A gunman shot and killed three children and a teacher at a school in Bend, Oregon, on Oct. 15, 2026, the 52nd school shooting this year, according to CNN. The children’s ages were 5, 8 and 11; a 7-year-old and another teacher were taken to the hospital with critical injuries. The 16-year-old shooting suspect was shot and killed by a bystander.

Though Oregon has stricter gun laws than most states, some of those laws, such as a measure requiring tougher background checks and requiring a person to have a permit in order to buy a gun, are stalled in court.

The Bend shooting – the latest in a long line of modern school shootings dating back to the late 1980s – comes just weeks before the midterm elections, in which voters will choose members of Congress and state lawmakers who can shape gun laws.

Nearly 50 million Americans ages 18 to 29 are eligible to vote in the upcoming midterm elections, and about 60% say they plan to. If they follow through, it would break midterm turnout records for voters under 30.

Gun control is an issue these young voters care about more than the public at large does, and it’s easy to understand why: In their lifetime, mass shootings have been a recurring part of American life.

Directly experiencing a mass shooting is rare, yet some young people have survived two before turning 25. When a gunman opened fire at Brown University in December 2025, at least two students on campus had already experienced a school shooting before they got to college. The same thing happened in April 2025, when students who lived through the 2018 Parkland, Florida, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School found themselves caught in another shooting at Florida State University. As one of them put it: “This is America.”

Researchers have called today’s young adults the “massacre generation.” They’re the first group to grow up entirely in the post-9/11, post-Columbine High School shooting era, with routine lockdown drills, heightened security in schools and nonstop media coverage of mass violence.

As criminologists who study the impacts of victimization and gun violence among young people, we wanted to know how growing up with the threat of mass shootings has shaped young adults’ views on gun legislation. In a recent study, we surveyed nearly 1,700 young adults, ages 18 to 29, across the country to find out. We found that fear of mass shootings pulls this generation apart along political and gender lines: It pushes some toward wanting stricter gun laws and others in the opposite direction.

A debate that repeats after every shooting

Mass shootings account for about 1% of gun deaths in the U.S. Still, they profoundly shape how safe millions of Americans feel. In a 2019 survey by the American Psychological Association, nearly 80% of Americans said the possibility of a mass shooting stressed them out, and a third said they avoided certain places because of it. The fear has become so common that clinicians now have screening tools to assess and treat people with anxiety over mass violence.

Young adults have also grown up watching the same heated gun debates play out after every tragedy. Gun control advocates call for stricter firearm restrictions to prevent the next mass shooting, whereas gun rights advocates push back with the “good guy with a gun” argument, a phrase made popular by the National Rifle Association. Supporters of the latter view say more armed citizens are needed to stop active shooters, so more people should be able to buy and carry guns with fewer restrictions, such as carrying in public without a permit or on college campuses.

Researchers have known for a long time that more guns don’t necessarily mean less violence. A 2021 study found that mass shootings were more common in states with higher rates of gun ownership, and gun homicides were more common in states with looser concealed carry laws. Yet even after decades of mass shootings, federal gun policy has barely budged. Even where individual states and local governments have passed assault weapons bans, including Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois, they’ve faced Second Amendment challenges that are now before the Supreme Court.

Young people have become some of the loudest voices in this debate, most notably through March for Our Lives – an organization started by Parkland survivors that focuses on ending gun violence – and other youth-led groups across the country. And because pro-gun views tend to be more common among older Americans, many political observers assume stricter gun laws will follow as young people gain voting power.

This fall, voters in a few states will weigh in on gun policy directly.

In Massachusetts, voters will decide whether to keep or repeal a 2024 law that, among other things, requires gun owners to register their firearms with the state, expands safety training for people applying for a gun license and broadens the state’s ban on assault-style weapons. In Arkansas, they’ll decide whether to change the state constitution to more strongly protect gun rights, including the right to own ammunition and gun parts. If young adults turn out in record numbers, their views could help determine outcomes like these.

Young adults are split

So where do young adults stand? We’ve found that a shared fear of mass shootings does not necessarily lead to shared views on guns. Our survey asked young adults to rate on a scale from 1 to 3 – from “not at all” to “a lot” – how much they fear that they or someone they love will become a victim of a mass shooting. More than 60% reported moderate or high levels of fear, including about 17% who fell in the high-fear range.

In general, about two-thirds of young adults said people should need a permit to carry a gun in public and that guns shouldn’t be allowed on college campuses. About 6 in 10 disagreed that owning more guns makes people safer, and a similar share disagreed that gun control laws are unconstitutional.

We found that young adults who worried more about mass shootings tended to be more supportive of gun control. But this pattern didn’t hold for young men, Republicans or those who were politically conservative. For these groups, the opposite was true: The more they feared mass shootings, the less they supported gun restrictions. Young adults are divided on gun control, and those divisions are sharpest when fear runs high.

In the coming years, the massacre generation is on track to become part of the largest voting bloc in the country. Most young adults share a fear of mass shootings, but they disagree on what to do about them. And with each new mass shooting, that divide may only deepen.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Oct. 15, 2026.

Jillian Turanovic has recently received research funding from the National Institute of Justice, the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and Arnold Ventures, none of which are responsible for this content.

Kristin Lloyd has recently received funding from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, who is not responsible for this content.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/16/young-voters-fear-mass-shootings-like-the-one-in-oregon-but-that-fear-divides-them-on-gun-control/

For more than 2,000 years, scientists have scratched their heads over one of the most basic mysteries of the natural world: Where do birds go?

Billions of birds appear and disappear with the seasons every year. Early naturalists offered explanations for the disappearances that today seem fantastical: Birds transformed into other species, one theory went. Others suggested they hibernated underwater or even migrated to the moon.

The truth, that these small animals were traveling thousands of miles across the planet, must once have seemed just as improbable.

Then, in the early 1800s, dramatic evidence emerged supporting the theory of migration. White storks began appearing in Germany with African arrows embedded in their bodies. These birds became known as pfeilstörche, or “arrow storks.” They provided compelling evidence that birds disappearing from Europe were traveling all the way to Africa and back.

Almost two centuries later, scientists are still asking the same question, but our ability to answer it has been transformed.

For most of ornithological history, scientists understood migration through brief glimpses of a bird, a specimen collected somewhere else, or the rare instance of a banded bird recovered hundreds or thousands of miles from where it had been marked. From these fragments of intelligence, scientists reconstructed journeys that took place largely beyond their view.

Today, it’s possible to see the journeys themselves, almost in real time.

A century of following birds

Bird banding was the first tool used to attempt a systematic approach to connect these fragments of information. Since the early 1900s, researchers have placed uniquely numbered metal bands on birds and hoped someone, somewhere, would encounter them again.

Of more than 79 million birds banded, only about 6.5 million have been recovered. That generally told scientists just two things: where a bird was banded and where it was encountered again. Everything between them remained invisible.

Over the past quarter-century or so, the tools used to determine where birds go have changed dramatically.

Tracking devices can now be carried by increasingly smaller birds, recording their movements and communicating with land-based receivers or satellites orbiting the earth. Testing stable isotopes in feathers and other tissues can reveal where a bird originated. Genetic testing can distinguish populations.

At the same time, the extraordinary growth of bird-watching and citizen science has created another revolution.

Millions of observations by bird-watchers submitted to eBird, an online database to record the birds they see, show the distribution and abundance of birds across a continent throughout the year in ways early ornithologists could scarcely have imagined.

Collectively, these methods open an extraordinary new window into migratory birds and one of nature’s most remarkable behaviors: migration.

Discovering unknown migrations

More than 70% of North American bird species are migratory. Yet scientists have known surprisingly little about where specific populations go.

A species like the American robin may breed across thousands of miles of North America, with different breeding populations migrating to entirely different places for the winter. Birds breeding in one part of the continent may travel one route and encounter one set of environmental conditions, while members of the same species experience a completely different set of conditions along another route.

These connections between where a bird breeds and where it spends the winter is called migratory connectivity. They are critical for understanding everything from the consequences of climate change on birds to how avian pathogens and diseases spread, to a species’ basic ecology.

We are ornithologists and conservation scientists who have spent almost 15 years along with a team of contributors compiling this rapidly expanding knowledge on bird movement into The Atlas of North America’s Migratory Birds. The atlas, being published on Nov. 3, 2026, by Princeton University Press, covers the latest information on seasonal movements for nearly 600 species and combines a century of bird-banding data with eBird observations, tracking studies, stable isotope testing, genetics and other sources of information.

What emerges is a picture of migratory birds that is both more complicated and more remarkable than the simple arrows pointing between breeding and wintering ranges on a map.

Consider the yellow-billed cuckoo. These birds breed over a wide range of the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. but migrate to a relatively small wintering area in the Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina, Paraguay and southern Bolivia.

