Gone fishing: DNA tech helps Traditional Owners map species at Budj Bim
Budj Bim is home to the oldest dated aquaculture system on earth. Comprised of channels, dams and weirs that control water flow, the aquaculture system has been used to contain floodwaters and trap, store and harvest eels for millennia.
The World Heritage-listed landscape in southwest Victoria has been cared for by Gunditjmara people for generations. Now, traditional knowledge is being combined with western science to continue safeguarding the important cultural and environmental landscape at Budj Bim. Traditional Owners are using environmental DNA sampling to map fish populations and track ecological changes in the waterways. The surveys have already detected 53 species.
Gunitj Mirring Traditional Owner Corporation Aboriginal water officer Nicole Hudson has been monitoring waterways at Budj Bim in Victoria. "We are able to trace where the Kooyang (short-finned eel) are travelling through our system, identify key endangered species and invasive species that are threatening our native cultural species," Ms Hudson told AAP. The technology, developed by EnviroDNA, takes a sample of particles left by living organisms in an ecosystem.
"We're able to pick up the presence of that DNA that's left behind and take it to our laboratory and assign that to different taxonomic groups to tell you what animals are absent or present," EnviroDNA chief executive Jim Stuart said. Mr Stuart said the technology was a more powerful tool than observational techniques, as it provided definitive evidence on whether a particular species was present. The technology enables users to hone in on just one species or map the biodiversity of the entire ecosystem.
For Ms Hudson, being able to map the biodiversity at Budj Bim helps fulfil a cultural responsibility thousands of years old. "It's our obligation to protect what our ancestors left for us," she said. "They planted the seeds and paved the path for us to walk in harmony with Country. "We read Country. It tells us what it needs, and when to step in to help it heal from pollution and unnatural changes. "Our connection is ongoing. We'll always care for our Country."
EnviroDNA's technology has been employed in 25 projects involving 19 Traditional Owner groups across Victoria, NSW, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. The projects have already covered more than 21,000 square kilometres of land and sea, and Mr Stuart said it was hoped the program could be further expanded to become national. "If we want to make lasting impact, we need to back Indigenous-led programs that are already working," he said.
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ABC News
4 hours ago
- ABC News
Why your AI questions are a power and water drain
Sam Hawley: How often do you use AI? It's becoming part of our everyday lives. But when you pump in a question into something like ChatGPT, do you ever think about the energy it uses? Today, Gordon Noble from the Institute of Sustainable Futures at UTS on the data centres driving AI and what they're doing to the climate. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. So Gordon, Googling something or typing a question into ChatGPT, it is so easy and simple for us and very, very useful, of course. But we don't really stop to think about where all that information is coming from, do we? Gordon Noble: Yeah, that's right. And I think this is crept up on us. When you do a search now with all these AI tools, ChatGPT being one of them, they can be 10 times more energy consuming than, for instance, doing a Google search. And what sits behind that is this massive investment that we've seen in data centres globally. So it's absolutely exploded. Sam Hawley: Yeah, okay. So we're not thinking about these data centres when we're typing in what we want to know from ChatGPT. And most of us would never have seen one or been in one. What do they look like? Where are they? Gordon Noble: Yeah, it's a really good question. So data centres, just to put it in visual terms, so the average size of what they call these hyperscale data centres, so they're around about 10,000 square feet. To give you an indication, a Bunnings store is about 8,000 square feet. So they're kind of just big sheds, right? Huge. But what we're seeing now is that we're moving to not just these Bunnings-like sheds, if you like, but we're moving to these massive million square data centres, almost campuses of data centres. Around the world, there are around about 1,100 of these hyperscale data centres. In Sydney, for instance, Sydney is a big centre for data centres here in Australia. We have over 85 data centres. One of the reasons Sydney is such an attractive place for data centres is we have 12 submarine cables that come out of Sydney and basically connect us to the rest of the world. So data centres globally are now around about 1.5% of global energy consumption. The question is what's going to happen in the future? Sam Hawley: Okay, so Gordon, let's delve a bit further into how these data centres actually work, because while they're enabling us to inform ourselves at lightning speed, they're also using a huge amount of power, massive amount. Gordon Noble: So roughly at the moment, global energy consumption coming out of data centres is around 1.5% of all the global electricity. The issue is that data centres are highly concentrated. So it's in places in the world, the US, parts of Europe, Ireland is a massive data centre hub, where they're actually causing strain on the energy grid because of how much the energy growth has been. So to give you an idea in Australia, so a research report from Morgan and Stanley, they were projecting that roughly at the moment, data centre energy consumption from the grid is around about 5% of all of our energy consumption. But what they're projecting is that this could grow to between 8% and 15% of all of our electricity consumption here in Australia, depending on some of the decisions that are made as in how much we use AI tools. So what the International Energy Agency is now saying is that by 2030, the energy consumption from data centres will be the size of Japan. So we're talking massive amounts of increase in energy consumption. That's