In response, three MHT products will be added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule (PBS): Estrogel and Estrogel Pro (gels) and Prometrium (a tablet). From March 1, this will bring the cost down to A$31.60 a month ($7.70 concession).
Some MHT skin patches are already subsidised on the PBS, but they’re in short supply globally. This is due to a combination of factors including manufacturing issues, unexpected increases in demand and the discontinuation of the Climara brand of patch.
So what are MHT patches? And how do they compare with gels, tablets and other formulations?
First a quick recap of menopause
During the transition to menopause, the ovaries gradually produce less oestrogen until they stop altogether.
This hormonal change can lead to a range of symptoms, including hot flushes, night sweats, sleep disturbances, mood swings, memory problems and vaginal dryness.
Over time, the reduction in oestrogen also increases the risk of health problems such as osteoporosis.
To help reduce the sometimes-debilitating symptoms, some women may be prescribed hormone therapy. This typically includes an oestrogen hormone (such as oestradiol or conjugated oestrogens) and, for women with an intact uterus, a progestogen. Therapy with both hormones is known as combination therapy.
If taken alone, oestrogen stimulates endometrial growth, increasing the risk of endometrial hyperplasia (irregular thickening of the uterine lining) and cancer. Progestogens counteract this by promoting regular shedding.
Women without a uterus (after a hysterectomy, for example) do not require progestogens as there is no endometrium to protect.
What are the different MHT formulations?
Early MHT, used in the 1940s, used oestrogens extracted from the urine of pregnant mares. Oral formulations derived from this source, such as conjugated equine oestrogens (such as Premarin, short for PREgnant MARes’ urINe), are still available.
These days, MHT can be broken down into two types of formulations:
1. ‘Systemic’ treatments such as tablets, patches or gels
Tablets and capsules are swallowed, while patches and gels are applied to the skin.
These treatments affect the whole body and are usually best for the vasomotor symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats, as well as to prevent bone loss.
2. ‘Localised’ treatments, such as creams and pessaries
These are inserted into the vagina, and act on the vagina and surrounding tissues. They are absorbed in very small amounts into the bloodstream, much lower than systemic treatments, and are unlikely to have significant effects on the rest of the body.
Creams and pessaries contain oestrogen alone, and are the best option for treating dryness and discomfort in the vagina.
They can also help prevent frequent urinary tract infections and improve some bladder problems, such as urinary urgency and urge incontinence.
It is possible for women to use different forms of oestrogen and progestogen in their hormone therapy regimen. They might use an oestradiol patch to deliver oestrogen, for example, and take oral progesterone to provide the necessary progestogen component.
Potential MHT side effects include oestrogen-related, headaches, breast tenderness or pain, nausea, leg cramps, mood changes, vaginal bleeding or spotting, bloating, swelling of the hands or feet, indigestion, and skin irritation with patches.
Patches vs tablets and gels
MHT patches, which have been available since the 1990s, are now more widely used and often preferred.
Patches deliver a consistent dose of hormones directly into the bloodstream through the skin, bypassing the liver. This mimics the natural release by the ovaries and provides steady hormone levels into the bloodstream.
Gels, like patches, bypass the liver. They are associated with less skin irritation than patches, making them a preferable option for people sensitive to adhesives or prone to skin irritation.
In contrast, oral formulations must be absorbed by the gut and then pass through the liver, where the drug gets processed. Some will be broken down, some will be converted to active metabolites, before entering the bloodstream. This can result in fluctuating oestrogen levels and more side effects than the more consistent delivery provided by patches.
When oral oestrogen goes through the liver, there is also an increase in the production of clotting factors. For this and other reasons, oestrogen patches have a lower risk of blood clots compared to oral tablets and capsules. Women with an elevated risk of blood clots – including those who are obese, smoke, or have a history of clotting disorders – often prefer patches.
Patches, which are applied once or twice weekly, are designed to make it easier to stick to than tablets and gels MHT, which requires daily dosing.
What if you need to switch?
Currently, both oestrogen and combination skin patches are in short supply in Australia.
The differences in absorption and metabolism between formulations mean that switching directly from one dosage form to another might not maintain the same level of symptom control or could cause new side effects.
MHT guidelines provide prescribers with information on dose equivalence between formulations – for example, switching from an oestrogen-containing patch to a gel or tablet – ensuring women have a range of options available and for treatment to be tailored to their individual needs.
To address the shortages, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has enabled pharmacists to dispense alternative brands or strengths of estradiol patches without requiring a new prescription. This might mean, for example, two lesser strengths that add up to the strength prescribed.
The TGA is advising prescribers to consider current shortages when initiating patients on MHT.
First-time MHT patients may be prescribed readily available formulations to avoid therapy changes and to preserve stock for those already using patches.
The TGA expects some patches to be out of stock until December 2025 and provides regular updates about the estimated dates the patches will be available again.
Mary Bushell 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.
It poses a serious health risk to tropical coastal communities, with some of the highest rates reported in Vanuatu. But now, Indigenous knowledge provides crucial insights for predicting fish poisoning outbreaks.
Our study documents a collaboration between scientists and Indigenous knowledge holders on Vanuatu’s Ambae island. It offers a powerful new model designed to protect people’s health in vulnerable regions.
Ecological indicators and fish poisoning risk
Ciguatera poisoning occurs when people eat fish contaminated with ciguatoxins produced by marine algae that accumulate in reef-feeding fish. Symptoms can range from nausea and muscle pain to severe neurological effects. In some cases, the poisoning can lead to serious illness or even death.
For millennia, Ambae islanders have relied on their knowledge of the local environment to manage their lands and seas in a sustainable manner. They have observed ecological indicators, including environmental changes that precede ciguatera fish poisoning events, to monitor and respond to risks.
For instance, they note how heavy rains wash volcanic sediments into the ocean, triggering algal blooms that produce ciguatoxins. Likewise, jellyfish blooms and shifts in coral growth signal imbalances in the marine ecosystem, often preceding toxic fish contamination.
These ecological indicators, passed down through oral traditions, have guided community decisions about fishing practices and food consumption.
The islanders’ traditional observations are now being woven together with scientific data to create an early-warning system known as the Gigila Framework, named after a local term meaning “risk onset”, to aid public health responses.
Our research documents 14 key environmental indicators used by Ambae island communities. We cross-referenced these indicators with climate, geological and marine data to confirm their accuracy. By comparing Ambae islanders’ observations with scientific data, we identify which Indigenous indicators can be used to assess when and where ciguatera fish poisoning outbreaks take place.
Ambae islanders use ecological observations guide decisions about fishing practices and food consumption. Allan Rarai, CC BY-SA
Lessons for other regions
The Gigila framework is a community-driven early-warning system designed to reduce the risk of people eating contaminated fish. It uses visual markers, such as dials, to indicate risk levels.
Village elders appoint local people to act as observers to track environmental changes. They then share their observations (such as jellyfish blooms) with government agencies.
The Gigila model helps local community members make informed decisions about if and where they go fishing. It also strengthens collaborations between Indigenous knowledge holders, scientists and medical professionals.
The approach makes health risk information more accessible and practical. Instead of replacing Indigenous knowledge, it seeks to empower and enhance it. It also helps to ensure that younger generations learn about it.
Challenges of working with different knowledge systems
The weaving together of Indigenous knowledge with scientific knowledge is not without hurdles.
Indigenous knowledge practices are deeply rooted in local culture, passed on through oral traditions and combined with lived experiences. Scientific research, in contrast, relies on standardised testing, numerical data and universal theories.
Unsurprisingly, miscommunication between scientists and Indigenous knowledge holders abounds. Scientists sometimes misinterpret and misunderstand Indigenous knowledge and treat it like data to be extracted and exploited. In doing so, Indigenous peoples’ sacred knowledge systems, cultural identities and ways of life are disrespected and marginalised.
However, the success of the Gigila framework shows that respectful collaborations between scientists and Indigenous knowledge holders are possible. At the heart of this collaboration is respect for Indigenous knowledge holders’ expertise.
Another vital component is that Indigenous communities are active participants in helping to create and maintain the early-warning system designed to protect their health. This approach highlights the strengths of combining different knowledge systems to address local environmental issues, which can be adapted to fit different problems and risks.
Local and global applications
The Gigila framework holds potential beyond Vanuatu. Many small island nations face similar challenges from fish poisoning. Climate change is making these risks worse by creating the environmental conditions that toxic algae favour.
Warmer sea temperatures, ocean acidification, more intense and frequent extreme weather events and changes in the distribution of fish species are all contributing to more frequent fish poisoning outbreaks worldwide, including in areas with no history of it.
This highlights the need for enhanced monitoring and management strategies to reduce the impacts on human health and communities that depend on fisheries.
Other communities could develop their own early-warning systems drawing on the Gigila framework. Globally, Indigenous peoples manage vast ecosystems. Their knowledge and environmental guardianship practices are critical for sustainability and environmental health, but are often sidelined in science and policy.
The Gigila framework highlights the continued relevance and importance of Indigenous knowledge and the need for Indigenous knowledge holders and scientists to work together in a respectful and equitable manner.
As climate change accelerates, partnerships between communities and researchers will be crucial. Governments should support locally led initiatives that promote the deployment of Indigenous knowledge with scientific expertise to produce solutions that are both effective and culturally grounded.
The Gigila framework offers a compelling example of what’s possible when different ways of knowing are woven together. By embracing these approaches, we can build stronger, more resilient and adaptable communities in the face of an uncertain future.
Allan Rarai receives funding from the Association of the Commonwealth Universities through the Ocean Country Partnership Programme research grant.
Meg Parsons 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 Jane Younger, Lecturer in Southern Ocean Vertebrate Ecology, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania
Australia’s Antarctic territory represents the largest sliver of the ice continent. For decades, Australian scientists have headed to one of our three bases – Mawson, Davis and Casey – as well as the base on sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, to research everything from ecology to climate science.
But despite our role as leaders in Antarctic science, Australian funding and logistics for Antarctic research hasn’t kept pace. Our single icebreaking vessel spends most of its time on resupply missions, restricting its use for actual science. And funding is often piecemeal, which makes it hard to plan the complex, multi-year efforts it takes to do research down on the ice.
This week, we saw a welcome change. The federal parliamentary committee on Australia’s external territories delivered a report calling for a second icebreaking vessel and more reliable funding. It also urged the government to progress work on marine protected areas in east Antarctica as well as resume fishing patrols, due to concern over illegal or exploitative fishing.
These measures are long overdue. For those of us who work and study on the ice continent, logistics and funding have long been a challenge. Illegal fishing in Antarctica must be stamped out, and a second vessel would support our ambitious, world-leading science.
Why is Antarctic science so important?
Antarctica is often out of sight, out of mind for many Australians. But what happens on the ice doesn’t stay there.
For climate science, Antarctica matters a great deal. For decades, much of the concern about melting ice focused on the Arctic and Greenland, while Antarctica stayed relatively stable. But this is now changing. Sea ice is melting more quickly than in the past. Glacial ice is retreating. Increased melting will affect sea level rise and ocean currents.
I study diseases such as the lethal strain of bird flu which has devastated bird and some mammals populations around the world. It recently reached Antarctica, where it killed large numbers of penguins, skuas, crabeater seals and more. I saw the devastation myself on my recent journey there.
If this strain makes it to Australia – the last continent free of it – it could come from the south and devastate both Australian wildlife and poultry.
To study these large and important changes, we need to be down there on the ice. It’s not an easy task. Keeping our bases functional means we need regular resupply missions. Repairs and extensions require tradies. Scientists and other workers need to be brought home.
Antarctic science has long relied on just one vessel, now the RSV Nuniya, which the Australian Antarctic Division describes as the “main lifeline to Australia’s Antarctic and sub-Antarctic research stations and the central platform of our Antarctic and Southern Ocean scientific research”.
The problem is, resupply can trump science. After all, no one wants bases running short of food or fuel. This is, in fact, what the Nuniya is largely doing.
Australia’s role is key
The Australian Antarctic Territory represents about 40% of the ice continent – the largest territory by far.
Territory, here, doesn’t mean exclusive rights. In 1959, 12 nations with a scientific interest in the ice continent signed the Antarctic Treaty. This treaty was an agreement that Antarctica – the only landmass with no indigenous human presence – would be reserved for peaceful, scientific purposes.
But in recent years, this treaty has come under pressure. Nations such as Norway and China have expanded fishing operations for krill. Illegal and unregulated fishing from various nations continues.
The report recommends the Australian government continue efforts to establish a marine protected area off East Antarctica – where fishing would be restricted – as well as reopening fishing patrols. China – which recently opened its fifth Antarctic base – is opposed to the idea of fishing-free zones and is pushing to expand fishing in the Southern Ocean.
Under Antarctica’s ice lie many resources. Mining is banned in Antarctica until 2048. What happens after that is uncertain. The race to tap critical minerals in Greenland signals what may lie ahead for Antarctica.
This is why Australia’s leadership in Antarctic science matters. Australia was an original signatory to the Antarctic Treaty, and has a long history of exploration and science. Hobart has long been the home of Australia’s Antarctic vessels.
As Antarctica changes, Australian scientists must be there to analyse, understand and report back. To do that, improvements are needed, including new vessels and longer-term funding. This report is the first step.
The government is yet to formally respond to the report’s recommendations. Let’s hope it takes heed of the findings.
Jane Younger receives funding from the Australian Research Council, WIRES Australia, the Geoffrey Evans Trust and the National Geographic Society.
Our cars sit unused most of the time. If you have an electric vehicle, you might leave it charging at home or work after driving it. But there’s another step you could take. If you have a bidirectional charger, you can set it to sell power back to the grid when demand is high.
Fewer than ten people across Australia actually do this, because the technology – known as Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) – is very new. To date, it only works with a single car model (Nissan LEAF) and a single charger (Wallbox Quasar 1). We’ve estimated the number of users based on sales of this charger. The chargers are expensive and there’s a thicket of regulations to navigate.
But that could soon change. Last year, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen announced new Australian standards and communications protocols for bidirectional chargers in a bid to make it mainstream. Cheaper EVs and bidirectional chargers will make this more appealing.
If it takes off, V2G could become extremely useful to the power grid as a way to release power as required and stabilise the grid against fluctuations.
This week, Australia’s renewable energy agency released a V2G roadmap, which notes widespread uptake could “materially reduce electricity costs for consumers and accelerate national emissions reduction”.
To understand why people are using the technology and the challenges to do so, we interviewed five early adopters from New South Wales and South Australia. Our findings are released today.
A bidirectional charger is necessary to sell power back to the grid. doublelee/Shutterstock
Setting up V2G isn’t easy
Our interviewees reported a long, complex journey to set up V2G. These early adopters had no playbook to follow, so the process was one of trial and error.
Some relied on professional networks or social media groups to gather information. They spent significant time and energy finding electricians, installers and charger manufacturers to set up their systems. Strata approvals were required. They also had to negotiate with power retailers and distributors.
Delays were common, especially when seeking approval from the energy distributor. Some interviewees reported delays of months to years.
Most interviewees had experience in a technical field such as engineering or technology. Some reported a significant learning curve, while others using new software from their retailer reported a smoother “set and forget” process.
So why do it? Our interviewees had several reasons, ranging from getting the most out of expensive assets (solar and the EV) to offsetting power bills entirely.
Four out of five interviewees reported making a small profit of about A$1,000 annually instead of a bill. Many wanted to be able to reduce dependence on the grid and reduce their environmental impact.
As one told us:
you originally think of it as a car you can also use to power your house. [But actually] it’s a house battery you can drive around.
Maximising savings
Typically, our interviewees plugged their car in at home during the day to charge from their rooftop solar. In the evenings when power prices peaked, they used an app to sell power back to the grid. This maximised their cost savings for charging the car battery and their earnings from the grid.
For instance, a V2G user was alerted by their energy retailer that power prices had spiked to over $20 per kilowatt hour – far above normal rates of 25–45 cents. They immediately set their car and home battery to sell power back to the grid. In two hours, they sold 28 kilowatt hours of power to the grid and made more than $560. As they told us: “I look forward to more such events.”
Our interviewees often monitored energy prices, solar output and car battery levels to optimise their output. To avoid their EV battery getting too low, they set a lower limit – say 30% of charge – after which their car would stop exporting power.
This photo shows the setup of one of our early adopter interviewees. Pictured is the Nissan LEAF and bidirectional charger. For years, this has been the only car model compatible with vehicle to grid, but this is set to change. Author provided, CC BY-NC-ND
Is there a downside?
One of the main reasons people are sceptical of V2G is due to concern about accelerated degradation of the battery.
This is a common concern. But to date, there’s no consensus showing V2G shortens the battery life of EVs significantly. One recent study shows it increases degradation by 0.3% a year. But another showed V2G might actually extend battery life in some scenarios.
Last year, we surveyed more than 1,300 members of a motoring organisation about their view of V2G technology. We found battery warranty was a bigger concern than battery life. This is because most EV manufacturers other than Nissan don’t mention V2G in their battery warranties, leading drivers to believe they might void their warranty by using V2G.
Awareness of V2G technology is growing. The survey also found almost 40% of respondents were very or somewhat familiar with V2G, a jump from the 17% who reported familiarity in 2022. Among EV owners, almost 90% reported knowledge of the concept.
Moving beyond early adopters
For V2G to go mainstream, the process must be much simpler, cheaper and easier to set up.
To accelerate uptake, reliable, accessible information is essential.
Expanding government incentive programs to include bidirectional chargers would cut the upfront cost and make it more accessible.
Even within the EV supply chain, knowledge of V2G is limited. Car dealerships will need to know which models work with V2G.
Electricians may need specific training to install and maintain these chargers.
EVs are falling in price as manufacturers vie for market share and cheaper options become available. V2G capabilities might help boost sales for competing car companies.
As more motorists switch to EVs, interest in V2G will increase. While V2G can boost the appeal of EVs, there are others, such as Vehicle-to-Home (using your car to power your home during blackouts or to save money) and Vehicle-to-Load (using your EV to run power tools or appliances).
Each of these can help consumers get more value from the vehicles parked in driveways and garages.
