-menopause-timing-207008

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Asmita Manchha, Research fellow, The University of Queensland

Aged care workers will see their award wages increase by 15% at the end of this month. It’s recognition that their work has been undervalued, and that something needs to be done to solve the looming critical shortage of aged care workers as the population ages.

Higher wages was a key recommendation of the aged care royal commission. But how much money is enough to compensate for the stigma associated with aged care work?

Our research shows that aged care work is burdened by three types of stigma – physical, social and moral.

Physical stigma refers to work performed under particularly dangerous conditions, or being exposed to dirt, bodily fluids and death. Examples of jobs with high physical stigma include firefighting, working with sewage and being an undertaker.

Social stigma is associated with work seen as low-status, because it involves being in a servile relationship and working people belonging to marginalised group – in this case, older people.

Moral stigma involves work that is viewed as deceptive or unethical. Examples include used car salespeople and loan sharks. Our findings point to a moral stigma around aged care work, which is reinforced by media coverage of elder abuse and neglect.

All three stigmas put aged care work in a select group of maligned occupations. Higher wages may ameliorate some of these stigmas, but more will be needed to address them all.

Read more:
Overseas recruitment won’t solve Australia’s aged care worker crisis

Physical, social and moral stigmas

Our research is based on surveying 159 health professionals who do not currently work in aged care about their perceptions of the sector and the work.

Many occupations are stigmatised. For example, being a miner carries a high physical stigma, a welfare worker a social stigma, and a real estate agent a moral stigma.

Some occupations have two strong stigmas, such as being a prison guard (physical and social stigma), being in the military (physical and moral stigma), or being a debt collector (social and moral stigma). The following graph shows how US researchers Blake Ashforth and Glen Kreiner categorised different occupations in their 2014 study, “Dirty work and dirtier work: Differences in countering physical, social and moral stigma”.

Our research shows that aged care work carries the burden of all three stigmas.

How can higher wages help?

Attracting more people to aged care work requires challenging all three of these stigmas. The question is to what extent higher wages can do this.

It’s generally the case that higher pay means higher occupational prestige.

Higher pay can’t reduce physical stigma, but it can compensate for it – just as high salaries compensate people willing to do mining work.

It can certainly help to diminish the social stigma, by signalling that society values this work more than it has done in the past. But the relatively small wage increase will not overcome the fact that society puts greater value on occupations that focus on “curing” rather than “caring”.

Higher pay may reduce the moral stigma, but only if other royal commission recommendations regarding better training and management are also implemented. The cases of abuse and neglect highlighted in media stories aren’t just about “bad apples”, but broader systemic issues such as staffing ratios and time allocated to direct care.

More fundamentally, the stigmatisation of aged care work reflects a structural deficiency of the economy, which fails to celebrate and remunerate caring work.

The federal government has taken a number of steps to address this, including giving the Fair Work Commission greater powers to address systemic low payment of female-dominated work, and expanding the potential for multi-enterprise enterprise bargaining.

But much more will need be done before all care work is valued the way it needs to be.

Read more:
Wages and women top Albanese’s IR agenda: the big question is how Labor keeps its promises

Asmita Manchha is employed as a Research Fellow in the Bolton Clarke Research Institute. Her views are her own as a researcher and do not represent the views of the aged care provider she is affiliated with.

– ref. We need more than a 15% pay rise to beat the 3 stigmas turning people off aged care jobs – https://theconversation.com/we-need-more-than-a-15-pay-rise-to-beat-the-3stigmas-turning-people-off-aged-care-jobs-206670

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Shortis, Lecturer in HIstory, RMIT University

In September last year, US President Joe Biden spoke to Americans from the “sacred ground” of Independence Hall in Philadelphia – the birthplace of the Constitution of the United States. In that landmark speech, Biden warned Americans, and indeed the world, that:

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.

Less than a year later, American democracy is being subjected to yet another stress test – one to add to an already exhaustingly long list.

As former President Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time in months – this time on federal charges – Biden must navigate uncharted territory. He could soon be faced with trying to win an election against an opponent being prosecuted by the government he leads.

At the same time, as he said in September, Biden is attempting to unite Americans “behind the single purpose of defending our democracy”.

Is it possible for a president to do both at once?

Defending the rule of law

Biden came into office under the shadow of a violent attack on American democracy. The near-success of the January 6 insurrection on the US Capitol felt like it could have been a test run – one that might be repeated, given the chance.

Biden insisted the integrity of American democracy thus requires accountability. As he put it,

American democracy only works only if we choose to respect the rule of law.

To Biden, ensuring this respect for the rule of law meant restoring the reputation and the integrity of the Department of Justice after the Trump administration. As part of this, Biden nominated Merrick Garland for the position of attorney general.

Garland had previously been nominated for a seat on the US Supreme Court by then-President Barack Obama in 2016. Republicans, however, refused to schedule nomination hearings until after the presidential election, thwarting Garland’s bid to join the court. Garland’s conduct then – and throughout his career – assured many that as attorney general he would act with integrity and, perhaps most importantly, political impartiality.

Read more:
Could Joe Biden be the most consequential American president of our times?

Garland has been nothing but consistent in this position. After his appointment, Garland said he would avoid “any partisan element of our decision-making about cases”. Garland is also, like Biden, staunch in his insistence that “no person is above the law in this country” – not even former or aspiring presidents.

In a functioning democracy, both things must hold at once.

When it comes to investigating Trump’s alleged activities, Garland has sought to ensure his department can do both – remain above the political fray, while ensuring the rule of law.

Appointing Jack Smith as special counsel was key. Not only does Smith’s appointment ensure a level of distance between Garland and the investigations, it also,
according to Garland, “underscores the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability”. Smith is politically unaffiliated and has an impeccable background in the law, including as a former war crimes prosecutor at The Hague.

Biden, too, is maintaining distance as best he can. He wasn’t in Washington when the indictment went public. He told reporters in North Carolina that he had not, and would not, speak to Garland about the case.

The Biden administration and Department of Justice see that distance as a critical part of the task of keeping American democracy functioning.

Reacting with resentment and fury

Biden’s political strategy is important, too – he wants to win an election, after all. Part of his own campaign messaging is that he is serious about the survival of the republic, and about protecting Americans from what he has called the “semi-fascists” in the Republican Party who are leading the charge against him.

Biden is all too aware, however, this is about a lot more than a game of political strategy. When, as Biden observed not so long ago, “too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal”, prosecuting a political strategy along these lines is incredibly difficult.

Republicans’ own strategy in the face of these latest charges against their presumptive leader should surprise no one. The rhetoric of the dominant, Trump-supporting faction of the party is designed to reinforce a longstanding politics of resentment and fury, which they are aiming squarely at Biden.

Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for example, incorrectly claimed that Biden himself had indicted “the leading candidate opposing him”, presumably in an effort to defeat him. Senator J.D. Vance similarly claimed Biden is “using the justice system to pre-emptively steal the 2024 election”. Senator Josh Hawley – who famously raised his fist in salute of insurrectionists during the January 6 riots – mooted the end of the American republic on Twitter.

To these Republicans, the clear distance between Biden, the Department of Justice and the attorney general – and the attorney general and special counsel leading the investigations – doesn’t matter. Nor does the substantial evidence against Trump.

Going beyond the more coded language of some of their more senior colleagues, some Trump-supporting representatives have opted for naked incitement. In Arizona, for example, one Republican congressman said “we have now reached a war phase”. In Louisiana, a colleague described the indictment as “a perimeter probe from the oppressors”.

Read more:
Yes, federal charges against a former president are unprecedented – but so is Trump’s political power

These Trump supporters know exactly what they are doing. They are actively testing the strength of American democracy, probing for weak points. They support, after all, a man who has called for nothing less than the “termination” of the Constitution. The difference between that and Hawley’s fear-mongering over the end of the US republic is only who gets to be in charge.

As he attempts in his re-election campaign to appeal to Americans who do not subscribe to Trump’s dangerous and distorted view of the world, Biden must prosecute a message of political integrity and the importance of the rule of law, while at the same time resisting continued assaults against them.

Whether Biden is up to these dual tasks remains to be seen. But the continued survival of the institutions of American democracy requires that he is.

Emma Shortis is a member of the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN).

– ref. For Joe Biden, the indictment of Donald Trump carries a heavy responsibility – and a risk – https://theconversation.com/for-joe-biden-the-indictment-of-donald-trump-carries-a-heavy-responsibility-and-a-risk-207603

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Suddenly Australians are being told we need to produce more if we want our wages to merely keep up with inflation.

Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe has begun referring to “productivity” in each of the statements he makes after each Reserve Bank board meeting.

Whereas in the past he has only said we needed to boost productivity to lift real wages (to lift wages growth above price growth), he has begun saying we need to boost productivity to justify wage increases well below inflation.

The Governor is right to say that labour productivity (output per hour worked) is falling. He’s also right to say that’s unusual. But it would be wrong to conclude that the solution is for workers to simply work harder.

A tougher line for workers than for business

Lowe has been suggesting he will only tolerate the wages growth we’ve got “provided that trend productivity growth picks up”.

Inflation is officially 7%. The Reserve Bank’s best guess is that the update, due in six weeks, will show it has fallen to 6.3%.

Wages growth is only 3.7%, and the bank’s best guess is the update, due in nine weeks, will show it little changed at 3.8%.

This means wages growth is below inflation and set to stay that way. But Lowe is concerned enough about wage increases that aren’t backed by productivity growth that he prepared to push up interest rates further to bring them down.

Read more:
Why RBA Governor Philip Lowe wants to damage the economy further

As it happens, this isn’t something he has said about businesses. Last month, Telstra said it would lift its mobile and data charges “in line with the consumer price index, rounded to the nearest dollar”.

That’s an increase of 7%, allowing Telstra to boost its charges in line with inflation in a way Lowe doesn’t want workers to. And Telstra won’t need to show it is more productive. It won’t need to offer anything extra.

Productivity is slipping

The official figures show labour productivity (output per hour worked) falling. Although it usually increases, and increased very fast in the 1990s, GDP per hour worked has been falling since March 2022. Since then, it’s down 4.6%.

But it’s the sort of thing that would be expected when there’s a surge in employment. All other things being equal, the more hours that are worked, the less GDP per hour should be.

In the past year, hours worked have surged an extraordinary 5% to an all-time high. When a cafe puts on an extra staff member it doesn’t immediately mean it’ll sell more food. When a childcare centre or a school puts on extra staff it mightn’t produce more at all.

Short-term, more jobs means lower productivity growth

In the short term, the quickest way to boost measured productivity is to bring on recession and throw people out to work.

In 2009, productivity jumped in the United States after what people there called “The Great Recession”. In Australia, we know that period better as “the global financial crisis” – because there was no local recession. Employment stayed strong, while productivity growth slumped.

As a rule, getting people into paid work is something to be welcomed, and as a rule there’s not much anyone can do to stop it. This means that a key driver of measured productivity is beyond anyone’s direct control.

And there’s another driver that’s hard to control.

When mining booms, non-mining productivity slumps

One of the biggest direct drivers of measured productivity is automation. The more that employers put in machines to increase output per worker, the greater the output per worker.

One of the reasons it’s hard to increase output per worker these days might be that the industries that are growing are those such as aged care, which are hard to automate. The Productivity Commission says after growing 2.2% per year through the 1990s, labour productivity grew by just 1.1% per year in the decade to 2020.

And there’s something else. When the price of Australia’s mineral exports booms, which it does from time to time for reasons beyond Australia’s control, other non-mining businesses tend to spend less installing machines. To use the approved terminology, there’s less “non-mining business investment”.

Former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry believes the two are connected. He says high prices for mineral exports push up the value of the Australian dollar, which makes Australian non-mining businesses less able to compete with imports and less able to see the sense in installing machines.

Henry says that’s what’s happening at the moment. Australians and foreigners are finding better opportunities overseas.

Australia has become a net exporter, rather than a net importer, of investment funds – a change Henry says isn’t only because superannuation has boosted household savings.

There are all sorts of things we can do to boost labour productivity. Earlier this year, the Productivity Commission published a nine-volume report outlining them.

But they won’t pay quick dividends, and it’ll be hard going while employment remains robust (which is something we want) and minerals prices remain high (which is something we probably want).

In what has to be his most re-quoted observation ever, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman famously said

productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.

There are all sorts of things we can do to boost productivity. But to the extent that productivity is in anyone’s hands, it is in the hands of employers, and broader economic forces beyond anyone’s ability to easily control.

Telling us to work harder is unlikely to make much difference.

