Science

The Burning Earth
Sunil Amrith (Allen Lane (UK); W. W. Norton (US))

So much has been written about the environmental crisis that it is difficult to say anything new. It is a hard problem, but Sunil Amrith takes a good swing at it.

He is a historian at Yale University, with interests that range from migration to climate history. In The Burning Earth: An environmental history of the last 500 years, Amrith documents the ways our societies have impacted the planet over the past half-millennium, from industrial…

Financial services, like many institutions, are losing Americans’ trust. That’s a problem. Economies depend on a healthy financial system, as became painfully evident during the 2008 financial crisis, and that system operates largely on trust—confidence that people can access the money in their bank accounts, that their investment accounts are secure, and that their trades will be filled at quoted market prices, to name just a few everyday financial interactions.

But building confidence in financial services is tricky. Financial systems are technical and complex and therefore somewhat opaque, and that opacity erodes trust. Financial technology from online trading and blockchain to mobile payments and banking has the potential to make financial services more transparent and trustworthy, but it’s not yet clear if, or to what extent, those innovations are making a difference.

Take blockchain, for example. Its proponents argue that trust isn’t necessary because a decentralized network of computers verifies and collectively stores transactions, making the record tamper-proof. Even so, I suspect few people understand how blockchain works, or how to mine or store digital coins.

That may explain why many investors own cryptocurrencies through financial intermediaries such as crypto exchanges and banks, or more recently, exchange-traded funds, all of which require no less trust than traditional financial services.

Now add artificial intelligence to the mix. AI could conceivably make financial services more accessible but also less transparent.

To better understand how these new technologies might affect our trust in the world of finance, Nir Kaissar, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, spoke to Myron Scholes, who, together with Robert C. Merton won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1997 for a method to determine the value of derivatives and has been thinking deeply on the subject of trust for decades. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our correspondence:

Nir Kaissar: Myron, how would you characterize the level and directionality of trust in financial services?

Myron Scholes: In my view, lack of trust and uncertainty go hand in hand. It is difficult for investors to separate the truth from fiction. Uncertainty masks the truth. Many products are offered to investors showing high rates of return.

Although there are always caveats claiming that future returns are not guaranteed and could differ from past results, how is the investor to know whether the results shown are not data-mined—found by searching the past for the best results or seeding a bunch of alternatives and then showing actual results on the best of them that randomly generated good returns?

Increases in the levels of uncertainty in the financial system have led to an erosion of trust, especially when the promised good results don’t materialize. Tail events or downside shocks expose products that suffer large losses in bad times while making smaller gains most of the time.

To garner extra returns, investors have sold put options that need to be paid off with market drawdowns. With higher levels of uncertainty, products are offered that make promises that have a low probability of success. This makes it difficult and costly for honest product providers to distinguish themselves from the cheaters. Many products that should be developed for investors are not. It becomes too costly to build trust.

Nir Kaissar: In that regard, new financial products, which are almost always marketed as an improvement, run the risk of making it harder for investors and consumers to navigate the financial system. One example is the explosion in the number of ETFs in recent years. That raises the questions: Is financial technology building or eroding trust in financial services? And does fintech make trust more or less important?

Myron Scholes: All new innovations precede the infrastructure to govern them. Under uncertainty, it is difficult to ascertain which innovations will be successful. It would be too expensive for financial institutions to set up all the controls and constraints that eventually come into being for successful products that demonstrate sustainability. This means that newer projects attract cheaters to game the system.

We saw that recently with cryptocurrencies and the many coins that were developed and failed. We see that with the rush into AI-generated financial solutions and products. Financial (or business) innovations are brought forward if they can provide services faster, more individualized, and more flexibly.

With more uncertainty, flexibility gains value, offering the ability to change with changing circumstances and new desired outcomes. With technology, financial companies can offer services more tailored to satisfy a given investor or provide a specific solution, rather than to focus on selling a particular product.

Moreover, no one wants to wait too long for a solution to their problem. Some other financial entity will provide it soon. Speed, individualization and flexibility are cornerstones of innovations if they can be provided at a lower cost.