Scott Dwyer receives funding from iMOVE Australia Cooperative Research Centre and the NRMA for this project.
Scott Dwyer receives funding from iMOVE Australia Cooperative Research Centre and the NRMA for this project.
Kriti Nagrath receives funding from iMOVE Australia Cooperative Research Centre and the NRMA for this project.
Our cars sit unused most of the time. If you have an electric vehicle, you might leave it charging at home or work after driving it. But there’s another step you could take. If you have a bidirectional charger, you can set it to sell power back to the grid when demand is high.
Fewer than ten people across Australia actually do this, because the technology – known as Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) – is very new. To date, it only works with a single car model (Nissan LEAF) and a single charger (Wallbox Quasar 1). We’ve estimated the number of users based on sales of this charger. The chargers are expensive and there’s a thicket of regulations to navigate.
But that could soon change. Last year, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen announced new Australian standards and communications protocols for bidirectional chargers in a bid to make it mainstream. Cheaper EVs and bidirectional chargers will make this more appealing.
If it takes off, V2G could become extremely useful to the power grid as a way to release power as required and stabilise the grid against fluctuations.
This week, Australia’s renewable energy agency released a V2G roadmap, which notes widespread uptake could “materially reduce electricity costs for consumers and accelerate national emissions reduction”.
To understand why people are using the technology and the challenges to do so, we interviewed five early adopters from New South Wales and South Australia. Our findings are released today.
A bidirectional charger is necessary to sell power back to the grid. doublelee/Shutterstock
Setting up V2G isn’t easy
Our interviewees reported a long, complex journey to set up V2G. These early adopters had no playbook to follow, so the process was one of trial and error.
Some relied on professional networks or social media groups to gather information. They spent significant time and energy finding electricians, installers and charger manufacturers to set up their systems. Strata approvals were required. They also had to negotiate with power retailers and distributors.
Delays were common, especially when seeking approval from the energy distributor. Some interviewees reported delays of months to years.
Most interviewees had experience in a technical field such as engineering or technology. Some reported a significant learning curve, while others using new software from their retailer reported a smoother “set and forget” process.
So why do it? Our interviewees had several reasons, ranging from getting the most out of expensive assets (solar and the EV) to offsetting power bills entirely.
Four out of five interviewees reported making a small profit of about A$1,000 annually instead of a bill. Many wanted to be able to reduce dependence on the grid and reduce their environmental impact.
As one told us:
you originally think of it as a car you can also use to power your house. [But actually] it’s a house battery you can drive around.
Maximising savings
Typically, our interviewees plugged their car in at home during the day to charge from their rooftop solar. In the evenings when power prices peaked, they used an app to sell power back to the grid. This maximised their cost savings for charging the car battery and their earnings from the grid.
For instance, a V2G user was alerted by their energy retailer that power prices had spiked to over $20 per kilowatt hour – far above normal rates of 25–45 cents. They immediately set their car and home battery to sell power back to the grid. In two hours, they sold 28 kilowatt hours of power to the grid and made more than $560. As they told us: “I look forward to more such events.”
Our interviewees often monitored energy prices, solar output and car battery levels to optimise their output. To avoid their EV battery getting too low, they set a lower limit – say 30% of charge – after which their car would stop exporting power.
This photo shows the setup of one of our early adopter interviewees. Pictured is the Nissan LEAF and bidirectional charger. For years, this has been the only car model compatible with vehicle to grid, but this is set to change. Author provided, CC BY-NC-ND
Is there a downside?
One of the main reasons people are sceptical of V2G is due to concern about accelerated degradation of the battery.
This is a common concern. But to date, there’s no consensus showing V2G shortens the battery life of EVs significantly. One recent study shows it increases degradation by 0.3% a year. But another showed V2G might actually extend battery life in some scenarios.
Last year, we surveyed more than 1,300 members of a motoring organisation about their view of V2G technology. We found battery warranty was a bigger concern than battery life. This is because most EV manufacturers other than Nissan don’t mention V2G in their battery warranties, leading drivers to believe they might void their warranty by using V2G.
Awareness of V2G technology is growing. The survey also found almost 40% of respondents were very or somewhat familiar with V2G, a jump from the 17% who reported familiarity in 2022. Among EV owners, almost 90% reported knowledge of the concept.
Moving beyond early adopters
For V2G to go mainstream, the process must be much simpler, cheaper and easier to set up.
To accelerate uptake, reliable, accessible information is essential.
Expanding government incentive programs to include bidirectional chargers would cut the upfront cost and make it more accessible.
Even within the EV supply chain, knowledge of V2G is limited. Car dealerships will need to know which models work with V2G.
Electricians may need specific training to install and maintain these chargers.
EVs are falling in price as manufacturers vie for market share and cheaper options become available. V2G capabilities might help boost sales for competing car companies.
As more motorists switch to EVs, interest in V2G will increase. While V2G can boost the appeal of EVs, there are others, such as Vehicle-to-Home (using your car to power your home during blackouts or to save money) and Vehicle-to-Load (using your EV to run power tools or appliances).
Each of these can help consumers get more value from the vehicles parked in driveways and garages.
Scott Dwyer receives funding from iMOVE Australia Cooperative Research Centre and the NRMA for this project.
Scott Dwyer receives funding from iMOVE Australia Cooperative Research Centre and the NRMA for this project.
Kriti Nagrath receives funding from iMOVE Australia Cooperative Research Centre and the NRMA for this project.
In October last year, the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) launched Dealing with the Moment: Anti-Racism in Community Sport, a free online course designed to help community coaches, parents, umpires and players respond to racism in sport.
The course equips people with the tools they need to intervene effectively when racism occurs, ensuring everyone feels safe, welcome and respected.
One of the key recommendations from the course is what to do if you hear someone say something racist on the sports field.
Why racist remarks are so damaging
Racist remarks hurt more than just a player’s feelings — they attack their sense of belonging and identity on the field.
I know from my own experiences.
During my years playing various community sports as a young adult, including Australian rules football, soccer and cricket, I was often one of the only people of colour.
In those moments, I wanted my play and skills to be the focus but unfortunately, my appearance often made me stand out, which led to racist comments.
Those remarks were deeply offensive and hurtful. They made me feel like I didn’t belong or shouldn’t be there.
Racism in sport sends a harmful message: that someone doesn’t belong because of their skin colour or background. These incidents leave lasting emotional and psychological scars, even if they don’t result in physical harm.
Why I helped develop the course
I worked on developing the course to address a significant gap in how racism is handled in community sport.
The course aims to ensure all sport participants have a positive and inclusive experience and that everyone understands the importance of addressing racism immediately – in the moment.
It’s not good enough to delay action, even if that’s how it has often been done in the past. Some organisations claim that delaying action allows for thorough investigations and careful consideration.
However, this is often a strategy to protect reputations and minimise backlash rather than address the root causes of the problem.
Such delays can silence victims, perpetuate harm, and show a lack of genuine commitment to tackling systemic racism. Immediate action is necessary to demonstrate accountability and foster meaningful change.
We must do better. We need to see progress, not stagnation.
So, what should you do after a racist comment?
If you don’t have time to dive into the full course, here are the key lessons:
the first 60 seconds are crucial: intervening immediately sends a strong message that racism won’t be tolerated and shows support for the victim
understand racism: recognise what racism is and how it affects people. Never dismiss someone’s experience by saying it’s “not racism” or telling them to “get over it”. Just because the harm isn’t physical doesn’t mean it’s not significant
take action: the course provides clear guidance on how to respond effectively to incidents of racism and support those affected.
Why are the first 60 seconds so cruical?
Acting early allows you to nip the issue in the bud by calling it out and intervening on the spot. It leaves no room for misinterpretation of events or for the narrative to shift.
The longer the delay, the more time it allows for the situation to be downplayed, the narrative to change, or for excuses to be made.
Ultimately, delays often result in the issue being swept under the carpet, with no one taking accountability for the harm caused.
Immediate action demonstrates clarity, conviction, and a genuine commitment to addressing racism.
Strategies for coaches, parents and officials
Everyone — coaches, parents, officials, players and spectators — has a role to play when dealing with racism. Here are some practical strategies:
acknowledge and act: staying silent is not an option. A simple statement like “that’s not okay” sends a strong message of support and sets a clear standard of behaviour
use your authority: coaches can address players directly, officials can stop play, and parents can challenge inappropriate behaviour from the sidelines. Everyone has the power to intervene
educate yourself: take the course or learn more about racism so you feel confident and empowered to act
don’t minimise the impact: never tell someone to brush it off or suggest it’s not a big deal. Acknowledge their feelings, show empathy, and take the situation seriously
apply this to all inappropriate behaviour: these strategies aren’t limited to racism. They apply to misogynistic, homophobic, or other harmful remarks as well.
Sport should be for everyone
We live in a multicultural society – a melting pot of diverse cultures that is beautifully reflected on our streets and in our classrooms. It would be wonderful to see this diversity equally represented in community sport.
Greater representation on the field and in the stands would create a sense of belonging and allow all players to thrive, regardless of their background.
This is why addressing racism is so crucial — it paves the way for more inclusive and equitable participation in sport.
The goal is to make sport a space where diversity is celebrated, teamwork is valued, and everyone can thrive without fear of discrimination.
We can all play a part in creating lasting change.
Aish Ravi receives funding from organisations for consulting work on training and education and evaluation work. She is also on various volunteer committees advocating for change.
Jumping spiders – one of the largest spider families – get their name from the extraordinary jumps they make to hunt prey, to navigate and also to evade predators.
Male jumping spiders also jump to escape from cannibalistic females and competing males. So they are under tremendous pressure to jump efficiently and rapidly.
We studied the jumping abilities of miniature male and female Australian peacock spiders. We found that the males – incredibly light creatures, weighing just 2 milligrams – have the highest acceleration among any known jumping spider.
Our study is the first to explore and identify differences in how male and female jumping spiders undertake their impressive jumps. It’s now published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
A male Australian splendid peacock spider. Pranav Joshi
Unique hydraulics
Jumping is an energetically “expensive” movement strategy. To perform it, animals have to launch themselves from a surface by coordinating the movement of numerous body parts.
Some invertebrates, like ants, jump with the help of their muscles. Others, like fleas, use energy stored in internal structures that are rapidly released to trigger a leap.
Jumping spiders are different – they use a unique semi-hydraulic system. They don’t have muscles to extend their legs and power the jumps. Instead, they extend their legs by increasing the pressure of the haemolymph (fluid analogous to blood in invertebrates) in their legs, which triggers the jump.
Peacock spiders are well known for the elaborate courtship display males carry out to court females. It has captured the attention of biologists and non-scientific audiences alike. The display includes extending and waving their third pair of legs and opening the colourful flap-like extensions on the abdomen.
The quantitative description of jumping movements, known as jump kinematics, has only been conducted for four of the 6,000+ jumping spider species known worldwide. On top of this, scientists have never investigated differences in jump dynamics in male and female spiders.
Because male and female peacock spiders differ strongly in size from each other, they present a unique opportunity to identify sex-specific differences in jump kinematics.
Spiders on campus
We studied the Australian splendid peacock spider (Maratus splendens) found both on the Macquarie University campus in Sydney and in the surrounding area.
The females weighed more than twice as much as males, and the heaviest female was 6.6 times heavier than the lightest male. We scanned male and female specimens using micro-computed tomography and carried out a 3D reconstruction to determine the centre of mass of each sex.
Micro CT reconstruction of the male of the Australian splendid peacock spider with centre of mass highlighted by a circle. Ajay Narendra
We then filmed the jumps of male and female spiders using a high-speed camera, and tracked the animals’ centre of mass during each jump. From this, we measured a suite of kinematic measures, including jump take-off angle, acceleration, and g-force.
We found that these lighter male peacock spiders have a distinct jump choreography and kinematics compared to the heavier females.
High, fast and steep
We discovered that the splendid peacock spiders accelerated at 127.8 m/s² – more than twice as fast as the previous highest known acceleration in jumping spiders.
This rapid acceleration may have evolved to escape from predators or to track and capture fast-moving prey in their natural environments.
Though the lighter males accelerated faster, after controlling for body mass we found that acceleration in males was slower compared to females. Males and females experienced accelerations equivalent to 13.03 times and 12.5 times the force of gravity, respectively.
Interestingly, the jumps of males were at a steeper angle than those of females, which is likely an adaptation to rapidly escape from females and other males.
A question that remained was which of the four pairs of legs powered this rapid jump. To figure this out, we tracked multiple joints on all of the spiders’ legs throughout the jump.
We found that the joint on the third pair of legs had an extremely acute angle before jumping, and rapidly changed to something like a straight angle after attaining maximum acceleration. Our results show that it’s the third pair of legs that propels the splendid peacock spider into its impressive jumps.
Ajay Narendra receives funding from Australian Research Council.
Inflation is building again; but the housing industry may find it harder to do so as a result of Trump tariffs. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Inflation figures released on Feb. 12, 2025, will come as a disappointment to Americans who hoped President Donald Trump would be true to his word on bringing down prices “on Day One.” It will also put pressure on the new administration to be wary of policies that may heat up inflation – and that includes tariffs.
The consumer price index, which measures the change in prices paid by consumers for a representative basket of goods and services, rose unexpectedly from December to January by 0.5%. It means consumers are paying around 3% more on item prices than they were a year ago.
The news isn’t good for anyone concerned. It means inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s long-run target of 2% – making it harder for the central bank to cut rates at its next meeting on March 19. At its last meeting, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee kept its benchmark federal funds rate unchanged at a range of 4.25-4.50%.
Following the release of the latest inflation data, markets have a stronger conviction that the Fed will again hold rates steady when it meets in March.
It also means more pain for consumers. Higher interest rates set by the Fed play a large role in determining rates for mortgages, credit cards and auto loans. If January’s rate of inflation were to continue throughout 2025, consumers would see a painful 6.2% annualized inflation rate.
And although it would be churlish to link the latest jump in inflation to an administration just weeks old, it does put into focus the current slate of Trump economic policies. Economists have long warned that imposing tariffs on imports and cutting taxes does little to curb inflation – rather, they may contribute to faster price increases.
I believe that if these wide-ranging tariffs come into effect, the Federal Reserve will have no choice but to keep rates elevated for the remainder of 2025.
If Trump’s tariffs on Canadian imports, like lumber, take effect, Americans can expect continued price increases in the homebuilding sector. Supply and demand imbalances remain a key driver for higher prices, so fewer houses being built due to higher materials cost will likely lead to higher rents.
Consumers saw better news on new vehicle prices, which remained flat over the month and showed slight declines from a year ago.
This is even as demand for new cars increased 2.5% over 2024. In January 2025, the number of new vehicles sold topped the same month a year earlier for the fifth month in a row.
But as with homebuilding, any tariffs on the import of car parts or materials will impact the auto industry. Carmakers may have breathed an immediate breath of relief when Trump delayed new tariffs on Canada and Mexico. But if deals aren’t reached by the March 1 deadline, industry analysts expect immediate impacts on top sellers.
And any higher cost of new cars will have a knock-on effect on used cars, which saw prices jump 2.2% in January – it’s largest increase since May 2023.
Increased prices are no yoke! (groan)
Of course, not all inflationary pressures are in the purview of government.
All in all, voters who cited inflation as the main reason they were backing Trump may be feeling a little uneasy – the administration is only a few weeks old, but for one reason or other, Americans are experiencing ever higher prices with little relief in sight.
Jason Reed 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.
United States Vice President JD Vance made headlines this week by refusing to sign a declaration at a global summit in Paris on artificial intelligence.
In his first appearance on the world stage, Vance made clear that the U.S. wouldn’t be playing ball. The Donald Trump administration believes that “excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off,” he said. “We’ll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies.”
But upon a closer look, events this week point to signs that just the opposite may be unfolding. A host of nations took notable steps towards address growing safety and environmental concerns about AI, indicating that a regulatory tipping point has been reached.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered the keynote address at the AI Action Summit in Paris, France.
The Paris communiqué calls for an “inclusive approach” to AI, seeking to “narrow inequalities” in AI capabilities among countries. It encourages “avoiding market concentration” and affirms the need for openness and transparency in building and sharing technology and expertise.
The document is not binding. It does little more than tout principles, or affirm a collective sentiment among the parties. One of these — perhaps the most important — is to keep talking, meeting and working together on the common concerns that AI raises.
While nothing is binding on the parties, the goals are notably specific. They include coming up with standards for measuring AI’s environmental impact and more effective ways for companies to report on the impact. Parties also aim to “optimize algorithms to reduce computational complexity and minimize data usage.”
Even if most of this turns out to be merely aspirational, it’s important that the coalition offers a platform for collaboration on these initiatives. At the very least, it signals a likelihood that sustainability will be at the forefront of debate about AI moving forward.
The convention commits parties to pass domestic laws on AI that deal with privacy, bias and discrimination, safety, transparency and environmental sustainability.
The treaty has been criticized for containing no more than “broad affirmations” and imposing few clear obligations. But it does show that countries are committed to passing law to ensure that AI development unfolds within boundaries — and they’re eager to see more countries do the same.
If Canada were to ratify the treaty, Parliament would likely revive Bill C-27, which contained the AI and Data Act.
The act aimed to do much of what Canada agrees to do under the convention: impose greater oversight of the development and use of AI. This includes transparency and disclosure requirements on AI companies, and stiff penalties for failure to comply.
What does this really mean?
While the U.S. signed the convention on AI and human rights, democracy and rule of law in the fall of 2024, it likely won’t be implemented by a Republican Congress. The same might happen in Canada under a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre. He could also decide not to fulfil commitments made under other agreements about AI.
The Trump administration may have ushered in a period of more lax tech regulation in the U.S., and Silicon Valley is indeed a key player in tech — especially AI. But it’s a wide world, with many other important players in this space, including China, Europe and Canada.
The events in Paris have revealed a strong interest among nations around the globe to regulate AI, and specifically to foster ideas about inclusion and sustainability. If the Paris summit was any indication, the hope of sheltering AI from effective regulation won’t last long.
Robert Diab 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.
