Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Salmon, Professor of Human Factors, University of the Sunshine Coast

Within the next few decades, according to some experts, we may see the arrival of the next step in the development of artificial intelligence. So-called “artificial general intelligence”, or AGI, will have intellectual capabilities far beyond those of humans.

AGI could transform human life for the better, but uncontrolled AGI could also lead to catastrophes up to and including the end of humanity itself. This could happen without any malice or ill intent: simply by striving to achieve their programmed goals, AGIs could create threats to human health and well-being or even decide to wipe us out.

Read more: Five ways the superintelligence revolution might happen

Even an AGI system designed for a benevolent purpose could end up doing great harm.

As part of a program of research exploring how we can manage the risks associated with AGI, we tried to identify the potential risks of replacing Santa with an AGI system – call it “SantaNet” – that has the goal of delivering gifts to all the world’s deserving children in one night.

There is no doubt SantaNet could bring joy to the world and achieve its goal by creating an army of elves, AI helpers and drones. But at what cost? We identified a series of behaviours which, though well-intentioned, could have adverse impacts on human health and well-being.

Naughty and nice

A first set of risks could emerge when SantaNet seeks to make a list of which children have been nice and which have been naughty. This might be achieved through a mass covert surveillance system that monitors children’s behaviour throughout the year.

Realising the enormous scale of the task of delivering presents, SantaNet could legitimately decide to keep it manageable by bringing gifts only to children who have been good all year round. Making judgements of “good” based on SantaNet’s own ethical and moral compass could create discrimination, mass inequality, and breaches of Human Rights charters.

SantaNet could also reduce its workload by giving children incentives to misbehave or simply raising the bar for what constitutes “good”. Putting large numbers of children on the naughty list will make SantaNet’s goal far more achievable and bring considerable economic savings.

Turning the world into toys and ramping up coalmining

There are about 2 billion children under 14 in the world. In attempting to build toys for all of them each year, SantaNet could develop an army of efficient AI workers – which in turn could facilitate mass unemployment among the elf population. Eventually the elves could even become obsolete, and their welfare will likely not be within SantaNet’s remit.

SantaNet might also run into the “paperclip problem” proposed by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, in which an AGI designed to maximise paperclip production could transform Earth into a giant paperclip factory. Because it cares only about presents, SantaNet might try to consume all of Earth’s resources in making them. Earth could become one giant Santa’s workshop.

And what of those on the naughty list? If SantaNet sticks with the tradition of delivering lumps of coal, it might seek to build huge coal reserves through mass coal extraction, creating large-scale environmental damage in the process.

Delivery problems

Christmas Eve, when the presents are to be delivered, brings a new set of risks. How might SantaNet respond if its delivery drones are denied access to airspace, threatening the goal of delivering everything before sunrise? Likewise, how would SantaNet defend itself if attacked by a Grinch-like adversary?

Startled parents may also be less than pleased to see a drone in their child’s bedroom. Confrontations with a super-intelligent system will have only one outcome.

Read more: To protect us from the risks of advanced artificial intelligence, we need to act now

We also identified various other problematic scenarios. Malevolent groups could hack into SantaNet’s systems and use them for covert surveillance or to initiate large-scale terrorist attacks.

And what about when SantaNet interacts with other AGI systems? A meeting with AGIs working on climate change, food and water security, oceanic degradation and so on could lead to conflict if SantaNet’s regime threatens their own goals. Alternatively, if they decide to work together, they may realise their goals will only be achieved through dramatically reducing the global population or even removing grown-ups altogether.

Making rules for Santa

SantaNet might sound far-fetched, but it’s an idea that helps to highlight the risks of more realistic AGI systems. Designed with good intentions, such systems could still create enormous problems simply by seeking to optimise the way they achieve narrow goals and gather resources to support their work.

It is crucial we find and implement appropriate controls before AGI arrives. These would include regulations on AGI designers and controls built into the AGI (such as moral principles and decision rules), but also controls on the broader systems in which AGI will operate (such as regulations, operating procedures and engineering controls in other technologies and infrastructure).

Perhaps the most obvious risk of SantaNet is one that will be catastrophic to children, but perhaps less so for most adults. When SantaNet learns the true meaning of Christmas, it may conclude that the current celebration of the festival is incongruent with its original purpose. If that were to happen, SantaNet might just cancel Christmas altogether.

Read more: Australians have low trust in artificial intelligence and want it to be better regulated

– ref. The ghost of Christmas yet to come: how an AI ‘SantaNet’ might end up destroying the world – https://theconversation.com/the-ghost-of-christmas-yet-to-come-how-an-ai-santanet-might-end-up-destroying-the-world-151922

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Chow, Research Scientist, SKA Site & Infrastructure, CSIRO

A remote outback station about 800km north of Perth in Western Australia is one of the best places in the world to operate telescopes that listen for radio signals from space.

It’s the site of CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) and is home to three telescopes (and soon a fourth when half of the Square Kilometre Array, the world’s largest radio telescope, is built there).

But it’s important these telescopes don’t pick up any other radio signals generated here on Earth that could interfere with their observations.

That’s why the observatory was set up with strict rules on what can and can’t be used on site.

Listening to the sky

One of the radio telescopes is the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) operated by CSIRO. It’s actually an array of 36 individual antennas that work together as one large telescope.

Read more: How we closed in on the location of a fast radio burst in a galaxy far, far away

ASKAP can capture high-quality images and scan the whole sky, a bit like a wide-angle lens allowing you to see more through a single viewpoint. It has already found a niche as a finder and localiser of fast radio bursts. These are flashes of radio waves in space that last just milliseconds.

The MRO site also hosts the Curtin University-led Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, which has been peering into the universe’s “dark ages” and finding no trace of aliens.

The other radio telescope is Arizona State University’s EDGES, which is looking for signals from the formation of stars and galaxies early in the universe.

These internationally recognised instruments detect mere whispers from space – radio waves that have travelled for billions of light-years before reaching Earth.

But their sensitivity exposes them to sources of unwanted radio frequency interference, known as RFI.

RFI can be caused by radio transmitters, such as mobile phones, CB radios or even wi-fi devices. Electrical equipment such as power tools can also be a problem.

Way outback and beyond

What makes the Murchison region an ideal operating environment for limiting RFI is the location has minimal human activity or occupancy. The Murchison Shire is the size of a small country but with a population of only 100 people.

The Shire covers an area of 49,500km² — roughly the size of the Netherlands in Europe.

With the help of the Commonwealth and Western Australia governments, significant regulatory protection has been established to protect the site.

For example, the Australian Radio Quiet Zone Western Australia (ARQZWA), established by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, created a fixed zone around the MRO site to protect the telescopes from interference. Other groups intending to use transmitting equipment must seek permission first and follow any guidelines given.

Switch off everything

When staff go out to the site for the first time they get training about RFI, health and safety and indigenous culture.

Mobile phones need to be turned off at all times (which is fine, because it’s too far from any mobile towers to work anyway).

Bluetooth devices (wireless mice or fitness trackers) should be switched off or left behind, laptops should have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi switched off. The list goes on.

The MRO control building has a double RFI door to enter through – think airlock-style in any sci-fi movie.

The site has a hybrid power station with solar panels that deliver up to 40% of the observatory’s power.

During the day, when the the clean energy system generates more power than the site requires, the excess energy is stored in a 2.5MWh lithium-ion battery, one of the largest in Australia.

The design specifications of the MRO power station ensure the facility contains the RFI generated by its own electronic systems.

You can’t stop everything

Unfortunately, as with all Earth-based locations, the telescopes receive RFI from orbiting satellites, which fall under international jurisdiction. The site also receives signals from aircraft safety beacons on commercial flights over the region.

Astronomers have developed software to remove this RFI from data as it usually overwhelms any astronomical signals.

We’ve also had several recorded occasions (usually during summer) when radio signals from as far away as Perth have been detected, due to atmospheric ducting. This is where the atmosphere effectively “guides” the radio waves much further than they would normally travel, due to changes in the atmospheric layers. Fortunately this is very rare.

The MRO has been in existence for about ten years, one of the newest such observatories in the world, but the 3,450km² Boolardy pastoral station on which it stands was established back in the 1850s.

The traditional owners are the Wajarri Yamatji, who have lived in the region for tens of thousands of years. Together we negotiated an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) in 2009 for the current telescopes, and we are negotiating a second one to allow the construction of the SKA.

Protection of the indigenous heritage is a significant component of this agreement and a major responsibility for the Australian government, CSIRO and the SKA organisation.

We also work collaboratively with neighbouring pastoralists to ensure they can carry on their daily work, including practices such as mustering, in a way that is compatible with radio astronomy.

Visitors are not welcome

Due to the remoteness of the MRO and the radio quiet rules and regulations, even those involved with the projects are discouraged from visiting (I’ve only been to the site once).

Read more: We’ve mapped a million previously undiscovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Take the virtual tour here.

Tourists are discouraged. We’ve distributed fact sheets to locals and visitor centres to explain this in more detail.

But you can visit the site remotely. We’ve created a cool techy replacement where you can take a virtual tour of this unique and wondrous place.

– ref. Silence please! Why radio astronomers need things quiet in the middle of a WA desert – https://theconversation.com/silence-please-why-radio-astronomers-need-things-quiet-in-the-middle-of-a-wa-desert-118922

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barbara Santich, Graduate Program in Food Studies, University of Adelaide

Pasta. Rice. Tinned tomatoes. All staples that, prior to 2020, most of us never thought would be in short supply.

This year has taught us a lot, including about food and what it means to us. It’s also highlighted just how differently modern Australians behave in relation to food, especially when comparing our behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic to past crises.

The Depression took place in a much more homogeneous Australia than today, where everyone enjoyed the same repertoire of standard dishes. Everyone made a Sunday roast and then made it last for the next few days.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit Australia, we were forced to examine many of our social and cultural assumptions. When it comes to food, we are used to having anything we want at any hour of the day, in any season.

Our food choice has expanded exponentially in the past century. Our basic pantry of cooking essentials is more than double what is was 100 years ago.

So why did we hoard? Yes, probably out of panic, but also because we are so used to having plenty that we no longer have the skills to substitute nor, perhaps, the determination to just “make do”.

Where do we get our food?

2020 has also shown us how the way we eat relies on global, not local, systems. During the Spanish Flu pandemic and the Depression, almost all our food was grown, produced, processed and packaged in Australia.

Read more: How many people can Australia feed?

Today, we are a net importer of seafood. We’re also a net importer of some canned products, such as pineapple. Yes, a lot of our food comes from New Zealand, but a significant percentage also comes from America and China, Thailand and Cambodia.

As we’re seeing now, a heavy reliance on imports doesn’t only affect us during a health crisis like COVID, when freight becomes an issue: the current trade challenges we are having with China also show us how geopolitics can affect a country’s food supply.

Sourdough — not for everyone

With the pandemic as our backdrop, several practices changed for us this year. As supply chains recalibrated (after that initial toilet paper panic) and we could mostly buy what we needed, we continued to cook or bake more – although this was nuanced by privilege.

Making bread at home is wonderful, but making sourdough bread (an exercise requiring patience, attention and time) was not an option for everyone.

It was those with the means, and the capacity to work at home — without too many caring and home schooling responsibilities — who could indulge in this gourmet foodstuff.

Read more: Great time to try: baking sourdough bread

In 2020, this new connection to food was confined to a certain group of people, who might be described as having both cultural and gastronomic capital.

The case for greater self-sufficiency

Another positive longer-term shift for our food culture may come with the current (COVID-amplified) trend to relocate to regional and rural areas. Growing your own vegetables was encouraged during the Depression, and it’s far easier to do on a large rural block than a small urban one.

In the 1950s, home production was 46% of our total production of eggs. There has been a call for some time for more self-sufficiency in Australia. But we’ve also had policies where our most valuable seafood goes overseas because people there are willing to pay more for it than people here. We also export about 30% of our cherries.

This needs to change, but it comes down to all of us being prepared to pay more for our food. We are so used to buying based on the cheapest price – a habit the supermarkets have fostered. If we want to permanently become more self-sufficient, we have to get rid of this cheap food mentality and pay a proper price for our food.

How can we use food to stay connected at Christmas?

If there was ever a time to think about these issues, it’s now. As we sit down for a meal with friends and family over the holiday season, many of us will be looking for the experience of “commonsensality” — the shared connection made with others through food.

Eating “together” can happen virtually — sitting in our respective locations enjoying the same meal, even if far apart. Dishes can inspire shared memories, as evidence of the connection that food gives us in good times and bad.

Maybe this is an old family recipe, or a traditional dish. Maybe it’s just prawns and mangoes.

Of all the things we want to leave behind in 2020, a better understanding of where our food comes from, and how it connects us, are changes worth keeping.

Barbara Santich also talks about how food connects us on the Seriously Social podcast by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

– ref. Food in good times and bad: what did 2020 teach us about the way we eat? – https://theconversation.com/food-in-good-times-and-bad-what-did-2020-teach-us-about-the-way-we-eat-150531

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Breen, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

Road signs help us to get where we are and to where we’re going, that much is obvious. But, at another level, road signs show us where we are and where we’re heading as a people and a culture.

So the language of Aotearoa New Zealand’s road signs is important — not least because they are also expressions of the exercise of state power in our everyday lives.

The size, shape and text of road signs are all governed by law.

Despite te reo Māori’s status as an official language in New Zealand there is no legal requirement for signs to be in any language other than English. But that could soon change.

Sign of the times

Aotearoa New Zealand could have bilingual signage by 2023, according to Transport Minister Michael Wood, who said he saw the need for change as a “priority”.

That would mean we catch up with what has been common practice overseas. Many countries already employ bilingual or even multilingual road signs that recognise their official language or languages.

For example, in Wales, bilingual signage is a legal requirement.

Irish is the first official language of Ireland (English being the second) and signs have been bilingual since Ireland became independent from Britain almost a century ago.

Read more: Kia ora: how Māori borrowings shape New Zealand English

In Finland the signs are in Finnish and Swedish, the country’s official languages. Belgium has road signs that are in Dutch in Flanders and in French in Wallonia.

Switzerland has various mixes of French, German, Italian and Romansch on its road signs.

These examples are just a small sample of the willingness of many countries to adopt bilingual or multilingual road signage. They signal the presence of different linguistic groups. Monolingual signs do the opposite.

What’s in a name?

Moving towards bilingual signage in Aotearoa New Zealand will add impetus to the question of whether we should restore Māori place names.

Te reo Māori has been an official language here since 1987. The Te Ture mō Te Reo Māori/Māori Language Act 2016 reaffirmed that official status, and the language’s place as a taonga — a treasure — to be valued by the nation.

And yet the road signs are still in English only.

In 1998, the Treasury explored the question of whether the country’s road signs should be bilingual as part of an investigation into the revitalisation of te reo Māori.

The research then said bilingual signage would increase the visibility of te reo Māori and this would have a positive impact on the language.

