US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a visit with Michigan Air National Guard troops, April 29.Getty Images
With US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “proud” cancellation this week of the military’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) program, the “war on woke” has found its latest frontier – war itself.
Stemming from a United Nations Security Council resolution in 2000, the WPS initiative aimed to increase the participation of women in public institutions, including in the security sector and in peace-making roles.
The WPS agenda aims to better understand how women, men, boys and girls experience war, peace and security differently. It increases operational effectiveness and supports the underlying goal of gender equality, described by the UN as the “number one predictor of peace”.
In the military context, it emphasises the need to increase the participation of women and to better protect non-combatant women in war, particularly from the prevalence of conflict-related sexual violence.
The decision to end the program as part of a wider war on diversity, equity and inclusion seems to assume national security and military power are incompatible with the promotion of racial and gender equality.
In other words, it assumes certain types of people aren’t really cut out to be “warfighters”. And it asserts that anything other than basic skill (such as weapons handling) undermines readiness and ability in warfare.
History and the available evidence suggest both ideas are wrong.
The archetypal warrior envisaged by Hegseth and others is one who relies on very traditional concepts of what constitutes a warrior and who that might be: not female, definitely not transgender, ideally also not gay.
Recent bans on transgender personnel in the US military, the removal of mandatory mental resilience training, and the
“disappearance” from US museums and memorials of the records of the military contribution of women and minorities, reinforce these ideas.
The ideal soldier, according to the new doctrine, is straight, white, physically fit, stoic and male. Yet people of all stripes have served their countries ably and with honour.
Hard-won progress in retreat
Military service is allocated a privileged kind of status in society, despite (or perhaps because of) the ultimate sacrifice it can entail. That status has long been the preserve of men, often of a particular class or ethnicity.
But women and minorities around the world have fought for the right to enter the military, often as part of broader campaigns for greater equality within society in general.
But there remains resistance to these “interlopers”. No matter their individual capabilities, women are painted as too physically weak, as a threat to combat unit cohesion, or a liability because of their particular health needs.
Women, in particular, are often perceived as being too emotional or lacking authority for military command. Minorities are seen as requiring distracting rules about cultural sensitivity, presenting language challenges, or are stereotyped as not cut out for leadership.
But problem solving – a key military requirement – is best tackled with a range of views and approaches. Research from the business world shows diverse teams are more successful, including delivering higher financial returns.
At a more granular level, we also know that minority groups have often outperformed other military units, as exemplified by the extraordinary feats of the New Zealand Māori Pioneer Battalion in World War I and the 28th Māori Battalion in World War II.
Women, too, have proved themselves many times over, most recently in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As well as matching the skills of their male counterparts, they also had different, useful approaches to roles such as intelligence gathering in conflict zones.
US Marines on a military exercise – but history shows us there’s more than one type of successful soldier. Getty Images
Any suggestion that military units are best served by being made up of only heterosexual men with “alpha” tendencies is undermined by the evidence. In fact, a monocultural, hypermasculine military may increase the potential for harrassment, bullying or worse.
Modern military roles also involve a much wider range of skills than the traditional and stereotypically male infantry tasks of digging, walking with a pack, firing guns and killing an enemy.
In modern warfare, personnel may also need to engage in “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency, or in “grey zone” tactics, where specialisations in intelligence, cyber or drone piloting are more highly prized. Militaries are also much more likely to be deployed to non-warfighting roles, such as humanitarian aid and disaster relief.
This isn’t to say “controlled aggression” and other traditionally alpha-male attributes don’t have their place. But national military strategies increasingly stress the need to train ethical and compassionate soldiers to successfully carry out government objectives.
The evolution of war requires the evolution of the military forces that fight them. The cancellation of the Women, Peace and Security program in the US threatens to put a stop to this process, at least in that country.
Despite Pete Hegseth’s claim to be increasing “warfighting” capability, then, there is a real chance the move will decrease operational effectiveness, situational awareness and problem solving in conflict situations.
Far from being peripheral, the Women, Peace and Security program is central to the future of all military activity, and to developing conceptions of war, peace and security. Hegseth’s “proud moment” looks less like winning a “war on woke” and more like a retreat from an understanding of the value a diverse military has created.
Bethan Greener 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tamsin S. Mitchell, Visiting Researcher, Centre for Freedom of the Media, University of Sheffield
Humberto Padgett was reporting on the effects of drought in Cuitzeo, a rural area of central Mexico, when his car was intercepted by armed men on September 13 2024. They threatened him and stole the car, his identity papers and work equipment, including two bullet-proof jackets.
Padgett, a Mexican investigative journalist and author, was reporting on Mexico’s growing environmental worries for national talk radio station Radio Fórmula. It proved to be his last assignment for the station. Two days later, he tweeted:
Today I’m leaving journalism indefinitely. The losses I’ve suffered, the harassment and threats my family and I have endured, and the neglect I’ve faced have forced me to give up after 26 years of work. Thank you and good luck.
Padgett made this decision despite the fact he, like many other journalists in Mexico, has been enrolled in a government protection scheme for years – the Protection Mechanism for Journalists and Human Rights Defenders, set up in 2012. Several other Latin American countries have similar protection programmes, including Honduras since 2015.
These programmes offer journalists measures such as panic buttons and emergency phone alerts, police or private security patrols, and security cameras and alarm systems for their homes and offices. Some are provided with bodyguards – at times, Padgett has received 24-hour protection.
In Honduras, reporter Wendy Funes, founder of the online news site RI, was given a police bodyguard after being threatened while covering an extortion trial that linked the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), an international criminal gang, with the Honduran government of former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who is now serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for drug trafficking and arms offences.
Yet even once journalists are enrolled in these government protection schemes, the attacks and threats continue. Shockingly, many come from state employees who, in both Mexico and Honduras, are thought to be responsible for almost half of all attacks on journalists. But the prospect of punishment is remote: at least 90% of attacks on journalists go unprosecuted and unpunished, meaning there is little deterrent for committing these crimes.
Both Mexico and Honduras currently have leftwing governments which have promised to protect journalists, following a long history of crimes against media professionals in both countries. Yet the risk to journalists posed by the state has worsened in recent years amid increasing use of spyware, online smear campaigns, and rising levels of anti-media rhetoric.
Journalists perceived as critical of the leadership are regularly accused of being corrupt, in the pay of foreign governments, and putting out fake news. Donald Trump’s vocal criticism of mainstream media since returning to power in the US is likely to have encouraged this anti-media hostility in Mexico and Honduras, as elsewhere in the world.
When I tell people about my research into how journalists in Latin America deal with the relentless violence and impunity, their first question is usually: “Oh, you mean drug cartels?” And indeed, both Padgett and Funes have received death threats for their investigations into cartels and other organised crime groups.
Padgett was once sent an unsolicited photo of a dismembered body in a morgue. He was beaten and kicked in the head by armed men who threatened to kill him and his family while he was reporting on drug dealing on a university campus in Mexico City in 2017. He wears a bullet-proof jacket – or did until it was stolen – and keeps his home address a closely guarded secret.
But cartels and gangs are only part of the story when it comes to anti-press violence and impunity in these countries. In many ways, the bigger story is the threat from the state. This has been a constant despite changes in government, whether right or left wing.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
My research project and resulting book were inspired by my work providing advocacy, practical and moral support for journalists at risk in Latin America for an international NGO between 2007 and 2016. The extent of the risk posed by state agents – acting alone or in cahoots with organised crime groups – is clear from the many journalists I’ve spoken to in both Mexico and Honduras.
I first interviewed these reporters, and the organisations that assist them, in 2018, then again in 2022-23 (89 interviews in total), to chart how journalists struggle for protection and justice from the state in the face of growing challenges at both domestic and international level.
For both Padgett and Funes, the intimidation, threats and attacks from organised crime groups often followed them reporting on state agents and their alleged links with such groups. Organised crime groups have deeply infiltrated the fabric of society in many parts of Mexico and Honduras – including politics, state institutions, justice and law enforcement, particularly at a local level.
In Padgett’s case, the suspected cartel threats came after he published a book and investigation into links between state governments and drug cartels, including drug money for political campaigns in Tamaulipas and a surge in cartel-related violence in Morelos under a certain local administration.
Padgett had first joined the federal protection mechanism after he was attacked by police when filming a raid in central Mexico City in 2016. The police confiscated his phone and arrested him.
He was later assigned an around-the-clock bodyguard after the Mexico City prosecutor’s office made available his contact details and his risk assessment and protection plan – produced by the state programme that was supposed to safeguard him – for inclusion in the court file on the 2017 attack on him at the university. This meant the criminals behind the attack had full access to this information.
Being part of this protection programme did not stop the threats by state employees. In April 2024, while trying to report from the scene of the murder of a local mayoral candidate in Guanajuato state, Padgett was punched in the face by a police officer from the state prosecutor’s office, who also smashed his glasses and deleted his photos.
Years earlier, he had been subjected to a protracted legal battle by former Mexico state governor and presidential candidate Eruviel Ávila Villegas, who sued Padgett for “moral damages” to the tune of more than half a million US dollars. His offence? A 2017 profile which mentioned that the politician had attended parties where a bishop had sexually abused male minors.
Padgett eventually won the case – but only on appeal, thanks to a pro bono legal team, after 18 months of stress and travelling to attend the hearings. This is a part of a growing trend of “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (Slapps) in Mexico and Latin America, aimed at silencing journalists and other critical voices.
As Padgett put it: “[Even] once we manage to win, there are no consequences for the politicians who call us to a trial without merit – no consequences at all. Eruviel Ávila is still a senator for the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]” – and he was not even liable for costs.
Mexico’s federal government and army have also carried out illegal surveillance of the mobile phones of journalists and human rights defenders investigating federal government corruption and serious human rights violations on multiple occasions, including by using Pegasus spyware.
In Honduras, Funes is no stranger to state harassment either. In 2011, she was among around 100 journalists, many of them women, who were teargassed and beaten with truncheons by officers of the presidential guard and the national police during a peaceful protest against journalist murders.
In recent years, according to Funes, she and her team at RI have been targeted by cyberattacks and orchestrated smear campaigns on social media that have sought to tar them as being corrupt or associated with criminal gangs. She suspects the army is behind some of these attacks since RI has written in favour of demilitarising the police. Several RI team members have been stopped at army checkpoints; when they have denounced this on TikTok or Facebook, they have been flooded by negative comments.
Profile of investigative journalist Wendy Funes, winner of the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression journalism award.
RI has also been attacked by government supporters unhappy with its critical coverage of the Honduras president Xiomara Castro’s leftwing administration. In August 2024, Funes was threatened with prosecution by the governor of Choluteca, southern Honduras, over RI’s investigation into alleged involvement by local government officials in migrant trafficking. And earlier in 2025, Funes and a human rights activist were subjected to misogynistic and sexist diatribes and threats by the head of customs for the same regional department, for demanding justice for a murdered environmental defender.
Almost half of all attacks on journalists in Mexico and Honduras are attributable to state agents, particularly at the local level. In Mexico, the NGO Article 19 has attributed 46% of all such assaults over the last decade to state agents including officials, civil servants and the armed forces.
In Honduras, according to the Committee for Free Expression (C-Libre), 45% of attacks on journalists in the first quarter of 2024 were attributed to state agents, up from 41% in 2021. These include the national police, the Military Public Order Police, officials and members of the government.
Impunity is a fact of life
One key reason for the failure of the journalist protection schemes in Mexico and Honduras is they lack the power to investigate, prosecute and punish those responsible for the attacks that caused the journalists to enter the programmes in the first place.
Padgett is yet to see justice, either for the attack on him by drug dealers at the university campus almost eight years ago or the results of the official investigation into the Mexico City prosecutor office’s apparent leaking of his contact details to the assailants. When he asked the prosecutor’s office for an update on its investigation in June 2024, he was told it had been closed two years earlier. His request for a copy of the file was denied.
When he went to the office to ask why, he was detained by police officers. “This is justice in Mexico City,” he said in a video he filmed during his arrest, adding:
Drug dealing is allowed. My personal data is leaked to the organised crime [group] that threatened to kill me and my family. Then the matter is shelved. I come to ask for my file and instead of giving it to me, they take me to court. That is the reality today.
News report by Al Jazeera English (February 2023)
Padgett lodged a complaint and, following “a tortuous judicial process”, eventually managed to get the investigation re-opened. But he says he has lost hope in the process and the justice system in general. Even something as simple as filing a report on the theft of his bullet-proof jacket during the armed attack in September 2024 has proved beyond the official responsible for the task, so the protection programme has not replaced it.
Funes says she reported one of the cyber-attacks on RI to the special prosecutor established by Honduras in 2018 to investigate crimes against journalists and human rights defenders. Funes provided the name and mobile phone number used by the hacker. However, she said the case was later closed for “lack of merit”.
Previously, the official investigation into the 2011 attack on her and other women journalists had also been quietly shelved after the evidence was “lost”. Funes says this put her off reporting subsequent incidents to the authorities:
What for? I just want them to protect me … why waste my time? Really, you get used to impunity, you normalise it.
There have been a few important advances in Mexico in recent years, including the successful prosecution of some of those behind the 2017 murder of two high-profile journalists, Javier Valdez and Miroslava Breach, but such cases remain the exception. Around 90% of attacks on journalists still go unprosecuted and unpunished by the state in both Mexico and Honduras, meaning there is little deterrent against these crimes.
Safer, better ways of working
Many of the journalists I have interviewed prioritise covering under-reported issues relating to human rights and democracy, corruption, violence and impunity. They use in-depth, investigative journalism to try to reveal the truth about what is happening in their countries – which is often obscured by the failings and corruption of the justice system and rule of law.
Many are developing safer, better ways of working, with three strategies having grown noticeably in recent years: building collaborations, seeking international support, and professionalising their ways of working.
Journalists from different media outlets often overcome professional rivalries to collaborate on sensitive and dangerous stories. In Mexico, members of some journalists’ collectives and networks alert each other of security risks on the ground, share and corroborate information, and monitor their members during risky assignments. Others travel as a group – when investigating the mass graves used by drug cartels, for example.
In Mexico and increasingly in Honduras, they publish controversial stories, such as on serious human rights violations involving the state, in more than one outlet simultaneously to reduce the chance of individual journalists being targeted in reprisal. Such collaborations build trust, solidarity and mutual support among reporters and editors – something that has traditionally been lacking in both countries.
Increasingly, international media partners also play an important role regarding the safety of Mexican and Honduran journalists and amplifying public awareness of the issues they report on – encouraging the mainstream media in their own countries to take notice and increasing pressure on their governments to act.
According to Jennifer Ávila, director of the Honduran investigative journalism platform ContraCorriente, transnational collaborations are a “super-important protection mechanism” because they give journalists access to external editors and legal assistance – as well as help leaving the country if necessary.
International partners also bring increased resources. In Mexico and Honduras, as in other Latin American countries, the main source of funding is government advertising and other state financial incentives. But these come with expectations about influence over editorial policies and content, so are not an option for most independent outlets. Private advertising is also challenging for these and other reasons. So, most independent media outlets and journalistic projects are heavily dependent on US and European donors such as the National Endowment for Democracy (Ned), Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations.
Much of Latin America has high levels of media concentration, with the mainstream media typically being owned by a handful of wealthy individuals or families with wider business interests – and close economic and political links to politicians and the state. Combined with the strings of government advertising, this often results in “soft” censorship of the content that these outlets publish. Some journalists are escaping this either by setting up their own media digital outlets, like Funes, or by going freelance – as Padgett has decided to do following the attack on him in Cuitzeo in 2024.
At the same time, there has been a widespread raising of standards through increased training in techniques such as journalistic ethics, making freedom of information requests, digital and investigative journalism, and covering elections. This all helps to promote “journalistic security” – using information as a “shield in such a way that no one can deny what you’re saying”, according to Daniela Pastrana of the NGO Journalists on the Ground (PdP). It also helps counter the perception – and in some cases, reality – of longstanding corruption in parts of the profession.
Hostile environment puts progress at risk
Despite the promise of transforming journalism through increasing collaboration, professionalisation and international support, the current outlook for journalists in Mexico and Honduras – and other countries in Latin America – is not encouraging. Hostile government rhetoric against independent reporters and media outlets is on the rise, despite the presidents of both Mexico and Honduras having pledged to protect journalists and freedom of expression.
In Honduras, the hostile rhetoric towards journalists is growing in the run-up to the presidential elections in November. According to Funes: “There is a violent public discourse from the government which is repeated by officials [and] prepares the ground for worse attacks on the press … This is dangerous.”
In both countries, such attitudes at the top are often replicated by local politicians and citizens, including online, with the threat of violent discourse leading to physical violence. This hostility appears likely to grow given the example of Donald Trump’s aggressive and litigious attitude towards journalists and the media in the United States.
