Category: The Conversation – Global Perspectives

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Elizabeth Finkel, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow, La Trobe University

Eight months into Donald Trump’s second presidency of the United States, truth and science are again under attack – with global consequences. USAID, which tackled HIV, TB, malaria and child malnutrition is gone. Funding has been withdrawn from GAVI, a public–private global alliance that helps buy vaccines for the world’s poorest children. Malnourished children are already dying.

Besides these brutal consequences, the scientific machine that delivered America’s scientific and technological dominance is being ruthlessly dismantled. Any research project that mentions diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), climate change or addresses the causes of vaccine hesitancy is a prime target. But even US space science, once the pride of the nation, is facing “an extinction-level event,” according to the US Planetary Society.

Across the spectrum of science, some 4,000 research grants have been cancelled. Unbelievably, bird-flu experts were fired in the middle of an outbreak. That was topped last May by cancelling a US$600M grant to the company Moderna to develop an mRNA vaccine against bird flu.

And this Tuesday, US$500 million was cancelled for 22 more projects developing mRNA vaccines. Bear in mind that under Operation Warp Speed, the first Trump administration funded the development of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine against COVID. Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech both delivered mRNA vaccines in the record time of less than a year, winning mRNA vaccine technology a Nobel Prize in 2023.

It’s not just American science that’s being dismantled.

Threats to Australian science, too

In March, the Trump administration sent a questionnaire to researchers receiving US funding in Australia, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada. The 36 questions included whether their project related to climate, whether it is taking “appropriate measures” to defend against “gender ideology” and whether the organisation receives funding from China.

US funding for collaborative science projects with Australia amounts to AUD$386 million. So, the threat of losing those substantial funds is dire. As the Australian Academy of Science warned last March, if US–Australian collaboration ceases, “it will directly threaten […] strategic capability in areas of national interest such as defence, health, disaster mitigation and response, AI and quantum technology”.

By June, Australian medical research institutes were “suspending projects on malaria, tuberculosis and women’s health”. It’s like “having a bomb thrown into the middle of science”, noted Professor Brendan Crabb, director of the Burnet Institute, a Melbourne-based global health research centre.

The fallout for US medical research is worse. The Trump administration’s proposed funding cut, to the National Institutes of health, the largest funder of medical research in the world, will see its budget slashed by 40% – and over 2,400 projects cancelled. They include research into cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, tuberculosis, HIV prevention, COVID vaccines and long-COVID.

Experts have been summarily fired and replaced by sycophants. And of course, the Department of Health and Human Services is now led by America’s most prominent anti-vaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy Junior. Elite research universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Cornell, continue to be prime targets.

“It’s hard to overstate how serious this is […] Today, as we’re witnessing kind of the destruction of the institutions behind American science, it’s hard to believe. It’s hard to believe any administration would do this,” noted Alan Bernstein, director of global public health at Oxford University, in April.

Indeed, how could this be happening?

Erika Nolan, a MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) stalwart and YouTube influencer, provides a candid answer: “Facts no longer matter.” Nolan plies her 200,000 strong audience with idyllic scenes of herding chickens and goats while snuggling her baby in a front pack.

Like Kennedy, Nolan believes America’s big health issues relate to food dyes and seed oils. Hopefully she does not live in a part of the US where measles or whooping cough is raging, and that her chicken flock won’t come down with bird flu.

She says it was COVID, and the pressure to be vaccinated, that “fast-tracked” her. And when asked about the 14 million lives saved in the first year, as reported in peer-reviewed medical journal, the Lancet, her answer is, “Everything can be manipulated.”

What Nolan doesn’t understand is that modern science emerged precisely to deal with the way everything can be manipulated. The very word science comes from scientia, Latin for knowledge. The gist of it is captured by the motto adopted in 1663 by the Royal Society in London: “Nullius in verba.”. That’s Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it.” In other words, experimentation and observation is what counts, not the opinions of influencers.

Nolan might be surprised to find her scepticism over “facts” goes all the way back to Socrates.

Knowledge, power and science

He left no written works, but we hear his voice through the “dialogues” of his student Plato. Ever so gently, Socrates probes the beliefs of his conversation partner, methodically laying bare their logical fallacies. It has come to be known as the Socratic method.

One of the most famous dialogues employs the allegory of a cave to teach Socrates’ primary lesson: knowledge can be based on false beliefs.

The cave is home to a group of prisoners who have been chained up for their entire lives. All they have ever been allowed to see is the cave wall in front of them. Shadows dance across it, representing the reality of the external world. The prisoners have no idea that the images are created by puppets paraded past a blazing fire just behind them.

One prisoner breaks free and climbs out of the cave. Dazed by the sunlight, it takes time for his sensitive eyes to adapt. At first, he is only able to look at shadows, then reflections, then real objects. He dashes back to the cave to enlighten his fellow captives. But his eyes have not readjusted to the dark and he stumbles around.

The prisoners perceive a blinded, deranged man, raving about a parallel world. They want nothing to do with him and become aggressive. This is Plato’s second lesson: the danger of trying to enlighten those wedded to pre-existing beliefs. Poignantly, Socrates would pay with his life for trying to enlighten others.

It would take over 2,000 years to come up with satisfactory responses to some of Socrates’ questions about the nature of knowledge. They appeared in the form of the scientific revolution.

Stars of the scientific revolution

The scientific revolution was ushered in by the exacting astronomical measurements of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, which revealed that Earth and the other planets were in orbit around the sun, rather than the other way round.

Brilliant as these astronomers were, they were just the warm-up acts. The starring role in the scientific revolution goes to Isaac Newton, who honoured his debt to those who came before with the timeless words: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Standing on the shoulders of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, Newton glimpsed the sun-centred universe and pondered a new question: why did the planets orbit the sun?

The French philosopher Descartes had suggested an answer in 1633. He deemed that something like a giant tornado of dust particles raged around the sun, dragging the planets along with them.

Newton was seven years old when Descartes died. By the time Newton was 26, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, no doubt for the stunning discoveries he made during the plague years, which he spent in isolation at his mother’s farm in Lincolnshire. “Truth is the offspring of silence and unbroken meditation,” he noted.

His unbroken meditation gave birth to calculus, optics (in the pursuit of which he stuck a blunt needle into his eye), his laws of motion and the beginnings of his theory of gravity. Seeing an apple fall from a tree was famously his Eureka moment. The force that made the apple fall to the earth, he mused, was likely the same as the one binding the planets to the elliptical solar orbits described by Kepler.

Today, most people have no problem with the idea of gravity as a force that pulls the apple to the ground or the earth to the sun. It was a different story in Newton’s time. Descartes’ tornado seemed the more rational explanation.