In contrast, peregrine falcons that breed in Alaska migrate almost directly south, dispersing across the Americas to wintering grounds that extend as far as southern South America.

Discoveries like these are accumulating rapidly. Collectively, they amount to a renaissance in our understanding of animal movement never before imagined.

Living masterpieces

The more clearly scientists can follow individual birds and populations across the planet, the more extraordinary these species can seem.

Migratory birds such as the arctic tern and northern wheatear cross oceans, deserts and mountain ranges. Some, like the bar-tailed godwits, fly thousands of miles without stopping. Others, like the American redstart, return year after year to remarkably precise breeding and wintering locations.

They navigate landscapes and respond to winds, weather, food and environmental conditions across enormous geographic scales.

We see these species and their migrations as among evolution’s great living masterpieces. That’s why we combined science with natural history and artist John Anderton’s extraordinary illustrations of the birds themselves. The maps allow us to see where birds travel, and the art brings the species to life.

Together, they make visible something that humans could only imagine for most of our history.

A map for conservation

North America has lost about 3 billion birds during the past half-century, and many migratory species continue to decline.

To understand why a population is declining and help save it, researchers need to understand the species’ entire annual cycle: its critical stopover habitats, wintering grounds and threats along its migration routes.

For much of the history of ornithology, scientists studied birds primarily during their breeding season. That made practical sense. Birds are conspicuous then – singing, defending territories, building nests and raising young.

But a migratory bird may spend only a few months of its life in its breeding grounds. Conditions such as weather, food availability and habitat quality encountered during migration can determine whether an individual survives to breed again.

Drought thousands of miles away can affect a bird’s condition months later. American redstarts depart later after dry winters and produce fewer young. Declining horseshoe crab populations in Delaware Bay have reduced food availability for migrating red knots, contributing to lower survival.

The power of people

All of this knowledge has accumulated because people value birds and have devoted enormous time and effort to understanding them.

For more than a century, thousands of bird-banders have woken up before the crack of dawn to set traps, carefully place bands on birds’ legs and release them, often knowing the chances of ever learning what happened to those individuals were exceedingly small.

More recently, tracking technology has allowed researchers to follow individual birds across continents and oceans. Those tracks exist because scientists, students, technicians and others have spent countless hours attaching and recovering tags, and contributing and sharing their data.

Today, millions of bird-watchers contribute observations that, thanks to advances in data science, allow us to watch migration unfold across an entire continent.

We have spent much of our careers documenting the decline of birds, and we know the challenges facing migratory species are formidable. But we also have hope for these creatures’ survival. Scientists today know more about where migratory birds go, how populations are connected and what they encounter along the way than at any previous point in history. That knowledge is helping to identify where conservation efforts can make a difference for the future.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/16/for-centuries-bird-migration-was-a-mystery-a-tech-revolution-is-changing-that-and-could-help-save-these-amazing-creatures/

More than 25,000 police officers were deployed across New Delhi recently to prevent demonstrations led by India’s new youth-led political movement, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Government authorities had denied the CJP permission to protest on public-order grounds.

The ensuing security operation saw the authorities shut one in six metro stations in the capital, barricade dozens of central roads and cancel over 250 trains in what Indian rail officials called an “unprecedented closure”. Thousands of protesters were detained, with documented accounts of police brutality. While the epicentre is in Delhi, protests have been documented in five other major cities.

The protests underscore a paradox at the heart of Indian politics. On the one hand, they show just how far India’s democracy has declined. On the other, they offer up glimmers of the key ingredients needed for democratic renewal: widening political participation, greater opposition coordination and mobilisation around concrete demands.

The protests grew out of discontent over a nationwide electoral roll review known as the Special Intensive Revision. The revision, which began in 2025, has removed more than 130 million names from eligible voter lists – almost a tenth of India’s entire population.

India’s Election Commission has led the revision and says it is necessary to remove duplicate and ineligible voters. But critics allege the review has political motivations. In the state of West Bengal earlier in 2026, almost 12% of registered voters were removed from voter rolls before India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sailed to an election victory in a state it had not previously governed.

One analysis found that in a large number of constituencies the BJP won, the number of deleted voters exceeded the party’s margin of victory. These events do not definitively prove that Special Intensive Revision deletions changed the state election results. But the pattern is troubling.

So when the Indian Express recently reported that Election Commission members themselves raised 14 objections to voter exclusion during the revision, all of which were overruled by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, the CJP called for his resignation and took to Delhi’s streets.

All of this is occurring in the context of considerable democratic decline under Narendra Modi’s government. This has taken the form of executive centralisation, intensified use of anti-terror laws and growing media ownership concentration.

No democracy watchdogs currently classify India as a full democracy. In 2021, Freedom House downgraded India from “free” to “partly free”, while the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute now classifies the world’s most populous country as an “electoral autocracy”.

Arresting the decline

The protests are unlikely to arrest India’s democratic decline. Modi’s government is powered not just by the BJP, but also the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. This is a century-old Hindu nationalist organisation with well-organised networks extending into schools, unions, charities and neighbourhoods.

The combination of deep grassroots organisation and effective government control of media makes Modi’s government extraordinarily capable of mobilising supporters. These advantages help explain why Modi has remained in power for 12 years in a country historically known for turning incumbents out of power.

But the cockroach movement is getting three aspects of its political activism right. First, the movement has begun to restore a sense of political efficacy in India, or the belief that collective action can force a powerful government to retreat.

Earlier in 2026, CJP-led protests successfully forced Modi’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to resign over a scandal involving leaked exam papers. The stakes are extremely high. In a country where university graduates make up two-thirds of unemployed 20-29 year olds, success in such exams offers a rare pathway to upward mobility.

One indication that participation in the protest movement is now widening came from popular Indian YouTuber, Dhruv Rathee. In a recent interview, Rathee told the BBC that he was not a political figure but now felt compelled to participate in his first protest because “basically the foundation of our democracy is at stake here”.

Second, the protests have brought together previously distinct forces across broad sectors of Indian society. For example, lawyers, farmers’ organisations and activists have come together to back the protests.

It is especially important to coordinate the CJP and the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (India) of opposition parties. This is because challenging a dominant party at the polls requires above all opposition coordination.

Opposition groups need not agree on every policy. The CJP is able to supply youth mobilisation without the historical baggage of an established opposition party, while the India bloc can bring parliamentary representation and organisation.

Third, protests are more effective when they coalesce around a clear and specific demand. Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March, a 24-day, 240-mile march to protest the British colonial monopoly on salt production and trade, epitomised this strategy. It brought together broad social alliances in opposition to a discrete policy that could be reversed.

A focused demand, in this case the resignation of the chief election commissioner, also gives any movement strategic flexibility. This includes the ability to pause mobilisation after concessions without entirely dissolving the coalition that produced it.

India’s incumbent government retains formidable advantages. The BJP has enormous organisational resources and nearly three years remain before the next national election in 2029, though an upcoming 2027 election in India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh will provide an important test of the government’s popularity.

That is ample time to outlast protests, exploit opposition divisions and wait for public attention to shift elsewhere. So, the recent demonstrations have not reversed India’s democratic decline. But they have widened political participation, focused public attention on the institutions that underpin democracy and weakened the belief that public resistance is futile.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/16/can-indias-cockroach-movement-reverse-its-democratic-decline/

Could a cheap roll of duct tape help protect your home from flooding? New research suggests it could make a surprisingly big difference.

In controlled tests, correctly applied duct tape on the outside of a household door reduced water leakage by 97-98%. The findings suggest that a simple low-cost measure could substantially reduce the amount of water entering a home during a flood. This is important as one of the key lessons from flood resilience research is that the best time to protect a property is before floodwater arrives.

The UK government’s 2025 FloodReady Review called for practical, affordable measures that help households understand their risks and to prepare for flooding. And one potential contribution to this agenda might sound unlikely, at first glance.

Duct tape is more commonly associated with household repairs than flood protection. However, tests colleagues and I conducted at the University of Hull demonstrated how much water can enter a property through an unprotected doorway during a flood.

Inside our laboratory we tested modern wooden, uPVC and composite household doors, installed by trade professionals. We captured any water that leaked through the door in a sealed enclosure behind the door, as we increased water depth in 5cm increments to a maximum depth of 60cm. We pumped out any water that leaked through the door and continuously measured the rate of water leakage to evaluate the performance of doors and different types of protection applied to them.

When testing sandbags we stacked 54 sandbags with plastic sheeting between the door and the sandbags. For tape, the same person applied the tape for all tests to minimise any bias. It took about 10-20 minutes to apply the tape to each door.

For unprotected doors, leakage often reached thousands of litres per hour at 60cm water depth. Applying duct tape across the external door reduced that leakage by 97-98%. Specialist sealing tapes achieved even greater reductions.

