New research has found that while Australians generally support strong punishments, people living in the bush are significantly more likely than city dwellers to want to punish more harshly those who break the law.
It means Australians living in rural and regional areas are more likely to support tougher penalties for crime than those in the cities.
However, it’s not for the reasons you might expect.
So, what drives this divide?
In short: fear of crime and a lack of confidence in the justice system.
Our research, published today in the Journal of Rural Studies, surveyed a representative sample of Australians to better understand their views on punishment and what shaped their views.
We found city residents with tough attitudes toward crime tend to focus on the individual and personal blame, thinking offenders commit crime due to internal attributes (such as having “a poor moral compass”). They tended to see lawbreakers as lacking the capacity to redeem themselves.
But in rural areas, people are more likely to focus on what’s happening around them. Specifically, we found support for tougher penalties for crime was related to wider concerns about rising crime rates and a general lack of confidence in the criminal justice system.
Consider the role of ‘rurality’
To understand these differences, we thought about how living in rural areas may shape punitive attitudes.
Contrary to popular belief, crimes occur at higher rates in many rural communities than in some urban areas.
Crime may also be more visible and more confronting because towns are smaller. Personal relationships are denser, meaning people often know the victims or the offenders.
This closeness creates a stronger emotional response and a heightened sense of risk at the local level – even if the actual chances of being victimised are statistically low.
There’s also the issue of access to the criminal justice system. Courts may sit infrequently, meaning it can take a long time to get a case heard in court. In some cases, victims and offenders are forced to share courtroom space due to limited facilities.
Police stations might not be staffed around the clock.
Add to this long wait times for justice, and it’s no wonder rural Australians may feel the system isn’t working for them.
The power of perception
It’s important to understand perception doesn’t always match reality.
Urban areas often have more total crime, but rural areas may have higher rates of certain offences, especially violent ones.
But what really matters in shaping public opinion is not necessarily the total numbers, but how close, immediate and personal crime feels.
Other research has found people who feel crime is psychologically “close” – meaning, that’s likely to happen to them or someone they know – are much more worried about it.
That worry can translate into calls for tougher sentencing, stricter laws, and less tolerance for rehabilitation.
This fear is made worse by a lack of confidence in the justice system. Many rural residents feel the system is too slow, too distant, or simply doesn’t understand local issues.
When people feel justice won’t be done, they’re more likely to demand punishment that feels immediate and severe.
Why it matters
These findings are more than just a snapshot of attitudes; they have real implications for public policy.
Politicians often draw on public opinion when shaping criminal justice policies.
If rural voters are more likely to support tough-on-crime platforms, that can influence laws that affect the whole country.
But one-size-fits-all solutions won’t work.
The factors shaping crime perceptions in Brisbane or Sydney are very different from those in Longreach or Wagga Wagga.
To build trust and improve safety, we need justice strategies that take into account local realities, especially in rural areas.
This means investing in better access to police and courts, improving communication between justice systems and rural communities, and helping the public understand what crime is really happening and what’s not.
Australians in rural areas aren’t more punitive because they’re harsher people. Our research shows they are more worried, feel less supported, and have less confidence in the system designed to protect them.
Understanding this difference is key to building smarter, fairer justice policies because when people feel seen, heard, and safe, they’re less likely to demand punishment to solve feelings of insecurity and more likely to support holistic solutions.
What’s needed now
Rural communities need tailored strategies that improve access to justice, rebuild trust, and respond to their unique experiences of crime.
That means policymakers need to go beyond reactive, headline-driven responses.
Rural justice strategies should include mobile court services, better resourcing for regional police and victim support, and culturally appropriate services for Indigenous communities.
Community education campaigns can also help close the gap between crime perception and reality.
Importantly, involving local voices in justice reform, through consultation and community partnerships, can help rebuild trust and ensure policies reflect rural realities, not just urban assumptions.
As political debate over law and order grows, especially in rural communities, leaders must address the divide in how city and country Australians view crime and punishment.
Kyle Mulrooney is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and co-director of the Centre for Rural Criminology at the University of New England.
Caitlin Davey and Sue Watt do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Speculation is swirling around the future of the A$368 billion AUKUS agreement, following Washington’s decision to review the nuclear submarine deal to ensure it meets President Donald Trump’s “America first” agenda.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was planning to use talks with Trump at the G7 to demand the US continue to back the deal – but the meeting has been cancelled.
With the Pentagon taking another look at AUKUS, we ask five experts whether the government should rethink Australia’s own commitment to the pact.
Jennifer Parker
Expert Associate, National Security College, Australian National University
Absolutely not. Another review would consume time and capacity better spent delivering AUKUS on its tight timelines.
To understand why, we must put the decision in context.
The leaked details of the US Department of Defense review does not alter the position of any of the three AUKUS partners. Much of the commentary has missed the broader picture: Washington is undertaking its regular review of defence strategy.
It makes sense the Pentagon would also assess AUKUS – a central element of its Indo-Pacific posture.
While some have fixated on Colby’s supposed scepticism, the reality is different. In March, Colby told the US Senate Armed Services Committee the US should do everything in its power to make AUKUS work.
Why now? Because the strategy review is being accelerated under the new administration. As for the leak, it is plausible it was designed to apply pressure to Australia over its defence spending commitments.
The more important question is: what is the likely outcome? While nothing is certain, AUKUS enjoys strong bipartisan support in the US, as it does in Australia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called it a “blueprint” for cooperation, echoed by other senior officials.
Crucially, the real driver of this so-called “America First” review is what the US gets out of AUKUS. The answer is quite a lot. It secures access to Southeast and Northeast Asia from a location beyond the range of most Chinese missiles, adds a fourth maintenance site for Virginia-class submarines, and delivers an ally with an independent nuclear-powered submarine industrial base.
Beyond AUKUS, Australia has expanded its support for Marine and bomber rotations and other posture initiatives. Australia is central to US strategy in the Indo-Pacific. They need us as much as we need them. All signs point to a constructive outcome from this short, sharp review.
While AUKUS carries risks and Australia must remain clear-eyed, alarmism is unhelpful. Much of the public debate has taken that tone. Nothing fundamental has changed since the optimal pathway was announced in 2023. The risks we face now were known then.
There is no basis for an Australian review at this point. It would only distract from delivering this ambitious program. If core assumptions materially change, then a review may be warranted. But until then, such talk is a distraction.
Albert Palazzo
Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, UNSW Sydney
The AUKUS review should be welcomed by all Australians as an opportunity for the Albanese government to scrap the agreement and wean itself off US dependency.
The review is a chance for our political leaders to exercise their most important responsibility: asserting the nation’s sovereignty and equipping Australia to provide for its national security on its own.
Since AUKUS already contains clauses the US could use to cancel the pact, a termination now would benefit Australia. It would save the nation huge sums of money, and force the government to formulate a more useful and appropriate security policy.
Elbridge Colby has previously questioned the logic of “giving away” America’s “crown jewels”, namely its nuclear-powered submarines, and argued the US will need all its boats against China.
Elbridge Colby is in charge of the AUKUS review.
More alarmingly, in his book The Strategy of Denial, Colby concludes the ideal way for the US to deny China regional hegemony is to use its allies to minimise its own “risks, commitment and expense”. Additionally, he says the US needs to retain the opportunity to walk away from a China conflict if that proves to be in America’s best interest.
Colby’s track record suggests he will recommend Australia make a larger military contribution to the alliance — as his boss Pete Hegseth demanded at the Shangri-La Dialogue. This is even as the US reserves its right to desert us at a time of its own choosing, as the United Kingdom did during the second world war with the Singapore Strategy.
At one time, the existing defence policy of reliance on the US made a degree of sense. But that is no longer the case. Instead, Australia’s leaders have an opportunity to recalibrate defence policy from one of dependency to one of self-defence.
As I outline in my forthcoming book, The Big Fix, Australia should adopt the philosophy of “strategic defensive”. This is a method of waging war in which the defender only needs to prevent an aggressor from achieving its objectives.
This would eliminate the risks and enormous cost of AUKUS while securing the nation’s future. A strategic defensive approach is well within Australia’s capabilities to implement on its own.
While it would be an ironic act of dependency if the US was to save Australia from itself by either cancelling AUKUS or by making it too unpalatable to swallow, the chance to reconsider should not be missed.
AUKUS remains an affront to Australian sovereignty.
Ian Langford
Executive Director, Security & Defence PLuS and Professor, UNSW Sydney
Australia should not walk away from AUKUS in light of the Pentagon’s newly announced review. However, it should seize the moment to increase defence spending to meet short-term challenges not addressed by the submarine deal.
Despite the noise, AUKUS remains Australia’s most straightforward path to acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, deepening strategic interoperability with the United States and United Kingdom, and embedding itself in the advanced defence technology ecosystems of its closest allies.
But clinging to AUKUS without confronting the deeper risks it now exposes would be a strategic mistake. From an Australian perspective, the submarine pathway is on a slow fuse: first deliveries are not expected until the early 2030s.
Meanwhile, the risk of major power conflict in the Indo-Pacific is accelerating, with a potential flashpoint involving China and the US as early as 2027. Naval brinkmanship in the Taiwan Strait and the South and East China Seas is already routine.
Submarines that arrive too late do little to shape the strategic balance in the next five years. Canberra must therefore confront a hard truth: AUKUS may enhance Australia’s deterrence posture in the 2030s, but it does little to prepare the ADF for a near-term fight.
That fight, should it come, will demand capabilities the ADF currently lacks in sufficient quantity: long-range missiles, deployable air defence, survivable command and control, and more surface combatants.
Yet under current spending plans, Australia is trying to fund both the AUKUS build and short-term deterrence within a constrained budget. It will not work. Even after recent increases, defence spending remains around 2% of GDP. This is well below the level needed to fund both long-term deterrence and immediate readiness.
Without a step change – closer to 2.5–3% of GDP – or a major reprioritisation of big-ticket programs, the ADF faces a dangerous capability gap through the second half of this decade.
Australia should hold firm on AUKUS. The strategic upside is real, and the alliance commitments it reinforces are indispensable. But we should not pretend it is cost-free.
Unless the defence budget is significantly expanded, AUKUS risks hollowing out the rest of the Defence Force. The result would be a future submarine fleet paired with an underpowered ADF, unready to meet the threats of today.
In reaffirming AUKUS, Australia must confront the complex reality that it won’t address the threats of this decade, and should plan accordingly.
Maria Rost Rublee
Professor, International Relations Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne
Let’s be honest – Australia is not going to withdraw from AUKUS.
The United States is our most important military and diplomatic partner; in the words of the 2024 National Defence Strategy, “our alliance with the US remains fundamental to Australia’s national security”.
Unilaterally extracting ourselves from AUKUS would significantly damage our relationship with the US. Given the bipartisan and public support for the alliance within Australia, it simply won’t happen.
As we navigate the complexities of AUKUS under Trump 2.0, we should remember that as a defence industrial agreement, AUKUS creates numerous benefits for Australia. In both Pillar I (nuclear submarines) and Pillar II (advanced defence capabilities), Australia is developing deep partnerships, collaboration and even integration with both the US and the UK in shipbuilding, advanced technology, and stronger supply chains.
In addition, a rarely discussed benefit of AUKUS is the total life-cycle climate impacts, given nuclear submarines are superior to diesel alternatives. Diesel is a non-renewable energy source with significant global warming potential, while nuclear power is generally acknowledged to be low-carbon.
However, AUKUS does offer very significant risks for Australia. Flexibility is baked into the arrangement for the three partner nations – leading to the very situation we are in today. There are significant concerns Washington may not sell nuclear Virginia-class submarines to Australia in the 2030s, as agreed.
We have known for years the US is not producing enough nuclear attack submarines for its own domestic use, but we seem to have hoped this would change or the US would sell us the subs anyway.
The current US review of AUKUS makes it clear Australia needs to think seriously about other options for submarines. Without the Virginia-class, we will be without any subs at all, at least until the SSN-AUKUS submarines are delivered by the mid-2040s.
Our current ageing Collins-class subs, already beset with operational problems, will not be fit for purpose much past mid-2030. At this point, the most likely viable option is off-the-shelf conventional submarines from Japan or South Korea.
The fact is, while Australia is unlikely to withdraw from AUKUS, the US may force the issue by refusing to sell us its nuclear-powered submarines. Refusing to acknowledge this does not change the risks.
President Donald Trumps wants US allies to lift their defence spending. Rawpixel/Shutterstock
David Andrews
Senior Manager, Policy & Engagement, Australian National University
I want AUKUS to succeed. It offers a unique opportunity to substantially upgrade Australia’s maritime capabilities with access to world-leading submarine technology and a suite of advanced and emerging technologies.
However, we cannot realistically pursue “AUKUS at any cost”. There must be an upper limit to how much time, effort and resources are committed before the costs – financial, political and strategic – outweigh the potential long-term benefits.
Of course, the government must not be hasty. Any decision should wait until the completion of the US review. Likewise, AUKUS should not be abandoned merely because it is being reviewed.
Reviews are not inherently negative processes. A review after four years of a project of this size and significance is not a particularly surprising development. As seen in the UK, reviews can refocus efforts and commit greater resources, if needed.
However, it doesn’t look like that’s what the US review is setting out to do. Rather, it’s focused on ensuring AUKUS is aligned with the America First agenda. That indicates an altogether different set of considerations.
People often describe Trump as a “dealmaker” or “transactional”, but these are misleading euphemisms. This review, and recent language from senior US officials, gives the impression of a shakedown – of coercion, not partnership.
The need to “win” and extract money from alliances is antithetical to their purpose. It misunderstands their nature and the fundamental importance of trust between partners. AUKUS is not an ATM.
Past behaviour suggests no deal Trump makes will last without further demands being imposed. No amount of money is likely to be satisfactory. Even if Australia’s defence spending was lifted to 3.5% of GDP, the question would be “why isn’t it 5%?” For AUKUS, there is no such thing as an offer he cannot refuse.
I do not say this lightly, but if the outcome of this process is a series of gratuitous or untenable demands by the US, the Albanese government should strongly consider walking away from AUKUS.
The consequences would be significant, so the threshold of such a decision would need to be similarly calibrated. But no single project should be put above the integrity of our wider defence enterprise and the sovereign decision-making of our government.
David Andrews has not personally received funding from any relevant external bodies, but he has previously worked on projects funded by the Australian Departments of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Home Affairs, and Defence. David is a member of the Australian Labor Party and Australian Institute of International Affairs, and previously worked for the Australian Department of Defence.
Albert Palazzo is not a member of a political party but does occasional volunteer work for The Greens. In 2019, he retired from the Department of Defence. He was the long-serving Director of War Studies for the Australian Army.
Ian Langford is affiliated with Security & Defence PLuS, a collaboration between the University of New South Wales, Arizona State University and Kings College, London.
Maria Rost Rublee has received grant funding from the Australian Department of Defence and the US Institute of Peace. She is affiliated with Women in International Security-Australia and Women in Nuclear-Australia.
Jennifer Parker 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.
There’s a certain feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I’m waiting for an important call to come through. You know the type – maybe a call from your boss, a potential new employer or news of a loved one who’s due to give birth.
In these situations, I usually stare at my phone, willing it to ring. I make sure – over and again – it’s not on silent or “do not disturb” mode. When the screen is out of my sight, I imagine I can hear the familiar ringtone.
Then it pops up – the missed call notification. But the phone never rang. What happened?
How do mobile calls work?
When making a mobile call using 4G or 5G networks, the caller dials a number and their network operator (Telstra or OneNZ, for example) routes the request to the recipient’s device.
For this to work, both phones must be registered with an IP Multimedia Subsystem – or IMS – which automatically happens when you turn on your phone. IMS is the system that allows the combination of voice calls, messages and video communications.
Both phones must also be connected to a 4G or 5G cell phone tower. The caller’s network sends an invite to the recipient’s device, which will then start to ring.
This process is usually very fast. But as generations of cellular networks have evolved (remember 3G?), becoming faster and with greater capacity, they have also become more complex, with new potential points of failure.
From phone failures to ‘dead zones’
Mobile phones use Voice over LTE (VoLTE) for 4G networks or Voice over New Radio (VoNR) for 5G. These are technologies that enable voice calls over those two types of networks and they use the above mentioned IMS.
In some countries such as New Zealand, if either of these aren’t enabled or supported on your device (some phones have VoLTE disabled by default), it may attempt to fall back to the 3G network, which was switched off in Australia in 2024 and is currently being phased out in New Zealand.
If this fallback fails or is delayed, the recipient’s phone may not ring or may go straight to voicemail.
Another possibility is that your phone may have failed to register with the IMS network. If this happens – due to something like a software glitch, SIM issue, or network problem – a phone won’t receive the call signal and won’t ring.
