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Fiji drinking water contaminated by microplastics, study finds

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Fiji drinking water contaminated by microplastics, study finds

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I reviewed the ABC Pacific Beat episode on Microplastics. While seemingly an environmental study, it is a critical study of Urban Metabolism. It highlights how 'The Pipe' (stormwater and wastewater infrastructure) acts as a high-speed conveyor for land-based pollutants into the ocean. This relates to Gleeson’s (2008) critique of the 'Promethean Dream'—our belief that we could infinitely discard plastic without 'Ecological Feedback.' Technically, the podcast’s use of interview layering provides a great template for our group’s conversation segment on the 'taste' of water. It effectively makes the invisible infrastructure of waste visible through audio storytelling.

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Fiji drinking water contaminated by microplastics, study finds - ABC Pacific

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Microplastics have been recorded in water sources across the globe, and Fiji is no exception. A study by the University of the South Pacific has found that Fijians are drinking water contaminated with microplastics every day.

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The Blueprint for Living episode Seeing the Better City offers a concise and insightful reflection on how everyday urban environments can be critically observed and interpreted. Through a calm and accessible narration, it encourages listeners to pay closer attention to spatial details, patterns of movement, and the layered meanings embedded within the built environment. The episode successfully balances academic thinking with an engaging, conversational tone, making complex urban ideas approachable. Its strength lies in framing observation as an active practice, prompting a more attentive and reflective engagement with cities and the subtle dynamics that shape urban life.

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How observation and urban diaries can improve urban planning and design.

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How can we solve Australia's housing crisis?

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How can we solve Australia's housing crisis?

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This portion shows how housing affordability is the most pressing problem in Australian politics given that housing is getting increasingly difficult to afford. For instance, deposits now take 12 years instead of six. The conversation with Georgina Harrison (CEO of Amplify) and Ben Snell, a participant, shows the gap between generations: homeowners typically have a more straightforward experience than younger people endeavouring to buy a home. Amplify's method of bringing 100 different Australians together to discuss reforms uses structured discussion and expert input to get people to reach an agreement, regardless of whether they have different political and personal perspectives. It shows that solutions need long-term, collaborative thinking and that getting the public involved, thinking critically, and being willing to make compromises are all essential elements of solving the Australian housing crisis.

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How can we solve Australia’s housing crisis? - ABC listen

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This weekend, 100 randomly-selected Australians are going to be asked about their views on a set of housing reforms that have been put forward by experts to see if they can find some rare common ground. Guests: Georgina Harrisson, CEO, Amplify
Ben Snell, participant

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Demolishing heritage listed buildings - aid in housing crisis?

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Demolishing heritage listed buildings - aid in housing crisis?

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The podcast discusses the role of heritage listed/protected buildings and if the challenges of the housing crisis means that we start repurposing them into new housing. Guest speaker Dr. Elizabeth Farrelly touches on how it is not either or and that frankly we do not have a well established protection of heritage buildings right now regardless. The host carries out the discussion through a Q&A format opening up to questions on how then could we determine the criteria of heritage protection to ensure we are protecting what we value through law. Ultimately the conversation circles to how it is more so a political issue than a heritage issue as the housing crisis is not purely a supply and demand challenge. More so it is about many factors that contribute to making the housing market infinite, hence prices continue to increase. The argument concludes to how perhaps the housing issues is about putting money into what we need (public housing as an example). Also looking into re-legislation of zones and building heights in order to open up streets and walkways creating a more livable and inviting environment.

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Heritage or homes: which is more important? - ABC listen

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When it comes to choosing between our history and our future, can we be sure we’re making the right choices?

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The episode explores how front yards are disappearing across Australian suburbs as older houses are replaced with larger new builds. According to Macquarie University research, contemporary developments increasingly prioritise maximising indoor floor space and driveways over maintaining traditional front gardens. This shift is reshaping suburban streetscapes, reducing greenery, altering neighbourhood character, and raising questions about urban planning, liveability, and community connection. Presenter Dom Knight discusses how these changes reflect broader trends in housing preferences and development pressures in Sydney.

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What happened to our front yards? - ABC listen

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As old homes get replaced, new builds are changing our suburban landscapes.

