Quantum 2.0: At the beating heart of biology

What is life? The question was posed by famous theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, and now advances in quantum mechanics could help provide the answer.

Arts & Culture | Pursuit by the University of Melbourne

Arts & Culture

The book that taught us to think of witches as women

Written in fury after a failed trial in 1485, the Malleus Maleficarum fuelled 150 years of witch hunts that shaped how Europe imagined, hunted and executed women

Research

Fifty words at a time, this project is helping to preserve Australia’s Indigenous languages

The 50 Words Project is documenting Australia’s Indigenous languages by recording 50 everyday words in as many as possible. It now has 100 languages online, free for anyone to explore and learn

Opinion

In 2026, we still need Robin Hood to be a hero

The new movie, The Death of Robin Hood, insists its weary, violent outlaw is the real man behind the myth, buried by centuries of sanitising. But the medieval Robin was a moral compass, not a villain

Opinion

Australia's arts sector needs more than words to survive

Australian artists are struggling. To support those who tell Australian stories, we need to go beyond the government’s Revive policy

Research

How Pasifika communities are reconnecting with their past in Australian museums

When a Samoan ethnomusicologist visited Melbourne's Grainger Museum as a music student, she found objects her community had no idea were there. Now she's changing that

Opinion

What The Devil Wears Prada 2 says about the state of print media

In 2006, Runway magazine was the place everyone wanted to be. Twenty years on, the fictional fashion media giant is at crossroads – but just how close to reality is Miranda Priestly’s situation?

Research

After 100 years, the song of a lost cricket returns to Venice Lagoon

As part of the Venice Biennale festival, the Adriatic Marbled Bush-Cricket has been reintroduced to lagoons via floating habitats, creating both an art installation and an ecological experiment

Research

Giant jars, ancient bells, buried bones and a mystery that endures

On a remote Laos plateau, thousands of stone jars hold clues to an ancient megalithic culture. An Australian-Lao team is piecing together what survives one artefact at a time

Opinion

The influencers with millions of followers who don't actually exist

They have lucrative brand deals and strong political opinions. They’re also not real. Behind the scenes, a handful of tech companies are rewriting the rules of global culture

Opinion

Have ballet and opera actually benefited from a Chalamet Effect?

Timothée Chalamet called opera and ballet irrelevant. The industries clapped back, tickets sold – but now comes the harder task of keeping those audiences

First published on 28 July 2025.


Share this article

Keep reading