Then there are handover issues. Each cell phone tower covers a particular area, and if you are moving, your call will be handed over to the tower that provides the best coverage. Sometimes your phone uses 5G for data but 4G for voice; if the handover between 5G and 4G is slow or fails, the call might not ring. If 5G is used for both data and voice, VoNR is used, which is still not widely supported and may fail.
Mobile apps introduce other potential problems. For example, on Android, aggressive battery-saving features can restrict background processes, including the phone app, preventing it from responding to incoming calls. Third-party apps such as call blockers, antivirus tools, or even messaging apps can also interfere with call notifications.
Finally, if your phone is in an area with poor reception, it may not receive the call signal in time to ring. These so-called “dead zones” are more common than telcos would like to admit. I live at the end of a long driveway in a well-covered suburb of Auckland in New Zealand. But, depending on where I am in the house, I still experience dead zones and often the WiFi-enabled phone apps will more reliably cause the phone to ring.
Battery-saving features on phones can restrict background processes, including the phone app, preventing it from responding to incoming calls. ymgerman/Shutterstock
What can I do to fix it?
If your phone frequently doesn’t ring on 4G or 5G there are a few things you can do:
make sure VolTE/VoNR is enabled in your network settings
restart your phone and toggle airplane mode to refresh network registration
check battery optimisation settings and exclude the phone app you are using
contact your carrier to confirm VoLTE/VoNR support and provisioning.
But ultimately, sometimes a call will just fail – and there’s very little an everyday person can do about it. Which yes, is annoying. But it also means you have a failsafe, expert-approved excuse for missing a call from your boss.
Jairo Gutierrez 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 Melinda Jackson, Associate Professor at Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University
If you’ve been on social media lately – perhaps scrolling in the middle of the night, when you know you shouldn’t but you just can’t sleep – you might have seen those videos promoting a get-to-sleep technique called “cognitive shuffling”.
The idea, proponents say, is to engage your mind with random ideas and images via a special formula:
pick a random word (such as “cake”)
focus on the first letter of the word (in this case, C) and list a bunch of words starting with that letter: cat, carrot, calendar and so on
visualise each word as you go along
when you feel ready, move onto the next letter (A) and repeat the process
continue with each letter of the original word (so, in this case, K and then E) until you feel ready to switch to a new word or until you drift off to sleep.
It’s popular on Instagram and TikTok, but does “cognitive shuffling” have any basis in science?
Where did this idea come from?
The cognitive shuffling technique was made famous by Canada-based researcher Luc P. Beaudoin more than a decade ago, when he published a paper about how what he called “serial diverse imagining” could help with sleep.
One of Beaudoin’s hypothetical examples involved a woman thinking of the word “blanket”, then thinking bicycle (and imagining a bicycle), buying (imagining buying shoes), banana (visualising a banana tree) and so on.
Soon, Beaudoin writes, she moves onto the letter L, thinking about her friend Larry, the word “like” (imagining her son hugging his dog). She soon transitions to the letter A, thinking of the word “Amsterdam”:
and she might very vaguely imagine the large hand of a sailor gesturing for another order of fries in an Amsterdam pub while a rancid accordion plays in the background.
a neutral or pleasant target and frequently [switch] to unrelated targets (normally every 5-15 seconds).
Don’t try to relate one word with another or find a link between the words; resist the mind’s natural tendency toward sense-making.
While the research into this technique is still in its infancy, the idea is grounded in science. That’s because we know from other research good sleepers tend to have different kinds of thoughts in bed to bad sleepers.
People with insomnia are more focused on worries, problems, or noises in the environment, and are often preoccupied with not sleeping.
Good sleepers typically have dream-like, hallucinatory, less ordered thoughts before nodding off. fran_kie/Shutterstock
Sorting the pro-somnolent wheat from the insomnolent chaff
Cognitive shuffling attempts to mimic the thinking patterns of good sleepers by simulating the dream-like and random thought patterns they generally have before drifting off to sleep.
In particular, Beaudoin’s research describes two types of sleep-related thoughts: insomnolent (or anti-sleep) and pro-somnolent (sleep-promoting) thoughts.
Insomnolent thoughts include things such as worrying, planning, rehearsing, and ruminating on perceived problems or failings.
Pro-somnolent thoughts on the other hand involve thoughts that can help you fall asleep, such as dream-like imagery or having a calm, relaxed state of mind.
Cognitive shuffling aims to distract from or interfere with insomnolent thought. It offers a calm, neutral path for your racing mind, and can reduce the stress associated with not sleeping.
Cognitive shuffling also helps tell your brain you are ready for sleep.
In fact, the process of “shuffling” between different thoughts is similar to the way your brain naturally drifts off to sleep. During the transition to sleep, brain activity slows. Your brain starts to generate disconnected images and fleeting scenes, known as hypnagogic hallucinations, without a conscious effort to make sense of them.
By mimicking these scattered, disconnected, and random thought patterns, cognitive shuffling may help you transition from wakefulness to sleep.
And the preliminary research into this is promising. Beaudoin and his team have foundserial diverse imagining helps to lower arousal before sleep, improve sleep quality and reduce the effort involved in falling asleep.
However, with only a small number of research studies, more work is needed here.
It didn’t work. Now what?
As with every new strategy, however, practise makes perfect. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see an improvement straight away; these things take time.
Stay consistent and be kind to yourself.
And what works for some won’t work for others. Different people benefit from different types of strategies depending on how they relate to and experience stress or stressful thoughts.
Other strategies to help create the right conditions for sleep include:
keeping a consistent pre-bedtime routine, so your brain can wind down
writing down worries or to-do lists earlier in the day so you don’t think about them at bedtime.
If, despite all your best efforts, night time thoughts continue to impact your sleep or overall wellbeing, consider seeking professional help from your doctor or a trained sleep specialist.
Melinda Jackson has received funding from the Medical Research Future Fund, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Aged Care Research & Industry Innovation Australia (ARIIA) and Dementia Australia. She a board member of the Australasian Sleep Association.
Eleni Kavaliotis has previously received funding from an Australian government Research Training Program (RTP) scholarship. She is a member of the Australasian Sleep Association’s Insomnia and Sleep Health Council.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melinda Jackson, Associate Professor at Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University
If you’ve been on social media lately – perhaps scrolling in the middle of the night, when you know you shouldn’t but you just can’t sleep – you might have seen those videos promoting a get-to-sleep technique called “cognitive shuffling”.
The idea, proponents say, is to engage your mind with random ideas and images via a special formula:
pick a random word (such as “cake”)
focus on the first letter of the word (in this case, C) and list a bunch of words starting with that letter: cat, carrot, calendar and so on
visualise each word as you go along
when you feel ready, move onto the next letter (A) and repeat the process
continue with each letter of the original word (so, in this case, K and then E) until you feel ready to switch to a new word or until you drift off to sleep.
It’s popular on Instagram and TikTok, but does “cognitive shuffling” have any basis in science?
Where did this idea come from?
The cognitive shuffling technique was made famous by Canada-based researcher Luc P. Beaudoin more than a decade ago, when he published a paper about how what he called “serial diverse imagining” could help with sleep.
One of Beaudoin’s hypothetical examples involved a woman thinking of the word “blanket”, then thinking bicycle (and imagining a bicycle), buying (imagining buying shoes), banana (visualising a banana tree) and so on.
Soon, Beaudoin writes, she moves onto the letter L, thinking about her friend Larry, the word “like” (imagining her son hugging his dog). She soon transitions to the letter A, thinking of the word “Amsterdam”:
and she might very vaguely imagine the large hand of a sailor gesturing for another order of fries in an Amsterdam pub while a rancid accordion plays in the background.
a neutral or pleasant target and frequently [switch] to unrelated targets (normally every 5-15 seconds).
Don’t try to relate one word with another or find a link between the words; resist the mind’s natural tendency toward sense-making.
While the research into this technique is still in its infancy, the idea is grounded in science. That’s because we know from other research good sleepers tend to have different kinds of thoughts in bed to bad sleepers.
People with insomnia are more focused on worries, problems, or noises in the environment, and are often preoccupied with not sleeping.
Good sleepers typically have dream-like, hallucinatory, less ordered thoughts before nodding off. fran_kie/Shutterstock
Sorting the pro-somnolent wheat from the insomnolent chaff
Cognitive shuffling attempts to mimic the thinking patterns of good sleepers by simulating the dream-like and random thought patterns they generally have before drifting off to sleep.
In particular, Beaudoin’s research describes two types of sleep-related thoughts: insomnolent (or anti-sleep) and pro-somnolent (sleep-promoting) thoughts.
Insomnolent thoughts include things such as worrying, planning, rehearsing, and ruminating on perceived problems or failings.
Pro-somnolent thoughts on the other hand involve thoughts that can help you fall asleep, such as dream-like imagery or having a calm, relaxed state of mind.
Cognitive shuffling aims to distract from or interfere with insomnolent thought. It offers a calm, neutral path for your racing mind, and can reduce the stress associated with not sleeping.
Cognitive shuffling also helps tell your brain you are ready for sleep.
In fact, the process of “shuffling” between different thoughts is similar to the way your brain naturally drifts off to sleep. During the transition to sleep, brain activity slows. Your brain starts to generate disconnected images and fleeting scenes, known as hypnagogic hallucinations, without a conscious effort to make sense of them.
By mimicking these scattered, disconnected, and random thought patterns, cognitive shuffling may help you transition from wakefulness to sleep.
And the preliminary research into this is promising. Beaudoin and his team have foundserial diverse imagining helps to lower arousal before sleep, improve sleep quality and reduce the effort involved in falling asleep.
However, with only a small number of research studies, more work is needed here.
It didn’t work. Now what?
As with every new strategy, however, practise makes perfect. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see an improvement straight away; these things take time.
Stay consistent and be kind to yourself.
And what works for some won’t work for others. Different people benefit from different types of strategies depending on how they relate to and experience stress or stressful thoughts.
Other strategies to help create the right conditions for sleep include:
keeping a consistent pre-bedtime routine, so your brain can wind down
writing down worries or to-do lists earlier in the day so you don’t think about them at bedtime.
If, despite all your best efforts, night time thoughts continue to impact your sleep or overall wellbeing, consider seeking professional help from your doctor or a trained sleep specialist.
Melinda Jackson has received funding from the Medical Research Future Fund, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Aged Care Research & Industry Innovation Australia (ARIIA) and Dementia Australia. She a board member of the Australasian Sleep Association.
Eleni Kavaliotis has previously received funding from an Australian government Research Training Program (RTP) scholarship. She is a member of the Australasian Sleep Association’s Insomnia and Sleep Health Council.
As consumption of traditional news continues to fall, audiences are turning to social media personalities and influencers for their information. These figures are increasingly shaping public debates.
But Australian news audiences are sceptical. More Australians believe social media influencers are a major misinformation threat than other sources, according to new research.
The Digital News Report: Australia 2025, released today, also reveals general news avoidance remains high, with 69% of people saying they try not to engage with it. This is particularly the case among women, young people and those in regional areas.
So if people don’t want to engage with traditional news, but are suspicious of influencers, how can we ensure they get reliable information when they need it? There are some solutions.
Suspicious of influencers
The Digital News Report: Australia is part of a global annual survey of digital news consumption in 48 countries, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
The survey was conducted by YouGov in January and February 2025. The data are weighted for age, gender and region. Education and political quotas were also applied.
For the 11th iteration of this study in Australia, we surveyed 2,006 online Australian adults. We asked people about sources and platforms they believe to be major misinformation threats.
More than half of participants said online influencers/personalities are the major risk (57%), followed by activists (51%), foreign governments (49%), Australian political actors (48%), and the news media (43%).
This is in stark contrast to the United States, where national politicians are seen as posing the biggest threat of misleading information (57%) and is ten percentage points higher than the global average of 42 countries in the survey (47%).
Navigating truth online
The report also finds Australians continue to be the most concerned about what is real or fake online, with 74% saying they are worried about it.
This is especially true on social media, where Australians see Facebook (59%) and TikTok (57%) as the two platforms that are the biggest threat of spreading misinformation.
Given the proportion of people using social media as their main source of news has increased (26%, up eight percentage points since 2016) and TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform for news (14%, up 13 percentage points since 2020), concern about misinformation will likely remain an issue in Australia.
This problem is not necessarily with the platform itself, but who audiences pay attention to when they are on it.
On TikTok, Australians are more likely to turn to information shared by influencers, particularly younger audiences.
Less or more intervention?
Deciding what is true or fake online is a complex issue. This was highlighted during the political debate over the federal government’s controversial Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, which was eventually withdrawn late last year.
Much hinged on questions around who gets to decide what the truth is, and who might be responsible for tackling it. Is it the job of digital platforms to remove harmful and misleading content? Or do audiences need more media literacy education? Or both?
As debate over how to reduce harm while balancing free speech continues, we asked people about the removal of harmful and offensive social media content.
One third (33%) say social media and video networks like TikTok and YouTube are not removing enough harmful or offensive content.
Fewer people (21%) think platforms are removing too much.
This indicates Australians want more action from social media companies.
Boosting media literacy
The data also tell us improving news literacy across the community may be key to tackling the problem.
We asked people what they do when they come across suspicious information. Thirty-nine percent said they fact-check using trusted news sources, official websites and search engines.
But there were important differences in fact-checking behaviours between those who had received some kind of news literacy education and those who had not.
People who had received training about how the news works were much more likely to use a reputable news source or go to an official website to verify information.
However, few people have had such education, with only 24% of those surveyed saying they had received some.
The data show not only are people with news literacy education more likely to fact-check, they also avoid news less, have higher interest in it, are more likely to trust the news, and more inclined to pay for it.
This suggests increasing news literacy can help users navigate the complex online environment, and could also have both civic and economic benefits.
While there is no single solution to reducing misinformation online, this year’s data points to two key areas for further action: increasing access to media literacy training for all Australians, and compelling digital platforms to remove more misleading and harmful content.
Sora Park receives funding from the Australian Research Council, SBS, Creative Australia and Boundless Earth.
Ashleigh Haw has received funding from the Australian National University’s Herbert and Valmae Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry, and The Australian Sociological Association (TASA).
Caroline Fisher has received funding from Australian Research Council, Google News Initiative, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, former Dept of Communication and Infrastructure, and Judith Neilsen Institute for Journalism and Ideas.
Kieran McGuinness has received funding from Google News Initiative and the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
The restoration of wetlands is an often overlooked opportunity. As our recent study shows, wetlands have long been treated as environmental “add-ons” but are in fact rising economic assets, delivering more value as they mature.
Restored coastal wetlands, particularly mangroves and saltmarshes, offer growing returns in the form of carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection and storm buffering. These benefits build up gradually, sometimes exponentially, over time.
But planning frameworks treat restorations as static costs, rather than compounding investments.
Using international data and economic modelling, we developed a framework to capture how wetland benefits evolve over decades. While we draw on global datasets, this approach can be applied in New Zealand to understand the value of local restoration projects.
Timing matters for wetland investment
Traditional cost-benefit analyses treat wetland restoration as a one-off expense with fixed returns. Our research shows this misses the bigger, long-term picture.
For example, coastal mangroves initially store a modest amount of carbon while seedlings develop. But as root systems establish and capture sediment, there is a critical threshold when carbon sequestration accelerates dramatically. Mature restored mangroves can store three times more carbon annually than during early years.
Saltmarshes follow a similar pattern. They develop from basic habitat into complex networks that buffer storm surges, filter nutrients and support productive fisheries.
For New Zealand, where many wetlands were historically drained or degraded, the implication is clear. Early investment in restoration is critical and will deliver increasing returns over time.
Our study highlights mangroves and saltmarshes as priority systems, but also points to peatlands and freshwater marshes as promising candidates.
The law review and freshwater policy consultations present both opportunities and challenges for wetland valuation.
The amendment to the Resource Management Act regarding freshwater proposes:
quick, targeted changes which will reduce the regulatory burden on key sectors, including farming, mining and other primary industries.
While this may reduce the regulatory burden, it highlight the need for robust valuation tools that can weigh long-term benefits against immediate development returns.
The current consultation outlines specific changes, including clarifying the definition of a wetland. The amended definition would exclude wetlands “unintentionally created” through activities such as irrigation, while constructed wetlands would have a new set of objectives and consent pathways.
Councils would also no longer need to map wetlands by 2030, while restrictions on non-intensive grazing of beef cattle and deer in wetlands would be removed.
These definition changes could exclude wetlands that accumulate significant climate and biodiversity benefits over time, regardless of their origin. As our research suggests, the ecological and economic value of wetlands often increases substantially as systems mature.
