Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

The US government has announced controversial guidance on the prevention and treatment of autism in children.

New health recommendations aim to discourage pregnant women from taking the painkiller paracetamol – also known as acetaminophen and by the brand name Tylenol – to prevent autism.

The recommendations also include using the drug leucovorin to treat speech-related difficulties that children with autism sometimes experience.

So what is leucovorin and what does the science say about its ability to treat autism?

What is leucovorin?

Leucovorin is a form of folic acid, a B vitamin our bodies usually get from foods such as legumes, citrus fruits and fortified grains.

The medication is most often used in cancer treatment. It’s typically used alongside the chemotherapy drug fluorouracil, a cancer treatment that stops cancer cells from making DNA and dividing. Leucovorin enhances the effects of fluorouracil.

Leucovorin is also used to reduce the toxic side effects of methotrexate, another chemotherapy drug.

Methotrexate works by blocking the body’s use of folate, which healthy cells need to make DNA. Leucovorin provides an active form of folate that healthy cells can use to make DNA, thereby “rescuing” them while methotrexate continues to target cancer cells.

Because methotrexate is also used to treat the skin condition psoriasis, leucovorin can also be used as a rescue agent during treatment for this autoimmune condition.

Why is folate important?

Because folate is essential for making DNA and other genetic material, which cells need to grow and repair properly, it’s especially important during pregnancy.

This is because insufficient folate is linked to the development of spina bifida, a condition where a baby’s spine does not develop correctly. For this reason, women are advised to take folic acid supplements before conception and during the early months of pregnancy.

Folate is also important for supporting the production of red blood cells and overall brain function.

Why is it being considered to treat autism?

The recommendation to use leucovorin to treat autism seems to stem from a theory that low levels of folate in the brain can lead to a condition called cerebral folate deficiency.

Children with cerebral folate deficiency don’t usually display symptoms for the first two years. Then they show signs of speech difficulties, seizures and intellectual disability.

As the signs of autism are similar and it usually presents at around the same age, some people have proposed a link between cerebral folate deficiency and autism.

What does the evidence say?

So can giving children folate, in the form of leucovorin, help them to function better with autism? The evidence says maybe yes, and here’s what we know so far.

A review of the evidence in 2021 analysed the results of 21 studies that used leucovorin for autism or cerebral folate deficiency. Children who took the drug generally had improved autism symptoms. But the authors also said more studies were needed to confirm the findings.

Since then, a small 2024 study involved about 80 children aged two to ten years with autism. Half took a daily maximum dose of 50mg of folinic acid (similar to leucovorin), the other half took a placebo. Children given folinic acid showed more pronounced improvement when compared with those who took the placebo.

A similar 2025 study examined the same dose of folinic acid given to Chinese children with autism. Those given folinic acid had greater improvement in a type of social skill known as social reciprocity when compared with children given placebo.

While promising, none of these trials are at the level to change medical practice. We’d need further, larger studies before doctors can make a proper recommendation.

Like all drugs, leucovorin has side effects. The most serious or common are severe allergic reactions, seizures and fits, and nausea and vomiting.

In a nutshell

Overall, the latest health recommendations are not yet backed by sufficient evidence.

While the US Food and Drug Administration will now allow doctors to prescribe leucovorin to treat autism symptoms, the Australian government should not change its prescribing guidance.

Support for people with autism should continue to follow evidence-based best practice until the data from clinical trials of leucovorin is more robust.

Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd (a medical device company) and was previously a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. He is a member of the Haleon Australia Pty Ltd Pain Advisory Board. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design and testing.

Jasmine Lee 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. What is leucovorin, the drug the Trump administration says can treat autism? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-leucovorin-the-drug-the-trump-administration-says-can-treat-autism-265849

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Robyn Arianrhod, Affiliate, School of Mathematics, Monash University

The Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton, who was born 220 years ago last month, is famous for carving some mathematical graffiti into Dublin’s Broome Bridge in 1843.

But in his lifetime, Hamilton’s reputation rested on work done in the 1820s and early 1830s, when he was still in his twenties. He developed new mathematical tools for studying light rays (or “geometric optics”) and the motion of objects (“mechanics”).

Intriguingly, Hamilton developed his mechanics using an analogy between the path of a light ray and that of a material particle. This is not so surprising if light is a material particle, as Isaac Newton had believed, but what if it were a wave? What would it mean for the equations of waves and particles to be analogous in some way?

The answer would come a century later, when the pioneers of quantum mechanics realised Hamilton’s approach offered more than just an analogy: it was a glimpse of the true nature of the physical world.