Peter Martin 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. Don’t blame workers for falling productivity – we’re not the ones holding it back – https://theconversation.com/dont-blame-workers-for-falling-productivity-were-not-the-ones-holding-it-back-207594

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sophie Loy-Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Australian History, University of Sydney

Review: The Poison of Polygamy, directed by Courtney Stewart, La Boite and Sydney Theatre Company.

Early Chinese migrants to Australia believed in ghosts.

Hailing mostly from a handful of villages in China’s southern Guangdong province, these migrants were Cantonese peoples. For them, the undead had immense power – given the right circumstances.

It was beholden upon the living to manage the dead: bury them appropriately, return their bones to China, arrange for ancestor worship.

Archives tell us Chinese migrants in Australia feared the consequences if such rituals were neglected, even in the chaotic environmental mess of the Australian goldfields.

I’ve read court records from this period in which Chinese witnesses recount “angry ghosts coming to strike them at night”.

The Poison of Polygamy begins with a ghost. The play directly addresses Australia’s Chinese ancestors, conjuring up the past while speaking directly to the present.

Issues of tyranny and servitude, oppression and resistance, violence and its afterlife are marshalled to speak to our modern souls.

What is the link between colonialism and environmental destruction? How do we tell the story of a group of people – themselves victims of European racism – who in turn were invaders of Indigenous land?

What do we do with a 19th-century Chinese-Australian morality tale which insists that Christian values, with all their concurrent conservative gender politics, will save us from moral dissolution?

À lire aussi :
New Gold Mountain review: a compelling murder mystery shines light on early Australian multiculturalism

Chinese migration

An evangelical Chinese Christian, The Preacher (an excellent Shan-Ree Tan), walks towards the audience through a sea of mist, his throat cut and clutching a Bible. He is righteous and here to save our souls.

The Preacher is especially forthright on the questions of polygamy, a common practice in 19th-century China, which took on a new life among overseas Chinese migrant communities. Many first wives were “left behind” in the village while their men took a second or third wife overseas.

The play’s hero (“and there is nothing heroic about him”, The Preacher dryly informs us) is Sleep-Sick (also played by Tan): an opium-addicted scrounger who mistreats his wife (Merlynn Tong) and is bundled off to the Australian goldfields by her cousin (Silvan Rus) due to his debt and social malignancy.

There, he befriends other Chinese migrants, eventually settling in Melbourne’s Chinatown. Their banter and debate encompass all the issues of the day: democracy, racial equality, capitalism, mateship, feminism and, of course, the scurvy of polygamy.

The Preacher will use Sleep-Sick’s misadventures as a warning to us all, until another equally righteous narrator – the servant girl or bond maiden Tsiu Hei (Kimie Tsukakoshi) – questions his right to tell her story.

A lost classic

The Poison of Polygamy was likely the first Chinese Australian novel. It was serialised in the Australian Chinese-language press, Charles Dickens-style, from 1909-1910 in 53 instalments.

The author was a Chinese Christian, Wong Shee Ping. The son of gold-rush migrants, he drew on his own experience to write a book about life on the goldfields and in Melbourne.

Australia is lucky in two regards when it comes to the recovery of our Chinese past. We have one of the best-preserved Chinese-language presses in the West, and we have a leading bilingual historian in Mei-fen Kuo, who has been working her way through this massive archive over the past 15 years.

Australia’s booming Chinatowns serviced several newspapers from the 1890s to the 1940s, read by Chinese Australians throughout Australia and beyond.

Prior to digitisation, much of this newsprint sat mildewed in Melbourne and Sydney’s Chinatowns. It took Mei-fen’s tenacity in 2006 to discover The Poison of Polygamy in the pages of the Chinese Times, which was published in Melbourne for a national readership.

The novel was translated by Ely Finch and published by Sydney University Press in 2019.

Playwright Anchuli Felicia King read the novel and rightly saw it as an “Australian classic” and a “lost piece of our cultural heritage”. She wanted to stage a production “which spoke directly to our ancestors”.

A brilliant success

The result is a gothic, brilliant success, darkly funny and subversively political.

“We made your unions, we built your democracy,” Tsiu Hei tells the audience at the end. “We are in your limestone, in your clay.”

Under the direction of Courtney Stewart, clever staging using rolling red columns, muscular choreography and a startlingly effective lighting design (Ben Hughes) allow for transitions across space and time, creating a world where Europeans are on the margins of historical action in this country.

Australia’s Chinese heritage is wrestled from the grip of our Euro-centric past and – finally – told from the perspective of Chinese migrants themselves.

This is a triumphant reclamation of an Australia denied to us in monolingual readings of our history.

The Poison of Polygamy is at the Sydney Theatre Company until July 15.

À lire aussi :
From lurid orange sauces to refined, regional flavours: how politics helped shape Chinese food in Australia

Sophie Loy-Wilson receives funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. A gothic, brilliant success: The Poison of Polygamy brings the first Chinese-Australian novel to the stage after 113 years – https://theconversation.com/a-gothic-brilliant-success-the-poison-of-polygamy-brings-the-first-chinese-australian-novel-to-the-stage-after-113-years-206929

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

A federal Resolve poll for Nine newspapers, conducted last week from a sample of 1,606, had “no” ahead by 51-49 in a forced choice question on the Indigenous Voice to parliament referendum to be held later this year.

This is the first “no” lead in any national Voice poll. In the past two months, there has been a rapid movement to “no” in Resolve polls. “Yes” was ahead by 58-42 in April, but this dropped to a 53-47 lead in May, and now “no” has taken the lead.

Party breakdowns suggest a large drop in support since April from Labor voters, with their support down 12 points to a 63-37 split in favour of “yes”.

State breakdowns were based on aggregate data from May and June with an overall sample of 3,216. As May and June results were averaged, “yes” led overall by 51-49. But these breakdowns suggest the Voice would not get the required majority in four of six states, as it was trailing narrowly in South Australia and Western Australia, and much further behind in Queensland.

Only 30% of voters said they could confidently explain the Voice to someone else. Not understanding the detail is likely a key driver of the swing to “no”. Initial preferences were 42% “yes” (down two since May), 40% “no” (up one) and 18% undecided (steady).

Essential poll: ‘yes’ leads by 60-40

An Essential poll, conducted last week from a sample of 1,123, gave “yes” to the Voice a 60-40 lead, a one-point gain for “yes” since May. In April, Essential and Resolve were only two points apart, with Resolve at 58-42 “yes” and Essential 60-40. Now there is an 11-point gap.

I believe Resolve and Newspoll are more credible as they have been tested and performed well at the federal 2022, Victorian 2022 and New South Wales 2023 elections. In my opinion, Resolve had the best final poll at the federal election, while Newspoll performed best at both the Victorian and NSW elections.

Read more:
How did the polls perform in the 2022 election? Better, but not great; also a Senate update

In contrast, Essential greatly overstated both major parties’ support at the federal election, and did not produce a voting intentions poll close to either the Victorian or NSW elections.

It’s possible that Essential’s skew to “yes” is caused by a bias in their samples towards better educated respondents. Seats with a higher educational attainment are where the Greens and teal independents performed best at the last federal election.

Relative to other polls, Essential has had much higher Greens votes, with their latest poll putting the Greens on 16% (up one since last fortnight), compared to 12% in Resolve and 12% in last week’s Newspoll. For this parliamentary term, the Greens support has usually been about 14% in Essential compared to 10-11% in other polls.

Last week’s Newspoll gave “yes” an overall 46-43 lead with 11% undecided. Education breakdowns had university-educated people favouring “yes” 56-35, but “no” was leading with both TAFE/college (by 48-43) and no tertiary education (by 45-41).

The skew to “yes” in Essential may be explained by having too many university educated people in their samples. Better-educated people are more likely to have decided how to vote on the Voice a long time ago, explaining the stable referendum vote in Essential.

A struggle ahead for the ‘yes’ campaign

In early May, I wrote that just one of 25 Labor-initiated referendums had succeeded, and that early poll leads for proposals often collapse by the referendum date. Furthermore, Labor-initated referendums have lost much more heavily when held as a midterm referendum than when held with general elections.

Read more:
While the Voice has a large poll lead now, history of past referendums indicates it may struggle

The Resolve poll and last week’s Newspoll (46-43 to “yes”) implied that support for the Voice is slumping. Given the history of Labor-initiated referendums, if these polls are correct, it is likely that the Voice will be defeated. Supporters of the Voice will hope that Essential is right, but Essential’s track record is worse than either Resolve or Newspoll.

Fadden byelection: July 15

A byelection for the federal Queensland seat of Fadden will occur on July 15 after the resignation of former Liberal minister Stuart Robert. The LNP won Fadden by a 60.6-39.4 margin against Labor at the 2022 federal election.

Fadden has only been won by Labor once, in 1983 on the election of the Hawke government, and has been more pro-LNP than Queensland overall since 1984 according to the ABC guide.

In my first look at this byelection, I thought Labor might not contest given how unlikely it is they would win. However, Labor will contest with their 2022 candidate. Nominations for the byelection close on June 22 and will be declared the next day. The LNP should retain easily.

Read more:
Easy Liberal wins likely in byelections in Robert’s and Morrison’s seats; support for rise in JobSeeker

WA state poll: 61-39 to Labor

The Poll Bludger reported on June 3 that an Utting research poll for The West Australian, conducted May 31 from a sample of 800, gave Labor a 61-39 lead from primary votes of 52% Labor, 28% Liberals, 5% Nationals and 8% Greens. This poll was taken two days after WA Premier Mark McGowan announced his resignation.

While Labor is well down from the record landslide margin of 69.7-30.3 at the March 2021 WA election, this would still be a massive win for Labor if repeated at an election.

New Labor Premier Roger Cook had ratings of 42% approve, 26% disapprove, while Liberal leader Libby Mettram was at 31% approve, 33% disapprove. Cook had a 50-24 lead as preferred premier over Mettram. McGowan’s ratings were 68% approve, 19% disapprove.

There will be a byelection in McGowan’s former seat of Rockingham on July 29. At the 2021 WA election, McGowan won Rockingham by an 87.7-12.3 margin over the Liberals, from a primary vote of 82.7%. There is likely to be a big swing against Labor at the byelection, but they should still hold Rockingham easily.

Adrian Beaumont 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. Resolve first national poll to have ‘no’ ahead in Voice referendum, but Essential has ‘yes’ far ahead – https://theconversation.com/resolve-first-national-poll-to-have-no-ahead-in-voice-referendum-but-essential-has-yes-far-ahead-207015

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ariane Moore, PhD Candidate in Philosophy, University of Tasmania

Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded in 2004 by Richard Branson, promotes its flights as offering:

A Brand New Perspective: Deepen your connection to Earth and to humanity with the transformational experience known as the Overview Effect.

First discussed in 1987 by space philosopher Frank White, the Overview Effect is a result of viewing Earth from space.

Expressions of the effect range broadly. Astronauts might experience profound awe and wonder at the perception of Earth as a fragile living being. Some suffer crushing grief when considering the harm humans inflict on nature.

While Virgin Galactic promotes access to the Overview Effect as a major drawcard, it is a terrible irony that space tourism is enormously damaging for the environment.

Read more:
Seeing Earth from space changes you – and you don’t even have to leave the planet

The Overview Effect

The Overview Effect is not limited to astronauts from the West. Their Chinese and Russian counterparts have described the same profound connection to Earth when witnessing the planet from space.

As Soviet Russian cosmonaut Yuri Artyushkin reported:

The feeling of unity is not simply an observation. With it comes a strong sense of compassion and concern for the state of our planet and the effect humans are having on it. It isn’t important in which sea or lake you observe a slick of pollution, or in the forests of which country a fire breaks out, or on which continent a hurricane arises. You are standing guard over the whole of our Earth.

Until recently, researching the Overview Effect has required interviews with professional astronauts. Today, commercial space tourism is increasing awareness of the phenomenon, particularly when experienced by celebrities with large platforms.

In 2021, Star Trek actor William Shatner completed a suborbital flight with Jeff Bezos’ space tourism company Blue Origin. Shatner had anticipated emotions of celebration and joy when viewing “mother and Earth and comfort” from space. Instead, he later wrote, he struggled with “the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered”.

Shatner attributed his experience to the Overview Effect.

Read more:
The wonders and terrors of modern technology evoke the ancient concept of the sublime, and present us with a choice

Space flight has a huge environmental impact

Virgin Galactic promotes the Overview Effect on its homepage as an experience exclusive to space flight.

However, access is extremely costly. While an eager space tourist consents to parting with US$450,000 to experience a profound connection with Earth, the planet itself has no say in receiving the massive pollution a single trip produces.

Rocket emissions impact Earth’s atmosphere, temperatures and the ozone layer at an unprecedented level. A 2022 study found space tourism produces black carbon particles that are almost 500 times more efficient at warming the atmosphere than all surface and airline sources of soot combined.

