Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University

The tragic case of Annie Moylan, who died in Melbourne in 2017 from sepsis, when 18 weeks pregnant, has put a spotlight on this life-threatening condition.

Delay in receiving blood results, admission to a private hospital that did not provide obstetric care, and communication breakdown when Annie transferred to another private hospital all seem to have played a role in what has been described as a “cascade of failures”. A coronial inquest into her death begins on Monday.

Sepsis can also happen after birth, as was seen in the devastating loss of Michaela Perrin who died in 2014, six days having a healthy baby girl via caesarean section.

Women who are currently pregnant may worry about how cases such as these can happen in a country like Australia with an excellent health system.

Sepsis is a serious health condition for anyone, and pregnant women are no exception to this. Thankfully it is still rare for young women to die from the condition.

Read more:
Sepsis still kills 1 in 5 people worldwide – two ICU physicians offer a new approach to stopping it

When the body fights itself

Sepsis is syndrome (or group of symptoms) mostly caused by a bacterial infection. It results when the body is trying to fight an infection and begins to damage its own tissues. This can lead to a serious drop in blood pressure, and organ damage.

In Australia, around 12% of people hospitalised with sepsis will die from it. Very young (less than 12 months) and older people (over 85 years) are most vulnerable. The death rate for pregnant women with sepsis worldwide is estimated to be between 1% and 4.6%.

Treatment relies on early identification, antibiotics, intravenous fluids (fluid through a drip) and skilful medical care. For those who survive, there can be lifelong damage, both physically and psychologically.

What causes sepsis during pregnancy, or after birth?

When sepsis happens during pregnancy, it is sometimes called maternal sepsis. After birth it is called postpartum or puerperal sepsis.

The syndrome can result from an infection anywhere in the body (such as pneumonia or a urinary tract infection) or it can be introduced during medical procedures like a caesarean section.

For this reason, all women who have a caesarean section are given intravenous antibiotics in the operating theatre to prevent sepsis.

For around 30% of cases, no source of infection is found.

When identified, the most common causes of sepsis during and after pregnancy are Escherichia coli (E. coli) and group B Streptococcus. As mixed infections are also possible with sepsis, broad-spectrum antibiotics are given as soon as possible.

Read more:
Vaginal birth after caesarean increases the risk of serious perineal tear by 20%, our large-scale review shows

Sepsis was a major cause of women dying after birth

Puerperal sepsis was once one of the main causes of women dying following childbirth. As knowledge about hygiene practices advanced and then antibiotics were introduced, this declined rapidly. However, sepsis has never been eliminated.

The work of Viennese physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis in the mid-1800s led to the discovery that health provider hand-washing could reduce infection rates in women.

Semmelweis observed there was a much lower rate of women dying when cared for by midwives than doctors in two clinics and realised the midwives were not involved in autopsies and hence not carrying bacteria from the autopsy rooms into the maternity ward.

Semmelweis told anyone attending autopsies to scrub their hands with chloride and lime before entering the maternity ward. Soon after this, the rate of maternal deaths in the doctors’ clinics fell.

It took nearly another 30 years for Semmelweis’s ideas to be fully embraced. He suffered a tragic death in an asylum and ironically succumbed to sepsis from a gangrenous wound to his hand.

It has been estimated nearly a half of all maternal deaths in the pre-antibiotic era (before the 1930s) were due to infection.

“Back-alley abortions” were once another major cause of sepsis and death in women before better access to proper medical care for abortions was legislated in many countries.

Today, around one in 12 maternal deaths are from lack of access to safe abortion care and infection remains a big part of this. This is one reason why there are such grave concern over the recent overturning of Roe vs Wade in the United States.

Read more:
Monkeypox can be transmitted to babies during and after pregnancy. We should be watchful but not alarmed

Rates of maternal sepsis today

While sepsis is considered to be a preventable cause of maternal death, it continues to be a major cause of women dying during or after childbirth, even in high resource countries such as Australia.

Sepsis was the second most common cause of maternal death between 2010 and 2019 in Australia (22 deaths).

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention sepsis is the second leading cause of pregnancy related deaths in the US, leading to around 14% of pregnancy-related deaths.

Investigations into sepsis cases during pregnancy and following birth in the United Kingdom found 63% of deaths were associated with substandard care, such as delays in recognising or managing sepsis.

Delays in diagnosing sepsis or misdiagnosis of sepsis in childbearing women is made more complicated due to the physical changes in women’s bodies during pregnancy, labour and the postnatal period. Sepsis can also progress more rapidly in pregnant women. https://www.ogmagazine.org.au/21/4-21/managing-the-septic-patient-in-labour/

We should all be alert

If you are unwell during pregnancy or following birth let your health care provider know and persist in seeking care if you are not satisfied.

Most of the time everything will be fine but there are signs of sepsis that can be detected by health providers, such as low blood pressure, temperature or via blood tests.

Health providers have processes for suspected maternal sepsis, guidelines to follow and regular training on this important health emergency.

Health providers need to listen to women and take them seriously when they are unwell, and have the possibility of sepsis in mind.

The brave and persistent actions of Annie Moylan’s parents in seeking answers about their daughter’s death from sepsis will make care safer for other women.

Hannah Dahlen 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. Sepsis is serious during pregnancy, but thankfully it is still rare – https://theconversation.com/sepsis-is-serious-during-pregnancy-but-thankfully-it-is-still-rare-188361

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

The Chinese reaction to United States Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit further escalated tensions in our region, as China becomes more bellicose in language and action.

On Wednesday, China’s Ambassador Xiao Qian spoke at the National Press Club. He talked about wanting a positive relationship between Australia and China, while reiterating China’s uncompromising line towards Taiwan, and giving a chilling prediction of what the Taiwanese would be in for post reunification.

“The least thing we are ready to do is use force. That is one of the reasons why China has been so patient for several decades. […] We’re waiting for a peaceful unification. But […] we can never rule out the option to use other means […] when compelled, we are ready to use all necessary means.”

“My personal understanding is that once Taiwan is united, come back to the motherland, there might be process for the people in Taiwan to have a correct understanding of China.”

In this podcast, Michelle Grattan speaks with Nick Bisley, Professor of International Relations at La Trobe University, an expert in Asian foreign relations and Australia’s foreign and defence policy.

Bisley says “what we are probably entering into, at least for the next few months, is a period of much sharply-heightened instability and military kind of friction in and around Taiwan”.

“China has made very clear for decades now that under certain circumstances it would use military force to deal with what it sees as a rogue province. And those circumstances are largely around a unilateral declaration of independence by Taiwan or some other really significant move away from the old status quo.”

“I think what what we see out of this crisis is that China’s risk appetite has gone up and its willingness to put up with what it sees as kind of provocations has gone down.

“So the likelihood of them using military force to coerce Taiwan – it’s not going to happen this year or next year, but its likelihood of occurring in the next four to five years has distinctly increased.”

On whether there is the likelihood of a conflict between China and the US as tensions between the two nations continue to rise, “the constraints that domestic politics puts on each side means that we could end up in a situation where they are backed into a corner and find that there’s few ways out other than some kind of military action, which then escalates.”

But “if there is a proper conflict between the US and China, everyone loses pretty significantly.”

“When we look back in February 2022, thinking about what Putin would do in relation to Ukraine, we all thought he’s not going to do a full-blown invasion. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not in his interest to do so. I think we’ve always thought that about Taiwan. It’s just not in the US’s interest to do the full-blown military operation. And the lesson has got to be from Ukraine, is that sometimes rationality doesn’t always win.”

On whether the Albanese government is handling the rising tensions with China well, Bisley says: “They’re playing a reasonable hand in what is a pretty difficult set of circumstances.”

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: How far will China go? La Trobe’s Nick Bisley says its ‘risk appetite’ has gone up – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-how-far-will-china-go-la-trobes-nick-bisley-says-its-risk-appetite-has-gone-up-188536

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist), The Conversation

On June 24, the US Supreme Court denied a constitutional right to an abortion, overturning its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. I covered this and two other late June right-wing decisions by the court in an early July article.

Read more:
How the US Supreme Court has become right-wing, and do recent decisions give Democrats hope at the midterms?

When this article was written, the court was historically unpopular, but so was US President Joe Biden. I thought it unlikely abortion would help the Democrats in the November midterm elections, given Biden’s unpopularity and the high inflation.

But in the last month, Democrats have gained in the national House of Representatives popular vote and in the FiveThirtyEight Senate forecasts. In my July article, Republicans had a 2.0% national lead over Democrats, an 87% chance to win the house and a 55% chance to win the Senate in FiveThirtyEight poll averages and forecasts.

Now FiveThirtyEight gives Democrats a 60% chance to win the Senate, while Republicans still have an 80% chance to win the House. Democrats have a tiny 0.1% national lead over Republicans, their first lead since last November.

Biden is still unpopular with a 55.5% disapproval, 39.8% approval (net -15.7). But Democrats are doing far better than we would expect from Biden’s ratings.

There are still three months to go before the November 8 midterm elections, and Republicans could advance again. But at the moment, abortion appears to be helping Democrats, and recent economic data is likely to also help.

At these elections, all 435 house seats and 35 of the 100 Senate seats are up for election. Democrats won the house in 2020 by a 222-213 margin, and hold the Senate from a 50-50 tie on Vice President Kamala Harris’ casting vote. Twenty-one Republicans and 14 Democrats are up for election in the Senate.

The Democrats’ biggest triumph occurred at an August 2 referendum in Kansas. Republicans attempted to remove a right to an abortion in the Kansas state constitution by a referendum. In this case, a “no” vote preserved the abortion right, while a “yes” would have scrapped this right.

The “no” side won this referendum by a landslide 59.0-41.0 margin. Kansas is a right-wing state that voted for Donald Trump over Biden at the 2020 US presidential election by a 56.2-41.5 margin. The swing from the 2020 election to this referedum was 32.7 points to the left.

Abortion important at midterms due to stripping of rights

I believe abortion has become important as the large majority of voters would have assumed it was settled law, and the Supreme Court would not reverse its 1973 decision.

Gun control is another issue where Republicans appear extreme, particularly to an international audience. But in this case, gun control advocates are trying to strip people of their “right” to bear arms. The side that thinks their rights are in danger of being stripped, whether that’s guns or abortion, is more motivated.

This July 22 Vox article said 13 states now have abortion bans, nine of these without exceptions for rape or incest (Oklahoma is unclear). Nine more states have abortion bans that are currently being held up by state courts, with four including exceptions for rape or incest.

A ten-year-old girl who became pregnant from rape in Ohio was forced to have an abortion in Indiana owing to Ohio’s total abortion ban. Indiana has now banned abortion from September 15, though with exceptions for rape and incest.

For much of his first year as president, Trump had near his worst ratings in the FiveThirtyEight tracker, likely due to his attempts to gut the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). These efforts were supported by Republicans who controlled both chambers of Congress. The repeal of Obamacare failed by just a 51-49 margin in the Senate.

When Obamacare was first enacted in March 2010, it likely hindered Democrats at the November 2010 midterm elections, which Republicans won easily. But the reaction to efforts to gut Obamacare demonstrates the electoral potency of stripping of rights already acquired.

Since 2006, the non-presidential party has won every midterm house election convincingly. Republican George W. Bush was president in 2006, when Democrats won. Democrat Barack Obama was president in both 2010 and 2014, when Republicans won, and Trump was president in 2018, when Democrats won.

By striking down Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has given Democrats an opportunity to be an opposition party. This could help Democrats retain their Congressional majorities.

Drop in inflation could help Democrats

Inflation has been the Democrats’ biggest economic problem this year. But the July inflation report (released Wednesday) had headline inflation unchanged, down from a 1.3% increase in June. Real wages increased 0.5% in July after falling 0.9% in June, though they are still down 3.6% in weekly terms for the 12 months to July.

In the July jobs report (released August 5), 528,000 jobs were created, and the unemployment rate was just 3.5%. While the unemployment rate has returned to its level in February 2020, prior to the COVID pandemic, the employment population ratio – the percentage of eligible Americans employed – was 60.0% in July, 1.2% below its February 2020 level.

The robust jobs report contradicted the two successive quarters
of negative GDP growth in both the March and June quarters that is often used to define a recession. Note that the US annualises its GDP data. In Australia’s quarterly terms, the contraction would be 0.4% in the March quarter and 0.2% in June.

Senate passes $US 739 billion health and climate bill

The US Senate on Sunday passed a USD739 billion bill that prioritises health care and climate change action. This bill was passed 51-50 on Harris’ casting vote with all Democrats in favour and all Republicans opposed. The House is expected to pass it Friday (Saturday AEST), then Biden will sign it into law.

The Senate usually requires a three-fifths majority (60 votes) to pass legislation, but only a simple majority is required for “budget reconciliation”. Not everything qualifies for reconciliation, and one clause of this bill was stripped out as it failed the reconciliation test.

This is a major legislative triumph for Democrats that had seemed unlikely after their most conservative senator, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, had twice rejected earlier versions. Democrats will hope this legislation boosts youth turnout at the midterms.

FBI raids Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and byelections

The FBI on Monday raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. While it would be satisfying for the US left if Trump went to prison, I do not think it will be important for the 2024 presidential election. If Trump can’t run, Republicans are almost certain to nominate another very right-wing candidate for president – current Florida governor Ron DeSantis would be the favourite.

Read more:
As the FBI raids Mar-A-Lago, Donald Trump reaches for unconvincing historical parallels

Republicans won Tuesday’s federal byelection for the Republican-held Minnesota first Congressional District by a 51.0-46.9 margin, but that was down from Trump’s 54.0-43.9 margin over Biden in 2020 in this district (see Daily Kos elections). Byelections will occur in three more federal seats in the next two weeks.

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. US Democrats gain ground before midterm elections as Kansas voters reject attempt to ban abortion – https://theconversation.com/us-democrats-gain-ground-before-midterm-elections-as-kansas-voters-reject-attempt-to-ban-abortion-187994

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven W. Salisbury, PhD; Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland

For the first time, we have shown that a soft heel pad was crucial to how sauropod dinosaurs supported their immense weight, according to a new digital reconstruction of their feet.

Sauropods, which weighed up to 50 tonnes and dominated the world’s ecosystems for around 100 million years, appear to have developed soft heel pads early in their evolution, and it was likely a key step that allowed sauropods to become the largest animals to have ever walked the earth. Our work appears this week in the journal Science Advances.

‘Thunder lizards’

One of the most notable things about sauropods is the immense size of some species: the feet of sauropod dinosaurs would have shaken the earth as they walked. Indeed, the name of one of the first described sauropods to gain popular appeal, Brontosaurus, means “thunder lizard”.

Sauropods had long necks and tails, and walked on four long, pillar-like legs, but they didn’t start out gigantic. Around 230 million years ago, the ancestors of these dinosaurs were small, two-legged animals that would have looked very much like their saurischian cousins, the theropods; most probably wouldn’t have weighed more than an ostrich.

But starting around 210 million years ago, sauropod ancestors increased in size, with an estimated body mass approaching one tonne. The largest sauropods such as Argentinosaurus, Patagotitan and Australotitan probably reached adult sizes in excess of 50 tonnes more than ten times the size of the largest living terrestrial animal today, the African elephant.

It goes without saying that animals of that size had immense feet. Some sauropod footprints found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia are more than 1.7 metres long – big enough for most people to bathe in!

But what did sauropod feet really look like, and how did they support the titanic adult body weight of their owners?

Read more:
Necks question … how did the biggest dinosaurs get so big?

On the trail of sauropods

Having spent many years tracking sauropods in the Kimberley, I [Steve Salisbury] have long pondered what their feet might have looked like in life. The front feet appear to have been like those of elephants, with the bones arranged in a near-vertical, semi-circular column, with greatly reduced finger bones except for the thumb. The “hand” prints of most sauropods are typically rounded or “bean-shaped”.

Despite their commonly portrayed columnar look, however, sauropod feet were very different to those of elephants. Sauropods had long, flexible toes, as evidenced by the mobility between the bones. Fossilised tracks show they could spread their toes, adjusting the splay of the foot as they walked across different surfaces – this is not what we find in elephants today.

It has long been assumed that like other dinosaurs, sauropods walked on their toes, with the ankle joint elevated off the ground. Yet many sauropod tracks include the impression of a large “heel”.

This has led many palaeontologists to speculate that sauropods had some kind of “heel pad”. But apart from tracks, definitive evidence of a heel pad in sauropods has remained just that – academic speculation. Our work aims to change that.

Walking in the feet of giants

Armed with knowledge of what the foot skeleton of various sauropods looked like, along with information about their tracks, Andréas Jannel went about trying to figure out how their feet may have worked, as part of his PhD at The University of Queensland. We also teamed up with Olga Panagiotopoulou, an expert in the foot mechanics of modern animals, and elephants in particular.

Andréas generated 3D digital models for the foot skeleton of various sauropods and sauropod precursors. He and Olga then went about testing the strength of these models using a technique known as finite element analysis. They compared how different postures influenced the mechanical behaviour of the foot with and without the addition of a soft-tissue pad.

Regardless of the posture of the foot – toes on the ground, toes partially on the ground, or only the tips of the toes on the ground — none of the models could sustain the magnitude of mechanical forces that sauropods would have encountered in life, unless they also had a soft tissue pad beneath the “heel”.