Technology facilitates each of these. But the move to more of a focus on solutions requires trust. Individuals must trust their financial advisers, who have more acumen than they do, to design and implement the solution and allow for flexibility as needs change.

This is objective-based, client-focused, a bottoms-up and not a top-down approach. This is where financial innovation and services are heading. Fintech is facilitating this evolution.

Nir Kaissar: So, how do we reconcile the uncertainty created by new financial products with the higher level of trust that these new, technology-based products require? How should financial services companies build trust, and what role does technology play?

Myron Scholes: Technology is a tool to innovate and to monitor. Institutions that have a long history of innovations that monitor cheaters and control their offerings are more likely to be successful. To maintain trust, their rate of innovation will most likely be slow and monitored. They will educate clients. They will be cautious. They need to protect their reputations. They put constraints on the innovation process. This takes longer for the educational process to unfold and the rollout of new services is slower and less flexible.

Financial technology helps the education and trust-building process within and outside entities. Learning and trust building need to occur within organizations. Learning occurs from one-on-one communication from entity to client and from fellow investors to fellow investors.

Clients compare across financial entities. Most advisers interact with clients to educate and understand their requirements to fashion solutions for them. They use the reputation of their firms to grow and maintain client relationships. They use the track records of similar offerings to build trust.

New technology and new innovations, however, can break through the governing constraints of old infrastructure by providing more idiosyncratic services faster and more individualized.

Older in-house infrastructure may be far more costly than newer fintech. Clients trade off the lower-cost offerings of new innovators with the cost of developing trust to use those new offerings. With success, the new offerings displace the old and the cycle repeats itself.

2024 Bloomberg L.P. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new extrasolar world orbiting a nearby star known as HD 86728. This is the first exoplanet detection made as part of the NEID Earth Twin Survey (NETS). The finding was detailed in a research paper published September 18 on the pre-print server arXiv.

NEID is a fiber-fed, environmentally-stabilized optical-near-infrared echelle spectrograph installed on the WIYN1 3.5 m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. The NETS survey employs NEID to search for low-mass exoplanets around nearby bright stars.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Arvind F. Gupta of the U.S. National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, has identified the first exoplanet from NETS. The newfound planet orbits HD 86728—a bright star of spectral type G3Va, located some 48.6 light years away.

“In this work, we present the first three years of NETS observations of the HD 86728 system and we confirm the detection of the exoplanet HD 86728 b … HD 86728 was observed with NEID on 137 separate nights during the first three years of the NETS program,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

According to the study, the newfound exoplanet HD 86728 b orbits its host star on a circular orbit every 31.15 days, at a distance of about 0.19 AU. The projected mass of this planet was estimated to be some 9.16 Earth masses.

The astronomers noted that the vast majority of exoplanets with similar masses and orbital periods to HD 86728 b reside in multi-planet systems. Therefore, if it hosts only HD 86728 b, this planet would be in the small minority (less than 12 percent) with no known siblings. However, further observations are required in order to rule out the presence of additional planets orbiting HD 86728.

When it comes to the host star, HD 86728, it has a radius of approximately 1.24 solar radii, while its mass is comparable to that of the sun. The star has an effective temperature of about 5,610 K and its metallicity is at a level of 0.2 dex.

In concluding remarks, the authors of the paper underlined that the detection of HD 86728 b proves how important extreme precision radial velocity spectrographs are for the search for low-mass alien worlds.

“NEID and other extreme precision spectrographs will continue to chip away at the sensitivity floor for quiet stars, enabling the detection of exoplanets at lower masses and longer periods as we push towards the discovery of Earth analogs with radial velocity measurements,” the scientists wrote.

© 2024 Science X Network

The discovery of an Earth-like planet 4,000 light years away in the Milky Way galaxy provides a preview of one possible fate for our planet billions of years in the future, when the sun has turned into a white dwarf, and a blasted and frozen Earth has migrated beyond the orbit of Mars.

This distant planetary system, identified by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers after observations with the Keck 10-meter telescope in Hawaii, looks very similar to expectations for the sun-Earth system: It consists of a white dwarf about half the mass of the sun and an Earth-size companion in an orbit twice as large as Earth’s today.