State governments, community groups, advocacy nonprofits and regular Americans have filed a large and growing number of federal lawsuits opposing President Donald Trump’s barrage of executive orders and policy statements. Some of his actions have been put on hold by the federal courts, at least temporarily.
One problem is that the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years has moved sharply to the right and has approved of past efforts to expand the powers of the presidency. But the problem with relying on the courts for help goes beyond ideology and right-leaning justices going along with a right-leaning president, as happened in Trump’s first term.
One challenge is speed: The Trump administration is moving much faster than courts do, or even can. The other is authority: The courts’ ability to compel government action is limited, and also slow.
The administration’s strategy, it seems, is the longstanding tech-company mantra: “move fast and break things.” The U.S. courts do not – and by design cannot – move equally quickly.
It can take years for a case to wind its way through the lower courts to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. This is by design.
Courts are deliberative in nature. They take into account multiple factors and can engage in multiple rounds of deliberation and fact-finding before reaching a final ruling. At every stage, lawyers on both sides are given time to make their cases. Even when a case does get to the Supreme Court – as many of these lawsuits likely will – it can take months to be fully resolved.
By contrast, Trump’s and Musk’s actions are happening in a matter of days. By the time a court finally resolves an issue that happened in late January or early February 2025, the situation may have changed substantially.
Volunteers hand out USAID flour at the Zanzalima Camp in Ethiopia in 2021. J. Countess/Getty Images
For an example, consider the effort to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development. In the space of a week, the Trump administration put most of USAID’s workers on administrative leave and halted USAID’s overseas medical trials, which included pausing potentially lifesaving treatments.
As of this writing, a district judge has temporarily blocked the order putting USAID workers on leave. But even if the courts ultimately conclude several months from now that the Trump administration’s actions regarding USAID were unlawful, it might be impossible to reconstitute the agency the way it used to be.
For instance, many workers may have been demoralized and sought other employment. New personnel would have to be recruited and trained to replace them. Contracts that were terminated or invalidated or expired would have to be renegotiated. And the countries and communities that had received help from USAID might be less committed to the renewed programs, because of concerns services could be cut off again.
Breadth
When Republicans disagreed with any of Joe Biden’s executive actions – for example, his student debt forgiveness plan – they went to federal court to obtain nationwide injunctions stopping the implementation of the plan.
But injunctions will not be as helpful given Trump’s recent playbook. A court blocking one order isn’t enough to stop the administration from trying different tactics. In 2017, courts blocked the first two versions of Trump’s ban on travel to the U.S. from majority-Muslim countries – but ultimately allowed a third version to take effect. And if an attack on one agency is blocked, the administration can try similar – or different – tactics against other agencies.
The strategy of moving fast and breaking things is successful if the other side – or even the process of repair – can’t keep up with all the different strategies. Courts can be part of the strategy to preserve the Constitution, but they cannot be its only defenders.
For instance, a federal district judge in Massachusetts has ordered the government not only to refrain from implementing changes to federal research grant funding but to provide evidence to the court that it was complying with the court’s order, immediately and every two weeks until the case is decided.
Another federal judge has already found the administration failed to abide by a court order – but so far has not imposed any consequences on Trump, the administration or other officials.
It’s unclear whether Trump would obey Supreme Court rulings against him, either. On the campaign trail, Trump’s running mate JD Vance said, “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.’” He also recently remarked that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” hinting at strong opposition to rulings the administration disagrees with.
All this doesn’t mean the courts are useless, nor that people shouldn’t sue to challenge actions they deem illegal or unconstitutional. The courts – and the Supreme Court in particular – exist in part to arbitrate power disputes between Congress and the presidency. As Chief Justice John Marshall said in his landmark 1803 Marbury v. Madison ruling, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
But the courts alone will not be sufficient. The courts are like an antibiotic on a cut, helping healing and staving off further infection. They cannot keep a grievously wounded patient alive. For this, a robust political strategy is necessary. It is in all Americans’ hands collectively to make sure that the constitutional structure is not just enforced, but also sustained.
Maya Sen 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.
It’s hard to remember a time the United States seemed as tense and divided as it does today. That should serve as a stark reminder of just how important it is to monitor the health of our own nation.
Today, our new report card on Australia’s progress will be launched in Canberra. It assesses progress on 80 economic, social and environmental targets and models a range of policy shifts that could boost progress.
We find that progress on more than half of these targets has either stagnated or is going backwards. And growing inequalities threaten the wellbeing of many Australians.
Our report comes on the heels of America’s own State of the Nation report, which puts the US near the bottom of global rankings on inequality, violence, trust and polarisation.
The situation in Australia is not yet as dire. However, our results signal a need to start thinking long-term and take bold action on inequality to avoid a similar fate.
Not an A+ student overall
Our report draws on the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to select a broad and balanced set of 80 economic, social and environmental indicators.
Each of our indicators can be grouped under one of these 17 goals and includes a 2030 target. We use this target to evaluate progress and allocate “traffic lights” that tell us about the direction in which the country is moving.
We also benchmark Australia against peer nations from the OECD, including the US.
The overall outlook for Australia is mixed. We aren’t completely on track to meet any of the 17 SDGs. And on some indicators, Australia is actually going backwards, away from the target.
Many areas of concern centre on increasing inequality. These include:
a 30% decline in the share of wealth held by the bottom 40% of Australians since 2004
almost 20% of Australians living in financial stress
over 40% of lower-income renter households living in housing stress
There are also some broader economic concerns. Australia’s level of investment in innovation is nearly 40% below OECD averages. Economic complexity – which measures the sophistication and diversity of what our economy produces – has fallen behind Honduras, Armenia and Uganda.
And there’s been a rapid decline in education outcomes for students from lower socio-economic groups.
Shining in some areas
On the other hand, Australia is on track and actually leading our peers in life expectancy, road fatalities, tertiary education, water efficiency and government debt.
We’re also above average on closing gender gaps in both income and political representation. Australia also has very low homicide rates and high feelings of safety and trust compared to our peers.
In some key areas, Australia is actually trending rapidly towards SDG targets.
The gender gap in superannuation, for example, has fallen from 53% in 2014 to 21% in 2021.
The share of renewable electricity in our national energy grid has climbed to 35% and greenhouse gas emissions are steadily falling.
And rates of unemployment, underemployment and youth unemployment have all declined to within or closer to SDG target levels of below 5-6%.
How does the US compare?
America’s State of the Nation report, which tracks progress on a range of similar measures to our report, paints a bleak picture.
There are only four measures where the US performs in the top 20% of high-income countries – economic output, productivity, years of education and long-term unemployment.
Compared to Australia, the US outperforms us on average per-capita income, investments in research and development and knowledge-based capital, economic complexity, household debt and broadband connection speeds.
But despite their apparent economic success, mental health and life satisfaction have deteriorated. Social connections are fraying with increased social isolation, polarisation and eroding trust.
Tragically, suicide rates, fatal overdoses and shootings have increased.
Far worse on some measures
In areas where Australia is also trending backwards, things in the US are often far worse.
Income and wealth inequality, for example, are much higher in the US. The top 1% of Americans hold around 35% of wealth – compared to 24% for the top 1% of Australians.
US welfare payments are almost 90% below the poverty line and the poverty rate is 30% higher than in Australia. Yet US government debt as a share of GDP is almost double that of Australia.
This stark contrast suggests America’s approach to pursuing material prosperity is undermining social wellbeing, with rising inequalities fuelling social tensions and polarisation.
Bold action needed
For the first time, our new report models two future scenarios for Australia, exploring policies that reverse negative trends and accelerate progress towards SDG targets by 2050.
Our modelling shows that with increased policy ambition, Australia can halve poverty and reduce income inequality by a third. We can also boost health, education and productivity, improve biodiversity, and deliver net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
To do it, we’d need to increase public investment by around 7% a year over 10 years in key areas such as education and health, disaster resilience, sustainable food, energy and urban systems and the natural environment.
Our modelling shows that with these measures, Australia could achieve 90% of our Sustainable Development Goal targets by 2050.
Without them, our future prosperity is projected to stagnate and decline by 2050, reaching just 55% progress towards our targets and with GDP around A$300 billion lower than our more ambitious scenario.
There’s a famous aphorism that in the long run, economic productivity is almost everything. The social fissures in the US despite a strong economy would suggest otherwise.
Australia should take note and take action to ensure the long-term sustainable prosperity of our nation.
Cameron Allen receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
John Thwaites is Chair of Monash Sustainable Development Institute and Climateworks Centre which receive funding for research, education and action projects from the Commonwealth and state governments as well as from philanthropy and industry. He is a former Deputy Premier of Victoria (1999 – 2007)
This week the corporate regulator is taking on executives and directors of Star Entertainment in the Federal Court, in a landmark case for Australian corporate governance.
ASIC will allege that despite multiple red flags that should have prompted internal investigation, directors at Star sat on their hands while accepting the considerable perks of the office.
Historically, ASIC has not been willing to go after apparently lax directors and executives and there are questions about its effectiveness as a regulator. Will this time be different?
What is Star accused of?
The case against Star Entertainment, like so many others, boils down to “acting with reasonable care and diligence” in respect of risk management. Did Star’s board and executives sufficiently focus on the well-known risks of money-laundering and criminal association in the operation of its casinos in Sydney and Queensland?
ASIC will seek to show that they did not. It is suing several former directors and executives, including the former chief executive, in a case expected to last six weeks. The defendants deny they breached their duties.
Warnings were ‘ignored’
In the first days of hearings, ASIC told the court the board had been given evidence of money-laundering risks from high-rollers with ties to criminal organisations, but that those warnings were ignored.
The court was told the board and executives were “incurious and complacent” about alleged criminal activity and money-laundering, with wads of cash delivered in a blue Esky and in paper bags to a private gambling room.
If the allegations are proven, it won’t be just the shareholders who have suffered. Anti-money-laundering laws exist because criminals need to clean their ill-gotten gains, or make them appear legitimate. While not alleged in this instance, in general, money-laundering enables crimes such as scams, fraud, child exploitation and drug/sex trafficking. There are many victims throughout society.
The issues at Star were uncovered by journalists in 2021. This was the catalyst for the NSW Independent Casino Commission to set up a review by Adam Bell SC. On August 31 2022, Bell handed down his findings into The Star casino’s suitability to hold a casino licence in NSW in a 946-page report.
Two months later, the NSW commission announced it had suspended Star’s licence indefinitely, fined the casino $100 million, and appointed an independent manager.
Share price tanked
Since 2021, the share price for Star Entertainment Group has collapsed from $3.76 to 13 cents today, wiping billions in market value.
It is true that Star Entertainment has been hurt by factors other than the financial allegations identified by Bell. But the collapse in revenue suggests the casino operator’s business model was inherently reliant on money-laundering. Strip that out, and what remains is a business that will likely not survive without a white knight.
To what extent can the directors be blamed for these failures? Based on the defences used during the Bell inquiry, they may claim they were not involved in the complex, day-to-day management of operations. Executives failed to inform them of risk-management issues. But are these adequate excuses?
For this sort of money, shareholders might reasonably expect some tough questions would be asked, especially given the red flags that came to light. The internal audit team or external independent advisers could have been charged with further investigating issues of concern.
Putting directors on notice
Unfortunately, the scandal at Star Entertainment is not an isolated case of risk-governance failure. A royal commission found the directors of Crown Casino also failed properly to manage the risks of money-laundering.
The financial crime regulator, Austrac, has identified similar failures at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac and Adelaide’s Sky City casino. Turning to cyber risk, it is clear that firms such as Medibank and Latitude Financial have failed to protect sensitive customer data.
While most of the above listed companies have been fined by regulators, the consequences for individual directors have been limited or non-existent. And herein lies the problem – lack of accountability breeds inattention, indolence and recklessness.
Where is the incentive for directors to ask those tough questions of the executive, to rock the boat on a nice cosy board? The reputation of ASIC as an ineffective corporate regulator has not served either shareholders or the Australian public well.
That is why the outcome of this case is so important. A win would put directors on notice that risk governance is a serious matter and they need to do more to earn their substantial fees.
Elizabeth Sheedy is on the advisory board of the Financial Integrity Hub and was previously on the board of the Australian Compliance Institute. In the past she has received research funding from financial institutions that have been accused of money-laundering, and from the Australian Compliance Institute.
Stan’s new series Invisible Boys follows four young gay men as they understand and explore their identities while living in Geraldton, a regional town in Western Australia.
Charlie Roth (Joseph Zada), Zeke Calogero (Aydan Clafiore), Kade “Hammer” Hammersmith (Zach Blampied) and Matt Jones (Joe Klocek) represent four very different young men. Yet they share the experience of feeling invisible because of their sexuality.
An adaptation of Holden Sheppard’s novel of the same name, the story challenges linear narratives of progress and typical ideals of queer life. It also shows how such mentalities can lead gay and bisexual men growing up in regional Australia to feel invisible, as they often don’t fit the neat narratives associated with “progress”.
Invisible Boys is an example of what my colleague Whitney Monaghan and I have termed a queer storyworld, which centres LGBTQIA+ stories, communities and issues in complex and nuanced ways.
Australian teen drama found international success in the 1990s. Series such as Heartbreak High (1994–99) and Sweat (1996) included underrepresented stories of cultural diversity and diverse sexuality, and were promoted with reference to their “gritty” themes.
The terms “gritty” and “real” have become key markers of the Aussie teen drama. Journalist Grace Back notes how Heartbreak High’s appeal lay in its characters having to “grapple with gritty issues”.
Similarly, Janine Kelly from the Australian Children’s Television Foundation describes More Than This (2022) as a “real, gritty and powerful series [that] reflects the diversity of the suburban Australian public-school environment.”
The trailer for Invisible Boys features a review describing the show as “powerful, topical and all too real”, placing it alongside the bold teen dramas that have come before.
But I’d argue no previous teen drama has been quite as truthful in its representation of some young gay and bisexual men’s experiences.
Sexual desire in the gay teen narrative
Invisible Boys is set in 2017, against the backdrop of the highly visible and divisive same-sex marriage survey.
The show examines how gay teen sex manifests in environments that often aren’t very visible. In the first five minutes, we see 17-year-old Charlie attempting to have sex at a beat – a public space where gay men seek anonymous sexual intimacy.
Later, an inciting incident occurs when Charlie uses an app to arrange a sexual encounter with an older married man in his home, before being caught by his wife.
Joseph Zada plays Charlie, a young gay man living in Geraldton. Stan
Invisible Boys examines how the sexual desires of gay and bisexual men do not hibernate in the face of oppression.
Research shows some older gay adolescents (under 18) seek out and have positive experiences of sex with older men. That these experiences exist means they should have a place in teen dramas, to examine and drive important conversations.
Queer as Folk (1999–2000) faced criticism for its underage sex storyline from the broader public and the LGBTQIA+ community alike, wherein the series opens with 15-year-old Nathan (Charlie Hunnam) seeking and finding a sexual partner on the gay scene in Manchester.
However, this story was based in something real: the oppressive Section 28 laws in England that made it illegal for gay and bisexual men under 18 to explore their sexuality. This drove them to spaces where they could remain anonymous.
Invisible Boys tackles the reality of gay and bisexual life in a regional town. Other teen series in other markets, such as Heartstopper (2022–), present a somewhat normative view of queer teen life under banners of “love is love”. And while this story is true for some, it has been told.
Invisible Boys gives audiences something that will challenge their worldview. Stan
Challenging gay respectability politics
Respectability politics is the view that “marginalised groups must demonstrate that they adhere to normative values before they will be accepted or granted rights by dominant groups”. We see this in the dominance of homonormative representation in Australian TV, which sees heterosexual norms being applied to LGBTQIA+ people – as well as in its exclusion of gay sex.
Invisible Boys challenges the dominance of gay respectability politics in the teen drama genre.
While older Australian series such as Dance Academy (2010–13) (admittedly aimed at younger teen audiences) explored queer sexuality through chaste kisses and teen angst, primetime series such as Please Like Me (2013–16) and In Our Blood (2022) made headway by telling complex, intimate stories of gay men.
Similarly, the horny gay teen isn’t hidden away in Invisible Boys – nor are his choices always comfortable.
A sign for streamers and Australian TV
Streaming services have often struggled to nail Australia’s television sensibility. Netflix’s Tidelands (2018) was criticised for not quite capturing what made Australian series appealing, while Stan’s Eden (2021) was met with similar critiques.
More recently, Prime Video’s Deadloch (2023–) and the Netflix reboot of Heartbreak High (2022–24) have signalled a shift to something more suited to local viewers.
Yet the creators of Heartbreak High made certain decisions that stood out to local viewers, such as not including school uniforms (likely to appeal to a global audience). Invisible Boys does not dilute the specificity of regional Aussie experiences.
The series challenges the way gay adolescence is often understood by broader communities. Stan
In the tradition of iconic teen dramas from 1970s and 1990s, such as Class of ‘74 (1974–75), the original Heartbreak High (1994–99), and Sweat (1996), the series is willing to go there by tackling the inconvenient truths of teenage life.
As someone who grew up gay in regional Australia, it feels like an authentic representation of my own experience. There’s something universal about Charlie, Zeke, Kade and Matt’s stories of not fitting in, and of being invisible to be safe.
Most striking is the way the series captures the complicated mix of joy and fear – the clash of opportunity and consequence – that accompanies becoming visibly gay in these environments.
Invisible Boys is streaming on Stan.
Damien O’Meara 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.
Crocodiles are hardy creatures, capable of adjusting their behaviour to cope with the heat of the tropics. But there’s a limit to their endurance.
Our new research shows the average body temperature of estuarine (saltwater) crocodiles in Far North Queensland has risen steadily over the past 15 years. The peaks align with heatwaves during El Niño events.
We tagged and tracked 203 crocodiles in the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve on Cape York Peninsula, to find out how they respond to rising temperatures. We know from our previous research that crocodiles can change their behaviour to quickly cool down, and might do this by diving deeper, seeking shade or hauling themselves out onto the riverbank at night.
We found hot crocodiles displayed more of these cooling behaviours, but this was not always enough to keep their body temperature under control. Crocodile diving performance decreased at body temperatures above 31–33°C. This could compromise other behaviours necessary for feeding, fleeing or reproducing.