Indeed, the policies of the second Trump administration are already jeopardising progress made in terms of transforming journalism in Mexico and Honduras. In late January 2025, the US government suspended international aid and shuttered USAID, amid unsubstantiated accusations of fraud and corruption.
According to the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, the USAID freeze included more than US$268m (£216m) that had been allocated to support “independent media and the free flow of information” in 2025.
USAID has been a key funder of organisations such as the nonprofits Internews and Freedom House, which in turn have been vital to the development of independent and investigative journalism in Latin America through their support of new media outlets, journalistic projects and media freedom groups. Another important donor, Ned – a bipartisan nonprofit organisation largely funded by the US Congress – has had its funding frozen.
Ned’s chair, Peter Roskam, explains its legal action against the Trump funding cuts.
Uncertainty about future funding has led to the immediate suspension of operations and layoffs by many nonprofit media organisations in Mexico, Honduras and across the region. While this seismic shift in the Latin American media landscape reinforces the urgent need to diversify its sources of funding, there is no doubt that in the short and even medium term, it has dealt a serious blow to the development of free and independent journalism and the safety of all journalists.
In a region of increasingly authoritarian leaders, it is now a lot harder to hold them accountable for corruption, human rights violations, impunity and other abuses.
International impotence
Anti-press violence and impunity are global problems, with more than 1,700 journalists killed worldwide between 2006 and 2024 – around 85% of which went unpunished, according to Unesco.
Although international organisations, protection mechanisms and pressure can be important tools in the fight against anti-press violence and impunity, they are ultimately limited in impact due to their reliance on the state to comply. Some journalists in Mexico and Honduras suggest the impact of such international attention can even be counter-productive, due to their governments’ increasing hostility toward any criticism by international organisations, journalists and other perceived opponents.
Twenty years ago, Lydia Cacho, a renowned journalist and women’s rights activist, was arbitrarily detained and tortured in Puebla state, east-central Mexico, after publishing a book exposing a corruption and child sexual exploitation network involving authorities and well-known businessmen. Unable to get redress for her torture through the Mexican justice system, Cacho eventually took her case to the United Nations.
Finally, in 2018, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that her rights had been violated and ordered the Mexican state to re-open the investigation into the attack, and to give her adequate compensation. This judgment has led to several arrests of state agents in Puebla, including a former governor and chief of the judicial police and several police officers, as well as a public apology from the federal government.
Journalist Lydia Cacho speaking at the 2020 Camden Conference.
But cases like Cacho’s are the exception. Securing rulings from international bodies requires resources and energy, the help of NGOs or lawyers – and can take years. What’s more, enforcement of international decisions relies on the state to comply.
While international pressure was key to persuading the Mexican and Honduran states to set up their government protection schemes for journalists and specialised prosecutors to investigate attacks against them, these institutions have generally proved ineffective.
Resourcing is always an issue: typically, protection mechanisms and prosecutors’ offices are underfunded and the staff are poorly trained. Some bodies have limited mandates, such as protection mechanisms that lack the power to investigate attacks on journalists. Sometimes, these failings are believed to be deliberate. According to Padgett, the Mexican journalist protection scheme has “political biases against those whom officials consider to be hostile to the regime”.
Indeed, many journalists and support groups suspect the Mexican and Honduran governments don’t really want these institutions to work. As the pro-democracy judge Guillermo López Lone commented about the repeated failure to secure convictions for crimes against journalists and human rights defenders in Honduras: “These are international commitments [made] due to pressure, but there is no political will.”
López Lone, who was illegally removed from his position after the 2009 coup in Honduras and only reinstated as a judge after a years-long struggle, including a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, alleged that these institutions “play a merely formal role” in Honduras, because they have been “captured by the political interests of the current rulers, and by criminal networks”.
Similarly, according to Sara Mendiola, director of Mexico City-based NGO Propuesta Cívica, it’s not enough to talk about a lack of resources or training: “Even if you doubled the [state] prosecutors’ offices’ budgets, you’d still have the same impunity because the structures [that generate impunity] remain.”
Activism is a risky business
It’s clear that in both Mexico and Honduras, despite the governments’ stated commitment to freedom of expression, there is a deep-seated ambivalence about how important or desirable it is to protect journalists and media freedom.
The heart of this issue is the contradiction of the state as both protector and perpetrator – a state that does not want to, or is incapable of, constraining or investigating itself and its allies. This in turn is linked to longstanding structural problems of corruption, impunity and human rights violations, and a legacy of controlling the media dating to pre-democracy days.
Activism by journalists against this situation – another form of self-protection – takes various forms, including public protests and advocacy, and working for and setting up NGOs that support colleagues at risk. Increasingly, activism also involves the coming together of those who are the victims of violence.
But activism is a risky business in Mexico and Honduras, opening journalists and their loved ones up to further repression and attacks by the state – and sometimes raising questions about their impartiality and credibility. While many journalists have taken part in activism out of necessity or desperation, in both countries their main source of optimism in the face of violence and impunity is journalism itself.
Journalism as the solution
Fortunately, journalists like Padgett don’t give up easily. After an eight-month hiatus following the attack in Cuitzeo and its aftermath, he now feels ready to go back to reporting.
Although he succeeded in getting the shelved investigation into the 2017 attack on him and subsequent data leak reopened, the lack of any action since means he’s decided to draw a line under this labyrinthine process. He is now looking for “alternative means of justice to compensate for the impunity”.
As a part of the reparations, he has been promised a formal apology from the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office (similar to the apology received by Cacho). Such a ceremony is not justice and may largely be symbolic, but Padgett feels it will allow him to move on and focus on journalism again – this time as a freelancer. He is keen to make the point that Mexico remains “an extraordinary place to be a reporter”.
Despite the lack of state protection and all the other challenges, journalists like Padgett and Funes are determined to keep going – investigating their countries’ ills, probing the root causes, transforming their profession. Their commitment offers a ray of hope for the emergence of a truly free and independent media in Mexico, Honduras and beyond.
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This article draws on research which was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Tamsin Mitchell’s new book, Human Rights, Impunity and Anti-Press Violence: How Journalists Survive and Resist, is published by Routledge.
As we roll into the dying hours of the election campaign, the polls are suggesting a Labor win, although it is not yet clear if it will be in minority or majority. Chief Political Correspondent Michelle Grattan and Politics Editor Amanda Dunn discuss why the Coalition has focussed on culture wars issues this week, plus the parties’ policies finally costed after millions of Australians have already voted.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the United States’ top public health official, recently claimed some religious groups avoid the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine because it contains “aborted fetus debris” and “DNA particles”.
The US is facing its worst measles outbreaks in years with nearly 900 cases across the country and active outbreaks in several states.
At the same time, Kennedy, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, continues to erode trust in vaccines.
So what can we make of his latest claims?
There’s no fetal debris in the MMR vaccine
Kennedy said “aborted fetus debris” in MMR vaccines is the reason many religious people refuse vaccination. He referred specifically to the Mennonites in Texas, a deeply religious community, who have been among the hardest hit by the current measles outbreaks.
Many vaccines work by using a small amount of an attenuated (weakened) form of a virus, or in the case of the MMR vaccine, attenuated forms of the viruses that cause measles, mumps and rubella. This gives the immune system a safe opportunity to learn how to recognise and respond to these viruses.
As a result, if a person is later exposed to the actual infection, their immune system can react swiftly and effectively, preventing serious illness.
Kennedy’s claim about fetal debris specifically refers to the rubella component of the MMR vaccine. The rubella virus is generally grown in a human cell line known as WI-38, which was originally derived from lung tissue of a single elective abortion in the 1960s. This cell line has been used for decades, and no new fetal tissue has been used since.
Certain vaccines for other diseases, such as chickenpox, hepatitis A and rabies, have also been made by growing the viruses in fetal cells.
These cells are used not because of their origin, but because they provide a stable, safe and reliable environment for growing the attenuated virus. They serve only as a growth medium for the virus and they are not part of the final product.
You might think of the cells as virus-producing factories. Once the virus is grown, it’s extracted and purified as part of a rigorous process to meet strict safety and quality standards. What remains in the final vaccine is the virus itself and stabilising agents, but not human cells, nor fetal tissue.
So claims about “fetal debris” in the vaccine are false.
It’s also worth noting the world’s major religions permit the use of vaccines developed from cells originally derived from fetal tissue when there are no alternative products available.
Are there fragments of DNA in the MMR vaccine?
Kennedy claimed the Mennonites’ reluctance to vaccinate stems from “religious objections” to what he described as “a lot of aborted fetus debris and DNA particles” in the MMR vaccine.
The latter claim, about the vaccine containing DNA particles, is technically true. Trace amounts of DNA fragments from the human cell lines used to produce the rubella component of the MMR vaccine may remain even after purification.
However, with this claim, there’s an implication these fragments pose a health risk. This is false.
Any DNA that may be present in this vaccine exists in extremely small amounts, is highly fragmented and degraded, and is biologically inert – that is, it cannot cause harm.
Even if, hypothetically, intact DNA were present in the vaccine (which it’s not), it would not have the capacity to cause harm. One common (but unfounded) concern is that foreign DNA could integrate with a person’s own DNA, and alter their genome.
Introducing DNA into human cells in a way that leads to integration is very difficult. Even when scientists are deliberately trying to do this, for example, in gene therapy, it requires precise tools, special viral delivery systems and controlled conditions.
It’s also important to remember our bodies are exposed to foreign DNA constantly, through food, bacteria and even our own microbiome. Our immune system routinely digests and disposes of this material without incorporating it into our genome.
This question has been extensively studied over decades. Multiple health authorities, including Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration, have addressed the misinformation regarding perceived harm from residual DNA in vaccines.
Ultimately, the idea that fragmented DNA in a vaccine could cause genetic harm is false.
The bottom line
Despite what Kennedy would have you believe, there’s no fetal debris in the MMR vaccine, and the trace amounts of DNA fragments that may remain pose no health risk.
What the evidence does show, however, is that vaccines like the MMR vaccine offer excellent protection against deadly and preventable diseases, and have saved millions of lives around the world.
Hassan Vally 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Carson, 2024 Oxford University visiting research fellow RIJS; Professor of Political Communication., La Trobe University
The spread of electoral misinformation and disinformation is undermining democracies around the world.
The World Economic Forum has identified the proliferation of false content as the leading short-term global risk in 2025 for a second consecutive year. Misleading information poses a bigger threat to global GDP, population and natural resources than even climate change or armed conflict.
Here in Australia, is the federal election facing the same threat from misinformation and disinformation? And how concerned should we be?
Fake information is real
Our latest study on public trust shows Australians are encountering electoral misinformation and are worried about it.
We surveyed more than 7,000 people during March and April when the election campaign was heating up. At least two-thirds of respondents said they had already encountered false or misleading election information.
Whether deliberate (disinformation) or unintentional (misinformation), we found Australians were exposed to different types of election falsehoods involving:
issues and candidates
election procedures
election integrity, such as alleged rigged outcomes and unsupported attacks on the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).
Consistent with other Australian and international misinformation studies, people are clearly anxious about being misled. An overwhelming majority of respondents (94%) viewed political misinformation as a problem; more than half regarded it as a “big” or “very big problem”.
An array of falsehoods
Our team, based across four universities, examined the types of electoral misinformation and disinformation Australians reported seeing. Almost two-thirds, 63.1%, encountered falsehoods about issues or candidates, such as misleading claims about parties’ policy proposals.
Thirty-nine percent reported misinformation/disinformation about voting procedures, such as when and how to vote. A similar share, 38.4%, identified fake content about election integrity, including false claims that elections are rigged or that the Australian Electoral Commission is colluding with political parties.
A significant number of people, 20-30%, were also unsure whether they had encountered misleading content. This uncertainty is concerning in itself. Being unable to judge the accuracy of information can undermine the formation of informed opinion.
It also aligns with other research showing many Australians feel they have limited ability to verify information online.
The most prominent examples of misinformation/disinformation related to major election issues, such as:
Medicare
nuclear energy
housing
cost of living
climate
The most common names that people associated with misleading information were:
Donald Trump
Clive Palmer
Labor Party
Liberal Party
Facebook
Deeper analysis is needed to understand the context of these self-reported claims of misinformation and disinformation during the campaign. However, we do know that those exposed to false content identified it in both mainstream daily news and social media sources.
Should we be alarmed?
Research across the fields of psychology, communication and political science shows exposure is not the same as impact. Yet, misinformation and disinformation can influence attitudes and behaviour among vulnerable groups.
Our own work on the 2023 Voice referendum showed disinformation targeting the Australian Electoral Commission had a small but noticeable effect on public trust, even though trust remained high overall.
In another global study, we found online disinformation can distort perceptions of election fairness.
These findings underscore the need to counter falsehoods. Electoral authorities and political leaders must work to protect democratic trust and prevent the kind of election denialism that led to the January 6 Capitol insurrection in the United States.
Of course, people might not always accurately judge how much misinformation or disinformation they’ve seen. This is a common challenge in studies like ours. But even if their perceptions don’t match reality, simply feeling exposed to false or misleading information is linked to greater political cynicism.
Fighting falsehoods
Encouragingly, most Australians recognise the problem and want action. In our survey, 89% said it’s important to know how to spot it, while 83% agreed the practice makes it harder for others to separate fact from fiction. But only 69% felt false information affected them personally.
Many feel especially vulnerable about false claims about candidates and election issues (see Figure 1). Such falsehoods are currently unregulated at the federal level in Australia. But the AEC ranks among the world’s most innovative electoral authorities in countering disinformation, even without “truth in advertising” laws.
In another, yet unpublished study, we found the AEC is a global role model with its multi-pronged strategy to counter misleading information. Its tools include a public disinformation register, media partnerships, and the “Stop and Consider” campaign, which provides clear, accurate information to help voters think critically before sharing content.
Our own study revealed other encouraging signs. Individuals who are more satisfied with Australian democracy perceive disinformation as less of an existential threat than those who are already dissatisfied. This suggests a positive attitude towards democracy helps protect democratic institutions.
This provides a strong rationale for non-profits such as the Susan McKinnon Foundation to promote the value of democratic governance. The Scanlon Foundation, is also making an important contribution with its recent Voices of Australia podcast series, “Truth, Trust and Politics”.
Whoever wins the election, our study shows one thing is clear – fighting electoral misinformation and disinformation is in everyone’s democratic interest.
Andrea Carson receives funding from the Australian Research Council for this project led by AJ Brown at Griffith University: DP230101777 — Mapping & Harnessing Public Mistrust: Constitutional Values Survey 2023-27.
Max Grömping receives funding from the Australian Research Council for this project led by AJ Brown at Griffith University: DP230101777 — Mapping & Harnessing Public Mistrust: Constitutional Values Survey 2023-27.
The world has been gripped by the case of Australian woman Erin Patterson, who was charged with the murder of three people after allegedly serving them a lunch of beef wellington containing poisonous death cap mushrooms (Amanita phalloides).
A new element of the sensational story emerged in court this week, when prosecutors reportedly alleged Patterson used iNaturalist to locate and visit places where death cap mushrooms were known to grow.
So what exactly is iNaturalist? And how is this 17-year-old citizen science project being used to better understand our world?
More than 240 million observations worldwide
iNaturalist is an app that allows users to take photos of plants, fungi, animals and any piece of nature. The photos are uploaded, and identified using a combination of crowd-sourcing and artificial intelligence.
All of this data is extremely important for scientists to understand the ecology of different species. iNaturalist has played a key role in the discovery of new species as well as sightings of species that have previously not been seen for decades.
iNaturalist might turn out to be an important part of Patterson’s trial, but how else can our observations be used?
Finding the unusual
Real people usually collect images for iNaturalist as part of their everyday life, rather than systematically as part of their job. That means there are patterns to the data that is collected.
Observations tend to be recorded on weekends and in good weather, and to involve life forms people find strange, unusual or interesting.
For example, at the time of writing, iNaturalist had recorded 1,382 sightings of domestic cats in Australia, compared with 29,660 koalas. But cataloguing the rare and wonderful can be useful.
When a user uploads an image to iNaturalist, they can also choose to make the location public, so others can see where it was found. iNaturalist
iNaturalist can be used to track invasive species
One key use of iNaturalist is understanding the native range of plants and animals.
Australia invests a lot of resources in preventing species from entering the country. But we still see incursions frequently. Observant citizen scientists can be really important for finding species outside their native range. In Australia, if observations of biosecurity threats are made, alerts are automatically sent to biosecurity teams for further investigations.
In the same vein, species commonly found in the pet trade can be quickly observed and captured to prevent the spread of invasive species.
In 2011, iNaturalist added more features to protect geoprivacy – which allows locations of observations to be obscured. Rare and exciting pets, and collectable insects could be found by looking at location data on iNaturalist.
There is previous evidence this has occurred. Nowadays, species of concern for poaching automatically have their locations obscured, preventing them from being illegally poached or collected. This can also be helpful to prevent people crowding popular endangered animals when they have been sighted.