The valuation gap
Despite growing international recognition of “blue carbon” initiatives (which store carbon in coastal and marine ecosystems), New Zealand lacks frameworks to capture the dynamic value of wetlands.
New Zealand has no wetland-specific financial instruments to attract private investment and wetlands are not integrated into the Emissions Trading Scheme, the government’s main tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
This creates a fundamental mismatch. Policy frameworks treat restoration as static costs while science reveals appreciating assets.
Our modelling framework offers a pathway to bridge this gap. By tracking how different wetland types accumulate benefits over time, decision makers can better understand long-term returns on restoration investment.
Australia is already developing wetland carbon markets. International blue carbon financial initiatives are emerging and recognising that today’s restoration investment delivers tomorrow’s climate benefits.
For New Zealand, this could mean:
integrating wetland valuation into environmental assessments, moving beyond upfront costs to consider decades of accumulating benefits across different wetland types
aligning finance with restoration timelines and developing funding mechanisms that capture growing value rather than treating restoration as sunk costs
building regional datasets and generating location-specific data on how New Zealand’s diverse wetlands develop benefits over time, reducing investment uncertainty.
With sea-level rise accelerating and extreme weather becoming more frequent, wetlands represent critical infrastructure for climate adaptation. Unlike built infrastructure (stop banks, for example) that depreciates, wetlands appreciate, becoming more valuable as they mature.
The current policy consultation period offers an opportunity to embed this thinking into New Zealand’s environmental frameworks. Rather than viewing wetlands as regulatory constraints, dynamic valuation could reveal them as appreciating assets that increase resilience for coastal communities.
Restoring coastal wetlands is not just about repairing nature. It’s about investing in a living, compounding asset that ameliorates climate impacts and protects our coasts and communities.
Wei Yang was funded by a Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour grant.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jairo Gutierrez, Professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Auckland University of Technology
There’s a certain feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I’m waiting for an important call to come through. You know the type – maybe a call from your boss, a potential new employer or news of a loved one who’s due to give birth.
In these situations, I usually stare at my phone, willing it to ring. I make sure – over and again – it’s not on silent or “do not disturb” mode. When the screen is out of my sight, I imagine I can hear the familiar ringtone.
Then it pops up – the missed call notification. But the phone never rang. What happened?
How do mobile calls work?
When making a mobile call using 4G or 5G networks, the caller dials a number and their network operator (Telstra or OneNZ, for example) routes the request to the recipient’s device.
For this to work, both phones must be registered with an IP Multimedia Subsystem – or IMS – which automatically happens when you turn on your phone. IMS is the system that allows the combination of voice calls, messages and video communications.
Both phones must also be connected to a 4G or 5G cell phone tower. The caller’s network sends an invite to the recipient’s device, which will then start to ring.
This process is usually very fast. But as generations of cellular networks have evolved (remember 3G?), becoming faster and with greater capacity, they have also become more complex, with new potential points of failure.
From phone failures to ‘dead zones’
Mobile phones use Voice over LTE (VoLTE) for 4G networks or Voice over New Radio (VoNR) for 5G. These are technologies that enable voice calls over those two types of networks and they use the above mentioned IMS.
In some countries such as New Zealand, if either of these aren’t enabled or supported on your device (some phones have VoLTE disabled by default), it may attempt to fall back to the 3G network, which was switched off in Australia in 2024 and is currently being phased out in New Zealand.
If this fallback fails or is delayed, the recipient’s phone may not ring or may go straight to voicemail.
Another possibility is that your phone may have failed to register with the IMS network. If this happens – due to something like a software glitch, SIM issue, or network problem – a phone won’t receive the call signal and won’t ring.
Then there are handover issues. Each cell phone tower covers a particular area, and if you are moving, your call will be handed over to the tower that provides the best coverage. Sometimes your phone uses 5G for data but 4G for voice; if the handover between 5G and 4G is slow or fails, the call might not ring. If 5G is used for both data and voice, VoNR is used, which is still not widely supported and may fail.
Mobile apps introduce other potential problems. For example, on Android, aggressive battery-saving features can restrict background processes, including the phone app, preventing it from responding to incoming calls. Third-party apps such as call blockers, antivirus tools, or even messaging apps can also interfere with call notifications.
Finally, if your phone is in an area with poor reception, it may not receive the call signal in time to ring. These so-called “dead zones” are more common than telcos would like to admit. I live at the end of a long driveway in a well-covered suburb of Auckland in New Zealand. But, depending on where I am in the house, I still experience dead zones and often the WiFi-enabled phone apps will more reliably cause the phone to ring.
Battery-saving features on phones can restrict background processes, including the phone app, preventing it from responding to incoming calls. ymgerman/Shutterstock
What can I do to fix it?
If your phone frequently doesn’t ring on 4G or 5G there are a few things you can do:
make sure VolTE/VoNR is enabled in your network settings
restart your phone and toggle airplane mode to refresh network registration
check battery optimisation settings and exclude the phone app you are using
contact your carrier to confirm VoLTE/VoNR support and provisioning.
But ultimately, sometimes a call will just fail – and there’s very little an everyday person can do about it. Which yes, is annoying. But it also means you have a failsafe, expert-approved excuse for missing a call from your boss.
Jairo Gutierrez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The United States’ newest federal holiday, celebrated annually on June 19, has quickly become its most puzzling one. Four years after President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, Americans have wrestled with what to make of the holiday.
This confusion likely emerged because many Americans did not even learn about Juneteenth until around when it became a federal holiday in 2021. Moreover, the Trump administration and state legislatures across the country have further complicated matters with their increased efforts to ban the type of education that led to the national recognition of the holiday in the first place.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
The official handwritten record of General Order No. 3, preserved at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. National Archives
Though President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the enslaved in all the states that had seceded from the U.S., nearly 2½ years earlier, Texas, a Confederate state, rebelled against it.
At the time, Texas had a minimal number of Union soldiers to enforce the proclamation’s emancipation of enslaved people residing within Confederate territory. Consequently, many of those enslaved in Texas remained ignorant of the proclamation’s potential impact on their lives, or of the fact the Civil War had functionally ended two months earlier.
In an interview published in 1941, for example, Laura Smalley of Hempstead, Texas, remembered how her enslaver fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. He returned without informing those whom he enslaved of their freedom. In her interview, she recounted,
“Old master didn’t tell, you know, they was free … I think now they say they worked them, six months after that.”
‘Second Independence Day’
June 19, 1865, a Monday, changed that.
The news of emancipation culminated a generations-long struggle for Black people to obtain a modicum of freedom in the U.S.
For this reason, some refer to Juneteenth as the nation’s second Independence Day. The end of bondage was ostensibly codified in the 13th Amendment ratified later that year.
Spontaneous Juneteenth celebrations emerged almost immediately. Celebrants referred to the day as “Emancipation Day,” “Freedom Day,” “Juneteenth” and “Jubilee Day.” The latter title alluded to the biblical period following seven sabbatical cycles that resulted in canceling debts and freeing the enslaved.
Flake’s Bulletin, a weekly, Galveston-based publication, reported on an Emancipation Celebration occurring on Jan. 2, 1866, that included upward of 800 people. A similar gathering occurred in Galveston on June 19, 1866, in what is now the church known as Reedy Chapel AME. Annual celebrations continued, beginning in southeastern Texas, with events such as historical reenactments, parades, picnics, music and speeches.
While the holiday marked a joyous occasion for some, Juneteenth met early and persistent opposition, particularly in the time following Reconstruction.
For years, local reporting spoke of Juneteenth, as the Galveston Historical Foundation put it, in a “flagrantly racist nature.” Additionally, the racist stereotyping – “idleness” – in the final sentence of Granger’s order simultaneously illustrated its complicated nature while also “[foreshadowing] that the fight for freedom would continue,” National Archives staffer Michael Davis wrote in 2020.
Historian Keisha Blain explains, “The enslavement of Black people in the U.S. may have ended but the legacies of slavery still shape every aspect of Black life.”
Advocates such as Opal Lee, commonly referred to as the “grandmother of Juneteenth,” pressed for Juneteenth celebration to continue and, ultimately, for it to be made a national holiday.
Lee began her advocacy in earnest during the mid-1970s in the Fort Worth, Texas, area. The oldest member of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, Lee spearheaded several campaigns to draw attention to Juneteenth. These campaigns included initiatives such as an online petition promoting the holiday’s observance launched in 2019 that amassed 1.6 million signatures.
In speaking on the significance of Juneteenth, Lee said, “Freedom is for everyone. I think freedom should be celebrated from the 19th of June to the Fourth of July; however, none of us are free until we are all free. We are not free yet, and Juneteenth is a symbol of that.”
Opal Lee, whose advocacy culminated in Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday in 2021, is known as the ‘grandmother’ of Juneteenth. AP Photo/LM Otero
National recognition
Because of this advocacy, Juneteenth has grown from relatively obscure regional celebrations to, starting in 2021, a federal holiday.
The establishment of the holiday was the capstone of initiatives during the racial reckoning. Historians refer to the racial reckoning as the time period beginning in the summer of 2020 until the spring of the following year that witnessed heightened attention to America’s nagging history of racism.
During this time, numerous institutions, ranging from colleges and universities to major companies, made commitments to racial equity. The recognition of Juneteenth represented a symbolic means to honor those commitments.
In remarks marking his signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, Biden said, “Juneteenth marks both the long, hard night of slavery and subjugation, and a promise of a brighter morning to come.”
President Joe Biden signs the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act on June 17, 2021. Evan Vucci/AP
Backtracking on gains
But within a year, some had already begun to argue the nation had, as community organizer Braxton Brewington wrote, “betrayed the spirit of Jubilee Day.”
Many of the racial equity commitments made during the racial reckoning quickly vanished within a year or two. Economist William Michael Cunningham revealed American companies pledged $50 billion to racial equity efforts in 2020, yet had only spent $250 million by 2021.
And members of the Trump administration have mounted continual attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion policies and used the term as a politically expedient slur to deride Black people. This is also exacerbated by the Trump administration’s challenges to birthright citizenship, a key right that gave citizenship to the formerly enslaved and later guaranteed important rights to the entire populace.
This major shift has fueled arguments that the U.S. has regressed from efforts toward racial equity and thus undermined the meaning of Juneteenth. And such backtracking arguably makes some Juneteenth celebrations performative exercises rather than celebrations of true racial equity.
As one critic asked, has the holiday devolved “into an exploitative and profit-driven enterprise for companies that disregard the true significance of this day to the Black community?”
All of this has led to increasing confusion over how to commemorate Juneteenth, if at all. Juneteenth is not the first federal holiday with a complicated history. Nevertheless, with other complex holidays, Americans had years to process their misgivings. In short, the nation is still deciding what it means to be free.
Between 2021-2023, Timothy Welbeck received honorariums from companies like 1Hotels, AON, Aramark, Campbell Soup, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, and Merrill Lynch, to deliver invited keynote addresses on subject matter similar to that discussed in this article.
Artist’s impression of Dargan Shelter as it would have looked during the last Ice Age.Painting by Leanne Watson Redpath
Travel back 20,000 years into the last Ice Age, to a time when the upper reaches of the Blue Mountains were treeless and the ridgelines and mountain peaks laden in snow and ice.
At an elevation of 1,073 metres, you will find Dargan Shelter, an ancient rock shelter resembling a large amphitheatre. Looking around, you could easily assume this cold and barren high country was too difficult for people to spend time in.
But our new research, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, indicates Dargan Shelter was occupied as early as the last Ice Age and repeatedly visited during this cold period.
Our excavation results provide the earliest known evidence of high-altitude occupation in Australia, establishing the Blue Mountains as Australia’s most archaeologically significant periglacial landscape – that is, an area which goes through seasonal freezing and thawing.
Cultural perspectives
This is a highly significant landscape concentrated with tangible and intangible cultural values for Aboriginal people.
For millennia, Aboriginal people have passed down the knowledge and stories of Country.
Knowing our Ancestors have lived here, in this Country, for thousands of years was on our minds as the team headed down into the site where we would sit alongside our Ancestors of yesterday.
We chose this site because of its location on a known Aboriginal travelling route, high elevation and its potential to hold deep deposits.
Archaeologically, a deep and undisturbed deposit is one of the most important things to look for. The sediment buildup over time preserves cultural material, and allows us to reconstruct past activities by associating cultural objects within distinct layers or bands of time.
Members of the season 3 team at Dargan Shelter. Back to front, left to right: Tyrone Pal, Rodney Lawson, Wayne Brennan, Duncan Wright, Eitan Harris, Juliet Schofield, Michael Spate, Wayne Logue, Lauren Roach, Rebecca Chalker, Dominic Wilkins, Phil Piper, Amy Way, Imogen Williams. Amy Way
When we enter the site, we pay respects to the Country and Ancestors before us. As part of the opening of the site for the archaeological works, a lyrebird song and dance were performed and, magically, a handful of lyrebirds began approaching the cave and singing out as if they were communicating between the current and old worlds through song.
We do not know who exactly the Aboriginal people who moved through the Blue Mountains in the deep past were, nor where they came from. But Dargan Shelter was probably an important stopover point for people to attend gatherings and ceremonies that could have included people from the western interior, the Cumberland coastal plains, and Country to the north and south.
Finds from the Dargan Shelter excavation
New evidence provides definitive proof of repeated occupation in this once frozen high-altitude landscape. It is now believed to be the oldest occupied site in Australia at high elevation.
We unearthed 693 stone artefacts, including 117 flakes from stratigraphic layers older than 16,000 years, and documented a small amount of faded rock art, including a child-sized hand stencil and two forearm stencils.
Charcoal from hearths (campfires) underwent radiocarbon dating, indicating Dargan Shelter had been continuously occupied since 22,000 to 19,000 years ago.
Stone artefacts excavated at Dargan shelter dating to the last ice-age, showing the range of non-quartz raw material used during that time. (A) hornfels; (B) black quartzite hammerstone from the Hunter region; (C) exotic coarse grained unidentified siliceous stone possibly from Jenolan; (D) Local Burragorang claystone; (E) exotic fine grained siliceous stone possibly from Jenolan; Amy Way
Among the findings, most of the stone tools were locally sourced and made. But, very interestingly some stones from the Jenolan Caves area, approximately 50 kilometres to the south-west, and the Hunter Valley region, 150 km to the north, were also found. This indicates people were travelling into this mountainous region from both the north and south.
We found a sandstone grinding slab, dated to 13,000 years ago, consistent with shaping bone or wooden artefacts such as needles, awls, bone points and nose points. A basalt anvil with impact marks consistent with cracking hard woody nuts and seed shells was dated to 8,800 years ago.
Greater Blue Mountains and world heritage
The Blue Mountains was listed as a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage area in 2000 for its outstanding biodiversity values.
Although the cultural heritage is remarkably intact and connected with an environmental system and natural features, the parallel nomination for cultural values listing failed due to a paucity of archaeological and cultural heritage information.
Our new research should be considered in a nomination for the UNESCO World Heritage area to also encompass cultural heritage alongside biodiversity.
The Blue Mountains landscape shrouds a silent yet rich tapestry of Aboriginal heritage.
Our people have walked, lived and thrived in the Blue Mountains for thousands of years. The mountains are a tangible connection to our Ancestors who used them as a meeting place for sharing, storytelling and survival. They are a part of our cultural identity.
We need to respect and protect our heritage for the benefit of all Australians.
Archaeological works in progress: Imogen Williams, Rebecca Chalker and Tyrone Pal excavating the Ice Age layers. Amy Way
Our results align Australia for the first time with ice age data from the world’s other inhabited continents, including sites in other places not traditionally thought of as cold climates, such as Mexico and Spain.
We now have a truly global story of people entering and living in high-altitude landscapes during the last ice age.
The continuation of research projects like this one, and the invaluable evidence it provides across the region, will allow Aboriginal people with connections to the Blue Mountains to begin to stitch back together much of the history and many of the stories that until now have had gaps.
The more we discover and piece together the movements, ceremonies and stories, the stronger we are as a community.
Amy Mosig Way receives funding from the Australian Museum Foundation and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney.
Erin Wilkins, Leanne Watson, and Wayne Brennan do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Artist’s impression of Dargan Shelter as it would have looked during the last Ice Age.Painting by Leanne Watson Redpath
Travel back 20,000 years into the last Ice Age, to a time when the upper reaches of the Blue Mountains were treeless and the ridgelines and mountain peaks laden in snow and ice.
At an elevation of 1,073 metres, you will find Dargan Shelter, an ancient rock shelter resembling a large amphitheatre. Looking around, you could easily assume this cold and barren high country was too difficult for people to spend time in.
But our new research, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, indicates Dargan Shelter was occupied as early as the last Ice Age and repeatedly visited during this cold period.