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This short podcast from ABC News looks at the rapid move towards ‘forever renting’ in Australia. Highlighting the effects of the housing crisis, limiting affordability within our suburbs. Forcing people to rent long term in order to find a sense of security. With many willing to pay higher rent to sustain that stability. The episode merges both public experiences/perspective with expert insights, to help illustrate how the rental shift could impact housing and retirement policies. As the number of renters has grown in the past two decades in every age group other then 80+. Creating a new reality for Australians and urging policies to adapt with these new circumstances to find a long term solution.

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Why more Australians are renting forever - ABC listen

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Some Australian renters say they’re willing to pay more in rent, to secure longer-term leases. That’s a finding from a new report published today that also shows many believe they’ll be renters for life. But a shift towards lifetime renting could put pressure on Australia’s retirement policies.

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The podcast looks at the design of suburbs in Melbourne, which seems to favor low-density housing and the use of cars over walkability. It also looks at the fact that suburbia is not designed to be close to daily needs, which makes it a very undesirable location to stay, as opposed to the city center. The podcasters argue that the new suburbias should be designed to include the feature of “gentle density.” It is interesting to note that it is actually easier to design suburbias correctly and smartly before they come about, as opposed to after the fact. However, the political reality of suburbs is also touched on, as many people do not support it due to the issue of too much density.

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Melbourne’s CBD is world class, but then what? - ABC listen

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Thebarton Aquatic Centre's $8.7 Million Upgrade

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Thebarton Aquatic Centre's $8.7 Million Upgrade

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Hosts Sonya Heldoff and Jules Schiller, smoothly and promptly introduced expert guest, Craig Houghton, YMCA's Head of Sport & Recreation, setting the pacy rhythm of the podcast. Hosts pitched a Q&A style interview discussing the re-opening of the Thebarton Aquatic Centre. Driven by leading questions, aimed at involving and representing the Thebarton community, to provide listeners with an wholistic representation of the project and how it will positively impact them and their community. Craig's concise answers allowed for the interview to flow and for a large amount of information to be covered in the short time slot. Contrastingly, the fast pace, may decrease the accessibility to digest information for some listeners.

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Brought to you byABC ADELAIDEPresented bySonya Feldhoff and Jules SchillerBobby Macumber

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Thebarton Aquatic Centre’s $8.7 million upgrade revealed - ABC listen

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Craig Houghton, YMCA’s Head of Sport & Recreation said, “Our Learn To Swim program with kick-off...which has been really important for the community of Adelaide, with Adelaide Aquatic Centre closing down”.

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This podcast summarises the information in a new WHO report, which focuses on the impact of health literacy on a person's ability to make lifestyle changes and how community and cultural norms are likely to impact a person's ability to make long-standing change. It highlights the importance for health professionals to vary their communication channels, depending on the client, educating clients on how to access the correct information and how education and communication between family and peers strongly impact the decisions a person makes regarding their health.

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Tegan Taylor: When you think about the factors that contribute to someone's health, you might like you might think about things like getting enough exercise or the availability of healthy fruits and vegetables. But a key determinant is health literacy, somebody's ability to know how to prevent disease and navigate health systems. And even in countries with good health systems, many people aren't able to make healthy choices, as we've seen these past few weeks on Magda's Big Health Check on ABC TV. The idea that the responsibility for good health literacy sits with society at large and not just individuals is central to a new World Health Organisation report. Richard Osborne from Swinburne University was an author on the report, as well as an editorial in the Lancet. He joins us now. Welcome, Richard.

Richard Osborne: Thanks, Tegan. Thanks for coming on the show.

Tegan Taylor: Let's start by just defining what we mean when we're talking about health literacy.

Richard Osborne: Well, health literacy is a way to understand people's health and their health information needs and why some people struggle to look after themselves and why it's hard for them to adhere to medications and why lifestyle change is so complex for them, and why many of our interventions are so ineffective for so many people. So we see this and this WHO report brings to light why a lot of interventions are so ineffective and what to do about it. So it's really a very important innovation.

Tegan Taylor: So these are interventions like saying maybe stop smoking, or maybe drink less, those sorts of things, and you're putting these messages out there but they're not always taken up by people.

Richard Osborne: Yeah, it recognises that people are often in the community doing what they're doing, and we think they should be categorising their lifestyles in different kinds of risk factors about smoking, diet, kinds of fats, amount of particular kinds of exercise and all these categories. But people are basically doing what they're doing the community, often in goodwill, that in some communities being big is really important, you're being loved. So there's a whole lot of risk factors, which as far as people are concerned they're doing the right thing; even though their father may have smoked until 90 and didn't get cancer, we're telling them it gives you cancer, but they've got no evidence from their immediate environment. So it points out how challenging it is for our healthcare professionals to communicate what's going on. But also all these mixed messages and mixed kinds of experiences that people have in the community.