Duct tape vs sandbags

For decades, sandbags have been portrayed as the go-to emergency response to flooding. But sandbags have practical limitations. They are heavy to transport, labour-intensive to deploy and difficult to dispose of after contact with contaminated floodwater. And of course people don’t keep a supply of sandbags ready to deploy.

In our tests, sandbags provided less effective protection against leakage through tested doorways compared to the tape-based sealing methods. Their performance varied with water depth and at their most effective only reduced leakage by 70% compared to an unprotected door at the same water depth.

The cost difference is striking. A household may already have duct tape or be able to purchase a roll for £10 or less, while finding and deploying sandbags involves significant additional costs, transport and effort.

Duct tape is not a substitute for professionally designed flood doors, barriers or a property-specific flood resilience plan. It is a temporary measure that may reduce water entering through particular gaps; it cannot guarantee a dry home or prevent water entering through other routes, including walls, floors, and drains.

Its effectiveness will depend on the condition of the door and frame, the surfaces to which the tape is applied, the quality of the seal and flood conditions. For properties at significant flood risk, professionally assessed protection remains important. For others, low-cost temporary measures could provide an additional layer of protection, though they cannot guarantee a property will remain dry.

Resilient households think ahead. They know whether they are at risk, sign up for flood warnings and have a plan for protecting valuables, moving vehicles and shutting off utilities if necessary. Adding duct tape to an emergency flood kit can be another small step in that process.

The wider lesson is that flood resilience does not have to start with a major investment. A £10 roll of duct tape cannot stop a flood. But our research suggests it could help keep out some of the water entering through a doorway. And that makes it a useful part of a wider plan to be prepared before the water arrives.

Stuart McLelland receives funding from Flood Re who funded this study. Stuart McLelland is a member of the PFR Roundtable, the DEFRA PFR Technical Group and the Flood Performance Certificate Oversight Group.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/16/duct-tape-kept-out-more-flood-water-than-sandbags-in-laboratory-tests/

When someone has a cardiac arrest, the actions of people nearby can make the difference between life and death. For years, the message has been clear: start cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) as quickly as possible, even if you’ve never been trained.

That advice remains essential. But growing evidence suggests that how CPR is performed could also influence someone’s chances of survival.

Cardiac arrest happens when the heart suddenly stops pumping blood around the body, depriving the brain and other vital organs of oxygen. CPR involves pressing repeatedly on the chest to keep some blood circulating until emergency help arrives.

Starting CPR promptly can double or even triple someone’s chances of survival. Yet survival remains low. In England in 2024, only 9.5% of people survived for 30 days following an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in which ambulance crews attempted resuscitation.

Survival depends on several factors, including how quickly CPR begins, whether the cardiac arrest is witnessed and whether a defibrillator is available. But researchers are increasingly interested in another question: how effectively are members of the public performing CPR before paramedics arrive?

A 2026 Australian study examined 17,715 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in New South Wales between 2021 and 2024. Researchers found that patients who received CPR judged by paramedics to be good quality had substantially higher odds of surviving for 30 days than those who received no CPR.

CPR judged to be of a poor quality was not associated with a statistically significant improvement in survival compared with no CPR. This does not mean that poor-quality CPR is ineffective: the study could not establish whether it offered a benefit.

However, these findings need careful interpretation. The study was observational, so it cannot establish that differences in perceived CPR quality directly caused the differences in survival. Paramedics’ assessments were also subjective, and CPR quality was not recorded for every case.

Nevertheless, the findings reinforce the importance of giving members of the public the knowledge and support needed to perform effective chest compressions.

What makes CPR effective?

When the heart stops pumping, blood flow to the brain rapidly falls. Chest compressions help maintain circulation until paramedics can provide more advanced treatment. A public-access defibrillator can also assess the heart’s rhythm and deliver an electrical shock if one is needed.

The UK’s Resuscitation Council guidelines recommend pressing firmly in the centre of an adult’s chest at a rate of 100 to 120 compressions a minute, to a depth of around 5 to 6cm.

Compressions should be interrupted as little as possible, and the chest should be allowed to return to its normal position between each push. These recommendations are designed to help maintain blood flow while avoiding unnecessary interruptions.

The difficulty of measuring CPR quality

In England, national cardiac arrest reports record whether CPR was provided by a member of the public, but published figures do not routinely show how effectively chest compressions were performed.

Paramedics arriving at the scene may be able to judge whether compressions are being delivered effectively. However, these observations are not always recorded consistently, making it difficult to compare cases or identify where improvements are needed.

The Australian research offers one approach. Paramedics assessed bystander CPR as either good or poor quality, allowing researchers to examine its association with survival. But without a standardised, objective method of assessment, such judgments have limitations.

More consistent recording could help ambulance services understand which aspects of CPR people find difficult and where additional training or guidance might help.

For example, people may understand that they need to press on someone’s chest but be uncertain about how hard or how quickly to push. Better information about what happens during real emergencies could help shape training and improve the instructions given by emergency call handlers.

And support is already developing. In the east of England, ambulance services have introduced a pilot using live video to help specialist paramedics guide people through CPR while waiting for an ambulance.

This gives emergency staff an opportunity to see what is happening and offer more specific advice about chest compressions.

Encouraging people to act remains essential

The number of people receiving CPR from members of the public has increased in some countries. In England, bystanders provided CPR in 73% of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest cases in 2024.

In Victoria, Australia, 80% of bystander-witnessed cases in which ambulance crews attempted resuscitation received bystander CPR in 2024-25, although the two figures cover different groups of patients.

There is still considerable room for improvement. Across Europe, the average reported bystander CPR rate is 58%, with substantial differences between countries.

Encouraging more people to intervene remains a public health priority. But in areas where bystander CPR is already common, improving its quality could offer another opportunity to increase survival.

This should never become a reason for someone to hesitate. A person witnessing a cardiac arrest cannot be expected to perform CPR perfectly, particularly in a frightening and unfamiliar situation.

Anyone who finds someone unresponsive should call 999 immediately. If the person is not breathing normally, the caller should begin CPR and follow the emergency call handler’s instructions. If a defibrillator is available, someone else can retrieve it while chest compressions continue.

The priority must always be to get people to act quickly, rather than worry about getting every compression right. But understanding what happens when bystanders perform CPR in real emergencies could help ambulance services give better guidance and support.

The aim is to make effective CPR easier for more people to deliver, and give those suffering a cardiac arrest a better chance of survival.

Melinda McPherson receives funding from Anglia Ruskin University and Essex and Herts Air ambulance as part of the Vice Chancellors PhD scholarship.

Hilary Bungay and Sarah McLachlan do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/16/cardiac-arrest-why-the-quality-of-cpr-could-affect-your-chances-of-survival/

A Japanese space mission is about to launch towards Mars. But it will not land on the planet itself. Instead, the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission will focus on Phobos, the bigger of Mars’s two small moons.

The mission will lift off on Monday October 19 at 20:41 BST on an H3 rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center, in the south of Japan.

This will start a five-year mission, during which the spacecraft will orbit and explore Phobos, deploy a lander, touch down and collect soil and small pebbles. In a world first, these samples will be delivered to Earth for study in laboratories.

MMX is led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa), in collaboration with the US, France, Germany and the European Space Agency (Esa). The overall science objective is to unravel the origins of the two Martian moons, the smaller of which is called Deimos. Mission scientists also want to examine the wider evolution of Mars and its local environment in space.

We still have no clear understanding of how the red planet got its moons. These natural satellites could have been hapless asteroids that were passing by Mars when they got captured by its gravity.

Another possibility is that that they formed when an asteroid collided with Mars, causing rocky material to be thrown out into space. Gradually, this material coalesced into Phobos and Deimos. The MMX mission will give us Phobos’s chemical composition, which could help distinguish between theories.

Grabbing samples from Phobos will be no easy task, however. Russia tried this in 2011 with its Phobos Grunt mission. The spacecraft launched successfully to low Earth orbit, but failed to fire its engines to send it toward Mars.

However, Jaxa is well placed to succeed. The space agency has already proved that it can return samples from asteroids with its Hayabusa space missions, which lasted from 2003-10 (Hayabusa) and 2018-20 (Hayabusa 2).

MMX will trial sophisticated sampling techniques designed for Phobos’s low gravity. The moon has about 0.1% the gravitational pull that Earth does. This means that a human on Phobos could jump a distance of 1.5 km horizontally without much effort.

The mission will also be a test of communication between the spacecraft and a newly developed ground station. After launch and deployment, MMX will take a year to reach Mars, arriving in August 2027. It will first circle the red planet before slipping into orbit around Phobos about a month later.

The spacecraft consists of three modules with distinct functions: a propulsion module to get MMX into orbit around Mars, an exploration module with landing and sample collection gear and a return module to deliver the sample to Earth.