Crocodile researchers gathered around a trap site by the Wenlock River, Queensland. Australia Zoo
How do crocs keep cool?
Crocodiles, like other reptiles, are “ectotherms”. This means their bodies heat up or cool down depending on the temperature of the surrounding environment.
They can’t control or adjust their own internal thermostat like birds or mammals. Instead, they regulate their body temperature by moving to a more comfortable place.
On hot nights the water stays warm, but the air cools down. So crocodiles will move onto the river bank at night to cool off. We call this “nocturnal basking”.
During the day, they might dive down really deep where it’s a bit cooler. Or they might lie on the bank in the shade with their mouth gaping wide, or sit in a cool freshwater creek.
Last year, we published research using data from thumb-sized temperature loggers implanted under the crocodile’s skin. By tracking when their body temperatures rose or fell rapidly, we were able to record “active cooling” and “active warming” periods during the day and night.
Active warming tended to occur on winter afternoons, and was likely achieved through basking in the sun on riverbanks and sand flats.
Active cooling was more common on hot summer nights. We think the crocodiles were either taking advantage of cool night air through nocturnal basking, or spending time in shady spots along the river.
But there’s a limit to how much warming crocodiles can take. Previous research has shown crocodiles have shorter dives at body temperatures above 32-33°C. This can reduce their ability to hunt for food or seek shelter.
How will crocs cope with climate change?
In our new research, we wanted to find out if crocodiles can reduce their exposure to high temperatures through active cooling behaviour.
With the help of Australia Zoo’s croc team, we tagged and tracked 203 wild estuarine crocodiles in the Wenlock and Ducie rivers of the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve, between 2008 and 2023.
During this time, the average air temperature in Far North Queensland rose by 0.08–0.30°C. Top temperatures peaked during El Niño events (2010 and 2016), whereas minimum temperatures peaked during La Niña events (2020–23).
We collected data on crocodile body temperature, daily distance travelled and diving behaviour. Then we compared it to local air temperatures.
We found body temperatures increased alongside rising air temperatures and peaked during El Niños such as the summer of 2015–16.
Almost all crocodiles spent time cooling during heatwaves. The hottest crocodiles switched almost exclusively to cooling behaviours, rather than warming behaviours. But in many cases their body temperatures still exceeded 32–34°C and their diving performance suffered.
Even when summer air temperatures rocketed to 40°C, crocodiles were able to limit their body temperature to 34°C. This feat demonstrates impressive resilience to heat.
Crocodile researchers on the Wenlock River, Queensland. Australia Zoo
What’s next for Queensland’s crocs?
While most estuarine crocodiles in Queensland are found in the north of the state, the occasional vagrant makes its way south below its natural range into more populated areas.
The crocodile population has grown since hunting was banned in 1974. So it is reasonable to wonder about the possibility of a southern expansion as warming continues. But there is currently no evidence to suggest Queensland’s crocodile population is moving south, or that this will become a concern in the near future with a warming climate.
Our new research shows crocodiles in the tropics are responding to higher temperatures. However, very little is known about how crocodiles in the southern, cooler part of their range behave in response to these conditions. This information could help to more effectively manage crocodiles and protect the general public.
Crocodiles are remarkably resilient predators that have evolved to survive in tropical conditions. Our research suggests they have the capacity to buffer themselves against the worst of the heat our current climate throws at them, without leaving their local river system.
Kaitlin Barham receives funding from the Australian Research Council. The Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment – Equity Trustees Charitable Foundation & the Ecological Society of Australia funded travel to the field site for this research. She is affiliated with The University of Queensland.
Craig E. Franklin receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Wildlife Warriors. He is affiliated with The University of Queensland.
Ross Dwyer has been funded by grants from the Australian Research Council and the Queensland government for crocodile research in wild and captive environments. He is affiliated with The University of the Sunshine Coast.
Statistics tell us Indigenous children are 11 times more likely to be removed by child protection systems than non-Indigenous children. Indigenous babies aged under one are at greatest risk.
But beyond the data, what do parents tell us about this experience?
Our recent study reviewed all the studies available about child protection processes in the perinatal period (during pregnancy and the year following birth) in Australia and across the world.
We looked at parents’ experiences across the board, with a special interest in whether First Nations families had been included in existing research.
Families that interact with child protection systems often already face multiple and complex forms of adversity. This can include poverty, homelessness, racism, intergenerational trauma, family violence, disability, mental illness, substance use and incarceration.
The perinatal period offers a unique window for early intervention and family support to reduce the risk of removal.
This could involve greater help accessing suitable housing and addressing family violence, and enhancing access to health care that is culturally safe and trauma-informed, before and after birth.
What we found
Our systematic review examined 24 studies about child protection services becoming involved with families during pregnancy and the first year after birth. This included research from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Sweden.
We looked at what parents told researchers about their experiences and found striking similarities, regardless of where they lived.
Globally, there were comparatively few studies including First Nations families. But both Indigenous and non-Indigenous parents reported punitive processes that had an enduring impact on the health and wellbeing of the parent and family.
They also agreed that early, transparent, compassionate and culturally appropriate support was required to address their needs. These included legal support to understand court processes, as well as being able to access health care without fear it could lead to removal.
Four themes emerged from these lived experiences. Here, we’ve included the voices of Aboriginal mothers who participated in a 2023 Australian study to illustrate the importance of these issues to Indigenous families.
1. A lack of support before and after removal
Parents often found the birth of their babies life-changing. However many believed child protection services didn’t adequately understand their experience or inform and support them at this time.
Mothers felt confused and overwhelmed, experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and enduring grief following the removal of their babies.
There is no support… I think they should help towards improving family and helping family before taking a child away. It should be the absolute last option.
You have to do what they want; they control everything… who you hang out with, what you do […] There is no fixing the family… What they say goes or they take your kids.
3. Feeling powerless in the system
Many mothers had been in care themselves. They felt unfairly punished, because it was assumed they would not be capable parents due to past and present trauma.
First-time parents felt especially powerless to prove their parenting capacity.
We had got secure accommodation with family. […] We weren’t doing any drugs; we were on the methadone… we had a caseworker…
They led us to believe we’re keeping her… [then] they handed me a piece of paper and said, “We’re taking your baby”. I was in shock… I felt like I was ambushed.
Parents with complex health issues also felt judged according to negative stereotypes and traditional, white, middle-class standards.
Some parents lost welfare entitlements and housing because babies had been removed, compounding their difficulties.
In Australia, current Indigenous-led research and the work of Aboriginal state, territory, and national children’s commissioners is critical to guiding the development of support for families to stay together and thrive.
Parents and researchers are united about the immediate need for child protection systems to:
provide early and sustained family-centred support during pregnancy and beyond
address families’ practical and material needs, including poverty and homelessness
train professionals to reduce power imbalances and build trusted relationships
offer trauma-informed and culturally matched support services
provide immediate and ongoing mental health support if babies are removed.
Renna (a co-author on this article and also a proud Walbunja woman from the Yuin Nation, academic and social worker) reflects on the removal of her baby not long before the apology.
Eighteen years later, I know we will never feel whole, left with empty arms, a life stolen, the shadow festers and grows.
Special thanks to our review co-authors Melissa O’Donnell, Lisa Wood, Colleen Fisher and Renée Usher, our expert advisory group, the Stan Perron Charitable Foundation and the original participants and researchers whose primary studies made our review and this article possible.
*Names have been changed for privacy.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. 13YARN is a free and confidential 24/7 national crisis support line for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are feeling overwhelmed or having difficulty coping. Call 13 92 76.
Sam Burrow receives a PhD scholarship from the Stan Perron Charitable Foundation.
Renna Gayde is affiliated with SAFeST start coalition, a stream of the Replanting the Birthing Trees Project.
When we think of Valentine’s Day, chubby Cupids, hearts and roses generally come to mind, not industrial processes like mass production and the division of labor. Yet the latter were essential to the holiday’s history.
As a historian researching material culture and emotions, I’m aware of the important role the exchange of manufactured greeting cards played in the 19th-century version of Valentine’s Day.
At the beginning of that century, Britons produced most of their valentines by hand. By the 1850s, however, manufactured cards had replaced those previously made by individuals at home. By the 1860s, more than 1 million cards were in circulation in London alone.
The British journalist and playwright Andrew Halliday was fascinated by these cards, especially one popular card that featured a lady and gentleman walking arm-in-arm up a pathway toward a church.
Halliday recalled watching in fascination as “the windows of small booksellers and stationers” filled with “highly-coloured” valentines, and contemplating “how and where” they “originated.” “Who draws the pictures?” he wondered. “Who writes the poetry?”
In 1864 he decided to find out.
Manufactured intimacy
Today Halliday is most often remembered for his writing on London beggars in a groundbreaking 1864 social survey, “London Labour and the London Poor.” However, throughout the 1860s he was a regular contributor to Charles Dickens’ popular journal “All the Year Round,” in which he entertained readers with essays addressing various facets of ordinary British daily existence, including family relations, travel, public services and popular entertainments.
In one essay for that journal – “Cupid’s Manufactory,” which was later reprinted in 1866 in the collection “Everyday Papers” – Halliday led his readers on a guided tour of one of London’s foremost card manufacturers.
Inside the premises of “Cupid and Co.,” they followed a “valentine step by step” from a “plain sheet of paper” to “that neat white box in which it is packed, with others of its kind, to be sent out to the trade.”
Touring ‘Cupid’s Manufactory’
“Cupid and Co.” was most likely the firm of Joseph Mansell, a lace-paper and stationary company that manufactured large numbers of valentines between the 1840s and 1860s – and also just happened to occupy the same address as “Mr. Cupid’s” in London’s Red Lion Square.
The processes Halliday described, however, were common to many British card manufacturers in the 1860s, and exemplified many industrial practices first introduced during the late 18th century, including the subdivision of tasks and the employment of women and child laborers.
Halliday moved through the rooms of “Cupid’s Manufactory,” describing the variety of processes by which various styles of cards were made for a range of different people and price points.
He noted how the card with the lady and gentleman on the path to the church began as a simple stamped card, in black and white – identical to one preserved today in the collections of the London Museum – priced at one penny.
A portion of these cards, however, then went on to a room where a group of young women were arranged along a bench, each with a different color of “liquid water-colour at her elbow.” Using stencils, one painted the “pale brown” pathway, then handed it to the woman next to her, who painted the “gentleman’s blue coat,” who then handed it to the next, who painted the “salmon-coloured church,” and so forth. It was much like a similar group of female workers depicted making valentines in the “Illustrated London News” in the 1870s.
These colored cards, Halliday noted, would be sold for “sixpence to half-a-crown.” A portion of these, however, were then sent on to another room, where another group of young women glued on feathers, lace-paper, bits of silk or velvet, or even gold leaf, creating even more ornate cards sometimes sold for 5 shillings and above.
All told, Halliday witnessed “about sixty hands” – mostly young women, but also “men and boys,” who worked 10 hours a day in every season of the year, making cards for Valentine’s Day.
Yet, it was on the top floor of the business that Halliday encountered the people who arguably fascinated him the most: the six artists who designed all the cards, and the poets who provided their text – most of whom actually worked offsite.
Here were the men responsible for manufacturing the actual sentiments the cards conveyed – and in the mid-19th century these encompassed a far wider range of emotions than the cards produced by Hallmark and others in the 21st century.
A spectrum of ‘manufactured emotions’
Many Victorians mailed cards not only to those with whom they were in love, but also to those they disliked or wished to mock or abuse. A whole subgenre of cards existed to belittle the members of certain trades, like tailors or draper’s assistants, or people who dressed out of fashion.
Cards were specifically designed for discouraging suitors and for poking fun of the old or the unattractive. While some of these cards likely were exchanged as jokes between friends, the consensus among scholars is that many were absolutely intended to be sent as cruel insults.
Furthermore, unlike in the present day, in the 19th century those who received a Valentine were expected to send one in return, which meant there were also cards to discourage future attentions, recommend patience, express thanks, proclaim mutual admiration, or affirm love’s effusions.
Halliday noted the poet employed by “Cupid’s” had recently finished the text for a mean-spirited comic valentine featuring a gentleman admiring himself in a mirror:
Looking at thyself within the glass,
You appear lost in admiration;
You deceive yourself, and think, alas!
You are a wonder of creation.
This same author, however, had earlier completed the opposite kind of text for the card Halliday had previously highlighted, featuring the “lady and gentleman churchward-bound”:
“The path before me gladly would I trace,
With one who’s dearest to my constant heart,
To yonder church, the holy sacred place,
Where I my vows of Love would fain impart;
And in sweet wedlock’s bonds unite with thee,
Oh, then, how blest my life would ever be!”
These were very different texts by the very same man. And Halliday assured his readers “Cupid’s laureate” had authored many others in every imaginable style and sentiment, all year long, for “twopence a line.”
Halliday showed how a stranger was manufacturing expressions of emotions for the use of other strangers who paid money for them. In fact, he assured his readers that in the lead up to Valentine’s Day “Cupid’s” was “turning out two hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of valentines a week,” and that his business was “yearly on the increase.”
Halliday found this dynamic – the process of mass producing cards for profit to help people express their authentic emotions – both fascinating and bizarre. It was a practice he thought seemed like it ought to be “beneath the dignity of the age.”
And yet it thrived among the earnest Victorians, and it thrives still. Indeed, it remains a core feature of the modern holiday of Valentine’s Day.
This year, like in so many others, I will stand at a display of greeting cards, with many other strangers, as we all try to find that one card designed by someone else, mass-produced for profit, that will convey our sincere personal feelings for our friends and loved ones.
Christopher Ferguson 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pandanus Petter, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University
The upcoming federal election will see the incumbent Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, face off against Liberal opposition leader, Peter Dutton. We’ll likely see a strong focus on the personal qualities and performance of the two leaders.
We tend to think a popular leader can win an election for their party while an unpopular one can lose it. Much of the commentary on the Coalition’s 2022 election loss, for example, centred on the widespread dislike of Scott Morrison.
But how much do party leaders actually affect their party’s vote share, and ultimately, the outcome of an election? We looked at 40 years of opinion polling to find out.
Our research
Opinion polls in Australia have been conducted since the 1940s, but it was not until the 1980s that they began to regularly ask questions about leader satisfaction and voting intention. In recent decades, the proliferation of polls has seen a greater consistency in question wording and protocols.
We have been analysing the polling data on government popularity and responsiveness in Australia. This enables us to track and compare leaders over an extended period.
We’ve crunched the numbers on voter intention and leader satisfaction from September 1985 until December 2024.
We can cross-reference these statistics to show which prime ministers and opposition leaders were a net benefit to their party (more popular than their party overall) and which were a net drag (less popular than their party).
Prime ministers: who helped and who hindered?
By this measure, the prime minister who provided the most electoral benefit to their party was Kevin Rudd between 2007 and 2010.
Rudd achieved some of the highest levels of voter satisfaction recorded since the early Bob Hawke years, averaging 60% satisfaction, a 14-point net benefit for his party.
His popularity declined considerably just before his replacement by Julia Gillard in 2010, and never fully recovered when he became prime minister again in 2013.
John Howard ranks second, with Morrison and Albanese (so far) sharing third place in terms of satisfaction. However, there’s a larger difference between Albanese’s personal popularity and his party’s vote intention.
Morrison’s tenure in office was skewed by the COVID pandemic, which saw a “rally around the flag” effect, seeing a spike in voters’ trust in government.
Paul Keating comes at the bottom of the list. His personal popularity trailed his party’s by eight percentage points on average, with an upset victory in 1993 not enough to win over the public to defeat a resurgent Howard in 1996.
Similiarly, Tony Abbott, although party leader when the Coalition returned to power after the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, was consistently less popular than his party – by seven points in opposition and four as prime minister.
What about opposition leaders?
Among opposition leaders, Rudd again tops the list. He was more popular than Labor overall in the year prior to winning the election in December 2007, peaking at 65.5% satisfaction.
The opposition leader who represents the greatest drag on their party was Andrew Peacock in the late 1980s, in what was his second incarnation as Liberal leader.
Overall, prime ministers have a greater impact on their party’s fortunes than opposition leaders. This is expected as incumbency has advantages, with prime ministers usually given more opportunity for media attention, greater recognition with the public, and hopefully a record of achievements in government to point to.
Prime ministers register a net gain to their party of about four percentage points, compared with minus three points for opposition leaders.
Labor leaders show a net gain to their party of two points, compared to minus four points for their Liberal counterparts.
The personalisation of politics
Since at least the 1970s, political leaders have attracted increasing attention in democratic elections around the world.
This trend has not been restricted to countries with presidential systems, such as the United States. It’s also playing out in parliamentary systems such as Australia’s and the United Kingdom’s. This is despite the fact voters elect local members to parliament, rather than voting for the prime minister directly.
This profound shift in democratic politics has been based on several social changes.
First, the rise of television, and more recently social media, has provided the visual images that direct voters’ attention towards the leader.
While television’s heyday has passed – in both the 2019 and 2022 elections, the Australian Election Study surveys show more people followed the election on the internet than on television – visual images of the leaders dominate the media, both traditional and social.
Second, party de-alignment has seen voters moving away from their traditional party loyalties, with the personalities of the leaders filling this gap.
In the 1960s, around one in ten voters said they did not identify with a party, compared with one in four in the 2022 election.
Third, the unprecedented expansion in university education has produced critical voters who are more volatile in their voting than any groups in the past.
One factor that can sway their vote is policies, but another is the leader they find most competent.
What does this mean for the next election?
For Australian voters, leaders matter, rightly or wrongly, for evaluating the performance of a government and choosing which party to vote for.
As we close in on an election in 2025, voters will be looking to Albanese and Dutton. In the chart below, we can see that while on average Dutton has been only marginally beneficial for his party compared with Albanese, this gap has narrowed in the latter half of 2024.
Although Albanese started at a historically very strong position, it appears his popularity began to decline in May 2023. The defeat of the Voice to Parliament Referendum in November sped up the decline.
