Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Dalton, Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science, Northumbria University, Newcastle

In the early 1970s, the idea of an ordinary person owning a computer sounded absurd. Computers back then were more like aircraft carriers or nuclear power plants than household appliances – vast machines housed in data centres operated by teams of specialists, serving governments, universities and large corporations.

Then came Apple.

Founded on April 1 1976 by “college dropouts” Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the Silicon Valley startup did not invent computing. What it did was arguably more important: it helped turn computing into a personal technology.

Before Apple, computers were largely sold in kit form. Jobs saw that people wanted them pre-assembled and ready to run. The earliest Apple I units, featuring handmade koa wooden cases, now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As an early Apple adopter and app developer, here’s my selection of the company’s (and Jobs’s) most significant technological achievements over the last 50 years.

Apple II – beige yet distinctive

Early personal computers were more curiosities than practical tools. The Apple II, launched in June 1977, introduced something new: style. Even its colour – beige! – was distinctive, contrasting with the black metal boxes common at that time.

The use of colour graphics was both new and exciting, and the keyboard felt satisfying to use. A simple speaker, with only a single-bit output, was ingeniously coaxed into producing tones and even speech-like sounds. The design revolution stretched as far as the packaging: Jerry Manock, Apple’s first in-house designer, placed the machine in a moulded plastic case which looked sleek and professional.

The mouse – a whole new way of interacting

By 1979, the 24-year-old Jobs – sensing that tech giant IBM was catching up with Apple – went looking for the next big thing. The photocopier company Xerox, wanting pre-IPO shares in Apple, offered a visit to its nearby research labs as an inducement. Jobs realised that researchers such as Alan Kay at Xerox’s Palo Alto research centre were creating the next generation of computing interfaces.

Central to this was a device invented by Kay’s mentor, Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford University in the mid-1960s and nicknamed “the mouse”. Engelbart’s vision of computers as machines to augment the human mind inspired Kay and colleagues to create graphical displays in which users interacted with scrollbars, buttons, menus and windows.

Macintosh – dawn of the modern product launch

Jobs thought anyone should be able to use a computer. In January 1984, the first Apple Mac pushed this idea to new extremes. The traditional need for obscure computer commands (and manuals) vanished. Early adopters such as myself felt we just knew how to do everything.

But the Mac’s launch was not just another technological leap for Apple. It also inspired the now-familiar cultural moment of the modern product launch. Following a teasing Super Bowl advert directed by Ridley Scott, Jobs used a 1,500-seat theatre on January 24 to create a stage performance centred on a single charismatic presenter. Jobs let a small, square and still-beige computer (then known as Macintosh) out of its bag – and it began speaking for itself, to rapturous applause.

Pixar – Jobs’s side hustle

In its first decade, Apple grew at an exceptional rate – but it also came close to financial collapse on several occasions. This led to one of the most dramatic moments in Apple’s history when, in May 1985, the company forced Jobs out.

A year later and now in charge of the startup NeXT Inc, Jobs bought a division of George Lucas’s film company which was soon rebranded as Pixar. Its RenderMan software generated images by distributing processing across multiple machines simultaneously.

Pixar, jokingly referred to as Jobs’s “side hustle”, would become one of the world’s most influential (and valuable) animation production companies, having released the first fully computer-animated feature film in Toy Story (1995).

iMac – a meeting of minds

After a failed attempt to develop a new operating system with IBM, Apple eventually bought Jobs’s company NeXT. In September 1997, he returned to Apple as interim CEO with the company “two months from bankruptcy”. The move, though welcomed by many Apple users, terrified some of its employees. Jobs quickly began firing staff and shutting down failed products.

During this restructuring, he visited Apple’s design studio and immediately hit it off with young British designer Jony Ive. Their meeting of minds led to the 1998 candy-coloured translucent iMac. Essentially smaller, cheaper NeXT machines, iMac (the i stood for internet) also kicked off another Apple habit: abandoning ageing technology. The floppy disk drive was ditched in favour of a CD drive – a move heavily criticised at the time, but later widely copied.

iPod – 1,000 songs in your pocket

For Apple, computing was always about more than, well, computing. In 2001, the company began focusing on processing sound and video, not just text and pictures. By November that year, it had released the iPod – a personal music player capable of storing “1,000 songs in your pocket”, compared with a maximum of 20-30 on each cassette tape in a Sony Walkman.

The iPod used an elegant “click wheel” to operate the screen. Music was synced through a new application called iTunes. By 2005, people were using iTunes to manage audio downloaded automatically from the internet using a process called RSS. This in turn put the pod in podcasting.

iPhone – a computer in everyone’s hands

By 2007, many mobile phone companies had approached Apple about merging the iPod with their phones. Instead, on January 9, Jobs unveiled Apple’s most ambitious product yet: a combined phone, music player and Mac computer – all at the size of a handset with no physical keyboard and huge screen.

Most media “experts”, from TechCrunch to the Guardian, predicted the iPhone would bomb. Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, mocked the US$500 price tag, saying nobody would buy it. In fact, 1.4 million iPhones were sold by the end of the year – and over 3 billion more since then. This truly put a computer into everyone’s hands – and opened the door to social media as we know it today.

App Store’s software revolution

By mid-2008, the iPhone enabled third-party developers the chance to to create a dizzying range of new applications. At the same time, the App Store – launched on July 10 2008 – addressed one of the most complex problems: how to distribute and commercialise these “apps”. Historically, they were often copied and distributed freely. The App Store changed this, using strong encryption to ensure the copy sold could only be used by that specific user, thus eliminating software piracy.

By establishing the first (eponymous) App Store, Apple changed the way people discover and purchase software. This led to an explosion of apps and a simple but powerful idea: whatever you wanted to do, someone, somewhere, had already built it. Apple captured this shift in a slogan that became part of everyday language: “There’s an app for that”.

Time and again, this extraordinary company has anticipated the value of opening up computing to everyone. Happy birthday, Apple.

– ref. Apple at 50: eight technology leaps that changed our world – https://theconversation.com/apple-at-50-eight-technology-leaps-that-changed-our-world-279541

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ed Macaulay, Lecturer in Physics and Data Science, Queen Mary University of London

The astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are preparing to launch into space on a trajectory that will make them the first humans to travel to the Moon in over half a century.

Their 10-day mission, known as Artemis II, loops around the Moon but will not land. It will see them travel 4,700 miles (7,600 kilometres) beyond the lunar far side in Nasa’s Orion spacecraft. As such, the four astronauts will travel further from Earth than any humans before them.

The quarter-of-a-million mile Artemis II expedition is audacious, but it’s the last five minutes of the mission that might be the most cause for concern for the safety of the astronauts.

An uncrewed test of the Orion spacecraft in 2022 first highlighted problems with the heat shield. This is the part of Orion that bears the brunt of the searing heat the capsule experiences during re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere.

