Scientists have layered hundreds of satellite images to reveal more than 1,000 previously uncharted coral reefs in the turbid waters of northern Australia. The number is comparable to the Great Barrier Reef, though many reefs are smaller in size, researchers say.

The reefs of northern Australia, while probably known to locals, had previously largely remained under surveyed. Project leader Eric Lawrey from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) wondered why, as he explored satellite imagery of the coastline and noticed shapes that looked like reefs.

The possible reefs were located in deep, turbid and sediment-rich waters, making them hard to discern in a single image. “If you look at any one satellite image, the water just looks like turquoise paint and you can’t really see reefs,” Lawrey said in a media release.

So Lawrey had the idea to layer 200 satellite images of each area, taken at different times. In this composite image, “all the swirly patterns of the moving water move around and average out while the reefs are constant,” he said.

Using this new composite imagery technique, the team from AIMS in partnership with the University of Queensland (UQ) mapped the reefs from Houtman Abrolhos in Western Australia all the way through to western Cape York in Queensland. The resulting work defined the location of more than 3,600 coral reefs and 2,900 rocky reefs, or reefs formed by geological processes. These reefs likely support an array of marine life.

The northern Australian coastline has been mapped in marine charts to alert approaching vessels, but those maps don’t clearly distinguish between rocky and coral reefs, the researchers say. The recent project provides the “first comprehensive view of coral reefs boundaries across northern Australia,” according to the statement from AIMS. This offers “planners, Traditional Owners, and managers a much clearer view of reef and habitat locations.”

“Northern Australia is so vast and comparatively understudied, so identifying more than 1,000 previously uncharted reefs highlights that important gaps in our understanding of reef distribution still exist – particularly in more turbid areas where it has traditionally [been] more difficult to ‘see’ these reefs,” Jody Webster, a marine geoscientist at the University of Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the research, told Mongabay by email.

The new satellite imagery methodology has also been applied to the Great Barrier Reef in a separate project, now under review, to “identify hundreds of additional reefs and to remove false reefs,” Lawrey said.

Webster said mapping the reefs is the first step, adding that field observations and sampling are now needed “to understand reef ecology, biodiversity, age and development.”

“Significant investment will be needed by the scientific community and agencies to do this important work,” he added.

Banner image: Combining satellite images helped reveal reefs in northern Australia. Image © AIMS/Eric Lawrey (CC BY4.0).

By Leida Zeidan

This article was originally published in Lahlah in Arabic on April 7, 2026. This translation is republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement. 

This post is part of Global Voices’ May 2026 Spotlight series, “Global crisis, local solutions.” This series offers stories of resistance and successful climate action, insight into how communities in the Global South are fighting back against the crisis, analysis of what this might mean for future generations, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.

On a small plot of land on the outskirts of Jaramana, in rural Damascus, the earth has been transformed into a site for reviving local seed production. In stark contrast to the city's crowded streets, the green expanses of this area represent a departure from the ordinary. It is an attempt to return to rural life, nature, and farming. On these grounds, the initiative known as “Solidarity Fields in Jaramana” was launched at the beginning of last March, when a group of organizers and farming enthusiasts began restoring the production of local and indigenous seeds by preparing the soil, sowing, covering, and irrigating it with the goal of recovering crop varieties that had nearly disappeared, amid the country's deteriorating economic conditions and the decline of agriculture.

From Greece to Jaramana

The Solidarity Fields in Jaramana initiative is an extension of the “Solidarity Fields and Dignity” project, which operates across various regions of Syria with the aim of supporting agriculture and rebuilding the relationship between people and the land. It seeks to empower communities to produce their own food, share harvests with those in need, and create a different model of cooperative work, particularly as environmental challenges and climate change increasingly affect land and agriculture.

Muhannad Deeb, an artist and coordinator of the Solidarity Fields in Jaramana initiative, spoke to Lahlah magazine about the project's origins. It emerged, he said, “from the convergence between the Shughl wa Fan [Work and Art] initiative and ‘Solidarity Fields and Dignity in Syria,’ which was established in 2025 as an extension of the Solidarity Fields project in Greece.”

