Run yearly by the Australian Conservation Foundation,

Children from across the country are invited to create an original artwork of one of Australia's many threatened native animals or plants, along with a short written component on their chosen threatened species.

The competition is a fantastic opportunity for primary school children to unleash their artistic creativity while learning about Australia's threatened animals and plants.

If you have children who love art, they may really enjoy taking part in this competition

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/35023765

Leading AI researchers now expect artificial general intelligence (AGI) – where AI meets or exceeds human intellectual capabilities – within three to five years. When AGI automates thinking, the economy will need to reorganise around what machines cannot do: feel.

We are already in the intimacy economy. But if we are to thrive within it, we must wrestle back our most valuable economic asset from technology: the messy complexities of being human. My generation are the begrudging harbingers of what will happen if we continue to outsource intimacy: we will lose the emotional skills a post-AGI economy will depend on most, rendering us unemployable. We knew social media was addictive and slowing our cognitive development, but officials took until this year to act. We can’t make the same mistake with the intimacy economy.

Our new report, A Ripple Effect of Suffering, shines a light on these impacts. We interviewed over 100 children, young people and members of their families and support networks, and documented the harm children and young people are experiencing in the shadow of Australia’s immigration detention and deportation systems.

Australia’s Migration Act requires the detention of any non-citizen who is in the country without a valid visa. This applies to people who arrive at the border without authorisation. It also applies to people whose visas have expired or been cancelled for reasons such as failing the character test, breaching their visa conditions or presenting a risk to the safety, health or good order of the community.

Around 61% of the detention population is people who’ve had their visa cancelled. Many have been part of Australian society for years or even decades and have families in Australia. Often their children are Australian citizens.

When detention culminates in deportation, these families may face permanent separation...

Food poverty, bill stress and housing insecurity are common, especially when the parent in question was the family’s main breadwinner.

While China has cracked down on AI companions, Australia has been leading the charge on young people’s use of social media.... but [doesn't] address social harms of AI companions, such as emotional dependency or displacing human connection.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also didn’t mention social harms from AI chatbots in his major speech on AI last week.

We propose that Australia’s age-restricted material protections should extend to unintended social harm of conversations with social, analytical and functional AIs.

The Australian government needs to explore how these virtual companions interact with Australians. And we must prepare to mitigate unintended social harms before these synthetic social connections become widespread and normalised.

Australia must prioritise developing social connectedness – in workplaces, productivity strategies, education curriculum, and in the design of our communities...

And Australia should leverage regulatory protections to mitigate social harms, extending on the work eSafety is already doing with social media.

Ed Husic’s push for Labor to recognise claims of a genocide against Israel has failed amid resistance from factional powerbrokers, prompting the backbencher to criticise the party’s culture under Anthony Albanese.

On Saturday, the former industry minister said he doesn’t “give a shit” if senior colleagues freeze him out for constantly breaking ranks, and vowed to keep speaking about contentious issues.

Two hours later, the party’s 50th national conference wrapped up without any major fights after a potential row over Israel and Palestine never materialised.

Instead, there was a staged moment of unity for Labor, with MPs Josh Burns, who is Jewish, and Basem Abdo, the son of Palestinian refugees, to jointly support an update to the party’s foreign platform to reflect the government’s position on Israel, Palestine and Hamas.

An international team of researchers, including experts from Monash University, has developed a world-first, commercially sized tandem solar cell that eliminates the need for a scarce and expensive metal.

The breakthrough... replaces costly indium-based oxide with abundant tin oxide. The new material costs just one per cent of the price of indium, achieving this dramatic cost reduction without sacrificing the solar cell’s performance.

(Tandem cells capture more of the solar spectrum by stacking multiple layers with different bandgaps.)

Let's celebrate a bit some positive news! We can fully celebrate when the compensation actually goes through!

Streaming services, where more than half of Australians now watch sport, will be allowed to run unlimited gambling ads during every break, any time of day. Television keeps the current rules. Streaming doesn't. It also does nothing about sign-up bonuses like "bet $10, get $50 in bonus bets," which researchers say are among the most effective ways to hook people into compulsive gambling.

Three years ago, an all-party parliamentary inquiry recommended something much simpler: phase out gambling advertising altogether. That recommendation was unanimous. This bill [the current govt introduced] doesn't deliver it.

The Greens and the Coalition, who agree on almost nothing, have sent the bill to a Senate inquiry rather than wave it through. That inquiry is taking public submissions right now.

We're building a GetUp submission made up of members' names and comments, calling on the inquiry to recommend the full ban Murphy proposed. Add your name, and if you want to say why this matters to you, there's space for that too.

On Tuesday, the managing director of publishing, Tory Maguire, told staff the company was looking to cut “around 30” positions, made up of voluntary and targeted redundancies. Maguire said the exercise was not simply a matter of cutting costs, but was an “evolution” to adapt to structural change.

“In the last 12 months, as we have discussed many, many times at the publishing town halls, we are in an extreme state of disruption because of AI,” she said.

The company has plans to retrain and to hire people for “digital-first, reader-savvy, data-informed roles”...

The announcement came two years after Nine Entertainment cut 200 jobs, including 90 positions from the legacy mastheads and the AFR.

The environment minister Murray Watt’s approval of the project last year was met with fury from conservationists and the Greens.

The approval, allowing Woodside’s Karratha gas processing plant to operate until 2070, has been described as a “carbon bomb” and according to ACF would see about 4bn tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere – equivalent to about 10 years of Australia’s annual emissions.

The gas plant operates beside the Murujuga indigenous rock art complex – a landscape of more than a million petroglyphs dating back 50,000 years, including the oldest known image of a human face.

The article gives a summary of various alternative fuels being developed in Australia.

While Australia’s rapid electrification is critical for net-zero targets and resilience across Australia’s energy system, it cannot solve the entire equation.

Hard-to-abate sectors – including aviation, heavy industry, agriculture and mining – face challenges relating to the use of electricity at the scales and temperatures required. Major fuel users require scalable and affordable alternative fuels to lower emissions while safeguarding operational continuity.

According to CSIRO’s research director – energy technologies Dr Daniel Roberts, who presented on a panel at the recent SAF APAC (Sustainable Aviation Fuel) Summit in Melbourne, supporting and enabling the alternative fuel transition requires a shift in mindset.

“There is no such thing as a single solution approach for a challenge of this magnitude,” Dr Roberts said. “Ultimately we will rely on a balanced portfolio of feedstocks and technologies, with each being evaluated on a case-by-case basis from the perspectives of scale, deployment time, feedstock availability, and cost.”

https://www.energymagazine.com.au/from-canola-to-ammonia-mapping-australias-alternative-fuel-pathways/

Great article. This is just for starts:

I have been watching and listening to the livestream broadcast of the Public Inquiry into AUKUS. Truthfully, I have been doing more than watching. As a board member of the Australian Peace and Security Forum, which is supporting the Inquiry, I have been hanging on every piece of evidence, every presentation, every media story.

The presentations and evidence offered have been nothing less than extraordinary and deeply disturbing. For instance, when former Defence Minister, Linda Reynolds, was asked at the hearing in Fremantle – good on her for appearing – whether she thought having nuclear submarines stationed near Fremantle would make Fremantle more of a nuclear target, her answer was clear. “Of course it would.”

When, later in the day, Dr Colin Hughes, former head of Public Health in Perth, spoke about what would happen in the event of a nuclear accident, he described how the tanks holding contaminated water would be breached, with radiation spewing into the ocean, poisoning the seagrass beds and the ecology for thousands of years.