Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

Hot on the heels of the disappointing Green Comet, astronomers have just discovered a new comet with the potential to be next year’s big story – C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS).

Although it is still more than 18 months from its closest approach to Earth and the Sun, comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS already has social media buzzing, with optimistic articles being written about how it could be a spectacular sight. What’s the full story on this new icy wanderer?

Introducing comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS)

Every year, a few dozen new comets are discovered – dirty snowballs moving on highly elongated paths around the Sun. The vast majority are far too faint to see with the unaided eye. Perhaps one comet per year will approach the edge of naked-eye visibility.

Occasionally, however, a much brighter comet will come along. Because comets are things of ephemeral and transient beauty, the discovery of a comet with potential always leads to excitement.

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) certainly fits the bill. Discovered independently by astronomers at Purple Mountain Observatory in China and the Asteroid Terrestrical-impact Last Alert System, ATLAS, the comet is currently between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, a billion kilometres from Earth. It is falling inwards, moving on an orbit that will bring it to within 59 million kilometres of the Sun in September 2024.

The fact the comet was found while it’s so far away is part of the reason for astronomers’ excitement. Although currently some 60,000 times too faint to see with the naked eye, the comet is bright for something so far from the Sun. And observations suggest it’s following an orbit that could allow it to become truly spectacular.

A recipe for comet greatness

It’s all down to a combination of the comet’s path through the Solar System, and the potential size of its nucleus – the solid centre.

As comets swing closer to the Sun, they heat up, and their surface ices sublime (turn from a solid to a gas). Erupting from the comet’s surface, this gas carries along dust, shrouding the nucleus in what’s called a coma – a giant cloud of gas and dust. The coma is then pushed away from the Sun by solar wind, resulting in a tail (or tails) pointing directly away from the Sun.

The closer a comet gets to the Sun, the hotter its surface becomes, and the more active it will get. Historically, the vast majority of the brightest, most spectacular comets have followed orbits that brought them closer to the Sun than Earth’s orbit. The closer, the better, and Tsuchinshan-ATLAS certainly ticks that box.

In fact, this new comet seems to tick all the boxes. It appears to have a sizeable nucleus, making it brighter (bright enough to be discovered so far from the Sun). It is destined to have a very close encounter with our star. And, the kicker, it will then pass almost directly between Earth and the Sun, approaching within 70 million kilometres of us just two weeks after perihelion (the closest approach to the Sun). The closer a comet comes to Earth, the brighter it will appear to us.

Put that together, and you have a recipe for a comet that could shine as brightly as the brightest stars. Some forecasts are even more bullish, suggesting it could be up to a hundred times brighter still!

Read more:
Meteors seem to be raining down on New Zealand, but why are some bright green?

The curse of prediction

Comets are like cats: they have tails, and they do precisely what they want
– astronomer David H. Levy.

Predicting how newly discovered comets will behave is a dangerous game. Some may be spectacular, while others fizzle.

Take, for example, comet Kohoutek, in 1973. Like Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, Kohoutek was discovered unusually far from the Sun, moving on an orbit that swung close to our star. Cue the hype. Astronomers promised the public “the comet of the century”, predicting Kohoutek could become bright enough to see in broad daylight.

But comets are like cats. Kohoutek brightened as it swung in towards the Sun, but more slowly than expected. Rather than being visible in broad daylight, it was only as bright as the brightest stars, and faded quickly after perihelion. It was still a good show, but far from the comet of the century. Because of the hype, many dubbed Kohoutek a spectacular disappointment.

It turns out Kohoutek was passing through the inner Solar System for the very first time. It had never come so close to the Sun, so its surface was rich in highly volatile ice which began to sublime when the comet was still far away. At that great distance, the comet was much brighter than other, more experienced comets – and that brightness suggested the comet would be truly spectacular.

As it came closer to the Sun, those volatiles were exhausted, and the comet’s final activity was less than initially predicted, making it fainter.

There is a very real chance Tsuchinshan-ATLAS might, like comet Kohoutek, be approaching the inner Solar System for the first time. We’re not yet sure – but if it is, it might also wind up being less spectacular than predicted.

Where it all falls apart

But it could be even worse. Comets are prone to disaster. They fragment, fall apart, and disintegrate surprisingly often. Those coming into the inner Solar System for the first time are particularly fragile.

A recent example of such a fragmentation was comet C/2020 F8 (SWAN). When SWAN was discovered, it looked promising – likely to become a naked-eye object in May 2020. But as it approached the Sun, it suddenly brightened, then became fuzzy, and began to fade away. By the time it should have been brightest, it had all but disappeared, having fallen apart before our very eyes.

On the flip side, fragmentation events can sometimes turn a good comet into a great one. Three years after Kohoutek came comet C/1975 V1 (West), and it was truly spectacular.

It passed even closer to the Sun than Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will – and was already dazzling when, at perihelion, its nucleus broke into four pieces. That fragmentation event released a huge amount of gas and dust, and the comet brightened markedly, even becoming visible in broad daylight.

Will Tsuchinshan-ATLAS be worth the anticipation?

We won’t know for certain whether comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will be a spectacle until it arrives. It could fall apart and become less bright, or it could surprise us.

It could brighten more than expected – which would make for an amazing sight in the morning sky in late September and early October 2024, and an even better one in the evening sky in mid-October 2024

We just don’t know. But we’ll get our first hints in the months to come. By tracking how the comet brightens as it glides sunwards, we will get our first indications as to its true fate – so keep your fingers crossed.

Read more:
Comet families similar to our own are found around another star

Jonti Horner 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. Astronomers just discovered a comet that could be brighter than most stars when we see it next year. Or will it? – https://theconversation.com/astronomers-just-discovered-a-comet-that-could-be-brighter-than-most-stars-when-we-see-it-next-year-or-will-it-201377

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Fuller, Charles Perkins Centre Research Program Leader, University of Sydney

It’s a question people ask often: does menopause cause weight gain?

Women commonly put on weight as they enter menopause. Research shows women aged 46-57 gain an average of 2.1kg over five years.

But like many things related to weight, all is not what it seems, and the relationship between menopause and weight gain is not straightforward.

Here’s everything you need to know about menopausal weight gain and what you can do about it.

What typically happens to women’s bodies during menopause?

Menopause marks the natural end of the reproductive stage of a woman’s life. It officially starts when a woman has not menstruated for 12 months, and most women reach menopause between the ages of 45 and 55, but it can happen much earlier or later.

The transition to menopause, however, typically starts four years prior, with perimenopause marking the time when a woman’s ovaries start slowing down, producing less oestrogen and progesterone. Eventually, these hormone levels fall to a point at which the ovaries stop releasing eggs and menstruation stops.

The symptoms associated with the menopausal transition are many and varied, and can include irregular periods, breast pain, vaginal dryness, hot flashes, night sweats, fatigue, difficulty sleeping, and changes in mood and libido.

Read more:
How long does menopause last? 5 tips for navigating uncertain times

So does menopause cause weight gain?

The short answer is no. But it’s complicated.

When it comes to menopause and weight, it’s weight redistribution – not weight gain – that is actually a symptom. Research has confirmed menopause is linked to an increase in belly fat but not an increase in overall weight.

This is because the hormonal changes experienced during menopause only prompt a change in where the body stores fat, making women’s stomachs and waists more prone to weight gain. Research shows visceral fat (deep belly fat) increases by nearly 50% in postmenopausal women, compared with premenopausal women.

It’s also important to recognise some menopause symptoms may indirectly contribute to weight gain:

• sleep issues can lead to sleep deprivation, disturbing the body’s appetite hormones, increasing feelings of hunger and triggering food cravings

• some mood changes can activate the body’s stress responses, increasing the production of the hormone cortisol, promoting fat storage and triggering unhealthy food cravings. Mood can also impact the motivation to exercise

• fatigue, breast pain and hot flushes can make physical activity challenging or uncomfortable, also impacting the ability to exercise.

The truth? Ageing is the real cause of menopausal weight gain

You read that right – the weight gain often associated with menopause is a byproduct of ageing.

As the body ages, it stops working as efficiently. It experiences an involuntary loss of muscle mass – referred to as sarcopenia – and fat levels begin to increase.

Because muscle mass helps determine the body’s metabolic rate (how much energy the body burns at rest), when we lose muscle, the body starts to burn fewer calories at rest.

Ageing also means dealing with other health issues that can make weight management more complex. For example, medications can impact how the body functions, and arthritis and general aches and pains can impact mobility and the ability to exercise.

In short – the body’s ageing process and changing physicality is the real reason women experience menopause weight gain.

Read more:
‘Brain fog’ during menopause is real – it can disrupt women’s work and spark dementia fears

It’s not just weight gain

While menopause doesn’t make you put on weight, it can increase a woman’s risk of other serious health conditions.

The redistributed weight that leads to more fat being carried in the belly can have long-term effects. Belly fat that lies deep within the abdominal cavity (visceral fat) is an especially unhealthy fat because it’s stored close to the organs. People with a high amount of visceral fat have a higher risk of stroke, type 2 diabetes and heart disease than people who hold body fat around their hips.

The reduction in the amount of oestrogen produced by the ovaries during menopause also increases a woman’s risk of heart disease and stroke. This is because oestrogen helps keep blood vessels dilated – relaxed and open – to help keep cholesterol down. Without it, bad cholesterol can start to build up in the arteries.

Lower oestrogen can also result in a loss of bone mass, putting women at greater risk of osteoporosis and more prone to bone fractures and breaks.

The bottom line: can we prevent weight gain during menopause?

Menopause itself does not cause weight gain; it unfortunately just occurs during a stage of life when other factors are likely to. The good news is weight gain associated with ageing is not inevitable, and there are many things women can do to avoid weight gain and health risks as they age and experience menopause.

Start with these six steps:

1. incorporate daily exercise into your routine, with a mixture of intensities and variety of exercises, including body-strengthening exercises twice a week

2. stop dieting. Dieting drives up the weight your body will strive to return to (your “set point”), so you’ll end up heavier than before you began. You’ll also slow down your metabolism with each diet you follow

3. curb your sugar cravings naturally. Every time you feel an urge to eat something sugary or fatty, reach for nature first – fruits, honey, nuts, seeds and avocado are a few suitable examples. These foods release the same feelgood chemicals in the brain as processed and fast food do, and leave us feeling full

4. create positive habits to minimise comfort-eating. Instead of unwinding in the afternoon or evening on the couch, go for a walk, work on a hobby or try something new

5. eat slowly and away from distractions to reduce the quantity of food consumed mindlessly. Use an oyster fork, a child’s fork or chopsticks to slow down your eating

6. switch off your technology for a minimum of one hour before bed to improve sleep quality.

Read more:
‘It changed who I felt I was.’ Women tell of devastation at early menopause diagnosis

Nick Fuller works for the University of Sydney and has received external funding for projects relating to the treatment of overweight and obesity. He is the author and founder of the Interval Weight Loss program.

– ref. Is menopause making me put on weight? No, but it’s complicated – https://theconversation.com/is-menopause-making-me-put-on-weight-no-but-its-complicated-198308

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erin Bradshaw, Research Assistant, Monash University

In 1974, Woroni, the student magazine of the Australian National University, published an article looking at the lives of lesbians at the university.

One contributor, “Jody”, told of her experience with a doctor who pressured her for details on how she has sex, and who didn’t believe her reports of pain, suggesting it may be “in her head”.

Jody recounted asking the doctor:

‘Are you telling me that I didn’t get endometriosis from a rotten abortion six years ago, that it’s all in my head?’ He quickly retreated and admitted that he knew I had endometriosis and that wasn’t psychological.

It’s important to state categorically you cannot get endometriosis from an abortion, despite what Jody believes caused her endometriosis.

But beliefs like this weren’t alone in the Australian press in the 1970s. It appears from both Jody’s story, and from another article published in the 1960s, it may have been public opinion abortions could result in endometriosis.

As an academic and sufferer of endometriosis, I wanted to know what the history was behind my own disease. How long ago did we start talking about endometriosis?

I went looking in the Trove archive to see how long endometriosis has been talked about in Australian newspapers and magazines, and how it was being written about. The earliest article I found was from 1949, but the 1970s was the first decade we saw endometriosis really being discussed by name in newspapers and magazines.

Read more:
You no longer need surgery to be diagnosed with endometriosis. Here’s what’s changed

What is endometriosis?

Endometriosis is a condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, around other parts of the body.

It affects more than 830,000 Australians and costs Australia $9.7 billion annually in direct medical costs and in lost productivity.

Despite these numbers, many people still don’t know about endometriosis.

Historical texts suggest endometriosis has been around for a very long time. Its most common symptoms of pelvic pain, adhesions and infertility were written about as far back as 1855 BCE.

Doctors were able to identify the disease microscopically in 1860, and it was named endometriosis in 1927 by gynaecologist John Sampson.

A ‘frequently occurring’ disease

I was able to find 12 articles mentioning endometriosis in the Australian popular press of the 1970s. Compared with earlier decades, the disease was now being talked about in personal stories alongside comments from experts.

Endometriosis was often talked about as a comorbidity to infertility, with other symptoms such as pain taking a backseat. Medical experts were the most common people quoted in articles.

Leading up to the 1970s, medical research into endometriosis had established it could grow on the lungs, lymph nodes and the bowels, among other organs. Treatment for the disease during this time was often hormonal therapies, excisions or hysterectomies.

During the 1970s in Australia, news was circulating about Danocrine (also known as Danazol) – a hormonal treatment to combat menstruation pain. Both The Canberra Times and the Australian Women’s Weekly wrote about this “capsule that could end menstrual pain”.

A 1975 feature story in Australian Women’s Weekly presented a couple who sought to have a baby under difficult medical circumstances, including endometriosis. The narrative used in the story is one of fertility “miracles” and impossible odds to clear to become a mother:

When a Sydney girl was told that, because of her medical history, it was unlikely she could ever have a child, she and her husband began talking of adopting – until the unbelievable happened. She became pregnant.

The relationship between pregnancy and endometriosis has a long history, and frequently appeared together in the articles I found. Pregnancy as a cure or symptom suppressor has been around since the Ancient Greeks. Indeed, the first mention I found of endometriosis in the Australian press, an article in Catholic Weekly in 1949, touted pregnancy as the only nonsurgical and “conservative” option for treatment.

(Despite medical research saying pregnancy is not a cure for endometriosis, patients are reporting GPs are still “prescribing” pregnancy in the incorrect belief it relieves symptoms or even cures the disease outright.)

The Australian Women’s Weekly appeared often in my data collection. The magazine did not shy away from talking about topics like the contraceptive pill, infertility and hysterectomies. The magazine published three separate articles on hysterectomies during the 1970s, reassuring readers they’d still be “all woman”.

Read more:
Pregnancy doesn’t ‘cure’ endometriosis, so where does this advice come from?

Learning from our past

What can we learn from historical news articles? In my opinion, a great deal.

Press coverage of diseases plays a huge role in the public’s understanding of a disease. By better understanding how endometriosis was perceived in previous decades, we can identify useful patterns of reporting and make sure the information presented on the disease today is accurate and helpful.

Today, media coverage about endometriosis is more likely to look at endometriosis through new lenses such as its chronic pain, the cost of treatments and loss of productivity.

And unlike in the 1970s, where medical voices were the primary source, now the patient’s voice is front and centre in these stories.

Read more:
Endometriosis costs women and society $30,000 a year for every sufferer

Erin Bradshaw is a part of a research team that receives ARC funding. Bradshaw spent a month with the Conversation on an editorial internship in 2012

– ref. ‘Are you telling me it’s all in my head?’ Endometriosis in the Australian press in the 1970s – https://theconversation.com/are-you-telling-me-its-all-in-my-head-endometriosis-in-the-australian-press-in-the-1970s-198514

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Quentin Hanich, Professor, University of Wollongong

Global squid fishing increased by 68% between 2017 and 2020, according to our international analysis, prompting concerns that much of the international fishing fleet is sidestepping necessary conservation and management.

Our study, carried out with colleagues in Australia, Japan, the United States, Chile and Canada, and published today in Science Advances, reveals that almost all of the increase in squid fishing has occurred in unregulated areas, with 86% of squid fishing now occurring in places with little or no scrutiny of catch sizes.

Unregulated fishing poses a significant challenge to fishery sustainability and raises substantial equity concerns. While attention has tended to focus on illegal fishing, the growth in legal but unregulated fishing may pose an even bigger threat, particularly to species such as squid, whose fisheries can cover entire oceans.

To estimate the scale of global squid fishing, we analysed satellite imagery and vessel tracking data to see how many vessels are fishing for squid, and where and how often they operate.

Read more:
We now have a treaty governing the high seas. Can it protect the Wild West of the oceans?

