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May 14, 2026

Love, quest, adventure: the storytelling behind Xi Jinping’s speeches and China’s grand strategy

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Mei Li, Lecturer in Strategic Public Relations, University of Sydney

For many in the West, China still feels hard to fully understand. Public debate and media coverage too often focus on the “China threat”. Critics highlight the flaws of China’s political system and limits on freedom, yet China has still managed to rise as a major power that can now compete with the United States.

One reason for this gap in understanding is that the media often interprets China through a Western-centric perspective.

US President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week, for instance, will be analysed in the West very differently from the way it will be seen in China. Xi’s language will be parsed and scrutinised for couched messages, veiled threats and hidden meanings.

But analysts may be missing some of the tools China uses to explain and justify its actions.

My co-authored new research offers a new way to look at China’s grand strategy: by analysing the way the government uses storytelling. My research partners and I are part of a growing group of scholars looking at how geopolitics is becoming a contest of narratives – how states tell stories about themselves and each other.

To do this, we studied four major speeches by Xi from 2021–23. We read them as stories and dissected the narratives – as well as the characters and language – to better understand the meaning behind the words.

Why narrative in politics matters

The use of political narratives by leaders is not new.

In ancient Athens and Rome, politicians relied on strong public rhetoric to persuade people. Aristotle described three key elements of persuasion in rhetoric: logic (logos), emotional appeal (pathos), and the speaker’s credibility (ethos).

Modern theorists like Kenneth Burke argue rhetoric creates a sense of shared purpose between leaders and the public, but it can also create division between groups.

And communications scholar Michael Kent identifies 20 master “plots” that have been used by storytellers for thousands of years to craft effective narratives. These include: quest, adventure, pursuit, transformation, revenge, sacrifice, discovery and of course love.

My research partners and I used these plot devices to analyse Xi’s speeches to see how he communicates – and tells stories – about China’s strategies.

The plot devices in Xi’s speeches

We found several master plots that consistently shape China’s official stories:

Adventure

In the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th anniversary speech in 2021, Xi said:

To save the nation from peril, the Chinese people put up a courageous fight. As noble-minded patriots sought to pull the nation together.

This storyline frames China as a nation on a long journey towards strength and prosperity, marked by setbacks and breakthroughs. This is seen as a type of political adventure. This narrative also appeals to shared memories in China of hardship and endurance.

Xi Jinping’s speech to mark the 100th anniversary of Chinese Communist Party’s founding.

Quest

Xi’s speeches also described a quest – the nation’s striving towards a difficult goal, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In Xi’s 20th Party Congress report in 2022, he said:

There has never been an instruction manual or ready-made solution for the Chinese people and the Chinese nation to turn to […] as they moved on toward the bright future of rejuvenation.

The message is intended to inspire unity, patriotism and pride among Chinese listeners.

Transformation

In his 14th National People’s Congress speech in 2023, Xi said:

The Chinese nation has achieved the great transformation from standing up and growing prosperous to becoming strong, and China’s national rejuvenation has become a historical inevitability.

Transformation stories describe not just change, but growth and renewal. This narrative presents China’s rise as a natural evolution built on decades of reform and sacrifice.

Xi Jinping’s speech at the 14th National People’s Congress.

Rivalry

Rivalry stories tend to feature internal and external threats.

In two of the speeches we studied, Xi refers to efforts by foreign powers to “blackmail, contain, blockade, and exert maximum pressure on China,” and recalls a past when foreign bullying caused “great suffering”.

In the CCP’s 100th anniversary speech, Xi also said:

Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.

These storylines reinforce the idea that China must remain vigilant and united against outside pressure.

Love

Xi doesn’t refer to a romantic-type of love story in his speeches; rather, he speaks of the dedication and loyalty of the Communist Party’s supporters.

In the 100th anniversary speech, for instance, Xi said:

And I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to people and friends from around the world who have shown friendship to the Chinese people and understanding and support for China’s endeavours in revolution, development and reform.

How audiences see these messages

The impact of this messaging is strong at home. It’s often reinforced through state media, cultural products and patriotic education to reach as wide an audience as possible.

The frequent contrast between past suffering and present strength encourages the public to see China as a peaceful but firm global actor.

For a foreign audience, this storytelling can help other countries interpret China’s actions and anticipate its responses.

For example, China’s narratives about past humiliation and the need to defend its sovereignty help explain its strong stance on Taiwan – and the Communist Party’s legitimacy on this issue in the eyes of the people.

But this does not mean a military conflict is inevitable. Any future military action over Taiwan would depend on a multitude of factors, including careful calculations of risk, China’s economic interdependence with the world, and the potentially catastrophic consequences for the region and its people.

This cannot be easily conveyed in storytelling, which is why we can’t rely on this device alone to explain China’s actions. But it does give us a window into leadership’s thinking – and in a political system like China’s, this is vital.

The author would like to acknowledge her co-researchers on the project: Mitchell Hobbs of the University of Sydney (project lead), and Zhao Alexandre Huang and Lucile Desmoulins of Gustave Eiffel University, France.

This piece is based on the author’s contribution to a research project funded by the Australia-France Social Science Collaborative Research Program from the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

– ref. Love, quest, adventure: the storytelling behind Xi Jinping’s speeches and China’s grand strategy – https://theconversation.com/love-quest-adventure-the-storytelling-behind-xi-jinpings-speeches-and-chinas-grand-strategy-269510

May 14, 2026

Trump-Xi summit: 3 ways the US and China can compete without going to war

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Kai He, Professor of International Relations, Griffith University

US President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing this week may ease tensions at the margins of the US–China rivalry. But it will not change a central fact: neither side can escape the rivalry, and neither side can decisively win it.

The biggest challenge for Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping is whether they can compete without turning the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship into its most dangerous one. A war is not inevitable.

If Washington and Beijing want to keep their competition peaceful, they must try to accomplish a few basic things:

preserve military deterrence without turning it into provocation
channel their rivalry into institutions and public goods, such as infrastructure development, rather than a military confrontation
keep ideology from hardening every disagreement into a zero-sum struggle.

So, how can this be done?

1. Establish mutual restraint

Both countries will continue to build military capabilities and balance against each other. The danger comes when each side convinces itself that its actions are intended to deter hostilities, while the other interprets them as a provocation.

Nowhere is that danger greater than the impasse over Taiwan. For Beijing, Taiwan is a core sovereignty issue and a test of national resolve. For Washington, it is tied to US credibility as a security guarantor in the Indo-Pacific, regional stability, and its ability to deter coercive unification.

