The Vanishing Wild, written by Queensland based science writer and photographer Justine E. Hausheer, was published recently. It was the introduction to the book’s subject that caught my eye: Australia is a country celebrated for its wildlife, yet native species are in crisis. In the last 200 years, Australia has...

Congratulations to Trinidad and Tobago based writer Jamir Nazir for taking out the Commonwealth Short Story Prize this year, with his work, The Serpent in the Grove. Since being named winner though, suggestions have emerged that the work is the product of an AI agent. When asked to assess the story, a number of...

Sixty percent of Australian parents reported experiencing psychological distress, according to the results of the Parenting Today survey, conducted late last year by the Parenting Research Centre. It has been suggested the impact on the mental health of parents in Australia is contributing to current record low...

The AI generated result summaries on Google searches, that we’ve become accustomed to recently, sound like they will be a thing of the past when a new search… experience is rolled out shortly. Because your curiosity doesn’t always fit into keywords, we’re also introducing the biggest upgrade to our Search box in...

From the Apple Newsroom: Apple today previewed a suite of accessibility updates that use Apple Intelligence to bring new capabilities to features users rely on every day, including VoiceOver, Magnifier, Voice Control, and Accessibility Reader. Apple also announced on-device generated subtitles for uncaptioned video...

Om Gupta, writing for India Today: The researchers believe smartphones fundamentally changed how young people interact with each other. More time shifted online, while face-to-face socialising declined. According to the study, this reduction in in-person interaction may have contributed to lower fertility rates. The...

Julie Evans recently re-wrote her website’s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and took the fight to the stylesheet language as it were: So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing that changed everything...

Tangentially related to the previous post… because what we need right now is another news aggregator dedicated to AI. Otherwise the re-launched social news website (quite unlike Reddit), which went offline some two months after returning earlier this year, is, for better or worse, back. digg, however, is on the...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the organisation that presents the Oscar awards, recently clarified their rules regarding the use of AI in films they will accept nominations for. According to rule two, regarding eligibility, specifically clause seven, there are instance where AI, and “other...

In winning the 2026 Stellar Prize, Montréal, Canada, based Australian cartoonist Lee Lai becomes the first graphic novelist to claim the Australian literary award, with Cannon. Lai’s debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, was shortlisted for the 2022 award, which went on to be won by Evelyn Araluen, with her poetry...

Melbourne based Australian artist Richard Lewer has won the annual portraiture award for his painting of Iluwanti Ken. Ken, an elder from Pitjantjatjara country (in the northwest of South Australia), is a well known artist herself. The announcement was made last Friday 8 May 2026. The works of all Archibald Prize...

American journalist Kelsey Piper, writing at The Argument: But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text...