Our excavation results provide the earliest known evidence of high-altitude occupation in Australia, establishing the Blue Mountains as Australia’s most archaeologically significant periglacial landscape – that is, an area which goes through seasonal freezing and thawing.
Cultural perspectives
This is a highly significant landscape concentrated with tangible and intangible cultural values for Aboriginal people.
For millennia, Aboriginal people have passed down the knowledge and stories of Country.
Knowing our Ancestors have lived here, in this Country, for thousands of years was on our minds as the team headed down into the site where we would sit alongside our Ancestors of yesterday.
We chose this site because of its location on a known Aboriginal travelling route, high elevation and its potential to hold deep deposits.
Archaeologically, a deep and undisturbed deposit is one of the most important things to look for. The sediment buildup over time preserves cultural material, and allows us to reconstruct past activities by associating cultural objects within distinct layers or bands of time.
Members of the season 3 team at Dargan Shelter. Back to front, left to right: Tyrone Pal, Rodney Lawson, Wayne Brennan, Duncan Wright, Eitan Harris, Juliet Schofield, Michael Spate, Wayne Logue, Lauren Roach, Rebecca Chalker, Dominic Wilkins, Phil Piper, Amy Way, Imogen Williams. Amy Way
When we enter the site, we pay respects to the Country and Ancestors before us. As part of the opening of the site for the archaeological works, a lyrebird song and dance were performed and, magically, a handful of lyrebirds began approaching the cave and singing out as if they were communicating between the current and old worlds through song.
We do not know who exactly the Aboriginal people who moved through the Blue Mountains in the deep past were, nor where they came from. But Dargan Shelter was probably an important stopover point for people to attend gatherings and ceremonies that could have included people from the western interior, the Cumberland coastal plains, and Country to the north and south.
Finds from the Dargan Shelter excavation
New evidence provides definitive proof of repeated occupation in this once frozen high-altitude landscape. It is now believed to be the oldest occupied site in Australia at high elevation.
We unearthed 693 stone artefacts, including 117 flakes from stratigraphic layers older than 16,000 years, and documented a small amount of faded rock art, including a child-sized hand stencil and two forearm stencils.
Charcoal from hearths (campfires) underwent radiocarbon dating, indicating Dargan Shelter had been continuously occupied since 22,000 to 19,000 years ago.
Stone artefacts excavated at Dargan shelter dating to the last ice-age, showing the range of non-quartz raw material used during that time. (A) hornfels; (B) black quartzite hammerstone from the Hunter region; (C) exotic coarse grained unidentified siliceous stone possibly from Jenolan; (D) Local Burragorang claystone; (E) exotic fine grained siliceous stone possibly from Jenolan; Amy Way
Among the findings, most of the stone tools were locally sourced and made. But, very interestingly some stones from the Jenolan Caves area, approximately 50 kilometres to the south-west, and the Hunter Valley region, 150 km to the north, were also found. This indicates people were travelling into this mountainous region from both the north and south.
We found a sandstone grinding slab, dated to 13,000 years ago, consistent with shaping bone or wooden artefacts such as needles, awls, bone points and nose points. A basalt anvil with impact marks consistent with cracking hard woody nuts and seed shells was dated to 8,800 years ago.
Greater Blue Mountains and world heritage
The Blue Mountains was listed as a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage area in 2000 for its outstanding biodiversity values.
Although the cultural heritage is remarkably intact and connected with an environmental system and natural features, the parallel nomination for cultural values listing failed due to a paucity of archaeological and cultural heritage information.
Our new research should be considered in a nomination for the UNESCO World Heritage area to also encompass cultural heritage alongside biodiversity.
The Blue Mountains landscape shrouds a silent yet rich tapestry of Aboriginal heritage.
Our people have walked, lived and thrived in the Blue Mountains for thousands of years. The mountains are a tangible connection to our Ancestors who used them as a meeting place for sharing, storytelling and survival. They are a part of our cultural identity.
We need to respect and protect our heritage for the benefit of all Australians.
Archaeological works in progress: Imogen Williams, Rebecca Chalker and Tyrone Pal excavating the Ice Age layers. Amy Way
Our results align Australia for the first time with ice age data from the world’s other inhabited continents, including sites in other places not traditionally thought of as cold climates, such as Mexico and Spain.
We now have a truly global story of people entering and living in high-altitude landscapes during the last ice age.
The continuation of research projects like this one, and the invaluable evidence it provides across the region, will allow Aboriginal people with connections to the Blue Mountains to begin to stitch back together much of the history and many of the stories that until now have had gaps.
The more we discover and piece together the movements, ceremonies and stories, the stronger we are as a community.
Amy Mosig Way receives funding from the Australian Museum Foundation and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney.
Erin Wilkins, Leanne Watson, and Wayne Brennan do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
About one quarter of Australian school students are learning English as an additional language or dialect.
This means their first language or dialect is something other than English and they need extra support to develop proficiency in what we call standard Australian English.
This group of students includes immigrants and refugees from non-English speaking countries, children of migrant heritage where English is not spoken at home and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
But the level and duration of support they receive varies across schools. This is an issue because these students risk underachieving or being labelled as having learning difficulties without adequate help.
Until now, little was known about how long these students take to learn English.
Our new research published today by the Australian Education Research Organisation, found it can take many years for students to develop the English language skills they need. This suggests students need ongoing and targeted support to learn English as an additional language.
Our study
We looked at more than 110,000 primary and high school students in New South Wales public schools over a nine-year period.
The students were learning English as an additional language from 2014 to 2022. Our research used two methods.
First, we analysed how long it took these students to achieve the same scores in their NAPLAN reading and writing tests as their English-speaking peers with the same background characteristics. That is, students were matched for characteristics such as gender, student socio-educational advantage and school location.
Second, we analysed how long it took students learning English as an additional language to reach certain phases of language proficiency. There is a national learning progression resource for schools supporting students learning English as an additional language. It has four phases: beginning, emerging, developing and consolidating.
Source: The EAL/D Learning Progression: Foundation to Year 10, ACARA, 2015., CC BY
It can take many years to learn English
Combining both methods, we found students need considerable time to learn English as an additional language.
For students who were assessed as “beginning” when they started school, it takes an average of six years to reach the final “consolidating” phase.
This means those students starting in kindergarten (the first year of school in NSW) are likely to need English language support throughout primary school.
For “beginning” students who start in later years, they may need continued English language support in high school.
Students who started school at the “emerging” and “developing” phases take, on average, four and three years, respectively to have English skills on par with their peers.
Learning English takes longer as you go along
We also found as students learned English, each phase in their progression took longer to achieve than the one before:
the average time from beginning to emerging was one year and one month
from emerging to developing was one year and eight months
from developing to consolidating was two years and seven months.
What can impact learning?
But learning English is complex and can be impacted by many factors.
We found students with socio-educational disadvantage progressed 22% slower than advantaged students, students with refugee experiences progressed 14% slower than those without. Male students took 6% longer than their female peers.
We also found students starting school in kindergarten progressed about 9% slower, compared to starting school in Australia in later primary year levels.
But we found students who started school already at the final, “consolidating” phase of English outperformed monolingual peers in NAPLAN. This suggests these students, who are arguably bilingual, were at an educational advantage.
Average NAPLAN reading performance of students learning English as an additional language and their matched peers. Source: NSW Department of Education National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy 2014 to 2022, CC BY
Targeted support is needed
Our findings have a number of implications.
Firstly, they help us understand the nature and length of support needed for students learning English students in schools.
This also suggests we need to make effective professional support available for teachers working with students who are learning English as an additional language.
The academic advantage of bilingual students also points to a need to encourage and support students using and developing their first and other languages, alongside English.
Lucy Lu is the Senior Manager, Analytics and Strategic Projects in the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO). AERO is jointly funded by the Commonwealth, state and territory governments.
Jennifer Hammond has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council and the NSW Department of Education. All projects funded from these sources were completed more than six years ago.
About one quarter of Australian school students are learning English as an additional language or dialect.
This means their first language or dialect is something other than English and they need extra support to develop proficiency in what we call standard Australian English.
This group of students includes immigrants and refugees from non-English speaking countries, children of migrant heritage where English is not spoken at home and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
But the level and duration of support they receive varies across schools. This is an issue because these students risk underachieving or being labelled as having learning difficulties without adequate help.
Until now, little was known about how long these students take to learn English.
Our new research published today by the Australian Education Research Organisation, found it can take many years for students to develop the English language skills they need. This suggests students need ongoing and targeted support to learn English as an additional language.
Our study
We looked at more than 110,000 primary and high school students in New South Wales public schools over a nine-year period.
The students were learning English as an additional language from 2014 to 2022. Our research used two methods.
First, we analysed how long it took these students to achieve the same scores in their NAPLAN reading and writing tests as their English-speaking peers with the same background characteristics. That is, students were matched for characteristics such as gender, student socio-educational advantage and school location.
Second, we analysed how long it took students learning English as an additional language to reach certain phases of language proficiency. There is a national learning progression resource for schools supporting students learning English as an additional language. It has four phases: beginning, emerging, developing and consolidating.
Source: The EAL/D Learning Progression: Foundation to Year 10, ACARA, 2015., CC BY
It can take many years to learn English
Combining both methods, we found students need considerable time to learn English as an additional language.
For students who were assessed as “beginning” when they started school, it takes an average of six years to reach the final “consolidating” phase.
This means those students starting in kindergarten (the first year of school in NSW) are likely to need English language support throughout primary school.
For “beginning” students who start in later years, they may need continued English language support in high school.
Students who started school at the “emerging” and “developing” phases take, on average, four and three years, respectively to have English skills on par with their peers.
Learning English takes longer as you go along
We also found as students learned English, each phase in their progression took longer to achieve than the one before:
the average time from beginning to emerging was one year and one month
from emerging to developing was one year and eight months
from developing to consolidating was two years and seven months.
What can impact learning?
But learning English is complex and can be impacted by many factors.
We found students with socio-educational disadvantage progressed 22% slower than advantaged students, students with refugee experiences progressed 14% slower than those without. Male students took 6% longer than their female peers.
We also found students starting school in kindergarten progressed about 9% slower, compared to starting school in Australia in later primary year levels.
But we found students who started school already at the final, “consolidating” phase of English outperformed monolingual peers in NAPLAN. This suggests these students, who are arguably bilingual, were at an educational advantage.
Average NAPLAN reading performance of students learning English as an additional language and their matched peers. Source: NSW Department of Education National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy 2014 to 2022, CC BY
Targeted support is needed
Our findings have a number of implications.
Firstly, they help us understand the nature and length of support needed for students learning English students in schools.
This also suggests we need to make effective professional support available for teachers working with students who are learning English as an additional language.
The academic advantage of bilingual students also points to a need to encourage and support students using and developing their first and other languages, alongside English.
Lucy Lu is the Senior Manager, Analytics and Strategic Projects in the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO). AERO is jointly funded by the Commonwealth, state and territory governments.
Jennifer Hammond has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council and the NSW Department of Education. All projects funded from these sources were completed more than six years ago.
Boronias, known for their showy flowers and strong scent, are a quintessential part of the Australian bush. They led Traditional Owners to the best water sources and inspired Australian children’s author and illustrator May Gibbs to pen one of her earliest books, Boronia Babies.
But a weird group of boronias has puzzled botanists for decades. They have closed flowers that thwart most insect visitors. Those that do gain entry may encounter alternating sterile and fertile anthers (the male part that produces pollen) and sometimes, an enlarged stigma (the female part that receives pollen).
Since the early 1960s, scientists speculated this group of boronias relied on an “unusual agent for effective pollination”. Moths were occasionally mentioned in the botanical literature as potential pollinators, but the full story remained elusive – until now.
As my colleagues and I detail in our new research, moths are indeed the mystery pollinators of this strange group of flowers. This knowledge is crucial to ensuring their long-term survival.
My interest in the boronia pollinators began 15 years ago. I was studying a family of moths in my spare time, with a group of friends.
These moths, called Heliozelidae, are tiny. Their wings are just a few millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice.
They fly during the day and are seldom attracted to lights, so they are poorly represented in museum collections. The best way to find them is to sweep plants with a butterfly net then look inside it.
The author searching for moths in Western Australia. Douglas Hilton
After sweeping plants all over Australia, we discovered this country is a hotspot for Heliozelidae. Hundreds – if not thousands – of these species are new to science and yet to be described. In comparison, only 90 species of Heliozelidae have been described from the rest of the world.
We consistently found one group of 15 moth species on the boronias with the weird flowers in the biodiversity hotspot of Western Australia’s South West. Each moth species was found only on a specific boronia species.
When we took a closer look, we found each of the 15 Heliozelidae has an intricate structure at the tip of its abdomen that collects pollen. There’s nothing else quite like this in the 150,000 known species of moths and butterflies. At last, the mystery of the boronia pollinators was solved.
Pollen-collecting structure, replete with pollen, on the dorsal tip of the abdomen of the moth that pollinates Boronia crenulata. Dr Qike Wang
The process of pollinating boronias
In spring, female moths lay many eggs inside flowers. While moving about inside the flower, she collects pollen in the little structure on her abdomen. She enters and exits multiple flowers, pollinating as she goes.
When the eggs hatch, the caterpillars eat some of the flowers’ developing seeds. When they are fully grown, they leave the flower and burrow into the soil to pupate in a cocoon. When they emerge in spring as moths, the flowers are blooming again and the life cycle repeats.
For some species, such as brown boronia, the moths may be the only visitor the flowers ever receive. This suggests the moth and the plant have a reciprocal relationship, depending on each other for reproduction and ultimately, survival.
This is unusual in nature. The poster-child for this type of relationship is the figs and fig wasps.
Tiny metallic day-flying moths are the boronia pollinators. Andy Young
What’s in a name?
When a scientist discovers and officially describes a new species in the academic literature, they have to name it. Scientific names have two parts. The first part is the genus or group of closely related species and the second identifies the individual species.
We built a family tree which included the new pollinating moths using their DNA sequences. We showed the pollinators belong to the genus Prophylactis meaning “to guard before”, which previously contained four non-pollinating species. This gives us the first part of the name.
For the second part, we used the name of the plant each moth pollinates and added the suffix -allax, meaning “alternately” or “in exchange”. This shows their close relationship to the plant.
So, the moth that pollinates Boronia megastigma is called Prophylactis megastigmallax. The moth that pollinates the endangered Boronia clavata is Prophylactis clavatallax – and so on.
Much to learn
The pollinating moths are more closely related to each other than to other species in the Prophylactis genus. This suggests they inherited their pollen-collecting structure from a long-gone common ancestor.
As with all good science, this research leads to new questions. For example, we are now studying which moth-plant pairs fully depend on each other.
Other Australian plant species may also have intimate relationships with moths.
Current field work is exploring which of Australia’s 486 plant species in the citrus-family (Rutaceae) are linked to moths and how often moths have evolved to pollinate them.
Bush secrets brought to life
Our research shows just how much of Australia’s biodiversity is yet to be understood and protected.
As climate change and land-clearing drive biodiversity loss at an unprecedented rate, this is a challenge we must tackle with renewed urgency. Otherwise our children and grandchildren may only experience the full glory of Gibb’s characters on a page, and not in the natural world.
Douglas Hilton works for CSIRO. The work highlighted in this article received funding from The Hermon Slade Foundation, which supports high quality biological research by scientists in Australian universities and research institutes. The research was made possible through a group of generous collaborators and co-authors including Andy Young, Liz Milla, Mengjie Jin, Stephen Wilcox, Qike Wang, Verena Wimmer, Jinny Chang, Henning Kallies, Andie Hall, Marina Watowich, Carly Busch, Jordan Wilcox, Aileen Swarbrick, Marlene Walter, Don Sands, Davina Paterson, David Lees, Marco Duretto, Adnan Moussalli, Mike Halsey and Axel Kallies.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Delyse Hutchinson, Associate Professor, Clinical Psychologist, and NHMRC Leadership Fellow, SEED Centre for Lifespan Research, School of Psychology, Deakin University
In Australia, an estimated one in ten men experience mental health issues such as anxiety and depression before and after their child is born (the perinatal period).
Alongside emotional ups and downs and exhaustion, new dads may also be facing greater practical demands, such as caring for the baby, supporting their partner, and providing financially.
It’s not surprising, then, that becoming a dad may be linked to increased psychological distress. But it’s concerning because many men don’t access help. There’s also growing evidence a father’s mental state may affect his developing child in the short and long term.
Our new review brings together the international evidence about the relationship between fathers’ mental health and children’s development for the first time.
We found consistent associations between dads’ psychological distress before and after birth and poorer outcomes in children’s social, emotional, cognitive, language and physical development, from birth until the early teens.