Both sides claim to be defending the status quo. Both believe the other is eroding it. And both are acting in ways that may be making the situation less stable.

The answer is not a unilateral concession by one side or the other. Rather, both sides need to establish mutual restraint, backed by clearer political reassurance.

For instance, China could reduce the scale and frequency of coercive military actions around Taiwan, such as military aircraft sorties, naval patrols and drone operations near the island. And the US could avoid steps that blur the line between support for Taiwan and support for formal independence.

Trust may be absent. But trust is not a precondition for stability. Clarity and restraint are.

This requires a serious framework for deterrence management, including:

sustained efforts to clarify red lines
reducing misperceptions about each other’s intentions and resolve
preventing competitive signalling from spiralling into a confrontation.

During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow eventually learned that an arms race without guardrails was too dangerous to sustain. Washington and Beijing have not yet reached that level of strategic maturity. They need to.

2. Compete in safer arenas

Rivalries can be channelled into forms that are less dangerous than military conflict, and can sometimes even be productive.

That is already happening. The United States and China are competing through global institutions and alignments, from the Quad and AUKUS (on the US side) to the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (on China’s side).

Both are trying to shape the rules, memberships and agendas of the regional and global orders in ways that advance their own influence and constrain the other’s.

On the surface, this can look like just another front in a new cold war. But institutional competition can be one of the safer forms of rivalry.

Competition can force institutions to adapt rather than stagnate. It can encourage new forms of regional cooperation. It can also push rival powers to provide public goods – such as infrastructure, development financing, technological investments and climate initiatives – in order to win support from others.

In infrastructure financing, for instance, China has used the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to expand its reach globally. The US and its partners have responded with initiatives of their own.

The competition between the two has been beneficial – and it has expanded the options available to developing countries.

This is also why a rush toward broad economic decoupling would be such a mistake. Some restrictions in sensitive sectors may be unavoidable. But a sweeping effort to sever economic ties would remove one of the few remaining guardrails in the relationship.

As long as the United States and China remain economically intertwined, both sides are incentivised to maintain stability and avoid conflict.

3. Lower the temperature

The US and China are not simply clashing over interests. They also have very different political and historical narratives.

US policymakers often cast the rivalry as a defence of the liberal order against authoritarian revisionism. Chinese leaders often see it as a struggle against containment, humiliation and foreign interference.

These are not just different rhetorical narratives. They shape what each side sees as threatening, acceptable or beyond compromise. They also help explain why the relationship has become so emotionally and politically charged.

Ideological competition is safest when it remains indirect. Neither Washington nor Beijing is likely to convert the other to its way of thinking. And neither is likely to persuade the wider world through their lectures on ideology.

The sounder strategy is to compete by example.

For the United States, it means showing that democratic governance can still deliver competence, cohesion and long-term economic vitality. For China, it means showing that its model can bring growth, social stability and international cooperation.

Both sides also need to recognise that ideological overreach is dangerous. The more Washington frames competition as a global struggle between democracy and autocracy, the more it encourages Beijing to see compromise as capitulation.

And the more Beijing wraps its foreign policy in narratives of anti-hegemony, the more likely Washington is to see its own restraint as weakness.

Engagement still matters for the same reason. If the United States and China stop talking, this ideological competition will harden and become more dangerous.

The greatest danger in the US–China competition is that both sides will come to see restraint as weakness, compromise as surrender and coexistence as impossible. Once that happens, catastrophe becomes far more likely.

The most realistic goal is not friendship, or even reconciliation. It is something harder and more modest: competition without war.

Kai He receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Toda Peace Institute, an independent institute in Japan promoting policy-oriented peace research. He serves as a non-resident senior research fellow at the Toda Peace Institute.

Huiyun Feng receives funding from Australia Research Council.

– ref. Trump-Xi summit: 3 ways the US and China can compete without going to war – https://theconversation.com/trump-xi-summit-3-ways-the-us-and-china-can-compete-without-going-to-war-281328

May 13, 2026

When words look like their meaning, we process them faster, new research reveals

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By David Sidhu, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Carleton University

The shape of the word bubble resembles the shape of an actual bubble, according to research participants. (Unsplash)

Think about a word that looks like its meaning. For instance, the word bed kind of looks like a bed, with the vertical lines resembling the posts at either end. Loop looks very loopy.

Some words are more subtly evocative — like blizzard, whose zigzagging letters might evoke something chaotic.

The term for this is “iconicity” and it has typically been studied in the sounds of words. For example, the word meow resembles the sound of a cat. The word teeny sounds like something small.

My recent study explored iconicity in the visual appearance of words in English for the first time. I found that people processed words faster and more accurately when the words physically resembled their meanings.

English letters began as visual symbols

The letters we use in English (which is a Latin script inherited from the Roman alphabet) actually started out as visual symbols. They likely evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

One possibility is that these Egyptian symbols were adopted by speakers of a North Semitic language, around 1800-1600 BC, into what is called the “Proto-Sinaitic” script.

Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting birds, eyes and other images in green, red and gold colour. — Hieroglyphs from the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.
(Wikimedia Commons)

This script used symbols to code for the first sound of the pictured thing. This is called the acrophony principle. For example, our letter M comes from a symbol for water, taking the first sound of the word mayim.

The letters have changed so much that these ancient origins aren’t relevant to reading English today. But there is some evidence that the shapes of letters have some relationship to the sounds they convey. For example, one study assembled letters for the sound /i/ (as in bee) and /u/ (as in boo) from 56 different languages and asked people to guess which was which. It turned out that people could do this, more often than expected by chance.

But this isn’t quite what I was interested in here. Rather than asking if the shapes of letters are related to the sounds of words, I was interested in whether those shapes are related to the meanings of words.

Bubble, hoop, wiggle

In this research, I asked participants to rate more than 3,000 words according to how much the shape of their letters resembled their meaning, using a scale of one to seven.

This is a common approach in the study of psycholinguistics. We often ask people to rate words on one dimension — for example, how concrete a word is, or how positive a word is — and then use those ratings to understand how people process word meaning.

The first thing to note is that there was agreement across participants, at least on par with ratings of other word properties in the past.

The highest-rated words included bubble, look, wiggle, hoop, puppy and bed.

It’s easy to come up with explanations for these ratings. Puppy looks like it has legs and a tail. There is something wiggly about the two G’s in the middle of wiggle.

But can we actually tell how participants made their ratings? We can get some clues by looking at the kinds of words that get higher ratings.