The puzzle of light

To understand Hamilton’s place in this story, we need to go back a little further. For ordinary objects or particles, the basic laws (or equations) of motion had been published by Newton in 1687. Over the next 150 years, researchers such as Leonard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange and then Hamilton made more flexible and sophisticated versions of Newton’s ideas.

“Hamiltonian mechanics” proved so useful that it wasn’t until 1925 – almost 100 years later – that anybody stopped to revisit how Hamilton had derived it.

His analogy with light paths worked regardless of light’s true nature, but at the time, there was good evidence that light was a wave. In 1801, British scientist Thomas Young had performed his famous double-slit experiment, in which two light beams produced an “interference” pattern like the overlapping ripples on a pond when two stones are dropped in. Six decades later, James Clerk Maxwell realised light behaved like a rippling wave in the electromagnetic field.

But then, in 1905, Albert Einstein showed some of light’s properties could only be explained if light could also behave as a stream of particle-like “photons” (as they were later dubbed). He linked this idea to a suggestion made by Max Planck in 1900, that atoms could only emit or absorb energy in discrete lumps.

Energy, frequency and mass

In his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, where light dislodges electrons from certain metals, Einstein used Planck’s formula for these energy lumps (or quanta): E = hν. E is the amount of energy, ν (the Greek letter nu) is the photon’s frequency, and h is a number called Planck’s constant.

But in another paper the same year, Einstein introduced a different formula for the energy of a particle: a version of the now-famous E = mc ². E is again the energy, m is the mass of the particle, and c is the speed of light.

So here were two ways of calculating energy: one, associated with light, depended on the light’s frequency (a quantity connected with oscillations or waves); the other, associated with material particles, depended on mass.

Did this suggest a deeper connection between matter and light?

This thread was picked up in 1924 by Louis de Broglie, who proposed that matter, like light, could behave as both a wave and a particle. Subsequent experiments would prove him right, but it was already clear that quantum particles, such as electrons and protons, played by very different rules from everyday objects.

A new kind of mechanics was needed: a “quantum mechanics”.

The wave equation

The year 1925 ushered in not one but two new theories. First was “matrix mechanics”, initiated by Werner Heisenberg and developed by Max Born, Paul Dirac and others.

A few months later, Erwin Schrödinger began work on “wave mechanics”. Which brings us back to Hamilton.

Schrödinger was struck by Hamilton’s analogy between optics and mechanics. With a leap of imagination and much careful thought, he was able to combine de Broglie’s ideas and Hamilton’s equations for a material particle, to produce a “wave equation” for the particle.

An ordinary wave equation shows how a “wave function” varies through time and space. For sound waves, for example, the wave equation shows the displacement of air, due to changes in pressure, in different places over time.

But with Schrödinger’s wave function, it was not clear exactly what was waving. Indeed, whether it represents a physical wave or merely a mathematical convenience is still controversial.

Waves and particles

Nonetheless, the wave-particle duality is at the heart of quantum mechanics, which underpins so much of our modern technology – from computer chips to lasers and fibre-optic communication, from solar cells to MRI scanners, electron microscopes, the atomic clocks used in GPS, and much more.

Indeed, whatever it is that is waving, Schrödinger’s equation can be used to predict accurately the chance of observing a particle – such as an electron in an atom – at a given time and place.

That’s another strange thing about the quantum world: it is probabilistic, so you can’t pin these ever-oscillating electrons down to a definite location in advance, the way the equations of “classical” physics do for everyday particles such as cricket balls and communications satellites.

Schrödinger’s wave equation enabled the first correct analysis of the hydrogen atom, which only has a single electron. In particular, it explained why an atom’s electrons can only occupy specific (quantised) energy levels.

It was eventually shown that Schrödinger’s quantum waves and Heisenberg’s quantum matrices were equivalent in almost all situations. Heisenberg, too, had used Hamiltonian mechanics as a guide.

Today, quantum equations are still often written in terms of their total energy – a quantity called the “Hamiltonian”, based on Hamilton’s expression for the energy of a mechanical system.

Hamilton had hoped the mechanics he developed by analogy with light rays would prove widely applicable. But he surely never imagined how prescient his analogy would be in our understanding of the quantum world.

