
Professor of Marketing Science & Director @EhrenbergBass Institute, @UniversitySA. Tweets marketing, science, sceptical thinking.
Australia
Joined February 2009
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Are those stem cells or cells from the plant stem?! #pseudoscience
Byron Sharp retweeted
Patrick Stewart as gay opera director Alistair Burke in one of my favourite scenes in Frasier. Rest in Peace
Byron Sharp retweeted
Orphaned kangaroos sleep in handmade pouches that mimic their mother's pouch and keep them warm and quiet.
📽: The Kangaroo Sanctuary
Byron Sharp retweeted
There were five slave trades. You were taught about only one. 🏴🇬🇧
One. The Atlantic. Twelve million Africans shipped to the Americas. Britain banned it in 1807, then hunted it for sixty years.
Two. The Barbary trade. A million Europeans taken to North Africa. Britain bombarded Algiers in 1816.
Three. The Saharan trade. A thousand years of caravans north across the desert. Britain had its northern end banned. Tripoli, 1857.
Four. The East African trade. Twenty thousand people a year through one customs house. Britain forced the market shut. 5 June 1873.
Five. The Ottoman trade. Raiders sold Eastern Europeans south for three hundred years. Britain made the Sultan ban it in 1854.
It cost sixty years and two thousand sailors. Nobody else fought all five. 🙏🇬🇧
It isn't over. Mauritania only made it a crime in 2007. Fifty million people are in slavery today.
Someone has to remember who started the fight. ⚓🇬🇧💪
Byron Sharp retweeted
🇩🇪 Germany’s Left may fail to form coalition over fears of Islamist radicals in own party
A major political scandal erupted in Berlin after staff of Elif Eralp, the Left party’s candidate for governing mayor, accidentally sent journalists a document in which she admitted fearing for her family’s safety because of people in her own party with links to Palestinian radical organizations.
The day before the letter, the party invited well-known pro-Palestinian activist Ibrahim Ibrahim to a party event. He has been linked to support for the terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
One of the party's MPs, Ferat Kocak, was pictured with Ibrahim Ibrahim.
CDU representatives have now demanded that the Left’s potential coalition partners, the SPD and the Greens, reconsider plans to form a joint government, saying they are no longer sure how the Left will form a government if they themselves fear an “Islamist environment in their own party.”
The head of Berlin’s Neukölln district said the situation shows how deeply supporters of antisemitic and terrorist organizations can be connected to the Left party.
Byron Sharp retweeted
"Line go up" is the pejorative that saved a billion lives and enriched billions more. It's not simply correlation; it's causation. This is the graph the degrowthers want you to ignore.
Byron Sharp retweeted
Here you go, kids - this is your heritage. 🇦🇺
Australian Yarns and History
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They called him Bill the Bastard because nobody could ride him. Then one day, he carried five Australian soldiers through enemy fire and became a legend.
He was big, bad-tempered and had a reputation for throwing anyone brave enough to climb onto his back.
But during the First World War, this troublesome Australian war horse would become the unlikely hero of one of our most extraordinary military stories.
Bill was a massive 17-hand horse sent overseas with the Australian Light Horse. He was strong, unpredictable and notoriously difficult to handle.
Most soldiers wanted nothing to do with him.
But Major Michael Shanahan was different. An experienced horseman, he managed to build a bond with Bill that others couldn’t.
Then came August 1916 and the Battle of Romani in Egypt.
Australian troops were fighting Ottoman forces in the scorching desert. The fighting was fierce, and men and horses were scattered across the battlefield.
During the chaos, Shanahan reportedly spotted four Australian soldiers stranded without their horses.
They were in serious danger.
Rather than leave them behind, Shanahan helped the four men climb onto Bill’s back.
Imagine the sight.
Five fully grown Australian soldiers clinging to one enormous horse, galloping across the desert as enemy fire surrounded them.
And somehow, Bill carried them to safety.
The horse that nobody could ride had just saved four stranded soldiers.
Shanahan was wounded during the battle and was later awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his bravery.
But Bill’s story has a bittersweet ending.
Like thousands of Australian war horses, Bill never made it back to Australia. Accounts of his final years vary, but his extraordinary wartime reputation endured.
Today, a life-size bronze statue of Bill stands at Murrumburrah in New South Wales, honouring the horse that went from being considered a menace to becoming an Australian legend.
It’s a reminder that sometimes the most unlikely characters turn out to be the greatest heroes.
🇦🇺Had you ever heard of Bill the Bastard?
🇦🇺 Murrumburrah, NSW
#AustralianHistory #AustralianLightHorse #AustralianWarStories #WW1 #AnzacHistory #LestWeForget
Byron Sharp retweeted
Highlight reel of Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner, the custodian of women’s rights, saying utter nonsense. It could on for hours but we’ve all got lives to lead so here’s 3 minutes.
That’s an amazing interesting and sensible, important comparison. I’m surprised no one has done this analysis earlier.
Below are two charts, one showing all the major conflicts going on in the world and the deaths accumulated by them in the month of September 2026.
The second chart lists the media coverage/headlines and attention those deaths received.
We now have real data to back up what many of us have been saying for months on this app.
Look at Gaza/Palestine with 120 the “least amount of deaths” where supposedly a genocide is happening but with “the most coverage.”
Nigeria had 451 deaths nearly 4 times that of Gaza but received ZERO HEADLINES and they receive $730 MILLION in American taxpayer dollars FY2025.
Somalia had 194 deaths, 74 murders than Gaza and receives ZERO HEADLINES and they received $498 MILLION in American taxpayer dollars FY2025.