Our findings indicate that a soft tissue pad would have cushioned the entire foot skeleton, allowing it to absorb mechanical forces during weight bearing. Put simply, without that pad beneath the heel, bones in the feet of sauropods would have crumpled under their immense weight.

Arrival of the giants

Sauropod precursors such as Plateosaurus have traditionally been reconstructed as having walked with their toes slightly raised off the ground and with no heel pad. Our models now indicate their foot skeleton could not have supported their body weight without some form of additional padding.

Some fossil tracks thought to belong to animals such as Plateosaurus do show evidence of pads starting to coalesce behind the toes. This “incipient” heel pad – one just starting to develop – would be consistent with our models.

The presence of an incipient heel pad in sauropod precursors laid the foundations for the evolution of a more substantial structure. By 170 million years ago, the first “true” sauropods were exceeding 10 metric tonnes, and tracks attributed to them show a well-developed heel pad.

The stage had been set, and within 10 million to 15 million years, titans weighing more than 30 tonnes were walking the earth, and the diversification of giant sauropods had begun. They would dominate world ecosystems for the next 100 million years.

Read more:
Curious Kids: how do we know if a dinosaur skeleton is from a child dinosaur or an adult dinosaur?

Steven W. Salisbury has received funding from Australian Research Council and the National Science Foundation

Andréas Jannel receives funding from a University of Queensland International Scholarship.

Dr Olga Panagiotopoulou has received funding from Marie Curie EU, NHMRC,FAPESP, BBSRC.

– ref. A key feature contributed to sauropods getting so enormous, new dino foot study reveals – https://theconversation.com/a-key-feature-contributed-to-sauropods-getting-so-enormous-new-dino-foot-study-reveals-188462

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Apisalome Movono, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, Massey University

With Samoa fully reopening its borders on August 1, another Pacific country moved tentatively forwards after two years of border closures and little or no international tourism.

But opening up is not as simple as flipping a switch, given the many challenges facing Pacific aviation. Rising fuel costs, mounting debt, management issues and a shortage of pilots have all plagued the industry in the region.

Climate change adds to these problems. Tourism aside, small island nations with very small economies, spread across a vast expanse of ocean, depend on high carbon-emitting air transport for health, trade and family connections.

These days, most Pacific national airlines are being kept afloat by government loans and guarantees – and in Fiji’s case, workers’ pension funds. With Pacific Forum economic ministers meeting in Vanuatu from today, all these issues should be high on the agenda.

Connecting the ‘blue continent’

Unfortunately, difficult conversations about the management of national airlines were largely absent at the earlier Pacific Forum leaders meeting in Fiji in July.

This was despite the
2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent “to protect and secure our Pacific people, place and prospects” laid out at the meeting. And it would have been disappointing to the ordinary taxpayers who have often supported their loss-making national carriers.

In 2021, for example, the Samoan government clipped the wings of Samoan Airways over concerns about its ongoing viability. The role of maintaining national prestige and pride in the form of an airline is still raised in debates about the nation’s near bankruptcy in the early 1990s.

Read more:
The sun is setting on unsustainable long-haul, short-stay tourism — regional travel bubbles are the future

Now, with international borders reopening, Samoa Airways has announced it will no longer operate long-haul flights to Brisbane, Sydney and Auckland – traditionally its primary sources of passengers and freight.

This may dampen hopes of a rapid resumption of tourism, an industry Samoa depends on for around 25% of its GDP.

With Samoa ending leases on some of its aircraft, its close neighbour Vanuatu is reportedly considering taking one of those planes as part of its own tourism development plans.

Kiribati, too, has invested in its fleet, acquiring two aircraft as part of an apparent international tourism growth strategy. Ironically, however, Kiribati pulled out of the recent Pacific Forum meeting, joining Micronesian countries that have also left the organisation.

Turbulence for Fiji Airways

Meanwhile, the region’s largest carrier, Fiji Airways (formerly Air Pacific), is caught up in controversy over changes in its ownership structure that caught many off guard in mid-July.

In particular, the Fiji National Provident Fund’s acquisition of a major share of the airline has been criticised by opposition MPs and union leaders for exposing the retirement fund’s members to a struggling enterprise.

Read more:
Pacific tourism is desperate for a vaccine and travel freedoms, but the industry must learn from this crisis

In 2020 the airline laid off large numbers of staff as it dealt with the fallout from the pandemic. And there have been calls for greater transparency in its operations. In 2021, Fiji’s former prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry called the airline a “noose around the necks of the taxpayers” after it took a FJD$130 million loan from the Asian Development Bank.

In an unprecedented move, Fiji Airways has now also taken over management of Airports Fiji, a move the Association of South Pacific Airlines (ASPA) described as “very unusual” and a potential conflict of interest.

Read more:
Pacific Islands are back on the map, and climate action is not negotiable for would-be allies

A ‘sense of urgency’

None of these systemic issues are entirely new. While cooperation has historically brought benefits for Pacific nations, tension between regionalism and nationalism has also hampered a coherent aviation strategy.

In July, however, Pacific aviation ministers endorsed a new aviation strategy aimed at ensuring “a safe, secure and sustainable aviation system” for the region. It is to be hoped this initiative works, despite
the region’s many competing priorities, political uncertainties and shifting allegiances.

But the current political divisions over Micronesia’s place within the wider Pacific family suggest these challenges will remain for some time.

Pacific Forum economic ministers meeting in Vanuatu today and tomorrow have already said “the sense of urgency is very real”. Their discussions about “resilient economic recovery and stability” should include the role of regional aviation in achieving those goals.

Any realistic strategy for a “blue Pacific continent” must involve the good governance, cooperation and viability of sustainable airlines so they can connect nations across that vast expanse of ocean for generations to come.

Apisalome Movono receives funding from a Marsden Fast-Start Grant from the Royal Society Te Aparangi

– ref. Pacific aviation is struggling to take off after the pandemic – how can the ‘blue continent’ stay connected? – https://theconversation.com/pacific-aviation-is-struggling-to-take-off-after-the-pandemic-how-can-the-blue-continent-stay-connected-187522

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Johnson, Associate Professor, Curtin University

Earth is the only planet we know of with continents, the giant landmasses that provide homes to humankind and most of Earth’s biomass.

However, we still don’t have firm answers to some basic questions about continents: how did they come to be, and why did they form where they did?

One theory is that they were formed by giant meteorites crashing into Earth’s crust long ago. This idea has been proposed several times, but until now there has been little evidence to support it.

In new research published in Nature, we studied ancient minerals from Western Australia and found tantalising clues suggesting the giant impact hypothesis might be right.

How do you make a continent?

The continents form part of the lithosphere, the rigid rocky outer shell of Earth made up of ocean floors and the continents, of which the uppermost layer is the crust.

The crust beneath the oceans is thin and made of dark, dense basaltic rock which contains only a little silica. By contrast, the continental crust is thick and mostly consists of granite, a less dense, pale-coloured, silica-rich rock that makes the continents “float”.

Beneath the lithosphere sits a thick, slowly flowing mass of almost-molten rock, which sits near the top of the mantle, the layer of Earth between the crust and the core.

If part of the lithosphere is removed, the mantle beneath it will melt as the pressure from above is released. And impacts from giant meteorites – rocks from space tens or hundreds of kilometres across – are an extremely efficient way of doing exactly that!

What are the consequences of a giant impact?

Giant impacts blast out huge volumes of material almost instantaneously. Rocks near the surface will melt for hundreds of kilometres or more around the impact site. The impact also releases pressure on the mantle below, causing it to melt and produce a “blob-like” mass of thick basaltic crust.

This mass is called an oceanic plateau, similar to that beneath present-day Hawaii or Iceland. The process is a bit like what happens if you are hit hard on the head by a golf ball or pebble – the resulting bump or “egg” is like the oceanic plateau.

Read more:
How rare minerals form when meteorites slam into Earth

Our research shows these oceanic plateaus could have evolved to form the continents through a process known as crustal differentiation. The thick oceanic plateau formed from the impact can get hot enough at its base that it also melts, producing the kind of granitic rock that forms buoyant continental crust.

Are there other ways to make oceanic plateaus?

There are other ways oceanic plateaus can form. The thick crusts beneath Hawaii and Iceland formed not through giant impacts but “mantle plumes”, streams of hot material rising up from the edge of Earth’s metallic core, a bit like in a lava lamp. As this ascending plume reaches the lithosphere it triggers massive mantle melting to form an oceanic plateau.

So could plumes have created the continents? Based on our studies, and the balance of different oxygen isotopes in tiny grains of the mineral zircon, which is commonly found in tiny quantities in rocks from the continental crust, we don’t think so.

Zircon is the oldest known crustal material, and it can survive intact for billions of years. We can also determine quite precisely when it was formed, based on the decay of the radioactive uranium it contains.

What’s more, we can find out about the environment in which zircon formed by measuring the relative proportion of isotopes of oxygen it contains.

We looked at zircon grains from one of the oldest surviving pieces of continental crust in the world, the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, which started forming more than 3 billion years ago. Many of the oldest grains of zircon contained more light oxygen isotopes, which indicate shallow melting, but younger grains contain a more mantle-like balance isotopes, indicating much deeper melting.

This “top-down” pattern of oxygen isotopes is what you might expect following a giant meteorite impact. In mantle plumes, by contrast, melting is a “bottom-up” process.

Sounds reasonable, but is there any other evidence?

Yes, there is! The zircons from the Pilbara Craton appear to have been formed in a handful of distinct periods, rather than continuously over time.

Except for the earliest grains, the other grains with isotopically-light zircon have the same age as spherule beds in the Pilbara Craton and elsewhere.

Spherule beds are deposits of droplets of material “splashed out” by meteorite impacts. The fact the zircons have the same age suggests they may have been formed by the same events.

Further, the “top-down” pattern of isotopes can be recognised in other areas of ancient continental crust, such as in Canada and Greenland. However, data from elsewhere have not yet been carefully filtered like the Pilbara data, so it will take more work to confirm this pattern.

The next step of our research is to reanalyse these ancient rocks from elsewhere to confirm what we suspect – that the continents grew at the sites of giant meteorite impacts. Boom.

Tim Johnson receives funding from Curtin University and through an Australian Research Council Discovery project (DP200101104).

– ref. What created the continents? New evidence points to giant asteroids – https://theconversation.com/what-created-the-continents-new-evidence-points-to-giant-asteroids-185606

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Piero Moraro, Lecturer in Criminology, Edith Cowan University

The recent transfer of a “difficult cohort” of teenagers to a maximum-security adult prison in Western Australia raises familiar questions about Australia’s prison system.

The 17 young detainees have “significant offending histories” and had for months been destroying infrastructure, assaulting staff and harming themselves at Perth’s Banksia Hill juvenile centre, according to the head of the WA justice department, Adam Tomison. Tomison didn’t elaborate on what led to these incidents.

According to Gerry Georgatos, coordinator of the National Suicide Prevention and Trauma Recovery Project, the damaged cells were a sign of the strain detainees were under at Banksia Hill.

Premier Mark McGowan and Corrective Services Commissioner Mike Reynolds said the government had been left with no choice. The transfer was a necessary circuit-breaker, they argued, to provide greater security and safety for the management of the detainees.

While no time frame has been specified, the WA government has described the move to Casuarina Prison as “temporary”.

Read more:
Almost every young person in WA detention has a severe brain impairment

Australia’s juvenile detention centres have been under the spotlight since 2016, when ABC Four Corners revealed the treatment of inmates at Darwin’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. The children were being stripped naked, tied to restraint chairs, manhandled and even teargassed.

Such was the shock when the episode aired that, within hours, then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called for a royal commission into juvenile detention centres in the Northern Territory, though he later refused to extend the inquiry to other states and territories.

The release of the commission’s final report, almost two years later, followed a familiar pattern. It found staff had in many cases not followed required procedures and the system had “failed to comply with the basic binding human rights standards in the treatment of children and young people”.

Nevertheless, none of the officers involved was charged and the commission’s recommendations seem to have been ignored.

Those incidents were not unique to Don Dale. While the government blames them on “difficult” juveniles, it ignores how young detainees are also among the most vulnerable members of society.

Unfortunately, as the Banksia Hill case shows, Australia pays scant attention to the difference between a child and an adult offender. The evidence suggests it’s time to rethink this approach.

Read more:
There’s still a long way to go for the Don Dale royal commission to achieve justice

A national problem

Problems concerning the treatment of inmates at Banksia Hill Youth Detention Centres have been known for years.

A 2017 report noted the increasing use of a special operations group to manage incidents at the facility. This group uses stun grenades, gun-laser sights and pepper spray, which is unprecedented in either adult or youth facilities in the state. The report noted this was a “telling sign of a facility that is failing the basics”.

An unscheduled visit by WA’s custodial inspector last year raised “reasonable suspicion” that young detainees were being subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”, including been held in their own cells for 23 hours of the day.

While Don Dale and Banksia Hill represent the more egregious cases, other youth detention centres around the country have also faced significant scrutiny in recent years. These include Frank Baxter in New South Wales and the Parkville facility in Victoria.

Changing the age of criminal responsibility is key

Article 37 (c) of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child states juvenile detainees “shall be separated from adults unless it is considered in the child’s best interest not to do so”.

On ratifying the convention, Australia specified it was “unable to comply with” this requirement. Children would be separated from adult prisoners only when “feasible”.

The federal government has so far rejected calls by the UN to raise the age of criminal responsibility from ten to 14. In this regard, Australia’s stance is oblivious to what’s commonly known as “the labelling effect”. Young people who are labelled “criminal” are likely to live up to this label rather than growing out of crime as would normally occur.

Youth justice detention, from this standpoint, is inherently criminogenic – it encourages rather than reduces criminal behaviour.

The risk of labelling grows where young offenders are housed with adult offenders. News reports are already suggesting some of the juveniles sent to Casuarina have been speaking to adult prisoners through the fence.

Read more:
Ten-year-olds do not belong in detention. Why Australia must raise the age of criminal responsibility

Last November, the Productivity Commission noted “Australia’s prison dilemma”: our imprisoned population is at an historic high, yet crime rates are falling.

Governments spend more than $4bn each year keeping people behind bars, and taxpayers should ask what that money is achieving. Australia must also recognise the role mental health plays in the behaviour of “difficult” children. We can’t continue to sweep that problem under the carpet.

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

– ref. Sending teens to maximum security prisons shows Australia needs to raise the age of criminal responsibility – https://theconversation.com/sending-teens-to-maximum-security-prisons-shows-australia-needs-to-raise-the-age-of-criminal-responsibility-187768

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Power, Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University

The recent global outbreak of monkeypox largely among men who have sex with men has raised concerns homophobia will undermine effective prevention efforts. There are also fears the disease will fuel homophobic stigma and discrimination.

Even the name monkeypox is stigmatising due to long-held racist appropriation of the term monkey and the false implication the virus is transmitted by monkeys.

The World Health Organization has said the name needs to change, but has not agreed on or announced a new one. Currently, advocates for the LGBTQA+ community are using the term MPX, the term I will use here.

MPX is, of course, not the first infectious disease to affect men who have sex with men. So there are things we must learn and things we must not repeat from the public health response to HIV.

Lessons from HIV

When HIV emerged among communities of gay and bisexual men in the 1980s, fear and uncertainty about the cause and nature of the virus led to vilification of gay and bisexual men.

HIV was initially named “gay-related immune deficiency” or GRID and there was speculation it was caused by men’s excessive sex or drug use (specifically use of amyl nitrate).

As well as sparking calls for a crackdown on the rights and freedoms of LGBTQA+ communities, the view gay and bisexual men were to blame for HIV obstructed effective public health responses.

Famously, in the United States, then President Ronald Reagan made no public mention of HIV or AIDS until more than 12,000 American citizens had died, and HIV had spread widely into many communities.

Although today, globally, HIV affects more women than men, it is still difficult to disentangle HIV-related stigma from homophobia or stigma against other affected populations, including injecting drug users or sex workers.

Stigma creates barriers to HIV prevention as people are reluctant to talk about HIV or seek testing for fear of being associated with stigmatised groups. It also perpetuates a fundamental lack of empathy for people living with HIV.

For these reasons, it’s important we don’t approach MPX in these terms.

Read more:
What’s in a name? Why giving monkeypox a new one is a good idea

A new approach?

There are some reports of MPX being used to justify homophobic sentiment or actions. However, a crucial difference between this disease and HIV is the world has learned from HIV.

There is now better understanding of the insidious ways stigma and discrimination undermine public health. HIV also taught us to be cautious about the potential for public health messaging to contribute to stigma, especially when an illness is associated with marginalised cultural or racial groups.

Health policy makers have been fast to condemn stigmatising media reporting of MPX. Meanwhile the community-based HIV sector has mobilised existing infrastructure and experience to support advocacy and MPX education for men who have sex with men.

Importantly, we now have better knowledge about the effectiveness of sex-positive approaches to preventing HIV and other sexually transmissible infections (STIs). Such approaches affirm the pleasures and benefits of sex, aim to build open dialogue about safe sex and ensure people can seek testing without fear of judgement or backlash.