Robyn Arianrhod 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. 100 years before quantum mechanics, one scientist glimpsed a link between light and matter – https://theconversation.com/100-years-before-quantum-mechanics-one-scientist-glimpsed-a-link-between-light-and-matter-261551

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Suzy Freeman-Greene, Books + Ideas Editor, The Conversation

Literature has long portrayed messed-up families. As poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”

In honour of this rich vein of dysfunction, we asked experts to nominate the worst literary fathers and mothers. Today we delve into dads. Tomorrow, we turn to mothers.

Of course, complex characters – neither wholly good nor bad – are the best sort. Author Andrew O’Hagan has spoken eloquently about striving to humanise even his most unpleasant creations, to fully amplify a novel.

Still, some characters are awfully hard to like. My least favourite dad might be Shug Bain, a cruel, violent man who abandons his wife and kids in Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Shug is appalled by his son Shuggie’s feminine mannerisms. “Look how twisted you’ve made him,” he tells his wife.

Here are our experts’ picks.

James Mortmain, I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

Perhaps the worst parent is not an obvious “monster”, but one you can all too easily imagine as your own. In Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle, James Mortmain, a once-successful writer in the grip of decade-long writer’s block, threatens his first wife with a cake knife and assaults a neighbour. His younger daughter, Cassandra, softens Mortmain’s awfulness with disarming humour. In court, she writes, everyone was being very funny, but “Father made the mistake of being funnier than the judge … he was sent to prison for three months.” The self-focused Mortmain condemns his family to penury in a crumbling castle, where he reads detective novels in the gatehouse and Cassandra captures their plight in her journal.

– Carol Lefevre

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Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

For me, Heathcliff even beats bad-dads King Lear and Agamemnon. Most readers won’t remember that Heathcliff is a dad at all, which is part of what makes him so bad. The sadistic, dysfunctional passion between Heathcliff and Catherine dominates Brontë’s novel, leaving young Linton, the kid Heathcliff has with another woman, Isabella, neglected, abused and dominated by his terrifying father.

Heathcliff doesn’t even meet his son until he’s 13, after Isabella dies. Linton is then forced to live in tormented isolation and tortured into marrying his first cousin, Cathy. All this so Heathcliff can take revenge on Cathy’s father Edgar, who married his beloved Catherine Earnshaw.

– Sophie Gee

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Zeus, the Iliad

Zeus wakes up in book 15 of the Iliad, having been lulled to sleep by Hera with sex and potions. Poor Zeus – with his sneaky wife, bickering, divine siblings and children, all trying to manipulate the war at Troy – and he is only trying to keep the Olympian show on the road. Seriously? Who started the family games? And, if he had canned the swan costume and not raped Leda (or the dozens of other nymphs he “manifested himself” to), no Helen, no war, no problems.

He really is the paterfamilias of toxic patriarchy.

– Robert Phiddian

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Reunion – John Cheever

The last time you see your father, I hope he is not drunk on Beefeater Gibsons. I hope he doesn’t clap at the wait staff or demand they speak languages they do not know. I hope he doesn’t get you removed from four restaurants in a single afternoon. Walking away as he curses at a newsstand clerk, I hope you don’t mourn his flaws as “your future and your doom”. But, were this all to occur, I hope it’s happening inside a John Cheever story, where the comic and tragic mix like flesh and blood, or gin and vermouth.

– Alex Cothren

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Kev, Last Ride – Denise Young

I’m not in favour of binaries of any kind, so I’m not comfortable with “best” vs “worst”. Rather, I contribute a father figure from Australian literature who may be both/and best/worst. I’m thinking of Kev, the father in Denise Young’s astonishingly moving novel, Last Ride, who takes his ten-year old son, Chook, with him on the run from the law across outback NSW after committing a brutal murder. Kev is among the worst, because: who would drag a kid into that? But Kev is simultaneously among the best, because his love for Chook, and his deep-seated impulse to protect him from another man’s abuse, is as genuine and moving as the paternal instinct gets. Kev wields fatherhood as double-edged sword. I feel for him.

– Julienne van Loon

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Albion Gidley Singer, Dark Places – Kate Grenville

The worst father in literature is an easy one for me, though it has been decades since I have read his story. I first encountered the incestuous father Albion Gidley Singer in Kate Grenville’s novel Lilian’s Story, in which he is a somewhat shadowy but menacing figure. But it’s in Dark Places that Albion’s evil is brought fully to bear. I can’t remember the details of the book, but I can remember all too well the feeling of suffocation that came from being too close to Albion, to his thoughts and his feelings. A tremendous book I never want to read again.