Typically, anything listed as endangered will automatically have an obscured location on iNaturalist.
Observations on iNaturalist can be helpful for forensics
Observing nature, and taking photos of plants and animals in their native environment, can give us a much better understanding of where they naturally live and grow.
Aside from being fantastic for conservation reasons, this has potential use for forensic investigation of crimes. The use of insects, animals and plants in forensic cases is well established. For example the Sarcosaprophagous Beetle is used in Australia to help understand the time since death when bodies are found.
This sort of science is underpinned by an understanding of where insects naturally live, their lifespans and the sort of environments they thrive in, which are all features iNaturalist can help with.
Should I worry about my location data on iNaturalist?
Observing nature has huge benefits to understanding our natural world. But these observations do collect a lot of personal data in terms of where and when the observation occurred.
Although iNaturalist doesn’t sell users’ information, and users can obscure their precise location, the pictures a person shares can still contain enough information to figure out where they are.
This could be used for forensic intelligence to locate plants and animals of interest, and to place people with them at the time the photo was taken.
If you’re lucky enough to see a rare or threatened species, consider taking a photo that has little background information that can give away the precise details of the locations, particularly when observing immobile organisms like such as plants and fungi.
iNaturalist has played a key role in the discovery of new species. kodartcha/Shutterstock
iNaturalist is a fantastic resource for observing nature. More data points to understand where plants, animals, and mushrooms can be found is vital for understanding their ecology, and potentially conserving species.
It also has huge ramifications for biosecurity, forensics, and even understanding movements that may have occurred during an alleged crime. So it’s really worth getting out in nature and taking photos of interesting things you see!
Melissa Humphries receives funding from the MRFF, NIH, USDoD and DSTG.
Caitlyn Forster 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
More than 50 years ago, when I was a junior curatorial assistant at the Art Gallery of NSW, I had the daunting experience of hanging the annual Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes.
At the time the professional staff held the exhibitions in such disregard, they complained about the news media’s interest in this mediocrity while ignoring more worthy events.
Attitudes changed in the 1980s with the late director Edmund Capon, who recognised popularity was an asset – not a disadvantage.
Capon raised the prize money with sponsorships and started charging the public to see the winners. His strategy proved so successful that the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman exhibitions are now a significant source of revenue for the gallery.
This year, the highly experienced Beatrice Gralton, Senior Curator of Contemporary Australian Art, has curated the exhibitions with support from a crew of more than 40 colleagues.
Packing Room Prize goes to Abdul Abdullah
In the 1970s, the media was refused access to the exhibitions until just before the winner was announced. Now it is actively courted with a public viewing of the works that survive the rigorous culling process.
This takes place a week before the final judging, when the Packing Room Prize is announced. The changing status of this prize is also evidenced by changing personnel. Those who did the physical work of packing and loading artworks in the past were not expected to know much about art – and often gave the prize to paintings that would otherwise not be hung.
In 2025, the specialist installation crew that handles the portraits in the packing room are most likely to be professional artists themselves – a reminder that most artists need another gig to stay afloat.
This year’s Packing Room Prize winner is Abdul Abdullah’s portrait of fellow artist Jason Phu, No mountain high enough. There is a glorious irony in this, as Abdullah has long been a critic of the self-important art establishment.
His work is a riff on the heroic paintings of 19th century landscapes, except for the flock of twittering birds that surround the head of the solitary rider, a bit like a halo.
His subject, fellow artist Phu, has to be seen as a serious contender for the main prize, which will be announced on May 9. Phu’s portrait of actor Hugo Weaving – older hugo from the future fighting hugo from right now in a swamp and all the frogs and insects and fish and flowers now look on – has both the humour and energy that has long characterised his work.
But there are many serious contenders for this year’s prize. Kurdish refugee Mostafa Azimitabar first exhibited in the Archibald in 2022, with a self-portrait painted in coffee, with a toothbrush. Art became his refuge during the many years he spent incarcerated as an asylum seeker.
He still uses a toothbrush, but has used paint for his wonderfully fierce painting of a taut Grace Tame, appropriately named The definition of hope.
Then there’s Kaylene Whiskey’s delightful self-portrait From comic to canvas, which manages to include images of her heroines, Dolly Parton and Tina Turner.
Not all works are so strident, however. Lucila Zentner’s Wendy in the gallery, is a subdued portrait of fellow artist Wendy Sharpe, placing her in the context of her art, almost as a decoration.
As is spelt out in J.F. Archibald’s will, the judges of the Archibald Prize must be the trustees of the gallery, and no one else may interfere in their decision.
However, for decades after a spectacular court case resulting from the 1943 Archibald, the trustees were so nervous of litigation that the final judging was administered by the NSW electoral office. In a court case in 1944, plaintiffs claimed the trustees’ 1943 decision was a breach of trust as the winning painting wasn’t a portrait. And one trustee claimed he had accidentally voted for the winner, thinking he was voting against it.
Today, all decisions are made in-house. Court cases have been fought over whether entries were paintings (or not), painted from life (or not), selected by the trustees (or not). In 1990 Sidney Nolan had to withdraw his entry after it was pointed out he could not be described as a “resident in Australasia for 12 months preceding the date of entry”.
But once the entry conditions are met, the curator has a free hand. This year, Gralton has hung all three exhibitions on the premise they are “about stories and storytelling”.
In the Sulman prize exhibition – awarded for best subject painting, genre painting or mural project – the once academic modernist Mitch Cairns has gone full conceptual with his stark Narrow cast (studio mural). It looks like something straight out of the 1970s Art & Language movement.
The Wynne prize is for both Australian landscapes and sculptures. This year there are many three-dimensional works, ranging from the elaborate Billy Bain to the almost agonised restraint of Heather B. Swann.
Then there is Mehwish Iqbal’s beautiful, delicate Zameen muqaddas (sacred earth), a pen and ink contrast of fine botanical drawing and delicate wash, all on handmade paper.
While artist Elizabeth Pulie has already judged the Sulman prize, the judging for the Archibald and Wynne will be finalised early morning on May 9. This year’s result is anyone’s guess.
Joanna Mendelssohn has in the past received funding from the ARC.
The native shrimp _Paratya australiensis_ was among the species found to incorporate carbon from natural gas into their bodies in the Condamine River.Chris Van Wyk/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
What’s the currency for all life on Earth? Carbon. Every living thing needs a source of carbon to grow and reproduce. In the form of organic molecules, carbon contains chemical energy that is transferred between organisms when one eats the other.
Plants carry out photosynthesis, using energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen. Animals get carbon by consuming organic matter in their diet – herbivores from plants, carnivores from eating other animals. They use this carbon for energy and to produce the molecules their bodies need, with some carbon dioxide released by breathing.
But there are other, stranger ways of getting carbon. In our new research, we found something very surprising. River animals were feeding on methane-eating bacteria, which in turn were consuming fossil fuel as food.
Usually, the carbon used as food by river creatures is new in the sense it has been recently converted from gas (carbon dioxide) to solid carbon through photosynthesising algae or trees along the bank. But in a few rivers, such as the Condamine River in Queensland, there’s another source: ancient natural gas bubbling up from underground, which is eaten by microorganisms. Insects such as mayflies have taken to this methane-based carbon with gusto.
How does a river usually get its carbon?
The way photosynthesised carbon moves from a plant to an animal and then another animal can be described as a food web. Food webs show the many different feeding relationships between organisms, and show how species depend on each other for sustenance in an intricate balance.
In a river food web, carbon usually comes from one of two sources: plants growing and photosynthesising in the river (such as algae), or when organic matter such as leaves are washed in by rain or blown in by wind.
Rivers that are well connected to their floodplains often get plenty of carbon from leaf litter from trees which dissolves in water or is eaten directly by animals. Algae in rivers provide a high-quality source of carbon for animals because they can contain high concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids essential for growth and reproduction.
The primary source of carbon for river animals varies depending on prevailing conditions and the individual river.
The carbon of the Condamine
Some microorganisms called archaea naturally produce small amounts of methane in oxygen-depleted sediments of rivers.
But we wanted to look at the Condamine to see whether much larger volumes of methane could be used as food.
After it forms deep underground, natural gas can slowly escape through cracks in the earth. If a river bed is directly above, this methane-rich gas will seep into the river.
That’s what happens in Queensland’s Condamine River. The river rises on Mount Superbus, inland from Brisbane, and flows inland until it meets the Darling River.
In some parts of the river, methane bubbles up constantly through the water column from a natural gas reservoir that formed since the Late Pleistocene.
In these stretches of river, dissolved methane concentrations are extremely high: up to 350 times greater than trace concentrations upriver, away from the methane seep.
We wanted to see whether methanotrophic bacteria consuming methane from natural gas were being eaten by river animals, and whether we could trace the carbon signature through the food web.
To find out, we analysed the carbon in the bodies of river animals such as zooplankton, insects, shrimp, prawns and fish, and compared it to the different sources of carbon that could make up their food.
The results were clear: animals within reach of the natural gas seeping from underground had a distinct carbon signature showing they were eating food derived from the natural gas. In fact, for insects such as mayflies, methane-based food made up more than half (55%) of their diet.
Over time, this methane-derived food moved up the food web, showing up in prawns and even fish. Here too, it contributed a significant portion of their carbon.
Natural gas bubbles up through the water column to the surface of the Condamine in some stretches. Gavin Rees, CC BY-NC-ND
We found this methane–derived carbon moved through multiple levels of the local food web. It made up almost a fifth (19%) of the carbon in shrimp and 28% of the carbon in carnivorous fish.
For river shrimp and prawns, leaves washed into the river were still important sources of carbon. For mayflies, algae was still an important source of food.
But our work shows that natural gas seeps can be a major, even dominant, source of energy for the entire food web. This is very surprising. It shows an unexpected connection between Earth’s geology and living creatures in a river.
Why does this matter?
Until now, researchers have focused on river and land plants as the main way a river gets its carbon. Our research has uncovered a surprisingly significant way some rivers get their carbon – methane.
In deep sea research, this pathway is better understood. Methane-eating bacteria can form the basis of entire ecosystems which have sprung up around deep sea hydrothermal vents of hot water.
But until now, we have overlooked the role methane-eating bacteria can play in rivers. With this knowledge, we can better track the flows of carbon in rivers so we can gauge ecosystem productivity and see how a food web is functioning.
Paul McInerney receives funding from the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder.
The impression of the Liberal Party as out of touch with women persists in this year’s election.
The party’s “women problem” was brought into sharp focus by the backlash to its now-abandoned policy to stop public servants working from home.
Then there was a candidate claiming women should be removed from the military, and misogynistic social media posts from a Liberal campaign manager. These recurring issues suggest there are larger problems that have not been dealt with.
Until the party does so, Liberal claims of broad representation remain in doubt. It also makes the party more vulnerable to independent insurgencies, making its path to majority government unclear.
My new research shows how a key Liberal weakness became an independent success for “Teal” candidates. The results provide key lessons for the Liberals on how the Teal campaigns that won against them in the previous election recruited women to their movement.
The Liberal Party has long had a lack of female representation in its ranks.
Although only 29% of federal Liberal MPs are women, the party has been reluctant to adopt gender quotas.
It’s instead adopted a gender parity by 2025 target, which will almost certainly not be met. Recent research has shown women still make up only one in three Liberal candidates and are less likely to run in safe seats.
A review of gender within the Liberal Party in 2020 found women made up 34.8% of Young Liberals and only 23.4% of branch presidents or similar leaders. Despite targets, these numbers have remained sticky.
Recruiting more women to take up positions throughout the organisation is vital. Without this, parties have a smaller pool of prospective women candidates and are less likely to preselect women.
My study
As part of my recently published study, I conducted 55 interviews in 2022 with volunteers, campaigners and candidates to examine how Teal campaigns recruited.
This study found women’s social and professional networks are vital for recruitment, for everyone from boots-on-the-ground volunteers to candidates.
Recruiting through personal networks is more effective than other means often used, such as individuals signing themselves up alone. Interviewees gave examples of recruiting their friends and family members into independent campaigns, like the woman who designed the graphics for a campaign because she was an old schoolmate of the candidate.
People’s social networks are often full of people who are similar to them. Among the independents, the women who volunteered were often skilled professionals, who recruited other professional women.
This recruitment developed organically through friendships and colleagues. Interviewees gave examples, such as a volunteer who:
[…] invited eight or ten of her own friends, who she knew were pretty well onside, but asked them to bring friends to that gathering, which ended up being 50 or so people.
Many independent volunteers had also been active in local community organisations. As one interviewee put it:
it’s women who get things done. It’s always the women who are organising barbecues and whatever needs to be done at school and whatever community organisation there is, whether it’s a community garden or a football club. It always seems to be women who just quietly go about the work.
Recruiting from civic organisations is not unique to independents. The Liberal Party effectively engaged with the Women’s Leagues in its formative years. Doing so again would likely provide volunteers who are well-known and connected in their communities, enthusiastic and full of expertise the campaigns could draw on.
Women seeing potential in other women
As the independent campaigns developed, they required supporters with specialist skills, such as website development. To find these people quickly, campaign leaders recruited trusted friends and professional contacts instead of advertising externally.
This meant women were recruited directly to the higher levels of the campaign, making up the majority of leaders across the movement.
In turn, these leaders shaped the candidate-selection processes, searching for “the candidate from central casting”, as one interviewee described Allegra Spender. Most saw a professional woman as the ideal candidate in 2022.
Women are more likely to believe women candidates are electable, shaping who gets preselected to run as a candidate.
Within the Liberal Party, women campaigned for more female candidates last year. To succeed in these factional battles, more women must hold leadership positions.
The continued lack of progress on gender parity suggests the Liberal Party needs to do more to actively engage with the women who are already members of the party and engage with leaders across civic and political organisations that already exist within the community. Members may be their most important resource in achieving parliamentary gender parity.
However, achieving this means first having women in the room. Independent interviewees viewed parties as masculine and hierarchical organisations.
Dealing with this perception will be no easy feat, but must be the first step in any attempt to bring women back to the Liberal Party.
Phoebe Hayman receives funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.
If you own a business, would you be willing to hire a person who has been convicted for a crime? Give them a chance when a background check shows they have a criminal record?
The answers matter for both individuals and communities. For people who have paid their debt to society, rejoining it can hinge on getting a second chance without being judged on their past.
It is not something they can really hide. Employers often conduct criminal background checks as part of the hiring process. People with criminal records face high levels of stigmatisation, making it harder to reenter their communities and make money legally.
The thorny question of what to do with people with convictions when it comes to employment has been considered by policymakers and justice campaigners around the world.
In the United States, more than 27 states have introduced “Ban the Box” legislation. While each law is unique, by and large they have eliminated the requirement to provide criminal background information in job applications.
And a number of countries, including New Zealand, have implemented clean slate initiatives which help conceal criminal records for people who meet certain criteria.
Our new research looks at whether New Zealand’s clean slate scheme increases the job prospects for eligible people.
The clean slate reform was introduced as the Criminal Records Act in 2004. People who were previously convicted of minor offences can now have their criminal records automatically concealed if they can maintain a conviction-free record for seven years after their last sentence.
The regulation excludes people who were involved in a serious offence (such as sexual misconduct) or who received a particularly punitive sentence (such as incarceration or an indefinite disqualification from driving).
The Criminal Records Act allows eligible people with a conviction to wipe their slate clean seven years after their last sentencing. Shutterstock
Clean slate and the labour market
Our research started with the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), hosted by Statistics New Zealand (StatsNZ). This is a repository of records provided by different public and private agencies, including court charge data from the Ministry of Justice and tax records from Inland Revenue.
StatsNZ uses specific characteristics of individuals (such as name and birth date) to identify them across the different datasets. This enables researchers to track the same individual’s data footprint across different administrative records.
We used court charges data on all men convicted between 1992 and 2003 who had fulfilled the clean slate eligibility criteria. We then linked this pool of people with their Inland Revenue records to measure their employment and earnings.
To identify the labour market impact of the clean slate policy, we compared the employment and earnings of those who completed their seven-year rehabilitation period (the treatment group) with individuals who become eligible some time later (control group).
Limited benefits of clean slate scheme
Our analysis found the clean slate scheme has no relevant impact on the likelihood of eligible individuals finding work. This could result from the length of time required between sentencing and being eligible for a clean slate. Seven years could simply be too long.
But the clean slate scheme did create at least a 2% increase in eligible workers’ monthly wages and salaries – equivalent to a NZ$100 hike for an individual with an average monthly salary of $5,000.
The increase in monthly earnings appears to be greater for workers with a stronger commitment to working and for those who remain with one company for longer periods.
Global patterns
The labour market effects of concealing past convictions have also been explored in the US. Recent research looked at a policy enacted in Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Bexar County, Texas. Mirroring our own results, the authors do not find any relevant impact on gaining employment.