Dutton received a short-term boost after the result, after which his popularity declined and then has steadily built over time. Current projections indicate the next election will likely be close-run.
It also appears the two current leaders, whatever their other merits, have fallen short of the levels reached by the most popular prime ministers and opposition leaders of the past.
Albanese’s early popularity has waned, while the Coalition and Dutton’s fortunes rise in step with one another.
This reflects a return to a normal vote share for the party after their loss in 2022. While it may prove problematic for the government, it doesn’t necessarily indicate a meteoric increase in Dutton’s personal popularity.
Pandanus Petter is employed at the Australian National University with funding from The Australian Research Council.
Ian McAllister receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Jensen, Associate professor, Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra, University of Canberra
Hate speech on X was consistently 50% higher for at least eight months after tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform, new research has found.
The research looked at the prevalence of overt hate speech including a wide range of racist, homophobic and transphobic slurs.
The study, published today in PLOS ONE, was conducted by a team of researchers led by Daniel Hickney from the University of California, Berkeley.
On October 27 2022, Musk officially purchased X (then known as Twitter) for US$44 billion and became its CEO. His takeover was accompanied by promises to reduce hate speech on the platform and tackle bots and other inauthentic accounts.
But after he bought X, Musk made several changes to the platform to reduce content moderation. For example, in November 2022 he fired much of the company’s full time workforce. He also fired outsourced content moderators who tracked abuse on X, despite research showing social medial platforms with high levels of content moderation contain less hate speech.
This new study is the first to show that this wasn’t an anomaly.
Hate speech including homophobic, racist and transphobic slurs was significantly higher on X after Elon Musk bought the platform. The black lines represent standard errors. Hickey et al., 2025 / PLOS One
More than 4 million posts
The study examined 4.7 million English language posts on X from the beginning of 2022 through to June 9 2023. This period includes the ten months before Musk bought X and the eight months afterwards.
The study measured overt hate speech, the meaning of which was clear to anyone who saw it – speech attacking identity groups or using toxic language. It did not measure covert types of hate speech, such as coded language used by some extremist groups to spread hate but plausibly deny doing so.
As well as measuring the amount of hate speech on X, the study also measured how much other users engaged with this material by liking it.
The researchers’ access to X data was cut off during the study due to a policy change by the platform, replacing free access to approved academic researchers with payment options which are generally unaffordable. This significantly hampered their ability to collect sample posts. But they don’t mention whether it affected their results.
A clear increase in hate
The study found “a clear increase” in the average number of posts containing hate speech following Musk’s purchase of X. Specifically, the volume of posts containing hate speech was “consistently” 50% higher after Musk took over X compared to beforehand – a jump from an estimated average of 2,179 to 3,246 posts containing hate speech per week.
Transphobic slurs saw the highest increase, rising from an average of roughly 115 posts per week before Musk’s acquisition to an average of 418 afterwards.
The level of user engagement with posts containing hate speech also increased under Musk’s watch. For example, the weekly rate at which hate speech content was liked by users jumped by 70%.
The researchers say these results suggest either hate speech wasn’t taken down, hateful users became more active, the platform’s algorithm unintentionally promoted hate speech to users who like such content – or a combination of these possibilities.
The study also detected no decrease in the activity of inauthentic accounts on X. In fact, it found a “potential increase” in the number of bot accounts partly based on a large upswing in posts promoting cryptocurrency, which are typically associated with bots.
An important data-driving deep dive
There were a number of limitations to the study. For example, it only measured hate speech posts in English, which accounts for only 31% of posts on the platform.
Even so, the study is an important, data-driven deep dive into the state of X. It shows it is a platform where hate speech is prolific. It also shows Musk has failed to fulfil his earlier promises to address problems on X such as hate speech and bot activity.
As Musk himself said at the White House earlier this week: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected”.
Michael Jensen receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Bayer, and the Australian Department of Defence Science and Technology Group.
An artist’s impression of a high-energy particle travelling through the KM3NeT neutrino telescope.KM3NeT
Three and a half kilometres beneath the Mediterranean Sea, around 80km off the coast of Sicily, lies half of a very unusual telescope called KM3NeT.
The enormous device is still under construction, but today the telescope’s scientific team announced they have already detected a particle from outer space with a staggering amount of energy.
In fact, as the team report in Nature, they found the most energetic neutrino anyone has ever seen – and it represents a tremendous leap forward in exploring the uncharted waters of the extreme universe.
To explain why it’s such a remarkable discovery, we need to understand what KM3NeT is, what it’s looking for, and what it saw.
What is KM3NeT?
KM3NeT is a gigantic deep sea telescope being built by an international collaboration of more than 300 scientists and engineers from 21 countries.
At the site off Sicily, and another off the coast of Provence in France, KM3NeT will be made up of more than 6,000 light detectors hanging in the pitch-black depths. When the telescope is complete, it will cover about a cubic kilometre of sea.
The KM3NeT telescope will eventually have more than 6,000 detectors like this one floating in the depths of the Mediterranean watching for tell-tale flashed of blue light. N Busser / CNRS
Down deep, KM3NeT is shielded from ordinary sources of light, such as the Sun. It is also shielded from other particles like electrons and protons, which are absorbed by the water long before they reach the detectors. So what does it see?
What is KM3NeT looking for?
Of all the particles that physicists have discovered, only the elusive neutrino can reach all the way down to KM3NeT.
The neutrino is an elementary particle with no electric charge and only a very tiny mass. It interacts with matter so weakly that it can pass through kilometres of ocean – and even thousands of kilometres of Earth itself – to reach the detector. That’s why KM3NeT is at the bottom of the sea: to see neutrinos, and only neutrinos.
But won’t the neutrinos pass through the detector, too? Yes, almost all of them.
When a high-energy particle passes through KM3NeT, the detectors register the tell-tale blue flashes and allow scientists to figure out how fast the particle was going and where it came from. KM3NeT
But very rarely, a neutrino will crash right into a water molecule. When it does, it can pack an enormous punch.
The energy of the neutrino can create many more particles. As these particles blast through the water, they create a bluish glow. That’s what KM3NeT detectors see.
By analysing this bluish light, and by timing each flash, scientists can reconstruct the original energy of the neutrino, and the direction from which it came. (Either that, or they’ve just clocked one of those deep-sea glowing fish travelling at nearly the speed of light.)
The most energetic neutrino ever detected
On February 13 2023, KM3NeT detected a neutrino travelling so fast it had 30 times more energy than any previously detected.
The amount of energy is 220 petaelectronvolts, but that doesn’t mean much to a non-particle physicist. It’s hard to imagine, but let’s try.
The neutrino had 100 trillion times more energy than a typical particle at the centre of the Sun. It’s a trillion times more energy than medical X-rays, and ten billion times more than the most dangerous radioactive particles. Earth’s biggest particle accelerators can’t produce a particle with even one ten thousandth of this energy.
Short story: it’s a lot of energy for one particle.
Making neutrinos in space
Neutrinos interact with matter very weakly, so how could a single neutrino have been given so much energy? What sort of cosmic event could create such a particle?
That’s the exciting part: we don’t know.
We know there are colossal explosions in the universe, such as supernovas: when a star exhausts its fuel and collapses. And there are gamma ray bursts, which are even more energetic explosions of supermassive stars, or collisions of neutron stars. These create extremely energetic neutrinos.
But there are other candidates. Supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies have millions to billions of times as much mass as the Sun.
As matter is swallowed by these black holes, it is accelerated to extreme speeds, and becomes wrapped around intense magnetic fields. The particles that aren’t swallowed can be shot out at extreme speeds. These “active galactic nuclei” are another way that the universe could create extreme neutrinos.
Third, the neutrinos could be created more locally (cosmically speaking). Explosions and active galactic nuclei also create cosmic rays: extremely energetic protons and electrons.
These could stream across the universe towards us, before colliding with a particle of light along the way. That collision can create an energetic neutrino.
How can we find the source?
Here’s where the Australian connection comes in. KM3NeT tells us this neutrino came from a particular spot in the southern sky.
If it came from an extreme explosion or an active galactic nucleus, we might hope to spot the source with other telescopes. In particular, both supernova remnants and active galactic nuclei can be spotted using radio waves.
Australia has the biggest radio telescopes in the southern hemisphere. The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) has mapped a lot of the southern sky, and found many supernova remnants and active galactic nuclei.
My colleagues and I at Western Sydney University are using ASKAP to follow up on KM3NeT detections like this one. For this particular neutrino, there are no obvious candidates in the radio sky that it came from.
However, KM3NeT doesn’t provide a very accurate position, so we can’t be completely sure. We’ll keep looking.
KM3NeT is still under construction, and ASKAP continues to survey the sky. Our window on the extreme universe is just opening up.
Luke Barnes 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.
Anti-immigrant sentiment has profoundly reshaped Germany’s political landscape. It is connected to the surge of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as the rightward shift of the Christian Democrats and Liberals, and the social democrat SPD under current chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Even the Greens and the Left party were internally conflicted on the matter, ultimately leading the anti-immigration BSW to split off from the Left.
At the centre of the debate is the notion of “welfare magnetism”. This is the idea that migrants are drawn to Germany by its generous welfare system. Actors like the AfD and Christian Democratic chancellorship-hopeful Friedrich Merz refer to it more pointedly as “Sozialtourismus” – welfare tourism.
Welfare magnetism: what does the evidence say?
For decades, politicians in Germany have suspected welfare as a “pull factor” for migrants, especially those living in poverty. Parties have proposed and implemented the same solution again and again: welfare exclusions. In 2006 and 2016, EU migrant citizens were excluded from two major social assistance schemes for their first five years in Germany.
Aside from normalising anti-immigrant sentiment, this achieved very little. In a major research project on the interplay between migration and social policy that ran from 2019 to 2024, we could find no evidence that introducing these exclusions led to declining migrant numbers.
Even researchers promoting the idea struggle to produce convincing evidence. Their findings are often limited to hyper-specific scenarios, such as migration between border towns of two US states.
While immigration economist George Borjas claims that “differences in welfare benefits generate strong magnetic effects” he himself calls the empirical evidence “relatively weak”, and notes that “there may well be alternative stories that explain the evidence”.
Want more politics coverage from academic experts? Every week, we bring you informed analysis of developments in government and fact check the claims being made.
In one study, researchers claimed to find “some of the first causal evidence on the welfare magnet hypothesis” in Denmark. Yet they analysed a case in which many of the immigrants in question were also excluded from the labour market and where their belongings were (partially) confiscated upon entering the country.
Under these circumstances, the researchers found that radically cutting welfare benefits by up to 50% could lead asylum seekers – who were migrating either way – to choose a different country of destination. As the researchers point out, “most newly arrived refugees have very limited job opportunities and therefore no alternative to welfare benefits”.
A major driving force of international migration is conflict. If refugees fleeing war are given no alternative option of sustaining a living than receiving benefits – and if these benefits are then cut – the refugees in question may seek asylum elsewhere. This, however, has little to do with a “pull effect” and is a far cry from anything that could be considered welfare tourism.
When confronted with the research, centrist politicians argue that regardless of how big a threat welfare magnetism actually is, people are afraid of it. To beat the far right, politicians feel obliged to copy their arguments.
But research shows this approach does not work. By copying the far right, mainstream parties normalise instead of weakening the fringes. Far-right parties will always be able to make more extreme demands than the mainstream – there is no point in trying to beat them on their own turf.
Policies that link migration and welfare can also make situations in already struggling areas worse. In our forthcoming research, we identified such problems in Germany.
In Nordstadt, a deprived neighbourhood in Dortmund, many migrants face poor living conditions as economic disadvantages overlap with welfare exclusions. Many cannot afford proper housing and healthcare, and have to accept exploitative working conditions.
Social assistance could provide help, yet excluding migrants from federally funded welfare schemes means that municipalities are largely left to deal with these challenges.
Working with the far right
Despite the lack of evidence for welfare tourism, the current political trajectory suggests that anti-immigrant sentiment will thrive further in Germany. Recent acts of violence by asylum seekers, including a fatal stabbing in Aschaffenburg, led the far-right AfD – accompanied by mainstream parties – to immediately push for restrictive immigration policy reforms.
In a watershed moment for German politics, the Christian Democrats subsequently broke with a postwar taboo, voting with the AfD in favour of border closures and similar measures. Merz was harshly criticised for cooperating with the AfD, and his immigration bill ultimately failed.
But, notably, hardly any party openly opposed his anti-immigration positions as such. The dispute was primarily about his cooperation with the AfD and less about disagreement over policy substance.
This was evident in the first televised debate between Scholz and Merz, where competition over who was tougher on migrants took up a significant portion of the run time.
Rarely have German elections seen a list of lead candidates so unequivocally united in characterising migrants as a threat. However, political tides may shift. Some of these candidates will unavoidably lose – and, perhaps, parties will shift gear once in opposition or government responsibility.
Dominic Afscharian has previously received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs under the FIS research grant. This article has followed from the associated project “Freedom of Movement and Social Policy in Historical and International Comparison (FuS)”. He currently works for the Zentrum für neue Sozialpolitik in Berlin, Germany, which was not involved in the genesis of this article.
Martin Seeleib-Kaiser has previously received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs under the FIS research grant. This article has followed from the associated project “Freedom of Movement and Social Policy in Historical and International Comparison (FuS)”.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon wants New Zealand to “go for growth”.
But his plan, focused on reforming foreign investment, planning and competition laws, as well as boosting the tourism and mining sectors, is hampered by a fundamental reality of New Zealand’s economy: much of the country’s capital is tied up in unproductive (and expensive) housing.
While this issue is not new, with New Zealand’s economy once described as “a housing market with bits tacked on”, the solution may lie in making housing more readily available through deregulation and policy reform. This would free up capital for drivers of growth such as infrastructure and business investment.
Household capital allocation March, 2021. Data source: RBNZ Household Balance Sheet. Author provided
The temptation of housing
Rapidly growing house prices over the past two decades have provided strong incentives to direct investment to the housing market.
On average, the price of a typical house has grown by around 8% per year, far outpacing household income growth. For example, in 2005 the median house price was roughly five times the average household income. By the middle of the pandemic house values had ballooned to nine times the average income.
Soaring prices have made residential investment extremely profitable for a long time. This means savings and investments have tended to flow into residential property rather than other productive sectors of the economy.
Constraints on housing supply
The problem is that in recent decades additional residential investment has not led to a substantial increase in new homes.
Local and central government rules and regulations have long hampered the construction of new houses. Instead, more investment in real estate has generally led to even higher prices.
As concerning as this is, it does not mean investments in housing have been misplaced. Rather, high prices and profits are what the market required in order to encourage those willing to build (few that there are) despite the costs, delays and uncertainties associated with bureaucratic battles with councils, planners and local NIMBY groups.
Banning property speculation might have kept prices down and reallocated investment to other productive uses. But in the absence of those speculators, the supply constraints would not have been any looser. Lower prices mean lower returns over building costs, leading to even fewer houses built.
Shifting capital out of the housing market in this way would not have benefited the country – we might have produced more and goods and services but fewer homes in which to live.
Christopher Luxon is pushing forward his plan for growth focused on reforming foreign investment, planning and competition laws, as well as boosting the tourism and mining sectors. Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images
Reforming housing supply
Fortunately, New Zealand has made meaningful progress on housing supply recently. For example, Auckland and Lower Hutt changed zoning laws in the 2010s making it easier to build, and Wellington City has recently followed suit.
These changes have led to local construction booms and, crucially, lower house prices and rents.
These reforms make it easier to build, reduce house prices and mean less investment capital is required for each new house built. So these policies have the dual benefit of improving housing affordability and freeing up capital for other productive sectors of the economy.
As prices come down, New Zealanders will no longer need to pour nine times their income into a home.
That will free up funds for investments in new bridges and tunnels, small businesses, and exciting new startups that will help drive innovation and generate the long-run growth we seek.
New Zealand need not give up its housing dreams in order to get business moving. Rather, it can do both.
All that requires is for local and central government to continue to let people build the housing they want so that we can free up the capital our infrastructure and businesses need.
James Graham has received research funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and is a member of Sydney YIMBY.
To address this, retrofit programs that improve home energy efficiency have become one of Canada’s main strategies to cut emissions in the housing sector. These programs focus on upgrades like air sealing, enhanced insulation, upgrading heating and cooling systems and installing energy-efficient windows and doors.
But do these programs deliver on their promises of lower bills and reduced carbon emissions? Our recent study, forthcoming in Energy Economics, examined the outcomes of the federal ecoENERGY home retrofit program, a predecessor to the Greener Homes Initiative.
Our findings shed light on where the program succeeded, where it fell short and what this all means for Canadian families and policymakers moving forward.
Real-world energy savings
Our study analyzed a decade of monthly electricity and natural gas consumption data from Medicine Hat, Alta., where residents participated in the federal ecoENERGY retrofit program that was in place between 2008 to 2012.
We found that households undertaking comprehensive envelope retrofits — which includes insulation and air sealing — reduced their total energy use by an average of 25 per cent per household. Natural gas usage dropped by 35 per cent on average for these same households, and these savings lasted for at least 10 years after the retrofit.
However, our study found that homes achieved only about 60 per cent of the predicted savings projected in pre-retrofit estimates. While measures like air sealing and attic and wall insulation were relatively effective, other upgrades, such as basement insulation and energy-efficient windows, showed zero effect on energy use.
This gap between projected and actual savings suggests that the estimates shown to households during pre-retrofit audits might be overestimating the benefits. This could leave families with lower-than-expected savings on their energy bills after making significant financial investments. These findings align with similar studies in the United States and Europe, where realized energy savings hover at around 60 per cent of pre-retrofit projections.
Despite this gap, there are promising opportunities for low-cost, high-return investments. Our research suggests that relatively cheap measures like air sealing generate high returns. Adopting electric heat pumps and fuel switching also show promise for delivering both energy savings and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
The need for broader participation
Our study also revealed significant gaps in program access and the distribution of benefits. Although the ecoENERGY program was available to all Canadian households, participation was highest among families of mid-valued houses.
