In January, the Trump administration ordered a broad pause on all US funding for foreign aid. Among other issues, this has significant effects on US funding for HIV. The United States has been the world’s biggest donor to international HIV assistance, providing 73% of funding in 2023. A large part of this is the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which oversees programs in low- and middle-income countries to prevent, diagnose and treat the virus. These programs have been significantly disrupted. What’s more, recent funding cuts for international HIV assistance go beyond the US. Five countries that provide the largest amount of foreign aid for HIV – the US, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands – have announced cuts of between 8% and 70% to international aid in 2025 and 2026. Together, this may mean a 24% reduction in international HIV spending, in addition to the US foreign aid pause. We wanted to know how these cuts might affect HIV infections and deaths in the years to come. In a new study, we found the worst-case scenario could see more than 10 million extra infections than what we’d otherwise anticipate in the next five years, and almost 3 million additional deaths. What is HIV? HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system. HIV can be transmitted at birth, during unprotected sex or thorough blood-to-blood contact such as shared needles. If left untreated, HIV can progress to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), a condition in which the immune system is severely damaged, and which can be fatal. HIV was the world’s deadliest infectious disease in the early 1990s. There’s still no cure for HIV, but modern treatments allow the virus to be suppressed with a daily pill. People with HIV who continue treatment can live without symptoms and don’t risk infecting others. A sustained global effort towards awareness, prevention, testing and treatment has reduced annual new HIV infections by 39% (from 2.1 million in 2010 to 1.3 million in 2023), and annual deaths by 51% (from 1.3 million to 630,000). Most of that drop happened in sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic was worst. Today, nearly two-thirds of people with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, and nearly all live in low- and middle-income countries. Our study We wanted to estimate the impact of recent funding cuts from the US, UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands on HIV infections and deaths. To do this, we used our mathematical model for 26 low- and middle-income countries. The model includes data on international HIV spending as well as data on HIV cases and deaths. These 26 countries represent roughly half of all people living with HIV in low- and middle income countries, and half of international HIV spending. We set up each country model in collaboration with national HIV/AIDS teams, so the data sources reflected the best available local knowledge. We then extrapolated our findings from the 26 countries we modelled to all low- and middle-income countries. For each country, we first projected the number of new HIV infections and deaths that would occur if HIV spending stayed the same. Second, we modelled scenarios for anticipated cuts based on a 24% reduction in international HIV funding for each country. Finally, we modelled scenarios for the possible immediate discontinuation of PEPFAR in addition to other anticipated cuts. With the 24% cuts and PEPFAR discontinued, we estimated there could be 4.43 million to 10.75 million additional HIV infections between 2025 and 2030, and 770,000 to 2.93 million extra HIV-related deaths. Most of these would be because of cuts to treatment. For children, there could be up to an additional 882,400 infections and 119,000 deaths. In the more optimistic scenario in which PEPFAR continues but 24% is still cut from international HIV funding, we estimated there could be 70,000 to 1.73 million extra new HIV infections and 5,000 to 61,000 additional deaths between 2025 and 2030. This would still be 50% higher than if current spending were to continue. The wide range in our estimates reflects low- and middle-income countries committing to far more domestic funding for HIV in the best case, or broader health system dysfunction and a sustained gap in funding for HIV treatment in the worst case. Some funding for HIV treatment may be saved by taking that money from HIV prevention efforts, but this would have other consequences. The range also reflects limitations in the available data, and uncertainty within our analysis. But most of our assumptions were cautious, so these results likely underestimate the true impacts of funding cuts to HIV programs globally. Sending progress backwards If funding cuts continue, the world could face higher rates of annual new HIV infections by 2030 (up to 3.4 million) than at the peak of the global epidemic in 1995 (3.3 million). Sub-Saharan Africa will experience by far the greatest effects due to the high proportion of HIV treatment that has relied on international funding. In other regions, we estimate vulnerable groups such as people who inject drugs, sex workers, men who have sex with men, and trans and gender diverse people may experience increases in new HIV infections that are 1.3 to 6 times greater than the general population. Will Oliver/EPA The Asia-Pacific received US$591 million in international funding for HIV in 2023, which is the second highest after sub-Saharan Africa. So this region would likely experience a substantial rise in HIV as a result of anticipated funding cuts. Notably, more than 10% of new HIV infections among people born in Australia are estimated to have been acquired overseas. More HIV in the region is likely to mean more HIV in Australia. But concern is greatest for countries that are most acutely affected by HIV and AIDS, many of which will be most affected by international funding cuts.

Owing to its violent political history, West Papua’s vibrant human past has long been ignored. Unlike its neighbour, the independent country of Papua New Guinea, West Papua’s cultural history is poorly understood. But now, for the first time, we have recorded this history in detail, shedding light on 50 millennia of untold stories of social change. By examining the territory’s archaeology, anthropology and linguistics, our new book fits together the missing puzzle pieces in Australasia’s human history. The book is the first to celebrate West Papua’s deep past, involving authors from West Papua itself, as well as Indonesia, Australasia and beyond. The new evidence shows West Papua is central to understanding how humans moved from Eurasia into the Australasian region, how they adapted to challenging new environments, independently developed agriculture, exchanged genes and languages, and traded exquisitely crafted objects. Dylan Gaffney , CC BY-SA Early seafaring and adaptation During the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million to 12,000 years ago), West Papua was connected to Australia in a massive continent called Sahul. Archaeological evidence from the limestone chamber of Mololo Cave shows some of the first people to settle Sahul arrived on the shores of present-day West Papua. There they quickly adapted to a host of new ecologies. The precise date of arrival of the first seafaring groups on Sahul is debated. However, a tree resin artefact from Mololo has been radiocarbon dated to show this happened more than 50,000 years ago. Genetic analyses support this early arrival time to Sahul. Our work suggests these earliest seafarers crossed along the northern route, one of two passages through the Indonesian islands. Dylan Gaffney , CC BY-SA Interestingly, the first migrants carried with them the genetic legacy of intermarriages between our species, Homo sapiens, and the Denisovans, a now extinct species of hominins that lived in eastern Asia. Geneticists currently dispute whether these encounters took place in Southeast Asia, along a northerly or southerly route to Sahul, or even in Sahul itself. In the same way modern European populations retain about 2% of Neanderthal ancestry, many West Papuans retain about 3% of Denisovan heritage. As the Earth warmed at the end of the Pleistocene, rising seas split Sahul apart. The large savannah plains that joined West Papua and Papua New Guinea to Australia were submerged around 8,000 years ago. Much of West Papua’s southern and western coastlines became islands. Social transformations during the past 10,000 years As environments changed, so did people’s cuisine and culture. We know from sites in Papua New Guinea that people developed their own agricultural systems between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, at a similar time to innovations in Asia and the Americas. However, agricultural systems were not universally adopted across the island. New chemical evidence from human tooth enamel in West Papua shows people retained a wide variety of diets, from fish and shellfish to forest plants and marsupials. One of the key unanswered questions in West Papua’s history is when cultivation emerged and how it spread into other regions, including Southeast Asia. Taro, bananas, yams and sago were all initially cultivated in New Guinea and have become important staple crops around the world. Tristan Russell , CC BY-SA The arrival of pottery, some 3,000 years ago, represents movements of new people to the Pacific. These are best illustrated by iconic Lapita pottery, recorded by archaeologists from Papua New Guinea all the way to Samoa and Tonga. Lapita pottery makers spoke Austronesian languages, which became the ancestors of today’s Polynesian languages, including Māori. New pottery discoveries from Mololo Cave suggest the ancestors of Lapita pottery makers existed somewhere around West Papua. Finding the location of these ancestral Lapita settlements is a major priority for archaeological research in the territory. Tristan Russell , CC BY-SA Other evidence for social transformations includes rock paintings and even bronze axes. The latter were imported all the way from mainland Southeast Asia to West Papua around 2,000 years ago. Metal working was not practised in West Papua at this time and chemical analyses show some of these artefacts were made in northern Vietnam. At all times in the past, people had a rich and complex material culture. But only a small fraction of these objects survive for archaeologists to study, especially in humid tropical conditions. Dylan Gaffney , CC BY-SA Living traditions and the movement of objects From the early 1800s, when West Papua was part of the Dutch East Indies, colonial administrators, scientists and explorers exported tonnes of West Papuan artefacts to European museums. Sometimes the objects were traded or gifted, other times stolen outright. In the early 1900s, many objects were also burned by missionaries who saw Indigenous material culture as evidence of paganism. The West Papuan objects that now inhabit museums in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand are connections between modern people and their ancestral traditions. Sometimes these objects represent people’s direct ancestors. Major work is currently underway to connect West Papuans with these collections and to repatriate some of these objects to museums in West Papua. Unfortunately, funding remains a central issue for these museums. Many West Papuans continue to produce and use wooden carvings, string bags and shell ornaments. Anthropologists have described how people are actively reconfiguring their material culture, especially given the presence of new synthetic materials and a cash economy. Klementin Fairyo, Martinus Tekege, Sonya Kawer, Abdul Razak Macap , CC BY-SA Far from being “ancient” people caught in the stone age – a stereotype propagated in both Indonesian and international media – West Papuans are actively confronting the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. Despite our new findings, West Papua remains an enigma for researchers. It has a land area twice the size of Aotearoa New Zealand, but there are fewer than ten known archaeological sites that have been radiocarbon dated. By contrast, Aotearoa has thousands of dated sites. This means West Papua is the least well researched part of the Pacific and there is much more work to be done. Crucially, Papuan scholars need to be at the heart of this research.

Australians will go to the polls on May 3 for an election squarely centred on the cost of living. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Governor-General Sam Mostyn at Yarralumla first thing on Friday morning. Later he told an 8am news conference at parliament house the election choice was “between Labor’s plan to keep building or Peter Dutton’s plan to cut”. “Only Labor has the plan to make you better off over the next three years,” he said. “Now is not the time for cutting and wrecking, for aiming low, punching down or looking back.” The opposition leader, starting his campaign in his home city of Brisbane, said the election was a choice “about who can better manage our economy”. “The question that Australians need to ask is, are you better off today, is our country better off today than three years ago?” Dutton told a news conference. Less than a week after the federal budget and following an earlier delay caused by Cyclone Alfred, the formal campaign starts with government and opposition neck and neck and minority government considered a real possibility. But in recent days, the government has gained more momentum and Labor enters the campaign more confident than at the start of the year. The aggregated January-March quarterly Newspoll had the Coalition leading Labor 51-49%, but Albanese leading Peter Dutton as preferred PM 45% to 40%. A YouGov poll published March 21 had Labor and Coalition on 50-50. Polling only shows a snapshot of the present, and the campaign itself could be crucial to the election result. This is the fourth consecutive election launched off the back of a budget, with both sides this week bidding for voters’ support with big handouts. Labor pushed through legislation for its $17 billion tax cut, the first stage of which comes in mid next year. Opposition leader Peter Dutton in his budget reply promised a 12-month halving of excise on petrol and diesel and a gas reservation scheme. Labor goes into the election with 78 seats in the lower house, and the Coalition with 57 (counting the seats of two recent Liberal defectors). The large crossbench includes four Greens and half a dozen “teals”. With a majority being 76 seats in the new 150-seat parliament, the Coalition needs to win 19 seats for an outright majority. This would require a uniform swing of 5.3% (although swings are not uniform). A swing of less than 1% could take Labor into minority. The Coalition would need a swing of about 3.6% to end with more seats than the government. While all states are important if the result is close, Victoria and NSW are regarded as the crucial battlegrounds. If the Coalition won, it would be the first time that a first-term government had been defeated since 1931, during the great depression. Since the end of the second world war, while all first term governments have been reelected, each saw a two-party swing against them. One challenge for Albanese is that he has only a tiny majority, providing little buffer against a swing. The combined vote of the major parties will be something to watch, with the vote steadily declining from 85.47% of the vote just 19 years ago at the 2007 election, to only 68.28% at the 2022 election. Labor won the last election with a two-party vote of 52.13% to the Coalition’s 47.87%. As of December 31 2024, 17,939,818 Australians were enrolled to vote. The start of the formal campaign follows a long “faux” campaign in which both leaders have been travelling the length and breadth of the country non-stop, with the government making a series of major spending announcement but the opposition holding back on policy.

The usual story for a first-term government is a loss of seats, as voters send it a message, but ultimate survival. It can be a close call. John Howard risked all in 1998 with his GST, and almost lost office, despite having a big majority. But you have to go back to 1931 to find a first-term government thrown out. So, going into this campaign, Anthony Albanese has the weight of history on his side. But modern day politics is volatile, and the voters are cranky, which has in recent months given the opposition hope it could run the government close or even defy the odds. Government and opposition start the formal campaign with the polls close on the two-party vote. In the past few weeks, the government has improved its position, arguably to be now in the lead. If the election were held today, Labor would probably win more seats than the Coalition, and form government. But the margins are narrow. With the next parliament, like this one, expected to have a large crossbench, present polling is pointing towards a minority government as a likely outcome. Things can change during a campaign. Albanese started the term with substantial public goodwill – although his majority was razor thin, and his 2022 election owed more to the unpopularity of then prime minister Scott Morrison than to any real enthusiasm for Labor. If one had to point to the single biggest political mistake the prime minister made, it was his over-investment in the Voice referendum. Whatever one thinks of the proposal itself, Albanese let it distract from what was a growing-cost-of-living crisis. The referendum was probably always destined to fail, but Albanese and the “yes” side were also out-campaigned by the “no” forces, strongest among them opposition spokeswoman Jacinta Price. Albanese never properly recovered from the Voice’s defeat. Early in the term the government was complacent about its opponents, believing Peter Dutton was unelectable. Indeed, that was a widespread view, including among many on the conservative side of politics. It underestimated Dutton’s strategic and tactical skills, the changing nature of the electorate, and how deeply the cost-of-living crisis – with its dozen interest rate rises under Labor, on top of one under Morrison – would bite. Suburbia up for grabs What was once ALP heartland, outer suburbia, is now up for grabs. Many of the tradies have become conservatives, to whom Dutton’s blunt, black-and-white political pitch is not just acceptable but potentially attractive. Labor’s appeal to working people in this campaign is that the worst is over on the economy, with unemployment still low and real wages in (slightly) positive territory. The latest national accounts figures showed Australia’s per capita recession, which had lasted seven quarters, was over. The February interest rate fall has also been a plus for the government: it may not be a big vote changer but it has reinforced Labor’s argument that things are going in the right direction. The question remains: will people buy the story of life getting better when they are still not back to where they were a few years ago, and continue to feel under the financial pump? Lukas Coch/AAP This week’s budget and Dutton’s reply have homed in on cost of living. The government has come up with modest tax cuts, starting mid next year. These were legislated in a rush before parliament rose, so the Coalition was forced into saying it would repeal them. Dutton countered by promising an immediate cut to the excise on petrol and diesel. The opposition leader also used his budget reply to open another front in the battle over the energy transition, with the promise of a gas reservation scheme. In the past month or two, there has been some change in the political atmosphere. Dutton’s momentum seemed to have stalled. The tight internal disciple he had maintained frayed somewhat, with mixed messages over some policy and internal fears Dutton had left policy announcements too late. Will voters think they don’t know enough about Peter Dutton? The risk for Dutton is that people will fear they’re buying a pig in a poke. He has run a small target strategy; leaders (Howard in 1996, Abbott in 2013) have won on that approach before. But if Dutton’s policy offerings in the campaign fall short, or his policy doesn’t stand up to the forensic scrutiny that comes in a campaign, he is likely to run into problems. So far, Dutton has established himself as a strong negative campaigner but he has yet to come through as a positive alternative prime minister. His signing up to Labor’s $8.5 billion bulk-billing initiative was an example of a short-term tactic to neutralise an issue that raised questions about the Coalition’s inability to produce its own health blueprint. The government will mobilise industrial relations against the Coalition, arguing Labor has delivered benefits to workers that a Coalition government would attack. This is risky for Dutton. His plans for slashing the public service, curbing working-from-home and removing the right to disconnect will fuel Labor’s negative campaigning, which will focus too on Dutton’s general plan to cut spending. The Trump factor A major unknown is what impact overseas events will have on this election. There has been a general swing to the right internationally. But the Trump factor has become a danger for Dutton. His opponents seek cast Dutton as Trump-lite. The opposition leader is a critic of Trump on Ukraine, and he’s aware Trumpism is now politically scary for many voters. Nevertheless, Dutton’s pre-occupation with the size of the public service and his emphasis on cuts (without giving detail) will, to some voters, sound like echoes (albeit faint) of Trump. Labor claims its focus groups show people have been increasingly seeing Dutton as Trumpist. Francis Chung/EPA/AAP Trump this week announced tariffs on foreign cars (not a worry to Australia, which doesn’t make any anymore). Next week he’ll announced the next stage in his tariff policy. This will feed into the election campaign. The extent it does will depend on whether Australia is directly hit. The government is busy with intense last-minute lobbying. The cost of living is front and centre in the election, but the recent appearance of Chinese ships near Australia and their live-fire exercise has contributed to making national security and defence (especially how much we should be spending on it) issues as well, although second tier for most voters. Major attention in this election will be on the performance of independents. Half a dozen so-called teals seized Liberal seats in 2022, and it would be very hard for the Coalition to obtain a majority without regaining some of them. The Melbourne seats of Kooyong and Goldstein will be especially closely watched. In New South Wales, one teal seat has already been lost through the redistribution. The teals ran last time on climate change, integrity, and equity for women. This election, climate is less to the fore in the voters’ minds, while we now have an anti-corruption body, the National Anti-Corruption Commission. And there is no Scott Morrison, who was a lightning rod for the Liberals’ “women problem”. So in terms of issues, the teals have a harder case to make than before. On the other hand, people remain deeply disillusioned with the major parties, and the teals have had plenty of time to dig into their seats. The general “community candidate” movement has strengthened and broadened. Whatever its precise composition, the new House of Representatives is expected to have a large crossbench. In the event of a hung parliament, the crossbench will come into play. This means its potential members, especially the teals, will be under pressure during the campaign to indicate what factors they would take into account in deciding to whom to give confidence and supply. They are likely to keep their cards close to their chests. The election will also test whether the hardline positions the Greens have taken, on local and foreign issues, have alienated or attracted voters. The Greens are at an historic high with four seats in the lower house. The three of those that are in Queensland will be on the line. Given the closeness of the polls as the formal campaign starts, what happens in the coming five weeks, and notably the personal performances of Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton could be crucial to the outcome. This is not one of those elections where either side can be confident it has the result in the bag.