That is likely to be Earth’s fate. The sun will eventually inflate like a balloon larger than Earth’s orbit today, engulfing Mercury and Venus in the process. As the star expands to become a red giant, its decreasing mass will force planets to migrate to more distant orbits, offering Earth a slim opportunity to survive farther from the sun. Eventually, the outer layers of the red giant will be blown away to leave behind a dense white dwarf no larger than a planet, but with the mass of a star. If Earth has survived by then, it will probably end up in an orbit twice its current size.

The discovery, to be published in the journal Nature Astronomy, tells scientists about the evolution of main sequence stars, like the sun, through the red giant phase to a white dwarf, and how it affects the planets around them. Some studies suggest that for the sun, this process could begin in about 1 billion years, eventually vaporizing Earth’s oceans and doubling Earth’s orbital radius—if the expanding star doesn’t engulf our planet first.

Eventually, about 8 billion years from now, the sun’s outer layers will have dispersed to leave behind a dense, glowing ball—a white dwarf—that is about half the mass of the sun, but smaller in size than Earth.

“We do not currently have a consensus on whether Earth could avoid being engulfed by the red giant sun in 6 billion years,” said study leader Keming Zhang, a former doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, who is now an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego.

“In any case, planet Earth will only be habitable for around another billion years, at which point Earth’s oceans would be vaporized by the runaway greenhouse effect—long before the risk of getting swallowed by the red giant.”

The planetary system provides one example of a planet that did survive, though it is far outside the habitable zone of the dim white dwarf and unlikely to harbor life. It may have had habitable conditions at some point, when its host was still a sun-like star.

“Whether life can survive on Earth through that (red giant) period is unknown. But certainly the most important thing is that Earth isn’t swallowed by the sun when it becomes a red giant,” said Jessica Lu, associate professor and chair of astronomy at UC Berkeley. “This system that Keming’s found is an example of a planet—probably an Earth-like planet originally on a similar orbit to Earth—that survived its host star’s red giant phase.”

Microlensing makes stars brighten a thousandfold

The far-away planetary system, located near the bulge at the center of our galaxy, came to astronomers’ attention in 2020 when it passed in front of a more distant star and magnified that star’s light by a factor of 1,000. The gravity of the system acted like a lens to focus and amplify the light from the background star.

The team that discovered this “microlensing event” dubbed it KMT-2020-BLG-0414 because it was detected by the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network in the Southern Hemisphere. The magnification of the background star—also in the Milky Way, but about 25,000 light years from Earth—was still only a pinprick of light.

Nevertheless, its variation in intensity over about two months allowed the team to estimate that the system included a star about half the mass of the sun, a planet about the mass of Earth and a very large planet about 17 times the mass of Jupiter—likely a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are failed stars, with a mass just shy of that required to ignite fusion in the core.

The analysis also concluded that the Earth-like planet was between 1 and 2 astronomical units from the star—that is, about twice the distance between the Earth and sun. It was unclear what kind of star the host was because its light was lost in the glare of the magnified background star and a few nearby stars.

To identify the type of star, Zhang and his colleagues, including UC Berkeley astronomers Jessica Lu and Joshua Bloom, looked more closely at the lensing system in 2023 using the Keck II 10-meter telescope in Hawaii, which is outfitted with adaptive optics to eliminate blur from the atmosphere. Because they observed the system three years after the lensing event, the background star that had once been magnified 1,000 times had become faint enough that the lensing star should have been visible if it was a typical main-sequence star like the sun, Lu said.

But Zhang detected nothing in two separate Keck images.

“Our conclusions are based on ruling out the alternative scenarios, since a normal star would have been easily seen,” Zhang said. “Because the lens is both dark and low mass, we concluded that it can only be a white dwarf.”

“This is a case of where seeing nothing is actually more interesting than seeing something,” said Lu, who looks for microlensing events caused by free-floating stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way.

Finding exoplanets through microlensing

The discovery is part of a project by Zhang to more closely study microlensing events that show the presence of a planet, in order to understand the types of stars around which exoplanets live.

“There is some luck involved, because you’d expect fewer than one in 10 microlensing stars with planets to be white dwarfs,” Zhang said.