– Natalie Kon-yu

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Sam Pollit, The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead

In Christina Stead’s exhilarating and suffocating semi-autobiographical The Man Who Loved Children, the naturalist and patriarch Sam Pollit is nicknamed by his wife Henny “the Great Mouthpiece” for his endless maxims and sickening Pollit-“fambly” patois. He claims to love his many children but mocks, cajoles, and insults them; even has them spy on each other. Family life is so bad that the novel’s heroine, the adolescent Louisa, believes her only hope of escape from the squalor and tyranny is through murder.

– Jane Messer

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My pick is a towering figure in Australian fiction: Sam Pollit of Christina Stead’s 1940 masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children. Sam’s oppressive sunniness, his maniacal refusal to look reality in the face, and his demand that his family play along with his ego-fantasy force them to absorb cruelty, mockery and contempt, all the while descending into more and more perilous poverty at his hands. He is a modern day narcissist par excellence, but also a grotesquerie or travesty of optimism as a virtue in the world. In Sam, “positivity” is transformed into dangerous and delusional thinking that steamrolls everything before it and leaves destruction in its wake.

– Edwina Preston

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Allie Fox, The Mosquito Coast – Paul Theroux

Charismatic, brilliant and narcissistic, Allie Fox drags his family off to live in an isolated part of Honduras’ Mosquito Coast to escape what he has persuaded himself is the impending end of the world. Like any colonist, he takes over a village and attempts to introduce Western technology and ideas. It all ends in catastrophe of course, and his wife and children barely escape with their lives. Allie is the exemplar of the charming destroyer and is at the top of my “bad dad” list.

– Jen Webb

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Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

Herman Melville, a great American author, was a lamentable father and an erratic provider for his family, who drove his son Malcolm to shoot himself in his bedroom in his parents’ house in 1867 after a row about the 18-year-old’s late hours. Melville’s fictional character Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick behaves even more reprehensibly, abandoning his own wife and son to focus obsessively on a doomed quest for a white whale that ultimately leads his whole crew to destruction. Ahab takes his name from the worst king of Israel in the Old Testament, and the author of this epic novel trains his gaze not just on one bad father, but the whole nature of patriarchy.

– Paul Giles

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Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

The worst father in fiction has to be one of the first fathers in the horror genre, the eponymous figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Victor, of course, does not beget the monstrous creature via the conventional method of procreating with a female, and he fashions his infamous progeny out of corpses, but he is very much a horrible dad when he denies his ghastly son his love. The Swiss medical genius is the true Gothic monster here, not the hapless and unsightly creature who just wants to be loved.

– Ali Alizadeh

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My dear Victor,

I should address you Father, but how can I? I do not have your own creator’s Miltonic power to throw moral injunction at you, as Satan did to God: “Did I request thee … from darkness to promote me?” Was there ever a son whose “being” (your own word) is not named but de-named as monster, dreaded spectre, fiend, vile insect, abhorred devil? I have entered literature as a hideous progeny, as an abortion and an anomaly. You never gave me love but do not forget, Father, that my form is “a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance”.

Your son.

– Vijay Mishra

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The novel’s horror is set in motion not just by Victor’s transgressive hubris as a scientist, but also by his refusal to accept responsibility. Victor abandons his “monster” at almost the moment after its birth, and repeatedly rejects its appeals for compassion and empathy. Victor’s attempts to disavow his legacy are ultimately futile, as his creation relentlessly pursues his “father” to the end of his days.

– Julian Novitz

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Thomas Sutpen, William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom!

“They feared him and they hated him because of his ruthlessness.” Thomas Sutpen is truly one of William Faulkner’s most terrifying creations: a man who arrives in Mississippi with nothing and wills a dynasty into being. Everything – his marriage, his children, his land – is subsumed by his amoral “design,” which he pursues at any cost and with no concern for those who get in his way.

When a hidden fact about his first marriage comes to light, he casts aside his wife and child, setting in motion a cycle of vengeance that consumes the Sutpen line. In Faulkner’s hands, this ghastly patriarch ultimately becomes a figure for the antebellum South itself – built on inhumanity, colonialism and slavery, unwilling to reckon with the horrors of the reality it has brought into being.

– Alexander Howard

Do you have a nomination for the worst father – or mother – in literature? If so, let us know by scrolling to the end of this article and adding your choice in the comments.

– ref. Who are the worst fathers in literature? Our experts make the tough call – https://theconversation.com/who-are-the-worst-fathers-in-literature-our-experts-make-the-tough-call-263815

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

United States President Donald Trump is well advanced in his systematic campaign to undermine the American media and eviscerate its function of holding him and others in power to account.