Now that an election has been called, Australian voters will go to the polls on May 3 to decide the fate of the first-term, centre-left Australian Labor Party government led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. In Australia, national elections are held every three years. The official campaign period only lasts for around a month. This time around, Albanese will be seeking to hold onto power after breaking Labor’s nine-year dry spell by beating the more right-leaning Liberal Party, led by Scott Morrison, in 2022. Now, he’s up against the Liberals’ new leader, a conservative with a tough guy image, Peter Dutton. It’s looking like a tight race. So how do elections work in Australia, who’s contesting for the top spot and why is the race looking so close? For Albanese, the honeymoon is over Albanese was brought into power in 2022 on the back of dissatisfaction with the long-term and scandal-prone Liberal-National Coalition government. At the time, he was considered personally more competent, warm and sensible than Morrison. Unfortunately for Albanese, the dissatisfaction and stress about the cost of living hasn’t gone away. Governments in Australia almost always win a second term. However, initially high levels of public support have dissipated over the first term. Opinion polls are pointing to a close election, though Albanese’s approval ratings have had a boost in recent weeks. At the heart of what makes this such a tight contest are issues shared by many established democracies: the public’s persistent sense of economic hardship in the post-pandemic period and longer-term dissatisfaction with “politics as usual”, combined with an increased focus on party leaders. Around the world, incumbents have faced challenges holding onto power over the past year, with voters sweeping out the Conservatives in the United Kingdom and the Democrats in the United States. Australia has faced some similar economic challenges, such as relatively high inflation and cost-of-living problems. Likewise, Australia – like many other established democracies – has long-term trends of dissatisfaction with major parties and the political system itself. However, this distaste with “business as usual” manifests differently in Australia from comparable countries such the UK and US. Australia’s voting system In Australia, voting is compulsory, and those who fail to turn out face a small fine. Some observers have argued this pushes parties to try to persuade “swing” voters with more moderate policies, rather than rely on their faithful “bases” and court those with more extreme views who are more likely to vote. In the UK, by comparison, widespread public distaste with the Conservatives, combined with low turnout and first-past-the-post voting, delivered Keir Steirmer’s Labour Party a dramatic victory. This was despite a limited uptick in support. And in the US, turnout in the 2024 election was only about 64%. Donald Trump and the Republicans swept to power last year by channelling a deep anti-establishment sentiment among those people who voted. And the country is now so polarised, that the more strongly identifying Democrat and Republican voters who do turn out to vote can’t see eye to eye on highly emotionally charged issues which dominate the parties’ platforms. Independent voters are left without “centrist” options. Because Australia’s voting system is different, Dutton is unlikely to follow Trump’s far-right positioning too closely, despite dabbling in the “anti-woke” culture wars. It also explains why Albanese’s personal style is usually quite mild-mannered and why he’s unlikely to present himself as a radical reformer. However, neither man’s approach has made them wildly popular with the public. This means neither can rely on their own popularity to win over the public. Another factor making Australia distinct is that voters rank their choices, with their vote flowing to their second choice if their first choice doesn’t achieve a majority. This means many races in the 150-seat lower house of parliament are won from second place. Similarly, seats in the Senate (Australia’s second chamber, with the power to amend or block legislation) are won based on the proportion of votes a party receives in each state or territory. This gives minor parties and independents a better chance at winning seats compared to the lower house. This means dissatisfaction with the major parties has in recent years created space for minor parties and a new crop of well-organised independents to get elected and influence policy. In 2022, around one-third of voters helped independents and minor parties take seats off both the Liberals and Labor in the inner cities. To win government, Dutton will need to get them back, or take more volatile outer-suburban seats off Labor. The big policy concerns Against this backdrop, Australian voters both in 2022 and today have a fairly consistent set of policy concerns. And while parties want to be seen addressing them, their messaging isn’t always heard. The 2022 Australian Election Study, run by Australian political researchers, revealed that pessimism about the economy and concerns about the cost of living were front of mind when Australians voted out the Liberal-National Coalition government last federal election. This time around, one might think some relative improvement in economic factors like unemployment and cuts to interest rates would put a spring in the prime minister’s step. However, the public is still very concerned about the day-to-day cost-of-living pressures and practical issues such as access to health care. The government’s policy efforts in this direction – for example, tax cuts and subsidies for power bills – have so far not strongly cut through. What have the major parties promised? Comparing the parties’ platforms, Labor is firmly focused on economic and government service issues to support people in the short term. Although expected to announce the election earlier, Albanese was handed the opportunity of delivering an extra budget by a tropical storm in early March. This included spending promises foreshadowed earlier, as well as a new modest tax cut as an election sweetener. In the longer term, Labor has promised significant incentives to improve access to free doctor’s visits and focused on investments in women’s health, as well as technological infrastructure. Labor is also encouraging more people to fill skill shortages through vocational education and promising to make the transition to renewable energy, while simultaneously supporting local manufacturing. The Coalition, for its part, has been critical of these long-term goals and promised to repeal the newly legislated tax cuts in favour of subsidies for petrol. It has focused its message on reduced government spending, while strategically mirroring promises on health to avoid Labor attacks on that front. Dutton has also proposed cuts to migration to reduce housing pressures and a controversial plan to build nuclear power plants at the expense of renewables. Will these differences in long-term plans cut through? Or are people focused on short-term, hip-pocket concerns? This election, whatever the result, will not represent a long-term shifting of loyalties, but rather a precarious compact with distrustful voters looking for relief in uncertain times.

At the last federal election, Australia elected the largest lower house crossbench in its post-war federal history. In addition to four Greens MPs, Rebekah Sharkie from the Centre Alliance and Bob Katter (with his own micro-party), there were ten independent MPs, seven of them new to parliament. These MPs have the freedom and flexibility to vote on every piece of legislation without having to adhere to any party-room pledge. Micro-parties and independents also fared well in the Senate in 2022, thanks in part to the fact that we use proportional representation to elect our senators. In a half-Senate election with 40 vacancies, six went to the Greens, one to Independent ACT candidate David Pocock, one to United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet and one to Pauline Hanson in Queensland. Defections during the 47th parliament grew the crossbench even further. Five former Coalition MPs and Senators have moved to the crossbench, one over allegations of sexual harassment, one over the Voice to Parliament referendum and three over bruising preselection defeats. Senator Fatima Payman defected from the Labor Party last year, citing problems with the party’s stance on Palestine, and has now set up the Australia’s Voice party. Mick Tsikas/AAP Getting elected Independents hardly enjoy a level playing field in federal elections. Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin pointed out in their book, Rebels with a Cause, that independent candidates lack equal access to the electoral roll, do not initially benefit from the public funding that flows consistently to the major parties, and cannot be listed above the line on the Senate ballot paper unless they form a group or party. Unless they are party defectors with a seat in parliament already, independent candidates also lack the advantages of incumbency. Previous research from the Australia Institute has shown the dollar value of an incumbent MP’s entitlements (in terms of their salary and those of staff, printing and travel allowances, public exposure), is about $2.9 million per term. Once elected, though, Independents have shown the major parties that they can be very hard to beat. Helen Haines and her predecessor as Member for Indi, Cathy McGowan, have won four consecutive elections between them. Zali Steggall, who famously beat former prime minister Tony Abbott in the electorate of Warringah in 2019, has been re-elected once, and the people of metropolitan Hobart have returned former public servant and whistleblower Andrew Wilkie to Canberra five times in a row. No safe seats Political parties and journalists have conventionally treated certain seats as “safe” (if the winning party’s vote two-party preferred margin was 60% or higher), others as “fairly safe” (if the winning party’s 2PP margin was between 56% and 60%) and others as “marginal” (those won by less than 56% at the previous election). But the days of safe and marginal seats are over. These terms belong to an age of two-party contests and more predictable preference flows. As Bill Browne and Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute have pointed out, the major party vote share has now “crossed a threshold” below which the idea of “safe seats” becomes redundant. Independent candidates can win with a relatively low share of the primary vote. In 2022, community independent Kylea Tink won the electorate of North Sydney with 25% of the primary vote, having ranked favourably, but not first, on many voters’ ballots. Holding on? Several contests involving current crossbenchers may prove nationally influential in the event of a hung parliament. Tink, whose electorate has been abolished in a routine redistribution, will not be among the incumbents hoping to hold their seat. The Liberal Party, by some accounts, perceives the Perth seat of Curtin, won by community independent Kate Chaney in 2022, as an important litmus test for the future. January saw a “surge in volunteers and donations” for Liberal candidate Tom White’s campaign, according to media reports. Richard Wainwright/AAP Elsewhere, the Liberals are attempting to meet incumbent community independents with candidates that more closely resemble them. The Liberal candidate for Warringah, Jaimee Rogers, is, like the sitting member Zali Steggall, a former athlete with a public profile. Wentworth candidate Ro Knox, a former Deloitte consultant, will run against Allegra Spender, whose own pitch for re-election has emphasised tax reform and productivity. In Victoria, Monique Ryan, who won the seat of Kooyong from then-treasurer Josh Frydenberg, will this time face Amelia Hamer, a local woman, professional and grand-niece of former Victorian premier Rupert Hamer. There are exceptions to that pattern. Former RSL President James Brown was preselected as the Liberal candidate for Mackellar, currently held by community independent Sophie Scamps. And in Goldstein, there will be a rerun of the previous contest between community independent Zoe Daniel and her Liberal predecessor Tim Wilson. At least three of the major party defectors in both houses are hoping to keep their seats, too. Gerard Rennick, formerly a Coalition senator who was denied a winnable spot on the Liberal National Party ticket, has registered the Gerard Rennick People First Party ahead of his bid for re-election this year. Rennick has pointed out that this will get his name “above the line” on the Senate ballot paper. Former Liberals Ian Goodenough and Russell Broadbent have both indicated they will run as independents to defend their seats – Moore and Monash respectively – from their erstwhile colleagues. Room for growth? Despite the watershed result in 2022, the crossbench may grow yet. Fundraising group Climate 200 is reported to be backing up to 35 candidates across the country, and an army of volunteers has already begun to mobilise in support. Health professional Carolyn Heise will hope that, with the support of the new campaign fundraiser the Regional Voices Fund, her second campaign in the regional electorate of Cowper may land her in parliament alongside Indi MP Helen Haines. The retirement of shadow minister Paul Fletcher as member for Bradfield in inner-Sydney makes for a particularly interesting contest in that electorate. Gisele Kapterian, who won Liberal preselection against Warren Mundine, will campaign against community independent Nicolette Boele, who would need a swing of only 5% in her favour to win on her second attempt. In Victoria’s western district, community independent Alex Dyson will attempt for the third time to win the seat of Wannon from shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan. Dyson came close in 2022 and would need only a 4% swing (two-candidate preferred) to win this time. In 2022, community groups supported independent candidate Penny Ackery in her campaign against then-minister and now shadow treasurer Angus Taylor. The two-candidate preferred vote left the seat “relatively safe” (in old terms), but declining support for the Coalition saw the state electorate of Wollondilly (within Hume’s borders) elect community independent Judy Hannan in a “surprise win” at the 2023 state election. There is plenty of potential for surprise victories and shock defeats at the forthcoming election. Community independents are running in at least four Labor-held seats. What should surprise nobody is that every vote in every seat will count on election day.

They are neither as leafy nor as affluent as much of the Liberal heartland, but Peter Dutton believes the outer ring-roads of Australia’s capitals provide the most direct route to power. He has been telling his MPs these once-safe Labor-voting suburbs are where the 2025 election can be won. From the moment the Queenslander assumed control of the Liberal Party in 2022, he was intent on this suburbs-first strategy, even if it seemed historically unlikely and involved repositioning his formerly business-loyal party as the new tribune of the working class. As he told Minerals Week in September 2023: The Liberal Party is the party of the worker. The Labor Party has become the party of the inner city elite and Greens. This has been Dutton’s long game. It’s an outsider approach reminiscent of what US President Donald Trump had achieved with disaffected blue-collar Democratic supporters in the United States, and what Boris Johnson managed by turning British Labour supporters in England’s de-industrialised north into Brexiteers and then Conservative voters. Read more: Labor's in with a fighting chance, but must work around an unpopular leader A political gamble It was not the obvious play but it may prove the right one. After a tumultuous period in which the Liberals had cycled through three prime ministers and ignored a clear public clamour for policy modernisation on women, anti-corruption and climate change, the Morrison government had been bundled from office. Morrison hadn’t merely failed to attract disengaged undecideds in the middle-ground, but had haemorrhaged engaged constituents from some of Australia’s safest Liberal postcodes. Nineteen seats came off the Coalition tally in that election, yet Labor’s gain was only nine. Something fundamental had happened. Six new centrist independents now sat in Liberal heartland seats – all of them professional women. Numerically, they formed a kind of electoral Swiss Guard around the new Labor government’s otherwise weak primary vote and thin (two-seat) parliamentary majority. In a sharp visual contrast to the Coalition parties, women made up around half of Anthony Albanese’s new Labor government and he moved to prioritise the very things on which the Coalition had steadfastly refused to budge – including meaningful constitutional recognition of First Peoples. Albanese, it seemed, had tuned in to the zeitgeist. He would even go on to break a 102-year record a year later, becoming the first PM to increase his majority by taking a set off the opposition in a byelection. One more urban jewel shifted out of the Liberals’ column. Dutton, however, never blinked. His first press conference as leader in 2022 had been notable for the absence of the usual mea culpa – a suitably contrite acknowledgement that he’d heard the message from erstwhile Liberals who had abandoned their party for more progressive community independents. Instead, Dutton confidently responded that the 2025 election would be decided not in these comfortable seats but in the further-flung parts of Australia’s cities where people make long commutes to work and struggle to find adequate childcare and other services. It was a bold strategy because it meant targeting seats with healthy Labor margins. Canberra insiders wondered privately if this was brave or simply delusional. Some concluded it could only work as a two-election strategy. Many asked where a net gain of 19 seats would come from if not through the recovery of most or all of what became known as the “teal” seats? Yet the combative Liberal continued to focus on prising suburbanites away from Labor with a relentless campaign emphasising the rising cost-of-living under Labor. Three years later and even accounting for the first interest rate cut in over four years, it is Dutton’s strategy that has looked the more attuned to the electoral zeitgeist. So much so that he goes into this election with a realistic chance of breaking another longstanding electoral record: that of replacing a first-term government. This hasn’t been done federally since the Great Depression took out the Scullin Labor government of 1929-1931. It’s all about geography While only votes in ballot boxes will tell, the Coalition’s rebounding support appears to have come from the outer mortgage belt, just as he predicted. These voters absorb their political news sporadically via social media feeds, soft breakfast interviews, and car-radio snippets. These are media where Dutton’s crisp sound-bite messaging around cost-of-living pressures has simply been sharper and more resonant than Labor’s. And it is by this means that these voters may have picked up that a Dutton government would seek to deport dual citizens convicted of serious crimes, stop new migrants from buying property (a policy first ridiculed as inconsequential by Labor and since copied), and cut petrol excise, temporarily taking around $14 off the price of a tank of fuel. These voters may have noticed Dutton’s campaign against the supermarket duopoly, which includes the option of forced divestiture for so-called “price-gouging”. Recently, he added insurance conglomerates to that divestment hit-list. And they might have heard his dramatic nuclear “solution” to high energy costs and emissions (in reality, devilishly complex and expensive). On top of these, semi-engaged voters might recall Dutton’s culture-war topics for which he has regularly received generous media minutes, including: his opposition to what he called “the Canberra Voice” his defence of Australia Day his refusal to stand in front of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags his oft-made claim that a Greens-Teals-Labor preoccupation with progressive issues has left the cost-of-living crisis unaddressed. Beyond such rhetoric, Dutton has had little to say in detailed policy terms. But will that matter? However comprehensive, Labor’s list of legislated achievements has, arguably, achieved even less purchase in the electoral mind. Polls taken as the election campaign neared showed Dutton’s Coalition was well-placed to win seats from Labor in suburban and outer-suburban areas of Perth, Melbourne, and Sydney, as well as regional seats in the NSW Central Coast. These include seats such as Tangney and Bullwinkel in outer Perth; McEwen and Chisolm in suburban Melbourne, and as many as seven seats in NSW – mostly on the periphery of Sydney or in the industrial Hunter Valley region. There may be other seats to move also. Liberal sources say they like their chances in Goldstein, currently held by the Teal, Zoe Daniel. And with a recent conservative turn in the Northern Territory election to the CLP, seats like the ultra-marginal Lingiari and the numerically safer Solomon could also be in play. A YouGov MRP poll reported by the ABC on February 16 put Dutton’s chances of securing an outright majority after the election at 20%. It measured the Coalition’s two-party-preferred support at 51.1% over Labor on 48.9%. That represents a swing towards the Coalition of 3.2%. But it is where the swing occurs that matters most. Seat-by-seat assessment of the YouGov results suggested the Coalition would be likely to win about 73 seats (median), with a lower estimate of 65 and an upper estimate of 80, if a federal election was held today. The same modelling indicates Labor would go backwards, holding about 66 seats in the next parliament, with a lower estimate of 59 and an upper estimate of 72. This is just one, albeit unusually large poll, but it will concern Albanese that even on its upper margin of Labor seat holds, he would not retain a majority. Of course, the campaign can change things and already, the delayed start caused by Cyclone Alfred introduced further variables in the form of a federal budget, replete with income tax cuts. A succession of polls conducted through March point to a Labor recovery with a Redbridge poll of 2,007 respondents, taken over March 3–11 putting Labor ahead 51%–49%. The same poll however showed a majority of people worry that the country is heading in the wrong direction. The final contest In political circles, people talk about momentum in campaigns, and say things like “the trend is our friend”. If true, that electoral amity has leaned decisively towards Dutton for the past year, and only recently to Labor. But caution is always advised. Election counts invariably throw up oddities – swings being more (or less) marked in one state compared to others, and seats retained (or lost) against a broader national trend on the night. Such surprises give the lie to the concept of uniform swings and makes prediction of a final seat count more difficult. If the polling consensus is broadly correct - rather than being the result of herding - and the source of Dutton’s rising support is former Labor suburbs, the question is, will those vote gains materialise at sufficient scale to translate into seat gains? If so, this election could redraw the political map and require new thinking about major party voting bases, policies and strategies into the future. The final outcome seems likely to turn on three things: Dutton’s ability to stay on message about the cost-of-living through the campaign when others in his team, buoyed by Trump’s war on wokeness, want to raise tendentious social issues. Albanese’s effectiveness in convincing wayward Labor voters that Labor has in fact delivered, that the economy has turned the corner, and that Dutton’s comparative toughness is code for budget cuts that would hit them hardest. Unforeseen events - at home or abroad. The Liberal leader is surprisingly well-placed. But remember, he is coming from a long way back.