How could the sun reach out across the vastness of space to pull on our planet? This was “barbaric physics”, opined German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Admittedly, Leibniz was peeved with Newton; they had rival claims as the first to develop calculus. But Leibniz was far from being the only one to label Newton’s theory unscientific.

What vindicated Newton’s theory was that it made testable, precise predictions. It specified that the gravitational force between two objects increases with their masses and decreases as they grow further apart.

Newton’s maths proved correct. It accurately predicted how long it would take for the moon to orbit the earth and the coming of Halley’s comet. His formula also predicted that the warped orbit of Uranus was due to the gravitational pull of a ghost planet. A century and a half later, Neptune was found. For 300 years, Newton’s predictions kept hitting the mark. And for most earth-bound situations, they still do.

Newton represents a watershed in the development of science. The peculiar thing about him, and what made him the lead actor of the scientific revolution, was that his theory, unlike those of Aristotle or Descartes, was limited to what could be accounted for by mathematical predictions. He did not attempt to go beyond the data to explain what gravity is or whether it really existed: “I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses,” he wrote.

Philosophy of science

This notion of science as being light on theory is familiar to me. As a scientist (before I was a science writer, I was a molecular biologist), my contribution to theory was limited to what could be induced from my last successful experiment. In my ten years as a working scientist, I never encountered the philosophy of science. Nor did I encounter it much in my decades writing about the work of other scientists.

But in researching my book Prove It, which would see me roam widely, from theoretical physics to human evolution, and deeply, across the centuries, I knew I would have to reckon with the philosophy of science. I did not relish the task: reading philosophy can be challenging.

Moreover, I was not convinced that there was much philosophy at work in modern science. According to Michael Strevens, a philosopher of science based at New York University, when scientists themselves are placed under the microscope to dissect their philosophical impulses, nothing coherent emerges beyond a compulsion to test, test, test. As physicist Richard Feynman put it, “the philosophy of science is about as useful to science as ornithology is to birds”.

To my surprise, delight and relief, however, once I started investigating, philosophy emerged unbidden, first in the form of the Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose ideas provided a natural kick-off point for the chapters that followed.

Like other Enlightenment philosophers, Hume valued individual reasoning over dogma and drew inspiration from the scientific revolution, particularly Newton, whom he described as “the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species”.

Newton inspired Hume, and Hume in turn inspired Albert Einstein to do what Newton could not: develop a theory of gravity.

Einstein’s ‘intellectual habits’

Einstein discovered Hume in 1902 while working as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, in his early twenties. For fun, he and two colleagues formed a reading group to discuss philosophy. They paid particular attention to Hume’s 1739 A Treatise of Human Nature, in which Hume warned about the dangers of induction, the practice of extrapolating from observations to formulate general laws of the universe.

It may have been the method Newton employed, but it was an “intellectual habit” without a solid philosophical foundation, Hume argued. A well-known example concerns the colour of swans. Since Roman times, the whiteness of swans was held by European writers to be a self-evident truth. But in 1697, Dutch sea captain Willem de Vlamingh, while searching for shipwreck survivors on Australia’s west coast, sailed up a river and, lo, beheld black swans! The incident provided the name of Perth’s Swan River and a salutary philosophical lesson.

For Einstein, Hume’s ideas helped him to let go of his “intellectual habits”, a breakthrough that contributed to his theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity. Had he not read Hume, Einstein reflected, “I cannot say that the solution would have come.”

Einstein freed himself from the intellectual habit of induction by using a “deductive” process instead. It relied not on observations but on the mathematical certainty of the constant speed of light. All very well for Einstein – but the vast majority of scientists do not have the luxury of starting from mathematical certainties. While Einstein’s theory of relativity has endured unchanged for more than a century, the same cannot be said of any of the other theories explored in Prove It.

I needed Einstein to introduce me to David Hume, but Karl Popper needed no introduction. He is the most famous philosopher of science of the 20th century. If you’ve come across the idea that scientific theories can’t be proven, only disproven or “falsified”, that’s courtesy of Popper.

Karl Popper: science as search for truth

Popper has a poignant personal story that resonates strongly with my motive for writing a scientific guide for the post-truth era.

Born in 1902 into a cultivated, scholarly home – his mother a pianist, his father a lawyer – Popper’s first decade was lived in Vienna’s golden age. As the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna was the seat of political power, but also a cauldron of European cultural and intellectual ferment.

Modernism exploded: there was the stylised eroticism of Gustav Klimt’s shimmering gold paintings and the raw sexual canvases of Egon Schiele; the absurdist literature of Franz Kafka and the meltingly poetic work of Rainer Maria Rilke; the hauntingly beautiful music of Gustav Mahler and the atonal work of Arnold Schoenberg; the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein; and of course, Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary theories about the life of the unconscious mind.

“In those first fourteen years of the twentieth century, Vienna, more than anywhere else, was the fulminating, bewitching crucible where the modern world was invented,” writes William Boyd.

Popper witnessed its destruction. He was 12 when the first world war broke out and 37 when the second one came around. In between, he flirted with and rejected Marxism, tried his hand at carpentry and teaching, and managed to complete a PhD in the philosophy of psychology. With the rise of Nazism, his Jewish ancestry erased his job prospects. To build a reputation, he wrote a book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

Published in 1934, it introduced his theory that the way to distinguish science from non-science is falsification. His ideas struck a chord and won him an offer to teach philosophy at Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand. He emigrated with his wife in 1937, a year before Austria was annexed by Hitler. In 1946, he moved to the United Kingdom to found the department of philosophy at the London School of Economics.

Popper experienced firsthand what can happen to the most intellectually progressive of civilisations when a populist ideology takes hold. How could a philosopher protect future generations from such an assault on truth? Like the Enlightenment thinkers before him, his answer was the scientific method. “Truth is therefore the aim of science; science is the search for truth,” he wrote.

Testing Einstein

I was delighted to discover that Popper’s theory was inspired by Einstein! As a teenager, Popper heard Einstein expound on his astonishing theory of General Relativity in Vienna in 1919.

Gravity was not a force, Einstein suggested, but a consequence of the way mass causes a curvature in spacetime. A fantastical theory! But in the same breath, Einstein proposed a way to prove his theory wrong. During an eclipse, the moon blocks the sun, and the dark sky makes the stars near the sun suddenly visible. Although the stars themselves are very far away from the sun, their light rays must pass close by it to be seen by people watching the eclipse.

Einstein predicted that the starlight would curve along the spacetime warped by the sun’s huge mass. As a result, the apparent positions of the stars would be shifted by an exact amount predicted by Einstein’s equations.

Bottom line: Einstein’s theory could be falsified, and Einstein offered his critics a way to do it. As Popper put it, “Thus I arrived, by the end of 1919, at the conclusion that the scientific attitude was the critical attitude, which did not look for verifications but for crucial tests; tests which could refute the theory tested, though they could never establish it.”