Since the late 18th century this function has often been called the fourth estate. It’s the idea the media is a watchdog over the other three estates which, in modern democracies, are parliament, the executive government and the judiciary.

In the US, Trump has had considerable success in weakening the other three.

His Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress, and they have shown no sign of wishing to restrain him.

He has stacked the executive government with cronies and ideological fellow travellers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr (and his anti-vaccination agenda) as secretary of health, a brief stint by Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary.

He has secured the support of the Republican Party to stack the Supreme Court with politically aligned judges who have routinely struck down lower court decisions against Trump, most notably in the matter of deporting migrants to countries other than their homelands.

Pulling funding, applying pressure

The fourth estate’s turn started in March, when Trump stripped federal funding from Voice of America, a public broadcasting service with a global reach, because it was “anti-Trump” and “radical”.

These cuts also hit two other projections of American soft power, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.

In July, he cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in a move that ended all federal support for National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting service and their member stations.

Now he has turned to the private sector media. He does not have the power to cut their funding, so he is taking a different approach: financial shake-downs and threats to the foundations of their business.

In October 2024, even before he was elected, Trump sued the Paramount company for US$10 billion (about A$15 billion). He alleged an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign had been “deceptively edited” by the CBS television network, a Paramount subsidiary.

In February 2025, after he had been sworn in as president, Trump upped the ante to US$20 billion (A$30 billion).

The case was considered by lawyers to have no legal merit, but at that time, Paramount was anxious to merge with Skydance Media, and this was subject to regulatory approval from the Trump administration.

So Paramount was vulnerable to, how shall we say? Blackmail? Extortion? Subornation?

A busy, dangerous July

On July 2, Paramount settled with Trump for US$16 million (A$24 million), which ostensibly is to go towards funding his presidential library.

On July 17 Paramount’s CBS network announced its longtime Late Show would be cancelled from May 2026 after its presenter Stephen Colbert, an outspoken critic of Trump, condemned the corporate cave-in. The Trump administration approved the merger shortly after.

Subsequently the House of Representatives Judiciary and Energy and Commerce committees announced an investigation into whether the $16 million settlement constituted a bribe.

Also in July, Trump sued Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for defamation arising from an article linking Trump to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. He claimed the now-familiar amount of US$10 billion (A$15 billion) in damages.

Legal experts in the US say Trump has next to no chance of winning. In the US, public figures who sue for defamation have to prove that the publisher was motivated by malice, which means they published either knowing the material to be untrue, or not caring whether it was true or not.

This case is never likely to end up in court, nor is it likely that Trump will see a red cent of Murdoch’s money. The two men need each other too much. To borrow a phrase from the Cold War, they are in a MAD relationship: Mutually Assured Destruction.

Coming to heel, one by one

Rupert Murdoch was a guest at Windsor Castle at the recent banquet given for Trump by King Charles.

Considering Murdoch’s bitter history with the Royal Family, it is difficult to imagine Buckingham Palace inviting him without Trump’s urging. It may have been a sign of rapprochement between the two men.

Meanwhile Trump has set his sights on The New York Times, suing it for defamation and claiming US$15 billion (A$27 billion).

Referring to the Times’ endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, he said it had become a “mouthpiece for the Radical Left Democrat Party”.

This case faces the same difficulties as his suit against the Wall Street Journal. The question is whether the Times will stand its ground or whether, like Paramount, it caves.

Among the big three US newspapers, the Times is the only one so far not to have been intimidated by Trump. The other two, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, refused to endorse a candidate at the election on instructions from their owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong respectively, both of whose wider business interests are vulnerable to Trumpian retribution.

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Read more:
Two of the US’s biggest newspapers have refused to endorse a presidential candidate. This is how democracy dies

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The Post’s decision was condemned as “spineless” by its celebrated former editor Marty Baron.

Now Disney is in the firing line. It owns another of the big four US television networks, ABC. On September 17, it pulled its late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Kimmel had responded to White House accusations that leftists were responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, saying:

we hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.

In what had all the hallmarks of a preemptive buckle, ABC and two of its affiliate networks took Kimmel off air indefinitely after Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said his agency might “take action” against the network because of Kimmel’s comments.

Kimmel is returning to TV, but the damage is already done.

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Read more:
Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is the latest sign we’re witnessing the end of US democracy

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Over at cable network MSNBC, its senior political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired after he had uttered on air the blindingly obvious statement that Kirk’s own radical rhetoric may have contributed to the shooting that killed him.

