MIL-OSI Export

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milad Haghani, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow in Urban Risk and Resilience, The University of Melbourne

Most people know about car safety ratings and many take them seriously when choosing a new car.

In Australia and New Zealand, safety ratings are issued by the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), a non-regulatory, not-for-profit organisation that tests new vehicles and publishes results.

ANCAP has announced significant changes from 2026.

Here’s how the ratings have traditionally been determined, what is changing and what it all means for safety on our roads.

How car safety rating works

A majority of Australians say they wouldn’t buy a car that hasn’t achieved a five-star rating.

Manufacturers know this too. Those stars influence which features companies prioritise and what specifications they supply to different markets.

Yet unless you closely follow the car industry, you may not know much about what is actually tested.

ANCAP assigns vehicles a safety rating from zero to five stars based on a mix of crash tests, assessments of on-board safety features and the safety technologies built into the car.

Its rating system has evolved over time. Under the framework introduced in recent years, vehicles are assessed across four key pillars.

1. Adult occupant protection. This looks at how well the car structure protects the driver and passengers in the most common crashes, assessed using crash-test dummies equipped with sensors. These tests include frontal (head-on) and side impacts, pole crashes, whiplash protection and how easy it is for emergency services to access occupants after a crash.

2. Child occupant protection. This examines how well children are protected in front and side crashes, and how built-in safety features such as seatbelts and restraint systems support them.

3. Vulnerable road user protection. This considers the risk the vehicle poses to pedestrians and cyclists, and includes tests of head and leg impact on the bonnet and bumper, as well as the car’s emergency braking system.

4. Safety assist. This focuses on crash-avoidance technology such as speed-assistance systems, lane support and autonomous emergency braking.

Vehicles receive a score for each pillar as well as an overall star rating.

To reach a given star level, cars must meet minimum thresholds across all pillars. This means the overall rating is limited by the weakest area.

Buyers’ considerations

It’s worth remembering that a safety score reflects the standards in place at the time of testing.

Rating requirements are updated every three years to encourage the inclusion of newer safety features and technologies in vehicles entering the Australian and New Zealand markets.

Buyers should check when a car was tested and which model was assessed.

It’s also important to consider the number of stars is an abstract rating – it doesn’t mean all five-star cars perform equally well in every area. Some may offer stronger crash protection, while others may be better at avoiding collisions or protecting pedestrians.

For anyone choosing between several top-rated vehicles, the detailed pillar scores can therefore be more informative than the stars alone.

How the ratings are changing

ANCAP has announced significant changes to its rating system.

Instead of the current four pillars, ANCAP will organise its assessments under a “Stages of Safety” framework (a reference to pre-, during and post-crash phases): safe driving, crash avoidance, crash protection and post-crash.

Crash testing remains part of the system but it becomes just one stage rather than the central construct.

The new approach places greater emphasis on features that help prevent crashes in the first place. This includes driver-monitoring technology and how reliably these systems work in real-world conditions – for example whether emergency braking can still detect pedestrians at night or in poor weather.

It also expands its assessment of safety features inside the vehicle by analysing issues such as whether key controls are accessible without using touchscreen menus.

More weight is also given to what happens after a crash. This includes whether electric door handles remain operable, if high-voltage batteries in electric vehicles are safely isolated and whether the vehicle can automatically notify emergency services with crash data through systems such as eCall.

What does all that mean?

While ANCAP is not a regulator, its ratings strongly influence what manufacturers supply to Australia and NZ and which cars buyers choose, meaning its priorities can shape real-world safety outcomes.

The new changes are broadly a positive step.

The main risk is, in broadening the existing framework, some areas may become less important.

Vulnerable road user protection was previously a distinct pillar and there is a chance its prominence could be diluted within a more complex system.

This matters because markets where safety ratings do not heavily emphasise vulnerable user protection – such as the United States – tend to have weaker incentives for manufacturers to prioritise it.