The good news? There are effective ways to intervene early.
Barriers to getting help
There are complex reasons why new fathers might not access help for mental distress.
Men may also feel they need to be strong and push past tough emotions to “get on” with looking after the family.
They may be reluctant to acknowledge their own difficulties, and instead avoid the issue, through strategies such as working excessively, or using alcohol or other drugs.
As a result, men may have trouble recognising mental distress and it may go undetected by the people around them and in the wider health-care system.
We don’t know the true impact
Research on early risk factors for poorer child development is around 17 times more likely to focus on mothers’ health and lifestyle, compared to fathers.
This focus is understandable, given up to one in five women experience perinatal anxiety or depression in the transition to motherhood.
Strong evidence links mothers’ mental distress to poorer child outcomes. For example, mothers experiencing perinatal anxiety or depression may withdraw and find it difficult to interact with their child. This may be linked to delays in children’s developing social and emotional skills.
Yet similar research on fathers has been lacking.
This imbalance affects health policy and clinical practice, leaving many fathers feeling excluded from family health care. The impact on their children has also been poorly understood.
What we looked at
Our new research aimed to understand how men’s mental health before and after birth is related to their child’s development, from birth through adolescence.
We looked at the findings from 84 longitudinal studies which track people over long periods of time, including from Australia, Europe, Asia and North America.
The review included any study that measured an association between perinatal depression, anxiety or stress in fathers (biological or adoptive) and child development. These included social and emotional skills, thinking and problem-solving, language, physical development and motor skills.
Our study had three main findings
First, mental distress in fathers during pregnancy and after birth was consistently linked to poorer development in their children.
Specifically, this included lower ratings on social, emotional, cognitive, and language skills, such as the capacity to interact with others, understand feelings, process information and communicate. It also affected physical health outcomes, such as body weight, sleep and eating patterns.
Second, associations were evident from early development (infancy) through to the early teens (13 years). This suggests that, without support, a father’s perinatal mental distress may be related to child development well beyond infancy.
Third, fathers’ mental distress after birth was more strongly related to how children developed than their mental distress during pregnancy.
This is not surprising, because it’s when fathers begin to interact with infants and may more directly influence their development.
So, what should change?
Our findings underscore that getting in early to support dads – both before and soon after the arrival of a new child – is crucial.
Routine screening for signs of mental distress is effective in identifying mothers who might benefit from help. This could be extended to all parents, through family planning, antenatal and postpartum clinics, and GP check-ups.
Research shows 80% of men see a GP or allied health practitioner in the year before having a baby. Asking about other aspects of wellbeing – such as sleep quality – can be an effective and non-stigmatising way to ease into conversations about mental health.
This can help connect men with support services earlier, to improve their health and their children’s.
What should men look out for?
Studies suggest men may often express their distress through relationship strain, rather than sadness. They may also report self-harm, suicidal ideation and feeling isolated.
Options for men who want more support include counselling, peer group support and online apps that use mindfulness and cognitive behaviour therapy to help manage moods.
For fathers needing more immediate support, crisis support services offer 24/7 live counselling via chat, telephone or video:
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. In an emergency in Australia, call triple 0.
Delyse Hutchinson receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).
Jacqui Macdonald receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council’s Medical Research Future Fund and the Australian Research Council. She convenes the Australian Fatherhood Research Consortium and she is on the Movember Global Men’s Health Advisory Committee.
Samantha Teague receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).
Genevieve Le Bas and Stephanie Aarsman do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Imagine a lush forest with tree-ferns, their trunks capped by ribbon-like fronds. Conifers tower overhead, bearing triangular leaves almost sharp enough to pierce skin. Flowering plants are both small and rare.
You’re standing in what is now Victoria, Australia, about 127 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous Period. Slightly to your south, a massive river – more than a kilometre wide – separates you from Tasmania. This river flows along the valley forming between Australia and Antarctica as the two continents begin to split apart.
During the Early Cretaceous, southeastern Australia was some of the closest land to the South Pole. Here, the night lasted for three months in winter, contrasting with three months of daytime in summer. Despite this extreme day-night cycle, various kinds of dinosaurs still thrived here, as did flies, wasps and dragonflies.
And, as our recently published research in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology reveals, termites also chewed through the decaying wood of fallen trees. This is the first record of termites living in a polar region – and their presence provides key insights into what these ancient forests were like.
But these wood-eating bugs are a key part of many environments, freeing up nutrients contained in dead plants. They are one of the best organisms at breaking down large amounts of wood, and significantly speed up the decay of fallen wood in forests.
Ancient polar forests roughly 120 million years ago in southeastern Australia were dominated by conifer trees. Bob Nicholls
The breakdown of wood by termites makes it easier for further consumption by other animals and fungi.
Their role in ancient Victoria’s polar forests would have been just as important, as the natural decay of wood is very slow in cold conditions.
Although the cold winters would have slowed termites too, they may have thrived during long periods of darkness, just as modern termites are more active during the night.
The oldest termite nest in Australia
Our new paper, led by Monash University palaeontology research associate Jonathan Edwards, reports the discovery of an ancient termite nest near the coastal town of Inverloch in southeastern Victoria. Preserved in a 80-centimetre-long piece of fossilised log, the nest tunnels carved out by termites were first spotted by local fossil-hunter extraordinaire Melissa Lowery.
Without its discoverers knowing what it was then, the log was brought into the lab and we began investigating the origins of its structures.
Understanding the nest was challenging at first: the tunnels exposed on the surface were filled with what looked like tiny grains of rice, each around 2 millimetres long. We suspected they were most likely the coprolites (fossilised poo) of the nest-makers. Once we took a look under the microscope we noticed something very interesting: this poo was hexagonal.
Termite poo has a distinct hexagonal shape, as seen in these thin sections of the fossilised log we examined. Jonathan Edwards & William Parker
How did this shape point to termites as the “poopetrators”?
Modern termites have a gut with three sets of muscle bands. Just before excretion, their waste is squeezed to save as much water as possible, giving an almost perfect hexagonal shape to the pellets.
The size, shape, distribution and quantity of coprolites meant we had just discovered the oldest termite nest in Australia – and perhaps the largest termite wood nest from dinosaur times.
A global distribution
We continued to investigate the nest with more specific methods.
For example, we scanned parts of it with the Australian Synchrotron – a research facility that uses X-rays and infrared radiation to see the structure and composition of materials. This showed us what the unweathered coprolites inside the log looked like.
MicroCT imagery of termite coprolites within the nest. Jonathan Edwards
We also made very thin slices of the nest and looked at these slices with high-powered microscopes. And we analysed the chemistry of the log, which further supported our original theory of the nest’s identity.
The oldest fossilised termites have been found in the northern hemisphere about 150 million years ago, during the Late Jurassic Period.
What is exciting is that our trace fossils show they had reached the southernmost landmasses by 127 million years ago. This presence means they had likely spread all over Earth by this point.
The termites weren’t alone
Surprisingly, these termites also had smaller wood-eating companions.
During our investigation, we also noticed coprolites more than ten times smaller than those made by termites. These pellets likely belonged to wood-eating oribatid mites – minuscule arachnids with fossils dating back almost 400 million years. Many of their tunnels ring those left by the termites, telling us they inhabited this nest after the termites abandoned it.
CT reconstructions of termite and mite coprolites show the huge difference in size between them. Jonathan Edwards
Termite tunnels may have acted as mite highways, taking them deeper into the log. Moreover, because both groups ate the toughest parts of wood, these two invertebrates might have directly competed at the time. Modern oribatid mites only eat wood affected by fungi.
Regardless, our study documents the first known interaction of wood-nesting termites and oribatid mites in the fossil record.
This nest also provides important support for the idea that Australia’s polar forests weren’t dominated by ice, as modern termites can’t tolerate prolonged freezing.
This is the first record of termites living in a polar region, and their presence suggests relatively mild polar winters — something like 6°C on average. Termites would’ve been key players in these ecosystems, kickstarting wood breakdown and nutrient cycling in an otherwise slow environment.
So maybe next time you spot a termite nest, you’ll see a builder, not a bulldozer.
The authors would like to acknowledge the work of Jonathan Edwards who led the research and helped prepare this article.
Alistair Evans receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Monash University, and is an Honorary Research Affiliate with Museums Victoria.
Anthony J. Martin 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.
Jaws turns 50 on June 20. Last year, Quentin Tarantino called Stephen Spielberg’s film “possibly the greatest movie ever made”. Though he was quick to add that it isn’t the best film in terms of script, cinematography or acting, he was convinced that its overall quality as a movie remains unmatched.
I’m not so sure if Jaws is the best movie ever made – but it’s certainly the movie that I like to watch the most. It is as fascinating and multilayered as it is entertaining and depressing. As a researcher of political propaganda, I believe that Jaws had political purpose.
I have watched Jaws well over 50 times and still, with every viewing, I spot a new detail. Just last week I noticed that when police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) leaves his office after the first shark attack, he opens a gate in a white picket fence.
The white picket fence is often used to symbolise the American dream and Brody’s actions are likely intended to symbolise the disruption to the dream’s pursuit of capitalism as he seeks to close the beaches and potentially ruin the town’s tourism season.
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The film was released in June 1975. Just in time for summer holidays spent splashing in the waves (or not!). However, despite its continued acclaim, it didn’t win any of the big Academy Awards in 1976. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest dominated that year. Composer John Williams did, however, win the Oscar for best original score, which I assume you are now humming in your head.
The film is based on the book by Peter Benchley, published a year earlier in 1974. The book’s plot is somewhat different to the film. For example, Matt Hooper – the shark specialist played by Richard Dreyfuss in the film – is eaten by the shark, possibly as an act of retribution for his sins on land. He survives in the film.
Benchley was US president Lyndon Johnson’s (1963-1969) communications advisor before he became an author and so knew Washington’s priorities well. The film was then commissioned before the book had time to become a commercial success, which is somewhat unusual.
The trailer for Jaws.
The shark – powerful, mysterious, dark eyed, stalking the American people and killing without emotion – represents the threat posed by communism. The defeat of this “menace” will require the reunification of American society following its disastrous and fractious involvement in the Vietnam war and political scandals like Watergate.
Hence, the white public sector worker (Brody), the scientist (Hooper) and the military veteran (Quint), put their differences aside to band together on a rickety and ill-equipped boat – the Orca – which was possibly meant to symbolise the wobbling US of its time.
So while Jaws is a parable of societal repair, it is also a story of exclusively white unification amid external threats. The civil rights movement and Vietnam are inextricably linked through the service of young black men to the cause, and yet black characters are conspicuous by their absence from the book and the film. The only black presence in the book is an anonymous gardener who rapes wealthy white women.
Human will to dominate the natural world
In the book, the horror focuses upon human, rather than animal, behaviour. This comes in the form of political corruption, mafia influence, adultery, snobbery, racial prejudice, community disconnect and dishonest journalism. And it occurs as much on land as it does at sea. There is a large section midway through the book where the shark plays no part in the, at times, highly sexual plot.
Spielberg removed many of the undercurrents and insinuations of the book for his adaptation. The film gives less attention to life in the town of Amity and focuses largely on the shark and the horror of its actions.
The irony is that so many characters feel personally offended by an animal capable of instinct alone, when they as humans – capable of reason and choice – behave so badly towards each other. Indeed, the lack of an eco-centric character to defend the shark in both the book or the film is telling.
Brody yells for people to ‘get out of the water’.
The overwhelming horror is instead found in the treatment of the shark and the assertion that it must be killed rather than respected and left alone. Indeed, Jaws represents a parable of the modern human perception of battle against nature. Wherein Brody, Hooper and Quint, despite their differences, are united in their assumption of human superiority and their perspective that the problem ought to be dealt with using violence.
The story of Jaws also speaks to George Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant from 1936. It captured the author’s dilemma while working as a police officer in colonial Burma when an elephant disrupted the regular process of capitalism by trampling through a local market.
The philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno referred to the enlightenment as having created a “new barbarity” wherein humans are engaged in a project of destruction. Here then, a shark has had the audacity to behave in an inconvenient way to man’s profiteering from tourism and must be killed.
Indeed, one of the biggest criticisms of the film, which Spielberg has subsequently acknowledged, is its inaccurate representation of shark behaviour and the extent to which the film’s success contributed to the decline of the species.
Ultimately then, Jaws – the book, the film and the reaction of audiences to it – serves as a testimony to the role played by fear within human decision-making. The fear of “others”. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the natural world. Fear of loss of status or reputation.
It’s a testament to the susceptibility of humans to become insular and violent when they are scared, but also to the distorting influence of propagandists in determining what they ought to be afraid of.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Colin Alexander 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 – Canada – By Chandrima Chakraborty, Professor, English and Cultural Studies; Director, Centre for Global Peace, Justice and Health, McMaster University
The June 12 Air India crash in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, with 230 passengers and 12 crew members aboard is sending deep reverberations through a group of Canadians who know all too well the shock, grief and horror of losing loved ones in hauntingly similar circumstances.
They are the families of those killed in the bombing of Air India Flight 182 en route from Canada to India 40 years ago this month.
As reports of the Ahmedabad crash came in, the WhatsApp account of the Air India Flight 182 families immediately flooded with expressions of shock, concern, sympathy and memories triggered by the latest incident.
On June 23, 1985, Flight 182 was brought down by terrorist bombs created and planted on Canadian soil. The devastating mid-air explosion occurred over the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland. It killed all 329 passengers and crew, including 268 Canadians. The crew and most of the passengers were of Indian origin.
Investigations into the causes of the crash of Air India Flight 171, en route to London’s Gatwick airport, shortly after take-off are still underway. At least 279 people died in the crash, which also impacted people on the ground.
Acknowledging losses as significant
A recent public conference at McMaster University commemorated the 40th anniversary of Flight 182, bringing together Indian and Canadian families, researchers, creative artists and community members.
Book cover for ‘Remembering Air India The Art of Public Mourning,’ edited by Chandrima Chakraborty, Amber Dean and Angela Failler. University of Alberta Press
The conference dealt with critical themes, including the challenge of Flight 182 families recovering from their losses within a climate of broad indifference among their fellow Canadians.
Regardless of what may have caused the more recent crash in western India, these Canadian families know the shock and loss that a new set of victims’ families are facing, and how important it is to support them.
Yet according to a 2023 Angus Reid poll, “nine out of 10 Canadians say they have little or no knowledge of the worst single instance of the mass killing of their fellow citizens.” That essentially means the bombing has yet to penetrate the consciousness of everyday Canadians or evoke shared grief or public mourning.
The families continue to carry the torch of remembrance as they organize annual memorial vigils every June 23. Few others attend. Many victims’ relatives have died since 1985. Some spouses, siblings or parents are now in their 80s, wondering why the bombing is still not widely discussed in schools or in public discourse.
At last month’s conference, my research team launched the Air India Flight 182 archive to counter this collective amnesia and lack of acknowledgement.
Canadian archival consultant and writer Laura Millar has said that archives act as “touchstones to memory” and can aid the process of transforming individual memories into collective remembering. Adopting NYU professor Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care for the archive, we have been consulting with families to find ways to share their grief with the public.
The Flight 182 memory archive — both physical and digital — serves as a repository for artefacts, first-person narratives, memorabilia and creative works related to the tragedy produced by family members. Family donations of artefacts such as dance videos and pilot wings redirect notions of archives away from a documental deposit. Hopefully, they can move the public to learn and care for the impacts of the Flight 182 bombing.
The archive is a publicly accessible record of the tragedy, where scholars and everyday citizens can learn about the victims and their families.
While the archive articulates the demand from families that the bombing of Flight 182 and its aftermath be incorporated into Canadian national consciousness, establishing this archive alone will not be enough to elevate the memory of Flight 182 to the place it deserves.
But at least it establishes a rich, permanent academic and personal legacy for the community of mourners, and for the Canadian and global public to find it, use it and learn from its many lessons.
Families of those on board the 1985 flight are preparing to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the terror bombing of Flight 182 that has devastated their lives.
As we learn more about the tragic Air India Flight 171 crash on June 12, the lessons of Flight 182 will hopefully prevent a new set of families from feeling the pain of indifference on top of the unimaginable agony of loss they’re already experiencing.
Chandrima Chakraborty receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Matthew Robertson, Research Scientist, Fisheries and Marine Institute, Memorial University of Newfoundland
The harbour in Bonavista, Newfoundland. Major reforms could fundamentally reshape fisheries science and management in Canada(Sally LeDrew/Wikimedia commons), CC BY-SA
Carney’s statement was made in response to protesting fish harvesters in Newfoundland and Labrador who decried recent DFO decision-making for multiple fisheries, including Northern cod and snow crab.