Tegan Taylor: So there's messages that you're getting through official health channels, and there's messages that you're getting culturally and societally, and those are received differently. So what do we know about how someone's health literacy impacts on their pathway to health and disease over their lifetime?

Richard Osborne: Well, it's tremendously important because if you don't have a good idea of what is the right and wrong information, it'll be easier to make the wrong choice. So you really have to have some skills to make those good decisions and to support your family members. This is another major thing that WHO is putting out now, that health literacy is more than just the individual's responsibility. Sure, they need to have understanding and skills, but really it's the people around them who will determine so many things. In the end, most people are making decisions with their family or their peers or others, so that's critically important, but the big onus really is on the healthcare system to make things easier. So the more we blame individuals for not doing the right thing, you could say, the more we're just going to increase inequalities and make it harder for people. We've got to get busy with increasing the capacity of the community, but also making it easier within the healthcare system to find information and get it to use it.

Tegan Taylor: What do we know works best when it comes to increasing people's levels of health literacy then? Because it sounds like a pretty big job you're setting the health system here.

Richard Osborne: Well, it is, but it's not that hard when you go into communities, and you ask really general and specific questions about people's experience. There are so many people already doing it really, really well as individuals or practitioners who are just amazing at communicating to people and for them to get it to make that lifestyle change. So in effect, there's already the wisdom out there in the community. And this WHO report really advocates to go to those local contexts and use the local wisdom to derive the new locally derived innovations. A big problem is that we've got so many top-down policies and interventions which are really disconnected from people's daily lives. So we're doing it all wrong, you could say, we need to be doing a huge range of bottom-up codesign with community to find out what really is doable and implementable.

Tegan Taylor: So this idea of a codesigned communication tool is part of the report. Are there any other key recommendations that you'd like to draw out?

Richard Osborne: Well, there's certainly ways in which our health services inadvertently or almost deliberately exclude people from actually getting the full range of services. So there's really clear guidance around that.

Tegan Taylor: Like what?

Richard Osborne: Well, making it a little bit harder for people to turn up, blaming people for not getting the full experiences from a service, or people can't really engage in full because it's not really meeting their needs. So many practitioners need to have a much better range of supports to really find out what's going on for individuals. So that will be a very useful part of it.

The report also really seeks to not blame the individual. That's a really important attitude of the health services. So you're saying at the start that even bright people have trouble in the healthcare system, that's for sure. So if we take a bottom-up approach, we'll have a much better chance of overcoming a lot of these issues.

Tegan Taylor: When patients have better health literacy, how does that affect doctors' behaviour towards them?

Richard Osborne: Well, there has been several studies showing that doctors do have perhaps a more negative attitude towards patients who appear to be from lower socio-economic status, so that makes it harder for them when there's those unconscious biases for people. But when people have a range of health literacy challenges or it's hard for them to understand or they're not strong in the local language, it makes it much harder for the practitioner. So indeed, the big solution here for improving health equity is providing a lot more supports for our practitioners and our services, to make the system responsive to people's abilities. So that's going to be a really important way forward recommended in this report.

Tegan Taylor: This is a global report; how does Australia stack up?

Richard Osborne: Australia stacks up very well because we are predominantly an English-speaking society, but then there's a huge number of people who are really struggling because of their language abilities. So Australia is doing well overall. But one of the problems is every context is different. We can't really compare one country with another because of different systems and services. But Australia is an absolute leader in health literacy research, with some of the best researchers in the world. And certainly a lot of the wisdom in this report, even though it came from 40 or 50 countries and a huge amount of work over five years, Australia had a very big input. In fact, there's three demonstration projects from Australia, out of the 16, really influenced the understanding of the development of this report.

Tegan Taylor: Well, it's great that we're taking a leadership stance, hopefully that continues. Richard, thanks for joining us.

Richard Osborne: You're welcome.

Tegan Taylor: Professor Richard Osborne is the director for the Centre of Global Health and Equity at Swinburne University.