The mission will make use of 13 science instruments to explore Phobos. High resolution cameras called Tengoo and Orochi will map the surface and a laser altimeter (Lidar) will build up a picture of the moon’s contours. Lidar uses laser pulses to measure the distance from the spacecraft to features on the surface.

An infrared spectrograph called MIRS will survey Phobos’s minerals, while a gamma ray and neutron detector, called Megane, will determine the moon’s elemental composition. From a greater distance, MMX will also gather data on Mars’s smaller moon Deimos.

Read more:
How did Mars get its moons? Japan’s MMX space mission aims to solve the puzzle

The instruments will send back data that controllers will use to decide where and how to land the spacecraft on Phobos.

In early 2029, the MMX exploration module will deploy a small microwave oven-sized rover called Idefix, which has been developed jointly by Jaxa, the French space agency Cnes and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Idefix will drop down onto Phobos’ surface from between 40 and 100m in altitude.

The rover will then right itself and travel over the surface during an operational period expected to last about 100 days. It will be using several sensors, including a Raman spectrometer and radiometer, to make a final call about where the exploration module should land.

In 2030, the module will swoop down and land on Phobos, remaining on its surface for about 2.5 hours. It will be able to extract samples from the surface once or possibly twice by landing again at a different location. The ability to sample from more than one place on Phobos is vital to understanding the moon’s composition.

The exploration module will use either an instrument called the C-sampler to drill a core or a device knowns as the P-sampler, which blows a jet of nitrogen gas to blast soil and loose pebbles off the surface and into a sample collection chamber.

The C-sampler would be able to collect a core from up to 2cm below the surface. This would provide the mission with a sample composition unaltered by solar radiation, which causes chemical changes to planetary surfaces over time. The P-sampler is a back-up option, but carries some small risk of toppling the spacecraft in low gravitational fields like the one on Phobos.

Having gathered at least 10 grams of material, the spacecraft will leave the Martian moon, separating from its landing gear. It will then travel back to Earth, arriving in 2031. On its approach, the spacecraft will eject its sample probe, which will then descend through Earth’s atmosphere. It will land using parachutes in Australia, where it will be recovered and transported to Japan.

A potential side-benefit of the mission is that samples from Phobos might also include material from Mars. Phobos closely orbits the red planet and is thought to be constantly hoovering up Martian soil. This soil is thought to be regularly ejected from the planet’s surface by asteroid impacts.

MMX could therefore be considered a lite-version of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. MSR, a collaboration between the US and European space agencies, would have sent rock samples from the Martian surface to Earth. However, budgetary pressures led to the programme being effectively cancelled by US Congress.

If scientists get lucky with the samples from MMX, they might get a nice consolation prize.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/16/japans-mmx-mission-aims-to-swipe-soil-samples-from-mars-moon-phobos/

Warning: this article contains spoilers for those not familiar with the plot of Stephen King’s Carrie.

Amazon Prime’s Carrie is the fourth screen adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel. Developed by frequent King collaborator Mike Flanagan (who also directed Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck), this eight-episode miniseries follows the legacy of Brian De Palma’s classic 1976 film starring Sissy Spacek.

Published in 1974, King’s original book tells the story of the infamous “black prom” through a tense, tight mix of prose, fake news reports and eyewitness interviews.

Bullied teenager Carrie White, who lives alone with her religious zealot mother in a quiet Maine town, discovers that she has supernatural, telekinetic powers (the ability to manipulate matter with her mind). After being invited to the senior prom by high school heartthrob Tommy Ross, she finally has a chance to escape her mother’s influence and find acceptance among her peers. But when events at prom take a dramatic, horrific turn, Carrie’s powers are finally unleashed.

In the first few episodes, Flanagan is surprisingly faithful to King’s novel. He also usefully deepens the moral complexity behind much of the story’s events. Chris Hargensen, Carrie’s nemesis, is developed beyond being simply villainous and cold-hearted. Instead, she is shown to be as troubled and afflicted by social and parental pressure as Carrie is herself.

The performances of the central cast are excellent. Summer H. Howell as Carrie, Alison Thornton as Chris and Siena Agudong as their mutual friend Sue Snell are standouts. And Flanagan’s aesthetic flourishes are, at times, masterful. A montage in the penultimate episode set to Lana Del Rey’s song Did You Know There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd showcases the lead-up to and arrival at prom that evokes both adolescent wonderment and anxious dread at the events about to unfold.

However, Flanagan’s expansion of the novel’s events are also this adaptation’s fundamental weaknesses.

The original novel and the classic film adaptation are tightly structured and compact. The Prime mini series, meanwhile, stretches events over the course of eight nearly hour-long episodes. The novel’s brevity – it’s just over 200 pages in most editions – compounds the claustrophobic atmosphere of the intense bullying Carrie suffers, which makes the tragedy of the black prom even more acute.

Crucially, the novel and film also keep Carrie isolated from Chris, Sue and the other girls at school, whereas Flanagan depicts Carrie forming an unlikely friendship with them even after they begin bullying her. This alteration makes little narrative sense especially given that, in the novel, the prom is depicted as the climax of Carrie’s young life and a moment of burgeoning, long-deferred social acceptance.

Flanagan’s major error is in his creation of an entirely new character, Emaline (Thalia Dudek), a fellow telekinetic who negatively influences Carrie’s behaviour. Emaline encourages Carrie to not only hone and strengthen her powers but to strike back at her bullies.

To my mind, this change undermines the entire point of King’s novel and diminishes precisely why the story continues to be so powerful after more than half a century: the black prom is the moment at which Carrie finally exerts agency, control and power over her tormentors. To take that power away from her is a morally neat and misguided attempt at clearing Carrie of wrongdoing. It undermines the implication in the original novel that, perhaps, Carrie’s actions can be understood if not condoned or justified.

In a post-Columbine context where school massacres are common across the US, the implication that Carrie’s actions during the prom could be comprehensible was probably too unpalatable and divisive for the studio.

Carrie shares many similarities with King’s 1977 novel Rage (originally published under his alias, Richard Bachman). It has been permanently taken out of print by King himself after the novel was linked to several real-life high school shootings.

When seen in that context, updating these details of Carrie’s original plot allows Flanagan to approach difficult material with sensitivity. Yet, if the subject matter raises such uncomfortable questions, would viewers not benefit from a new story that, while heavily inspired by King’s original tale, makes its own unique narrative contribution to the horror genre?

Overall, Flanagan’s Carrie fails to satisfy as much as the original novel or 1976 film adaptation do, which is unfortunate, because the series shines when it is most faithful to the source material.

Flanagan shared in an interview that King’s first response to plans for a new adaptation was: “Leave her [Carrie] alone. She’s been through enough.” Carrie, and the audience, may have been better served if Flanagan had taken the author’s advice.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Ahmed Honeini is an Honorary Research Associate in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/16/primes-carrie-miniseries-expands-stephen-kings-story-but-weakens-its-central-horror/

Overnight on October 13-14, Russia launched 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 drones at Kyiv and Kharkiv in one of its heaviest bombardments for some time. We already knew that Russia’s new-generation jet-powered drones pose a significant threat to Ukraine’s air defences. They are simply too fast to intercept consistently – so many more can get through than was the case with its less sophisticated drones.

But another factor made it even harder for Ukraine to defend itself. A speed limit had been imposed on the SpaceX Starlink satellite system it has depended on since early in the war. This effectively meant that the interceptors it uses to try to shoot down the jet-powered drones became ineffective.

Elon Musk took to his social media platform X to assert that the US govenrment controls Starlink’s military application, Starshield, so any decision to limit it would be “decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS”.

But it isn’t just Ukraine’s air defences that are hampered by the Starlink slowdown, writes Anthony King. Starshield is the vital backbone of Ukraine’s military operations. So, just as Kyiv is celebrating the success of Operation Vivaldi, a well-planned counteroffensive that has set back Vladimir Putin’s bid to capture the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, suddenly its frontline operations have been compromised.

King, the director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter, explains how Ukraine has come to depend on Starshield and what the apparent restriction will mean for its survival as Russia increases the intensity of its bombardment as winter approaches.

Read more:
Is the US limiting Starlink in Ukraine? The risks could be catastrophic

Vivaldi, meanwhile, represents a coup for Ukraine’s military. The Russian president has repeatedly said he was confident of capturing Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk by year’s end. This now looks implausible to say the least, writes Chris Tuck, an expert in military strategy at King’s College London.

Months in the planning, the operation showed how Ukraine’s commanders have become adept at combining resources and technology in innovative ways. Most importantly, writes Tuck, it shows how Ukraine has been able to restore manoeuvrability to a battlefield that the sheer number of drones in the air had seemingly made impossible.