The Albanese government has a fighting chance of winning the 2025 election, but will need to achieve in five weeks of campaigning what it hasn’t in three years in office. That is, work out a narrative explaining what it’s about and that can persuade Australians to back it for a second term. Convincing voters that electing a Peter Dutton-led Coalition government would be risky is the other essential element for a Labor victory – a task made easier by the evident chaos arising from the Trump administration’s recent actions in the US. The main Coalition promises announced ahead of the election being called were to start a nuclear power industry, slash the public service and, without explaining how, cut immigration. These policies are sufficiently Trumpesque in tone to lend some credence to Labor insinuations that Dutton could be a mini-Trump if elected. Attacks on Dutton’s integrity and policy credibility have improved Labor’s position in the run-up to the election. With Prime Minister Anthony Albanese somewhat lifting his performance this year, and getting Dutton slightly off balance, the trend is perceived to be moving Labor’s way. Government insiders hope the 2025 election will mimic the 1998 election, where the incumbent government survived despite losing the two party-preferred vote 48.5% to the opposition’s 51.5%. This paradoxical outcome, which saw the Howard government survive, was because the swing to the Beazley Labor opposition was concentrated in seats the opposition already held, rather than those it needed to win office. There’s little room for complacency, though. A handkerchief-sized set of policies such as Dutton’s did not stop opposition leader John Howard winning the 1996 election. Nor did a campaign built entirely on a three-pronged slogan stop opposition leader Tony Abbott winning the 2013 election. Labor will need to do deliberately what it did on the fly last time, when opposition leader Albanese got COVID during the 2022 campaign. That is, showcase attractive and articulate Labor frontbenchers to glow up, by association, an unloved leader. Mick Tsikas/AAP Both Albanese and Dutton have negative net approval ratings and are a drag on each of their party’s vote. In the latest Newspoll before the election was called, Albanese was on –12% and Dutton on –14%. An aggregate analysis of Newspoll by state and gender, covering the three months in the run up to the election, underlines the problem. Both leaders had double digit net negative approval ratings in every state except Queensland, where Dutton has a positive net rating of 9%. Both leaders have negative net approval ratings by gender, though Albanese’s (men –16%, women –18%) is worse than Dutton’s (men –8%, women –15%). Albanese has been famously indifferent to advice in the government’s first term. He long resisted the urgings of some cabinet colleagues to restructure the stage 3 tax cuts legislated by the Morrison government, for example, until the need for a mid-term political circuit-breaker made him budge. However, the risk of not getting a second term will make the prime minister more open to the advice of senior colleagues, ALP national secretary Paul Erickson, and party elders during the campaign. Albanese’s solution to all problems, as one Labor figure puts it, is to “apply more Albo”. Since voters rate Labor more highly than its leader, however, “more Albo” during the campaign is not the answer. Effective communicators such as Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, Education Minister Jason Clare, Housing Minister Clare O'Neill, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke and Employment Minister Murray Watt must be showcased. Their job is to embody an implicit promise that inside the Albanese government there’s a better one waiting to break out, and through that to stir voters’ hopes. So if the Albanese government can finally work out its story and get the message out via frontbenchers to whom voters are willing to listen, it could get across concrete promises that make them want to give it another go. What those concrete policy promises are will, of course, be crucially important. Labor has a tremendous challenge ahead. When up against one of the worst governments since Federation – that led by prime minister Scott Morrison – Albanese Labor won with a majority of just two seats in 2022. Voters have accorded new governments a second term at every federal poll since Federation, with the exception of the Depression-era 1931 election. But in 2025, this is far from assured. The unusual situation is partly a product of what systems thinkers describe as an “eroding goals” problem. After the loss of the Voice referendum campaign, the government’s leadership quickly conditioned Labor MPs to settle for the likelihood of minority government after the 2025 election. Now that election is here, and there are real fears even this lower hurdle might not be achieved. Having a leader who can do both the substance and theatre of politics is crucial to winning elections. If people don’t want to listen to you, the best government policies and performance can’t be communicated, recognised and rewarded. Having the right people in key portfolios is another. The prime minister prioritised the containment of potential leadership rivals over party and the national interest in some portfolio allocation decisions. This hurt the government’s performance and disappointed voters. Australians have signalled in repeated polls that they believe neither the current Labor prime minister nor the current Coalition alternative prime minister are up to the job. It is striking that the major parties, which claim to listen to voters, disrespect those voters by offering them deeply unpopular choices for prime minister. The spraying of votes to minor parties and independent candidates evident at the 2022 election could well accelerate as a consequence. People and parties often seem to be determined to learn the hard way. Now the election is here, Labor needs to tack around its shortcomings in this term of office and convincingly project there’s better ahead to win.

After weeks of speculation, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese today called the 2025 federal election for May 3. This will be an election for all 150 House of Representatives seats and 40 of the 76 senators (a normal House and half-Senate election). At the May 2022 election, Labor won 77 of the then 151 House seats, to 58 for the Coalition, four for the Greens, ten for independents and two for others. Labor gained Aston from the Liberals in April 2023, so they currently hold 78 seats, a majority of five by the UK method. Since the last election, there have been federal redistributions in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia. Victoria and NSW both lost a seat while WA gained a seat, reducing the House to 150 seats, with an unchanged 76 needed for a majority. The Poll Bludger’s election guide has 77 notional Labor seats, 58 Coalition and 15 for all Others. To win a majority in its own right, the Coalition needs to gain at least 18 seats. Assuming no change in the crossbench, the Coalition needs to gain at least ten seats from Labor to hold more seats than Labor. Nationally, Labor won the 2022 election in two-party preferred terms by a 52.1–47.9 margin over the Coalition. After the election, Labor and Albanese had a long honeymoon that extended well into 2023, and included gaining Aston at a byelection. The aftermath of the October 2023 Voice referendum defeat was bad for Labor, and they struggled in the polls during 2024 owing to rising concerns about inflation. In late 2024, the Coalition gained a narrow poll lead, which they held in analyst Kevin Bonham’s aggregate until early March. Labor has now recovered the poll lead. It is ahead by 51.1–48.9 using 2022 election preference flows, and by 50.5–49.5 adjusting for presumed stronger One Nation preference flows to the Coalition. On these figures, Labor would be likely to win more seats than the Coalition and form government. The Poll Bludger’s BludgerTrack is not as good for Labor, putting them in a 50.0–50.0 tie with the Coalition, representing a 2.1% swing to the Coalition since the last election. By state, Labor leads by 50.1–49.9 in NSW, a 1.3% swing to the Coalition. Labor leads by 50.1–49.9 in Victoria, a 4.7% swing to the Coalition. The Coalition leads by an unchanged 54.0–46.0 in Queensland. In WA, Labor leads by 55.1–44.9, a 0.1% swing to Labor. In South Australia, Labor leads by 52.1–47.9, a 1.9% swing to the Coalition. The big swing to the Coalition in Victoria is probably due to the unpopularity of the state Labor government. See also Newspoll aggregate data and a DemosAU Victorian federal poll below. The only new national poll added since my last article on Monday was Morgan’s weekly poll. All polls presented here were taken before Tuesday’s budget. I have extended the x-axis on the poll graph below to show the election date. Labor holds solid lead in Morgan despite Coalition gain A national Morgan poll, conducted March 17–23 from a sample of 1,683, gave Labor a 53–47 lead by headline respondent preferences, a 1.5-point gain for the Coalition since the March 10–16 Morgan poll. Primary votes were 35.5% Coalition (up 1.5), 33.5% Labor (up one), 12.5% Greens (down one), 4% One Nation (down one), 10% independents (down 0.5) and 4.5% others (steady). By 2022 election flows, Labor led by 54–46, a 0.5-point gain for the Coalition. By 52.5–32.5, respondents thought the country was going in the wrong direction (50.5–35 previously). Morgan’s consumer confidence index was up 0.4 points to 84.2. Newspoll aggregate data The Australian on March 23 released aggregate data for the three federal Newspolls conducted from late January to early March, from a combined sample of 3,757. The Poll Bludger said that in NSW there was a 50–50 tie, unchanged from the December quarter Newspoll aggregate. In Victoria, Labor led by 51–49, a one-point gain for Labor. In Queensland, the Coalition led by 57–43, a four-point gain for the Coalition. In WA, Labor led by an unchanged 54–46. In SA, there was a 50–50 tie, a three-point gain for the Coalition. The Poll Bludger’s BludgerTrack data shows Labor had a 52–48 lead with university-educated people, a one-point gain for Labor. Among those with a TAFE/technical education, the Coalition led by 52–48, a three-point gain for the Coalition. Among those without any tertiary education, the Coalition led by 52–48, a one-point gain for Labor. Victorian DemosAU federal and state poll A Victorian DemosAU poll, conducted March 17–21 from a sample of 1,006, gave federal Labor a 51–49 lead (54.8–45.2 to Labor in Victoria at the 2022 federal election). Primary votes were 34% Coalition, 29% Labor, 15% Greens, 8% One Nation and 14% for all Others. Albanese led Dutton as preferred PM by 40–37. By 55–30, voters did not believe Australia is headed in the right direction. In the state poll, the Coalition led by 52–48 (55.0–45.0 to Labor at the 2022 Victorian state election). Primary votes were 39% Coalition, 25% Labor, 15% Greens and 21% for all Others. Liberal Brad Battin led Labor incumbent Jacinta Allan as preferred premier by 43–30. By 60–25, voters did not believe Victoria is headed in the right direction. Seat poll of Brisbane Seat polls are unreliable. The Poll Bludger reported on March 25 that a uComms poll of Greens-held Brisbane for Liberals against Nuclear, conducted March 20 from a sample of 1,184, gave the Liberal National Party 31.2% of the primary vote, the Greens 24.2% and Labor 23.2%. The LNP would lose on preferences to either Labor or the Greens. Canadian election to be held on April 28 On March 23, new Canadian PM Mark Carney called the Canadian federal election for April 28, six months early. Carney’s centre-left governing Liberals were narrowly leading the Conservatives after being more than 20 points behind in early January. I covered this for The Poll Bludger on March 24.

A bizarre ancient life-form, considered to be the first giant organism to live on land, may belong to a totally unknown branch of the tree of life, scientists say. These organisms, named Prototaxites, lived around 420 million to 375 million years ago during the Devonian period and resembled branchless, cylindrical tree trunks. These organisms would have been massive, with some species growing up to 26 feet (8 meters) tall and 3 feet (1 meter) wide. Since the first Prototaxites fossil was discovered in 1843, scientists haven't been sure whether they were a plant, fungus or even a type of algae . However, chemical analyses of Prototaxites fossils in 2007 suggested they were likely a giant ancient fungus . Now, according to a paper published March 17 on the preprint server bioRxiv, Prototaxites might not have been a humongous fungus after all — rather, it may have been an entirely different and previously unknown life-form. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed. All life on Earth is classified within three domains — bacteria, archaea and eukarya — with eukarya containing all multicellular organisms within the four kingdoms of fungi, animals, plants and protists . Bacteria and archaea contain only single-celled organisms. Previous chemical analysis of Prototaxites fossils indicated that they likely fed off decaying organisms, just like many fungi do today, rather than making their food from carbon dioxide in the air like plants. However, according to this new research, Prototaxites may actually have been part of a totally different kingdom of life, separate from fungi, plants, animals and protists. Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors The researchers studied the fossilized remains of one Prototaxites species named Prototaxites taiti, found preserved in the Rhynie chert, a sedimentary deposit of exceptionally well-preserved fossils of early land plants and animals in Scotland. This species was much smaller than many other species of Prototaxites, only growing up to a few inches tall, but it is still the largest Prototaxites specimen found in this region. Upon examining the internal structure of the fossilized Prototaxites, the researchers found that its interior was made up of a series of tubes, similar to those within a fungus. But these tubes branched off and reconnected in ways very unlike those seen in modern fungi. "We report that Prototaxites taiti was the largest organism in the Rhynie ecosystem and its anatomy was fundamentally distinct from all known extant or extinct fungi," the researchers wrote in the paper. "We therefore conclude that Prototaxites was not a fungus, and instead propose it is best assigned to a now entirely extinct terrestrial lineage." True fungi from the same period have also been preserved in the Rhynie chert, enabling the researchers to chemically compare them to Prototaxites. In addition to their unique structural characteristics, the team found that the Prototaxites fossils left completely different chemical signatures to the fungi fossils, indicating that the Prototaxites did not contain chitin, a major building block of fungal cell walls and a hallmark of the fungal kingdom. The Prototaxites fossils instead appeared to contain chemicals similar to lignin, which is found in the wood and bark of plants. "We conclude that the morphology and molecular fingerprint of P. taiti is clearly distinct from that of the fungi and other organism preserved alongside it in the Rhynie chert, and we suggest that it is best considered a member of a previously undescribed, entirely extinct group of eukaryotes," the researchers wrote. Kevin Boyce , a professor at Stanford University, led the 2007 study that posited Prototaxites is a giant fungus and was not involved in this new research. However, he told the New Scientist that he agreed with the study's findings. "Given the phylogenetic information we have now, there is no good place to put Prototaxites in the fungal phylogeny," Boyce said. "So maybe it is a fungus, but whether a fungus or something else entirely, it represents a novel experiment with complex multicellularity that is now extinct and does not share a multicellular common ancestor with anything alive today." More research into Prototaxites fossils needs to be done to determine if they were fungi or a completely different type of life, and what caused them to go extinct millions of years ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a stunning image of a bizarre astronomical optical illusion. This "rare cosmic phenomenon", called an Einstein ring , appears as a single eye-like orb in the darkness of space, but is actually a distorted view of two distant galaxies in the constellation Hydrus. In the bright center of this cosmic spectacle is one galaxy, while the stretched orange and blue color surrounding it is the light from another galaxy located behind it. The light from the more distant galaxy looks like a ring because it has been distorted by gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when the gravity of a massive object — like a galaxy or a black hole — bends the light from a more distant object. This effect is a direct consequence of Einstein's theory of relativity , which states that mass warps the fabric of space-time, causing light to follow curved paths, like a ball rolling down a curved slope. "This effect is much too subtle to be observed on a local level, but it sometimes becomes clearly observable when dealing with curvatures of light on enormous, astronomical scales," ESA representatives wrote in a statement. This latest image was released by ESA and the Canadian Space Agency today (March 27) as their March picture of the month . It was captured by JWST's Near-InfraRed Camera instrument and also includes data from the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope. Related: 42 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors Einstein rings like these are created when the distant light source, the massive lensing object, and the observer are perfectly aligned, resulting in the light appearing as a complete ring wrapped around the lensing object. As a result, they are rare. In this case, the elliptical galaxy in the foreground — which is part of a galaxy cluster named SMACSJ0028.2-7537 — is so massive that it is bending the light of the spiral galaxy situated far behind it. "Even though its image has been warped as its light travelled around the galaxy in its path, individual star clusters and gas structures are clearly visible," according to the statement The fascinating phenomenon of gravitational lensing also allows astronomers to better understand the universe. Light emitted from distant galaxies, which existed long ago in the past, is often too faint to be observed directly from Earth. Strong gravitational lensing magnifies these galaxies, making them appear larger and brighter, and allowing astronomers to study some of the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang. "Objects like these are the ideal laboratory in which to research galaxies too faint and distant to otherwise see," the ESA statement noted. Additionally, because black holes and dark matter don’t emit light, scientists can use gravitational lensing to detect and study these phenomena by measuring how they bend and magnify background stars. James Webb Space Telescope quiz: How well do you know the world's most powerful telescope?

The sun rises partially eclipsed over India in October, 2022. A similar spectacle will be visible from parts of North America and Europe on March 29, 2025. The March 29 solar eclipse is almost upon us! Early on Saturday, the sun will rise partially eclipsed over 13 U.S. states and a broad swath of northeastern Canada. With the new moon covering up to 93% of the sun's visible surface, millions of people will have the opportunity to watch our star appear to grow a pair of "devil's horns" in the eerie dawn light. But even if you're not in the immediate path of the eclipse — or if you don't have protective eyewear — you can still watch this rare phenomenon unfold in several free online live streams, which you can find right here on this page, courtesy of Timeanddate.com and the Royal Observatory Greenwich . Watch live: March 29 solar eclipse from North America LIVE: Partial Solar Eclipse - March 29, 2025 - YouTube Watch On Beginning at 5:30 a.m. EDT, Timeanddate’s stream will show the partial eclipse transpire from a variety of angles and locations around the world. The precise time, duration and extent of the eclipse will be different depending on where in the world it's being observed from. Related: What time does the March 29 solar eclipse start? The live feed will feature images and videos of the eclipse as soon as the sun rises in North America, with prime views coming from St. John's — the capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada. If skies are clear, the "devil's horns" will appear prominently on the sun when the eclipse peaks at around 7:53 a.m. EDT, reaching 82% coverage of the solar disk, according to Timeanddate's eclipse map . The partial eclipse over Newfoundland will end an hour later. Watch live: The view from Europe Timeanddate's stream will also feature several views from across the Atlantic. These will include images from Siena, Italy, which will see a maximum eclipse of about 5% at noon local time; views from the towns of Kristiansand and Skibotn, Norway, where the sun will reach 30% and 37% obscuration, respectively; and a feed from the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London, U.K., where the eclipse will peak at around 11:03 a.m. local time with about 40% coverage. Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors The Royal Observatory Greenwich will also be hosting its own free live stream of the eclipse, beginning at 10 a.m. local time. For that midmorning view of the eclipse, you can watch the stream below. Partial Solar Eclipse LIVE | 29 March 2025 - YouTube Watch On If you're watching the live stream, you need nothing but your eyes (and probably a fresh cup of coffee). But if you do manage to see the partial eclipse in person, you MUST wear protective eyewear — such as certified solar eclipse glasses or a backyard telescope with solar filters — at all times, according to NASA . Unlike last year's total solar eclipse over North America , there will be no moment of totality (when the sun is completely covered by the moon) during Saturday's partial eclipse, so there is no safe time to remove your eclipse glasses. After March 29, the next solar eclipse visible from North America will be a partial eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026. This eclipse will appear as a total solar eclipse in Spain, Iceland, Greenland, Russia and a small area of Portugal. Sun quiz: How well do you know our home star?

In the crowded indoor cycling market there are plenty of machines that all claim to be the best exercise bike, we've tested many of them here at Live Science, and our fitness experts are well placed on what to look out for when it comes to recommending an exercise bike deal. Right now in the Amazon Big Spring Sale there is a massive 41% off the NordicTrack Commercial S22i Studio Cycle. It takes it down to $899.99 and equates to a $610 saving of the $1,499.99 MRSP — so at this price its a brilliant exercise bike deal and terrific value for money. Buy the NordicTrack Commercial S22i Studio Cycle for just $899.99 at Amazon. NordicTrack is a big player in the home fitness market and many of it's products hold much coveted spots in many of our best fitness equipment buyers guides — including the best rowing machines and best treadmills. Although we've yet to review this particular model, the NordicTrack Commercial S22i Studio Cycle has some unique features that make it an attractive offering for anyone looking to boost their general health, fitness and cycling performance from the comfort of their own home. NordicTrack Commercial S22i Studio Cycle: was $1,499.99 now $899.99 at Amazon Save 41% on this excellent exercise bike from fitness equipment experts NordicTrack. The Commercial S22i Studio Cycle has everything you'll need for the best exercise bike experience and includes a 30-Day iFIT membership — which gives new users full access to the iFIT Library to stream breathtaking global workouts filmed on location around the world or studio classes with the iFIT expert trainers leading the workout experience. Price check: Best Buy: $1,599.99 Cycling is one of the best ways to boost your cardio fitness, but you don’t need to leave the house to get started. The NordicTrack Commercial S22i Studio Cycle is a great option to consider when looking at an indoor exercise bike. This machine has some fairly unique features like an adjustable incline from +20 to -10%, AutoAdjust resistance and incline. It integrates with the iFit app through the large 22-inch touchscreen which provides an immersive experience that simulates real-world riding. iFit includes an extensive library of studio classes, but the real highlight is the trainer-led real world rides that take you to some of the worlds most scenic cycling locations from Japan to Hawaii. NordicTrack says it delivers alongside the AutoAdjust incline an extremely realistic ride. So realistic that the NordicTrack is the only indoor cycling brand to have an officially licensed Tour de France machine. Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors Elsewhere, to further enhance the user experience, the bike features an adjustable cooling fan and an immersive sound system for listening to your favorite workout music and clear audio for every iFit workout. At full price, the NordicTrack Commercial S22i Studio Cycle is excellent value, but with 41% off the usual price, it's a hard-to-beat exercise bike deal. Key features: AutoAdjust resistance and incline, iFit app with studio and real-world workouts, 22-inch touchscreen, adjustable fan, immersive sound system. Price history: With a launch MRSP $2,000, the price has slowly dropped and generally held steady at around $1,699 on Amazon. It lowest price to date has been $1,099 — so with this whopping 41% off, the NordicTrack Commercial S22i Studio Cycle is at it's cheapest ever price. Reviews consensus: The NordicTrack Commercial S22i Studio Cycle is a great choice for anyone new to indoor cycling and looking for a machine that comes with tons of on-demand and instructor-led lead workouts, especially at this price. Amazon reviewers have been overwhelmingly positive on the NordicTrack, and it gets an aggregate score of 4 out of 5 from almost 5,000 ratings, with 63% of reviewers giving it top marks. Buy it if: You want a fantastic exercise bike with brilliant real-world locations and studio instructor-led classes. Don't buy it if: You want another type of exercise machine, the NordicTrack x22i is our best in guide treadmill and has a small discount on Amazon.