After being released into the upper atmosphere, the black carbon particles circulate for four to five years in a fine layer. This acts as a thin black umbrella absorbing solar radiation while blocking it from reaching Earth’s surface.

A 1.5-hour Virgin Galactic flight generates emissions equivalent to a ten-hour trans-Atlantic commercial air flight. However, the latter carries hundreds of passengers. With a passenger limit of six, a Virgin Galactic launch emits 4.5 tonnes of carbon per person. That’s more than twice the Paris Agreement’s recommended annual individual carbon budget.

Space tourism rocket launches don’t currently compare to commercial airline flights in number. But the suborbital transportation and space tourism market is expected to be worth US$2.58 billion by 2031. It’s growing at an annual rate of 17.15%.

Virgin Galactic is aiming to launch 400 space tourism flights every year.

Read more:
Space tourism: rockets emit 100 times more CO₂ per passenger than flights – imagine a whole industry

Caring for Earth doesn’t depend on space flight

The desirability of the Overview Effect is not the overwhelming emotions experienced when witnessing Earth from space. As was evident in Shatner’s feelings of immense grief, these emotions are not always pleasant.

Instead, researchers, astronauts and space philosophers are interested in the spontaneous and powerful awareness that occurs. Astronauts’ accounts of the moment vary, but a consistent theme emerges: a connection to planet Earth that inspires environmental care.

Importantly, such clarity can be achieved without a suborbital space flight.

Frank White argues that, while viewing Earth from space produces the “ultimate” Overview Effect, it might also be had while looking at landscapes from a great height – such as a mountain range. Commercial pilots flying at high altitudes have experienced similar phenomena.

And for those considering a Virgin Galactic flight, there are no guarantees. Many astronauts with long careers report never experiencing the Overview Effect.

Read more:
Keen to sign up for space tourism? Here are 6 things to consider (besides the price tag)

Environmental epiphanies happen on Earth

Spontaneous clarity about the importance of nature can occur while standing on solid ground. “Environmental epiphanies” are well documented and have no connection to specific religious or cultural beliefs.

Involving profound emotions and sudden awareness similar to the Overview Effect, environmental epiphanies can be accessed for free in mundane locations – such as reading a book at home.

And, like the Overview Effect, environmental epiphanies can lead to lasting change.

As space tourism continues to “take off”, misaligned marketing tactics like Virgin Galactic’s promotion of the Overview Effect must be scrutinised.

Being launched into space – and the massive pollution the process creates – isn’t necessary for us to want to sustain our Earth.

Ariane Moore 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. Virgin Galactic’s use of the ‘Overview Effect’ to promote space tourism is a terrible irony – https://theconversation.com/virgin-galactics-use-of-the-overview-effect-to-promote-space-tourism-is-a-terrible-irony-206868

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Abdulghani Mohamed, Senior Lecturer in Aerospace Engineering, RMIT University

The basic configuration of traditional propellers has not fundamentally changed since the first powered flight by the Wright brothers in 1903.

However, as engineers learn more about aerodynamics and attempt new experiments, propellers are evolving to more complex shapes. These feature multiple blades, high sweep angles, blade tip devices and other features to optimise performance in different conditions.

A recent advancement in propeller technology are “toroidal” propellers. These devices are ring-shaped, with the blades looping around each other. A few recent articles and videos have been hyping these – but how “revolutionary” are they, really?

Refining the shape

In 2017, researchers at MIT filed a patent for toroidal propellers. Their patent claims the invention is more efficient than traditional propellers and is less noisy.

Coincidentally, already in 2012, US engineering company Sharrow Marine also developed a toroidal propeller for boats; they have demonstrated it to be more efficient and quieter than traditional marine propellers.

The reason toroidal propellers may be quieter is because of their complex shape – it minimises the strength of the vortex (a spiralling movement of air, water, or another fluid) that naturally happens over propeller blade tips.

This happens because there’s a high-pressure region under the blade, and low pressure above it. As high-pressure air from under the blade moves towards the low-pressure region above it, it travels in a spiral – a vortex.

This phenomenon is not unique to propeller blades, which are essentially rotating wings. The wing of a plane also experiences this phenomenon. Engineers have done much research on wingtip devices that can minimise this.

The use of closed-loop structures – like in a toroidal propeller – is one way of reducing tip vortices.

Even though the basic propeller shape has remained the same since its invention, many propeller blade designs have been put forward. To test these, engineers need to perform design trade-off studies. Some of these approaches have been tested to try and make helicopter blades and drones more efficient and less noisy.

No magic propeller

It’s important to understand propeller geometry must be optimised for a specific “operational envelope”. This means the properties of the fluid or air it operates in, rotation speed, forward speed, and other details. Outside that envelope, the propeller will perform poorly.

So far, nobody has achieved the magical propeller geometry that will achieve low noise and high efficiency for all operating conditions and scales. Toroidal propellers are no exception – from the sparse results available so far, their advantages are not yet fully quantified.

Comparing a well-designed toroidal propeller to a poorly designed traditional propeller will show a significant improvement, but is not a fair comparison.

Well-designed toroidal propellers may have advantages in specific operating conditions, such as dense fluids or a specific range of speeds. However, the question remains as to how a toroidal propeller compares to a well-designed traditional propeller for the same conditions.

This is a challenge, since improvements are always relative to a benchmark – which may not be the most efficient design to start with.

Another aspect of a fair comparison that doesn’t seem to have been published for toroidal propellers is comparing different propellers at the same thrust force. Only then you can see the true advantages regarding noise reduction and energy required to spin the propeller.

Read more:
Drones to deliver incessant buzzing noise, and packages

Home experiments are not representative

An MIT announcement earlier this year about toroidal propellers winning one of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s 2022 R&D 100 Awards generated significant excitement. There’s been widespread experimentation with 3D-printed toroidal propellers, but not all of these have delivered positive results.

This may be due to un-optimised geometry and poor scientific rigour by the general public conducting some of these experiments. This gives the scientific community a research opportunity – to truly assess and optimise toroidal and traditional propellers to enhance their performance.

Previous optimisation studies have been conducted, some of which even use machine-learning techniques to identify suitable geometries. Engineers are also trying to make propellers that sound less annoying, by considering how humans perceive sound.

Expensive and hard to scale

Toroidal propellers also have clear disadvantages. The main one is the difficulty to scale them to mass production due to their complex geometry, which leads to high production costs.

The complex structure also requires special care to avoid unwanted vibrations – a significant issue when rotating at high speeds. This also adds to higher manufacturing costs.

When it comes to using toroidal propellers for drones, their heavier weight will also have implications on the responsiveness and stability of the drone. This is critical when operating in windy and turbulent conditions such as windy weather.

Overall, toroidal propellers are an exciting recent development in propeller design, at least in some cases. While they can be more quiet, they won’t completely replace traditional props just yet – there’s no single propeller design that will suit all situations.

Read more:
Got a drone for Christmas? Know the law before taking to the skies

Abdulghani Mohamed is a researcher at RMIT university who receives funding from a few companies for undertaking aerodynamic optimisation.

– ref. What is a ‘toroidal propeller’ and could it change the future of drones? An expert explains – https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-toroidal-propeller-and-could-it-change-the-future-of-drones-an-expert-explains-206498

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Laird, Honorary Principal Fellow, University of Wollongong

Australia’s new High Speed Rail Authority comes into being today. Created by the Albanese government, the authority and its newly named board have been set a challenging task: “bring high-speed rail to reality”.

Nearly four decades after it was first proposed, Australia must surely hold the world record for high-speed rail studies with no construction. I estimate the cost of all these studies to date to be about A$150 million (both public and private money, in 2023 dollars). Yet not one kilometre of a land corridor for a high-speed rail track has been reserved.

The challenge for the Albanese government is to go further than yet more studies and start construction.

Read more:
More than ever, it’s time to upgrade the Sydney–Melbourne railway

How many countries have high-speed rail?

The International Union of Railways (UIC) defines high-speed rail as including “infrastructure for new lines designed for speeds of 250km/h and above; upgraded existing lines for speeds of up to […] 220 km/h”.

Starting in 1964 with the Tokaido Shinkansen in Japan linking Tokyo to Shin-Osaka, high-speed rail now operates in 20 countries. Another 14 countries are building or planning high-speed rail links.

In Indonesia, a high-speed rail service from the capital Jakarta to Bandung is due to begin this August. Construction of high-speed rail in India and Thailand is advanced.

And Australia? It only rates a mention by the UIC of long-term planning for high-speed rail.

Read more:
Don’t abandon plans for high-speed rail in Australia – just look at all the benefits

A history of projects that came to nothing

In 1984, CSIRO proposed the Very Fast Train connecting Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. A consortium undertook many studies. A Senate committee inquiry was held. However, the proposal failed to win government support and did not proceed.

Next was the pragmatic Speedrail proposal. This was to link Sydney to Canberra using existing track from Sydney to Macarthur and new track to Canberra. Prime Minister John Howard enthusiastically endorsed the project before the 1998 election, saying:

The very fast train will rival airline flight as the preferred means of travel for countless millions of Australians for decades to come.

The Howard government gave approval to the Speedrail consortium to “prove up” their proposal. The cost was to be about $4.5 billion. About $1 billion would have been required from government, but this was denied. It was a lost opportunity for Australia.

Instead, the Howard government funded yet another study, which effectively found high-speed rail to be too expensive. So also did a two-stage study by the Gillard government, in which Anthony Albanese was the minister overseeing the planning process until Labor lost office in 2013. It costed a high-speed rail network for the east coast at $114 billion (in 2012 dollars).

More parliamentary inquiries have since followed. And the National Faster Rail Agency formed in 2019 has expended further funds. This agency now falls under the High Speed Rail Authority.

The NSW factor

In 2018, the New South Wales government began its own investigations into faster rail. Launched by the then premier, Gladys Berejiklian, the resulting report by UK rail expert Andrew McNaughton has not been released. It was reported last year to have recommended new tracks between Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong, along with a Sydney-Canberra upgrade and better services to the state’s central west.

Other NSW reports also remain under wraps. In late 2022, the former NSW government stopped investigating high-speed rail or the upgrading of existing lines. These studies were reported to have cost about a further $100 million (my estimate of $150 million doesn’t include this figure, as it was for studies of both high-speed and faster rail).

Read more:
NSW on a slow track to fast trains: promised regional rail upgrades are long overdue

NSW now lags far behind Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia. All these states have trains moving at 160km/h over upgraded tracks. This includes the Queensland electric tilt train, which has been running between Brisbane and Rockhampton since 1998.

There are also questions about the supply of new intercity trains for NSW. These and other questions are the subject of a review set up by the recently elected state Labor government.

So, what happens next?

There is some opposition to high-speed rail in Australia. In 2020, the Grattan Institute said:

The east-coast bullet train advocated by the federal ALP would be an expensive folly.

Last December, the shadow minister for infrastructure, Bridget McKenzie,
said:

While very fast trains has great appeal, the reality is that it is decades away from being built – even if governments were to get serious about it.

McKenzie favours upgrades of existing lines.

The minister for infrastructure and transport, Catherine King, said last week the first priority of the High Speed Rail Authority is planning and corridor works for the Sydney-to-Newcastle section of the network. The government is providing $500 million for this. In addition, this project will require a much-improved, in-house, rail engineering capability.

Read more:
Vital Signs: Sydney to Newcastle fast rail makes sense. Making trains locally does not

The project will also need to be delivered without the problems that the Inland Rail freight line project has encountered. The Albanese government ordered an independent review of Inland Rail, which found serious shortcomings. It will now only proceed this decade on a rail link between Melbourne and Parkes. Questions remain over the section from Parkes to Brisbane.

The government is also reviewing other major infrastructure projects.

One project that would produce many benefits is to build a new track between Macarthur and near Mittagong. This would be close to the reconstructed section of the Hume Motorway that opened in 1980. The benefits include faster, more energy-efficient train travel between Sydney and each of Melbourne and Canberra. It would also lower emissions.

A Macarthur-Mittagong deviation could be the start of a staged process to construct high-speed rail between Sydney and Melbourne. High-speed rail advocacy group Fastrack and others have proposed this approach. It would give regional Australia “more trains, and faster trains, to get us on our way”.

A growing population is waiting for Australia to join the 34 countries that have or are about to get high-speed rail.

Read more:
Transport is letting Australia down in the race to cut emissions

Philip Laird owns shares in some transport companies and has received funding from the two rail-related CRCs as well as the ARC. He is affiliated, inter alia, with the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, the Railway Technical Society of Australasia and the Rail Futures Institute. The opinions expressed are those of the author.

