MIL-OSI Export

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Spear, Professor of Anatomy, University of Bristol

Many households will recognise this familiar exchange. One person insists an object simply isn’t there: impossible to find despite what they describe as a thorough and highly competent search. Another walks in, glances briefly at the same spot and points to it almost immediately.

“It’s right under your nose!”

This frustrating (for both sides) situation reflects something real about how the brain works. Finding objects in everyday environments relies on a process called visual search, and our brains are surprisingly imperfect at it. Even when something is directly in front of us, the brain can fail to register its presence. In other words, we are looking without seeing.

At first glance, searching for something seems simple. You scan a surface – a kitchen counter, a desk, the “everything” drawer – until the missing item appears.

But the brain cannot analyse every object in a scene simultaneously. Instead, it relies on attention, selecting certain features while filtering out the rest.

Psychologists often describe attention as a kind of spotlight sweeping across the visual field. Wherever that spotlight lands, information is processed in detail. Everything outside it receives far less scrutiny.

There is a practical anatomical reason the brain must constantly shift its gaze. The centre of the retina – the fovea – provides our sharpest vision. But it covers only a tiny part of the visual field, roughly the size of your thumbnail held at arm’s length. To inspect a scene properly, our eyes must repeatedly jump so that different parts of the environment fall onto this small, high-resolution patch.

Those jumps are called saccades, and they happen constantly. Even when you think you are staring steadily at something, your eyes are quietly darting from point to point.

Most of the time, this system works remarkably well. It allows us to navigate visually complex environments without becoming overwhelmed by information.

Looking without seeing

Seeing, it turns out, is not just about what reaches the eyes. It is also about what the brain expects to find. This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness.

One of the most famous demonstrations of this involves a video in which participants watch a group of people passing a basketball and are asked to count the number of passes. While viewers concentrate on the task, a person in a gorilla suit strolls casually through the scene.

Roughly half the viewers never notice the gorilla at all.

The gorilla is not hidden. It walks directly across the centre of the screen. But the brain, focused on counting basketball passes, simply fails to register it.

If you have ever searched a kitchen counter for your keys only to have someone else pick them up instantly, you have experienced the same phenomenon.

Once visual information reaches the brain, it is processed along different pathways. One of these – often called the dorsal stream – runs toward the parietal lobe of the brain, an area that plays a crucial role in spatial awareness and directing attention. This helps the brain determine where objects are in space. This system plays a crucial role in guiding attention during visual search.

Do men and women search differently?

In describing this familiar household moment, I avoided invoking a particular stereotype. The one where it is my husband who cannot find the object sitting directly in front of him.

Studies of visual search tasks have found small differences in how men and women scan complex scenes. On average, women tend to perform slightly better at locating objects in cluttered environments, while men often perform better on tasks involving large-scale spatial navigation or mentally rotating objects in three dimensions.

The reasons for this are still debated, but part of the answer may lie in how we move our eyes while searching.

Visual search relies on shifting our gaze from one point to another – the previously mentioned “saccades”. Eye-tracking studies show that some people tend to scan a scene methodically, moving their gaze in a more systematic pattern. Others make larger jumps across the visual field.

A systematic scan is more likely to cover every part of a cluttered surface, increasing the chances of spotting something small, such as a pair of keys or the elusive kitchen scissors. Larger jumps, by contrast, can skip over areas entirely, leaving an object sitting in plain sight but never quite falling under the brain’s attentional spotlight.

Some evolutionary psychologists have suggested these tendencies may have deep historical roots in hunter-gatherer societies. However, there is limited evidence for this. Experience, familiarity with an environment, and simple differences in attention probably matter far more than gender alone.

Ultimately, visual search is less like scanning a photograph and more like running a prediction algorithm. The brain constantly guesses where something is likely to be and directs attention accordingly.

Most of the time those predictions are correct. Occasionally, they are not, and an object sitting in plain sight fails to match the brain’s expectations.

Which means the next time someone insists they have looked everywhere, they may well be telling the truth. They just haven’t looked in quite the right way.

– ref. It’s right under your nose – why some people can’t find things in plain sight – https://theconversation.com/its-right-under-your-nose-why-some-people-cant-find-things-in-plain-sight-277845

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/14/its-right-under-your-nose-why-some-people-cant-find-things-in-plain-sight-277845/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Ziegler, Collection Manager, Vertebrate Palaeontology, Museums Victoria Research Institute

Those who venture into Foul Air Cave, below Buchan township in eastern Victoria, quickly realise how it got its ominous name. In its deepest chambers, bacteria consume oxygen and excrete organic gases to produce a toxic stench.