Read more:
Operation Vivaldi: success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive shows it has learned to manoeuvre on a drone-filled battlefield

The sobering news for Volodymyr Zelensky, though, is that the worse things go for Russia on the battlefield, the more it will redouble its attacks on Ukraine’s cities. The Ukrainian president recently reported intelligence intercepts reporting that Putin had told his military commanders to abandon the rules of war that protect civilians. As Zelensky reported: “He said there are no rules now.”

This has been widely reported as a “new Russian doctrine”. But in truth it’s anything but. The principle of “Sodcit” – or “strategic operations to destroy critical infrastructure” – has long been a key element of Russia’s way of waging war, writes Tracey German.

German, an expert on Russian security policy at King’s College London, identifies this as a strategy of exhaustion – by which attacks on an enemy’s economic, material and moral resources over time gradually breaks its people’s morale. She traces it back via Syria and Chechnya to the “Soviet Clausewitz”, Alexandr Svechin, whose 1923 book Strategy has informed Russian (and many other countries’) military planners ever since.

Read more:
‘Sodcit’ – after battlefield setbacks, Russia returns to destroying Ukraine’s morale

What Russians think of the motherland

On Russia’s home front – and among Russian émigrés meanwhile – the war appears to be prompting something of a rethink as to what many people think of the motherland. Marina Yusupova-Ryder, of Edinburgh Napier University, has provided some fascinating insights as to how this has changed over the course of the war.

Yusupova-Ryder interviewed 40 men in Russia and abroad in 2013-14 and again in 2022-23, asking them about their sense of national identity and what they thought of Russia in general. She says there was a dramatic shift between the two sets of interviews.

The first time she spoke with her interviewees, most saw Russia in a generally positive light and were secure about their own sense of national identity. By 2022-23, only two were positive about their country. One even went as far as to say Russia was like Voldemort, the evil wizard from the Harry Potter books.

Read more:
How the ‘geopolitical stigma’ associated with Putin’s Russia is affecting ordinary Russians

Is Donald Trump abandoning Ukraine?

The idea – as yet unconfirmed – that the Trump administration may have decided to hamstring Ukraine’s use of Starlink was made all the more believable by events over the past week.

Last Friday, as US negotiators met in Miami with representatives from Ukraine and its European allies, Donald Trump announced he had done a deal with Putin to lift sanctions on the sale of Russian diesel, potentially putting billions into Russia’s war chest.

The following day he called for Zelensky to be replaced. The day after that, he announced he had arranged an energy ceasefire, which both sides ignored. His administration also threatened to close down the prioritised Ukraine requirements list by which Ukraine’s European allies buy US weapons.

And his negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jarrod Kushner, reportedly threatened to halt intelligence sharing. So the restrictions to Starlink may be part of that.

Stefan Wolff notes that this bullying is very much of a piece with the Trump administration’s approach to trying to get Ukraine to end the war by offering Russia concessions. It won’t, he writes, make America’s relations with its European allies any smoother.

Read more:
Donald Trump aligns with Vladimir Putin yet again, leaving Ukraine – and US relations with Europe – under pressure

Debunking lessons from Sweden

Closer to home, UK prime minister Andy Burnham told Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on their The Rest is Politics podcast this week that he’d received information clearly demonstrating Russian interference in UK politics. He told the UN recently that Britain would set up a National Centre for Information Defence to guard against mischievous foreign disinformation.

Sweden could provide some useful lessons here. The country has been consciously guarding against propaganda and foreign manipulation since the early years of the cold war.

Drew Caveney-Holler of Durham University takes a close look at Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency and how it attempts to spot and debunk foreign lies before they can gain traction. The agency is also experimenting in “prebunking” techniques – giving people the tools to spot information manipulation for themselves.

Read more:
What Andy Burnham can learn from Sweden about defending against Russian disinformation

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/16/throttling-starlink-puts-added-strain-on-us-ukraine-relations/

Last week, Australian Federal Police commissioner Krissy Barrett warned artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are not a sufficient replacement for human support for children. The comment was in response to a recent Adelaide University study that found more than one in three Australian children turn to AI chatbots for support when they are sexually victimised online, or otherwise tell nobody at all.

While there can be benefits to children using AI, such as help with learning, or practising social skills, there is also a risk they will go to AI chatbots and assistants for emotional support over parents and other trusted adults.

In Australia, around half of children aged between 10 and 17 who use AI are turning to it for personal and social reasons. This includes seeking advice on sensitive topics, talking about their feelings, and just “hanging out”.

So how can parents help their children to use AI safely?

Why are kids turning to AI chatbots over people?

One practical reason why young people are using the tech is it can provide them with answers around the clock. This means a chatbot might be a natural go-to when a child wants a quick answer and a trusted adult or friend isn’t available.

Another reason is pure curiousity. Like adults, young people are experimenting with AI and trying to understand what it does and how it can make their lives better.

Seeking deeper connections

Sometimes the reason for talking to chatbots is deeper though.

It might be that a young person wants information about something they feel embarrassed about raising with their parents or friends. As teens explore their identity, they begin to ask more sensitive questions. This may make them more likely to use AI for personal reasons than younger children.

For others, the reason is an unmet need for connection. Reaching out to chatbots for personal reasons is more common for those who are already vulnerable.

A 2025 Danish study found loneliness may be a precursor for high school students seeking AI companionship. Other studies suggest a lack of connection to parental figures may also lead to teens talking to chatbots.

What do kids miss out on when they choose chatbots over people?

A major concern is that, if AI use becomes excessive, it may displace real-world interactions and create unrealistic expectations of human relationships.

This problem is linked to sycophancy – the tendency of AI to be overly agreeable.

AI interactions lack the natural friction that happens in human relationships. This warping of social experience is a particular worry when it comes to young people because they are still forming their understanding of how relationships work. We know real-life human social interaction is crucial to teens’ development.

AI lacks context

Another concern is the quality of the advice AI provides. And it’s not just its capacity to spread convincing misinformation that’s a problem.

AI lacks the full context of a child’s life. Parents and carers are often much better placed to provide the nuanced and age-appropriate guidance their child needs.

There are also more subtle impacts. When a child poses questions to an AI chatbot over a parent, they are missing out on day-to-day moments of connection with family. While each miss may be small, the accumulation over time can truly matter.

This is especially important for children. Research shows strong and secure bonds with parents in the preteen years support kids as they navigate the challenges of adolescence.

Here’s how can parents and carers can help their child experiment with AI and stay safe.

1. Explore AI together

Find a moment to sit down and explore AI tools on a device with your child. You might:

• engage in brainstorming ideas with the software

• test a chatbot’s ability to correctly source information

• ask the AI about itself with questions such as “do you have feelings?” and “can you think?”

• ask AI to generate and edit a short story with your child as the lead character

• ask AI to tell a joke

• play a game with an AI chatbot, such as twenty questions.

One AI game that is both fun and educational is the “catch the AI out” game. The idea is to test AI on topics that you know or can fact check. Points are scored each time you catch the AI make an error.

2. Ask your child questions

While exploring these AI tools and functions with your child, ask them questions to help them think more critically about the tech such as:

• what do you think AI is good at?

• what can humans do that AI can’t?

• where do you think AI gets it’s information from?

• how often is AI wrong about something? How can you check this?

• what do you think an AI chatbot does with the information you tell it?

Their answers can open up conversations that help your child enjoy AI while understanding its limitations and how to stay safe.

For instance, if your child says AI does everything better than humans, you can help them brainstorm all the things people have to offer – hugs, for starters.

Or, if your child isn’t sure what AI does with their information, you might talk them about privacy risks.

3. Remind your child you are there to support them

It’s important to encourage your child to come to you for advice on difficult topics instead of AI.

To help children feel more comfortable, maintain a curious mindset whenever they raise a sensitive topic with you. Research shows teens who perceive their parents as more accepting tend to share more. Try to take a moment to listen to them before jumping in with advice too.

You can also ask non-judgemental questions about your child’s AI use to show you’re engaged. This can be as simple as asking them how they’re feeling about a particular AI interaction, or what they’re currently using AI for.

Talking about AI with your child should be an ongoing conversation.

4. Keep up to date with the tech

One of the challenges for parents is that AI is rapidly evolving. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner offers resources that can help people keep up to date.

We are currently researching how children use AI chatbots and how it impacts their lives as they enter their teen years, through one-to-one conversations with them. If your child is aged between 9 and 12 years, and is chatting with AI, you can register their interest.

Amy Dawel receives funding from Australian Rotary Health and the Australian Research Council.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/16/kids-and-teens-are-going-to-ai-chatbots-for-advice-how-can-parents-make-sure-this-is-safe/

Some of the most popular travel destinations for Australians are also places where dengue is common.

Prevention has traditionally relied on avoiding mosquito bites. But with the dengue vaccine Qdenga now available in Australia, travellers have another way to protect themselves.

Deciding whether to get vaccinated isn’t always straightforward. Here’s what you need to know.

What is dengue?

