'We have filed a case under your name': beware of tax scams — they'll be everywhere this EOFY

By Paul Haskell-Dowland

The end of the financial year is near. So all of us especially those scrambling at the last minute to get their receipts in order should keep an eye out for the accompanying onslaught of tax scams. Posing as the...

What if I can't get in for my second Pfizer dose and the gap is longer than 3 weeks?

By Nathan Bartlett

Bookings for the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine have been halted in Victoria this week, amid shortages of the vaccine. Some Victorians whove had their first Pfizer dose already will need to wait six weeks to get their...

The Labor Party has long struggled over a position on Israel and Palestine. Here's why

By Dennis Altman

After the brutal conflict in Gaza flared yet again in the past month, and the end of Benyamin Netanyahus 12 years as prime minister of Israel, attention is again focused on the apparently intractable conflict between...

Australia needs construction waste recycling plants — but locals first need to be won over

By Salman Shooshtarian Et Al

Strong community opposition to a proposed waste facility in regional New South Wales made headlines earlier this year. The A$3.9 million facility would occupy 2.7 hectares of Gunnedahs industrial estate. Its intended to...

Approaching zero: super-chilled mirrors edge towards the borders of gravity and quantum physics

By David Ernest McClelland Et Al

The LIGO gravitational wave observatory in the United States is so sensitive to vibrations it can detect the tiny ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. These waves are caused by colliding black holes and other...

Too few women get to invent – that's a problem for women's health

By Rem Koning

MacArthur Genius and MIT professor Linda Griffith has built an epic career as a scientist and inventor, including growing a human ear on a mouse. She now spends her days unpacking the biological mechanisms underlying...

Sport in Africa: book delivers insights into the games, people and politics

By Tarminder Kaur Et Al

The efforts of a range of academics across Africa have produced a new anthology of articles about sport on the continent. Its an important book because its a subject thats been largely neglected. Sports in Africa, Past...

Iran presidential elections: who will win and what will happen next?

By Louise Kettle

Iranians are heading to the polls to elect their next president and after years of economic hardship and internal crackdowns on government protests this election could have long-term implications domestically, regionally...

Writing can improve mental health – here's how

By Christina Thatcher

Ernest Hemingway famously said that writers should write hard and clear about what hurts. Although Hemingway may not have known it at the time, research has now shown that writing about what hurts can help improve our...

We archived 84 million tweets to learn about the pandemic – each one is a tiny historical document

By Robert Lawson

The first tweet that the UKs Department of Health and Social Care published about its new coronavirus testing regime came on January 25 2020. Less than a week later, the department tweeted its first announcement of two...

4 ways companies can avoid post-pandemic employee turnover

By Erica Pimentel

With provinces across Canada starting to lift pandemic-related lockdowns, businesses are announcing plans to bring employees back into the office. Considering the widespread isolation and Zoom fatigue of the past year,...

Post-pandemic return to work is a perfect opportunity to move to a four-day week

By David Spencer

The gradual easing of lockdowns and social restrictions opens the possibility of a welcome return to pre-pandemic habits. This might mean trips to the cinema, eating in restaurants, or attending a large wedding. For...

Millions are rejecting one of humanity's best weapons for saving lives: Vaccines

By S. Jay Olshansky Et Al

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by employees at a Houston hospital who did not want to be vaccinated for COVID-19, claiming that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe. In the June 12, 2021 ruling, U.S. district Judge...

Postal banking could provide free accounts to 21 million Americans who don't have access to a credit union or community bank

By Terri Friedline Et Al

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea About a quarter of census tracts with a post office dont have a community bank or credit union branch, suggesting postal banking could...

What's the charitable deduction? An economist explains

By Patrick Rooney

The charitable deduction is a dollar-for-dollar reduction in taxable income that lowers what someone owes the Internal Revenue Service. Only donations to tax-exempt charities count. This giving incentive is available...

Working from home: How classism covertly dominated the conversation

By Tracey Warren Et Al

Since the arrival of the pandemic, media accounts about the new world of work have painted a curiously uniform picture of the jobs that people across the UK do. Chief among them was the idea that everyone was all suddenly...

The Biden-Putin summit: no magic reset of relations, but no hitting the snooze button, either

By Matthew Sussex

Much speculation surrounded the lead up to the just concluded summit in Geneva between US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Coming after a NATO meeting where Biden reaffirmed his...