The new observations also allowed Zhang and colleagues to resolve an ambiguity regarding the location of the brown dwarf.

“The original analysis showed that the brown dwarf is either in a very wide orbit, like Neptune’s, or well within Mercury’s orbit. Giant planets on very small orbits are actually quite common outside the solar system,” Zhang said, referring to a class of planets called hot Jupiters. “But since we now know it is orbiting a stellar remnant, this is unlikely, as it would have been engulfed.”

The modeling ambiguity is caused by so-called microlensing degeneracy, where two distinct lensing configurations can give rise to the same lensing effect. This degeneracy is related to the one Zhang and Bloom discovered in 2022 using an AI method to analyze microlensing simulations. Zhang also applied the same AI technique to rule out alternative models for KMT-2020-BLG-0414 that may have been missed.

“Microlensing has turned into a very interesting way of studying other star systems that can’t be observed and detected by the conventional means, i.e. the transit method or the radial velocity method,” Bloom said. “There is a whole set of worlds that are now opening up to us through the microlensing channel, and what’s exciting is that we’re on the precipice of finding exotic configurations like this.”

One purpose of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2027, is to measure light curves from microlensing events to find exoplanets, many of which will need follow up using other telescopes to identify the types of stars hosting the exoplanets.

“What is required is careful follow up with the world’s best facilities, i.e. adaptive optics and the Keck Observatory, not just a day or a month later, but many, many years into the future, after the lens has moved away from the background star so you can start disambiguating what you’re seeing,” Bloom said.

Zhang noted that even if Earth gets engulfed during the sun’s red giant phase in a billion or so years, humanity may find a refuge in the outer solar system. Several moons of Jupiter, such as Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, and Enceladus around Saturn, appear to have frozen water oceans that will likely thaw as the outer layers of the red giant expand.

“As the sun becomes a red giant, the habitable zone will move to around Jupiter and Saturn’s orbit, and many of these moons will become ocean planets,” Zhang said. “I think, in that case, humanity could migrate out there.”

Other co-authors are Weicheng Zang and Shude Mao of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, who co-authored the first paper about KMT-2020-BLG-0414; former UC Berkeley doctoral student Kareem El-Badry, now an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena; Eric Agol of the University of Washington in Seattle; B. Scott Gaudi of The Ohio State University in Columbus; Quinn Konopacky of UC San Diego; Natalie LeBaron of UC Berkeley; and Sean Terry of the University of Maryland in College Park.

More than half of the detainees in Police Watch Houses are there because they have violated their bail conditions. A first of its kind study by Edith Cowan University (ECU) has provided insights into the key reasons for those breaches.

In Australia, the bail system permits most people accused of a crime to remain in the community while they await their court date, under various conditions, because they are considered innocent until proven guilty.

However, a high number of people on bail breach the orders placed on them, resulting in additional charges and incarceration, without even having their day in court.

A new study published in the Journal of Criminology, led by criminology researchers Associate Professor Natalie Gately and Dr. Suzanne Rock, surveyed 230 police detainees at the Perth Watch House about their orders and the reasons behind their recent breaches.

Key findings:

• Homelessness, family responsibilities, and procedural challenges were identified as primary barriers to adhering to bail conditions.
• No significant differences in breach rates were found based on Indigeneity, though allowances for cultural obligations were recommended to reduce breaches.

Associate Professor Gately said most of the detainees understood their orders but shared a range of complex issues in their lives which interfered with compliance.

“A public misconception may be that people breach bail due to committing further crimes,” she said.

“However, our study has shown that most breaches are the result of administration difficulties and situations outside the bailees control, such as homelessness.”

Impact of breaches

Granting bail in Australia’s justice system upholds human rights, allows people to keep their jobs, maintain family obligations and relationships, and helps avoid overcrowding in prisons.

Dr. Rock said people may underestimate the impact that breaching bail orders has on both the detainee and the wider community.

“It can be highly disruptive for people when they breach bail and can’t remain in the community,” she said.

“For women on remand, it often means leaving their children, who may then go into foster care, which can damage family relationships.

“And for people with stable employment it can mean a risk of losing their job.

“There is a significant cost to the community when people breach bail conditions, especially if they might not even end up with a prison sentence once their case is heard.”

