The Conversation

On Thursday, Gold Coast man Gable Tostee was found not guilty of the murder of a woman, Warriena Wright, who fell to her death from his unit’s balcony. The case raises questions about how common death by falling is – and how many such incidents are homicides.

During the debates, fact-checkers like CNN and Politifact focus on evaluating the truthfulness of what each candidate said. While it is important to get the facts straight, focusing on the truth of the candidates’ statements is not nearly enough to evaluate the actual impact of the debate on the audience. How candidates say things matters just as much as whether they stuck to the facts.

Hearing voices that other people can’t is a meaningful experience. Like dreams, they can usually be understood in terms of one’s life experiences. Within mental health services, however, the prevailing medical model means some practitioners pay attention only to their presence, not their meaning.

A prolonged Internet outage affecting major sites like Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and The New York Times on Friday has commentators concerned that this is was a practice run for future, more widespread disruption of the internet. The distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) targeted the dynamic domain name service provider Dyn and came in three waves during the day.

Occasionally in science there are theories that refuse to die despite the overwhelming evidence against them. The “aquatic ape hypothesis” is one of these, now championed by Sir David Attenborough in his recent BBC Radio 4 series The Waterside Ape.The hypothesis suggests that everything from walking upright to our lack of hair, from holding our breath to eating shellfish could be because an aquatic phase in our ancestry.

Our linguistic and legal obsession with “insult” and “offense” is nothing new. In 1832, Sydney resident William McLoughlin was given 50 lashes for using the word “damned” against his master.But what does McLoughlin’s case tell us about today?Welsh Rabbit and lashes from pretty fellowsThe word insult can be traced to the Latin insultāre “to leap upon” or “assail”. It possibly entered English via a Middle French word insulter, meaning “to insult, crow, vaunt, or triumph over; to wrong, reproach, affront”.

Doctors and parents sometimes disagree about a child’s medical treatment. As the recent case of six-year-old boy Oshin Kiszko highlights, some disagreements between doctors and parents can’t be resolved by further information and discussion.Oshin has brain cancer.

“Never put anything smaller than your elbow into your ear” is something we’ve been wisely cautioned against at some stage or another. But more of us are ignoring this advice.We use in-the-ear-headphones to listen to music, car keys and hair pins to scratch that particularly unpleasant itch, and hearing aids to enable better communication.Many of us also use disposable foam earplugs to protect from damaging noises in the workplace, or to block the noise of snoring partners, loud traffic outside bedroom windows, dogs barking and any other bothersome sounds that prevent a good night’s sleep.

Stem-cell research holds promise for the treatment of a broad range of diseases and conditions, from spinal cord injury to autism. But more work is needed to turn this research into safe and effective therapies.

This week, an Australian woman delivered a baby at the age of 62 after having in vitro fertilization (IVF) abroad.Few women can naturally conceive a baby later in life without the help of IVF – and these are rarely first pregnancies. These women go through menopause later, and have lower risks of heart disease, osteoporosis and dementia.But does that mean that it’s safe to start a family later in life? Are there other risks and complications associated with pregnancy and childbirth in your 50s and 60s – or even your 40s?

Whatever happened to energy crops? A decade ago, the UK authorities confidently expected farmers to devote swaths of land to growing the likes of short-rotation willow and poplar and perennial grasses. These were to help feed one of the UK’s promising new renewable power sources – biomass energy, which burns plant materials to produce heat and power.

There are two features of life on the African continent that are fundamentally deadly to socioeconomic development. These are lack of cleanliness and punctuality.There is plenty of discussion on macro and micro economics and the big theories of economic development, but it seems the African worldview is a primary problem. It is opportune to discuss more fundamental inhibitors to economic development and growth. In my view this entails a fundamental change in how things get done.