Australia's 2.5% minimum wage rise: there's something in it for you, and the economy

By John Buchanan

Australia has a serious wage problem. Over the past decade wages for all but the top 20% of income earners have flat-lined. This is part of the longer-term problem concerning productivity and wages identified by groups...

Why a carbon price alone won't be enough to drive down New Zealand's emissions

By David Hall

With its emissions budgets, the Climate Change Commissions final advice to the government charts a course towards a low-emissions economy. But its comprehensive policy package is arguably the more decisive element targets...

At last, health, aged care and quarantine workers get the right masks to protect against airborne coronavirus

By C Raina MacIntyre Et Al

Almost a year ago, in July 2020, our calls for the government to urgently upgrade the guidelines to protect health workers from airborne SARS-CoV-2 fell on deaf ears. The existing guidelines said health providers...

Which COVID vaccine is best? Here's why that's really hard to answer

By Wen Shi Lee Et Al

With the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines accelerating, people are increasingly asking which vaccine is best? According to Google Trends, more and more people want to know. Even if we tried to answer this question,...

Why we still don't have self-driving cars on the roads in 2021

By Francesco Biondi

Do you remember the time when self-driving cars were upon us? It was almost a decade ago when the Autonomous Vehicle division at Google (now Waymo) promised a world where people would be chauffeured around by self-driving...

Netanyahu leaves behind a complex legacy in Israel. His successor will need to deliver change — and fast

By Ran Porat

Israels 36th government was approved today, with a slim majority of 6059 in the Knesset (parliament). The new prime minister is the leader of national-religious party Yamina, Naftali Bennett. A religious person, former...

Even without new fossil fuel projects, global warming will still exceed 1.5℃.

By Sven Teske Et Al

The International Energy Agency (IEA) last month made global headlines when it declared there is no room for new fossil fuel investment if were to avoid catastrophic climate change. However, our new research suggests...

Is it worth selling my house if I'm going into aged care?

By Colin Zhang

For senior Australians who cannot live independently at home, residential aged care can provide accommodation, personal care and general health care. People usually think this is expensive. And many assume they need to...

Can Bitcoin become a real currency? Here's what's wrong with El Salvador's crypto plan

By John Hawkins1

Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, has got himself a pair of laser eyes on his Twitter profile at least. Laser eyes are something social media users give themselves to show they love cryptocurrency and Bukele...

The problem with online learning? It doesn't teach people to think

By Robert Danisch

The modern research university was designed to produce new knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to students. North American universities over the last 100 years have been exceptionally good at that task. But this is...

What's the G-7? An international economist explains

By Emily J. Blanchard

What the G-7 is The Group of 7 is an informal group of seven powerful democracies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. The presidents of the European Commission and European...

Does a plant-based diet really help beat COVID-19?

By Duane Mellor

Since the beginning of the pandemic, its been suggested that certain foods or diets may offer protection against COVID-19. But are these sorts of claims reliable? A recent study published in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention...

How COVID-19 exposed the systemic ageism at the heart of Britain

By Shir Shimoni

The UK public cares deeply about injustices. In the first few months of 2021, thousands of people took to the streets demanding much-needed social changes, from Black Lives Matter to Kill the Bill protests against the...

Identity fusion: why some people will go to extremes for the beliefs of a group

By Roger Whitaker

Football fans often become so deeply connected to their club and to other fans, as though theyre related. Theyre willing to support the group on a lifelong basis, with unwaivering pride even in the face of losses. At...

With new Atlantic Charter, Biden and Johnson reset the special relationship

By Martin Farr

Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill first met in the summer of 1941 on HMS Prince of Wales to create the Atlantic Charter, establishing the terms of their countries relationship in war, and, as it was to prove, in...

Fake news: a simple nudge isn’t enough to tackle it – here's what to do instead

By Sander van der Linden Et Al

One high-profile theory of why people share fake news says that they arent paying sufficient attention. The proposed solution is therefore to nudge people in the right direction. For example, accuracy primes short...

Fashion for pointy shoes unleashed a wave of bunions in medieval England

By Piers Mitchell Et Al

The 14th century saw the arrival of an abundance of new styles of dress and footwear in Europe, coming in a wide range of fabrics and colours. Among these new fashion trends were poulaines rather eccentric-looking...