When engineers examined the Orion heat shield from 2022’s Artemis I mission, they found large chunks of material had been lost. The worry was that, should this happen again on the crewed Artemis II mission, it could expose the interior of the capsule to dangerously high temperatures.

Since the earliest days of human spaceflight, engineers have protected capsules from the extreme heat of re-entry with so-called “ablative” heat shields, made from material that’s designed to burn away evenly as the capsule scorches its way through the atmosphere.

To meet the demands of the reusable space shuttle, Nasa developed an incredible heat shield system made from ultra-light tiles of glass-coated silica fibres. While this heat shield had extraordinary thermal properties, it was also exceptionally fragile, and required exhaustive maintenance after every shuttle mission.

It was damage to this fragile and exposed protection system that caused the tragic loss of space shuttle Columbia in 2003. For the Artemis programme, Nasa has returned to the concept of an ablative heat shield.

The heat shield for the Orion capsule is composed of a material called Avcoat, based on the material originally developed for the Apollo programme. Although Nasa considered other, newer materials for the Orion heat shield, they ultimately decided on the material that had been proven in flight by the Apollo missions.

However, the structure of Orion’s heat shield differs from those used during Apollo. The Apollo heat shield comprised a singular honeycomb matrix of about 320,000 individually filled hexagonal segments. To make the heat shield for Orion more efficient and reproducible to manufacture, Nasa has opted for a configuration of around 180 individual blocks.

This heat shield was first tested in 2014 when an uncrewed Orion capsule was launched to an apogee of 3,600 miles by a Delta IV rocket. The capsule blazed through the atmosphere on its return at a temperature of about 2,200°C (4,000°F), but the heat shield proved itself capable of withstanding such an inferno.

The next test of the Orion capsule was the Artemis I mission in 2022. This was the first flight of the powerful Space Launch System rocket, and an uncrewed demonstration of the mission planned for Artemis II. Hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere from a far greater distance than the first test, the spacecraft reached temperatures of around 2,800°C (5,000°F). It’s here that the first concerns about the Avcoat heat shield were raised.

Instead of burning away evenly over the whole surface, parts of the Artemis I heat shield were lost unexpectedly in uneven chunks. This uneven ablation makes modelling the thermal loads of re-entry more unpredictable, and raises the possibility that the Orion capsule could be exposed to dangerous levels of heating.

On investigation, the cause of this uneven ablation was found to be irregular releases of gases trapped within the heat shield material, compounded by the “skip re-entry” profile adopted by the mission.

In the skip profile, Orion first grazes the edge of the atmosphere to slow down. It then uses the aerodynamic lift of the capsule to skip back out of the atmosphere, before re-entering for its final descent to Earth. The skip profile is so named because it somewhat resembles a stone skipping across a pond.

Nasa investigators found that, when heating rates decreased during the period between dips into the atmosphere, thermal energy accumulated inside the Avcoat material. This led to the build up of gases and, in turn, the internal pressure – causing cracks and the uneven shedding of material.

Based on the lessons from Artemis I, Nasa has adopted a number of measures to protect the crew of Artemis II. For the first crewed mission of the programme, Nasa has kept the Avcoat heat shield material, but updated the design of the blocks to help the gases to escape during re-entry.

Furthermore, instead of the skip profile, Nasa has now opted for a more direct re-entry mode for the Orion capsule. This reduces the uncertainty in the heating profile and means less time at peak temperatures for trapped gases to damage the heat shield, but also means that the crew will be subjected to increased deceleration on re-entry.

Safety first

At the height of the drama in the film Apollo 13, flight director Gene Kranz famously declares to the team at mission control that “failure is not an option”.

Although the line was in fact the product of the film’s screenwriters, it’s become not just the second-most quotable line from the film, but also somewhat of a mantra at Nasa itself.

Nowhere is this more true than with the heat shield of Artemis II. During the final phase of the Artemis II mission, there’s no backup, no contingency, and no chance of escape. The four astronauts on board will be depending on a few inches of resin-coated silica to shield themselves from temperatures approaching half that of the surface of the Sun.

Human spaceflight has always brought with it calculated risks, but it has also provided a uniquely human perspective on our place in the cosmos. The Artemis II mission will make its crew the first humans in over half a century to observe the blue marble of planet Earth in its entirety with their own eyes.

The crew will carry with them the hopes and aspirations of a whole new generation of explorers. They will be depending on the meticulous work of thousands of scientists and engineers for their safe return, bringing with them a renewed human perspective on not just the Moon, but the planet we all call home.

– ref. Heat shield safety concerns raise stakes for Nasa’s Artemis II Moon mission – https://theconversation.com/heat-shield-safety-concerns-raise-stakes-for-nasas-artemis-ii-moon-mission-275853

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ed Hutchinson, Professor, MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, University of Glasgow

The first human case of H9N2 influenza virus (bird flu) has been reported in Europe. A human infection was recorded by the Italian Ministry of Health on March 25, 2026.

As an influenza virologist, I can explain what this means and why I am not particularly worried by it – yet.

What do we know about this case?

The patient was infected outside of Europe before travelling to the Lombardy region of northern Italy. Lombardy’s welfare councillor Guido Bertolaso has reported that the patient is a boy with underlying health conditions who was diagnosed after returning from a visit to Africa.

Fortunately, his infection hasn’t made him seriously unwell, but he has been placed in hospital isolation in the San Gerardo hospital in Monza. Italian public health authorities diagnosed H9N2 influenza virus infection using laboratory tests that detect the virus’s genetic material.

What is H9N2 influenza virus?

H9N2 influenza viruses are influenza A viruses. This large group of viruses includes two of the viruses causing human seasonal influenza (H1N1 and H3N2) as well as many other viruses that infect birds.

H9N2 influenza viruses are classified as “low pathogenicity avian influenza viruses”. “Low pathogenicity” refers to their ability to cause disease in poultry (avian influenza is a major threat to poultry farming), but it is unusual for H9N2 to cause anything other than mild illness in humans.

H9N2 is not well suited to infecting humans, and when it does manage to do so it tends to be through direct contact with poultry in heavily contaminated environments. Although this was the first human case in Europe, hundreds of human H9N2 cases have been recorded previously, mainly in China, but also in other countries across Asia and Africa.

What is the level of risk to humans?

Hopefully, the infected patient will make a good recovery. At the moment, the wider risk to humans is very low.

Why is this? Virologists look for multiple factors when assessing if an isolated human infection with an animal virus is likely to cause wider problems – in the worst case a pandemic, which avian influenza viruses have caused repeatedly in the past. This case of H9N2 currently shows no signs of this.

We know that this particular strain of influenza virus would need to acquire mutations in order to become well adapted to growing in humans. As a precaution, Italian public health authorities have traced contacts of the patient to confirm there was no onwards transmission. At the moment, it seems very unlikely that this will go any further.

However, there is a wider picture. There are many influenza viruses out there that are much more unpleasant than H9N2. Most troubling is the ongoing worldwide outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza viruses, which are much more pathogenic and are showing a troubling tendency to infect mammals.