The cave is also a natural pitfall trap. Its water-worn entrance offers no escape to any creature unlucky enough to tumble in. The smell of death clings to your nostrils as you navigate vertiginous drops and calf-deep, sucking mud.

Tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago during the Pleistocene Epoch, Foul Air Cave accumulated remains of diverse, often-giant mammals known collectively as Australia’s megafauna.

One of these mammals was the giant echidna Megalibgwilia owenii, as we report in a new paper published today in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology. We recognised this extinct monotreme, twice the size of Australian echidnas today, from a newly identified fossil collected almost 120 years ago.

And the specimen is enough to verify for the first time that this species once roamed Ice Age Victoria, spanning a 1,000 kilometre gap in its previously known distribution.

Scores of ancient bones

The first scientific expeditions to Foul Air Cave were made in 1906–7 by Frank Palmer Spry who worked for what’s now called Museums Victoria, local caves curator Francis Moon, and geologist Thomas Sergeant Hall.

They were among the first to enter the cave. They encountered scores of fossil bones loosely buried in damp earth, including powerful, clawed mega-marsupial palorchestids and predatory marsupial “lions”.

They deposited their finds in the state collection, now housed at Melbourne Museum.

Over a century later, the fossils of Foul Air Cave have granted us a further insight into deep time.

A robust creature

Previously described fossils of Megalibgwilia owenii derive from a handful of sites in Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales. They’re sparse, too: one well-preserved skeleton, four skulls of varying completeness, and a range of isolated bones.

Together, they illustrate a robust mammal a metre long and weighing in at 15 kilograms – roughly as big as a four-year-old child.

The meaning of its name is straightforward. Mega-libgwil-ia joins the ancient Greek prefix “mega-”, meaning large or mighty, with “libgwil”, the name for the echidna in the language of the Wemba Wemba people of northern Victoria and south-eastern NSW.

We can combine this with the species epithet owenii (acknowledging prolific 19th century anatomist Sir Richard Owen) to coin a common name: “Owen’s giant echidna”.

Using its fossil remains as a guide, Owen’s giant echidna most resembled the long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus), which today occupies the wet tropical cloud forests of New Guinea. Its broad limbs and shoulders bore prominent bony scars indicating it was more heavily muscled than other monotremes. It also had a wide, long and straight untoothed beak, with bony ridges across its palate.

This suite of differences implies Megalibgwilia was adapted to a different lifestyle than its modern relatives. One can imagine it tearing to pieces fallen logs or digging hard soils to seek out moth and beetle larvae, rather than feeding on termites or earthworms.

A fossil awaits its finder

Our new fossil came to light during the systematic documentation and maintenance of thousands of fossil bones, teeth, and skeletons preserved by Museums Victoria.

But even this obscure seven centimetre fragment of skull was sufficient to identify the unique proportions of M. owenii – especially when we examined material in museum collections across Australia.

As well as identifying the fossil, we also researched its connection to Foul Air Cave by drawing on collection notes, hand-drawn maps, diaries and public newspaper archives.

These historical ephemera established Spry as the fossil’s collector. And they inspired a return to the cave in his footsteps.

Ready for re-examination

Spry and Moon wore their everyday outfits of breeches, jacket and waistcoat for their fossicking. They lit their path with candles or kerosene lamps, and entrusted their life to stiff, heavy nautical rope. The trained geologist Hall never ventured into the cave himself. Under those conditions, who would judge him?

By comparison, modern caving is a technical affair. Brilliant headlamps illuminate entire caverns. Heavy-duty nylon oversuits protect from skin-shredding rocky surfaces. And the climbing ropes and devices are strong enough to suspend a small car.

The collaboration between Spry, Moon and Hall combined an informed perspective, fluent local knowledge, and technical know-how to succeed. Despite obvious advances in technology and disciplinary knowledge, our success is rooted in the same foundation as theirs – curiosity and community spirit.

During my own investigations at Buchan, families spanning generations have shared local history and acted as subterranean guides. Parks Victoria rangers have facilitated and overseen work on public reserves. Recreational cavers from the Victorian Speleological Association have been a wellspring of enthusiastic support.

The long residence of this specimen in Victoria’s state collection epitomises how, thanks to past work, palaeontological discoveries arise from “collection-based” fieldwork as often as investigations outdoors.