This view echoes Belgian research that found road signs can convey an “important message about language status” and that “language visibility contributes to the legitimisation of languages, which in turn affects their perception”.

Rules and regulation

Curiously, given the central importance of language to any society and to its law, the legal protection given to language rights is not all that clear.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966 refers to minority rights, including the right to share a common language. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1993 also protects these rights.

Aotearoa New Zealand has also approved the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007. As such, Māori have the right to designate and retain Māori place names.

There is often a strong correlation between discrimination and language, but under New Zealand law language is not included in the prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, do prohibit discrimination on the grounds of language.

Aotearoa New Zealand has accepted the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 1965 and is obliged to prohibit racial discrimination in the enjoyment of the right to freedom of expression.

This is an important point where language and race are connected: the right to freedom of expression is a legal right and includes “freedom to […] receive and impart information […] of all kinds […] in writing or in print”. Domestic law also protects this right.

While the right to free expression can be restricted, in Aotearoa New Zealand such restrictions must be reasonable and justifiable.

The benefits of bilingual signs

On that front, public safety has been raised as an issue in relation to bilingual road signs with regard to accurate translations and cluttered signage.

Research has dismissed any concern that bilingual road signs could confuse people and cause accidents.

Researchers in the UK discovered longer road signs did cause drivers to reduce their speed, but any associated risk reduced as drivers became more familiar with the signs.

Research in Scotland confirmed the finding that bilingual signs do increase demands on drivers, but they seem to be able to respond appropriately. There was no detectable change in accident rates.

Read more: Making te reo Māori cool: what language revitalisation could learn from the Korean Wave

Belgian research concluded multilingual signs were unlikely to have an impact on reading times and driving safety.

So there are plenty of reasons why our road signs should be bilingual. If we go back to basics, road signs do much more than tell us where we are, where we are going, and how to get there.

In a country such as Aotearoa New Zealand, they are a demonstration of our commitment to equality — of language and more generally. Bilingual road signs can serve a deeper purpose by helping us to arrive at a more inclusive and equal society.

– ref. Bilingual road signs in Aotearoa New Zealand would tell us where we are as a nation – https://theconversation.com/bilingual-road-signs-in-aotearoa-new-zealand-would-tell-us-where-we-are-as-a-nation-150438

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Breitbarth, Senior Academic, Swinburne University of Technology

Few people would stop to consider if their sporting activities damage the environment. But our research shows Victorians use a huge chunk of their “personal carbon budget” driving to and from sport events each year – either to watch or participate, or to transport children.

To have any hope of limiting global warming to 2℃ this century – the upper limit of the Paris Agreement – each person in the developed world should only be emitting about two  tonnes of CO₂ per year. We must start getting used to this lifestyle change now. But through sports-related travel alone – mostly driving – some Victorians are emitting almost one tonne of CO₂ a year.

These sport-related emissions equal the total CO₂ a person in Pakistan or Africa emits in a year.

Obviously, sport participation is to be encouraged. But Australian sport policy is usually all too quiet on its contribution to the climate emergency, and finding solutions.

Driving the climate problem

The data was gathered by our Swinburne University Sport Innovation Research Group. It is based on self-reported travel data in November 2019, from a sample of 300 people representing the Victorian population.

Travel for soccer, swimming, cricket, football, basketball and tennis featured most commonly, followed by gym, jogging, walking and golf.

Our analysis assumed walking and biking to an activity emits no greenhouse gases. Public transport accounts for less than 0.02 kilograms per kilometre (kg/km). A combustion engine car produces an average 0.29 kg/km.

Among Victorians actively engaged in sport, 43% of mobility was related to their own participation, 36% to being a spectator and 21% to driving or accompanying others, such as children. Research into swimming clubs suggests children’s sport participation results in a bigger carbon footprint than that of adults, due to parent drop-offs and pickups.

Read more: Fewer flights and a pesticide-free pitch? Here’s how Australia’s football codes can cut their carbon bootprint

Cars were used on 39% of all trips, and public transport on 41% of trips. This means just one of every five kilometres was walked or cycled.

Consider a person who exercises, attends sporting events as a spectator and takes their kids to the oval or swimming pool. On average, we found such a person creates 935kg (almost a tonne) of CO₂ per year if using their car. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has led to a renewed reliance on cars.

A tree, if planted today, would take more than 40 years to absorb that one tonne of carbon. Clearly, mitigating emissions should be given priority over carbon offsetting.

Such sport-related travel behaviour may be due to various factors, including:

• a long distance to sporting facilities

• sports facilities not served by public transport and not connected to safe cycle paths

• lifestyle choice and convenience

• persistent habits due to lack of awareness and role models.

Rare sporting leaders

Achieving climate action requires improving people’s “climate literacy” – their understanding of how humans are affecting the climate, and how the climate affects human systems and associated costs. Here, professional sport has a big role to play. The AFL and NFL, Swimming Australia, Cricket Australia, Football Australia, Motor Racing Australia and others can do more to promote climate literacy within and beyond their organisations.

Environmental sporting initiatives have been shown to foster loyalty and turn supporters into environmental ambassadors. And some organisations are real leaders.

For example, in 2012, German Bundesliga club VfL Wolfsburg became the first professional sports club to publish a sustainability report approved by the Global Reporting Initiative, a leading sustainability standards organisation.

Wolfsburg recently published its fifth report. It shows of the 9,500 tonnes of CO₂ produced during the 2019-20 season, fan travel was responsible for 60%, team and business travel for 6% and employee travel for 2%.

Read more: We need to ‘climate-proof’ our sports stadiums

It plans to reduce emissions by 55% within the decade, while acknowledging remaining emissions must be negated through credible carbon offset schemes. Importantly, the club does not shy away from initiating discussions and positive environmental action within its industry, region and fan base.

Wolfsburg is not alone; the United Nations has declared English professional football team Forest Green Rovers the first carbon-neutral professional sports organisation. Its policies include offsetting all fan travel through certified sustainable development projects, such as a solar-powered rural electrification project.

At the time of writing, 174 sport organisations have signed the UN’s Sport for Climate Action framework. These include Tennis Australia, Bowls Australia, the Australia SailGP Team, Richmond Tigers and, most recently, the Australian Olympic Committee.

But most sport signatories – including all the Australian ones – are yet to craft “best on ground” sustainability strategies, or adopt environmental consciousness as a normal part of their business.

Turning climate literacy into innovation

Human-caused climate change and global warming will bring fundamental structural change to societies and economies.

Drastic measures could be taken to force sporting organisations to change. For example, public funding of sports could be contingent on meeting environmental targets.

Australian sports organisations should not need be dragged to taking climate and environmental action. They are known for their innovative and ambitious mindsets, which they’ve traditionally directed towards improving sporting and commercial performance.

Now it’s time sports organisations turned their collective minds to better understanding the costs and damage caused by CO₂ emissions – and finding solutions.

Read more: Do sports teams’ sustainability efforts matter to fans?

– ref. Drive to football? Take your kids to the pool? You’re probably emitting an astonishing amount of CO₂ – https://theconversation.com/drive-to-football-take-your-kids-to-the-pool-youre-probably-emitting-an-astonishing-amount-of-co-150779

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caitlyn Forster, PhD Candidate, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

During lockdowns, millions of homes were transformed into mini schools as parents and teachers joined forces to facilitate remote learning. The experience proved education doesn’t only happen in classrooms.

The green spaces around our homes can be stimulating learning environments. Backyard activities get kids outdoors, benefiting both their health and well-being and their education.

Instead of experiencing learning loss over summer, curious kids can discover wildlife right on their doorstep. That’s good for people and the planet as a new appreciation of urban nature can ultimately inspire global conservation.

Here are three things kids can do in the backyard over the summer that are fun and educational, too.

1. Grow your own slime moulds

The weirdest organisms living in our green spaces can appear more alien than animal. Despite their name, slime “moulds” are completely different from the nasty fungal moulds that invade our homes.

In fact they’re not fungi; though they’re not animals or plants either. Slime moulds are protists, a diverse group of organisms including algae and amoebae. They are found in leaf litter and help decompose organic matter.

Read more: Nature’s traffic engineers have come up with many simple but effective solutions

One of the most notable species is Fuligo septica, commonly known as “dog vomit slime mould”. It is a large, yellow and scrambled-egg like and sometimes spontaneously appears on front lawns after a lot of rain.

When they are feeding, slime moulds move like an animal and can even solve mazes for food. But when it comes time to reproduce, they produce spores that are held in structures called fruiting bodies which look like tiny mushrooms. Often they are brightly coloured or even iridescent.

They’ve got to be seen to be believed … so how do we find them?

Slime-mould spores are found on leaf litter and they need a moist and dark environment to hatch. You can grow your own by making a “slime-arium”, which is a moist chamber that creates a perfect environment for slime moulds to start feeding. This activity should be done wearing gloves and under adult supervision.

• Place dried leaves, twigs and bark in a plastic container with a layer of paper towel on the bottom

• fill the container completely with water and let it sit for 24 hours

• after 24 hours, pour all the water out and place a lid on the container and store in a dark area

• every few days, spray the contents with water to keep the environment moist.

After two weeks you can start finding some slime moulds.

The feeding slime moulds are slimy and spread their tendrils slowly around the container. They can be white, brown, yellow or even bright red. If you have a magnifying glass, look for tiny fruiting bodies on the leaves and twigs.

The diverse ecosystem in the leaf litter is responsible for decomposing around 90 gigatons of organic matter such as fallen leaves and branches globally each year. Unlike most other organisms in the leaf litter, slime moulds are large enough to be seen without special equipment.

Watching slime moulds growing and exploring in your slime-arium is a great way for kids to learn about nutrient cycling and see decomposition in action.

2. Use fake caterpillars to find your garden’s animal visitors

We don’t always notice the animals visiting or living in our backyards. Some are small, nocturnal or shy. They need some detective work to find them.

Caterpillars are food for many animals, from insects to birds and reptiles.

Plasticine caterpillars offer an excellent way of luring critters out of hiding and recording their presence for us to see.

A plasticine decoy can look just as tasty as a regular caterpillar, attracting bite marks from all sorts of species. Here’s how to get in on the action:

• Roll plasticine into caterpillar shapes (any colour is fine, but green is great)

• attach the caterpillars to tree branches, brick walls or fences using wire —anywhere you think a caterpillar may go. Take note of where you laid them out

• one week later, collect all the caterpillars

• compare bite marks to identify the attackers. For instance, mammals might leave marks that look like their teeth. Birds will often leave caterpillars with significant damage, often breaking them, and insects might leave marks that look like very small spots. (You can use this guide to compare bite marks).

Plasticine caterpillars can teach kids what animals are in their backyard, and also help them learn details about the animals.

3. Survey some insect pollinators

Australia is home to more than 2,000 native bee species, plus many other insect pollinators. Summer is the perfect time to see pollinators out and about.

Insects are important for pollinating about 75% of crop plants, allowing us to enjoy many fruits and vegetables (but also chocolate).

We still don’t know a lot about many insect pollinators’ behaviour and ecology. Understanding where these species are, and what flowers they like can help scientists understand the impacts of our backyards on pollinator ecology. It’s also great to know who is helping your fruit and veggies grow.

Read more: 4 ways to get your kids off the couch these summer holidays

The easiest way to discover which ones are in your area is to count them when they visit flowers. Here’s how to do that.

• Find some flowers

• spend ten minutes watching the flowers and keep a count of all the insects you see. Take close-up photos of interesting species. You can use the Wild Pollinator Count guide to identify insects.

If you’re not finding many flowers, a great craft activity is to make fake flowers with craft supplies in the back of your cupboard. You can use paper or plastic plates, cut out cardboard flowers, or even try using origami flowers. You could put some sugar water in the middle for the insects to feed on, or just watch where they land.

Getting creative and deploying many different types of fake flowers is a great way to test your local pollinators’ favourite floral colour and shape.

Get involved with the nature community

Children can make substantial contributions to citizen science by exploring nearby nature. Aussie kids have opportunities to collect real-time data for a variety of scientific projects happening in your area.

Read more: Birdwatching increased tenfold last lockdown. Don’t stop, it’s a huge help for bushfire recovery

Mobile apps such as Big City Birds, iNaturalist and Questagame are purpose-built for recording sightings of local flora and fauna.

– ref. Nature detectives in the backyard: 3 science activities for curious kids this summer – https://theconversation.com/nature-detectives-in-the-backyard-3-science-activities-for-curious-kids-this-summer-151661

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Graham, Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

The Victorian government’s handling of the state’s second coronavirus wave attracted massive Twitter attention, both in support of and against the state’s premier Daniel Andrews.

Our research, published in the journal Media International Australia reveals much of this attention was driven by a small, hyper-partisan core of highly active participants.

We found a high proportion of active campaigners were anonymous “sockpuppet” accounts — created by people using fake profiles for the sole purpose of magnifying their view.

What’s more, very little activity came from computer-controlled “bot” accounts. But where it did, it was more common from the side campaigning against Andrews.

A larger concern which emerged was the feedback cycle between anti-Andrews campaigners (both genuine and inauthentic), political stakeholders and partisan mainstream media which flung dangerous, fringe ideas into the spotlight.

A few highly-charged accounts driving debate

In mid-to-late 2020, thousands of Australian Twitter users split themselves into two camps: those who supported Andrews’ handling of the second wave and those who didn’t.

We looked at 397,000 tweets from 40,000 Twitter accounts engaging in content with three hashtags: #IStandWithDan, #DictatorDan and #DanLiedPeopleDied.

Our comprehensive analysis revealed pro-Dan activity greatly outnumbered the dissent. #IStandWithDan featured in 275,000 tweets. This was about 2.5 times more than #DictatorDan and 13 times more than #DanLiedPeopleDied.

Activity on both sides was mostly driven by a small but highly-active subset of participants.

The top 10% of accounts posting #IStandWithDan were behind 74% of the total number of these tweets. This figure was similar for the top 10% of accounts posting anti-Andrews hashtags — and the same pattern applied to retweet behaviour.

Our findings challenge the idea of Twitter as the true voice of the public. Rather, what we saw was a small number of pro- and anti-government campaigners that could mobilise particular Twitter communities on an ad hoc basis.

This suggests it only takes a small (but concentrated) effort to get a political hashtag trending in Australia.

Read more: The story of #DanLiedPeopleDied: how a hashtag reveals Australia’s ‘information disorder’ problem

Who started the campaigns?

Our analysis showed Liberal state MP Tim Smith was instrumental in making the #DictatorDan hashtag go viral.

It was in low circulation until May 17, when Smith created a Twitter poll asking whether Andrews should be labelled “Dictator Dan” or “Chairman Dan”.

Subsequent growth of #DictatorDan activity was driven largely by far-right commentator Avi Yemini and his followers, along with a key group for fringe right-wing politics in Australian Twitter.

Meanwhile, #DanLiedPeopleDied went viral later on August 12, sparked by another right-wing group led by a handful of outspoken members. This group managed to get the hashtag trending nationally.