Read more:
Lessons from the history of HIV/AIDS in Australia – how activism changed the image of an illness

The impact of sexual moralising

We have learned lessons from HIV. However, MPX has exposed the ways sexual moralising is ever-present in public health, undermining sex-positive health promotion.

Observers of early media responses to MPX note efforts to avoid stigmatising gay and bisexual men have led to obtuse and confusing reporting about the ways in which the disease, although not classified as an STI, can be spread through close physical contact and why gay and bisexual men may be at risk of exposure.

Reporting has been deliberately vague because there is very limited cultural space for speaking about group sex, casual sex or sex with multiple partners without these practices, and people involved, being shamed.

Despite increasing acceptance of sexual diversity, people’s right to engage in pleasurable sex outside a married, monogamous relationship is rarely affirmed. Young women, for example, are shamed for having “too many” sexual partners, while calls for comprehensive, pleasure-based sex education are controversial.

Read more:
Sex ed needs to talk about pleasure and fun. Safe sex depends on it and condom use rises

While the world has come a long way toward acceptance of same-sex marriage, homophobia often drives condemnation of gay and bisexual men’s sexual cultures.

This is most visible in relation to public health. For example, when pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) first became available to prevent HIV, public funding for it was critiqued by some on the grounds this amounted to subsidising gay and bisexual men’s promiscuity.

When considered through the lens of public health, casual sex is often equated with irresponsibility. People’s right to seek sex and intimacy can also be devalued or seen as irrelevant.

We know, however, acknowledging the significance of sexual identities and sexual connection in people’s lives is the best way to engage communities in sexual health promotion.

Read more:
Monkeypox isn’t like HIV, but gay and bisexual men are at risk of unfair stigma

A sex-positive approach

As current vaccine supplies for MPX are limited in many jurisdictions, including Australia, priority access is being given to high-risk groups, including men who have sex with men who have multiple sexual partners.

Given men are being asked to disclose their sexual practices to obtain a vaccine, assurance of non-stigmatising health care will be essential for this program to be successful.

A sex-positive approach to MPX prevention will also support more open conversations so people can gain a better handle on risk and prevention, no matter who they are.

Read more:
Australia secures 450,000 new monkeypox vaccines. What are they and who can have them?

Jennifer Power receives research funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Department of Health.

– ref. We need to talk about monkeypox without shame and blame – https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-talk-about-monkeypox-without-shame-and-blame-188295

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Reem Abbas, Research Fellow, Auckland University of Technology

New Zealand’s healthcare policies for migrants rate among the top five countries globally. Yet research shows persistent health inequities among women and children with migrant and refugee backgrounds.

The current health system reforms create opportunities to improve publicly funded migrant health policies and to achieve health equity, particularly in maternal and child health services.

Annual migration to New Zealand was estimated at 46,100 in March 2022. This includes the annual refugee and family reunification quotas which have recently increased from 1,300 to 2,100.

By 2038, a quarter of New Zealand’s population is projected to identify with African, Asian, Latin American or Middle Eastern heritage backgrounds. In 2018, almost four in five of these people were born overseas and nearly two-thirds of the women were of childbearing age.

Our recent studies highlight several interlocking factors that affect access and acceptability of maternal and child health services for migrant and refugee women and their children.

They include cultural and language barriers, stereotyping and systemic racism, inequities in access to information and lack of support to navigate services.

The health reforms emphasise attention to voices from marginalised communities for the development of primary care “localities”. However, eliciting migrant and refugee women’s voices requires a bottom-up approach that acknowledges and addresses the profound barriers to community engagement.

Read more:
Coronavirus shows how hard it is for ethnic minority and migrant women to access healthcare

Health system challenges for migrant and refugee women

Migrant mothers face substantial challenges as they raise their children in a new country. These include social isolation, emotional distress, financial constraints and different cultural norms.

Our own lived experiences as migrant women demonstrate the personal impact of these issues. This motivated our studies with the ultimate aim of improving policy and practice.

Sexual and reproductive health services in Aotearoa fail to cater adequately for African women because cultural taboos around “sex talk” and family planning impose a strong barrier to accessing such services. These taboos are based on longstanding African religious and gender norms, accompanied by attitudes and social mores about women’s morality and sexual conduct.

One research participant explains:

So even though the services are there, we are not accessing them. We know it’s there but it’s not for us. Everybody knows everybody. When they see you walk into that clinic you’re going to be talked about.

Stereotyping and discrimination, and lack of support and information during and after birth are problems. An African colleague shared her experience of being refused pain relief medication during birth, despite noting it in her birth plan and asking for it during labour.

The midwives said they had seen African women going to fetch wood and water with the newborn strapped on their back a few hours after delivery.

An opaque healthcare system

Newly migrated, first-time pregnant Indian women found it difficult to understand the process of finding a midwife and other maternal health services. One research participant said:

I had a pretty hard time finding a good midwife because when I was pregnant for the first time, I didn’t know anything. And New Zealand is a new country. And I didn’t have anyone, I didn’t know anyone, and I have no family, no friends.

This resonated with a Canadian Indian researcher among us:

I’ll just say that – like I had a lot of privilege coming here – and the healthcare system was really hard to navigate and especially when I recently had a child.

Communication issues are another common challenge. An African team member said:

I only found out from my birthing partner that the cord was wrapped around the baby’s [neck]. Yet it was omitted as it is considered to be common.

And a Chinese research participant said:

I have a feeling of uncertainty. I am concerned that what if I cannot understand what the doctor says.

Refugee mothers noted insufficient information provided about vaccines and post-vaccination management. They explained that ineffective communication hinders childhood immunisation experiences:

When [nurses] say side effect, we don’t know what’s being affected.

Our Iranian researcher noted:

The only time that I received a document in my language was during the COVID pandemic when an instruction was translated.

Read more:
Building trust with migrant and refugee communities is crucial for public health measures to work

Responsive and inclusive maternity and childhood services that tackle language barriers and include a culturally competent workforce will have profound impacts on achieving health equity for migrants and refugees.

The Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act now includes a women’s health strategy that requires health entities to improve outcomes for women. This opportunity to include planning, delivery and evaluation of work which fulfils the potential of migrant and refugee women should not be missed.

Only then will Aotearoa New Zealand achieve social justice strategies that resonate with the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda of “leaving no one behind”.

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

– ref. Why migrant and refugee women and children remain in the shadows of health reforms in New Zealand – https://theconversation.com/why-migrant-and-refugee-women-and-children-remain-in-the-shadows-of-health-reforms-in-new-zealand-186902

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary Woessner, Lecturer in Clinical Exercise and Research Fellow, Institute for Health and Sport (iHeS), Victoria University, Victoria University

Every week millions of Australian children play community sport. Participating in community sport can improve children’s mental, physical and social wellbeing, but only if the sport environment is physically and emotionally safe.

Our new research shows community sport spaces aren’t safe for everyone. We found 82% of 886 survey respondents said they experienced violence while playing community sport as a child in Australia.

Our study was one of the first in Australia to include the experiences of non-gender-binary individuals. We found gender-diverse people reported particularly high rates of violence while playing sport as children. Some 81% reported experiencing psychological violence from a coach, compared to 55% and 50% for women and men respectively.

Women also had high rates compared to men of psychological (82% vs 74%) and sexual (40% vs 33%) violence.

So how can we change this?

Violence in community sport

In recent years, cases of violence against children in elite sport in Australia have garnered national media attention. Swimming and gymnastics are perhaps the most visible examples of the widespread nature of violence against children in sport, but they aren’t alone.

The media often focus on single sports and the abuse experienced by elite athletes, which can lead to a false sense of security in other sports and in sport at the community level.

Read more:
Whether teams win or lose, sporting events lead to spikes in violence against women and children

The short- and long-term consequences of violence are profound and include anxiety, depression, mistrust, impaired relationship dynamics and more.

Understanding how often children experience violence playing sport is critical to monitoring this violence and keeping children safe.

What we studied

Our team at Victoria University completed the largest study to date in Australia exploring how often children experience violence in community sport.

We surveyed 886 Australian adults who had played organised community sport when they were younger than 18, asking them about their experiences of violence in sport. Specifically, they were asked about unsanctioned violence, that is, violence occurring outside the specified rules of the game. This could have occurred in diverse environments such as on the field, in the locker rooms, or during travel for sport.

It’s important to note that because the study didn’t use a nationally representative sample, the data can’t be extrapolated out to represent the whole of community sport in Australia.

Respondents were mostly women (63%), but came from all states and territories in Australia and had participated in 68 different sports. Around 18% of respondents were between 18 and 25 years old, which highlights how recent some of the reported experiences are.

Psychological, physical, sexual

We found 82% of respondents experienced violence while participating in sport as children in Australia.

Psychological violence was the most frequent form (76% of respondents), but rates of physical violence (66%) and sexual violence (38%) were also high.

The survey also distinguished between different types of perpetrators – peers, coaches and parents. Our respondents reported high rates of psychological violence by peers (68%), and high rates (>50%) of physical and psychological violence perpetrated by a coach.

Read more:
The long history of gender violence in Australia, and why it matters today

We found non-gender-binary people experienced higher rates of several types of violence than both women and men combined. Peer-perpetrated sexual harassment was particularly high for these individuals (59%), as was peer physical violence (53%).

Women experienced more psychological and sexual violence, whereas men experienced more physical violence by their peers when playing sport as a child.

While our sample wasn’t representative of the Australian population, our findings echo international research findings. A Canadian study from 2020, which used the same survey in 14-17 year olds, also found high rates of psychological (79%), physical (40%) and sexual violence (28%).

How we can change things

These data can be quite confronting, especially for those of us (ourselves included) who are so passionate about sport.

The aim of this article and study isn’t to demonise sport. Instead, it’s to acknowledge we need to understand the depth and breadth of violence against children in sport, in order to make sport safer.

In the long-term, a national study with a representative sample is needed to establish how often violence against children in community sport occurs. It’s the only way to measure whether our policies and practices are preventing violence against children in sport. Such studies take time, expertise and funding, but they are achievable with the right support.

National frameworks and policies are essential to ensuring sporting clubs are complying with safeguarding standards.

However, national policies and campaigns take time to have impact at the grassroots level. This is complicated by a context where many community sport clubs are surviving on the capacity of very few, burnt-out volunteers.

Read more:
How sport can tackle violence against women and girls

A top-down approach to behaviour change isn’t our only option. There’s an opportunity to start creating change with and within community sport. This can help identify the most effective strategies for preventing violence against children in community sport.

Community sport can and should be a welcoming, inclusive and safe environment. We can only achieve this through a whole-of-community effort.

Awareness that violence in community sport exists is a first step.

If this article has raised issues for you or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.

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

– ref. More than 80% of people we asked said they’ve experienced violence in junior sport – and women and gender-diverse people cop it most – https://theconversation.com/more-than-80-of-people-we-asked-said-theyve-experienced-violence-in-junior-sport-and-women-and-gender-diverse-people-cop-it-most-188430

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christian Downie, Associate Professor, Australian National University

If politics moves slowly, climate politics often feels like it doesn’t move at all.

Yet at the weekend, US senators worked through the night to accomplish something they have failed to do since NASA scientist James Hansen first warned them about the dangers of climate change almost 35 years ago. They passed a major climate bill.

And not just any bill. The A$530 billion of clean energy initiatives in the larger Inflation Reduction Act represent the largest single investment to slow global heating in US history. It means the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases will become a global leader on climate change.

Initial modelling suggests the bill could be enough to cut US emissions by around 40% by 2030, relative to a 2005 baseline. That won’t meet President Joe Biden’s goal of halving emissions by 2030, but it gives America a fighting chance.

What does it mean for Australia? After the go-slow years of Coalition government and Trump’s fossil-fuel-friendly presidency, the times finally favour action. There is a clean energy race on, and Australia needs to keep up.

It’s been a hard road

When the bill passed, senators broke down in tears. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer spoke of “a long, tough and winding road. But at last, at last we have arrived.”

The bill looked dead in the water as recently as July, when controversial Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia pulled his crucial vote for climate legislation.

That led many to despair, believing the window for climate action had shut again given Republican disinterest in climate action. But then Manchin cut a deal. It was the last chance to act before November’s midterm elections, which Republicans are expected to win – although the Supreme Court’s seismic decision on abortion may change this.

I remember being in Washington DC, studying climate policy, the last time the US got this close. In the summer of 2009, the US House of Representatives passed a bill designed to institute a nationwide carbon price. With chants of “yes we can” still ringing in many ears after President Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House, it seemed climate politics was moving. But the Senate killed that bill, and with it any hope for legislative action on climate change.

Read more:
Government set to legislate its 43% emissions reduction target after Greens announce support

America had to wait more than a decade for the next opportunity. The weekend’s vote was close, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the decider.

What was lost in the intervening years was more than time. In the past decade, climate impacts have become more frequent and deadly. Just ask the flood victims of Lismore in New South Wales, or the citizens of Mallacoota in Victoria after the bushfires.

Most of Europe is now in drought. Stories of unprecedented heatwaves and flooding come in weekly from China, India, the Middle East and South America. The western US is in megadrought, the worst in at least 1,200 years, with reservoirs at dangerous lows.

What does the bill actually contain?

When climate action is deliberately stalled by political parties, the price is paid by communities, families and the natural world.

That’s why the US bill is momentous. Senate approval of the A$530 billion in spending will directly advance clean energy. This includes billions of dollars in tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and geothermal plants, among other technologies.

Read more:
Albanese just laid out a radical new vision for Australia in the region: clean energy exporter and green manufacturer

This comes through around A$13 billion in rebates for Americans to electrify their homes, tax credits of almost A$11,000 to electrify their cars, and billions more to establish a “green bank”, target agricultural emissions and help disadvantaged communities.

Even better, these billions in public money will crowd in private investment, accelerating the speed at which the US economy can decarbonise.

What should Australia take from this?

There are several lessons for Australia.

The first is legislating a target as Labor has done is a start, but only a start. The world is set for a clean energy race, given China is also investing huge amounts in clean energy while European nations are trying to wean themselves off Russian gas.

The Albanese government should follow the US with historic investments in clean energy, using renewable jobs as an incentive. Key features of the US bill aim to turbocharge local clean energy manufacturing, such as requiring battery components be made in the US. As it stands, America’s geopolitical rival China has cornered the market in many areas of clean tech, such as solar panels.

Second, fossil fuel industries will fight tooth and nail against change. Manchin has received more money from the oil and gas industry than any other member of Congress – and has personal interests in coal. His interventions mean the bill has rewards for the oil and gas industries, such as requiring the federal government to auction new offshore oil and gas leases. There is likely more devil in the detail.

For decades, fossil fuel industries have had an outsized influence on climate policy in Australia. It’s folly to think they’ll just give up. This week we found out the car industry has already launched a secret PR campaign to slow electric vehicle uptake.

Against these entrenched interests stand the growing throngs of people involved in climate movements. This is what has kept climate politics moving. Countless Americans, from political activists to schoolkids, mobilised to pressure Congress to act.

The same has happened here. Arid and sparsely populated Australia is already being hit by intensifying natural disasters. As the May election result showed, people have had enough of political delays and inaction.

We must keep moving. Climate science does not stand still, and neither should the politics.

Read more:
The Greens have backed Labor’s 43% target – but don’t think Australia’s climate wars are over 

Christian Downie receives funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. The US has finally passed a huge climate bill. Australia needs to keep up – https://theconversation.com/the-us-has-finally-passed-a-huge-climate-bill-australia-needs-to-keep-up-188525

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Fraser, Senior Researcher in Antarctic Remote Sensing, University of Tasmania

As Antarctica’s slow rivers of ice hit the sea, they float, forming ice shelves. These shelves extend the glaciers into the ocean until they calve into icebergs.

But they also play a crucial role in maintaining the world as we know it, by acting as a brake on how fast the glaciers can flow into the ocean. If they weren’t there, the glaciers would flow faster into the sea and melt, causing sea levels to rise.
Unfortunately, Antarctica’s ice shelves are not what they were. In research published today in Nature, we show these ice shelves have significantly reduced in area over the last 25 years due to more and more icebergs breaking off. Overall, the net loss of ice is about 6,000 billion tonnes since 1997.

Previous estimates of ice shelf loss come from satellite measurements, which captured ice shelves gradually thinning in recent years. We tracked how much extra ice had been lost as icebergs calve away from the retreating edge of the continent. We found Antarctica’s ice shelves have lost twice as much mass as previous studies suggested.

Ice shelves are now weaker than at any time since at least the 1990s. This has led Antarctica’s glaciers to begin adding more water to the oceans, and more quickly. To date, much of the concern about the cryosphere – the world’s frozen parts – has focused on the fast-melting Arctic sea ice. But as climate change intensifies, Antarctica will begin melting in earnest, contributing more to sea level rise.

What we measured

We built numerical models to figure out what ice shelf thinning and loss of area mean for the ability of ice shelves to resist new ice being pushed in from upstream glaciers.

Our work shows the drop in ice shelf area has led to more ice flowing into the sea since 2007, as calving has weakened ice shelves and allowed some of the world’s largest glaciers to accelerate.

We found the Pine Island Glacier and the so-called “Doomsday” Thwaites Glacier – which could destabilise the entire West Antarctic ice sheet if it melts – are highly sensitive to calving, and are already increasing their contribution to sea level rise as their protective ice shelves crumbled.