An isolated case of H9N2 influenza in Europe may not be a major problem itself, but it is a reminder that we need to remain vigilant in monitoring the unpredictable behaviour of avian influenza viruses.

– ref. First European case of H9N2 bird flu reported in Italy – what you need to know – https://theconversation.com/first-european-case-of-h9n2-bird-flu-reported-in-italy-what-you-need-to-know-279574

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Murray, Lecturer, The University of Western Australia

George Eliot – the pen name of Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans – is celebrated today as a writer of realist novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871) and Daniel Deronda (1876).

We don’t tend to associate her with science fiction. But in 1859, as she was embarking on her career as a novelist, Eliot published a short science-fiction novel titled The Lifted Veil.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is often credited as the first “science fiction” novel, but in the mid-1800s the term was rare. It was used to describe literature depicting aspects of current scientific thought. It became popular as a genre term in the late 19th century, when it was applied to the work of speculative writers, such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

The Lifted Veil is science fiction in both senses. It complicates our view of Eliot as a realist writer and provides an insight into the scientific aspects of her later realist work.

The Lifted Veil is a first-person account of the life of a man named Latimer who is writing his story because he knows he is soon to die. Following a severe illness as a young man, his sensitivity has heightened into an ability to access the minds of others and see into the future.

Latimer’s extrasensory abilities are not imagined as scientific advances. Instead, he is forced into a scientific education to remedy his deficiencies (he describes himself as “sensitive and unpractical”), while secretly reading poetry and literature.

Possessing a keenly poetic sensibility without the talent to vent it, Latimer develops what feels to him “like a preternaturally heightened sense of hearing, making audible a roar of sound where others find perfect stillness”.

Sympathy and literature

Essential to Eliot’s realism was the idea of sympathy. As a teenager, she was intensely evangelical. She criticised her older brother for attending the theatre, refused to read novels (except for those of Sir Walter Scott), and once devolved into hysterics at a party after hearing secular music.

In her twenties, however, her relationship with Christianity grew complicated. Eliot ceased believing in the miraculous elements of the Bible. Influenced by new works of German philosophy, which she translated into English, she began to see relationships between human beings as the cornerstone of morality.

To grow morally and intellectually, for Eliot, meant widening our experience beyond our narrow individual lives, entering into the experiences of others very different from us.

She saw literature – particularly the realist novel – as uniquely capable of extending our sympathies, because literature can make us feel as well as think. An important aspect of her realism is her subtle depiction of the inner lives of her characters. She criticised Charles Dickens for what she saw as his “frequently false psychology”.

In Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, the drama arises from the characters misreading one another. They cannot unveil the mystery of each other’s minds. The narrator famously observes that if we possessed a “keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life […] we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.

In one of Middlemarch’s most sophisticated plotlines, a young doctor, Lydgate, falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Rosamond. Lydgate is idealistic and ambitious, but his capacity for sympathy is curtailed because his perception of women has been shaped, in part, by popular literature and poetry. He conflates Rosamond’s exterior beauty with her inner life and so overlooks her egoism and superficiality.

When Lydgate thinks about Rosamond, there is a light touch of satire in the way his thoughts take on the flowery qualities of a romance. The marriage, unsurprisingly, is a disaster. Between Lydgate and Rosamond there is “a total missing of each other’s mental track”.

Read more: George Eliot’s Middlemarch: egoism, moral stupidity, and the complex web of life

Science and evolution

A list of Eliot’s reading over her life shows astonishing breadth. She read – in multiple languages – history, theology, classics, poetry, novels and philosophy. A significant portion of her reading comprised works of geology, physiology, physics and evolutionary theory.

Eliot’s partner George Henry Lewes (to whom she was, scandalously, not married) was part of a new school of physiological psychology, influenced by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. Lewes theorised groupings of different neural processes, involving the relations of senses, feelings, mental images and language.

Variations of the phrase “stream of consciousness” are first used in Lewes’ writing, although it is often attributed to later writers. Eliot and Lewes influenced each other in their conceptions of psychology.

Eliot’s realist novels were closely engaged with different strands of 19th-century science. Contemporary readers sometimes criticised her use of language and metaphors drawn from science. A review in the Spectator from 1872 begins:

We all grumble at Middlemarch; we all say that the action is slow, that there is too much parade of scientific and especially physiological knowledge in it.

Such criticism did not deter Eliot. Her writing offers insight into the blended familiarity and strangeness of 19th-century science, as well as its uncanny proximity to fiction. In her final novel, Daniel Deronda, she draws an explicit connection between the speculative work of literature and scientific hypothesising:

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit.

This opening foreshadows the novel’s experimental form, which begins in the middle of the narrative.

Psychology and literature shaped each other

The word “psychology” at this time could suggest different mixtures of philosophical and physiological approaches to the mind and brain. As literary scholar Sally Shuttleworth has shown, literature and psychology shaped one another in the 19th century. Examples from Eliot’s novels were used as case studies in psychological texts.

Articles and lectures in the fields of medicine and physiological psychology addressed problems such as where to locate the soul in the body and whether conscience had its own “special ganglionic centre in the brain”.

Psychiatrists (then called “mental scientists”) were aware of the limits of their physiological knowledge. Addressing the many gaps in empirical enquiry involved speculative work, often influenced by philosophy and theology.

The Lifted Veil envisions the possibility of hearing “that roar on the other side of silence” – that is, fully accessing the minds of others.

Latimer’s foresight initially arises from language: the word “Prague” precipitates a stream of mental images and associations which create his first vision of the future. He experiences the mental process of others as fragmentary “obtrusions” on his mind: “a stream of thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be got rid of”.

Rather than spurring human connection, Latimer’s abilities become a source of Gothic melodrama, as there is no longer anything hidden or uncertain in his life. His “superadded consciousness” seems to open “the souls of those who were in a close relation to me”, but this causes him “intense pain and grief”:

the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.

Latimer becomes obsessed with a woman named Bertha, because she is the only exception. The combined uncertainty and physical attraction that Latimer experiences leads to a deep infatuation:

I could watch the expression of her face, and speculate on its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real interest of ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope and fear.

Yet there is no real affinity between them. She is “keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical”. She is contemptuous of the literature Latimer loves.

This sole element of mystery dissolves. Latimer eventually sees into Bertha’s inner self, which appears to him as “a blank prosaic wall”. It was perhaps the “negation of her soul” that had arrested his insight for so long. Bertha’s growing suspicion that Latimer has some way of knowing her inner thoughts only intensifies her hatred.

Eliot was writing at a time when “science fiction” was beginning to evolve into a genre exploring possible future advances in science. The Lifted Veil has some qualities of science fiction in this sense. During his time at school, Latimer becomes friends with a youth he calls Charles Meunier, whose intellectual passion is science.