Recommendations

Dr. Rock said removing some of the procedural roadblocks to compliance would reduce additional charges, workloads of police and court staff and assist with delays in the administration of justice.

The study outlined the following strategies to address the barriers to compliance identified in the research:

• Establish a specific court outreach service to help those on orders navigate and adhere to their conditions.
• Set up court reminders in the most appropriate method for the bailee (e.g., mobile phone texts).
• Provide a phone number/email specific for bailees so if they are having trouble attending, they can notify the right person and avoid a breach.
• Set up a formalized “extension tracker” to record the date, time and reason why an extension or alternative court date or reporting method is being sought (this could also monitor trends and protect the public).

“When low risk people on bail breach their conditions, they are re-criminalized and take up valuable court and police time and resources that could be used for high-risk offenders,” Associate Professor Gately said.

“For Australia’s justice system of granting bail to be effective, conditional orders must be achievable, and the current system’s rigidity does not account for the complex realities of those on bail.

“By adopting a more flexible approach, we can reduce the strain on individuals, decrease additional charges, and ultimately improve the efficiency and fairness of our justice system.”

Given that 77 percent of people in Canada and 57 percent of people in the United Kingdom watch a sports team regularly—compared to the 60 percent of people who turn out to vote in Canada and the U.K.—it’s clear sports have an important and persistent influence on people’s lives.

Sports can serve as a beacon to provide societal leadership or reflect changes in wider society in significant ways. A historical example would be how the integration of sports leagues in North America paralleled the Civil Rights Movement.

But how can sports influence politics today?

Similar to supporting a political party, sports fandom aids in the formation of social identity. This happens when people look to form attachments with other individuals who they believe are similar to them in some way to cultivate positive self-esteem.

Men’s professional sports teams have historically engaged with certain political causes, namely the military and law enforcement, while neglecting others, such as the plight of marginalized members of local communities. Sports engagement with the military has been shown to boost military enrollment and support for government spending on the military in peace times.

Women’s professional sport, meanwhile, has drawn positive attention through its engagement with marginalized community members. The Women’s National Basketball League, for example, has engaged with the LGBTQ+ community to create safe fan spaces for the league.

Men’s sports protests

My preliminary research into these issues has shown that in men’s professional sports, there has often been hostility towards the introduction of newer, more inclusive causes into sporting events. In the National Hockey League, for example, some players refused to participate in Pride Night events on religious grounds.

Former professional quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s non-violent protest of police brutality in the United States resulted in his exile from the National Football League for the apparent “distraction” it created. A crucial element of the backlash against Kaepernick was allegations by conservatives that he disrespected the military and the American flag.

The power of this backlash was surprising given that in the U.S., Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to be avid sports fans, with no meaningful differences in the strength of their fandom. However, Republican sports fans tend to be more vocal about what causes should receive representation in sports.

Essentially, that means those who say athletes should “stick to sports” or “shut up and dribble” aren’t suggesting they don’t want any politics in sports. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to see political views they oppose being represented in professional sports.

The patriotic causes that have routinely been championed by sports leagues and used for nation-building, such as the military, are viewed as apolitical and therefore appropriate in sports settings. Conversely, messages that are critical of a country or focus on historical inequalities have been deemed “inappropriate” and are excluded by sports because of potential fan backlash.

Can sports influence politics?

More recently, however, sports leagues and teams have begun to engage with social justice causes, such as LGBTQ+ rights in the U.K., Canada and the U.S..

These causes also include Indigenous rights and anti-racism messaging.

As sports organizations adapt to changing social norms and embrace newer social causes, they hold tremendous potential to impact political attitudes. They can showcase the acceptance of marginalized groups in previously hostile spaces, and provide valuable representation.

Furthermore, sports fandom identity has been shown to hold a strong psychological connection that can create feelings of inclusion which, in turn, can boost self-esteem.

This is why athletes make easy role models for children, and why watching sports events is a valued leisure activity for many people of all ages. Finally, sports fandom can also teach people how to cope with negative emotions or feelings of disappointment over time through emotional regulation.