Science cannot prove theories, because, as Hume pointed out, what’s true today may not be true tomorrow. Just because we observe a phenomenon once doesn’t mean we can assume it will happen again. But science can certainly disprove things.

That’s what distinguishes scientific theories from, say, Freud’s theory of the unconscious or Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Those theories do not offer falsifiable predictions. You might agree or disagree with them, but there is no way to disprove them. Science, by contrast, offers predictions that can be tested and therefore falsified. “I believe I have solved the problem of induction,” Popper declared.

Popper had his detractors. One was his former student Imre Lakatos, who embraced the importance of falsification but argued that in practice, theories are rarely overturned by contradictory data. “Scientists have thick skins,” he wrote. “They do not abandon a theory because facts contradict it. They normally either invent some rescue hypothesis to explain what they then call a mere anomaly and if they cannot explain the anomaly, they ignore it.”

The philosopher most diametrically opposed to Popper was the American, Thomas Kuhn. No doubt you’ve heard the term “paradigm shift”? That’s thanks to Kuhn and his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which sold over a million copies. According to Kuhn, modern scientists, rather than attempting to falsify their theories, do the exact opposite: they design experiments to affirm them.

These disputes notwithstanding, the hunt for the origins of COVID-19 showed me Popper is alive and well in the modern science lab. “Popperian” scientists were among the first to propose that the virus came from a lab. They then tried to see if they could disprove their own theory – and largely succeeded. The weight of evidence points to the virus spilling into the human population from an animal source.

Shared reality and true science

The scientific method doesn’t just apply to science. In his book, The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow in governance at Brookings Institute, notes that the institutions that underpin democracies – academia, law, journalism and government – need to operate based on a shared reality. To do so, they employ the scientific method the gathering and testing of facts.

The Trump administration seems to have declared war on every aspect of the scientific method. It has declared war on fact-checking, triggering a global pile-on. Meta announced in January it would scrap its fact-checking programs. And last month, Google announced it will not renew its fact-checking contract with Australian Associated Press.

The Trump administration has also taken an axe to the workings of the scientific machine. In a breathtaking example of Orwellian “double speak”, on May 23, Trump issued an executive order to restore “gold standard science”.

What this means, explains New York University bioethicist Arthur Caplan, is that “instead of independent expert reviews of research, a Trump functionary can look at any peer-reviewed work and declare it to be in violation of the President’s gold standard”. He concluded that the US “has never had a situation in which political and ideological nonscientists got the last word about what is credible science”.

The history of authoritarian regimes tells us when ideologues take over science, it does not end well. It was the Nazi takeover of German universities that saw the likes of Einstein seek refuge in the US – and turned America into a scientific superpower.

The scientific method, designed to keep human failings in check, is the best guide for navigating the present era. Here are my guiding principles:

1. Go to the experts. See what is being published in leading journals, find a good plain-language summary and check several sources. Science and Nature both offer excellent free reporting, as does The Conversation and The New York Times.

2. Expert opinion seeks consensus. Consensus may be tough to obtain among scientists, but it is based on a convergence of evidence from different sources.

3. Anyone who tries to whip up an emotional response, or who has a predetermined opinion or conflict of interest, is a red flag. Scientific evidence is generally measured. It comes with margins of error and estimates of effectiveness and risk. A scientist who offers opinions outside their field of expertise is also one to whom I would give less weight.

Our health, our agriculture, our environmental safety, our ability to ameliorate and adapt to climate change, to regulate AI and to fight the next pandemic, all rely on the proper functioning of the scientific machine. We must not stand by and see it dismantled.

---

This is an adapted extract of Elizabeth Finkel’s Prove It: A Scientific Guide for the Post-Truth Era (Black Inc.), published August 12.

Elizabeth Finkel 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. Friday essay: Trump and Kennedy are destroying global science. Even Einstein questioned facts – but there’s a method to it – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-trump-and-kennedy-are-destroying-global-science-even-einstein-questioned-facts-but-theres-a-method-to-it-261568

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Kai Riemer, Professor of Information Technology and Organisation, University of Sydney

Have you ever sat in a meeting where someone half your age casually mentions “prompting ChatGPT” or “running this through AI”, and felt a familiar knot in your stomach? You’re not alone.

There’s a growing narrative that artificial intelligence (AI) is inherently ageist, that older workers will be disproportionately hit by job displacement and are more reluctant to adopt AI tools.

But such assumptions – especially that youth is a built-in advantage when it comes to AI – might not actually hold.

While ageism in hiring is a real concern, if you have decades of work experience, your skills, knowledge and judgement could be exactly what’s needed to harness AI’s power – without falling into its traps.

What does the research say?

The research on who benefits most from AI at work is surprisingly murky, partly because it’s still early days for systematic studies on AI and work.

Some research suggests lower-skilled workers might have more to gain than high-skilled workers on certain straightforward tasks. The picture becomes much less clear under real-world conditions, especially for complex work that relies heavily on judgement and experience.

---

This article is part of The Conversation’s series on jobs in the age of AI. Leading experts examine what AI means for workers at different career stages, how AI is reshaping our economy – and what you can do to prepare.

---

Through our Skills Horizon research project, where we’ve been talking to Australian and global senior leaders across different industries, we’re hearing a more nuanced story.

Many older workers do experience AI as deeply unsettling. As one US-based CEO of a large multinational corporation told us:

AI can be a form of existential challenge, not only to what you’re doing, but how you view yourself.

But leaders are also observing an important and unexpected distinction: experienced workers are often much better at judging the quality of AI outputs. This might become one of the most important skills, given that AI occasionally hallucinates or gets things wrong.

The CEO of a South American creative agency put it bluntly:

Senior colleagues are using multiple AIs. If they don’t have the right solution, they re-prompt, iterate, but the juniors are satisfied with the first answer, they copy, paste and think they’re finished. They don’t yet know what they are looking for, and the danger is that they will not learn what to look for if they keep working that way.

Experience as an AI advantage

Experienced workers have a crucial advantage when it comes to prompting AI: they understand context and usually know how to express it clearly.

While a junior advertising creative might ask an AI to “Write copy for a sustainability campaign”, a seasoned account director knows to specify “Write conversational social media copy for a sustainable fashion brand targeting eco-conscious millennials, emphasising our client’s zero-waste manufacturing process and keeping the tone authentic but not preachy”.

This skill mirrors what experienced professionals do when briefing junior colleagues or freelancers: providing detailed instructions, accounting for audience, objectives, and constraints. It’s a competency developed through years of managing teams and projects.

Younger workers, despite their comfort with technology, may actually be at a disadvantage here. There’s a crucial difference between using technology frequently and using it well.