Our findings indicate the concealment of past convictions through New Zealand’s clean slate scheme might happen too late to make a huge difference. But there are changes that can be made to improve work outcomes for people who have completed their sentences.
This could include following the example of countries such as Finland, where access to criminal histories is much more restricted. In Finland, the background check has to be directly relevant to the job requirements. For example, the law allows checks for someone applying to work in the financial sector who was convicted of fraud.
There would also be benefits from looking at the eligibility criteria for New Zealand’s clean slate scheme.
Currently, it only applies to people who committed a minor offence. But policymakers should consider whether it makes sense to expand the policy to people who committed more serious crimes but managed to turn their life around. Making this change would allow people to reap the benefits of working without stigma.
All that said, the government’s current “tough on crime” stance makes change unlikely, with a focus on the cost of crime rather than what happens after punishment has been completed.
Kabir Dasgupta is affiliated with the Federal Reserve Board. The opinions expressed in this article does not reflect the views of the the Federal Reserve Board or the Federal Reserve System.
Alexander Plum 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.
Foreign audiences often associate German cinema with tragedy, trauma and death. Certainly, major historical events such as the second world war and the Fall of the Berlin Wall — cornerstones of German film — are present in this year’s selection at the 2025 German Film Festival.
Alongside these themes is a variety of contemporary topics, innovative fictional formats and strong documentary work. The increased presence of women in directing and producing roles also brings female experiences sharply into focus.
Here are my highlights from this year’s programme.
Riefenstahl (2024)
Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003), Hitler’s favourite filmmaker, has been a subject of controversy for decades – explored in documentaries such as The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993).
Now, with access to new material from Riefenstahls’ private archive, director Andres Veiel and journalist Sandra Maischberger cast a fresh eye over this complex figure.
Using extensive visual materials, they trace Riefenstahl’s journey from dancer to actress, to filmmaker and photographer – capturing everything from her pioneering cinematic techniques to her entanglement with political power and personal vanity. And they are not afraid to confront uncomfortable aspects of her past.
Her claim to have endured an unwanted romantic pursuit by Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels (first made in her 1987 memoir) appears in new light as an older Riefenstahl faces questioning from aggressive TV interviewers. She unflinchingly and fiercely maintains her version of events.
Is Leni Riefenstahl a creative genius, a political victim, or an ignorant perpetrator? This film invites audiences to grapple with this old question anew — and perhaps come to their own conclusion.
Montages depict Riefenstahl’s life from youth to old age, culminating in an image of an elderly lady who, even late in life, manipulates camera angles and lighting to ensure a more flattering appearance.
Two to One (2024)
Some German films such as Balloon (2018) or The Last Execution (2022) have a tendency to explore East Germans as either victims of oppression, or complicit with the regime of the German Democratic Republic.
But there are also films that rebel against such simplification – such as Beauty and Decay (2019), Dear Thomas (2021) and Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (2023) – to powerfully present the many dimensions of former East Germany and its people.
Among them is Two to One, a thoughtful picture by director Nadja Brunckhorst, which fluctuates between thriller, comedy and melodrama. Based on a true story, this film remembers the delirious time between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification.
It is July 1990, and just days after the deadline for exchanging East German marks to more valued West German marks at the exchange rate of 2:1. This halved the life savings of many East Germans.
We follow a Hausgemeinschaft (community of renters) who discover millions of East German mark bills in an underground bunker. They cleverly use the more privileged members of their old and new worlds – sleek Western sales representatives and former East German diplomats – to transform the worthless bills into West mark and buy goods for everyone.
Two to One stars Ronald Zehrfeld (also in the festival opener Long Story Short), Sandra Hueller and Peter Kurth in top form.
Dying (2024)
As a contender in the 2024 Berlin Film Festival (where it won best screenplay), and winner of the 2024 German Film Award, Dying comes highly recommended.
Versatile German actor Lars Eidinger is cast as Tom, a youth orchestra conductor trying to pull off his best friend’s composition “Dying”. Not only does the performance never please the composer, his private world is also a mess.
Tom is raising someone else’s child. His father (Hans-Uwe Bauer) suffers dementia. His sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) can’t keep up with the expectations of their estranged parents. And his mother’s (Corinna Harfouch) thinly veiled contempt for her own son is visible in a breathtaking scene involving the seemingly innocent ritual of coffee and cake.
But despite its weighty subject matter, humour appears in the most unexpected places.
There is Ellen’s affair with her boss, a dentist, who ends up drunk in a bar — where she pulls one of his teeth. There is also the quietly absurd scene of her ageing parents trying to drive home from the supermarket: one nearly blind, the other unable to remember where they live.
A film that uses absurdity and tenderness to break through emotional tension with surprising charm, Dying is a must see.
I Want It All (2025)
Singer and actress Hildegard Knef would have turned 100 this year.
Knef was one of the most prominent and daring post-WWII West German female artists. Driven from a young age to become successful, she began her career in the 1946 rubble film, The Murderers Are Among Us.
In her 2025 documentary I Want It All, director Luzia Schmidt captures Knef in rehearsals, at home, in the recording studio and through press photos. The film is a vivid portrait of an unapologetic woman constantly under scrutiny, as the German public seemed entitled to access every corner of her life.
Knef comes across as sharp but self-aware. The artist discusses her stage fright and the art of holding an audience’s attention. Her candid remarks about undergoing plastic surgery, as a female artist navigating the ruthless entertainment industry, remain just as relevant today.
Arguably the greatest assets of the film are the reflective comments from Knef’s daughter, Tinta, who speaks with empathy and kindness about her mother’s ambition and vulnerabilities.
I Want It All is a treat for anyone who is familiar with Knef, and for those who want to know more about this grand dame of German culture.
Cicadas (2025)
An idyllic countryside in summer: a paradise retreat for some, and a prison for others.
Isabell is the daughter of an architect, who is paralysed by a stroke. His beautifully designed house is in disrepair and no one can pay for it, but Isabell can’t get him to sell it. Meanwhile, Isabell’s marriage to her needy French husband Philippe is strained by a shared trauma.
Anja, a single mum to young Greta, navigates a fragile existence. In a region with weak infrastructure, she moves between low-paying jobs, barely making ends meet.
When the two women meet, their bond forms cautiously. Both are shaped by differences in class, age and life experience, yet there is a connection that bridges these divides.
Carried by compelling performances by Saskia Rosenthal and Nina Hoss (the latter of whom had worked with director Ina Weisse in The Audition (2019)), Cicadas is a quiet drama about vulnerability and loss of control that evolves in the open landscapes of the Brandenburg region.
Claudia Sandberg 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philippa Specker, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Refugee Trauma and Recovery Program, School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney
When Australia signed the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention, it committed to providing protection to people who have fled war, persecution and human rights violations.
Refugees have often experienced severe traumatic events. This can include war, torture, kidnapping and witnessing the murder of loved ones.
Understandably, refugees are more likely than the general population to experience mental health problems. About 27% of adult refugees suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 30% from depression. Only 5.6% of Australians experience PTSD and 6.4% experience depression.
Australia has a humanitarian and legal responsibility to support the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers so they can recover and thrive.
Mental health problems are highly treatable when people have access to effective treatment. Addressing key barriers to accessing mental health services is in everyone’s best interest.
So, what mental health support is available for refugees when they arrive in Australia?
Different pathways
Much depends on how the person came to Australia and through which scheme they applied to be recognised as a refugee.
First, there are people who apply for and are granted refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or Australia’s humanitarian program before arriving in Australia.
These people, often termed “humanitarian entrants”, represent the largest cohort of Australia’s refugees.
Humanitarian Settlement Program caseworkers can refer these people to internal or external mental health support services.
Importantly, people under Australia’s humanitarian program can also access vital services such as:
Medicare
Centrelink
English-language classes.
They also have the right to work and study. This helps promote recovery, adjustment and wellbeing.
Some people apply for and are granted refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees before arriving in Australia. John Wreford/Shutterstock
Second, there are people who sought asylum via alternate pathways.
This often means they arrived in Australia without a valid visa. Or, they may have held a non-refugee visa and subsequently applied for refugee status after arriving in Australia.
These people, termed “asylum seekers”, are in a much more precarious situation.
They face lengthy visa processing times, the possibility of being held in detention, and a greater likelihood of being granted only temporary visas.
Many people in this situation are restricted from accessing government-run settlement support, such as the Humanitarian Settlement Program and Centrelink.
Demand for specialised mental health services is high. That can mean long waiting times for all Australians, including refugees and asylum seekers.
Research has identified a number of barriers that especially affect refugees and asylum seekers. These include:
stigma around mental health problems and help-seeking
lack of knowledge on mental health
language and cultural barriers, and
logistical barriers (such as cost and travel distance).
Finally, some refugees (particularly asylum seekers or people with temporary visas) may not be as aware of mental health services as humanitarian entrants. The latter group are often connected with such services while part of the Humanitarian Settlement Program.
This puts the onus on such individuals to independently research what services are available and refer themselves.
That’s a tough ask for people also busy finding housing, learning English, enrolling children in school, and progressing their visa applications.
International law dictates that survivors of torture and other forms of persecution under Australia’s protection have access to effective rehabilitation services.
More broadly, the psychological cost of trauma can make it harder for some refugees to adapt to life in Australia. PTSD and depression can be chronic conditions. Without effective treatment, mental health challenges can persist for decades.
Helping refugees recover from the psychological effects of trauma and displacement also promotes the prosperity of the wider community. That’s because refugees enrich Australian society by establishing local businesses, working, facilitating new trade links, volunteering and contributing to the community.
When refugees thrive, we all do.
Philippa Specker receives funding from an MQ: Transforming Mental Health Postdoctoral Scholarship (MPSIP15). She is an associate of the Human Rights Institute, UNSW.
Angela Nickerson receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Belinda Liddell receives funding from the Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Josephine Goldman, Sessional Academic, School of Languages and Cultures, Discipline of French and Francophone Studies, University of Sydney
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s promise to power Australia with nuclear energy has been described by experts as a costly “mirage” that risks postponing the clean energy transition.
Beyond this, however, the Coalition’s nuclear policy has, for many First Nations peoples, raised the spectre of the last time the atomic industry came to Australia.
Indigenous peoples across Oceania share memories of violent histories of nuclear bomb testing, uranium mining and waste dumping – all of which disproportionately affected them and/or their ancestors.
Two sides of the same coin
While it may be tempting to separate them, the links between military and civilian nuclear industries – that is, between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy plants – are well established. According to a 2021 paper by energy economists Lars Sorge and Anne Neumann: “In part, the global civilian nuclear industry was established to legitimatise the development of nuclear weapons.”
The causative links between military and civilian uses of nuclear power flow in both directions.
As Sorge and Neumann write, many technologies and skills developed for use in nuclear bombs and submarines end up being used in nuclear power generation. Another expert analysis suggests countries that receive peaceful nuclear assistance, in the form of nuclear technology, materials or skills, are more likely to initiate nuclear weapons programs.
Since the first atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, Indigenous peoples across the Pacific have been singing, writing and talking about nuclear colonialism. Some were told the sacrifice of their lands and lifeways was “for the good of mankind”.
Today, they continue to use their bodies and voices to push back against the promise of a benevolent nuclear future – a vision that has often been used justify their and their ancestors’ suffering and displacement.
Black mist and brittle landscapes
In 2023, Bangarra Dance Company produced Yuldea. This performance centres on the Yooldil Kapi, a permanent desert waterhole.
For millennia, this water source sustained the Aṉangu and Nunga peoples and a multitude of other plant and animal life across the Great Victorian Desert and far-west South Australia.
Directed by Wirangu and Mirning woman Frances Rings, Yuldea tells the story of this Country in four acts: act one, Supernova; act two, Kapi (Water); act three, Empire; and act four, Ooldea Spirit.
The impacts of nuclear testing are directly confronted in a section titled Black Mist (in act three, Empire). Dancers’ bodies twist and spasm as a black mist falls from the sky, representing the fog of radioactive particles that resulted from weapons testing. In reality, this fog could cause lifelong injuries when inhaled or ingested, including blindness.
But Yuldea is more than just a story of destruction. By exploring Aṉangu and Nunga relationships with Country before and after nuclear testing, it affirms their enduring presence in the region. This is captured in the opening prose:
We are memory.
Glimpsed through shimmering light on water.
A story place where black oaks stand watch.
Carved into trees and painted on rocks.
North – South – East – West.
A brittle landscape of life and loss.
To acknowledge is to remember
The podcast Nu/clear Stories (2023-), created by Mā’ohi (Tahitian) women Mililani Ganivet and Marie-Hélène Villierme, uses storytelling to grapple with the consequences of colonial nuclear testing.
Ganivet and Villierme address the memories of French nuclear testing on the islands of Moruroa and Fangataufa in Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia) from 1963 to 1996.
Rather than using a linear understanding of time, which keeps the past in the past and idealises a future of “progress”, Nu/clear Stories draws on Indigenous philosophies of cyclical or spiral time to insist that by turning to the past, we can understand how history shapes the present and future.
We are part of a long genealogy of people who found the courage to speak before us. […] To acknowledge them here is to remember that without them we would not be able to speak today. And so today, we stand on their shoulders, with the face firmly turned towards the past, but with our eyes gazing deep into the future.
In her 2018 poem video Anointed, Part III of the series Dome, Marshall Islander woman Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner pays homage to Runit Island. This island in the Enewetak Atoll was transformed into a dumping site for waste from US nuclear bomb tests between 1946 and 1958.
A huge concrete dome was built on Runit Island in the 1970s to cover about 85,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste. The island became known as “the Tomb” to the Enewetak people – a tomb that still leaks nuclear radiation into the ocean today.
Nuclear bombs were exploded above ground and underwater on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. A huge concrete dome on Runit Island, built to contain nuclear waste, has given the island the nickname ‘the Tomb’. Wikimedia
However, like the creators behind Yuldea and Nu/clear Stories, Jetn̄il-Kijiner refuses to remember Runit Island as only a nuclear graveyard. Instead, she approaches it like a long-lost family member or ancestor who she hopes will be full of stories.
Jetn̄il-Kijiner speaks to the island through her poem, drawing a devastating contrast between what it once was and what it is now:
You were a whole island, once. You were breadfruit trees heavy with green globes of fruit whispering promises of massive canoes. Crabs dusted with white sand scuttled through pandanus roots. Beneath looming coconut trees beds of ripe watermelon slept still, swollen with juice. And you were protected by powerful irooj, chiefs birthed from women who could swim pregnant for miles beneath a full moon.
Then you became testing ground. Nine nuclear weapons consumed you, one by one by one, engulfed in an inferno of blazing heat. You became crater, an empty belly. Plutonium ground into a concrete slurry filled your hollow cavern. You became tomb. You became concrete shell. You became solidified history, immoveable, unforgettable.
While Jetn̄il-Kijiner describes herself as “a crater empty of stories”, she continues to find stories in the Tomb: namely, the legend of Letao, the son of a turtle goddess who turned himself into fire and, in the hands of a small boy, nearly burned a village to the ground.
Juxtaposing this fire with the US’s nuclear bombs, she ends her poem with “questions, hard as concrete”:
Who gave them this power?
Who anointed them with the power to burn?
The link between past and future
In their book Living in a nuclear world: From Fukushima to Hiroshima (2022), Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and others explore how “nuclear actors” frame nuclear technology as “indispensable”, “mundane” and “safe” by neatly severing nuclear energy from nuclear history.
This framing helps nuclear actors avoid answering concrete questions. It also helps to hides the colonial history of nuclear technologies – histories which leak into the present. But not everyone accepts this framing.
Indigenous artists remind us the nuclear past must be front-of-mind as we look to shape the future.
During her PhD thesis – funded by the Australian Government Research Training Program – Josephine worked on photographic works by Marie-Hélène Villierme. She has also interviewed Villierme in the past, and worked with her collaboratively on a book chapter on her work (published in Francophone Oceania Today (2024)).
The school curriculum has changed a lot from when many parents and grandparents were at school.
Alongside new approaches to learning maths and increasing attention on technology, there is a compulsory focus on social and emotional skills.
Children start developing these skills by watching and observing others as babies. But they also need to be taught about them more actively – think about parents telling kids to say “thank you” or making sure they take turns when playing with friends.
How do schools teach social and emotional skills? And why is it important? Our new research shows how these lessons can improve students’ wellbeing and lead to better academic results.
What do schools teach about social and emotional skills?
As the Productivity Commission noted in 2023, schools should support students’ social and emotional wellbeing to help them “cope with the various stresses of life”. It also found strong social and emotional skills support students’ ability to engage and learn at school.
Since 2010, social and emotional skills have been a compulsory part of the Australian Curriculum. This involves four key strands for students from the first year of school to Year 10:
self-awareness: understanding your strengths and limitations and having confidence you can achieve goals
self-management: identifying and managing your emotions, thoughts and behaviours in different situations. This includes managing stress and controlling impulses
social awareness: understanding other perspectives, empathising with others from different backgrounds and cultures and understanding social expectations for behaviour
relationship skills: forming and maintaining healthy relationships, communicating and cooperating. This also includes responsible decision-making and understanding morals and consequences.