The Greek Solidarity Fields project was founded by Suleiman Dakdouk, a Syrian refugee, and his fellow Syrians in Greece. Beginning with just 0.4 hectares, two cows, and three sheep, the project eventually expanded to more than 15 hectares, spread across displaced communities. The initiative was built on a principle of self-sufficiency, organizing work residencies, farms, poultry raising, crop harvesting and marketing, as well as the production of food items including dairy products, cheeses, beverages, and other daily necessities. It also established shops to market any surplus production. 

The Shughl wa Fan initiative, for its part, was founded in 2008 as an artistic, cultural, and developmental project aimed at raising awareness within Syrian society about its role in preserving living spaces, and recognizing the impact of art on creating a better environment, engaging local communities alongside governmental institutions, and clarifying the role of artists in society. This alignment in vision and goals led to collaboration and ultimately to the establishment of the Solidarity Fields in Jaramana.

Deeb continues:

After connecting and meeting with the general coordinator of Solidarity Fields in Syria, Suleiman Dakdouk, the Jaramana Solidarity Fields was established in March 2026, work in the field began, and interested parties, farmers, volunteers, and friends were invited to engage with the experience.

Local seeds and food security

The importance of local seeds lies in the fact that they represent the primary source of planting material for farmers. According to FAO, community-based seed systems can account for 80 to 90 percent of total seeds consumed, particularly for self-pollinated crops. Ensuring a supply of local seeds also helps reduce dependence on food aid.

Local seeds are well-suited to local climates and low-input farming systems, and they carry wide genetic diversity, making them resistant to disease and adaptable to climate variation. FAO notes that community seed system activities tend toward integration and self-organization, encompassing the ways in which farmers produce, disseminate, and access seeds directly from their harvests, or through exchange and barter with friends, neighbors, relatives, and through local markets.

Deeb describes the heart of the Solidarity Fields work as relying on “diverse agricultural experiences that are shared to enrich the project,” adding that the initiative sources its seeds primarily from household gardens, “where most people rely on their home plots to produce vegetables.”

According to Deeb, indigenous seeds can be identified by experts, but the most reliable method remains obtaining them from a mature, locally grown fruit. Seed planting is the project's first phase: the initiative has allocated approximately 300 dunams (around 75 acres) of farmland for cultivating the seedlings that emerge from these seeds. After the cultivation and harvest process is complete, the produce is distributed in a way that ensures the project's continuity and the availability of authentic local seeds going forward.

Seeds are the fundamental source of human food and the carriers of the genetic traits of crop varieties and types. Over time, through improvement, selection, and adaptation, the highest-quality varieties have emerged. Improving seeds and obtaining high-quality varieties is essential to increasing production and meeting environmental challenges. FAO underscores that food security depends critically on farmers having access to good seeds appropriate to their environment. Without good seeds, there can be no good crops. This makes projects that provide local seeds particularly significant, especially in post-war and post-disaster periods. 

The importance of Indigenous seeds

The war in Syria caused the rural population to shrink by 50 percent between 2011 and 2016, leading to heavy losses in crop and livestock production, the destruction of irrigation systems, damage to vast agricultural areas, and sharp increases in the costs of agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. The blockade of certain areas also prevented the transport of seeds, pushing farmers to rely on imported varieties. When war ravages a country, the continuity of its agricultural systems is also destroyed. Farmers may keep their lives but lose land and seed stocks carefully stewarded for generations, lacking the resources for reconstruction. 

Deeb considers this initiative especially significant following the years of drought and conflict, arguing that it “helps increase the number of farmers adopting this approach, thereby expanding the areas cultivated with local seeds, particularly as production costs are reduced through the elimination of chemical pesticides and fertilizers.”

He also believes the initiative has the potential to bring about lasting change in agricultural practice and to influence farmers and local communities: “Most farmers rely on experience before adopting any method in their work, so it's possible for the results of this experiment to influence farmers and the wider community, making it more widespread.”

Given the challenges facing agriculture in Syria and the decline in agricultural output in recent years, the production of local seeds represents a vital step toward ensuring sustainable farming and toward rebuilding the farmer's relationship with the land and their dependence on it as a source of food, in the face of both climatic and political crises.