Although addressing industry concerns is important, any change to DFO decision-making must serve the broader public interest, which includes commitments to reconciliation and conserving biodiversity.
Major reforms could fundamentally reshape fisheries science and management in Canada, yet most Canadians are unaware of how DFO’s science-management process works, or why change might be needed.
The DFO’s dual mandate
DFO has long been criticized for its dual mandate, which involves both supporting economic growth and conserving the environment.
For organizations like DFO to be trusted by the public, they need to produce information and policies that are credible, relevant and legitimate.
However, DFO’s dual mandates have been viewed as antithetical and have at the least created a perceived conflict of interest. The issue at stake is how science advice from DFO can be considered independent, if it is also supposed to serve commercial interests.
One solution to this problem would be to shift control over the economic viability of fisheries to provinces. This is not a radical idea by any means, as most of the economic value of the fishery arises after fish are brought to harbour.
This was driven driven by a concern that the department has not focused enough on provincial and territorial fisheries issues. This shouldn’t be seen as a criticism of DFO, but rather an opportunity to embrace differentiated responsibility.
DFO could maintain regulatory control for fisheries, like enforcing the Fisheries Act, defining licence conditions and performing long-term monitoring and assessments. As included in the modernized Fisheries Act, it could still consider the social and economic objectives in decision-making.
Regional decision-making
DFO is structured into regions with their own science and management branches, but many decisions end up being made by staff at DFO headquarters in Ottawa. In addition, the federal fisheries minister retains ministerial discretion for almost every decision, something that has been criticized as being inequitable.
“Because of…risk aversion, much more of the decision-making has now been bumped up to higher levels. So I like to facetiously state that I am no longer a manager, I am a recommender.”
Centralized decision-making can limit communication between regional scientists and managers and federal government policymakers.
This communication gap can make it difficult for managers to use the latest science and adjust policies quickly and it can also lead to recommended policies that are challenging to implement at the local level.
Handing management decision-making power to regional fisheries managers could therefore benefit science and policy, and contribute to decisions that are deemed more equitable by those impacted.
However, because the meetings are focused on DFO ecological science, they are not designed to formally consider stakeholder and rights holder knowledge. This can lead to two key issues. First, it may blur the line between peer-reviewed science and rights holder and stakeholder input, reducing the credibility of the scientific advice.
Second, the valuable information provided by rights holders and stakeholders may be overlooked since it is not shared in a setting designed to incorporate it.
These problems could be addressed by developing procedures through which stakeholders and rights holders contribute their local and traditional knowledge to better inform ecological and socio-economic considerations.
Regardless of how rights holders and stakeholders perspectives are included, the process should be clearly structured and documented.
By reconsidering DFO’s mandate, decentralizing management decision-making and improving the scientific consideration of varied forms of knowledge, DFO could make decisions that are closer to the wharf.
Matthew Robertson receives funding from the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant and the Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO) Atlantic Fisheries Fund (AFF).
Megan Bailey receives research funding from multiple sources, including NSERC, SSHRC, CIRNAC, Genome Atlantic, Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Centre, Ocean Frontier Institute (through a Canada First Research Excellence Fund), and the Canada Research Chairs program.
Tyler Eddy receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant, Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO) Atlantic Fisheries Fund (AFF) and Sustainable Fisheries Science Fund (SFSF), the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), and the Crown Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) Indigenous Community-Based Climate Monitoring (ICBCM) Program.
Did you know that around one in two women in the UK will experience symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction at some point in their lives? And for women who engage in high-intensity exercise, that figure rises to 63%.
The female pelvic floor is a remarkable yet often overlooked structure: a complex “hammock” of muscles and ligaments that stretches from the front of the pelvis to the tailbone.
These muscles support the bladder, bowel and uterus, wrap around the openings of the urethra, vagina and anus and work in sync with your diaphragm, abdominal and back muscles to maintain posture, continence and core stability. It’s not an exaggeration to say your pelvic floor is the foundation of your body’s core.
Throughout a woman’s life, various events can challenge the pelvic floor. Pregnancy, for example, increases the weight of the uterus, placing added pressure on these muscles. The growing baby can cause the abdominal muscles to stretch and separate, naturally increasing the load on the pelvic floor. Childbirth, particularly vaginal delivery, may result in perineal trauma, directly injuring pelvic floor tissues.
However, contrary to popular belief, pelvic floor problems aren’t only caused by pregnancy and childbirth. In fact, research shows that intense physical activity, even in women who have never been pregnant or given birth, can contribute to dysfunction.
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Exercise is essential for overall health and is often recommended to ease symptoms of menopause and menstruation. But one side effect that’s not talked about enough is the effect that repeated strain, such as heavy lifting or high impact movement, can have on the pelvic floor. The increased intra-abdominal pressure during these activities can gradually weaken the pelvic floor muscles, especially if they’re not trained to cope.
Pelvic floor dysfunction often results when these muscles aren’t strong enough to match the workload demanded of them, whether from daily life, exercise, or other core muscles. And it’s a growing issue, affecting more women than ever before.
Common symptoms include leaking urine or faeces when coughing, sneezing or exercising, a dragging or heavy sensation in the lower abdomen or vaginal area, painful sex, changes in bowel habits, visible bulging in the vaginal area (a sign of prolapse). The emotional toll can also be significant, leading to embarrassment, anxiety, low confidence and a reluctance to stay active – all of which affect quality of life.
Prevention
The good news? Help is available and, better yet, pelvic floor dysfunction is often preventable.
If you’re experiencing symptoms, speak to your GP. You may be referred to a women’s health physiotherapist, available through both the NHS and private services. But whether you’re managing symptoms or hoping to avoid them in the first place, there are practical steps you can take:
Most importantly, build strength with regular pelvic floor exercises. Here’s how to do a basic pelvic floor contraction:
Imagine you’re trying to stop yourself passing wind – squeeze and lift the muscles around your back passage.
Then, imagine stopping the flow of urine mid-stream – engage those muscles too.
Now, lift both sets of muscles upwards inside your body, as if pulling them into the vagina.
Hold the contraction for a few seconds, then fully relax. Repeat.
If you’re just starting, it may be easier to practise while sitting. With time and consistency, you’ll be able to hold contractions for longer and incorporate them into your daily routine, like brushing your teeth or waiting for the kettle to boil.
Like any muscle, the pelvic floor gets stronger with training, making it more resilient to strain from childbirth, ageing, or strenuous activity. Research shows that a well-conditioned pelvic floor recovers faster from injury.
So be proud of your pelvic floor. Support it, strengthen it – and don’t forget to do those squeezes.
Holly Ingram 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 Brian Brivati, Visiting Professor of Contemporary History and Human Rights, Kingston University
Israel’s large-scale attack against Iran on June 13, which it conducted without UN security council approval, has prompted retaliation from Tehran. Both sides have traded strikes over the past few days, with over 200 Iranians and 14 Israelis killed so far.
The escalation has broader consequences. It further isolates institutions like the UN, International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ), which have found themselves increasingly sidelined as Israel’s assault on Gaza has progressed. These bodies now appear toothless.
The world appears to be facing an unprecedented upending of the post-1945 international legal order. Israel’s government is operating with a level of impunity rarely seen before. At the same time, the Trump administration is actively undermining the global institutions designed to enforce international law.
Other global powers, including Russia and China, are taking this opportunity to move beyond the western rules-based system. The combination of a powerful state acting with impunity and a superpower disabling the mechanisms of accountability marks a global inflection point.
It is a moment so stark that we may have to rethink what we thought we knew about the conduct of international relations and the management of conflict, both for the Palestinian struggle and the international system of justice built after the second world war.
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The Israeli government is, in addition to its preemptive air campaign against Iran’s nuclear programme, advancing with impunity on three other fronts. It is tightening its hold on Gaza, with the prospect of a lasting occupation increasingly possible.
Senior Israeli ministers have also outlined plans for the annexation of large parts of the occupied West Bank through settlement expansion. This is now proceeding unchecked. Israel confirmed plans in May to create 22 new settlements there, including the legalisation of those already built without government authorisation.
This is being accompanied by provocative legislation such as a bill that would hike taxes on foreign-funded non-governmental organisations. The Israeli government is also continuing its attempts to reduce the independence of the judiciary.
Hardline elements of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet say they will collapse the government if he changes course.
The ICJ moved with urgency in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. In January 2024, it found evidence that Palestinians in Gaza were at risk of genocide and ordered Israel to implement provisional measures to prevent further harm.
Then, in May 2024, as Israeli forces pressed an offensive, the ICJ issued another ruling ordering Israel to halt its military operation in the southern Gazan city of Rafah immediately. It also called on Israel to allow unimpeded humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip.
The court went further in July, issuing a landmark advisory opinion declaring Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal. The ICC took bold action by issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, and the leaders of Hamas.
Disregarding international law
These dramatic attempts to enforce international law failed. Israel only agreed to a temporary ceasefire in Gaza in January 2025 when Washington insisted, demonstrating that the only possible brake on Israel remains the US.
But the second Trump administration is even more transactional than the first. It prioritises trade deals and strategic alliances – particularly with the Gulf states – over the enforcement of international legal norms.
In January, Trump issued an executive order authorising sanctions on the ICC over the court’s “illegitimate” actions against the US and its “close ally Israel”. These sanctions came into effect a little over a week before Israel launched its strikes on Iran.
Trump then withdrew the US from the UN human rights council and extended a funding ban on Unrwa, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees.
A further executive order issued in February directed the state department to withhold portions of the US contribution to the UN’s regular budget. And Trump also launched a 180-day review of all US-funded international organisations, foreshadowing further exits or funding cuts across the multilateral system.
In May 2025, the US and Israel then advanced a new aid mechanism for Gaza run by private security contractors operating in Israeli-approved “safe zones”. Aid is conditional on population displacement, with civilians in northern Gaza denied access unless they relocate.
This approach, which has been condemned by humanitarian organisations, contravenes established humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality.
In effect, one pillar of the post-war order is attacking another. The leading founder of the UN is now undermining the institution from within, wielding its security council veto to block action while simultaneously starving the organisation of resources. The US vetoed a UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza on June 4.
The implications of this turning point in the international order are already playing out across the globe. Russia is continuing its war of aggression in Ukraine despite rulings from the ICJ and extensive evidence of war crimes. It knows that enforcement mechanisms are weak and fragmented and the alternative Trumpian deal making can be played out indefinitely.
And China is escalating military pressure on Taiwan. It is employing grey-zone tactics, that do everything possible in provocation and disinformation below the threshold of open warfare, undeterred by legal commitments to peaceful resolution.
These cases are symptoms of a collapse in the credibility of the post-1945 legal order. Israel’s policy in Gaza and its attack on Iran are not exceptions but the acceleration. They are confirmation to other states that law no longer constrains power, institutions can be bypassed, and humanitarian principles can be used for political ends.
Brian Brivati is executive director of the Britain Palestine Project. He is writing this article in a personal capacity.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Muhammad Wakil Shahzad, Associate Professor and Head of Subject, Mechanical and Construction Engineering, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Data centres are the invisible engines of our digital world. Every Google search, Netflix stream, cloud-stored photo or ChatGPT response passes through banks of high-powered computers housed in giant facilities scattered across the globe.
These datacentres consume a staggering amount of electricity and increasingly, a surprising amount of water. But unlike the water you use at home, much of the water used in datacentres never returns to the water reuse cycle. This silent drain is drawing concern from environmental scientists. One preprint study (not yet reviewed by other scientists) from 2023 predicted that by 2027 global AI use could consume more water in a year than half of that used by the UK in the same time.
Datacentres typically contain thousands of servers, stacked and running 24/7. These machines generate immense heat, and if not properly cooled, can overheat and fail. This happened in 2022 when the UK endured a heatwave that saw temperatures reach a record-breaking 40° Celsius in some areas, which knocked off Google and Oracle datacentres in London.
To prevent this, datacentres rely heavily on cooling systems, and that’s where water comes in.
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One of the most common methods for cooling datacentres involves mechanical chillers, which work like large fridges. These machines use a fluid called a refrigerant to carry heat away from the servers and release it through a condenser. A lot of water is lost as it turns into vapour during the cooling process, and it cannot be reused.
A 1 megawatt (MW) datacentre (that uses enough electricity to power 1,000 houses) can use up to 25.5 million litres annually. The total data centre capacity in the UK is estimated at approximately 1.6 gigawatts (GW). The global data centre capacity stands at around 59 GW.
Unlike water used in a dishwasher or a toilet, which often returns to a treatment facility to be recycled, the water in cooling systems literally vanishes into the air. It becomes water vapour and escapes into the atmosphere. This fundamental difference is why data centre water use is not comparable to that of typical household use, where water cycles back through municipal systems.
As moisture in the atmosphere that can return to the land as rain, the water datacentres use remains part of Earth’s water cycle – but not all rain water can be recovered.
The water is effectively lost to the local water balance, which is especially critical in drought-prone or water-scarce regions – where two-thirds of datacentres since 2022 have been built. The slow return of this water makes its use for cooling datacentres effectively non-renewable in the short term.
The rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, image generators and voice assistants has made datacentres work much harder. These systems need a lot more computing power, which creates more heat. To stay cool, data centres use more water than ever.
This growing demand is leading to a greater reliance on water-intensive cooling systems, driving up total water consumption even further. The International Energy Agency reported in April 2025 that datacentres now consume more than 560 billion litres of water annually, possibly rising to 1,200 billion litres a year by 2030.
What’s the alternative?
Another method, direct evaporative cooling, pulls hot air from datacentres and passes it through water-soaked pads. As the water evaporates, it cools the air, which is then sent back into server rooms.
While this method is energy-efficient, especially in warmer climates, the added moisture in the air can damage sensitive server equipment. This method requires additional systems to manage and control humidity, which necessitates more complex datacentre design.
My research team and I have developed another method which separates moist and dry air streams in datacentres with a thin aluminium foil, similar to kitchen foil. The hot, dry air passes close to the wet air stream, and heat is transferred through the foil without allowing any moisture to mix. This cools the server rooms in datacentres without adding humidity that could interfere with the equipment.
Trials of this method at Northumbria University’s datacentre have shown it can be more energy-efficient than conventional chillers, and use less water. Powered entirely by solar energy, the system operates without compressors or chemical refrigerants.
As AI continues to expand, the demand on datacentres is expected to skyrocket, along with their water use. We need a global shift in how we design, regulate and power digital infrastructure.
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Legal protection of abortion rights in England and Wales is fragile. Abortion has popular support and is readily available on the NHS, but has also generated a series of criminal investigations. Nicola Packer is one of the most recent abortion-seekers facing criminalisation rather than care. She was found innocent in May after a five year ordeal.
Amid concerns about investigations for illegal abortions, MPs may vote on June 17 on legislative action to decriminalise abortion. Political opinion is divided, however, on how to do it. In the absence of a broader push for the kind of inquiries that produced full decriminalisation in Northern Ireland in 2019, MPs will consider two different legal proposals: NC1 and NC20.
In England and Wales, people do not have explicit abortion rights as a matter of domestic law. They may feel that they have when they get good abortion care. But as a matter of law, abortion is only permissible under the Abortion Act 1967 if two conditions are met.
Two doctors must approve, and the case must meet the legal grounds outlined in the act. These are that there must be a risk to health up to 24 weeks gestation or, after 24 weeks, a risk to life, a risk of grave permanent injury to health or a serious foetal anomaly.
If these conditions are not met, then someone who voluntarily ends a pregnancy could be criminally liable. This is because old criminal provisions against abortion – under the Offences against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 – are still on the books.
Each of the two amendments being put forward would decriminalise abortion by amending a government bill that is already making its way through parliament, the crime and policing bill, rather than by adopting a standalone piece of legislation for abortion.
The two amendments
NC1, proposed by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, is for a partial decriminalisation that would entail the “removal of women from the criminal law related to abortion”. This would put a stop to criminal investigations of women and pregnant people on suspicion of abortion, and mean that abortion-seekers no longer face the possibility of prosecution.
The proposed amendment has the support of over 130 MPs, has been negotiated with and has the backing of abortion providers, including the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas), MSI Reproductive Choices and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. But it would not repeal or remove the existing criminal law. The criminal offences in the Offences against the Person Act and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act would remain in place.
Neither would abortion providers, or those who assist or support abortion-seekers, including friends and family buying abortion pills on the internet, be exempted from criminal liability.
NC20, the second amendment, is for full decriminalisation and is proposed by MP Stella Creasy. It has the support of over 100 MPs, but apparently not the support of abortion providers according to Bpas.