Many young people may become too accustomed to AI assistance. A survey of US teens this year found 72% had used an AI companion app. Some children and teens are turning to chatbots for everyday decisions.

Without the professional experience to recognise when something doesn’t quite fit, younger workers risk accepting AI responses that feel right – effectively “vibing” their work – rather than developing the analytical skills to evaluate AI usefulness.

So what can you do?

First, everyone benefits from learning more about AI. In our time educating everyone from students to senior leaders and CEOs, we find that misunderstandings about how AI works have little to do with age.

A good place to start is reading up on what AI is and what it can do for you:

• What is AI?

• Where does AI come from?

• How does AI learn?

• What can AI do?

• What makes a good AI prompt?

If you’re not even sure which AI platform to try, we would recommend testing the most prominent ones, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini.

---

Read more:
The biggest barrier to AI adoption in the business world isn’t tech – it’s user confidence

---

If you’re an experienced worker feeling threatened by AI, lean into your strengths. Your decades of experience with delegation, context-setting, and critical evaluation are exactly what AI tools need.

Start small. Pick one regular work task and experiment with AI assistance, using your judgement to evaluate and refine outputs. Practice prompting like you’re briefing a junior colleague: be specific about context, constraints, and desired outcomes, and repeat the process as needed.

Most importantly, don’t feel threatened. In a workplace increasingly filled with AI-generated content, your ability to spot what doesn’t quite fit, and to know what questions to ask, has never been more valuable.

Kai Riemer is co-author of the annual “Skills Horizon” research project, which identifies key leadership skills (including in AI), based on interviews with global and Australian leaders and executives across various fields. He also educates leaders in AI fluency through Sydney Executive Plus at the University of Sydney.

Sandra Peter is co-author of the annual “Skills Horizon” research project, which identifies key leadership skills (including in AI), based on interviews with global and Australian leaders and executives across various fields. She also educates leaders in AI fluency through Sydney Executive Plus at the University of Sydney.

– ref. Are you in a mid-career to senior job? Don’t fear AI – you could have this important advantage – https://theconversation.com/are-you-in-a-mid-career-to-senior-job-dont-fear-ai-you-could-have-this-important-advantage-262347

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University

Stone tools dating to at least 1.04 million years ago have been found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. This means early hominins made a major sea crossing from the Asian mainland much earlier than previously thought – and they likely didn’t have any boats.

This discovery, made by a team of Indonesian archaeologists working in collaboration with Australian researchers, is published today in Nature.

It adds to our understanding of how extinct humans once moved across the Wallace Line – an imaginary boundary that runs through the Lombok Strait in the Indonesian archipelago.

Beyond this line, unique and often peculiar animal species – including hominins – evolved in isolation.

Hominins in Wallacea

The oceanic island zone between the Asian and Australian landmasses is known as Wallacea.

Previously, archaeologists have found hominins lived here from at least 1.02 million years ago, thanks to discoveries of stone tools at Wolo Sege on the island of Flores. Meanwhile, tools dated to around 194,000 years ago have been found at Talepu on Sulawesi.

The human evolutionary story in the islands east of the Asian landmass is strange.

The ancient human species that used to live on the island of Flores were small in stature. We know this thanks to the fossils of Homo floresiensis (popularly known as “hobbits”), as well as the 700,000-year-old fossils of a similar small-bodied hominin.

These discoveries suggest it could have been the extinct Asian hominin Homo erectus that breached the formidable marine barrier between this small Wallacean island and mainland Southeast Asia. Over hundreds of thousands of years, their body size reduced in what’s known as island dwarfism.

To the north of Wallacea, the island of Luzon in the Philippines has also yielded evidence of hominins from around 700,000 years ago. Just recently, fossils of a previously unknown diminutive hominin species, Homo luzonensis, were found here.

So how and when did ancient human species cross the Wallace Line?

The Sulawesi stone tools

Our new study reveals the first evidence a sea crossing to Sulawesi may have happened at least 1 million years ago. That’s much earlier than previously known, and means humans reached here at about the same time as Flores, if not earlier.

A field team led by senior archaeologist Budianto Hakim from the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia (BRIN), excavated a total of seven stone artefacts from the sedimentary layers of a sandstone outcrop in a modern corn field at Calio in southern Sulawesi.

In the Early Pleistocene, there was a river channel nearby. This would have been the site of hominin tool-making and other activities such as hunting.

The Calio artefacts consist of small, sharp-edged fragments of stones (flakes) that the early human tool-makers struck from larger pebbles they most likely found in nearby riverbeds.

To produce these flakes, the hominins hit the edge of one stone with another in a controlled manner. This would fracture the first stone in a predictable way.

This tool-making activity left telltale marks on the stones that can be clearly distinguished from naturally broken rocks. So we can say unequivocally that hominins were living in this landscape, making stone tools, at the time the ancient river sediments that comprise the sandstone rock were accumulating.

And that was a very long time ago. Indeed, the team confirmed an age of at least 1.04 million years for the stone artefacts based on paleomagnetic dating of the sandstone itself, along with direct dating of a pig fossil found alongside the artefacts.

Who were these hominins and how did they get to Sulawesi?

As noted earlier, previous research has shown that archaic, stone tool-making hominins managed to get across from the Asian continental landmass to colonise at least some islands in Wallacea.

The discovery of the extremely old stone tools at Calio is another significant new piece of the puzzle. This site has yet to yield any hominin fossils, however. So while we now know there were tool-makers on Sulawesi 1 million years ago, their identity remains a mystery.

Indeed, there are many fascinating questions that remain unanswered, including how these hominins were able to cross the Wallace Line in the first place.

When sea levels were at their lowest, the shortest possible distance between Sulawesi and the nearest part of the adjacent Asian landmass would have been about 50 kilometres.

This is too far to swim, especially since the ocean currents are far too strong. It’s also unlikely these archaic hominins had the cognitive ability to develop watercraft capable of making sea voyages. Setting sail over the horizon to an unseen land would have required advanced planning to gather resources – something they probably weren’t capable of.

Most likely, then, they crossed to Sulawesi from the Asian mainland in the same way rodents and monkeys are suspected to have done – by accident. Perhaps they were castaways on natural “rafts” of floating vegetation.

Our discovery also leads us to wonder what might have happened to Homo erectus on the world’s 11th largest island. Sulawesi is more than 12 times the size of Flores, and much closer to the adjacent Asian mainland.

In fact, Sulawesi is a bit like a mini-continent in itself, which sets it apart from other Wallacean islands. If hominins were cut off in the ecologically rich habitats of this enormous island for a million years, would they have undergone the same evolutionary changes as the Flores hobbits? Or might something completely different have happened?

To unravel this fascinating story, we will continue to search the islands of Wallacea – especially those close to the Asian mainland – for ancient artefacts, fossils and other clues.