That’s partly why pedestrian safety outcomes are so vastly different between the US and other Western countries.

In recent years, the pedestrian death rate in Australia has risen despite improved car occupant safety. So, it’s important our rating systems do not lose emphasis on the risks outside the vehicle.

This is especially relevant as newer vehicles are becoming larger and taller – design features associated with higher injury risk for pedestrians and cyclists.

If safety ratings do not continue to highlight this clearly and prominently, buyers are less likely to notice it, its weight in the overall score will also decline, and manufacturers will naturally have less incentive to address it in vehicle design.

While greater emphasis on crash avoidance is welcome, crashes involving vulnerable road users will still occur. Protection should therefore continue to be clearly visible in ratings and a key criterion.

One alternative approach might have been to retain the existing pillars and build on them – for example by adding a fifth pillar, or expanding the current framework to include “safe driving” while integrating other new elements into the existing categories.

– ref. Buying a car? Here’s what you need to know about new safety ratings – https://theconversation.com/buying-a-car-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-new-safety-ratings-276177

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/24/buying-a-car-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-new-safety-ratings-276177/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kade Paterson, Associate Professor of Musculoskeletal Health, The University of Melbourne

People with hip and knee osteoarthritis are advised to wear “appropriate footwear” to minimise their pain.

Does that mean heels are out? Does it matter if you wear runners or something a little stiffer? How about using insoles?

Our research, including our latest clinical trial published today in Annals of Internal Medicine, provides some answers.

We show that stable, more supportive shoes aren’t necessarily the best option, despite what you might have heard.

What is osteoarthritis?

Osteoarthritis is a condition that affects the tissues in and around a joint, including bone, cartilage, ligaments and muscles. It is more common in older people, and people with excess body weight. It causes joint pain and stiffness, and can lead to disability.

About 2.35 million Australians have osteoarthritis and this number is predicted to increase as the population ages and obesity rates rise.

Osteoarthritis commonly affects the hip and knee joints, making it difficult to walk. There is no cure, so self-management is important.

That includes wearing the right type of shoes.

Read more: What’s the difference between osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis?

How can shoes affect symptoms?

There are many causes of osteoarthritis, but excessive force inside the joint when someone is walking is thought to play a role. Excessive joint forces can also increase the chance of osteoarthritis worsening over time.

Shoes are our connection to the ground and can influence how forces are transmitted up the leg during every step. Some shoe features are particularly important.

Shoes with higher heels increase joint forces. For example, shoes with six-centimetre heels increase knee forces by an average 23% compared to walking barefoot.

Some shoes come with supportive features, such as insoles that support the arches. Other supportive features include being made with a stiffer material in the sole or heel.

Many people, and clinicians, think these stable and supportive shoe features are best for people with osteoarthritis.

But biomechanical research shows shoes with these supportive features actually increase knee force by up to 15% compared to shoes without them. Arch-supporting insoles also increase knee force by up to 6% when added to shoes.

So, are flatter, flexible shoes without stable supportive features – such as ballet flats – better for knee and hip osteoarthritis?

Not necessarily. We also need to look at people’s pain.

What we found

Our biomechanical research from 2017 in people with knee osteoarthritis showed flat flexible shoes reduced knee forces by an average 9% compared to stable supportive shoe styles.

This suggests flat flexible shoes could be better for osteoarthritis. To find out, we conducted two clinical trials to look at people’s pain levels.

Our new clinical trial involved 120 people with hip osteoarthritis.

They were randomised to wear different types of flat flexible shoes, such as flexible ballet flats, or different types of stable supportive shoes, such as supportive runners. People were asked to wear their shoes for at least six hours a day. After six months we measured the change in hip pain when they walked.

We found flat flexible shoes were no better than stable supportive shoes for reducing hip pain.

These findings differ to those from our 2021 clinical trial in 164 people with knee osteoarthritis. In that trial, we found wearing stable supportive shoes for six months reduced knee pain when walking by an average 63% more than wearing flat flexible shoes.

