Almost one year on from the start of Australia’s landmark social media ban, it is clear that the law has failed to stop most children from accessing the platforms. Meanwhile, teenagers are hoping to overturn the policy through a challenge at the nation’s highest court.

“I’m bringing the High Court case because young Australians have a right to be in the digital town square,” says Noah Jones, a primary witness opposing the ban in the case, which started hearings on 3 November. “This is the world of technology and I’m entitled to see it all and not be shut out.”

Jones was 15 when the ban came into effect, prohibiting under-16s from accessing social media sites, including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok. He was a plaintiff in the case, but withdrew due to the risk of costs being awarded against his family.

Now, the constitutional challenge is being led by advocacy group the Digital Freedom Project, alongside Reddit, which – like other social media behemoths – fears that Australia’s social media ban will be replicated elsewhere around the world. The primary argument before the court this week has been that the ban limits the freedom of political communication for under-16s.

In spite of this challenge and widespread concerns about implementing and enforcing a social media ban for children, numerous nations, including the UK, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil and a number of EU members, say they, too, will follow suit.

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From the moment the policy was announced, many experts warned that it would be unworkable and could have negative outcomes, and that the real target of any policy should be the platforms, their algorithms and what they allow online.

The biggest failure of the policy highlighted by researchers is that most children have been able to keep their profiles. One study by Courtney Barnes at the University of Newcastle in Australia and her colleagues, who surveyed more than 400 under-16s prior to the ban and then again three months after it, were still using prohibited platforms.

Such research and similar findings from Australia’s forced the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to announce in June a from AUS$49.5 million to AUS$99 million ($35 million to $69 million) if breaches were identified. He also introduced a raft of new powers for the eSafety commissioner to compel companies to provide information about what they were doing to get kids off their sites.

At that time, Albanese said countries around the world were following Australia’s lead on social media reform, but that social media companies weren’t doing enough to exclude children.

Yet, nearly half a year later, and in spite of widespread evidence that the laws have had little effect on teens’ social media use, not a single fine has so far been issued.

“Some kids hid accounts and devices from parents at first, but when accounts shut down, we all just made a new one or had someone older do the face scan,” says Jones. “Kids just laughed and kept using socials. Most kids I know have more social media accounts than last year because new platforms popped up and we tried them out.”

at the Age Verification Providers Association in London says up to 80 per cent of children have kept their accounts, with half saying they were never challenged and over a third retaining access “thanks to the false ages they originally used to create the account”.

“Australia has been a missed opportunity for those who hoped it would provide evidence on the benefits and drawbacks of age restrictions for social media, because the platforms did not implement the law in good faith,” says Corby.

He says the UK’s communications watchdog, Ofcom, has been much clearer about the requirement for highly effective age assurance when the UK brings in its restrictions next spring, and that ministers are “alive to the need for robust legislation that pre-empts loopholes”. “The social media platforms may think they have muddied the waters and avoided a successful precedent being set by Australia, but it is clear that lessons are also being learned by observers.”

at CyberSafety Solutions, an Australian consultancy, says it is sad that teens around the world can access Instagram teen accounts with inbuilt safety settings, limited content and algorithmic controls, yet Australian children cannot because of the ban. She says this is pushing them to far less safe platforms. “I would never have found primary kids even knowing what Reddit was before the ban, but now it’s mainstream for kids as their vetting is easily bypassed,” says McLean.

at the University of Sydney says her children have been able to retain their social media accounts and a “tentative conclusion” can be drawn that not that much has changed for Australian teens. She says there is no point doubling the penalty for social media firm breaches if the government isn’t going to enforce the law. “What does enforcement look like? Are we going to see that? Are we going to see these platforms being taken to court?” Jeffery asks.

at RMIT University in Melbourne says governments around the world have been captivated by the headlines rather than the data. Instead of bans, efforts should instead be on online safety and digital duty of care, she says.

It is impossible to keep children from interacting online and the focus of governments should be on making platforms safe, says Given. “My main message is that this isn’t the solution,” she says. “I think other countries really need to actually look at the data.”

Noah Jones, the young witness in the High Court case, says the arguments made by the government’s lawyers in court this week left him dismayed. “I don’t matter as an Australian when they say I’m not an elector and they do not seem to know the shorthand of how people communicate today,” he says. “I resent when statements are made that I should form a local club to exchange ideas or drop pamphlets – that sounds like my mum’s childhood before the internet.”

Introducing tight bands in socks around the ball of the foot seems to make walking and running easier. The effects of these socks, which stiffen the feet, are equivalent to the reduced energy expenditure that the average person would experience if they lost 2 kilograms, according to the researchers behind them.

at the University of Texas at Austin says he hopes to see elite runners in the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics using these socks, which he developed with , also at the University of Texas at Austin. “Our back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that wrapping the foot in the new socks could improve marathon performance by 1 to 2 minutes,” says Beck.