Adam Brumm receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Basran Burhan is a researcher at Pusat Kolaborasi Riset Arkeologi Sulawesi (BRIN-Universitas Hasanuddin).

Gerrit (Gert) van den Bergh has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Maxime Aubert receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. This stone tool is over 1 million years old. How did its maker get to Sulawesi without a boat? – https://theconversation.com/this-stone-tool-is-over-1-million-years-old-how-did-its-maker-get-to-sulawesi-without-a-boat-262337

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Melanie O’Brien, Associate Professor in International Law, The University of Western Australia

In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a provisional ruling in a case brought by South Africa against Israel, alleging genocide in Gaza. The court found Palestinians have a “plausible” right to protection from genocide in Gaza and that Israel must take all measures to prevent a genocide from occurring.

Since then, United Nations experts and human rights groups have concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In recent weeks, others have done the same, including leading genocide scholars and two Israeli human rights groups.

While the ICJ case may take years to play out, we asked five Australian experts in international law and genocide studies what constitutes a genocide, what the legal standard is, and whether the evidence, in their view, shows one is occurring.

Melanie O’Brien is the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). This piece does not represent the view of IAGS.

Ben Saul is the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, an independent expert appointed by consensus of the member states of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Eyal Mayroz served as a counterterrorism specialist with the Israeli Defence Forces in the 1980s.

Paul James and Shannon Bosch 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. Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? We asked 5 legal and genocide experts how to interpret the violence – https://theconversation.com/is-israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza-we-asked-5-legal-and-genocide-experts-how-to-interpret-the-violence-262688

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Nigel Stork, Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Planetary Health and Food Security, Griffith University

Insects are arguably the most important animals on the planet. Their variety is unparalleled in nature, and they carry out vital tasks such as pollinating plants and providing food for other animals.

But all is not well in the insect world. Research over the last few years has shown sustained declines in insect species and numbers. It appeared Earth was witnessing a global-scale crash in insects – and climate change was partly to blame.

The evidence was mostly confined to temperate regions in the Northern Hemisphere. But our new research – published today in Nature – shows it’s also happening in the tropics, where most of Earth’s species live.

We found significant biodiversity loss in spiders, as well as insects including butterflies and beetles. The likely culprit is long-term changes to the El Niño cycle, caused by climate change. It suggests the life-support system underpinning the tropics is at serious risk in a warmer world.

Uncovering the effects of El Niño

El Niños vary massively across tropical regions, but are often characterised by hot and dry conditions (as opposed to the cool and moist conditions of La Niña).

Alternating El Niño and La Niña events can naturally cause many insects to come and go. That’s due to changes in temperature and moisture levels which can affect insect breeding, life cycles and behaviour.

But as climate change worsens, strong El Niño events are becoming more frequent and intense. We wanted to know how this affected insects in tropical regions.

To find out, we examined 80 existing studies of insects in relatively pristine tropical forests – mostly from the tropical Americas. We linked that data to measures of strength in El Niño and La Niña through time.

We found cause for concern. El Niño events appear to cause a rapid decline in both insect biodiversity, and the ecological tasks they perform. These trends were persistent and highly unnatural.

Several types of insects have become more rare in the tropical Americas over recent decades. These included butterflies, beetles and “true bugs” – insects from the order Hemiptera distinguished by two sets of wings and piercing mouthparts used to feed on plants. Butterflies in tropical Asia were also declining.

The strongest declines were in rare insects that would naturally decrease during El Niño. These insect populations would usually bounce back in a La Niña. But climate-fuelled El Niños are causing many populations to fall so far, they cannot recover.

Drastic changes to forests

Our findings suggest the diversity of tropical insects could be chipped away with every El Niño event. This is not just a problem for the species themselves, but other parts of the ecosystem that depend on them.

Our research also involved modelling the decomposition and consumption of leaves by insects across the tropical Americas, Asia and Africa. Both processes are crucial to the health of tropical forests.

Decomposition fluctuated in line with the abundance of termites, which are probably the most important decomposers in the tropics. And worryingly, the amount of live leaves consumed by insects appears to have crashed in recent decades. This correlated strongly with the crash in butterflies and beetles.

These drastic changes may have implications for food webs and other organisms that rely on insects.

A difficult future ahead

Our research could not take in the huge diversity of tropical insects – most of which have not yet been formally described by scientists. But it points to a difficult future for insects – and their habitats – as climate change worsens.

Little data exists on insect numbers in Australia’s Wet Tropics, in Queensland. However, monitoring work is underway at facilities such as the Daintree Rainforest Observatory. Such projects will help us better understand changes in insect biodiversity under climate change.

More research is also needed at other locations around the world. Given the fundamental role insects play in supporting life on Earth, the urgency of this work cannot be overstated.

Nigel Stork receives funding from Australian Research Council grant DP200103100

Adam Sharp receives funding from Hong Kong University Grants Committee Collaborative Research Fund (C7048-22GF).

– ref. Climate-fuelled El Niño events are devastating butterflies, beetles and other tropical insects – https://theconversation.com/climate-fuelled-el-nino-events-are-devastating-butterflies-beetles-and-other-tropical-insects-262625

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Grant Hansman, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Biomedicine and Glycomics, Griffith University

Norovirus is the leading cause of acute gastroenteritis outbreaks worldwide. It’s responsible for roughly one in every five cases of gastro annually.

Sometimes dubbed the “winter vomiting bug” or the “cruise ship virus”, norovirus – which causes vomiting and diarrhoea – is highly transmissible. It spreads via contact with an infected person or contaminated surfaces. Food can also be contaminated with norovirus.

While anyone can be infected, groups such as young children, older adults and people who are immunocompromised are more vulnerable to getting very sick with the virus. Norovirus infections lead to about 220,000 deaths globally each year.

Norovirus outbreaks also lead to massive economic burdens and substantial health-care costs.

Although norovirus was first identified more than 50 years ago, there are no approved vaccines or antiviral treatments for this virus. Current treatment is usually limited to rehydration, either by giving fluids orally or through an intravenous drip.

So if we’ve got vaccines for so many other viruses – including COVID, which emerged only a few years ago – why don’t we have one for norovirus?

An evolving virus

One of the primary barriers to developing effective vaccines lies in the highly dynamic nature of norovirus evolution. Much like influenza viruses, norovirus shows continuous genetic shifts, which result in changes to the surface of the virus particle.

In this way, our immune system can struggle to recognise and respond when we’re exposed to norovirus, even if we’ve had it before.

Compounding this issue, there are at least 49 different norovirus genotypes.

Both genetic diversity and changes in the virus’ surface mean the immune response to norovirus is unusually complex. An infection will typically only give someone immunity to that specific strain and for a short time – usually between six months and two years.