It’s unclear why findings differed between the knee and hip. But it might be because joint forces are higher in knee compared to hip osteoarthritis, and so there may be greater potential for stable supportive shoes to reduce knee forces, and therefore knee pain.

In both trials, more complications, such as foot pain, were reported by people who wore flat flexible shoes. This might be because these shoe styles provide less protection for the feet.

So which shoes should I wear?

For people with knee osteoarthritis, stable supportive shoes are likely to be more beneficial than flat flexible ones.

For people with hip osteoarthritis, neither shoe type is better than the other for improving hip pain.

But for all older people – including those with hip and knee osteoarthritis – it is sensible to avoid ill-fitting shoes, as well as shoes with high or narrow heels, due to an increased risk of falls.

For younger people with knee or hip osteoarthritis but who are not at risk of falls, it may still be advisable to avoid high heels given their potential to increase joint forces.

Who should you talk to?

If you are concerned about your hip or knee osteoarthritis, talk to your GP or other health-care provider, such as a podiatrist or physiotherapist.

Other non-surgical treatments, such as exercise, weight management, nutrition and some pain medicines can help.

– ref. These shoes are best for hip and knee arthritis, according to science – https://theconversation.com/these-shoes-are-best-for-hip-and-knee-arthritis-according-to-science-273109

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/24/these-shoes-are-best-for-hip-and-knee-arthritis-according-to-science-273109/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Pember, Assistant Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick

“Want to go again?” a choreographer asks Charli XCX at the start of the mockumentary The Moment. It’s the latest entry in the pop star’s rapidly expanding cinematic empire, propelled by the stratospheric cultural impact of her 2024 album, Brat.

He is asking if she’s ready to practise a gyrating, strobe-heavy routine one more time. But this question also gestures towards the central conceit of the film: what if “Brat summer” was pushed beyond its natural expiry date? Not to explore “the tension of staying too long”, as Charli has described it, but in a cynical attempt to further monetise this fleeting moment of pop cultural hype.

Conceived by Charli, The Moment offers a semi-fictionalised mockumentary account of the post Brat summer comedown. It positions her at the centre of several cynical attempts to extend its lifespan through questionable endorsement deals, social media posts and an ill-fated concert film. The film’s events map eerily onto the real post-Brat timeline, inviting knowing audiences to question the boundary between fiction and reality.

Charli’s uncertain response to the choreographer’s question − “Err … yeah?” – from the floor of her rehearsal space (in that starriest of destinations, Dagenham) crystallises the film’s knowing subversion of dominant trends in the female-oriented pop star documentary.

As cultural theorist Annelot Prins has outlined in a paper, pop star documentaries like Lady Gaga’s Five Foot Two (2017), Kesha’s Rainbow (2020) and Taylor’s Swift’s Miss Americana (2020) tend to present “empowering narratives of talented and hardworking women who used to be constrained by different factors but overcame them with resilience […] and are now self-determined agents”.

This approach to female celebrity has continued in a recent glut of arena concert films released by stars including Swift, Beyoncé and Olivia Rodrigo. These arena spectaculars combine polished tour footage with backstage glimpses into the creative process. It’s a combination of intimacy and polish engineered to confirm their authentic talent in the face of the relentless commercial demands of the pop world.

Read more: A swift history of the concert film, from The Last Waltz to the Eras Tour

The “resilient pop documentary” is part of a wider trend identified by feminist media scholars: representations of celebrity women overcoming setbacks such as sexual assault (Kesha), addiction (Demi Lovato) or illness (Lady Gaga).

Feminist sociologist Angela McRobbie’s work shows how these images of “resilient” female celebrities block collective resistance to misogyny, racism and classism, by making women believe they can overcome oppression through “self-management and care”.