Participation among families in lower-valued houses was disappointingly low: about four per cent of the families in lowest-valued houses took part, even though they stood to benefit the most from reduced energy bills. Homes in our study saw bill savings ranging from eight to 17 per cent, based on a comparison of their actual consumption before and after the retrofit. The highest savings were observed in homes with assessed values of $100,000.
Middle-valued homes with the highest retrofit program participant rate tended to save the least amount of money; this group had average gas bill reductions of approximately 10.5 per cent.
The maximum amount that could be claimed under the ecoENERGY program was $5,000, yet the average rebate received was $1,100. This disparity not only limited the program’s potential to reduce emissions on a large scale, but also means Canada’s current approach to energy retrofits may be missing an opportunity to improve energy affordability for those who need it most.
Room for improvement
Energy-saving retrofits have significant potential, but current prediction models often overestimate the savings homeowners can achieve. Improving these models could allow homeowners to make better-informed choices, leading to greater efficiency and improved household welfare.
Upfront costs also remain a significant barrier, particularly for lower-income families. Many cannot afford the upfront expenses associated with retrofitting their homes. Expanded financial support, such as rebates or no-interest loans, may provide much-needed support necessary to allow more households to participate, and more research is needed to evaluate how best to incentivize household participation.
Another major challenge is a lack of awareness. Many Canadians are unaware of the benefits of deep retrofits. Public awareness campaigns, possibly delivered in collaboration with community organizations, may also help educate homeowners on the long-term value of retrofits and make the process more accessible and appealing.
Our project is the first in Canada to use detailed household-level data to assess energy savings from retrofits in houses of various values. We were able to achieve this through partnerships between academia, utilities and the federal government. Such collaborations are crucial for advancing research that informs effective policies and programs.
As Canada advances toward net-zero emissions by 2050, energy-efficient housing should remain central to its climate strategy. Achieving sustainable progress in this area will require retrofit programs that deliver on their promises by enhancing household welfare, addressing energy affordability and ensuring continued public support.
Maya Papineau receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the National Science and Engineering Research Council and the National Research Council of Canada.
Nicholas Rivers receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the National Science and Engineering Research Council. He is affiliated with the Canadian Climate Institute.
Kareman Yassin 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.
United States Vice President JD Vance made headlines this week by refusing to sign a declaration at a global summit in Paris on artificial intelligence.
In his first appearance on the world stage, Vance made clear that the U.S. wouldn’t be playing ball. The Donald Trump administration believes that “excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off,” he said. “We’ll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies.”
But upon a closer look, events this week point to signs that just the opposite may be unfolding. A host of nations took notable steps towards address growing safety and environmental concerns about AI, indicating that a regulatory tipping point has been reached.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered the keynote address at the AI Action Summit in Paris, France.
The Paris communiqué calls for an “inclusive approach” to AI, seeking to “narrow inequalities” in AI capabilities among countries. It encourages “avoiding market concentration” and affirms the need for openness and transparency in building and sharing technology and expertise.
The document is not binding. It does little more than tout principles, or affirm a collective sentiment among the parties. One of these — perhaps the most important — is to keep talking, meeting and working together on the common concerns that AI raises.
While nothing is binding on the parties, the goals are notably specific. They include coming up with standards for measuring AI’s environmental impact and more effective ways for companies to report on the impact. Parties also aim to “optimize algorithms to reduce computational complexity and minimize data usage.”
Even if most of this turns out to be merely aspirational, it’s important that the coalition offers a platform for collaboration on these initiatives. At the very least, it signals a likelihood that sustainability will be at the forefront of debate about AI moving forward.
The convention commits parties to pass domestic laws on AI that deal with privacy, bias and discrimination, safety, transparency and environmental sustainability.
The treaty has been criticized for containing no more than “broad affirmations” and imposing few clear obligations. But it does show that countries are committed to passing law to ensure that AI development unfolds within boundaries — and they’re eager to see more countries do the same.
If Canada were to ratify the treaty, Parliament would likely revive Bill C-27, which contained the AI and Data Act.
The act aimed to do much of what Canada agrees to do under the convention: impose greater oversight of the development and use of AI. This includes transparency and disclosure requirements on AI companies, and stiff penalties for failure to comply.
What does this really mean?
While the U.S. signed the convention on AI and human rights, democracy and rule of law in the fall of 2024, it likely won’t be implemented by a Republican Congress. The same might happen in Canada under a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre. He could also decide not to fulfil commitments made under other agreements about AI.
The Trump administration may have ushered in a period of more lax tech regulation in the U.S., and Silicon Valley is indeed a key player in tech — especially AI. But it’s a wide world, with many other important players in this space, including China, Europe and Canada.
The events in Paris have revealed a strong interest among nations around the globe to regulate AI, and specifically to foster ideas about inclusion and sustainability. If the Paris summit was any indication, the hope of sheltering AI from effective regulation won’t last long.
Robert Diab 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 David Benoit, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Physics and Astrochemistry, University of Hull
A detector on the seabed near Toulon, France, has spotted a high energy neutrino.ivan bastien/Shutterestock
Recent research on lightweight particles called neutrinos might have passed you by – much like the more than 10 trillion neutrinos passing through your body each second. Now, our new paper – with 21 countries, more than 60 institutes and around 360 scientists contributing – reports the observation of the most energetic neutrino yet.
Despite the enormous number of neutrinos around us, this is one of the most exciting – and rarest – astronomical events of the year. Our paper has been published in the journal Nature.
Neutrinos are tiny elementary (sub-atomic) particles that are abundant in our universe. Yet, you probably haven’t seen any. They do not interact with other matter in the ways we are familiar with.
Their lack of charge, for example, means that the electrostatic force that governs most of our everyday experiences does not interact with them at all. And their vanishingly small mass means that gravity – the other major force we experience – also has no effect on them in lab conditions on Earth.
So, detecting their presence is challenging to say the least.
They are formed through the actions of the weak nuclear force, which governs radioactive decay. It is this force that enables positively charged particles called protons, which make up to atomic nucleus, to change into neutrons, neutrally charged particles which also exist in the atomic nucleus, and vice versa.
We cannot detect a neutrino directly. But, every now and then (although very rarely), they might bump into something. When that happens, through the action of this weak nuclear force, a charged particle, such as an electron, may be created – seemingly out of nowhere – that we can detect.
Those charged particles travel at enormous speeds. And when they move through a medium such as water, they create an eerie, faint blue glow as they are slowed down. This event, called the Cherenkov effect, also happens in nuclear reactor containment pools.
How likely (or unlikely) are these interactions? Well, you would have to flip 75 heads in a row on a fair coin to have the same probability of a single neutrino interacting with a particle of matter. Think this is easy? Go ahead and flip them. It’ll take a while.
Under the sea
The KM3NeT telescope collaboration uses this Cherenkov effect to scrutinise the depths of the Mediterranean Sea for the telltale faint glow of those neutrino events. They operate two huge detection stations – one off the shores of Toulon, France and one off the southern coast of Sicily. Scientists keep watch for events around the clock.
The scale of those detectors is gigantic, as are most neutrino detectors, since the only way of spotting the elusive neutrino collision is to try to increase the amount of matter that the neutrino can interact with. In fact, the KM3 part of the KM3NeT acronym stands for the kilometre cube (KM3) of seawater that the detector will be surveying when completed.
The detection stations themselves each consist of nearly 600 light detectors – spherical buoys each containing 31 light sensing tubes, which are attached to cables anchored to the seabed up to 3.5km below the surface.
The particle described in our recent paper was detected on February 13 2023. And you might wonder why the long wait? The intervening time has been spent by collaborators across Europe verifying and simulating the detection to confirm the nature of the event. After months of work by the KM3NeT team, we can finally say that this is the most energetic observation of a neutrino interaction ever recorded.
About 28,000 photons (light particles) were detected across the array in Sicily, indicating that a hugely energetic event had just happened. That said, an average 75W lightbulb generates millions and millions of photons every second (about 100 quintillion to be more precise). But while these few thousands of photons might appear to be a small event, remember that this has been generated by a single particle.
In fact, the energy of the neutrino responsible for such bright display was estimated to be 220 peta-electronvolts (PeV) or 30 times more energetic than the highest-energy neutrino recorded so far. In terms of particle energies, it is around 1,000 times more energetic than the particles generated at Cern, the most energetic accelerator facility in the world.
The light generated by this record-breaking event could be followed through the detector array and our collaboration was able to use it to reconstruct the near-horizontal trajectory of this high-energy neutrino. The path taken indicates that this neutrino is of cosmic origin.
We don’t know exactly where it comes from, but we’ve identified 12 potential blazars (bright cores of active galaxies) that may have produced it. It is also possible that it was created in the interaction of cosmic rays with photons from the cosmic energy background.
This detection provides a window into the ultra-high-energy phenomena happening in the universe and could, for example, help us better understand the nature of some of the most energetic cosmic rays. Moreover, the observation can help us further test the theoretical models that predict the existence of high-energy neutrinos.
David Benoit receives funding from the European Union, the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the UKRI National Quantum Computing Centre.
James Keegans receives funding from the European Union.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Blane Savage, Lecturer in MA Creative Media Practice and BA(Hons) Graphic Art & Moving Image, University of the West of Scotland
The exhibition curator James Knox is to be congratulated on bringing together an impressive collection of work that tells the story of a diverse group of artists who helped transform and modernise British art in the early 20th century and contains work held in private collections not seen by the public before.
The Scottish colourists, as they were known, all visited and lived in Paris and were heavily influenced by the burgeoning avant-garde movement there in the early years of the 20th century. This was during its most dynamic and transformative stages, when cubism, post-impressionism and fauvism movements were evolving.
The exhibition highlights and contrasts the work produced by the colourists to that of Roger Fry’s Bloomsbury group members, Vanessa Bell and her amour Duncan Grant. It also includes work by the Fitzroy Street Group and several distinguished Welsh artists of that time, Augustus John and James Dickson Innes, as well as fauvist artists Andre Derain and Kees van Dongen.
The colourists’ paintings stand out in the exhibition through the maturity and confidence of their artworks, the tonal qualities and vibrancy of their colour palettes consistently rising above the more muted works surrounding them.
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The capacity of the colourists to study, travel and seek inspiration internationally, away from a grey Scottish Presbyterian climate, and particularly, embedding themselves in the Paris art scene in the early 20th century is impressive.
These artists stood shoulder to shoulder with their European contemporaries, inspired by the post-impressionist work of Cezanne, Matisse, Van Gogh and Derain. They delivered consistent and highly sophisticated artworks throughout their careers exploring light, shape and dynamic colour ranges, and often painted outdoors.
Each of the Scottish colourists returned to Scotland bringing new approaches to art with them. Peploe experimented with Cezanne-like geometric forms, whereas Fergusson’s practice was heavily influenced by the fauves. Hunter experimented with simplified post-impressionist blocks of colour to create dynamic shapes, while Cadell often focused on bold shapes and stylish impressionistic compositions.
Peploe, Hunter and Cadell exhibited in London’s Leicester Gallery in 1923 where they were first described as the “three colourists” by critic P.G. Konody.
Peploe, Fergusson and Hunter’s reputations were enhanced in 1924 when their work was bought by the French state after an exhibition organised by one of the most influential art dealers in Europe, Glaswegian Alexander Reid. He represented the four artists at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris entitled Les Peintres de L’Ecosse Moderne, and turned their loose affiliation into an art movement.
Reid had also been responsible for developing the profile of The Glasgow Boys – a group of radical young painters whose disillusionment with academic painting signalled the birth of modernism in Scotland in the late 19th century. Reid was also a central figure in developing Sir William Burrell’s art collection. This was closely followed by a further exhibition in London’s Leicester Gallery in 1925 and then in Paris in 1931.
Peploe was the most commercially successful of the four artists, having a still life purchased by the Tate in 1927. His painting of Paris Plage captures the atmospherically startling white light of that French region. His studio work with a still life of flowers and fruit had the hallmarks of Cezanne’s style.
His love of outdoor landscapes, as shown in Kirkcudbright, painted in south-west Scotland, also resemble Cezanne’s primary geometric forms. He visited the island of Iona on a number of occasions with Cadell and other painters, revealing his love of the white sands, rocks and water which can be seen in Green Sea, Iona.
Cadell was known for his powerful still lifes, stylish portraits of elegant women in hats, and for his landscape painting on Iona. Cadell’s Green Sea on Iona and Ben More on Mull on show are part of a series of paintings of the white sands he produced on his regular visits there.
J.D. Fergusson‘s The Blue Hat, Closerie de Lilas is an outstanding piece on show which dazzles with the vibrancy of Parisian cafe life. He was attracted to fauve-like expressive colours and strong outlines in his work. The one piece of sculpture on display is by Fergusson, whose foray into sculptural medium in the Eastre, Hymn to the Sun is striking in its modernist aesthetic – like the female robot character in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Having no art training like the others, Lesley Hunter’s Still Life with White Jug and Peonies in a Chinese vase highlight his developing skills as a still life painter and they have a striking vibrancy to them. His outdoor scenes use loosely styled daubs of colour in a post-impressionistic style often in vibrant colours.
All the Scottish colourists were recognised for their influence and contribution to the development of Scottish art during their lifetimes, combining aspects of The Glasgow School and cutting-edge Parisian avant garde. But they fell out of fashion due to economic decline before the second world war.
They were rediscovered and packaged as a collective in the 1950s initially by art historian T.J. Honeyman in his book Three Scottish Colourists and were brought together with the inclusion of J.D. Fergusson in the 1980s. Although their key role in the development of Scottish art history is assured, interestingly their appreciation in France is even greater than in Britain.
The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives is on at the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh until June 28.
Blane Savage 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.
We are in the early days of a seismic shift in the global AI industry. DeepSeek, a previously little-known Chinese artificial intelligence company, has produced a “game changing”“ large language model that promises to reshape the AI landscape almost overnight.
But DeepSeek’s breakthrough also has wider implications for the technological arms race between the US and China, having apparently caught even the best-known US tech firms off guard. Its launch has been predicted to start a “slow unwinding of the AI bet” in the west, amid a new era of “AI efficiency wars”.
In fact, industry experts have been speculating for years about China’s rapid advancements in AI. While the supposedly free-market US has often prioritised proprietary models, China has built a thriving AI ecosystem by leveraging open-source technology, fostering collaboration between government-backed research institutions and major tech firms.
This strategy has enabled China to scale its AI innovation rapidly while the US – despite all the tub-thumping from Silicon Valley – remains limited by restrictive corporate structures. Companies such as Google and Meta, despite promoting open-sourceinitiatives, still rely heavily on closed-source strategies that limit broader access and collaboration.
What makes DeepSeek particularly disruptive is its ability to achieve cutting-edge performance while reducing computing costs – an area where US firms have struggled due to their dependence on training models that demand very expensive processing hardware.
Where once Silicon Valley was the epicentre of global digital innovation, its corporate behemoths now appear vulnerable to more innovative, “scrappy” startup competitors – albeit ones enabled by major state investment in AI infrastructure. By leveraging China’s industrial approach to AI, DeepSeek has crystallised a reality that many in Silicon Valley have long ignored: AI’s centre of power is shifting away from the US and the west.
It highlights the failure of US attempts to preserve its technological hegemony through tight export controls on cutting-edge AI chips to China. According to research fellow Dean Ball: “You can keep [computing resources] away from China, but you can’t export-control the ideas that everyone in the world is hunting for.”
DeepSeek’s success has forced Silicon Valley and large western tech companies to “take stock”, realising that their once-unquestioned dominance is suddenly at risk. Even the US president, Donald Trump, has proclaimed that this should be a “wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing”.
But this story is not just about technological prowess – it could mark an important shift in global power. Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has framed DeepSeek’s emergence as a “shot across America’s bow”, urging US policymakers and tech executives to take immediate action.
DeepSeek’s rapid rise underscores a growing realisation: globally, we are entering a potentially new AI paradigm, one where China’s model of open-source innovation and state-backed development is proving more effective than Silicon Valley’s corporate-driven approach.
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.
I’ve spent much of my career analysing the transformative role of AI on the global digital landscape – examining how AI shapes governance, market structures and public discourse, and exploring its geopolitical and ethical dimensions, now and far in the future.
I also have personal connections with China, having lived there while teaching at Jiangsu University, then written my PhD thesis on the country’s state-led marketisation programme. Over the years, I have studied China’s evolving tech landscape, observing firsthand how its unique blend of state-driven industrial policy and private-sector innovation has fuelled rapid AI development.
I believe this moment may come to be seen as a turning point not just for AI, but for the geopolitical order. If China’s AI dominance continues, what could this mean for the future of digital governance, democracy, and the global balance of power?
China’s open-source AI takeover
Even in the early days of China’s digital transformation, analysts predicted the country’s open-source focus could lead to a major AI breakthrough. In 2018, China was integrating open-source collaboration into its broader digitisation strategy, recognising that fostering shared development efforts could accelerate its AI capabilities.
Unlike the US, where proprietary AI models dominated, China embraced open-source ecosystems to bypass western gatekeeping, scale innovation faster, and embed itself in global AI collaboration. China’s open-source activity surged dramatically in 2020, laying the foundation for the kind of innovation seen today. By actively fostering an open-source culture, China ensured that a broad range of developers had access to AI tools, rather than restricting them to a handful of dominant companies.
The trend has continued in recent years, with China even launching its own state-backed open-source operating systems and platforms in 2023, to further reduce its dependence on western technology. This move was widely seen as an effort to cement its AI leadership and create an independent, self-sustaining digital ecosystem.
Video: BBC.
While China has been steadily positioning itself as a leader in open-source AI, Silicon Valley firms remained focused on closed, proprietary models – allowing China to catch up fast. While companies like Google and Meta promoted open-source initiatives in name, they still locked key AI capabilities behind paywalls and restrictive licenses.
In contrast, China’s government-backed initiatives have treated open-source AI as a national resource, rather than a corporate asset. This has resulted in China becoming one of the world’s largest contributors to open-source AI development, surpassing many western firms in collaborative projects. Chinese tech giants such as Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent are driving open-source AI forward with frameworks like PaddlePaddle, X-Deep Learning (X-DL) and MindSpore — all now core to China’s machine learning ecosystem.