Since diverging from chimpanzees around 6 million years ago, human feet have become much stiffer than those of other apes, which assisted our bipedalism. Beck and Tang first wondered if they could take this stiffness further by tweaking footwear. However, previous attempts to reduce walking and running effort using shoes with stiffer midsoles or inserts have failed, so then the pair turned to socks.

They are made of a common synthetic yarn blend, typical of athletic socks. Beck and Tang tightly knitted three 1-millimetre wide bands at a 30-millimetre-wide region around the ball of the foot. This results in 24 times more pressure being applied to feet compared with regular, control socks.

To test them, they recruited 12 adults of both sexes who had no known health conditions. The researchers analysed how they walked while wearing the foot-stiffening socks, control socks and no socks.

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Participants then walked on a treadmill while wearing shoes with the stiffened socks and control ones for 5 minutes. Beck and Tang measured their VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen the body can absorb during high-intensity exercise. This allowed them to determine how much energy they burned in each of the walking experiments, known as metabolic expenditure.

The foot-stiffening socks reduced this expenditure in 10 of 12 of the participants by 2 per cent more than the control socks. That is equivalent to the average person losing 2 kilograms, according to the researchers.

This reduced expenditure probably doesn’t mean the socks lead to wearers getting fewer health benefits, such as weight loss, from walking or running compared with those wearing regular socks, says Beck. “Reducing the whole-body metabolic rate means we have better walking endurance, we sweat less during hot days and we can walk faster for the same effort [that we would use] using commercially available socks.”

The socks work by enabling the ankle and its muscles to push off at a slower velocity, he says. This requires less activation and less metabolic energy, leading to more economical muscle contractions. Unlike a stiffened shoe, the socks allow the toes to flex and the arch to recoil more freely, he says.

Want to move fast? Look for these materials in your next running shoes

Spiked running shoes with a rubbery material between the inner and outer soles, and a stiff plate to improve stability, seem to help people move faster

at the University of Oxford says the idea that a stiff foot makes walking less metabolically costly has been around for a long time, but nobody had managed to show it in people while they were walking until now. “The team’s clever insight was that those earlier attempts [with shoes] also stopped the foot moving when it needs to, right at the end of the step.”

The applications of the socks are yet to be tested. But Beck says that, in theory, anyone whose feet have lost some of their shape, say through old age, could benefit. The researchers already have a sponsored research agreement with the shoe company New Balance to commercialise the socks, says Beck.

However, Püschel warns that other explanations for the results cannot be ruled out, such as the volunteers changing how they walked when they knew they had the socks on. “It’s a promising first demonstration, rather than evidence that these socks will change anyone’s daily life,” he says.

Young children selected to be sacrificed as part of elaborate Inca rituals were given psychedelic and intoxicating substances, possibly to relieve the terror of their imminent death or in the belief that the drugs would help them communicate with the gods.

“We cannot reconstruct the children’s emotions or determine precisely how they experienced these events,” says at the University of Warsaw, Poland. “However, we should not assume that being selected for a prestigious religious ceremony necessarily meant that the experience was not frightening or traumatic.”

The Inca kingdom dominated 4000 kilometres of the west coast of South America from the late 13th century until the Spanish conquest of the 16th century.

In a ritual known as capacocha, children and young women were sacrificed to the mountain gods. According to an account by Spanish friar Martín de Murúa, , the capacocha ceremony was conducted to ensure there would be “no famine nor lack of fruits of the earth, nor would there be drought, nor pestilence, nor rebellion”.

Socha and her colleagues studied eight frozen, mummified children, seven of whom were girls, discovered between the 1920s and 90s at sites in Peru, Argentina and Chile. They are thought to have been aged between 6 and 14 when they died. It is thought some were killed with sharp weapons, while others were buried alive, says Socha.

The researchers analysed the mummies’ hair and nail samples to determine which psychoactive plants were given to children during the capacocha ritual.

Toxicological screening detected cocaine in all the hair samples, along with markers of alcohol and coca leaf chewing in half of the individuals. The team also identified harmine, a hallucinogenic compound found in the ceremonial drink ayahuasca, in one of the nail samples.

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Socha and her colleagues suggest that the antidepressant properties of harmine could have been used to calm the children and maintain a positive mood.

Each sacrifice seemed to be associated with a unique chemical signature preserved in the child’s hair and nails. This may indicate that each child was “prepared” in a different way, perhaps to direct their sacrifice towards a specific deity.