This is a pattern that these documentaries repeat with their emphasis on the creative survival of the damaged female pop star. The Moment invokes and satirises these narrative templates by showing Charli’s fictionalised self’s inability to control the runaway momentum of her own stardom.

Resilience to reflexivity

While The Moment has been positioned as Charli’s pivot from pop to the silver screen, it extends the subversions of her oft-forgotten first cinematic venture: 2022’s Charli XCX: Alone Together.

Inverting The Moment’s narrative structure, Alone Together opens with Charli’s preparations for her first arena tour, charting the effects of its abrupt cancellation in the wake of COVID. The remainder of the film depicts Charli’s production of her fourth studio album over the course of a whirlwind six-weeks of the first lockdown.

This ambitious undertaking could have provided the perfect opportunity to emphasise Charli’s resilience, but Alone Together takes a difference tack. It focuses on the emotional toll the album’s production took on Charli and emphasises the digital spaces of care and community that enabled her and her fans to survive the pandemic.

While The Moment and Alone Together approach subversion differently, both knowingly undermine the resilience typically celebrated in pop star documentaries, exposing the endless performance of “overcoming” on which female pop stardom relies. The ending of Alone Together positions Charli as the unmoved consumer of the final album. A post-credit sequence shows her immediately at another loose end. “I just feel a bit, like, bored … What am I going to do now?” she says to camera, laughing.

The Moment’s closing scenes echo Alone Together’s feeling of anti-climax by ending with the trailer for the Brat concert film and its invitation to “be a 365 Party Girl from the comfort of your own home”. Hilariously, this is soundtracked by the Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony – an overplayed Britpop anthem that confirms the fictional XCX’s fall from cool in pursuit of mass appeal.

The film’s quasi-documentary style compounds its challenge to the forms of authenticity upon which resilient pop stardom relies. In a voice note to her team, Charli explains that she is completing the film to “kill Brat” and free herself to pursue other creative endeavours. Here, the film uses the intimate framing used to convey authentic agency in the conventional pop documentary. This serves to blur the paper-thin line between the “real” post-Brat hype engineered by Charli and the trite, opportunistic spectacle she embraces in The Moment.

That we are left with no clear sense of what the difference truly is signals that, far from being a “shallow” take on pop celebrity, The Moment turns the conventions of the pop star documentary against themselves. In doing so, the film cleverly exposes the artificiality inherent in even the most seemingly authentic of pop performances.

Taken together, these two films cement Charli XCX’s status as our best chronicler of contemporary female pop stardom and the role of her film texts in exposing the artifice at play in supposedly “authentic” resilient pop cultural performance.

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– ref. The Moment: Charli XCX is the ultimate chronicler of contemporary pop stardom – https://theconversation.com/the-moment-charli-xcx-is-the-ultimate-chronicler-of-contemporary-pop-stardom-276681

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/24/the-moment-charli-xcx-is-the-ultimate-chronicler-of-contemporary-pop-stardom-276681/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Georgina Sauzier, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Chemistry, Curtin University

3D-printed guns are a growing threat to public safety. The blueprints used to make these firearms can be found online, making them easily accessible. With a relatively cheap 3D printer and a quick web search, anyone could print their own unlicensed gun.

These guns have been called “untraceable”. Research is now putting this claim to the test.

Our new study, published in the journal Forensic Chemistry, has found some filaments – the materials used in 3D printers – have distinct chemical profiles that could help link seized 3D-printed guns to their source.

The threat of ‘ghost guns’

Last October, an Australian Border Force operation uncovered 281 3D-printed firearms or components.

3D-printed components can be combined with common hardware store parts to create “hybrid” weapons, increasing their strength and durability. Both fully 3D-printed and hybrid 3D-printed guns can be just as lethal as factory-made firearms.

Recent events have led to calls for retailers to help stem the flow of 3D-printed guns. Suggestions have included placing blocking technology on 3D printers or flagging the purchase of items that could be used to make hybrid firearms.

But what can be done about the weapons already circulating in the community?