But they’re also making major contributions to global AI projects, from Alibaba’s Dragonfly, which streamlines large-scale data distribution, to Baidu’s Apollo, an open-source platform accelerating autonomous vehicle development. These efforts don’t just strengthen China’s AI industry, they embed it deeper into the global AI landscape.
This shift had been years in the making, as Chinese firms (with state backing) pushed open-source AI forward and made their models publicly available, creating a feedback loop that western companies have also – quietly – tapped into. A year ago, for example, US firm Abicus.AI released Smaug-72B, an AI model designed for enterprises that built directly upon Alibaba’s Qwen-72B and outperformed proprietary models like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and Mistral’s Medium. But the potential for US companies to further build on Chinese open-source technology may be limited by political as well as corporate barriers.
In 2023, US lawmakers highlighted growing concerns that China’s aggressive investment in open-source AI and semiconductor technologies would eventually erode western leadership in AI. Some policymakers called for bans on certain open-source chip technologies, due to fears they could further accelerate China’s AI advancements.
But by then, China’s AI horse had already bolted.
AI with Chinese characteristics
DeepSeek’s rise should have been obvious to anyone familiar with management theory and the history of technological breakthroughs linked to “disruptive innovation”. Latecomers to an industry rarely compete by playing the same game as incumbents – they have to be disruptive.
China, facing restrictions on cutting-edge western AI chips and lagging behind in proprietary AI infrastructure, had no choice but to innovate differently. Open-source AI provided the perfect vehicle: a way to scale innovation rapidly, lower costs and tap into global research while bypassing Silicon Valley’s resource-heavy, closed-source model.
From a western and traditional human rights perspective, China’s embrace of open-source AI may appear paradoxical, given the country’s strict information controls. Its AI development strategy prioritises both technological advancement and strict alignment with the Chinese Communist party’s ideological framework, ensuring AI models adhere to “core socialist values” and state-approved narratives. AI research in China has thrived not only despite these constraints but, in many ways, because of them.
Video: CNBC.
China’s success goes beyond traditional authoritarianism; it embodies what Harvard economist David Yang calls “Autocracy 2.0”. Rather than relying solely on fear-based control, it uses economic incentives, bureaucratic efficiency, and technology to manage information and maintain regime stability.
The Chinese government has strategically encouraged open-source development while maintaining tight control over AI’s domestic applications, particularly in surveillance and censorship. Indeed, authoritarian regimes may have a significant advantage in developing facial-recognition technology due to their extensive surveillance systems. The vast amounts of data collected through these networks enable private AI companies to create advanced algorithms, which can then be adapted for commercial uses, potentially accelerating economic growth.
China’s AI strategy is built on a dual foundation of state-led initiatives and private-sector innovation. The country’s AI roadmap, first outlined in the 2017 new generation artificial intelligence development plan, follows a three-phase timeline: achieving global competitiveness by 2020, making major AI breakthroughs by 2025, and securing world leadership in AI by 2030. In parallel, the government has emphasised data governance, regulatory frameworks and ethical oversight to guide AI development “responsibly”.
A defining feature of China’s AI expansion has been the massive infusion of state-backed investment. Over the past decade, government venture capital funds have injected approximately US$912 billion (£737bn) into early-stage firms, with 23% of that funding directed toward AI-related companies. A significant portion has targeted China’s less-developed regions, following local investment mandates.
Compared with private venture capital, government-backed firms often lag in software development but demonstrate rapid growth post-investment. Moreover, state funding often serves as a signal for subsequent private-sector investment, reinforcing the country’s AI ecosystem.
China’s AI strategy represents a departure from its traditional industrial policies, which historically emphasised self-sufficiency, support for a handful of national champions, and military-driven research. Instead, the government has embraced a more flexible and collaborative approach that encourages open-source software adoption, a diverse network of AI firms, and public-private partnerships to accelerate innovation. This model prioritises research funding, state-backed AI laboratories, and AI integration across key industries including security, healthcare, and infrastructure.
Despite strong state involvement, China’s AI boom is equally driven by private-sector innovation. The country is home to an estimated 4,500 AI companies, accounting for 15% of the world’s total.
As economist Liu Gang told the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper: “The development of AI is fast in China – for example, for AI-empowered large language models. Aided with government spending, private capital is flowing to the new sector. Increased capital inflow is anticipated to further enhance the sector in 2025.”
China’s tech giants including Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and SenseTime have all benefited from substantial government support while remaining competitive on the global stage. But unlike in the US, China’s AI ecosystem thrives on a complex interplay between state support, corporate investment and academic collaboration.
Recognising the potential of open-source AI early on, Tsinghua University in Beijing has emerged as a key innovation hub, producing leading AI startups such as Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax — all founded by its faculty and alumni. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has similarly played a crucial role in advancing research in deep learning and natural language processing.
Unlike the west, where companies like Google and Meta promote open-source models for strategic business gains, China sees them as a means of national technological self-sufficiency. To this end, the National AI Team, composed of 23 leading private enterprises, has developed the National AI Open Innovation Platform, which provides open access to AI datasets, toolkits, libraries and other computing resources.
DeepSeek is a prime example of China’s AI strategy in action. The company’s rise embodies the government’s push for open-source collaboration while remaining deeply embedded within a state-guided AI ecosystem. Chinese developers have long been major contributors to open-source platforms, ranking as the second-largest group on GitHub by 2021.
Founded by Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng in 2023, DeepSeek has positioned itself as an AI leader while benefiting from China’s state-driven AI ecosystem. Liang, who also established the hedge fund High-Flyer, has maintained full ownership of DeepSeek and avoided external venture capital funding.
Though there is no direct evidence of government financial backing, DeepSeek has reaped the rewards of China’s AI talent pipeline, state-sponsored education programs, and research funding. Liang has engaged with top government officials including China’s premier, Li Qiang, reflecting the company’s strategic importance to the country’s broader AI ambitions.
In this way, DeepSeek perfectly encapsulates “AI with Chinese characteristics” – a fusion of state guidance, private-sector ingenuity, and open-source collaboration, all carefully managed to serve the country’s long-term technological and geopolitical objectives.
Recognising the strategic value of open-source innovation, the government has actively promoted domestic open-source code platforms like Gitee to foster self-reliance and insulate China’s AI ecosystem from external disruptions. However, this also exposes the limits of China’s open-source ambitions. The government pushes collaboration, but only within a tightly controlled system where state-backed firms and tech giants call the shots.
Reports of censorship on Gitee reveal how Beijing carefully manages innovation, ensuring AI advances stay in line with national priorities. Independent developers can contribute, but the real power remains concentrated in companies that operate within the government’s strategic framework.
The conflicted reactions of US big tech
DeepSeek’s emergence has sparked intense debate across the AI industry, drawing a range of reactions from leading Silicon Valley executives, policymakers and researchers. While some view it as an expected evolution of open-source AI, others see it as a direct challenge to western AI leadership.
Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, emphasised its technical efficiency. “It’s super-impressive in terms of both how they have really effectively done an open-source model that does this inference-time compute, and is super-compute efficient,” Nadella told CNBC. “We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously”.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a prominent advisor to Trump, was similarly effusive. “DeepSeek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen – and as open source, a profound gift to the world,” he wrote on X.
For Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, DeepSeek is less about China’s AI capabilities and more about the broader power of open-source innovation. He argued that the situation should be read not as China’s AI surpassing the US, but rather as open-source models surpassing proprietary ones. “DeepSeek has profited from open research and open source (e.g. PyTorch and Llama from Meta),” he wrote on Threads. “They came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people’s work. Because their work is published and open source, everyone can profit from it. That is the power of open research and open source.”
Not all responses were so measured. Alexander Wang, CEO of Scale AI – a US firm specialising in AI data labelling and model training – framed DeepSeek as a competitive threat that demands an aggressive response. He wrote on X: “DeepSeek is a wake-up call for America, but it doesn’t change the strategy: USA must out-innovate & race faster, as we have done in the entire history of AI. Tighten export controls on chips so that we can maintain future leads. Every major breakthrough in AI has been American.”
Elon Musk added fuel to speculation about DeepSeek’s hardware access when he responded with a simple “obviously” to Wang’s earlier claims on CNBC that DeepSeek had secretly acquired 50,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, despite US export restrictions.
Beyond the tech world, US policymakers have taken a more adversarial stance. House speaker Mike Johnson accused China of leveraging DeepSeek to erode American AI leadership. “They abuse the system, they steal our intellectual property. They’re now trying to get a leg up on us in AI.”
For his part, Trump took a more pragmatic view, seeing DeepSeek’s efficiency as a validation of cost-cutting approaches. “I view that as a positive, as an asset … You won’t be spending as much, and you’ll get the same result, hopefully.”
The rise of DeepSeek may have helped jolt the Trump administration into action, leading to sweeping policy shifts aimed at securing US dominance in AI. In his first week back in the White House, the US president announced a series of aggressive measures, including massive federal investments in AI research, closer partnerships between the government and private tech firms, and the rollback of regulations seen as slowing US innovation.
The administration’s framing of AI as a critical national interest reflects a broader urgency sparked by China’s rapid advancements, particularly DeepSeek’s ability to produce cutting-edge models at a fraction of the cost traditionally associated with AI development. But this response is not just about national competitiveness – it is also deeply entangled with private industry.
Musk’s growing closeness to Trump, for example, can be viewed as a calculated move to protect his own dominance at home and abroad. By aligning with the administration, Musk ensures that US policy tilts in favour of his AI ventures, securing access to government backing, computing power, and regulatory control over AI exports.
At the same time, Musk’s public criticism of Trump’s US$500 billion AI infrastructure plan – claiming the companies involved lack the necessary funding – was as much a warning as a dismissal, signalling his intent to shape policy in a way that benefits his empire while keeping potential challengers at bay.
Not unrelated, Musk and a group of investors have just launched a US$97.4 billion (£78.7bn) bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit arm, a move that escalates his feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and seeks to strengthen his grip on the AI industry. Altman has dismissed the bid as a “desperate power grab”, insisting that OpenAI will not be swayed by Musk’s attempts to reclaim control. The spat reflects how DeepSeek’s emergence has thrown US tech giants into what could be all-out war, fuelling bitter corporate rivalries and reshaping the fight for AI dominance.
And while the US and China escalate their AI competition, other global leaders are pushing for a coordinated response. The Paris AI Action Summit, held on February 10 and 11, has become a focal point for efforts to prevent AI from descending into an uncontrolled power struggle. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, warned delegates that without international oversight, AI risks becoming “the wild west”, where unchecked technological development creates instability rather than progress.
But at the end of the two-day summit, the UK and US refused to sign an international commitment to “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy … making AI sustainable for people and the planet”. China was among the 61 countries to sign this declaration.
Concerns have also been raised at the summit about how AI-powered surveillance and control are enabling authoritarian regimes to strengthen repression and reshape the citizen-state relationship. This highlights the fast-growing global industry of digital repression, driven by an emerging “authoritarian-financial complex” that may exacerbate China’s strategic advancement in AI.
Equally, DeepSeek’s cost-effective AI solutions have created an opening for European firms to challenge the traditional AI hierarchy. As AI development shifts from being solely about compute power to strategic efficiency and accessibility, European firms now have an opportunity to compete more aggressively against their US and Chinese counterparts.
Whether this marks a true rebalancing of the AI landscape remains to be seen. But DeepSeek’s emergence has certainly upended traditional assumptions about who will lead the next wave of AI innovation – and how global powers will respond to it.
End of the ‘Silicon Valley effect’?
DeepSeek’s emergence has forced US tech leaders to confront an uncomfortable reality: they underestimated China’s AI capabilities. Confident in their perceived lead, companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI prioritised incremental improvements over anticipating disruptive competition, leaving them vulnerable to a rapidly evolving global AI landscape.
In response, the US tech giants are now scrambling to defend their dominance, pledging over US$400 billion in AI investment. DeepSeek’s rise, fuelled by open-source collaboration, has reignited fierce debates over innovation versus security, while its energy-efficient model has intensified scrutiny on AI’s sustainability.
Yet Silicon Valley continues to cling to what many view as outdated economic theories such as the Jevons paradox to downplay China’s AI surge, insisting that greater efficiency will only fuel demand for computing power and reinforce their dominance. Companies like Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft remain fixated on scaling computational power, betting that expensive hardware will secure their lead. But this assumption blinds them to a shifting reality.
DeepSeek’s rise as the potential “Walmart of AI” is shaking Silicon Valley’s foundation, proving that high-quality AI models can be built at a fraction of the cost. By prioritising efficiency over brute-force computing power, DeepSeek is challenging the US tech industry’s reliance on expensive hardware like Nvidia’s high-end chips.
This shift has already rattled markets, driving down the stock prices of major US firms and forcing a reassessment of AI dominance. Nvidia, whose business depends on supplying high-performance processors, appears particularly vulnerable as DeepSeek’s cost-effective approach threatens to reduce demand for premium chips.
Video: CBS News.
The growing divide between the US and China in AI, however, is more than just competition – it’s a clash of governance models. While US firms remain fixated on protecting market dominance, China is accelerating AI innovation with a model that is proving more adaptable to global competition.
If Silicon Valley resists structural change, it risks falling further behind. We may witness the unravelling of the “Silicon Valley effect”, through which tech giants have long manipulated AI regulations to entrench their dominance. For years, Google, Meta,and OpenAI shaped policies that favoured proprietary models and costly infrastructure, ensuring AI development remained under their control.
More than a policy-driven rise, China’s AI surge reflects a fundamentally different innovation model – fast, collaborative and market-driven – while Silicon Valley holds on to expensive infrastructure and rigid proprietary control. If US firms refuse to adapt, they risk losing the future of AI to a more agile and cost-efficient competitor.
A new era of geotechnopolitics
But China is not just disrupting Silicon Valley. It is expanding “geotechnopolitics”, where AI is a battleground for global power. With AI projected to add US$15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, China and the US are racing to control the technology that will define economic, military and political dominance.
DeepSeek’s advancement has raised national security concerns in the US. Trump’s government is considering stricter export controls on AI-related technologies to prevent them from bolstering China’s military and intelligence capabilities.
As AI-driven defence systems, intelligence operations and cyber warfare redefine national security, governments must confront a new reality: AI leadership is not just about technological superiority, but about who controls the intelligence that will shape the next era of global power.
China’s AI ambitions extend beyond technology, driving a broader strategy for economic and geopolitical dominance. But with over 50 state-backed companies developing large-scale AI models, its rapid expansion faces growing challenges, including soaring energy demands and US semiconductor restrictions.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, remains resolute, stating: “Whoever can grasp the opportunities of new economic development such as big data and artificial intelligence will have the pulse of our times.” He sees AI driving “new quality productivity” and modernising China’s manufacturing base, calling its “head goose effect” a catalyst for broader innovation.
To counter western containment, China has embraced a “guerrilla” economic strategy, bypassing restrictions through alternative trade networks, deepening ties with the global south, and exploiting weaknesses in global supply chains. Instead of direct confrontation, this decentralised approach uses economic coercion to weaken adversaries while securing China’s own industrial base.
Video: AP.
China is also leveraging open-source AI as an ideological tool, presenting its model as more collaborative and accessible than western alternatives. This narrative strengthens its global influence, aligning with nations seeking alternatives to western digital control. While strict state oversight remains, China’s embrace of open-source AI reinforces its claim to a future where innovation is driven not by corporate interests but through shared collaboration and global cooperation.
But while DeepSeek claims to be open access, its secrecy tells a different story. Key details on training data and fine-tuning remain hidden, and its compliance with China’s AI laws has sparked global scrutiny. Italy has banned the platform over data-transfer risks, while Belgium and Ireland launched privacy probes.
Under Chinese regulations, DeepSeek’s outputs must align with state-approved narratives, clashing with the EU’s AI Act, which demands transparency and protects political speech. Such “controlled openness” raises many red flags, casting doubt on China’s place in markets that value data security and free expression.
Many western commentators are seizing on reports of Chinese AI censorship to frame other models as freer and more politically open. The revelation that a leading Chinese chatbot actively modifies or censors responses in real time has fuelled a broader narrative that western AI operates without such restrictions, reinforcing the idea that democratic systems produce more transparent and unbiased technology. This framing serves to bolster the argument that free societies will ultimately lead the global AI race.
But at its heart, the “AI arms race” is driven by technological dominance. The US, China, and the EU are charting different paths, weighing security risks against the need for global collaboration. How this competition is framed will shape policy: lock AI behind restrictions, or push for open innovation.
DeepSeek, for all its transformational qualities, continues to exemplify a model of AI where innovation prioritises scale, speed and efficiency over societal impact. This drive to optimise computation and expand capabilities overshadows the need to design AI as a truly public good. In doing so, it eclipses this technology’s genuine potential to transform governance, public services and social institutions in ways that prioritise collective wellbeing, equity and sustainability over corporate and state control.
A truly global AI framework requires more than political or technological openness. It demands structured cooperation that prioritises shared governance, equitable access, and responsible development. Following a workshop in Shanghai hosted by the Chinese government last September, the UN’s general secretary, António Guterres, outlined his vision for AI beyond corporate or state control: “We must seize this historic opportunity to lay the foundations for inclusive governance of AI – for the benefit of all humanity. As we build AI capacity, we must also develop shared knowledge and digital public goods.”
Both the west and China frame their AI ambitions through competing notions of “openness” – each aligning with their strategic interests and reinforcing existing power structures.
Western tech giants claim AI drives democratisation, yet they often dominate digital infrastructure in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, exporting models based on “corporate imperialism” that extract value while disregarding local needs. China, by contrast, positions itself as a technological partner for the rest of the global south; however, its AI remains tightly controlled, reinforcing state ideology.
China’s proclaimed view on international AI collaboration emphasises that AI should not be “a game of rich countries”“, as President Xi stated during the 2024 G20 summit. By advocating for inclusive global AI development, China positions itself as a leader in shaping international AI governance, especially via initiatives like the UN AI resolution and its AI capacity-building action plan. These efforts help promote a more balanced technological landscape while allowing China to strengthen its influence in global AI standards and frameworks.