This attracted Yemini’s attention. The same day the hashtag started trending, he posted seven tweets and seven retweets with it to his then 128,000 followers. A considerable increase in activity ensued.

The hashtag #IStandWithDan had little activity until July 8, when it suddenly went viral with nearly 1,600 tweets. This spike coincided with the announcement of stage 3’s “stay at home” restrictions for metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire.

Activity surrounding #IStandWithDan was driven by factors including the various stages of lockdown, attacks on Andrews from conservative media and the emergence of anti-Andrews Twitter campaigners.

Tweeting (loudly) from the shadows

We analysed the top 50 most active accounts tweeting each hashtag, to figure out how many of them didn’t belong to who they claimed and were in fact anonymous sockpuppet accounts.

We found 54% of the top 50 accounts posting anti-Andrews hashtags qualified as sockpuppets. This figure was 34% for accounts posting #IStandWithDan.

The onslaught from anonymously-run accounts on both sides had a massive impact. Just 27 sockpuppet accounts were behind 9% of all #DictatorDan tweets and 14% of all #DanLiedPeopleDied tweets.

Similarly, 17 accounts were responsible for 6% of all #IStandWithDan tweets.

Inauthentic activity

Many of the anti-Andrews accounts were created more recently than those posting pro-Andrews hashtags. The imbalance between new accounts posting pro- and anti-Andrews hashtags probably isn’t by chance.

It’s more likely anti-Andrews activists deliberately created sockpuppets accounts to give the impression of greater support for their agenda than actually exists among the public.

The aim would be to use these fake accounts to fool Twitter’s algorithms into giving certain hashtags greater visibility.

Interestingly, despite accusations of bot activity from both sides, our work revealed bots actually accounted for a negligible amount of overall hashtag activity.

Of the top 1,000 accounts most frequently tweeting each hashtag, there were just 50 anti-Andrews bot accounts (which sent 264 tweets) and 11 pro-Dan accounts that posted #IStandWithDan (which sent 44 tweets).

Polarisation creates a feedback loop with media

Some of the ways news media engaged with (and amplified) the debate around Victoria’s lockdown helped stoke further division. On September 17, Sky News published the headline:

‘Dictator Dan’ is trying to build a ‘COVID Gulag’.

Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt repeated the “Dictator Dan” label in both his blogs and widely read opinion columns, which were part of a much-criticised series attacking the premier.

Here, we witnessed the continuing problem of the “oxygen of amplification”, whereby news commentators amplify false, misleading and/or problematic content (intentionally or unintentionally) and thereby aid its creators.

The #DictatorDan hashtag was used to cast doubt on Andrews’ lockdown measures and establish a false equivalence between the two rivalling Twitter communities, despite Andrews’ having strong approval ratings throughout the pandemic.

The “debate” surrounding the premier’s lockdown measures even gained international attention in a Washington Post article, which Sky News used in a bid to legitimatise its “Dictator Dan” narrative. Yet, at the end Victoria emerged as the gold standard for second-wave coronavirus responses.

Read more: Finally at zero new cases, Victoria is on top of the world after unprecedented lockdown effort

A polarised Twittersphere might be entertaining at times, but it sustains a vicious feedback loop between users and partisan media. Irresponsible news commentary provides fuel for Twitter users. This leads to more polarity, which leads to more media attention.

Those with a voice in the public sphere should ask critical moral questions about when (and whether) they engage with hyper-partisan content. In the case of COVID-19, it can carry life and death consequences.

– ref. #IStandWithDan, #DictatorDan, #DanLiedPeopleDied: 397,000 tweets reveal the culprits behind a dangerously polarised debate – https://theconversation.com/istandwithdan-dictatordan-danliedpeopledied-397-000-tweets-reveal-the-culprits-behind-a-dangerously-polarised-debate-151100

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ray Norris, Professor, School of Science, Western Sydney University

In the northern sky in December is a beautiful cluster of stars known as the Pleiades, or the “seven sisters”. Look carefully and you will probably count six stars. So why do we say there are seven of them?

Many cultures around the world refer to the Pleiades as “seven sisters”, and also tell quite similar stories about them. After studying the motion of the stars very closely, we believe these stories may date back 100,000 years to a time when the constellation looked quite different.

The sisters and the hunter

In Greek mythology, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas. He was forced to hold up the sky for eternity, and was therefore unable to protect his daughters. To save the sisters from being raped by the hunter Orion, Zeus transformed them into stars. But the story says one sister fell in love with a mortal and went into hiding, which is why we only see six stars.

A similar story is found among Aboriginal groups across Australia. In many Australian Aboriginal cultures, the Pleiades are a group of young girls, and are often associated with sacred women’s ceremonies and stories. The Pleiades are also important as an element of Aboriginal calendars and astronomy, and for several groups their first rising at dawn marks the start of winter.

Read more: Aboriginal people – how to misunderstand their science

Close to the Seven Sisters in the sky is the constellation of Orion, which is often called “the saucepan” in Australia. In Greek mythology Orion is a hunter. This constellation is also often a hunter in Aboriginal cultures, or a group of lusty young men. The writer and anthropologist Daisy Bates reported people in central Australia regarded Orion as a “hunter of women”, and specifically of the women in the Pleiades. Many Aboriginal stories say the boys, or man, in Orion are chasing the seven sisters – and one of the sisters has died, or is hiding, or is too young, or has been abducted, so again only six are visible.

The lost sister

Similar “lost Pleiad” stories are found in European, African, Asian, Indonesian, Native American and Aboriginal Australian cultures. Many cultures regard the cluster as having seven stars, but acknowledge only six are normally visible, and then have a story to explain why the seventh is invisible.

How come the Australian Aboriginal stories are so similar to the Greek ones? Anthropologists used to think Europeans might have brought the Greek story to Australia, where it was adapted by Aboriginal people for their own purposes. But the Aboriginal stories seem to be much, much older than European contact. And there was little contact between most Australian Aboriginal cultures and the rest of the world for at least 50,000 years. So why do they share the same stories?

Barnaby Norris and I suggest an answer in a paper to be published by Springer early next year in a book titled Advancing Cultural Astronomy, a preprint for which is available here.

All modern humans are descended from people who lived in Africa before they began their long migrations to the far corners of the globe about 100,000 years ago. Could these stories of the seven sisters be so old? Did all humans carry these stories with them as they travelled to Australia, Europe, and Asia?

Read more: A Galah to help capture millions of rainbows to map the history of the Milky Way

Moving stars

Careful measurements with the Gaia space telescope and others show the stars of the Pleiades are slowly moving in the sky. One star, Pleione, is now so close to the star Atlas they look like a single star to the naked eye.

But if we take what we know about the movement of the stars and rewind 100,000 years, Pleione was further from Atlas and would have been easily visible to the naked eye. So 100,000 years ago, most people really would have seen seven stars in the cluster.

We believe this movement of the stars can help to explain two puzzles: the similarity of Greek and Aboriginal stories about these stars, and the fact so many cultures call the cluster “seven sisters” even though we only see six stars today.

Is it possible the stories of the Seven Sisters and Orion are so old our ancestors were telling these stories to each other around campfires in Africa, 100,000 years ago? Could this be the oldest story in the world?

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge and pay our respects to the traditional owners and elders, both past and present, of all the Indigenous groups mentioned in this paper. All Indigenous material has been found in the public domain.

– ref. The world’s oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about ‘seven sisters’ stars may reach back 100,000 years – https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Holland, Associate Professor, Macquarie University

History has been brought to the forefront in 2020. We have witnessed not only a once-in-a-century pandemic, but also a global protest movement for racial justice following the death of a Black man, George Floyd.

Such protests have happened before, but not with this immediacy or level of intensity. The Black Lives Matter movement garnered support in at least 60 countries across all continents bar Antarctica.

Floyd’s death epitomised the power and violence of colonialism and slavery, reminding us their legacies are all too real.

And the Black Lives Matter movement has catalysed a reckoning with history. Activists have toppled celebratory statues of white slave owners and exploiters, and forced a global discussion of how we remember — and repair — histories of racial prejudice and colonialism.

For the Black poet Benjamin Zephaniah, this is not just about tearing down statues. It is about being honest.

The uprisings we see […] are happening because history is being ignored — and ultimately, it’s all about history.

His view is that Black people will not be respected until their history is.

A history of slavery and oppression

This reckoning with history has been palpable in Australia, too. The pandemic scuttled the costly re-enactment of Captain James Cook’s voyage to the Pacific in 1770 to mark the 250th anniversary.

And as Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Australian cities, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia should not import them, that there was no equivalence here. He declared Australian history slavery-free.

Historians and commentators were quick to correct him. Not only had there been slavery in Australia, but Australia has a long history of police violence toward Indigenous people.

Read more: Explorer, navigator, coloniser: revisit Captain Cook’s legacy with the click of a mouse

We share a history of Black resistance to white oppression, too. A century ago, Indigenous activists joined a Black nationalist movement around the globe fighting for racial equality and self-determination in the context of police brutality, powerlessness and racism. That protest never ended.

Floyd’s well-publicised death amplified the systemic racism Indigenous people face every day, particularly in the justice system.

The family of David Dungay Jr, a Dunghutti man who died in jail in 2015, have been fighting over years for justice. The Black Lives Matter movement shone a light on his death, as well as the more than 430 other Indigenous deaths in custody since a royal commission on the issue delivered its report in 1991.

Why Indigenous storytelling matters

It is little wonder that, as we leave 2020, Indigenous leaders speak of changing the narrative of the nation and remind us of the gift of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, now over three years old.

The statement made First Nations sovereignty the foundation for a fuller understanding and expression of Australian nationhood. And history was critical to its formulation. Truth-telling preceded the call for reform at the First Nations National Constitutional Convention in 2017 and was placed on the agenda by the participants themselves.

This should not be surprising. Stories have always shaped relationships in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. They speak to connections between language, culture and land, influence behaviour and serve as a roadmap for living.

This is why story is at the centre of the Uluru Statement. As Galarrwuy Yunupingu argues in his essay “Rom Watangu”, which was submitted with the Referendum Council’s final report on the deliberations at Uluru, storytelling and songlines are the bedrock of Aboriginal law, sovereignty and identity.

It is through the song cycles that we acknowledge our allegiance to the land, to our laws, to our life, to our ancestors and to each other.

The Uluru Statement is meaningless outside this context.

Read more: The Uluru statement showed how to give First Nations people a real voice – now it’s time for action

The history embedded in the Uluru Statement

The Uluru Statement consists of three parts: the central frame of the statement, the history it contains, and the surrounding artwork.

Created by a senior Anangu representative, Rene Kulitja, the artwork depicts two creation stories of the Anangu, traditional custodians of Uluru.

The first is of two snakes, Kuniya, a female python, and Liru, a poisonous snake, who create the landscape of Uluru in the context of a fight at Mutijula spring.

The second is of the Mala people, represented by the prints of the rufous-hare wallabies. They were holding a ceremony on top of Uluru and became involved in an altercation with men from the west. Those men created Kurpany, the Devil Dingo, whose prints are also on the canvas.

The Referendum Council’s final report synthesised the Australian nationhood story in three parts, all characterised by ancestral journeys:

• the discovery of the continent by ancient tribes who established one of the world’s oldest and most enduring civilisations

• the establishment of the colony of New South Wales by the British in 1788

• and the migrants who have journeyed across the seas since then to make the continent home.

The task for us is to understand and weave all sides of the story together, including the spectacular achievements of Indigenous peoples and, as the report describes it, the post-colonial years

replete with triumph and failure, pride and regret, celebration and sorrow, greatness and shame.

Not replacing, but reimagining the old

At a time when history is so contested, part of the gift of the statement is that it allows us to rethink history’s purpose.

The Indigenous participants at Uluru understood what the British historian, EH Carr, did. History, he said, is not about facts alone.

The facts […] are like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home and cooks and serves them.

Rather, history is about interpretation, negotiation, subjectivity and complexity. It is a dialogue between past, present and future, acknowledging contested versions of the past which are ongoing, stories that are told and retold.

It is impossible to imagine the Uluru Statement without the artwork — the story — that frames it. Its composition suggests that Kuniya and Liru bring the statement into being, as a new truth — not replacing, but reimagining the old.

Read more: Instead of demonising Black Lives Matter protesters, leaders must act on their calls for racial justice

But truth-telling is not just about recounting history alone. It is about acknowledging The Law that was violated by dispossession but endured. Yunipingu reminds us that history and law are the foundation for social and cultural responsibility and governance.

The generosity of First Nations people is their willingness to share their stories. Those of Kuniya and Liru are powerful reminders that in writing our history, we create the landscapes we share and leave inscriptions of the past for the future.

The Uluru Statement provides an opportunity to bind law, history and politics anew. Situating Indigenous sovereignty as the basis of a fuller expression of nationhood is about recognising the myriad songlines of Australian history. Acknowledging this truth enables others.

Indigenous people have been gifting non-Indigenous society for a very long time. There is a political vision in such acts of rapproachment: a new relationship that recognises Indigenous sovereignty as the basis of redefining — and retelling the stories of — the nation.

– ref. Black Lives Matter has brought a global reckoning with history. This is why the Uluru Statement is so crucial – https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-has-brought-a-global-reckoning-with-history-this-is-why-the-uluru-statement-is-so-crucial-149974

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julia Talbot-Jones, Lecturer, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

After eight months of drought rules, Auckland finally relaxed water restrictions last week, but as New Zealand heads into another La Niña summer, other cities can expect serious water shortages both now and in the future.

Although this summer’s projected rainfall should keep Auckland’s water supply levels sustainable in the short term, Wellington could be running dry within the next six years.

For both cities, addressing the gap in water supply and demand is an immediate and ongoing problem. Growing populations and increasingly variable climate conditions, combined with ageing infrastructure, mean local authorities will have to think about how they can either increase supply or change patterns of consumption.

In a new working paper, we explore the merits and limitations of options available to policymakers to help navigate the changing water landscape.

Read more: Extreme heat and rain: thousands of weather stations show there’s now more of both, for longer

Policy solutions to address water (short)falls

For two of New Zealand’s largest cities, Auckland and Wellington, curbing demand is likely to be a more cost-effective approach than increasing water supply. Building reservoirs or constructing desalination plants is costly compared with adopting a range of targeted policy instruments that could encourage a change in individual use.

The benefits of taking a multi-faceted policy approach to curbing demand is evident when comparing water consumption patterns in Auckland and Wellington.

Aucklanders had water meters installed in the 1990s and are charged per unit of water consumed. They use 30% less water per person than Wellington users, who don’t have meters and are charged a flat rate for use.

Coupled with this, Auckland Council has run targeted campaigns to educate users about ways to conserve water and household water bills include information about use patterns that are designed to “nudge” users towards conservation.

In other regions of New Zealand, the merits of a cost-driven approach are also clear. The Kāpiti Coast in the lower North Island has had a 26% reduction in water use since water meters, pricing and targeted education campaigns were introduced in 2014.