And if one illuminating specimen can lie unnoticed across a century, why not others?

Sparse fossil bones of large, slender echidnas, seemingly distinct from Megalibgwilia owenii, have been noted from Victoria and South Australia. These warrant re-examination to test if Owen’s giant echidna adapted to different conditions over space or time, or if another unknown species co-occupied the landscape.

The latter option is intriguing in light of the proposition that Zaglossus may even have occupied northern Australia until as late as the 20th century.

If true, then surely one of its ancestors awaits recognition – either among the landscape or preserved carefully among the nation’s public scientific assets.

– ref. An extinct echidna the size of a small child once roamed Victoria, new fossil shows – https://theconversation.com/an-extinct-echidna-the-size-of-a-small-child-once-roamed-victoria-new-fossil-shows-279860

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/14/an-extinct-echidna-the-size-of-a-small-child-once-roamed-victoria-new-fossil-shows-279860/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leon Goldsmith, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Middle East and Comparative Politics, University of Otago

After the breakdown of ceasefire talks between the United States and Iran, President Donald Trump has now ordered a blockade of the pivotal Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.

It’s just the latest and most combustible phase of a broader regional conflict with global impacts and long, complex roots.

But while there has been copious analysis of this “coronary artery” of global oil and gas trade, much less attention has been paid to the history and sociopolitical fabric of the Hormuz region itself.

This is something of a blind spot, because understanding the deeper cultural dynamics of the strait and its surrounds can tell us something of what might now lie ahead.

Indeed, just as the 1956 Suez Crisis marked the eclipse of the old British Empire, the Hormuz crisis of 2026 may be remembered as a turning point for the US-led global order.

Origins of the oil monarchies

Great powers have long sought to control the Strait of Hormuz. Following the expulsion of the Portuguese in the early 17th century, imperial Britain evolved into the chief external power in the region over the next three-and-a-half centuries.

For much of this Pax Britannica commercial shipping through the strait – essential to links with Britain’s imperial territories in South Asia – faced attacks from local raiders in swift dhows that would emerge and quickly disappear into the complex and often foggy coastlines.

Not fully understanding the human and physical geography of the area, the British set out to closely map the coasts and populations. Based on this, Britain switched to co-opting certain tribes and sheikhs with financial incentives.

It also coordinated closely with the powerful sultan of Oman, who presided over an empire extending from the Persian Gulf to Zanzibar in east Africa, to tame the unruly populations of the Hormuz coastline.

This set the pattern of enriching local tribal rulers in the eastern Arabian peninsula that transformed into the contemporary oil monarchies in the 20th century.

The same tribes and clans that Britain privileged in the 19th century remain the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait (Saudi Arabia evolved more independently). The result was long-term secure passage for commercial oil and gas shipping through Hormuz.

When the US inherited security responsibility for the Persian Gulf from the British after 1971, by which time eastern Arabian states were granted formal independence, it focused on these existing ruling families. Other facets of the region’s complex human geography were neglected.

In parallel, local rulers on both sides of the Gulf constructed narrow nationalisms based on Arab Sunni Islamic (apart from Oman, which is partly Ibadi) and Persian Shi’a Islamic identities. The combined effect was an illusion of political and cultural homogeneity.

Despite this, highly diverse communities continue to live along both coasts. The northern coast of the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz is home to significant ethnic Arab and Baluchi communities, both of which have long had testy relations with the Persian-dominant Iranian state (as well as with Pakistan).

Even less well known are the populations of the southern coastlines of Hormuz, including Oman’s governorate of Musandam at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula jutting into the Gulf, forming the Strait of Hormuz.

Only directly reachable from the Omani mainland by ferry, it contains a complex archipelago of islands and precipitous fiords and is surrounded by the UAE to the south and west.

Some of the indigenous population speak a unique language called Kumzari, with Arabic and Persian elements. The island communities have lived for centuries, virtually unknown, in a deeply symbiotic relationship with the sea.

For example, Kumzaris’ primary reference for direction is not north, south, east or west, but simply upward (bāla) and downward (zērin) – as a fisherman would perceive the depths of the sea relative to the mountains.

When I visited in 2019, I noted how many Musandam residents seemed relatively uncommitted to their Omani nationality. Many even wore the Emirati dish dasha – the traditional white robes that mark out the separate nationalities of the Gulf states.