How are these skills taught?
Teaching these skills can be done in two ways.
The first is by incorporating them into core academic subjects. For example, an English teacher might ask students to discuss the emotions, behaviours and relationships of characters in a novel. Teachers should also model the skills in their interactions with students.
To do this effectively, teachers need specific knowledge of how to teach these skills. Busy schools may not prioritise this professional development for teachers because, unlike academic knowledge, these skills are not assessed.
The second approach is to use a structured program designed to develop these skills. These programs can particularly help teachers with less training in social and emotional teaching.
However, we know these programs are not always available or implemented adequately in schools. For example, in 2015 we surveyed 600 public, Catholic and independent NSW primary schools. Fewer than two-thirds (60%) taught social and emotional skills using formal programs. And of the programs used, one in three (34%) had either never been tested or showed no positive effects on students’ social-emotional skills.
Why is this important?
But research tells us formal programs can work. Our 2025 study looked at the social and emotional skills of 18,600 Year 6 students in NSW government and non-government primary schools. We also used data from their school leaders about the types of social and emotional skills programs they used – or did not use.
We found students who received structured, evidence-based programs (on average, over three to four years) had better social and emotional skills on our self-report survey than those who did not.
Students who received these programs had social and emotional skills that were 7-10 percentile points better than those who did not. That is, in a group of 100 students, they ranked 7-10 places higher.
But it showed there was only a benefit if programs were evidence-based – this means they had been formally tested to check they could be taught effectively by teachers in the classroom.
Social and emotional skills include being able to identify your emotions and cooperating with others. DGLImages/Shutterstock
There are academic benefits as well
In another 2025 study, we followed students as they went to high school. We wanted to see how their social and emotional skills in primary school related to their later academic achievement.
We linked our survey data on NSW Year 6 students’ self-awareness and self-management skills with their NAPLAN reading and numeracy scores in Year 7. We could do this for almost 24,000 students who participated in our survey and in NAPLAN.
We found increases in these skills were linked to increases in NAPLAN scores. Standard gains ranged between 8–20 percentile points.
Our research shows how programs teaching social and emotional skills can give young people fundamental skills to navigate learning and life beyond school. But implementation is patchy and not always based on evidence. School today involves more than reading, maths and facts. This means all schools need resources and access to effective programs to teach social and emotional skills.
Kristin R. Laurens received funding for this research from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia.
Emma Carpendale received an Australian Government Research Training Program Stipend scholarship and a Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Health Excellence Top-Up scholarship.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maldwyn John Evans, Senior Research Fellow, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University
Old growth mountain ash forest in the Maroondah water supply catchment, Victoria.Chris Taylor
Following the end of native logging in Victoria on January 1 2024, the state’s majestic forests might be expected to regenerate and recover naturally. But our new research shows that’s not always the case.
We quantified the extent of regeneration following logging in the eucalypt forests of southeastern Australia between 1980 and 2019. This included nearly 42,000 hectares of logged mountain ash forest in Victoria’s Central Highlands.
We analysed satellite data, logging records, on-ground surveys and drone photography, and discovered that nearly 20% of logged areas failed to regenerate. This represents more than 8,000 hectares of forest lost. All that remains in these areas are grassy clearings, dense shrublands or bare soils.
We also found the rate of regeneration failure has increased over the past decade. While failure was rare in the 1980s, it became much more common over time – affecting more than 80% of logged sites by 2019.
These regeneration failures weren’t random. They were found mostly in close proximity to each other, on areas with steep slopes, relatively low elevation, and where the area of clear-felled forest was long and narrow.
Our research shows more needs to be done to restore Victoria’s forest after logging.
Failed regeneration in the Upper Thomson water supply catchment. Chris Taylor/Lachie McBurnie
Restoring majestic forests and their vital services
Victoria is home to some of the most spectacular forests on the planet. They include extensive stands of mountain ash, the tallest flowering plant on Earth, which can grow to almost 100 metres in height. Alpine ash, another giant, can grow up to 60m tall.
These forests have great cultural significance to Indigenous people and support many recreational and tourism activities.
Healthy forest ecosystems also deliver clean water and carbon storage services. In fact, mountain ash forests contain more carbon per hectare than most other forests around the world.
But Victoria’s forests have long been logged for timber and pulp. The main method of logging – clearfelling – scars the landscape, leaving large areas devoid of trees if natural tree regeneration fails.
Mountain ash is especially vulnerable
Our research revealed 19.2% of areas logged between 1980 and 2019 in our study area (8,030ha out of 41,819ha cut) failed to regenerate naturally.
We also found strong evidence of a significant increase in the extent of failed regeneration over 40 years, increasing from less than two hectares per cutblock in 1980 (about 7.5%) to more than nine hectares per cutblock in 2019 (about 85%), on average.
We found regeneration failure was more likely in mountain ash forests compared with other forest types.
This adds to the case for listing the mountain ash forests of the Central Highlands of Victoria as a threatened ecological community.
The presence of non-eucalypt categories of vegetation indicates large areas of regeneration failure in forest near Mt Matlock, in the Central Highlands of Victoria. Chris Taylor
That’s because it is nearly impossible for the native forest to regenerate after three years without human intervention. The young trees face too much competition from grass and shrubs.
These degraded areas no longer hold the value they once did and they cannot provide the same level of ecosystem services such as carbon storage, water purification, or habitat for wildlife.
With no current government restoration plan, these landscapes will remain degraded indefinitely. The Victorian government retains legal responsibility to restore these degraded forests, but currently lacks any large-scale restoration strategy, making action urgently required.
Photographs of vegetation categories on logged sites: Eucalyptus regeneration near Toolangi (A), grass-dominated area near Mt Matlock (B), shrubby vegetation at Ballantynes Saddle (C), Daviesia vegetation near Mt Matlock (D), Acacia near Mt Baw Baw (E), and bare earth near Mt Matlock (F). Chris Taylor
A way forward: using green bonds to fund regeneration
Our research shows the regeneration of forests after logging is not guaranteed. Nature often needs a helping hand. But we need to find ways to fund these projects.
Globally, governments have used “green bonds” to lower the cost of borrowing tied explicitly to measurable environmental results.
Victoria already has green bonds “to finance new and existing projects that offer climate change and environmental benefits”. But funds are typically used to finance investments in transport, renewable energy, water and low carbon buildings.
As part of a coalition of researchers, environmental organisations, and finance sector partners we proposed a A$224 million green bond for forest regeneration. This proposal was put to the Victorian government via the Treasury Corporation of Victoria.
Green bond funding would help leverage co-investment from the Commonwealth government and philanthropic partners to improve monitoring and biodiversity outcomes in native forests.
As part of the proposed green bond, areas of logged forest where natural regeneration has failed would be restored.
Other investments under the green bond could include creating tourism ventures (and associated jobs), controlling feral animals such as deer, and biodiversity recovery – creating habitat for endangered species such as the southern greater glider and Leadbeater’s possum, for example.
Our research suggests leaving nature to its own devices would mean losing a fifth of the forests logged over the past 40 years. Bringing the trees back has multiple benefits and would be well worth the investment.
Maldwyn John Evans receives funding from the Australian Government.
David Lindenmayer receives funding from The Australian Government, the Australian Research Council and the Victorian Government. He is a Councillor with the Biodiversity Council and a Member of Birdlife Australia.
Chris Taylor 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phoebe Williams, Paediatrician & Infectious Diseases Physician; Senior Lecturer & NHMRC Fellow, Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney
So far in 2025 (as of May 1), 70 cases of measles have been notified in Australia, with all states and territories except Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory having recorded at least one case. Most infections have occurred in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia.
We’ve already surpassed the total number of cases recorded in all of 2023 (26 cases) and 2024 (57 cases).
Measles outbreaks are currently occurring in every region of the world. Most Australian cases are diagnosed in travellers returning from overseas, including popular holiday destinations in Southeast Asia.
But although Australia eliminated local transmission of measles in 2014, recently we’ve seen measles infections once again in Australians who haven’t been overseas. In other words, the virus has been transmitted in the community.
So with measles health alerts and news reports popping up often, what do you need to know about measles? We’ve collated a list of commonly Googled questions about the virus and the vaccine.
1. What is measles?
Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known to affect humans. In fact, every person with measles can infect 12 to 18 others who are not immune. The measles virus can survive in the air for two hours, so people can inhale the virus even after an infected person has left the room.
Measles predominantly affects children and those with weaker immune systems. Up to four in ten people with measles will need to go to hospital, and up to three in 1,000 people who get measles will die.
The signs and symptoms of measles usually start 7–14 days after exposure to the virus, and include rash, fever, a runny nose, cough and conjunctivitis. The rash usually starts on the face or neck, and spreads over three days to eventually reach the hands and feet. On darker skin, the rash may be harder to see.
Complications from measles are common, and include ear infections, encephalitis (swelling of the brain), blindness and breathing problems or pneumonia. These complications are more likely in children.
Pregnant women are also at greater risk of serious complications, and measles can also cause preterm labour and stillbirth.
Even in people who recover from measles, a rare (and often fatal) brain condition can occur many years later, called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.
3. What’s the difference between measles and chickenpox?
Measles and chickenpox are caused by different viruses, although both commonly affect children, and vaccines can prevent both diseases. Chickenpox is caused by the varicella zoster virus, which is also transmitted through the air, and can cause fever, rash and rare (yet serious) complications.
The chickenpox rash is different to the rash seen in measles. It often starts on the chest or back, appearing first as separate red bumps that evolve into fluid-filled blisters, called vesicles. Chickenpox can also appear later in life as shingles.
In Australia, people born before 1966 would have most likely been infected with measles, because the vaccine wasn’t available to them as children. They are therefore protected from future infection.
Measles infection however can reduce the immune system’s ability to recognise infections it has previously encountered, leaving people vulnerable to many of the infections to which they previously had immunity. Vaccination can protect against this.
5. What is the measles vaccine, and at what age do you get it?
The measles vaccine contains a live but weakened version of the measles virus. In Australia, measles vaccinations are given as part of a combination vaccine that contains the measles virus alongside the mumps and rubella viruses (the MMR vaccine), and the chickenpox virus (MMRV).
Under the national immunisation program, children in Australia receive measles vaccines at 12 months (MMR) and 18 months of age (MMRV). In other countries, the age of vaccination may vary – but at least two doses are always needed for optimal immunity.
Measles vaccines can be given earlier than 12 months, from as early as six months, to protect infants who may be at higher risk of exposure to the virus (such as those travelling overseas). Infants who receive an early dose of the measles vaccine still receive the usual two recommended doses at 12 and 18 months old.
An additional measles vaccine can be given to these adults at any time. It’s safe to get an extra dose even if you have been vaccinated before. If you are unsure if you need one, talk to your GP who may check your measles immunity (or immunisation record, if applicable) before vaccinating.
However, as the measles vaccine is a live vaccine, it’s not safe to give to people with weakened immune systems (due to certain medical conditions) or pregnant women. It’s therefore important that healthy, eligible people receive the measles vaccine to protect themselves and our vulnerable population.
6. How long does a measles vaccine last?
The measles vaccine is one of the most effective vaccines we have. After two doses, about 99% of people will be protected against measles for life.
And the measles vaccine not only protects you from disease. It also stops you from transmitting the virus to others.
Phoebe Williams receives research funding focused on reducing antimicrobial resistance and neonatal sepsis from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Gates Foundation.
Archana Koirala is the chair of the Vaccination Special Interest Group and a committee member of the Australian and New Zealand paediatric infectious diseases network with Australasian Society of Infectious Diseases. Her vaccine and seroprevalence research has been funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care and NSW Health.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a visit with Michigan Air National Guard troops, April 29.Getty Images
With US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “proud” cancellation this week of the military’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) program, the “war on woke” has found its latest frontier – war itself.
Stemming from a United Nations Security Council resolution in 2000, the WPS initiative aimed to increase the participation of women in public institutions, including in the security sector and in peace-making roles.
The WPS agenda aims to better understand how women, men, boys and girls experience war, peace and security differently. It increases operational effectiveness and supports the underlying goal of gender equality, described by the UN as the “number one predictor of peace”.
In the military context, it emphasises the need to increase the participation of women and to better protect non-combatant women in war, particularly from the prevalence of conflict-related sexual violence.
The decision to end the program as part of a wider war on diversity, equity and inclusion seems to assume national security and military power are incompatible with the promotion of racial and gender equality.
In other words, it assumes certain types of people aren’t really cut out to be “warfighters”. And it asserts that anything other than basic skill (such as weapons handling) undermines readiness and ability in warfare.
History and the available evidence suggest both ideas are wrong.
The archetypal warrior envisaged by Hegseth and others is one who relies on very traditional concepts of what constitutes a warrior and who that might be: not female, definitely not transgender, ideally also not gay.
Recent bans on transgender personnel in the US military, the removal of mandatory mental resilience training, and the
“disappearance” from US museums and memorials of the records of the military contribution of women and minorities, reinforce these ideas.
The ideal soldier, according to the new doctrine, is straight, white, physically fit, stoic and male. Yet people of all stripes have served their countries ably and with honour.
Hard-won progress in retreat
Military service is allocated a privileged kind of status in society, despite (or perhaps because of) the ultimate sacrifice it can entail. That status has long been the preserve of men, often of a particular class or ethnicity.
But women and minorities around the world have fought for the right to enter the military, often as part of broader campaigns for greater equality within society in general.
But there remains resistance to these “interlopers”. No matter their individual capabilities, women are painted as too physically weak, as a threat to combat unit cohesion, or a liability because of their particular health needs.
Women, in particular, are often perceived as being too emotional or lacking authority for military command. Minorities are seen as requiring distracting rules about cultural sensitivity, presenting language challenges, or are stereotyped as not cut out for leadership.
But problem solving – a key military requirement – is best tackled with a range of views and approaches. Research from the business world shows diverse teams are more successful, including delivering higher financial returns.
At a more granular level, we also know that minority groups have often outperformed other military units, as exemplified by the extraordinary feats of the New Zealand Māori Pioneer Battalion in World War I and the 28th Māori Battalion in World War II.
Women, too, have proved themselves many times over, most recently in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As well as matching the skills of their male counterparts, they also had different, useful approaches to roles such as intelligence gathering in conflict zones.
US Marines on a military exercise – but history shows us there’s more than one type of successful soldier. Getty Images
Any suggestion that military units are best served by being made up of only heterosexual men with “alpha” tendencies is undermined by the evidence. In fact, a monocultural, hypermasculine military may increase the potential for harrassment, bullying or worse.
Modern military roles also involve a much wider range of skills than the traditional and stereotypically male infantry tasks of digging, walking with a pack, firing guns and killing an enemy.
In modern warfare, personnel may also need to engage in “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency, or in “grey zone” tactics, where specialisations in intelligence, cyber or drone piloting are more highly prized. Militaries are also much more likely to be deployed to non-warfighting roles, such as humanitarian aid and disaster relief.
This isn’t to say “controlled aggression” and other traditionally alpha-male attributes don’t have their place. But national military strategies increasingly stress the need to train ethical and compassionate soldiers to successfully carry out government objectives.
The evolution of war requires the evolution of the military forces that fight them. The cancellation of the Women, Peace and Security program in the US threatens to put a stop to this process, at least in that country.
Despite Pete Hegseth’s claim to be increasing “warfighting” capability, then, there is a real chance the move will decrease operational effectiveness, situational awareness and problem solving in conflict situations.
Far from being peripheral, the Women, Peace and Security program is central to the future of all military activity, and to developing conceptions of war, peace and security. Hegseth’s “proud moment” looks less like winning a “war on woke” and more like a retreat from an understanding of the value a diverse military has created.
Bethan Greener 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.
In the midst of all this, it’s important to remember ours is not the first generation to face dark times. As my recent research argues, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy can offer us valuable tools for navigating today’s challenges.
Kant’s vision of possible progress
A painted portrait of German philosopher and Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant circa 1790. (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1776, the same year the U.S. was founded, Kant was preparing his breakthrough critical philosophy and lecturing on freedom and pragmatic anthropology, all while living in the absolutist monarchy of Prussia.
Amid this, Kant observed the contradictions of human nature — people who acted both good and bad, cruel and respectful of others — and described humanity as “crooked timber.” Yet Kant insisted on viewing this “crooked timber” through the lens of freedom.
At the centre of Kant’s universalist, freedom-focused vision for the future was the idea of a world where all people lived in dignity. It is focused on autonomy as the capacity to self-legislate. Freedom served as his North Star for what is today called “backcasting,” or thinking backward from a desired future to identify possible paths toward achieving it.