However, beneath all these narratives, both China and the US share a strategy of AI expansion that relies on exploited human labour, from data annotation to moderation, exposing a system driven less by innovation than by economic and political control.
Seeing AI as a connected race for influence highlights the need for ethical deployment, cross-border cooperation, and a balance between security and progress. And this is where China may face its greatest challenge – balancing the power of open-source innovation with the constraints of a tightly controlled, authoritarian system that thrives on restriction, rather than openness.
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Peter Bloom 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 Ivo Vlaev, Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
Sir Keir Starmer has become the first sitting UK prime minister to publicly take an HIV test to reduce stigma around Aids and encourage more people to get tested.
There are historical parallels. In 1956, when Elvis Presley, at the height of his fame, was filmed receiving his polio vaccine on US television.
Do these high-profile gestures really change attitudes and behaviour, or are they just headline-grabbing stunts?
A closer look at the behavioural science behind celebrity endorsements suggests that, under the right conditions, public demonstrations by famous figures can indeed shift social norms, reduce stigma and influence health outcomes. However, the effects depend a lot on the credibility of the endorser, the authenticity of the act and the presence of sustained, follow-up campaigns.
Elvis Presley’s polio jab is one of the most iconic examples of celebrity-led health campaigns. But many other well-known figures have encouraged the public to adopt protective health measures, from actors promoting annual flu jabs to footballers advocating organ donation drives.
The premise is that a celebrity’s endorsement can normalise certain behaviour by tapping into the principles of “social learning theory”, particularly observational learning. That is, when we see someone we admire or trust do something, we are more likely to follow suit.
In the 1950s, polio was a serious threat, capable of causing paralysis or death. After witnessing Elvis roll up his sleeve on national television, many teenagers – previously sceptical or apathetic – became far more willing to accept the polio vaccine. That event is now hailed as a masterclass in leveraging popular culture to address a public health crisis.
A masterclass in leveraging popular culture.
A cornerstone of behavioural science is the recognition that who delivers a message can be as important as – or sometimes more important than – what the message contains. The so-called “messenger effect” highlights how we are often more persuaded by people we perceive to be credible, relatable or high status.
In the case of Elvis, he was already idolised by millions. He was the perfect conduit to promote vaccination among teenagers who might otherwise dismiss appeals from older authority figures.
Starmer occupies a different kind of influence. Supporters of the Labour party may see him as a trustworthy figure, while others could be sceptical of a politician’s motives. This underscores a key aspect of the messenger effect: if a large segment of the target audience views the figure as partisan or self-serving, the endorsement can backfire or simply fail to register.
Another powerful effect identified in behavioural science is social norms – our shared understandings of what is typical or appropriate – which strongly influence whether we take certain actions.
Stigma around HIV remains a major barrier to testing and treatment. Even though medical advances have changed the landscape of HIV/Aids care, many people still fear the societal consequences of a positive diagnosis. According to the UK Health Security Agency, around 5,000 people in the UK are unaware they are living with HIV, partly because they hesitate to test in the first place.
By publicly taking an HIV test, Starmer aimed to shift perceptions and normalise testing. In terms of social identity theory, seeing a prominent figure within the national community – especially one involved in shaping policies – undergo testing can communicate that “people like us” view HIV testing as a routine, responsible health measure. This may be particularly powerful for people who identify politically with Starmer or who respect his leadership position.
Despite the potential of celebrity or high-profile endorsements, behavioural science also points to authenticity as a vital ingredient. Audiences are more likely to change their behaviour if they believe the celebrity genuinely cares about the issue rather than simply seeking publicity. If endorsements are perceived as insincere or politically opportunistic, their effect can be muted or even counterproductive.
In Elvis’s case, he was known for engaging with young fans and had a track record of public good works, which helped bolster the sense that his polio vaccination was done for more than just a publicity boost.
For Starmer, sustaining the momentum beyond a single test – through continued advocacy, support of free testing programmes, and visibility in HIV-awareness campaigns – could reinforce the perception of a real commitment rather than a fleeting photo opportunity.
Nudges
Behavioural scientists also often talk about “nudges” – small interventions that change people’s choices without forbidding options or significantly changing incentives. A celebrity endorsement can serve as a nudge by making a desirable health behaviour (like getting tested) more top-of-mind or socially acceptable.
However, historically, Elvis’s vaccination was not a standalone act. It was part of a broader public health strategy involving schools, local campaigns and continued outreach. Those elements ensured that once people were motivated to get the polio jab, they could do so easily.
For HIV testing, the same principle applies: visible leadership from Starmer may spark initial interest, but practical measures – such as pop-up testing centres, free home-test kits and confidential testing support – are vital to maintain engagement.
Is Keir Starmer the new Elvis? In reality, the two scenarios differ in time and context. A 21st-century political leader raising awareness about HIV testing in the UK operates within a more complex media landscape than a 1950s rock ’n’ roll icon on American primetime television. Yet, there is a parallel: both used their public status to tackle a widespread health concern, hoping to overcome stigma and promote an important preventative measure.
Ultimately, celebrity moments can open the door, but only a sustained, evidence-based strategy will keep it open – and encourage people to walk through.
Anyone in England can order a free and confidential HIV test from www.freetesting.hiv to do the test at home.
Ivo Vlaev 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.
Grown in Ecuador (Équateur en français), sold in Paris. Robert Crum / shutterstock
As you read this, planes full of roses are heading from east Africa and South America to almost every corner of the world. If you buy someone a rose this Valentine’s Day, it may be in the air right now or perhaps in a refrigerated warehouse in the Netherlands.
A huge logistical operation ensures those flowers are timed to be perfectly in bloom on the 14th. From flower farm to bouquet can take just a few days. In all, hundreds of millions of roses will be shipped internationally this week, and many will die before they can be sold.
Can all this flying be justified?
You’re reading the Imagine newsletter – a weekly synthesis of academic insight on solutions to climate change, brought to you by The Conversation. I’m Will de Freitas, energy and environment editor, covering for my colleague Jack Marley who is lovesick. This week, we’re looking at flowers.
Many people don’t realise just how far a Valentine’s rose has probably travelled. Though roses can be grown in the UK (and some species are native), most of them won’t flower for at least another few months.
Jill Timms and David Bek, academics at the University of Coventry who have researched the global flower trade point out: “This sort of localised growing does not satisfy the demand for volume, variety and year-round supply, or indeed guarantee sustainability in terms of energy, pesticide use and so on.”
This means most roses are imported from countries with more land, more sunshine, and a cheaper workforce. Major growers include Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya and Ethiopia. The Netherlands is actually the biggest exporter of roses, partly due to its own production in greenhouses but mostly thanks to its position as a crucial hub for the global trade. Flowers sent to the UK from the Netherlands were probably grown elsewhere.
To ensure they stay fresh, those flowers are kept cool as they’re transported in a series of refrigerated lorries, planes or boats, while some are sprayed with chemicals to freeze them.
“Geography matters,” say Timms and Bek. “Some flowers travel by sea, some cargo plane and others in the hold of passenger jets, all with very different carbon footprints.”
Figuring out a flower’s carbon footprint is not straightforward. Jennifer Lavers and Fiona Kerslake from the University of Tasmania compared cut flowers grown in heated or refrigerated greenhouses in the Netherlands with those grown in Kenya.
“Maintaining the controlled environmental conditions inside these [Dutch] buildings requires artificial light, heat and cooling, so each rose grown in The Netherlands contributes an average of around 2.91kg of CO₂ to the atmosphere.”
“In contrast”, they write, “a single rose grown on a farm in Kenya contributes only 0.5kg. This is largely because Kenyan hot houses do not use artificial heating or lighting, and most farm workers walk or cycle to work. As a result, flowers grown in tropical regions are sometimes considered low-carbon (of course, this doesn’t always factor in international transport).”
Paul D. Larson of the University of Manitoba points out that, while local production would ground some of the international flower flights, “growing flowers in greenhouses can use as much energy as shipping them [to North America] from Colombia by air freight”.
Larson, a professor of supply chain management, does highlight one major issue with “low carbon” flowers in the global south, however:
“Since flowers are not classified as edible, they are often exempt from pesticide regulations. Thus, many flower production workers in Ecuador and Colombia have suffered from respiratory problems, rashes and eye infections caused by exposure to toxic chemicals in fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides.”
The flower trade in Ecuador and Colombia was actually engineered a few decades ago to try and stem the flow of cocaine into the US, says Jay L. Zagorsky, an associate professor at Boston University’s business school.
“One part of the strategy was to convince farmers in Colombia to stop growing coca leaves – a traditional Andean plant that provides the raw ingredient for making cocaine – by giving them preferential access to US markets if they grew something else.”
Whether this policy helped stop drug production is unclear, says Zagorsky, but American domestic rose growing has collapsed and “many businesses in Colombia and Ecuador started growing and shipping flowers north”.
No one expects you to know exactly how a flower was grown, what conditions were like for workers, or to conduct a full “life cycle assessment” of their carbon footprint. But what can you do to help this Valentine’s Day?
Timms and Bek, the flower trade experts at Coventry University, wrote about five ways to ensure your flowers are ethical. They contrast flowers grown in the Netherlands and Kenya and say that “your priorities need to guide your purchase: environmental issues include carbon footprint, chemical use, ecological degradation and water use; social issues include health and safety standards, gender discrimination, precarious employment and land rights.”
While the first world war and the Spanish civil war had already drawn children in Europe and beyond into the orbit of conflict, the second world war marked a pivotal period in how young people have experienced the horrors of war.
During the 1940s, children faced unprecedented mobilisation and violence. From bombings and massacres to forced displacement and genocide, the impact was staggering. Millions of children were directly affected by these atrocities, while countless others endured the indirect consequences: shortages, family separations and grief.
In the aftermath of the war, childhood experts such as pediatricians, psychologists and nutritionists, as well as political leaders and humanitarian workers, feared for this potentially “lost generation”. With recognition of the vulnerability of children as a social group, there was a transnational push to implement protective measures. This shared awareness led to milestones such as the establishment of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in December 1946 and, later, the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
The period from 1939 to 1949 not only highlighted the need to protect children worldwide, but also underscored their importance in building a peaceful future. As detailed in La Seconde Guerre mondiale des enfants (The second world war of children), published in September 2024 by Presses Universitaires de France, children embodied hope for postwar nations. They were seen not only as victims of war but also as active participants in shaping a peaceful world.
Schools as foundations of reconstruction
After 1945, schools became central to Europe’s social reconstruction. Seen as spaces of socialisation that included nearly all children, schools were viewed as critical for rebuilding society. Some measures mirrored those introduced after the first world war. Children, particularly those aged 6 to 14 (the typical age for compulsory education in Europe), were tasked with preserving the memory of fallen soldiers, resistance fighters and civilian victims. They cleaned and adorned graves, attended public ceremonies and paid homage to the dead.
However, postwar education went further. In some countries, particularly those that formerly had authoritarian or totalitarian regimes such as Italy and Germany, school curricula underwent significant transformation. Lessons on democratic governance and peaceful figures were either reinforced or reintroduced, and history classes began emphasising cultural, political and economic exchanges between nations. These reforms aimed to counteract the nationalist ideologies that had fuelled war and division.
Unlike the post-WWI era, the years after 1945 saw efforts to strengthen ties between nations by fostering connections among their youngest citizens. Programs promoting international school exchanges flourished. French students corresponded with Canadian peers, British children sent books to Germans and Swedish students traveled to Belgium.
Germany hosted one of the most ambitious programs: the US-led “World Friendship Among Children Program”. This initiative included pen-pal projects, student travel and even the symbolic adoption of war orphans by classrooms. The program also established the “World Friendship Council of the Future”, where young people proposed initiatives for international dialogue, mimicking the operations of newly formed organisations such as the United Nations, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the World Health Organization.
It was also in Germany that Houses of America, or Youth Centres, were established. While the goal was to offer children sports and cultural activities, they were primarily seen by Americans as tools of soft power and political instruments to (re)educate youth about the principles of democracy.
Active pedagogy for European education
Indeed, after 1945, educating children for peace also meant educating them about democracy. Across Western Europe, teaching methods inspired by progressive education movements – championed by figures such as Maria Montessori, Ovide Decroly and John Dewey – became widespread.
For educational leaders, merely teaching democratic principles wasn’t enough: children needed to practice them. Classrooms became miniature societies where students elected class representatives, voted on school matters and debated everyday and political issues. This active engagement aimed to cultivate civic responsibility and critical thinking.
Some postwar experiments went further. Communities of children or “children’s republics” emerged across Europe to provide homes for children who had lost their homes and parents. While their primary mission was humanitarian, these communities were also intended to form the foundations of new, peaceful societies. Self-governance was central to their goal of preparation for active citizenship. In the Repubblica dei Ragazzi (boys’ republic) in Santa Marinella, near Rome, children ran their own court, deliberative assembly and union.
Ideological differences
While schools are indeed the cornerstone of global peacebuilding, debates about fostering peace go beyond the classroom to encompass all aspects of children’s lives. This includes the private sphere, as evidenced by numerous transnational legislative efforts to ban violent comic books and war-themed toys, which are accused of inciting aggression in children and thus threatening a peaceful future.
This surge of post-WWII initiatives underscores the fact that educating for peace and democracy was a European – if not global – project. However, its interpretation varied depending on country and region. In France, West Germany and Italy, the project was rooted in liberal ideals; in Eastern Europe, it reflected a different understanding of democracy.
In the West, the focus was on the individual, with boys and girls assigned traditional, gendered roles: girls were encouraged to become future mothers, while boys were groomed to be workers contributing to economic growth. In contrast, the Eastern model emphasised collective values within a socialist framework, promoting more egalitarian relationships between boys and girls, albeit in service of political objectives.
Regardless of ideological differences, these post-1945 initiatives left a lasting legacy. Their influence can still be seen today in school activities such as student elections and class trips, which continue to echo the democratic ideals of that era.
Camille Mahé ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jennifer Clapp, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability, and Member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, University of Waterloo
History has shown us again and again that, so long as inequality goes unchecked, no amount of technology can ensure people are well fed.
Today, the world produces more food per person than ever before. Yet hunger and malnutrition persist in every corner of the globe — even, and increasingly, in some of its wealthiest countries.
The major drivers of food insecurity are well known: conflict, poverty, inequality, economic shocks and escalating climate change. In other words, the causes of hunger are fundamentally political and economic.
The urgency of the hunger crisis has prompted 150 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates to call for “moonshot” technological and agricultural innovations to boost food production, meaning monumental and lofty efforts. However, they largely ignored hunger’s root causes — and the need to confront powerful entities and make courageous political choices.
Food is misallocated
To focus almost exclusively on promoting agricultural technologies to ramp up food production would be to repeat the mistakes of the past.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s-70s brought impressive advances in crop yields, though at considerable environmental cost. It failed to eliminate hunger, because it didn’t address inequality. Take Iowa, for example — home to some of the most industrialized food production on the planet. Amid its high-tech corn and soy farms, 11 per cent of the state’s population, and one in six of its children, struggle to access food.
Even though the world already produces more than enough food to feed everyone, it’s woefully misallocated. Selling food to poor people at affordable prices simply isn’t as profitable for giant food corporations.
They make far more by exporting it for animal feed, blending it into biofuels for cars or turning it into industrial products and ultra-processed foods. To make matters worse, a third of all food is simply wasted.
Meanwhile, as the laureates remind us, more than 700 million people — nine per cent of the world’s population — remain chronically undernourished. A staggering 2.3 billion people — more than one in four — cannot access an adequate diet.
Women queue up to receive food distributed by local volunteers at a camp in Somalia in May 2019. Conflicts hinder the effective delivery of humanitarian aid during food security crisis. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)
Confronting inequity
Measures to address world hunger must start with its known causes and proven policies. Brazil’s Without Hunger program, for example, has seen dramatic 85 per cent reduction in severe hunger in just 18 months through financial assistance, school food programs and minimum wage policies.
Our politicians must confront and reverse gross inequities in wealth, power and access to land. Hunger disproportionately affects the poorest and most marginalized people, not because food is scarce, but because people can’t afford it or lack the resources to produce it for themselves. Redistribution policies aren’t optional, they’re essential.
Governments must put a stop to the use of hunger as a weapon of war. The worst hunger hotspots are conflict zones, as seen in Gaza and Sudan, where violence drives famine. Too many governments have looked the other way on starvation tactics — promoting emergency aid to pick up the pieces instead of taking action to end the conflicts driving hunger.
Governments must also break the stranglehold of inequitable trade rules and export patterns that trap the poorest regions in dependency on food imports, leaving them vulnerable to shocks.
Instead, supporting local and territorial markets is critical in helping build resilience to economic and supply chain disruptions. These markets provide livelihoods and help ensure diverse, nutritious foods reach those who need them.
Mitigating and adapting to climate change requires massive investments in transformative approaches that promote resilience and sustainability in food systems.
Agroecology — a farming system that applies ecological principles to ensure sustainability and promotes social equity in food systems — is a key solution, proven to sequester carbon, build resilience to climate shocks and reduce dependence on expensive and environmentally damaging synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
More research should explore agroecology’s full potential. And we must adopt plant-rich, local and seasonal diets, ramp up measures to tackle food waste and reconsider using food crops for biofuels.
This means pushing back against Big Meat and biofuel lobbies, while investing in climate-resilient food systems.
Bold political action needed
This is not to say that technology has no role — all hands need to be on deck. But the innovations most worth pursuing are those that genuinely support more equitable and sustainable food systems, and not corporate profits. Unless scientific efforts are matched by policies that confront power and prioritize equity over profit, then hunger is likely to here to stay.
The solutions to hunger are neither new nor beyond reach. What’s missing is the political will to address its root causes.
This message is shared by my colleagues with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, IPES-Food, whose work covers a range of expertise and experience. Hunger persists because we allow injustice to endure. If we are serious about ending it, we need bold political action, not just scientific breakthroughs.
Jennifer Clapp receives funding from the Canada Research Chairs program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).