placing strains on the grid, but it's also placing a shift in terms of how the energies come from. So for instance, in the US, we're seeing providers like Microsoft, who are big data centre operators because of the tools that they've got. They're looking to shift to nuclear. And one of the things they're looking to do is to reopen Three Mile Island, which is the nuclear plant that had been mothballed to basically take all that energy from a reopened Three Mile Island. So lots and lots of decisions as a result of this. Sam Hawley: Why is it, Gordon, that AI takes so much more energy than just Googling? Gordon Noble: These large language models are effectively trained to look at the whole of the internet, right? So when they're developing these models, they're actually looking at everything in the internet. And then when we ask it to do something, it's churning away from all that work that it's done. Lots and lots of different applications, but I think that common common thread is that it's aggregating across a lot of data rather than just that single data search where it goes to a single source. Sam Hawley: Do we have a sense already about the sort of strain that it's putting on electricity grids in Australia? Gordon Noble: Yeah, so at the moment, that's one of the questions. And we don't really have, I think, a good picture of the national demand, right? So the issue at the moment is a lot of the training of these AI tools, they've taken place in the US principally. So they haven't yet really been here in Australia. So that's going to be one of the questions as we increase the size of our data centre industry. Where is it going to start to have implications in terms of energy demand? Will it be, for instance, in Sydney, which is really our data centre capital? What would the impact, if you like, in terms of energy consumption in New South Wales in particular? Other states have the same issue, but because Sydney really is that capital of data centres in Australia, that's where some of the key issues will emerge. Sam Hawley: And Gordon, every time we use an AI site like ChatGPT, it uses a lot of water, doesn't it? Gordon Noble: Yeah, look, this is a real sleeper issue, and it's one that we're very concerned with. There's recent research, for instance, that since 2022, all the new data centres that have been developed, you know, two thirds of them are in areas where there's water stress. So it's becoming a big issue. But the way to think about data centres is that they're like the human body, they like to be kept cool, operate efficiently. And one of the ways that that happens is using water. So they consume literally billions of litres of water. The issue as we go forward is how do we actually, in Australia, build a data centre industry that is sustainable, given that we're an arid continent, given that we're going to have challenges from our climate in terms of water. At the moment, one of the opportunities is that both in Sydney and Melbourne, where data centres are going to likely be established, is we actually have surplus water in the form of recycled water. We tip 97% of our recycled water out in Sydney and Melbourne, we actually tip it out into our oceans and bays. So this is an asset, for instance, that could be used if we're smart enough to say, well, how can we actually build, say pipelines of recycled water to use this water, so we're not actually putting stress, environmental stress, on our rivers and creeks and streams, etc. So there's opportunities around this that we could solve. Sam Hawley: This is all making me start to feel rather bad for using ChatGPT for that recipe last night. I must go back to the old book, the cookbook lives on. Anyway, just tell me about emissions then, because we're meant to be bringing them down and I'm gathering this is not helping. Even the tech companies admit that, don't they? Gordon Noble: Yeah, this is what happened last year. So I think the surprise to the market is we started having the sustainability reports of the big tech companies and they all started to actually reveal how much their emissions had started to increase over the last four or five years. Each one of them, there are different increases in emissions depending on the way they've structured their operations, whether they build data centres, whether they outsource them, etc. But the picture that was emerging was a very consistent increase in their energy consumption. I think that really woke up a lot of the market in terms of, yeah, this is actually an energy intensive industry. Up until at that time, I think there was a little bit of a lack of understanding of how much energy data centres were creating because it wasn't really being aggregated in a single spot. So as we've been getting what we call these climate related financial disclosures and companies are starting to report on what we call the scope one, two and three emissions, we're starting to get a bigger picture. We're expecting to get more reporting in the next month or so. So what we'll start to see is what's happened since 2024 and 2025 and then we'll start to really have a good understanding of where things go forward. But what the clear picture at the moment is emissions arising in the big tech companies driven by their investments in AI. Sam Hawley: Gosh, all right. So Gordon, how worried do you think we should be then about this massive energy use and who should actually be taking responsibility for this? Gordon Noble: You know, I think it's as you mentioned, there's a lot of potential benefits around AI tools. You know, we can use these, for instance, for whether it's the recipe, a lot of environmental applications, a lot of benefits here if we get this right. At the moment from an Australian perspective, what really we haven't seen is a national approach being taken on this. We have, I think, in the Australian government an approach to communications that goes back to the, you know, the days in the early Federation we had a postmaster general. At the moment we need to start to think of, you know, the digital economy as actually moving across a range of different portfolios in the federal government, for instance. So we need a strategy around this to recognise that this