In this spirit, Kant observed the rise of competitive markets that rewarded selfishness and greed, and argued that law and international co-operation — what he called a federation of republics — could turn antagonism into springs of progress. In other words, he analyzed the discord and conflict of his present for signs of possible progress.
Crucial for the identification of such possibilities was the freedom of public reason: people thinking for themselves and contributing to public debate.
Thinking long-term about freedom
What can we learn from Kant about navigating today’s multiple crises?
First, focus on freedom from a long-term perspective. The current trade war will likely reduce economic growth, but they may also advance the re-regionalization of economies — an idea long supported by post-growth economists seeking sustainable prosperity.
However, regional production is not inherently good. Rather, we need a public discussion about which essential goods — food, for example — are best mostly supplied regionally, by whom and where international co-operation is called for.
The climate crisis requires plans not fixes
Second, Kant’s insights remind us that freedom must be pursued within the reality of a shared, finite planet. Climate change is not a problem that can be solved overnight. Emissions don’t care about the threats and angry fits of autocrats. It’s a global, complex challenge that requires long-term planning processes.
There are signs of progress in this regard: in 2024, the United Kingdom reported greenhouse gas emissions to be at their lowest levels since 1872 thanks to long-term planning. Canada, after opting out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2011, finally saw emissions start to fall in 2025 following a renewed commitment to international climate goals and planning.
But this progress is fragile. The chaos of Trump’s tariff wars must not lead our politicians and policymakers to prioritize short-term economic and political gains over long-term climate strategies.
It also diverts public money away from cheaper sources of renewable energy and supporting citizens through a just energy transition. With trade wars and economic insecurity, inflation will likely increase costs of living. This will hit poorer households harder, making this a matter of both environmental and social justice.
Rebuilding the public sphere
Third, for Kant, current lifestyle expectations are no guide for the core of future freedom. So if the American treasury secretary asserts that “cheap goods are not part of the American dream,” can we, paradoxically, detect an unexpected sign of possible progress?
The answer is yes — if we take that example as evidence that worthwhile aspirations cannot be captured by consumerism but call for a more sustained effort.
While modern consumers are willing to make big efforts — such as for daily gym and running routines — can similar energy be released to collective dreams of progress and saving the planet? For Kant, future freedom requires seeing beyond individual to collective aspirations. This relies on shared goals that can be articulated through foresight and supported by a vibrant, critical public sphere.
In Kant’s time, the public sphere mainly consisted of the Republic of Letters, a network made of intellectuals and writers in the late 17th and 18th centuries engaging in open debate.
Today, by contrast, much of our communication takes place on social media platforms that prioritize short-form formats, reward anger over analysis and are owned by a few global corporations structured to maximize profits rather than the quality of public deliberation. To counter this trend, regionally diverse, independent news providers are needed along with decentralized, open source social media.
But above all, in an era of climate crisis, political polarization and economic instability, Kant reminds us of what he called a “Denkungsart:” an “art of thinking” or mindset based on freedom and possibility in a long-term perspective.
Rafael Ziegler 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.
Donald Trump promised he could sort out a peace deal for the Ukraine war in 24 hours. It still hasn’t happened. Instead the US administration has taken 100 days just to sign a mineral deal with Ukraine.
This agreement will give the US access to revenue from Ukrainian natural resources, including 100 major deposits of critical minerals. It also has huge symbolism. Ukrainians see it as a sign that the US is committed to staying involved in their country, and also as a warming of the relationship between Ukraine’s president and Trump. It will also be a signal to Russia that what hurts Ukraine could also hurt the US economy.
Of course, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt calls the deal “historic” and puts its brilliance down to Trump’s amazing negotiation skills.
However, in the week that Trump celebrated 100 days in office, others would argue that Trump’s deal-making skills are nowhere near as astute as he thinks they are. That he gave Russia way too much room to manoeuvre in the early months of 2025 by leaning so clearly in Putin’s direction, allowing the Russian leader to think he could pretty much do anything he fancied and win as much of Ukraine as he desired.
US and Ukraine sign a mineral deal.
But US national security advisor Michael Waltz, who has announced he is standing down, has signalled that the balance may now be shifting, when he said the minerals deal was “a momentous step” and: “Russia needs to come to the table.”
As Bridget Storrie from UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity has pointed out, this deal was all about what the global super power was going to get as justification for its support in the war, rather than about how it could increase prosperity in a war-torn country.
Andrew Gawthorpe, a lecturer in history and international studies at Leiden University, has looked at the details and believes Kyiv is getting more than many expected, and more than was on offer earlier in the year, when Trump fell out so publicly with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, at a White House press conference. As part of the deal Ukraine will retain ownership of its natural resources. All profits are to be invested in Ukraine for ten years after the agreement comes into force. It also looks like Washington will contribute new military aid.
Trump’s first 100 days have been tumultuous, not just for the US, but for most of the world. His “liberation day” tariffs on international goods have turned existing economic balances and expectations upside down.
Countries that have long seen themselves as confident allies of the US – Canada, Denmark and Germany, for instance – now see the landscape somewhat differently, given the high US tariffs that have landed on their doorsteps. No longer convinced of the strength of their relationship with the world’s superpower, many are rethinking both their economic plans and their alliances.
Meanwhile, China, the main focus of Trump’s tariffs, can see opportunities opening up to forge stronger relationships with, and sales to, other countries also looking for new markets. China has not crumbled yet under the weight of 145% US tariffs. And China’s president, Xi Jinping, is showing no sign of blinking first and heading to Washington to negotiate as Trump was clearly expecting.
Trump now swings daily from claiming he is negotiating with China and that their tariffs can come down, to stating that Beijing will cave. All that sound and fury sounds a good deal like wavering. And with US supermarket bosses warning of empty shelves around the corner, and US ports expecting traffic from China to significantly slow this month, as Nottingham University’s Chee Meng Tan sets out, there is every reason to expect Trump will cave and open negotiations before Xi Jinping does.
Many nations now see the US as a far less trustworthy partner now than in the past. The most obvious of these is Canada, which just elected the leader of a party that was 20 percentage points behind in the polls in January and expected to be beaten badly not long ago. But when Trump decided that he wanted Canada as the 51st state, normality went out the window over its northern border.
This week, newly elected Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said he would seek meetings with Trump with the “full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United States”, promising to strengthen relations with “reliable partners” in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
“We are over the shock of America’s betrayal,” he said. He is ready to write a new foreign policy. He’s not the only one.
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Two of the US’s firm friends for decades, South Korea and Taiwan, are now not so sure that they see Washington as a dependable ally, according to a report from research organisation the Brookings Institution. It saw a significant jump in the numbers of people who saw the US as untrustworthy from July 2024, to March 2025.
This matters, as Steve Dunne, a political scientist at the University of Warwick points out, because without trust people and nations are likely not to honour their commitments. After the second world war, the western allies decided to create a series of international bodies to avert such a disaster happening again, and to encourage nations to follow a set of rules that would encourage democracy and trust in each other.
In his first 100 days, says Dunne, Trump broke the compact of trust with countries that had a long alliance with the US, and that could have a deep impact on the trust that has existed for decades between western nations.
Declining trust in the US could well reduce other forms of its global power. As well as financially and politically, in the post-war decades the US has influenced the world, by exporting its culture, its films, its television programmes and its ideas, as well as importing tourists to visit its national treasures, from Yosemite national park to New York City.
In the past 100 days, international tourists are reported to be cancelling their bookings, partly worried about the welcome, or the lack of it, they may encounter at the border. Summer airline bookings from Canada (21%), Germany (17%) and the Netherlands (12%) to the US have fallen significantly for this year, although other countries such as UK show only a minor fall.
Admittedly, Trump told voters that he wanted to put “America first”. However, at his inauguration, the president declared he wanted to make America the “most respected nation on earth”. That achievement is looking quite far off at the moment. In fact, in many countries it is going the other way.
That international respect took a significant hit at one of the most remarkable moments of the past 100 days, when Trump proceeded to take Zelensky to task publicly for a range of offences including not being grateful enough for US support and not wearing a suit.
So what has Trump achieved domestically in his first 100 days and how does that match up against the promises he made? Let’s look at some of the plans he set out in his inauguration speech.
Trump said he wanted to increase US wealth. But current economic indicators are more than a bit shaky, with US stock markets falling and rising on a regular basis as they follow Trump’s on-and-off-again announcements on tariff negotiations with various countries. On April 30, the day after Trump’s big 100 days rally, stocks fell after data was released showing a contraction in the GDP of the US in the first quarter.
But Trump has told his supporters that, in the long term, tariffs will work and manufacturing jobs will benefit. So far, Republican voters still believe in Trump’s policies on jobs and the economy, with 82% approving, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. Only 8% of Democrats and 32% of independent voters do though.
Many of the big decisions we have seen playing out in the first 100 days – including the Elon Musk-led dismantling of some parts of government and Trump’s swing at driving down immigration – were detailed in the Project 2025 document, published the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation before the election, says Dafydd Townley of the University of Portsmouth. But it also hints at what may come next, including more legislation restricting American women’s access to abortion further.
On January 20 Trump thought that Americans stood “on the verge of the four greatest years in American history”. For many Americans worried about their pensions, savings and the cost of groceries, the future is not looking so great right now. But for those who were sharp focused on cutting immigration, Trump may have made the great start they were hoping for.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gavin D. J. Harper, Research Fellow, Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements & Critical Materials, University of Birmingham
Ukraine and the US have signed a much-anticipated deal on natural resources. The deal would open up some of the war-torn country’s mineral and energy resources to the United States.
The Conversation spoke to Dr Gavin Harper a Critical Materials Research Fellow at the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials about the deal and what it means for both Washington and Kyiv.
What mineral resources exist in Ukraine?
The agreement between Ukraine and the US provides a list of 57 mineral resources which it applies to. Ukraine has reserves of lithium and rare earth metals valued in the trillions of dollars. Rare earth metals are a group of 17 elements, including scandium and yttrium, that are used in technology and important industrial processes.
Ukraine is also a producer of manganese, a key material in metallurgy and some of the widely used lithium-ion batteries, as well as graphite which is also used in lithium ion batteries. Ukraine also holds major deposits of zirconium silicate, which is indispensable in the ceramics industry. Ukraine’s extraction of graphite is limited, and lithium deposits have gone untouched due to the ongoing war and the need for new mining technology and investment.
The regions of Ukraine that are currently occupied by Russia are known to possess considerable reserves of critical minerals, which are vital for modern technologies. These critical minerals include lithium, titanium, graphite, and rare earth elements.
There are, however, significant challenges. Many geologists have contended that some of the critical materials Ukraine possesses are not particularly desirable to extract from an economic point of view. Some in the mining industry believe that other aspects of the deal, such as oil and gas, and access to mining infrastructure, may in the near term be the more desirable components of the deal.
While the agreement considers the primary, mined resources from the ground, Ukraine is also a large importer of new and used electric vehicles. When the components in these vehicles reach the end of life, there is an enormous opportunity to harvest and recycle these critical materials “above the ground”. There may be ways to processing these materials in tandem with the new industries that will be developed to take advantage of Ukraine’s mineral wealth.
Why is the US so interested in Ukraine’s mineral resources?
Elements and materials that are economically important, but at risk of short supply are known as critical materials. There are various reasons why these might be in short supply.
Sometimes one or a small number of countries have a monopoly on the supply of a material and can leverage that position for geopolitical influence. For some materials, it is not about the accessibility of material in the ground, but the ability to process and refine it. This is known as “mid-stream processing”.
The US realises that critical materials are key to the technologies that will power the economies of the future, and seeks to secure their supply. This allows them to capitalise on the economic opportunity.
Many of these materials are essential to building the technologies that will aid decarbonisation. Given that China currently controls around 60% of global critical materials supply chains and 85% of processing capacity, it is clear why the US sees a strategic interest in developing other supply chains.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already caused significant challenges around the supply of certain materials, and the ongoing war presents significant challenges to being able to take advantage of and develop the mineral resources Ukraine possesses.
What applications are these minerals used in?
Graphite and lithium are key to electric vehicle batteries and are considered important critical materials due to their essential roles in the booming lithium-ion battery industry, powering everything from smartphones to electric vehicles and grid storage.
Beryllium, valued for its exceptional lightness, stiffness, and thermal conductivity, is crucial for demanding specialised applications in aerospace, defence and electronics. Manganese is vital in steel production, because it significantly enhances steel’s strength and resistance to wear. It’s also an increasingly important component of some batteries.
Uranium’s most well-known application is as the fuel source in nuclear reactors, and it also has niche uses in medicine and industry.
The implementation of the US-Ukraine minerals deal will be challenging because of Russia’s war. A primary concern revolves around the significant geographical overlap between Ukraine’s critical mineral deposits and the active war zones in the eastern and southern regions of the country.
The significant damage to Ukrainian infrastructure presents a challenge to the development of new industries and the movement of extracted goods to onward markets.
The economic case for developing critical material deposits rests on a clear and accurate understanding of the mineral wealth that exists, and for some of the resources, it is unclear how accurate that data is.
For some of the types of deposit that are in Ukraine, extractive technologies have not been currently developed to a level where they can be commercialised. It takes a long time to develop new mines and the industries associated with them. So the timescales of developing Ukraine’s mineral wealth will be longer than those of political administrations.
It has taken some time for the parties to negotiate the deal, which at times has been contentious. The deal has evolved significantly from the initial proposals, and Ukraine has now agreed to the revised terms.
One thing to note is that the US was one of the signatories, alongside the UK and Russia, of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994. The memorandum’s signatories agreed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and to refrain from threat and use of force and economic coercion against Ukraine. Given the distressed situation Ukraine finds itself in, the at times challenging negotiations sometimes felt at odds with the wording of this document.
Gavin D. J. Harper 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.
The price of eggs might mean more to some Americans than what’s going on with GDP.Scott Olson/Getty Images
The Bureau of Economic Analysis released the latest U.S. gross domestic product data on April 30. In the first three months of 2025, it said, GDP contracted by 0.3%. The GDP growth rate captures the pace at which the total value of goods and services grows or shrinks. Together with unemployment and inflation, it usually receives a lot of attention as an indicator of economic performance.
Some economists and analysts said the economy might not be as bad as this rate’s decline might suggest. While this is the first time in three years that GDP has shrunk instead of growing, it is a relatively small decline.
This raises a critical question: Does a relatively small GDP contraction mean the economy is in trouble? I have spent much of my working life studying economic well-being at the level of individuals or families.
What I’ve learned can offer a different lens on the economy than you’d get from just focusing on the most popular indicators, such as the GDP growth rate.
GDP problems
The GDP growth rate has many limitations as an economic indicator. It captures only a very narrow slice of economic activity: goods and services. It pays no attention to what is produced, how it is produced or how people assess their economic lives.
GDP gets a lot of attention, in part, because of the misconception that economics only has to do with market transactions, money and wealth. But economics is also about people and their livelihoods.
Many economists would agree that economics treats wealth or the production of goods and services as means to improve human lives.
Since the 1990s, a number of international commissions and research projects have come up with ways to go beyond GDP. In 2008, the French government asked two Nobel Prize winners, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, as well as the late economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, to put together an international commission of experts to come up with new ways to measure economic performance and progress. In their 2010 report, they argued that there is a need to “shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.”
Considering complementary metrics
One approach is to use a composite index that combines data on a variety of aspects of a country’s well-being into a single statistic. That one number could unfold into a detailed picture of the situation of a country if you zoom into each underlying indicator, by demographic group or region.
The production of such composite indices has flourished. For example, the Human Development Index of the United Nations, started in 1990, covers income per capita, life expectancy at birth and education. This index shows how focusing on GDP alone can mislead the public about a country’s economic performance.
In 2024, the U.S. ranked fifth in the world in terms of GDP per capita, but was in 20th place on the Human Development Index due to relatively lower life expectancy and years of schooling compared to other countries at the top of the list, like Switzerland and Norway.
Monitoring other indicators
Another approach is to rely on a larger number of indicators that are frequently updated. These other data points reflect a variety of perspectives about the economy, including subjective ones that convey personal perceptions and experiences.
For instance, in addition to inflation rates, there is data on stress due to inflation as well as inflation expectations. Both offer insights into people’s perceptions, perspectives and experiences about inflation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual U.S. inflation rate increased from 1% in July 2020 to 8.5% in July 2022. My research partners and I found, using U.S. Census data, that more than 3 in 4 adults in the U.S. were experiencing moderate or high levels of stress due to inflation at that time and continued to do so even after inflation went down in 2023.
More recently, the Trump administration’s sporadic tariff changes have made future prices more uncertain, which exposes people to risks. That, in turn, makes people adjust their expectations and feel worse off.
Consumers also have negative expectations about their own future income and worry about their own economic status.
At this moment, the U.S. economy has not officially entered a recession – which requires a longer period of GDP contraction than just one quarter. Although unemployment and inflation rates remain relatively low, the broad picture of the economy that takes into account people’s expectations and perceptions is troubling. To be clear, I’m not saying that just because of what the GDP data may indicate.