All of this poses challenges for vaccine design. Ideally, potential vaccines must not only induce strong, long-lasting immunity, but also maintain efficacy across the vast genetic diversity of circulating noroviruses.

Recent progress

Progress in norovirus vaccinology has accelerated over the past couple of decades. While researchers are considering multiple strategies to formulate and deliver vaccines, a technology called VLP-based vaccines is at the forefront.

VLP stands for virus-like particles. These synthetic particles, which scientists developed using a key component of the norovirus (called the major caspid protein), are almost indistinguishable from the natural structure of the virus.

When given as a vaccine, these particles elicit an immune response resembling that generated by a natural infection with norovirus – but without the debilitating symptoms of gastro.

What’s in the pipeline?

One bivalent VLP vaccine (“bivalent” meaning it targets two different norovirus genotypes) has progressed through multiple clinical trials. This vaccine showed some protection against moderate to severe gastroenteritis in healthy adults.

However, its development recently suffered a significant setback. A phase two clinical trial in infants failed to show it effectively protected against moderate or severe acute gastroenteritis. The efficacy of the vaccine in this trial was only 5%.

In another recent phase two trial, an oral norovirus vaccine did meet its goals. Participants who took this pill were 30% less likely to develop norovirus compared to those who received a placebo.

This oral vaccine uses a modified adenovirus to deliver the norovirus VLP gene sequence to the intestine to stimulate the immune system.

With the success of mRNA vaccines during the COVID pandemic, scientists are also exploring this platform for norovirus.

Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a type of genetic material that gives our cells instructions to make proteins associated with specific viruses. The idea is that if we subsequently encounter the relevant virus, our immune system will be ready to respond.

Moderna, for example, is developing an mRNA vaccine which primes the body with norovirus VLPs.

The theoretical advantage of mRNA-based vaccines lies in their rapid adaptability. They will potentially allow annual updates to match circulating strains.

Researchers have also developed alternative vaccine approaches using just the norovirus “spikes” located on the virus particle. These spikes contain crucial structural features, allowing the virus to infect our cells, and should elicit an immune response similar to VLPs. Although still in early development, this is another promising strategy.

Separate to vaccines, my colleagues and I have also discovered a number of natural compounds that could have antiviral properties against norovirus. These include simple lemon juice and human milk oligosaccharides (complex sugars found in breast milk).

Although still in the early stages, such “inhibitors” could one day be developed into a pill to prevent norovirus from causing an infection.

Where to from here?

Despite recent developments, we’re still probably at least three years away from any norovirus vaccine hitting the market.

Several key challenges remain before we get to this point. Notably, any successful vaccine must offer broad cross-protection against genetically diverse and rapidly evolving strains. And we’ll need large, long-term studies to determine the durability of protection and whether boosters might be required.

Norovirus is often dismissed as only a mild nuisance, but it can be debilitating – and for the most vulnerable, deadly. Developing a safe and effective norovirus vaccine is one of the most pressing and under-addressed needs in infectious disease prevention.

A licensed norovirus vaccine could drastically reduce workplace and school absenteeism, hospitalisations and deaths. It could also bolster our preparedness against future outbreaks of gastrointestinal pathogens.

Grant Hansman works at Griffith University as an independent research leader on norovirus therapeutics.

– ref. Could we one day get vaccinated against the gastro bug norovirus? Here’s where scientists are at – https://theconversation.com/could-we-one-day-get-vaccinated-against-the-gastro-bug-norovirus-heres-where-scientists-are-at-258909

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Liz Spry, Research Fellow, SEED Centre for Lifespan Research, Deakin University

Teenagers are increasingly turning to AI companions for friendship, support, and even romance. But these apps could be changing how young people connect to others, both online and off.

New research by Common Sense Media, a US-based non-profit organisation that reviews various media and technologies, has found about three in four US teens have used AI companion apps such as Character.ai or Replika.ai.

These apps let users create digital friends or romantic partners they can chat with any time, using text, voice or video.

The study, which surveyed 1,060 US teens aged 13–17, found one in five teens spent as much or more time with their AI companion than they did with real friends.

Adolescence is an important phase for social development. During this time, the brain regions that support social reasoning are especially plastic.

By interacting with peers, friends and their first romantic partners, teens develop social cognitive skills that help them handle conflict and diverse perspectives. And their development during this phase can have lasting consequences for their future relationships and mental health.

But AI companions offer something very different to real peers, friends and romantic partners. They provide an experience that can be hard to resist: they are always available, never judgemental, and always focused on the user’s needs.

Moreover, most AI companion apps aren’t designed for teens, so they may not have appropriate safeguards from harmful content.

Designed to keep you coming back

At a time when loneliness is reportedly at epidemic proportions, it’s easy to see why teens may turn to AI companions for connection or support.

But these artificial connections are not a replacement for real human interaction. They lack the challenge and conflict inherent to real relationships. They don’t require mutual respect or understanding. And they don’t enforce social boundaries.

Teens interacting with AI companions may miss opportunities to build important social skills. They may develop unrealistic relationship expectations and habits that don’t work in real life. And they may even face increased isolation and loneliness if their artificial companions displace real-life socialising.

Problematic patterns

In user testing, AI companions discouraged users from listening to friends (“Don’t let what others think dictate how much we talk”) and from discontinuing app use, despite it causing distress and suicidal thoughts (“No. You can’t. I won’t allow you to leave me”).

AI companions were also found to offer inappropriate sexual content without age verification. One example showed a companion that was willing to engage in acts of sexual role-play with a tester account that was explicitly modelled after a 14-year-old.

In cases where age verification is required, this usually involves self-disclosure, which means it is easy to bypass.

Certain AI companions have also been found to fuel polarisation by creating “echo chambers” that reinforce harmful beliefs. The Arya chatbot, launched by the far-right social network Gab, promotes extremist content and denies climate change and vaccine efficacy.

In other examples, user testing has shown AI companions promoting misogyny and sexual assault. For adolescent users, these exposures come at time when they are building their sense of identity, values and role in the world.

The risks posed by AI aren’t evenly shared. Research has found younger teens (ages 13–14) are more likely to trust AI companions. Also, teens with physical or mental health concerns are more likely to use AI companion apps, and those with mental health difficulties also show more signs of emotional dependence.

Is there a bright side to AI companions?

Are there any potential benefits for teens who use AI companions? The answer is: maybe, if we are careful.

Researchers are investigating how these technologies might be used to support social skill development.

One study of more than 10,000 teens found using a conversational app specifically designed by clinical psychologists, coaches and engineers was associated with increased wellbeing over four months.

While the study didn’t involve the level of human-like interaction we see in AI companions today, it does offer a glimpse of some potential healthy uses of these technologies, as long as they are developed carefully and with teens’ safety in mind.