– ref. Can the new High Speed Rail Authority deliver after 4 decades of costly studies? – https://theconversation.com/can-the-new-high-speed-rail-authority-deliver-after-4-decades-of-costly-studies-206287

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christine McCarthy, Senior Lecturer in Interior Architecture, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

It is hard to find much joy in the Prison Inspectorate’s report on segregation and cell confinement released today. It finds many prisoners in New Zealand are kept in solitary confinement and suffer negative psychological and physical effects.

The report follows the 2021 finding that female prisoners were segregated without due process, and the Ombudsman’s statement last year that legal reform is needed “to ensure that New Zealand meets its international human rights obligations with respect to solitary confinement and PSC [prolonged solitary confinement]”.

Two things in particular stood out for me in the report: the Inspectorate’s willingness to call segregation “solitary confinement”, and the inadequate record keeping by the Department of Corrections that is highlighted.

“Segregation” can mean different things in the prison context, making it easy to get bogged down in definitional complexities. Unlike cell confinement, segregation is not a punishment. Instead, it is intended to manage a complex group of people, including supporting those with significant mental health needs, difficult behaviour, or even managing gang affiliations.

It can simply involve separating one group of prisoners from another. Or it can be solitary confinement, isolating a prisoner in their cell for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact.

The report finds that for all intents and purposes “segregation” means “solitary confinement” in New Zealand prisons. And some prisoners experience solitary confinement for months or years.

‘A dangerous place’

So what does this look like in practice? Imagine being alone in a bleak version of your bedroom – without a phone or clock, with concrete walls, a television (only free channels) and an open toilet.

You’ll get an hour in a concrete yard to exercise, and at least five minutes a week on the phone with friends and family. In some prisons, dinner arrives at 3.30pm. As one prisoner quoted in the report says:

When things get too hard, I wanted to kill myself. I’ve cut myself so many times [… there’s] no-one to talk to.

Read more:
Prison turns life upside down – giving low-risk prisoners longer to prepare for their sentences would benefit everyone

Segregation includes isolating vulnerable prisoners in “intervention and support units” (ISUs). The picture painted here also lacks hope: stark environments, inaccurate record keeping, sensory deprivation and insufficient social interaction. One ISU prisoner described being “quite lonely”, adding:

Mentally it reminds me of being forced into a cupboard when I was in foster care. I didn’t have any mental health support when I was there – just in my own mind, which can be a dangerous place.

Telling details haunt the report: the removing of cardboard tubes from toilet rolls, coldness due to too few blankets, prohibition of wearing shoes, no books in an ISU dayroom for fear prisoners might eat the pages, and lack of exposure to sunlight requiring prescriptions for vitamin D.

One prisoner describes injuring himself at his first opportunity to run in an open space:

I just couldn’t help myself, fresh air, the wind on my face, and the grass under my feet, you can’t imagine what that feels like after so many years of being locked in a concrete box.

Impacts on prison staff

Research has demonstrated the psychological trauma, harm to mental health and problems with physical health that solitary confinement can cause. One prisoner put it this way in the report:

Alone in my cell for days, used to often lead me to be frustrated, which led to anger and in turn led to violence. [I] caused a lot of violence in the cells.

Read more:
Solitary confinement by any other name is still torture

These conditions undermine normal socialisation. Twinned with the lack of access to rehabilitation that the Inspectorate also identifies, segregation cannot be good preparation for release into the community.

The harm caused by such treatment may become permanent after 15 days. This is the threshold defined by the United Nations between “solitary confinement” and “prolonged solitary confinement”, as set out in its “Mandela Rules”.

This is not just a problem for the prisoners. It also has an enormous impact on an already fatigued workforce. As the report states, employees “felt like they had been trained as custodial staff but were being asked to manage prisoners with mental health issues”.

Read more:
Why are there prisons? An expert explains the history of using ‘correctional’ facilities to punish people

A watershed moment

The report estimates about 29% of prisoners were segregated during the year of the review (October 1 2020 to September 30 2021). This is within a system where only 16% of prisoners have maximum or high-security classifications. Of all those segregated prisoners, 63% were Māori.

But the report gives only a glimpse into solitary confinement, due to what it identifies as unreliable paperwork and inaccurate data.

Nonetheless, it represents a watershed moment. Important recommendations are made to address key areas of concern. The Department of Corrections can no longer say solitary confinement is not used in New Zealand. Nor can it deny that, for a significant number of prisoners, this confinement is prolonged.

The fact that the department has accepted the Inspectorate’s recommendations should materially improve prisoner experience of segregation, and mean transparent reporting of demographic data and incidents of self-harm.

This is long overdue. As one prisoner noted, describing solitary confinement’s profound isolation: “There is only so much colouring in you can do.”

Christine McCarthy was formerly the president of the Wellington Howard League for Penal Reform (2018-2020). In 2021 a petition she initiated to ban prolonged solitary confinement in New Zealand was presented to parliament.

– ref. A watershed report on solitary confinement in NZ prisons must now trigger real reform – https://theconversation.com/a-watershed-report-on-solitary-confinement-in-nz-prisons-must-now-trigger-real-reform-207597

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Scholar, NCAR; Affiliate Faculty, University of Auckland

El Niño is officially here, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and with it comes a change from the La Niña weather patterns New Zealand has experienced for the past three years.

In particular, a switch from prevailing northeasterlies to southwesterlies means New Zealand is one of the few countries where cooler conditions are felt during El Niño. But what “flavour” will this El Niño be?

Time will tell, but El Niño has been looming for some time. Evidence of its imminent arrival could be seen last year in subsurface ocean temperatures, with a buildup of warm water in the Coral Sea and western tropical Pacific.

Moreover, it was overdue. When La Niña finally gave up the ghost in March this year, global sea surface temperatures were suddenly the highest on record (Figure 1 below), as the tropical Pacific abruptly began to warm.

Meanwhile, record high sea surface temperatures in the extratropical North and South Pacific were partly a signature from La Niña and partly a sign of global warming. The resulting “atmospheric rivers” delivered torrential rains to California in the north and New Zealand in the south.

These sea surface temperature changes can be readily seen by comparing variations from mean temperatures for December 2022 versus May 2023 (Figure 2 below). We can see a startling transformation throughout the central tropical Pacific, with a coastal El Niño off Peru and Ecuador strongly evident.

Modest cooling in the eastern North Pacific is associated with the train of storms that barrelled into the West Coast of the US and in northwest Australia from Cyclone Ilsa.

El Niño and New Zealand

The weather in the tropics is seldom average, however. It tends to fluctuate more like a roller coaster. In the atmosphere, this is referred to as the Southern Oscillation. The combined atmosphere and ocean phenomenon is often referred to as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

The bottom of the roller coaster is the cold phase: a basin-wide cooling of the tropical Pacific, named La Niña, while the top of the roller coaster is El Niño, which occurs every three to seven years or so. The most intense phase of each event typically lasts half a year.

But El Niños can be very strong, and hence highly anomalous. La Niñas, by comparison, are usually moderate in strength and occur more often.

El Niños tend to peak in December, although their biggest atmospheric impacts may not be until February. The last major El Niño was in 2016-17, while a weak El Niño occurred in 2019-20.

Read more:
El Niño is back – that’s good news or bad news, depending on where you live

Coupled oceans and atmosphere

In the tropical Pacific Ocean, the atmosphere and ocean are strongly coupled. Surface winds drive surface ocean currents, and largely determine the sea surface temperature distribution, the differential sea levels, and the heat content of the upper ocean. In turn, the sea surface temperatures determine the winds.

Cool waters limit atmospheric convection and storm activity, while high sea surface temperatures attract convection, clusters of thunderstorms, and tropical cyclones (off the equator, where Earth’s rotation comes into play).

Heat that was stored up in the tropical western Pacific during La Niña is moved around and into the atmosphere during El Niño, mainly through evaporation. This cools the ocean and moistens the atmosphere.

Read more:
2023 hurricane forecast: Get ready for a busy Pacific storm season, quieter Atlantic than recent years thanks to El Niño

This alters where the main rainfall occurs. In turn, it changes the latent heating of the atmosphere that sets up “teleconnections” (links between weather phenomena in different parts of the globe) and major changes in the jet streams and extratropical storm tracks in both hemispheres – including across New Zealand, especially in winter.

Because most action occurs over the tropical Pacific Ocean, more settled weather and dry spells often occur over land.

The warmest years in terms of global mean surface temperature are the latter stages of El Niño events. 2016 is the world’s warmest year on record, in part because of the very strong El Niño event. But 2023 could beat that record – and odds are that 2024 will beat it by a lot.

So far, there is little evidence that climate change has altered ENSO events themselves. But all impacts of El Niño are exacerbated by global warming, including extremes of the hydrological cycle involving floods and droughts, which are already common with ENSO.

Impacts of El Niño

Of course, major events related to El Niño have serious social and economic impacts, too. Droughts, floods, heatwaves and other changes can severely disrupt agriculture, fisheries, health, energy demand and air quality (mainly from wildfires).

Research shows El Niño “persistently reduces country-level economic growth”, with damage now estimated in the trillions of US dollars.

Globally, El Niño is the largest cause of droughts; they are more intense, set in quicker and increase the risk of wildfires, especially in Australia, Indonesia and Brazil. In the weak 2019-20 El Niño, smoke from fires in eastern Australia affected the southern hemisphere to the extent that it blocked the sun and may have exacerbated the subsequent La Niña conditions.

Meanwhile, torrential rains are heavier, with greater risk of flooding, especially in Peru and Ecuador. Very wet conditions can also (though not always) occur in California and the southeast US.

Read more:
New study helps solve a 30-year-old puzzle: how is climate change affecting El Niño and La Niña?

Another ‘super’ El Niño?

New Zealand had its highest annual mean surface temperature on record in 2022. In the past year the preponderance of northeasterlies due to La Niña has seen an unprecedented number of tropical and subtropical storms bombarding the country.

The record rain event in Auckland on January 27, and Cyclone Gabrielle just three weeks later, were just two among many such events.

By contrast, New Zealand tends to experience stronger and more frequent winds from the southwest in winter and from the west in summer during El Niño. This can encourage dryness in eastern areas and more rain on the West Coast, with generally cooler conditions overall.

But El Niño varies, and there have been three “super” El Niños: 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16. It remains to be seen whether the latest will join them. But together with the augmenting effects of global warming, any El Niño can be very disruptive. We need to be vigilant.

Kevin Trenberth 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. El Niño combined with global warming means big changes for New Zealand’s weather – https://theconversation.com/el-nino-combined-with-global-warming-means-big-changes-for-new-zealands-weather-207493

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia

Rice is a staple food for billions of people in Asia and Africa. It’s also a versatile ingredient for many iconic dishes from around the world, including dolmades from Greece, risottos from Italy, paella from Spain and rice puddings from the United Kingdom.

Despite its universal appeal, the question asked in every kitchen, be it a professional one or your own home, is whether you should pre-wash (or rinse) your rice before cooking.

What do chefs and cooks say?

Culinary experts claim pre-washing rice reduces the amount of starch coming from the rice grains. You can see this in the cloudy rinse water, which studies have shown to be the free starch (amylose) on the surface of the rice grain produced by the milling process.

In culinary circles, washing is advocated for some dishes when a separated grain is sought after. Yet for other dishes such as risottos, paella and rice puddings (where you need a sticky, creamy effect), washing is avoided.

Other factors, such as the type of rice, family tradition, local health warnings and even the perceived time and effort required will influence whether people pre-wash their rice.

Is there evidence that washing rice makes it less sticky?

A recent study compared the effect of washing on the stickiness and hardness of three different types of rice from the same supplier. The three types were glutinous rice, medium grain rice and jasmine rice. These different rices were either not washed at all, washed three times with water, or washed ten times with water.

Contrary to what chefs will tell you, this study showed the washing process had no effect on the stickiness (or hardness) of the rice.

Instead, the researchers demonstrated the stickiness was not due to the surface starch (amylose), but rather a different starch called amylopectin that is leached out of the rice grain during the cooking process. The amount leached differed between the types of rice grains.

So, it’s the variety of rice – rather than washing – that’s critical to the stickiness. In this study, glutinous rice was the stickiest, while medium grain rice and jasmine rice were less sticky, and also harder as tested in the laboratory. (Hardness is representative of the textures associated with biting and chewing.)

You may still want to wash your rice, though

Traditionally rice was washed to rinse off dust, insects, little stones and bits of husk left from the rice hulling process. This may still be important for some regions of the world where the processing is not as meticulous, and may provide peace of mind for others.

More recently, with the heavy use of plastics in the food supply chain, microplastics have been found in our foods, including rice. The washing process has been shown to rinse up to 20% of the plastics from uncooked rice.