has potentially got massive benefits, but also we really need to manage that. What we're seeing in other jurisdictions, for instance, Singapore, have gone down the pathway of establishing a green data centre roadmap. We need something like that in Australia. Sam Hawley: But what do you think without a new approach, can we keep pumping these questions into ChatGPT and still reach our environmental goals? And can our energy system actually cope with demand that is just going to keep growing? Gordon Noble: This is the big question. So the reality is if we do have at the higher end of expectations of the growth of AI, the energy that's demanded here just in Australia will actually crowd out other investments that we're making in renewable energy. So whilst we're making progress in decarbonising our grid, you know, there's an assumption that's based on, you know, a certain level of growth of energy demand. If that increases significantly, you start to put pressure on how much we can actually invest in more renewables, in more solar, for instance, more battery technology. It starts to then have that question, do we keep coal-fired power stations longer than we need? So I think there's a broader set of issues that we really need to get our heads around. Sam Hawley: Gordon Noble is a Research Director with the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Adair Sheppard. Audio production by Cinnamon Nippard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. I'm going to take some leave from now for a couple of weeks. Sydney Pead will be with you from tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
News.com.au
15 hours ago
- News.com.au
Green light for psychedelic drugs trial to treat binge-eating
Australian researchers will soon deploy a psychedelic compound found in 'magic mushrooms' to treat binge-eating in a world-first clinical trial. Experimental healthcare company Tryptamine Therapeutics announced the radical trial in a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange this week, telling investors Swinburne University would conduct the open-label research on 12 patients suffering from binge-eating disorder. Open-label means there are no placebos involved and all patients and researchers know what is being administered. The patients will receives two doses of TRP-8803, a psilocin-based IV infusion. Psilocin, which is produced when psilocybin is broken down in the body, is a psychedelic compound that triggers changes in mood, perception and thinking patterns. Cognitive neuropsychologist Professor Susan Rossell, from Swinburne, designed the trial with Tryptamine and told NewsWire she hoped the psychedelics would open up the trial's participants to new ways of thinking. 'What we have found in other psychedelics work is that the psychedelic itself opens up people to think differently,' she said. 'And one of the things that we know with a lot of mental health conditions, is they start to have repetitive thinking and it becomes very rigid. 'So people with binge eating disorder, 'I need to consume lots of food to help with my emotional issues'. 'They are in that very stuck, rigid thought pattern and they can't find other ways to deal with their life stressors.' Binge-eating is the uncontrollable consumption of food and can lead to a range of serious health problems, including social isolation and weight gain. It is the second most common eating disorder in Australia. In the US, an estimated 1.25 per cent of adults experience the disorder each year and 1.6 per cent of teenagers aged 13 to 18 are affected. 'It's extraordinarily costly,' Professor Rossell said. The trial is expected to run for three to four months, with initial results due at the end of the year. Tryptamine CEO Jason Carroll said the primary objective of the trial was to assess TRP-8803's utility in treating the disorder, but it could also generate insights into how the product might help with other neuropsychiatric disorders. 'With patient recruitment initiatives now underway, we look forward to first enrolment and the commencement of baseline data generation from participations, prior to first patient dosing,' he said. Clinical trials involving psychedelics to treat medical conditions are growing around the world, but the impacts are not yet clear. Psychedelic drugs are illegal in Australia and there is evidence that consuming mind-altering substances can lead to adverse outcomes. A study on single-dose Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, funded by psychedelics company Compass Pathways and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2022, revealed mixed results, with most participants experiencing 'adverse events'. 'Adverse events occurred in 179 of 233 participants (77 per cent) and included headache, nausea, and dizziness,' the researchers found. A small number of participants suffered serious negative impacts, the study revealed, including suicidal ideation and intentional self-injury. Professor Rossell said the Swinburne trial would be safe. 'I don't know whether these medications are going to work or not but I've worked with them now for two years and I haven't had anything negative happen with anybody in my trials, in the right and safe environment,' she said. She also said the use of an IV solution added an additional layer of control. 'The IV is even more safe,' she said. 'If we start to be aware that the person is having an unpleasant reaction, we can stop it straight away with the IV. 'With the oral preparations, they have to work through it. And it can leave people with some unpleasant feelings.' Tryptamine, a listed company with a market capitalisation of $43m, stresses the 'confirmed reversibility' of TRP-8803 as a key selling point for the product. 'This formulation aims to overcome several limitations of oral psilocybin, including significantly reducing the time to onset of the psychedelic state, controlling the depth and duration of the experience and reducing the overall duration of the intervention to a commercially feasible time-frame,' the company states. 'TRP-8803 also provides dosing flexibility and the ability to terminate treatment if the patient is experiencing an adverse event.' The company held $4.6m in cash as of March 31.