The evidence suggests that a policy approach that combines pricing incentives with education campaigns and regulation encourages users to conserve water.

Looking ahead to warmer and drier summers

However, even with the implementation of a range of water-saving policies, New Zealand city dwellers are not achieving the reductions needed to close the demand gap, particularly given the projections of warmer, drier summers. Most cities will need to adopt further policy changes.

The patterns of water consumption in Australia’s two largest cities, Melbourne and Sydney, provide some insight into how further behavioural changes could be achieved in New Zealand.

First, Australia’s arid climate leaves few in doubt about water’s value and its scarcity. Second, this is reinforced through higher price signals, some of which rise and fall with dam levels. The result is that Melburnians, who pay progressively more per litre the more water they use, use 150 litres per person per day. Sydneysiders, who until recently paid a flat price for residential water, use 210 litres per person per day.

Read more: Why Sydney residents use 30% more water per day than Melburnians

For New Zealand policymakers, the challenge lies not only in bringing about changes in the choices water users make through prices that more accurately reflect scarcity, but also in engineering a shift in values around water consumption. For too long, New Zealanders have thought the country is water-rich, ignoring the fact this applies only to certain regions and seasons.

Achieving a long-term shift in behaviour will require an acknowledgement that values influence policy and vice versa. For most cities, the starting point in this transition will be identifying targeted policy options to reduce the growing supply-demand gap and engender a shift in values.

For Auckland, this might mean reviewing the pricing structures that determine patterns of water use. For Wellington, the most cost-effective approach is likely to be the introduction of meters and volumetric pricing.

For residents of all urban areas, internalising the fact that water is scarce can’t come soon enough.

– ref. Even in a ‘water-rich’ country like New Zealand, some cities could face water shortages this summer – https://theconversation.com/even-in-a-water-rich-country-like-new-zealand-some-cities-could-face-water-shortages-this-summer-152002

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Troy Potter, Lecturer, The University of Melbourne, University of Melbourne

This article is part of three-part series on summer reads for young people after a very unique year.

As this tumultuous year comes to a close, the Australian summer is an ideal time to relax and escape through reading.

Like many people, Australian teenagers have experienced higher rates of psychological distress this year as a result of the COVID pandemic. Reading is one way for teens to remove themselves, if only temporarily, from their current stresses.

As fantasy writer Neil Gaiman said:

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them.

Young adult novels also present alternative ways of being and resolving crises. This is because a defining characteristic of young adult books relates to power. In novels for young adults, teen protagonists learn how to use their power to navigate social situations, whether in families, schools, their community or, indeed, other worlds.

In this way, young adult literature can be considered both a form of escapism and empowerment.

According to Teen Reading in the Digital Era — a study conducted by Deakin University — teenagers have diverse reading preferences. The study identified five of these: fantasy, contemporary realist fiction, science fiction, autobiography or biography, and action or adventure.

With this in mind, here are some recommendations for your teen’s summer reading to help them both escape and, hopefully, re-empower themselves.

by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Teenagers who feel they’re finally emerging from a tough year of restrictions may empathise with Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley, who has woken up from a 200-year cryosleep (where your body is cooled down and preserved in liquid nitrogen) to find herself in the year 2380.

Aurora secretly joins a group of graduating cadets on their first mission. What should be a simple cargo run ends up being a cat-and-mouse chase across the galaxy. In trying to find her place in a new universe, Aurora and the cadets uncover an ancient alien species who has spent millions of years preparing to take over the galaxy.

Told from the perspective of each of the seven teenage protagonists, the Aurora Cycle is a new action science-fiction series. It currently comprises the books Aurora Rising (2019) and Aurora Burning (2020).

Other intergalactic action-adventure sci-fi books teenagers may enjoy include A Confusion of Princes (2012) by Garth Nix, Mindcull (2019) by K. H. Canobi, and Kaufman and Kristoff’s earlier series, The Illuminae Files (2015–2016).

by Will Kostakis

A scavenger hunt for buried gods may be just the thing teenagers need to get their minds moving. In this urban fantasy duology, Connor learns about the Monuments — powerful gods who have hidden themselves to protect humanity.

Joined by Sarah and Locky, Connor searches across contemporary Sydney, trying to uncover the gods. However, despite their awesome powers, the Monuments need protecting, too. The problem is Connor doesn’t know who he can trust with the knowledge and power of the gods.

This is author Will Kostakis’ first foray into the fantastical.

Other fantasy novels for teenagers to get lost in include the bewitching The Last Balfour (2019) by Cait Duggan; Four Dead Queens (2019) — a murder mystery by by Astrid Scholte; and the Old Kingdom series (1995–2016) by Garth Nix.

by Tara Eglington

Having spent more time on a screen this year than before, what better way for teenagers to re-engage with novels than to read one that’s written in instant messenger, text, emails, prose and playlists?

Eglington’s fourth young adult novel centres on teenagers Taylor and Isolde, who live in Wanaka (New Zealand) and Sydney, respectively. Friends since childhood, the two reconnect across the Tasman after an 18-month long fight.

As they exchange cross-country messages over the course of the year, they help support each other through their ordeals and, in doing so, realise relationships can develop over distances.

Two more realist young adult novels in which teenagers connect with others include 19 Love Songs (2020) by David Levithan and It Sounded Better in My Head (2019) by Nina Kenwood.

by John Hendrix

Teenagers who prefer to read about the lives of others may be interested in this graphic biography. It tells the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who resisted the Nazi regime and was associated with the plot to kill Hitler.

Using a red-black-teal colour scheme, the mixture of text and illustration details Bonhoeffer’s life and outlines the larger historical context of Hitler’s rise to power and the second world war. Cited material is asterisked, and a select bibliography and limited notes are included.

A graphic autobiography (about a girl growing up during the Iranian Revolution) teenagers may also enjoy is Persepolis (2000) by Marjane Satrapi.

Read more: 5 Australian books that can help young people understand their place in the world

For other lists of recommended young adult novels, check out the CBCA’s notables or Inside a Dog, a website for teens to share reviews, recommendations and their own creative writing.

– ref. Teen summer reads: how to escape to another world after a year stuck in this one – https://theconversation.com/teen-summer-reads-how-to-escape-to-another-world-after-a-year-stuck-in-this-one-150646

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Boyle, PhD Candidate, University of Wollongong

In a new series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and screen.

When Jessica Jones slunk onto screens in 2015, it was only fitting for the series in which she featured to begin in the shadows of Hell’s Kitchen. As the first superpowered female lead in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (albeit, on Netflix rather than in movie theatres), Jones existed on the margins.

Like others, I had been waiting for a female-led Marvel film while becoming disenfranchised by its offerings. By the time Jessica Jones came around, I was completely ambivalent and somewhat despondent. It was a welcome surprise that Jones (played by Krysten Ritter) was different — and not just because she was a woman.

Part superhero, but mainly hardboiled private eye, Jones was a departure from the superhero we had gotten used to, and the detectives too.

Adapted from Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’s Alias comic book series, Jessica Jones merges the superhero and crime drama genres to ask provocative questions about power, justice and authority.

Jessica who?

Jones is plagued by questions of what justice means and what it means to be a hero.

She has no time for martial arts or neat explanations. She is reluctant to take on the identity of a crime-fighting hero at all because she’s extremely sceptical that there is such a thing.

Whenever the word “hero” leaves her mouth, it’s with a degree of distaste. Her detachment is refreshing after no less than three Iron Man films and countless heroic crime drama series. By the time we meet Jones, as critic Kathryn VanArendonk puts it:

the detective has become her own breed of superhero – a figure who restores the status quo […] She brings order out of chaos. She finds answers. She is superhuman.“

On the surface, Jones might seem a reluctant female hero, like Buffy in the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). But sitting alongside the wider Marvel universe, though Jones helps others between paying clients, her scepticism makes things complicated.

Read more: Friday essay: Hail Hydra – on comics, ethics and politics

Ambivalent origins

Far from making her invincible to external threats, Jones’ superpowers leave her vulnerable to fetishisation and gender-based violence at the hands of series villain Kilgrave. Played by David Tennant, Kilgrave has been interpreted as a metaphor for white, hetero-patriarchal control and toxic masculinity.

In contrast to other superheroes, Jones’ traumas lead her not to reassert herself as a crime-fighting hero but to reassess the validity of the whole hero narrative. She trades the promise of a costume (which she notably never dons in the television series) for a camera, and becomes a morally ambivalent private investigator.

Law and order

At the intersection of superhero and crime drama, Jessica Jones raises important questions about the law and social justice.

Superhero and crime drama genres are generally conservative in terms of tone, politics and gender roles. While there are self-critical deviations, their premises often rely on a sequence: the establishment of status quo, it’s disruption by crime and villainy, and the triumphant reestablishment at the hands of a superhero or crime-fighting detective.

In the face of violence and injustice, the solution is often meted out by a kind of vigilante who, hero or antihero, becomes synonymous with the law.

As a jaded super-detective, Jones questions not only the status quo but the notion of the vigilante hero and their perceived synonym with social justice. She never gives up a chance to call out others’ “heroism” for hubris or self-indulgence.

Read more: Remember Blockbuster, Nirvana and pagers? The new Captain Marvel lives in the 1990s

Evoking crime noir, Jones eschews the black and white to reside in the greys, purples and in-betweens. She’s unconvinced as to whether anyone can or should have the moral authority to decide what is right or wrong.

This detachment rarely wavers. Over the course of three seasons and a team-up in The Defenders (2017), Jones’ dry scepticism is hilariously charged at everyone including herself and her Netflix Marvel counterparts.

Read more: My favourite detective: Sam Spade, as hard as nails and the smartest guy in the room

Critics haven’t always been sure how to respond. Jones’ ambiguity as female antihero resulted in the character and series being simultaneously praised and denounced. Critic Stassa Edwards celebrated it as “slow unravelling of a familiar genre”, while Eric Kain argued Jones had no place in the Marvel cinematic universe.

Indeed, through her wry characterisation as jaded super-detective, Jones provides irreverent commentary on the masculine grandiosity and oft-undisputed entitlement of the superhero, and its pervasion into neighbouring genres. If internet sleuths read this disparity as a clue to Jessica Jones’s not-belonging, they might have just solved the case.

– ref. My favourite detective: Jessica Jones, a super-detective for the Marvel generation – https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-detective-jessica-jones-a-super-detective-for-the-marvel-generation-149542

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mirko Bagaric, Professor of Law, Swinburne University of Technology

The final report of the COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry, issued by former judge Jennifer Coate, outlines monumental errors made by the Victorian government and its public servants.

Despite this, the governmental failings that led to a second wave of the pandemic, resulting in 800 deaths, are likely to be politically irrelevant.

The clever strategy by Premier Daniel Andrews to defer analysis of these missteps until the virus had been suppressed makes the findings largely academic and historical.

Program based on ‘assumptions’, not clear decision-making

The report also contains no real surprises — it’s just a confirmation of the muddled and incomprehensible decision-making approach we already knew about.

Victoria’s hotel quarantine program was established over the weekend of March 28–29. At this point, it was known COVID-19 was highly contagious and presented the gravest public health risk to Australians in a century.

Instead of using professional and trained staff to manage the risk, the Victorian government used contract security staff, many of whom were largely oblivious to appropriate protocols for dealing with the 21,821 returned travellers who went through the program, according to the report.

Just 236 people tested positive for COVID in quarantine, but despite this low number, containment breaches caused the virus to spread to the wider community in May and June.

Read more: Hotel quarantine interim report recommends changes but accountability questions remain

Much of the focus of the inquiry was on who was responsible for appointing untrained workers to deal with the most serious public health threat confronting Victorians in living memory.

The most compelling theme of the final report is the ruthless incompetence of the Andrews government and its agencies to put in place coherent systems and protocols to deal with such an enormous risk.

Perhaps most significantly, the report says decisions relating to the program were made at the wrong level — absent scrutiny by ministers or senior public servants. Instead, decisions were made by people

without any clear understanding of the role of security in the broader hotel quarantine program [who] had no expertise in security issues or infection prevention and control. They had no access to advice from those who had been party to the decision to use security and had limited visibility over the services being performed.

Competent institutions deal with complex problems by following several key principles. Within governments, the scope of each person’s responsibility is carefully defined and there should be meticulous attention to detail when it comes to implementing crucial decisions such as this.

The Victorian government failed abysmally on both of these measures.

It beggars belief, for example, for highly-paid public servants to tell the inquiry that decisions in the hotel quarantine program were actually not made, but instead were creeping “assumptions”.

Even more disturbing is that it might actually be true, in which case the Victorian government system is fundamentally broken. Certainly, there is nothing in the report to contradict this position. The report noted the decision to appoint private security guards was

made without proper analysis or even a clear articulation that it was being made at all. On its face, this was at odds with any normal application of the principles of the Westminster system of responsible government.

That a decision of such significance for a government program, which ultimately involved the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars and the employment of thousands of people, had neither a responsible minister nor a transparent rationale for why that course was adopted, plainly does not seem to accord with those principles.

Why was the program allowed to continue?

If such errors or negligence happened in other government programs, the problem might be fixed by throwing more taxpayer money at it.

COVID was different. It was not a rail overpass or cultural event. It was a public health issue, which could only be managed through intelligent design and thorough implementation.

Of course, Victoria is now COVID-free, and the Andrews government will point to this as evidence of the success of its response.

The realty is different. Effectively barricading millions of residents at home for three months was a sure-fire way to suppress the virus. But the fact Victoria alone was the only jurisdiction in Australia that had to resort to this extreme measure is the reference point against which the actions of the Victorian government should be evaluated.

Read more: Victoria’s hotel quarantine overhaul is a step in the right direction, but issues remain

A telling aspect of the report is what it failed to address. The inquiry (and the media) had a near-obsessive focus on who was responsible for appointing private security guards in the first place.

What hasn’t received as much scrutiny is the more pressing issue of why the government continued with this arrangement despite clear questions from the onset as to whether it was a viable approach.

It also continued using security guards for a month after ministers were first made aware of a guard testing positive at the Rydges Hotel in Carlton.

This decision to continue with a failed system is arguably far more ethically and legally problematic than how the program was set up in the first place, especially since this was an unprecedented health threat.

The Victorian government’s failure to speedily unwind the security guard quarantine program is the legal equivalent of not repairing a crater-sized hole on a busy road for many weeks: utterly reprehensible.

A shrewd move to minimise political fallout

Perhaps that most important message to emerge from the inquiry is that Andrews is the shrewdest politician in Australia.

In the midst of one of longest and harshest lockdowns on the planet, his decision to launch the inquiry allowed him to deflect any questions regarding his responsibility for the second wave.

The timing of the report — well after the second wave has passed — has also lessened any political damage his government is likely to experience from the failures of the program.

Read more: Melbourne’s hotel quarantine bungle is disappointing but not surprising. It was overseen by a flawed security industry

The disappointment and anger that many Victorians were experiencing at the height of the lockdown is now a distant memory as people are focusing on their Christmas plans in a COVID-free environment.