Meunier returns at the end of the novel as a brilliant scientist, specialising in the “psychological relations of disease”. Meunier is present when Bertha’s maid, Mrs Archer, becomes fatally unwell. He asks Latimer’s permission to perform an experiment. Human blood transfusions were a new form of medical treatment in the 1800s. But Meunier wants to wait until after Mrs Archer is dead before he transfuses his own blood into her arteries.

The transfusion momentarily restores Mrs Archer to life – “the eyelids quivered, and the soul seemed to have returned beneath them” – in time to expose Bertha’s concealed intention to poison Latimer. The experience awakens Meunier to the experience of life as more than “a scientific problem”.

Latimer’s motivation for writing his story, we realise, is to win the sympathy of readers after his death, which he failed to obtain from those close to him in life.

– ref. George Eliot is best known for Middlemarch, but she also wrote an early work of science fiction – https://theconversation.com/george-eliot-is-best-known-for-middlemarch-but-she-also-wrote-an-early-work-of-science-fiction-269379

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leonidas Karagounis, Professor Research Translation & Enterprise, Australian Catholic University

Peptides are widely marketed as a kind of “holy grail” for workout recovery and physical performance.

You may have seen advertisements online claiming these supplements can significantly boost muscle growth, eliminate joint pain, and accelerate recovery times.

As the prevalence of joint-related issues such as osteoarthritis rises, many people are also turning to these “nutraceuticals” in hope of finding a more natural alternative to traditional medications.

But what does the science say about peptides – specifically collagen peptides and whey-derived peptides? Do they really offer a performance edge, or is the polished marketing little more than high-protein hype?

Wait, what are peptides?

Peptides are short chains of amino acids, the fundamental building blocks of protein in our bodies. They are essentially “pre-digested” protein fragments.

Unlike whey protein, which is readily digested and absorbed by the body, collagen protein can’t be easily digested due to its very large and complex structure (much larger than whey protein).

However, as peptides are much smaller molecules and are more easily absorbed, you should only look for collagen supplements that are sold in peptide form.

The production of peptide supplements typically involves a process called enzymatic hydrolysis. During this process, collagen protein obtained from cow hide or fish scales, for example, is treated with specific enzymes called proteases.

These proteases act like biological scissors. They essentially snip the long protein chains into tiny fragments, which are the peptides.

Because of this processing, peptides have a much lower molecular weight (smaller size) than their parent proteins. This allows them to be more easily absorbed in the small intestine, transported through the bloodstream and used wherever there is a need, such as in muscles, tendons and joints.

So, do they work?

Research into peptides for workouts provides a mixed but interesting picture.

When it comes to pure muscle growth (known as hypertrophy), peptides derived from whey protein are generally considered superior to those derived from collagen.

However, in a study published in 2022, the authors concluded that after a ten-week resistance training program in young adults who ingested either whey protein or collagen peptides enriched with an amino acid known as leucine, whey was better in terms of increasing muscle size. But both proteins resulted in similar gains in strength and power.

Collagen peptides also show significant promise in athletic performance improvement when combined with vitamin C. This is because collagen peptides require vitamin C to help them better incorporate into their necessary structure, resulting in stronger collagen formation in tissues.

A 2021 trial involving male athletes found that vitamin C-enriched collagen peptides improved explosive power during squats and jumps, likely by increasing the stiffness and efficiency of the “springs” in our tendons.

Unlike whey peptides, collagen peptides are rich in glycine and proline. These amino acids specifically support tendons, ligaments and cartilage.

Research suggests taking 15 grams of collagen peptides in combination with vitamin C roughly 60 minutes before a workout may stimulate the production of new collagen in these tissues. This potentially protects against injury.

Studies have also demonstrated that ingesting 20g of collagen peptides daily can help reduce muscle soreness. It can also accelerate the recovery of muscle function after strenuous exercise.

Many of these studies, however, are small in scale. Small-scale clinical trials are limiting because the relatively low number of participants reduces the ability to apply the results to the broader population.

These studies also vary in the type of peptide provided, resulting in mixed findings.

This is important because the actual peptide sequences (the order of the specific amino acids found in the peptides) and size of the peptides can vary significantly between brands.

This means the benefits of one product may not apply to another.

It’s also worth remembering that once the peptides are absorbed into our blood stream, our body uses them wherever they are most needed – not necessarily in the skin, joints or other specific areas people may be hoping to target.

What are the risks?

For most of the general population, peptides are considered safe and well-tolerated.

Because they are often derived from food sources, the body processes them much like any other dietary protein.

The primary concern relates to contamination from the source.

For example, in the case of marine-sourced collagen peptides, there might be potentially harmful chemicals present in the fish species from which the collagen has been extracted.

This is not exclusive to collagen. It also applies to other marine-sourced supplements, such as omega 3 fish oils.

Research has also found some marine-sourced collagen products may contain low levels of mercury and arsenic. However, these were within the European Union’s regulatory limits, and average daily doses were consistently below what is defined as tolerable daily intakes.

– ref. Do peptides improve workout performance? A nutrition expert explains the science – https://theconversation.com/do-peptides-improve-workout-performance-a-nutrition-expert-explains-the-science-276965

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gehan Gunasekara, Professor of Commercial Law, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

Following a series of significant health data breaches, the government released a cyber security strategy and action plan to establish a national framework for responding to escalating cyber threats.

The strategy covers New Zealand’s critical infrastructure, from the electricity grid to transport, financial payment systems and the health sector. The government held consultations with each sector this week.

We argue better regulatory oversight is particularly urgent for the health sector.

Late last year, more than 120,000 New Zealanders had their medical records compromised when the patient data portal Manage My Health was hacked.

Then in February, the prescription app MediMap was taken offline after patient information was found to have been altered in a cyber attack.

These security breaches have damaged trust in New Zealand’s entire health system. They are being investigated as part of a government review and an inquiry by the privacy commissioner.

To stop this from happening again, the government must require all parties holding, transferring or sharing health data to be subject to regulatory oversight and mandatory audits, regardless of whether they are in the private or public sector.

Lack of a single cyber security law

From a public standpoint, the distinction between public healthcare providers and their private IT service providers is immaterial.

This is reinforced by section 11 of the Privacy Act, which says healthcare providers remain responsible for information handled on their behalf, even when using IT service providers.

However, a clause in the Health Information Privacy Code also lists IT providers as “health agencies” which may result in confusion as to which agency is ultimately responsible.

Currently, New Zealand has no single piece of legislation that mandates enforceable minimum cyber security requirements. There are no explicit, binding due-diligence requirements in primary legislation for choosing IT services, beyond general privacy and security obligations.

We argue this needs to change.

Current issues with health data

When patients change doctors, their old records don’t disappear. They can remain on whichever system their previous practice used for many years.

One patient reported their medical files were still uploading to Manage My Health two years after their doctor’s practice stopped using the platform.

While providers are legally required to protect and manage this information, there is limited proactive auditing. Patients may not be notified unless or until a serious incident occurs.

Section 11 of the Privacy Act should be strengthened to require clear auditable contractual commitments between providers and those acting on their behalf to store or process information.