Round letters, spiky letters

Words with high ratings tended to refer to things you can see. This makes sense if participants were actually considering a resemblance between the word and its meaning.

Getting more specific, when a word for a round thing contained round letters (for example, O, G and C), it was rated higher. When a word for a spiky thing contained spiky letters (like W, Z and X), it was rated higher. Words for small things tended to be rated higher when they contained fewer letters.

All in all, it seems like the ratings actually did capture a resemblance between the look of a word and its meaning.

This is all well and good, but does it matter? To answer this, I used three existing databases with information on how quickly people can process individual words. These are from studies that, for example, present participants with strings of letters (for example, spoon or flarg) and have them identify them as real or invented words as quickly as possible.

In all three databases, I found that people were faster and more accurate at processing words that looked like their meanings. This was after accounting for all kinds of things like how common a word is, how many letters it contains and how easy a word’s meaning is to picture. Not only that, these words tended to be learned at an earlier age.

There is a growing appreciation that language is more than words and their meanings. It involves all kinds of things like tone of voice, gesture and gaze. We can now add one additional subtle cue: the shapes of letters.

David Sidhu receives funding from NSERC and SSHRC.

– ref. When words look like their meaning, we process them faster, new research reveals – https://theconversation.com/when-words-look-like-their-meaning-we-process-them-faster-new-research-reveals-282228

May 13, 2026

Canada to host new NATO-linked defence bank as Mark Carney pushes security overhaul

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Srdjan Vucetic, Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

Canada has been chosen to house the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB). Originally dubbed “the NATO bank,” the new institution will help NATO and non-NATO countries more easily direct funding toward defence and security needs.

This translates to hundreds of new jobs in finance, research and analysis in Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto or Vancouver — all potential host cities.

This comes as a boost for Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former banker who has sought to craft a bold new foreign policy for Canada.

As Carney argued in his acclaimed Davos speech, the ongoing geopolitical “rupture” requires countries to “hedge against uncertainty.”

Rethinking global co-operation

In Canada’s case, the primary concern is the aggressive behaviour of the Donald Trump administration south of the border.

To unwind longstanding dependence on the now-unpredictable superpower neighbour, the federal government has set out on an ambitious nation-building plan that includes both retaliatory tariffs on American goods and a rapid expansion and diversification of trade and investment.

Carney’s emerging foreign policy doctrine extols the influence of middle powers alongside a commitment to “variable geometry” multilateralism — his term for the once controversial idea that institutions and coalitions should be shaped by the issue or mission at hand, rather than the other way around.

Could this approach also work in defence and security? Geography and history have bound Canada and the United States through countless formal and informal agreements, including a mutual commitment to come to each other’s defence in the event of an attack.

However strained relations between Canada and the U.S. have become, the partnership is not simply an either/or choice. Canada must instead carefully balance its relationships and interests.

The Carney government’s opening moves have included a sweeping expansion of military spending and security-related infrastructure, pushing investment toward levels not seen since the Cold War, alongside a landmark strategic defence and security partnership with the European Union and Canada’s first-ever Defence Industrial Strategy.

Combined, these initiatives reveal the core logic of the approach: to bolster Canada’s capacity for strategic autonomy over the long term.

In theory, changing where defence supplies come from is less complicated than helping Canadian companies find new markets.

Yet the hardest challenges still lie ahead.

Biggest obstacles

First, boosting current spending to meet NATO’s new spending target of five per cent of GDP will be impossible without a combination of cutting back non-defence expenditures, increasing taxes and borrowing more. No democracy can achieve this quickly without a declaration of a war economy.

Second, as a three-ocean country — nearly 40 per cent of Canadian territory is in the Arctic — Canada faces competing defence priorities.

The challenge for the government, therefore, is not just to spend more on defence, but to ensure new investments are aligned with the objectives set out in its policy and strategy documents.

Yet the Carney government is still working on these initiatives. The delay once again has to do with Trump.

From the new defence policy (last updated in April 2024) to the new intelligence priorities (first issued in September 2024) and — most significantly — a long-overdue national security strategy (last released in April 2004), these initiatives must set clear goals for the relevant government ministries and agencies while piloting the political interplay between the Trump White House and largely anti-Trump Canadian public opinion.

The Trump influence

This is a delicate dance in which every word matters. Before Trump, every new Canadian defence policy statement was predictable, emphasizing the same three roles — domestic; NORAD and other North American operations; and NATO and other multilateral operations.

Now the government often struggles to communicate even the prime minister’s own basic talking point — that intensifying rivalries among major powers makes Canada more vulnerable because of its deep dependency on its unreliable, unpredictable but powerful neighbour to the south.

The same goes for the new intelligence priorities statement. The 2024 version outlined 14 areas of focus, spanning Arctic security and cyber- threats to technological change and violent extremism.

With the risk of another global economic crisis rising, the updated statement should rethink this list.

The Carney government won’t entertain the idea of a “royal commission for securing Canada’s future” — which could be a comprehensive, non-partisan review of the nation’s long-term stability and adaptability in the new geopolitical context

What comes next

This makes the long-awaited national security strategy even more important. Meant to guide resource allocation and capability development throughout at least Carney’s tenure as prime minister, this policy should not only fully acknowledge the scale of the security challenges confronting Canada but also assess the country’s comparative advantages and structural vulnerabilities as a middle power.

This, in turn, would require incorporating key dimensions of climate and economic security, as well as science and technology policy, into the strategic framework.

With some luck, this would mark a step forward in answering some of the most pressing questions about Canada’s future, including:

What security issues should Ottawa prioritize in its “variable-geometry” multilateralism?
How should the government approach the creation of a new agency to collect foreign intelligence — if it chooses to pursue one at all?
What about a national industrial strategy to better catalyze all investments in defence and security?

If the Carney government is serious about both preparing for different scenarios and following through on its plans, clear communication will be essential.

Politicians and the public alike recognize the need to rethink the assumptions and decisions that have shaped Canadian life over the past 50 years, if not longer. The more Canadians understand why some risks are being prioritized over others, and why resources are being directed accordingly, the better equipped the country will be to handle what comes next.

Srdjan Vucetic has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Mobilizing Insights in Defence and Security (MINDS) program of the Department of National Defence. He is also the co-author, with Hager Ben Jaffel, of the forthcoming book Beyond Five Eyes Intelligence: An International Political Sociology.