Squid fishing vessels are typically outfitted with powerful lamps to attract squid to the surface. These lamps are so powerful that they are visible from space. This means we can use satellite data to spot these lights at night, along with data from the ships’ Automatic Identification System (AIS), which allows authorities to monitor the location and course of registered vessels.

Using this data, we estimate that the amount of light-luring vessel effort increased from an estimated 149,000 vessel days in 2017, to 251,000 vessel days in 2020. Of these, 61-63% were by vessels not broadcasting their AIS, and thus only visible by the loom from their lamps. This light-luring vessel effort represents an estimated total of 801,000 vessel days over the period 2017–20.

Finally, we correlated these data with national and regional management bodies, and determine how much of this activity is unregulated.

A complex problem

Regulation and management of globalised squid fisheries is complex, because this fishing takes place both in waters that are under national jurisdiction and on the high seas. Consequently, cooperation is fundamental to ensure fisheries are regulated at sustainable levels and avoid gaps or loopholes.

Regional fisheries management organisations have been established through international treaties to provide the framework for such cooperation, and to regulate so-called “transboundary” fisheries. However, out of 17 such organisations in existence, only two – the North Pacific Fisheries Commission and the South Pacific Fisheries Management Organisation – have dealt with squid fisheries. This means there are still large gaps in the Indian and Atlantic oceans.

Furthermore, it is not enough to create a regional fisheries management organisations; parties must also ensure the organisation actually adopts regulations. The United Nations’ International Plan of Action to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing defines unregulated fishing (among other things) as that which occurs “in areas or for fish stocks in relation to which there are no applicable conservation or management measures”. Regional fisheries management organisations must do more than simply exist or adopt general measures if their fisheries are to be considered regulated.

What we found

Our analysis defines “regulated” fisheries as those within the exclusive economic zones of coastal countries, or within regional fisheries management organisations that have implemented specific conservation and management measures for squid stocks. In contrast, we define “unregulated” fisheries as those on the high seas where there is no such organisation in place, or where the relevant organisation has failed to adopt regulations pertaining specifically to squid stocks.

Using satellite imagery, vessel tracking, and data monitoring, our study found that globalised light-luring squid fishing fleets are truly global in scope, fishing across multiple oceans within a given year, moving freely between regulated and unregulated spaces, and catching vast amounts of squid with little or no oversight. Often, there is no requirement to report their catches to anyone other than their flag nation, with little or no independent verification.

Unregulated spaces are often directly adjacent to regulated ones, and different fleets often target the same fisheries. This creates equity concerns for coastal communities that rely on species targeted by large industrial fleets, and for the governments of developing nations that depend on revenue from stocks that move between regulated and unregulated areas.

Furthermore, many of the fishing vessels carrying out unregulated fishing stay at sea for exceptionally long periods (months to years), often refuelling and offloading their catches to other vessels while still at sea, and thus avoiding the oversight that accompanies port calls.

Like all activities that draw on global resources, fishing on transboundary stocks should be fully regulated. Yet the regional bodies with the competence to adopt management measures are often restrained by distant water fishing nations that stall or oppose conservation and management measures.

Read more:
Chinese fishing boats took half a billion dollars of illegal squid from North Korea. Scientists used satellites to catch them out

The global squid fishery shows how important it is to strengthen regional management of high seas resources and to continue international calls for states and regional bodies to take this challenge seriously. These fisheries are ultimately shared by us all, yet few receive any benefit, and nearby countries’ own fish stocks are sometimes unfairly depleted.

Furthermore, the trans-oceanic nature of these fisheries highlights the crucial importance of comprehensive data-sharing agreements between regional fisheries management organisations for improving understanding of the movements of these vessels, and quantifying their impacts on squid stocks.

Quentin Hanich’s participation in this study was funded by Global Fishing Watch and Oceans 5.

Katherine Seto is a Global Fishing Watch research partner and an Honorary Fellow of the Australia National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS).

Adviser for the Chilean Government prior to 2022. Consultant for international and inter-governmental organisations.

– ref. Squid fishing grew by 68% in just three years, raising fears the industry is out of control – https://theconversation.com/squid-fishing-grew-by-68-in-just-three-years-raising-fears-the-industry-is-out-of-control-200943

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Olga C. Pandos, PhD Candidate in Technology, Medical Law and Ethics, University of Adelaide

Hundreds of experts from around the world gathered at the Francis Crick Institute in London this week for the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing.

As at the first and second summits, held in Washington DC in 2015 and Hong Kong in 2018, leading experts in research shared their discoveries and discussed how they should be used.

The prospect of curing certain diseases by changing the parts of our DNA that cause them is becoming a reality. A somatic genome editing treatment for sickle cell disease is set to obtain regulatory approval in the US later this year.

“Delivery” was a recurring issue: the delivery of equitable access to genome editing therapies, ongoing research to optimise delivery systems for genome editing apparatus and delivery of measures to foster discussions regarding regulation, governance, public and patient engagement.

American Nobel laureate David Baltimore aptly noted in his opening remarks, “new technologies continue to challenge our society”. The advent of CRISPR gene-editing technology, short for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats”, has reaffirmed this proposition, igniting a global dialogue on its accompanying ethical and regulatory issues.

Five years after the last summit, CRISPR technology has continued to mature. It is an insurmountable task to capture all of the developments in both the science and ethics of CRISPR technology. These will be addressed with reference to the key themes raised during the summit – scientific developments, accessibility and the importance of public and patient engagement.

Scientific developments

Many new advances in genome editing techniques were presented.

American chemist and biologist David Liu reported on findings to use “prime editing” to treat genetic conditions such as Huntington’s disease and Friedreich’s ataxia. Unlike CRISPR, which makes a double stranded cut in the DNA, prime editing induces a single stranded cut. This makes it more versatile and precise for targeted deletion and insertion of genetic sequences.

Read more:
What is gene editing and how could it shape our future?

The summit heard about Vertex Pharmaceutical’s CRISPR-based treatment for sickle cell disease. The treatment is expected to become the first approved CRISPR genome editing therapy later this year.

There were also reports of research using CRISPR technology to treat diseases including Duchenne muscular dystrophy, cancer, HIV/AIDS, heart and muscle disease and inborn errors of immunity. American molecular biologist Eric Olson reported success in using base editing to target CaMKIIδ, a central regulator of cardiac signalling, in restoring cardiac function, as a treatment for myocardial infarction.

Equitable access

As research proceeds and treatments become available, questions about equitable access to the technology arise.

Equity extends beyond considerations of cost, access and ownership, to research engagement and output. This refers to capacity for knowledge production, data sovereignty and collection, access to latest knowledge, opportunities for collaboration and infrastructure to facilitate recruitment and trialling of new therapies.

Access issues are particularly relevant to lower- and middle-income countries, which may be compromised by systemic and structural inequities. Policy and political landscapes, economic constraints and scientific racism further perpetuate this inequity.

Gautam Dongre, representing the National Alliance of Sickle Cell Organisations India, described the reality of those living with sickle cell disease in India, where access to treatment is dire:

“Our priority is to be alive, to receive gene therapy in the future.”

Patient perspectives and public engagement

The summit also gave a platform to the experiences and concerns of people with lived experience of genetic disease. This included insights into the role and utility of public engagement, such as patient advocacy groups, do-it-yourself community groups and citizens’ juries.

A memorable presentation from Victoria Gray – the first recipient of Vertex Pharmaceutical’s CRISPR therapy for sickle cell disease – highlighted its life-changing impact. Gray says her CRISPR-modified “super cells” have cured her, enabling her to lead a disease-free life. The great potential of CRISPR technology can be realised, but importantly, it must be accessible to all.

Concluding remarks

How should CRISPR technology be regulated? This is a critical question.

As the summit’s organisers noted, somatic genome editing has made “remarkable progress”, demonstrating its capability to “cure once-incurable diseases”. Further research is needed to target more diseases and enhance our understanding of risks and unintended consequences.

“Somatic” genome editing (which makes changes that are not heritable) is different to germline and heritable genome editing (which makes heritable changes).

Basic research for germline genome editing, which is not for reproduction purposes, is underway, for example, in gametes and embryos to explore aspects of early development. However, the organising committee concluded that heritable human genome editing for reproduction purposes “remains unacceptable at this time”. This is in light of the absence of preclinical evidence for safety and efficacy, legal authorisation and rigorous oversight and governance.

The concept of “safe enough” was interrogated – whose ethics should be applied to make this value judgment? Does the notion of safety traverse into areas beyond medically defined risks of physical harm?

It is notable that risk tolerance and perception of safety is dictated by an individual’s position in their country, culture, socio-economic status and lived experience.

In 2021, the World Health Organization published a framework for governing human genome editing. This retains its authority as an exemplar for a pathway toward an appropriate regulatory framework. While not overly prescriptive, it was designed to be adaptable for implementation in any jurisdiction. This year, Uganda plans to implement the framework as a pilot project.

The organising committee called for global action to explore measures for equitable and affordable pathways to access genome editing therapies. Ongoing global discussions are far from complete, and perhaps may never be complete, reinforcing the need for collective dialogue to proceed this summit. And on with research, innovation and collaboration.

Olga C. Pandos is a recipient of the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

– ref. Somatic genome editing therapies are becoming a reality – but debate over ethics, equitable access and governance continue – https://theconversation.com/somatic-genome-editing-therapies-are-becoming-a-reality-but-debate-over-ethics-equitable-access-and-governance-continue-201234

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Darren O’Donovan, Senior Lecturer in Administrative Law, La Trobe University

The robodebt royal commission hearings came to an end on Friday. Over the past four months, they have delivered a telling portrait of unaccountable government power.

As they look back on a mass of limited recollections, missing paper and inaction, what are key things Australians should take away?

‘I’m appalled’

The first phase of the inquiry was marked by bombshell revelations. Two iron curtains that protect government – legal professional privilege and cabinet confidentiality – were pulled back.

In the opening week, we learned:

• In 2014, Department of Social Services’ legal advice on robodebt was a flat “no”. New legislation was needed to raise debts by averaging annual income. Robodebt went ahead without it.

• In 2017, after enormous public outcry, external legal advice was not sought. Instead, a government lawyer reported feeling “pressure” to produce heavily qualified legal advice. This unpersuasive advice was then used to justify the scheme.

• In 2018, the Department of Social Services, received advice dubbed “catastrophic” for the scheme. It stayed in draft, something lawyers admitted was a common practice.

Confronted by this, Commissioner Catherine Holmes had only two words: “I’m appalled”.

Without the commission, the standard rules on transparency would have applied. Australians would never have known any of it.

Ethically indefensible

Robodebt is about so much more than just the absence of law. After years of semantics and political rhetoric, the hearings confirmed robodebt as baseless, ethically indefensible policy.

Holmes rebuked the program as “amateurish, rushed and disastrous”.

The core concept at the heart of robodebt was the tactical imposition of administrative burden on vulnerable people. Instead of the previous system, where evidence would be gathered direct from employers, the onus of proof was reversed.

The hearings revealed the department’s own budget assumed most people would give up. Hundreds of thousands would effectively cop an averaged and inaccurate debt.

Robodebt should never again be framed as a technological glitch or a legal oversight. It was the active and direct exploitation of people’s vulnerability. The department’s own research into the letters sent confirmed they generated terror and confusion. We learnt it even held modelling that debts raised under the programme were inflated.

We have built a dense, highly conditional welfare system, which concentrates enormous, life-changing powers in the hands of government decision-makers. The hearings delivered a portrait of a system warped by imbalances of power and a lack of access to justice.

Read more:
Robodebt was a fiasco with a cost we have yet to fully appreciate

Welfare cop

So what of the politicians? Their appearances had one clear theme: they positioned themselves as the victims of the Australian Public Service.

Scott Morrison indicated he was entitled to rely on a checklist that read “no legislation needed”. Christian Porter relied on the verbal assurance of a public servant that the system was above board.

For hours, we cycled through the same phrases: “I did not know”. “I was not told”. “I was entitled to rely on public servants”.

In our Westminster system, a minister is responsible for the actions of their department. The hearings have revealed that to be abstract fiction rather than functional reality. While a storm of suffering and advocacy raged, politicians and their offices didn’t ask even the simplest questions about the core issue.

What they focused on was seeking political benefit – right from the earliest press releases, trumpeting the arrival of a “strong welfare cop on the beat”. In the pursuit of this political brand, we saw egregious actions ranging from deliberately evading questions to approving the release of the personal information to “correct the record”.

Moving past individuals, our focus needs to be on tackling the broader ecosystem that produced “welfare cop”. The phrase speaks powerfully to how we have fallen into a social security system driven by shortcut cultural images, rather than on supporting work, families and care.

Taken advantage of

Most people will not have had time to follow the commission. Media coverage, predictably, surged for “politician days”. They missed the most powerful and important contributions.

Victims of the scheme spoke up for what should matter, what a social security system needs to protect and deliver. Sandra Bevan, a single mother of four boys, who works in disability support, told us about the experience of correctly reporting income and not being listened to.

It was so traumatic that she swore she would “never access Centrelink benefits ever again”. Bevan is a powerful reminder of where courage, strength and leadership are found in our society.

In the final block, another victim, Matthew Thompson, summed up what he felt drove robodebt:

It seems to me that the powerful people are always able to take advantage of vulnerable people, as the gap between rich and poorer increases still. And no matter how many royal commissions we have, that always seems to be the case. And I hope this royal commission can change that.

Holmes could only give a simple human response. Somehow, all at once, it spoke to her commitment, the limits on her role, the history of royal commissions and the reality of the system as it currently is:

I’m afraid I can’t promise you that. But we’ll do what we can.

In a room in Brisbane, we have learnt of the scale of problems in front of us. Only a broader societal change, not just a royal commission, will ever deliver the change we need.

Darren O’Donovan 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. ‘Amateurish, rushed and disastrous’: royal commission exposes robodebt as ethically indefensible policy targeting vulnerable people – https://theconversation.com/amateurish-rushed-and-disastrous-royal-commission-exposes-robodebt-as-ethically-indefensible-policy-targeting-vulnerable-people-201165

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Priya Chacko, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Adelaide

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has made a landmark visit to India this week in the hopes of boosting ties in trade, education and security.

Australia’s relationship with India has been marked by short bursts of enthusiasm, interspersed with long periods of disinterest.

For a long time, Australia and India shared only superficial similarities captured by the belaboured phrase “cricket, curry, Commonwealth”.

Though cricket remains a mainstay, in the past few years the relationship has deepened. In large part this is due to the flare-up of India’s border dispute with China, and the general deterioration of Australia’s relationship with China.

Australia is now looking to India as both a geopolitical and economic partner as it seeks to diversify its markets and shape regional order in the Indo-Pacific.

Meanwhile, India looks to Australia for resources, investments and support in its ongoing disputes with China.

So what are the two sides seeking from Albanese’s visit, and what does it mean for Australia-India relations?

What we know so far

Albanese’s first official visit to India comes with a packed itinerary and a diverse agenda. There are as many as 25 business leaders accompanying him in the hope of securing lucrative agreements on economic cooperation and making some headway in negotiations for a full free-trade agreement, building on the interim agreement signed last year.

A key area is education. India has been hoping to improve its performance on higher education by encouraging foreign universities to build campuses in India.

The two countries signed agreements this week for the mutual recognition of qualifications, and to establish a Deakin University campus in India. This would be the first foreign university with a campus in India.

The two sides are also keen to increase cooperation and investment in critical minerals such as lithium, which is used in batteries, as India seeks to lower emissions. This comes despite Albanese saying in February he wanted to keep more critical minerals onshore in response to questions about China seeking approval to invest in new mines in Australia.

Albanese this week also declared India a “top-tier security partner”. This comes ahead of Australia hosting the Malabar naval exercise in August, traditionally a joint exercise between India, Japan and the US, from which it had been excluded until a few years ago.

In turn, India will step up its participation in joint military exercises with Australia.

Differences endure

However, challenges and contradictions remain, most notably the two countries’ differences over Ukraine.

Australia has strongly condemned the Russian invasion, committing hundreds of millions of dollars in military support to Ukraine, and joining Western countries in sanctioning Russia.

But India maintains its traditionally strong military and economic links with Russia. India relies on Russia for advanced military equipment and has recently increased its oil imports from the latter.

While Australia has never been outwardly excessively critical of India’s position on the Ukraine war, it will remain a thorn in the side of long-term cooperation.

A full free-trade agreement would involve reconciling different interests in key areas. Australia is focused on improving market access for agricultural and dairy products, while India’s focus is services and labour mobility. Both are sensitive political issues that will be difficult to overcome even with the large contingent of business leaders accompanying Albanese.

Shared values?