Government agencies face strict rules because New Zealand’s protective security requirements mandate how government departments must handle sensitive information. If data needs protection when held by the government, it needs equal protection when held by contractors.

In the UK, any public or private organisation accessing patient data held by the public health system must complete a mandatory data security and protection toolkit annually. In the US, federal audits of healthcare providers are conducted under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Another example is Finland, which responded swiftly to a 2020 data breach at the private psychotherapy centre Vastaamo, mandating security audits for all healthcare providers, with no exceptions.

Vastaamo’s system, holding records of 33,000 psychotherapy patients, had stored sensitive data without encryption. Investigations found Vastaamo’s patient database was exposed through very weak administrator access controls and inadequate network restrictions, and that the system had not been subject to effective external security audits.

Since Finland strengthened and broadened mandatory external security audits for those handling patient information, no breach on the same scale has been reported. New Zealand should follow a similar approach.

As we await the findings from the inquiry and review on how the breaches occurred, the government should consider the following points:

Data storage and sovereignty

If data is stored on foreign-owned servers, foreign laws may apply regardless of the physical location. This is particularly relevant when we consider the implications for Māori data.

Due diligence and mandatory oversight

Government agencies must follow clear and auditable processes before trusting private vendors with patient data.

All private companies handling sensitive health data are already categorised as health agencies and must comply with the conditions of the Health Information Privacy Code 2020. Clear guidance should be given to doctors and health providers to help them determine whether they should entrust patient data to private companies.

Historic data

At present, rules regarding the retention and deletion of health data are found across multiple legislative codes. The ability to delete data is limited. We need better transparency and supervision across the system.

We argue New Zealand needs mandatory security audits for all healthcare data systems. We hope the government will enforce this.

– ref. Public health providers have to obey strict cyber security rules – so should private contractors – https://theconversation.com/public-health-providers-have-to-obey-strict-cyber-security-rules-so-should-private-contractors-279300

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nina Van Dyke, Associate Professor and Associate Director, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

When most people think about “healthy eating”, they usually focus on what they eat. That might mean trying to eat more fruit and vegetables or less fast food, or counting calories.

But there’s a lot more to healthy eating than just dietary intake. Behaviours and attitudes around food are also important.

Take, for example, orthorexia nervosa, which is an obsessive preoccupation with consuming only “healthy” foods. If healthy eating only means ingesting healthy foods, then people with orthorexia are super healthy.

But people who live with this eating disorder often struggle with relationships and report poor quality of life, among other issues.

Research suggests that shifting the focus from food itself to our experience of eating can have a range of health benefits. Let’s take a look.

Why are we so obsessed with diet?

Equating “healthy eating” with “healthy diet” may have taken off in the early 1980s with panic over the “obesity epidemic” in Western countries – defined as a rapid rise in the prevalence of people in the population with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or greater.

But causes of obesity are complex and poorly understood, with numerous possible explanations beyond simply what a person eats. And admonishing overweight people to eat “healthier” has done nothing to reduce population rates of obesity.

There is some evidence that this fixation on weight has resulted in increased rates of disordered eating and eating disorders – both of which involve problematic eating behaviours and distorted attitudes towards food, weight, shape and appearance.

Clearly, something needs to change in how we think about healthy eating.

Listening to your body

A growing body of research on intuitive eating has found this approach has an array of health benefits.

Intuitive eating means trusting internal body cues that tell us when, what and how much to eat. For example, tuning into your stomach growling telling you it’s time to eat, or noticing feeling full or satisfied, or that you may crave certain foods because your body wants specific nutrients (such as protein after exercising).

Studies have shown this approach can lead to better physical and mental health as well as better diet quality, and is associated with lower BMIs.

Research also shows eating at regular intervals and eating with other people also lead to better overall health and diet.

But if you find it hard, you’re not alone

Most of us are surrounded by food environments that make healthy eating difficult.

Unhealthy food environments promote overeating and encourage us to override our innate signals of hunger and fullness.

When we’re surrounded by cheap and accessible sugary snacks, fast foods and large portions – and lots of marketing – it can be hard to develop a positive relationship with food.

The issue is particularly acute for people in more disadvantaged communities.

For example, in our research with rural Australians about food and eating, most told us they wanted to eat more healthily, but found it difficult for many reasons, These included busy schedules and the cost of healthier food.

Habits and emotional eating can also make healthy eating difficult.

So, what works?

For most people, healthy behaviours and attitudes to eating mean a balanced, flexible and non-judgmental approach, without fear of “bad” foods. It means paying attention to hunger and fullness cues.

But it also means recognising that food is a source of social and cultural connection. A healthy attitude to food doesn’t ignore nutritional information – it incorporates this knowledge into a broader and more joyous approach to eating.

Here are three suggestions to get you started.

1. Recognising signs of hunger and fullness

These may differ from person to person. Can you hear your stomach start to growl or your energy begin to dip? Is it a while since you ate? And while eating, is there a point where the hunger has gone away and you no longer feel a strong desire to continue eating? Some people find using hunger and fullness scales useful.

2. Reframing “bad” foods

Is there a food you really like but don’t eat because you consider it “bad” or “forbidden”? Try incorporating a small amount into your next meal or snack. You may find that doing so brings greater joy to your eating while simultaneously taking away its power.

3. Eating with people

If you normally eat by yourself or “grab and go”, see if there’s a way to plan more time for meals and include other people – whether this is more family meals or group lunches with coworkers.

But some people have to follow a specific diet

People with medical conditions that require a particular type of diet – such as those with diabetes or coeliac disease – need to follow that advice. But they may still be able to have healthy behaviours and attitudes towards food even within these constraints.

For example, one 2020 study of people with type 2 diabetes found that more intuitive eaters had better control of their blood sugar levels.

The bottom line

So – if you don’t have a medical condition that prevents it – go ahead and have some of that birthday cake. And then listen to your body when it tells you you’ve had enough.

If you feel that you have an unhealthy relationship with food that is interfering with your life, please contact your GP to discuss your options. You may also want to contact the Butterfly Foundation for support.

– ref. Focusing on how and why you eat – not just what – may be the key to healthy eating – https://theconversation.com/focusing-on-how-and-why-you-eat-not-just-what-may-be-the-key-to-healthy-eating-273019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bernard Stewart, Professor, Paediatrics and Child Health, UNSW Sydney

As early as the 1880s, there was evidence that smoking tobacco damaged your lungs. But it took almost 100 years to definitively show that smoking causes lung cancer.

So, what about vapes?

Until now, most research that has looked at the cancer risk for people using vapes, also known as electronic or e-cigarettes, has mainly focused on their role as a gateway to smoking tobacco. This is because we know people who vape are more likely than non-smokers to take up smoking.

But whether they cause cancer by themselves has been unclear. There are still no long-term studies. But now a comprehensive review of the evidence I conducted with colleagues, published today, has found vaping likely causes oral and lung cancers.