Sophie Mitra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Coercive or controlling behaviour in an intimate or family relationship became a criminal offence in the UK in December 2015. The legislation was the result of a long campaign by the charity Women’s Aid to extend understanding of domestic abuse beyond physical violence. But, over 150 years earlier, Emily Brontë placed coercive control at the heart of her celebrated gothic romance, Wuthering Heights.
In the novel, Cathy declares that “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Coercive control, like Cathy’s love, may not be fully visible, but it nonetheless underpins the emotional logic of Brontë’s plot.
This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.
Wuthering Heights is a novel of two halves. The first focuses on spirited, passionate Cathy, caught between her tamely domestic husband Edgar Linton and the thrilling wildness of Heathcliff, her soulmate from childhood. To revenge himself on Cathy for marrying Edgar, Heathcliff elopes with Edgar’s infatuated sister Isabella. Isabella initially sees Heathcliff as a brooding romantic hero, but she soon repents, fleeing with their baby son Linton.
Heathcliff’s abuse of Isabella is sometimes physical, but more often psychological. He takes care, as he tells the family servant Nelly Dean, to “keep strictly within the limits of the law” to avoid giving Isabella “the slightest right to claim a separation”.
The law grants him ownership of his wife’s money and property, but subtler refinements of abuse include humiliation, isolation from family and friends, and deprivation of food, privacy and personal care. At Wuthering Heights, Nelly is shocked to see Isabella unwashed, shabbily dressed. She’s “wan and listless; her hair uncurled: some locks hanging lankly down”.
Isabella has already reported that she is forced to sleep in a chair because Heathcliff keeps “the key of our room in his pocket”. Heathcliff delights in humbling her before Nelly and his own servants, calling her “an abject thing”, “shamefully cringing”, “pitiful, slavish, and mean-minded”.
Isabella escapes Heathcliff clad only in “a girlish dress” and “thin slippers”, and goes into hiding with her brother’s financial help. After her death, Heathcliff recovers their son Linton and uses him to engineer a second coercive marriage to his cousin, Cathy and Edgar’s daughter Catherine.
A sickly, peevish adolescent, Linton Heathcliff is perhaps the most unappealing character in Victorian fiction, lacking altogether the strength and charisma of his father. But his puny physicality casts the coercive nature of his abuse into relief.
Catherine is imprisoned at Wuthering Heights and blackmailed into consenting to marry Linton, who becomes the legal owner of all her property. Incapable of dominating her physically, Linton delights in psychological torment, conspiring in his father’s surveillance and depriving her of beloved possessions:
All her nice books are mine; she offered to give me them, and her pretty birds, and her pony Minny, if I would get the key of our room, and let her out; but I told her she had nothing to give, they were all, all mine. And then she cried, and took a little picture from her neck, and said I should have that; two pictures in a gold case, on one side her mother, and on the other uncle [Catherine’s father], when they were young. That was yesterday – I said they were mine, too.
After Linton’s death, Heathcliff inherits everything, leaving the widowed and orphaned Catherine his penniless dependant. Wuthering Heights is a dark parable about the absolute power that marriage can grant to abusive men.
Real-life inspiration
Brontë’s plot was rooted in a real-life local case of domestic torment. In 1840, a Mrs Collins came to Haworth Parsonage to ask Emily’s father Patrick’s advice about her alcoholic, abusive husband. He was Patrick’s colleague and fellow clergyman, Rev. John Collins, assistant curate of Keighley.
Unusually for the time, Patrick advised her to leave him and take her two children with her. In April 1847, just seven months before Wuthering Heights’ publication, Mrs Collins returned to Haworth to thank him. She told the Brontë family how she had settled in Manchester with her children, supporting them all by running a lodging house.
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Mrs Collins’ experience of abuse did not only shape the chilling psychodrama of Wuthering Heights. There are echoes of Patrick’s advice in Emily’s sister Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), and her eponymous heroine’s famous declaration of autonomy: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.”
Mrs Collins’ strength and resilience also inspires the bravery of Helen Huntingdon in Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Like Emily’s “eternal rocks,” coercive control lurks beneath the Brontës’ best-loved fictions, warning Victorian readers of the terrifyingly real dangers of psychological abuse long before the law caught up.
Beyond the canon
As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is the suggestion from Hannah Roche and Katy Mullin:
Like the Brontës’ famous novels, George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) shows an acute awareness of the impact of psychological abuse. Against her better judgement, the 21-year-old Monica Madden marries Edmund Widdowson, a man 23 years her senior who attempts to police every aspect of her domestic, social, intellectual and psychological life.
Gissing’s fictional abuser is a classic coercive controller, a perpetrator of a crime that did not yet exist, and his pattern of behaviour is now so familiar and identifiable that it appears both prescient and predictable. Intensely jealous and possessive, Widdowson deploys tactics of surveillance, stalking, regulation and isolation, making decisions about where Monica goes, who she sees, and even what she reads.
Of course, like Heathcliff and Linton, Widdowson does not have access to online communication tools or spyware. But the many red flags in his treatment of Monica are likely to appear strikingly modern to readers today.
Katy Mullin receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (“Coercive Control: From Literature into Law”, an AHRC Research Network).
Hannah Roche receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (“Coercive Control: From Literature into Law”, an AHRC Research Network).
The latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s movie slate, Captain America: Brave New World, arrived earlier this year with the hopes of continuing the legacy of the beloved sub-franchise. But the film struggled to hit the heights of the three earlier instalments. Critics hit out at its messy plot, unremarkable characters, tired visuals – and an overall absence of creativity.
This raises an interesting and broader question about creativity at work. Most advice on this focuses on having one creative idea. But what does it take to stay creative over time? After all, creativity at work isn’t just about having great ideas – it’s about having them consistently.
Yet over time, even the most innovative minds and organisations like the Marvel Cinematic Universe can hit a creative slump that they struggle to recover from.
Long-term creativity is often hindered by two broad factors. The first is the “expertise trap”. Expertise can initially be great for creativity. After all, as a person develops greater knowledge and skills, they can combine different elements of that knowledge to develop unique ideas and solutions to problems.
Over time however, expertise can actually limit flexibility and creativity. When people become exceptionally skilled or knowledgeable in a particular field, they tend to experience “cognitive entrenchment”, a fixation where deeply ingrained knowledge of a topic leads to rigid ways of thinking.
This might work well in familiar situations, but it can also make it harder for people to see things in a new light.
The second factor is the “success trap”. Research suggests that success – and receiving recognition for a creative idea or outcome – can affect creativity in unexpected ways.
Creative success can motivate people to come up with more ideas, increasing the quantity and pace of their output. But on the other hand, it can also encourage creators to focus on the things that worked well in the past. They often try to replicate or tweak them instead of coming up with something genuinely new.
Of course all is not lost. There are inspiring examples of people and organisations who break out of a creative slump. Taylor Swift faced being pigeonholed after her initial country-pop success, but came back even stronger with her shift to synth-pop in 2014.
It’s hard to believe Danish firm LEGO ever struggled – but it built back better. olrat/Shutterstock
And Danish firm LEGO, which was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2003, regained its supremacy in the toy sector by coming up with new ways of making their core products – LEGO bricks – popular again. This even included taking the creative leap into movies based on their bricks.
Get your creative spark back
Research indicates that if you want to be consistently creative, it is important to break away from the things that helped you achieve creative success in the past.
This can mean moving away from familiar environments as your career advances. Or it could be adding to your knowledge sources so that you are not merely reliant on the depth of your knowledge but also on the breadth. You may also benefit from collaborating with people who already have that additional knowledge so you can combine your brainpower.
Second, if you have had a recent success this can often come with expectations to replicate it and chase more opportunities. While this may have some short-term benefits, in the long run insulating yourself from those expectations – and the rapid increase in opportunities – can give you the time and space to come up with new ideas instead of retreading old ground.
My own research suggests that sustaining creativity over time is not just about generating ideas repeatedly, it is also about managing a portfolio of developing ideas. This is a better approach than merely focusing on one central idea.
It involves putting aside (or stockpiling) ideas that have limited use or value right now and turning your attention to other ideas in the portfolio. Stockpiled ideas can exist and develop in the background, but you can return to them in the future and use them flexibly to learn from, seek inspiration or develop new projects.
For people who work in the knowledge economy, ideas can be their primary currency. But beyond that, creativity can also improve wellbeing and so is a fundamental part of being human. By following these tips to reignite your creative spark, you can reap those benefits of continued creativity over a long period of time.
Poornika Ananth 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.
Newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney and the governing federal Liberals must work to reverse the trends in rising violent crime. Canada needs a federal minister with clear responsibility for the prevention of violent crime, supported by a deputy minister with no other responsibilities than stopping violence before it happens.
The evidence and successes in other countries suggest this approach could reduce violent and serious crime by 50 per cent in the next five years.
Canadian homicide rates have increased by 50 per cent in the past 10 years, returning to levels from the early 2000s. Black and Indigenous Canadians are victimized at rates several times higher than the national rate. Intimate partner and sexual violence are at epidemic levels, with one in three women experiencing some form in their lifetime.
Recent federal and provincial election campaigns left the impression that spending more on prisons and policing is enough to stop violent and serious crime.
Current crime-fighting proposals lack concrete, evidence-based actions and proven public health strategies that are known to significantly and cost-effectively reduce violent crime.
Over the last 50 years, research in Canada and internationally has identified a short list of programs proven to reduce violent crime by as much as 50 per cent within three years.
These initiatives are promoted by prestigious organizations such as the World Health Organization and the United Kingdom’s Youth Endowment Fund. The non-partisan Washington State Institute for Public Policy has also demonstrated the cost-effectiveness of many of these programs compared to the dominant systems of policing and incarceration. These initiatives include:
• Community violence interveners who build trust with the young men most involved in violence and help them go back to school, get job training and gain control over the emotions that lead to senseless violence.
• Stop Now and Plan, developed in Toronto, reaches young men as they enter adolescence to problem-solve instead of resorting to violence.
Public health strategies that diagnose the risk factors that contribute to crime and implement effective solutions have cut crime in half in other countries.
In the 2000s, the Scottish city of Glasgow established a small violence reduction unit and organized community outreach to young men most involved in a violent lifestyle. The results were a 50 per cent reduction within three years.
By 2020, the U.K. replicated the violence reduction unit model across more than half the country, where independent evaluations have demonstrated a 25 per cent reduction in violent crime in areas with a unit. While some areas are still facing problems with youth violence, experts point to multi-agency work as most effective when partners prioritized youth violence.
In 2023 in the United States, Joe Biden’s administration established the White House Office on Gun Violence Prevention and provided funding for cities to implement proven solutions, including community violence interveners.
The mayor of Boston based her public health strategy on convening citywide departments, community organizations and experts in violence prevention. By increasing outreach workers and teaching problem-solving skills, Mayor Michelle Wu promised to reduce violence by 20 per cent within three years — only to overachieve by cutting it by 50 per cent in two years
What Canadian officials should do
The Ontario Police Act calls for public health strategies called community safety and well-being plans to tackle the risk factors that contribute to crime and monitor results.
When she was elected in 2023, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow called for strategies to combat gun violence and violence against women. She called for “a scientific public health approach, like the one exemplified by Glasgow’s efforts to address violence as a public health issue (that) has proven effective in reducing violence.”
No Canadian officials are doing the smart planning or making the affordable and smart investments to reduce violent and serious crime significantly.
Carney can and should lead by example. The federal government can invest in stopping violence before it happens by:
Developing the human capacity nationally for smart community safety planning;
Establishing a knowledge centre on violence prevention;
Shifting from its current funding model of short-term projects to partnering with the provinces via sustained and adequate funding of effective violence prevention programs.
Prevention saves money
Parliamentary committees have recommended an annual investment equivalent to five per cent of spending on police and corrections, or about $400 million federally, and $900 million from other orders of government.
Research, results and best practices make clear that a 25 per cent reduction in violent and serious crime could be achieved within five years, and a 50 per cent reduction in a decade.
That would mean 200 fewer lives lost and more than 500,000 fewer victims of violence in the next five years, and significantly less money — as much as $1.5 billion — spent annually on police and prisons.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steven W. Kerrigan, Professor of Precision Therapeutics, School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences
The mouth is often described as a window to overall health – and for good reason. A growing body of research reveals a significant link between poor dental hygiene and cardiovascular disease. While these two areas of health may seem unrelated, the condition of your oral health can have far-reaching effects on the heart.
Gum disease and oral infections can trigger inflammation, allow harmful bacteria into the bloodstream, and, in severe cases, even lead to direct infection of heart tissue. Together, these effects can contribute to serious, sometimes life-threatening, cardiovascular conditions.
At the centre of this connection lies periodontitis – a severe form of gum disease caused by long-term plaque buildup and inadequate oral hygiene. Left untreated, plaque irritates and inflames gum tissue, eventually causing it to recede and deteriorate.
This breakdown gives oral bacteria easier access to the bloodstream. Everyday actions like brushing, flossing, or chewing – and especially dental procedures – can provide a pathway for these microbes to travel through the body.
Once in the bloodstream, certain bacteria can attach to the endothelium, the inner lining of blood vessels. This disrupts the vascular barrier, making it easier for infection to spread throughout the body, including to vital organs. In extreme cases, this can lead to organ failure – or even death.
Inflammation and infection
Systemic inflammation is one of the main ways oral health affects heart health. Chronic periodontitis triggers a prolonged immune response, increasing levels of key inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein and cytokines.
These molecules can damage blood vessel linings and contribute to the development of atherosclerosis – a condition that narrows arteries, raises blood pressure and dramatically increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Inflammation is now recognised not only as a symptom of cardiovascular disease but also as a driving force behind it. This insight elevates oral care from a cosmetic concern to a critical aspect of heart disease prevention.
Poor oral hygiene can also increase the risk of infective endocarditis (IE), a serious infection of the heart’s inner lining or valves. This condition typically occurs when oral bacteria – especially from the streptococcus viridans group –enter the bloodstream and colonise damaged areas of the heart.
People with pre-existing valve abnormalities, prosthetic valves, or congenital heart defects are particularly vulnerable. For patients with prosthetic valves or certain heart conditions, dentists may even recommend antibiotics before specific procedures to minimise the risk of infective endocarditis. IE is a medical emergency requiring prolonged antibiotic treatment or, in some cases, surgery.
Epidemiological studies support this oral-cardiac link. People with gum disease are significantly more likely to suffer from heart disease. While these studies can’t always prove direct causation, the correlations are strong – even after accounting for shared risk factors like smoking, diabetes and poor diet.
One study found that people with periodontitis were up to twice as likely to develop coronary artery disease compared to those with healthy gums. Other studies point to a “dose-response” effect: the more severe the gum disease, the greater the cardiovascular risk.
Oral microbiome
Smoking, unhealthy diets, excessive alcohol consumption and diabetes all contribute to both poor oral health and heart disease. Tobacco weakens gum tissue and suppresses immune function. Alcohol can dry out the mouth and disrupt the oral microbiome. And poorly controlled diabetes impairs circulation and slows healing, worsening both periodontal and cardiovascular conditions.
This overlap doesn’t make the research less meaningful – in fact, it strengthens the case for addressing health holistically. Healthy habits benefit the whole body, not just isolated systems.
Emerging research also suggests that oral hygiene may influence heart health through changes in the body’s microbiome. A poorly maintained mouth allows harmful bacteria to overtake beneficial microbes, causing an imbalance known as dysbiosis. This can disrupt immune function and contribute to chronic inflammation and atherosclerosis.
To be clear, good dental hygiene alone won’t eliminate heart disease risk. Genetics, diet, exercise and underlying conditions all play crucial roles. But maintaining oral health is a simple, effective and often overlooked part of preventive health care. Regular brushing and flossing, routine dental visits and prompt treatment of gum disease can all reduce the risk of systemic complications.
Increasingly, health professionals are recognising the importance of collaboration. Cardiologists are being encouraged to ask about oral health, and dentists are urged to consider cardiovascular risk factors during checkups. This integrated approach can lead to earlier detection, more personalised care, and better long-term outcomes.
The mouth is far more than just the beginning of the digestive system – it plays a vital role in overall wellbeing. The connection between oral health and heart disease underscores the need to treat oral care as a foundational part of preventive medicine. By brushing up on good habits, individuals can protect not only their smile – but their heart, too
Steven W. Kerrigan receives funding from Science Foundation Ireland, Health Research Board of Ireland, Irish Research Council and Enterprise Ireland .
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ruth Itzhaki, Professor Emeritus of Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Professorial Fellow, University of Oxford
The common cold sore virus, which is often caught in childhood, usually stays in the body for life – quietly dormant in the nerves. Now and then, things like stress, illness or injury can trigger it, bringing on a cold sore in some people. But this same virus – called herpes simplex virus type 1 – may also play an important role in something far more serious: Alzheimer’s disease.