This same study found that irrespective of the packaging (plastic or paper bags) you buy rice in, it contains the same level of microplastics. The researchers also showed plastics in (pre-cooked) instant rice have been found to be fourfold higher than in uncooked rice. If you pre-rinse instant rice, you could reduce plastics by 40%.

Read more:
You’re eating microplastics in ways you don’t even realise

Rice is also known to contain relatively high levels of arsenic, due to the crop absorbing more arsenic as it grows. Washing rice has been shown to remove about 90% of bio-accessible arsenic, but it also rinses out a large amount of other nutrients important for our health, including copper, iron, zinc and vanadium.

For some people, rice offers a small percentage of their daily intake of these nutrients and hence will have a small impact on their health. But for populations that consume large amounts of heavily washed rice daily, it could impact their overall nutrition.

Another study looked at other heavy metals, lead and cadmium, in addition to arsenic; it found that pre-washing decreased levels of all these from between 7–20%. The World Health Organization has warned of the risk of arsenic exposure from water and food.

Arsenic levels in rice vary depending on where it’s grown, the cultivars of rice and the ways it is cooked. The best advice remains to pre-wash your rice and ensure you consume a variety of grains. The most recent study in 2005 found that the highest level of arsenic was in the United States. However it is important to keep in mind that arsenic is present in other foods including products made from rice (cakes, crackers, biscuits and cereals), seaweed, seafood and vegetables.

Read more:
High levels of cancer-causing arsenic in rice – so why isn’t it regulated in our food?

Can washing rice prevent bacteria?

In short, no. Washing rice will have no effect on the bacterial content of the cooked rice, as high cooking temperatures will kill all bacteria present.

What is more concerning is how long you store cooked rice or washed rice at room temperature. Cooking rice does not kill the bacterial spores from a pathogen called Bacillus cereus.

If wet rice or cooked rice is kept at room temperature, this can activate the bacterial spores and they begin to grow. These bacteria then produce toxins which can not be deactivated by cooking or re-heating; these toxins can cause severe gastrointestinal disease. So, make sure you avoid keeping washed or cooked rice at room temperature for too long.

Evangeline Mantzioris is affiliated with Alliance for Research in Nutrition, Exercise and Activity (ARENA) at the University of South Australia. Evangeline Mantzioris has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, and has been appointed to the National Health and Medical Research Council Dietary Guideline Expert Committee.

– ref. Do you need to wash rice before cooking? Here’s the science – https://theconversation.com/do-you-need-to-wash-rice-before-cooking-heres-the-science-204692

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liquan Liu, Senior lecturer, Western Sydney University

None of us is a stranger to the downsides of the pandemic. For families with kids, kindergartens and schools closed during the lockdown, and parents had to manage schooling and working from home.

Yet there is a silver lining: our research shows that, in families where a parent’s mother tongue is not the language spoken in wider society, children learned more about that language during lockdowns.

Let’s call the language these parents speak the “home language” and the language society uses the “societal language”. Take me as an example: at home I speak Shanghainese with my mum, Mandarin with dad, and Telepath with my cat. But in the community and at work, I speak English, the societal language.

To many multilingual families, our kids’ home language often comes second to the societal language, which dominates their language development as they grow up. When parents witness this transition, they fear their children will gradually lose the ability to use the language they speak. They fear that, as a consequence, their children will lose touch with their roots.

Along with my colleagues, Elisabet García González and Elizabeth Lanza, we conducted a survey of around 200 multilingual families in Norway (to be published in the journal Multilingua). Parents expressed their concerns about their children’s development of home and societal languages. For example, one said:

Since our daughter mostly speaks [home language] with her father and [societal language] with me and at kindergarten (although her father and I exclusively speak [home language] to each other), her [home language] is generally less advanced than her [societal language] […]

Multilingual children rarely use all their languages in the same contexts or with the same frequency. This is often perceived as being more or less “advanced” in one language than the other, but in reality multilingual speakers use their languages as best fits their needs.

Despite these concerns, there was a silver lining. Our study found children’s home language literacy improved during the pandemic. The parents who reported the concern above later said:

We’ve clearly noticed that her spoken [home language] has developed during the lockdown.

Another family told us:

With the two-year-old, I noticed an improvement in her [home language] vocabulary while kindergarten was closed.

What is the reason for this improvement in the home language? As one family shared:

My children started to be interested and speak more [home language] during the lockdown. Assume this is a result of (us) working from home for an international company and them hearing mum use this (home) language.

Another said:

My kids have started using more [home language] in their [societal language] speech with parents and each other during the lockdown, because they are watching more YouTube and playing Minecraft, Animal Crossing and Zelda. Words from the games are difficult to translate into [societal language].

Our statistical analyses had something even more interesting to say: the improvement of a child’s home language made their parents feel more positive about their children being multilingual. Parents see it as a source of wellbeing, especially when they notice their child is picking up their mother tongue. Overall, family relationships, resilience, cultural connection and hope are boosted even in the darkest days of the pandemic.

Is this at the expense of the societal language, one may ask? Indeed, some parents were worried about the development of kids’ societal language, especially when it was not spoken at home. Others said the societal language was still being used during the lockdown, such as in online media. One parent said:

My son is a bit behind the level of the class. He really improved his [societal language] reading during the lockdown, since we had more time to individually support him in a positive way. Before, he was much more negative.

Another family told us:

The difference (in language use) was noticeable when the kindergarten reopened. [Societal language] came back for the kids as easily as restarting to ride a bike.

The societal language is often strong in young children – sometimes so strong that it can bully the home language into a corner. The key task for many multilingual families is not so much to find a balance between the two languages, but to make sure the home language is being actively used and not being overshadowed by the societal language.

Unity is important in society. Being able to speak a common language is important, but equity and diversity are important too. The ability to speak one’s mother tongue can become a source of belonging and wellbeing.

In addition, children growing up in a culturally and linguistically diverse environment tend to be more flexible. Their neurocognitive plasticity shines across developmental domains, from language learning to music perception.

So the pandemic lockdowns were bad, but not all bad. Our kids adapt and adjust to the new environment, and can surprise us with stronger skills that make mum and dad proud.

Liquan Liu receives funding from uropean Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 798658 hosted by Center for Multilingualism across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo, financed by Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme grant agreement No. 223265; and from Western Sydney University School of Psychology 20820 83181.

The corresponding academic publication will be published on journal Multilingua. DOI details to be added. Co-authors are Elisabet Garcia Gonzalez and Elizabeth Lanza.

– ref. A silver lining from the pandemic: how lockdowns helped kids learn the languages their parents speak – https://theconversation.com/a-silver-lining-from-the-pandemic-how-lockdowns-helped-kids-learn-the-languages-their-parents-speak-205012

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Wood, Professor, epidemiological modelling of infectious diseases, UNSW Sydney

Each Omicron wave so far in Australia has had distinguishing features – the sharp rise and fall of BA.1, the widespread transmission among children and families in BA.2, a shift to more infections in older people with BA.5, then the confusing variant mix in the summer wave of 2022-23.

Now Australia is in its fifth Omicron wave, which has been brewing since February. But it has grown so slowly that many people may have not realised it until recent months.

Why has this most recent wave been so drawn out? And what has its real impact been on our health and health systems?

Slower spread, less testing

With most people in Australia now having been vaccinated against COVID, infected or both, we expect the virus to spread more slowly through the population.

This means the overall number of infections in the current wave should be fewer than in previous ones. Infections should also occur over a longer period of time.

But we also know people are mixing and socialising more than in previous waves. So it is easier for viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) to be transmitted.

While these two factors counter each other, overall we expect to see reduced health impacts compared with previous waves.

We are already seeing fewer people with confirmed infections and fewer people who are unwell requiring hospitalisation.

We also know from weekly surveys that people are less likely to test for COVID and report their results at this stage of the pandemic. So reported cases are now a smaller fraction of all infections than in previous waves.

Read more:
Flu or COVID? You can now test for both at home with a single swab. Here’s what you need to know

New sub-variants are likely the cause

The slow and drawn out nature of the current wave is most likely due to the sequential emergence and spread of new Omicron sub-variants. The current wave started with XBB.1.5, then shifted to XBB.1.9.1 and XBB.1.9.2, then most recently XBB.1.16.

Each sub-variant has been able to spread where the previous one could not. But the competitive advantage of each has been minor. So we have only seen a progressive increase in infections as new sub-variants emerge, rather than the dramatic surges in infections and health impacts associated with previous variants.

Are we at the peak of the current wave?

There is some debate about whether New South Wales has reached the peak of its wave. However, forecasts for most other jurisdictions suggest declines have begun or are imminent.

But as always, there is uncertainty in how the wave will develop, and we cannot exclude the possibility of sustained epidemic activity over a longer period.

Hospitalisations for those infected with COVID may stay elevated for a while longer. This is due both to the lag between infection and hospitalisation and we are seeing a shift in infections to older people as the wave progresses.

Thankfully, we do not expect the health system to come under the pressure from COVID seen during the BA.5 wave in winter 2022. This is good news.

However, for the first time in Australia, the SARS-CoV-2 wave may coincide almost completely with influenza and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) waves. This certainly appears likely in NSW. The combined impact of these three viruses may be significant.

Looking ahead, this combined threat will need careful attention. Surveillance systems need to be (re-)designed to detect, anticipate and forecast the combined burden of acute viral respiratory infections.

We expect COVID to contribute to the increased burden of seasonal respiratory diseases over the next few years, and perhaps well beyond.

Read more:
I need a flu shot and a COVID booster. Can I get them at the same time?

How about future waves?

Future COVID waves are likely to become much more predictable, and coincide with winter. While this is somewhat speculative, it is consistent with how other respiratory viruses behave.

What might this look like? In the United Kingdom all COVID indicators have seen a major decline after winter. We see similar patterns in other temperate northern hemisphere countries, such as the United States.

Although there are other contenders, internationally, it is likely that the next wave of COVID will also be caused by a sub-variant of XBB.

Without a clear successor to XBB.1.16 identified at present, a new wave will likely only form as genetic mutations accumulate during the next northern winter.

During that time (our Australian summer) people will travel between Australia and the northern hemisphere, re-importing these newer variants into Australia. As conditions in Australia change (next autumn) and the risk of transmission increases, a new wave may develop, peaking in the winter of 2024.

Alpha, Delta, Omicron waves

Of course, we have seen COVID behave very differently to this over the past three years. The Alpha, Delta and then Omicron variants appeared and spread across the globe causing large and often devastating waves.

But they occurred at a fundamentally different period of the pandemic, where small changes in the virus had dramatic consequences for transmission and our health.

Recent changes to the virus have provided far less advantage, suggesting such transformative events are now far less likely.

Still, we should maintain sufficient surveillance to keep an eye on emerging sub-variants (genomics), case numbers and hospitalisations – all essential if we are to protect our health and wellbeing.

James Wood receives funding from NSW Health and the National Health and Medical Research Council for projects on COVID-19. He has previously received funding from the federal government as part of COVID responses in 2020-21 and from WHO Western Pacific Regional Office in 2020. He is a current member of the Australian Technical Advisory Committee on Immunisation.

Freya Shearer receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Government Departments of Health and Foreign Affairs and Trade, and NSW Health.

James McCaw receives funding from the Australian Government Departments of Health and Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. He is an invited expert member of the Communicable Disease Network of Australia and between January 2020 and May 2022 was an invited expert member of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee.

– ref. We’re in another COVID wave. But it’s not like the others – https://theconversation.com/were-in-another-covid-wave-but-its-not-like-the-others-206493

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susanne Schmidt, Professor – School of Agriculture and Food Science, The University of Queensland

Most food and garden waste in Australia comes from homes. Australian households waste 3.1 million tonnes of food each year. That’s more than five kilograms each household per week.

Over half of all household waste is food organics and garden organics, also known as “FOGO”. These scraps and clippings take up space in landfill and, when they rot, emit dangerous greenhouse gases.

The federal government’s National Waste Policy Action Plan aims to increase the organic waste recycling rate from 47% to 80% by 2030 and halve the amount sent to landfill. This won’t happen on its own – we need investment and action.

Food and garden waste can be captured and turned into compost. Composting is no longer just the domain of the home gardener or eco-warrior. It’s happening at commercial scale, through services such as council collection from homes.

A federal government fund is building new composting facilities and supporting other food and garden organics recycling projects. The South Australian government has invested in council trials of weekly green bin collection and fortnightly rubbish collection.

But more must be done. Recycling food waste into high-quality compost is a win-win solution, for people and the planet. Here, we explain why.

Read more:
Despite government delays, food waste recycling bins are coming to your kitchen sooner than you think

Compost is a winner for the climate

When food rots in landfill, in the absence of oxygen, the process releases a potent greenhouse gas called methane.