What we looked at and what we found

Given there is no long-term research on whether vaping directly causes cancer, we had to look for effects on the body that we know are linked to cancer.

We identified all peer-reviewed research published between 2017 and mid-2025 that looked at health impacts of vapes considered indicative of potential cancer causation.

The aerosol that vapers inhale contains a complex range of chemicals, including nicotine and its byproducts, and vapourised metals. This aerosol demonstrates almost all of the ten “key characteristics of carcinogens” identified by the World Health Organization.

Blood and urine analyses from vapers confirmed they had absorbed chemicals from e-cigarette chemicals that we know are linked to cancer. These studies revealed nicotine and its breakdown products present in their bodies, including carcinogenic (cancer-causing) metals from the heating element and organic compounds from vapourising e-liquids.

There is no doubt vaping alters tissues in the mouth and lungs. We found evidence of mutations in DNA from the mouth and lungs in those who vaped, which is further evidence of carcinogen exposure.

There was also evidence of changes to cancer biomarkers in the lung and mouth tissue of vapers. Cancer biomarkers are changes in cell or molecular structure that precede a tumour developing. Some of these can be observed under a microscope, such as inflammation, while others such as oxidative stress are detected by molecular analysis.

We also examined experiments on mice which found the aerosols in vapes caused lung cancer, as well as cases reported by dentists who thought that oral cancers in certain individual patients (who didn’t smoke) were caused by them vaping.

Our review did also examine studies that had addressed the possibility vaping may cause cancer. However none of these covered the wide range of evidence we had assessed.

What this means

The evidence shows nicotine-based vapes are likely to cause oral and lung cancer. We just don’t yet know how many cases it will cause.

But in the evidence we looked at, there was rising concern, and a significant shift in the conclusions that had been drawn.

Between 2017 and 2019, researchers tended to say there wasn’t enough evidence to conclude that vapes cause cancer. This included papers that typically looked at cancer biomarkers and carcinogenic mechanisms.

By 2024 and 2025, almost without exception, authors were expressing concern. They noted that the idea vaping has a lower cancer risk than smoking could no longer be supported, given the evidence we now have.

Our study, which looks at cancer caused by vapes in their own right, marks a new approach to what we know about the link between cancer and vaping.

What we still don’t know

We still don’t have direct evidence that there are more cancer cases than expected among people who vape.

The fact it took 100 years to demonstrate that smoking causes cancer indicates it will take decades to make a similar case for vaping. And it will be challenging, because definitive proof will depend on a population of people who only vape, not people who smoke and vape.

So we need large and carefully planned studies, which will then allow us to monitor and detect cancer early, and precisely determine if it is caused by – or worsened by – vaping. Lives can be saved by these means, but only if this research is funded and started now.

– ref. Strongest evidence yet that vaping likely causes cancer – https://theconversation.com/strongest-evidence-yet-that-vaping-likely-causes-cancer-279550

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zachary Aman, Professor of Chemical Engineering, The University of Western Australia

Fuel has become a precious, and increasingly expensive, commodity.

The ongoing Middle East conflict has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the world’s oil supplies. This, coupled with tit-for-tat attacks on key energy infrastructure across the region, has sent fuel prices soaring.

In Australia, petrol and diesel bowsers have already started running dry. And the country’s leading motoring organisation is now urging drivers to fill up with E10 fuel, in an effort to conserve our national fuel supplies.

So what exactly is E10? And could it help ease the current fuel crisis?

Remind me, what’s E10?

E10 is a type of fuel made from a mixture of regular unleaded petrol and ethanol. Ethanol is a highly flammable liquid produced when sugars from plants, such as corn or sugarcane, are fermented into ethyl alcohol or ethanol.

To make a batch of E10, you combine nine parts petrol with one part ethanol. So the “E” stands for ethanol and the “10” indicates how much of it is in the blend. Given ethanol costs less than regular petrol, E10 is generally cheaper than other fuel types.

E10 fuel contains 3% less energy than other low-grade petrols. This means if you swap regular unleaded for E10, you’d need about 3% more E10 to travel the same distance. So while E10 is often cheaper at the bowser, it’s likely any savings will be balanced out by the need to fill up more often.

Read more: Oil, petrol, gasoline: a chemical engineer explains how crude turns into fuel

Could it damage my car?

Both ethanol and regular unleaded petrol can be ignited. So blending these two liquids to make E10 produces a fuel that is compatible with modern combustion engines.

However, the inclusion of ethanol increases the octane rating of the fuel. The octane rating is based on how quickly a fuel ignites in a standard combustion engine. So the higher the octane rating, the more stable the fuel and the less likely it is to damage engine cylinders and rods.

But if you have an older car, it may be best to avoid using E10. This is because engines built before 2000 are generally incompatible with this type of fuel. Ethanol can degrade older seals and fuel lines, which are often made of plastic and rubber not designed for exposure to ethanol. Importantly, E10 is not suitable for use in petrol carburettors. These devices, which pump a mixture of fuel and air into combustion engines, are only found in older cars.

So the idea that E10 damages cars likely comes from its effect on older vehicles. But for cars with engines made after 2000, E10 is generally safe to use.

Read more: The rise of diesel: but how cheap and clean is it?

Is E10 better for the environment?

Research suggests the combustion of E10 could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 5%, depending on how the ethanol is produced.

Crops such as sugarcane, commonly used in Brazilian and some Australian ethanol, absorb significant amounts of carbon dioxide as they grow. This can help offset the emissions produced from the combustion of E10. In contrast, corn-based ethanol, which is mostly found in the US, has a negligible impact on carbon dioxide emissions. Sitting in the middle is ethanol made from wheat. Research suggests this kind of ethanol may slightly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But this variability means some people broadly view E10, and its apparent environmental benefits, with scepticism.

Read more: It’s not hoarding: farmers need to buy huge amounts of diesel to keep our food secure

What about the global fuel crisis?

Over the past 14 years, demand for E10 fuel has declined by about 44%. But this trend could turn around, as the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz forces governments around the world to consider alternatives to diesel and regular petrol.

For countries which import most of their crude oil and refined petroleum products, encouraging the production and use of E10 may slightly reduce the strain on domestic fuel supplies. This is because adding up to 10% ethanol increases how much regular petrol is available. However, this assumes residents have engines that are compatible with lower-grade fuels. And it would only be useful if countries can produce their own ethanol, instead of relying on imported ethanol.

In Australia, we import the vast majority of our diesel. This makes us extremely vulnerable to fuel shocks, including the crisis we’re currently experiencing. We meet about 20% of our national fuel demand with domestic supplies. However, only a portion of that fuel is produced in the form of unleaded petrol which is suitable for E10 blending.

Australia produces nearly all of the ethanol we consume domestically, in any given year. This includes ethanol used in E10 fuel. Increasing our domestic ethanol production, involving both our agricultural and manufacturing sectors, could help conserve a small percentage of our national petrol supplies. This is because the E10 blending process must happen at the point of refining, so we can only add ethanol to the petrol we produce in Australia.