“We are beginning to understand capacocha not simply as a single sacrificial event, but as a complex process involving extensive preparations, long journeys and different ritual practices,” says Socha.

Archaeological stories of the Inca and Machu Picchu: Peru

Immerse yourself in the Inca civilisation’s history and archaeological sites, including Machu Picchu, accompanied by Dr Jacques Decoster.

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A nondescript 115-million-year-old fragment of leg bone has yielded spectacularly preserved red blood cells, which may be the earliest ever found in dinosaurs.

Red blood cells have previously been found in dinosaur remains, including 75-million-year-old bone fragments collected in Canada in 2015 and the femur of a Tyrannosaurus rex that died 68 million years ago, found in Montana in 2005.

Now, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and her colleagues say they have isolated the oldest-ever dinosaur red blood cells from the hind-limb of a theropod dinosaur, Aratasaurus museunacionali, found in Brazil in 2008.

The Aratasaurus individual studied by the team wasn’t yet fully grown, with an estimated body length of just over 3 metres, and weighed about 34 kilograms.

“The fossils we worked on are not display specimens by any means, so they don’t look very interesting,” says Grice. “If you look at them, you think there’s just a bunch of bones and there’s probably not much in there.”

Grice cut thin sections of bone, mounted them onto glass slides and used hydrochloric acid to remove surrounding rock – and she was shocked at what she saw.

“I was jumping up and down,” says Grice. “I ran up to my head of school’s office and was so excited that he gave me a whisky to calm me down. No one has ever seen dinosaur red blood cells in high resolution before.”

The cells she found were abundant: in a single slide, just a fifth of a millimetre wide, there were 20 blood cells. All of the cells were within fossilised blood vessels, providing further evidence that they really were red blood cells.

Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry analysis revealed the presence of haem B, a constituent of haemoglobin that binds to oxygen, adding molecular evidence of the type of cell.

The team also had to rule out the possibility of any contamination, especially from the sediments in which the fossil was preserved, which were dominated by algae.

The cells found outside the bone were dominated by chlorophyll-derived compounds, whereas those inside contained haem-derived molecules, which strongly suggests that the latter cells weren’t a result of contamination.

The researchers also compared the blood cells to those of the closest living relatives of the dinosaur fossil, birds and crocodiles. The Aratasaurus red blood cells are significantly larger. This could indicate that the cells swelled during fossilisation, or that the species grew much bigger than the fossilised specimen.

at the Natural History Museum in London says previous studies reporting red blood cells in fossils tens of millions of years old are contentious, with some researchers suggesting they could be the result of bacteria or artefacts of the fossilisation process. “This paper is further evidence that fossilised soft tissues such as red blood cells can preserve over geological timescales,” she says.

Grice says the discovery may mean that other nondescript dinosaur fossils that have been locked away in museum collections may hold profound secrets. “There’s drawers and drawers of fossil material, which don’t look very nice,” she says. “This kind of work opens up a whole new opportunity to unlock those collections and bring modern technology and molecular techniques to these specimens.”

The Late Triassic seas contained a multitude of marine reptiles, but lurking on the sea floor was something different: a marine amphibian. A fossil of the large, bottom-dwelling ambush predator discovered in China is the first evidence that amphibians once found a way to adapt to life in the ocean.

Named Gerrothorax maritimus, the near-perfect and exquisitely preserved 74-centimetre-long fossil was found by farmers in what is now a national geopark in Guanling county, China.

The researchers who studied the fossil think that its secret to survival in salt water, which is normally fatal to amphibians because of their permeable skin, probably lay in its strong body armour.

“It was a flat animal that lived on the sea floor,” says at the University of California, Davis, who was part of the team that analysed the fossil. It was probably an ambush feeder, he says, as its wide mouth and the strong hyoid bone in its neck suggest it used suction feeding, as is seen in some modern bottom-dwelling predators of a similar size that use an ambush strategy, such as wobbegong sharks.

As soon as the researchers began to study the fossil, they knew it was neither fish nor reptile. It had to be an early amphibian because of its tell-tale anatomy, which included its four legs and gills.

There is, however, no evidence that the creature underwent metamorphosis, as many modern amphibians do, such as when tadpoles become frogs, says Motani.

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To prove that the animal was indeed marine and not just a land-based creature washed into the sea after death, the researchers studied the strontium isotope ratios of the fossil bones.

They found that the remains of the new species had a clear signature of sea water, meaning G. maritimus grew to adulthood while in the ocean. Palaeogeographic reconstructions also suggest that, 237 million years ago in the Late Triassic Period, the location in which the fossil was discovered was at least 30 kilometres away from land.