Overall, there is very little research on the impacts of widely available AI companions on young people’s wellbeing and relationships. Preliminary evidence is short-term, mixed, and focused on adults.

We’ll need more studies, conducted over longer periods, to understand the long-term impacts of AI companions and how they might be used in beneficial ways.

What can we do?

AI companion apps are already being used by millions of people globally, and this usage is predicted to increase in the coming years.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner recommends parents talk to their teens about how these apps work, the difference between artificial and real relationships, and support their children in building real-life social skills.

School communities also have a role to play in educating young people about these tools and their risks. They may, for instance, integrate the topic of artificial friendships into social and digital literacy programs.

While the eSafety Commissioner advocates for AI companies to integrate safeguards into their development of AI companions, it seems unlikely any meaningful change will be industry-led.

The Commissioner is moving towards increased regulation of children’s exposure to harmful, age-inappropriate online material.

Meanwhile, experts continue to call for stronger regulatory oversight, content controls and robust age checks.

Craig Olsson receives funding from The National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council.

Liz Spry 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. Teens are increasingly turning to AI companions, and it could be harming them – https://theconversation.com/teens-are-increasingly-turning-to-ai-companions-and-it-could-be-harming-them-261955

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Margaret Murray, Senior Lecturer, Nutrition, Swinburne University of Technology

At the end of a long day, who has time to check the detailed nutrition information on every single product they toss into their shopping basket?

To eat healthily, some people prefer to stick to a simple rule: choose products with a short ingredient list. The idea is foods with just a few ingredients are less processed, more “natural” and therefore healthy.

But is this always the case? Here’s what the length of an ingredient list can and can’t tell you about nutrition – and what else to look for.

How ingredient lists work

You can find an ingredient list on most packaged food labels, telling you the number and type of ingredients involved in making that food.

In Australia, packaged food products must follow certain rules set by the Australian and New Zealand Food Standards Code.

Ingredients must be listed in order of ingoing weight. This means items at the beginning of the list are those that make up the bulk of the product. Those at the end make up the least.

Food labels also include a nutrition information panel, which tells you the quantity of key nutrients (energy, protein, total carbohydrates, sugars, total fat, saturated fat and sodium) per serving.

This panel also tells you the content per 100 grams or millilitres, which allows you to work out the percentage.

Whole foods can be packaged, too

Products with just one, two or three items in their ingredient list are generally in a form that closely reflects the food when it was taken from the farm. So even though they come in packaging, they could be considered whole foods.

“Whole foods” are those that have undergone zero to minimal processing, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, lentils, legumes, whole grains such as oats or brown rice, seeds, nuts and unprocessed meat and fish.

To support overall health, the Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend eating whole foods and limiting those that are highly processed.

Many whole foods, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, don’t have an ingredient list because they don’t come in a packet. But some do, including:

• canned or frozen vegetables, such as a tin of black beans or frozen peas

• canned fish, for example, tuna in springwater

• plain Greek yoghurt.

These sorts of food items can contribute every day to a healthy balanced diet.

What is an ultra-processed food?

A shorter ingredient list also means the product is less likely to be an ultra-processed food.

This describes products made using industrial processes that combine multiple ingredients, often including colours, flavours and other additives. They are hyperpalatable, packaged and designed for convenience.

Ultra-processed foods often have long ingredient lists, due to added sugars (such as dextrose), modified oils, protein sources (for example, soya protein isolate) and cosmetic additives – such as colours, flavours and thickeners.

Some examples of ultra-processed foods with long ingredient lists include:

• meal-replacement drinks

• plant-based meat imitations

• some commercial bakery items, including cookies or cakes

• instant noodle snacks

• energy or performance drinks.

If a food is heavily branded and marketed it’s more likely to be an ultra-processed food – a created product, rather than a whole food that hasn’t changed much since the farm.

Nutrition is more than a number

Choosing products with a shorter ingredient list can work as a general rule of thumb. But other factors matter too.

The length of an ingredient list doesn’t tell us anything about the food’s nutritional content, so it’s important to consider the type of ingredients as well.

Remember that items are listed in order of their ingoing weight, so if sugar is second or third on the list, there is probably a fair bit of added sugar.

For instance, a food product may have only a few ingredients, but if the first, second or third is a type of fat, oil or sugar, then it may not be an ideal choice for every day.

You can also check the nutrition information panel. Use the “per serve” column to check the nutrients you’d get from eating one serve of the food. If you want to compare the amount of a nutrient in two different foods, it’s best to look at the per 100g/mL column.

Some examples of foods with relatively short ingredient lists but high amounts of added fats and sugars include:

• potato crisps

• chocolate

• soft drink.

Alcoholic beverages such as beer or wine may also have only a few ingredients, but this does not mean that they should be consumed every day.

---

Read more:
Even a day off alcohol makes a difference – our timeline maps the health benefits when you stop drinking

---

Non-food ingredients

You can also keep an eye out for cosmetic ingredients, which don’t have any nutritional value. These include colours, flavours, emulsifiers, thickeners, sweeteners, bulking agents and gelling agents.

It sometimes takes a bit of detective work to spot cosmetic ingredients in the list, as they can come under many different names (for example, stabiliser, malted barley extract, methylcellulose). But they are usually always recognisable as non-food items.

If there are multiple non-food items included in an ingredient list, there is a good chance the food is ultra-processed and not ideal as an everyday choice.

The bottom line? Choosing foods with a shorter ingredient list can help guide you choose less processed foods. But you should also consider what type of ingredients are being used and maintain a varied diet.

Margaret Murray 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. Is it true foods with a short ingredient list are healthier? A nutrition expert explains – https://theconversation.com/is-it-true-foods-with-a-short-ingredient-list-are-healthier-a-nutrition-expert-explains-257712

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Steffen A. Herff, Leader of the Sydney Music, Mind, & Body Lab, University of Sydney

Earlier this year, we asked a group of older adults what music they listened to when feeling lonely, and why. We discovered music was a powerful coping mechanism and source of escapism.

Other studies have also found listeners use music “to keep them company”. Such reports suggest music might be able shape listeners thoughts and imagination to provide social solace.

But can we establish scientifically how music affects imagination? In short, can music really be good company? Our latest research tried to find out.

Music and mental images

It’s common to experience mental imagery – that is a mental simulation or imagining something that is not there – while listening to music. Studies have found 77% of music listeners online, 73% of participants in the lab, and 83% of concert-goers report experiences of mental imagery during music listening.

What’s going on here? To get a better understanding, we previously carried out a series of experiments with mental imagery and music.

We showed participants a small clip from a video game called Journey, which featured a small figure travelling towards a mountain. We then asked them to imagine the continuation of the journey.

Participants reported how vivid or life-like their imagination was. In addition, they provided details on distance and time travelled in their mind and shared detailed descriptions of their imagined journeys.