As he landed in India, Albanese declared that Australia and India had a rich friendship underpinned by “shared democratic values”. His trip began with a visit to Sabarmati Ashram, where Mahatma Gandhi once lived.

Yet, India is much further away from Gandhi today than it has ever been. In the past ten years, India has displayed increasing intolerance for dissent and has curtailed media freedom.

Minorities have been marginalised, discriminated against, and attacked, as the government and its affiliates assert Hindu nationalist politics.

Australian universities hoping to build campuses in India could face curbs on academic freedom. India’s draft guidelines for foreign universities prohibits activities that are “contrary to the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency, or morality”.

While Australia has expressed concerns about digital authoritarianism, India has used technology to curb dissent. It has also allegedly used technology to surveil opposition leaders, minorities and critics.

The frequently acrimonious responses of India’s leadership to any criticism of itself in the Western world is probably why Australia, which is anxious to cultivate India as a bulwark against China, has been loath to publicly criticise India.

The government may also be hoping that emphasising democratic values will put some pressure on India’s leadership to halt its further slide toward authoritarianism. But recent events suggests this is wishful thinking. Evidence for this includes government raids on BBC India offices after it aired a documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Rather, Australia risks being seen as turning a blind eye to India’s model of electoral autocracy. This includes the persecution of academics, students, journalists, activists who languish in jail on dubious charges of sedition and terrorism.

It’s important Australia bases its relationship with India on a realistic estimation of the latter’s political and economic credentials, rather than being driven almost entirely by the strategic urgency to create a regional counterweight to China.

Priya Chacko receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Janhavi Rajiv Pande 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. Albanese visit hopes to strengthen ties with India amid China’s rise. But differences remain – https://theconversation.com/albanese-visit-hopes-to-strengthen-ties-with-india-amid-chinas-rise-but-differences-remain-201369

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catriona Macleod, Associate professor, University of Tasmania

Seaweed is increasingly seen as a solution to many of the world’s most pressing problems. Interest in farming seaweed has exploded.

There’s such a wide range of applications, from fertilisers to foods, bioplastics, textiles, supplements and carbon sinks. It’s hard to think of another substance with so much potential.

Can seaweed save the world? It’s a question being posed this weekend at the WOMADelaide world music festival Planet Talks. I’m on the panel and the answer, I think, is a definite maybe!

I’ve studied seaweeds as ecosystem health indicators for years. I became interested in using seaweed to clean up nutrients in our coastal systems. Now at the Marine Bioproducts Cooperative Research Centre, my eyes have opened to the huge diversity of Australian seaweeds and their many amazing applications.

Read more:
Ever heard of ocean forests? They’re larger than the Amazon and more productive than we thought

A marvelous multitool

Seaweed is a catch-all term for marine plants. These are the primary producers in our marine and aquatic systems.

In many ways, they’re as diverse as the plants you see on land. Many are foundational species that act like forests underwater, but they come in many different types and forms. We group them into reds, greens and browns. And they have very different properties, just like terrestrial plants, depending on the species and where they live.

It’s true that seaweed has huge potential to address some of the most wicked problems facing the planet. If we were to think of seaweed as one of the tools in the toolbox, they’d be the multitool or Swiss army knife with a wide range of potential applications, including:

• reducing methane production in cows and other ruminants such as goats and sheep

• capturing and storing carbon dioxide

• boosting protein and nutrients in food products

• providing extra health benefits in new therapeutics

• soaking up excess nutrients in wastewater

• creating new materials such as bioplastics, packaging and textiles.

Another thing that blows me away with seaweed is that one plant can actually tap into several of these market opportunities. So you could be growing it as a nutraceutical supplement, a fibre for textiles and as a fertiliser, all at once. That’s really exciting because it’s not something many of our traditional farming approaches have been able to do.

Not without its challenges

Early studies suggested that scaling up seaweed aquaculture could make a big difference to climate change by capturing carbon dioxide emissions. But it turns out it’s not as simple as that.

Verifying whether the carbon dioxide fixed by seaweeds through photosynthesis can be locked up long-term is extremely complex. There are differences between species and ecosystems. And research has to factor in the interactions of the various organisms that live on and around seaweed communities, as well as the prevailing environmental conditions.

In some situations, seaweed ecosystems produce more carbon than they can capture.

Read more:
Kelp won’t help: why seaweed may not be a silver bullet for carbon storage after all

However, seaweeds may still have a contribution in this space through carbon offsets. As they can be used to make new products to replace other materials that have larger carbon footprints. This includes new foods, new materials such as fabrics, and new building supplies designed to store carbon in the long term.

Cutting methane emissions and other benefits

The native Australian red seaweed Asparagopsis has been shown to markedly reduce methane production in cattle, when added to their diet.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. It accounts for 20-30% of all greenhouse gas emissions, much of it associated with livestock production.

Any significant reduction in methane production “would have a rapid and significant effect on atmospheric warming potential”, according to a report from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

At the most recent global climate meeting, COP26, it was clearly noted that current national climate commitments will not be enough to avoid exceeding 1.5℃ of warming. So we need new and radical solutions. If Asparagopsis farming lives up to its potential, it could make a truly meaningful difference.

Seaweed can improve intensive agriculture too. As highly effective biostimulants, they provide viable alternatives to synthetic fertilisers.

Seaweed can also be used to recover and recycle excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphates from wastewater. So when you have large human populations, intensive land-based farming or aquaculture facilities releasing nutrients into our coastal systems, can be a very effective way to respond to that. Seaweed farms can do better when grown in areas with higher nutrient levels, such as alongside fed finfish production facilities.

Human health and medical benefits extend beyond commercially viable and tasty alternative protein sources. Some seaweeds can contain 10-30% protein, which is comparable with soy protein levels. But they also have the added natural advantage of relatively high levels of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids (brain food), which are not naturally found in terrestrial food sources.

Increasingly we are finding seaweeds with anticoagulant, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticarcinogenic and antiviral properties. Several types of kelp have been shown to promote a beneficial immune response.

Seaweed supplements in animal feeds have also been shown to offer advantages such as improved gut health and digestive efficiency. This has the potential to markedly improve yield and other outcomes on farms.

Let’s get on with it

There are still challenges to overcome, and there may be more issues to contend with down the track. But if we support coordinated and appropriate research and development, focused on fast-tracking the benefits that seaweed has to offer, Australian seaweed really can play a big part in saving the world.

It’s worth mentioning here, several initiatives and funding bodies that are currently supporting seaweed research and development in Australia. Most notably the Marine Bioproducts Co-operative Research Centre (MBCRC), the Blue Economy CRC, AgriFutures Australia, the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC) and the Australian Sustainable Seaweed Alliance (ASSA).

And it’s really encouraging to see broader community engagement in this conversation including the panel discussion at the WOMADelaide Festival Planet Talks series. It’s great to have a chance to talk openly about the challenges while showcasing the opportunities. It’s complicated, but it’s exciting. Let’s get on with it.

Catriona Macleod is a program leader in the Marine Bioproducts CRC (MBCRC) which actively supports research and development projects in the seaweed industry and is on the board of the Australian Sustainable Seaweed Alliance (ASSA). She has previously received funding from the Australian Co-operative Research Centres (CRC), Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC) and Agrifutures to support seaweed related research. She is affiliated with The Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania.

– ref. Can seaweed save the world? Well it can certainly help in many ways – https://theconversation.com/can-seaweed-save-the-world-well-it-can-certainly-help-in-many-ways-201459

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aisling Gallagher, Senior Lecturer in Social Geography, Massey University

Some eight months out from this year’s election, the National Party has launched a new tax rebate policy to help reduce childcare costs. At the same time, Australia and Canada are abandoning their own rebate policies for failing to really address childcare affordability issues.

It might be a good idea for New Zealand to learn from their experiences.

Childcare in Aotearoa New Zealand is some of the most expensive in the world, despite the government spending about NZ$2.3 billion annually on childcare through subsidies and payments to the sector.

National’s Family Boost scheme would give a 25% tax rebate on childcare expenses up to $75 per week to families earning less than $180,000. This rebate is in addition to the extended childcare subsidy announced by Labour last year.

On the face of it, National’s approach will return much needed money to families and has the potential to increase workforce participation. But overseas experience shows there are some fundamental flaws with offering rebates for childcare.

Turning away from rebate schemes

The Australian Labor government has just launched a major childcare review, noting their rebate and subsidy schemes – which have been in place since the mid-1990s – have not achieved the hoped-for affordability outcomes.

Government spending on support to parents has reached almost AUS$9 billion, yet it is estimated childcare costs have risen by 41% for families since 2014.

Canada has also recently moved from tax rebates for childcare, instead embarking on an ambitious public funding commitment to offer C$10-a-day childcare by 2026. The government has committed $30 billion to develop 250,000 new affordable childcare places by expanding the not-for-profit sector.

Read more:
If governments were really concerned about tax and the cost of living they would cut the cost of childcare

So, what can we learn from tax rebate funding models overseas?

As seen in Australia, tax rebate schemes are administratively burdensome. Their childcare rebate schemes were added into an existing funding model developed by previous governments, ultimately making the system confusing and complicated for parents and providers to navigate.

Similarly, National’s proposed rebate scheme will add yet another layer to what is now an already complex funding model, including the 20 hour early childcare education payment and the recently extended childcare subsidy.

Rebates ineffective on their own

Moreover, international experience suggests rebate schemes do little on their own to reduce childcare costs in highly privatised childcare markets.

Although money goes directly to parents, evidence shows there are limited benefits to families if there is no cap on the costs that providers can charge.

Any money going to parents risks being absorbed by fee increases. This occurred in Australia under the childcare tax rebate scheme introduced in 2004, with the following decade seeing what sector advocates called a financial “bonanza for private providers”.

But in a sector that is now almost 65% for-profit in New Zealand, any governmental attempt to control price increases risks being seen as “market interference”.

Proponents of rebate schemes argue that fee increases should not happen in theory, because such schemes empower parents as consumers. They can regulate costs through choosing services that best meet their needs, and change services when they are not satisfied.

But research has long shown that viewing parents as consumers of childcare in this way is a political fiction. Childcare markets do not work under textbook supply and demand imperatives.

Read more:
How English-speaking countries upended the trade-off between babies and jobs, without even trying

The commonly held notion that parents will “talk with their feet” by changing childcare providers is simply not the case. As any parent will attest, changing your child’s care environment once the child is settled is a move they are loathe to make, even if the service down the road is cheaper.

Furthermore, parental choice in many regions is constrained by the lack of childcare services and long waiting lists. As we see growing privatisation and corporatisation of the sector, the range of choice is further limited.

Time for an overhaul

It is certainly time to consider childcare costs as a crucial issue affecting New Zealand households. But this needs to be part of a much more ambitious funding review of the sector.

Overseas evidence has shown that the kind of intervention the National Party is proposing does little to improve affordability in the longer term, or address other thorny problems such as quality and access in childcare markets.

If we look at Australia and Canada, countries which have had extensive experience of these kinds of funding models, there is now a renewed incentive to explore more universal, publicly-funded childcare options.

This may involve stronger support for community, not-for-profit services, which are a shrinking part of the childcare landscape in Aoteoroa. At the very least, it would require a much stronger sense of market stewardship than is currently in place.

If political leaders are serious about making some real changes for parents, children and the wider sector, we should expect better than to repeat the same mistakes already made elsewhere.

Aisling Gallagher has recieved funding from the Royal Society of New Zealand, Marsden Fund.

– ref. New Zealand’s childcare is among the most expensive in the world. But tax rebates are not the answer – https://theconversation.com/new-zealands-childcare-is-among-the-most-expensive-in-the-world-but-tax-rebates-are-not-the-answer-201382

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ettore Camerlenghi, PhD student, Monash University

Multilevel societies are among the most complex societies known in nature. They are organised like Russian nesting dolls – individuals belong to family groups, which belong to clans, which belong to tribes.

At each level, the relationships between these social units (individuals, families, clans and tribes) are stable and predictable.

Such a social structure, which has been described in some primates , whales, elephants and more recently in birds, has likely characterised much of human evolution. In fact, it’s still common among many hunter-gatherer societies around the world.

Even though multilevel societies are documented across the animal world, it’s not entirely clear what their benefits are.

One hypothesis, based on observations of two populations of contemporary hunter-gatherer people, is that living in a multilevel society allows people to simultaneously have different types (levels) of cooperative relationships.

Read more:
To share is human, to collaborate divine

In our research, published today in Current Biology, we tested this hypothesis in a wild population of superb fairy-wrens, a familiar little songbird across southeastern Australia’s parks and gardens.

Living together means helping each other out

Superb fairy-wrens live in multilevel societies in which breeding groups – between two and six birds – represent the lowest social level, with tight social bonds among individuals.

During the non-breeding season, neighbouring breeding groups associate closely with a few other breeding groups, and these “supergroups” then associate to form communities (the highest social level). As a result, these birds develop social relationships of varying levels of intensity.

Read more:
(The most social) bird of the year: why superb fairy-wren societies may be as complex as our own

To make it possible to track those complex relationships, we attached different-coloured leg bands to superb fairy-wrens in our study population so we could recognise all individuals through binoculars. While we are attaching their bands, we recorded any birds that gave distress calls, distinctive calls that individuals use to seek help when they’re in imminent danger, for example from a predator.

Other wrens commonly respond to such calls and try to help, for example by approaching the predator and giving alarm calls. They may also use a distraction tactic called a “rodent-run”. To do this, birds approach the threat to within striking range, assume a hunched posture, and scurry back and forth like a mouse. This distracts the predator, and this “altruistic distraction display” places the bird that performs it at high risk.

Here we tested whether altruistic responses to calls for help vary across the distinct social levels of the society, akin to food sharing among hunter-gatherers, but with much higher stakes.

Read more:
It isn’t easy being blue – the cost of colour in fairy wrens

To simulate a predator threatening a fellow wren, we presented a stuffed kookaburra – a fierce predator of small birds, including fairy-wrens – while playing back a distress call recorded from a local fairy-wren. We then recorded the responses of all wren-witnesses.

For each breeding group, we tested if social relatedness affected how willing birds were to help another in distress. We played back, on different occasions, a distress call from an individual within the same breeding group, one from the same community, or one from an unfamiliar individual outside the community.

We found that superb fairy-wrens were more likely to heed the calls for help from birds of the same breeding group. They responded less fervently, taking fewer risks and never performing rodent-runs, when a merely familiar wren – from the same community – called for help.

As for strangers? They ignored them completely. So being part of a complex society lets the birds carefully “dose” their cooperative assistance.

Like birds, like people

This pattern mirrors what was previously found in hunter-gatherers. Here, food is shared mostly by people from the same household, followed by members of the same cluster of households. The least sharing happens between members of the same camp – the highest social level of their multilevel society.

Similarly, living in a multilevel society helps the wrens to distinguish whom to cooperate with and how much. The cooperation at different social levels likely has different social functions, too.

For example, cooperative relationships between breeding group members might increase group cohesion, survival and reproduction. At the community level, alliances between neighbouring breeding groups are likely to help the birds defend against predators better, and to have less aggression between groups.

Humans and superb fairy-wrens belong to very distant branches within the tree of life (our common ancestor lived at least 200 million years ago. Nevertheless, the pattern of cooperative behaviour shown by these little songbirds is astonishingly similar to ours.

This suggests the complex cooperative patterns we see in our own society may have emerged independently many times in different species, and first appeared millions of years before we set the first foot on this planet.

Acknowledgements: we thank Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment and the Ecological Society of Australia, the Australian Research Council, The Australian National University (ANU), the University of Zurich, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Monash University for support. We are grateful to our colleagues Robert Magrath, Sergio Nolazco and Damien Farine who co-authored this study, and thank Robert Magrath for co-authoring this article.

Anne Peters receives funding from Australian Research Council.

Ettore Camerlenghi 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. Fairy-wrens are more likely to help their closest friends but not strangers, just like us humans – https://theconversation.com/fairy-wrens-are-more-likely-to-help-their-closest-friends-but-not-strangers-just-like-us-humans-198231

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Scarlett Howard, Lecturer, Monash University

As we progress through life, we learn many essential behaviours from more experienced people around us. For example, through observing adults, we go from being babbling babies, to using single words, to speaking in full sentences.

This is an example of social learning. And it turns out it isn’t unique to our species.

Honeybees also have a language, expressed through dance, which they use to communicate the location and quality of food sources to hive mates. This behaviour plays a crucial role in the functioning of a hive, which can sometimes have more than 60,000 bees.

Today, a new study published in Science reveals honeybees perfect this dance language by learning from more experienced bees.

What is the ‘waggle dance’?

In 1973, Professor Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for decoding the dance of the honeybee, termed the “waggle dance”. This dance consists of a series of movements forager honeybees perform to nest mates in a hive.