Composting is different because the microbes can breathe. In the presence of oxygen, they transform waste into valuable organic matter without producing methane. They recycle organic carbon and nutrients into compost, which can be used to improve soil health and productivity.

This process also captures and stores carbon in the soil, rather than releasing it as carbon dioxide (CO₂) to the atmosphere.

In Australia, organics recycling (including food and garden organics, biosolids and tree wastes) saves an estimated 3.8 million tonnes of CO₂ from entering the atmosphere each year. That’s equivalent to planting 5.7 million trees or taking 877,000 cars off the road.

Soils can profit from compost because globally an estimated 116 billion tonnes of organic carbon has been lost from agricultural soils. This has contributed to rising CO₂ levels in the atmosphere.

Promisingly, compost can restore soil organic carbon while also boosting health and fertility. Compost improves soil structure and water retention. It’s also a source of essential nutrients that reduces the demand for costly fertilisers.

The opportunity presented by soils to draw down atmospheric CO₂ levels was brought to global awareness in the 2015 global Paris Agreement, via the “4-per-mille” initiative.

Translated from French, it means increasing the organic carbon stored in global soils by 0.04% each year (4 per 1000) would neutralise increases in atmospheric CO₂. In other words, CO₂ would remain constant rather than continue to increase. That would make a substantial contribution to mitigating climate change.

Read more:
Soil carbon is a valuable resource, but all soil carbon is not created equal

Farming with precision

Our research has investigated how compost can benefit global agriculture.

We found that in most cases where compost is applied as a generic product to agricultural land, the benefits are not fully realised. But if suitable composts and application methods were aligned with target crops and growth environments, crop yields can be increased and organic carbon in soils replenished.

We call this a “precision compost strategy”. Using a data-driven approach, we estimate global application of this strategy has potential to increase the production of major cereal crops by 96.3 million tonnes annually. This is 4% of current global production and twice Australia’s annual cereal harvest.

Of great relevance for Australia’s farms, precision compost has the strongest effects in dry and warm climates, boosting yield by up to 40%. We now need to develop this strategy for the specific needs of farms.

Compost has the potential to restore 19.5 billion tonnes carbon in cropland topsoil, equivalent to 26.5% of current topsoil soil organic carbon stocks in the top 20 cm.

Give FOGO a go-go

The rate of food and garden waste in Australia is growing at a rate six times faster than Australia’s population and 2.5 times faster than GDP.

But less than a third of Australian households have access to food waste collection services. A national rollout has been pushed back from 2023 to the end of this decade so there is time to overcome some roadblocks. This includes uptake by community and high quality composting.

This waste stream offers a huge opportunity for landfill diversion and compost production. The cost benefit alone is compelling: councils can save up to A$4.2 million a year on landfill levies by diverting 30,000 tonnes of waste (based on A$74 to 140 per tonne of waste, with levies increasing).

Preventing food in the home from being wasted should be top priority. But for unavoidable food waste, turning it into high-quality compost makes perfect sense.

Read more:
What can go in the compost bin? Tips to help your garden and keep away the pests

us

Susanne Schmidt receives funding from Fight Food Waste CRC.

Nicole Robinson receives funding from Fight Food Waste CRC.

– ref. The case for compost: why recycling food waste is so much better than sending it to landfill – https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-compost-why-recycling-food-waste-is-so-much-better-than-sending-it-to-landfill-205583

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Russell Tytler, Professor of science education, Deakin University

The case for action on climate change no longer needs to be laid out.

We see, almost daily, disturbing images of bushfires, floods or a mass extinction crisis. But however widespread that sense of urgency may be, we are struggling as a nation to respond in a substantive, coordinated way.

One thing is clear: these responses will need to be sustained and developed by future generations. Education is crucial for the workforce needed now and for young people who will be increasingly faced with the accelerating realities of climate change.

The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia has done a review of research on climate change education in schools around the world.

Here we outline three areas needing urgent attention: the emotional and psychological effects of learning about climate change, the school curriculum and the education of teachers.

The emotional side of learning about climate

Teaching climate change in schools raises basic and potentially divisive questions about the purpose of education and the nature of childhood. We are supposed to teach children about their world. But what if in doing so, we scare them with facts about climate change?

We also know children are worried about climate change anyway. Many children and teenagers are stressed and anxious due to their growing awareness of climate change.

An increasing body of research is identifying approaches to teaching and learning about climate change that address students’ understanding in this complex area and engages them with positive actions.

This includes making climate change personally relevant, interacting with scientists to experience scientific practices and designing projects to address an aspect of climate change.

Read more:
Ignoring young people’s climate change fears is a recipe for anxiety

Climate change is (almost) missing from the curriculum

In 1975, UNESCO’s Belgrade charter on environmental education bluntly said the “youth of the world” needed a “new kind of education” if we were to avoid politically and economically short-sighted responses to environmental crises.

To date, environmental sustainability has not had a specific home in the Australian curriculum. It has been taught across various different subjects such as geography and science, or art, according to school and teacher priorities.

Our review found schools seem almost perfectly evolved to avoid, let alone prioritise, an educational area that relies on cross-curriculum activity.

The most recent update to the curriculum (agreed) under the former Morrison government in April 2022 included a more substantial focus on climate change at Years 9 and 10 in geography and science. But it ignores other foundational year levels in these subjects, and other potentially powerful parts of the syllabus, such as English and the arts.

Students need to receive a nuanced education, to understand the attitudes, motivations, and technologies that will address climate change. They need knowledge, but also the intent and skill to apply that knowledge faithfully and responsibly.

Student agency in confronting climate change is also becoming a key feature within international education circles. Australia participates in three main international tests, one of which is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

The next PISA test in 2025 will measure

the degree to which 15-year-olds are knowledgeable of, concerned about, and able to act on environmental issues as a result of their science education.

So teacher education is key

So we need teachers to adapt their teaching. And the urgency lies now in developing their confidence, knowledge and supports to do this.

Our review found teachers around the world don’t always have the knowledge and training they need to tackle climate change in their classrooms. For example, one 2016 study found US science teachers had an “insufficient grasp” of climate science. A study of Australian education degree students came to a similar conclusion, despite their favourable attitude to environmental education.

This is understandable. Knowledge about the scale and nature of this complex problem has expanded so rapidly that whatever a new national curriculum may mandate, it is unrealistic to expect teachers (and teacher educators) to have naturally kept up.

Our review argues we need to “turbo charge” teacher education in universities and professional development programs in schools to develop a culture around climate change education. We need a national initiative to support teachers across all year levels in their knowledge of climate change and how to meaningfully engage students.

This needs to cover the interconnected issues of climate change, environmental destruction, social justice and Indigenous knowledges. We also need to be able to counter misinformation.

The scale of government decision-making around climate change mitigation, energy policy, and environmental reconstruction is huge. But as part of this, school education, and teacher education, need to be high on the agenda.

Read more:
Dumbed-down curriculum means primary students will learn less about the world and nothing about climate

Russell Tytler receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a member of the Climate Change Education committee.

Peter Freebody is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Up to 2013 he received numerous research grants from the ARC to study various aspects of the teaching and learning of literacy.

– ref. How should we teach climate change in schools? It starts with ‘turbo charging’ teacher education – https://theconversation.com/how-should-we-teach-climate-change-in-schools-it-starts-with-turbo-charging-teacher-education-207221

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Travis Holland, Senior Lecturer in Communication, Charles Sturt University

In June 1993, director Steven Spielberg released a film that unleashed a wave of technological change in film-making and simultaneously helped to revive popular interest in dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park, based on Michael Crichton’s novel, spawned five blockbuster sequels as well as a multitude of spin-off games, toys, novels, and multiple animated television shows. It features a theme park housing de-extincted dinosaurs that break out of their confines and cause havoc.

Underpinning the plot is clever genetic engineering that has allowed the Park’s scientists to assume they could control all aspects of the dinosaurs’ development, including their sex, much to their later horror when it becomes apparent such control was never possible.

The film franchise has taken an average of over $1 billion dollars at the box office, according to Variety.

From puppets to CGI

According to industry legend and multiple documentaries, Spielberg had planned to use only practical effects, including stop-motion Velociraptors and an animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex. However, well into the filming schedule, he was convinced to also include wholly digital dinosaurs after viewing test footage produced by staff at special effects house Industrial Light & Magic.

In a critical history of Industrial Light & Magic, Julie Turnock observes that the film “relied on a canny mix of large-scale mechanical effects cut together with a few digitally generated shots”. After its success, ILM embraced digital composition technology more fully and integrated it into many later films.

As it stands, Jurassic Park features about 50 shots of digital-only prehistoric creatures, including the first full-body scene of a dinosaur – the sauropod Brachiosaurus – flocking Gallimumus, and the T. rex chasing a Jeep.

Industrial Light & Magic now claims on their website that “Suddenly, directors could imagine making films in which realistic animals, fantasy creatures, even digital people could perform without restraint.”

Nowadays, films and television productions are replete with photoreal computer-generated animals and people and the next revolution in screen production has them projected live behind actors on a series of large screens known as “the volume”.

Palaeontologists aren’t extinct

Shortly after seeing their first dinosaur, on-screen palaeontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) suggests to his palaeobotanist partner Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) that the de-extinction success of Jurassic Park might make their profession redundant. Their colleague Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) responds, “Don’t you mean extinct?”

But far from extinction, palaeontology and associated sciences have seen an extensive rebound in public interest in the thirty years since Jurassic Park was released.

In 1975, palaeontologist Robert Bakker popularised the term “dinosaur renaissance” to describe a spate of developing research findings which argued the creatures were endothermic (warm-blooded), active, and related to the birds rather than cold-blooded, slow and wholly extinct as had been the public perception for much of the previous century. This renaissance lasted from about the 1960s into the 1980s and Jurassic Park reflected many of these new orthodoxies.

Bakker himself consulted for the film and was referenced by the character Tim Murphy. A Bakker lookalike also appeared in the sequel The Lost World, further reinforcing its role in reflecting these new perspectives.

But the film also arrived at the dawn of yet another new age of dinosaur discoveries which Steve Brusatte, in his 2018 book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, described as “the golden age of discovery”. Brusatte referred to the cohort of scientists making these newer discoveries as “men and women from many backgrounds who came of age in the era of Jurassic Park.” Among their findings are new understandings that many dinosaurs were feathered like their modern avian cousins.

Elizabeth Jones recently chronicled the history of the field of “ancient DNA” science, noting the “Jurassic Park effect” playing out on this fascinating area of research:

Even as scientists rejected the conclusions or the implications of the Jurassic Park narrative, they drew on the popularity of the book and movie to emphasise the importance of the technical enterprise in which they were engaged.

And a recent review of the last 60 years of dinosaur research by celebrated palaeontologist Philip J. Currie suggested “public interest continues to be stimulated by a multibillion-dollar movie, media, and toy industry founded on our interest in dinosaurs.”

The Jurassic Park legacy

Dinosaurs have long featured in popular media such as films and television. The first animated dinosaur, Gertie, debuted as part of a vaudeville performance in 1914. Dinosaurs, including a fearsome Tyrannosaurus featured in Disney’s groundbreaking and famed 1940 film Fantasia. But it was Jurassic Park which truly presented them as believable living creatures for the first time.

Though the science of the film has been widely criticised since its release, Jurassic Park succeeded in revolutionising film-making and reigniting a public fascination with dinosaurs even as palaeontology itself underwent a boom in new research efforts. In his recent memoir, actor Sam Neill described the film’s visuals as “a perfect collision of coming-of-age computer generated imagery… with state of the art puppetry”.

The sequels sequels and spin-offs have continued to adapt to changing social expectations, featuring strong female and queer characters, and even feathered dinosaurs in response to changing scientific understandings.

Perhaps the next Jurassic film will feature a full-lipped Tyrannosaurus?

Travis Holland 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. How Jurassic Park changed film-making and our view of dinosaurs – https://theconversation.com/how-jurassic-park-changed-film-making-and-our-view-of-dinosaurs-203147

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

The Brittany Higgins saga has damaged almost everyone it has touched, or who’s touched it.

It will forever haunt Higgins, who alleged she was raped in 2019 in a minister’s office, and Bruce Lehrmann, who denied committing the alleged assault. An aborted trial has meant there is no legal judgement.

It helped destroy Scott Morrison. It deeply scarred Linda Reynolds, the minister in question, and had an impact on Fiona Brown, Reynolds’ staffer at the time who dealt with the matter.

In fresh rounds of this story that never goes away, more people are being dragged down, to greater or lesser degrees: the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions, police, some in the media. Now, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher is in the political frame.

After The Australian’s recent publication of texts between Higgins and her partner David Sharaz, exchanged in the run-up to the airing of Higgins’ 2021 interview with Ten’s Lisa Wilkinson, Gallagher faces allegations of misleading parliament.