A study that claimed OpenAI’s ChatGPT can positively impact student learning has been retracted nearly one year after publication. The journal publisher, Springer Nature, cited “discrepancies” in the analysis and a lack of confidence in the conclusions—but not before the paper racked up hundreds of citations and made the rounds on social media.

“The paper’s authors made some very attention-grabbing claims about the benefits of ChatGPT on learning outcomes,” said Ben Williamson, a senior lecturer at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, in an email to Ars. “It was treated by many on social media as one of the first pieces of hard, gold standard evidence that ChatGPT, and generative AI more broadly, benefits learners.”

The retracted paper attempted to quantify “the effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking” by analyzing results from 51 previous research studies. Its meta-analysis calculated the effect size between various studies’ experimental groups that used ChatGPT in education and control groups that did not use the AI chatbot.

That analysis supposedly showed how “ChatGPT has a large positive impact on improving learning performance” along with a “moderately positive impact on enhancing learning perception” and “fostering higher-order thinking,” according to the researchers who authored the paper. The now-retracted results first appeared in the journal Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, published by Springer Nature on May 6, 2025.

“In some cases it appears it was synthesizing very poor quality studies, or mixing together findings from studies that simply cannot be accurately compared due to very different methods, populations, and samples,” Williamson told Ars. “It really seemed like a paper that should not have been published in the first place.”

Williamson also questioned the timing of the paper’s publication just two and a half years after OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022. “It is not feasible that dozens of high-quality studies about ChatGPT and learning performance could have been conducted, reviewed, and published in that time,” Williamson said.

A legacy that may outlive retraction

Since its publication, the study has been cited 262 times in other papers published by Springer Nature’s peer-reviewed journals and received a total of 504 citations from both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sources. It also attracted nearly half a million readers and received enough online attention to rank in the 99th percentile for journal articles in terms of attention score.

When you pull into the Assembly, as it’s familiarly known, one of the first things you see is a speed limit sign: 14 MPH. Practically, the quirky number says slow down more effectively. But it’s a symbol, too, of a world set apart. Just five minutes off the interstate, the whole place moves at a different pace, a living remnant of a 19th-century phenomenon. 

If you trace the Cumberland Plateau northward, its highlands eventually give way to the Allegheny Plateau, a kissing cousin that runs to western New York. There, in 1874, the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly was established — a training ground for Protestant church workers that President Ulysses S. Grant visited the following year. Its purely religious focus expanded over time, growing into a curated spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and recreational program. Today, it’s known as the Chautauqua Institution, borrowing the Haudenosaunee place name.

From a beautiful lakeshore in New York, this movement for adult learning and enrichment spread with gusto. Hundreds of “Chautauquas” or “assemblies” were formed in rural locales across the U.S. and Canada. Others took the concept on the road, popping up a “tent Chautauqua” for a handful of days and then circuiting on. Pastors giving sermons, lecturers making speeches, musicians and other performers offering entertainment — all played essential roles in the life of an assembly. Some describe them as the original TED talks. The movement also gave us book clubs. 

In 1882, Tennessee hopped aboard the band-wagon. That fall, an ecumenical group of leaders drew up a charter for the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly. The following summer, teachers from denominations across the South gathered for the inaugural session. A campus was raised, and, as in New York, the program quickly expanded to serve a broader audience with something of an edifying vacation. 

The core religious and educational program became intermingled with a social scene and, of course, courtship. Among those attending the Monteagle Assembly in the 1890s was John Bell Keeble, an attorney from Nashville and my great grandfather. According to the story passed down to me, he heard Emmie Frazer give a dramatic reading in the auditorium and was instantly smitten. She, apparently, had plans for a carriage ride with a suitor the following day. Putting his lawyerly wiles to personal use, John rented out all the horses. Her only option would be to ride with him. 

The stratagem worked. The two married. In August 1905, one of their six children, my grandfather Edwin, was born in the Assembly and, I’m told, placed in a laundry basket. Edwin would become a celebrated architect in Nashville, designing churches, homes, the Life & Casualty Tower downtown, and Memorial — Vanderbilt’s iconic gym.