Creasy’s proposal is more complex and wider in scope. This amendment would fully decriminalise abortion by repealing the criminal provisions altogether. It would maintain the Abortion Act 1967 as the legal framework for abortion care, so the legal grounds for abortion would remain the same.
The proposed amendments to decriminalise abortion come after several high-profile cases. Brizmaker/Shutterstock
Most importantly, this amendment aims to make abortion a human right, and protect the law from being restricted in the future. It does this by requiring that the secretary of state apply to England and Wales the human rights recommendations that led to decriminalisation in Northern Ireland. These are outlined in a 2018 UN report on the elimination of discrimination against women.
The report’s recommendations establish full decriminalisation as a baseline standard that must be achieved. They also require minimum legal standards of allowing abortion in cases where there is a risk to health, where the pregnancy results from rape, and in cases of severe foetal anomaly.
The Abortion Act 1967 already delivers these standards. But the recommendations – and Creasy’s proposed amendment – would set out a framework that could be applied in the future to other questions around bodily autonomy.
No change in the law will happen immediately after the vote as the crime and policing bill has several more stages to pass in parliament. But the debate should give observers an indication of the direction of travel when it comes to the future of reproductive rights in England and Wales.
Ruth Fletcher is Chairperson of the Abortion Support Network.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Leonie Fleischmann, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, City St George’s, University of London
The UK’s decision to impose sanctions on two far-right Netanyahu government ministers has put it at loggerheads with the Trump administration over Israel. Announcing on June 10 that Britain would join Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway in sanctioning Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, the UK foreign secretary David Lammy said the pair had “incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights”.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio criticised the decision, releasing a statement the same day saying the sanctions did not “advance US-led efforts to achieve a ceasefire, bring all hostages home, and end the war”. He added: “We remind our partners not to forget who the real enemy is. The United States urges the reversal of the sanctions and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel.”
Britain and its allies also called on the Netanyahu government to respond to extremist Israeli settler violence in the West Bank and to “cease the expansion of illegal settlements which undermine a future Palestinian state”. This has brought the spotlight back to the West Bank, where decades of settler violence towards Palestinians and a planning system which favours the Israeli settlers, have led to the gradual displacement of Palestinian communities.
The announcement seemed to signal a possible breach in relations between the UK government and the Netanyahu government. But with conflict escalating between Israel and Iran, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has said the government may be willing to provide military support for Israel.
Smotrich responded to the sanctions, speaking on his “contempt” at Britain’s decision and referring to Britain’s history of administration of what he called “our homeland”. He said: “Britain has already tried once to prevent us from settling the cradle of our homeland, and we will not allow it to do so again. We are determined to continue building.”
In retaliation for the sanctions, Smotrich pledged to collapse the Palestinian Authority, by taking measures to prevent Israeli banks for corresponding with Palestinian banks. This has been vital for sustaining the Palestinian economy.
UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, explains why the government has sanctioned the two Israeli ministers.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and their ultra-nationalist followers actually represent a relatively small fraction of Israeli society, but they hold the balance of power in Netanyahu’s coalition, controlling 20 seats in Netanyahu’s 67-seat coalition. This has enabled them to consolidate decades of settler activity outside of parliamentary legitimacy into influencing government policy.
Itamar Ben-Gvir
Ben-Gvir is an admirer of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the far-right Kach party which was labelled a terrorist organisation in 2008 having been banned from running in parliamentary elections. In 2007 he was convicted for incitement to racism and being a supporter of a terrorist organisation.
He subsequently told an event to honour Kahane that, while he admired Kahane, he would not try to pass laws to expel all Arabs from Israel and the West Bank or to create a regime which involved ethnic segregation. But Kahane’s violent anti-Arab ideology and desire to establish a theocratic Jewish state has influenced the next generation of ultra-nationalists.
The national security minister has been convicted eight times for offences that include racism and support for a terrorist organisation. He gained prominence as a successful defence lawyer for Jews accused of violence against Palestinians. The political party he heads, Otzma Yehudit, advocates for the annexation of the entire West Bank without granting Palestinians Israeli citizenship.
Ben-Gvir has become infamous for his provocative statements. In August 2023, he declared in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, that his rights trump those of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
“My right, and my wife’s and my children’s right to get around on the roads in Judea and Samaria, is more important than the right to movement for Arabs,” he said, effectively advocating for a regime of apartheid. He has consistently pushed Netanyahu to maintain the war in Gaza, blocking past attempts to reach a ceasefire.
Bezalel Smotrich
Smotrich also has a history of making inflammatory statements. In February 2023, three days after settler vigilantes rampaged through the West Bank town of Huwara, he called for Israel to wipe the town off the map. He later apologised for this comment after being criticised by both the opposition leader, Yair Lapid, and the US government, saying he hadn’t meant it to be a call for vigilante violence.
Smotrich believes the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are part of the biblical land of Israel and rightfully belong to the Jewish people. He has dedicated his career to ensuring the establishment of Jewish settlements.
In 2006, he helped establish a non-governmental organisation called Regavim as a pressure group to increase settlement of the West Bank. The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz has criticised Regavim as “an organisation waging a total war on Palestinian construction in the West Bank”.
Since Smotrich was given increased control over civil affairs on the West Bank in early 2023, the building of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank has accelerated. He is reported to have recently directed his office to “formulate an operational plan for applying sovereignty” over the West Bank.
He told a group touring new settlements approved by the Israeli government that: “”We will not stop until the entire area receives its full legal status and becomes an inseparable part of the State of Israel. We are changing the face of the settlement enterprise not just as a slogan, but through real action.”
Rightward shift
The prominence of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich reflects a rightward shift in the Israeli electorate that has brought ultra-nationalist settler ideology into the mainstream. However, their meteoric rise is also due to their holding the balance of power, which has enabled Netanyahu to remain in office. That Netanyahu remains prime minister is widely believed to be partly responsible for the slow progress of his trials for bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
Before the November 2022 Knesset election, Netanyahu reportedly brokered a deal whereby Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party and Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Home party joined forces. This ensured they won enough seats to ensure Netanyahu could form a coalition. And so these two extremists bent on thwarting any hope for Palestinian independence became kingmakers.
While they have such influence over the Netanyahu government, there is no possibility for a Palestinian state. Instead it is more likely that the violence towards Palestinians and the dispossession of their land will continue to increase.
Leonie Fleischmann 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 Jeremy Hicks, Professor of Post-Soviet Cultural History and Film, Queen Mary University of London
A statue of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was unveiled in the Taganskaya metro station in Moscow in May, recreating a mural that was dismantled decades ago. It is the first such statue to be erected in central Moscow since Stalin’s death in 1953 and marks a disturbing new stage in Russia’s authoritarian path.
Tens of millions of people died as a direct result of Stalin’s policies between 1924 and his death. These policies included the forced collectivisation of agriculture, the Gulag labour camp system and the “great terror” – a wave of mass arrests between 1937 and 1938, including of key figures in the army.
Yet ultimate victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, with the support of Britain and the US, redeems Stalin in the eyes of Russia’s current rulers. For the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, this victory was one of the crowning achievements of the Soviet Union and remains a unifying force in modern Russia.
De-Stalinisation, which from 1956 to the late 1960s saw the dismantling of Stalin’s policies and legacy, meant no statues of him were erected from his death until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But 110 monuments have been built since then (at the last count in 2023), with 95 of them erected in the Putin era. The rate of construction multiplied after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
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These statues initially tended to be in peripheral parts of the Russian Federation, such as Yakutia, North Ossetia and Dagestan, and not in city centres. The renaming by presidential decree of the airport in Volgograd as Stalingrad in April 2025, to echo the city’s wartime name, was thus a significant moment.
But the statue in the Moscow metro, an architectural gem in the centre of Russia’s capital that is used by millions of people each day, is an even more important symbolic statement.
‘Stalinwashing’
Stalin’s reputation in Russia continues to recover. According to a poll from 2015, 45% of the Russian population thought the deaths caused by Stalin’s actions were justified (up from 25% in 2012). By 2023, 63% of Russians had an overall positive view of his leadership.
This reflects the view promoted in schools and amplified by the Russian media, where criticism of Stalin is rare. Even the 2017 British comedy, The Death of Stalin, was banned in Russia for fear of popping the bubble of public approval.
The purpose of rehabilitating Stalin is about boosting support for Putin’s regime, training Russians’ conformity reflex, and instilling pride in their history. But it also has external ramifications.
With the partial exception of Georgia, his birthplace, Stalin is widely reviled by Russia’s neighbours which were often the victims of Stalin’s repressive policies. This is especially true of Ukraine. A famine known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor was deliberately imposed there between 1932 and 1933 as part of collectivisation and killed as many as 3.8 million people.
As a result, his death unleashed de-Stalinisation accompanied by the destruction of his statues all over eastern Europe. This began during the 1956 Budapest uprising and was followed by later such reactions in Prague and elsewhere.
After the uprisings were put down, Stalin’s place was typically taken by the less controversial Vladimir Lenin, the revolutionary leader who founded the Soviet Union.
But since the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine, which culminated in the ousting of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, Ukrainians have also been pulling down statues of Lenin. Other Soviet-era symbols have also been torn down in a wave of demonstrations known as Leninopad or Leninfall.
This is what has informed the latest intensification of Stalin-washing. The Ukrainian refutation of the symbolic heritage of the Soviet Union seems to have supercharged the Russian embrace of it, Stalin included.
Russia has restored statues of Lenin in the Ukrainian territories it occupies. And it has now also started erecting statues of Stalin, notably in the southeastern city of Melitopol, where a statue was unveiled in May to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory in the second world war.
This is against the law in Ukraine, where there is a ban on pro-Communist (and pro-totalitarian) symbolism. Russian forces have meanwhile been destroying memorials to the Holodomor in a battle over the meaning of the Soviet legacy.
Russia’s military strength
The re-elevation of Stalin promotes a narrow interpretation of his rule, stressing Russia’s military strength. Modern statues typically portray Stalin in a military uniform and evoke a sense of him as a victorious wartime leader.
In fact, some of the appeal of the symbol of Stalin lies in welfare provisions of his leadership where, despite imposing an often cruelly authoritarian system, education and healthcare were free for all. The same can be said for his use of fear as a work incentive. Russians sometimes still denounce complacent or inept officials with the imprecation: “If only Stalin was here to sort you out” (Stalina na vas net in Russian).
Nevertheless, it is the imperial version of Stalin that dominates, vindicating Russian refusal to reckon with its colonial past as the centre of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s record is sometimes defended within Russia on the basis that Winston Churchill, for instance, remains a British national hero despite a bloody past (such as his role in the Bengal famine of 1943).
While there is an element of truth in this, the difference is that Churchill’s shortcomings and complicity in the death toll attributable to the British empire are publicly discussed. Such criticism of Stalin is not permitted in Russia. Even the new statue in Moscow was erected under cover of the night, evading public scrutiny and debate.
The fact that the UK subjects its historical heroes to scrutiny is what distinguishes it from Russia, and defines it as democratic. At least for the time being.
The Bible Society recently published a report claiming that church attendance in England and Wales increased by more than half between 2018 and 2024. The revival was especially striking among young men, with reported church attendance jumping from 4% to 21% over this short period.
As a quantitative social scientist who has studied religious change in modern societies for more than 25 years, I’m surprised – and sceptical. I do not doubt that the Bible Society acted in good faith, but they haven’t engaged with the mountain of evidence, some of it very recent, pointing to religious decline.
The annual British Social Attitudes survey – widely regarded as the best and most reliable source of data on such matters – shows that the share of adults in England and Wales who said that they were Christian and went to church at least monthly fell by nearly a quarter (from 12.2% to 9.3%) between 2018 and 2023, the last year available. The Bible Society surveys suggest that churchgoers were 8% of the adult population in 2018 and 12% in 2024.
The main Christian denominations (Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist) conduct and publish their own attendance counts every year. Those show that while churchgoing continues to rebound from the lows of the COVID lockdown, attendance at worship services remains substantially lower than it was in 2019, before the pandemic. In the Church of England, average weekly attendance is down about 20% from pre-pandemic levels, and the story is similar in other denominations.
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The Bible Society report claims that “Catholicism has risen sharply.” According to their figures, Catholics were 23% of churchgoers in 2018 and 31% in 2024. As total churchgoing supposedly increased by 56% over that period, from 3.7 million to 5.8 million, the implication is that Catholic mass attendance has more than doubled.
We know from the Catholic church itself, however, that the reality is far different. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales counted 701,902 people attending Sunday mass in 2019. In 2023, there were 554,913 – a drop of 21%.
The findings are also inconsistent with other data from YouGov, the polling firm that collected the data for the Bible Society. A decade ago, the British Election Study (BES) commissioned YouGov to create an online panel. This panel, which includes more people than the Bible Society surveys, was asked about religious affiliation and church attendance in 2015, 2022 and 2024.
According to YouGov’s data for the BES internet panel, the share of Christian churchgoers in England and Wales declined from 8.0% to 6.6% between 2015 and 2024, whereas YouGov’s surveys for the Bible Society apparently show an increase from 8% to 12% between 2018 and 2024.
The fact that the findings were completely different in the two cases suggests that this kind of polling is not a reliable way of measuring trends in church attendance.
What could be the problem with the data?
Gold standard social surveys are based on random (probability) samples of the population: everyone has a chance to be included. The British Social Attitudes survey is one such example – and found that churchgoing fell by nearly a quarter from 2018-23.
By contrast, people opt in to YouGov’s survey panel and are rewarded after completing a certain number of surveys. The risk of low-quality or even bogus responses is considerable.
YouGov creates a quota sample from its large self-selected panel. The sample will match the population on a number of key characteristics, such as age and sex, but that does not make it representative in all respects. As quota samples do not give each person in the population a known chance of being selected, statistical inference is not possible and findings cannot be reliably generalised.
To write (as in the Bible Society report) that because thousands of people participated in the two surveys, they “give a 1% margin of error at a 99% confidence level” is misleading.
This study is not the first time such non-probability sampling has led to dubious findings. In late 2023, the Economist ran the story that one in five young Americans believed that the Holocaust was a myth, based on another YouGov poll. A study by the Pew Research Center showed that that finding was almost certainly fallacious, and the Economist added a disclaimer acknowledging the problem.
The trouble with young adults
The Bible Society claims that the alleged religious revival is being driven by young people flocking to church (and reading their Bibles). There are numerous reasons to be sceptical of survey findings about young adults. They are what survey researchers call a hard-to-reach population. They tend to be in transition between the parental home and education or employment; they are often out of the house and difficult for interviewers to find or for online survey companies to recruit.
Those who do respond to surveys may not be representative of their age group. They are more likely to be living with their parents, less likely to be out with friends, more likely to be compliant, less likely to be suspicious of authority, and so on. Such characteristics are associated with religious participation.
The Bible Society report claims 21% of men aged 18-24 are regular churchgoers. Yuri A/Shutterstock
Other findings from the report are also surprising. The Bible Society asserts: “Men are now more likely to attend church than women.” Most churchgoers would probably be surprised by this news, which would make England and Wales an exception to the religious gender gap present in most western countries. For example, recent research by Pew in the US has found that, although the gender gap is less pronounced among the youngest adults, “women remain more religious than men … by a variety of measures”.
It would be fascinating to probe all of these issues further, but regrettably the Bible Society has not published the dataset. (When contacted about this, the Bible Society pointed to aggregate statistics published by YouGov and said it plans to publish more summary tables in the coming months.) Open access to all data is now a basic expectation in scientific work.
That the Bible Society report has generated some enthusiastic coverage is not surprising – it appears to challenge conventional wisdom, and there are plenty of anecdotes to be provided as supporting “evidence”.
But this doesn’t mean the data should be taken at face value. We need to place more trust in surveys based on probability sampling and less in data collected from opt-in online panels. That’s particularly the case when people are pushing a story that runs counter to everyday experience – and years of data.
In response to the arguments made in this article, the Bible Society said it was committed to producing rigorous and high-quality research that equips the church and provokes conversation in culture. “We are well aware of the limits of non-probability panels, but also the demonstrated strength of this method in producing valid and actionable insights when paired with quota controls and post-stratification, as widely acknowledged in existing survey methodology literature according to academic standards. [Our data] points to both increased engagement with Christianity and a changing spiritual atmosphere, and we are happy to acknowledge it may be on the upper end of a range that future data sets will nuance.”
A spokesperson for YouGov said: “YouGov’s methodology is robust. We have a proprietary panel of millions of people to take part in our surveys. YouGov draws a sub-sample of the panel that is representative of British adults by range of demographic factors, and invites this sub-sample to complete a survey.”
David Voas 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 his academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Colin Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University
Jaws turns 50 on June 20. Last year, Quentin Tarantino called Stephen Spielberg’s film “possibly the greatest movie ever made”. Though he was quick to add that it isn’t the best film in terms of script, cinematography or acting, he was convinced that its overall quality as a movie remains unmatched.