Proceed to your nearest (virtual) exit: gaming technology is teaching us how people respond to emergencies

By Ruggiero Lovreglio

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) arent just for gaming anymore, theyre also proving to be useful tools for disaster safety research. In fact, they could save lives. Around the world, natural and...

It's not the Reserve Bank's job to worry about housing prices

By Richard Holden

Once again folks are pointing to the potential danger of Australias low interest rates. This week a poll of so-called market economists by ratings agency Fitch had only 12% of respondents in favour of the Reserve Bank...

Aphantasia explained: some people can't form mental pictures

By Zoë Pounder

How many times have you watched a book adaptation on film or TV, and felt disappointed when a scene wasnt quite how youd pictured it? Or perhaps a character looked nothing like youd imagined them to look? Most people,...

London terror attack: Canadians have become desensitized to violence against Muslims

By Jasmeet Bahia

A Muslim family was targeted in a violent hate crime in London, Ont., that left four people dead and a nine-year-old child in critical condition. Police have confirmed the attack was motivated by hate and that the...

Rapid delivery grocery apps have flourished during the pandemic – but will they permanently change how we shop?

By Janina Steinmetz

Billions of dollars are flowing to support companies you may never have heard of startups with memorable names like Zapp, Deliveroo, Getir and Gorillas. These speedy delivery companies have become the go-to for many...

Fastly's global internet meltdown could be a sign of things to come

By David S. Wall

For an hour on the morning of June 8, dozens of the worlds most-visited websites went offline. Among those affected were Amazon, Reddit, PayPal and Spotify, as well as the Guardian, the New York Times and the UK government...

The internet consumes extraordinary amounts of energy. Here's how we can make it more sustainable

By Jeff Kettle

Around 4.6 billion people use the internet every day. In fact, 350,000 tweets have been sent in the past minute. We tend to think of the internet as something ephemeral partly thanks to terms like web and cloud but the...

Bitcoin: El Salvador's grand experiment

By David Coker

Around the world, bitcoin has a mixed reputation. Owning and using the cryptocurrency is legal in a majority of nations, tolerated in many others, and outlawed by a relatively small number. El Salvador has just become...

Ultra-marathon running: how safe is the sport?

By Lindsay Bottoms

The 2021 Yellow River Stone Forest 100km trail race in Gansu province, China, ended in tragedy in May, when unexpectedly severe weather resulted in the deaths of 21 of the 172 competitors. Among them was the Chinese...

Fastly global internet outage: why did so many sites go down — and what is a CDN, anyway?

By Paul Haskell-Dowland

If you were having difficulty accessing your favourite website on Tuesday evening Australian time, youre not alone. A jaw-dropping number of major websites around the globe suddenly became unavailable with no immediately...

Mexican president suffers setback in country's deadliest election in decades

By Luis Gómez Romero

Mexicans turned away from President Andrés Manuel López Obradors party in the countrys June 6, 2021, midterm election, widely seen as a referendum on his administrations self-proclaimed transformation of...

How an app to decrypt criminal messages was born 'over a few beers' with the FBI

By David Tuffley

Australian and US law enforcement officials on Tuesday announced theyd sprung a trap three years in the making, catching major international crime figures using an encrypted app. More than 200 underworld figures in...

What would sustainable tourism really mean for New Zealand? Let’s ask the river

By Jason Paul Mika Et Al

Excitement among Cook Islands tourism operators and officials at the opening of quarantine-free travel with Aotearoa New Zealand was understandable. The impact of the pandemic on the island nations economy has been massive...

Tasmania's reached net-zero emissions and 100% renewables – but climate action doesn't stop there

By Rupert Posner Et Al

Getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and 100% renewable energy might seem the end game for climate action. But what if, like Tasmania, youve already ticked both those goals off your list? Net-zero means...

Why too many recorded lecture videos may be bad for maths students' learning

By Sven Trenholm

Screen-based devices have increasingly become part of our human experience even more so since the pandemic began. This trend includes watching more and more videos. For example, before COVID-19, the average American...

To become an innovation nation, we really need to think smaller

By Martie-Louise Verreynne Et Al

It took a chance meeting between Cameron van den Dungen, founder of a start-up mattress company, and Madhu Bhaskaran, an engineering professor at RMIT University, to see an opportunity to collaborate and commercialise...