In 1950, Edwin and my grandmother, Alice Beasley, met at a porch party in the Assembly. She’d been swept into the goings on of Monteagle summers by her own grandmother, Lucy Pulliam Williamson. The day the architect and the redhead from West Tennessee met was the Fourth of July and — forgive me for this — there were fireworks of the best kind. 

Despite our efforts to build a more liberatory mental healthcare system, psychosis remains one of the most stigmatised psychological experiences. Even people who are otherwise sceptical of psychiatry often see psychosis as different, as more severe and inherently pathological, where social explanations no longer apply and medical authority, including non-consensual interventions, are seen as unavoidable. Psychosis is framed as something that cannot be understood in relation to the world a person lives in, only managed or contained.

This assumption carries weight: it not only shapes how psychotic people are treated, but it also acts as a barrier to meaningful change in our mental healthcare system. When we make exceptions for some people or experiences, we suggest that our stated aims are not fit for purpose – that the social model is insufficient, and that psychiatric abolition, or even substantive reform, is utopian rather than realistic. My aim is to challenge these assumptions, exploring how psychosis can be understood using the social model and supported outside of the psychiatric system.

When I share my critiques of psychiatry with others, a common rebuttal is “what if you had a loved one that was psychotic — would you still think the same?” My answer to that is, undoubtedly, yes. My understanding of psychosis is shaped partly by watching people close to me struggle with beliefs that caused them real fear, yet were judged in completely different ways depending on their cultural fit. Some of these beliefs were immediately pathologised as symptoms of psychosis, while others — despite having the same structure, certainty, and distress — were accepted as normal because they aligned with dominant social anxieties around culture, religion and politics. Seeing this double standard up close made it impossible for me to view ‘psychosis’ or ‘delusion’ as a discrete and purely clinical category. It felt less like a measure of innate disorder and more like a reflection of the specific fears society is willing to legitimise, and those it will not.

The medical model presents psychosis as a combination of delusions (fixed, false beliefs) and hallucinations (sensory experiences that others don’t also experience) that cause distress or impairment in daily life. In psychiatry’s own terms, most delusions are ‘non-bizarre’, meaning the content involves situations possible in real life, like being followed or being in trouble with the police. Hallucinations are usually related to the delusion’s content, such as seeing the person you believe is following you. This means even when a person’s beliefs do not reflect their circumstances, the content usually draws on recognisable, real-world events. They are not random or incomprehensible, but shaped by the social and material environment in which the person lives.

Not only does the genuine plausibility of most psychotic beliefs allow them to take hold, but so does the atomised and precarious nature of our society. It is far easier to become paranoid about people around you when you don’t know them, and when you are living with real, unresolved stress and injustice. In these conditions, people naturally try to make sense of their distress by locating its source, especially in a society that offers few collective explanations or avenues for change. As a result, the experience of psychosis is often far more distressing and debilitating for those living in urban areas and in neoliberal countries. A study found that London and Paris had the highest rates of psychosis in the world, with the strongest predictor of psychosis being a low rate of owner-occupied housing — the metric used to measure housing instability, and by extension inequality. A separate study found that the experience of psychosis varied wildly around the world: while paranoid and distressing symptoms are common in individualistic societies, psychosis is viewed neutrally or even positively in more community-oriented societies. The paranoid, persecutory beliefs we associate with psychosis are not inherent to it; they don’t prove a disordered mind, but rather a disordered society.

This becomes clearer when we consider the prevalence of ‘delusion-like beliefs‘ in the general population, and how analogous these are — both in content and impact on the individual — to those that are pathologised as psychotic. Fixed, false, and distressing beliefs are common, often relating to victimisation: there are far more social media stories of “stalking” and “almost abduction” than are statistically credible. These anxieties are distressing, and often disrupt people’s lives, but they’re also understandable. In a patriarchal society where crime is common and its fearmongered media coverage even more so, “stranger danger” takes precedence over community. In such a society, it is common, natural, and certainly not ‘crazy’ to distrust others.