3D-printed guns have earned the nickname of “ghost guns”, as they are difficult to trace through standard firearms analysis. With law enforcement struggling to trace the source of seized ghost guns, it falls to researchers to find an alternative solution.

Chemical analysis of the filaments used to print these weapons may be the ticket to ending their “untraceable” reputation.

What are 3D-printing filaments?

3D-printing filaments are made up of various polymers, or plastics.

The main polymer used in at-home 3D printing is polylactic acid or PLA, a bioplastic used to make compostable waste bags. Other common filaments are those made from ABS – the main material used to make LEGO bricks due to its toughness – and PETG, a flexible polymer found in sports water bottles.

Some specialist filaments are made by combining different polymers. Many also have additives – extra ingredients to improve toughness, flexibility or appearance.

As 3D-printing filaments are usually patented to protect their individual formulations, additives and other minor ingredients are typically not listed on the product packaging. It is these ingredients that could hold the key to tracing ghost guns.

The mix of ingredients used in 3D-printing filaments gives each type of filament a particular chemical signature. We can identify these signatures using a method called infrared spectroscopy, which records how the filament absorbs infrared light. This pattern of absorbance – an infrared profile – changes based on what molecules are present in the filament.

What we found

In our research, conducted in collaboration with ChemCentre – a statutory forensic laboratory in Western Australia – we analysed more than 60 filaments sourced from the Australian retail market. We discovered that many of these filaments could be distinguished using their infrared profile, despite looking identical to the eye.

Filaments made of PLA, ABS and PETG can be easily set apart due to large differences in the chemical make-up of each polymer.

However, we were also able to separate some filaments made of the same polymer, due to minor additives creating differences in their infrared profile.

In one filament for example, we found signs of a compatibiliser – an additive that helps two polymers to mix together. This ingredient was not found in other filaments of the same base polymer, meaning it could be a distinct part of the brand’s formulation. It also suggests this filament contained two different polymers, despite only one being listed on the packaging.

These findings highlight why chemical analysis of filaments is useful, despite them being a widely available consumer product.

Tracing the seemingly untraceable

Being able to distinguish or identify different 3D-printing filaments could allow forensic investigators to create links between a seized gun and seized filament, or guns seized from different cases.

These links can help lead law enforcement to the suppliers of these guns, ultimately disrupting supply chains and future production.

While our research shows some 3D-printing filaments could be distinguished, this was not the case for all filaments. We are now conducting further research using more analytical techniques that will provide complementary information, such as the elements contained within the filaments.

Combining different techniques will allow us to complete a full chemical picture of each filament. We hope this information will help us to make links between a seized 3D-printed firearm, the filament it was printed from, and the 3D-printer used to print it.

By tracing the chemical fingerprint of 3D-printed guns, criminals can no longer feel safe under their “untraceable” veil.

– ref. 3D-printed ‘ghost guns’ are not as untraceable as criminals think – new study – https://theconversation.com/3d-printed-ghost-guns-are-not-as-untraceable-as-criminals-think-new-study-275566

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/24/3d-printed-ghost-guns-are-not-as-untraceable-as-criminals-think-new-study-275566/

Polynesian Panther Party Legacy Trust

The Polynesian Panthers met Roger Fowler in the early 1970s when Ponsonby was home to the largest urban Pacific population in Aotearoa.

He helped establish the Ponsonby People’s Union for Survival and ran several much needed community focused programmes like a food co-op, tenant’s rights advice and support.

He was a gifted community organiser deeply committed to social justice. He had a wide field of vision enabling him to see injustice in Aotearoa and injustice overseas are interconnected.

He brought so much light into the world and into the lives of many many people who came within his orbit locally and globally including ours.

He lived his life so others could have theirs.

Manuia lou malaga Roger. Our sincere condolences and aroha to Lyn and the Fowler whanau.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/24/roger-fowlers-legacy-and-the-polynesian-panthers-connection/