The findings of a new study may provide hope for patients with common eye diseases. Scientists have identified never-before-seen cells in the human eye that could potentially help reverse vision loss caused by common diseases, such as macular degeneration . The researchers discovered the cells in the retina, a light-sensitive structure at the back of the eye that is vital for vision. The cells were found in donated samples of fetal tissue. The scientists also identified the same cells in lab-grown models of the human retina — and when they tried transplanting those models into mice with a common eye disorder, it restored the rodents' vision. "This research not only deepens our understanding of retinal biology but also holds immense potential for advancing therapeutic interventions in RD [retinal degeneration] diseases," the researchers wrote in a paper describing the findings, which was published March 26 in the journal Science Translational Medicine . Related: Scientists restore monkey's vision with a patch made from human stem cells The retina detects light and converts it into signals that the brain can then interpret to determine what we're seeing. Deterioration of the retina is a leading cause of blindness worldwide. It can be triggered by many things, including aging, diabetes and physical injury , and the degeneration can lead to common eye diseases, such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa . Current treatments for these conditions focus mainly on reducing the rate at which retinal cells deteriorate, and protecting those that are still healthy. However, there are currently no effective therapies that promote repair of the retina , which would effectively reverse the deterioration. Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors A potential solution is to replace deteriorated cells with stem cells — cells that can mature to become any type of cell in the body under the right conditions. Yet, until now, scientists haven't found suitable stem cells in the human retina to achieve this, the authors of the new study wrote. In the new research, the team analyzed the activity of cells in the fetal retinal samples in the lab. The scientists discovered two types of retinal stem cells with promising regenerative properties: human neural retinal stem-like cells (hNRSCs) and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) stem-like cells. This image shows retinal stem cells in dyed tissue from human fetuses. (Image credit: Jianzhong Su, State Key Laboratory of Eye Health, Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University) The researchers found that both types of cells, which were located in the outer edge of the retina, could clone themselves. However, only hNRSCs could turn into other types of retinal cells under the right conditions. In a separate experiment, the researchers grew miniature replicas of the human retina in petri dishes. These 3D tissue models, known as organoids , better mimic the unique complexities of human organs than traditional animal models do. An analysis of the cells within these organoids revealed that they contained hNRSCs similar to those found in the fetal tissue samples. The team also identified specific molecular chains of events that turned the stem cells into other retinal cells and regulated the repair process. When transplanted into the retina of mice with a disease similar to retinitis pigmentosa, the stem cells from the organoids turned into the retinal cells needed to detect and process light signals. These new retinal cells ultimately improved the vision of the mice, compared with rodents that didn't receive any transplanted cells. This effect was seen for the duration of the experiment, up to 24 weeks. Taken together, these early findings suggest that hNRSCs could be used to develop new treatments for retinal eye disorders in humans. But more research will be needed to confirm the potential of these cells for restoring the vision of human beings.

Eight human sacrifices were found at the entrance to this tomb, which held the remains of two 12-year-olds from ancient Mesopotamia. Five millennia ago, Bronze Age people in Mesopotamia built elaborate stone tombs full of spectacular grave goods and human sacrifices. Researchers are unsure of the meaning of this ritual, but a new study of the skeletons points to a clue: the age at which people were sacrificed and their biological sex. "The fact that they are mostly adolescents is fascinating and surprising," David Wengrow , a professor of comparative archaeology at University College London, told Live Science. "It highlights how little thought scientists and historians have really given to the importance of adolescence as a crucial stage in the human life cycle." The finding may also upend assumptions about the type of government this culture practiced. Previously, it was thought to be a king-led hierarchical society, but these burials hint at a more egalitarian organization. Ancient burials in Turkey Wengrow and colleagues have studied a series of skeletons found at the archaeological site of Başur Höyük on the Upper Tigris River in southeastern Turkey. Once part of ancient Mesopotamia, Başur Höyük is dated to between 3100 and 2800 B.C. Several stone tombs were discovered there a decade ago, full of hundreds of copper artifacts, textiles and beads. In a previous study , researchers identified a burial of two 12-year-old children flanked by eight violently killed people and suggested the funeral ritual indicated the rise of an early state that included "royal" tombs with "retainer sacrifice." But in a new study, published March 17 in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal , the researchers conducted ancient DNA analysis on a separate set of skeletons and presented a more nuanced view of the cemetery, focusing on the idea of adolescence as an important life stage in this society. Related: Massive Mesopotamian canal network unearthed in Iraq Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors Assemblages of beads discovered inside one of the graves at Başur Höyük. (Image credit: Photograph by permission of the Başur Höyük Research Project; Cambridge Archaeological Journal 2025) Ancient DNA analysis of nine skeletons from Başur Höyük showed that the people were not biologically related to one another. The DNA also showed that most of the people the researchers tested were female. "So we are dealing with adolescents brought together, or coming together voluntarily, from biologically unrelated groups to carry out a very extreme form of ritual," Wengrow said. The meaning of the ritual, however, is still unclear. Previously, researchers thought that the main burials represented young royals with their sacrificed attendants. But this interpretation was based on the idea that early Bronze Age societies had evolved into large-scale states with a king at the top of the social hierarchy. There is now more archaeological evidence that Bronze Age political systems were more flexible. Societies in Mesopotamia could have regularly switched between hierarchical, king-based rule and a more egalitarian social organization where people collectively make decisions. "The idea that humans evolved to live in just one form of society almost all the time is almost certainly wrong," Wengrow said. If Başur Höyük was one of these more fluid societies, the "royal" burial may be better explained as a complex and potentially age-related funeral tradition. "Much more likely, what we see in the cemetery is a subset of a larger group, other members of which survived the ritual process and went on to full adulthood," Wengrow said. This larger group can be called an "age set," according to the study. In general, in egalitarian societies, leadership is earned instead of inherited, but "age sets" and gender can also come into play. For instance, elders may be valued for their wisdom and experience, while adolescents may be valued for their hunting skills. In the case of the Bronze Age burials in Turkey, this "age set" of adolescents could represent initiates into an ancient cult or victims of inter-group competition or violence, the researchers note in their study. Few researchers focus on adolescence in ancient societies, the researchers noted in their study, so the Başur Höyük burials suggest that it is important to investigate age sets in early Bronze Age states rather than assuming the society was led by kings and other royals at the top of a political hierarchy. Further research on the skeletons is forthcoming, Wengrow said, in terms of stable isotope analysis to figure out the origins of the people buried at Başur Höyük. "For now, all we can say is that many of the teenagers buried in the tombs were not local to the area of the cemetery," he said.

The James Webb Space Telescope detected infrared auroras on Neptune for the first time. The auroras are shown in cyan in this enhanced-color image. New James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images have captured auroras on Neptune for the first time. The telescope spotted infrared auroras that create exotic molecules known as trihydrogen cations, according to a study published March 26 in Nature . Scientists identified auroras on Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus more than 30 years ago, but Neptune's auroras staunchly evaded detection until now. Auroras form when energetic, charged particles from the sun get caught up in a planet's magnetic field. The field funnels the particles toward the planet's magnetic poles, where they collide with — and ionize — atmospheric molecules along the way, causing them to glow. Unlike auroras on Earth, which occur at extreme northern and southern latitudes near our planet's North and South Pole, Neptune's auroras appear near the planet's mid-latitudes. That's because Neptune's magnetic field is tilted 47 degrees off its rotational axis, so the planet's magnetic poles lie between the geographic poles and the equator — around where South America would be located on Earth. And unlike the Northern Lights, Neptune's auroras aren't visible to the naked eye. "Turns out, actually imaging the auroral activity on Neptune was only possible with Webb's near-infrared sensitivity," Henrik Melin , a planetary scientist at Northumbria University in the U.K., said in a statement . "It was so stunning to not just see the auroras, but the detail and clarity of the signature really shocked me." Finishing Voyager's work In June 2023, researchers used JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph to look for the trihydrogen cation (H 3 +), a hallmark of auroral activity in the hydrogen-rich atmospheres of the solar system's gas giants. NASA's Voyager 2 probe flew by Neptune in 1989, but it didn't have the right equipment to detect the cation. Since then, scientists at ground-based facilities, such as Hawaii's Keck telescope and NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, have looked for this molecule in Neptune's atmosphere without success, despite predictions that it should be present. Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors Related: 'Hidden' rings of Uranus revealed in dazzling new James Webb telescope images This time, JWST detected H 3 +, but researchers also noted unexpected changes in Neptune's atmosphere. "I was astonished — Neptune's upper atmosphere has cooled by several hundreds of degrees [since the Voyager flyby]," Melin said in the statement. "In fact, the temperature in 2023 was just over half of that in 1989." These cold temperatures could be why scientists haven't detected H 3 + on Neptune until now. The auroras appear much fainter at cold temperatures, and light reflecting off Neptune's clouds may have drowned them out, the researchers said.

ANAHEIM, CALIF. — At the world’s largest gathering of physicists, a talk about Microsoft’s claimed new type of quantum computing chip was perhaps the main attraction. Microsoft’s February announcement of a chip containing the first topological quantum bits, or qubits, has ignited heated blowback in the physics community. The discovery was announced by press release, without publicly shared data backing it up. A concurrent paper in Nature fell short of demonstrating a topological qubit. Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak, a coauthor on that paper, promised to provide solid evidence during his March 18 talk at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit. Before the talk, the chair of the session made an announcement: Follow the code of conduct; treat others with respect. The room, jam-packed with hundreds of eager physicists filling the seats and standing along the walls, chuckled knowingly at the implication that decorum might be lost. Topological quantum computing has had a dark shadow cast upon it by a series of retracted claims. Nevertheless, the concept holds great promise. The qubits that make up quantum computers are notoriously fragile and error-prone. Qubits that harness the concepts of topology, the mathematical discipline that describes structures with holes or loops, might improve on this. With topological quantum computing, “you can have very low error rates,” Nayak, of Microsoft’s Station Q in Santa Barbara, Calif., said during his talk. Scientists were not wowed by the data he presented. A key plot looked like random jitter, rather than an identifiable signal. Nayak claimed that an analysis of that apparent randomness revealed a pattern underlying the noise, suggesting a working qubit. That argument wasn’t enough to flip the harshest critics. “The data was incredibly unconvincing. It is as if Microsoft Quantum was attempting a simultaneous Rorschach test on hundreds of people,” says physicist Henry Legg of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, one of the fiercest critics of Microsoft’s work. Still, others were optimistic that, with additional effort, Microsoft could improve their device to produce a clearer signal. “I felt like it was maybe a bit premature to call it a qubit,” says physicist Kartiek Agarwal of Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill. But “there’s very many positive signs.” The draw — and pushback — of topological qubits Quantum computers promise to unlock new types of calculations, but only if they can be made reliable. The idea of building a qubit that is intrinsically less error-prone has excited scientists. “It’s one of the more creative, more original approaches to quantum computing, and in this sense, I’ve really been rooting for it,” says physicist Ivar Martin of Argonne National Laboratory. But the idea has struggled to get off the ground, trailing decades behind more conventional qubit technologies. Creating a topological qubit requires provoking electrons in a material to dance just-so. The electron collective behaves like a hypothetical, particle-ish thing: a quasiparticle known as a Majorana. But creating Majoranas, and proving they exist, has been extremely challenging. Sponsor Message Microsoft has made impressive strides, Martin notes. But “as far as demonstrating things which people at this meeting would care about the most — really convincingly showing physics of Majoranas — it’s underwhelming to many.” If it’s possible to be less-than-underwhelmed, that would describe Legg, who gave a talk the day before Nayak’s. He expressed doubts about the very foundation of Microsoft’s method in a room filled to bursting — albeit a significantly smaller room than Nayak’s headliner venue. In his talk, squeezed into the meeting’s schedule at the last minute, Legg listed a litany of criticisms. The critique centered on the method used to demonstrate that the device is topological in the first place — the “topological gap protocol,” laid out in a 2023 Microsoft paper in Physical Review B. That protocol was flawed, he argued in his talk and in a paper submitted March 11 to arXiv.org. For example, Legg argued, the protocol gives different results for the same data, depending on the range of the parameters included, such as the spread of magnetic field or voltage values. “Any company claiming to have a topological qubit in 2025 is essentially selling a fairytale, and I think it’s a dangerous fairytale,” Legg said. “It undermines the field of quantum computation and, in general, I think it undermines, actually, the public’s confidence in science.” During a Q&A immediately after Legg’s talk, Microsoft researcher Roman Lutchyn rose with a forceful rebuttal: “A lot of statements here are just simply incorrect,” he said, ticking through several of Legg’s claims, which he also addressed in a LinkedIn post. “We stand behind the results in these papers.” Disorderly conduct At their most basic level, Microsoft’s devices consist of aluminum nanowires, just 60 nanometers wide, laid atop a semiconductor. When cooled, this aluminum becomes superconducting, allowing it to transmit electricity without resistance. This induces superconductivity in the semiconductor, creating ideal conditions for Majoranas. Once the device is tuned to particular values of magnetic field and voltage, Majoranas should theoretically appear at each end of the nanowires. Disorder in these devices is a big problem for topological qubits. Surface roughness or material defects can result in spurious signals or ambiguous results. In recent years, Microsoft’s devices have improved enormously in that regard, says physicist Sankar Das Sarma of the University of Maryland in College Park. But, he says, “some more improvement is needed.… I think disorder still needs to go down by another factor of two.” When the aluminum threads are arranged in an H shape, they create a qubit with Majoranas at each of its four ends. To claim a working qubit, Microsoft needed to show that they could perform measurements on it. This involves probing quantum dots, hot dog–shaped nanoparticles laid out near the nanowires. Two types of measurements, known as X and Z, are necessary. Microsoft’s new qubit looks like a H on its side. It’s made of two nanowires (green, in this rendering) connected by a third (gray). Two quantum dots (hot dog shapes) allow two different types of measurements, X and Z (indicated by dotted lines). The qubit is based on quasiparticles called Majoranas which should reside at the wires’ ends (red). Microsoft In the February Nature paper, Microsoft demonstrated a Z measurement, which involves probing the quantum dot associated with a single wire. Repeated Z measurements revealed the qubit switching between two possible states, the expected outcome for a topological qubit. These transitions purportedly indicated flips in parity, essentially reflecting whether there were an even or odd number of electrons within a wire. During Nayak’s talk, he unveiled their X measurement, which probes a quantum dot adjacent to two nanowires. The plot of these data looked random, lacking the same obvious flip-flopping between two values. The audience did not seem particularly impressed. During the Q&A, Cornell University physicist Eun-Ah Kim said, “I would have loved this to just come out screaming at me that there’s only two, but I don’t think that’s what I see.” Nayak said that a statistical analysis of the random-looking data revealed a hidden pattern. But, in an email, Kim questioned the validity of Nayak’s method for teasing out this pattern. Even regarding the clearer Z measurement, scientists still don’t agree whether this flipping constitutes evidence for Majoranas. “I’m persuaded,” Das Sarma says, “but people of goodwill could disagree.” During the talk, attendees raised smartphones high to snap photos of Nayak’s slides, which rocketed around the physics community. Just after the presentation, physicist Sergey Frolov of the University of Pittsburgh, who was not at the meeting, posted a detailed rebuttal on the social media platform BlueSky. “[T]he data shown are … just noise. They are simply disappointing,” wrote Frolov. This, he suggested, doesn’t bode well for the chip containing eight qubits that Microsoft announced in February: “That chip cannot possibly work, given what we saw today.” Not all scientists are quite as critical as Legg and Frolov. Agarwal, for example, thinks Microsoft’s topological gap protocol, the foundation of their current work, is sound. But, he notes, the device Nayak presented is impractical, given that its values appear essentially random. “It certainly can’t be used as a qubit in its present state. That’s also clearly obvious,” Agarwal says. Nayak is confident that his team will improve their devices further, until skeptics are convinced. Frolov, for one, is confident that more paper retractions are coming.

The generative AI industry raised $56 billion in venture capital globally in 2024 alone, but scientists don't think this technology will lead to AGI. Current approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) are unlikely to create models that can match human intelligence, according to a recent survey of industry experts. Out of the 475 AI researchers queried for the survey, 76% said the scaling up of large language models (LLMs) was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), the hypothetical milestone where machine learning systems can learn as effectively, or better, than humans. This is a noteworthy dismissal of tech industry predictions that, since the generative AI boom of 2022, has maintained that the current state-of-the-art AI models only need more data, hardware, energy and money to eclipse human intelligence. Now, as recent model releases appear to stagnate , most of the researchers polled by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence believe tech companies have arrived at a dead end — and money won’t get them out of it. "I think it's been apparent since soon after the release of GPT-4, the gains from scaling have been incremental and expensive," Stuart Russell , a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who helped organize the report, told Live Science. "[AI companies] have invested too much already and cannot afford to admit they made a mistake [and] be out of the market for several years when they have to repay the investors who have put in hundreds of billions of dollars. So all they can do is double down." Diminishing returns The startling improvements to LLMs in recent years is partly owed to their underlying transformer architecture. This is a type of deep learning architecture, first created in 2017 by Google scientists, that grows and learns by absorbing training data from human input. This enables models to generate probabilistic patterns from their neural networks (collections of machine learning algorithms arranged to mimic the way the human brain learns) by feeding them forward when given a prompt, with their answers improving in accuracy with more data. Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors Related: Scientists design new 'AGI benchmark' that indicates whether any future AI model could cause 'catastrophic harm' But continued scaling of these models requires eye-watering quantities of money and energy. The generative AI industry raised $56 billion in venture capital globally in 2024 alone, with much of this going into building enormous data center complexes, the carbon emissions of which have tripled since 2018 . Projections also show the finite human-generated data essential for further growth will most likely be exhausted by the end of this decade . Once this has happened, the alternatives will be to begin harvesting private data from users or to feed AI-generated "synthetic" data back into models that could put them at risk of collapsing from errors created after they swallow their own input. But the limitations of current models are likely not just because they’re resource hungry, the survey experts say, but because of fundamental limitations in their architecture. "I think the basic problem with current approaches is that they all involve training large feedforward circuits," Russell said. "Circuits have fundamental limitations as a way to represent concepts. This implies that circuits have to be enormous to represent such concepts even approximately — essentially as a glorified lookup table — which leads to vast data requirements and piecemeal representation with gaps. Which is why, for example, ordinary human players can easily beat the "superhuman" Go programs." A child plays Go with SenseTime's "Meta Radish" AI chess robot at the 2023 Future Life Festival in Hangzhou, China. (Image credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing) The future of AI development All of these bottlenecks have presented major challenges to companies working to boost AI’s performance, causing scores on evaluation benchmarks to plateau and OpenAI's rumored GPT-5 model to never appear, some of the survey respondents said. Assumptions that improvements could always be made through scaling were also undercut this year by the Chinese company DeepSeek, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley's expensive models at a fraction of the cost and power . For these reasons, 79% of the survey's respondents said perceptions of AI capabilities don't match reality. "There are many experts who think this is a bubble," Russell said. "Particularly when reasonably high-performance models are being given away for free." Yet that doesn't mean progress in AI is dead. Reasoning models — specialized models that dedicate more time and computing power to queries — have been shown to produce more accurate responses than their traditional predecessors. The pairing of these models with other machine learning systems, especially after they’re distilled down to specialized scales, is an exciting path forward, according to respondents. And DeepSeek's success points to plenty more room for engineering innovation in how AI systems are designed. The experts also point to probabilistic programming having the potential to build closer to AGI than the current circuit models. "Industry is placing a big bet that there will be high-value applications of generative AI," Thomas Dietterich , a professor emeritus of computer science at Oregon State University who contributed to the report, told Live Science. "In the past, big technological advances have required 10 to 20 years to show big returns." "Often the first batch of companies fail, so I would not be surprised to see many of today's GenAI startups failing," he added. "But it seems likely that some will be wildly successful. I wish I knew which ones."