Iceberg calving is a natural process. In any climate, we expect to see massive flat-top icebergs periodically break off and float away. So while no single calving event should be taken as cause for alarm, the long term trend is concerning. We found a majority of Antarctica’s ice shelves have lost mass since the late 1990s.

Why are Antarctic ice shelves shrinking? There’s no single answer. Some ice shelves such as the Wilkins Ice Shelf have already seen catastrophic disintegration, while others are retreating slowly and some are even advancing. But overall, these ice shelves are shrinking.

We know one cause of ice shelf retreat is the thinning of ice shelves, which is largely caused by relatively warm seawater eroding the base of these shelves.

We also know iceberg calving increases whenever Antarctica’s protective ring of sea ice weakens. This year, Antarctica saw the lowest sea ice extent ever recorded since measurements began in the 1970s. We’ve also seen entire ice shelves collapse when warmer air temperatures create surface meltwater that can cut through hundreds of metres of ice shelf.

Read more:
Warmer summers threaten Antarctica’s giant ice shelves because of the lakes they create

Four giant ice shelves are still in good shape

Antarctica’s four largest ice shelves are the Ross, Ronne, Filchner, and Amery. These vast floating sheets of ice tend to calve off giant icebergs once every few decades.

All four are on track for major calving events in the next 10 to 15 years, and none would normally be cause for alarm. The problem is calving will come on top of steady ice shelf loss. When the major ice shelves do calve off huge icebergs, they will leave the Antarctic Ice Sheet smaller than we’ve ever seen it.

But while we’re not yet seeing any abnormal behaviour in these four major ice shelves, the overlooked losses from all the smaller ice shelves fringing the continent are adding up. Earlier this year, one smaller ice shelf collapsed entirely.

The most troubling changes of the past few decades are less photogenic than sudden ice shelf collapse. Bit-by-bit, West Antarctica’s Thwaites ice shelf has retreated.

Read more:
How a near-perfect rectangular iceberg formed

Each calving event has left the ice shelf weaker and allowed the Thwaites Glacier behind it – the size of the state of Victoria – to flow faster into the ocean. While the Thwaites ice shelf is relatively small, it is vital. Until now, it has acted like a plug. If it keeps retreating, it could potentially destabilise the entire West Antarctic ice sheet and unlock several metres of sea level rise.

Climate change is the big picture

Our warming atmosphere and ocean are the root cause. Given the long lag time between greenhouse gases trapping heat and actual warming, it stands to reason that what we’re seeing in Antarctica right now is at least partly a response to warming gases dumped into the atmosphere decades or even a century ago. That means we’re already locked into more ice shelf retreat, as emissions have continued rising.

Antarctica holds around 30 million cubic kilometres of ice, a truly enormous figure. That represents around 90% of the world’s surface fresh water. If it all melted, seas would rise almost 60 metres. Humanity’s decisions will shape what Antarctica will look like in decades to come, and how much ice will remain.

Read more:
Ice world: Antarctica’s riskiest glacier is under assault from below and losing its grip

Alexander Fraser receives funding from the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership and the Australian Research Council.

Chad Greene receives funding from NASA.

– ref. Ice shelves hold back Antarctica’s glaciers from adding to sea levels – but they’re crumbling – https://theconversation.com/ice-shelves-hold-back-antarcticas-glaciers-from-adding-to-sea-levels-but-theyre-crumbling-185509

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Burton, Lecturer, Theatre, University of Southern Queensland

If you felt the world stop turning for a moment in July, it’s because Beyoncé dropped her new album, Renaissance.

Rolling Stone has described her as the world’s “greatest living entertainer”, with a stardom that intersects fashion, dance, multiple genres of music and visual albums.

Renaissance is her seventh solo studio album, and her first in five years. It is being widely acclaimed as an “immaculate” dance record.

Part of Beyoncé’s continued success involves her sampling from a diverse range of artists across history to layer and create new meaning. She has done this repeatedly as a way of showcasing African artists, and on Renaissance she pays special tribute to house and disco music, and especially it’s queer history.

In fact, the entire album is dedicated to her late gay Uncle Johnny. “He was my godmother and the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and culture that serve as inspiration for this album,” Beyonce wrote.

Thank you to all the pioneers who originate culture, to all of the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognised for far too long.

The first single from the album, Break My Soul, features two key samples and songwriting credits. The first is New Orleans artist Big Freedia, previously featured on Beyoncé’s 2016 Formation. The second is from Show Me Love by Robin S., a song that typifies the house genre that grew from the 80s and became mainstream in the 90s.

The use of house music throughout the album, and her sampling of queer artists such as Big Freedia, points to a queer history of disco and house music that was once controversial enough to cause public riots.

Read more:
It’s Beyoncé’s world. We’re just living in it

The day they killed disco

On a warm night in July 1979, disco was murdered.

Referred to as “Disco Demolition Night”, 50,000 people showed up to a baseball park in Chicago to watch a crate of disco records be blown up. In the aftermath, the crowd rushed onto the field. A riot followed in which over 30 people were arrested and many were injured.

Disco had grown in popularity across the 1970s reaching its apex with the release of Saturday Night Fever in 1977. A concentrated rebellion against the genre grew in popularity among rock music fans, who felt the genre was too fixated on mechanical sounds that lacked authenticity.

Rock fans genuinely feared they would lose out to disco, but it is difficult to separate their fears from racism and homophobia.

John Travolta’s starring role in Saturday Night Fever in 1977 presented a different version of masculinity, concerned with fashion and dancing. Acts such as The Village People did little to ease fears of the death of rock and roll. The gradual rise in gay and queer visibility in New York and San Francisco, particularly in music clubs, were also seen as a threat.

Critics have since identified the anti-disco movement as almost completely populated by white men between 18-37. The leader of the movement was radio DJ Steve Dahl and in the weeks leading up to the explosive protest, Dahl and press agencies covering the movement conflated disco with R&B and funk music, and with gay men.

Disco Demolition Night was the climax of a protest years in the making. To a certain extent, it was successful in its desire to kill disco. In the years that followed, disco disappeared off the charts and glam-rock began to take its place.

The artists and audiences who adored disco were forced underground, particularly the queer community, and such was the birth of house music.

Read more:
Beyoncé is cutting a sample of Milkshake out of her new song – but not because she ‘stole’ it

Don’t stop the beat

As disco declined in popularity, artists were no longer able to afford the lush sounds of a full orchestral backing, forcing a reliance on cheaper, synthetic sounds. Disco clubs moved to literal warehouses, giving house music its name.

House music, like disco, is dance music for clubs. It focuses on mechanical sounds, fixed tempos and repetitive sounds. By the 1990s, thanks to hits like Show Me Love by Robin S., house music became mainstream, and was used by Cher, Madonna, Kylie Minogue and even Aqua’s quintessential 90s pop hit Barbie Girl.

In recent years, disco has seen a steady re-emergence, spearheaded by producers such as Pharrell, who collaborated with Daft Punk for the 2013 hit Lose Yourself to Dance. Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia (2020) was a finely crafted, album length tribute to disco music.

Beyoncé’s new album also features a pantheon of other queer artists (Ts Madison, Honey Dijon, Syd, Moi Renee, MikeQ and Kevin Aviance), and is deliberately designed to be played in dance clubs. In contrast to her other albums, each track blends seamlessly into the next, as if the entire album is an elongated DJ set.

Beyoncé has been particularly open about the release of an acapella and instrumental versions of Break My Soul for use by DJs who may remix the work. She has even released a new remix of the single featuring Madonna.

Beyoncé’s Renaissance may secure 2022 as the year disco and house fulfilled their resurrection. Lizzo’s new album, Special, features About Damn Time, a retro-disco dance hit that is currently sitting at the top of America’s Billboard charts.

These female artists follow a trend already set by Cher, Madonna and Kylie Minogue, who publicly ally themselves with the queer community and deliberate create dance albums for their dedicated audience. In doing so, they have become the biggest pop stars of their time.

Read more:
Beyoncé has helped usher in a renaissance for African artists

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

– ref. Disco ain’t dead: how Beyoncé resurrected dance music and its queer history for Renaissance – https://theconversation.com/disco-aint-dead-how-beyonce-resurrected-dance-music-and-its-queer-history-for-renaissance-188431

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Di Winkler, Adjunct Associate Professor, La Trobe University

Eighteen months ago, a Melbourne woman named Leila had a stroke and went to a local hospital. After medical support over a few weeks, Leila was ready to be discharged from the hospital, but required some specialist support due to her disability.

Three weeks ago Leila finally left hospital care. After nearly 18 months in limbo, left lying in a hospital bed, Leila can finally get on with her life.

Unfortunately Leila’s story is not unique. More than 1,430 people with disability are waiting 160 days to be discharged from hospitals around Australia. To those of us who work in this sector it is not surprising.

Once segregated

For decades we housed people with disability in segregated accommodation and institutions. Shut away where they couldn’t be seen or heard, abuse was rife and positive life outcomes for residents were rare. At best it was a case of “out of sight, out of mind”. At worst, it revealed something more sinister about the way we viewed disability.

Thankfully, as a society we have come a long way. The advent of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) brought disability into the spotlight. At the recent federal election, it attracted renewed political focus.

And yet, people with disability remain stuck in hospital for months or years after they are ready to be discharged. There is no practical reason for this and it doesn’t save costs. In fact, it is twice as expensive to accommodate NDIS participants in hospital compared to disability housing.

Read more:
Hospitals only note a person’s intellectual disability 20% of the time – so they don’t adjust their care

Timely discharge is evidence-based

The issue is not that we don’t know what to do. There is clear evidence for ways to support the timely discharge of NDIS participants to age-appropriate housing.

And the issue is not the availability of housing. The NDIS has its world leading Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) policy, which provides housing for participants with high needs. Right now, there are more than 3,000 vacancies in SDA around Australia including more than 1,000 new, purpose built homes.

However the SDA market is being held back by the very people responsible for “stewarding” the market. The principles that underpin the SDA policy and the entire NDIS are insurance principles. Improved outcomes and reduced costs require investment in innovation, housing that is fit for purpose and service redesign.

There are 3,000 vacancies in disability housing and 1,430 NDIS participants stuck in hospital because the bureaucratic process of securing adequate NDIA funding for housing and support is complex and takes many months or years.

Instead, the focus of the NDIA appears to be on reducing short-term up-front costs. This means slow and inaccurate decisions that affect NDIS participants.

The NDIS appears to be creating friction as a way of containing scheme costs but there is an urgent need to make faster decisions for NDIS participants stuck in hospital or at risk of admission to aged care.

The Summer Foundation’s recent financial modelling shows well-designed housing is part of the solution to the NDIS’s sustainability issues and the growing cost of support in traditional disability housing.

Read more:
‘It’s shown me how independent I can be’ – housing designed for people with disabilities reduces the help needed

Slowly, way too slowly

The main barrier to discharge is NDIA bureaucracy. The number one reason NDIS participants are stuck in hospitals is that they are waiting for the NDIS to process paperwork.

The NDIA promised both NDIS participants and providers to streamline funding decisions. However, independent data shows the NDIA has become slower in making SDA decisions over the past 18 months.

NDIS participants take months or years to navigate the process of requesting specialist housing and then appealing unfair decisions, the majority of which are overturned. Many NDIS participants give up and lose hope along the way. The resources spent on legal costs are another extraordinary waste of taxpayers money.

Read more:
Mental distress is much worse for people with disabilities, and many health professionals don’t know how to help

A better approach

There are three steps the NDIA could quickly take to address this issue.

One, make faster decisions on housing and support for people stuck in hospitals. Two, make the best use of the thousands of vacant specialist disability dwellings. And three, invest in providing better support for hospitals to enable timely discharge.

The human cost of remaining in hospital for months or years is dire for everyone involved. NDIS participants lose the gains made in rehabilitation as well as condition, skills, confidence and social connections. NDIS participants are also at risk of COVID and other illnesses in hospital.

Promises have been made and there is goodwill evident from Disability Minister Bill Shorten, his colleagues around the country and every hospital we have worked with. But now it’s time the NDIS stepped up and delivered. Those stuck in hospital have already waited long enough.

Read more:
What the NDIS needs to do to rebuild trust, in the words of the people who use it

Di Winkler is the CEO and Founder of the Summer Foundation and a board member of Summer Housing.

– ref. NDIS participants are left waiting for too long in hospital beds due to bureaucratic delays – https://theconversation.com/ndis-participants-are-left-waiting-for-too-long-in-hospital-beds-due-to-bureaucratic-delays-188439

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flavio Macau, Associate Dean – School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

Australia is experiencing a national egg shortage. Prices are rising and supermarket stocks are patchy. Some cafes are reportedly serving breakfast with one egg instead of two. Supermarket giant Coles has reverted to COVID-19 conditions with a two-carton limit.

We became used to grocery shortages throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. These were due to changes in buying patterns, stockpiling and panic-buying. Eggs were temporarily part of this, along with flour, as people at home got baking.

Read more:
Why flour is still missing from supermarket shelves

But with lockdowns long past, what’s causing this egg shortage now?

News reports have quoted eggs producers blaming, at least in part, pandemic restrictions – because they reduced their laying flocks due to lower demand from restaurants and cafes.

That was the case in countries such as India, where misinformation about poultry being a source of COVID-19 led to a sharp decline in demand. But in Australia, an initial 30% drop from hospitality was compensated by a growth in retail sales.

What changed during that time was the way people got their eggs. Food delivery, food boxes and home cooking exploded for a time.

More fundamentally, this shortage reflects a long-term trend in egg-buying preferences, with a shift to free-range eggs, whose production is more affected by the colder, shorter days of winter.

Shifting to free-range eggs

Australians consume about 17 million eggs every day. In the 2020-21 financial year, egg farmers produced about 6.3 billion eggs. Of those, 52% were free-range. This compares to about 38% a decade ago.

This growth, however, has not been consistent. Between 2012 and 2017, free-range eggs’ share of the market grew about 10 percentage points, to about 48%. Growth in the past five years has been half that.

But with more rapid growth predicted, and the promise of higher profits, many egg farmers invested heavily in increasing free-range production. In New South Wales, for example, total flock size peaked in 2017-18.

Like many agricultural industries where farmers respond to price signals and predictions, this led to overproduction, leading to lower prices and profits. This in turn led to a 10% drop in egg production the next year.

Compliance costs also increased. In 2018 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission introduced rules to police the marketing of eggs as “free-range”.

These rules mean hens need to have “meaningful and regular access” to an outdoor range during the daylight hours of their laying cycle (with a maximum density of 10,000 hens per hectare).

This experience has likely influenced farmers’ reticence to increase their flocks based on predictions of higher demand.

Winter affects free-range production

Producing free-range eggs is more expensive not just because it requires more land. Free-range hens are less consistent layers.

Hens kept in cages or barns are more regular producers because conditions are optimised to stimulate laying. Temperatures are constant, and hens are exposed to 16 hours of light every day.

Free-range hens are affected by hot or cold temperatures, wind and rain, and length of daylight. In winter months they have less energy and produce (on average) 20% fewer eggs than a chicken confined indoors in controlled conditions.

Read more:
National plan to allow battery cages until 2036 favours cheap eggs over animal welfare

Pressures on farmers

The egg industry is flexible and adaptable – but the confluence of economic and environmental events in 2022 has made things difficult. Farmers will want to meet demand, but face time lags and cost pressures.

Increasing a laying flock takes about four months. An egg takes about three weeks to hatch. Under ideal conditions, chicks need another 17 weeks before they are ready to begin laying.

Any farmer who has begun this process in the past month will be producing more eggs by December. But then it will be summer, when they won’t need 20% more hens to make up for their winter slump.

Feed costs, which typically represent 60-70% of layer production costs, have been increasing along with transport, electricity and interest rates.

So farmers must be cautious if they are to stay in business. It is preferable to undersupply than go bankrupt through oversupply.

Are farmers willing to invest in increasing production in an uncertain economic environment, with interest rates and costs going up and a recession on the horizon? Probably not.

So a short-term fix seems unlikely. Weather forecasts are not favourable. The Bureau of Meterology expects a wetter August to October, with “more than double the normal chance of unusually high rainfall”. That means less daylight and more cold. Blame the negative Indian Ocean dipole, not the chickens.

Come spring, with longer days and milder temperatures, along with an agricultural visa program, things should return to “normal”.

Read more:
Eight cracking facts about eggs

Unless consumers are willing to pay more to ensure a constant supply in winter months, our shift to free-range eggs carries a higher likelihood of winter shortages.

We must do what we have done through every disruption in recent times: endure, adapt and prepare for the next crisis.

Flavio Macau is affiliated with the Australasian Supply Chain Institute (ASCI)

– ref. What’s causing Australia’s egg shortage? A shift to free-range and short winter days – https://theconversation.com/whats-causing-australias-egg-shortage-a-shift-to-free-range-and-short-winter-days-188433

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Broom, Professor of Sociology & Director, Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, The University of Sydney., University of Sydney

Since news of Olivia Newton-John’s death this week, many have paid tribute to her character, humble nature and cultural significance.

She also made a significant contribution to cancer survivorship and the ideal of treating the whole person, not just their disease.

