When you think of outer space, you’re likely picturing stars, planets and moons. But much of space is filled with clouds of gas, plasma and stardust – known as interstellar clouds.

In the local parts of our galaxy alone there’s a complex of roughly 15 individual interstellar clouds. The Solar System is currently traversing one of them, aptly named the Local Interstellar Cloud. The origin and history of these clouds are believed to be tightly connected to the birth and death of stars. But we can see their imprints right here on Earth, in a place you might not expect – Antarctic ice.

My colleagues and I have been studying stardust trapped in old Antarctic snow and ice to trace the history of our solar neighbourhood, including the Solar System itself.

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, we found a subtle clue that reveals our Solar System’s movement through the local interstellar environment over the past 80,000 years.

Looking down to see the sky

Astronomy usually looks outward. Telescopes collect light from distant stars and galaxies, allowing us to observe events across vast stretches of space and time. From these observations, we infer how stars live and die, how elements are formed, and how the universe evolves.

Our approach turns that idea on its head.

Instead of observing the light coming to us, we study the debris of exploding stars right here on Earth. As cosmic furnaces, stars forge many elements in their cores, from carbon and oxygen to calcium and iron. This includes rare isotopes (variants of chemical elements) such as iron-60.

When massive stars explode into supernovae at the end of their life, these elements are ejected into space and become interstellar dust.

Tiny grains of this dust then drift through the galaxy and occasionally find their way to Earth’s surface. Radioactive iron-60, a fingerprint of stellar explosions, is embedded within these grains. By searching for these atoms in geological archives on Earth, we can probe astrophysical events like supernovae long after their light has faded.

This is why Antarctica is so valuable. Its snow accumulates slowly and remains largely undisturbed, forming a layered record that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Each layer captures a snapshot of the material that was present in our cosmic neighbourhood at the time.

Finding stardust in Antarctic ice

When we studied 500kg of recent snow in Antarctica, we unexpectedly found this rare radioactive isotope. Where did it come from? There was no recent near-Earth supernova.

But our solar neighbourhood is filled with 15 clouds, with the Solar System currently traversing at least one of them. Is the stardust waiting in the clouds to be picked up by Earth? If yes, then the amount of stardust Earth collects should be related to their structure: the denser the clouds, the more iron-60 they contain. This was our educated guess in 2019.

Soon, other explanations were brought forward. Millions of years ago Earth received large showers of iron-60 from massive supernovae. Is the iron-60 in Antarctic snow the last remnant or an echo of this signal? A rain that became a drizzle?

To find out, we analysed a 300kg section of Antarctic ice, dating from 40,000 to 80,000 years ago. The process is painstaking. The ice needs to be melted and chemically treated to isolate tiny amounts of iron, including the iron-60 from the stardust.

Then, using the sensitive atom counting technique of accelerator mass spectrometry at the Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility at Australian National University, we counted individual atoms of iron-60.

The expectation was straightforward: based on previous measurements from surface snow of Antarctica and several thousand-year-old ocean sediments, we anticipated a certain steady level of iron-60 deposition.

Instead, we found less. Not zero, but noticeably lower than expected.

This result suggests that less interstellar dust was reaching Earth during that period. This is a remarkable change on a comparatively short astrophysical timescale and does not fit the long timescales of the iron-60 deposits that landed here millions of years ago. Instead, we needed to look for a smaller, more local source for the isotope.

A fitting story

Naturally, astronomers are also quite interested in the clouds around the Solar System. Last year, a study reconstructing the history of the clouds arrived at the conclusion that they most likely originated in a stellar explosion. Furthermore, they found the Solar System has been traversing the Local Interstellar Cloud from sometime between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.

If that’s correct, we would expect that the amount of iron-60 collected on Earth should have changed sometime in the same time period – between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.

This is exactly what our results showed in Antarctica.

The story doesn’t fit perfectly, though. If these clouds did originate directly from an exploding star, we would expect way more iron-60 than we actually see in Antarctic ice.

Nevertheless, these clouds are imprinted in Earth’s geological record. If we look deeper and analyse even older ice, we might soon unravel the mystery of these local interstellar clouds, revealing their full history and uncertain origins.

Dominik Koll receives funding from the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE).

In late April, Amal Khalil, a 43-year-old Lebanese journalist, was killed in a double-tap Israeli strike in southern Lebanon. When rescue teams tried to reach her and another injured journalist, they reportedly also came under fire.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said Israel’s “deliberate and consistent targeting of journalists” was “aimed at concealing the truth of its aggressive acts against Lebanon”, despite a ceasefire that had been agreed to by Israel days earlier.