For most baseball fans, hope springs eternal on Opening Day. Many of those fans – more than you might think – are women. A 2024 survey found that women made up 39% of those who attended or watched Major League Baseball games, and franchises have taken notice. The Philadelphia Phillies offer behind-the-scenes tours and clinics for their female fans, while the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees offer fantasy camps that are geared to women. The number of women working professionally in baseball has also grown. Kim Ng made history in 2020 when she became the first woman general manager of an MLB team, the Miami Marlins. As of 2023, women made up 30% of central office professional staff and 27% of team senior administration jobs. In addition, 43 women held coaching and managerial jobs across the major and minor league levels – a 95% increase in just two years. As a fan and scholar of the game, I’m happy to see more women watching baseball and working in the industry. But it still nags at me that the girls and women who play baseball don’t get much recognition, particularly in the U.S. Women take the field In the U.S., baseball is seen as a sport for boys and men. Girls and women, on the other hand, are supposed to play softball, which uses a bigger ball and has a smaller field. It wasn’t always this way. Women have been playing baseball in the U.S. since at least the 1860s. At women’s colleges such as Smith and Vassar, students organized baseball teams as early as 1866. The first professional women’s baseball team was known as the Dolly Vardens, a team of Black players formed in Philadelphia in 1867. Barnstorming teams, known as Bloomer Girls, traveled across the country to play against men’s teams from the 1890s to the 1930s, providing the players with independence and the means to make a living. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded by Philip K. Wrigley in 1943, also offered women the chance to play professionally. The league, which inspired the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” enforced rigid norms of femininity expected at the time. Players were required to wear skirts and makeup while playing and were fined if they engaged in any behavior deemed “unladylike.” Teams were open only to white women and light-skinned Latinas. Black women were not allowed to play, a policy that reflected the segregation of the Jim Crow era. Three Black women – Connie Morgan, Mamie “Peanut” Johnson and Toni Stone – did play in the otherwise male Negro Leagues in the early 1950s. However, their skills were often downplayed by claims that they’d been signed to generate ticket sales and boost interest in the struggling league. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League folded in 1954, and by the late-1950s women’s participation in baseball had dwindled. Girls funneled into softball Softball was invented in Chicago in 1887 as an indoor alternative to baseball. Originally aimed at both men and women, it eventually became the accepted sport for girls and women due to its smaller field, larger ball and underhand pitching style – aspects deemed suitable for the supposedly weaker and more delicate female body. The passage of Title IX in 1972 further pushed the popularization of fast-pitch softball, as participation in high school and college increased markedly. In 1974, the National Organization for Women filed a lawsuit against Little League Baseball because the league’s charter excluded girls from playing. The lawsuit was successful, and girls were permitted to join teams. In response, Little League created Little League Softball as a way to funnel girls into softball instead of baseball. As political scientist Jennifer Ring has pointed out, this decision reinforced the gendered division of each sport and “cemented the post-Title IX segregated masculinity of baseball.” Girls can still play baseball, but most are encouraged to eventually switch to softball if they want to pursue college scholarships. If they want to keep playing baseball, they have to constantly confront stubborn cultural beliefs and assumptions that they should be playing softball instead. A global game You might be surprised to learn that the U.S. fields a national women’s baseball team that competes in the Women’s Baseball World Cup. But they receive scant media attention and remain unknown to most baseball fans. In a 2019 article published in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, I argued that the U.S. has experienced inconsistent success on the global stage because of a lack of infrastructure, limited resources and persistent gendered assumptions that hamper the development of women’s baseball. Other countries such as Japan, Canada and Australia have established solid pathways that allow girls and women to pursue baseball from the youth level through high school and beyond. That being said, opportunities for girls to play baseball are increasing in the U.S. thanks to the efforts of organizations such as Baseball for All and DC Girls Baseball. Approximately 1,300 girls play high school baseball, and a handful of young women play on men’s college baseball teams each year. In recent years, numerous women’s collegiate club baseball teams have been established; there’s even an annual tournament to crown a national champion. Pro league in the works Momentum continues to build. MLB recently appointed Veronica Alvarez as its first girls baseball ambassador, who will oversee development programs such as the Trailblazers Series and the Elite Development Invitational. A new documentary film, “See Her Be Her,” is touring the country to celebrate the growth of women’s baseball and raise awareness of the challenges these athletes face. Perhaps most significantly, the Women’s Pro Baseball League announced that it is planning to start play in summer 2026 with six teams located in the northeastern U.S. Over 500 players from 11 countries have registered with the league, with a scouting camp and player draft scheduled for later this year. Should the league have success, it will mark a revitalization of women’s professional baseball in the U.S., a nod to the rich history of the women’s game and a commitment to securing opportunities for the girls and women who continue to defy cultural norms to play the game they love.

The new season of “The White Lotus” is set on a luxury resort on the Thai island of Koh Samui. This comedy-drama series, which critiques wealthy tourists, focuses one plotline on foreigners who arrive in Thailand with an interest in engaging with its Buddhist traditions. It depicts a young American woman who is interested in joining a yearlong meditation program at a Buddhist temple, even though Thai temples do not offer such programs. It also portrays a temple environment with many foreigners staying there long term, not dressed in typical clothing for residents of a temple – unusual in Thailand – and inaccurately describes the Buddhist view of the afterlife. I have studied Buddhism in Thailand for over a decade, including the diverse ways in which Thai Buddhists practice their religion. While the Thai Buddhism depicted in The White Lotus is not completely realistic, there are several authentic ways to engage deeply with Buddhism, ranging from offering donations to short meditation retreats to ordination as a monastic. Generosity and Buddhist laity Without donations, Buddhist temples and monastic institutions could not exist. The lay community provides for monks and temples, in exchange for the spiritual currency of merit, which is believed to turn into good karma. This good karma is believed to produce favorable conditions in this life and the next life, such as attaining wealth or being reborn into a privileged family. Some laypeople might give food to monks as they walk on their alms rounds every morning, while others may visit the temple only on most Buddhist holidays. The main intention behind interacting with a monk or visiting a temple is to make merit. Each temple has donation boxes for specific funds it needs, such as paying the electricity bill, completing renovation projects, providing education for young monks and funding the monastic community’s health care. People can take home blessed objects such as a lucky candle or small amulet in exchange for a small donation. In some temples, a monk’s duty is to sit inside one of the main halls and wait until the laity comes to receive offerings and give blessings. Meditation retreats Temples with meditation centers generally offer meditation retreats for a short period of time. Many offer 10-day retreats; participants can also sign up for a 21-day program in the north of Thailand, where they will aim to spend their days in 10-15 hours of meditation and minimize any other activity, including sleep. Participants in the 21-day program aim to reach the first of the four stages of enlightenment within Thai Theravada Buddhism. Buddhists believe that those who attain the first stage have “entered the stream” of enlightenment and are guaranteed to attain it within seven lifetimes. Contrary to popular Western beliefs about Buddhist meditation, it is not viewed as a secular practice. Thai Buddhists believe that meditation is a meritorious activity, helping them not only to ultimately leave the cycle of rebirth but also to accumulate merit and good karma along the way – in this life and future ones. At a meditation center, every moment is spent in mindfulness of every action, along with periods of formal walking or sitting meditation. All meditation centers have a structured program and schedule that practitioners, typically dressed in white pants and top, must follow individually or in group periods of meditation. Ordination of men and women Ordination is an important part of the Buddhist life course. Thai Buddhists often enter a monastery for a short period of time, temporarily being ordained as a monk or nun. Even for those who intended to enter for life but choose to leave the monastic life, the process is simple; it usually carries no shame or disappointment. However, if a monk was well known for his teaching, his followers would likely feel upset. In Theravada Buddhism, the kind of Buddhism practiced in Thailand, there are two levels of ordination: novice and full “bhikkhu” – the term for a fully ordained male. Males under the age of 20 may pursue only novice ordination, while those over 20 can become fully ordained monks. It is often considered a rite of passage, or at least a sign of discipline and maturity, for a male to have been ordained at some point in his life. Temporary ordination is seen as a way for men to make merit for their parents, especially their mothers, who sacrificed so much for their existence. Women are generally not allowed to be ordained in Thai Buddhism, but some have received ordination in Sri Lanka, where they are allowed to be monks, and set up communities in Thailand, which are gaining in popularity. These female monastic practice centers have initiated temporary ordination programs for female monks, or “bhikkhuni.” These centers host special programs once or twice a year, where up to 100 women, including international visitors, can ordain as novice female monks for a short period. During this time, they learn what it is like to wear the robes, receive offerings and study the Buddhist texts. Many women find this opportunity meaningful because they can offer merit to their parents, which was previously only available to a male. Women can also ordain temporarily or long term as a “mae chi” in Thailand, or a precept nun. They usually follow Eight Precepts, including celibacy, wearing white robes and shaving their head. Although more accepted today in Thailand as a role for Buddhist women than bhikkhuni, this category of ordination was not initiated by the Buddha. Precept nuns are believed to have existed for centuries, but without a clear origin. These are some common ways in which Thai Buddhists practice Buddhism, often with the goal of achieving prosperity in this life and a better rebirth. Such practices, Buddhists believe, may also get them closer to the ultimate aspiration of enlightenment.

When top White House defense and national security leaders discussed plans for an attack on targets in Yemen over the messaging app Signal, it raised many questions about operational security and recordkeeping and national security laws. It also puts Signal in the spotlight. Why do so many government officials, activists and journalists use Signal for secure messaging? The short answer is that it uses end-to-end encryption, meaning no one in position to eavesdrop on the communication – including Signal itself – can read messages they intercept. But Signal isn’t the only messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption, and end-to-end encryption isn’t the only consideration in choosing a secure messaging app. In addition, secure messaging apps are only part of the picture when it comes to keeping your communications private, and there is no such thing as perfect security. I’m a cybersecurity professor who worked for several decades advising companies on cybersecurity. Here are some of the factors I recommend considering when looking for a secure messaging app: Secure app choices The most common messaging protocol, SMS, is built into every smartphone and is easy to use, but does not encrypt messages. Since there is no encryption, carriers or government agents with a warrant, which are typically submitted by law enforcement and issued by a judge, can read the message content. They can also view the message metadata, which includes information about you and your recipient, like an internet address, name or both. Truly secure messaging is based on cryptography, a mathematical method to scramble data and make it unreadable. Most secure messaging apps handle the scrambling and unscrambling process for you. The gold standard for secure messaging is end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption means your message is fully encrypted while in transit, including while transiting the communications provider’s networks. Only the recipient can see the message. The communication provider does not have any encryption key. Apple iMessage and Google Messages use end-to-end encryption, and both are widely used, so many of your contacts are likely already using one of them. The downsides are the end-to-end encryption is only iPhone to iPhone and Android to Android, respectively, and Apple and Google can access your metadata – who you communicated with and when. If a company has access to your metadata, it can be compelled to share it with a government entity. WhatsApp, owned by Meta, is another widely used messaging app. Its end-to-end encryption works across iOS and Android. But Meta has access to your metadata. There are a number of independent secure messaging apps to choose from, including Briar, Session, Signal, SimpleX, Telegram, Threema, Viber and Wire. You can use more than one to adapt to your individual needs. Default end-to-end encryption is only the first factor to consider when thinking about message security. Depending on your needs, you should also consider whether the app includes group chats and calls, self-destructing messages, cross-device data syncing, and photo and video editing tools. Ease of use is another factor. You can also consider whether the app uses an open-source encryption protocol, open-source code and a decentralized server network. And you can weigh whether the app company collects user data, what personal information is required on sign-up, and generally how transparent the company is. Human factors Beyond the messaging app, it’s important to practice safe security hygiene, like using two-factor authentication and a password manager. There’s no point in sending and receiving messages securely and then leaking the information via another vulnerability, including having your phone itself compromised. People can be lured into compromising their apps and devices by unintentionally giving access to an attacker. For example, Russian operatives reportedly tricked Ukrainian troops into giving access to their Signal accounts. Also, if you use Signal, you should probably use its nicknames feature to avoid adding the wrong person to a group chat – like National Security Adviser Michael Waltz apparently did in the Signalgate scandal.

It probably feels obvious that having a close friend can influence your well-being. But do the groups that you’re a part of also affect your well-being? For example, does the culture of your work colleagues influence your productivity? It may seem like the answer is also an obvious “yes.” But the idea that a group’s composition or structure can affect the individuals in it has been among the most controversial ideas in biology. This phenomenon, called multilevel selection, is an extension of natural selection: the process by which organisms with traits better suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. Over generations, these advantageous traits – behavioral, morphological or physiological – become more common in the population. In the traditional view of how evolution works, natural selection acts on an individual organism’s traits. For instance, mammals with more friends typically live longer lives and have more offspring. The trait under selection in this case is the number of social connections. Multilevel selection proposes that at the same time selection is happening on the traits of individuals, selection also acts on the traits of groups. Here’s an example: Living in a more social and interconnected group may be beneficial for the members of that group, meaning the group’s traits are under selection. In nature, this means individuals in well-connected groups may live longer lives and have more offspring because well-connected groups may be better at finding limited resources or detecting predators. The traits of the group as a whole are what’s under selection in this case. Multilevel selection could even select for traits that seem at odds at the individual and group levels. For instance, it could mean that selection favors individuals that are more reserved while at the same time favoring groups that are very social, or vice versa. Multilevel selection has been a controversial idea since Charles Darwin first suggested that groups likely affect individuals in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man.” The only evidence for multilevel selection acting simultaneously on individuals’ social relationships and on social groups comes from laboratory experiments. Experiments like these are vital to the scientific process, but without evidence for multilevel selection in wild animals, the 154-year-old debate rages on. As two field biologists interested in the evolution of behavior, we investigated multilevel selection in the wild by studying yellow-bellied marmots. Our newly published study provides support for this contested concept, suggesting that the structure of the groups marmots are members of may matter for survival just as much as, if not more than, the friendly one-on-one relationships they have with other marmots. G. Johnson Spying on marmots’ social lives It’s taken a century and a half to answer the question of multilevel selection because you need an incredible amount of data to have an adequate sample size to address it. Scientists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Crested Butte, Colorado, have been studying the marmots nearby since 1962. This research is the second-longest study of individually identifiable wild mammals in the world. Each year, the team ensures that all marmots are individually marked. We trap them so we can give them unique ear tags and paint a mark on their back that lets us identify them from afar. Then trained “marmoteers,” as we call them, spend about 1,000 hours a year watching these chunky cat-sized rodents through binoculars and spotting scopes. Since 2003, the team has paid particular attention to the marmots’ social interactions and relationships. Our analysis of multilevel selection was based on 42,369 unique affiliative social interactions – behaviors such as playing and grooming – between 1,294 individuals from 180 social groups, with group sizes ranging from two to 35 marmots. We also tracked how long marmots lived – up to 16 years in some cases – and how many offspring individual animals had each year. Using this data, we mapped out the marmots’ social networks. Our goal was to identify how many social relationships each marmot had, who was connected to whom, and the overall structure of each group. Understanding all these marmot connections let us ask two crucial questions. First, how do social relationships affect individual survival and reproduction – that is, what individual traits are under selection? Second, how do social groups affect individual survival and reproduction – in other words, what group traits are under selection? Importantly, we didn’t ask these two questions in isolation – we asked them at the same time. After all, marmots are influenced simultaneously by both their social relationships and the social groups they’re part of. Our statistical approach, which researchers call contextual analysis, tells us how much social relationships and social groups matter relative to each other. New evidence changes the debate It can be tricky to distinguish how group-level selection differs from traditional individual-level selection. It’s like a more complex version of thinking about the relationships that affect an individual. Instead of just your own behavior affecting you, your group – a product of many individuals – is affecting you. Our new analysis shows that there is indeed multilevel selection for social behavior in the wild. We found that not only do both social relationships and social groups affect individual animals’ survival and reproduction, but social groups matter just as much, if not more. We calculated the selection gradient, a measure of how strong the selection is on a trait, to be 0.76 for individual traits, while for group traits it was 1.03. D.T. Blumstein Interestingly, the type of impact on survival and reproduction wasn’t always the same across the two levels. In some cases, selection favored marmots with fewer social relationships while favoring marmots living in more social and connected groups. In human terms, think of an introvert at a really bustling party. Evolution and multilevel selection are complex natural processes, so these types of complicated findings are not unexpected. Multilevel selection is relevant for human groups, too, which come in many forms, whether friend groups, local communities, businesses we frequent or work at, economies or even entire nations. Our marmot study suggests it’s not uniquely human for groups at every level to have consequences for individual success.