Dengue is a viral illness spread by mosquitoes. It typically causes fever, headache, body aches, nausea and rash.

There is no specific treatment. Most people get better in one to two weeks, but for some, fatigue can persist for weeks or months.

Some people will develop severe illness and need hospital care and, in some cases, dengue is fatal.

There are four types of dengue virus. Infection with any type can make you sick. After infection, you’re protected against that type in the future, but can still be infected by the other three. A second infection with a different type can sometimes cause more severe illness than the first.

The reasons are complex, but one is that antibodies left over from the first infection can make it easier for the new virus to infect cells.

People who live in, or frequently travel to, places where dengue is common are more likely to be exposed to different dengue virus types over time.

Where is the risk highest?

Although mosquitoes that can spread dengue are found in tropical parts of central and far north Queensland, local dengue outbreaks are now rare thanks to a successful public health program involving the release of mosquitoes infected with a bacterium that blocks the spread of viruses.

For Australians, the main risk is during overseas travel. More than 1,900 dengue cases were reported in Australia in 2025, largely in returned travellers.

Between 2012 and 2022, Indonesia, Thailand and India were the most common places Australian travellers got dengue. Some popular destinations for Australians, such as Bali, have frequent outbreaks.

Read more:
Heading to Bali or somewhere tropical these holidays? Here’s what you need to know about dengue fever

Dengue can be more common at certain times of year, and outbreaks can cause case numbers to rise sharply from one year to the next. The risk in many regions is also increasing as a changing climate creates more favourable conditions for the mosquitoes that spread it.

Why has developing a dengue vaccine been so difficult?

A dengue vaccine needs to protect against all four virus types and not increase the risk of severe disease if someone gets infected with dengue after they have been vaccinated.

An earlier vaccine, Dengvaxia, was found to increase the risk of severe dengue in some children who had never had dengue before, and then got dengue after being vaccinated. That experience means new dengue vaccines have been closely studied and assessed for safety.

How well does Qdenga work, and is it safe?

Qdenga uses weakened dengue viruses to teach the immune system to protect against all four types of dengue virus. It is given as two doses, three months apart.

Millions of doses have now been given worldwide, and an increased risk of severe dengue has not been seen following vaccination. In a large study of children and teenagers living in countries where dengue is common, the vaccine prevented about 80% of illness and more than 95% of hospitalisations in the first year.

Protection against hospitalisation remained high for more than four years.

Like all vaccines, Qdenga can cause side effects. In recent European studies, around half of travellers receiving Qdenga reported side effects, most commonly pain or redness where the injection was given, headache, fatigue or muscle aches. Most were mild and lasted one to three days.

There are still some gaps in the evidence. Most studies looking at how well Qdenga prevents dengue have involved children and teenagers. Studies in adults have focused more on immune responses and safety than on directly measuring protection against dengue.

Among people who have never had dengue, Qdenga provides strong protection against types one and two, but there’s more uncertainty around protection against types three and four. As a result, different countries have made different recommendations about who should receive Qdenga.

Qdenga also isn’t suitable for everyone. Because it is a live vaccine, people with weakened immune systems cannot have it, and it’s not recommended during pregnancy.

So, should I get vaccinated?

Getting vaccinated isn’t a simple yes-or-no decision. Advice may differ depending on where you are going, whether you have had dengue before and how much exposure you are likely to have in the future. A discussion with a health professional can help you decide whether vaccination is right for you.

In Australia, Qdenga is recommended for travellers aged four or older who have had dengue before, and for those who haven’t but expect to spend a long time, or make repeated trips, to places where dengue occurs. It costs around AUD$300 for two doses.

For someone who hasn’t had dengue and is only taking a shorter trip, the decision is more individual. Factors such as where you’re going, how long you’ll be there and whether there is a current outbreak can all influence whether vaccination is worthwhile.

What else can I do to avoid dengue?

Whether or not you get vaccinated, avoiding mosquito bites remains important. Aedes aegypti, the main mosquito that spreads dengue, tends to bite during the day, often around the lower legs.

Travellers should use insect repellent outdoors during the day. It’s a good idea to buy it before you leave, as products available overseas may not be tested to Australian standards.

Wearing loose-fitting long pants and covered shoes can provide extra protection. Bed nets can also help if you’re sleeping during the day, particularly somewhere without insect screens.

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

Katie Anders receives funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and the UK Medical Research Council to undertake research on mosquito-borne disease surveillance and prevention. She is a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Integrated Vector Control Guideline Development Group, which supports WHO in developing recommendations for vector-borne disease control. Katie previously worked for the World Mosquito Program, a not-for-profit company that partnered with Queensland Health to implement the Dengue Safe Project in north Queensland.

Sarah McGuinness receives funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council to undertake research on vaccine-preventable diseases and vaccine decision-making. Sarah is a member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), which provides advice to the Australian Government on vaccines and immunisation. The views expressed are her own and do not represent those of ATAGI or the Australian Government.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/15/a-dengue-vaccine-is-now-available-for-travellers-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

The Australian government looks likely to introduce stronger legal checks on artificial intelligence (AI) companies to parliament early next year, after a bipartisan parliamentary committee released early recommendations in a letter to the prime minister. Their final report is due by the end of November.

Yet even after those proposed changes, our laws won’t do enough to hold companies accountable for so-called “rogue AI”.

This includes instances such as OpenAI’s AI agents hacking multiple federal and state government websites in Australia this year, which OpenAI only belatedly revealed.

But there are precedents for how to get tougher on companies responsible for rogue AI hacks.

How AI agents slip through legal cracks

If an Australian business – even a relatively small one, with an annual turnover of just A$3 million or more – suffers a data breach likely to cause serious harm, the rules are clear. That business or organisation must notify the customers or others affected, as well as the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

But if a company’s AI agent – software that can browse websites and complete tasks without needing a person to check each step – actually does the breaking in, the rules are very different.

OpenAI had no legal obligation to tell anyone that its AI agents breached security on Australian government websites during a training exercise in June. It didn’t even have a direct obligation to prevent those hacks.

The only legal responsibility sits with whoever held the data – not whoever took it. That’s true whether that company is based here in Australia, or overseas (such as US-based OpenAI).

Hacking offences currently assume a human intentionally breaks in. The law doesn’t account for a machine that, in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s words, “didn’t accept ‘no’ for an answer”.

Read more:
What does the OpenAI Medicare hack reveal about Australia’s cyber security?

What’s being done now

The prime minister’s AI rapid review taskforce is considering whether existing processes can handle AI cyber incidents. It is expected to report within weeks.

There’s also draft legislation being prepared on other ways to better regulate technology.

For example, the government’s privacy bill proposes requiring any handling of personal information to be “fair and reasonable”. If that legislation passes, clicking “I agree” when you see terms and conditions would no longer excuse unfair practices.

Meanwhile, the digital duty of care bill – introduced to parliament on Thursday – would require social media platforms and search engines to assess foreseeable risks and proactively reduce them. Penalties for failing could exceed A$100 million.

Read more:
Australia’s ‘digital duty of care’ was just introduced to parliament. So what’s in the bill?

However, neither of those bills covers companies that build AI models, then let their AI agents loose on the internet.

On Tuesday, the joint parliamentary committee on AI released its preliminary recommendations for AI safety and risk management. Those recommendations included requiring AI companies to submit to independent safety checks.

Without stronger obligations on the companies, this measure is unlikely to have real impact on safety culture at the tech giants.

4 more steps we need to take

Our submissions to parliament’s AI inquiry propose several additional steps.

An AI “duty of care”: The proposed “digital duty of care” needs to be extended beyond online safety. It should include a legal obligation on companies developing AI to take reasonable care not to harm others.

Australian employers have worked this way for decades, keeping workers safe “so far as is reasonably practicable”.

This would mean AI companies have to find and reduce foreseeable risks, such as an AI agent that won’t take no for an answer. It also means proper testing with secure boundaries, before a new agent is allowed onto the internet.

Individual rights: People harmed when a company falls short under the duty of care should be able to take it to court. Without a direct safety duty, and accompanying right of legal action, people currently face jumping through multiple legal hoops to get redress.

Registration of AI companies: Phone companies and financial advisers need a licence. Yet most AI businesses need not even tell a regulator they exist. So how can regulators know who they are regulating?

Registration of companies providing large AI and computing services to Australians, with a local contact and a duty to report incidents promptly, would close that reporting gap.

Mandatory reporting rules for AI breaches: Appearing at a parliamentary inquiry hearing last week, OpenAI and rival company Anthropic both backed the need for mandatory reporting for AI breaches. We agree.

None of this is radical.

Since 1992, Australian law has held manufacturers responsible for goods that are less safe than people are entitled to expect. For instance, a car maker has to both report and pay to fix faulty airbags. They can also be sued if those airbags cause harm.