The dance communicates various information about a bee’s foraging trip, including the food source’s distance and direction from the hive, angle from the sun, and the quality of the resource. It’s performed in a repetitive figure eight movement.

The forager positions herself perpendicular to the Sun in the direction of the food source, thereby demonstrating its direction. She also performs a “vibration” through the centre of the figure eight, which demonstrates how far the source is.

This behaviour is an interesting example of a complex, informative and co-operative communication style among insects. But, until now, experts didn’t know the extent to which it is learnt, as opposed to innate.

Nature vs nurture?

To find out, a team of researchers from China and the US put some bees to the test. They created hives containing young novice bees (one day old) that had never seen a waggle dance before, and hives containing both novice bees and experienced bees (20 days old).

They placed the hives 150 metres away from a feeder of sugar water: the food source. This placement was important, as it would allow the researchers to assess how accurately the forager bees were dancing to convey information to their hive mates.

The team observed the first dances of novice bees, in both the novice and mixed colonies. Then, after another 20 days, they observed them again.

They found the first dances of bees in the novice colonies overestimated the distance of the food source, were less accurate in communicating direction and were more disordered compared to the first dances of novice bees from the mixed colonies.

After 20 days, when the dancers from both types of colonies were more experienced, the bees in the novice hive had decreased their directional errors and their dances were less disordered. However, they still underperformed compared to their counterparts in the mixed colonies.

Early experience sets a bee up for life

These findings show the waggle dance is indeed innate, since it was performed by novice honeybees that had never seen it before.

However, bees that had undergone social learning from more experienced foragers were more accurate and ordered dancers. Even after gaining foraging and dancing experience, the bees in the novice colonies could not dance as well as those that had undergone social learning.

Therefore, the opportunity to observe experienced bees dancing at a young age will determine a bee’s capability to perform accurate dances for the rest of its short life.

We know from past studies there are different dialects across honeybee species – and dialects indicate a language has been at least partially learned. This new research strengthens the evidence for social learning among honeybees, prompting interesting new questions about how nature and nurture overlap to form this social insect’s complex culture.

Read more:
Long-lost letter from Albert Einstein discusses a link between physics and biology, 7 decades before evidence emerges

Scarlett Howard receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and has previously received funding from Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, RMIT University, Fyssen Foundation, L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Young Talents French Award, Deakin University, Monash University, Hermon Slade Foundation, and the Australian Academy of Sciences. She is affiliated with Pint of Science Australia.

– ref. Is the honeybee’s iconic waggle dance learned or innate? New research provides the answer – https://theconversation.com/is-the-honeybees-iconic-waggle-dance-learned-or-innate-new-research-provides-the-answer-201297

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Toole, Associate Principal Research Fellow, Burnet Institute

On March 11 2020 the World Health Organization classified COVID as a pandemic. Three years on, it remains just that.

As much as we don’t want it to be, and as much as it is off the front pages, COVID is still very much with us.

But how bad has it really been? And, more importantly, what have we learned that could help us accelerate a real and sustained exit?

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Friday essay: COVID in ten photos

COVID has hit us hard

There was a slow initial global response to what we now call SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. This allowed the virus to get a foothold, contributing to unexpectedly rapid viral evolution.

Three years into the pandemic, with the removal of almost all mitigation measures in most countries, it’s clear the virus has hit the world very hard. So far, almost 681 million infections and more than 6.8 million deaths have been reported.

This is perhaps best visualised by its impact on life expectancy. There were sharp declines seen across the world in 2020 and 2021, reversing 70 years of largely uninterrupted progress.

The excess mortality driving this drop in life expectancy has continued. This includes in Australia, where over 20,000 more lives than the historical average are estimated to have been lost in 2022.

Read more:
Thousands more Australians died in 2022 than expected. COVID was behind the majority of them

Not just COVID deaths

The indirect impacts on the health systems in rich and poor countries alike continue to be substantial. Disruptions to health services have led to increases in stillbirths, maternal mortality and postnatal depression.

Routine child immunisation coverage has decreased. Crucial malaria, tuberculosis and HIV programs have been disrupted.

A paper out this week highlights the severe impact of the pandemic on mental health globally.

Read more:
My kids are behind with their vaccines. How do they catch up?

Then there’s long COVID

Meanwhile, more evidence of long COVID has emerged around the world. At least 65 million people were estimated to be experiencing this debilitating syndrome by the end of 2022.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates 5-10% of people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 will develop long COVID, with symptoms persisting more than three months. That’s between 550,000 and 1.1 million Australians, based on the more than 11 million cases reported so far.

Read more:
We got some key things wrong about long COVID. Here are 5 things we’ve learnt

COVID highlighted inequalities

The pandemic has also had a huge economic impact, both directly and indirectly.

The United States alone spent US$4 trillion on its response. Economists have estimated the pandemic will contribute an average 0.75% reduction in GDP in countries with high infection rates and high productivity in 2025.

Studies in the United Kingdom, US and Australia show COVID has had a disproportionate impact – including higher death rates – in disadvantaged communities and ethnic minorities.

The causes range from high exposure in low-paid jobs to inadequate access to health care. And poorer countries have fared terribly on all fronts from COVID, including inequitable access to vaccines.

Read more:
Wealthy nations starved the developing world of vaccines. Omicron shows the cost of this greed

There’s no end in sight

We cannot assume there will be a natural exit to the pandemic, where the virus reaches some benign endemicity, a harmless presence in the background.

In fact, there is little indication anything like that is imminent.

In Australia, since the beginning of January, more than 235,000 COVID cases have been reported, almost as many as in 2020 and 2021 combined. Since the start of January, there have been 2,351 COVID-related deaths, more than twice as many as in the whole of 2020 and around the same as in the whole of 2021.

What needs to happen next?

The future response can be practically distilled into three overlapping actions.

1. Politicians need to be frank

Our political leaders need to communicate frankly with the public that the pandemic is not over. They need to stress we still have an exceptional problem on our hands with acute disease as well as worrying concerns about long COVID. It’s crucial politicians acknowledge sufferers and those who have died. They need to do this while delivering the good news that addressing COVID does not require lockdowns or mandates.

If our politicians did this, the public would be more likely to have their booster vaccines, get tested and treated, and adopt measures such as improving indoor ventilation and wearing high-quality masks.

The health system also needs to be greatly strengthened to deal with long COVID.

Read more:
Yes, masks reduce the risk of spreading COVID, despite a review saying they don’t

2. Avoiding infections is still important

Suppressing the virus is still important. We still can and should reduce the burden of newly acquired COVID and, therefore, long COVID. We have the tools to do this.

We need full recognition that COVID is transmitted largely through the air. As this just-published article in the journal Nature discusses, there are things we can do right now to ensure we all breathe air that is safer, not just from SARS-CoV-2 but from other respiratory viruses.

Read more:
Ventilation reduces the risk of COVID. So why are we still ignoring it?

3. Adopt new knowledge and technology

We should be focusing on the science and be ready to adopt new knowledge and products rapidly.

Just a few days ago we had trials of a promising new approach to treat long COVID with the diabetes drug metformin.

There is also intriguing research that has identified persistent infection as a potential underlying cause of organ damage and disease after COVID and in long COVID. This suggests anti-viral drugs such as Paxlovid may have an important role to play in reducing the impact of chronic disease.

Many types of new COVID vaccines are being trialled, such as versions administered by nasal spays, which may be game changers.

Read more:
COVID nasal sprays may one day prevent and treat infection. Here’s where the science is up to

The virus won’t fix itself

As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, we must not leave it up to the virus to fix itself.

The biggest lesson of the past three years is there’s little chance that is going to work, at least without an intolerably high cost.

Rather, we can end the pandemic by choice. We know what to do. But we are simply not doing it.

Michael Toole receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Brendan Crabb and the Institute he leads receives research grant funding from the National Health & Medical Research Council of Australia, the Medical Research Future Fund, DFAT’s Centre for Health Security and other Australian federal and Victorian State Government bodies. He is the Chair of The Australian Global Health Alliance and the Pacific Friends of Global Health, both in an honorary capacity. And he serves on the Board of the Telethon Kids Institute, on advisory committees of mRNA Victoria, the Sanger Institute (UK), the Institute for Health Transformation (at Deakin University), The Brain Cancer Centre (Australia), the WHO Malaria Vaccine Advisory Committee; MALVAC, and is a member of OzSAGE, all honorary positions.

– ref. Three years into the pandemic, it’s clear COVID won’t fix itself. Here’s what we need to focus on next – https://theconversation.com/three-years-into-the-pandemic-its-clear-covid-wont-fix-itself-heres-what-we-need-to-focus-on-next-201181

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wesley Morgan, Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

This week, the Albanese government is attempting to reform the safeguard mechanism to try to make it actually cut emissions from our highest polluting industrial facilities.

Experts and commentators see Labor’s plan as a cautious, incremental change that doesn’t yet rise to the urgency of the intensifying climate crisis. But it could generate momentum after a wasted decade of climate denial and delay under the previous government. Done right, it could set our biggest industrial polluters on a pathway to cut their emissions and be a springboard for more ambitious changes.

But there’s one glaring problem. Under the government’s proposed rules, there is still no requirement for polluters to actually cut their emissions at the sites where they are released into the atmosphere. Instead, companies can choose to buy carbon credits or offsets to meet their obligations. Incredibly, there would be no limit on the number of offsets companies can use.

You’ve probably heard about Australia’s rubbery offset schemes and questions of integrity. But there’s an even more fundamental problem. One tonne of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels is not the same as one tonne of carbon stored in the tree trunks of a newly planted forest.

The carbon in coal, gas and oil has been safely stored underground for extraordinary lengths of time. But when trees take carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere, they may only store it for a short period.

There is simply no way around it. Avoiding the worst of climate change means stopping the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Offsets will not save us. In fact, unlimited use of offsets could see even more emissions, if coal and gas companies “offset” emissions and ramp up exports.

Why can’t we rely on nature to pull carbon dioxide from the air?

In 2023, many policymakers still believe we can adequately offset emissions. It would certainly be easier if we could keep burning fossil fuels and offsetting them by planting forests. But it doesn’t work. It’s simply not possible to fully “offset” billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from burning of coal, oil and gas by regrowing forests, increasing the amount of carbon in soils or other measures.

That’s because the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels is fundamentally different to the way carbon is stored above ground in trees, wetlands and in the soil.

Carbon is everywhere on Earth — in the atmosphere, the ocean, in soils, in all living things, and in rocks and sediments. It is constantly being cycled through these different parts. Carbon is also being continually exchanged between the atmosphere and the ocean’s surface. Together these processes make up the earth’s “active” carbon cycle.

When we burn fossil fuels, we release carbon locked away for millions of years (hence “fossil” fuels), pumping vast new volumes of carbon into the active carbon cycle. This is very clearly altering the balance of carbon in the Earth system and faster than ever recorded in the Earth’s geological history. Planting trees does not lock carbon away again deep underground. Instead, the introduced fossil carbon remains part of the active carbon cycle.

To compound the problem, much of the carbon stored in land-based offsets does not stay stored. Forests can easily be destroyed by fire, disease, floods and droughts, all of which are increasing with climate change.

Offsets are a last resort – nothing more

Despite these issues, offsets will still have a small role. Some emissions cannot be avoided or reduced at present, given low-emissions technologies for industries like steelmaking are still scaling up. But these offsets must be strictly limited and set to progressively decline over time, as opportunities for genuine emissions reductions – at the source – are developed and rapidly scaled.

Unfortunately, paying for offsets is the first and only thing many large companies are doing about their harmful emissions.

Read more:
The Greens aren’t grandstanding on a new coal and gas ban – they’re negotiating well

If we allow fossil fuel companies to offset their emissions without limit, they will keep along a business as usual track or even expand their operations. That, in turn, will mean significantly more emissions when Australian fossil fuels are burned overseas.

Our leaders must avoid the offset trap

It’s taken Australia decades too long, but we’re finally past climate denial, perhaps due to unprecedented fire and floods. Our leaders tell us it’s now about finding solutions. Well, offsets are not a solution. There is no substitute to actually ending the routine burning of fossil fuels.

We all want our comfortable lives to continue with a minimum of change. Offsets seem to deliver that. But all they really do is offset our guilt and responsibility. They cannot solve the central problem which is that every year, we add another 33 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

The atmosphere doesn’t respond to good intentions or clever schemes. All it responds to is the volume of greenhouse gases which trap ever more heat.

If Labor is to make the safeguard mechanism fit for purpose, it must focus on genuine emissions reductions at the source.

What Australia does matters a great deal to the world’s efforts to tackle the climate crisis. If Australia became the first major fossil fuel exporter to embrace a future as a clean energy superpower, it will demonstrate it is possible – and that it comes with benefits like new industries, cleaner air and energy security.

First, though, we have to give up on offset pipe dreams. The only thing that matters is cutting emissions.

Read more:
Now we know the flaws of carbon offsets, it’s time to get real about climate change

Wesley Morgan is a senior researcher with the Climate Council. This article was drafted in collaboration with Climate Council senior researchers Simon Bradshaw and Ashleigh Croucher.

– ref. A tonne of fossil carbon isn’t the same as a tonne of new trees: why offsets can’t save us – https://theconversation.com/a-tonne-of-fossil-carbon-isnt-the-same-as-a-tonne-of-new-trees-why-offsets-cant-save-us-200901

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine de Fontenay, Honorary Fellow, Department of Economics, The University of Melbourne

Aged care is being hit both ways by the ageing of Australia’s population. While population ageing is increasing the number of Australians in need of formal care, it’s also reducing the proportion of working age people able to provide formal care.

To help bridge the gap, we are going to need to make it easier for working age Australians to provide informal care for parents and partners living at home.

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety suggested a way. In 2021, it asked the government to examine requiring employers to offer unpaid extended leave for carers of older Australians.

In February 2022 the government asked the Productivity Commission to conduct the examination. I was one of the two commissioners appointed to lead it, and last week we released our position paper.

Here’s what we found, and how you can have your say.

Growing demand for informal care

We discovered there’s a lot of informal care already. Most older Australians who require assistance get it through informal care – 62% according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

About half of this informal care is provided by partners, about 30% by daughters, and 24% by sons.

Calculations by Deloitte Access Economics suggest if this informal care was charged for, it would cost A$78 billion per year. But it is set to become more scarce.

As more people live longer, the needs of the oldest Australians will grow and become harder to manage without considerable support. And as families become smaller, there will be fewer family members to help.

Deloitte Access expects the need for informal care to grow by 23% to 2030, while the number of informal carers grows only 16%.

Examining extended unpaid carer’s leave

When my father was diagnosed with dementia, I was incredibly lucky to have ample leave balances, his wife as his primary carer, and the resources to privately pay for formal care while we waited for a government-provided home care package.

But many aren’t that lucky. Many carers state that they have unmet needs for leave, financial assistance, physical assistance and respite.

The National Employment Standards applying to workers covered by the Fair Work Act require employers to offer 10 days per year of paid carer leave, which is bundled with sick and personal leave and accumulates when not used, as well as “up to two days per episode” of unpaid leave.

In addition, workers can take up to two days of compassionate leave when an immediate member of the family or household dies or develops a life-threatening illness. This is paid for permanent employers and unpaid for casual workers.

Read more:
In 2020 our workforce and caring system broke. They are the same thing

Many employers offer more. But what’s missing from the legislative requirements is unpaid extended carers leave, available for months rather than days.

It is available for new parents. The legislative requirement is 12 months of unpaid leave, with the right to request an additional 12 months.

But after much investigation, we found that extending the option to the carers of older Australians would do little to close the care gap, little to help the majority of carers, and little to keep carers in the workforce.

Few people would use it

The model we developed based on parental and other leave standards (and the need to avoid undesirable consequences) provided three to 12 months of unpaid leave for carers of older people who have worked for at least 12 months for their current employer, after giving four weeks’ notice.

We found between 7,000 to 17,000 employees would use it each year, less than 0.1% of the workforce.

About half of those who used the entitlement would have provided care anyway, leaving their jobs if necessary.

We estimated it would produce only 4,000 to 8,000 extra informal carers.

And many don’t want unpaid extended leave. What they told us they want is workplace flexibility, with the income and relief from caring it offers.

Read more:
Carers’ leave could help us look after elderly parents and stay in work

That said, mandated extended unpaid leave would benefit the older people who would be cared for, and would benefit the carers who took it, reducing their costs of searching for a job after their extended absences.

But it would impose costs on employers: disrupting workplaces, requiring the recruitment of new temporary staff, and leaving employers uncertain about which of their workers would stay.

For businesses with high turnover of relatively unskilled labour, these costs would be low. In more specialised businesses, the limited evidence (mainly from parental leave) suggests these costs would be significant.