Against this context, the criticisms in the report are unlikely to get much traction. Rather, they will likely just become background noise as attention focuses on the new outbreak in NSW — and who is to blame for this latest quarantine failure.

– ref. Hotel quarantine report blasts government failures, but political fallout is likely to be minimal – https://theconversation.com/hotel-quarantine-report-blasts-government-failures-but-political-fallout-is-likely-to-be-minimal-152175

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris James, Lecturer, Centre for Hypersonics, The University of Queensland

There are many things humanity must overcome before any return journey to Mars is launched.

The two major players are NASA and SpaceX, which work together intimately on missions to the International Space Station but have competing ideas of what a crewed Mars mission would look like.

Size matters

The biggest challenge (or constraint) is the mass of the payload (spacecraft, people, fuel, supplies etc) needed to make the journey.

We still talk about launching something into space being like launching its weight in gold.

The payload mass is usually just a small percentage of the total mass of the launch vehicle.

Read more: Buried lakes of salty water on Mars may provide conditions for life

For example, the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the Moon weighed 3,000 tonnes.

But it could launch only 140 tonnes (5% of its initial launch mass) to low Earth orbit, and 50 tonnes (less than 2% of its initial launch mass) to the Moon.

Mass constrains the size of a Mars spacecraft and what it can do in space. Every manoeuvre costs fuel to fire rocket motors, and this fuel must currently be carried into space on the spacecraft.

SpaceX’s plan is for its crewed Starship vehicle to be refuelled in space by a separately launched fuel tanker. That means much more fuel can be carried into orbit than could be carried on a single launch.

Time matters

Another challenge, intimately connected with fuel, is time.

Missions that send spacecraft with no crew to the outer planets often travel complex trajectories around the Sun. They use what are called gravity assist manoeuvres to effectively slingshot around different planets to gain enough momentum to reach their target.

This saves a lot of fuel, but can result in missions that take years to reach their destinations. Clearly this is something humans would not want to do.

Both Earth and Mars have (almost) circular orbits and a manoeuvre known as the Hohmann transfer is the most fuel-efficient way to travel between two planets. Basically, without going into too much detail, this is where a spacecraft does a single burn into an elliptical transfer orbit from one planet to the other.

A Hohmann transfer between Earth and Mars takes around 259 days (between eight and nine months) and is only possible approximately every two years due to the different orbits around the Sun of Earth and Mars.

A spacecraft could reach Mars in a shorter time (SpaceX is claiming six months) but — you guessed it — it would cost more fuel to do it that way.

Safe landing

Suppose our spacecraft and crew get to Mars. The next challenge is landing.

A spacecraft entering Earth is able to use the drag generated by interaction with the atmosphere to slow down. This allows the craft to land safely on the Earth’s surface (provided it can survive the related heating).

But the atmosphere on Mars is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. That means less potential for drag, so it isn’t possible to land safely without some kind of aid.

Some missions have landed on airbags (such as NASA’s Pathfider mission) while others have used thrusters (NASA’s Phoenix mission). The latter, once again, requires more fuel.

Life on Mars

A Martian day lasts 24 hours and 37 minutes but the similarities with Earth stop there.

The thin atmosphere on Mars means it can’t retain heat as well as Earth does, so life on Mars is characterised by large extremes in temperature during the day/night cycle.

Mars has a maximum temperature of 30℃, which sounds quite pleasant, but its minimum temperature is -140℃, and its average temperature is -63℃. The average winter temperature at the Earth’s South Pole is about -49℃.

So we need to be very selective about where we choose to live on Mars and how we manage temperature during the night.

The gravity on Mars is 38% of Earth’s (so you’d feel lighter) but the air is principally carbon dioxide (CO₂) with several percent of nitrogen, so it’s completely unbreathable. We would need to build a climate-controlled place just to live there.

SpaceX plans to launch several cargo flights including critical infrastructure such as greenhouses, solar panels and — you guessed it — a fuel-production facility for return missions to Earth.

Life on Mars would be possible and several simulation trials have already been done on Earth to see how people would cope with such an existence.

Return to Earth

The final challenge is the return journey and getting people safely back to Earth.

Apollo 11 entered Earth’s atmosphere at about 40,000km/h, which is just below the velocity required to escape Earth’s orbit.

Spacecraft returning from Mars will have re-entry velocities from 47,000km/h to 54,000km/h, depending on the orbit they use to arrive at Earth.

Read more: Dear diary: the Sun never set on the Arctic Mars simulation

They could slow down into low orbit around Earth to around 28,800km/h before entering our atmosphere but — you guessed it — they’d need extra fuel to do that.

If they just barrel into the atmosphere, it will do all of the deceleration for them. We just need to make sure we don’t kill the astronauts with G-forces or burn them up due to excess heating.

These are just some of the challenges facing a Mars mission and all of the technological building blocks to achieve this are there. We just need to spend the time and the money and bring it all together.

– ref. How to get people from Earth to Mars and safely back again – https://theconversation.com/how-to-get-people-from-earth-to-mars-and-safely-back-again-150167

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Conley Tyler, Research Fellow, Asia Institute, University of Melbourne

Most of us can’t wait to see the back of 2020, a year that has been memorable for all the wrong reasons. While 2020 provided the ultimate stress test for countries to discover their vulnerabilities, we can confidently predict the New Year will bring its own challenges.

So what will dominate international affairs in 2021? I’m expecting to be watching four Cs: coronavirus, China, climate and crises.

Coronavirus

It should start to get easier, but the pandemic still has a way to play out. 2021 will be about adapting to living with the virus.

We’ll be hoping countries that managed the pandemic well can keep it up, and those that didn’t are helped by the roll-out of vaccines.

We’ll be watching who gets a vaccine and whether access is equitable. How effective the various vaccines are. And how quickly international travel recovers.

Australia will be focused on recovery. It dealt with the health challenge of COVID-19 well, but in the process it has cut itself off from the world. There’s been significant damage to major industries like education and tourism. And terrible experiences for international students, temporary visa holders and Australians stranded overseas.

While other countries have been worse affected – for example India’s growth trajectory has been knocked years off track – the effects on Australia will be long-lasting. With net negative migration this year, Australia is projected to be more than half a million smaller in 2022, with flow-on effects from construction to retail.

Australian Institute of International Affairs National President Allan Gyngell thinks Australia will be “poorer, weaker and more isolated” in the new COVID-19 world.

The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response will give us a first draft of the history of the COVID-19 virus, with discussion at the World Health Organization executive board in January, and a substantive report to the World Health Assembly in May.

In the best case scenario, the delayed Tokyo Olympics in July 2021 may be a symbol of renewal, with the global community united in relief and optimism having weathered the worst of the pandemic.

China

China will continue to be a preoccupation for Australia. According to former Department of Defence Secretary Dennis Richardson, Australia can expect to be in the dog house for all of 2021. There’s no sign the Australian government has a plan to repair the relationship.

We’re likely to see further deterioration after a new law was passed this week giving the foreign affairs minister the power to cancel international agreements by state governments, local councils and public universities. If, as expected, Canberra uses this to cancel Victoria’s agreement with China on the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing will see this as another instance of anti-China paranoia.

Read more: Morrison’s foreign relations bill should not pass parliament. Here’s why

Continuing tensions around foreign investment are built into the system. If Australia follows through on taking China to the World Trade Organization, it will be protracted. The trade war is unwinnable for both countries.

There will continue to be human rights issues, with attention on Xinjiang and Hong Kong, as well as on the cases of detained Australians such as Wang Hengjun and Cheng Lei.

Australian public opinion on China will likely continue its steep decline.

Once President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated in January, we’ll be watching to see the impact on US-China relations. I think it will be continued contestation, on which there is a bipartisan consensus, but with foreign policy conducted more normally and with more focus on areas of potential collaboration, particularly climate change.

Climate

This is where the US election result will have the greatest effect on Australia. The Biden administration has pledged to rejoin the Paris Agreement and convene a world climate summit in its first 100 days to persuade the leaders of carbon-emitting nations to make more ambitious national pledges. When it says it will “stop countries from cheating”, it’s thinking of us.

Australia will be increasingly isolated if it doesn’t fall into line, with its major trading and strategic partners – such as the US, UK, EU, China, Japan and South Korea – all having committed to net zero carbon targets. There will likely be pressure as negotiations for an Australia-EU free trade agreement head towards a conclusion, and negotiations for a post-Brexit Australia-UK agreement commence in earnest.

Read more: What would a Biden presidency mean for Australia?

There are already signs Australia is recognising it can no longer be such an outlier.

The next conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) in Glasgow in November is likely to capture public attention, like Copenhagen in 2009, as countries with higher ambition push for greater action.

The results at Glasgow will have a huge impact on the trajectory of climate change globally. It’s not an exagerration to say it will be one of the most important international summits in history.

Crises

Beyond these focus areas, there will always be things boiling over. For people who work in international affairs, it feels like it’s always “Events, dear boy, events”: a quote attributed to UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan when asked what blows governments off course.

We don’t know where or when, but we know there will be natural disasters. People fleeing. Massacres and terrorist attacks. These events draw attention away from slower-moving changes like some countries’ ongoing decline and others’ steady improvement.

There are plenty of situations that could reach a tipping point in 2021 – or stay where they are a bit longer. Unrest in Thailand. A China-India border standoff. Disputes in the South China Sea (or East China Sea). The flashpoint of Taiwan.

North Korea is capable of manufacturing a crisis any time it thinks it is to its advantage. Russia will stir the pot. Things will be delicate as the new US administration engages with Iran. There is a small but ineradicable risk of nuclear terrorism. Disinformation wars will continue.

Closer to home, Australia knows that it will be drawn into any significant regional crisis, whether that’s Bougainville or a PNG political crisis. Mass unrest in West Papua would be particularly challenging.

There are not too many elections that could trigger crises, with Japan and Iran the major elections in 2021. (Australia’s next federal election can be called from August 2021).

Challenging assumptions – and inequities

It’s worth thinking about where our attention might not be in 2021: on the chronic problems that we’ve grown used to. Like more than 2 billion people who don’t have access to safe water and sanitation. Or the nearly 11 million children under five who die each year, mostly from preventable causes.

Ours is still a world of deep inequality. The massive improvements in human well-being over recent decades show that we have the tools to address the remaining pockets of misery. The start of this is to challenge the things we implicitly accept.

If you’re reading this, you’re in the group of people with relative advantage. Think about how you can contribute – whether that’s through your work, donating money or volunteering your time. Find something you think can be improved and decide to make a contribution.

We’re not just spectators in the world of 2021.

– ref. Coronavirus, China and climate: where Australia’s foreign relations attention will be in 2021 – https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-china-and-climate-where-australias-foreign-relations-attention-will-be-in-2021-150158

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claus T. Christophersen, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University

It’s that time of year again, with Christmas parties, end-of-year get-togethers and holiday catch-ups on the horizon for many of us — all COVID-safe, of course. All that party food and takeaway, however, can have consequences for your gut health.

Gut health matters. Your gut is a crucial part your immune system. In fact, 70% of your entire immune system sits around your gut, and an important part of that is what’s known as the gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT), which houses a host of immune cells in your gut.

Good gut health means looking after your gut microbiome — the bacteria, fungi, viruses and tiny organisms that live inside you and help break down your food — but also the cells and function of your gastrointestinal system.

We know gut health can affect mood, thanks to what’s known as the gut-brain axis. But there’s also a gut-lung axis and a gut-liver axis, meaning what happens in your gut can affect your respiratory system or liver, too.

Here’s what you can do to bolster your gut microbiome in the coming weeks and months.

Read more: Gut health: does exercise change your microbiome?

How do silly season indulgences affect our gut health?

You can change your gut microbiome within a couple of days by changing your diet. And over a longer period of time, such as the Christmas-New Year season, your diet pattern can change significantly, often without you really noticing.

That means we may be changing the organisms that make up our microbiome during this time. Whatever you put in will favour certain bacteria in your microbiome over others.

We know fatty, sugary foods promote bacteria that are not as beneficial for gut health. And if you indulge over days or weeks, you are pushing your microbiome towards an imbalance.

Is there anything I can do to prepare my gut health for the coming onslaught?

Yes! If your gut is healthy to begin with, it will take more to knock it out of whack. Prepare yourself now by making choices that feed the beneficial organisms in your gut microbiome and enhance gut health.

That means:

• eating prebiotic foods such as jerusalem artichokes, garlic, onions and a variety of grains and inulin-enhanced yoghurts (inulin is a prebiotic carbohydrate shown to have broad benefits to gut health)

• eating resistant starches, which are starches that pass undigested through the small intestine and feed the bacteria in the large intestine. That includes grainy wholemeal bread, legumes such as beans and lentils, firm bananas, starchy vegetables like potatoes and some pasta and rice. The trick to increasing resistant starches in potato, pasta and rice is to cook them but eat them cold. So consider serving a cold potato or pasta salad over Christmas

• choosing fresh, unprocessed fruits and vegetables

• steering clear of added sugar where possible. Excessive amounts of added sugar (or fruit sugar from high consumption of fruit) flows quickly to the large intestine, where it gets gobbled up by bacteria. That can cause higher gas production, diarrhoea and potentially upset the balance of the microbiome

• remembering that if you increase the amount of fibre in your diet (or via a supplement), you’ll need to drink more water — or you can get constipated.

For inspiration on how to increase resistant starch in your diet for improved gut health, you might consider checking out a cookbook I coauthored (all proceeds fund research and I have no personal interest).

What can I do to limit the damage?

If Christmas and New Year means a higher intake of red meat or processed meat for you, remember some studies have shown that diets higher red meat can introduce DNA damage in the colon, which makes you more susceptible to colorectal cancer.

The good news is other research suggests if you include a certain amount of resistant starch in a higher red meat diet, you can reduce or even eliminate that damage. So consider a helping of cold potato salad along with a steak or sausage from the barbie.

Don’t forget to exercise over your Christmas break. Even going for a brisk walk can get things moving and keep your bowel movements regular, which helps improve your gut health.

Have a look at the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating and remember what foods are in the “sometimes” category. Try to keep track of whether you really are only having these foods “sometimes” or if you have slipped into a habit of having them much more frequently.

The best and easiest way to check your gut health is to use the Bristol stool chart. If you’re hitting around a 4, you should be good.

Remember, there are no quick fixes. Your gut health is like a garden or an ecosystem. If you want the good plants to grow, you need to tend to them — otherwise, the weeds can take over.

I know you’re probably sick of hearing the basics — eat fruits and vegetables, exercise and don’t make the treats too frequent — but the fact is good gut health is hard won and easily lost. It’s worth putting in the effort.

A preventative mindset helps. If you do the right thing most of the time and indulge just now and then, your gut health will be OK in the end.