Both Aoun and Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam declared they would pursue international accountability for her death. Khalil was the ninth journalist to be killed in Lebanon so far this year. Israel says the incident is under review.

The incident had parallels to the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza in March 2024. She and her family were fired on by Israeli forces while trying to evacuate Gaza City by car. Hind survived the initial attack, but remained trapped for hours, on the phone with Palestinian Red Crescent workers trying to reach her.

Even after following an approved route, the two medics sent to rescue Hind in a clearly marked ambulance were killed, as was Hind herself. A subsequent investigation by Forensic Architecture found 355 bullet holes in the car carrying her and her family.

These are not isolated incidents. This is a clear pattern across war zones in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and Lebanon. Militaries using drones and AI-assisted weapons systems – marketed for their precision – are changing the face of war and driving increasing numbers of civilian deaths.

These growing attacks on civilians, journalists and humanitarian personnel are leading many to fear a new normal setting in: war without rules.

Performative adherence to law

At a Chatham House event in London last month, UN Humanitarian Chief Tom Fletcher spoke plainly: “1,000 dead humanitarians in three years – when did that become normal?”

Fletcher identified the absence of legal accountability as an enabler of escalating attacks on aid workers.

Part of this is the performative adherence to international humanitarian law – often repeated in political statements and media coverage – as militaries simultaneously carve out exceptions for the use of force.

For example, Israel has continued to issue evacuation orders for residents of southern Lebanon in recent weeks. It has cited its compliance with international humanitarian law, while also expanding its control over territory there.

When evacuation orders primarily serve to shift populations, rather than protect them, it is a violation of the rules of war.

Self-assessments of legal compliance have also enabled systematic attacks on civilian infrastructure in Lebanon to continue, such as healthcare and food and water systems. Some 1.2 million people now facing crisis levels of food insecurity.

Ceasefires, too, have become performative. Experts argue they are merely serving to divert public attention from Israel’s broader goals in both Gaza and Lebanon.

Six months on, for instance, the Gaza ceasefire is failing to meet its stated objectives. There is no peace or safety for residents. More than 800 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire came into effect and 60% of people have lost their homes. Humanitarian aid continues to be obstructed, while children suffer from acute malnutrition.

The ‘Gaza playbook’

Last month, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly threatened to make Dahiyeh, a suburb of southern Beirut, look like Khan Younis in Gaza.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has also said all “houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed, in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza”.

This is precisely what is happening now, despite the ceasefire. Israel created a “buffer zone” in Gaza where it has expanded territorial control, and the same thing is taking place in southern Lebanon.

There were countless warnings, including from the UN secretary-general, that insufficient action over Gaza would have consequences – not only for Palestinian civilians and international law, but wider peace and security.

What can be done?

Now is the time for more principled confrontation from political leaders and concerned states to clearly call out performative adherence to international law and ceasefires.

The normalisation of Israel’s “Gaza playbook” strategies in Lebanon, without sustained outside political pressure, will only continue to escalate the threats to civilians and wider international peace and security.

Middle powers have important roles to play, too. Practically speaking, states can use what’s called “universal jurisdiction” to bring domestic legal action against Israeli leaders and individuals accused of crimes. This could include legal action for the targeting of aid workers and journalists.

A broad coalition of UN member states must also come together to reinforce international law against the forces and practices undermining it.

The “Hague Group” is one such path forward. Formed in early 2025, its membership has expanded to include more than 40 nations aimed at supporting international law, the right to self-determination and the prohibition on taking territory by force.

From Gaza to Lebanon to Iran, greater political action is needed to reinforce international law. The world cannot afford the reverberating human and security costs of continued impunity and war without rules.

Amra Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

India and Pakistan are no strangers to heat. This time of year is the worst, as heat peaks before the monsoon brings cooler conditions from June.

But this year’s heat is something else. Intense, sustained heat began in mid-April. Daily maximum temperatures have topped 46°C in many locations, with some areas running around 5–8°C above seasonal norms.

The unrelenting heat has driven record demand for electricity in India as people turn on air conditioners – and worsened drought conditions affecting more than a million square kilometres across both countries.