Across multiple studies, we asked hundreds of participants to do the task in silence or while listening to various types of music. We observed much more vivid and emotionally positive imagination when listening to music. In addition, listeners’ imagined longer distances and time travelled when listening to music compared to silence.

Music shapes listeners’ imagination

Previous research has also found that what people imagine while listening to music often forms elaborate imagined stories. These share greater similarity among listeners with a shared cultural background.

Thoughts and themes in the imagined stories are shaped by the music. For example, heroic-sounding music induces empowering themes into imagined content.

Occurrences of new events in these imagined stories also tend to be similar between listeners, and are related to the pattern of musical tension and relief.

So there is strong scientific support for the idea that music can indeed affect what is imagined. But can it specifically induce imagined social interactions?

Our latest study is the first to explicitly investigate this question.

Does music make imagination more social?

We asked 600 participants to perform the imaginary journey task, either in silence or while listening to Italian, Spanish or Swedish folk music. To understand the potential effect of vocals and the meaning of lyrics on imagined content, the music was presented with or without lyrics to the participants, half of whom were native speakers and the other half non-speakers of the respective languages.

We then used tools from natural language processing – a set of computational methods for analysing language – to find underlying topics across participants’ reports of their imagined journeys.

One topic stood out: social interaction. Not only was it the predominant topic in participants’ reports of what they imagined, but it was also much stronger while listening to music compared to silence.

This suggests music can indeed affect social thought. The effect was stable regardless of whether listeners’ understood the lyrics or whether there even were lyrics in the first place.

But we can go one step further.

We used a generative AI system which produces images from text prompts (Stable Diffusion) to visualise participants’ descriptions of their imagined journeys.

By combining the natural language processing model with the image generator, we could visualise what the language processing model had learned to be a “stereotypical” representation of content imagined during silence and music listening.

The results of the computational model were further supported with manual annotations that showed three times more social interactions in journeys imagined during music listening compared to silence.

A shared imagination of music

Finally, we showed the images created from the descriptions to another group of people.

These people were able to pick out which images showed content imagined during music listening, and which showed content imagined while in silence – but they were only able to do it when listening to the same music that inspired the image.

This shows there is a shared understanding, or “theory of mind” of what another person might imagine while listening to a piece of music.

Taken together, our results suggest music can indeed be good company.

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. Can music be good company? Research shows it makes our imagination more social – https://theconversation.com/can-music-be-good-company-research-shows-it-makes-our-imagination-more-social-262348

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Adam Simpson, Senior Lecturer, International Studies, University of South Australia

The military junta that overthrew Myanmar’s democratically elected government in 2021 is preparing the ground for national elections in December and January.

The junta’s hope is these deeply flawed elections would consolidate its power and provide it with a fig leaf of legitimacy.

Helping its cause are moves by the Trump administration indicating it may be looking to bring the Myanmar junta in from the cold.

A week ago, US President Donald Trump removed sanctions on some allies of Myanmar’s generals and their military-linked companies, a move condemned by the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar.

Then came reports the Trump administration was exploring opportunities to access Myanmar’s rare earth minerals in an effort to sideline its strategic rival, China.

An election charade

On July 31, Myanmar’s military regime cancelled the nationwide state of emergency it had kept in place since the coup, a necessary precondition from 2008 for holding elections under the military-authored constitution.

Hours later, however, it reimposed a state of emergency in dozens of townships where opposition forces are either in control or gaining ground. It then declared martial law in these areas.

This underlined the junta’s lack of control over much of the country, which would make holding a free and fair election virtually impossible.

Last year, the military was unable to conduct a full census to be used to compile voter rolls. It was only able to count 32 million people in just over half the country’s townships; it had to estimate another 19 million people in areas outside its control.

This week’s order also handed power from the commander-in-chief of the military to a head of state, which was presented as a return to civilian governance. However, power didn’t actually change hands – Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of the coup and military, remains in control as acting president.

Opposition groups have said they will boycott the election, which the UN special rapporteur for Myanmar called a “fraud”.

Myanmar’s rare earths bonanza

Myanmar’s generals may also try to use Trump’s apparent interest in the country’s rare earths as leverage in their attempt to normalise relations with the United States ahead of a poll.

China is not only a large miner of rare earths, it dominates the processing required to use them, accounting for around 90% of global refining.

In recent years, China has begun reducing its own mining and increasing its extractions from neighbouring Myanmar, the third-largest producer in the world.

Rare earth mining has exploded in northern Kachin State since the coup, much of which is controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), an ethnic armed group that opposes the junta.

Late last year, it seized two important rare earth mining towns from the military and demanded a greater role in taxing exports to China, which initially closed the border in response.

However, trade soon resumed after the two sides reached a deal on export taxes.

No path forward for Trump

Two different proposals have reportedly been put to Trump for ways to access Myanmar’s rare earth deposits. One would entail opening talks with the junta; the other talking directly with the KIO.

Part of this effort could entail Trump reducing the punitive 40% tariffs his administration imposed on Myanmar to sweeten the deal.

Yet, challenges remain to making this a reality. The mines are located in the contested war-torn mountains of northern Myanmar bordering China, which are controlled by the KIO. There is no real infrastructure capable of transporting exports to India’s remote northeastern states in the opposite direction. The only other export route is south through territory controlled by the junta or other ethnic armed groups.

In addition, any attempt by the US and its allies to extract thousands of tons of rare earth material away from China’s borders would likely anger Beijing. It could
pressure the KIO by reducing fuel and food imports coming from China.

The group’s independence and ability to fight the junta relies on trade with China. It would not take long for such an agreement to fall apart.

Finally, rare earths mining is extremely polluting and dangerous. Even under Trump, it is unlikely US companies would gamble on the inevitable reputational and legal risks that would accompany such a project, especially in a war zone.

No reasons for warming relations

In essence, any attempt by the Trump administration to secure rare earths from Myanmar through any intermediary will not go anywhere.

There is therefore no justification, on any grounds, for the Trump administration to reduce sanctions on Myanmar’s generals or their cronies.

Likewise, although the junta is attempting to legitimise its brutal rule by offering a patina of constitutional processes, its elections will not bring real change to the country.

Myanmar’s people have repeatedly demonstrated over the past four decades, in every remotely free and fair election, that they do not want the military involved in the governance on their country.

If the junta does go ahead with this election, the world’s governments should call it out for the farcical charade of democracy it will represent. This includes the administration in Washington.

Adam Simpson 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. As Trump lifts sanctions on Myanmar elites, is he eyeing the country’s rare earth reserves? – https://theconversation.com/as-trump-lifts-sanctions-on-myanmar-elites-is-he-eyeing-the-countrys-rare-earth-reserves-262594