We need carers to know their new rights

The good news for carers is that changes to the Fair Work Act due to begin in June will strengthen employees’ rights to request flexible work.

Under the amendments, employers will only be permitted to refuse requests for flexible work if they have:

• discussed the request with the employee

• genuinely tried to reach an arrangement

• not been able to come to an agreement

• considered the consequence to the employee of refusing the request for flexible work, and

• a reasonable business grounds for refusing the request.

The government should ensure that carers are aware of these and other rights through its Carer Gateway.

It should also ensure informal carers get support from the formal sector, with formal carers available to provide care at times and in ways informal carers cannot.

Informal care needs formal support

Waiting lists for formal home care packages at one stage climbed to 15 months in some categories and have come down considerably, but there is more to be done in reducing waiting lists.

Carers also need access to respite care for the older Australians they care for, to give them a break, especially respite care in the home.

And they need support for a wider range of relationships.

Carers can usually only access leave to care for immediate family members or members of their households. This excludes broader kinship networks for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, care relationships in “families of choice” for LGBTI seniors, and care for aunties and close friends.

We can do more to support carers. I was personally lucky to get a good deal of support. We ought to make sure we are all that lucky.

You can make a written submission on the carer’s leave paper until March 28. You can also register here to watch online or attend the March 20 and 21 public hearings.

Catherine de Fontenay is a Commissioner at the Productivity Commission.

– ref. Carers of older Australians need more support – but we found unpaid extended leave isn’t the best solution – https://theconversation.com/carers-of-older-australians-need-more-support-but-we-found-unpaid-extended-leave-isnt-the-best-solution-201109

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

Of the ten films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, six are really good. That’s a high percentage for a year – 2022 – in which most cinematic offerings seemed drab.

This year sees films that are less moralistic than usual and less pretentious. The worst thing you can say about the worst film is that it’s boring. In other words, there are no absolute duds, although there is only one true standout, with over-length continuing to hamstring otherwise excellent films.

It seems like producers, in their desire to differentiate their product from TikTok videos, turn everything into a Ben Hur-scale epic.

The standout: The Banshees of Inisherin

The Banshees of Inisherin is an absolute masterpiece, and my pick for Best Picture (and one of the best films of the year).

Writer-director Martin McDonagh has made a career out of Irish schtick, and his films (like those of his brother) sometimes feel like caricatures of themselves. But The Banshees of Inisherin takes a different turn, moving away from a narrow focus on the Irish character towards the form of drama itself.

The narrative begins from a simple premise: what if your best friend decided, one day, randomly, they never wanted to speak to you again? It opens with begrizzled old fiddler Colm (Brendan Gleeson) cutting off his relationship with the younger, painfully average, Pádraic (Colin Farrell). It’s 1923, near the end of the Irish Civil War, on the fictional isle of Inisherin, and Pádraic is at a loss regarding what he should do.

The whole thing begins firmly in the realm of the kind of hokey Irish-banter film that has made the McDonaghs global Irish exports. There are lots of absurd moments and jokes, Farrell in peak form – before slowly progressing into the kind of bloody, weird hallucinogenic fantasy that a Greek tragedian like Aeschylus might have come up with.

Some might decry its deviation from naturalism and realism, but it embodies its point. In the same way Colm decides life on an island in Ireland is boring, the film seems to decide, after the first third, that realism is boring, and livens things up with some garish self-mutilation, arson, a dead dog. The film seems to suggest that the bitterness and permanence of war, of the tragic and tragedic, endows mundane life with the energy to keep going, and forms the basis of all vital art. And, as Colm realises, life isn’t worth living without art, without an aesthetic vision overlaying everything. The dialogue is, like the work of the best playwrights, hyper-real, funny, tender and savage.

McDonagh’s film is remarkable for its grandness of vision, for its willingness to look at and interrogate its very form and medium in a commercial context that, nonetheless, never feels like an essay or treatise.

Other strong contenders

Women Talking is likewise a cinematic work. Faithful to the title, the narrative follows a group of women having a debate over the course of a day as they decide whether or not they should band together and leave their Mennonite-style community when they realise that the beings who are routinely raping and impregnating them are not, as they’ve been told by their religious leaders, demons, but the men of the community.

Buoyed along by the voice over of a young witness to the discussion, the tone oscillates effectively between melodrama and fable, and the film works well as an immersive piece of cinema, with points that are genuinely suspenseful – such as when they decide to leave the community and have to prepare before the men, who have gone to the city to post bail for the attackers, return.

Read more:
All the cinema (and sequels) we have to look forward to in 2023

There are also some strikingly eerie images, and the performers are excellent. It’s great seeing Judith Ivey on the big screen again, and Ben Whishaw is exceptional as the sensitive school-teacher scribe who is minuting their discussion. At the same time, it is a film that mainly involves people sitting around and talking, so there are sections that become tedious.

Women Talking is a strong film, and its ambience of fantasy and fable allow us to forgive its sentimentality as captured in the closing image of a baby with the voiceover sounding like a social media post: “Your story will be different from ours.”

Two-thirds of writer-director Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness is excellent – it’s the kind of misanthropic farce with which he is now associated, joyfully anarchic in its perpetual assault on bourgeois sensibilities.

The narrative follows a young couple, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), as they go on a luxury cruise. It’s the kind of cruise where Nutella is flown in by helicopter and dropped into the ocean in a Pelican case for retrieval.

Their occupations as models/influencers ensure that, unlike the rest of the supremely affluent people on the boat, they don’t have to pay for anything. Their already fragile relationship is further strained as the eccentric characters on board are carefully introduced. There’s Vera (Sunnyi Melles), the “egalitarian” passenger who insists the whole crew have a swim, and have fun while doing it, or Dimitry (Zlatko Buric), the obese and excessive Russian oligarch who made his fortune in fertiliser.

The whole thing descends into a vulgar mess during the captain’s dinner. The seas become moderately rough and the vomit starts to spray, counterpointed to the haute cuisine being served. Pirates then board the ship, it’s blown up and sinks, and the survivors are stranded on a deserted tropical island.

This final third on the island seems interminable. The film painfully overstates all the points already made in the first two-thirds. As with The Banshees of Inisherin, this is a grandly designed film, making no effort to please everyone. Woody Harrelson is sensational as the drunk Marxist captain, as is Zlatko Buric as his anti-communist drinking pal. The film is unwilling to rest on moral cliches or depend on moral pleasures, and this makes it worthwhile in today’s media ecology.

Netflix’s new production of Eric Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, is a very good – if not particularly inspired – war film. The hypnotic music adds a surreal quality to the images of carnage. We see bodies under ash forming macabre shapes, gnarled figures tangled up in barbed wire illuminated by flare light filtered through smoke – and many other striking images.

The film adeptly captures the slaughter and misery of trench warfare in World War I from the perspective of enthusiastic, patriotic, impressionable German youth. It’s all very well done, but – given the pantheon of excellent “war is hell” films that have appeared over the past 100 years – seems strangely unnecessary, even anachronistic.

Unusually, two action films have been nominated for Best Picture this year: Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Both labour to be rousing crowd-pleasers, so their popularity is understandable, and both work as throwbacks to the high adventure films of the 1980s.

In the case of Top Gun this is self-evident – it’s a sequel to Tony Scott’s fabulously popular film of 1986. But where Scott’s film is superbly stylish, including all the signature tropes that made him one of the great action auteurs of the 1980s and ‘90s – backlit curtains blowing in the wind, an abundance of haze used in most shots, sparse but effective slow motion – Joseph Kosinski’s film feels derivative and pointless.

It’s thoroughly enjoyable, but also lacks the formal coherence and originality of Scott’s film. Its popularity – its nomination for Best Picture(!) – more than anything suggests that audiences are primed for well-made genre films that don’t try too hard to be clever.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, similarly works well as a romp, a comedic action yarn. It’s funny but with some touching sequences, has charming cutesy characters, and is overlaid with an air of nostalgia (including featuring Jamie Lee Curtis in a role that fronts up to her younger self in True Lies). But it is similarly derivative as well as overlong and pretentious, with its protestations towards philosophy (like The Matrix) a touch silly (but unlike The Matrix, at least this has a sense of humour about itself).

Both Top Gun and Everything Everywhere All at Once play like full-bodied old-fashioned adventures – enjoyable but also completely unchallenging, lacking the formal inventiveness that made many of these kinds of films striking in the 1980s.

Dull, dull, dull

The narrative of the much-discussed Tàr is sufficiently interesting, but one wonders why so many of the formal choices by both director Todd Fields and Cate Blanchett in the lead are so dull?

Blanchett plays a kind of James Gatz/Jay Gastby-esque self-made woman, Lydia (but really Linda) Tàr, a conductor of international repute, world renowned for her interpretations of Mahler (wink wink, he was “cancelled” by the Nazis).

As the film unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that, even though she (rightly) espouses a kind of ad hominem philosophy that demands that we void ourselves of ego in engaging with art and with masters of the past, she actually cares more about identity than many of those around her. She makes professional hiring decisions based solely on the person of the applicant (rather than on their artistry), to satisfy her sexual predilections. She can chastise a “bipoc” student for outrightly rejecting Bach because he thinks he was a bad guy (which is, of course, absurd), but then chooses musicians for her orchestra based on sexual appeal.

It becomes increasingly difficult to empathise with her when it’s revealed that she has gone so far as to blacklist ingenues who (perhaps) have refused to sleep with her, resulting in a suicide. But by the end of the film we cannot help feeling something for her nonetheless – she has lost her career, her child (with whom she has a wonderful relationship), and her sense of self.

Blanchett is fine in the lead, effectively capturing the character’s combination of arrogance and fragility of ego, but also everything about her performance is run of the mill. And this is generally the problem with the film: aside from its annoying topicality, there’s nothing formally interesting about it.

It is stylistically dull, and for a film about music there is nothing compelling about its soundtrack or score. It’s the kind of film that works almost wholly through exposition, involving discussions of Schopenhauer being a bad dude but his philosophy still being good, for example.

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis has likewise enjoyed immense popularity. Like most of Luhrmann’s films, while it has a certain infectious energy in the performances and staging at the beginning, it quickly become tedious.

There’s a lot of visual noise in Elvis, and this is the point (showing the relationship between hype and human in the Elvis Presley mythography), but it doesn’t make for an engaging film. Tom Hanks’ irritating performance as the Colonel – knowing, cynical, wry, doing a hackneyed accent – makes parts of it almost unbearable.

Butler is fine as Elvis, as everyone keeps pointing out, but Elvis Presley was better as Elvis – more charismatic and compelling than Butler’s karaoke version. I would prefer Elvis’ performance in a bad movie (say, Easy Come Easy Go) over Butler in this movie every day of the week.

The Fabelmans was similarly enjoyable enough – it’s charming and sweet – but the whole thing is dependent on our knowledge that it’s director Steven Spielberg’s virtual autobiography. There’s not really any genuine drama (although it probably seems like it for Spielberg, because he lived through it) – the only thing that happens is a middle-class family breaks up because the wife-mother has an affair.

There’s just not enough drama to sustain the narrative on its own terms – thus, this depends upon our knowledge extraneous to the film, which seems ironic, given Spielberg’s penchant for arresting style and imagery throughout his career. In other words, the thing that has driven his career – his capacity to create immersive standalone worlds – is absent in his new acclaimed film.

Avatar: The Way of Water is similarly a dull and overlong entry in a dull series. Fans of Avatar may disagree, but this film is almost the inverse of The Fabelmans – this seems to depend too much on our investment in James Cameron as a director, and as a kind of cinematic wizard creating an original world, while the actual substance of the narrative is rudimentary.

Best Film of 2022?

My pick for best film of 2022 would be Kirill Serebrennikov’s Tchaikovsky’s Wife, a hilarious and deeply unnerving examination of the fraught life of the title character in her unreasonable obsession with the composer.

There are a handful of other excellent films that won’t see representation in the ceremony, as usual. For horror afficionados it would be hard to beat Parker Finn’s sadistic schlocker Smile, a kind of cruel meditation on the social media age.

Likewise, Luca Guadagnino’s teen vampire flick Bones and All is a smashing take on the genre, and The Passengers of the Night is a delightful French coming-of-age drama anchored by the unstoppable Charlotte Gainsbourgh.

Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love is one of the most striking documentaries in recent years, following the romance between Katia and Maurice Krafft as they travel around the world documenting volcanoes.

Dosa’s film has been nominated for Best Documentary but not Best Picture, although there’s no rule precluding non-fiction films from this award.

That being said, The Banshees of Inisherin is up there with these films, and most of the other nominees work well as pieces of cinema, which is seldom the case with films nominated for Best Picture these days.

Ari Mattes 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. Banshees, wives, women and mavericks: our predictions for the Oscars 2023 best pictures – https://theconversation.com/banshees-wives-women-and-mavericks-our-predictions-for-the-oscars-2023-best-pictures-198772

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

One of those closely watching the extraordinary legal face-off between independent Monique Ryan and her former high-profile staffer, Sally Rugg, will be Josh Frydenberg, who lost Kooyong to the “teal” at last year’s election.

The outcome of the case, going to whether Rugg was forced to work unreasonable hours, could have significant ramifications for parliamentary staffs’ conditions.

But Frydenberg will be focused on whether the fight takes paint off Ryan.

Now in the private sector, Frydenberg hasn’t declared whether he will run again for Kooyong, but he hasn’t lost his political ambition.

He didn’t put his hand up for the Aston byelection, but then insiders didn’t expect him to. He’s concentrated on Kooyong – anyway the Liberals needed a woman in Aston.

If Frydenberg could regain his seat and Peter Dutton lost the 2025 election, one scenario for the Liberals would be for Frydenberg to take over the leadership and position the party to be competitive for the 2028 poll.

There are a lot of “ifs” involved, not least the 2025 result in Kooyong. Its boundaries will be affected by a redistribution. Ryan has another two years to dig in, and independents can be hard to dislodge.

Still, the teals were elected in very special circumstances, helped by the acute unpopularity of Scott Morrison, and some could be vulnerable next time. Ryan might be one of those.

Frydenberg would benefit if the economy were central at the election. But he’d need to make a decision on contesting relatively early, and run a savvier campaign than last time, when he unwisely derided his opponent as a “fake” independent.

There are those who cast doubt on how well Frydenberg would do as leader. Critics argue it’s hard to know what he stands for and that he wants to be popular with everyone. On the other hand, as a former treasurer and former energy minister, he has a wealth of front-line experience.

Frydenberg started out with the label of a conservative, but became more centrist. In 2018 he won the Liberal deputyship overwhelmingly. He carries baggage from the Morrison years, including what some saw as excessive loyalty to the then PM (he was also loyal to PMs Abbott and Turnbull).

Whatever his limitations, however, a Liberal party defeated in 2025 wouldn’t be replete with leadership talent.

Speculation about the significance of a Frydenberg return carries with it the assumption Dutton is doomed to failure. Caveats are required. I recalled being sceptical when Tony Abbott was elected leader. Then he nearly won his first election, and cleaned up at his second.

Read more:
Word from The Hill: Another rate rise; support for super tax hike; PM’s India trip; Rugg V Ryan

That said, it would be difficult at present to find anyone who’d put any money on Dutton.

Meanwhile he and his party are struggling for a strategy.

Dutton is, on a range of issues, adopting the “just say no” approach. The Liberals are opposing the legislation for implementing the government’s emissions reduction target (the safeguard bill), and bills for the national reconstruction fund (a kick-start for manufacturing), and a fund to generate a money stream to help provide affordable housing.

The “say no” strategy means Labor can counter Liberal attacks on the government over, for example, energy prices, by pointing out the Coalition voted against legislation last year to curb price rises.

Dutton jumped on the government’s superannuation tax rise, but the subsequent polling did not meet Liberal hopes they were on a winner. Newspoll showed strong support (64%) for the change, including 54% of Coalition voters.

While the Coalition is pursuing negative tactics (as Abbott did in opposition), this doesn’t extend to everything. There is important bipartisanship, for instance, on AUKUS. With the deal on the nuclear-powered submarines to be unveiled next week, Dutton on Thursday reaffirmed the opposition “will support the decisions of the government under AUKUS”.

However, one test coming up will be on the level of defence spending in the budget. Will the opposition say it should be higher than whatever the government settles on?

On the Voice to Parliament, Dutton has yet to declare a formal position. But he’s had nothing positive to say about it, and his party room would have a majority against. If the Liberals oppose it, that’s likely to go down poorly with younger voters.

Among the Liberals’ multiple problems is a weak team, which also lacks balance.

Read more:
Grattan on Friday: Trimming the tail of the superannuation tax tiger is no easy task

Senior people such as Liberal deputy Sussan Ley and shadow treasurer Angus Taylor are poor performers.