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Health literacy is a societal responsibility-a WHO report - ABC listen

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Key determinants in someone's health are their knowledge of how to prevent disease, and to find their way through a health system. And the idea that society-not only an individual-is responsible for this 'health literacy' is central to a new World Health Organisation report.

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1. On the right hand toolbar, choose the remake button (square with arrows) to create a copy of this activity.
2. In the copy version, update the section titles to topics relevant to your unit.
3. Add more sections if required.
4. Review and amend student instructions depending on if you initially provide podcasts.
5. Delete this card before sharing the link with students.

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This short 6 minute podcast attempted to answer the question- should humans prepare a defence from an asteroid ambush. The decision-making required by NASA to determine which asteroids are worth destroying highlights the need for risk analysis in Science.

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G'day, Dr Karl here.

Normally, when you build a $300 million spacecraft, you want it to last. Now imagine the exact opposite and you've got DART - a half-tonne spacecraft, purpose-built to be destroyed.

DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. "Double Asteroid" means two asteroids, closely orbiting each other. "Redirection" means changing the path of one of those asteroids, by hitting it head-on. And "Test" means it was a test.

This DART asteroid impact was a dress rehearsal, or a dry run, to see if we could nudge an asteroid from its original path, to a slightly different one. Why? Because if a big asteroid is going to hit Earth, we want a plan.

Asteroids that hit our planet can make a real mess. Big asteroids are rare, but smaller ones are more common.

A big asteroid, like the 10-kilometre rock that helped wipe out the non-bird dinosaurs, will hit us only once every 100 million years or so.

However asteroids about a kilometre across are likely to hit us once every half-million years. Even though they're much smaller, they would probably end civilisation.

By scanning the skies over the last few decades, we have probably identified about 95% of the one-kilometre asteroids that could possibly hit us.

But much more worrying are the asteroids about 160 metres across - roughly the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

They hit our planet roughly once every 25,000 years, and we have found about 25,000 of them orbiting nearby. What's really worrying is that we have identified only about half of them - and even at 160 metres, they could destroy a state, or a small country.

Before DART, we had no proven technology that could change an asteroid's trajectory.

To properly test if we could change the path of an asteroid, we needed a pair of small asteroids orbiting each other. Hooray then, for Didymos, discovered in 1996.

Didymos means "twin". It's the name of the bigger asteroid, which is about 870 metres across.

The smaller asteroid is called Dimorphos - and it's about 160 metres across.

The two asteroids orbit their common centre of gravity at a distance of about a kilometre. They travel together in an elliptical orbit that over some two years, takes them from just 6,000,000 kilometres outside Earth's orbit, to about 160,000,000 kilometres further out in the solar system.

When you have two rocks orbiting each other, measuring changes becomes so much easier. Let me explain.

To our best ground-based telescopes, the asteroids looked like a single point. But every time one twin blocked out the light of the other, it reduced their combined apparent brightness ever so slightly.

This is how we found out the two asteroids orbited each other once every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Or at least, they used to....

The trajectory of the DART spacecraft was aimed so that it would run into the smaller, 160-meter asteroid Dimorphos head-on - not from the side, not from behind, but from directly ahead, in its path of travel.

This would slow Dimorphos down five minutes, meaning that the two asteroids would take a slightly longer 12 hours to orbit their common centre of gravity. So now our ground-based telescopes would see the brightness of the single dot of light vary every 12 hours, instead of every 11 hours and 55 minutes.

The 570 kg DART spacecraft successfully smashed into Dimorphos at about 6-and-a-half kilometres per second - releasing the energy equivalent to about three tons of TNT.

Size-wise, it was like a speeding golf cart running into the Great Pyramid.

Back in 2015, asteroid 2015TB145 zipped past us at a distance roughly equal to the space between the Earth and the Moon.

It turned out to be about 650 metres in diameter. It was close enough and big enough to be really scary. And we discovered it only three weeks before it flew past. All that protected us was dumb luck. Which is convenient, because we would have needed at least three years to do something about it.

I secretly think that 2015TB145 was the Universe's way of asking, "Hey Earthlings, how's your space program going?"

The successful DART impact means that we can now thankfully declare that our space program is going much better.

And so, in future, the human race won't be put between a rock and a hard place.

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Close encounters of the asteroid kind - ABC listen

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Earth's defence against the existential threat of extraterrestrial rocks has been bolstered. But is it really all that important for humanity to have a plan of attack for an asteroid ambush?

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