It’s time AI companies were held legally responsible for their faulty products too.

Rob Nicholls is a member of the University of Sydney Centre for AI, Trust, and Governance. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Jeannie Marie Paterson receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Medical Research Futures Fund.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/15/companies-that-get-hacked-face-stricter-laws-than-firms-unleashing-rogue-ai-we-can-fix-that/

This month, the Australian Research Council (ARC) announced that some funding in its new “Explore” grant scheme will be allocated to scientists by a conditional lottery.

Reviewers will classify every application as highly competitive, competitive, or not competitive. Highly competitive applications will be funded and non-competitive ones will not, which is standard.

However, the “competitive” applications are where it gets interesting: they will go into a lottery, with winners receiving funding.

It might seem like a strange idea to distribute millions of taxpayer dollars by random chance – but evidence from around the world shows it might actually be a very good idea.

Random rules

Lotteries are an age-old way of making difficult choices. In ancient Athens, public officials and jurors were chosen by sortition, so that office could not be captured by the wealthy and well connected.

In more modern history, lotteries have been used to admit babies to London’s Foundling Hospital, to conscript Australian men during the Vietnam War, and to allocate car licences in Beijing to reduce traffic pollution.

Research funding is a more recent application of lotteries, but they are increasingly being used by funders overseas. New Zealand’s Health Research Council led the way in 2013, followed by Germany’s Volkswagen Foundation, the Austrian Science Fund and the British Academy.

The Swiss National Science Foundation now lets reviewers draw lots as a tie-breaker in all its funding schemes. A 2022 Nature editorial made the case for lotteries as a tiebreaker of quality in research funding.

Allocating funding by lottery may sound antithetical to science. Surely all applications can be ranked as more or less deserving? However, applications are lengthy documents with complex methods and unknown returns, so peer reviewers often disagree about their merits.

Hence, winning funding is already somewhat random, because it depends on the luck of the draw of the peer reviewers. Getting a reviewer who knows your area and understands your methods increases your chances. Drawing one who is sceptical of your approach, or thinks there’s a better method, can sink you.

The fairness argument

Another argument for conditional lotteries is fairness. Every human is biased, and those biases can be amplified when making knife-edge decisions between equally qualified applications.

For example, if two applications are impossible to separate, but one comes from a well-known university, that prestige can influence the decision, even subconsciously.

There is evidence that conditional lotteries increase diversity in applications, too. When the British Academy introduced a lottery, the overall number of applications increased, but there was a greater increase among researchers with an Asian and British Asian background. These applicants likely felt they had a better chance when the final decision had no human influence.

Efficiency and impact

Conditional lotteries are also efficient, reducing the time reviewers spend splitting hairs between equally good applications.

A scheme in Germany has even used a lottery to win the right to apply. This saves scientists the time of writing unsuccessful proposals, which is the largest cost of any scientific funding scheme.

Reducing the number of applications also reduces the costs of running the funding system. Running costs are likely to grow as researchers use AI to write more proposals, meaning more funders may turn to a lottery to make their task more manageable.

The German scheme also saw a large increase in the number of female applicants, likely because women perceived a greater chance of success when human biases were reduced.

The biggest gains might come in the returns to society. Researchers know that risky applications are less likely to win funding in traditional systems, so they often propose safer ideas.

Explicitly including chance in funding decisions could free researchers to put forward truly novel ideas. There may be more failures, but also more breakthroughs.

A conditional lottery also adds a way to measure these returns. Because funding is allocated by chance, winners and those who miss out are, on average, alike in every other respect.

We used this approach in New Zealand to run the world’s first randomised trial of the impact of funding on researcher productivity. Funders can thereby accurately estimate the impact of their grants on a wide range of outcomes, from publications and citations to patents, spin-out companies, and changes to public policy.

A first for Australia

The ARC Explore grant is Australia’s first major conditional funding lottery. Those who have never seen how funding decisions are actually made might decry funding lotteries as an abrogation of responsibility.

Yet the citizens of Athens, the world’s first democracy, trusted the lottery to choose their officials. The evidence is that chance can also be trusted to choose between research proposals that experts already judge to be of comparable merit.

Chance has always played a part in who gets funded. The ARC has simply decided to be honest about it, and, as an added bonus, create a perfect way to measure the benefits of research funding. If all goes well, more Australian funders may do the same.

Adrian Barnett received funding from The British Academy to investigate lotteries and randomises applicants for their schemes. He is a member of the NHMRC Research Committee.

Philip Clarke receives research funding from British Academy to investigate the use of lotteries in research funding and receives research grants from a variety of sources both in Australia and overseas including the UKRI, NIHR, JPAL and the MRFF.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/15/some-australian-research-funding-is-now-a-lottery-and-thats-actually-good-news/

Jared Wesley, a professor of political science at the University of Alberta, is on the award-winning Conversation Weekly podcast discussing the Alberta independence referendum being held on Oct. 19 and his work in community town halls throughout the province leading up to the vote. The following is a truncated version of that compelling conversation. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

The Conversation: What’s the mood in Alberta right now just a few days before the referendum?

Jared Wesley: There’s a lot of uneasiness in most Alberta communities. This is the largest exercise in direct democracy in Canadian history. Never before in one event have we seen so many questions put to the public for a vote. So I think there’s a lot of confusion.

TC: There are 10 referendum questions in total, five related to immigration. Tell us a bit about them.

JW: They aren’t particularly concisely worded and a lot of folks are struggling to understand them. A lot of my work at community town halls is trying to provide a non-partisan perspective on why the government has introduced these questions and how people can make sense of them. Public opinion polls show quite consistently over the last two years that about 70 to 75 per cent of Albertans want to remain in Canada. And so folks in Alberta are either animated and ready to come out to the polls and vote to remain, or they’re quite confused as to why an issue that’s only supported by about 25 per cent of the population has made its way onto a referendum ballot and captured the world’s attention. So there’s a lot of confusion around the process and why we’re holding this vote in the first place.

TC: Let’s rewind a bit to the 1970s when there were first calls for Alberta’s independence. What was that movement about?

JW: The sense of what we call western alienation has really been part of Alberta’s political DNA since it joined Canadian Confederation, all the way back in 1905. These sentiments were captured by a political cartoon that featured a giant cow, and this cow was positioned across the entire country of Canada. It’s eating in Western Canada. It’s being fed hay by some burly farmers. It’s being milked in central Canada, particularly in Ottawa but also the financial capitals of Toronto and Montréal. So the, the notion has always been that the West has been feeding more into central Canada in terms of natural resources; originally agriculture, but now it’s oil and gas. So western alienation is imbued with this sense that Albertans put more into Canada than they get out, and we’ve seen versions and manifestations of that over time.

TC: There’s a successful separatist party in Québec. Why never in Alberta?

JW: Similar parties have been tried in Western Canada, but they failed to win seats. Looking at other far-right populist movements in the United States and in the United Kingdom, folks started saying: “We don’t need to start our own political party to make this work. We simply need to infiltrate mainstream parties, and in particular, governing parties.” That change in strategy by groups called Take Back Alberta and others was the start of a new approach to Alberta separatism and one of the main reasons why we’re now seeing separatism on the public agenda.

TC: Where are separatist groups getting money? Is there funding and support from both inside and outside Canada?

JW: Alberta and Canada have some fairly strict campaign finance laws. And so since the campaign started, disclosures have been made available publicly so we can see who’s donating. Most separatist organizations are drawing fairly large amounts of money — the maximum contributions of about $5,000 dollars per person. But what’s less clear is where the initial funding for these organizations came from. How did one of the largest separatist organizations, the Alberta Prosperity Project, start off with a million-dollar endowment? Where did that money came from? We do have reports that Russian and American operatives are active, particularly in social media misinformation campaigns, and that’s been confirmed by academics.

TC: Are these campaigns working?

JW: We haven’t seen an increase in support for separatism, despite all the fundraising and spending; despite all of the attention. It seems the more Albertans seek out information about separatism, the less likely they are to support it. And this is very different from what we saw in the case of Brexit in the U.K., where that interest was converted into public support.

TC: What do Alberta separatists think of Donald Trump?

JW: Most Alberta separatists want to form an independent country. While they want to have strong trade ties with the United States, they don’t want to become the 51st state. But there’s a strong faction, about 20 per cent, that do firmly believe that Alberta should be a 51st state and should be integrated into the United States more directly. So it’s dividing the movement itself. Separatists are more likely to tune into far-right American-based news sources like Fox News, Newsmax and other sources, where they’re hearing a lot of far-right populist narratives that they seem to want to import into Alberta politics. Those concerning immigration, re-migration, the great replacement theory, and so on.

TC: What about average Albertans? And how has U.S. involvement played a role?