Newton-John was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992 and underwent a partial mastectomy and chemotherapy and breast reconstruction. Her cancer journey spanned three decades, and as she explained:

The whole experience has given me much understanding and compassion, so much so that I wanted to help others going through the same journey.

Bringing our attention to cancer

Getting the community mobilised around difficult topics like cancer can be tough. Celebrities – and their experience of illness and healing – has become one of the most powerful means for mobilising action.

Olivia Newton-John was one of the first to share her experience of breast cancer with a wide audience and her advocacy opened the door for others such as Kylie Minogue and Angelina Jolie to share theirs.

Stories like theirs have mobilised cancer screening and research, prompting reflection and normalised the experience of living with cancer.

Read more:
Angelina Jolie has had a double mastectomy, so what is BRCA1?

The ‘alternative’ voices of cancer survivorship

The diverse approach Newton-John took to cancer treatment was a distinguishing part of her legacy. As she explained when establishing the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre:

I did herbal formulas, meditation and focused on a vision of complete wellness.

Explaining her “pro cannabis” stance on 60 minutes in 2019, she reflected a growing recognition of community interest in diverse approaches to pain and symptom management, and how such community views often rub up against legal and regulatory constraints. Australia only legalised medicinal cannabis in 2016, and many reservations persist among the Australian medical community.

Being open about her experience, Newton-John gave voice to things which many Australian cancer patients try, and believe in, but many in the medical community continue to push back on. In Australia, more than half of people living with cancer use alternative treatments over the course of their cancer journeys. Yet, alternative practices, including herbal products and medicinal cannabis, remain largely absent from mainstream cancer care. This risks putting mainstream medicine out of step with community beliefs.

As regularly noted, managing patient interest in “alternative” cancer care is a tricky area, but what is clear is that openness and frank discussions serve everyone best. A harm-reduction approach, which discusses and detects any dangerous side-effects or interactions, is safer than silencing what people living with cancer are doing or believe in.

Read more:
Physician heal thyself? After 4 years of treatment for stage 4 cancer I just wanted some encouraging words from my oncologist

Challenges to unhelpful cancer narratives

Cancer has suffered from a wide range misconceptions and misrepresentations. Ranging from ideas about cancer as a “death sentence”, or the idea that you either beat it or succumb to it. People often feel this does them a disservice.

People with cancer are so much more than a “cancer patient”, and they don’t want to be trapped in that frame. They can live well with cancer, without focusing entirely on trying to be cancer-free to the exclusion of all else. Newton-John emphasised this idea regularly.

Likewise, the expectation of “cancer heroics” is an all-consuming and regularly unhelpful cultural ideal. Sometimes “fighting” works and is needed, but in many contexts and particularly for long-term survivors, focusing on quality of life and wellness is critical.

This is likely why various alternative practices have gained traction, despite the slim evidence base for many. The world of “alternative therapies” has tended to present to the community a more person-centred approach, regardless of whether this is actually achieved by many practitioners in practice.

Towards ‘survivorship’

Cancer “survivorship”, in its broadest sense, denotes a broad focus, inclusive of the mind, body and the social life of the person living with cancer, not merely their disease, symptoms or treatment side-effects.

Even two decades ago, with the almost exclusive emphasis placed on curative cancer treatment, treatment discovery, or post curative experiences. This overly disease-centred focus tended to marginalise the many people who will continue to live on with cancer, rather than beyond it.

Person-centred approaches, in their many forms, show considerable benefit, although there continues to be a diverse set of understandings about what it actually means. The broad principle of person-centredness is that we are much more than disease and this matters throughout all aspects of care. Our care needs to be structured around our beliefs, psychological and social needs and life experiences. This may sound simple, but it is often not a central part of the picture.

While we are making progress, as Newton-John was acutely aware, there is so much more to do in this realm. Based on our most recent estimates more than one million Australians alive today are either currently living with cancer or have lived with it. Strategies which help all of us touched by cancer to live well, whether cured or not, should be the priority moving forward.

While we must be careful not to push too far in the other direction – a cruel optimism which threatens to sideline the hard, sad and often difficult experiences of cancer – a balance is needed which we have not quite reached.

Olivia Newton-John’s death will likely be difficult for some living with cancer. Important survivorship stories, when they come to a close, are difficult. So, let’s not pretend. Endings are hard, but a life well lived it also something to celebrate.

Alex Broom receives funding from the ARC.

– ref. Olivia Newton-John gave a voice to those with cancer and shifted the focus to the life of survivors – https://theconversation.com/olivia-newton-john-gave-a-voice-to-those-with-cancer-and-shifted-the-focus-to-the-life-of-survivors-188444

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

New analysis this week found strong fuel efficiency standards would have saved Australia A$5.9 billion in fuel costs and emissions equal to a year’s worth of domestic flights if the policy was adopted in 2015.

The finding, by think-tank the Australia Institute, puts further pressure on the new federal government to bring our fuel efficiency standards in line with Europe and other developed nations.

Unlike other comparable countries, Australia does not have fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles. On the face of it this is puzzling; aside from lower costs for motorists and fewer emissions, the policy would also decrease our reliance on imported oil.

But opposition from vested interests – including oil refineries and the car dealership industry – has held Australia back. The onus is now on the Albanese government to enact this obvious and long overdue policy which is crucial to the electric vehicle transition.

Long road, little progress

So how would a fuel efficiency standard work?

Under a likely model, the government would set a national limit, averaged across all new cars sold, stipulating grams of CO₂ that can be emitted for each kilometre driven. This measure depends on fuel-efficiency: that is, the amount of fuel burnt per kilometre.

The limit would not apply to individual cars. Instead, each supplier of new light vehicles to Australia would have to make sure the mix of vehicles does not exceed the limit. Low-efficiency vehicles could still be sold, but car dealers would have to balance this out by selling enough high-efficiency vehicles.

Because electric vehicles don’t use fuel (or use less, in the case of hybrids), a fuel efficiency standard would give suppliers an incentive to include electric vehicles in the mix of vehicles they supply.

The prospect of fuel efficiency standards on light vehicles has regularly hit the national agenda in recent years.

In 2014, the Climate Change Authority prepared a detailed plan for a standard and estimated the likely economic savings. The plan seemed well timed. Australia has traditionally produced large, fuel-guzzling cars like the Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon. At the time of the plan’s release, however, the last remaining domestic car manufacturers had just announced plans to close, removing the most likely source of political resistance.

But the Coalition government sat on the idea. It ran a string of reviews before ultimately letting the issue drop.

In 2019, then-Opposition Leader Bill Shorten pledged fuel efficiency standards, as well as a target for electric vehicles to comprise half of new car sales by 2030. But he soon ran into Scott Morrison’s jibe that Labor wanted to “end the weekend” and take away people’s utes.

Labor, of course, lost that election and Anthony Albanese dumped the fuel standards idea on becoming party leader.

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

But what about the benefits?

A fuel efficiency standard would deliver significant benefits to Australia.

The first is economic. The report released this week is just the latest of many studies showing motorists would have been slugged far less at the bowser if our cars used fuel more efficiently.

The second benefit is tackling climate change. Transport accounts for nearly 20% of Australia’s emissions and this share is increasing.

And while lab tests suggest cars sold in Australia are becoming somewhat more efficient, real world testing shows the opposite. If we are to achieve emissions cuts consistent with the goals of the Paris agreement, cutting emissions from transport is essential.

Third, Australia is almost entirely dependent on foreign fuel. So new efficiency standards would decrease overall liquid fuel consumption, leaving us less reliant on imports.

Read more:
We thought Australian cars were using less fuel. New research shows we were wrong

What’s holding us back

So why hasn’t Australia introduced this clearly beneficial policy? In short, because fuel inefficiency is deeply embedded in Australia’s automotive sector.

The strongest initial resistance to fuel efficiency standards came from the operators of refineries. Fuel-efficient cars require high-quality fuel. But Australia has long had among the dirtiest petrol in the developed world in terms of sulphur content.

Australian refiners resisted fuel efficiency standards because they said the cost of upgrading their plants would put them out of business. But the Morrison government last year funded upgrades at Australia’s last two oil refineries, removing one obstacle.

Further resistance has come from car dealers. From a dealership perspective, it’s easier to sell a car with a low sticker price even if lifetime running costs are higher.

Fuel efficiency standards, and the subsequent large-scale shift to electric vehicles, would fundamentally undermine the business model of the Australian car dealership industry. Much of its profitability comes from after-sales services required to maintain warranty protection, such as oil changes, transmission fluid and tune-ups.

None of these are needed in electric vehicles. The lifetime costs of maintaining an electric vehicle engine are about half those for a comparable internal combustion engine. At some point in their lives, an electric vehicle will require a new battery. But this will occur long after the initial sale.

Given all this, it’s not surprising the car industry is reportedly campaigning to limit any new fuel efficiency standards and delay the shift to electric vehicles.

What now?

The Albanese government has proposed some incentives to encourage a shift towards electric vehicles. But these limited measures won’t drive the dramatic transition that is needed.

Strong fuel efficiency standards would save motorists money, cut emissions and reduce Australia’s dependence on imported fuel. Anyway you look at it, the policy makes sense.

Read more:
Government assumes 90% of Australia’s new car sales will be electric by 2050. But it’s a destination without a route

John Quiggin was a Member of the Climate Change Authority from 2012 to 2017

– ref. Who’s holding back electric cars in Australia? We’ve long known the answer – and it’s time to clear the road – https://theconversation.com/whos-holding-back-electric-cars-in-australia-weve-long-known-the-answer-and-its-time-to-clear-the-road-188443

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Broom, Professor of Sociology & Director, Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, The University of Sydney., University of Sydney

Since news of Olivia Newton-John’s death this week, many have paid tribute to her character, humble nature and cultural significance.

She also made a significant contribution to cancer survivorship and the ideal of treating the whole person, not just their disease.

Newton-John was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992 and underwent a partial mastectomy and chemotherapy and breast reconstruction. Her cancer journey spanned three decades, and as she explained:

The whole experience has given me much understanding and compassion, so much so that I wanted to help others going through the same journey.

Bringing our attention to cancer

Getting the community mobilised around difficult topics like cancer can be tough. Celebrities – and their experience of illness and healing – has become one of the most powerful means for mobilising action.

Olivia Newton-John was one of the first to share her experience of breast cancer with a wide audience and her advocacy opened the door for others such as Kylie Minogue and Angelina Jolie to share theirs.

Stories like theirs have mobilised cancer screening and research, prompting reflection and normalised the experience of living with cancer.

Read more:
Angelina Jolie has had a double mastectomy, so what is BRCA1?

The ‘alternative’ voices of cancer survivorship

The diverse approach Newton-John took to cancer treatment was a distinguishing part of her legacy. As she explained when establishing the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre:

I did herbal formulas, meditation and focused on a vision of complete wellness.

Explaining her “pro cannabis” stance on 60 minutes in 2019, she reflected a growing recognition of community interest in diverse approaches to pain and symptom management, and how such community views often rub up against legal and regulatory constraints. Australia only legalised medicinal cannabis in 2016, and many reservations persist among the Australian medical community.

Being open about her experience, Newton-John gave voice to things which many many Australian cancer patients try, and believe in, but many in the medical community continue to push back on. In Australia, more than half of people living with cancer use alternative treatments over the course of their cancer journeys. Yet, alternative practices, including herbal products and medicinal cannabis, remain largely absent from mainstream cancer care. This risks putting mainstream medicine out of step with community beliefs.

As regularly noted, managing patient interest in “alternative” cancer care is a tricky area, but what is clear is that openness and frank discussions serve everyone best. A harm-reduction approach, which discusses and detects any dangerous side-effects or interactions, is safer than silencing what people living with cancer are doing or believe in.

Read more:
Physician heal thyself? After 4 years of treatment for stage 4 cancer I just wanted some encouraging words from my oncologist

Challenges to unhelpful cancer narratives

Cancer has suffered from a wide range misconceptions and misrepresentations. Ranging from ideas about cancer as a “death sentence”, or the idea that you either beat it or succumb to it. People often feel this does them a disservice.

People with cancer are so much more than a “cancer patient”, and they don’t want to be trapped in that frame. They can live well with cancer, without focusing entirely on trying to be cancer-free to the exclusion of all else. Newton-John emphasised this idea regularly.

Likewise, the expectation of “cancer heroics” is an all-consuming and regularly unhelpful cultural ideal. Sometimes “fighting” works and is needed, but in many contexts and particularly for long-term survivors, focusing on quality of life and wellness is critical.

This is likely why various alternative practices have gained traction, despite the slim evidence base for many. The world of “alternative terhapies” has tended to present to the community a more person-centred approach, regardless of whether this is actually achieved by many practitioners in practice.

Towards ‘survivorship’

Cancer “survivorship”, in its broadest sense, denotes a broad focus, inclusive of the mind, body and the social life of the person living with cancer, not merely their disease, symptoms or treatment side-effects.

Even two decades ago, with the almost exclusive emphasis placed on curative cancer treatment, treatment discovery, or post curative experiences. This overly disease-centred focus tended to marginalise the many people who will continue to live on with cancer, rather than beyond it.

Person-centred approaches, in their many forms, show considerable benefit, although there continues to be a diverse set of understandings about what it actually means. The broad principle of person-centredness is that we are much more than disease and this matters throughout all aspects of care. Our care needs to be structured around our beliefs, psychological and social needs and life experiences. This may sound simple, but it is often not a central part of the picture.

While we are making progress, as Newton-John was acutely aware, there is so much more to do in this realm. Based on our most recent estimates more than one million Australians alive today are either currently living with cancer or have lived with it. Strategies which help all of us touched by cancer to live well, whether cured or not, should be the priority moving forward.

While we must be careful not to push too far in the other direction – a cruel optimism which threatens to sideline the hard, sad and often difficult experiences of cancer – a balance is needed which we have not quite reached.

Olivia Newton-John’s death will likely be difficult for some living with cancer. Important survivorship stories, when they come to a close, are difficult. So, let’s not pretend. Endings are hard, but a life well lived it also something to celebrate.

Alex Broom receives funding from the ARC.

– ref. Olivier Newton-John gave a voice to those with cancer and shifted the focus to the life of survivors – https://theconversation.com/olivier-newton-john-gave-a-voice-to-those-with-cancer-and-shifted-the-focus-to-the-life-of-survivors-188444

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter McNeil, Distinguished Professor of Design History, UTS, University of Technology Sydney

Throughout his career, Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, who has died of cancer at 84, rejected terms like “fashion”.

But his work allowed much of the world to reimagine itself through clothing.

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake studied graphic design in Tokyo where he was influenced by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the black and white photography of Irving Penn.

As soon as the post-war restrictions barring Japanese nationals from travelling abroad were lifted, he headed to Paris, arriving in 1964.

There, the young designer apprenticed for eminent haute couture fashion houses Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy. Such houses made expensive clothes that conformed to prevailing standards of etiquette. Miyake was to go well beyond that.

Miyake was there for the Paris student revolt of 1968 and was galvanised by the youth quake shaking all rules of society.

The ready-to-wear concept by a couturier had been launched just a few years earlier when Yves Saint Laurent created Saint Laurent Rive Gauche in late 1966.

The fashion system was changing and Miyake rose to the challenge.

Japanese fashion revolution

Miyake arrived in Paris shortly after Kenzo’s “Jungle Jap” clothes had made waves, with their bright colours and unexpected patterns based partly on Japanese artistic traditions.

The Japanese revolution in fashion was commencing.

Japanese designers including Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey – all born in the 1930s and 40s – rose to prominence in the 70s and showed in Paris.

All questioned Eurocentric views of fashion and beauty. The Japanese designers reversed the Western focus on symmetry and tidiness and adopted aspects of Japanese aesthetic systems, such as Yamamoto’s use of black with colours such as red, purple, cerise, brown and dark blue.

Miyake held his first show in New York in 1971 and in Paris in 1973. He integrated technology with tradition, exploring Japanese aesthetics and the uncut, untailored garment. He also commissioned high-tech textiles that influenced fashion around the world.

Miyake’s BODY series included the famous bustiers of plastic, rattan and resin in which the female body was re-imagined as a type of armour.

In February 1982 the prominent journal Artforum photographed a Miyake bustier on its cover.

It was the first time a contemporary art journal had featured fashion.

Covering the body

Throughout his career Miyake completely re-imagined the potential of textiles.

Working with his textile director Makiko Minagawa and Japanese textile mills, he began to create the famous Pleats collections: using thermally processed polyester textiles that are not pleated before sewing (the regular practice), but manufactured much larger, and then pleated in machines.

The Rhythm Pleats collection from 1989 was inspired by the French artist Henri Rousseau: Miyake took elements of the colour palette and the strange sculptural shells surrounding women in these paintings, a good example of how his influences were always abstract and suggestive.

His very commercial collection Pleats Please was launched in 1993.

The A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) collection (in collaboration with Dai Fujiwara, 1998) revolutionised clothing design and prefigured anxieties around the unsustainability of fashion and its attendant waste. Clothes were knitted in three dimensions in a continuous tube using computerised knitting technology as a whole and from a single thread.

The garment came in a cylinder and was later cut out by the wearer – there was no waste, as leftover sections became mittens, for example.