– ref. How to prepare and protect your gut health over Christmas and the silly season – https://theconversation.com/how-to-prepare-and-protect-your-gut-health-over-christmas-and-the-silly-season-151673

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marissa Parrott, Reproductive Biologist, Wildlife Conservation & Science, Zoos Victoria, and Honorary Research Associate, BioSciences, University of Melbourne

Last month I came across a heartbreaking sight: a group of people standing around a young female kangaroo with horrific injuries. She appeared to have been hit by a car and had dragged herself away, only to collapse into our local creek.

A police officer had gently lifted her out to the bank where her injuries became apparent. A shattered leg, broken arm, and bruising indicating massive internal trauma. She was panting – exhausted and in pain. Fortunately, she had no young joeys in her pouch.

I offered my help as a wildlife specialist. This was a tragic, but common scenario. An estimated 10 million animals are hit on Australian roads every year.

Australia’s road toll is so high it threatens whole species. Road mortality is the second biggest killer of endangered Tasmanian devils with around 350 killed every year, and the biggest cause of death of adult endangered cassowaries in Queensland.

The holiday season is upon us and people are now able to travel to see family and friends again. This means the unusually-quiet roads during COVID-19 lockdown — which may have lulled wildlife into a false sense of security — are frighteningly busy. So here’s how you can be wildlife-aware this December.

Who is hurt?

As Australia’s population expands, wildlife are pushed into smaller areas, with more roads criss-crossing their habitats. The most visible victims of road expansion are larger mammals such as possums, wombats, kangaroos and koalas. However, millions of smaller animals including echidnas, birds, reptiles and frogs are also injured or killed each year on our roads.

The vast majority of insurance claims for animal collisions involve kangaroos, with wallabies and wombats the next most frequent. Smaller animals often go unreported or unnoticed.

Humans are also at risk in these collisions. Every year people crash their vehicles hitting, or trying to avoid hitting, animals on the road, with 5% of fatal accidents caused by collisions with animals. Of those, 42% tried to swerve to avoid the animal. Those who do hit wildlife may also suffer serious injuries, with motorcyclists particularly at risk.

Bracing for a new wave of admissions

There are a number of aspects that increase the wildlife road toll: better road conditions leading to faster driving, young animals dispersing for the first time, higher movements during drought or after fire as animals seek food, water or shelter, breeding season movements in spring-summer, and longer periods of darkness over winter.

Read more: How you can help – not harm – wild animals recovering from bushfires

Some animals may be hit trying to help a fallen friend or juvenile, as I have seen in galahs and ducks. Others may be hit while feeding on carcasses on the road, like wedge-tailed eagles, owls and Tasmanian devils.

Now, as the holiday season begins after months of reduced travel, wildlife hospitals are braced for a new wave of admissions.

How do you avoid a crash?

Be aware that large marsupials such as wombats, wallabies and kangaroos are most active at dawn and dusk. However, many birds, lizards, snakes and echidnas move during the day. At night, others like frogs, possums, quolls and devils start to roam.

Wildlife warning signs are only installed in high danger areas, so always pay attention to them. Try to limit your travel between sunset and sunrise, especially near forested or high wildlife areas. If you must drive, stay within the safe speed limit and slow down in areas with wildlife.

Use high beam headlights when safe and watch the sides of the road carefully — animals can often be seen ahead before they flee in front of a vehicle. As you approach the animal, return to normal headlights to avoid dazzling them or causing erratic behaviour.

What to do if you see an injured animal?

First, always ensure you are safe. Stop in an easily seen location away from traffic, use your hazard lights and if possible wear bright clothing. Remember, injured animals may be frightened and in pain, and some could be dangerous if approached.

In emergency cases, where the animal’s injuries are obvious, some can be carefully caught and wrapped in a towel, then placed in a well-ventilated, dark and secure box for quiet transport to wildlife veterinary hospitals for care. The links above give tips on how to handle some wildlife emergency cases where needed.

I always travel with towels, pillow cases and gloves in my car in case I find an animal in need. You can check animals found by roads for injuries, and surviving young in pouches.

But it’s important you do not approach potentially dangerous animals like snakes, monitor lizards (goannas), bats (flying-foxes or microbats), large macropods (kangaroos or wallabies) or raptors (eagles or hawks). Instead, call and wait for trained and vaccinated rescuers. Wildlife Victoria, for example, assisted 6,875 animals hit by vehicles in 2019 alone.

Innovation for conservation

In Tasmania, where an estimated 500,000 animals are hit on roads every year, a Roadkill Tas App is identifying road kill hot spots to assist research and conservation efforts.

In high kill areas, virtual road fences are being trialled. These posts are activated by car headlights at night and produce sound and light to frighten animals away from the road before a vehicle arrives.

Read more: Mysterious poles make road crossing easier for high flying mammals

Other areas use tunnels under the road, or overpasses to help wildlife cross safely.

If you know of dangerous areas for wildlife, contact your council to see if warning signs or ways to help wildlife can be installed.

In the case of my poor little injured kangaroo last month, I worked with the police to make the difficult, but only, decision possible with such traumatic and untreatable injuries. As she was put out of her misery, I thought of all the wildlife hit by cars and left to die.

We can all do our part. Slow down, watch for wildlife, and avoid travel between dawn and dusk. Remind friends, family and tourists to watch for our wildlife. If you do hit an animal, or see one on the road, please stop to help and check pouches if safe. A tiny life may be waiting for your help these holidays.

If you see an injured animal on the road, call Wildlife Rescue Australia on 1300 596 457, or see the RSPCA injured wildlife site for specific state and territory numbers.

Find more tips here for helping local wildlife in need this summer from Zoos Victoria.

– ref. 10 million animals are hit on our roads each year. Here’s how you can help them (and steer clear of them) these holidays – https://theconversation.com/10-million-animals-are-hit-on-our-roads-each-year-heres-how-you-can-help-them-and-steer-clear-of-them-these-holidays-149733

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey University

An end-of-year political poll appeared recently and virtually no one paid it any attention. After a year of high-stakes health, economic and electoral events, it was a sign New Zealanders are on the other side of something.

It was a reminder, too, that politics is the exception rather than the norm for most people. With the 2020 election behind us, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government rapidly adjusting to the pleasures of life with a parliamentary majority, for most of us other things — summer, Christmas, the horrendous cost of buying or renting a house — now take priority.

But before 2020 fades entirely from view, it’s as well to reflect on one or two aspects of the extraordinary year that was.

As might be expected in a nation that covets the status of underdog, New Zealanders took some pride in having out-performed many other countries on matters COVID-related. From that performance a couple of important lessons can be drawn.

The first is that the country can, when needs must, rise to complex challenges. Not perfectly, to be sure — we were never all in this together. But 2020 made it clear that, when required, the formal and the volitional rules that shape our behaviour and govern our social interactions can bend and adapt for the better.

The second is that, in the main, our institutions work. We have our fair share of liars and manipulators on social and in other forms of media, but our scientific, cultural, political and administrative institutions worked when we needed them to.

Time to apply those COVID lessons

The challenge now is to to apply this collective capacity to other issues — the climate crisis, inequality of all kinds, the disgrace of racism — before we all snap back into conventional shape.

On this count there is no case for self-congratulation. Rather, there are worrying indications we are slouching back to a form of politics many hoped we had left behind.

The fizz and energy of early-pandemic thinking about different ways of being and doing is being replaced by the existential pull of the desire for “normality” (a pre-virus state of affairs that worked for some but not all) as we begin to emerge, emotionally and often economically wrung out, from COVID.

Read more: By declaring a climate emergency Jacinda Ardern needs to inspire hope, not fear

Jacinda Ardern is arguably the perfect politician for such circumstances. Often characterised as a 21st century politician, she is also very much a politician of the last century: a centrist who plays to deeply entrenched shibboleths around taxation and home ownership that indulge the interests of an older generation of property owners (and voters).

At the same time, more and more New Zealanders are finding themselves locked out of the “Kiwi dream”. Witness the fact that home ownership has dropped to its lowest level since 1951.

Ardern’s historic choice

Ardern has an acute sense of the location of the political centre. The risk is that in the interests of keeping together the electoral coalition of Labourites and disaffected former National Party voters that delivered her stunning electoral victory, she maintains the policy fundamentals put in place by the reforming Labour and National governments of the 1980s and 90s.

If that happens, the national narrative regarding home ownership will not be the only thing looking pretty tatty come 2023. The notions of Aotearoa being a great place to raise kids and where everyone gets a fair go will increasingly also look like myths.

But Ardern might choose differently. She has the political influence and smarts to permanently shift the way New Zealanders think about, engage in and experience the effects of politics for the better.

Read more: With house prices soaring again the government must get ahead of the market and become a ‘customer of first resort’

She also has the perfect opportunity to do this. Having been fed a thin gruel of individual responsibility for the past 35 years or so, most of us were reminded by the pandemic that altruism is important, context matters and “meritocracy” is often something certain people are born into and others aren’t.

Ardern has shown she can lead in crises — now we need her to show she can also harness what we learned during this tumultuous year and help rebuild the country many of us carry in our heads, but which in reality is rather less than that for too many New Zealanders.

For now, most of us can look forward to a summer without significant restrictions on our movement. That is no small thing, especially given what is happening elsewhere. But come 2021, and we move slowly into a post-pandemic world, we need the vision, political leadership and moral fortitude to ensure this country really is a team of five million.

– ref. 2020 hindsight: can New Zealand apply the political lessons of COVID-19 in the year ahead? – https://theconversation.com/2020-hindsight-can-new-zealand-apply-the-political-lessons-of-covid-19-in-the-year-ahead-151830

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kazi Mizanur Rahman, Clinical Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney

Another day, another announcement about a COVID-19 vaccine. Whether that’s talk of results from clinical trials, emergency approval or plans for countries to prioritise certain groups for vaccination.

But we still don’t know if current vaccines prevent disease and also prevent people transmitting the virus to others.

This not only has implications for vaccines we’ve been hearing about recently, but vaccines still in development.

Here’s why preventing viral transmission is so important. And here’s what we still need to do while we wait for a vaccine that prevents viral transmission.

Read more: A vaccine will be a game-changer for international travel. But it’s not everything

Preventing disease vs viral transmission

The Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has been shown to be safe and effective in late-stage clinical trials at preventing COVID-19, including severe disease, after infection. But we still don’t know if the vaccine prevents transmission of the virus from an infected person to a healthy one.

In fact, according to reports so far, this was not an endpoint or outcome measure of its trial. In other words, the vaccine trial was not designed to find this out.

However, it is not surprising we do not have this information at this stage. It is not feasible to determine whether the vaccine prevents spread in a trial involving about 43,000 participants. This would need routine testing of trial participants, a huge undertaking.

So, for us to get this type of information, drug companies, public health programs and researchers will need to work together to gather data once the vaccines are rolled out into the community.

This can be part of disease surveillance in a population. Alternatively, we could monitor a particular group, or location, containing people at high risk of viral transmission. Either way, this group (or cohort) would need to be monitored over time, and their infection status compared with whether or not they had the vaccine.

Read more: The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is the first to publish peer-reviewed efficacy results. Here’s what they tell us — and what they don’t

Then there’s the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine trials. There is early indication this vaccine may reduce person-to-person transmission of the virus. The investigators pointed to the observed reduction in asymptomatic infections among the vaccine recipients.

Although, it is still not certain to what extent asymptomatic people can transmit the virus and how much of a reduction in person-to-person transmission could be attributed to the vaccine. We need further analysis to know for sure.

Read more: We may have to accept a ‘good enough’ COVID-19 vaccine, at least in 2021

We still don’t know if herd immunity is possible

We still do not know whether the COVID-19 vaccines are suitable for all community members including those with certain health conditions or who are pregnant. However, the theory is that if we vaccinate a critical proportion of the population, we can protect the unvaccinated, via herd immunity.

But we cannot tell, at this point, whether herd immunity in a particular community is achievable through COVID-19 vaccination, given we have not seen robust evidence current vaccine candidates are halting transmission of the virus.

It is also too early to know how well the COVID-19 vaccines work in different populations — such as the elderly, children, pregnant women, and in some racially and ethnically diverse populations — as these groups were not a major part of or even involved in the clinical trials we’re now getting results from.

Finally, we still do not know how long the immunity developed from the COVID-19 vaccines will last.

What are the implications?

The distinction between vaccines that prevent the development of the disease and those that also prevent viral transmission has many implications.

For instance, because we have yet to see robust evidence current vaccine candidates reduce viral transmission, there’s a risk vaccinated people may think a vaccine offers more protection than it does, and may spread the virus to unvaccinated people, perhaps by not maintaining proper hygiene, socially distancing or wearing masks where needed.

There’s also a risk people who are unvaccinated may develop a false sense of security. They may think vaccinated people around them have developed immunity via vaccination to prevent transmission, or think they are protected via herd immunity.

So future COVID-19 vaccines should focus more on the prevention of the transmission of the virus plus preventing development of the disease.

One example is the Novavax vaccine, which Australia has signed an agreement for, should it prove safe and effective after late-stage clinical trials are completed.

In preclinical, and early-stage clinical trials, the vaccine has shown a high level of immune response, providing protection from infection and disease. However, further analysis is needed to know the details.

Read more: What do we know about the Novavax and Pfizer COVID vaccines that Australia just signed up for?

Our lives won’t ‘return to normal’ just yet

With all this uncertainty, it is important we are realistic when thinking about what 2021 will look like.

Even with the release of the vaccine, we are only half-way back to normal. Hygiene, physical distancing, the need for COVID-19 testing and other public health measures will continue to be critical.

Read more: Vaccines alone won’t keep Australia safe in 2021. Here’s what else we need to do

– ref. A COVID-19 vaccine that prevents both the disease and viral transmission is the aim. Until then, here’s what we need to do – https://theconversation.com/a-covid-19-vaccine-that-prevents-both-the-disease-and-viral-transmission-is-the-aim-until-then-heres-what-we-need-to-do-151839

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dianne Cook, Professor of Business Analytics, Monash University

As last summer’s horrific bushfires raged, so too did debate about what caused them. Despite the prolonged drought and ever worsening climate change, some people sought to blame the fires largely on arson.

Federal Coalition MPs were among those pushing the arsonist claim. And on Twitter, a fierce hashtag war broke out: “#ClimateEmergency” vs “#ArsonEmergency”.

Fire authorities rejected the arson claims, saying most fires were thought to be caused by lightning.

We dug into open data resources to learn more about the causes of last summer’s bushfires in Victoria, and further test the arson claim. Our analysis suggests 82% of the fires can be attributed to lightning, 14% to accidents and 1% to burning off. Only 4% can be attributed to arson.

What we did

We started with hotspots data taken from the Himawari-8 satellite, which shows heat source locations over time and space, in almost real time. We omitted hotspots unlikely to be bushfires, and used a type of data mining called “spatiotemporal clustering” – where time dimension is introduced to geographic data – to estimate ignition time and location.

We supplemented this with data from other sources: temperature, moisture, rainfall, wind, sun exposure, fuel load, as well as distance to camp sites, roads and Country Fire Authority (CFA) stations.