Crucially, this pattern isn’t limited to beliefs commonly labeled as ‘delusional’. Many culturally accepted beliefs operate in much the same way: they draw on shared narratives, become deeply personal, and shape people’s daily lives, even resulting in sensory experiences that are analogous to hallucinations. For example, religious or spiritual frameworks may involve beliefs about divine punishment, demonic forces, or apocalyptic futures; while political conspiracies may centre on shadowy elites, impending wars, or secret plots. These beliefs can be intensely distressing, all-consuming, and resistant to counter-evidence, yet they are rarely medicalised when they align with dominant cultural or ideological norms. My point is not to pathologise religion or conspiracy, but to highlight the absurdity of pathologising beliefs at all. If distressing, unprovable beliefs are ubiquitous across society, then the act of singling some out as symptoms of illness appears less like science and more like a social judgement about whose interpretations of the world are permitted.

This means that the harm lies less in what people believe than in how those beliefs are responded to. Regardless of content, the best way to approach distressing beliefs is with honesty and respect. For example, a person I know talked to me recently about their fear of stranger abductions, and how they believe a trafficking ring will abduct them if they leave the house. I discussed this belief with them like I would with anyone, regardless of diagnosis. I affirmed their right to be afraid but explained why I thought the belief was not credible; I showed them the true statistics for stranger abductions and stated my opinion as to why it’s such a prevalent yet irrational fear. That it’s the moral panic of “stranger danger”, similar to other moral panics in that it keeps people fearful of, and so separate from, their communities, stifling attempts to organise and shifting blame for social problems onto some ‘other’ rather than addressing their structural causes. This explanation reflects my real view, and it starts a discussion rather than shutting one down. In contrast, responding to psychotic people with lies, such as by disingenuously affirming the content of distressing beliefs, or misleading someone into compliance with a narrow model of ‘recovery’, strip those interactions of honesty and agency. Whether the aim is to reduce disruption, secure cooperation, or facilitate treatment, deception denies people their autonomy. Being repeatedly lied to, managed, or misled in this way is often noticed, and it understandably reinforces paranoia.

The harm deepens with the involvement of carceral systems like psychiatry and the police. Interventions such as forced medication, involuntary detention, welfare checks, and surveillance are justified as neutral or therapeutic responses to psychosis, but they are often unwanted and distressing. Many common psychiatric practices have been recognised by the UN as “forms of torture and ill-treatment” when they rely on coercion, confinement, or the removal of legal capacity. When a person’s distress is met with force, and when those around them collaborate with systems that deny their account of reality or conceal decisions being made about their body and freedom, trust is damaged. What is presented as care becomes indistinguishable from punishment. When a person is forcibly medicated, detained, or surveilled, is it really irrational for them to feel persecuted? And when you are persecuted, is the paranoid response to blame distant powers, or to look to the people, services, and systems that you trust, that are meant to care?

If we take the social model seriously, then psychosis cannot remain the exception that proves psychiatry’s authority. The social model asks us to locate distress not in defective minds, but in unequal, violent, and isolating conditions; to understand impairment as something produced through the interaction between people and their environments. It requires us to recognise that what is called ‘psychosis’ is often an attempt to make sense of real insecurity, injustice, and harm in a society that offers few collective explanations and even fewer routes to safety.

From this perspective, the harm associated with psychosis is not inevitable. The question then is not how to correct or contain psychotic beliefs, but how our responses either compound or relieve distress. Coercion, deception, and surveillance don’t restore trust or clarity; they deepen fear and confirm a sense of persecution. Likewise, drawing rigid boundaries between “sane” and “delusional” beliefs doesn’t protect people from distress, it simply determines whose interpretations of the world are taken seriously and whose are punished. A truly liberatory approach to psychosis is not force disguised as care. It asks that we build our communities, and create trust rather than dismissing distrust as madness, and in doing so strengthening the distrust and isolation felt. A truly liberatory approach to psychosis demands honesty, solidarity, and material change.

For more information and peer-led support for people with psychotic or similar experiences, visit the Hearing Voices Network