– ref. Canada to host new NATO-linked defence bank as Mark Carney pushes security overhaul – https://theconversation.com/canada-to-host-new-nato-linked-defence-bank-as-mark-carney-pushes-security-overhaul-282773

May 13, 2026

The Hanau far-right extremist shooting exposed how racism costs lives — and how institutions let it

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jayanthan Sriram, PhD Candidate, Centre for Sensory Studies, Public Scholar, Concordia University

In Hanau, Germany, on Feb. 19, 2020, after Vili-Viorel Pǎun witnessed the beginning of a mass shooting and tried to stop the gunman by chasing him down with his car, he called emergency services three times. No one answered, and Pǎun was shot dead.

Later, Pǎun’s father overheard police officers using a common racial slur while commenting on the supposed impossibility of a Roma person showing civic courage. This was not an aberration; it was a part of the same systemic racism that’s left the victims’ families without true justice six years later.

As sensory studies scholars who focus on racism and migration, we argue that racism is not only interpersonal or even simply structural, it’s also multi-sensory. It shapes how minorities see, hear and move through the world, with consequences that extend from everyday interactions to life-or-death institutional failures.

Systemic failures shaped the tragedy

The gunman , a firm believer in the “Great Replacement” theory, scouted out places where minorities were thought to gather — shisha bars, youth centres and kebab shops — to carry out his attack.

And on that day, Vili-Viorel Pǎun, Ferhat Unvar, Hamza Kurtović, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Kaloyan Velkov, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Sedat Gürbüz and Gökhan Gültekin lost their lives. All were ethnically either Turkish, Afghan, Romanian, Bulgarian or Bosnian.

The aftermath and investigation into the event revealed how in Germany the devaluation of minority lives that drove the gunman’s worldview is also present in the way justice, media and politics operate.

What happened at the Arena Bar & Café, the final site of the attack, serves as another example for the families of the victims who argue that the racism in this tragedy is also evidence of systemic issues within policing. The exit had been illegally locked to facilitate police raids, largely driven, investigators found, by racial profiling linking hookah bars with criminality.

The London-based research agency Forensic Architecture, which uses architectural techniques and digital technologies to investigate human rights violations, revealed that five of the nine victims could have escaped through the emergency exit and survived.

There were questions about why it took hours to apprehend the perpetrator, even though his location was known. The special forces stood by his house and waited, which gave the perpetrator time to kill his mother and commit suicide. They never offered a reason for their delayed intervention.

Other investigations later revealed that some of the special forces were members of a chat group sharing right-wing extremist ideologies.

These failures create a reminder of how the racism faced by minorities feeds back into societal structures that can cost lives and obstruct justice.

Multi-sensory impact

Our research shows that racism is a multi-sensory experience that transforms the ways in which minorities feel and interact with the world. Qualitative research and statistics confirm that people face a loss of trust and the development of health issues when faced with institutional discrimination.

Multi-sensory racism can present through a visual categorization based on skin colour — the discomfort of entering predominantly white spaces, for example. It can manifest through olfactory perception such as comments on “smelly” foods.

It affects everyday social interactions like how and where people choose to safely socialize — and why they may prefer to spend their time within their own communities rather than “integrating.”

These experiences culminate in how institutional behaviour sets up or fails to sanction individual racism.

Beyond moments of tragedy

In the case of Hanau, the failure by politicians and police to acknowledge the ubiquity of the racist worldview that motivated the perpetrator and made his violence possible has prompted survivors and their families to begin a multi-pronged anti-racist effort.

Most prominently, the survivors founded Initiative February 19 Hanau to create a platform that pushes for social action and solidarity for the victims of racist violence. Guided by the principles of remembrance, investigation, justice and accountability, the initiative calls for state responsibility while embracing the notion of #SayTheirNames.

The hashtag underscores the importance of naming those who have been murdered as an act of resistance against racism and systemic violence.

Both Said Etris Hashemi — who still carries shrapnel from the perpetrator’s ammunition in his body — and Çetin Gültekin, brother of the murdered Gökhan Gültekin, released memoirs that deal with the inherent racism of German society and situate it within a broader political struggle of growing far-right movements and their popularity in Germany.

The 2025 documentary Das Deutsche Volk follows the lives of the survivors and their families over the years and captures the ongoing fight for a memorial in Hanau’s city centre.

At one point, Çetin Gültekin suggests a landmark that showcases the deceased as pillars encircling the Brothers Grimm National Monument. The indifference that follows this suggestion has been interpreted by advocates as a lack of recognition for dignified remembrance.

The Hanau attacks, and the ongoing struggle for recognition of migrants’ experiences in a system where German institutions often treat them as third-class citizens, expose a troubling fallacy. It was captured by the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2015 non-fiction book Between the World and Me: “Race is the child of racism, not its father.”

In societies where race is still treated as a biological fact — rather than a colonial construct used to place people into arbitrary hierarchies — and where structural inequalities are only beginning to be acknowledged, there is still limited understanding of racism as a multi-sensory reality that shapes the everyday lives of minorities.

The work of addressing racist injustice requires sustained, long-term institutional and social change.

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

– ref. The Hanau far-right extremist shooting exposed how racism costs lives — and how institutions let it – https://theconversation.com/the-hanau-far-right-extremist-shooting-exposed-how-racism-costs-lives-and-how-institutions-let-it-278960

May 13, 2026

Canada’s 2026 World Cup team reflects the country’s multicultural identity — in a way hockey never has

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven, PhD Candidate, Political Science, Western University

The Men’s World Cup will be a unique sporting event for Canadians — and not merely because it’s being co-hosted on Canadian soil or because soccer is now the most-played youth sport in Canada.

The Canadian men’s national soccer team has the unique opportunity to forge a different vision of Canadian national identity — one that looks quite different from what hockey has historically offered.

This tournament will be especially unique when compared to recent sporting events including the Four Nations Faceoff, the Milan Cortina winter Olympic Games and the Toronto Blue Jays’ World Series run last year.

The difference lies not in the sport itself, but in who is wearing the Canadian jersey and the stories they carry onto the pitch.

National sports and nation building

In Canada, hockey has historically been the sport used to symbolize Canadian national excellence and foster collective identity. However, it’s also an expensive sport that has long reflected a white, European conception of Canadian identity.

The National Hockey League employs a workforce that is 84 per cent white across players and team staff, a reality reinforced by the composition of Canada’s men’s hockey team at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

The Toronto Blue Jays’ extraordinary run to the 2025 World Series was a moment that genuinely galvanized the country around baseball in ways not seen since the back-to-back championships of 1992 and 1993. The 2025 World Series prompted the entire country to root for “Canada’s team.”