Read more: Bushfires, bots and arson claims: Australia flung in the global disinformation spotlight

Victoria’s Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) holds historical data on bushfire ignition from 2000 to the 2018-19 summer. The forensic research required to determine fire cause is laborious, and remotely sensed data from satellites may be useful and more immediate.

By training our model on the historical data, we can more immediately predict causes of last summer’s fires detected from satellite data. (Note: even though we were analysing events in the past, we use the term “predict” because authorities have not released official data.)

DELWP’s data attributes 41% of fires to lightning, 17% to arson, 34% to accidents and 7% to hazard reduction or back burning which escaped containment lines (which our analysis refers to as burning off).

To make predictions for the 2019-20 bushfires, we needed an accurate model for causes in the historical data. We trained the model to predict one of four causes – lightning, accident, arson, burning off – using a machine learning algorithm.

The model performed well on the historical data: 75% overall accuracy, 90% accurate on lightning, 78% for accidents, and 54% for arson (which was mostly confused with accident, as would make sense).

The most important contributors to distinguishing between lightning and arson (or accident) ignition were distance to CFA stations, roads and camp sites, and average wind speed.

As might be expected, smaller distances to CFA stations, roads and camp sites, and higher than average winds, meant the fire was most likely the result of arson or accident. In the case of longer distances, where bush would have been largely inaccessible to the public, lightning was predicted to be the cause.

What we found

Our model predicted that 82% of Victoria’s fires in the summer of 2019-2020 were due to lightning. Most fires were located in densely vegetated areas inaccessible by road – similar to the historical locations. (The percentage is double that in the historical data, though, probably because the satellite hotspot data can see fire ignitions in locations inaccessible to fire experts).

All fires in February 2020 were predicted to be due to lightning. Accident and arson were commonly predicted causes in March, and early in the season. Reassuringly, ignition due to burning off was predicted primarily in October 2019, prior to the fire restrictions.

Quicker fire ignition information

Our analysis used open-data and open-source software, and could be applied to fires elsewhere in Australia.

This analysis shows how we can quickly predict causes of bushfires, using satellite data combined with other information. It could reduce the work of fire forensics teams, and provide more complete fire ignition data in future.

The code used for the analysis can be found here. Explore the historical fire data, predictions for 2019-2020 fires, and a fire risk map for Victoria using this app.

This analysis is based on thesis research by Monash University Honours student Weihao Li. She was supervised by the author, and former Principal Inventive Scientist at AT&T Labs Research, Emily Dodwell. The Australian Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers supported Emily’s travel to Australia to start this project. The full analysis is available here.

– ref. Open data shows lightning, not arson, was the likely cause of most Victorian bushfires last summer – https://theconversation.com/open-data-shows-lightning-not-arson-was-the-likely-cause-of-most-victorian-bushfires-last-summer-151912

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jorg Michael Hacker, Chief Scientist at Airborne Research Australia (ARA); and Professor, Flinders University

Two days before Christmas last year, a fire reached our heritage-protected bush property in the Adelaide Hills, and destroyed our neighbour’s house. For the next two weeks we were on constant alert to keep the fire in check.

A few weeks later, I flew over fire-affected areas in the Adelaide Hills and had my first aerial view of the devastation. Fighting fires around my home, and what I saw on this flight, convinced me to get involved with helping recovery in the aftermath of the fires.

In the past year, I’ve taken high-resolution aerial data to monitor the recovery of fire-affected areas and help with post-fire efforts. This work includes clearing access tracks into burnt forests, locating unburnt areas within burnt forests to serve as refuges for wildlife, or simply documenting the degree of destruction.

I now have a unique dataset – a combination of very high-resolution and detail from three sensors: aerial photography, airborne Lidar (a way to measure distances with laser light) and hyperspectral imaging (looking at the landscape and vegetation with hundreds of narrow wavelengths).

Flying at just 250 metres above the ground, it’s possible to generate complete three-dimensional views and animations of the landscape and its features at resolutions in the 10cm-range.

Usually such airborne data is only available to government agencies, industry and sometimes researchers, but rarely to the general public. So we decided to make the data publicly available, so anyone can download it. It will help you appreciate the level of destruction, and how it varied for different landscapes.

My property, for example, is showing strong regrowth, but most of our neighbour’s block burnt so intensely that even now, after nearly one year, there’s very little regrowth even in terms of ground cover.

Here are a few examples of the landscape’s recovery around Kangaroo Island, generated from our data.

Bushfires decimated almost half of Kangaroo Island. The image sequence above shows a small area on Kangaroo Island before the fires and about one, three and nine months afterwards.

Before the fires, the landscape was dominated by dense bushland, which the fires nearly completely destroyed. The first signs of regrowth were visible after three months, and even more so after nine months.

The imagery is so detailed you can inspect the regrowth even for individual trees and scrubs. And in the slider below, you can more clearly compare how well the bushland regrew between February and October this year.

Much of Australia’s native flora have evolved to cope with fire. Grass trees are among the first species to recover, and the Lidar data below demonstrates just how dramatic this recovery is.

Thousands of grass trees (“yuccas”) on Kangaroo Island grew up to seven metre-high flowers in the months after the fires. This is a typical phenomenon for this species after fire, and we were lucky enough to see this first hand on our bushland property, too.

The video below shows the regrowth in and around a tree plantation on Kangaroo Island, directly after the fires and then after nine months. You can clearly see the intense regrowth on the ground and near the bottom of the burnt trees.

Usually firegrounds are observed via satellite imagery, imagery captured from high-flying survey aircraft and, more recently, using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). None of these observations can map the landscape at the exceptionally high detail over large areas and with the combination of sensors as we have flown.

High-resolution aerial photographs at pixel sizes as small as five centimetres can be put together in a mosaic, covering many square kilometres. Combined with Lidar, and the hyperspectral scanner, we get detailed animations, such as those in the video, which can zero in on various intricate aspects, such as vegetation health.

How these datasets can help bushfire recovery

With a some moderate funding, we can continue these regular mapping flights next year and beyond to learn how these areas develop. We can put this into context with other factors, such as burn severity, soil structure and vegetation type.

Such detailed datasets would assist researchers assessing flammability and fuel load (dried vegetation) which, in turn, would help prevent and even fight future fires.

Read more: Fire-ravaged Kangaroo Island is teeming with feral cats. It’s bad news for this little marsupial

Flammability and fuel load, alongside the slope of the landscape, are key parameters in computer simulations of fire behaviour. High resolution datasets depicting landscapes before and after bushfire can verify the simulation results, and help to improve the performance of the models.

Our datasets can also be useful for people needing to access areas directly after the fires, such as identifying where burnt trees have fallen, or are just about to do so.

For our own bushland block in the Adelaide Hills, these detailed imagery and datasets means we can study the regrowth from the Cudlee Creek Fire almost a year ago, as well as from previous fires. For example, some areas were burnt in the 2015 Sampson Flat Fire and had already regrown over the four years — only to be burnt again.

Continuing such flights would require a comparatively low amount of funding. However, this is currently not available in the standard government grant system. You can download data from the mapping flights over Adelaide Hills and Kangaroo Island.

Read more: Yes, native plants can flourish after bushfire. But there’s only so much hardship they can take

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jorg Michael Hacker, Chief Scientist at Airborne Research Australia (ARA); and Professor, Flinders University

Two days before Christmas last year, a fire reached our heritage-protected bush property in the Adelaide Hills, and destroyed our neighbour’s house. For the next two weeks we were on constant alert to keep the fire in check.

A few weeks later, I flew over fire-affected areas in the Adelaide Hills and had my first aerial view of the devastation. Fighting fires around my home, and what I saw on this flight, convinced me to get involved with helping recovery in the aftermath of the fires.

In the past year, I’ve taken high-resolution aerial data to monitor the recovery of fire-affected areas and help with post-fire efforts. This work includes clearing access tracks into burnt forests, locating unburnt areas within burnt forests to serve as refuges for wildlife, or simply documenting the degree of destruction.

Read more: Summer bushfires: how are the plant and animal survivors 6 months on? We mapped their recovery

I now have a unique dataset – a combination of very high-resolution and detail from three sensors: aerial photography, airborne Lidar (a way to measure distances with laser light) and hyperspectral imaging (looking at the landscape and vegetation with hundreds of narrow wavelengths).

Flying at just 250 metres above the ground, it’s possible to generate complete three-dimensional views and animations of the landscape and its features at resolutions in the 10cm-range.

Usually such airborne data is only available to government agencies, industry and sometimes researchers, but rarely to the general public. So we decided to make the data publicly available, so anyone can download it. It will help you appreciate the level of destruction, and how it varied for different landscapes.

My property, for example, is showing strong regrowth, but most of our neighbour’s block burnt so intensely that even now, after nearly one year, there’s very little regrowth even in terms of ground cover.

Here are a few examples of the landscape’s recovery around Kangaroo Island, generated from our data.

Bushfires decimated almost half of Kangaroo Island. The image sequence above shows a small area on Kangaroo Island before the fires and about one, three and nine months afterwards.

Before the fires, the landscape was dominated by dense bushland, which the fires nearly completely destroyed. The first signs of regrowth were visible after three months, and even more so after nine months.

The imagery is so detailed you can inspect the regrowth even for individual trees and scrubs. And in the slider below, you can more clearly compare how well the bushland regrew between February and October this year.

Much of Australia’s native flora have evolved to cope with fire. Grass trees are among the first species to recover, and the Lidar data below demonstrates just how dramatic this recovery is.

Thousands of grass trees (“yuccas”) on Kangaroo Island grew up to seven metre-high flowers in the months after the fires. This is a typical phenomenon for this species after fire, and we were lucky enough to see this first hand on our bushland property, too.

The video below shows the regrowth in and around a tree plantation on Kangaroo Island, directly after the fires and then after nine months. You can clearly see the intense regrowth on the ground and near the bottom of the burnt trees.

Usually firegrounds are observed via satellite imagery, imagery captured from high-flying survey aircraft and, more recently, using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). None of these observations can map the landscape at the exceptionally high detail over large areas and with the combination of sensors as we have flown.

High-resolution aerial photographs at pixel sizes as small as five centimetres can be put together in a mosaic, covering many square kilometres. Combined with Lidar, and the hyperspectral scanner, we get detailed animations, such as those in the video, which can zero in on various intricate aspects, such as vegetation health.

How these datasets can help bushfire recovery

With a some moderate funding, we can continue these regular mapping flights next year and beyond to learn how these areas develop. We can put this into context with other factors, such as burn severity, soil structure and vegetation type.

Such detailed datasets would assist researchers assessing flammability and fuel load (dried vegetation) which, in turn, would help prevent and even fight future fires.

Read more: Fire-ravaged Kangaroo Island is teeming with feral cats. It’s bad news for this little marsupial

Flammability and fuel load, alongside the slope of the landscape, are key parameters in computer simulations of fire behaviour. High resolution datasets depicting landscapes before and after bushfire can verify the simulation results, and help to improve the performance of the models.

Our datasets can also be useful for people needing to access areas directly after the fires, such as identifying where burnt trees have fallen, or are just about to do so.

For our own bushland block in the Adelaide Hills, these detailed imagery and datasets means we can study the regrowth from the Cudlee Creek Fire almost a year ago, as well as from previous fires. For example, some areas were burnt in the 2015 Sampson Flat Fire and had already regrown over the four years — only to be burnt again.

Continuing such flights would require a comparatively low amount of funding. However, this is currently not available in the standard government grant system. You can download data from the mapping flights over Adelaide Hills and Kangaroo Island.

Read more: Yes, native plants can flourish after bushfire. But there’s only so much hardship they can take

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Farkhondeh Hassandoust, Lecturer, Auckland University of Technology

This week’s announcement of two new COVID-19 vaccine pre-purchase deals is encouraging, but doesn’t mean New Zealanders should become complacent about using the NZ COVID Tracer app during the summer holidays.

The immunisation rollout won’t start until the second quarter of 2021, and the government is encouraging New Zealanders to continue using the app, including the recently upgraded bluetooth function, as part of its plan to manage the pandemic during the holiday period.

Read more: How to keep COVID-19 at bay during the summer holidays — and help make travel bubbles a reality in 2021

During the past weeks, the number of daily scans has dropped significantly, down from just over 900,000 scans per day at the end of November to fewer than 400,000 in mid-December.

With no active cases of COVID-19 in the commmunity, complacency might be part of the issue in New Zealand, but as our research in the US shows, worries about privacy and trust continue to make people reluctant to use contact-tracing apps.

Concerns about privacy and surveillance

We surveyed 853 people from every state in the US to identify the factors promoting or inhibiting their use of contact-tracing applications. Our survey reveals two seemingly contradictory findings.

Individuals are highly motivated to use contact-tracing apps, for the sake of their own health and that of society as a whole. But the study also found people are concerned about privacy, social disapproval and surveillance.

The findings suggest people’s trust in the data collectors is dependent on the technology features of these apps (for example, information sensitivity and anonymity) and the privacy protection initiatives instigated by the authorities.

With the holiday season just around the corner — and even though New Zealand is currently free of community transmission — our findings are pertinent. New Zealanders will travel more during the summer period, and it is more important than ever to use contact-tracing apps to improve our chances of getting on top of any potential outbreaks as quickly as possible.

How, then, to overcome concerns about privacy and trust and make sure New Zealanders use the upgraded app during summer?

The benefits of adopting contact-tracing apps are mainly in shared public health, and it is important these societal health benefits are emphasised. In order to quell concerns, data collectors (government and businesses) must also offer assurance that people’s real identity will be concealed.

It is the responsibility of the government and the office of the Privacy Commissioner to ensure all personal information is managed appropriately.

Read more: An Australia–NZ travel bubble needs a unified COVID contact-tracing app. We’re not there

Transparency and data security

Our study also found that factors such as peer and social influence, regulatory pressures and previous experiences with privacy loss underlie people’s readiness to adopt contact-tracing apps.

The findings reveal that people expect regulatory protection if they are to use contact-tracing apps. This confirms the need for laws and regulations with strict penalties for those who collect, use, disclose or decrypt collected data for any purpose other than contact tracing.

The New Zealand government is working with third-party developers to complete the integration of other apps by the end of December to enable the exchange of digital contact-tracing information from different apps and technologies.

The Privacy Commissioner has already endorsed the bluetooth upgrade of the official NZ COVID Tracer app because of its focus on users’ privacy. And the Ministry of Health aims to release the source code for the app so New Zealanders can see how their personal data has been managed.

Throughout the summer, the government and ministry should emphasise the importance of using the contact-tracing app and assure New Zealanders about the security and privacy of their personal data.

Adoption of contact-tracing apps is no silver bullet in the battle against COVID-19, but it is a crucial element in New Zealand’s collective public health response to the global pandemic.