News.com.au
16 hours ago
- News.com.au
This is where you want to be if nuclear war breaks out
Is anywhere safe anymore? Is the Lucky Country lucky enough? The face of Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) is building a secret lair on a remote Hawaiian Island. Mr X (Elon Musk) is assembling his harem and genetic legacy in an exclusive Texas commune. And everybody's PayPal (Peter Thiel) bought up a chunk of New Zealand with plans to build an underground mansion. They're the disrupters that rebooted history. And their brave new world is once again growing dark under a nuclear shadow. An attempt by the United States to obliterate Iran's plans to build nuclear warheads on behalf of Israel (which itself evaded international fallout over its own illicit arsenal) has reset the clock. The End of history is over. Once again, every corner of the globe is contemplating The End. Once again, the Lucky Country and that other place where every cloud has a silver lining suddenly look even more appealing. Australia and New Zealand are largely irrelevant in the global scheme of things. Though Pine Gap may be joined on a list of high-priority targets by Adelaide and Fremantle as the AUKUS nuclear submarine project gains steam. But will living in the middle of nowhere make any difference? 'We've examined the effects of single nuclear explosions,' Middlebury College nuclear analysts Professor Richard Wolfson and Dr Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress write in a new assessment. 'But a nuclear war would involve hundreds to thousands of explosions, creating a situation for which we simply have no relevant experience.' Fears of the long reach of radiation emerged in the 1950s. Subsequent attempts to understand it led to explosive growth in climate science. Now, with the fallout of global warming already blasting the world's cities and agricultural centres, the threat of bombs is back. Most nuclear fallout lingers for only a few days. But some will stay around for many millennia. Both, the Middlebury College analysts argue, mean nowhere is truly safe. So, do Zuck, Musk and Thiel know something we don't? 'At first blush, these tycoons might seem to be 'prepping' for a familiar 20th-century style apocalypse, as depicted in countless disaster movies,' argue University of Queensland academics Katherine Guinness, Grant Bollmer and Tom Goig. 'But they're not.' Fallout fantasies The apocalypse is big business. From survivalists to couch potatoes, the idea of escapees emerging to a pre-industrial world swept clean of all ideological opponents reigns supreme. But there are always plenty of mutants to shoot among the dusty, tumbleweed-strewn ruins. The reality, however, won't be so romantic. Forget the flash. Forget the fireball. Forget the blast. For now, just focus on the fallout. What happens is anyone's guess. 'Extreme and cooperative efforts would be needed for long-term survival, but would the shocked and weakened survivors be up to those efforts?' the Middlebury academics ask. 'How would individuals react to watching their loved ones die of radiation sickness or untreated injuries? 'Would an 'everyone for themselves' attitude prevail, preventing the co-operation necessary to rebuild society? 'How would residents of undamaged rural areas react to the streams of urban refugees flooding their communities? 'What governmental structures could function in the post-war climate? 'How could people know what was happening throughout the country? Would international organisations be able to cope?' Climate models suggest Australia and New Zealand would be among those few areas least affected. Society may survive for a while. At least until Canberra's two-week fuel reserves run out. Then it's back to horses, ploughs and sealskin coveralls. Or what you've managed to stash away in a bunker. 'What is emerging among billionaires is a belief that survival depends not (only) on hiding out in a reinforced concrete hole in the ground, but (also) on developing, and controlling, an ecosystem of one's own,' the University of Queensland academics argue. Oprah Winfrey is getting in on the act. She's bought a 150-acre estate on the island of Maui. Oracle supremo Larry Ellison's personal 2000-acre ranch takes up most of the island of Lanai. And billionaire Frank VanderSloot has a similar-sized property next door to Zuckerberg on Kauai. Why Hawaii? Its islands are small. And a long way from anywhere. In an all-out nuclear war, remoteness equals survival. Even if the Pearl Harbor naval base is a prime target. Musk's Texas commune would be a start. But it's in easy reach of refugees. And Thiel has already fallen foul of one easily anticipated problem in New Zealand: Hostile locals. Revolting peasants 'Zuckerberg, Winfrey, Ellison and others are actually embarking on far more ambitious projects,' the University of Queensland academics assess. 