This cable network is no longer part of the main NBC network, so it can’t be said that NBC itself has yet come to heel.

Within 24 hours of Brendan Carr’s veiled threat, Trump stripped the veil away and made the threat explicit. Trump said of the national networks:

All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed, they’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat party. I would think maybe their licence should be taken away.

Whether cancelling a licence would breach the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, is a question that might ultimately come before the Supreme Court. Given the present ideological proclivities of that court, the outcome would be by no means certain.

So Trump now has two out of three national newspapers, and two out of the big four national television networks, on the run.

Only one national newspaper and two national networks to go, and one of those is Murdoch’s Fox News, Trump’s most reliable cheerleader.

Denis Muller 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. Lawsuits, cancellations and bullying: Trump is systematically destroying press freedom – https://theconversation.com/lawsuits-cancellations-and-bullying-trump-is-systematically-destroying-press-freedom-265848

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Lister Staveley-Smith, Professor at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), The University of Western Australia

Most of the ordinary matter in the universe is hydrogen. But surprisingly, less than 20% of this hydrogen sits inside galaxies. The rest lies in the vast spaces between them – the so-called intergalactic medium.

This cosmic reservoir is thought to fuel the birth of new stars, as gas slowly falls into galaxies over billions of years. Yet much of that material doesn’t stay put: supernova explosions and powerful outflows from supermassive black holes can fling gas back out into intergalactic space.

The push-and-pull between inflows and outflows is central to understanding how galaxies grow and change over cosmic time. Probing this balance is one of the aims of the WALLABY survey, carried out using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.

A new discovery from WALLABY, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, sheds new light on the cosmic cycle of matter into, through and out of galaxies.

What is WALLABY?

Despite its name, WALLABY isn’t about animals. It’s a somewhat contrived acronym – Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind surveY – for a large survey of neutral hydrogen (the atomic form of hydrogen) across nearly half the southern sky. The ASKAP telescope is sensitive enough to detect hydrogen in and around galaxies up to a billion light years away.

Because it’s a “blind” survey, WALLABY doesn’t target known galaxies. Instead, it scans huge patches of sky – each night covering an area about 150 times the size of the full Moon.

A galactic bridge

We then use automated algorithms to search for signs of hydrogen in the resulting data. One such search revealed an unusual gas bridge linking two otherwise unremarkable galaxies on the outskirts of the Virgo cluster, in the constellation Virgo. The bridge, at least 160,000 light years long, likely formed through tidal interactions between two dwarf galaxies known as NGC 4532 and DDO 137.

These tides are the cosmic equivalent of Earth’s ocean tides, but on a vastly larger scale and made of hydrogen rather than water. Gas pulled from the galaxies now stretches between them, filling the surrounding intergalactic space.

Such bridges are hard to detect because they contain few stars. But we have a local example: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, are joined by a 70,000-light-year-long gas bridge.

An extraordinary tail

The newly discovered bridge also helps explain a long-standing puzzle: an enormous gas tail streaming away from the dwarf galaxies NGC 4532 and DDO 137, first detected more than 30 years ago with the Arecibo telescope. This tail is ten times longer than the bridge and is the largest ever observed from a galaxy system.

New observations suggest that while tidal forces created the bridge and the envelope of gas around the galaxies, the spectacular tail was produced by another process.

As the pair of galaxies plunges into the Virgo cluster, they encounter extremely hot, thin gas that fills the cluster. The galaxies’ motion through this medium produces ram pressure – much like the resistance felt when cycling into a strong headwind – which strips gas from them and sweeps it out behind.

Remarkably, the gas density required for this effect is only around ten atoms per cubic metre, a value consistent with new measurements from the eROSITA X-ray telescope. Thanks to the galaxies’ high infall speed – more than 800 kilometres per second – this sparse medium is enough to create the vast tail.

The bigger picture

These two galaxies are just a fraction of the 200,000 WALLABY expects to detect by the end of its survey. Each discovery adds to our picture of how gas flows in and out of galaxies, enriching the intergalactic medium and shaping galactic evolution.

Together, they will help astronomers untangle the so-called baryonic cycle – the continuous recycling of matter between galaxies and the space around them.

Lister Staveley-Smith receives research funding from ICRAR, the Western Australian government, and the University of Western Australia.

– ref. What a newly discovered gas bridge between galaxies tells us about the cosmic cycle of matter – https://theconversation.com/what-a-newly-discovered-gas-bridge-between-galaxies-tells-us-about-the-cosmic-cycle-of-matter-265760