In a testy exchange with Reynolds at a Senate estimates committee in 2021, Gallagher insisted she’d had no knowledge before the story broke.

Reynolds had claimed she’d been told by a Labor senator (who was the late Kimberley Kitching) “two weeks before about what you were intending to do with the story in my office”.

At the hearing Labor’s Senate leader Penny Wong immediately declared she’d had no knowledge, while Gallagher said categorically, “No one had any knowledge,” adding angrily, “how dare you!”

Reynolds subsequently said Gallagher and Wong later that day told her they’d had some prior indication but had nothing to do with the matter going public.

In the text exchange Sharaz, anxious to ensure the story would become an issue politically, flagged he’d shared information with Gallagher, whom he knew. He believed she would be useful in pursuing the matter when the Wilkinson interview was broadcast.

Gallagher at the weekend admitted she was told “there was going to be some public reporting that a young woman [was] making serious allegations about events that had occurred in a minister’s office”. Wong also qualified her position, saying she didn’t know “full details of the allegations before the story became public”.

The opposition is calling for Gallagher’s resignation or sacking, but that won’t be happening.

While her statement to the committee was misleading, Gallagher was not a minister. Indeed, even ministers do not fall on their sword these days for what was once considered the serious sin of misleading parliament. (In the 1980s, Hawke government minister John Brown did so, in the wake of an answer he gave to an opposition question.)

Precisely what Labor knew before the story broke remains unclear, as does precisely who in Labor knew about it. The Kitching leak indicated the senior Labor women in the Senate were aware – did they pass anything on?

But there was nothing improper about Gallagher receiving information – oppositions get alerts all the time. The issue was her denial at the Senate committee.

Labor will stare down the opposition’s attacks. It can counter by saying returning to the issue brings fresh trauma for Higgins, and the private text messages should never have been leaked (where they came from is unknown).

If it chooses, Labor can raise Brown’s weekend claims that, when the heat was on her over her handling of the Higgins matter, she received little support from Scott Morrison and his office (to which she’d returned by the time the story broke). Her weekend interview with The Australian carried the implication Morrison may have misled parliament when he told the House of Representatives he’d spoken with her about the matter (Brown said he hadn’t).

There’s unlikely to be much mileage for the opposition in the pursuit of Gallagher – although that’s not to say she doesn’t have questions to answer.

As Anthony Albanese has pointed out, the issue was about the former government, not the then opposition. For the Liberals to revisit it is to hark back to the Morrison days – bad territory for the Coalition.

Moreover, people have entrenched views about the Higgins matter and few opinions will shift.

Anyway, the public are now preoccupied with a range of bread-and-butter issues. They’re unlikely to focus on, or care about, the ins-and-outs of who in Labor knew what when.

But Reynolds cares a lot. All along she felt wrongly targeted, believing she behaved properly. Most recently, she was angered when not allowed into the mediation that saw Higgins receive a large sum of Commonwealth money. She wanted to mount her defence against the claims made about her and her office.

Reynolds intends to refer this payout to the National Anti-Corruption Commission, which commences operating on July 1.

Regardless of that, in the name of transparency, the government should provide the details of the payment.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot still to come in this story, even apart from what happens in defamation actions Lehrmann has launched. On the basis of the evidence we heard, the ACT inquiry into the conduct of criminal justice agencies in the case could be set to deliver a hefty load of brickbats in its report, due at the end of next month.

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: Brittany Higgins story continues its damaging trail, with no end in sight – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-brittany-higgins-story-continues-its-damaging-trail-with-no-end-in-sight-207500

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jared Mondschein, Director of Research, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

Since Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy eight years ago this week, few words have been more overused than “unprecedented”. It was unprecedented for a previously unelected politician who had never served a day in the US military or government to become president. It was also unprecedented for a US president to twice be impeached.

Yet again, there is no historical precedent for the fact that a former US president has been indicted by the federal government. Specifically, for 37 counts and seven separate charges concerning his handling of classified documents after he left the White House.

Compounding this challenge is the unmistakable political reality that the former president, who is currently the leading candidate to win back his old job, is facing the prospect that the US government, which is currently led by his chief political adversary, could imprison him.

From the allegations that the former president colluded with Russia, to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s charges over falsifying business records, even many critics of the former president would admit Trump has been unfairly targeted by political opponents.

The norm-shattering former president, they posit, led Trump’s political opponents to engage in reckless behaviour that also shattered norms.

But few, if any, critics of the former president have stepped forward to say that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment is political in nature.

What are the charges?

As detailed in a 49-page indictment released late last week, the charges allege that the former president was fully aware of the laws about classified documents, as well as the fact that the documents he maintained at his residence were not declassified.

The prosecution’s evidence for this include his statements in the 2016 presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton, as well as a recording of a conversation he had at his residence that indicated that he knew some documents in his possession remained classified.

These documents, the indictment alleges, were not merely informal papers that were perhaps over-classified. Instead, they

included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for a possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

According to former Trump administration Attorney-General Bill Barr, the accusation that these charges are evidence the Department of Justice has been weaponised for political purposes is “ridiculous”. On the contrary, Barr told Fox News that if even half of the “very detailed” and “very damning” indictment is true, then Trump “is toast”.

Mixing the political with the legal

Since becoming a public figure in the 1980’s, Trump has been unmatched in his ability to successfully navigate countless investigations and lawsuits, seemingly without ever paying significant political or legal costs.

While few legal scholars are as confident the former president will escape unscathed in this instance, that has not changed Trump’s political strategy. Indeed, the former president’s hiring of a new legal team may be indicative of a change in legal tact. Despite this, his political approach has remained remarkably consistent.

Within hours of being informed he was being indicted, the president and his staff had already broken the news on his Truth Social page. They had also started a fundraising campaign, and put key talking points out to his political supporters and proxies.

This strategy is straightforward: highlight the political nature of a special counsel appointed by Biden administration officials charging the former president; reiterate the lack of a prosecution for the mishandling of classified documents by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden; and question why these charges were brought the same week that Republicans publicised their reported findings about misdeeds by Biden and his family.

Trump can now enjoy dominating the news for the next week or more. This will leave fellow Republican candidates such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence stuck in a news cycle about the former president instead of about their own campaigns.

Furthermore, the solid level of support Trump continues to enjoy in the Republican Party has left little alternative but for the majority of the Republican candidates to pledge their support for Trump’s innocence – regardless of what they may say privately about the man.

In the court of public opinion, one recent poll found that 48% of Americans think the former president should have been indicted, 35% think he should not have been indicted, and 17% were unsure.

While Jack Smith will only work in the court of law, he and the Department of Justice will undoubtedly remain conscious of the public’s perception of their case against the former president.

What happens now?

It should be noted that as novel as it may be for a former US president to face a federal indictment, it is by no means unprecedented in the democratic world. As much as the former president and many of his supporters continue to call his indictment “third world country stuff”, the experience of a number of developed democracies such as France and South Korea indicate that political leaders facing prosecution did not fundamentally undermine their democracies.

Nonetheless, Smith appears highly conscious of the global ramifications arising from his indictment of a former president of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy, saying “our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world”.

No global debate has dominated the past decade of politics more than that about the populist moment that both led to and was fuelled by Americans electing Donald Trump in 2016. Defined by an appeal to ordinary people who feel their concerns are disregarded by elites, one could perceive the charging of the apex of US elites – a former US president – as something that would quell populist sentiment. Speaking to that sentiment, Smith told the public:

We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.

Yet, the image that will dominate news this week – that of a former president entering a federal courthouse on Tuesday for arraignment for the first time – is just as likely to reinforce Trump’s political power in the Republican Party.

Such a political grasp, which he famously said would outlast even him shooting someone on 5th Avenue in New York City, remains unprecedented.

Jared Mondschein 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. Yes, federal charges against a former president are unprecedented – but so is Trump’s political power – https://theconversation.com/yes-federal-charges-against-a-former-president-are-unprecedented-but-so-is-trumps-political-power-207408

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nathan Brownlowe, Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney

Two weeks ago, a modest-looking paper was uploaded to the arXiv preprint server with the unassuming title “On the invariant subspace problem in Hilbert spaces”. The paper is just 13 pages long and its list of references contains only a single entry.

The paper purports to contain the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle that mathematicians have been picking away at for more than half a century: the invariant subspace problem.

Famous open problems often attract ambitious attempts at solutions by interesting characters out to make their name. But such efforts are usually quickly shot down by experts.

However, the author of this short note, Swedish mathematician Per Enflo, is no ambitious up-and-comer. He is almost 80, has made a name for himself solving open problems, and has quite a history with the problem at hand.

Per Enflo: mathematics, music, and a live goose

Born in 1944 and now an emeritus professor at Kent State University, Ohio, Enflo has had a remarkable career, not only in mathematics but also in music.

He is a renowned concert pianist who has performed and recorded numerous piano concertos, and has performed solo and with orchestras across the world.

Enflo is also one of the great problem-solvers in a field called functional analysis. Aside from his work on the invariant subspace problem, Enflo solved two other major problems – the basis problem and the approximation problem – both of which had remained open for more than 40 years.

By solving the approximation problem, Enflo cracked an equivalent puzzle called Mazur’s goose problem. Polish mathematician Stanisław Mazur had in 1936 promised a live goose to anyone who solved his problem – and in 1972 he kept his word, presenting the goose to Enflo.

What’s an invariant subspace?

Now we know the main character. But what about the invariant subspace problem itself?

If you’ve ever taken a first-year university course in linear algebra, you will have come across things called vectors, matrices and eigenvectors. If you haven’t, we can think of a vector as an arrow with a length and a direction, living in a particular vector space. (There are lots of different vector spaces with different numbers of dimensions and various rules.)

Read more:
Explainer: the point of pure mathematics

A matrix is something that can transform a vector, by changing the direction and/or length of the line. If a particular matrix only transforms the length of a particular vector (meaning the direction is either the same or flipped in the opposite direction), we call the vector an eigenvector of the matrix.

Another way to think about this is to say that the matrix transforms the eigenvectors (and any lines parallel to them) back onto themselves: these lines are invariant for this matrix. Taken together, we call these lines invariant subspaces of the matrix.

Eigenvectors and invariant subspaces are also of interest beyond just mathematics – to take one example, it has been said that Google owes its success to “the $25 billion eigenvector”.

What about spaces with an infinite number of dimensions?

So that’s an invariant subspace. The invariant subspace problem is a little more complicated: it is about spaces with an infinite number of dimensions, and it asks whether every linear operator (the equivalent of a matrix) in those spaces must have an invariant subspace.

More precisely (hold onto your hat): the invariant subspace problem asks whether every bounded linear operator T on a complex Banach space X admits a non-trivial invariant subspace M of X, in the sense that there is a subspace M ≠ {0}, X of X such that T(M) is contained back in M.

Stated in this way, the invariant subspace problem was posed during the middle of last century, and eluded all attempts at a solution.

Read more:
Pythagoras’ revenge: humans didn’t invent mathematics, it’s what the world is made of

But as is often the case when mathematicians can’t solve a problem, we move the goalposts. Mathematicians working on this problem narrowed their focus by restricting the problem to particular classes of spaces and operators.

The first breakthrough was made by Enflo in the 1970s (although his result was not published until 1987). He answered the problem in the negative, by constructing an operator on a Banach space without a non-trivial invariant subspace.

What’s new about this new proposed solution?

So what is the current status of the invariant subspace problem? If Enflo solved it in 1987, why has he solved it again?

Well, Enflo settled the problem for Banach spaces in general. However, there is a particularly important kind of Banach space called a Hilbert space, which has a strong sense of geometry and is widely used in physics, economics and applied mathematics.

Resolving the invariant subspace problem for operators on Hilbert spaces has been stubbornly difficult, and it is this which Enflo claims to have achieved.

This time Enflo answers in the affirmative: his paper argues that every bounded linear operator on a Hilbert space does have an invariant subspace.

Expert review is still to come

I have not worked through Enflo’s preprint line by line. Enflo himself is reportedly cautious about the solution, as it has not yet been reviewed by experts.

Peer review of Enflo’s earlier proof, for Banach spaces in general, took several years. However, that paper ran to more than 100 pages, so a review of the 13 pages of the new paper should be much speedier.

If correct, it will be a remarkable achievement, especially for someone who has already produced so many remarkable achievements over such a large span of time. Enflo’s many contributions to mathematics, and his answers to many open problems, have made a big impact on the field, generating new techniques and ideas.

I’m looking forward to finding out whether Enflo’s work now closes the book on the invariant subspace problem, and to seeing the new mathematics that may emerge out of its conclusion.