This explains the special treatment Musandam residents receive, including social welfare assistance not available in other governorates, as a means of keeping the population loyal to Muscat, the capital of Oman.

Local forces, global tensions

All of this has potential implications for the current crisis.

On one hand, the ideological legitimacy of the Iranian state has increasingly been hollowed out in the face of internal unrest and external attacks by Israel and now the US.

Power in Tehran has been whittled down to a narrow clique within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. This weakening of state institutions opens the potential for sub-national identities, including those communities adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz, to crystallise and mobilise in the vacuum.

On the other hand, Oman is increasingly at odds with the UAE over Iran and the war. While the UAE is hawkish towards Tehran, Oman – long the Gulf’s most trusted neutral broker – has been implicated with Iran in a plan to establish a toll system for the Strait of Hormuz. Oman has denied this strenuously.

Ultimately, Oman’s control of the Musandam peninsula and its closeness to Iran create an uncomfortable tension with Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital.

The potential for the UAE to exploit local identity politics to try and bring the strategic Musandam peninsula under its own control is very real. Whether the US and other Gulf states would stand in the way is not clear.

Omani sensitivity to this possibility is extreme. At a university seminar I attended in Muscat in 2019, a map of the peninsula that failed to designate Musandam as part of Oman sparked a furious response from some in the audience.

More broadly, the fate of the Strait of Hormuz is emblematic of shifting world orders.

In 1956, Britain misread rising grassroots Arab nationalism and a changing world order as it sought to preserve its imperial lifelines through the Suez Canal. The risk for the US now is that it is making similar mistakes in the Strait of Hormuz, failing to adapt to local dynamics as the world changes again.

– ref. Strait of Hormuz blockade: the complex regional realities the US ignores at its peril – https://theconversation.com/strait-of-hormuz-blockade-the-complex-regional-realities-the-us-ignores-at-its-peril-280427

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/14/strait-of-hormuz-blockade-the-complex-regional-realities-the-us-ignores-at-its-peril-280427/

Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: Ship traffic has halted again in the Strait of Hormuz after President Trump ordered the US military to begin a naval blockade of all Iranian ports and coastal areas starting on Monday.

Iran denounced Trump’s move as an illegal act amounting to “piracy”. Iran has threatened to strike Gulf ports in retaliation.

Trump ordered the blockade after the US and Iran failed to reach a deal to end the war following 21 hours of talks in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The negotiations marked the highest-level talks between the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. US Vice-President JD Vance headed the U.S. delegation, which included US envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Iranian negotiators had flown to Pakistan on a plane they called “Minab 168” as a tribute to the 168 people killed in a US missile strike on an elementary school in the city of Minab on February 28. The plane carried images of the dead schoolchildren, along with blood-stained school bags recovered beneath the rubble.

Global oil prices jumped after Trump announced the blockade.

We’re joined now by Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the author of several books, most recently, Oil Crisis in Iran: From Nationalism to Coup d’État. His forthcoming book is 1979: An Inevitable Revolution.

So, your response to what transpired in Pakistan, the deal that was not reached between Iran and the United States, and what this means, Professor?

[embedded content]
Trump orders naval blockade of Iran            Video: Democracy Now!

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I think both sides actually presented, basically, ultimate demands which the other side couldn’t accept, so it was a false start. But the implications of the failure is going to be actually quite drastic on the United States, because Trump’s main concern has been to actually put a limit, a lid, on the oil prices going up, and they’ve already jumped from $88 a barrel to over $100. They’re going to increase more with the present crisis, with the embargo on the Strait of Hormuz.

And as the crisis escalates, I think the US will start bombing Iranian oil installations. Iran will retaliate by bombing the Gulf’s oil installations, gas installations. The oil prices then could really zoom up.

Some people expect it to reach $200 a barrel. In that case, you know, it will have long-term implications for Wall Street and the whole American economy, not to mention the world economy. So, things that Trump has tried to avoid, he has got, actually, himself into the major crisis, economic crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: You have Robert Malley, who had previously been involved with talks with Iran, saying, “Twenty-one hours was 20 hours too many if the goal was to reiterate a demand Iran had already rejected. It was many hours too few if the goal was to negotiate.” Your response?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He’s exactly right. And I think, I mean, what Iran sees as the present crisis is an existential one, because although the talk has been regime change, the Israeli policy, clearly, in the last 10 years has been more than regime change. It’s basically been the destruction of the Iranian state, Iranian nation. So Iran sees this as an existential threat.