Canadians rallied enthusiastically behind a team that played in Canada and wore the maple leaf, something their owners were happy to emphasize throughout the Jays’ run.

Yet the Blue Jays presented their own identity puzzle. The team that Canada adopted as “Canada’s team” had only one Canadian player on its World Series roster: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — who was born in Montréal and whose father played for the Montreal Expos — in a majority-American lineup.

A lot of the national enthusiasm was likely stoked by Canada’s tense trade relationship with the United States and not Blue Jays players being directly representative of the lived experiences of most Canadians.

A squad built on multiculturalism

Canada’s men’s soccer team presents a different image: a racially diverse squad whose players embody stories of immigration, offering a more inclusive vision of what Canadian identity can look like.

No player embodies this more than Canada’s team captain, Alphonso Davies. Born in the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana to Liberian parents who had fled the civil war, he arrived in Edmonton at age five through Canada’s resettlement program. He is now a Champions League winner and a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador.

But it goes beyond Davies. Head coach Jesse Marsch, who took over from John Herdman in 2024, has made the recruitment of dual nationals an explicit priority.

He recruited players like Tani Oluwaseyi, who could have declared for Nigeria; Niko Sigur, who played for Croatia at the under-21 level; Marcelo Flores, who competed for Mexico at various youth levels; and Alfie Jones, an English-born centre-back who learned the Canadian national anthem from a teammate before taking his citizenship oath at training camp.

The result is a squad built largely from immigrants and dual nationals who were actively courted to represent Canada, reflecting a vision of the country shaped by multiculturalism rather than ethnic homogeneity. This carries historical resonance: Canada’s past policies once explicitly favoured white, European immigrants, provoking a countervailing push toward official multiculturalism.

It is precisely this multicultural framework that’s made the squad possible and given Canada unprecedented strength and depth.

The power of recognition

National sporting events are powerful vehicles for building shared identity. When people connect to sporting events in ways that make their sense of belonging to a country feel personal, sport becomes something more than entertainment.

This World Cup arrives at a politically charged moment, with the United States — a co-host alongside with Mexico — planning to involve immigration enforcement in tournament security. Canada’s multicultural squad offers a counter-narrative in a tournament already shadowed by debates about immigration and belonging.

For the millions of Canadians who immigrated to Canada or who carry their family’s immigration story as a major part of their sense of identity, the men’s national soccer team offers something that the men’s Olympic hockey squad and the Toronto Blue Jays never quite delivered: the possibility of seeing themselves in a more complete representation of Canada’s team.

That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the realization of the full potential of sport in building Canadian national identity.

Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven 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.

– ref. Canada’s 2026 World Cup team reflects the country’s multicultural identity — in a way hockey never has – https://theconversation.com/canadas-2026-world-cup-team-reflects-the-countrys-multicultural-identity-in-a-way-hockey-never-has-280329

May 13, 2026

Illegal gold mining causes surges in malaria in the Amazon, and the association is far worse than we suspected

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Daniela de Angeli Dutra, Lecturer in Zoology, Bangor University

Gold prices are at an all-time high, and we are very worried. As disease ecologists, it’s not the economic instability that concerns us, but the fact that a surge in gold mining could have a devastating impact on human health.

Our team of researchers from Stanford University, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, established and quantified the effects of illegal gold mining on a recent surge in malaria in the Yanomami territory in the Brazilian Amazon that plunged this isolated Indigenous population into a devastating health crisis in the early 2020s.

An executive push towards extraction

When Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil’s president in 2019, he made environmental deregulation a central tenet of his platform, claiming that environmental and Indigenous land protections hindered the country’s economic development. He also transferred the authority of Indigenous land demarcation from the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) to the Agriculture Ministry.

Furthermore, he issued decrees aimed at deregulating small-scale mining activities in the Amazon region. The decrees made no distinction between regulated (therefore, legal) mining outside of Indigenous territory and mining within Indigenous land, which is universally illegal. Illegal miners flooded the Yanomami territory.

By January 2023, when Lula da Silva secured the Presidency as Bolsonaro successor, the number of illegal gold miners in Yanomami territory — the largest Indigenous territory in the Amazon — had surged to 20,000, roughly two-thirds the number of the local Yanomami population.

Malaria and the Yanomami health crisis

Weeks after Lula da Silva took office, independent news outlet Sumaúma released a dispatch citing shocking disease and malnutrition figures among the Yanomami. Threaded with images of suffering Yanomami people, the report motivated the president to declare a humanitarian crisis.

Dr. Andre Siqueira, a researcher from the Oswaldo Cruz research institute (Fiocruz) and a member of the team of doctors sent into the territory upon declaration of the crisis recounted: “The conditions of the population were devastating.” Nearly every person they tested was positive for malaria.

Even small increases in mining can cause a surge in malaria cases

The Sumaúma dispatch, and the Instituto Sociaombiental report upon which it was based, linked the influx of illegal gold miners during the Bolsonaro administration to the Yanomami health crisis and the proliferation of malaria.

As researchers who focus on how trends in land use contribute to the spread of parasites, we suspected that gold mining and malaria were not separate contributors to the same crisis, but part of one system of cause and effect devastating the territory and its people.

Illegal gold mining can drive malaria in multiple ways. First, when miners tear down forests and open gashes along the edges of rivers to access gold deposits, they create the ideal breeding grounds for the mosquito species that transmits malaria in the Amazon.

Second, when miners travel to the territory, potentially from malaria hotspots across South America, they can carry the parasite into the territory and increase its transmission.

Finally, small-scale gold miners often use mercury to cheaply and easily extract gold particles. This mercury is dumped into waterways across the region, poisoning the people who rely on the rivers for water and for fish, weakening their immune systems and making them more susceptible to malaria infection.

Thorough data on health and environmental conditions in the Amazon collected by the Brazilian Ministry of Health enabled us not only to confidently establish the link Indigenous people had long suspected, but to assign numbers to the relationship, making it concrete and actionable.

We were shocked by the results. The relationship was far stronger than we suspected. We found that every 0.03% increase in mining led to a 20-46% increase in malaria one to two years later, resulting in a 300% increase in malaria in the Yanomami territory between 2016-2023.

Understanding the association between gold mining and malaria underpinning the Yanomami health crisis is only one part of the puzzle. We hope that this research can serve as a tool to empower Indigenous communities with information about their health and inform policies that protect both human health and the environment. Our data indicates that by preventing illegal mining within Indigenous lands can protect their health and other important natural and cultural heritage.