Nathan Brownlowe 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. Has a mathematician solved the ‘invariant subspace problem’? And what does that even mean? – https://theconversation.com/has-a-mathematician-solved-the-invariant-subspace-problem-and-what-does-that-even-mean-206859

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Powers, Lecturer In Buddhism Studies, The University of Melbourne

In China, a group of atheists (the Chinese Communist Party) has long dictated how the country’s religious groups should practice their faiths.

Chinese Christians are told to reject salvation by faith and the Resurrection; their core beliefs should be patriotism and love of the party. The party has also published several pamphlets detailing appropriate beliefs and practices for Buddhists and ordered them to adjust their thoughts accordingly.

Communist officials are particularly concerned with one politically sensitive element of Buddhism: the succession of the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, whose reincarnation lineage began in the 16th century. He will be 88 years old in July and has reportedly experienced health problems, though he claims he is in good health.

In official news outlets like the Global Times, the party maintains the Chinese government is the sole legitimate arbiter for all reincarnations of Buddhist lamas, regardless of where they are born or their traditional regions of influence.

The Chinese state is deeply suspicious of religious believers and the potentially persuasive power of rival ideologies, which is why it insists on appointing and educating all prominent religious figures. They learn the propaganda of Chinese patriotism and become adept at parroting the party line, but they generally have little knowledge of their purported religion. True believers recognise this.

The Dalai Lama highlighted the absurdity of the party’s stance earlier this year when he recognised an eight-year-old Mongolian boy as the tenth Jetsun Dampa, the most influential reincarnation lineage in Mongolia.

Read more:
Dalai Lama identifies the reincarnation of Mongolia’s spiritual leader – a preview of tensions around finding his own replacement

The move angered Chinese officials because it demonstrated the Dalai Lama’s continuing authority among Buddhists in the region. It also showed that despite decades of persistent claims the Communist Party exercises sole authority in these matters, it is merely an official fabrication.

In 1995, the Dalai Lama issued a proclamation that a Tibetan boy named Gendün Chökyi Nyima was the Panchen Lama, the second-most prominent reincarnate lama in his order, the Geluk. The party responded by arresting the boy, then six years old, along with his family. They have not been seen since.

The Golden Urn

Tibetan Buddhists believe that after death a person’s consciousness transmigrates to a new body. For most people, this happens involuntarily, but advanced masters can choose their life situations. These are referred to as “tulkus” (“emanation bodies”). Traditionally, tulkus have exercised ultimate authority over their own successions. Many lamas issue predictions regarding the circumstances of their rebirths, including place and timing.

The Dalai Lama, hoping to counter Communist Party plans to name his successor, has declared he will not take rebirth in any region under Chinese control. He argues the main task of a new tulku is to carry on the unfinished work of their predecessor, and this would be impossible in occupied Tibet.

The party cites precedents, mostly invented or exaggerated, that it claims give it a historically determined right to adjudicate all matters of tulku succession.

Many of these hinge on the “Golden Urn”, which was sent to Tibet in 1792 by the Qianlong Emperor, along with instructions on its use. The names of prospective tulkus were to be inscribed on lots and placed in the urn. The officiating lama would then choose one at random as the successor tulku.

Despite claims by party officials that the urn has been used in all tulku selections since it was delivered to Tibet, historical sources indicate it was only used sporadically.

Moreover, I have not seen any Tibetan document that presents the urn as the sole factor for determining tulku succession. In every case I’ve examined, traditional tests were administered first.

For instance, a prospective child was presented with two sets of items – one belonged to the predecessor, the other did not but appeared similar. The real successor should be able to correctly identify the ones owned by his predecessor.

Lots were then drawn from the Golden Urn as one of a series of measures to ensure the correct candidate was selected – or to placate Chinese officials.

The Dalai Lama has indicated he is open to a process that includes lots drawn from the urn, but also insists on the standard succession methods developed under Tibetan Buddhism.

Clashes over philosophy

Most public discussions of succession focus on historically based claims and counterclaims, but the underlying logic of both sides is seldom mentioned.

Tibetan Buddhism holds that as death approaches, the coarser levels of consciousness drop away. At the moment of death, the most subtle one, the “mind of clear light,” manifests. After this, one enters the “intermediate state” (bardo) and is reborn in another body.

The main basis for rebirth is consciousness, which is compared to a river. It flows from moment to moment, with each moment conditioned by those that preceded it. It is not like a soul or self because it is impermanent and changing.

Most Buddhists believe that rebirth is determined by their past karma, but tulkus can consciously choose their next life situations.

One of the core absurdities of the Communist Party’s claims to authority over this process is its members adhere to a Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism, which rejects the idea of rebirth or consciousness being transferred between bodies.

So, when the party designates someone as “Dalai Lama,” it is similar to naming a postmaster: it is a position overseen by the government, and it can be conferred on anyone.

Tibetan Buddhists, however, believe that the recognition of a Dalai Lama is much more than this. It is the end result of a series of rigorous tests designed to determine one unique person, whose consciousness is the continuation of his predecessor’s.

What’s at stake for Tibetan Buddhism?

After the disappearance of Gendün Chökyi Nyima in 1995, the government held a ceremony to anoint another boy as Panchen Lama. Panchen Lamas have often played key roles in the recognition of Dalai Lamas, and the party has declared it plans to use its Panchen Lama to choose a Dalai Lama who will be under its control.

The Dalai Lama has declared on a number of occasions the Tibetan people will reject China’s choice. And Tibetan exiles plan to employ traditional methods to identify Tenzin Gyatso’s successor.

Inevitably, other countries will be drawn into this arcane conflict, based on centuries-old religious precedents, which few will understand.

Read more:
There’s a religious revival going on in China — under the constant watch of the Communist Party

So, after both sides have announced their respective Dalai Lamas, what effect will this have on Tibetan Buddhists in Tibet and their religious practices?

Probably very little. The party’s Panchen Lama is viewed by Tibetans as a high-ranking government official and is treated with the appropriate respect. But he has no authority as a religious teacher.

And despite government attempts to promote him as one, he lacks the training, knowledge and charisma that would be required for him to function as a tulku. He rarely visits Tibet, and has shown no aptitude for the religious aspects of his role.

The future Dalai Lama born in exile will receive traditional training from the most esteemed figures in Tibetan Buddhism, while his or her Communist Party rival will be trained in a government-run school and become a mouthpiece of the party.

The former will probably follow in the footsteps of Tenzin Gyatso and become an internationally prominent Buddhist spokesperson. The latter will emulate the party’s Panchen Lama and repeat whatever messages his overlords command him to deliver to Tibetan Buddhists.

The question of Tibetan Buddhism’s future survival is by no means assured. Tibetans overwhelmingly identify as Buddhists, and most deeply revere the Dalai Lama despite decades of propaganda demonising him.

The government is increasingly imposing restrictions on religious practice. There are also economic disincentives for those who want to retain their traditional religious commitments. This struggle between tradition and Communist Party control is likely to play out over the course of the next few decades, and the future looks increasingly grim for those who want to resist.

John Powers 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. Succession on the Tibetan plateau: what’s at stake in the battle over the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation? – https://theconversation.com/succession-on-the-tibetan-plateau-whats-at-stake-in-the-battle-over-the-dalai-lamas-reincarnation-202353

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mike Armour, Associate Professor at NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University

If you’ve been on social media recently you might have noticed sponsored posts and ads for a variety of small, portable electrical devices. These claim to manage period or endometriosis pain safely and without drugs.

Most devices have a small box that generates an electrical pulse, and wires connected to sticky pads, which go on your tummy.

So how are these devices supposed to stop your pain? Are they safe? Do they actually work?

Read more:
Health Check: are painful periods normal?

They’re mini TENS machines

These devices use “transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation”, better known as TENS. In other words, they apply small electrical pulses across the skin to stimulate certain types of nerves.

TENS machines are not new. They’ve been around since the 1970s and have been used for a variety of painful conditions, from muscular injuries to pain relief in labour.

However, these latest devices are compact and easy to wear discretely compared to the older models. They’re fairly simple to use, portable, you can use them at home, and they cost around A$50-200.

It’s easy to see why devices like these might be popular. Half of people with period pain say over-the-counter medication such as ibuprofen doesn’t get rid of their period pain. Most people with endometriosis report major issues with getting adequate pain relief.

Read more:
From sharp butt pains to period poos: 5 lesser-known menstrual cycle symptoms

How might TENS work?

All TENS-based devices generate small electrical pulses that feel a little like mild electrical shocks. These pulses are transmitted through the surface of the skin via the sticky pads.

You generally place these pads where the pain is. So for period pain that’s usually at or below the level of the belly button but above the pubic region. You can also place the pads on your lower back or even on your tailbone (sacrum). This is because some nerves near your tailbone also affect the pelvic area.

Here’s what we know so far

The exact mechanisms of how TENS works to reduce pain is still unclear. There are likely many different pathways.

First, we need to first talk about different types of nerves. Nociceptors are nerves that send “danger” impulses about actual or potential tissue damage. Sensory nerves in your skin transmit information about things such as touch and pressure.

The gate control theory of pain says the spinal cord has “gates” that can be open or closed. When these gates are open, nerves can transmit these danger impulses up the spinal cord to the brain where they may be interpreted as “pain”. If these gates are closed, these impulses can’t reach the brain as easily.

TENS machines, especially at high frequency (greater than 50 pulses per second), tend to stimulate sensory nerves (the ones in your skin). These sensory nerves also send signals to your brain, but faster than the danger ones.

These sensory signals can close the “gates” at certain parts of the spinal cord. So if the TENS machine can stimulate enough of these sensory nerves in your skin, it will block at least some of these danger impulses from reaching the brain. The fewer danger impulses that reach the brain, the less pain you are likely to feel.

Then there’s the concept of endogenous opioids as pain relief. These are pain relieving chemicals the body makes itself.

TENS machines stimulate the release of these chemicals, with different types of endogenous opioids released depending on the frequency of stimulation.

Read more:
Explainer: what is pain and what is happening when we feel it?

So does TENS work?

For period pain

A systematic review in 2022 found four studies looking at TENS to manage primary dysmenorrhea (period pain that occurs without any physical changes in the pelvis).

There was a significant reduction in period pain when high-frequency TENS (more than 50 pulses per second) was compared to sham TENS (where the machine looks the same but doesn’t deliver a pulse).

This is in line with an older Cochrane review that found similar benefits.

Pain relieving effects only tend to last while the device is active.

For endometriosis

Endometriosis is where tissue similar to the lining of the uterus is found outside the uterus, commonly in the pelvis. There is only one study of TENS for pelvic pain due to endometriosis.

This study compared two types of TENS – one using a higher frequency for 20 minutes twice a day, and one using a lower frequency for 30 minutes once per week. Both types used pads placed on the tailbone, and women were told to make the pulses “strong, but comfortable”.

Both types improved pelvic pain, pain after sex, and quality of life, but not period pain. This was a very small study (11 women in each group) and there was no control or placebo group. So we need larger studies with a proper control group before we can be sure if TENS works for endometriosis pain.

Read more:
I have painful periods, could it be endometriosis?

Is it safe?

Most studies report no side effects when the pads are used on the abdomen or lower spine.

However, if you turn up the intensity too high it can be uncomfortable. You could also get a rash from the adhesive on the pads.

Read more:
First periods can come as a shock. 5 ways to support your kid when they get theirs

Which one to buy?

All TENS machines should allow you to change the intensity (how strong the pulse feels). Some also allow you to change the frequency (how often the pulses happen).

If you are going to use the device occasionally (less than 4-5 days per month) you may just need a device that allows you to change the intensity.

To get the best relief, the machine should be turned up high enough so it delivers noticeable pulses, but is not painful. So you need to find your own comfort level.

For period pain, high frequency (more than 50 pulses per second) shows better results than low frequency (usually 2-5 pulses per second). So make sure the device you’re thinking of buying is either set to a high frequency or you can change the frequency.

For people with endometriosis, it’s a little more tricky. You’ll probably going to want to use the device more often than a few days a month.

Unfortunately, like with taking regular opioid painkillers, with regular TENS use people can become tolerant to its pain-relieving effect, which means it doesn’t work as well as it did when you first started using it.

One possible solution to tolerance is to use mixed-frequency TENS where both high and low frequencies are alternated. You can also slowly increase the intensity level over time.

TENS also doesn’t work well when people are regular opioid users. This is important as people with endometriosis are often using opioid medications to manage their pain. If you are using opioids regularly, high-frequency TENS is likely to be a better choice.

Mike Armour 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’s a TENS machine? Can it help my period pain or endometriosis? – https://theconversation.com/whats-a-tens-machine-can-it-help-my-period-pain-or-endometriosis-201389