By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
The federal government will push for new national laws with rules for where data centres can go, how they must be powered and where their water comes from.
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By Christopher Coffman, Master Lecturer in Humanities, Boston University
His latest – and possibly last – book tackles America’s foreign policy before and after 9/11. Could it also serve as an antidote to the fragmented attention and political duplicity of our current moment?
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By Matthew Koss, Professor of Physics, College of the Holy Cross
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.
How do ice cubes cool a drink? – Helen, age 12, Boston, Massachusetts
I like to make my own iced tea. First, I steep about a quart of terrifically strong hot tea and pour it into a pitcher loosely filled…
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By David Duvernell, Professor of Biological Sciences, Missouri University of Science and Technology
My students and I encountered a mystery. We were partnering with the Missouri Department of Conservation to monitor for fish presence and abundance in the Missouri Ozarks. We visited half a dozen rivers and streams across the region and collected a few cups of water from each.
We were testing for DNA in the environment to determine which species had left behind their genetic material and were therefore present…
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By Brooke Schedneck, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Rhodes College
Thai Buddhism involves daily rituals and collective acts of worship, unlike the individual-focused emphasis on meditation often found in Western Buddhist communities.
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By Laura Yares, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University
Sharon Avni, Professor of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
“Emma,” a young Jewish woman who we met in 2019, didn’t belong to a synagogue. She didn’t have a Jewish partner. She didn’t observe Jewish rituals regularly. On most surveys about religion, she would not seem very engaged with Judaism.
But as Emma talked about what she did in her free time, a very different picture began to emerge. She visited Jewish websites and enjoyed listening to Jewish music. She read books about Jewish topics and had recently attended a retreat for young Jewish adults to learn Torah while also doing yoga.
She was highly invested in learning about Judaism,…
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By Catherine Steel, Professor of Classics, University of Glasgow
Robert Harris has returned to Rome with his new novel, Agrippa. It’s a fictional autobiography of M. Vipsanius Agrippa, right-hand man of the Emperor Augustus, purportedly written in the days before Agrippa’s death at the age of 50 in 12BC.
In Harris’s Cicero trilogy (2021), narrator Tiro allowed readers to see an intimate side of the Roman statesman Cicero. In a similar way, Agrippa…
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By Simon Thorne, Senior Lecturer in Computing and Information Systems, Cardiff Metropolitan University
AI could speed up some police work, but trusting it with evidence raises difficult questions about accuracy, accountability and justice.
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By Eef Hogervorst, Professor of Biological Psychology, Loughborough University
A major new study of 4.2 million people found leisure exercise cuts dementia risk – but manual labour and active commuting may raise it.
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By Stuart Jones, Professor of Sedimentology & Geoenergy, Durham University
Andrew Crossland, Professor in Practice, Department of Engineering, Durham University
Chris Groves, Professor, Director of Education in the Department of Engineering, Durham University
Every time Britain has a still, grey week in winter, something invisible happens behind our plug sockets: gas power stations fire up to keep the lights on. That gas is often imported, with prices set by volatile global markets. This is one reason why energy bills surged during the cost-of-living crisis, despite the low cost of available renewable energy.
On very windy days, we have a different problem. The grid can’t always use all the electricity our wind farms generate, so we pay them to switch off. In…
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