When extreme heat combines with humidity, it can be lethal. Human bodies cannot cool themselves easily in these conditions. The heatwave has claimed at least 37 lives in India and 10 in Pakistan. These figures are likely to be a major underestimate, as heat-related deaths are systemically undercounted in India.

Why is it so hot?

It’s usually a hot wait for the monsoon. But several factors can line up to make a bad season much worse.

One reason it’s been so bad this year is due to persistent high-pressure weather systems. When these systems sit in place, they make heatwaves more likely by suppressing cloud formation and reducing the chance of cooling rain. This year, strong high-pressure systems have lingered over parts of India and Pakistan, trapping hot air near the surface and allowing temperatures to build over many days.

With less rain, there’s more heat at ground level and soils dry out. Drier soils make things worse, because less heat is used up evaporating moisture in the soil and more goes into heating the land. High pressure systems can often hang around for many days, allowing extreme heat to build up.

It’s often worst in cities, as concrete and asphalt absorb heat during the day and release it slowly overnight. This means cities stay hotter overnight, boosting health risks for people without access to cooling.

Behind these immediate reasons is the big one: climate change. As the world gets steadily hotter, heatwaves get worse and worse. Estimates from World Weather Attribution suggest the first big heatwave from 15–29 April 2026 was made about three times more likely and about 1°C hotter due to climate change.

At current global levels of global warming (~1.4°C), this means the subcontinent faces similar events about once every five years. At present, we’re tracking towards 2.6°C of warming by 2100. At that level of heat, heatwaves like this would hit every 2-3 years and be 2.2°C hotter.

Humidity makes heat much more lethal

The number on a thermometer is only part of the danger.

Many parts of India and Pakistan are intensely humid. When sustained extreme heat arrives, humidity acts to intensify the threat to health. Humidity levels are worsening in parts of the region.

That’s because it’s harder to cool down naturally in humid conditions. Human bodies use sweating as the main method of cooling. When these beads of warm water evaporate off the skin, heat is carried away.

Humid air makes sweating a much less effective method of cooling. When the air already holds a lot of moisture, it takes longer for sweat to evaporate. The body can keep getting hotter even as it sweats.

This is why scientists are increasingly concerned about lethal humidity – when heat and humidity combine to rapidly sicken or kill.

Dying like this is deeply unpleasant. It begins with the core body temperature rising. People sweat more to try to shed the heat, but sweating doesn’t work well. If there’s no reprieve, the body temperature can keeps rising past 40°C and heatstroke can set in, damaging the brain and other vital organs. This can be fatal without rapid cooling and urgent care.

To gauge the combined danger of heat and humidity, scientists use measures such as the wet-bulb temperature. This reflects how much cooling is possible through sweating.

It used to be thought the limit for human survival was a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C. But new research shows heat and humidity can be lethal across a range of temperature and humidity combinations. For example, for older people who are outdoors, 35°C and 90% humidity is as deadly as 45°C and 30% humidity. These levels have already been reached during heatwaves in Southern Asia in recent years. For instance, even healthy 18-35 year olds are at risk of dying with humidity of 40% and temperatures of 45°C.

It’s likely some areas of the subcontinent have hit those limits at times during this intense period of heat. But we can’t say for sure, as most weather bulletins give air temperatures rather than wet-bulb temperature.

A threat faced unequally

The risks of heat and humidity are not faced equally. Wealthier people can turn on the air conditioner and avoid going outdoors.

But poorer people in informal settlements can’t escape the heat. Neither can construction workers, farmers, delivery riders and others doing physically demanding work outdoors.

There’s another risk too. The body needs cooler temperatures overnight to recover from intense heat. When the heat continues overnight, there’s no relief.

While cities are hotter than the surrounding areas, rural communities still face threats from heat and humidity. That’s because more work tends to be outdoors, healthcare is often far away and cooling is limited.

When could relief come?

When the monsoon arrives, it usually brings cooler conditions. Cloud cover and widespread rainfall help lower daytime temperatures, though humidity often stays high. The monsoon usually arrives in early June in southern India and covers the whole country by mid-July. In Pakistan, the monsoon typically arrives later, usually beginning in early July. The monsoon often lasts till September.

Relief can’t come too soon for the region.

Unfortunately, it won’t be the last threat. But as climate change ramps up, extreme heat and humidity will hit these nations more often – and more severely.

Oluwafemi E. Adeyeri receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research Council and is President of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

The “world first museum of AI arts” is scheduled to open next month in a 35,000 square feet purpose-built facility in downtown Los Angeles.

