Taming cyclones

Seeding clouds with aerosols could hold the key to stopping potentially destructive cyclones in their tracks, according to a first-of-its-kind study from The Australian National University.

Labor’s productivity puzzle

Higher productivity has quickly emerged as an economic reform priority for Labor’s second term but it remains ‘hard to measure and difficult to shift’.

A history of violence

The Labor party is happy to bankroll wealthy sportsmen, but underfunds measures to tackle Australia’s growing crisis of violence against women and children.

Taming the NDIS

The much vaunted National Disability Insurance Scheme has proved to be a money pit and maintaing the provision of high quality disability services will pose a significant challenge for the Albanese government’s second term.

The biggest losers

Gambling has played a major role in Australian culture, but the sums lost to on-course betting have long been dwarfed poker machines and now online sports betting.

Saving the technological republic

A new book explains how the USA outsourced its productive economy to communist China to maximise profits by reducing costs, but is now reaping the whirlwind as China uses that power to challenge US technological dominance, having long since surpassed its manufacturing capacity, while Silicon Valley amuses itself with AI slop and social media apps.

Gambling on change

The newly re-elected Labor Government should bite the bullet of reform and curb the rise of heavily promoted online sports betting and ubiquity of poker machines to protect the Australian people it professes to care about, rather than pander to gambling industry lobby groups.

How hyperbolic is your adjective on World Football Day?

Soccer is the world’s most popular sport and while there are valid criticisms of its financial model, there is much to celebrate about the ‘beautiful game’ on World Football Day.

End of the species

Could humanity be extinct within 10,000 years? A new book – The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction by Henry Gee may be the wake up call our species needs.

No power greater

A new book collects some of the life stories of the people behind Australia’s union movement over the last 150 years.

Finding your ‘why’

A new study has revealed there’s more to happiness and wellbeing than simply chasing goals, it also comes down to why you’re chasing them.

Brand new day?

Every new Pope brings hope of a fresh start for Catholicism, and while Leo XIV will face limits in modernising the Catholic Church, his predecessor Francis set the stage for further reform.