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When the natural environment is stretched beyond its ability to meet basic human needs for food, clean air, drinkable water and shelter, it is not just a humanitarian concern for the world community. Research shows that these crises are a matter of national security for the U.S. and other countries. The Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community have long paid close attention to the influence of climate change on national security. Although recent intelligence reports of the Trump administration have omitted any mention of climate change, prior intelligence reports have shown how climate change can generate flash points for global conflict, affect how troops and equipment work, and influence which defense locations are vulnerable. The effects of ecological disruptions on national security get less attention. But they, too, can cause social and political instability, economic strife and strained international relations. Ecological disruptions occur when ecosystems that provide natural resources are compromised and can no longer meet basic human needs. Examples include overfishing, human disease and environmental crime. Protecting access to fish Some 3.2 billion people worldwide rely on fisheries as a major source of protein. Overexploitation of ocean fisheries is a common root of international conflict. From the 1950s to the 1970s, intermittent conflict broke out between British and Icelandic fishermen over the Icelandic cod fisheries, which had been depleted by overfishing. The Icelandic government sought to ban British trawlers from a broader area around the country’s coast, but the British continued to fish. The result was standoffs between fishing boats and Icelandic gunboats, and even the intervention of the British Royal Navy. These “Cod Wars” broke diplomatic relations between Iceland and the United Kingdom for a time. Iceland even threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and close a U.S. military base in Iceland. The U.K. ultimately agreed to abide by a 200-mile territorial limit on fishing around Iceland. Decades later, in 2012, the British government issued an apology and offered £1,000 each in compensation to 2,500 British fishermen for the loss of jobs and livelihoods that resulted from abiding by the 200-mile limit. More recently, China’s rampant overfishing of its own coastal waters has meant expanding fishing in the South China Sea and using fishing fleets to assert new territorial claims. Indonesia has responded by blowing up more than 40 Chinese vessels accused of fishing illegally in its waters and stealing more than US$4 billion per year in Indonesian profits. The United States, Australia, New Zealand and Britain have stepped up naval patrols against illegal fishing in the waters of Pacific island nations. Conflicts have arisen with Chinese coast guard vessels that routinely escort fishing fleets entering other countries’ waters without permission. China’s fishing fleets have also expanded their activities off the coasts of Africa and South America, depleting fish stocks and creating political instability in those regions, too. In 2024, the U.S. Coast Guard and Argentine navy began joint exercises to combat illegal Chinese fishing in the Atlantic Ocean. Public health crises The best-known examples of ecologically related public health crises that jeopardize national security involve what are called zoonotic diseases, which spread from animals to humans as a result of close contact between people and wildlife. More than 70% of the world’s emerging infectious diseases – uncommon or newly identified infectious diseases – stem from contact with wild animals. The risks of animal-to-human disease transmission are especially high for those who handle or eat wild meat. A recent example is the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 global pandemic. Epidemiological and genetic studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 first spilled over to humans from wild animals sold in the Huanan live animal market in Wuhan, China. Although the specific animal that served as the original host is still under investigation, bats and other mammals are considered likely natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2 because they harbor other coronaviruses with closely related genomes. Following the zoonotic spillover event, the pathogen spread rapidly across the globe, killing more than 7 million people and causing acute disruptions not only to global markets and supply chains but also to social cohesion and political stability. Countries with high COVID-19 mortality rates had elevated levels of civil disorder and fatalities caused by political violence as the trust of citizens in the ability of governments to protect them eroded. Many other zoonotic diseases caused by human-wildlife contact, such as Zika, Ebola, SARS and West Nile virus, have similarly generated international political and economic crises that have activated security measures within the U.S. government. Environmental crime Illegal poaching and trade of wildlife and forest products is valued at $91 billion to $258 billion per year. That makes environmental crime one of the world’s largest crime sectors, comparable with drug trafficking, at $344 billion, and human trafficking, at $157 billion. Exorbitant black market prices for rare wildlife specimens and body parts provide funding for terrorist groups, drug cartels and criminal organizations. Illegal logging helps finance terrorist groups such as Al-Shabaab in Somalia, where trade in charcoal has become a critical revenue source. Money from illegally cut trees turned into charcoal and sold to markets in the Middle East has funded al-Shabab-linked suicide bombings in Mogadishu, the 2013 Westgate mall attack in Nairobi that killed 67 Kenyan and non-Kenyan nationals, and the 2015 massacre of 147 university students in Garissa, Kenya. Those and other terrorist activities funded through environmental crime have contributed to the destabilization of countries throughout the Horn of Africa. These examples make clear how ecological disruptions to nature increase national security risks. National security is not just a matter of military strength. It also depends on the ability of a nation to maintain productive and stable ecosystems, resilient biological communities and sustainable access to natural resources. Sovereign nations already develop and protect physical infrastructure that is essential to security, such as roads, communication networks and power grids. The natural world plays an equally vital role in social and political stability and, we believe, deserves more attention in planning for national security.

The Trump administration’s firing and furloughing of tens of thousands of federal workers and contractors have obviously caused economic hardship for Americans employed in national parks, research labs and dozens of government agencies. As a professor of social work who studies how people’s finances affect their physical and mental well-being, I’m concerned about the health hazards they’ll face too. My research shows that losing your job can seriously harm your physical and mental health, especially when you see the situation as a catastrophe rather than a temporary setback. Power of financial perception When people lose their jobs, they do have real problems. Typically, for example, their income and savings decline. They might struggle to keep up on their rent or mortgage payments and might not be able to afford to maintain the same standard of living they had beforehand. However, research shows that your perspective regarding your financial situation can do more harm to your health than your actual financial circumstances – even as your savings dwindle. Someone might view losing their job as a temporary setback and remain relatively calm, while another person might experience the same circumstances as a disaster, triggering intense stress that cascades into serious health problems, such as depression and substance abuse. This difference in perspective often determines whether somebody will suffer significant health problems when they lose their job or experience a similar financial setback. In a study I published in 2023 with social work scholar Theda Rose, we found that how a person felt about a decline in income mattered 20 times more than the actual financial change itself. This finding comes from our analysis of data from the 2018 National Financial Capability Study, which surveyed more than 27,000 American adults. We used advanced statistical methods to examine how different financial factors affected people’s health and financial decision-making, looking specifically at financial strain, confidence in managing money and overall financial satisfaction. The study confirmed earlier work about the vastly different psychological and physical responses two people can have when their income falls by the same amount, based on how they perceive this change. Pathway to illness Previous research has typically viewed what’s known as “financial precarity” – not having enough money to get by – in either purely technical terms, such as being able to come up with US$400 in an emergency, or in terms related to your feelings about that situation, such as persistent worrying about your finances. However, we found that both aspects of financial precarity can influence health and behavior. Among the many variables we explored, a decline in income surprisingly contributed much more in terms of worry than just not being able to pay the bills. This distress caused by economic hardship isn’t just a psychological problem – it can produce physical changes that may have long-term health implications, such as high blood pressure. Mental health suffers There’s also a toll on your mental health. Losing a job can lead to anxiety, depression and lower self-esteem. Interestingly, people who face ongoing financial challenges but don’t get stressed about their situation aren’t more likely to develop depression symptoms than people without any financial stress. A systematic review of 65 studies found clear connections between debt and mental health problems, depression and even suicide attempts. Physical health troubles Losing your job can harm your body in two main ways. First, the stress from financial worries can affect people’s bodies directly – for example, by increasing blood pressure. Being in debt is associated with other ailments, including back pain and obesity. Second, when money is tight, people often try to save money by skipping doctor visits or forgoing prescription drugs. Even with health insurance, high deductibles can mean paying thousands of dollars out of pocket before insurance helps. When choosing between paying for rent, food and health care, people often put their medical needs last. Unhealthy coping methods Some people turn to alcohol, tobacco or other substances to cope with the loss of their jobs. These habits are bad for your health and may empty your wallet, adding to the financial strain. Others turn to gambling or excessive shopping to cope, which can also make money problems even worse. Marriage and other relationships may fray amid financial stress too. Borrowing money excessively from friends and family or snapping at your loved ones when you feel stressed out can weaken ties with those closest to you. Moving on in healthy ways To be sure, some people become more resilient after losing their job by adopting positive coping strategies. Whenever you lose a job, try reaching out. Your friends and loved ones can help protect your health while you move on. In addition to applying for new positions, spend time networking. Reach out to former colleagues, join professional groups and attend events related to your career. Try to volunteer. It will help you sharpen or expand your skills while expanding your networks and perhaps lead you to a new job. And consider starting or expanding a side hustle. It will generate some income, give you a greater sense of control over your life and keep you feeling productive during the monotony of sending out applications. It’s also essential to stick to self-care basics: Regular exercise reduces stress hormones. Getting enough sleep improves cognitive function, and maintaining a busy social life provides emotional support. Keeping healthy habits is always important. But they could protect your mental and physical health during challenging times. Losing a paycheck is hard enough. Losing your health over it is even worse.

These dishes contain Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria behind tuberculosis (TB). Each outlined area contains a different antibiotic, and you can tell which drugs the bacteria is resistant to based on how well it grows in that section. Drug resistance makes TB much more challenging to treat. Author John Green has been obsessed with tuberculosis (TB) since 2019, when he first visited Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone and met a young TB patient named Henry Reider. In his latest book Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection (Crash Course Books, 2025), Green explores the history of the bacterial disease, highlighting its impact in different eras of history. And he calls attention to the present reality of TB, a curable disease that nonetheless kills over a million people each year due to stark health care inequities around the globe. In this day and age, Green argues that injustice is the root cause of TB cases and deaths, and that we can collectively choose to correct that injustice and finally snuff out the deadly disease. Related: 'We have to fight for a better end': Author John Green on how threats to USAID derail the worldwide effort to end tuberculosis At the time, I knew almost nothing about TB. To me, it was a disease of history — something that killed depressive 19th-century poets, not present-tense humans. But as a friend once told me, "Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past." When we arrived at Lakka, we were immediately greeted by a child who introduced himself as Henry. "That's my son's name," I told him, and he smiled. Most Sierra Leoneans are multilingual, but Henry spoke particularly good English, especially for a kid his age, which made it possible for us to have a conversation that could go beyond my few halting phrases of Krio. I asked him how he was doing, and he said, "I am happy, sir. I am encouraged." He loved that word. Who wouldn't? Encouraged, like courage is something we rouse ourselves and others into. My son Henry was 9 then, and this Henry looked about the same age — a small boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. He wore shorts and an oversized rugby shirt that reached nearly to his knees. Henry took hold of my T-shirt and began walking me around the hospital. He showed me the lab where a technician was looking through a microscope. Henry looked into the microscope and then asked me to, as the lab tech, a young woman from Freetown, explained that this sample contained tuberculosis even though the patient had been treated for several months with standard therapy. The lab tech began to tell me about this "standard therapy," but Henry was pulling on my shirt again. He walked me through the wards, a complex of poorly ventilated buildings that contained hospital rooms with barred windows, thin mattresses, and no toilets. There was no electricity in the wards, and no consistent running water. To me, the rooms resembled prison cells. Before it was a TB hospital, Lakka was a leprosy isolation facility — and it felt like one. Inside each room, one or two patients lay on cots, generally on their side or back. A few sat on the edges of their beds, leaning forward. All these men (the women were in a separate ward) were thin. Some were so emaciated that their skin seemed wrapped tightly around bone. As we walked down a hallway between buildings, Henry and I watched a young man drink water from a plastic bottle, and then promptly vomit a mix of bile and blood. I instinctively turned away, but Henry continued to stare at the man. Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors I figured Henry was someone's kid — a doctor, maybe, or a nurse, or one of the cooking or cleaning staff. Everyone seemed to know him, and everyone stopped their work to say hello and rub his head or squeeze his hand. I was immediately charmed by Henry — he had some of the mannerisms of my son, the same paradoxical mixture of shyness and enthusiastic desire for connection. Henry eventually brought me back to the group of doctors and nurses who were meeting in a small room near the entrance of the hospital, and then one of the nurses lovingly and laughingly shooed him away. "Who is that kid?" I asked. "Henry?" answered a nurse. "The sweetest boy." "He's one of the patients we're worried about," said a physician who went by Dr. Micheal. "He's a patient?" I asked. "Yes." "He's such a cute little kid," I said. "I hope he's going to be okay." Dr. Micheal told me that Henry wasn't a little boy. He was seventeen. He was only so small because he'd grown up malnourished, and then the TB had further emaciated his body. "He seems to be doing okay," I said. "Lots of energy. He walked me all around the hospital." "This is because the antibiotics are working," Dr. Micheal explained. "But we know they are not working well enough. We are almost certain they will fail, and that is a big problem." He shrugged, tight-lipped. There was a lot I didn't understand. After I first met Henry, I asked one of the nurses if he would be okay. "Oh, we love our Henry!" she said. She told me he had already gone through so much in his young life. Thank God, she said, that Henry was so loved by his mother, Isatu, who visited him regularly and brought him extra food whenever she could. Most of the patients at Lakka had no visitors. Many had been abandoned by their families; a tuberculosis case in the family was a tremendous mark of shame. But Henry had Isatu. I realized none of this was an answer to whether he would be okay. He is such a happy child, she told me. He cheers everyone up. When he'd been able to go to school, the other kids called him pastor, because he was always offering them prayers and assistance. Still, this was not an answer. "We will fight for him," she told me at last. Editor's note: This excerpt, from Chapter 1 of "Everything is Tuberculosis," has been shortened for the purpose of this reprinting.

One of the keys to performing like an elite athlete — or at least having the metabolism of one — may be pooping like one. Transplanting feces from certain top-level cyclists and soccer players into mice boosted levels of a molecule that fuels intense workouts, researchers report March 27 in Cell Reports. Our gut microbiota — the collection of bacteria and other microorganisms living in our digestive tract — play a crucial role in helping us digest food. When digestion goes terribly awry, a refresh of these gut bacteria may provide relief. Fecal microbiota transplants, in which a donor’s poop is transplanted into another person’s gut, have been used to treat inflammatory bowel disease and other conditions. Frédéric Derbré, a physiologist at Rennes 2 University in France, and his colleagues wanted to analyze the gut microbiota of top-level athletes and see how mice fared when they received fecal transplants from these athletes. The team focused on both athletes and nonathletes who maintained healthy diets to rule out gut microbiota differences caused by varying eating habits. Analysis of the cohort’s poop revealed that athletes with the highest exercise capacities had less diverse gut microbiota and lower overall amounts of gut bacteria compared to other study participants. Despite that, they also had higher levels of metabolites called short-chain fatty acids, produced by gut bacteria and used as energy sources. Derbré says the bacteria in these athletes’ guts may extract nutrients from food more efficiently — a hypothesis that requires further study. Mice given fecal transplants from athletes with very high exercise capacity were more sensitive to insulin and had increased stores of a molecule called glycogen, an important energy source, compared to other transplanted mice. Still, the mice didn’t show increased running endurance, suggesting that more than a fecal transplant is needed to act like an elite athlete. Nonetheless, the possible metabolic benefits suggest that a person’s exercise capacity should be considered when selecting donors for fecal microbiota transplantation, Derbré says. “It’s a long-winded way of just showing that being more physically active and having a healthy diet is very good for you,” says Edward Chambers, a physiologist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the research. As for how the treatment might translate to humans, Chambers says that supplementing a diet with short-chain fatty acids might be less invasive and expensive than fecal microbiota transplantation.

Trimethylaminuria causes people to smell like rotten fish because their urine, sweat and breath contain high levels of a pungent chemical that is normally metabolized in the gut. Disease name: Trimethylaminuria (TMAU), also known as "fish odor syndrome" Affected populations: TMAU is a rare metabolic condition that causes a person to smell like rotten fish . The condition is more common in women than in men, and there's evidence that female sex hormones, such as progesterone, can exacerbate patients' symptoms. The exact prevalence of TMAU is unknown, and estimates of global cases vary greatly, ranging from 1 in a million to 1 in 200,000 people . Causes: Patients with TMAU smell like fish due to a buildup of a chemical called trimethylamine in their body. Trimethylamine is produced by bacteria in the gut as a byproduct of the digestion of certain foods, including eggs, liver, legumes and specific kinds of seafood , such as fish, squid and crabs. Related: Why can't we smell ourselves as well as we smell others? Normally, an enzyme in the body breaks down trimethylamine into an odorless chemical, known as trimethylamine N-oxide, which is then excreted via urine . This enzyme is encoded by a gene called FMO3. In patients with TMAU, though, this enzymatic process doesn't occur, so trimethylamine accumulates in the body and ends up being released in excess quantities in patients' sweat, urine and breath . This makes them smell like rotten fish. Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors Most cases of TMAU are caused by mutations in the FMO3 gene that prevent the enzyme it encodes from working properly. In these instances, patients inherit the disease in an autosomal recessive manner, meaning they must inherit two copies of the mutated FMO3 gene — one from each parent — to develop the condition. More rarely, TMAU can be caused by consuming a large quantity of foods that lead to trimethylamine production. It can also result from liver failure and certain medical treatments, such as testosterone replacement therapy, which impact the processing and production of trimethylamine, respectively. Hormonal changes brought about by the menstrual cycle can also cause a transient form of TMAU. Patients with trimethylaminuria should avoid eating seafood, which can aggravate their symptoms. (Image credit: Oscar Wong via Getty Images) Symptoms: Symptoms of TMAU may be present from birth or arise later in life , normally near the start of puberty (roughly around age 8 to 13 in females and 9 to 14 in males), when many hormonal changes happen . Some patients with TMAU have a strong fishy odor all the time , while the smell may come and go for others with the condition. A patient's stress levels and diet can worsen their symptoms by increasing their sweat production and levels of trimethylamine, respectively. TMAU is not deadly , but the condition can have devastating effects on patients' quality of life, by impeding their relationships with others and their career , for instance. These impacts can considerably impede their mental health and may lead to symptoms of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts in some. Treatments: There is no cure for TMAU. However, health care providers may recommend that patients avoid foods that contain trimethylamine or substances that can be broken down into the chemical . These include milk from wheat-fed cows, as well as eggs, liver, kidney, seafood and peas. Patients may also be advised to wash their skin with a slightly acidic soap or shampoo , to avoid strenuous exercise that causes sweating, to wash their clothes frequently and to use antiperspirant. They may also be advised to take measures to reduce their stress levels. Additionally, doctors can prescribe low doses of antibiotics to reduce the amount of bacteria in the gut that metabolize trimethylamine. They may also prescribe activated charcoal, which binds to and reduces the amount of trimethylamine that can be absorbed from the gut . ( Activated charcoal can interact with many medications , though, so it should be used with caution.)