Read more:
Four clothing businesses that could lead us away from the horrors of fast fashion

Miyake and men

Miyake’s pneumatic collection in 1991 included knickerbocker trousers for men with plastic bladders and straws – men could inflate or deflate the clothes to suit.

It was the age of the AIDS crisis and attendant body wasting. Calvin Klein had responded with hyper-masculine underwear and hyper-masculine advertising. Miyake, on the other hand, tested the zeitgeist by suggesting we use clothes to make our bodies and appearances suit our needs.

Having worn his clothes myself for some time, I can testify for the liberation they provide. The jackets are unlined and embrace the body in unexpected ways. Sleeves might be manufactured so they create a pagoda shape on your arm and add dynamism to the body.

The colour palette is extraordinary and so different from a diet of sensible woollens or tweeds.

Computer-generated jacquard weaving creates subtle patterns only truly registered by closer looking. The textiles have an unexpected tactility next to the skin. Some of the garments are provided literally rolled in a ball. They weigh virtually nothing, meaning they liberate the traveller. Once unrolled and put on the body, they spring back to life.

There is a real sense that you, the wearer, animate these lifeless things: dressing is a performance and the clothes generate a reality that is both theatrical and practical. Although widely worn (there is a cliche all gallerists once lived in Miyake) people remain intrigued by them, wanting to touch them for themselves.

At the Issey Miyake Retrospective in Tokyo in 2016, I saw Miyake and very much wanted to go over and thank him for transforming the potential of fashion for women and men around the world, its material possibility and imaginative possibility.

I’d very much like to thank him for that now.

Read more:
How Japanese avant-garde ceramicists have tested the limits of clay

Peter McNeil 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. Part of the Japanese revolution in fashion, Issey Miyake changed the way we saw, wore and made fashion – https://theconversation.com/part-of-the-japanese-revolution-in-fashion-issey-miyake-changed-the-way-we-saw-wore-and-made-fashion-188523

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karlo Doroc, PhD Candidate in Decision Science, Centre for Brain, Mind and Markets, The University of Melbourne

Nobel laureate economist Richard Thaler famously quipped:

People aren’t dumb, the world is hard.

Indeed, we routinely encounter problems in our everyday lives that feel complex – from choosing the best electricity plan, to deciding how to effectively spend our money.

Australian pay hundreds of millions of dollars each year to comparison websites and consumer-focused groups such as CHOICE to help them make decisions about products and services.

But how can we objectively measure how “complex” our decisions really are? Our recently published research offers one potential way to do this, by drawing on concepts from computer and systems science.

Why bother measuring complexity?

There are several factors when it comes to measuring complexity in any scenario. For instance, there may be a number of options to choose from and each option may have several different features to consider.

Suppose you want to buy jam. This will be easy if there are only two flavours available, but difficult if there are dozens. Yet choosing an electricity plan would be much harder even with just two options.

In other words, you can’t isolate one particular factor when trying to determine the complexity of something. You have to consider the problem as a whole – and this requires a lot more work.

The ability to accurately measure complexity could have a wide range of practical applications, including informing the design of:

• regulation on how complex products should be

• easy to navigate digital systems including websites, apps and smart device programs

• easy to understand products. These may be financial products (superannuation and insurance plans, credit card schemes), physical products (devices) or virtual products (software)

• artificial intelligence (AI) that offers advice when problems are too complex for humans. For example, a scheduler AI may let you book meetings yourself, before jumping in to suggest optimal meeting times and locations based on your history.

How we study human decision-making

Computer science can help us solve problems: information goes in and one (or more) solutions come out. However, the amount of computation needed for this can vary a lot, depending on the problem.

We and our colleagues used a precise mathematical framework, called “computational complexity theory”, that quantifies how much computation is needed to solve any given problem.

The idea behind it is to measure the amount of computational resources (such as time or memory) a computer algorithm needs when problem-solving. The more time or memory it needs, the more complex the problem is.

Once this is established, problems can be categorised into “classes” based on their complexity.

In our work, we were particularly interested in how complexity (as determined through computational complexity theory) corresponds with the actual amount of effort people must put into solving certain problems.

We wanted to know whether computational complexity theory could accurately predict how much humans would struggle in a certain situation and how accurate their problem-solving would be.

Testing our hypothesis

We focused on three types of experimental tasks, for which you can see examples below. All of these task types sit within a broader class of complex problems called “NP-complete” problems.

Each task type requires a different ability to perform well in. Specifically:

• “satisfiability” tasks require abstract logic
• “travelling salesperson” tasks require spatial navigation skills and
• “knapsack” tasks require arithmetic.

All three are ubiquitous in real life and reflect day-to-day problems such as software testing (satisfiability), planning a road trip (travelling salesperson), and shopping or investing (knapsack).

We recruited 67 people, split them into three groups, and made each group solve between 64-72 different variations of one of the three types of task.

We also used computational complexity theory and computer algorithms to figure out which tasks were “high complexity” for a computer, before comparing these with the results from our human problem solvers.

We expected – assuming computational complexity theory is congruent with how real people solve problems – that our participants would spend more time on tasks identified as being “high complexity” for a computer. We also expected lower problem-solving accuracy on these tasks.

In both cases that’s exactly what we found. On average, people did twice as well on the lowest complexity cases compared to the highest complexity cases.

Computer science can measure ‘complexity’ for humans

Our results suggest effort alone is not enough to ensure someone does well on a complex problem. Some problems will be hard no matter what – and these are the spaces in which advanced decision aids and AI can shine.

In practical terms, being able to gauge the complexity of a wide range of tasks could help provide people with the necessary support they need to tackle these tasks day-to-day.

The most important result was that our computational complexity theory-based predictions about which tasks humans would find harder were consistent across all three types of task – despite each requiring different abilities to solve.

Moreover, if we can predict how hard humans will find tasks within these three problems, then it should be able to do the same for the more than 3,000 other NP-complete problems.

These include similarly common hurdles such as task scheduling, shopping, circuit design and gameplay.

Now, to put research into practice

While our results are exciting, there’s still a long way to go. For one, our research used quick and abstract tasks in a controlled laboratory environment. These tasks can model real-life choices, but they’re not representative of actual real-life choices.

The next step is to apply similar techniques to tasks that more closely resemble real-life choices. For instance, can we use computational complexity theory to measure the complexity of choosing between different credit cards?

Progress in this space could help us unlock new ways to aid people in making better choices, every day, across various facets of life.

Read more:
We’ve crunched the numbers in McDonald’s Monopoly challenge to find your chance of winning

Karlo Doroc receives funding from a University of Melbourne Graduate Research Scholarship from the Faculty of Business and Economics, a Kinsman Scholarship, and Australian Government Research Training Program.

– ref. How complex is your life? Computer scientists found a way to measure it – https://theconversation.com/how-complex-is-your-life-computer-scientists-found-a-way-to-measure-it-187997

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne

When you think of “conifers”, tall, conical shaped trees often found in public parks or front yards may spring to mind. But these impressive trees are far more fascinating than you may have realised, as they represent just one piece of an unsolved botanical puzzle.

These popular garden trees are from the northern hemisphere. But we also have conifers in the southern hemisphere, called “southern conifers”, found largely in Australia, South America, New Zealand and New Caledonia.

A little detective work reveals that southern conifers evolved in Gondwana, and long ago separated from coniferous relatives in the northern hemisphere.

They appeared around 200 million years ago, before the first flowering plants evolved, sharing land with the dinosaurs. One example is the Wollemi pine, which was famously saved in a secret firefighting operation during the 2019-2020 bushfires.

Unlike the introduced conifer garden trees, southern conifers are neither as well-known nor as popular with Australians as they should be. So let me help you get to know them a little better.

Famous ‘living fossils’

Northern conifers are mostly evergreen, woody trees with needle-like leaves, while southern conifers tend to have broad leaves like flowering trees.

Trees in the genus Araucaria, including the monkey puzzle, bunya bunya, hoop pine and Norfolk Island pine, are southern conifers. As are most members of the Podocarp family (Huon pine, celery top pine and plum pine) and 22 species of Agathis (including the majestic Queensland and New Zealand Kauri trees).

Southern conifers often possess cones, such as the Araucaria and Agathis species. Sometimes, these cones are very large and heavy that can cause serious injury if they fall from high in the tree onto an unsuspecting passerby.

Read more:
Backyard gardeners around the world are helping to save Australia’s deeply ancient Wollemi pine

Some southern conifers can be over 30 metres high. Others, such as the Kauri and Huon pine, are renowned for their longevity. They can live for centuries or, for the Huon pine, perhaps over an astonishing ten millennia.

While all species of southern conifers are of ancient origin, the Wollemi pine is famous for its status as a “living fossil”. Of course, this is a contradiction in terms – a fossil is any evidence of past life.

But in this context, the term refers to organisms that appeared in the fossil record long ago, were then thought to be extinct, before a living version was discovered. We are curious as to how they successfully hid for so long and may imagine a link with a distant, different past.

So, the question botanists have yet to answer is: how distant are the north and south relatives?

When flowering plants evolved

Many southern conifers show little resemblance to the “true conifers” of the northern hemisphere, such as pine, cedar, spruce and juniper.

All conifers are gymnosperms, which means they have naked seeds and cones. They evolved from an ancient group of seed ferns, before the fragmentation of the super continent Pangaea.

These seed ferns were a diverse group. As Pangaea divided into Gondwana in the south and Laurasia in the north, the seed ferns began to diversify, giving rise to northern and southern seed ferns.

Botanists have long known that northern conifers and other gymnosperms evolved from these northern seed ferns. But what of the southern seed ferns? They remained a bit of a mystery until the 1970s.

One group of southern seed ferns constituted what’s now called the Glossopteris flora, which was of Gondwanan origin. From this diverse group of Glossopterids, flowering plants in all their variety evolved.

This solved one of the great riddles of botany – the origin of the flowering plants which had puzzled scientists, particularly in the northern hemisphere until the early 1980s.

Read more:
Where the old things are: Australia’s most ancient trees

It’s likely southern conifers also evolved from these southern seed ferns. Some may have arisen from other members of the Glossopteris group, too, or perhaps their relatives.

If this was the case, then the southern conifers would be more closely related to flowering plants than to the true conifers of the north.

When the trees were in fashion

After millions of years of evolution, southern conifers became fashionable with gardeners in the 1800s.

Their novelty and striking form captured the interest of the educated and wealthy landowners of Europe and they were planted as status symbols on estates and in public gardens.

In Australia they were planted in large private gardens and in many public parks from the mid 1800s to World War 1, after which their popularity waned.

You can see many of these fine trees growing still in large gardens and public parks across Australia, such as botanic gardens in most Australian states, as well as in smaller public parks and gardens of older suburbs and inland towns. Their striking, almost geometrical, form catches the eye.

Southern conifers are known for their resilience, are rarely affected by pests or disease and, despite their large size, cause few problems with paths, roads, buildings and other urban infrastructure. Probably because they were given plenty of space to grow when first planted.

We still have much to learn

It takes time to solve some of these botanical puzzles. Evolution is a sophisticated process that has led to very complex relationships between plant groups.

In future we may well recognise that southern conifers are not really conifers at all. Perhaps, the links between the two groups go so far back in time, the relationship is too distant for both southern and true conifers to be called conifers at all.

In any case, these mysterious trees have persisted through vast periods of time and changing environments – they have much to teach us about plant responses to climate change.

Read more:
Dinosaur food and Hiroshima bomb survivors: maidenhair trees are ‘living fossils’ and your new favourite plant

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

– ref. Southern conifers: meet this vast group of ancient trees with mysteries still unsolved – https://theconversation.com/southern-conifers-meet-this-vast-group-of-ancient-trees-with-mysteries-still-unsolved-182600

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andy Marks, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Strategy, Government and Alliances, Western Sydney University

The 1973 Watergate Committee hearings ran for 51 days. The televised revelations drew a huge audience. The pressure built with slow, devastating intensity, devouring then US President Richard Nixon’s agenda, eventually leaving him no option but to fall on his sword.

While not quite a Watergate moment, it is hard to see how the current NSW parliamentary inquiry into the appointment of the New York trade commissioner will end. Approaching day 49 of proceedings, the inquiry has already prompted the resignation of NSW Liberal deputy leader Stuart Ayres, with more fallout a distinct possibility.

Internal Liberal-National Coalition critics of Dominic Perrottet’s management of the issue are reportedly “furious”. Their wrath centres on two issues. First, the premier’s inability to anticipate public reaction to the appointment. Second, his incapacity to put an end to the controversy.

The latter point is telling, as it goes to heart of the most prized skill in modern politics: tempo.

Regaining control of political tempo is possibly Perrottet’s only chance of securing another term for his 12-year-old government at the March 2023 election against a reinvigorated Labor opposition. Finding your rhythm, let alone dictating it, is not as easy as it sounds. Trust me. In a former life I was a drummer of mild renown.

Political tempo is an interesting phenomenon. Elected officials do everything they can to control it, but it is a dark and fleeting art. In Australian politics of old, slowing down the media and parliamentary agenda was a virtue; a marker of reasoned, deliberative and informed leadership.

Read more:
NSW government slides further into trouble as Perrottet struggles for clear air

Asked on an airport tarmac in 1965 by a clamouring media pack whether Labor would back then Prime Minister Robert Menzies’s commitment of Australian troops to Vietnam, Labor leader Arthur Calwell calmly refused to answer.

Days later, on the floor of parliament, he articulated Labor’s prescient rejection of the decision. It was a moment that restored his party’s moral compass and set a tempo towards eventual electoral victory eight years later under Whitlam.

The art of slow politics has been lost. In recent decades, controlling the daily media agenda has become the goal. The timing of press releases, the staging of doorstop interviews, speaking points, three-word slogans and zingers have become the hallmark of fast politics. Perrottet, like other contemporary leaders, is compelled to move, and accordingly be judged, at this speed.

A protracted inquiry is kryptonite to fast politics.

With no end in sight to the upper house inquiry, the NSW Coalition is contending with daily, relatively unpredictable attacks on its integrity. This comes in the wake of the electoral defeat of its federal colleagues, largely over questions of integrity and trust.

The premier has attempted to counter this perception by initiating his own inquiry – by former public service commissioner Graeme Head – to “ensure the utmost independence and public confidence in the process”. Public confidence is indeed the critical factor.

But the concurrent upper house inquiry has no patience for slow politics. It makes its own case for the public’s confidence. It marches on, drowning out the premier’s internal inquiry, with a cavalcade of political and “private citizen” appearances setting their own tempo, making their own claims, and marking out their own versions of events.

In this scenario, the premier’s attempts at process and transparency are countered by the unpredictable and meandering events of hearings he can neither predict nor counter.

The political agenda has been lost, and tempo – of any discernible rhythm – seems impossible to restore.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Barilaro keeps Nationals in the tent; koalas stay in limbo

It is a dire position for any government to find itself in, particularly at this late stage of the electoral cycle. It may be that an abandonment of prior positions is the only option. A reset.

To a degree, the NSW Labor opposition has beaten the Coalition on the reset front. Opposition Leader Chris Minns has vowed to “abolish” the controversial trade postings should Labor win office. It is not too late for the premier to make the same commitment.

Matching Labor’s political tempo on this issue would seem anathema to many Coalition strategists, and their Labor counterparts. Careers in modern politics have been forged through steadfast political differentiation, conflict, and dogged combat.

The federal poll tells us voters might be tiring of political cacophony. Truly “new” politics in NSW might just be found in synchronicity.

Andy Marks 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 ‘fast’ politics has left the NSW government staring into the electoral abyss – https://theconversation.com/how-fast-politics-has-left-the-nsw-government-staring-into-the-electoral-abyss-188429

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karin Hammarberg, Senior Research Fellow, Global and Women’s Health, School of Public Health & Preventive Medicine, Monash University

Egg freezing is promoted as an empowering option for women who want to stop the biological clock and improve their chance of having a baby later in life. But they need to know it’s more like a lottery than an insurance policy.

Fertility declines with age. To avoid age-related infertility, women increasingly turn to elective egg freezing. Advertising on IVF clinic websites and social media promote this as an insurance policy that allows women to start a family when the time is right for them.

But the reality is there’s no guarantee of a baby. The procedure is expensive and not risk-free. Most women need more than one egg collection for a reasonable chance of having a baby down the track. And, for a range of reasons, many women won’t use their stored eggs.

Typically, women who freeze their eggs are well educated, financially secure single women in their mid to late 30s. And contrary to the common stereotype that women freeze their eggs to advance their career or for other reasons to do with their personal fulfilment, the most common reason is they don’t have a partner or have a partner who is unwilling to commit to parenthood or is “not ready” to have children.

Read more:
Why women choose to freeze their eggs – new research

Quality of information on clinic websites

An assessment of the quality of the information about elective egg freezing on 21 Australian and New Zealand IVF clinic websites showed poor quality overall and a lot of room for improvement.

Only one clinic addressed the question about whether the data presented on the website were based on the clinic’s own experience or on published data from other clinics.

None of the clinics clarified if the data they gave related specifically to elective egg freezing, where most women are in their mid to late 30s, or if the data related to egg freezing in the context of egg donation, where eggs are retrieved from younger women with greater fertility potential.

Only two websites quoted the chance of having a baby as a result of elective egg freezing and only six websites provided information about cost.