Improving healthcare access

The Lula government is engaging in important efforts to expel illegal gold miners and establish health centers in the Yanomami territory. Though hospitalizations for malaria have decreased slightly since 2023, malaria rates among Yanomami remain high due to the lagged effect we identified in our research and the difficulty of access to timely diagnoses and treatment in remote regions.

Researchers are making strides to close this accessibility gap. An international team has developed “malakits”, which empower community members without formal medical training to diagnose and treat malaria on site. Such efforts are of critical importance given that the lagged effects of illegal gold mining will continue to cause elevated malaria incidence unless communities have broad access to treatment.

It is also important to ensure full land rights of Indigenous populations and empower them to defend their land. This is proven to be one of the most effective ways to fight deforestation and protect ecosystems.

Addressing the malaria crisis requires diversifying the rural Amazonian economy with an eye toward sustainability, such that people have options beyond mining and logging. Brazil is making strides toward this goal with the recent launch of a national bioeconomy development plan.

Informed consumers can prioritize purchasing recycled gold or refrain from purchasing gold at all to send a signal that further illegal gold extraction is not worth the human toll. As with the Blood Diamonds campaign in the early 2000s, real change can come from spreading the word about the human and environmental cost of illegal mining and demanding ethical supply chains.

Appeals to protect the Amazon region are often made on environmental terms. We want to make the case that saving the people in Amazon is also a global health imperative. Protecting the forest, investing in Indigenous land rights, fostering healthy economic opportunities for rural communities, and interrogating the role of gold in our global economy are all part of preventing the continued spread of one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.

Daniela de Angeli Dutra was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (USA) awarded to Professor Erin Mordecai.

Riley Casagrande não presta consultoria, trabalha, possui ações ou recebe financiamento de qualquer empresa ou organização que poderia se beneficiar com a publicação deste artigo e não revelou nenhum vínculo relevante além de seu cargo acadêmico.

– ref. Illegal gold mining causes surges in malaria in the Amazon, and the association is far worse than we suspected – https://theconversation.com/illegal-gold-mining-causes-surges-in-malaria-in-the-amazon-and-the-association-is-far-worse-than-we-suspected-280568

May 13, 2026

Trump-XI summit: US president says he will discuss arms sales to Taiwan – breaking decades of US policy

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, Leiden University

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are likely to discuss many issues as they meet this week in Beijing. But alongside trade, technology and the war in Iran, one topic of conversation will stand out – the future of Taiwan.

Taiwan has long been a sensitive issue in Sino-American relations. Beijing regards the island as a breakaway province which must be reunited with the mainland. The United States has long opposed such a step. Yet in recent months, Trump has fuelled speculation that he may be ready to change key aspects of US policy on the issue, potentially granting Beijing long-sought concessions.

Trump’s apparent readiness to make these moves means that Taiwan is one of the issues on which we might see the most significant policy developments at the summit. And that could happen simply through the famously voluble president uttering just a few simple words.

The president’s policy towards Taiwan has been inconsistent and seemingly more malleable than that of previous administrations. Advocates for Taiwan point out that his administration recently approved the largest ever US arms sale to the island. But at the same time, he has sowed doubts about the strength of his support for Taiwan’s independence.

US policy towards Taiwan has traditionally been based on two principles. The first is “strategic ambiguity”, which means that the US declines to explicitly state whether it would actively use its military to defend Taiwan from attack by China. This policy is supposed to deter China while also discouraging Taiwan from formally declaring its independence from Beijing.

The second principle is the “one China policy”. According to this policy, the US recognises Beijing as the legitimate government of China, while opposing any violent solution to its dispute with Taiwan. It also retains robust informal links to the Taiwanese government in Taipei.

Observers are concerned that Trump may water down these principles during his summit with Xi. For instance, he might state that the US not only “does not support” Taiwanese independence but actively “opposes” it. Or he might double down on previous comments he has made indicating that whether or not Xi invades Taiwan is “up to him”.

Trump has also explicitly stated that he will discuss future US arms sales to Taiwan with Xi during this week’s summit. This violates one of the so-called Six Assurances that the US has upheld towards Taiwan since the 1980s, and which were endorsed by the US Congress in 2016.

Even securing a discussion of arms sales would be a victory for Xi, who would welcome an opportunity to chip away at the Six Assurances. Presumably he would then try to weaken the US commitment to the other five, which include a US commitment not to change its position on Taiwan’s sovereignty.

More concretely, if Xi succeeds in making US arms sales to Taiwan a legitimate topic of negotiation in Sino-American relations, then he could head them off in the future by offering the US concessions in other areas. For instance, if Trump or a future president asks Beijing for its help settling a conflict like that in Iran, Beijing might demand an end to US arms sales to Taiwan as the price.

High stakes

Given Trump’s reputation as a formidable China hawk, his attitude towards Taiwan may seem surprising. But it’s actually part of a longstanding pattern.

In relations with China, Trump has arguably always prioritised economic issues, while appearing less concerned about the security of America’s regional allies. He has also raised doubts about whether Taiwan is even defensible. In his first term, he reportedly told aides that: “Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are 8,000 miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it”.

Trump is also both highly transactional and less focused on abstract principles of foreign policy than most previous presidents. He views America’s support of allies such as Taiwan as a gift that it gives them, one that is often not worth the cost. If he can achieve a concrete victory for himself today by trading away support for Taiwan tomorrow, he may well be willing to do so.

All of these developments matter because they make a violent conflict between China and Taiwan, potentially ultimately involving the US, more likely. If Trump makes concessions to Xi, it will be the latest signal that US support for Taiwan is wavering. That made be read in Beijing as permission to violently change the status quo. Even though such an act might belatedly then be met with force from Washington in response, it is made more likely by Trump’s stance today.

Even worse for Trump, the summit comes at a time when American power and the wisdom of its long-term strategy are being visibly called into question in the Middle East. The US is bogged down in an intractable conflict and has severely damaged its deterrent capacity in the Indo-Pacific by burning through advanced munitions at a high rate. Trump’s personal unpopularity is also rising at home amid the war and its economic fallout.

This weakened position makes it even more likely that Trump will want to strike a deal with Xi to help end the war in Iran or ease trade tensions to help the economy at home. Taiwan may be the price of that – and, ultimately, peace.