Ships transport around 80% of the world’s cargo. From your food, to your car to your phone, chances are it got to you by sea. The vast majority of the world’s container ships burn fossil fuels, which is why 3% of global emissions come from shipping – slightly more than the 2.5% of emissions from aviation. The race is on to reduce these emissions, and quickly, to meet the Paris agreement targets. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we find out what technologies are available to shipping companies to reduce their carbon emissions – from sails, to alternative fuels or simply taking a better route. “ We live in a world of information. The biggest challenge is knowing how to use it,” says Daniel Precioso, a data scientist at IE University in Madrid, Spain. He’s part of a team of researchers that developed a platform called Green Navigation, what he calls a “Google maps for the sea”. Pulling together publicly available data on wind, waves and ocean currents, it can suggest new routes to ship captains to optimise their journey from A to B and reduce carbon emissions. Precioso presented the project in November 2024 in Dubai at the Prototypes for Humanity exhibition organised by Dubai Future Solutions as a showcase for young researchers designing solutions for global challenges. Pressure mounting Route optimisation software like Green Navigation is seen as a transition between the status quo and a future where ships will move to using alternative, greener fuels. The UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) has a target for zero emissions from shipping by 2050 and a strive target of 30% reductions by 2030 relative to 2008 levels. In early April, IMO member states will meet to discuss a proposal to introduce a flat rate tax on carbon emitted by commercial shipping. If adopted, shipping companies would have to pay a levy, the price of which is still being worked out, for every tonne of carbon dioxide they emit. The money would sit in a fund run by the IMO, which would be used to help developing countries reduce maritime emissions. The proposal is supported by 47 countries, and it’s being pushed particularly by island nations most at risk from climate change, and flag states, those countries such as the Bahamas, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, where a lot of international ships are registered. What’s the alternative? If the flat tax is adopted it would add an extra financial incentive for ships to reduce their emissions and potentially move to greener alternative fuels. But Alice Larkin, professor of climate science and energy policy at the University of Manchester in the UK, says unfortunately it’s not currently cost efficient to switch away from fossil fuels. The challenge is that when you’re moving away from something which was naturally the cheapest, easiest fuel to come by and to burn, then inevitably if all you’re doing is literally swapping the fuel for a different fuel that is much cleaner, then that is going to be more expensive, at least in the short term. A number of alternative fuels are being explored, such as green hydrogen, biodiesel, biomethane and green ammonia. But Larkin says no alternative fuel is currently emerging as a frontrunner, making it difficult for shipping companies to know what to invest in and creating inertia in the transition to greener fuels. She stresses the need to reduce emissions in the shorter term to help keep the world below 1.5 degrees of warming. Options include strategies like route optimisation, sail, or wind-assist technologies, or for ships to travel at a slower speed. Larkin and her colleagues modelled the potential impact from these technologies and found combinations of these technologies could reduce a ship’s emissions by up to a third. Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly to hear conversations with Daniel Precisio and Alice Larkin. This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

Modern humans have uniquely small and flat faces, especially compared with our Neanderthal cousins' notoriously robust faces and large noses, but the reason for this difference has eluded paleoanthropologists. Now, researchers have determined that human faces grow slowly and stop growing during early adolescence, whereas Neanderthals' faces kept growing into early adulthood. "These two human species followed different developmental trajectories for their facial bones," Alexandra Schuh , a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, told Live Science. In a study published Monday (March 24) in the Journal of Human Evolution , Schuh and colleagues analyzed the midface region of 174 skulls of Homo sapiens , Neanderthals and chimpanzees. By including skulls from individuals throughout childhood and into adulthood, the researchers were able to investigate facial ontogeny — how the facial bones of the skull develop and grow. The researchers used two techniques to closely examine the skulls. First, they created virtual 3D models of the skulls and digitized over 200 landmarks on the upper jawbone to look at patterns of growth and development. Then, they undertook microscopic analysis to look for bone formation and bone resorption, a normal process in bone remodeling that helps the tissue retain its structure and strength. Related: 28,000-year-old Neanderthal-and-human 'Lapedo child' lived tens of thousands of years after our closest relatives went extinct "We found that bone formation is predominant in Neanderthals — from birth on — who develop larger and more projecting faces," Schuh said. "In contrast, present-day humans exhibit significantly higher levels of bone resorption." The new research showed that both chimpanzees and Neanderthals had larger, faster-growing faces, while modern humans have smaller faces that stop growing sometime during adolescence. Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors "Earlier growth cessation is a distinctive feature of our species," Schuh said. "We have identified a unique developmental pattern seen exclusively in Homo sapiens." Experts have put forth numerous explanations for why Neanderthals had such large faces and noses, including adaptation to a cold climate , higher energy needs , the chewing of tough foods, and the use of their teeth as tools. Explanations for humans' small faces, on the other hand, include the invention of cooking and increases in brain size. But the reason humans evolved these uniquely small faces is a particularly complex question in paleoanthropology that has not yet been solved. "However, our study addresses aspects of the 'how,'" Schuh said, "providing an important first step toward understanding these processes." Neanderthal quiz: How much do you know about our closest relatives?

When the countdown hit zero on September 23, 1992, the desert surface puffed up into the air, as if a giant balloon had inflated it from below. It wasn’t a balloon. Scientists had exploded a nuclear device hundreds of meters below the Nevada desert, equivalent to thousands of tons of TNT. The ensuing fireball reached pressures and temperatures well beyond those in Earth’s core. Within milliseconds of the detonation, shock waves rammed outward. The rock melted, vaporized and fractured, leaving behind a cavity oozing with liquid radioactive rock that puddled on the cavity’s floor. As the temperature and pressure abated, rocks collapsed into the cavity. The desert surface slumped, forming a subsidence crater about 3 meters deep and wider than the length of a football field. Unknown to the scientists working on this test, named Divider, it would be the end of the line. Soon after, the United States halted nuclear testing. Beginning with the first explosive test, known as Trinity, in 1945, more than 2,000 atomic blasts have rattled the globe. Today, that nuclear din has been largely silenced, thanks to the norms set by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, or CTBT, negotiated in the mid-1990s. Only one nation — North Korea — has conducted a nuclear test this century. But researchers and policy makers are increasingly grappling with the possibility that the fragile quiet will soon be shattered. Some in the United States have called for resuming testing, including a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump. Officials in the previous Trump administration considered testing, according to a 2020 Washington Post article. And there may be temptation in coming years. The United States is in the midst of a sweeping, decades-long overhaul of its aging nuclear arsenal. Tests could confirm that old weapons still work, check that updated weapons perform as expected or help develop new types of weapons. Meanwhile, the two major nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, remain ready to obliterate one another at a moment’s notice. If tensions escalate, a test could serve as a signal of willingness to use the weapons. Testing “has tremendous symbolic importance,” says Frank von Hippel, a physicist at Princeton University. “During the Cold War, when we were shooting these things off all the time, it was like war drums: ‘We have nuclear weapons and they work. Better watch out.’ ” The cessation of testing, he says, was an acknowledgment that “these [weapons] are so unusable that we don’t even test them.” Many scientists maintain that tests are unnecessary. “What we’ve been saying consistently now for decades is there’s no scientific reason that we need to test,” says Jill Hruby, who was the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, during the Biden administration. That’s because the Nevada site, where nuclear explosions once thundered regularly, hasn’t been mothballed entirely. There, in an underground lab, scientists are performing nuclear experiments that are subcritical, meaning they don’t kick off the self-sustaining chains of reactions that define a nuclear blast. Workers prepare the diagnostics rack to monitor the underground explosion for the last U.S. nuclear test, called Divider, in the Nevada desert in 1992. Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory Many scientists argue that subcritical experiments, coupled with computer simulations using the most powerful supercomputers on the planet, provide all the information needed to assess and modernize the weapons. Subcritical experiments, some argue, are even superior to traditional testing for investigating some lingering scientific puzzles about the weapons, such as how they age. Others think that subcritical experiments and simulations, no matter how sophisticated, can’t replace the real thing indefinitely. But so far, the experiments and detailed assessments of the stockpile have backed up the capabilities of the nuclear arsenal. And those experiments avoid the big drawbacks of tests. Sponsor Message “A single United States test could trigger a global chain reaction,” says geologist Sulgiye Park of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group. Other nuclear powers would likely follow by setting off their own test blasts. Countries without nuclear weapons might be spurred to develop and test them. One test could kick off a free-for-all. “It’s like striking a match in a roomful of dynamite,” Park says. The rising nuclear threat The logic behind nuclear weapons involves mental gymnastics. The weapons can annihilate entire cities with one strike, yet their existence is touted as a force for peace. The thinking is that nuclear weapons act as a deterrent — other countries will resist using a nuclear weapon, or making any major attack, in fear of retaliation. The idea is so embedded in U.S. military circles that a type of intercontinental ballistic missile developed during the Cold War was dubbed Peacekeeper. Since the end of testing, the world seems to have taken a slow, calming exhale. Global nuclear weapons tallies shrunk from more than 70,000 in the mid-1980s to just over 12,000 today. That pullback was due to a series of treaties between the United States and Russia (previously the Soviet Union). Nuclear weapons largely fell from the forefront of public consciousness. Since the first nuclear weapons test in 1945, there have been more than 2,000 tests. In the 1960s, countries began performing tests underground over fears of radioactive fallout. In the 1990s, nuclear testing largely ended with the arrival of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. The only country to test nuclear weapons in the 21st century is North Korea. Its last known test was in 2017. But now there’s been a sharp inhale. The last remaining arms-control treaty between the United States and Russia, New START, is set to expire in 2026, giving the countries free rein on numbers of deployed weapons. Russia already suspended its participation in New START in 2023 and revoked its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty to mirror the United States and a handful of other countries that signed but never ratified the treaty. (The holdouts prevented the treaty from officially coming into force, but nations have abided by it anyway.) Nuclear threats by Russia have been a regular occurrence during the ongoing war in Ukraine. And China, with the third-largest stockpile, is rapidly expanding its cache, highlighting a potential future in which there are three main nuclear powers, not just two. “There is this increasing perception that this is a uniquely dangerous moment.… We’re in this regime where all the controls are coming off and things are very unstable,” says Daniel Holz, a physicist at the University of Chicago and chair of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit that aims to raise awareness of the peril of nuclear weapons and other threats. In January, the group set its metaphorical Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been. Some see the ability to test as a necessity for a world in which nuclear weapons are a rising threat. “We are seeing an environment in which the autocrats are increasingly relying on nuclear weapons to threaten and coerce their adversaries,” says Robert Peters, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “If you’re in an acute crisis or conflict in which your adversary is threatening to employ nuclear weapons, you don’t want to limit the options of the president to get you out of that crisis.” Testing, and the signal it sends to an adversary, he argues, should be such an option. Peters advocates for shortening the time window for test preparations — currently estimated at two or three years — to three to six months. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls for “immediate test readiness.” The United States regularly considers the possibility of testing nuclear weapons. “It’s a question that actually gets asked every year,” says Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Los Alamos is one of the three U.S. nuclear weapons labs, alongside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Each year, the directors of the three labs coordinate detailed assessments of the stockpile’s status, including whether tests are needed. “Up until this point, the answer has been ‘no,’ ” Mason says. But if scientific concerns arose that couldn’t be resolved otherwise or if weapons began unexpectedly deteriorating, that assessment could change. If a test were deemed necessary, exactly how long it would take to prepare would depend on the reasons for it. “If you’re trying to answer a scientific question, then you probably need lots of instrumentation and that could take time,” Mason says. “If you’re just trying to send a signal, then maybe you don’t need as much of that; you’re just trying to make the ground shake.” Studying nuclear weapons without testing The area of the Nevada desert encompassing the test site is speckled with otherworldly Joshua trees and the saucer-shaped craters of past tests. In addition to 828 underground tests, 100 atmospheric tests were performed there, part of what’s now known as the Nevada National Security Sites. Carved out of Western Shoshone lands, it sits 120 kilometers from Las Vegas. Radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests, which ceased in 1962, reached nearby Indian reservations and other communities — a matter that is still the subject of litigation. By moving tests underground, officials aimed to contain the nuclear fallout and limit its impact on human health. Before an underground test, workers outfitted a nuclear device with scientific instruments and lowered it into a hole drilled a few hundred meters into the earth. The hole was then filled with sand, gravel and other materials. As personnel watched a video feed from the safety of a bunker, the device was detonated. “You see the ground pop, and you see the dust come up and then slowly settle back down. And then eventually you see the subsidence crater form. It just falls in on itself,” says Marvin Adams, a nuclear engineer who was deputy administrator for NNSA’s Defense Programs during the Biden administration. “There was always a betting pool on how long that would take before the crater formed. And it could be seconds, or it could be days.” Kilometers’ worth of cables fed information from the equipment to trailers where data were recorded. Meanwhile, stations monitored seismic signals and radioactivity. Later, another hole would be drilled down into the cavity and rock samples taken to determine the explosion’s yield. Today, such scenes have gone the way of the ’90s hairstyles worn in photos of underground test preparation. They’ve been replaced by subcritical experiments, which use chemical explosives to implode or shock plutonium, the fuel at the heart of U.S. weapons, in a facility called the Principal Underground Laboratory for Subcritical Experimentation, PULSE. The experiments mimic what goes on in a real weapon but with one big difference. Weapons are supercritical: The plutonium is compressed enough to sustain chains of nuclear fission reactions, the splitting of atomic nuclei. The chain reactions occur because fission spits out neutrons that, in a supercritical configuration, can initiate further fissions, which release more neutrons, and so on. A subcritical experiment doesn’t smoosh the plutonium enough to beget those fissions upon fissions that lead to a nuclear explosion. The PULSE facility consists of 2.3 kilometers of tunnels nearly 300 meters below the surface. There, a machine called Cygnus takes X-ray images of the roiling plutonium when it’s blasted with chemical explosives in subcritical experiments. X-rays pass through the plutonium and are detected on the other side. Just as a dentist uses an X-ray machine to see inside your mouth, the X-rays illuminate what’s happening inside the experiment. Glimpses of such experiments are rare. A video of a 2012 subcritical experiment shows a dimly lit close-up of the confinement vessel that encloses the experiment over audio of a countdown and a piercing beeping noise, irritating enough that it must be signifying something important is about to happen. When the countdown ends, there’s a bang, and the beeping stops. That’s it. It’s a far cry from the mushroom clouds of yesteryear. This video shows a 2012 subcritical experiment at the PULSE facility in Nevada. The experiments are a component of the U.S. stockpile stewardship program, which ensures the weapons’ status via a variety of assessments, experiments and computer simulations. PULSE is now being expanded to beef up its capabilities. A new machine called Scorpius is planned to begin operating in 2033. It will feature a 125-meter-long particle accelerator that will blast electrons into a target to generate X-rays that are more intense and energetic than Cygnus’, which will allow scientists to take images later in the implosion. What’s more, Scorpius will produce four snapshots at different times, revealing how the plutonium changes throughout the experiment. And the upcoming ZEUS, the Z-Pinched Experimental Underground System, will blast subcritical experiments with neutrons and measure the release of gamma rays, a type of high-energy radiation. ZEUS will be the first experiment of its kind to study plutonium. Subcritical experiments help validate computer simulations of nuclear weapons. Those simulations then inform the maintenance and development of the real thing. The El Capitan computer, installed for this purpose at Lawrence Livermore in 2024, is the fastest supercomputer ever reported. That synergy between powerful computing and advanced experiments is necessary to grapple with the full complexity of modern nuclear weapons, in which materials are subject to some of the most extreme conditions known on Earth and evolve dramatically over mere instants. To maximize the energy released, modern weapons don’t stop with fission. They employ a complex interplay between fission and fusion, the merging of atomic nuclei. First, explosives implode the plutonium, which is contained in a hollow sphere called a “pit.” This allows fission reactions to proliferate. The extreme temperatures and pressures generated by fission kick off fusion reactions in hydrogen contained inside the pit, blasting out neutrons that initiate additional fission. X-rays released by that first stage compress a second stage, generating additional fission and fusion reactions that likewise feed off one another. These principles have produced weapons 1,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. To mesh simulations and experiments, scientists must understand their measurements in detail and carefully quantify the uncertainties involved. This kind of deep understanding wasn’t as necessary, or even possible, in the days of explosive nuclear weapons test, says geophysicist Raymond Jeanloz of the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s actually very hard to use nuclear explosion testing to falsify hypotheses. They’re designed mostly to reassure everyone that, after you put everything together and do it, that it works.” Laboratory experiments can be done repeatedly, with parameters slightly changed. They can be designed to fail, helping delineate the border between success and failure. Nuclear explosive tests, because they were expensive, laborious one-offs, were designed to succeed. Stockpile stewardship has allowed scientists to learn the ins and outs of the physics behind the weapons. “We pay attention to every last detail,” Hruby says. “Through the science program, we now better understand nuclear weapons than we ever understood them before.” For example, Jeanloz says, in the era of testing, a quantity called the energy balance wasn’t fully understood. It describes how much energy gets transferred from the primary to the secondary component in a weapon. In the past, that lack of understanding could be swept aside, because a test could confirm that the weapons worked. But with subcritical experiments and simulations, fudge factors must be eliminated to be certain a weapon will function. Quantifying that energy balance and determining the uncertainty was a victory of stockpile stewardship. This type of work, Jeanloz says, brought “the heart and soul, the guts of the scientific process into the [nuclear] enterprise.” Is there a need to test nuclear weapons? Subcritical experiments are focused in particular on the quandary over how plutonium ages. Since 1989, the United States hasn’t fabricated significant numbers of plutonium pits. That means the pits in the U.S. arsenal are decades old, raising questions about whether weapons will still work. An aging pit, some scientists worry, might cause the multistep process in a nuclear warhead to fizzle. For example, if the implosion in the first stage doesn’t proceed properly, the second stage might not go off at all. Craters mark where nuclear devices were detonated underground at the Nevada National Security Sites. Karen Kasmauski/Corbis Documentary/Getty Images Plus Plutonium ages not only from the outside in — akin to rusting iron — but also from the inside out, says Siegfried Hecker, who was director of Los Alamos from 1986 to 1997. “It’s constantly bombarding itself by radioactive decay. And that destroys the metallic lattice, the crystal structure of plutonium.” The decay leaves behind a helium nucleus, which over time may result in tiny bubbles of helium throughout the lattice of plutonium atoms. Each decay also produces a uranium atom that zings through the material and “beats the daylights out of the lattice,” Hecker says. “We don’t quite know how much the damage is … and how that damaged material will behave under the shock and temperature conditions of a nuclear weapon. That’s the tricky part.” One way to circumvent this issue is to produce new pits. A major effort under way will ramp up production. In 2024, the NNSA “diamond stamped” the first of these pits, meaning that the pit was certified for use in a weapon. The aim is for the United States to make 80 pits per year by 2030. But questions remain about new plutonium pits as well, Hecker says, as they rely on an updated manufacturing process. Hecker, whose tenure at Los Alamos straddled the testing and post-testing eras, thinks nuclear tests could help answer some of those questions. “Those people who say, ‘There is no scientific or technical reason to test. We can do it all with computers,’ I disagree strongly.” But, he says, the benefits of performing a test would be outweighed by the big drawback: Other countries would likely return to testing. And those countries would have more to learn than the United States. China, for instance, has performed only 45 tests, while the United States has performed over 1,000. “We have to find other ways that we can reassure ourselves,” Hecker says. Other experts similarly thread the needle. Nuclear tests of the past produced plenty of surprises, such as yields that were higher or lower than predicted, physicist Michael Frankel, an independent scientific consultant, and colleagues argued in a 2021 report. While the researchers advise against resuming testing in the current situation, they expect that stockpile stewardship will not be sufficient indefinitely. “Too many things have gone too wrong too often to trust Lucy with the football one more time,” Frankel and colleagues wrote, referring to Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts. If we rely too much on computer simulations to conclude an untested nuclear weapon will work, we might find ourselves like Charlie Brown — flat on our backs. But other scientists have full faith in subcritical experiments and stockpile stewardship. “We have always found that there are better ways to answer these questions than to return to nuclear explosive testing,” Adams says. What counts as a nuclear weapons test? For many scientists, subcritical experiments are preferable, especially given the political ramifications of full-fledged tests. But the line between a nuclear test prohibited by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and an experiment that is allowed is not always clear. The CTBT is a “zero yield” treaty; experiments can release no energy beyond that produced by the chemical explosives. But, Adams says, “there’s no such thing as zero yield.” Even in an idle, isolated hunk of plutonium, some nuclear fission happens spontaneously. That’s a nonzero but tiny nuclear yield. “It’s a ridiculous term,” he says. “I hate it. I wish no one had ever said it.” The United States has taken zero yield to mean that self-sustaining chain reactions are prohibited. U.S. government reports claim that Russia has performed nuclear experiments that surpass this definition of the zero yield benchmark and raise concerns about China’s adherence to the standard. The confusion has caused finger-pointing and increased tensions. But countries might honestly disagree on the definition of a nuclear test, Adams says. For example, a country might allow “hydronuclear” experiments, which are supercritical but the amount of fission energy released is dwarfed by the energy from the chemical explosive. Such experiments would violate U.S. standards, but perhaps not those of Russia or another country. Even if everyone could agree on a definition, monitoring would be challenging. The CTBT provides for seismic and other monitoring, but detecting very-low-yield tests would demand new inspection techniques, such as measuring the radiation emanating from a confinement vessel used in an experiment. Underground tests are not risk-free Tests that clearly break the rules, however, can be swiftly detected. The CTBT monitoring system can spot underground explosions as small as 0.1 kilotons, less than a hundredth that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That includes the most recent nuclear explosive test, performed by North Korea in 2017. Despite being invisible, underground nuclear explosive tests have an impact. While an underground test is generally much safer than an open-air nuclear test, “it’s not not risky,” Park says. Underground nuclear tests can accidentally release radioactive fallout, as in the 1970 Baneberry test (shown) in Nevada. Courtesy of the National Nuclear Security Administration The containment provided by an underground test isn’t assured. In the 1970 Baneberry test in Nevada, a misunderstanding of the site’s geology led to a radioactive plume escaping in a blowout that exposed workers on the site. While U.S. scientists learned from that mistake and haven’t had such a major containment failure since, the incident suggests that performing an underground test in a rushed manner could increase the risks for an accident, Park says. Hecker is not too concerned about that possibility. “For the most part, I have good confidence that we could do underground nuclear testing without a significant insult to the environment,” he says. “It’s not an automatic given.… Obviously there’s radioactive debris that stays down there. But I think enough work has been done to understand the geology that we don’t think there will be a major environmental problem.” While the United States knows its test sites well and has practice with underground testing, “other countries might not be as knowledgeable,” Hruby says. So if the United States starts testing and others follow, “the chance of a non-containment, a leak of some kind, certainly goes up.” A U.S. test, she says, is “a very bad idea.” Even if the initial containment is successful, radioactive materials could travel via groundwater. Although tests are designed to avoid groundwater, scientists have detected traces of plutonium in groundwater from the Nevada site. The plutonium traveled a little more than a kilometer in 30 years. “To a lot of people, that’s not very far,” Park says. But “from a geology time scale, that’s really fast.” Although not at a level where it would cause health effects, the plutonium had been expected to stay put. The craters left in the Nevada desert are a mark of each test’s impact on structures deep below the surface. “There was a time when detonating either above ground or underground in the desert seemed like — well, that’s just wasteland,” Jeanloz says. “Many would view it very differently now, and say, ‘No, these are very fragile ecosystems, so perturbing the water table, putting radioactive debris, has serious consequences.’ ” The weight of public opinion is another hurdle. In the days of nuclear testing, protests at the site were a regular occurrence. That opposition persisted to the very end. On the day of the Divider test in 1992, four protesters made it to within about six kilometers of ground zero before being arrested. The disarmament movement continues despite the lack of testing. At a recent meeting of nuclear experts, the Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Arlington, Va., a few protesters gathered outside in the January cold, demanding that the United States and Russia swear off nuclear weapons for good. But that option was not on the meeting’s agenda. During a break between sessions, the song that played — presumably unintentionally — was “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has adopted a heavy-handed approach to cutting any perceived wasteful spending in the US government. One of the more recent institutions targeted by Trump’s team, Voice of America, holds a potentially staggering implication: the end of American soft power. Soft power earned the US government a significant amount of goodwill over the course of the 20th century, with Voice of America one of the most effective conduits. Taking VOA off the airwaves could signify a new era in geopolitics. Shawn Thew/EPA A short history of Voice of America The Voice of America (VOA) has been in operation for over 80 years and was one of the first major campaigns conducted by the American government to promote positive sentiments towards the US as a leader of the free world. The government-funded radio station began as a method of keeping US troops informed during the Second World War and was administered by the Office of War Information. After WWII, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which aimed to promote a “better understanding” of the US around the world and to “strengthen cooperative international relations”. This act put the VOA under the domain of the United States Information Agency (USIA). It became one of the US government’s many assets in combating Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. The VOA was essentially a method of generating soft power, an invaluable tool in international diplomacy made famous by the American political scientist, Joesph Nye. As Nye believed, a nation can use military intervention (“hard power”) to achieve its foreign policy aims, or it can create familiarity with other nations by promoting its culture, educational institutions and ideology (“soft power”). During the Cold War, VOA broadcasts were an invaluable method of cultivating soft power. People all over the world relied on them as a source of news and commentary, especially in countries where the media was state-controlled. Additionally, Voice of America effectively became an advertisement for the American way of life. The Music USA program, for instance, took Western popular culture to a global audience. This was especially effective in the Eastern Bloc, where jazz, in particular, became incredibly popular. Voice of America and the other US-funded radio stations operating during the Cold War, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, had their share of critics. The majority came from the Eastern Bloc. Some, however, were American. In the 1970s, Senator William J. Fulbright, for instance, maintained that radio broadcasts such as VOA hindered diplomacy with the Soviet Union by disseminating American propaganda. He called them “Cold War relics”. They were not mere propaganda mouthpieces, though. Although these stations and many of the other radio outlets under the control of the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) were funded by the American government, they demonstrated a reliance on journalistic integrity. The VOA has also not shied away from reporting on negative aspects of American society. This is likely one reason why Trump has been so critical of its mandate. The end of US soft power? The short-term implications of Voice of America’s potential demise are worrying. Many journalists are out of work and a respected institution promoting international diplomacy hangs in the balance. The long-term geopolitical implications, however, could be far greater. First, Voice of America and other stations managed by USAGM have long provided an alternative to state-run media in countries such as Russia and China. Outlets like Russia’s Sputnik news organisation, which was recently removed from the airwaves in Washington for promoting antisemitic content and misinformation about the war in Ukraine, will now face fewer challenges reaching a global audience. Taking VOA off the air also signals the Trump administration is done with soft power as a diplomatic tool and has little regard for the harm this will cause America’s reputation on the global stage. If the US abandons the principles of appealing to other governments through soft power, it could resort to other means to achieve its geopolitical aims. This includes hard power. One soft power advocate, General James Mattis, told Congress in 2013 when he was overseeing US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.” The Trump administration’s rejection of soft power as a diplomatic tool could also allow China, in particular, to take its place. As Nye himself pointed out in a recent Washington Post essay, polling in 24 countries in 2023 found the US was viewed much more positively than China. Another survey showed the US had the advantage over China in 81 of 133 countries surveyed. Nye concluded: “If Trump thinks he will easily beat China by completely forgoing soft power, he is likely to be disappointed. And so will we.”