How sports could influence attitudes

The representative and psychological value of sports fandom suggests sport is an understudied area of political science, one I hope to build on in my future research.

For example, we do not yet fully understand the impact that sports teams holding Pride Nights have on attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community.

Nor do we know how soccer clubs in England, as local symbols of a migrant workforce, may impact immigrant attitudes.

Finally, we do not know why certain women’s national soccer teams, like Canada, have been successful in protesting for equal pay while others, like the Spanish team, have failed.

Sport could have a valuable role to play in unpacking these political questions about protest and identity—and represents an exciting emerging research area in political behavior.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the occurrence of weather extremes continues to escalate, the climate change movement now grapples with a new challenge, “climate burnout.”

The troubling trend of despair and fatigue among those who work for environmental and climate change, this climate burnout could jeopardize vital commitment to the cause.

New Flinders University research published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology explored the exacerbating and attenuating factors of despair-induced climate burnout to learn how people can overcome despair and maintain motivation to fight climate change.

“Our research highlights the growing issue of climate burnout, where people involved in the climate justice movement experience sheer exhaustion and disengagement due to feelings of despair about the crisis,” says lead author, Dr. Lucy Bird from the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work.

“We found that people are more likely to experience burnout when they feel despair and exhaustion about tackling climate change.

“But importantly, our findings show that when people contemplated pragmatic steps, such as using their car less and reducing waste, as well as acting collectively to encourage organizations to make changes, they felt markedly less disengaged.

“When people focus on actionable steps and fostering a sense of community and shared purpose, they can combat burnout and continue to make meaningful progress in addressing one of humanity’s most defining challenges,” she says.

The research involved two studies using more than 1,200 participants to examine whether despair about the climate crisis is associated with experiencing burnout.

It also explored whether thinking about a positive future where the climate crisis has been addressed (utopian thinking) or considering the steps necessary to address climate change (pragmatic thinking) could reduce climate burnout.

In some instances, the findings show that simply imagining a climate utopia could reduce peoples’ urge to disengage from the climate movement.

“Given the urgent need to address the climate crisis, it is important to protect people from experiencing despair-induced burnout and disengaging from the climate movement,” says Dr. Bird.

“This approach aligns with evolving strategies within the climate advocacy community, focusing on actionable solutions rather than overwhelming sentiments of despair.

“As communities around the globe strive for impactful climate policies and initiatives, it is imperative that they foster an environment that encourages sustained engagement and mutual support.”

She says that future research needs to consider different interventions to reduce peoples’ exhaustion and fatigue regarding climate change as this was not always reduced by engaging in pragmatism and utopian thinking.

Dr. Bird sums up her research by referencing street artist Banksy’s mural near London’s Hyde Park in support of Extinction Rebellion protests in 2019, “From this moment despair ends and tactics begin.”

Human remains recovered from the British Royal Navy’s doomed Franklin expedition have been identified as Captain James Fitzjames using DNA and genealogical evidence. The unfortunate officer has also been confirmed as the first known victim of cannibalism among the expedition members.

In 1845, an expedition led by Sir John Franklin set out to find a navigable North-West Passage through the Arctic with 129 men aboard the ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. But in 1848, Captain James Fitzjames, commander of the HMS Erebus, left a report in a stone cairn recording how the survivors had decided to abandon the ships. Later, the unidentified skeletal remains of many sailors were discovered in various locations across the Canadian Arctic.

Now researchers have put a name to some of those remains. “Identifying an individual using molecular methods often takes time because descendants need to be involved in the process,” says Treena Swanston at MacEwan University in Canada, who was not involved in the study.

Douglas Stenton at the University of Waterloo in Canada and his colleagues identified Fitzjames by comparing the Y chromosome profiles from a tooth that was found on Canada’s King William Island with cheek swabs taken from one of Fitzjames’s descendants. The descendant donor had a demonstrated genealogical relationship with Fitzjames through the captain’s great-grandfather.

The discovery also makes Fitzjames the first identified victim of cannibalism among the Franklin expedition’s members. Earlier analysis by the late bioarchaeologist Anne Keenleyside had revealed cut marks on many of the recovered remains, with one lower jawbone – now identified as belonging to Fitzjames – having multiple cut marks.