The moderates were decimated at the election, and those left are failing to act as a cohesive influence.

Backbencher Bridget Archer speaks out on issues, but comes across as reflecting and protecting her seat rather than having wider clout within the party.

The Liberals’ Senate leader, Simon Birmingham, is a heavyweight moderate who is not the driving force he should be. Former foreign minister Marise Payne, also a moderate, is neither seen nor heard publicly.

Valuable parliamentary seats are taken up by people with extreme positions, such as senators Gerard Rennick from Queensland and Alex Antic from South Australia.

Scott Morrison is in another category, but should make way for new blood.

The challenge of recruiting good potential candidates and getting them selected is only likely to get worse at a time when a political career has become unattractive to many, and the party erects road blocks to the best and brightest.

At the grass roots, it is vulnerable to infiltration by fundamentalist religious groups. Organisationally, it’s riven by factionalism and incompetent, with the Victorian, NSW and Western Australian divisions dysfunctional. Dutton needs to tackle this, but it’s a near-impossible task.

Among Dutton’s problem is Dutton himself.

As leader, the right-winger has shown himself pragmatic and managed to hold the party together. He is an asset in his home state of Queensland, where Labor is weak. But it is hard to see him making inroads in the south, especially in the progressive state of Victoria. Observers are looking to Aston to give an early reading.

Labor holds government by a very narrow margin, but as things stand now, Dutton’s only route to victory in 2025 would require the Albanese government – which faces some tough economic problems – to fail lamentably in the next two years.

Not impossible. Labor went into minority government in 2010 after a good win in 2007. Malcolm Turnbull turned Abbott’s 2013 landslide into a close result in 2016.

But if Albanese doesn’t squander power, the Liberals would be pitching for a two-stage comeback at best. And Frydenberg just might be back in the play.

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Could Josh Frydenberg still have a path to the Liberal leadership? – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-could-josh-frydenberg-still-have-a-path-to-the-liberal-leadership-201463

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Foster, Professor, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

The United Kingdom’s Illegal Migration Bill, introduced in the House of Commons this week, will look very familiar to Australians.

If passed, the bill would see asylum seekers who arrive in the UK without a visa deemed “illegal” and prohibited from applying for protection under the refugee system. Any claim for protection will be deemed “inadmissible”, and anyone arriving “illegally” will be removed to their home country or a so-called “safe” third country.

The bill also grants enhanced detention powers to the government while removal arrangements are under way. In other words, it lifts directly from the Australian handbook when it comes to punitive refugee policy, including the potentially devastating human impact and disregard for human rights.

The similarities extend to political spin as well as policy. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has firmly backed the bill, vowing this week to “fight” for the legislation. He made his address behind a lectern emblazoned with the slogan “stop the boats” – the same three-word slogan that helped former Australian Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott win the 2013 federal election, and launched a particularly dark chapter in refugee policy in Australia.

While the UK government notes that irregular migrant arrivals have “increased notably” since 2019, it is imperative to consider the origin of those seeking asylum.

Afghans consist of the largest nationality group to have crossed the English Chanel in recent months, consistently increasing since the resurgence of the Taliban.

Countries do not exist in a vacuum. When wars and conflict erupt, people are forced to flee elsewhere. This is the fundamental premise upon which the Refugee Convention was drafted in the aftermath of the second world war.

The dark history of Australia’s refugee policy

The reintroduction of regional processing of asylum seekers in Australia in 2012 followed a long history of turning back boats at sea. The turn-backs were drastically stepped up in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 election under the guise of Operation Sovereign Borders.

Both policies remain in place under the new Labor government at an estimated cost of $9.65 billion over the past decade for offshore processing alone. Australia’s policy of sending asylum seekers to third countries – Nauru and Papua New Guinea – has been found to contravene human rights by numerous international bodies.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet labelled the centres “an affront to the protection of human rights”. The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor called the offshore regime “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.

Australian law provides that an application for a protection visa is not valid if made by an “unauthorised maritime arrival”. It also stipulates that such arrivals “must” be removed to a regional processing country.

The UK bill similarly places a duty on the secretary of state to remove any person who arrives without authority, irrespective of their claim for protection under refugee law. This amounts to a dangerous repudiation of the UK’s obligations under international refugee law to respect the doctrine of non-refoulement. It’s a cornerstone principle that protects refugees from being returned to a place where they may suffer harm.

This is but one of the more drastic ways in which the UK bill contravenes human rights law. Home Secretary Suella Braverman has acknowledged she cannot guarantee the bill is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

Concerningly, the UK bill further authorises the secretary to “make arrangements for the removal” of an unaccompanied child who arrives alone.

Removal of children is sadly commonplace in the Australian experience, with devastating impacts. More than 8,000 pages of leaked incident reports from Australia’s detention camps on Nauru in 2016 (known as the “Nauru files”) detailed numerous cases of child abuse and sexual assault suffered on the island. More than 1,000 of the leaked reports documented harm to children.

There’s no denying the issue of refugees arriving by sea is complex. But within the tangle of competing arguments, some things are simple. There’s no excuse for harming people.

With the UNHCR estimating the “vast majority” of those arriving in the UK via the English Channel would be accepted as refugees if their claims were fairly determined, this bill undermines the fundamental system of international protection. It represents a dangerous trend by governments eager to follow the lead of Australia’s punitive policy.

Read more:
Changes to temporary protection visas are a welcome development – and they won’t encourage people smugglers

The human toll is too high

Beneath the intellectual discussion of human rights violations lies the devastating human impact of the Australian policy Britain seeks to replicate. Over the past ten years, we’ve represented and heard from many who have suffered irreparable harm from Australia’s refugee policy.

Among them were children who have attempted self-harm and speak about no longer wanting to live. A tall, gentle man who lost his eye and suffered blunt facial trauma while witnessing his friend die during a riot in detention on Manus Island. A wife who watched on helplessly as her husband self-immolated on Nauru. He died in agonising pain two days later from burns the inquest into his death heard were “very survivable”. There were also pregnant women medically evacuated to Australia with life-threatening conditions, shaking on the hospital bed as they recall their ordeal and clutch their newborn.

We have witnessed families separated across oceans; fathers who missed the birth of their children. The ongoing physical and mental harm suffered by refugees in Australia cannot be overestimated – nor can the damage to the soul of the nation.

The Australian experience of deterring and punishing people seeking asylum by boat should serve as a warning rather than a blueprint for the UK. Australia represents an example of a dangerously inhumane and exorbitantly costly policy that has damaged its human rights standing globally. But, more fundamentally, it’s an example of the devastating human toll that will ensue if this bill is passed into law.

Michelle Foster receives funding from Australian Research Council.

Katie Robertson 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. UK moves to copy Australia’s cruel asylum-seeker policy – and it will have the same heavy human toll – https://theconversation.com/uk-moves-to-copy-australias-cruel-asylum-seeker-policy-and-it-will-have-the-same-heavy-human-toll-201390

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Cresswell, Adjunct professor, UNSW Sydney

Macquarie Island, around 1,500km southeast of Tasmania, is more than just a remote rocky outcrop. In fact, it’s the only piece of land on the planet formed completely from ocean floor, which rises above the waves to form peaks that teem with penguins and other bird species, some of them found nowhere else on Earth.

These are just some of the reasons why this unique island, and the seas that surround it, have globally significant conservation values. Our new independent assessment of these values forms the scientific evidence base of Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s announcement last month of plans to significantly increase protections for the waters surrounding Macquarie Island.

By comprehensively assessing the available data on the marine ecosystems and the many species that live on and around Macquarie Island, our report reveals a subantarctic environment that is crucial for breeding and feeding for millions of seabirds and thousands of marine mammals.

Macquarie Island and its surrounding seas (to a distance of 5.5km) are already protected as a Tasmanian reserve, and the area (this time including seas to a distance of 22km) is also a World Heritage Area. A Commonwealth marine park also covers most of the southeast quadrant of the island’s “economic exclusion zone”, including a sanctuary zone and two seafloor management zones.

The federal government’s proposed expansion of the marine park would cover the island’s entire economic exclusion zone, increasing the area of Australia’s marine sanctuaries by more than 388,000 square kilometres, an increase larger than the area of Germany.

An outstanding spectacle

Macquarie Island is the exposed crest of the 1,600km-long undersea Macquarie Ridge, which makes Macquarie Island the only piece of land in the world formed entirely of oceanic crust.

Macquarie Ridge is one of only three such ridges that impede the eastward flow of a current called the Antarctic Circumpolar Circulation, resulting in distinct differences between the west and east sides of the ridge, which are used in different ways by different species.

The oceanography is further divided north to south by two major ocean fronts, the Sub-Antarctic Front and the Polar Front, creating three distinct bodies of water. They are closer here than anywhere else in the Southern Ocean, and as they interact with the Macquarie Ridge create at least six different large-scale oceanographic habitats.

This creates an outstanding spectacle of wild, natural beauty and a diverse set of habitats supporting vast congregations of wildlife, including penguins and seals. Fifty-seven seabird species, including four species of penguins and four species of albatross, have been recorded on Macquarie Island, and 25 of these species have been observed breeding there. The royal penguin and the Macquarie Island imperial shag live nowhere else on Earth.

The ridge includes a series of undersea mountains that act as “stepping stones” linking subantarctic and polar animals on the sea floor, such as brittlestars.

Read more:
Enjoy them while you can? The ecotourism challenge facing Australia’s favourite islands

Needing more protection

Our report shows the area around Macquarie Island is not well represented by the current marine park. In particular, the entire area to the west, and most of the northern and southern parts of the Macquarie Ridge, are not protected by the current marine park, but will be included in the proposed expansion.

Our report also considers several options for protecting the area’s unique ecosystems and concludes that the most sensible approach, given the available data, would be to declare the whole area around the Macquarie Ridge as a marine park, increasing the protection outside the current sanctuary zone, while allowing the current fishery to continue in a habitat protection zone.

This provides the simplest, most expeditious reserve design that is relatively easy to implement, achieves environmental protection and sustainable fishing, recognises the importance of the entire Macquarie Island region, and provides the most resilience to climate change.

Direct human impacts in the area are predominantly due to fishing and marine debris, although climate change is an ever-present threat too. The fishery targets the deepwater Patagonian toothfish using bottom longlines, mostly in the central zone of the Macquarie Ridge. This fishery is generally well regarded for its best-practice fishing methods and commitment to positive environmental outcomes, and this fishing activity would continue under the new plans.

But if new fisheries were allowed to develop targeting midwater species, or new industries such as seabed mining were permitted, these could directly impact the seabirds, marine mammals and other species that live in these areas.

The proposal put forward by Minister Plibersek protects all of the Commonwealth waters in two different zones of a marine park, effectively tripling the size of the current marine park. It protects the marine domain and allows the current fishery to continue without significant changes to current practices or catches.

Restrictions on any potential future fisheries would be determined by the distribution of “sanctuary zones” which would preclude fishing, and “habitat/species zones”, which could accommodate sustainable fishing. Mining would be precluded under either category of protection.

Read more:
Disruption over Macquarie Island calls for some clever Antarctic thinking

What next?

The government’s proposal signals a clear priority for protection over development in this area. A period of public consultation on the proposal will commence in March. Any future development of the marine park would need to be orderly and careful, including prior consideration of environmental impacts. Any changes to the current fishery management arrangements should ensure that the changes maintain or enhance conditions for a long-term sustainable fishery.

More broadly, our report also demonstrates the potential for, and importance of, compiling the most up-to-date available data for any region prior to any formal review process to update Australia’s marine park network.

The authors thank Anthony D. M. Smith for his contribution to this article and the report on which it’s based.

Ian Cresswell received funding from the Australian Marine Conservation Society and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Andrew John Constable has received Funding from the Australian Marine Conservation Society and Pew Charitable Trusts.

Nic Bax has received funding from the Australian Marine Conservation Society and the Pew Charitable Trusts

Keith Reid 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. Penguin paradise and geological freak: why Macquarie Island deserves a bigger marine park – https://theconversation.com/penguin-paradise-and-geological-freak-why-macquarie-island-deserves-a-bigger-marine-park-201368

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Xanthe Mallett, Forensic Criminologist, University of Newcastle

Madeleine McCann, the British girl who vanished as a three-year-old from her family’s holiday apartment in Portugal in 2007, was back in the news recently as yet another person claimed to be her. It’s a phenomenon fuelled by social media – in 2020 a TikTok trend emerged in which women uploaded images to compare themselves to Madeleine.

The latest claim was quickly debunked by police, but it raises an interesting question: why do some cases stick in the public consciousness? What generates the ongoing engagement and interest?

Put this into the context that two people under the age of 18 go missing every hour in Australia. That’s 48 every single day.

In the United Kingdom, of the 353,000 missing person incidents reported annually, almost 215,000 relate to children. Of these, 98% will be found within 2 days, while the other 2% will remain missing for more than a week – and, as in Madeleine’s case, some will stay missing for years.

The case of Madeleine McCann

I was living in the UK when Madeleine was abducted, and remember vividly the photos of her, and the constant live news coverage from the scene.

And I remember the interviews with Madeleine’s parents. I was working in a forensic centre, and I can recall conversations with criminal psychologists and forensic practitioners about the parents – we were all of the same mind. They were behaving exactly as parents would if their child had been abducted. Their body language, verbal cues, everything said they were telling the truth.

But their innocence was not accepted by everybody, and some people were suspicious because of the parents’ apparent determination to stay in the spotlight. For me, the reason was clear – keeping Madeleine on page 1, at the beginning of every news bulletin, constantly in the public eye and on the public’s mind, was their best chance of getting her back. They were trying to use the world’s media to help find their daughter.

Sadly, it failed, and we still don’t know what happened to Madeleine, or why, and ultimately who is responsible.

But it was that media strategy, fuelled by the parents’ intelligence, perseverance and strength, that made Madeleine a worldwide story. Add to that the pictures of Madeleine constantly circulated in the media, an innocent, angelic, blonde-haired child, and she has become part of the world’s collective conscience.

Madeleine is what social scientists would call an “ideal victim”, a term coined by criminologist Nils Christie as “a person or category of individuals who, when hit by crime, most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim”.

Once her face was implanted on our public consciousness, the story played into every parent’s worst nightmare: their child being taken by a predator, without leaving a trace, and never seen again.

Madeleine McCann and the ideal victim

It wasn’t that the circumstances around Madeleine’s disappearance were different to others, but the family that changed the script by how they responded. That’s why the whole world knows her name.

The term “ideal victim” can be a little confronting, and criminologists are not saying they are a good choice – but rather that the victim wasn’t engaging in any risky behaviour, they weren’t involved in any criminal activity, they were in essence totally blameless for what happened to them.

This is complicated framing, as people’s unconscious and conscious bias plays into how we judge a victim’s culpability, and ultimately how much we care about them as a victim or survivor.

I’ve spoken about this “weighing of human worth” and our associated interest in some cases over others before. In an earlier piece for The Conversation , I discussed the notion of “White women’s syndrome” and why there is always more media and public interest when a young, attractive, Caucasian female vanishes, when compared to a woman of colour for example.

I used the media storm around Gabby Petito to illustrate this: Gabby was another “ideal victim” – young, innocent, vulnerable, and the target of an abusive, controlling man.

Read more:
The Gabby Petito case has been exploited by the media. We need to stop treating human tragedy as entertainment

But how has that level of public attention on the case, dissection almost, expressed itself? Well, if you type ‘Madeleine McCann’ into a Google search, you will return around 26,200,000 hits.

Channel 9 created a podcast, which releases new episodes every time there is a “breakthrough”. Dozens of other podcast series have produced episodes on the case.

A comparable Australian story

William Tyrrell is Australia’s Madeleine. William was also three years old when he vanished from his step-grandmother’s home in New South Wales in 2014. Like Madeleine, he vanished without a trace, and there were images of William available in the media, showing a gorgeous little boy, the very picture of innocence.

Who can forget the little boy in the Spider-Man suit? Another ideal victim, and one the media – and the public – took to their hearts.

But not all children get the same attention. Do you know the name of Bradford Pholi, a ten-year-old Indigenous boy who disappeared after leaving his family home in Sydney on Boxing Day in 1982?

It’s likely Bradford was murdered, and a $100,000 reward was offered in 2009. While his siblings remain hopeful one day they will find out what happened to their brother, I doubt his face is one you will recognise.

I have never seen it age-progressed to see what Bradford would look like now, as has been done for both Madeleine and William.

Stories about First Nations children do not generate the same attention as that seen for white children, a sad truth and one that must be recognised and faced. Why are we less engaged with stories like Bradford’s? This is a question I wrestle with as a criminologist and as a person.