Dataland is the brainchild of Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkiliç, artists known for using artificial intelligence and vast datasets to create large-scale immersive art projects.

The “living museum” will present a continuously evolving immersive, audiovisual experience based on millions of images, sounds and scents from nature. As an indication of what it will be like, Dataland’s website presents phantasmagorical images of ecological wonder and awe.

Anadol says he wants Dataland to

develop a new paradigm of what a museum can be, by fusing human imagination with machine intelligence and the most advanced technologies available.

But behind its futuristic facade and the fleeting cultural landscapes hosted inside, the museum has much deeper historical roots.

The birth of the museum

A clear connection exists between the aspirations and dreams of Dataland’s founders and the 19th century fascination with emerging technologies. Large-scale exhibitions promised new forms of public spectacle and commercialised entertainment.

The Crystal Palace exhibition was held in London in 1851. Its purpose-built glass and iron building was considered a technological marvel.

Visited by over six million people, it was designed to promote Britain as an industrial power.

It showcased more than 100,000 objects from around the globe. These included locomotives, hydraulic presses, agricultural products and musical instruments. Its most famous item was the world’s largest-known diamond, acquired from India two years earlier for Queen Victoria.

The “midway” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was famous for its exhilarating amusements and living exhibits.

Premier attractions were the world’s first Ferris wheel and the world’s first commercial movie theatre. It also featured human display villages, or “human zoos”, that reinforced racist colonial hierarchies.

This era kicked off the modern public museum movement in Europe and the United States. Early museums were rooted in Enlightenment ideals of industrial and technological progress, civic education and national identity.

Museums including the South Kensington Museum (1857) and the Smithsonian’s Graphic Arts Department (1897) extended visitor fascination with new technologies such as cinema and railway travel, and sold mass-produced souvenirs of exotic and intriguing cultures.

Just as we today express conflicted views about AI-generated art, 19th-century audiences needed to learn how to respond to new cultural forms. Entertainment was key.

They quickly learnt viewing motion pictures was a social and public activity, improved if they suspended disbelief and expressed individual reactions.

The most well-known (albeit exaggerated) account describes an 1895 screening of a Lumière Brothers film. As the moving image of a train seemingly hurtled toward the audience, viewers are said to have screamed and ducked under seats.

Global exploitation

There is a darker side to the 19th-century precursors of Dataland.

The project’s dataset is a large nature model (LNM) – an open-source model trained on half a billion images sourced “ethically” from partner institutions including the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and London’s Natural History Museum.

These images are complemented by data gathered by Anadol’s team from 16 rainforests “from Chile to Indonesia to Australia”.

Dataland’s website does not provide provenance information about partner institution’s source collections. But we know they would likely include 19th century specimens.

Natural history collecting was a lucrative industry in the 19th century. The increasing ease with which people and commodities were able to travel the world expanded supply chains and the global industry of specimen transfer.

Museum collecting was deeply entangled with the violent, systemic processes of European imperialism, colonial expansion and scientific exploitation.

Dataland promotes its “permission-based” approach to using data from institutions. It cites contemporary collaboration with the Yawanawá people of the Amazon as “radically responsible”.

It also insists it manages the environmental impact of the museum’s consumption of natural resources.

But Dataland does not appear to apply its own ethical standards for producing collections from rainforests to the vast historical resources it sources from its partner museums.

It is silent on the obligations it may have to contemporary descendants of communities from which specimens and knowledge were extracted. It provides no guardrails about appropriate cultural protocols or safeguards for anyone wanting to access or learn more about any of its collections.

This approach is out of step with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The declaration enshrines the rights of Indigenous peoples to self-determination over their data. This includes traditional knowledge and ownership over natural resources.

Many of the kinds of institutions Dataland has partnered with are now seeking to repair the loss of Indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage and authority caused by colonial collecting.

The Natural Sciences Collections Association UK explains this reparative work is

proactive in telling hidden truths however difficult, about how we got our collections – [we must] acknowledge we have them, but at what cost?

The lack of transparency and self-awareness regarding the large nature model’s use of historical collection materials is a significant oversight. It echoes criticism that AI art does not adequately seek human consent or offer credit or compensation for contemporary art.

Dataland is a museum of the future. But it cannot outrun the historical and very human legacies of the form it has chosen to align itself with – the museum.