The fossil was also recovered alongside that of a large marine reptile: an ichthyosaur called Guizhouichthyosaurus, which reached lengths of 7 metres.

Interestingly, the closest relative to G. maritimus lived in freshwater environments. A fossil of this amphibian, Gerrothorax pulcherrimus, was first described nearly a century ago.

This has led the researchers to suggest the marine lifestyle of G. maritimus was an accident of evolution. “There was a freshwater amphibian that happened to have the equipment needed to colonise the sea – the body armour,” says Motani.

The armour originally protected the Gerrothorax genus from predators in fresh water. But because it formed an impermeable barrier, it could also help the amphibians survive in seawater, he says.

Although it is commonly believed that “amphibious” means the ability to be on land or in the water, this is a misconception, says Motani. There are many modern newts that never leave the water, yet they are amphibians, he says.

Spectacular fossil preserves internal organs of ancient marine reptile

A stunningly intact marine reptile named Austronaga minuta that lived around 245 million years ago may have looked like a miniature version of more famous later ocean predators, like plesiosaurs

“My take is that it is similar to calling a snake a tetrapod, when it does not have limbs,” says Motani.

at Flinders University, Australia, says the fossil is a first, given that none of the 8000 or so living species of amphibians today is fully adapted for life in the sea.

“If not for the marine invasion by many groups of reptiles at the same time, they might have even had a chance at diversifying in this niche, but that clearly didn’t occur,” he says. “It shows us that amphibians closely related to modern forms were able to adapt to different environments, like seawater, in ways we never thought possible.”

The remains of a Neanderthal recently discovered in a cave in Iraq demonstrate the excruciating brutality of life in the Palaeolithic. The Neanderthal had a severely smashed but healed jaw and a spear hole straight through their shoulder, which is evidence of a likely fatal injury.

However, given that survival after such a massive, earlier dental injury would have been possible only with long-term care, the remarkable find may also provide early evidence of compassion, says at the University of Cambridge.

“We sometime romanticise hunter-gatherer or pre-agriculture lifestyles as peaceful and close to the natural world, or at the other extreme, we think of life in the Palaeolithic as [Thomas] Hobbes described it,” says Pomeroy. In 1651, the political philosopher Hobbes wrote about life in ungoverned societies as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. “But it’s not that simple, and both are extreme stereotypes,” she says.

The 75,000-year-old partial skeleton, known as Shanidar A, was recovered in 2019 and 2022 from the Shanidar cave in northern Iraq and consists of a largely complete right hand, two left ribs, a right rib fragment, a left scapula and six teeth. At least five Neanderthal individuals have been found at Shanidar since it was first excavated in the 1950s, and the way they were placed in the ground is often seen as evidence that these ancient humans buried some of their dead.

While the sex of Shanidar A couldn’t be determined, the wear on the teeth suggested that the remains were those of an individual who lived to be about 45 years old – a long life by Neanderthal standards.

They must have been hit very hard in the face at some point in their life, which made one of their bottom front teeth split in half and also probably fractured their jaw, says Pomeroy.

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The broken edge of the tooth became covered in hardened plaque, showing they continued living afterwards without that part of the tooth.

But, says Pomeroy, the person must have been in terrible pain. Although there is evidence from other archaeological sites that Neanderthals used mild, natural painkillers, “I don’t think they would have touched this pain”, she says.

Such a dental injury would have also made it difficult to eat, drink or talk, and would almost certainly have required a period of intensive care from the individual’s group, she says.

“The half tooth that remained in their mouth must have stuck out through the bone and the gums, meaning the hardened plaque, known as calculus, formed all over the top and bottom of the tooth,” says Pomeroy.

She says the force of the blow also made the teeth next to the broken one rotate slightly.

Shanidar A’s scapula, or shoulder blade, had also survived – and the team were stunned to see that it carried a perfectly round hole that was probably made by a wooden spear rather than a stone-tipped weapon.

The location of bone fragments also recovered from Shanidar A’s remains indicate that the spear entered the individual’s body on the left-hand side while they were facing forward.

The team says such an injury would have “penetrated all the way through the chest, including the lungs and potentially major blood vessels, likely leading to a rapid death”.

What is unknown is whether the injury was sustained while hunting or through violence.

, at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, wasn’t part of the team but recently helped discover the remains of wooden Neanderthal spears at site called Abric Romaní near Barcelona.

She says Neanderthals, like us, were complex beings, capable of very different behaviours depending on the circumstances.

“What I find most striking about Shanidar is how it brings together two seemingly opposite sides of human behaviour,” says Saladié. “We have evidence of lethal violence, but also evidence of care for injured individuals and complex funerary practices.”