Madeleine’s disappearance changed missing children’s cases forever

One positive that can be taken away from Madeleine’s case is that the media strategy used by her parents has changed the ways families of missing children interact with the media.

To gain interest and keep the search front and centre for the missing children, the family has to engage and face the media pack, as hard as that is under such an extremely stressful situation. They need to be the voice for their missing child.

Read more:
Cleo Smith has been gone almost a week. Why missing children cases grip the nation

It worked in the case of Cleo Smith, the four-year-old who was abducted while camping with her mother and de facto father in regional Western Australia in 2021. Again, the world watched and breathed a collective sigh of relief when 18 days later Cleo was found.

Sadly, the media strategy has not paid off, yet, in Madeleine’s case, but the world lives in hope that one day we will find out what happened to her.

Xanthe Mallett 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. The case of missing Madeleine McCann still grips the world – but why? – https://theconversation.com/the-case-of-missing-madeleine-mccann-still-grips-the-world-but-why-200727

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

New Zealand’s smokefree law, which came into effect in January, introduces several world-first endgame measures, including removing most nicotine from smoked products, disallowing product sales to anyone born on or after January 1 2009, and a major reduction in the number of tobacco retail outlets nationwide (from about 6000 to 600).

Several studies reporting associations between greater retailer density and higher tobacco use among both adults and adolescents support this measure.

As researchers working on these issues, we were keen to know how people who smoke perceived the retail reduction measure, and how they would respond and adapt once it was implemented.

Our open-access research unearthed new insights into the potential effects fewer outlets would have on people who smoke. We were particularly interested in speaking with Māori, who bear a disproportionate burden of harm from smoking.

We interviewed 24 adult participants from Dunedin (Otepoti) and Hamilton (Kirikiriroa). We used web-based, interactive maps to illustrate the potentially large drop in retailers in these locations, compared with the current number of outlets. For Dunedin, the number of outlets in our scenario dropped from around 80 to just 3.

Read more:
New Zealand is introducing law to create a smokefree generation. Here are 6 reasons to support this policy

Impacts on daily life, wellbeing and equity

Although many expected to be able to purchase tobacco during regular shopping trips, people who did not live near a designated retailer felt the changes would disrupt their lives. They raised concerns about fuel costs, travel difficulties and risk of increased judgement.

While some expected to budget more carefully in response to the changes, others anticipated purchasing tobacco in bulk (buying a week’s supply at once) in the short term, if they could afford it. Some worried that having extra tobacco on hand could increase smoking.

As discussions evolved, many participants thought they would reduce their smoking, or quit, as access became less convenient. They anticipated better health and felt becoming smokefree would foster their physical and mental wellbeing. As one explained:

It would be a really good way for me to cut down. I’m over it … Why do I put something into my body that’s harming me? Self-harm, isn’t it?

Nonetheless, others were adamant their smoking would not change, either because they thought addiction ruled this out or because they resisted change imposed by others.

Most thought the measure would help people planning to quit and those who had recently given up smoking, as it would make tobacco less ubiquitous. They also expected reduced availability to prevent youth uptake, an outcome they strongly supported.

Participants anticipated youth would experience a “healthier, better world” where tobacco no longer threatened their wellbeing, independence and resilience.

Yet many remained concerned about people who had smoked longer-term and felt they would struggle to quit and could perhaps sacrifice necessities (food and power) to continue smoking. One said:

The younger generation … target them, that’s great, but people who have been smoking their entire lives … I think it’s extremely unfair for them.

A large majority believed the changes would burden people experiencing material hardship and mental ill health. They thought these people would experience reduced physical, mental and whānau wellbeing. Participants strongly endorsed greater community-level support, which they thought could help people managing difficult life circumstances.

Read more:
Forget tobacco industry arguments about choice. Here’s what young people think about NZ’s smokefree generation policy

Taking a wider approach

Participants’ contributions illustrate the complex and contradictory responses smokefree policies elicit. While they supported quitting (many participants hoped to eventually become smokefree) and preventing youth uptake, their concerns illustrate another, less comfortable perspective which sees the new measures as a potential threat to those who are vulnerable and addicted.

Our findings highlight the importance of community mobilisation, enhanced cessation support and strong Māori leadership, as signalled in the Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action Plan.

In particular, the responses highlight the need for approaches that go beyond biomedical, health-focused thinking. Addressing the concerns raised in our research could assuage our participants’ worries and minimise maladaptive responses – but only if the approaches used are comprehensive and culturally meaningful.

Anna DeMello 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. NZ’s smokefree law will reduce the number of tobacco retailers – here’s what people who smoke think of that – https://theconversation.com/nzs-smokefree-law-will-reduce-the-number-of-tobacco-retailers-heres-what-people-who-smoke-think-of-that-200436

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Greening, Professor, Microbiology, Monash University

It may sound surprising, but when times are tough and there is no other food available, some soil bacteria can consume traces of hydrogen in the air as an energy source.

In fact, bacteria remove a staggering 70 million tonnes of hydrogen yearly from the atmosphere, a process that literally shapes the composition of the air we breathe.

We have isolated an enzyme that enables some bacteria to consume hydrogen and extract energy from it, and found it can produce an electric current directly when exposed to even minute amounts of hydrogen.

As we report in a new paper in Nature, the enzyme may have considerable potential to power small, sustainable air-powered devices in future.

Bacterial genes contain the secret for turning air into electricity

Prompted by this discovery, we analysed the genetic code of a soil bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis, which consumes hydrogen from air.

Written into these genes is the blueprint for producing the molecular machine responsible for consuming hydrogen and converting it into energy for the bacterium. This machine is an enzyme called a “hydrogenase”, and we named it Huc for short.

Hydrogen is the simplest molecule, made of two positively charged protons held together by a bond formed by two negatively charged electrons. Huc breaks this bond, the protons part ways, and the electrons are released.

In the bacteria, these free electrons then flow into a complex circuit called the “electron transport chain”, and are harnessed to provide the cell with energy.

Flowing electrons are what electricity is made of, meaning Huc directly converts hydrogen into electrical current.

Hydrogen represents only 0.00005% of the atmosphere. Consuming this gas at these low concentrations is a formidable challenge, which no known catalyst can achieve. Furthermore, oxygen, which is abundant in the atmosphere, poisons the activity of most hydrogen-consuming catalysts.

Isolating the enzyme that allows bacteria to live on air

We wanted to know how Huc overcomes these challenges, so we set out to isolate it from M. smegmatis cells.

The process for doing this was complicated. We first modified the genes in M. smegmatis that allow the bacteria to make this enzyme. In doing this we added a specific chemical sequence to Huc, which allowed us to isolate it from M. smegmatis cells.

Read more:
Antarctic bacteria live on air and make their own water using hydrogen as fuel

Getting a good look at Huc wasn’t easy. It took several years and quite a few experimental dead ends before we finally isolated a high-quality sample of the ingenious enzyme.

However, the hard work was worth it, as the Huc we eventually produced is very stable. It withstands temperatures from 80℃ down to –80℃ without activity loss.

The molecular blueprint for extracting hydrogen from air

With Huc isolated, we set about studying it in earnest, to discover what exactly the enzyme is capable of. How can it turn the hydrogen in the air into a sustainable source of electricity?

Remarkably, we found that even when isolated from the bacteria, Huc can consume hydrogen at concentrations far lower even than the tiny traces in the air. In fact, Huc still consumed whiffs of hydrogen too faint to be detected by our gas chromatograph, a highly sensitive instrument we use to measure gas concentrations.

We also found Huc is entirely uninhibited by oxygen, a property not seen in other hydrogen-consuming catalysts.

To assess its ability to convert hydrogen to electricity, we used a technique called electrochemistry. This showed Huc can convert minute concentrations of hydrogen in air directly into electricity, which can power an electrical circuit. This is a remarkable and unprecedented achievement for a hydrogen-consuming catalyst.

We used several cutting-edge methods to study how Huc does this at the molecular level. These included advanced microscopy (cryogenic electron microscopy) and spectroscopy to determine its atomic structure and electrical pathways, pushing boundaries to produce the most highly resolved enzyme structure yet reported by this method.

Enzymes could use air to power the devices of tomorrow

It’s early days for this research, and several technical challenges need to be overcome to realise the potential of Huc.

For one thing, we will need to significantly increase the scale of Huc production. In the lab we produce Huc in milligram quantities, but we want to scale this up to grams and ultimately kilograms.

However, our work demonstrates that Huc functions like a “natural battery” producing a sustained electrical current from air or added hydrogen.

As a result, Huc has considerable potential in developing small, sustainable air-powered devices as an alternative to solar power.

The amount of energy provided by hydrogen in the air would be small, but likely sufficient to power a biometric monitor, clock, LED globe or simple computer. With more hydrogen, Huc produces more electricity and could potentially power larger devices.

Another application would be the development of Huc-based bioelectric sensors for detecting hydrogen, which could be incredibly sensitive. Huc could be invaluable for detecting leaks in the infrastructure of our burgeoning hydrogen economy or in a medical setting.

In short, this research shows how a fundamental discovery about how bacteria in soils feed themselves can lead to a reimagining of the chemistry of life. Ultimately it may also lead to the development of technologies for the future.

Chris Greening receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health & Medical Research Council, Human Frontiers Science Program, and Australian Antarctic Division.

Ashleigh Kropp receives funding from the Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship from the Australian Government.

Rhys Grinter receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), and the National Health the Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

– ref. Electricity from thin air: an enzyme from bacteria can extract energy from hydrogen in the atmosphere – https://theconversation.com/electricity-from-thin-air-an-enzyme-from-bacteria-can-extract-energy-from-hydrogen-in-the-atmosphere-200432

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick F Walsh, Professor Intelligence and Security Studies, Charles Sturt University

A recent Wall Street Journal article reported on new, classified intelligence from the US Department of Energy about the origins of COVID. It concluded with “low confidence” that the pandemic may have been due to a lab leak in Wuhan, China, rather than a natural disease transmission from animal to human.

The report is the latest chapter in a long saga about the origins of the pandemic, involving conflicting assessments from intelligence, policy and scientific communities around the globe.

The debate over the origins of COVID began early in the pandemic, with a lot of pressure being placed on the intelligence community by then-US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to lay blame on the Chinese government.

In May 2021, the Biden administration tried to resolve some of the conflicting intelligence and data points about the origins of COVID by tasking the US intelligence community to do a 90-day review on the available information.

An unclassified version of this review was then released in October 2021. It was published by the peak body within the US intelligence community – the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The report shows a consensus among eight US intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council (which provides longer-term strategic analysis for the president) that COVID was not a bioterrorism incident.

However, there was disagreement among the agencies around the two most probable origins of COVID:

• it was the result of animal-to-human transmission

• it was the result of an accidental laboratory leak, likely from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

No agency was named in the unclassified report, though four agencies, as well as the National Intelligence Council, have reportedly concluded (also with low confidence) that the origins were from natural transmission. Two others (the FBI and Department of Energy) have now assessed it as a lab leak. Two agencies remain undecided, including, reportedly, the CIA.

Why is intelligence conflicting?

This lack of consensus among intelligence agencies and low levels of confidence on their assessments are due to many factors.

The variations in analytical judgements are mostly due to how each agency interprets what are, at best, fragmented intelligence sources. There’s also the question of how intelligence analysts comprehend complicated scientific research.

Several scientific studies that examined environmental testing for COVID at the live animal and seafood market in Wuhan and early patient cases living nearby have provided strong evidence of a natural transmission of the virus. That is, the scientific evidence leads to the market as the probable epicentre of the epidemic.

Read more:
The COVID lab leak theory is dead. Here’s how we know the virus came from a Wuhan market

Yet, the scientific and epidemiological data itself is also incomplete. In particular, analysts haven’t identified which animal the virus likely “jumped from” to infect humans. More genetic data and a better understanding of how coronaviruses are transmitted naturally are required to fill the information gaps, notably in the initial cases in Wuhan.

According to US officials, Beijing has not been willing to provide full access to data requests from Western governments – or to the World Health Organization.

What needs to change before the next pandemic

The Department of Energy report highlights an even greater issue that has received less attention. The US intelligence community and its other “Five Eyes” partners (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand) must improve their intelligence collection methods and analysis of health security threats and dangers, including from potential pandemics.

Four things will help improve the capabilities of the intelligence community and hopefully bring greater confidence in their assessments of the causes of future health emergencies and pandemics.

1. Better health intelligence collection and analysis

As pandemics become more frequent, our intelligence agencies need better risk, threat and hazard assessment methodologies to drive more robust, evidence-based collection and analysis of intelligence.

This means improving ways to combine traditional intelligence sources (often qualitative in nature) with scientific evidence to better assess the potential intent, capability and impact of threats and health hazards.

2. Fostering stronger ties with the scientific community

The intricacy of future pandemic threats and possible weaponisation of biotechnology will require intelligence agencies to foster a more purposeful and consistent interaction with the scientific community.

The US intelligence community has a track record here, but it and other Five Eyes countries will require even more strategic, coordinated outreach from the relatively closed intelligence world to the scientific community.

Greater workforce expertise in microbiology, genetics, virology and public health is also required within the intelligence community.

3. Creating a robust national health security strategy

Each agency cannot feasibly develop the capabilities to improve its intelligence collection and analysis on its own. A whole-of-government approach is required to iron out each agency’s roles, functions and mandates for future health security risks.

We advocate for a national health security strategy, much like the national cybersecurity strategies in each Five Eyes country, to improve governance and coordination across intelligence agencies in the health security space.

4. Conducting a 9/11 commission-style review

Lastly, to develop stronger post-COVID national health security measures, we need full independent reviews of how the intelligence community and key public health agencies worked throughout the pandemic in the US and its allies.

Such reviews could include what was done well and lessons to be learned that can be fed into national health security strategies.

Ideally, a review would also examine any evidence of politicising intelligence. Politics have always influenced intelligence gathering and analysis, not just during COVID.

For example, the assessment of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 shows how politics can negatively affect the ability of intelligence agencies to provide independent, non-biased advice to policy makers.

Recent calls for the equivalent of a 9/11 commission into COVID so far have not gone anywhere in Washington. It is not too late for such a review to take place. But realistically, given the fractured political climate in the US, the possibility of establishing an independent commission seems more difficult than in the other Five Eyes countries.

What this means is that we’re missing an opportunity to improve our intelligence agencies, which is acutely needed before the next global pandemic event.

Read more:
It’s getting harder for scientists to collaborate across borders – that’s bad when the world faces global problems like pandemics and climate change

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. Disputes over COVID’s origins reveal an intelligence community in disarray. Here are 4 fixes we need before the next pandemic – https://theconversation.com/disputes-over-covids-origins-reveal-an-intelligence-community-in-disarray-here-are-4-fixes-we-need-before-the-next-pandemic-201166

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sora Park, Professor of Communication, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra

Australian media have been widely criticised for not representing the diversity of the community they speak to and write for – nor, importantly, the people they report on. Our latest research shows that while the news industry is beginning to address its lack of diversity, there is still much work to be done.

Findings are showcased in the Valuing Diversity in News and Newsrooms report, released today. The analysis is based on a national online survey of 2,266 Australians and 196 journalists, combined with in-depth interviews with 27 journalists about their views on diversity in the news and in newsrooms.

Australia is a multicultural country. Half (48%) the population has at least one parent born overseas. Almost one-third (28%) were themselves born overseas. One in four lives in a non-English-speaking household.

However, the report shows only 39% of Australians believe everyone is treated equally, regardless of their ethnic or cultural background.

A key reason respondents may feel this is a sense of not being seen or heard in the news. Feeling equally valued and heard is an essential ingredient of social cohesion.

However, when asked about fairness and amount of coverage, less than half (46%) say the news covers culturally diverse people fairly. Only 44% say there is enough coverage of issues relevant to them, while 41% say the news is impartial and unbiased when reporting on these groups. These figures drop significantly among audiences from non-European, non-Anglo or Indigenous backgrounds.

Most Australians consider the news media to be doing a good job of covering the most important stories of the day (76%) and reporting stories accurately (70%). However, only around half say that news organisations are doing a good job of giving voice to the underrepresented (54%), with 38% saying they are doing a bad job at this.

Journalists are generally critical of the state of diversity in the industry. Only 30% of journalists say there is enough ethnic or cultural diversity in their news organisation. Around one in ten say they have experienced discrimination based on their ethnic or cultural background, and 47% of women journalists say they have experienced discrimination because of their gender. Only around half say their news organisation is doing a good job of producing news content for ethnically diverse audiences.

Why are we not seeing diversity in the news? Some of the answers can be found in the structure, practices and cultures of news organisations.

First, there are simply too few people from different cultural backgrounds in newsrooms across Australia.