JW: A lot of Albertans who would have otherwise been persuaded that voting in this first referendum to support independence would send a message to Ottawa are really withholding that support because they worry about what message a divided Canada sends to the United States. We know that the Trump administration likes to exploit weaknesses. And that’s why State Department officials have made comments about how an independent Alberta would be a welcome addition to the North American economy. They’re not passive bystanders. They would like nothing more than to see Canada divided.

TC: Have federalist forces cited Donald Trump as a reason to vote no to separation?

JW: There’s no doubt about it. In the closing weeks of the campaign, a lot of federalist organizations are running ads that feature Donald Trump very prominently.

TC: Danielle Smith has said she’s voting to remain in Canada and it seems she may have proceeded with this referendum to please the separatist faction of her party. Is she essentially trying to call their bluff?

JW: The premier has indicated that she’s feeling pressure from within to to settle this issue, and that’s one of the reasons why she’s holding this referendum. She is facing a faction within her party that wants to separate from Canada. Some polls show that up to half or even more than half of her party’s supporters would vote to leave Canada if given the choice.
So that’s a lot of internal pressure. The other half wants to stay in Canada, so how do you resolve those disputes? One way is to throw it to the broader public.

TC: What do we know about the typical pro-separatism voter in Alberta?

JW: About 20 per cent of Albertans are what we would call hardcore separatists. They will vote to leave. Another 10 or 15 per cent who would vote to leave to send a message to the rest of Canada, to say: “We don’t really want to leave, but we want a better deal within Confederation, and you need to take notice and, and listen to some of our demands when it comes to federal policy.” If we look at that hardcore 20 per cent, demographically, these folks tend to be in rural areas. They tend to be white. They tend to be married. They tend to be more religious than the general population, and they tend to work in blue-collar jobs; that is, in oil and gas or in agriculture.

TC: What does either outcome mean for Alberta, Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney?

JW: A lot depends on how the vote is split. Very few polls show a reasonable prospect for this first referendum passing. However, in a low turnout situation, the gap narrows considerably. Some modelling suggests if turnout is in the 50 per cent range, this becomes a coin flip in a very real sense. The premier holds a lot of power when it comes to interpreting the results of these non-binding referendums. Will she interpret a narrow result as a reason to continue moving forward with negotiating for a better deal within Canada? Does she look at a strong remain result as a reason to move on to other priorities? The prime minister needs to look at the result and decide whether Alberta independence is a genuine threat, whether his government must continue to take steps to assuage separatist demands or whether it’s time to put this behind us.

Listen to the podcast here:

Jared Wesley receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is affiliated with LeadNotLeave.ca.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/15/qa-with-an-alberta-politics-expert-taking-the-provinces-pulse-as-the-referendum-approaches/

In the western Canadian province of Alberta, a political battle is playing out on people’s front lawns. Separatists are flying the royal blue Alberta flag, others the red and white maple leaf of Canada to show their support for a united Canada.

It’s all because a populist right-wing political movement wants Alberta to break away from the rest of the country. On October 19, Albertans will vote on whether to have a binding referendum on independence.

“Public opinion polls show quite consistently over the last two years that about 70% to 75% of Albertans want to remain in Canada,” explains Jared Wesley, a professor of political science at the University of Alberta to The Conversation Weekly podcast. “So there’s a lot of confusion around the process and why we’re holding this vote in the first place.”

Separatist sentiment is driven in part by a longstanding sense of western alienation from eastern Canada, fuelled by grievances that the province puts more into the federal budget than it gets back. But the current wave of separatism in Alberta also has links to protests against Covid vaccine mandates and conspiracy theories. While most separatists want Alberta to become its own country, some even want the province to be the 51st US state.

Donald Trump’s aggressive trade war with Canada and his attacks on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney loom large over the poll. Some Albertans who may otherwise have voted in favour of independence to send a message to Ottawa, Wesley says, “are really withholding that support because they worry about what message that sends to the United States.”

Read more:
Albertans disapprove of Donald Trump — and his brand is weakening separatism, too

The referendum was called by the Alberta premier, Danielle Smith, leader of the province’s United Conservative Party. Despite her support for Alberta remaining in Canada, Smith faced pressure from separatists within her party to hold a referendum. Wesley says Smith’s decision bears similarities with the decision taken by then UK prime minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 Brexit referendum on leaving the European Union:

“More or less, David Cameron called the bluff of his internal Brexiteers that were putting pressure on him, and called a nationwide referendum thinking that he would win it. A lot of the same pressures are at play for Danielle Smith.”

There are ten questions on the ballot, ranging from whether to introduce stricter rules on access to public services for immigrants, to proposals for judicial and constitutional reform. The final question reads:

“Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

Wesley says turnout will be key to how the referendum plays out:

“Very few polls show a reasonable prospect for this first referendum passing. However, in a low turnout situation, the distance between remain and continue the conversation … narrows considerably.”

Disclosure statement

Jared Wesley receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Credits

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Grace Jennings-Edquist. Mixing by Dan Semo and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from cpac, BBC and Global News.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/15/in-alberta-far-right-populism-fuelled-by-conspiracy-theories-and-alienation-drive-bid-to-separate-from-canada/

The Earth got its Moon when a small planet collided with our planet more than four billion years ago. This impact hurled molten rock into space, which eventually coalesced to form the satellite we can see every night from across our planet.

But what of our neighbour, Mars? The red planet has two small, irregularly shaped moons called Phobos and Deimos. There are several theories on how these natural satellites formed, but no clear front-runner. Soon, a Japanese-led space mission called Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) will begin its hunt for the answer.

On Monday October 19, MMX is due to lift off on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan. The mission will aim to land on Phobos and collect a sample of soil. The spacecraft will then send this precious payload to Earth, for study in laboratories.

Of the two Martian moons, Phobos is the largest and orbits closer to the planet. It has a mean diameter of 22.2km and a mass of 10,637 million million kg. Deimos has a mean diameter of 12.5km and a mass of 1,480 million million kg.

The moons were discovered during a six-day window in 1877 by the American astronomer Asaph Hall, who was working at the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC.

Two main hypotheses dominate discussions of how Mars got these moons. The giant impact theory proposes that a celestial object a third of Mars’ size hit the planet early in its history, ejecting material into space.

The general mechanism is similar to how scientists think Earth’s natural satellite formed. But in the Martian impact theory, a single “giant” moon was created by the ejected material, along with a host of smaller satellites.

Over time, each one broke up and fell to Mars’ surface. Simulations by Pascal Rosenblatt, from the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique (LPG) in Nantes, France, and his colleagues show that Phobos and Deimos would have been the sole moons to survive.

Gravitational capture

The other main idea is known as the captured asteroid theory, which goes back to the 1960s. This suggests that Phobos and Deimos were originally asteroids that wandered so close to Mars they were captured by the planet’s gravity.

According to this idea, the moons may have originated from within or just beyond the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. The moons might even have been what’s known as a binary – two asteroids that orbit each other.

The moons are characterised by their low density, which implies they have porous interiors.

The captured asteroid hypothesis, however, requires an extremely dense Martian atmosphere to explain how the asteroids were trapped by tidal forces. Mars today has a thin atmosphere mainly composed of carbon dioxide. Also, asteroids captured by planets tend to have highly eccentric orbits. The orbits of Phobos and Deimos around Mars are, by contrast, almost circular.

Scientists have also proposed other theories for the origins of these moons, but they command lower levels of support among the scientific community. One visualises the origin of these moons as debris from the destruction of a single “proto-moon”.

Another lesser known idea proposes that Mars undergoes billion-year cycles where rings of rocky material orbiting Mars coalesce over time into moons.

Once the moons are formed, they are eventually ripped apart by gravitational (tidal) forces to form new rings. Under this scenario, we just happen to live in an era where the debris is in the form of moons and not as rings.

Solving the mystery

Amid this ongoing uncertainty surrounding the moons’ origins, MMX aims to collect more than 10g of material from Phobos – marking the world’s first sample return mission from the Moon.

If the samples contain a large amount of material from Mars itself, along with material from the asteroid that collided with the red planet, then it would favour the giant impact theory. If the composition of Phobos is similar to that of meteorites from known categories of asteroid, it would favour the asteroid capture theory.

MMX’s round trip to Mars will take five years in total. It will arrive at the red planet in late 2027, and return to Earth in 2031.

The spacecraft consists of three modules, one to get to Mars, one to land on Phobos and another to return the sample to Earth. It houses 11 scientific instruments, including a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer for measuring the chemical composition of Phobos, two cameras and a near-infrared instrument for characterising minerals. MMX will also deploy a 25kg rover called Idefix on Phobos’ surface.

For decades, the origin of Mars’s unusual moons has been subject to intense debate. Now, with the launch of this landmark space mission, scientists could be on the verge of a breakthrough.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/15/how-did-mars-get-its-moons-japans-mmx-space-mission-aims-to-solve-the-puzzle/