By Kenny Travouillon, Curator of Mammals, Western Australian Museum; Curtin University
Helen Ryan, Collections Manager (Palaeontology), Western Australian Museum
Kailah Thorn, Project Coordinator (Biodiversity), Western Australian Museum
Natalie Warburton, Associate Professor in Anatomy, Murdoch University
In 2024, the Western Australian Museum received a donation. It was a koala skull collected from Moondyne Cave in Margaret River by Lindsay Hatcher, an avid caver. There was something a bit odd about this skull, and we were able to put our finger in it.
This koala had dimples.
Koalas are iconic on Australia’s east coast, but they are regionally extinct in Western Australia today. Fossils tell a different story: koalas once lived across parts of WA, from the Margaret River region to as far north as Yanchep and as far east as Madura.
In our new study, published…
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By Changlong Wang, ARC ECR Industry Fellow in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Monash University
Rahman Daiyan, Associate Professor and Scientia Fellow in Minerals and Energy Resources Engineering, UNSW Sydney
Australia is rich in minerals, metals, sun and wind. Iron ore, copper and critical minerals are all mined here and largely exported overseas to be turned into products such as steel, fertiliser, fuel and infrastructure. Mining and heavy industries create jobs and wealth. But their emissions are some of the hardest to cut.
This is changing. Steel can now be made without coal. Hydrogen can be made using water and renewable power rather than from gas.
The Australian government wants to create…
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By Ramesh Kadariya
Rising fuel prices linked to the ongoing war in West Asia are already affecting consumers in Nepal and expected to drive up costs of food, transport, and household essentials soon.
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By Amnesty International
Amnesty International strongly condemns the Zambian government for open-endedly “postponing” RightsCon – the largest global tech and human rights conference, which was due to start today in Lusaka and online – after allegedly being pressured by Chinese diplomats. Conference organizers Access Now have confirmed they believe “foreign interference” was behind the last-minute postponement. According to their statement, officials from Zambia’s Ministry of Technology and Science had communicated that they were under pressure from Chinese diplomats over, among others, the participation of Taiwanese civil…
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By Amnesty International
Reacting to reports that Azat Miftakhov, a mathematician and anarchist activist, was subjected to torture, including sexualized abuse, in a Russian penal colony, Denis Krivosheev, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said: “The authorities must urgently launch an independent and effective investigation into these allegations, hold all those suspected to […] The post Russia: Urgently investigate torture allegations of imprisoned anarchist Azat Miftakhov appeared first on Amnesty International. ]]>
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By Nathan Murray, Assistant Professor, Department of English and History, Algoma University
Elisa Tersigni, Senior Research Associate, University of Toronto
Imagine two identical spoons. One is hand-wrought from silver by a skilled metalworker. The other, a base-metal facsimile, was mass-produced by a machine. Which would you value more? Most of us would say the handmade spoon.
In 1899, more than a century ago, American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen used this very example to explain how we assign value, or his theory of conspicuous consumption, in which he contended that bourgeois consumption was driven…
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By Olga Dodd, Senior Lecturer in Finance, Auckland University of Technology
Adrian Fernandez-Perez, Assistant Professor in Finance, University College Dublin
NZ today stands as the only International Energy Agency member whose public oil reserves lie entirely offshore. How can it now rebuild its domestic fuel resilience?
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By Vivek Krishnamurthy, Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Boulder
Iran’s decision to levy tolls on ships passing through the crucial choke hold has an unlikely connection to the site of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet.’
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By Amin Saikal, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Australian National University; The University of Western Australia; Victoria University
Amitav Acharya, Distinguished Professor of International Relations, American University
At every difficult moment in their long history, the Persian people have fought to preserve what is theirs. The Trump administration may have underestimated this.
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By Thea van de Mortel, Professor Emerita, Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University
Is it the flu, COVID or something else? That old rapid antigen test sitting in your cupboard may tell you. But this is what you need to know.
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