'They are seeking to create entirely self-sustaining ecosystems, in which land, agriculture, the built environment and labour are all controlled and managed by a single person, who has more in common with a medieval-era feudal lord than a 21st-century capitalist.' But feudal lords have to fight to keep what they have. Even before the apocalypse. Thiel's attempt to lord it over New Zealand's South Island from a bunker on his 73,700 sqm estate fell foul of a mere district council. The local yokels didn't like the idea of his sort moving in next door. Zuckerberg's Kauai lair may be more manageable. He's bought up 5.5 million square meters of the island for a $A400 million retreat. This includes an 'underground storage' bunker with hydroponic agriculture and water purification systems. It's accessible via tunnels from several mansions and 11 'tree houses'. And it's all protected by a two-meter high wall, quad-bike mounted security guards and served by hundreds of local labourers. 'But precisely how many, and what they actually do, is concealed by a binding nondisclosure agreement,' the UQ academics report. Zuckerberg's survival is still questionable. Will the security staff and servants be fed? Will they get precious medical treatment? Will money still buy their love? What's certain is their manual labour would be invaluable. Evidence suggests the Toba supervolcano erupted 74,000 years ago. Only a few thousand humans appear to have clung on in South Africa to survive the subsequent fallout winter. And they didn't have to reckon with radiation. 'An all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia, even with today's reduced arsenals, could put over 150 million tons of smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere,' the Middlebury College researchers write. 'The result would be a drop in global temperature of some 8C (more than the difference between today's temperature and the depths of the last ice age), and even after a decade, the temperature would have recovered only 4C.' 'In the world's 'breadbasket' agricultural regions, the temperature could remain below freezing for a year or more, and precipitation would drop by 90 per cent. The effect on the world's food supply would be devastating.' Envying the dead A thermonuclear explosion produces a wide variety of nuclear materials. All have different rates of decay. 'The dominant lethal effects last from days to weeks, and contemporary civil defence recommendations are for survivors to stay inside for at least 48 hours while the radiation decreases,' the Middlebury academics write. Everything depends on the type of warhead, its size – and where it explodes. An atmospheric explosion maximises the reach of its shockwave: 'This reduces local fallout but enhances global fallout.' A ground-level explosion blasts a crater into the ground. The mushroom cloud 'drops back to the ground in a relatively short time'. An immediately dangerous fallout zone will easily reach beyond 30 kilometres of the blast. 'The exact distribution of fallout depends crucially on wind speed and direction,' the academics explain. 'However, it's important to recognise that the lethality of fallout quickly decreases as short-lived isotopes decay.' But even a 'limited' nuclear exchange will have global effects. Radioactive clouds rise high into the atmosphere. Particles will rain down on the ground over the following months and years. The more explosions, the more radioactive dust. The more radioactive dust, the greater the reach – and intensity – of fallout. Princeton University global security researcher Sébastien Philippe has simulated the effects of the first 48 hours after a 'limited' nuclear strike on the US. It would kill between 340,000 and 4.6 million (depending on prevailing winds). 'Acute radiation exposure alone would cause several million fatalities across the US – if people get advance warning and can shelter in place for at least four days,' he writes in the Scientific American. 'Without appropriate shelter, that number could be twice as high.' Then comes the new world order. 'Intense fallout from ground-burst explosions on missile silos in the Midwest would extend all the way to the Atlantic coast,' the Middlebury academics add. 'Fallout would also contaminate a significant fraction of US cropland for up to a year and would kill livestock.' Global airstreams won't be the only source of radioactive fallout. The dust and pollutants would strip the Earth of its protective ozone layer, allowing harmful solar rays to strike humans, plants and animals from sunup to sundown for centuries to come. And that's the 'limited exchange' scenario. So, are the world's richest people buying up estates in remote locations and fitting them out with bunkers because they have access to some inside information? 'The truth is simpler, and more brutal, than that,' the University of Queensland academics conclude. 'Billionaires are building elaborate properties … because they can. 'For billionaires, putting money into such projects doesn't mean they're crazy, or paranoid, or in possession of some special secret knowledge about the future. It simply means they've amassed such colossal surpluses of wealth, they may as well use it for something.'