Kylie Message does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Back in 2005, US economist Fred Bergsten coined the term “Group of 2” or “G2”, proposing a stronger partnership between what are now the world’s two largest economies – the United States and China.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis a few years later, economic cooperation between these two countries briefly seemed to attest to the success of efforts at integrating China into a liberal rules-based order.

To be sure, the ostensible G2 was not meant to replace the larger, formalised G20 group of major economies, so much as strengthen it. Underpinning the broader G20’s response to the global financial crisis, the US enacted an initial US$787 billion fiscal stimulus, while China provided its own US$586 billion stimulus. This helped avert a much larger global economic catastrophe.

This week’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping heralds a different sort of G2. On Friday, Trump claimed the countries had struck some “fantastic trade deals”. But anyone hoping for details of such deals – on tariffs, rare earths or Iran – was left disappointed on Friday afternoon.

Whatever may have transpired, US–China cooperation no longer automatically implies positive spillover effects for the rest of the world. Instead, in 2026, the G2 appears, at best, to be a private bargain between two great powers, imposing hidden costs on those outside, looking in.

The Trump administration has ushered in a noticeable shift in how the US views its economic interests: no longer premised on shared liberal values, but on spheres of influence among great powers. The key question, therefore, is not whether the US and China can cooperate. It is what kind of order their cooperation will produce.

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Read more: Trump-Xi summit: 3 ways the US and China can compete without going to war

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West and East

An older economic contrast is useful here.

In the wake of the second world war, the Western bloc (led across the US, the United Kingdom, and Western European states) was united by a shared commitment to a Keynesian global order (under the Bretton Woods system) that sought freer trade in goods while preserving national economic autonomy.

In contrast, the Eastern bloc (led by the Soviet Union) organised trade through what was called the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), trading many goods between countries through planned barter arrangements, instead of for cash.

The irony for the present day is that the Trump–Xi agenda looks more like the old Eastern bloc’s approach.

In this light, the clearest sign that a G2 may be working outside the G20 or larger rules-based order is not that Washington and Beijing are talking. It is the range of issues that may be managed, tying together such concerns as tariff relief, airplane orders, rare-earths access, chip restrictions, Taiwan and Iran.

In each of these cases, it’s reasonable the two countries would want to coordinate their policies. But together, they point to a new global order where two superpowers increasingly call the shots in their own interests.

Chips and rare earths

Rare earths and advanced chips are the clearest example. Beijing wants access to the advanced semiconductors necessary to dominate the artificial intelligence race.

Washington wants rare earths and critical minerals whose importance has become more acute as the conflict with Iran has strained US stocks of missiles, drones, air-defence systems and other high-end military technologies.

If these are traded against one another, the summit is not about economic liberalisation. It is about whether strategic technologies remain national-security constraints or become bargaining chips in a bilateral deal.

An entourage of executives

The business delegations that have accompanied Trump on this trip point in the same direction.

The presence of executives such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk (not to mention others from Qualcomm, Citigroup and Boeing) gave the summit the appearance of a commercial negotiation.

Reported agreements on aircraft orders, agricultural purchases, investment forums and corporate access may all be presented as signs of economic normalisation.

But the question is not only whether US firms gain market access. It is whether commercial wins help stabilise a great-power bargain whose geopolitical costs are borne elsewhere.

Any deal the countries eventually reach on tariffs will likely have the biggest market impacts. But the deal itself could matter less than the optics, allowing Trump to claim a business victory.

This might calm markets in the short term, but it highlights the potential for a retreat from rules-based multilateral liberalisation in the longer term.

A warning on Taiwan, near silence on Iran

The question of Taiwan loomed large over this week’s summit. On Thursday, Xi gave an unusually direct warning to Trump, saying if the issue was not handled properly, the two countries could see “clashes and even conflicts”.

In a larger sense, the danger is not necessarily a formal US concession on Taiwan. It is that Taiwan and other regional actors bear the external costs of a private bargain.

If Taiwan becomes one variable in a wider negotiation, the costs of US–China cooperation may fall on those not in the room.

Iran and oil broaden the same logic. If Trump has pressed Xi to use China’s influence over Tehran, he is not simply asking for diplomatic help. He is treating Beijing as a co-hegemon in a great-power bargain based on order for some – the US and China – and exclusion for others.

This kind of G2 can undermine the global public good. It will also test whether middle powers like Australia, Canada and European countries can keep their seat at the table where decisions are made or, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it, risk being “on the menu”.

Wesley Widmaier receives funding from the Australian Research Council.