There was a speech that Trump made when he launched the attack on Iran a couple of weeks ago. It was actually quite an interesting speech. He talked about various ethnic minorities being oppressed in Iran, and they were dying to be liberated from Iranian control. And he listed obvious ethnic groups, but then there was one ethnic group that, really, I’d never heard of.

So I scratched my head. What is this group? And I did what most people do: You google. And lo and behold, this ethnic group actually exists in the other side of the Caucasus Mountains in Dagestan.

So you wonder what reason they had for putting this ethnic group that doesn’t exist in Iran as one of the ethnic groups, unless there’s some sinister idea the Israelis have of a civil war in Iran, where they will recruit, actually, mercenaries from the other side of the Caucasus to bring into Iran.

Of course, this sounds far-fetched, but this is what actually happened in Syria. You had a lot of Chechens actually brought in to fight against Assad. So, the Israelis may be thinking in those terms of actually a long civil war in Iran, where they would be bringing in mercenaries from outside. So, for this reason, I think Iran sees this as a real, serious, existential war. It’s not just a question of a minor sort of fine tuning of relations with the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve written about oil in Iran a great deal. Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, tweeted on Sunday, “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called ‘blockade’, soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4-$5 [per gallon] gas.”

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the price could go up to $200 a barrel, even more than that, if, basically, the Gulf oil — it’s not just Iranian oil, but the whole Gulf oil and gas — is actually cut off from the world market.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what Iran wants right now and what the US wants. Ten o’clock am — we’re broadcasting right before that — Eastern time is when the US Navy blockades, apparently, the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

What exactly does this mean? How will the Gulf nations be affected? How will Iran be affected? Because it both exports oil, but, of course, it needs oil and makes a great deal of its own oil.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, I mean, it won’t break Iran, because it has — Iran has other ways of actually exporting oil. It’ll obviously be a hardship, but it’ll be a much worse hardship on the Gulf states, if Iran actually dismantles their oil installations.

And that affects directly United States economy, because so much of Gulf oil money, gas money actually goes into high-tech United States. And much of the American, basically, modern technology is funded by subsidies from the various Gulf states. So it would have drastic repercussions on US economy.

AMY GOODMAN: What does Trump want? His latest, and what Vance said — right? Vance leaves the Hungarian prime minister, campaigning for him, Orbán, who was soundly defeated, and then goes to Islamabad to lead this negotiation. He says it’s all about nuclear weapons. Vance said, “The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them [to quickly] achieve a nuclear weapon.” Your response?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Exactly. I mean, that’s exactly what the Obama agreement was.

AMY GOODMAN: That Trump pulled out of.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes, which Trump pulled out of. But if you look at that agreement, basically, it said Iran had the right to enrich, but it had to be supervised to make sure it couldn’t enrich to the level of nuclear weapons.

So, Netanyahu cries it was vague agreement. In fact, it was very precise. Iran could enrich to 3.67 percent of uranium. That’s as precise as you can get. It was limited to 200 grams of enriched uranium. And also, it was — everything was supervised.

There were 140 international monitors, including American monitors. So, this was an incredibly tight procedure to make sure that Iran would actually fulfill its promise not to go into nuclear weapons.

When Trump pulled out of that, he basically unwound the whole system. And the best he can get is going back to that. So, demand that Iran should have no nuclear enrichment is a nonstarter. The best he could get is to go back, permit Iran to have enrichment, but with monitoring that it would not be weapon enrichment.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute. In a call with the Russian President Putin, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said a deal is, “not out of reach.” So, if you can talk about whether — where you see this all headed?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, there are people in Iran in the — basically, in the National Security Council, including Pezeshkian, who think that they can make a deal with the United States. And they’ve been there a long time.

But there are also people now, I think, hardliners, who are stronger now than before the war, who are arguing that you can’t make a deal with Trump. Even if Trump makes a deal, he could, the following week, decide he’s going to pull out. So it’s a nonstarter, from their point of view, unless US can actually make full commitments. And I don’t see how they can do that, because Trump is basically untrustworthy.

So, from their point of view, I think the hardliners in Iran could argue, persuasively, the more the pressure they have, the more the prices are going to go up; the more it goes up, sooner or later, the patient will have a heart attack or a stroke. So they have an upper hand at the moment.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/14/iran-threatens-retaliation-over-gulf-piracy-in-trumps-naval-blockade/