With the government’s Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill about to become law within days, New Zealand’s already high incarceration rate will almost certainly climb even higher. The new legislation essentially limits how much judges can reduce a prison sentence for mitigating factors (such as a guilty plea, young age or mental ability). A regulatory impact statement from the Ministry of Justice estimated it would result in 1,350 more people in prison. This and other law changes are effectively putting more people in prison for longer. By 2035, imprisonment numbers are expected to increase by 40% from their current levels, with significant cost implications. Last year, the Corrections budget was NZ$1.94 billion, up $150 million from the previous year. In sheer numbers, the Ministry of Justice projects the prison population will increase from 9,900 to 11,500 prisoners over the next decade. But Minister of Corrections Mark Mitchell recently said government policies could see a peak of 13,900 prisoners over that period. New Zealand’s imprisonment rate is already high at 187 per 100,000 people. That’s double the rate of Canada (90 per 100,000), and well above Australia (163 per 100,000) and England (141 per 100,000). Accounting for imprisonment and population projections, New Zealand’s prisoner ratio could be between 238 and 263 per 100,000 by 2035. That is higher than the current imprisonment rate in Iran (228 per 100,000). The role of remand Much of this increase is driven by the number of people awaiting trial or sentencing on remand. This has risen substantially in the past ten years and is expected to keep rising. Remand prisoner numbers are projected to nearly equal sentenced prisoners in 2034. Among women and young people, remand numbers are already higher than for sentenced prisoners. In October 2024, 89% of imprisoned youth were on remand, a 15% increase in seven years. In December 2024, 53% of women prisoners were on remand, more than double the 24% rate a decade ago. Men on remand comprise 41% of prisoners, nearly double the 21% rate a decade ago. Māori are affected most by these increases, making up 81% of imprisoned youth, 67% of imprisoned women and 53% of imprisoned men. Some 30% of those on remand are not convicted. Of those who are, data released to RNZ last year showed 2,138 people (15% of remand prisoners) were not convicted of their most serious change, almost double the 2014 figure of 1,075 people. Significant court delays can mean people are remanded for a long time. By 2034, it is projected the average remand time will be 99 days, compared with 83 days in February 2024. As well as being a human rights concern, this is very expensive. Putting more people away for longer Crime and imprisonment rates fluctuate independently of each other, as the former Chief Science Advisor acknowledged in a 2018 report. Increasing imprisonment rates are the result of political decisions, not simple arithmetic. The Bail Amendment Act 2013 reversed the onus of proof in certain cases, meaning the default rule is that an accused person will not be granted bail. This results in more people being sent to prison while awaiting a hearing, trial or sentencing. When this week’s changes to the Sentencing Act come into effect, they will further constrain judges’ discretion, capping sentence reductions for mitigating factors at 40% (unless it would be “manifestly unjust”). At the same time, it has become more difficult for prisoners to return to the community. For example, some are kept in prison or recalled because they do not have stable housing. (Dean Wickliffe, currently on a hunger strike over an alleged assault by prison staff, was arrested for breaching parole by living in his car.) Last year, Corrections received $1.94 billion in operating and capital budget, a $150 million increase to account for rising imprisonment numbers and prison expansion. There was no meaningful increase in funding for rehabilitation programmes or investment in legal aid. Imprisoning people is expensive. The cost of a person on custodial remand has almost doubled since 2015, from $239 a day to $437. For sentenced prisoners, it is $562 per day. This comes to between $159,505 and $205,130 per year to confine one person. The Waikeria expansion and beyond Corrections has developed a Long-Term Network Configuration Plan to meet anticipated prison population growth. This year’s budget in May will fund 240 high-security beds and 52 health centre beds at Christchurch men’s prison, at a cost of approximately $700-800 million. Those 240 beds will fit within 160 cells, meaning “double-bunking”. This is known to have a significant impact to prisoner health and rehabilitation, and can also add to staffing costs. Former corrections minister Kelvin Davis acknowledged this before the first 600-bed expansion of Waikeria prison, costed at $750 million in 2018. By June 2023, that had increased by 22% to $916 million. The second Waikeria expansion will deliver another 810 beds for an estimated $890 million, although the exact budget has been unclear. These projects will involve public private partnership, a model known for not always delivering the cost savings and service quality initially promised. There will be other costs for facilities maintenance, asset management services and financing. And there can be unanticipated costs, too. For example, the government’s partner in the Waikeria expansion, Cornerstone, claimed $430 million against Corrections in 2022 for “time and productivity losses” due to COVID-19. These overall trends are happening while the government is also cutting funding for important social services. Shifting resources to improve social supports would be a better option – and one that has worked in Finland – than pouring more money into expanding prisons.

How to Play Click the timer at the top of the game page to pause and see a clue to the science-related word in this puzzle! The objective of the game is to find words that can be made with the given letters such that all the words include the letter in the center. You can enter letters by clicking on them or typing them in. Press Enter to submit a word. Letters can be used multiple times in a single word, and words must contain four letters or more for this size layout. Select the Play Together icon in the navigation bar to invite a friend to work together on this puzzle. Pangrams, words which incorporate all the letters available, appear in bold and receive bonus points. One such word is always drawn from a recent Scientific American article—look out for a popup when you find it! You can view hints for words in the puzzle by hitting the life preserver icon in the game display. The dictionary we use for this game misses a lot of science words, such as apatite and coati. Let us know at games@sciam.com any extra science terms you found, along with your name and place of residence, and we might give you a shout out in our daily newsletter!

How to Play Click the timer at the top of the game page to pause and see a clue to the science-related word in this puzzle! The objective of the game is to find words that can be made with the given letters such that all the words include the letter in the center. You can enter letters by clicking on them or typing them in. Press Enter to submit a word. Letters can be used multiple times in a single word, and words must contain four letters or more for this size layout. Select the Play Together icon in the navigation bar to invite a friend to work together on this puzzle. Pangrams, words which incorporate all the letters available, appear in bold and receive bonus points. One such word is always drawn from a recent Scientific American article—look out for a popup when you find it! You can view hints for words in the puzzle by hitting the life preserver icon in the game display. The dictionary we use for this game misses a lot of science words, such as apatite and coati. Let us know at games@sciam.com any extra science terms you found, along with your name and place of residence, and we might give you a shout out in our daily newsletter!

The U.S. has been experiencing a prolonged crisis with opioid overdoses which has affected innumerable lives, families, and communities. Americans are more likely to die from drug overdoses than gun violence or car accidents. The number of people who died of an opioid-related overdose each year rose exponentially from at least 1999 until 2023, but recently the trend has shifted. Provisional data shows drug overdose deaths (of which opioid-involved deaths make up a large majority) saw about a 25 percent nationwide drop from October 2023 to October 2024, and more than a 28 percent drop in New York State over the same period. Experts are puzzled about the nationwide drop, but some speculate that improved access to medication for opioid-use disorders and to harm reduction services (such as syringe exchange programs, overdose prevention education, safe consumption spaces, and peer support programs) may have contributed to the decline. My recent research has also identified potential best practices that could further help sustain this downward trend in opioid-related deaths. I was one of the principal investigators of a five-year study to reduce overdose deaths. The HEALing Communities Study, launched in 2019 by the National Institutes of Health and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, was the largest community-based addiction research study ever conducted. It spanned 67 communities in Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio — four states that had seen large increases in overdose deaths. Our study was built upon the principle of community-engaged research, in which researchers and community members form partnerships at all stages. These partnerships included diverse community coalitions that identified strategies, developed plans for implementation, and recruited members to take the lead in addressing challenges. The coalitions included people with lived experience and were intentionally formed to have diversity in race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and professional expertise. Because of the power of these collective voices, local governments began to pay more attention to the urgency of the overdose crisis and attended coalition meetings. Our study was built upon the principle of community-engaged research, in which researchers and community members form partnerships at all stages. As the principal investigator for the New York site, I oversaw the implementation of the study in 16 New York counties, both urban and rural. Several counties saw meaningful decreases in overdose deaths, but three counties — Cayuga, Ulster, and Chautauqua — saw more dramatic reductions. Cayuga County, for instance, reported to me that they witnessed a nearly 57 percent reduction in overdose deaths over the past three years. In Ulster County, overdose fatalities decreased by more than 45 percent in 2024 compared to 2023. Meanwhile, Chautauqua County reported a 55 percent reduction in overdose fatalities during an 11-month period in 2024 compared with the same period in 2023. These dramatic reductions confirmed what we learned from the study — that addressing the longstanding problem of overdose deaths requires an integrated approach, community engagement, and data-driven strategies. As a long-time addiction researcher, I understand the importance of an integrated approach that simultaneously addresses substance-use disorders, co-occurring mental health issues, and related challenges like housing and food insecurity. Unfortunately, access to drug use services in the U.S. often requires people to navigate multiple separate systems that provide addiction treatment, harm reduction services, mental health treatment, housing assistance, and more. In Ulster County, for example, a parent of three children who had experienced multiple overdoses due to past abuse and trauma reported benefitting from study resources. After one overdose, the individual found themselves alone, with no shelter, an untreated addiction, and children to support. The study helped secure funding for a mobile outreach service called ORACLE — Opioid Response as County Law Enforcement — led by the local sheriff’s office. ORACLE provided a voucher for the person to stay in a specialized motel with a care package that included food, toothbrushes, soap, and socks. ORACLE then connected them with a service provider through which they received substance-use treatment and permanent housing — effectively “closing the loop” for this individual’s recovery process. SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTER JOURNEYS: Dive deeper into pressing issues with Undark’s limited run newsletters. Each week for four weeks, you’ll receive a hand-picked excerpt from our archive related to your subject area of interest. Pick your journeys here. We also saw first-hand the importance of seeing community members as experts in addressing their own challenges. Over the past two decades, I have witnessed a shift away from “parachute science” whereby researchers enter a community without prior engagement, collect data with little input, and depart. In contrast, the community coalitions began by identifying where critical resources were most needed, for instance by pinpointing high-risk areas for overdoses called “overdose hotspots.” In these locations, they strategically placed “NaloxBoxes” which contain the overdose reversal medication naloxone and fentanyl test strips. This initiative ensured that life-saving tools were available when and where they were most needed. As a result, we found that naloxone distribution was 79 percent higher in communities that had the boxes compared with study communities that did not yet have them. In New York state, rapid access to data remains a significant challenge due to delays in government reporting. For instance, overdose deaths disproportionately impact Black communities, but data by race and ethnicity is often lacking or lagging in U.S. health systems. The lack of timely data limits a coalition’s ability to implement data-driven solutions, which is why in the study, we also worked to democratize the data process. The ability for communities to access timely data on overdose deaths and the people most in need of treatment helps them to allocate resources when and where they are needed. For example, data showing numerous overdose calls from certain hotels or apartment buildings could identify those places as hotspots for a NaloxBox or naloxone vending machine. Online, password-protected data dashboards helped community coalitions integrate and visualize data so that they could monitor trends and make data-informed decisions closer to real-time. As one example, Chautauqua County discovered that stimulants (such as cocaine and methamphetamines) were involved in almost 80 percent of overdose deaths in 2023. This insight allowed the coalition to pivot their messaging to a new population — people using stimulants. The ability for communities to access timely data on overdose deaths and the people most in need of treatment helps them to allocate resources when and where they are needed. Data also can inform distribution and training strategies. Cayuga County told me they discovered more bystanders administered naloxone than first responders such as police or EMTs. This insight led them to launch a public information campaign to encourage bystanders to use naloxone to save lives. Also, data showing a rise in deaths from fentanyl in the stimulant drug supply prompted our study’s communication campaigns to warn of the danger and promote harm reduction strategies. Results from the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested more time was needed to measure its long-term impact. Implementing best practices like prescribing medication for opioid-use disorder and distributing naloxone takes time to establish and reach large numbers of people at highest risk of an overdose death. To address a societal challenge as widespread as the opioid crisis, we need to sustain efforts beyond the intervention period, including a strong commitment from the state and local government. Policymakers and community leaders can adopt these approaches nationally. At the local level, researchers must ensure that communities lead the efforts to reduce overdose deaths, like the coalitions in Cayuga, Ulster, and Chautauqua. Local solutions, backed by scientific evidence, can turn the tide on this national crisis. Dr. Nabila El-Bassel is a University Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work. She is director of the Columbia Center for Healing of Opioid and Other Substance Use Disorders and director and cofounder of Columbia’s Social Intervention Group and the Global Health Research Center of Central Asia.