Andrew Gawthorpe is affiliated with the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

– ref. Trump-XI summit: US president says he will discuss arms sales to Taiwan – breaking decades of US policy – https://theconversation.com/trump-xi-summit-us-president-says-he-will-discuss-arms-sales-to-taiwan-breaking-decades-of-us-policy-282894

May 13, 2026

State opening of parliament 2026: experts on plans for cost of living, EU ties, tourist tax and more

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Simon Usherwood, Professor of Politics & International Studies, The Open University

The government has set out its legislative agenda for the new parliamentary session in the king’s speech. Our panel of experts reveals the key points.

Measures to ease high living costs

Jonquil Lowe, Visiting Academic, The Open University

Surveys suggest that the cost of living is still a major concern for UK households, with energy and food prices topping the list of worries. In response, some campaigners have called on the government to use the energy independence bill announced in the king’s speech to break the link between electricity and gas prices and volatile global gas prices. And they want it to provide support, especially for low-income households, to switch away from heating homes with fossil fuels.

Among other measures, the bill aims to ensure landlords upgrade their properties to reduce tenants’ energy bills. These kinds of measure need to be introduced urgently if they are to save households from heftier energy bills expected this winter.

Other cost-of-living reliefs are welcome, although their impact may be small. For example, a move to “strengthen ties with Europe” may ease food inflation by reducing red tape and border checks on some imported foods.

The leasehold and commonhold reform bill (carried over from the previous parliamentary session) will help owners of leasehold flats and houses by capping ground rents at £250 a year, and then reducing them to a negligible amount after 40 years. Meanwhile, the social housing renewal bill aims to increase the stock of affordable social homes.

A ‘Bresignation’ bill: options for UK-EU closer relationship remain limited

Miriam Sorace, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics, University of Reading

The government clearly recognises that to improve the UK’s economic and trade security, strengthening ties with the European Union is paramount. But public attitudes are still characterised by “bresignation” rather than wholehearted “bregret”.

While support for rejoining the EU sits at around 55%, this obscures deep polarisation and strong conditionality. Support drops sharply in rejoining scenarios that require the UK to relinquish its previous opt‑outs, notably euro adoption and participation in the Schengen agreement on free movement. These would probably be among the concessions demanded by the EU, given public opinion across member states. Support for rejoining the single market (48%) or the customs union (50%) lags behind support for rejoining the EU and remains highly polarised.

The least polarising and most popular option is a broadly defined “closer relationship” with the EU, supported by around 63% of the public and even attracting a sizable minority (40%) of Reform UK voters (and 56% of previous Leave voters). Yet this plea reflects a degree of wishful thinking. Given the UK’s and EU’s red lines, marginal adjustments to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement are the only real options short of the various rejoin alternatives.

The status quo is widely disliked (only 33% prefer the current UK-EU relationship), but there is no other politically viable alternative to tinkering around the edges. “Closer relations” is not a concrete policy: it’s the default expression of living under sub-optimal constrained choice. In other words: “bresignation”. The UK is likely to remain locked into a status quo of continual negotiation with the EU for the foreseeable future, unless public opinion shifts towards accepting the significant concessions required to initiate rejoining negotiations.

Tourist taxes – England plays catch-up

Rhys Ap Gwilym, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Bangor University’s Business School

England is set to become the 26th country in Europe to introduce a tourist tax. The overnight visitor levy bill, announced in the king’s speech, follows recent moves in Scotland and Wales allowing local authorities to tax overnight stays.

In Scotland, Edinburgh will lead the way, adding a 5% levy to accommodation bills from July 24 this year. In Wales, Cardiff intends to introduce charges from April 2027: £1.30 per person per night in hotels and Airbnbs, and 75 pence in campsites and hostels. Such measures have proved controversial, with strong opposition from parts of the tourism industry.

The UK government has framed this as “the first step in a new era of fiscal devolution in England”. In practice, it is a modest one. Revenues are likely to be small relative to existing local taxes and mayors may place greater weight on reforms to council tax caps or business rate retention.

That said, international evidence suggests well-designed tourist taxes can work. Even modest revenues can help fund destination management, ease pressures on local communities and improve the visitor experience. The detail of the legislation will ultimately determine whether England achieves these gains.

Plans to make it easier to align UK law with EU agreements

Simon Usherwood, Professor of Politics & International Studies, The Open University

For all the talk from Prime Minister Keir Starmer of putting the UK at “the heart of Europe”, the proposed European Partnership Bill is a relatively modest and technical move. It would give the government powers to make adjustments to domestic legislation to ensure it complies with agreements being made with the EU. This would apply to those currently under negotiation (like youth mobility, food and veterinary standards, or emissions trading) or those that might be considered in future.

This streamlines a process that would have been necessary in any case, and remains reliant on those EU deals actually being struck. So there’s nothing particularly remarkable about the content. However, the repeated mention of “where it benefits the national interest” highlights how the government is trying to package this as something more.

Decisions about when to align are necessarily attached to decisions to sign up to deals with the EU, not to whether to make the domestic adjustments (which international law would consider to be an obligation). Much like Starmer’s flowery rhetoric in his speech on Monday, the substance doesn’t really match up.

Nationalising steel for security – but debts could burden the taxpayer

Phil Tomlinson, Professor of Industrial Strategy and Regional Development, University of Bath

Plans to nationalise British Steel offer some comfort to UK steel workers in the form of preserving jobs and providing stability. More pertinently, the move represents a renewed willingness for the state to intervene in a strategically important industry facing financial difficulties, high energy costs, fierce global competition and the challenges of the green transition.

Steel is a critical element in UK sectors such as car manufacturing and defence, infrastructure projects like railways, and low-carbon technologies including wind turbines. Nationalisation should offer the UK a degree of security over steel supply in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical climate.
The risk is that British Steel continues to lose out in global markets and makes substantial losses. This will impose a huge financial burden on the UK taxpayer, at a time when public finances are tight. But public ownership could align steel production with the UK’s broader industrial strategy goals, such as infrastructure development and net-zero targets.

And state financing could allow for long-term investment in new electric steel furnaces and decarbonisation. In the future, the government could use other levers to ensure a market for British Steel, such as strategies which favour UK-sourced, low-carbon steel for green infrastructure projects.

Plans to clean up our rivers and seas could be watered down

Alex Ford, Professor of Biology, University of Portsmouth

Water bills are rising, public anger over sewage pollution has not abated, and the government has now set out a major overhaul of water regulation in England and Wales in the king’s speech.

