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AAP Image/David Mariuz The horrific Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20 burned more than 8 million hectares of vegetation across southeastern Australia. An estimated 3 billion animals were caught in the fire zone. Intense media coverage often included graphic images of koalas and other...

Halfpoint/Shutterstock Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are taking drugs like Ozempic to lose weight. But what do we actually know about them? This month, The Conversation’s experts explore their rise, impact and potential consequences. After weight-loss drugs like Ozempic exploded...

Andres Ayrton/Pexels Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are taking drugs like Ozempic to lose weight. But what do we actually know about them? This month, The Conversation’s experts explore their rise, impact and potential consequences. Every now and then, scientists develop...

A piece of debris thought to belong to MH370 on display in 2019. EPA/Fazry Ismail It has been ten years since Malaysia Airlines passenger flight MH370 disappeared on March 8 2014. To this day it remains one of the biggest aviation mysteries globally. It’s unthinkable that a modern Boeing...

szefei/Shutterstock As a clinical psychologist, I often have clients say they are having trouble with thoughts “on a loop” in their head, which they find difficult to manage. While rumination and overthinking are often considered the same thing, they are slightly different (though linked)...

Shutterstock With the winter AFL and NRL seasons about to start, Australia’s sporting calendar is once again transitioning from its quietest to busiest period. For many, the return of the AFL and NRL competitions is highly anticipated. But there is one group whose experience is very...

adriaticfoto/Shutterstock Around one in six Australians has some form of hearing loss, ranging from mild to complete hearing loss. That figure is expected to grow to one in four by 2050, due in a large part to the country’s ageing population. Hearing loss affects communication and social...

Kitreel/Shutterstock The morning started with a message from a friend: “I used your photos to train my local version of Midjourney. I hope you don’t mind”, followed up with generated pictures of me wearing a flirty steampunk costume. I did in fact mind. I felt violated. Wouldn’t you? I bet...

CGN089/Shutterstock Before the cost of living hit Australian families hard, a group of consumers were already paying top dollar for their staples. Whether it be gluten free, dairy free or lactose free, people with special dietary requirements are used to spending more at the supermarket...

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. Guiseppe Catuogno/AAP In December 2023, WIRED reported that Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire CEO of Meta and one of the foremost architects of today’s social-media-dominated world, has been buying up large swathes of the Hawaiian island Kauai...

Annie Spratt/Unsplash From the bristles of brushes to the porous surfaces of sponges, your makeup kit can harbour a host of bacteria and fungi. These potentially hazardous contaminants can originate not only from the cosmetics themselves, but also from the very surface of our skin. So...

Max kegfire/Shutterstock Methamphetamine, also known as ice or meth, is the drug Australians most associate with a drug problem and the drug they’re most concerned about, according to the latest National Drug Strategy Household Survey. Yet the survey, released today, shows recent use of...

Tero Vesalainen/Shutterstock Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are supercharging the problem of misinformation, disinformation and fake news. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and various image, voice and video generators have made it easier than ever to produce content, while...

Katherine Barrett/Artemis Media/SBS The health of Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce is in the news again, this time with a diagnosis of a sleep disorder made while filming a TV documentary. Joyce’s diagnosis of insomnia plus sleep apnoea arose while filming Australia’s Sleep Revolution with Dr...

Pexels/Karolina Grabowska According to social media, carbs come in various guises: naked carbs, net carbs, complex carbs and more. You might be wondering what these terms mean or if all carbs are really the same. If you are into “carb counting” or “cutting carbs”, it’s important to make...

Shutterstock Have you ever felt a sudden pang of sadness? A bird seems to stop and look you in the eye. A photo drops out of a messy drawer from long ago, in the mundanity of a weekend spring clean. Your day is immediately derailed, unsettled. You are pulled into something you thought was...

The newly described western delicate mouse. Ian Bool Australia can lay claim to two new native mammal species, discovered as part of our collaborative research published today in the journal Molecular Ecology. Australia has some of the most unique biodiversity in the world, and our native...

Sebastian Pfautsch/Western Sydney University Weather extremes driven by climate change hit low-income communities harder. The reasons include poor housing and lack of access to safe and comfortable public spaces. This makes “climate readiness” a pressing issue for governments, city planners...

Shutterstock As misinformation and radicalisation rise, it’s tempting to look for something to blame: the internet, social media personalities, sensationalised political campaigns, religion, or conspiracy theories. And once we’ve settled on a cause, solutions usually follow: do more...

Shutterstock Imagine believing you owed nothing to the Australian Tax Office, and then suddenly finding out decades later that you did, and that the Tax Office had been accruing interest and penalties on it for decades. You might think it was like Robodebt, the disgraced scheme under which...