Over 30 years ago, my colleagues and I made a surprising discovery. We found that this cold sore virus can be present in the brains of older people. It was the first clear sign that a virus could be quietly living in the brain, which was long thought to be completely germ-free – protected by the so-called “blood-brain barrier”.
Then we discovered something even more striking. People who have a certain version of a gene (called APOE-e4) that increases their risk of Alzheimer’s, and who have been infected with this virus, have a risk that is many times greater.
To investigate further, we studied brain cells that we infected with the virus. They produced the same abnormal proteins (amyloid and tau) found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.
We believe that the virus stays mainly dormant in the body for years – possibly decades. But later in life, as the immune system gets weaker, it can enter the brain and reactivate there. When it does, it will damage brain cells and trigger inflammation. Over time, repeated flare-ups could gradually cause the kind of damage that leads to Alzheimer’s in some people.
We later found the virus’s DNA inside the sticky clumps of these proteins, which are found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Even more encouragingly, antiviral treatments reduced this damage in the lab, suggesting that drugs might one day help to slow or even prevent the disease.
Large population studies by others found that severe infections, specifically with the cold sore virus, was a strong predictor of Alzheimer’s, and that specific antiviral treatment reduced the risk.
Our research didn’t stop there. We wondered if other viruses that lie dormant in the body might have similar effects – such as the one responsible for chickenpox and shingles.
Herpes hides out in our body from childhood – occasionally erupting as cold sores. Domaskina/Shutterstock
Shingles vaccine offers another clue
When we studied health records from hundreds of thousands of people in the UK, we saw something interesting. People who had shingles had only a slightly higher risk of developing dementia. Yet those who had the shingles vaccine were less likely to develop dementia at all.
This supported our long-held proposal that preventing common infections could lower the risk of Alzheimer’s. Consistently, studies by others showed that infections were indeed a risk and that some other vaccines were protective against Alzheimer’s.
We then explored how risk factors for Alzheimer’s such as infections and head injuries could trigger the hidden virus in the brain.
Using an advanced 3D model of the brain with a dormant herpes infection, we found that when we introduced other infections or simulated a brain injury, the cold sore virus reactivated and caused damage similar to that seen in Alzheimer’s. But when we used a treatment to reduce inflammation, the virus stayed inactive, and the damage didn’t happen.
All of this suggests that the virus that causes cold sores could be an important contributor to Alzheimer’s, especially in people with certain genetic risk factors. It also opens the door to possible new ways of preventing the disease, such as vaccines or antiviral treatments that stop the virus from waking up and harming the brain.
What began as a link between cold sores and memory loss has grown into a much bigger story – one that may help us understand, and eventually reduce, the risk of one of the most feared diseases of our time.
Ruth Itzhaki 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.
Britain’s booming green energy generation has a costly side-effect: the national electricity system operator has had to compensate wind turbine operators that could have produced more clean electricity than the grid could take.
The cost of paying windfarms to temporarily switch off rose significantly in early 2025, surpassing £250 million in the first two months of the year. This figure not only includes these “constraint payments” to windfarm operators, but also payments to gas power plants to switch on and meet demand in the south of England that could theoretically be met by wind energy.
Wind power is often generated in remote areas like the Scottish Highlands, where there is low electricity demand. To transmit this power over long distances to areas of higher demand (mostly in the south of England) requires power lines, but these have transmission limits and there are not enough of them.
Britain will only make effective use of its energy potential if grid-scale energy storage keeps pace with the expansion of new windfarms and other forms of intermittent renewable energy, such as solar.
Large-scale battery systems, pumped hydro and other storage methods could capture the excess energy injected by windfarms on windy days and release it when needed. But are these energy storage options arriving quickly enough?
Why is storage so important?
Most British consumers will not see a significant change in how they use electricity with the introduction of planned storage installations, other than fewer blips in power quality, such as flickering or dimming lights.
You might spot these new energy storage facilities in rows of what look like shipping containers but are actually batteries. And the national grid (which serves England, Wales and Scotland – Northern Ireland has a separate electricity network) will be more capable of responding quickly to even minor variations in electricity supply and demand, meaning fewer headlines about curtailed windfarms.
The UK government is aiming to build up to 27 gigawatts of battery storage by 2030 (in 2023, battery capacity was estimated to be around 5 gigawatts). There are applications totalling 59 gigawatts of battery storage in the connections queue for 2030.
Some of these are speculative – introduced to secure connection slots and permissions, with the intention of selling the rights on. These connections will not necessarily be built, yet contribute to long delays in approvals.
As a result, the energy regulator Ofgem has been working with network operators to reform the connections queue. This includes new rules and more coordination between grid operators and project developers, as well as incentives (such as lower connection charges) to encourage battery developers to ensure their output can be adjusted to accommodate network constraints when necessary.
Having substantial grid-scale energy storage could help stabilise electricity prices, which might give households lower and less volatile bills. It would also reduce the need to fire up gas generators during supply lulls, lowering the influence of expensive imported gas on electricity prices.
Options and opportunities
Storing excess renewable energy involves a range of technologies. Short-duration storage options such as batteries can supply energy ranging from seconds to a few hours. Long-duration storage, such as pumped hydro, can supply energy for several hours, days or more.
Pumped hydro is the oldest long-duration storage technology. It involves storing vast amounts of energy by pumping water to a higher reservoir when electricity is plentiful, and releasing it to a lower reservoir through a turbine when needed. Dinorwig in north Wales and Cruachan in western Scotland are capable of storing 9 and 7 gigawatt-hours of energy, respectively.
Major expansions are planned, such as the new pumped hydro storage scheme Coire Glas in Scotland. Expected to be completed around 2030-31, it is designed to store 30 gigawatt-hours, adding vast reserves of energy to the grid.
Britain’s largest grid-scale battery installation, the Minety battery storage project completed in 2022 in Wiltshire, southern England, is capable of absorbing or delivering 150 megawatts – roughly equivalent to the power demand of 450,000 UK households.
There is a drive by energy companies to develop new forms of long-duration storage. Along with hydrogen, liquid‑air storage is capable of inter-seasonal storage. This would allow solar energy collected during the summer to be available for release during the duller autumn and winter months.
In liquid-air plants, excess electricity is used to cool air to a liquid which can then be stored in insulated tanks. When electricity is required, the liquid air is heated and turned back into a gas, which moves a turbine and generates electricity. A 50-megawatt liquid-air plant planned near Manchester is expected to start commercial operation in 2026.
In hydrogen energy storage plants, surplus electricity powers an electrolyser that splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is stored and, when electricity is needed, fed into a fuel cell or turbine to generate the electricity. An example is the proposed Aldbrough facility in east Yorkshire, which is expected to be in operation by 2030 and will have a storage capacity of 320 gigawatt-hours. This facility will use three repurposed salt caverns originally developed to store natural gas.
Energy storage technology has become a serious business opportunity, with companies investing billions of pounds into building new facilities. The variety of projects in the pipeline suggests the UK will be better able to avoid curtailing wind energy in the future, even accounting for growth in wind power capacity. Paying windfarm operators to switch off may soon be a thing of the past.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Victor Becerra 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.
For decades, neuroscientists have developed mathematical frameworks to explain how brain activity drives behaviour in predictable, repetitive scenarios, such as while playing a game. These algorithms have not only described brain cell activity with remarkable precision but also helped develop artificial intelligence with superhuman achievements in specific tasks, such as playing Atari or Go.
Yet these frameworks fall short of capturing the essence of human and animal behaviour: our extraordinary ability to generalise, infer and adapt. Our study, published in Nature late last year, provides insights into how brain cells in mice enable this more complex, intelligent behaviour.
Unlike machines, humans and animals can flexibly navigate new challenges. Every day, we solve new problems by generalising from our knowledge or drawing from our experiences. We cook new recipes, meet new people, take a new path – and we can imagine the aftermath of entirely novel choices.
It was in the mid-20th century that psychologist Edward Tolman described the concept of “cognitive maps”. These are internal, mental representations of the world that organise our experiences and allow us to predict what we’ll see next.
Starting in the 1970s, researchers identified a beautiful system of specialised cells in the hippocampus (the brain’s memory centre) and entorhinal cortex (an area that deals with memory, navigation, and time perception) in rodents that form a literal map of our environments.
These include “place cells”, which fire at specific locations, and “grid cells” that create a spatial framework. Together, these and a host of other neurons encode distances, goals and locations, forming a precise mental map of the physical world and where we are within it.
And now our attention has turned to other areas of cognition beyond finding our way around generalisation, inference, imagination, social cognition and memory. The same areas of the brain that help us navigate in space are also involved in these functions.
Cells for generalising?
We wanted to know if there are cells that organise the knowledge of our behaviour, rather than the outside world, and how they work. Specifically, what are the algorithms that underlie the activity of brain cells as we generalise from past experience? How do we rustle up that new pasta dish?
And we did find such cells. There are neurons that tell us “where we are” in a sequence of behaviour (we haven’t named the cells).
To uncover the brain cells, networks and algorithms that perform these roles, we studied mice, training the animals to complete a task. The task had a sequence of actions with a repeating structure. Mice moved through four locations, or “goals”, containing a water reward (A, B, C and D) in loops.
When we moved the location of the goals, the mice were able to infer what came next in the sequence – even when they had never experienced that exact scenario before.
When mice reached goal D in a new location for the first time, they immediately knew to return to goal A. This wasn’t memory, because they’d never encountered it. Instead, it shows that the mice understood the general structure of the task and tracked their position within it.
The mice had electrodes implanted into the brain, which allowed us to capture neural activity during the task. We found that specific cells in the cortex (the outermost layer of the brain) collectively mapped the animal’s goal progress. For example, one cell could fire when the animal was 70% of the way to its goal, regardless of where the goal was or how far away.
Some cells tracked progress towards immediate subgoals – like chopping vegetables in our cooking analogy – while others mapped progress towards the overall goal, such as finishing the meal.
Together, these goal progress cells created a system that gave our location in behavioural space rather than a physical space. Crucially, the system is flexible and can be updated if the task changes. This encoding allows the brain to predict the upcoming sequence of actions without relying on simple associative memories.
Common experiences
Why should the brain bother to learn general structural representations of tasks? Why not create a new representation for each one? For generalisation to be worthwhile, the tasks we complete must contain regularities that can be exploited — and they do.
The behaviour we compose to reach our goals is replete with repetition. Generalisation allows knowledge to extend beyond individual instances. Throughout life, we encounter a highly structured distribution of tasks. And each day we solve new problems by generalising from past experiences.
A previous encounter with making bolognese can inform a new ragu recipe, because the same general steps apply to both (such as starting with frying onions and adding fresh herbs at the end). We propose that the goal-progress cells in the cortex serve as the building blocks – internal frameworks that organise abstract relationships between events, actions and outcomes. While we’ve only shown this in mice, it is plausible that the same thing happens in the human brain.
By documenting these cellular networks and the algorithms that underlie them, we are building new bridges between human and animal neuroscience, and between biological and artificial intelligence. And pasta.
Special thanks to Alison Cranage for her support in writing this article.
Mohamady El-Gaby receives funding from the Wellcome Trust.
As temperatures rise and sandals make their seasonal debut, our feet step into the spotlight. But summer presents challenges that make foot care especially important. Heat, sun exposure and the temptation to go barefoot can lead to dry, cracked heels – leaving feet feeling uncomfortable.
The good news? A few simple habits can keep your feet healthy, smooth and ready for sandal season.
Cracked heels – also known as heel fissures – develop due to dry skin and reduced elasticity. Because feet lack sebaceous glands, they don’t produce natural oils, which makes them more prone to dryness. In response to friction and pressure, the skin thickens, but this added thickness can split under the stress of walking or standing.
Summer tends to exacerbate the issue. Open-back shoes like flip-flops allow the heel’s fat pad to expand, increasing stress on the surrounding skin. Research shows that repeated exposure to hot and dry environments significantly reduces skin hydration, increasing the risk of fissures developing. So, long hours standing at events or walking on hot surfaces – like pavement or poolside tiles – further weaken the skin’s barrier.
Other contributing factors include obesity, which places greater pressure on the heels. Conditions like eczema and psoriasis, especially when they cause broken skin, significantly compromise the skin barrier. These conditions can lead to inflammation, dryness and reduced moisture retention, weakening the skin’s ability to act as a protective barrier. Excess moisture from sweating or prolonged soaking may soften the skin too much and reduce its resilience, making it prone to fissures.
Cracked heels aren’t just a cosmetic problem – they can become painful and even dangerous. Without treatment, fissures can deepen and bleed, making walking uncomfortable and increasing the risk of infection.
For those with health conditions like diabetes, hypothyroidism or vascular disease, even small cracks can escalate into serious complications, including cellulitis or ulcers. Poor circulation and reduced healing ability mean these issues can quickly become severe.
Prevention
Prevention is simple and effective when made part of your daily routine.
Moisturise daily – use creams with 10% urea or lactic acid to retain moisture and soften thickened skin.
Wear supportive footwear – while sandals are summer staples, many lack proper support. Choose shoes with cushioning and heel support when possible. If you wear open-back styles, alternate with more structured footwear to minimise heel stress.
Avoid going barefoot – walking on rough or hot surfaces dries out the skin and causes micro-traumas that increase the risk of cracking.
Exfoliate weekly – briefly soak your feet (for up to five minutes), then gently remove dead skin with a pumice stone or file. This prevents the buildup of thickened skin.
Treatment
If cracks have already formed, timely treatment can help heal and restore your skin’s health.
Apply a heel balm – use a formula containing 10–25% urea and up to 6% salicylic acid. Urea deeply hydrates and softens thick skin, while salicylic acid aids in exfoliation. Avoid using these products during the day if you’re wearing open shoes, as they can make your feet slippery, increasing the risk of falls and injuries.
Nighttime occlusion – apply balm before bed and cover your feet with cotton socks to lock in moisture. Studies show this improves hydration and speeds up healing.
See a professional if needed – if your heels are severely cracked, infected, or not responding to at-home care, consult a podiatrist. They may use medical adhesives or prescribe stronger treatments to support healing.
Take extra care if you’re in a high-risk category – if you have diabetes, circulatory issues or inflammatory skin conditions, regular foot checks and prompt treatment of minor cracks are crucial. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines recommend professional care and properly fitted footwear to help avoid serious complications.
Caution: foot peel socks
Exfoliating foot peels – often sold as “foot peel socks” – contain exfoliants like glycolic, lactic or salicylic acid, usually in concentrations of 5–17%. These acids help shed layers of dead skin and can be effective for general roughness. However, they are not recommended for cracked heels or heel fissures.
When used on broken or fragile skin, these peels can cause irritation, delay healing and increase the risk of infection. Those with underlying health issues that affect skin integrity – such as diabetes, poor circulation or chronic skin conditions – should be particularly cautious. In these cases, experts advise against chemical exfoliants due to the higher risk of skin damage and slower healing.
Instead, targeted treatments like heel balms containing 10–25% urea offer a safer, more suitable option. These help soften and hydrate dry, thickened skin without compromising the protective barrier.
Your feet support you every day; this summer, return the favour. With a bit of daily care, smart footwear choices and early intervention when problems arise, you can keep your feet looking and feeling great.
Cracked heels don’t have to be part of your summer story.
Craig Gwynne 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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Daniel B. Oerther, Professor of Environmental Health Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Tatooine’s moisture farming equipment stands in the desert of Tunisia, where parts of the ‘Star Wars’ movie series were filmed.Véronique Debord-Lazaro via Flickr, CC BY-SA
Just 48 short years ago, movie director George Lucas used the phrase “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” as the opening to the first “Star Wars” movie, later labeled “Episode IV: A New Hope.” But at least four important aspects of the “Star Wars” saga are much closer – both in time and space – than Lucas was letting on.
And we, an environmental health engineer and a civil engineer, know there are at least three more elements of these ancient, distant Lucas stories that might seem like science fiction but are, in fact, science reality.
Moisture farming
In that first movie, “Episode IV,” Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert.
Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but it’s distributed very unevenly – including landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely.
Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people.
Researchers can harvest water from air in the desert, in a process powered only by the Sun.
Space debris
When the second Death Star was destroyed in “Return of the Jedi,” it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movie’s mythology helpfully explains a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy.
As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So we’re left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space.
According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked.
Just as on Earth’s roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths.
Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies – including a net, a harpoon and a laser – to remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment.
There are many different kinds of mitochondria, and medical professionals are learning how to transplant mitochondria from one cell to another just like they transplant organs from one person’s body to another. Maybe one day a transplant procedure could help people find the light side of the Force and turn away from the dark side.
May the Fourth – and the Force – be with you.
Daniel B. Oerther is affiliated with the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists.
William Schonberg occasionally receives funding from NASA.