According to Census 2021, only about 9% of journalists are from a non-Anglo or non-European background. A study that analysed 103 news programs over two weeks in June 2022 found 78% of presenters, commentators and reporters had an Anglo-Celtic background.

Second, competing news values often push diversity down the priority list.

Most journalists we interviewed agreed inclusive reporting is good journalism. In the survey, we asked journalists which area of newsroom diversity they would like to prioritise: “ethnic and cultural diversity” was ranked the top.

However, when they are on the job and making reporting decisions, understandably they prioritise relevance to their audience (91%) first. Compared to other news values such as exclusivity (47%), capturing attention (42%) or surprise and novelty (38%), only 29% say it is very or extremely important that news includes voices from multicultural communities.

Third, the “glass ceiling and sticky floor” phenomenon is persistent. We found people from ethnically or culturally diverse backgrounds seeking a career in journalism continue to face discrimination.

Overall, 43% of journalists agree there are barriers to getting a job in their organisation because of ethnic or cultural background. And the majority (69%) of journalists from non-Anglo/non-European backgrounds say they have experienced barriers to career progression because of their ethnic or cultural background.

More than two-thirds “somewhat” or “strongly agree” their organisation’s junior level is doing a good job with employee diversity (67%). In stark contrast, only 23% “somewhat” or “strongly agree” that senior levels at their organisation are doing well with employee diversity.

Fourth, there is not enough training and support from the organisation.

Over half (52%) of journalists say their news organisation has policies relating to language use about ethnically diverse communities. About half (49%) also say their organisation collects or monitors staff diversity. However, only 39% received training on how to cover issues of diversity in the past year.

The journalists we interviewed cautioned against inclusion as a “box-ticking” exercise, and labelling people from diverse backgrounds. A journalist from an Asian background talked about an inclusivity workshop where participants were all non-white, emphasising the importance of making sure journalists from all cultural backgrounds receive adequate training.

News organisations have made significant efforts to improve newsroom diversity in recent years. Despite this, we still have a long way to go in shifting the culture, removing unconscious bias and making space for journalists from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Trust and engagement with the news media are directly related to audiences’ perceptions of adequate and fair representation. So for news organisations seeking to regain audience trust, it is vital to have journalists from diverse cultural backgrounds telling stories from their experience.

Sora Park receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Google News Initiative, Australian Community Media and Australia Council for the Arts.

Jee Young Lee receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Google News Initiative, Australian Community Media and Australia Council for the Arts.

Kieran McGuinness has received funding from Google News Initiative and the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

– ref. Australia’s media improve on diversity – but there’s still a long way to go – https://theconversation.com/australias-media-improve-on-diversity-but-theres-still-a-long-way-to-go-200452

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Malouff, Associate Professor, School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England

You have made a momentous decision: you will seek psychological treatment for your depression, anxiety, substance abuse, or other mental health issue.

Your mind then may turn to the question of what type of treatment would best suit you. To even ask this sophisticated question, you need to realise there are various types of psychological treatment. To make a wise choice, you must understand what each type of therapy provides.

Let’s look at several types of psychotherapy (also known as talking therapy) that have the potential to help with almost any mental health problem.

Read more:
Think therapy is navel-gazing? Think again

1. Cognitive behaviour therapy

Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) is a common type of therapy where the therapist explores the thoughts and behaviours that relate to your therapy goal.

Let’s suppose you have been feeling depressed for months. Relevant thoughts might be that no one likes you and that you are worthless. Relevant behaviours might include staying in your home and avoiding contact with others.

The therapist would likely help you challenge the accuracy and usefulness of those thoughts and find replacement thoughts. The therapist might encourage you to do more for fun and to interact more with others.

Read more:
Explainer: what is cognitive behaviour therapy?

2. Acceptance and commitment therapy

In acceptance and commitment therapy, you would instead be asked to accept your negative thoughts as yours (regardless of whether they are accurate) and also accept your negative emotions.

The therapist would encourage you to look at your thoughts and emotions as separate from you so you can examine them more objectively. Acceptance might reduce your negative feelings about yourself.

The therapist would explore your values and encourage you to commit to acting according to them. If you value kindness, for instance, the therapist might encourage you to show kindness to others.

3. Psychodynamic therapy

A psychodynamic therapist would help you explore your childhood, searching for traumas and difficulties with your parents.

If you felt unloved by your parents as a child, you would consider whether your parents provide a fair representation of the entire world.

You might consider to what extent you deserve love now as an adult. You might also gain insight into how your early experiences colour your current expectations, and affect your emotions and behaviour.

You might find yourself transferring to the therapist your feelings toward your parents and then realise that others are not your parents and you are no longer an unloved child.

4. Narrative therapy

In narrative therapy, you would explore the stories of your life, particularly the stories that seem to persist.

If you were an outsider in school, reluctant to join in social activities, you may think of yourself as a loner. As an adult, even though you engage fully and successfully in social interactions at work, you may continue to think of yourself as a loner.

In other words, the story you tell yourself remains unchanged despite your social success at work, and you feel depressed about being alone.

In becoming aware of the story of your life, you create distance from the story and you may find ways to change the story (the narrative). In essence, you rewrite the story in a realistic way to develop toward being the person you want to be.

Read more:
Psychologists are starting to talk publicly about their own mental illnesses – and patients can benefit

5. Person-centred therapy

In person-centered therapy, sometimes called supportive counselling, the therapist would listen attentively, try hard to understand life as you experience it and try to understand and even feel your emotions.

The therapist would show caring and an interest in helping you, in the expectation that you can find your own way to overcome feeling depressed.

A mix of styles to suit you

You can ask potential therapists what type of therapy they provide. Many will say they are eclectic, meaning they try to choose methods to suit each client and specific problem. They may combine methods of different therapy types.

They may also use popular methods such as mindfulness training that do not fit any specific therapy type. Mindfulness training involves focusing on your breathing and being aware of the here and now.

You can request an eclectic therapist to provide a certain type of therapy or certain therapy methods. Once the therapist gets to know you, you can discuss your preferences and decide on the therapy methods to use.

Read more:
Meditation and mindfulness offer an abundance of health benefits and may be as effective as medication for treating certain conditions

How can you decide which one?

You might wonder which type of therapy usually works best. The answer is unclear. Much depends on the specific client, the problem and the therapist.

Most types of therapy work moderately well for treating people with depression. Psychotherapy also appears to be reasonably effective for other types of psychological problems.

CBT has the strongest evidence for treating a broad range of psychological problems (including post-traumatic stress disorder). However, CBT has the most evidence in part because it is heavily studied (for example to treat specific phobias).

Acceptance and commitment therapy is also backed by substantial evidence, as is psychodynamic therapy.

The effects of narrative therapy and person-centred therapy have not been studied so much.

Some people, including those with depression or psychosis, can benefit by receiving psychotherapy and taking medication prescribed by a GP or psychiatrist.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

John Malouff 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. I think I need therapy. Here are 5 types of psychotherapy to help with almost any mental health problem – https://theconversation.com/i-think-i-need-therapy-here-are-5-types-of-psychotherapy-to-help-with-almost-any-mental-health-problem-199197

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Rae, Honorary Professorial Fellow, School of Chemistry, The University of Melbourne

Can bushfire smoke reduce the concentration of ozone in the stratosphere? A decade ago, we might have been sceptical. But there’s a growing body of research showing a clear link.

Last year, MIT expert Susan Solomon and colleagues published a groundbreaking study showing the 900,000 tonnes of bushfire smoke and particles emitted during Australia’s 2019–20 Black Summer did, in fact, thin out the ozone umbrella that protects us.

Ozone floats around 20–25 kilometres above our heads, acting like airborne sunscreen. Its concentration is tiny – up to 15 parts per million – but it is highly effective at blocking damaging ultraviolet-B rays from the sun. Without this layer, many plants would die, while humans and other animals would be afflicted with skin cancers.

The Black Summer fires burned so much forest and scrub across the country they produced massive pyrocumulus clouds. The fires were making their own weather, sending plumes of smoke into the higher reaches of our atmosphere, where smoke particles interacted with ozone. That single Australian summer of fire took out 1% of the atmosphere’s ozone – damage that will take a decade to fix.

Now, Solomon’s researchers have found out how smoke actually does it. In their new research, they detail the chemistry involved. This research is important, as we enter what’s been dubbed the Pyrocene – the age of fire – with bushfires already growing in size and intensity as the world heats up.

So how does smoke break ozone?

Australians became all too familiar with the sight and smell of bushfire smoke over the Black Summer. But what’s in it?

Particles in bushfire smoke are carbonaceous, consisting of burnt and partly burnt vegetable material alongside sulfates – compounds which can be pumped into the atmosphere by volcanoes, fossil fuel burning, or bushfires.

The problem is, these carbonaceous particles bind well to substances like hydrogen chloride which comes from the chemical compounds found in living plants. Other compounds with chlorine are also involved in the smoke, such as the reactive chlorine nitrate and hypochlorous acid.

Read more:
Bushfire smoke is everywhere in our cities. Here’s exactly what you are inhaling

The tiny smoke particles act as transport, carrying these substances containing chlorine up higher and higher to the stratosphere. Once there, chlorine sets about destroying ozone, molecule by molecule. Each chlorine atom can take apart hundreds of ozone molecules, meaning a small amount can have a disproportionate impact.

To find this out, Solomon and her colleagues relied heavily on models of the atmospheric chemistry. Their results agreed well with experimental observations made by satellite. So, although the chemical interactions have not been fully shown, the overall picture is probably correct.

You might remember it was chlorine atoms at the heart of our fears about the hole in the ozone layer. Almost 50 years ago, scientists discovered our protective ozone layer was thinning – and connected it to the chlorine-dense chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in spray cans and refrigerators.

The area of greatest loss was dubbed the “ozone hole”, which still appears over Antarctica each year in spring in smaller form.

The way we responded to the loss of stratospheric ozone is remarkable, in retrospect. In 1987, nations agreed to the Montreal Protocol, banning CFC manufacture and use. It worked, and concentrations of ozone are now recovering by around 1% a year. That figure is about what was lost during the Black Summer.

What does this mean for the future?

It means the ozone layer will be slowly degraded by wildfire smoke. Fires burn in both northern and southern hemispheres, and their smoke is swept around the globe by natural processes. That means we’re likely to see falling ozone concentrations in new places rather than just around the South Pole. Affected areas would include the mid-latitudes around the equator, where billions of people live.

Ozone does replenish itself. It’s continuously formed and destroyed in the stratosphere. The net balance of these competing processes has – until now – been a steady but small concentration of ozone. This layer makes life possible by absorbing the worst of the ultraviolet light pouring down from the sun and giving us a measure of protection from skin-damaging radiation.

A hotter world is one with more fire in it, affecting areas like Siberian tundra, Californian mountains and Kenyan grasslands.

This research is yet another warning about the perils of unmitigated climate change. Bushfire smoke could undo the good work of the Montreal Protocol.

In retrospect, achieving this protocol seems relatively straightforward: ban one class of chemicals. To stop bushfire smoke eating away at our ozone umbrella means reversing climate change. And that is something we are struggling to do.

Read more:
Repairing ozone layer is also reducing CO₂ in the atmosphere – new study

Ian Rae was for 15 years a member of technical advisory groups to the Montreal Protocol

– ref. Bushfire smoke eats up the ozone protecting us from dangerous radiation. The damage will increase as the world heats up – https://theconversation.com/bushfire-smoke-eats-up-the-ozone-protecting-us-from-dangerous-radiation-the-damage-will-increase-as-the-world-heats-up-201375

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gavin R. Slemp, Associate Professor, Centre for Wellbeing Science, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne

About three quarters of Australian teachers experience substantial stress in a typical work week, according to a 2021 survey. Another 2019 Australian study showed more than half suffer from anxiety, and about one in five meet the criteria for moderate to severe depression.

It’s not surprising, then, that increasing numbers of teachers are leaving the profession. Meanwhile, enrolments for education degrees have been declining.

Teachers in Australia and around the world are under-resourced and burning out, reinforcing the urgent need for policy initiatives to improve their working conditions. But can anything else be done?

Our research shows one way teachers may be able to take more control over their wellbeing at work is by “job crafting”.

Read more:
Australia has a plan to fix its school teacher shortage. Will it work?

What is job crafting?

Job crafting is about making noticeable changes to your job to make it more engaging and meaningful. These are changes you make yourself of your own initiative and they can be small or large. The idea is employees “craft” their jobs so it more closely aligns with what they value and how they perceive themselves.

Job crafting emerged in management research in 2001, and has since been studied in a range of occupations. There are at least three different ways employees can craft their work:

• Task crafting is about changing the number, scope, sequence, or types of tasks in a job

• Relational crafting is about making changes to how you relate to people at work

• Cognitive crafting refers to changing how you interpret or think about your work.

Studies show job crafting is associated with employee wellbeing, engagement and performance. Studies also show when employees are trained to use job crafting strategies, they show increased performance and work engagement.

Read more:
Australian teachers are dissatisfied with their jobs but their sense of professional belonging is strong

Our research

In 2022, we conducted 46 in-depth interviews with teachers across all levels in Australia about how they used job crafting. Teachers told us they used job crafting in multiple ways, including by modifying the tasks they did with students and by involving other teachers in their classes.

One primary school teacher spoke about how he combined his hobby of playing cards with his maths lessons.

I bring a lot of those card games into class with the kids and we find the maths in the games […] I think they can definitely sense my passion for the games and that makes them more excited. I’ve had quite a few parents say, ‘My child now loves maths because of the way you play the games,’ which is really nice.

Another primary school teacher spoke of how they emphasised their love of reading in their teaching – and sought out new ways to read with their students through collaborating with other teachers.

Just because I love reading books, after lunch we might read a book, or go to another [teacher’s] class and read a book with their kids, and [that teacher] will come to mine. It means I get to meet new kids and they’ve got someone different in front of them, and my kids also have someone different in front of them.

A secondary teacher gave us another example of how they work with colleagues during the day, to change classroom dynamics:

I love saying to the other teachers, ‘Hey, do you want to drop into my class because I think you’ll like it’ or ‘This kid misses you, he hasn’t seen you in ages, do you want to come swing by?’ It’s so nice to have other adults in the room […] And [for] teachers that you have really good relationships with, you can then model what a healthy relationship looks like to the kids.

‘Helping human beings’

Other teachers spoke of how they used cognitive crafting by expanding their ideas of what they consider to be the role of a teacher. As one primary teacher noted:

I see myself as helping human beings grow rather than teaching academic knowledge.

A secondary teacher also talked of the importance of thinking beyond the daily “grind” of their job:

I think teachers can, especially when they’ve been teaching for a while, kind of get into a bit of a grind. And it’s just they see teaching as delivering content. But I don’t see it that way. To me, teaching is all about building relationships with my students and using the content as a vehicle to build those relationships and to hopefully get them to where they need to be in later life.

Cognitive strategies such as this are key to connecting the job to a larger purpose. This gives work more meaning, which is essential for employee wellbeing.

What helps job crafting?

Our interviewees also spoke of the things that helped and hindered their job crafting.

They told us having too many time pressures and administrative burdens made it difficult to try new approaches. They also said a lack of time, rigid systems, and a lack of autonomy within their schools made it difficult to be creative. One secondary teacher noted:

If you’ve been teaching for a while, or even if you’re a grad teacher, you spend a lot of time, you know, just surviving. Then to have the energy to think about changing things, even if it is for the better, it’s difficult.

Teachers said they needed time to reflect on their work. They also said they needed school leaders to support their ideas, so they felt safe and free to take risks, which research shows is important for job crafting.

One primary teacher noted how many teachers are fearful of being judged at work.

We preach mistakes being okay and risk-taking with our kids, but we don’t really with our staff. We like our staff to be neat and ordered and to tick the right boxes […]. So I think that whole idea of taking risks and challenging educational philosophies would allow people to be more curious in that space.

Job crafting works, but we need to do more

Our research shows teachers are using job crafting to make their jobs more manageable, more enjoyable and more effective.

They also told us the overall school environment can either support these different approaches – or make it too difficult to try.

While job crafting has significant potential to help teachers in stressful jobs, it is important to note that improving teacher wellbeing is a shared responsibility. And it is up to schools, government and the broader community to better support the important work teachers do.

Kelsey J. Lewis contributed to the research in this piece.

Gavin R. Slemp has previously participated in a research project that was partially funded by the Victorian Department of Education and Training’s Strengthening Teachers Initiative.

Dianne Vella-Brodrick and Jacqui Francis 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. Our research shows how ‘job crafting’ can help teachers manage and enjoy their stressful work – https://theconversation.com/our-research-shows-how-job-crafting-can-help-teachers-manage-and-enjoy-their-stressful-work-200087