If every Australian switched to using E10, this would save roughly 2% of the 20% of petrol we produce domestically. Every saving matters in a global fuel crisis. However, our current reliance on fossil fuels such as coal and gas limits the potential benefits of switching to E10.

So if you do switch from diesel or petrol to E10, you may see a slight reduction in your fuel costs and emissions. However, this decision is unlikely to take much pressure off our limited fuel supplies. For that we need effective policy and, ultimately, a swift end to the current Middle East conflict.

– ref. Is E10 fuel bad for my car? And could it save me money? – https://theconversation.com/is-e10-fuel-bad-for-my-car-and-could-it-save-me-money-279081

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sally Patfield, Lecturer, Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, School of Education, University of Newcastle

Each year, about 30% of new undergraduates in Australia are the first in their families to go to university.

This means their parents do not have a university-level qualification. Often, they also don’t have any siblings or relatives who have gone to uni as well.

So these students must navigate a new and unfamiliar pathway. National data shows they are not only less likely to go to uni, but they are also less likely to graduate than those with university-educated parents.

Our new research provides insights into how we can support first-in-family students to complete their university studies.

A new focus on completion

Until very recently, federal government university funding has tended to focus more on getting students to enrol.

This year, a new “needs-based” funding model encourages universities to better support students from underrepresented backgrounds to graduate.

First-in-family students can be considered an “umbrella” equity category, as students often fall into multiple equity groups. For example, they may be Indigenous, come from a regional area and a low socioeconomic background.

On top of this, they face educational disadvantage by being newcomers to higher education. In many cases, these students are the first in their families to finish school.

On the one hand, this means first-in-family students are educational trailblazers. On the other, they can’t rely on family members to guide them on this journey.

Our new research

Since 2017, we have been conducting research with first-in-family students across Australia, Austria, Ireland and the United Kingdom, looking at what actually helps these students to persist in their studies.

Our latest paper, published this month, includes interviews with 174 first-in-family students from across diverse age ranges, locations, study disciplines and life circumstances.

Despite varied contexts, these students consistently described three powerful internal drivers drawn from their backgrounds that helped them to succeed: a strong work ethic, defying the expectations of others, and wanting a better life.

This shows us first-in-family students often have significant personal strengths as they begin their studies.

A strong work ethic

Many of the first-in-family students in our research drew on a deeply ingrained sense of effort and perseverance, often learned from their family.

While students expected things could be difficult at university, they saw their progress as dependent on their own hard work rather than talent or entitlement. This resulted in them approaching university as something that had to be earned, rather than a given. As one interviewee told us:

[It’s] something that we were taught when we were younger that if you really want something, nothing in life is ever going to be handed to you on a silver platter […] that’s probably because of that working class ethic in our family, just to never give up – where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Defying the expectations of others

For these students, their persistence at university was also driven by a strong internal motivation to challenge the way they were perceived by others.

University represented an important space to demonstrate their capability, intelligence, and worth, particularly when they had faced discouragement or negativity from family members and partners. Staying at university therefore came to represent more than just getting a degree:

There was a stage where I just went, ‘I actually think I can do this and I want to prove to everyone – especially my husband – that I’m not this silly, dumb person that can’t put one foot in front of the other’.

Wanting a better life

The third internal driver was students’ desire for change. University was not simply about finding a job, but about securing stability, reducing risk and changing life trajectories – both for themselves and often for their families.

For these students, any short-term hardship during university was justified by the longer-term outcomes believed to come from a degree:

Mum and Dad both finished [school] in Year 10. We come from a low socioeconomic background so I always just wanted to be better. Not better, but I don’t know, have more opportunity I guess.

What’s needed now

Our research shows how first-in-family students have the determination and aspiration to succeed.

However, as we argue in our paper, universities often rely on students’ own efforts to persist in their studies, hoping they will compensate for systems not designed with them in mind.

For many of the first-in-family students in our research, struggle was seen as a normal part of life. This means universities shouldn’t put the onus on students to reach out for help – as they are not likely to do so.

What can universities do

Our research suggests there are several proactive changes universities can make to help first-in-family students stay and complete their studies. These include:

• routine check-ins from course coordinators and key professional staff.

• making academic and social support part of the first-year curriculum.

• opt-out, rather than opt-in, academic skills development, so students can learn the ropes of university study and life.

Academic staff also need time and support to monitor students’ progress and intervene early if there is an issue.

More flexibility will also help

A shift towards flexible student pathways is also required. Not everyone can afford to study full-time and finish a degree in the set timeframe. Many students need to work to support themselves, particularly those who are first-in-family.

Universities could look at simplifying transitions between full-time and part-time study and making part-time enrolment a more visible and legitimate option. Having full-time study as the “default” can create pressure to remain enrolled full-time, even when it might be unsustainable.

They can also ensure that if a student repeats a course, it triggers personalised academic support and enrolment advice, rather than this being framed as a failure.

Now is the time to redesign systems so persistence becomes a shared responsibility, rather than relying on students’ capacity to quietly carry the load.

– ref. ‘Mum and Dad both finished school in Year 10’– how to help first-in-family students graduate from uni – https://theconversation.com/mum-and-dad-both-finished-school-in-year-10-how-to-help-first-in-family-students-graduate-from-uni-279323

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vinh Thai, Professor of Logistics and Supply Chain Management, School of Accounting, Information Systems and Supply Chain, RMIT University

An Easter bunny for $10. A box of 20 hollow Easter eggs for $18. A 100g block of plain dark chocolate for $8.50.

Even last year, such high prices wouldn’t have been surprising. Cocoa prices spiked to all-time highs above US$12,000 per ton in 2024.

But the price of cocoa then fell through most of 2025. It was trading at around US$3,165 per ton on March 28, back to where it was around three years ago.

Why doesn’t that lower cocoa price mean cheaper chocolates on our shelves this Easter?

What’s the price of cocoa now?

Cocoa prices began rising in 2023, but really took off in early 2024, surging to an all-time high. That rate of growth was even faster than the US stock market and cryptocurrency bitcoin.

There were multiple factors behind that sharp rise. These included intense rains and heat hitting harvests in West Africa – which grows around two-thirds of the world’s cocoa – as well as disease, fertiliser issues, and other supply disruptions. The United Nations Trade and Development agency said climate change contributed to those smaller harvests and rising costs.

Since then, cocoa’s price has come down significantly – though after a price bounce only last month, industry website Confectionery News warned:

For manufacturers, the latest price swing is yet another reminder that volatility is the new normal in cocoa markets.

Cocoa-free chocolate

Confectionery makers have responded to the last few years of higher prices by reformulating more of their products to use less cocoa.

Many of the world’s biggest chocolate makers are working on lab-grown, fermented and upcycled “cocoa” – or even cocoa-free chocolate.

But that work to research and develop cocoa alternatives also comes with a cost. We’re yet to see how commercially viable those alternatives will be.