This indicates some of the last survivors who were trekking overland resorted to eating parts of Fitzjames’s body and those of several other sailors. The finding “reveals the desperation of the Franklin sailors”, says Swanston.

Such research also reinforces the importance of testimony from Indigenous Inuit people, she says. The Inuit reported seeing about 40 men dragging a ship’s boat on a sledge and made the first discoveries of bodies showing signs of cannibalism.

In Australia and most countries, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Because of this, keeping someone in detention before trial comes with serious legal, practical and human-rights consequences, not just for the person accused but also for their family and for society.

That’s why most people accused of a crime are usually released on bail.

Bail is essentially a written promise where a person is released, on the agreement they return to court on a set date. It can also be granted to those who have been found or pleaded guilty while they wait for sentencing.

Bail allows the accused to keep their job, maintain their home, and support their family, while eliminating the costs of imprisonment.

However, bail comes with conditions that the person must follow, including curfews, regular check-ins, restrictions on whom they can talk to or where they can go, drug or alcohol testing, and staying at a specific address.

These conditions may seem easy to understand and follow, but breaches of orders were the third most common offense in Australian courts in 2022 and 2023. They made up 10% of adult court appearances, using valuable time and resources.

There’s a widespread belief that people on bail who breach their conditions commit more crimes—sometimes violent ones—that put others at risk and threaten public safety. This has fueled demands for stricter bail laws or to stop granting bail altogether.

Many also think that when someone breaches their bail conditions, it’s because they’re deliberately defying or ignoring the rules. With this in mind, we wanted to look deeper.

We spoke to 230 police detainees about what led to their bail breaches. The results were surprising: very few (just 11%) breached by committing new offenses.

Instead, most explained their breaches happened because of things beyond their control.

Homelessness

A fixed residential address is a fundamental condition for getting bail.

However, many of our participants shared that becoming homeless or returning to homelessness was common for them. Some said they left the address they provided because of family tensions:

“I’m meant to stay at my sister’s house under my bail conditions, it’s for my curfew […] she kicked me out because we had an argument. Now I’ve breached my conditions and have nowhere to go.”

It’s well known that chronic homelessness makes it tough to comply with bail conditions, and we found the same. A detainee told us, “It was an honest mistake and a mix-up of the days.”

Another said, “I was homeless at the time I was meant to go to court and dealing with a lot.”

A third person told us, “I’m homeless and I’ve got bigger issues than going to court. I’m living in a tent in the park at the moment with no job.”

The mental stress meant people focused on meeting basic needs such as food and shelter, which took priority over following bail conditions.

Family responsibilities

Participants also shared their personal responsibilities of caring for sick children, parents or other dependents. This often prevented them from attending court or reporting. One person told us, “I’m my nan’s caregiver […] I needed to look after her and my brother wasn’t there. I couldn’t go to court or make it. I’m the one who washes her and does everything for her […]”

Family commitments clashing with reporting requirements led to feelings that the system was stacked against them and they had few options but to breach.

Work commitments

Employment often interfered with reporting on time and attending court. “I have to report Monday, Wednesday and Friday but I’m a truck driver. I have no problems with coming in to report, but I couldn’t make it because I was working. When I went in to report, they arrested me […]”

Keeping a job is crucial for financial and housing stability. Having a stable job also deepens community connections to reduce the chances of getting involved in criminal activity.

Procedural barriers

When these kinds of everyday issues derailed compliance, many said they had tried to let the court, police or their lawyer know, either before or right after they missed reporting in or a court date but were faced with an inflexible system.

For some, even when they did manage to get through, they were told that by not reporting or attending court they had already breached their bail and a warrant would be issued for their arrest. A study participant told us:

“I told them (the police) that I’d been kicked out (of the nominated accommodation) and wasn’t there and they locked me up here. I’ve got an extra charge now because I breached bail and probably won’t get let back out tomorrow. It wasn’t in my control. I was meant to be doing my medical to start work on the mines too tomorrow, so I won’t be working there now.”

We recommend considering of the complexities of bailees’ lives when setting bail. More flexible reporting conditions for when “life happens” will reduce charge pile ups and pressures on the criminal justice.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.