Since we know people’s first port of call for health information is the internet, it’s possible this poor quality information – combined with the often upbeat and emotive images on clinic websites – can give women a false impression of what is possible with elective egg freezing.

Read more:
Egg freezing is on the up – but new research raises questions about how clinics advertise

Chances of success

So, what is the chance of having a baby with frozen eggs? These three numbers will largely determine your chance.

1) Your age when you freeze your eggs

To help women decide if and when to freeze their eggs, American scientists developed a prediction model which shows that for a 50%, 80% or 95% chance of a baby from frozen eggs a woman aged 35 or less needs to freeze six, 14, and 30 eggs respectively.

But for a woman aged 39, this goes up to 15 eggs for a 50% chance, 33 eggs for an 80% chance and 70 eggs for a 95% chance.

2) The number of eggs stored

Egg freezing involves a course of hormone injections to stimulate the ovaries to produce multiple eggs, ultrasound and blood tests to monitor the progress, and when the eggs are mature, retrieving them in a transvaginal ultrasound-guided procedure under light anesthetic.

The retrieved eggs are stored in liquid nitrogen until the woman returns to use them.

So, how many eggs can women expect from each egg retrieval?

According to data from all IVF clinics on Victoria in 2020, the average number of eggs collected per egg retrieval was 13 for women aged less than 35 years and ten for women aged 35-39 years.

If we apply these numbers to the model, women in their mid to late 30s will likely need at least three egg retrievals for an 80% chance of having a baby from frozen eggs.

3) How many cycles you can afford?

Each egg retrieval process costs between A$7,000 and $8,000 and unlike IVF, there is no Medicare rebate.

Based on the data above, an average 35-year-old woman can expect to pay $14,000-$16,000 and an average 38-year-old woman $21,000-$24,000 to store enough eggs for an 80% chance of a baby.

And if you return to use those eggs, you will need to pay to thaw them and inseminate them to create embryos. That process will add thousands to the overall cost.

What happens after freezing?

The longest follow-up study so far looked at the return rate among women who had stored their eggs for more than a decade. It found less than 40% had returned to use their eggs.

The most comprehensive data on what happens when eggs are thawed comes from the United States, where researchers calculated that for women under the age of 35, 41 eggs needed to be thawed for one live birth. This increased to 99 eggs for women aged between 38 and 40.

Read more:
Half of women over 35 who want a child don’t end up having one, or have fewer than they planned

Women need the facts to make informed decisions

Elective egg freezing is taking off as a reproductive choice, which women are increasingly turning to for a range of reasons. They deserve:

• comprehensive information about all the pros and cons of elective egg freezing
• knowledge about the potential risks, including ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), a potentially serious condition caused by an excessive physical response to the hormone stimulation
• transparency around the clinic’s own experience and track record
• personalised estimates of how many eggs they need to freeze to have a reasonable chance of having a baby down the track.

Women need factual and realistic information about what is possible with elective egg freezing to make informed decisions and manage their expectations.

Karin Hammarberg works for the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority

– ref. Thinking about freezing your eggs to have a baby later? Here are 3 numbers to help you decide – https://theconversation.com/thinking-about-freezing-your-eggs-to-have-a-baby-later-here-are-3-numbers-to-help-you-decide-187845

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Penelope Jones, Research Fellow in Environmental Health, University of Tasmania

Savanna burning projects in northern Australia provide economic benefits to Indigenous communities and claim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But our research suggests smoke from these projects is harming human health.

Northern Australia’s savannas cover about 25% of Australia’s land mass. They’re among the most flammable regions in the world and comprise 70% of Australia’s fire-affected area each year.

Savanna fire management involves strategically burning grasslands early in the dry season, purportedly to reduce the chance of large, intense, more carbon-intensive fires later in the season. Under Australia’s Emissions Reduction Fund, land managers who undertake savanna burning receive financial rewards in the form of carbon credits.

But our research, focused on Darwin, has shown savanna burning under the fund is making air pollution worse. A review of the fund now underway must consider these unacceptable costs to human health.

The Top End’s smoke problem

Savanna fire management is currently a topic of substantial global interest – much of it stemming from its potential to reduce carbon emissions.

The underlying premise is that early dry season burning releases fewer emissions than late dry season burning. This is because the fuel is moister and weather conditions milder — hence fires will be less extensive, less fuel will combust and less carbon will be released.

In Australia, savanna burning programs for carbon abatement were developed in the mid-2000s and integrated into the carbon market. Land managers are offered financial incentives to burn large amounts of savanna before the end of July each year.

The scheme has proved popular: registered projects now cover some 25% of Australia’s 1.2 million km² tropical savannas, including 55% of land within 500km of Darwin.

Australia now touts itself as a world leader in savanna burning. We are sharing the practice with other regions around the world, and savanna burning programs linked to carbon markets have been proposed elsewhere.

Yet the smoke pollution consequences of such programs are rarely considered. In Australia’s Top End, for example, thick and prolonged smoke blankets communities every dry season. Darwin, a city of 158,000 people, regularly exceeds the Australian air quality standard for particulate matter.

In Darwin, smoky days bring more hospital admissions for lung and heart disease, and more emergency department presentations for asthma. These impacts disproportionately affect Indigenous people.

Almost all Darwin’s particulate pollution is caused by landscape fires. In the early dry season, almost all of this is generated by prescribed burning – and there’s been a marked increase in burning in recent years linked to carbon abatement schemes.

Read more:
We blew the whistle on Australia’s central climate policy. Here’s what a new federal government probe must fix

What our research found

Our research considered the relationship between prescribed burning and smoke pollution in Darwin from 2004 to 2019.

We first assessed the very small particles found in smoke known as PM2.5. We then analysed fire activity within a 500km radius, and assessed the links between pollution, weather and fire.

The results showed air quality worsened in Darwin in the early dry season (particularly in June and July), with an increase in the annual number of severely polluted days.

Perhaps surprisingly, air quality did not change substantially in other seasons. In other words, shifting savanna burning to the early dry season did not appear to lead to better air quality later in the season.

Our findings highlight a complex story. Despite a substantial expansion of savanna burning for carbon abatement over our study period, net annual PM2.5 concentrations in Darwin did not decline. In fact, there was an increase in the number of times the national air quality standard was exceeded.

So what’s driving these results? One important factor involves large areas of savanna burned for carbon abatement to the southeast of Darwin in the early dry season. At that time of year, a steady south-easterly trade wind hits Darwin, bringing much of the smoke from these fires with it.

Fuel dynamics may also be at play. Native and non-native grasses which are highly flammable in the early dry season have been expanding on frequently burned savannas. Higher temperatures may be drying fuel out earlier in the dry season. These factors may make early dry season fires as extensive and intense as savannas burnt later in the season.

Our research comes with caveats. For example, we drew only broad inferences about the geographic sources of smoke over Darwin. Notwithstanding this, our results clearly demonstrate Darwin’s already significant air quality problem is worsening, rather than improving, in association with increased early dry season burning.

Read more:
Air pollution causes more than 3 million premature deaths a year worldwide

A balancing act

None of this means savanna burning should cease, nor that traditional owners should not be paid to manage fire on country. But it does mean policies should be designed so unintended harm is minimised and the benefits are maximised.

Policymakers must consider how to regulate burning to avoid smoke pollution exposure. In Darwin, particular attention may be needed in locations southeast of the city. One solution may be to regulate how much smoke can be released in a specific area on a given day.

Other factors should be considered too. For example, savanna burning in Australia may risk harming biodiversity.

But the Emissions Reduction Fund is a blunt tool which doesn’t consider these hidden costs and other nuances.

The new Labor government has ordered an independent review of the fund. For this review to fulfil its brief, all unintended harms must be taken into account.

Read more:
Australia’s central climate policy pays people to grow trees that already existed. Taxpayers – and the environment – deserve better

Penelope Jones receives funding from the Northern Territory Department of Health and has previously received funding from the Northern Territory Environment Protection Authority. She also receives funding from ACT Health, the Tasmanian Department of Health, and the Commonwealth Department of Home Affairs, Asthma Australia and the Tasmanian Natural Disaster Risk Reduction Program.

David Bowman has received funding to study fire ecology and management from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub, Bushfire and Natural Hazard CRC, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania.

Fay Johnston receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the National Environment Science Program, the Health Departments of the Northern Territory, Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania, and the Tasmania Natural Disaster Risk Reduction Program.

– ref. ‘Unacceptable costs’: savanna burning under Australia’s carbon credit scheme is harming human health – https://theconversation.com/unacceptable-costs-savanna-burning-under-australias-carbon-credit-scheme-is-harming-human-health-186778

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Sciberras, Associate Professor, Deakin University

COVID lockdowns and home schooling seemed never-ending for a lot of families. But there were some silver linings.

Our new research published in two papers looked at children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) during lockdowns to understand what home learning was like for them.

We surveyed more than 100 Australian parents of children with ADHD, asking them about the benefits, challenges and strategies they used.

While this provided insights into into pandemic schooling, there are lessons here for learning beyond lockdowns.

As COVID cases remain high, so too does the potential for more home learning. But parents can also use our findings to help with homework and teachers can apply them in their primary and high school classrooms.

This comes amid calls from parents to better support children with ADHD at school.

Remind me, what is ADHD?

ADHD begins in childhood and occurs in about 5% of children and adolescents worldwide.

Symptoms can include difficulty maintaining concentration, controlling impulses (including being able to pause and think), planning and organising tasks, and managing time and belongings.

Read more:
ADHD looks different in adults. Here are 4 signs to watch for

Children with ADHD experience greater school and learning difficulties, compared to their peers without ADHD.

Medication can help with reducing inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity difficulties. But to succeed at school, children with ADHD also require other supports.

Our findings

Our research found Australian parents experienced challenges during lockdowns.

Of those surveyed, 25% reported difficulty keeping children on task during home learning. Similar numbers also reported children lacking motivation (22%) and difficulty with the format, structure, and delivery of online learning (19%). If a child had trouble paying attention and anxiety symptoms, these were most likely to make home learning difficult.

But there were also benefits.

Of those surveyed, 20% of parents reported their child had lower anxiety and stress. Similar numbers also reported they got a better understanding of their child’s learning style and needs (20%) and greater flexibility around how and when their child did school work (19%).

These benefits may be due to children receiving more one-on-one support and more ability to personalise learning for their child.

What strategies helped?

According to our study, the most common helpful strategies used during home learning for Australian children with ADHD were:

1. having routines/organisation and time management, including waking up at a set time each day and then following a schedule

2. parents being actively involved in their child’s work – keeping track of what work needed to be done and what work had been done

3. having a suitable space for children to work, that was quiet and free from distractions.

Tips for parents of children with ADHD

Our suggestions can be used during any future home learning or for parents helping their children with homework. They can also be easily adapted by classroom teachers.

The key thing to remember is children with ADHD are not intentionally trying to be naughty, impulsive or distracted. For that reason, discipline will not be effective but the following strategies may help:

• focus on your child’s strengths and positive attributes – this is essential for them to build and maintain self-esteem

• give plenty of praise and encouragement

• ask your child about their struggles and then listen to their responses, acknowledge their feelings and don’t judge or just leap to give advice. You could say, “I can see that you’re really upset. Do you feel like talking about it?” Recent research shows children with ADHD want to have positive social connections.

• provide gentle redirection if your child gets distracted – you could say, “Wow! What a great job you’ve done so far. Keep going!”, instead of “Back to work!”

• limit distractions – turn off TVs, silence phones and have siblings work or play elsewhere

• work with your child from the start of an activity to ensure they understand it and to help them plan the next steps

• give your child one to two instructions at a time

• provide time management assistance – this could include a visual schedule of the steps/tasks required

• enable your child to expend energy whilst listening – this could include fidgets, doodling or bouncing on a Pilates ball – to assist with their concentration

• ensure your child takes regular learning breaks. The frequency of these will depend on your child, it could be helpful to start with more frequent breaks, then adjust as needed.

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Popping toys, the latest fidget craze, might reduce stress for adults and children alike

Emma Sciberras receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, veski, the Waterloo Foundation, and internal research funding from Deakin University. Emma Sciberras is affiliated with the Australian ADHD Professionals Association.

Glenn Melvin receives funding from Australian Research Council, National Health & Medical Research Council, Medical Research Future Fund, Beyond Blue, Suicide Prevention Australia, Economic & Social Research Council (UK), & the Sax Institute. Glenn is affiliated with the International Network for School Attendance.

Louise Brown is affiliated with the Australian ADHD Professionals Association.

Anna Jackson 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 can you support kids with ADHD to learn? Parents said these 3 things help – https://theconversation.com/how-can-you-support-kids-with-adhd-to-learn-parents-said-these-3-things-help-187012

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sian Mitchell, Lecturer, Film, Television and Animation, Deakin University

Batgirl has become the latest film to be added to a growing list of movies we will never get to see. The US$90 million film had been shot and largely edited, but now the whole thing will be consigned to the cutting room floor.

Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav stated the decision to cancel the film was due to a redirection of the company strategic vision – a discouraging, but often used corporate rationale when Hollywood studios believe they will make a better financial return on a film by writing it off as a loss instead of releasing it .

Batgirl isn’t the first film to be scrapped in the history of the movie business.

Infamous examples include Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s plan for a 14-hour version of Dune.

Here are five other films that didn’t make it onto our screens … at least not yet.

1. Superman Lives

Starring Nicholas Cage as the “man of steel”, Superman Lives also met its untimely end at Warner Brothers.

Kevin Smith (of Clerks fame) was commissioned to rewrite a Superman script in the mid-90s.

It seemed to be doomed from the beginning with producer Jon Peters reportedly suggesting this Superman shouldn’t fly or wear his famous suit. Smith then got ousted from the project once Tim Burton signed on to direct, with Burton insisting on making his own version of the story.

Three drafts later and with a budget that had almost doubled to around US$200 million the studio put the film on hold.

Both Burton and Cage eventually pulled out of the project, although Cage stated this Superman film would have been the best one ever.

Read more:
Nicolas Cage is the most fascinating and exciting actor working today

2. Revenge of the Jedi

Imagine if Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi opened with a family of Ewoks sitting silently in a retro lounge room, or a scene where Jabba the Hutt and Bib Fortuna merge bodies in a grotesque sarlacc pit accident.

This is what could have been if Revenge of the Jedi were made.

Both David Lynch and David Cronenberg were listed as potential directors for the third instalment of George Lucas’ saga.

Some accounts of the story suggest Lynch turned it down to do Dune, while Cronenberg cited his youthful arrogance and lack of interest in doing other people’s material.

Richard Marquand went on to direct the retitled film, so we are left to wonder what surreal nightmare it could have been.

3. Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales

This 1968 film, directed by then film student Penelope Spheeris (Wayne’s World) and starring Richard Pryor, told the story of a wealthy white man abducted and put on trial by the Black Panthers for all the racial crimes that occurred throughout US history.

With the film near complete, Pryor and his then wife, Shelley Bonus, got into a heated argument where she reportedly accused him of being more interested in the film than in her. Pryor responded by destroying the only negative of the film .

Fragments of the film remained, which Spheeris screened at a 2005 retrospective tribute to Pryor. The fragments became the subject of a lawsuit filed by Pryor’s seventh wife, Jennifer Lee, arguing Spheeris and Pryor’s daughter had together stolen the negative.

As of 2021, the lawsuit was still pending.

4. Who Killed Bambi?

Named after their song Who Killed Bambi?, the Sex Pistols were the subject of a feature film set for release in 1978. Written by Roger Ebert and directed by Russ Meyer, the film was to be a vehicle for the Pistols to break through into the US market.

Fox Studios shut down production after the first day of shooting, with executives and Fox shareholder, Princess Grace of Monaco, concerned about making another Meyer sexploitation film. There were also issues with a lack of funding and infighting between the band, filmmakers and band manager, Malcolm McLaren.

The film was no more, but the screenplay can still be found on Ebert’s website.

5. 100 Years

Robert Rodriguez’s 100 Years makes the list for a different reason. Intriguingly, the film has a planned release date of 2115 – 100 years after its completion.

Perhaps not so intriguingly the film is said to have been “inspired by the century of careful craftsmanship it takes to create each decanter of Louis XIII Cognac” – making it seem more like a marketing gimmick than an experiment in exhibition.

The only copy of the physical film was displayed in a custom made safe at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, due to open automatically on November 18 2115.

Written by and starring John Malkovich, the film imagines Earth in 100 years. Secrecy surrounds further details on the film’s story and whether the filmmakers’ have predicted an authentic vision of the future.

We can safely assume cognac will make a cameo, but most of us will never know.

Read more:
Holy birthday, Batman! Sizing up the Caped Crusader at 75

Sian Mitchell 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. Never made, destroyed, in a locked safe for 100 years: with Batgirl cancelled, here are 5 other films we will never get to see – https://theconversation.com/never-made-destroyed-in-a-locked-safe-for-100-years-with-batgirl-cancelled-here-are-5-other-films-we-will-never-get-to-see-188232

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Howe, Research Fellow, University of Auckland

Routine childhood immunisations have dropped so dramatically globally during the COVID-19 pandemic that the World Health Organization and UNICEF are raising the alarm.