What about the price of chocolate?

It’s understandable why consumers get frustrated with higher chocolate prices – especially at Easter, the biggest chocolate sales period of year.

And, as consumer advocates have long pointed out, Easter chocolates often come with a higher price tag. Consumer group Choice’s latest annual assessment of Easter egg prices found some chocolate eggs on sale this Easter are smaller but more expensive for the second year in a row.

But this Easter, shoppers may be asking another question – given cocoa costs have plunged, why hasn’t the shelf price of all chocolates on our supermarket shelves also fallen?

The short answer is time.

While the current price of cocoa is down from its highs, even as recently as December last year, the price was about double what it is now.

Especially for the biggest producers, at least some of the cocoa or cocoa products used to make chocolate being sold now would have been bought when prices were still at much higher levels.

Some key cocoa products used in chocolate making, such as cacao nibs, can last for many years if stored in the right cool, dry conditions.

When large commercial chocolate makers are calculating their profits and losses, and setting their chocolate prices, they have to factor in what they’ve already paid for ingredients – not the current prices.

In other words, it’s still too soon to expect the full savings from the recent cocoa price drop to be passed on.

Cocoa is also not the only cost to consider in chocolate prices. While some other key ingredients such as sugar have come down in price in recent years, others such as vegetable oil (often used as a cheaper alternative to cocoa butter) have risen. Then there’s everything from labour and energy costs, to packaging and transport.

Think about packaging alone. If you buy chocolates with any kind of plastic packaging, that plastic was made from petrochemicals. Those petrochemicals are derived from oil and natural gas, and are crucial in making up more than 6,000 everyday products.

As a result of the Middle East war, packaging makers have already warned consumers to expect price hikes on future food, groceries and medications because of “unprecedented disruptions” to resin supplies, used to make plastic.

The outlook for chocolate prices

There is some good news. The International Cocoa Organization has reported global cocoa supplies are back in surplus again, thanks to better weather. An even bigger surplus is forecast for the 2025-26 growing season.

There’s also been slower demand for cocoa, which could keep the price at lower levels.

Looking ahead, it is possible we could see some slight reduction in chocolate prices towards the end of 2026 and moving into 2027.

But chocolate is also a perfect example of just how our global food systems are closely intertwined with much bigger geopolitical and logistical factors. Like so much else, what we pay for chocolate next year will depend at least partly on how long the current Middle East war and global oil crisis drags on.

Read more: What’s the difference between Easter egg chocolate and regular chocolate?

– ref. Why does chocolate cost so much this Easter, when cocoa’s price is at a 3-year low? – https://theconversation.com/why-does-chocolate-cost-so-much-this-easter-when-cocoas-price-is-at-a-3-year-low-279209

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul S.C.Taçon, Chair in Rock Art Research and Director of the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU), Griffith University

Extinct animals have long fascinated people around the world – from dinosaurs, to giant kangaroos, to enormous flightless birds and almost unimaginable sea creatures.

But one of the most intriguing is the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus).

These large dog-like animals with stripes on their backs once roamed throughout the Australian mainland. But when Europeans colonisers arrived, thylacines were only found in Tasmania, hence the name Tasmanian tiger.

Our team of researchers has been documenting depictions of thylacines and other creatures at rock art sites in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, for decades.

Today, we publish new research on rock art in north-west Arnhem Land, including 14 rock paintings of thylacines and two of Tasmanian devils. A few of these paintings were previously known but not described, while others were identified by our team over the past three years.

Besides rock art, we also examined recent paintings on bark, paper and canvas – as well as information from Aboriginal elders. Our findings emphasise how thylacines are still important to Arnhem Land Aboriginal communities today.

Memories of a curious creature

Scientists studying fossil remains suggest the thylacine became extinct on the Australian mainland about 3,000 years ago. The Tasmanian devil disappeared from the continent about the same time. Dingoes, humans and ancient climate change have been implicated in their demise.

The last known thylacine in Tasmania died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936, but reports of tiger sightings in rugged, remote parts continued. Recent research suggests the thylacine may have persisted in Tasmania until the 1980s.

In the mid-1800s, Aboriginal people in Tasmania told settlers many things about thylacines, including that they had a powerful swimming ability, much like domestic dogs.

In the 1900s, rock paintings and engravings of thylacines were recorded at various locations on mainland Australia, especially in the north of the continent. Arnhem Land is particularly rich in images of this curious creature.

Paintings in red, white and yellow

Our research focuses on rock paintings from Awunbarna (Mount Borradaile) and Injalak Hill (near Gunbalanya), east of the East Alligator River that separates Arnhem Land from Kakadu National Park.

Since 2018, we have been working with local Aboriginal community members to record hundreds of rock art sites in each location – some of which include thylacine paintings.

North-west Arnhem Land is well known for its rich galleries of rock paintings. These have been made over at least the past 15,000 years and feature unique styles and subject matter. Our new findings add to the region’s cultural and scientific importance.

The thylacine and devil paintings we examined were made in various Aboriginal art styles. They were usually made with red and sometimes yellow ochre in various styles. The oldest were made about 15,000 years ago, while others were made at various times since.

Two of the paintings were made using white pipe clay (kaolin) with red ochre.

One red and yellow thylacine painting had fine white cross-hatching added to its body within the past few hundred years.

The white pigment does not last long and easily flakes off. It is coarse and sits on the rock surface rather than penetrating and staining the way red ochre does. Most paintings with white are less than 1,000 years old.

This suggests some depictions of the two extinct species are more recent than we might have expected.

Rock art depictions of thylacines are much more numerous and widespread across mainland Australia than Tasmanian devils. Including our new findings, only 25 Tasmanian devil images have been documented – versus more than 160 thylacine depictions.

Thylacines may have survived much longer in pockets of northern Australia than Tasmanian devils, but were likely also more culturally important.

At three rock art sites we recorded pairs of thylacines. Some Aboriginal elders we worked with had stories about Ngalyod (Rainbow Serpents) having two thylacines as pets that would swim in rock pools where Ngalyod resided.

The tails of the thylacines are shown in a few different positions – and some thylacines are depicted with teeth.

These variations don’t seem to be linked to the style or age of the work. It’s more likely they relate to different ways paintings were used to pass on information about the animal.

Stories passed down through generations

Contemporary artists in western Arnhem Land have long been inspired by these paintings and related stories. Today, they continue to portray the thylacine across various forms of media. They also have a name for thylacines: Djankerrk.

The thylacine lives on in western Arnhem Land, not as a living animal or a ghost from the past, but as a creature that still has present day relevance. Our new research, conducted in collaboration with community members, contributes towards our understanding of what makes the thylacine so meaningful.

– ref. NT rock art thousands of years old sheds new light on the mysterious Tasmanian tiger – https://theconversation.com/nt-rock-art-thousands-of-years-old-sheds-new-light-on-the-mysterious-tasmanian-tiger-278670