The proposed water reform bill signals a shift in emphasis. Rather than focusing solely on water companies, the legislation aims to address pollution more broadly, including contributions from agriculture and industry. This is a welcome change. The bill also promises a more unified regulatory system to end the fragmented oversight that has characterised the sector for decades.

Yet despite the language of reform, the vision looks less like a radical reset and more like a reboot of privatisation. This focus will worry campaigners, as it suggests continuity with an economic model widely blamed for under-investment, rising bills and environmental harm.

Immigration bill to tighten rules on right to family life

Joelle Grogan, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University College Dublin

The government says the new immigration and asylum bill will “tighten the application” of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Article 8 right to family life is inherently restricted, and both national courts and the European Court of Human Rights generally defer to government migration policy. So more detail of the bill in future will be welcome.

The background briefing notes state that Article 8 is stopping the removal of those living illegally in the UK, saying that 86% of people from January to September 2022 who raised rights-based applications in detention were released. However, this highlights the lack of data – both on how many removals have been stopped by the ECHR and its connection with the number of illegal arrivals. Research on available data on the ECHR and foreign national offenders indicate that numbers are very low.

The bill will define family life to ensure that it is limited to the core family unit of spouse, parents and children. But the European Court of Human Rights emphasises the “dependence” of one family member on another (for example by providing sole financial support) in migration cases as the trigger for Article 8. So by defining “family unit” without the condition of “dependence”, the government may unintentionally widen the definition rather than narrow it.

Simon Usherwood has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, as a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative.

Alex Ford has received funding from UKRI research councils, EU, charities and industrial partners including the water industry.

Joelle Grogan, Jonquil Lowe, Miriam Sorace, and Phil Tomlinson 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.

– ref. State opening of parliament 2026: experts on plans for cost of living, EU ties, tourist tax and more – https://theconversation.com/state-opening-of-parliament-2026-experts-on-plans-for-cost-of-living-eu-ties-tourist-tax-and-more-282895

May 13, 2026

Stardust trapped in Antarctic ice reveals tens of thousands of years of Solar System’s past

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Dominik Koll, Honorary Lecturer, Nuclear Physics, Australian National University

When you think of outer space, you’re likely picturing stars, planets and moons. But much of space is filled with clouds of gas, plasma and stardust – known as interstellar clouds.

In the local parts of our galaxy alone there’s a complex of roughly 15 individual interstellar clouds. The Solar System is currently traversing one of them, aptly named the Local Interstellar Cloud. The origin and history of these clouds are believed to be tightly connected to the birth and death of stars. But we can see their imprints right here on Earth, in a place you might not expect – Antarctic ice.

My colleagues and I have been studying stardust trapped in old Antarctic snow and ice to trace the history of our solar neighbourhood, including the Solar System itself.

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, we found a subtle clue that reveals our Solar System’s movement through the local interstellar environment over the past 80,000 years.

Looking down to see the sky

Astronomy usually looks outward. Telescopes collect light from distant stars and galaxies, allowing us to observe events across vast stretches of space and time. From these observations, we infer how stars live and die, how elements are formed, and how the universe evolves.

Our approach turns that idea on its head.

Instead of observing the light coming to us, we study the debris of exploding stars right here on Earth. As cosmic furnaces, stars forge many elements in their cores, from carbon and oxygen to calcium and iron. This includes rare isotopes (variants of chemical elements) such as iron-60.

When massive stars explode into supernovae at the end of their life, these elements are ejected into space and become interstellar dust.

Tiny grains of this dust then drift through the galaxy and occasionally find their way to Earth’s surface. Radioactive iron-60, a fingerprint of stellar explosions, is embedded within these grains. By searching for these atoms in geological archives on Earth, we can probe astrophysical events like supernovae long after their light has faded.

This is why Antarctica is so valuable. Its snow accumulates slowly and remains largely undisturbed, forming a layered record that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Each layer captures a snapshot of the material that was present in our cosmic neighbourhood at the time.

Finding stardust in Antarctic ice

When we studied 500kg of recent snow in Antarctica, we unexpectedly found this rare radioactive isotope. Where did it come from? There was no recent near-Earth supernova.

But our solar neighbourhood is filled with 15 clouds, with the Solar System currently traversing at least one of them. Is the stardust waiting in the clouds to be picked up by Earth? If yes, then the amount of stardust Earth collects should be related to their structure: the denser the clouds, the more iron-60 they contain. This was our educated guess in 2019.

Soon, other explanations were brought forward. Millions of years ago Earth received large showers of iron-60 from massive supernovae. Is the iron-60 in Antarctic snow the last remnant or an echo of this signal? A rain that became a drizzle?

To find out, we analysed a 300kg section of Antarctic ice, dating from 40,000 to 80,000 years ago. The process is painstaking. The ice needs to be melted and chemically treated to isolate tiny amounts of iron, including the iron-60 from the stardust.

Then, using the sensitive atom counting technique of accelerator mass spectrometry at the Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility at Australian National University, we counted individual atoms of iron-60.

The expectation was straightforward: based on previous measurements from surface snow of Antarctica and several thousand-year-old ocean sediments, we anticipated a certain steady level of iron-60 deposition.

Instead, we found less. Not zero, but noticeably lower than expected.

This result suggests that less interstellar dust was reaching Earth during that period. This is a remarkable change on a comparatively short astrophysical timescale and does not fit the long timescales of the iron-60 deposits that landed here millions of years ago. Instead, we needed to look for a smaller, more local source for the isotope.

The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex is a type of interstellar cloud.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

A fitting story

Naturally, astronomers are also quite interested in the clouds around the Solar System. Last year, a study reconstructing the history of the clouds arrived at the conclusion that they most likely originated in a stellar explosion. Furthermore, they found the Solar System has been traversing the Local Interstellar Cloud from sometime between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.

If that’s correct, we would expect that the amount of iron-60 collected on Earth should have changed sometime in the same time period – between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.

This is exactly what our results showed in Antarctica.

The story doesn’t fit perfectly, though. If these clouds did originate directly from an exploding star, we would expect way more iron-60 than we actually see in Antarctic ice.

Nevertheless, these clouds are imprinted in Earth’s geological record. If we look deeper and analyse even older ice, we might soon unravel the mystery of these local interstellar clouds, revealing their full history and uncertain origins.

Dominik Koll receives funding from the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE).

– ref. Stardust trapped in Antarctic ice reveals tens of thousands of years of Solar System’s past – https://theconversation.com/stardust-trapped-in-antarctic-ice-reveals-tens-of-thousands-of-years-of-solar-systems-past-279745