I’m not so sure if Jaws is the best movie ever made – but it’s certainly the movie that I like to watch the most. It is as fascinating and multilayered as it is entertaining and depressing. As a researcher of political propaganda, I believe that Jaws had political purpose.
I have watched Jaws well over 50 times and still, with every viewing, I spot a new detail. Just last week I noticed that when police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) leaves his office after the first shark attack, he opens a gate in a white picket fence.
The white picket fence is often used to symbolise the American dream and Brody’s actions are likely intended to symbolise the disruption to the dream’s pursuit of capitalism as he seeks to close the beaches and potentially ruin the town’s tourism season.
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The film was released in June 1975. Just in time for summer holidays spent splashing in the waves (or not!). However, despite its continued acclaim, it didn’t win any of the big Academy Awards in 1976. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest dominated that year. Composer John Williams did, however, win the Oscar for best original score, which I assume you are now humming in your head.
The film is based on the book by Peter Benchley, published a year earlier in 1974. The book’s plot is somewhat different to the film. For example, Matt Hooper – the shark specialist played by Richard Dreyfuss in the film – is eaten by the shark, possibly as an act of retribution for his sins on land. He survives in the film.
Benchley was US president Lyndon Johnson’s (1963-1969) communications advisor before he became an author and so knew Washington’s priorities well. The film was then commissioned before the book had time to become a commercial success, which is somewhat unusual.
The trailer for Jaws.
The shark – powerful, mysterious, dark eyed, stalking the American people and killing without emotion – represents the threat posed by communism. The defeat of this “menace” will require the reunification of American society following its disastrous and fractious involvement in the Vietnam war and political scandals like Watergate.
Hence, the white public sector worker (Brody), the scientist (Hooper) and the military veteran (Quint), put their differences aside to band together on a rickety and ill-equipped boat – the Orca – which was possibly meant to symbolise the wobbling US of its time.
So while Jaws is a parable of societal repair, it is also a story of exclusively white unification amid external threats. The civil rights movement and Vietnam are inextricably linked through the service of young black men to the cause, and yet black characters are conspicuous by their absence from the book and the film. The only black presence in the book is an anonymous gardener who rapes wealthy white women.
Human will to dominate the natural world
In the book, the horror focuses upon human, rather than animal, behaviour. This comes in the form of political corruption, mafia influence, adultery, snobbery, racial prejudice, community disconnect and dishonest journalism. And it occurs as much on land as it does at sea. There is a large section midway through the book where the shark plays no part in the, at times, highly sexual plot.
Spielberg removed many of the undercurrents and insinuations of the book for his adaptation. The film gives less attention to life in the town of Amity and focuses largely on the shark and the horror of its actions.
The irony is that so many characters feel personally offended by an animal capable of instinct alone, when they as humans – capable of reason and choice – behave so badly towards each other. Indeed, the lack of an eco-centric character to defend the shark in both the book or the film is telling.
Brody yells for people to ‘get out of the water’.
The overwhelming horror is instead found in the treatment of the shark and the assertion that it must be killed rather than respected and left alone. Indeed, Jaws represents a parable of the modern human perception of battle against nature. Wherein Brody, Hooper and Quint, despite their differences, are united in their assumption of human superiority and their perspective that the problem ought to be dealt with using violence.
The story of Jaws also speaks to George Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant from 1936. It captured the author’s dilemma while working as a police officer in colonial Burma when an elephant disrupted the regular process of capitalism by trampling through a local market.
The philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno referred to the enlightenment as having created a “new barbarity” wherein humans are engaged in a project of destruction. Here then, a shark has had the audacity to behave in an inconvenient way to man’s profiteering from tourism and must be killed.
Indeed, one of the biggest criticisms of the film, which Spielberg has subsequently acknowledged, is its inaccurate representation of shark behaviour and the extent to which the film’s success contributed to the decline of the species.
Ultimately then, Jaws – the book, the film and the reaction of audiences to it – serves as a testimony to the role played by fear within human decision-making. The fear of “others”. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the natural world. Fear of loss of status or reputation.
It’s a testament to the susceptibility of humans to become insular and violent when they are scared, but also to the distorting influence of propagandists in determining what they ought to be afraid of.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Colin Alexander 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.
When you think of dinosaurs, you might imagine towering predators or gentle giants roaming prehistoric landscapes. But what if these ancient creatures could teach us about one of humanity’s most persistent challenges: cancer?
In a new study, my team and I explored how fossilised soft tissues, preserved for tens of millions of years, could reveal new insights into ancient proteins that might one day help the study of cancer.
For decades, dinosaur research has focused on bones, which are much more likely to be preserved. But bones alone can’t tell the full story of how these animals lived, or how they died. Advances in technology, like paleoproteomics (the study of ancient proteins) are now allowing scientists to analyse delicate fragments of soft tissues preserved in fossils.
In 2016, I read an article about the discovery of a new fossil in Romania with a tumour in its jaw. Those remains were from a dinosaur called Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus, a duck-billed, plant-eating “marsh bird”. The specimen had lived between 66-70 million years ago in the Hateg Basin in present-day Romania.
I was fascinated by what we might learn from this. Although there were a handful of previous reports of cancers in other dinosaur bones, and previous findings of soft tissues like blood vessels in fossils, no one had ever described soft tissues in an ancient tumour.
The Telmatosaurus specimen. Pramodh Chandrasinghe, CC BY-NC-SA
To understand more, my team went to Romania and collected the specimen. We brought it back, and made a tiny hole into it with a drill the width of a human hair, taking a miniscule sample.
Then we mounted it onto a powerful microscope, called a scanning electron microscope. Inside it, we saw images of blood cells, which contain proteins.
In the original Jurassic Park film, the scientists create or clone dinosaurs from ancient genetic material. But in reality over millions of years the DNA is completely broken down.
Proteins however, unlike DNA, can be remarkably stable over time. Research has shown that they can persist in fossils for millions of years under the right conditions, acting as molecular time capsules. Studying these proteins can help us reconstruct biological processes, including diseases like cancer, that affected dinosaurs.
Cancer’s deep evolutionary roots
Cancer is often seen as a modern plague, but it has ancient origins. Large, long-lived animals, from elephants to whales, are a paradox. Their size and longevity should make them cancer-prone, yet many have evolved remarkable defences.
Elephants, for example, carry extra copies of the TP53 gene, a tumour suppressor. Bowhead whales which can live for over 200 years, have ultra-efficient DNA repair mechanisms and damage to DNA is the root cause of cancer. Dinosaurs, as some of the largest animals to ever exist, probably faced similar problems.
My team’s research builds on growing evidence that dinosaurs weren’t immune to cancer. Fossilised tumours have been found in species like Tyrannosaurus rex and Telmatosaurus, ranging from benign growths to aggressive cancers. My team is aiming to uncover the molecular tools dinosaurs used to suppress tumours in the future.
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Bones tell us about anatomy, but soft tissues hold the keys to biology. In my team’s study, the red blood cell-like structures we found in Telmatosaurus fossils represent gateways to understanding the dinosaur’s physiology.
Proteins preserved in these tissues could reveal how dinosaurs managed oxidative stress which is linked to cancer, inflammation, or even immune responses to cancer. For instance, certain proteins might indicate mechanisms for detecting and destroying faulty cells before tumours can form.
This work also highlights a a need for a critical shift in paleontology: to preserve soft tissues, not just skeletons. Museums and researchers often prioritise intact bones, but fragments of fossilised skin, blood vessels, or cells can harbour molecular secrets. As technology advances, these overlooked specimens could become invaluable for studying disease evolution.
Bridging past and present
The link between dinosaurs and humans might seem distant, but evolution often repurposes ancient biological tools. Modern oncology already draws inspiration from nature and many chemotherapies come from plants or trees. The drug trabectedin, for example, used to treat soft-tissue sarcoma, comes from a marine organism called the sea squirt.
Expanding our search to extinct species could open a library of evolutionary solutions. If we can identify cancer-suppressing or cancer-promoting proteins in dinosaurs, these molecules might inspire new lessons about human cancers.
It’s taken nearly a decade to get this far. Like so much work, this research underscores the importance of patience and we’re not there yet. A real breakthrough might come when advances in research allows us to study ancient proteins in detail, tracking how cancer mechanisms evolved over millions of years.
Bridging paleontology and oncology is not only uncovering ancient history. We’re potentially writing a new chapter in the fight against cancer.
Justin Stebbing 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.
But rather than charting a path to stability, the CPT remains mired in dysfunction as Haiti’s crisis deepens with no end in sight. Armed gangs now control most of the capital, more than a million Haitians have been displaced and half the country faces acute food insecurity.
The United Nations says the country may be reaching a point of no return and risks falling into “total chaos.”
Haitian friends tell me their whole country feels as blocked as the barricaded streets and choke points used by the gangs to control the capital.
A security crisis paralyzing everything
The impasse is undoubtedly shaped by entrenched gang violence. Armed groups have been used by political players for political ends in Haiti for decades.
But now, new, well-organized armed gangs have emerged as political entities in their own right.
For example, the G9 Alliance, the most notorious of gangs — actually a federation of gangs — is led by former police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier.
Chérizier presents himself on social media as a revolutionary figure fighting the elites, but in the streets of Port-au-Prince most, see him as a violent criminal.
Last year, the G9 merged with rivals to form a coalition called Viv Ansamn (Live Together). Led by Chérizier and others, the group forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry from power. Henry had become prime pinister after the assassination of Haiti’s last elected head of state, President Jovenel Moïse, in July 2021, despite himself being implicated in the assassination.
Viv Ansamn’s takeover of the capital confirms gangs have become an autonomous political force. They have since expanded their power through their control over fuel supplies, critical infrastructure and key choke points.
It’s telling that the gangs have become so powerful despite the presence of a UN-approved, Kenya-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission. The mission has been in Haiti since shortly after Henry was forced out of power.
But with limited scope and funding from donor countries, including the United States, Canada and Ecuador, the mission has failed to achieve any major successes. Indeed, by the UN’s own estimates, gang violence continues to have a “devastating impact” on the population, despite the presence of the mission.
Last month, the U.S. government designated Viv Ansamn and Gran Grif, Haiti’s two most powerful armed gangs, as terrorist organizations. Canada and others have also imposed sanctions on politicians and gang leaders, and perhaps this could lead to more sanctions against those who most directly benefit from the crisis. But for residents of Port-au-Prince, little has changed on the ground, where many feel the gangs are holding the country hostage.
Democratic vacuum with no clear path forward
A common saying in Haiti goes like this: peyi’m pa gen leta, my country has no state. Once a criticism of a particular government, it now feels literal. Haiti has no elected national officials.
The CPT was established by the Organization of American States after Henry’s ousting, but has has done little to restore democracy. Elections are impossible under the current security conditions.
Instead, the CPT has become another obstacle to resolution. Mired in internal conflict, some members have been accused of bribery. With no framework for political compromise, the council reflects a system where some key players actually benefit from the political impasse.
Governing structures that can’t govern
Haiti is now in uncharted territory. The CPT operates in a legal vacuum, making decisions without a clear mandate or authority.
Still, the council is moving forward with a controversial plan to rewrite the Haitian constitution. The proposed changes will fundamentally alter Haiti’s government structure, including abolishing the senate and the prime minister, allowing presidents to hold consecutive terms, changing election procedures and allowing dual citizens and Haitians living abroad to run for office.
This constitutional reform highlights the paradox at the heart of Haiti’s crisis: an institution with questionable legitimacy is attempting to redesign the very framework that would determine its own authority.
These aren’t just procedural problems: they represent fundamental questions about who has the authority to govern and how decisions get made in a country where democratic institutions have always been fragile.
International responses miss the mark
International groups, including the UN, the Organization of American States and the Core Group that includes the United States, Canada and France, have overseen Haiti’s politics for decades. But their influence has often backfired. Many in Haiti see the international community as directly responsible for the current crisis.
The MSS mission is a stop gap at best and a liability at worst. It is insufficient for the scale of the crisis.
Some observers have called for a full UN peacekeeping mission, but there is little support for it and such a mission would likely face resistance within Haiti given the country’s fraught history with international interventions.
Can the international community undo the damage it has already done? And can Haiti make it through the impasse without the international community?
Beyond the impasse: What needs to change
There are no easy solutions. Addressing gang violence without legitimate governing institutions won’t create lasting stability. Yet the path to a legitimate government remains unclear as organizing elections without basic security is unrealistic.
The international community must stop treating Haiti as a series of separate crises requiring separate responses. The current piecemeal approach treats symptoms while ignoring the underlying causes that block political resolutions.
For Haitians, the stakes could not be higher. The question isn’t whether change is needed, but whether the international community and Haitian leaders can move beyond the impasse before the situation deteriorates even further.
Greg Beckett receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Benjamin Muller, Professor & Program Coordinator in Migration and Border Studies, King’s University College, Western University
Perhaps. But the timing also highlights the longtime shared border saga between Canada and the U.S. — and should compel Canada to carve its own path.
Like Trump’s 2017 travel ban, his 2025 directives significantly prevent or limit access to the U.S. for citizens from 12 mostly African and Middle Eastern countries, with more possibly on the horizon. It’s likely to face judicial challenges and may not survive for long.
In contrast, Bill C-2 could lead to several significant and broad statutory changes that Canadians will contend with for years to come.
Data privacy concerns
Days before Trump’s announcement, the Canadian government advanced the controversial Strong Borders Act covering a wide swath of proposed legislative changes, from intensified border security measures to more restrictive immigration and asylum policies.
In these respects, the proposed Canadian legislation could be considered more worrisome than Trump’s travel bans.
In the fog of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and Canada, the focus is on American tariffs and their economic impact. But little attention is being paid to Canada’s longstanding co-ordination and co-operation with the U.S. in terms of border management.
Unfortunately, Canada has a history of appeasing the U.S. on the border. The period following 9/11 is worth noting.
These agreements included greater reliance on biometric and surveillance technology, binational information-sharing and accelerated, robust co-ordinated and co-operative border enforcement (specifically the Shiprider program and the Integrated Border Enforcement Team or IBET).
The early 2000s saw the rise of new institutions such as the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA), along with significant policy changes that included prolific and more robust American pre-clearance of people and goods, and authorizing CBSA agents to carry firearms (which was once controversial).
Frequently, these reforms were in response to American pressure or reactionary U.S. policies. The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), for example, is an American policy that has compelled travellers to produce passports when crossing the U.S. border for almost 20 years.
In the past year, there have been increasing concerns about the impact of potential increases in asylum claims in Canada because of American policies. Those raising concerns often make reference to Roxham Road, the unofficial border crossing that thrived during the last Trump administration due to a loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA).
Such gaps in legislation were modestly addressed, including in the proposed Bill C-2, which will require arriving migrants to claim asylum within 14 days of arrival. After that time, claimants will not receive a hearing and be subject to deportation.
Amid renewed American pressures under Trump and a history of border co-operation, it’s not surprising Prime Minister Mark Carney is following his predecessor in trying to appease the U.S. president via Canadian border policy. And because asylum claimants often languish for up to two years in Canada’s immigration and asylum system, it’s clear there are problems.
But that doesn’t preclude the need to think critically about the sweeping powers proposed in Bill C-2.
In particular, enhanced executive powers — in many cases by institutions that have no civilian oversight — must be scrutinized.
Many of these changes are reminiscent of the kind of co-operative — and sometimes coercive — border policies that emerged in the post-9/11 years. It could be argued that Canadians should have expressed “elbows up” responses to American pressures to reimagine our border almost 25 years ago.
Furthermore, these changes serve as reminder that co-operative and co-ordinated management of our border is increasingly “baked in,” and despite tariff rhetoric, that’s unlikely to change dramatically without significant pushback from Canadians.
Revisionist history
It’s worth reflecting on the nostalgic and revisionist accounts of the coercive — not truly co-operative and collaborative — post-9/11 era of border security management, especially in the heat of the ongoing Canada-U.S. trade war.
Canadians should remember they live during a time of deep integration in border management — but Canada can always assert its own interests and marshal its own resources to manage borders and those who cross it.
In the long Canada-U.S. relationship, coercion has often masqueraded as co-operation. There are far fewer coincidences in border policy than we might think, possibly including the timing of the Strong Border Act. But Canada must always evaluate its policies in terms of whether they serve Canadian, not American, interests.
Unlike the Trump administration’s travel bans and deportations, Bill C-2 introduces a wide swath of changes Canadians could grapple with for decades.
Benjamin Muller receives funding from SSHRCC and King’s University College at Western University.
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