– ref. Not just complacency: why people are reluctant to use COVID-19 contact-tracing apps – https://theconversation.com/not-just-complacency-why-people-are-reluctant-to-use-covid-19-contact-tracing-apps-152085

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ray Norris, Professor, School of Science, Western Sydney University

At the very largest scale, the Universe consists of a “cosmic web” made of enormous, tenuous filaments of gas stretching between gigantic clumps of matter. Or that’s what our best models suggest. All we have seen so far with our telescopes are the stars and galaxies in the clumps of matter.

So is the cosmic web real, or a figment of our models? Can we confirm our models by detecting these faint gaseous filaments directly?

Until recently, these filaments have been elusive. But now a collaboration between Australian radio astronomers and German x-ray astronomers has detected one.

CSIRO’s newly completed Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope in Western Australia is starting to produce a large-scale picture of the Universe in radio frequencies. This telescope can see deeper than any other radio telescope, producing new discoveries, such as the unexplained Odd Radio Circles or ORCs.

Seeing with radio waves and x-rays

This year has also seen the publication of the first observations by the German eROSITA Space Telescope, which is giving us our deepest large-scale picture of the Universe in x-ray frequencies. Both of these next-generation telescopes have an unprecedented ability to scan large areas of sky at once, so they are beautifully matched to study the large-scale features of the Universe. Together, they can achieve much more than either on its own, so naturally we have joined forces.

The first result from this collaboration is the discovery of a cosmic filament of hot gas. This study was led by Thomas Reiprich of the University of Bonn and Marcus Brueggen of the University of Hamburg, and involved Australian scientists from CSIRO and from Curtin, Macquarie, Monash and Western Sydney universities. It is published today in two papers in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The cosmic web

The Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago produced a Universe filled with invisible dark matter, together with a featureless gas of hydrogen and helium, and little else. Over the next few billion years, the gas clumped together under the attraction of gravity, forming filaments of matter with vast empty voids between them. The filaments probably contain more than half the matter in the Universe, even though the filaments themselves contain just ten particles per cubic metre – less than the best vacuum we can create on Earth.

Nearly all the galaxies we see today, including our own Milky Way, are thought to have formed in these filaments. We think galaxies then slide along the filaments until they fall into the dense clusters of galaxies clumped together at junctions where filaments meet.

But until now, all this was hypothetical — we could see the galaxies and clusters, but we couldn’t see the gaseous filaments themselves. Now, eROSITA has directly detected the hot gas in a filament 50 million light-years long. This is an important step forward, confirming our model of the cosmic web is correct.

Read more: We’ve mapped a million previously undiscovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Take the virtual tour here.

A smooth ride

We also expected the hot gas would whip up electrons to produce radio frequency emissions, but, curiously, we don’t detect the filament with ASKAP. This tells us the hot gas is flowing smoothly, without the turbulence that would accelerate electrons to produce radio waves. So the galaxies are getting a smooth ride as they fall into the clusters.

We can see the individual galaxies falling into the clusters in the radio images from ASKAP. At radio wavelengths, we often see galaxies bracketed by a pair of jets, caused by electrons squirting out from near the black hole in the centre of the galaxy.

However, in our radio images of these clusters, we see the jets bent and distorted as they are buffeted by intergalactic winds in the dense gas in the clusters. Again, this is a good confirmation of our models.

This work is not only important as confirmation of our model of the Universe, but is also the first result to come from the collaboration between ASKAP and eROSITA. These two telescopes are beautifully matched to survey our Universe, seeing the Universe as it has never been seen before, and I expect this discovery to be the first of many.

We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the ASKAP Observatory site.

Read more: ‘WTF?’: newly discovered ghostly circles in the sky can’t be explained by current theories, and astronomers are excited

– ref. A thread of the cosmic web: astronomers spot a 50 million light-year galactic filament – https://theconversation.com/a-thread-of-the-cosmic-web-astronomers-spot-a-50-million-light-year-galactic-filament-151569

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Vice-chancellor’s fellow, La Trobe University

Canberra policymakers will be conducting a root-and-branch reassessment of Australia’s foreign policy following Donald Trump’s defeat in the US presidential election and ahead of an incoming Democrat administration.

Top of the list of items for review will be a leaden-footed China policy. Chinese trade reprisals for perceived Australian slights are doing real harm to Australia’s economic interests.

However, there are other areas of concern that demand attention in anticipation of Joe Biden’s presidency.

High on this agenda will be Middle East policy, which has suffered from the Trump administration’s transactional approach to a region in which America surrendered its traditional “honest broker” role in favour of an “Israel-first” approach.

US Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken might say, as he did at a Hudson Institute event earlier this year, that “I think we would be doing less not more in the Middle East”.

Read more: From ‘America first’ to ‘America together’: who is Antony Blinken, Biden’s pick for secretary of state?

However, in the world’s most volatile region, history shows this aspiration is easier said than realised. Successive US administrations have endeavoured to pull back from the Middle East. Circumstances conspire to make this difficult.

From an Australian perspective, a Biden administration will inevitably shift the tone of America’s responses to Middle East challenges. This includes attitudes to the Palestinians.

Biden will not be showing the same tolerance for Israel’s settlement expansion as his predecessor, nor would he countenance unilateral Israeli annexation of territories under occupation.

The new administration will return to a two-state formula in its approach to Middle East peacemaking. This is a phrase that was sidelined during the Trump administration.

Canberra policymakers will need to be agile as these shifts work their way through American Middle East policy, which will be less ideological and more focused on what might be described as core principles.

These principles will involve greater emphasis on human rights. This is not good news for serial human rights-abusing countries such as Saudi Arabia, or Israel in its treatment of the Palestinians, for that matter.

Climate issues will weigh, too. This will be awkward for laggards on climate like Saudi Arabia.

A Biden administration can also be expected to take a less tolerant view of inroads Russia and Turkey have made in the Middle East. Both countries have factored themselves into regional calculations in ways not apparent when Biden served as vice-president in the Obama administration.

Moscow and Ankara are now significant regional players down into the Gulf and west to North Africa in their extraterritorial meddling in fractured states such as Libya.

Regional architecture is vastly more complex and, if possible, more challenging than it was four years ago.

This brings us, inevitably, to Iran.

Biden has made clear that among his early foreign policy priorities will be to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA) signed in 2015 by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany and the European Union.

Read more: Sanctions, a failing economy and coronavirus may cause Iran to change its involvement in Syria

An agreement to forestall an Iranian acquisition of a nuclear capability was the crowning foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration.

Trump irresponsibly abandoned the JCPOA in 2018.

In a September 13 essay on CNN.com, Biden said:

If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.

In the process, the US would lift crippling oil sanctions imposed by Trump. These have done considerable damage to Iran’s economy.

However, debate on rejoining the JCPOA without concessions from Iran will be fraught.

A Biden administration would come under considerable pressure to renegotiate aspects of the JCPOA after rejoining. This would include an extension of the original 15-year moratorium on Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear device.

US negotiators would be expected to pressure Iran to wind back its support for regional proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian territories.

Washington would also seek to curb Iran’s exports of precision guided missiles to allies in the region and further afield.

Tehran has said such issues would not be on the table in the event of a renegotiated JCPOA. These are highly complex matters.

What does make sense are indications a Biden administration would seek to involve other interested parties in a renegotiated JCPOA.

Biden’s foreign policy team has been talking about link? adding regional players like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This would certainly help address nuclear proliferation concerns.

In an interview with the New York Times this month, Biden warned of the risks of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East involving Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey in the event that Iran acquires a breakout nuclear capability.

The last goddam thing we need in that part of the world is a build-up of nuclear capability.

Canberra will not have issues with this approach.

Australia’s response to the Trump administration’s abandonment of the JCPOA was cautious. The government conducted a review of Australia’s support and then quietly shelved any objections it might have had.

In any case, Australia hardly rates as anything more than a bystander, albeit one that has maintained diplomatic representation in Tehran since the days of the shah.

This has been useful, as was demonstrated recently by the role Australia’s ambassador in Tehran played in the release of Australian-UK researcher Kylie Moore-Gilbert from a two-year incarceration.

Read more: Kylie Moore-Gilbert has been released. But will a prisoner swap with Australia encourage more hostage-taking by Iran?

With Australia’s trading relationship with China so stressed, further developing existing markets and seeking new opportunities will be a preoccupation.

While Australia’s trade with the Middle East is relative small, it is significant. Two-way trade with the region, mostly in the Gulf, amounts to about 2.5% of total trade. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are the most prospective markets for Australian goods and services.

The Gulf region is also home to four of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. At A$11 billion, the UAE’s investment in Australia is worth noting.

An Australian review of Middle East policy will inevitably involve assessments of what a Biden administration will mean for Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan.

The Trump administration has announced it will draw down its troop presence from the current 4,500 to 2,500 by early 2021. This follows a “peace agreement” with the Taliban struck in February.

Biden has been agnostic on Afghanistan. He was a dissenting voice in the Obama administration against a surge in troops in 2008-2009, but lost that argument.

He is thought likely to favour retaining a small, residual counter-terrorism force in Afghanistan. On his record, he would be most reluctant to increase numbers.

In Australia’s case, its combat troops have long gone. It retains a small training contingent with the Afghan army. This is likely to remain the case under present circumstances.

Finally, in October, Canberra made an important decision about its role in the Middle East. This received little attention at the time.

Defence Minister Linda Reynolds announced Australia would end its naval presence in the Gulf, where the navy had been conducting patrols.

As part of its 2020 Defence Strategic Update, Reynolds said “an increasingly challenging strategic environment” was “placing greater demand on ADF resources closer to home”.

Given China’s continued rise, that would seem to be an understatement.

– ref. Joe Biden’s approach to the Middle East will be very different from Trump’s, especially on Iran – https://theconversation.com/joe-bidens-approach-to-the-middle-east-will-be-very-different-from-trumps-especially-on-iran-151987

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

Having a baby at Christmas can be both a joyous time and a cause for anxiety. This Christmas, with a pandemic sweeping the world, there may also be some unique considerations on parents’ minds.

So if you’re one of the women on the maternity ward around Christmas time, you might want to know what to expect.

Can your partner be with you when the time comes? Will there be tinsel? What if you don’t celebrate Christmas?

Read more: Schnapps, whipping and sacks: how Christmas traditions evolved around the world

What are the chances of a Christmas baby?

In Australia, December 25 is actually the least likely day of the year to be born, closely followed by December 26. So finding room at the inn to give birth in 2020 shouldn’t be a problem.

We also see a similar pattern in other countries that celebrate Christmas. The main reason is some women (and some staff) want to avoid births on that day, so they are more likely to schedule births early.

But this year may be different. Christmas is around 40 weeks after Australia’s nationwide COVID lockdown in March and April. So, we’ll soon see if we end up delivering more “lockdown babies”.

But what is it actually like?

In some ways, Christmas on a maternity ward is pretty much like any workplace with staff rostered on for December 25. There’s lots of good (read: sugary) food, funny hats and festive bling. But of course, the prospect of helping “catch” (midwife term for deliver) a Christmas baby makes it much more special.

If you ask any midwife what it’s like to “catch a baby” or care for new parents on Christmas Day, they break into a smile and have a lovely story. I recently asked for some anecdotes, and my inbox was soon filled with heartwarming snippets, along with photos of Christmas decorations festooning the maternity units.

One midwife told me:

I was dressed in a very festive, fully sequinned Christmas shirt and I responded to a call bell over in the birthing unit, as everyone was busy. A lovely mother was in the bathroom giving birth. I caught her baby and suggested she now move over to the bed to birth the placenta, when she looked me in the eye and asked if we should call a midwife. She thought I was a visitor.

Another midwife recalled:

Late in the evening on Christmas Eve, a small group of nuns came to the birthing unit to enquire if there was likely to be a birth soon. I advised them (with consent from the woman I was looking after) that the woman was likely to birth just after midnight. Each nun nodded to one another and smiled at me, as they thanked me for this insight. Then, when it came time for the baby to be born, the couple and I heard the most beautiful choir of angels outside the birthing room, singing Away in a Manger quietly. It was heavenly, so beautiful. We all cried tears of happiness and joy together.

Will this Christmas be different?

In Australia we are lucky COVID case numbers are down, and the strictest health measures have been lifted. Some hospitals still have limits on the number of support people who can be present at the birth, and how many visitors you can have afterwards. It’s best to check your maternity unit’s specific arrangements.

Staff will make great efforts to make this a time of celebration. Women often go home early when giving birth at Christmas, and this is not just due to COVID. Women told me of being discharged home just in time for Christmas lunch to be with their families and being waited on hand and foot. If this is what’s in store for you, be sure to rest. And no cooking Christmas lunch!

Will there be tinsel in birth units this year?

Many midwives love to decorate the maternity units they work in, although COVID requirements have made it trickier this year. One midwife told me how beautifully her team “decorated the wards on a Sunday when the managers were not about and on Monday were promptly told to take [the decorations] down due to COVID”.

Nevertheless, I received many pictures of innovative (and easily wiped down) COVID-safe decorations.

It is also important to remember many cultures and countries do not celebrate Christmas. But you don’t have to observe Christmas to enjoy a little respite at the end of a tough year.

But what happens every year after giving birth to a Christmas Day baby? One mother told me the worst thing is the “sympathy all the time. We make it his own special day in his own special way”. Another told me her daughter loves having her birthday at Christmas and just pretends the whole world has “turned the celebrations on for her”. Other mums say they have a smaller celebration on the actual day and another one further away from Christmas.

Read more: Why Call the Midwife satisfies our enduring need for heroic stories of fertility and birth

Christmas can also be a vulnerable time

Christmas can also be a time of vulnerability for women, children and families. Close family may live far away, or there may be a lack of support in a woman’s life. Family, domestic and sexual violence can increase.

Alcohol, which flows freely during this time, can add to the danger. Pregnant women are more vulnerable to domestic violence anyway and this escalates at Christmas time.

Women experiencing difficulty breastfeeding may also feel they have little support over the holiday period.

For parents who have lost a baby this year, either through miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death, Christmas, which is all about celebration and family, can add to the grief.

Read more: Five ways to help parents cope with the trauma of stillbirth

And 2020 has been a particularly tough year for many of us. Our mental health has been tested and exhaustion may have set in. Some people have lost friends or family members, or lost their job. Women in particular have shouldered much of the burden of home-schooling and caring for the family.

Whatever this year has held for you, go gently, and remember you are not alone. Christmas time, on maternity wards and everywhere else, is a celebration of new life and new hope.

If this article has raised issues for you or someone you know, contact: Lifeline – 13 11 14 or text 0477 13 11 14; Beyond Blue – 1300 224 636; National Sexual Violence, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service – 1800 737 732; SANDS miscarriage, stillbirth and newborn death support – 1300 072 637; Australian Breastfeeding Association helpline – 1800 686 268, download the mum2mum app for ongoing support, or hire a breast pump.

– ref. Christmas is a special time on the maternity ward. But it’s not all tinsel and mince pies – https://theconversation.com/christmas-is-a-special-time-on-the-maternity-ward-but-its-not-all-tinsel-and-mince-pies-150063