Internationally, 25 million children in 2021 alone have missed out on life-saving vaccinations. This is the largest sustained drop in childhood immunisation in a generation.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, we are seeing a similarly concerning trend. The decline in childhood immunisation resulting in low overall coverage is now putting our tamariki (children) at real risk of preventable disease, especially with national borders open again.

The country is not alone in suffering collateral damage to normal childhood immunisation programmes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But while the decline may be worrying, all is not lost.

Risk of disease outbreaks

Immunisation coverage at six months of age has fallen in New Zealand from a high of around 80% in early 2020 to 67% by June 2022, and as low as 45% for Māori.

This is important because immunisation coverage at six months is used as a marker for timely receipt of lifesaving government-funded vaccines, including for whooping cough (pertussis), diphtheria, polio, pneumococcal disease and rotavirus.

For example, whooping cough (pertussis), a particularly serious illness for babies, is a very real concern. Aotearoa has seen a pertussis resurgence every three to four years, meaning we are due an increase in cases at a time when we also have low vaccine coverage.

Additionally, these declines in immunisation coverage and subsequent risk of infection are especially important to consider now, as international travel picks up.

The return of ‘old’ diseases

Polio, a viral disease that can cause paralysis, disappeared from Aotearoa thanks to immunisation, with the Western Pacific region declared polio free in 2000. As some parts of the world have yet to eradicate it, however, we still vaccinate children against polio.

A recent case in an unvaccinated young man in New York shows how the virus can travel and re-emerge – even in developed, polio-free countries.

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Likewise, diphtheria is a rare but serious disease that causes breathing problems and can also lead to nerve paralysis and heart failure, with 5% to 10% of people with the disease dying.

Until widespread immunisation after the 1940s, diphtheria was a common cause of childhood death, and we haven’t seen it in Aotearoa for decades. But diphtheria has recently been detected in Australia in two unvaccinated children.

With New Zealand’s borders fully open since July 31, we run the risk of both these “old” diseases being imported and causing problems for our under-immunised tamariki and their whānau.

A perfect measles storm

The significant measles outbreak of 2019 serves as a warning. More than 2,000 people were infected and 700 hospitalised, with the largest case numbers in Auckland.

Fiji, Tonga and Samoa also saw outbreaks, with Samoa particularly devastated by more than 5,000 cases and more than 80 deaths, mostly in young children.

The severity of this outbreak could have been prevented because the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is highly effective.

Read more:
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But childhood coverage of MMR was not high enough at the time (nor has it been historically), leaving a known immunity gap of susceptible teens and young adults.

Significant efforts have since been made to close this gap in MMR coverage, although these have been dwarfed by the COVID-19 vaccination campaign.

The upshot is a potential perfect storm for another measles outbreak, with low MMR coverage worldwide and locally. Measles could “walk” through New Zealand airports and meet under-immunised tamariki and rangatahi (youth).

Prevention as cure

There is some good news, however. This year we’ve seen the introduction of new initiatives to help manage surges of winter ills, including the government funding influenza vaccines for children aged three to 12.

This is welcome, as influenza crosses our border every year (with the exception of 2020 when COVID-19 public health measures, including quarantine and mask wearing, were in force). Because children are often considered super-spreaders, vaccination of children can reduce influenza-like illness and related costs in both tamariki and their whānau.

But the message from World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus remains urgent:

Planning and tackling COVID-19 should also go hand-in-hand with vaccinating for killer diseases like measles, pneumonia and diarrhoea.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the COVID-19 vaccination experience has also shown how Māori and Pacific community health providers can help reach high vaccination targets – especially when combined with good outreach services, increasing vaccination providers beyond GP clinics, and building the vaccination workforce.

But right now the statistics paint a concerning picture. Low childhood immunisation coverage puts tamariki at risk of many preventable and serious diseases and adds a major burden to the already strained healthcare system.

Prevention must be our top priority. It is better than the best cure, and will protect the health system from overload so it is available for those who need urgent care.

Anna Howe receives funding from the Health Research Council. While not the principal investigator she has been involved in research projects funded by GSK and was the first KPS Research Fellow. She works with the Immunisation Advisory Centre as their Research and Policy Analyst.

Emma Best is as a member of anti-infectives Subcommittee of PHARMAC and holds research grants Health and Research Council. She works as a medical advisor for the Immunisation Advisory Centre

Dr. Matthew Hobbs receives funding from the New Zealand Health Research Council, Cure Kids/A Better Start National Science Challenge and IStar. He was also previously funded as a researcher by the New Zealand Ministry of Health.

– ref. NZ children face a ‘perfect storm’ of dangerous diseases as immunisation rates fall – https://theconversation.com/nz-children-face-a-perfect-storm-of-dangerous-diseases-as-immunisation-rates-fall-188157

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Encarnacao, Musician, lecturer, Western Sydney University

My default mental image of Olivia Newton-John is from the mid-1970s: long, flowing floral dresses; long, centre-parted light brown hair; big inquisitive eyes; and, when called for, an irresistible smile perfect for the cover of TV Week.

It seemed like the counterculture had passed her by.

But even in the heights of my hippie and punk-inspired (imagined, toothless) rejections of society and a perceived mainstream, I respected Olivia, a figure so ubiquitous in popular culture during my first 20 years on the planet it feels natural to call her by her first name.

There was something about her voice, her way with a song. Through her phrasing and timbre, there was always a personal appeal to her singing.

Like heatstroke in December-through-February, Olivia was part of the Australian landscape. The country felt a little less hostile for her being in it – or beamed into it from the northern hemisphere, while we claimed her as “ours”.

There was a big sister who understood and sympathised.

Read more:
Pop icon Olivia Newton-John was the rare performer whose career flourished through different phases

1. What she taught me about murder

Despite all this, Olivia did contribute to a certain loss of innocence.

Some of us are unlucky enough to encounter death personally as children; for the rest it will be a song or a TV show, a passing remark or a news item.

Newton-John’s recording of the folk ballad Banks of the Ohio was released in 1971. It concerns the protagonist luring their loved one down to the river to stab them through the heart.

I held a knife against his breast
As into my arms he pressed
He cried: My love! Don’t you murder me
I’m not prepared for eternity.

I can’t think of an earlier exposure to the idea of death, let alone murder. I associate it with the tinny sound of a portable AM radio. I have the honeyed tones of ONJ forever linked to the visceral realisation one human being could wilfully kill another.

Heavy metal and hip hop are the traditional punching bags of parents worried about harmful content. But people let their guards down around ONJ.

2. What she taught me through a cover band

Shaggin’ Wagon, a cover band of mine instigated around 1993, did what it said on the label: rocked the hell out of songs from the 1970s.

We combined relatively obscure minor chart hits – say, Silver Lady by David Soul, or Ebony Eyes by Bob Welch – with what we thought of as a classic lineage of power pop by the likes of Big Star, The Soft Boys, The dB’s, The Sweet and Abba.

There was always a smattering of hard rock – Kiss, Alice Cooper – and Australian artists like The Numbers, Models and Dragon. Though the repertoire was always changing, there were a few big crowd pleasers to bring the house down.

One of mine, as part-time singer, was Hopelessly Devoted to You. What started as half a joke I took to with gusto. It is a great song, with a fantastic key change from A major in the verses to F major in the chorus via a devastating G minor chord.

“There’s nowhere to hide”, wallows the protagonist on that pitiful chord, harmonically so removed from the plaintive longing of comfortable A major we’ve swooned through thus far.

I started to search for other Olivia songs. I picked up a 45 of A Little More Love and realised it was a kind of masterpiece; like Hopelessly it was composed by longtime Newton-John collaborator John Farrar.

It is another beautifully structured song, somewhat labyrinthine. Even now I find it a thrill to play on the guitar.

Despite my party trick of (usually) being able to hit the high F at the end of Hopelessly, sustaining the upper octave required for the choruses of A Little More Love was beyond me.

The attempt further educated me about the technical demands Olivia shrugged off. The range is so wide that no matter how I transposed it, I could not pull off both low verses and high choruses.

I already knew she was good – and I’d never claim to be anywhere near ONJ’s league – but this was further proof being learned by my body.

3. What she taught me about the girl-next-door

Olivia wasn’t entirely convinced about Physical. She loved the song but wondered: could she get away with it?

Tired of the flirtation and game-playing, the protagonist wants to get down to it: “There’s nothin’ left to talk about unless it’s horizontally”.

The record was banned in Utah and South Africa due to its explicit content (!). The video further fanned the flames, with its closing “gay scene” (two guys leaving the gym holding hands).

Every bit of controversy just further hyped what was a superlative pop record. Physical topped the US charts for 10 weeks in 1981 and was one of the biggest songs of the decade. And if Physical wasn’t enough, the follow up single was Make a Move On Me.

You’d be forgiven for sensing a theme.

Physical, the album, is about more than a seasoned pop star trying on a slightly more risqué persona. None of the six images of Newton-John on the cover feature her looking at the camera, or even with her eyes open.

She does not challenge the camera or voyeur with her direct gaze, and so may be seen to be offering herself as an object to be consumed; the assumption along this line of reasoning is she avails herself of the male gaze.

I find it more compelling to consider her lost in her body. The viewer, the whole world outside her physical sensation, is irrelevant.

Despite the fact the music remains eminently accessible, she is not looking to her audience for approval.

Physical is the definitive statement of independence – from country music radio, from her pre-1978 image as girl-next-door, from a certain level of conservatism in her audience.

She even cut her hair.

John Encarnacao 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. Three lessons Olivia Newton-John taught me about music – and life – https://theconversation.com/three-lessons-olivia-newton-john-taught-me-about-music-and-life-188446

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rodney Tiffen, Emeritus Professor, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney

“These are dark times for our nation”, former US President Donald Trump declared when he announced his mansion at Mar-A-Lago had been raided by FBI agents on Monday night Florida time. An assault like this “could only take place in broken, Third World countries […] corrupt at a level not seen before”.

“They even broke into my safe!” he went on, comparing the FBI action to Watergate:

What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.

Watergate was the hotel–office complex in Washington, home to the Democratic Party national headquarters, which was famously burgled in June 1972 by political operatives working for the re-election of Richard Nixon. After more than two years of tortuous judicial and political inquiries, Nixon became the first – and still the only – American president to resign.

The differences between the raid on Trump’s mansion and Watergate are obvious. Trump’s mansion was raided by law officers executing a legally issued search warrant. They entered by the front door and searched openly. Watergate was an illegal break in by political operatives acting secretly.

And where Trump, playing to his shrinking base, claimed last night’s raid was undertaken by “Democrats”, it was in fact conducted by a group of FBI agents. The Florida raid took place to enforce the law; the Watergate action broke the law.

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Speculation intense

As of late Monday night Washington time, neither the FBI nor the Justice Department had made an official announcement about the raid. However, on the basis of background comments by various officials, most media reports agree that its purpose was to secure various documents, including classified material, from Trump’s presidency. Some reports said the FBI officers left with 15 boxes of documents.

Trump had failed to meet the requirements of the innocuous-sounding national Archives Act, which exists to minimise the scope for corruption and abuse of process. Trump has treated these legal obligations, and any accountability provisions, with contempt. Indeed, a soon to be published book by New York Times political correspondent, Maggie Haberman, includes photos showing Trump used to flush unwanted documents down the toilet.

The FBI raid follows the recent critical scrutiny of Trump’s actions in inciting a riot against the Capitol on January 6 2021, when the congressional vote for the presidential election was declared. While politically humiliating to Trump, it is not clear that any legal action will follow from those hearings. Congress has no power to initiate such action, and some speculate that Attorney-General Merrick Garland is reluctant to be seen to be undertaking politically motivated prosecutions.

Trump, speaking of himself in the third person, asserted in his statement on the FBI raid that “the political persecution of President Donald J. Trump has been going on for years.”

Read more:
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Loyalty or else

More than anything, that response is testimony to Trump’s paranoid worldview, which demands the loyalty of those around him despite any inconvenient principle or evidence to the contrary. In another soon-to-be published book, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired marine general, recounts how Trump said he wanted his generals to be loyal to him the way Hitler’s were loyal to him under Nazi rule.

One of the Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward, wrote a series of books about Trump and interviewed him several times. He reported an episode where Trump went through the faces of various Democratic congressional figures watching him deliver his State of the Union address, most of whom – according to Woodward – looked bland, bored or unemotional. After each of them, Trump exclaimed to Woodward “look at the hate” – “they hate me”.

“It was a remarkable moment,” Woodward commented.

A psychiatrist might say it was a projection of his own hatred of Democrats. But it was so intense that it did not resemble the subdued reaction of the Democrats. His insistence that it was “Hate!” was unsupported by the images […] This Trump spectacle was unforgettable and bizarre.

From the Roe v. Wade anti-abortion and anti-gun control rulings of the Supreme Court, to charges against Trump’s supporters for violence on January 6, to the various dubious activities of Trump himself, much in American politics looks likely to be played out in the courts over the next year or two – far more than is healthy in a democracy.

Read more:
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But when Trump has slashed and burnt his way through many political conventions, recourse to legal sanction may be the only means of protecting democracy. These are dark times for the American nation, but for precisely the opposite reason Trump asserted.

Rodney Tiffen 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. As the FBI raids Mar-A-Lago, Donald Trump reaches for unconvincing historical parallels – https://theconversation.com/as-the-fbi-raids-mar-a-lago-donald-trump-reaches-for-unconvincing-historical-parallels-188455

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wasim Raja, Research scientist, CSIRO

Within 24 hours of accessing the first stage of Australia’s newest supercomputing system, researchers have processed a series of radio telescope observations, including a highly detailed image of a supernova remnant.

The very high data rates and the enormous data volumes from new-generation radio telescopes such as ASKAP (Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder) need highly capable software running on supercomputers. This is where the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre comes into play, with a newly launched supercomputer called Setonix – named after Western Australia’s favourite animal, the quokka (Setonix brachyurus).

ASKAP, which consists of 36 dish antennas that work together as one telescope, is operated by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO; the observational data it gathers are transferred via high-speed optical fibres to the Pawsey Centre for processing and converting into science-ready images.

In a major milestone on the path to full deployment, we have now demonstrated the integration of our processing software ASKAPsoft on Setonix, complete with stunning visuals.

Traces of a dying star

An exciting outcome of this exercise has been a fantastic image of a cosmic object known as a supernova remnant, G261.9+5.5.

Estimated to be more than a million years old, and located 10,000-15,000 light-years away from us, this object in our galaxy was first classified as a supernova remnant by CSIRO radio astronomer Eric R. Hill in 1967, using observations from CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope, Murriyang.

Supernova remnants (SNRs) are the remains of powerful explosions from dying stars. The ejected material from the explosion ploughs outwards into the surrounding interstellar medium at supersonic speeds, sweeping up gas and any material it encounters along the way, compressing and heating them up in the process.

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Additionally, the shockwave would also compress the interstellar magnetic fields. The emissions we see in our radio image of G261.9+5.5 are from highly energetic electrons trapped in these compressed fields. They bear information about the history of the exploded star and aspects of the surrounding interstellar medium.

The structure of this remnant revealed in the deep ASKAP radio image opens up the possibility of studying this remnant and the physical properties (such as magnetic fields and high-energy electron densities) of the interstellar medium in unprecedented detail.

Putting a supercomputer through its paces

The image of SNR G261.9+05.5 might be beautiful to look at, but the processing of data from ASKAP’s astronomy surveys is also a great way to stress-test the supercomputer system, including the hardware and the processing software.

We included the supernova remnant’s dataset for our initial tests because its complex features would increase the processing challenges.

Data processing even with a supercomputer is a complex exercise, with different processing modes triggering various potential issues. For example, the image of the SNR was made by combining data gathered at hundreds of different frequencies (or colours, if you like), allowing us to get a composite view of the object.

But there is a treasure trove of information hidden in the individual frequencies as well. Extracting that information often requires making images at each frequency, requiring more computing resources and more digital space to store.

While Setonix has adequate resources for such intense processing, a key challenge would be to establish the stability of the supercomputer when lashed with such enormous amounts of data day in and day out.

Key to this quick first demonstration was the close collaboration between the Pawsey Centre and the ASKAP science data processing team members. Our teamwork enabled all of us to better understand these challenges and quickly find solutions.

These results mean we will be able to unearth more from the ASKAP data, for example.

Read more:
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More to come

But this is only the first of two installation stages for Setonix, with the second expected to be completed later this year.

This will allow data teams to process more of the vast amounts of data coming in from many projects in a fraction of the time. In turn, it will not only enable researchers to better understand our Universe but will undoubtedly uncover new objects hidden in the radio sky. The variety of scientific questions that Setonix will allow us to explore in shorter time-frames opens up so many possibilities.

This increase in computational capacity benefits not just ASKAP, but all Australia-based researchers in all fields of science and engineering that can access Setonix.

While the supercomputer is ramping up to full operations, so is ASKAP, which is currently wrapping up a series of pilot surveys and will soon undertake even larger and deeper surveys of the sky.

The supernova remnant is just one of many features we’ve now revealed, and we can expect many more stunning images, and the discovery of many new celestial objects, to come soon.

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. A new Australian supercomputer has already delivered a stunning supernova remnant pic – https://theconversation.com/a-new-australian-supercomputer-has-already-delivered-a-stunning-supernova-remnant-pic-188375