Gaza receives way more headlines, coverage, and attention than Ukraine and they had 6202 deaths in September alone and it’s not considered a GENOCIDE. Nobody’s marching in the streets, protesting, and rioting around the world for Ukrainians.
Ethiopia had the 4th largest deaths at 609 and coverage is AGAIN surpassed by Gaza and they received $920 MILLION in American taxpayer dollars in FY2025. None of people talking about Gaza care that the tax dollars are getting to extremists and funding their atrocities.
And you wanna know why?
Yes it’s antisemitism because it’s a conflict with Jewish people.
But ALSO in the other countries it’s the Islamists who are doing the killings mainly, but in Gaza they’re being killed and are pissed about it and the world has to know and pay, as they cry victim.
Byron Sharp retweeted
the funniest part is that trying to cancel someone for a meme that says Mao was a dictator has produced the largest global conversation about Mao being a dictator in decades
Byron Sharp retweeted
Tomorrow we're releasing a full UATX course for free: all 19 lectures of Professor Isabella Reinhardt's Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome, filmed in class with our students.
It runs from Rome's mythical founding to the Third Century Crisis. It ends on a question the class spent a whole session arguing about: did Rome ever really fall?
Brilliant
A high school girl in Mexico just won a gold medal for putting out fires with a speaker. It plays one deep, low hum and the flames die in about 5 seconds.
DARPA tried the same idea back in 2012 with a rig so big and clunky they never took it any further, and hers runs on a 12-volt battery and a speaker she can carry around.
Sound is just air being pushed back and forth. A low note at 30 hertz means the air around the flame is flipping direction 30 times every second.
Flames only exist in a thin layer where fuel vapor mixes with oxygen. Shake that layer hard enough and it keeps getting stretched thinner, the heat gets pulled away faster than the flame can make more, and eventually the flame rips right off the fuel. Whatever tears off is too cool to keep burning, so it just goes out.
DARPA's report put a number on how little it takes. Once the air at the flame is moving about half a meter per second, which is barely a breeze, the flame goes out, and pretty much any pitch can get there if you crank the power high enough.
Low notes just get you there way cheaper, because a speaker moves a lot more air on each push when the pitch is low. Two engineering students at George Mason figured this out by trial and error in 2015. They started with super high pitches, 20,000 to 30,000 hertz, and all the flames did was shiver. It only worked once they dropped down to 30 to 60 hertz, which is basically the bass on a hip-hop track.
Ángela Karime's build is a 12-volt battery, a frequency generator, an amplifier and a speaker, tuned to 30 hertz. She named it Vortex Tech and talks about it shooting out little rings of air, and that's real physics. When loud, low sound gets pushed through a narrow opening, the air curls up into rings like a smoke ring, and those rings carry a puff of air way farther than the sound would get on its own. In her tests it put out small flames from about 2 meters away.
She went through five prototypes and over 100 tests in about a year, and she says it's put out burning wood, flammable liquids, electronics and cooking oil.
The cooking oil one is a big deal. Throw water on a grease fire and it flashes into steam and flings burning oil all over your kitchen, which is exactly the kind of fire where you'd want something that doesn't put anything into the pan.
Now, sound can't cool anything down, so a big fire sitting on red-hot fuel can come right back the second the speaker shuts off. The George Mason guys worried about the same thing in 2015, and it's why this is still a prototype for small flames and the red extinguisher under your sink isn't going anywhere yet.
Space might end up being where this matters first. Up there water floats off in blobs, while sound works the same with or without gravity, and acoustics researchers have already published experiments on fighting fires with sound on spacecraft.
She's still in high school, and she's already working on a version that spots a fire and puts it out by itself. The gold in Indonesia also came with a special award that gets her into another international competition.
Byron Sharp retweeted
When I received a message from a former Trump administration official in August, asking me to meet with his team at a prestigious think-tank, I never could have imagined I was conversing with an Iranian intelligence agent.
It was the start of a two-month sting - described by ASIO chief Mike Burgess as "sophisticated and targeted" - that ended with the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gaining access to my personal emails and details in a major security breach.
The message from a former senior Trump administration contact I forged through my Wuhan reporting, who has a prominent profile with hundreds of thousands of followers, came on August 18 this year.
I had worked with him on my investigation into the origins of Covid-19. I trusted him and had met him in person during one of his visits to Australia.
Unbeknownst to either of us, his genuine X account had been infiltrated by an Iranian operative, using the ‘delegate feature’ on X, which gives a third party access to manage and operate your account.
Full story here:
news24.com.au/politics/austr…
Byron Sharp retweeted
Britain's biggest ever petition wasn't about Britain. 📜
1814. We'd just beaten Napoleon. The peace treaty gave France five more years of the slave trade. ⚓
Our own government had signed it. The country erupted. 🔥
One in every seventeen people signed. Children included. ✍️
Castlereagh took those names to Vienna. He could have asked for anything. He asked for an end to the slave trade. ⚖️
France never got its five years because of the British people. 🇫🇷 🫷🇬🇧
Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧
Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Byron Sharp retweeted
The Handmaid’s Tale is fiction for you. For us, it’s real life.
In Poland, I spoke about the victims of Auschwitz and the people massacred by the Islamic Republic in Iran. History teaches us what happens when the world looks away. We must remember the victims, confront tyranny, and refuse to let another massacre be met with silence.
#Iran
Byron Sharp retweeted
“I had $EX with underage girls. My entire family and my father did too.
So what? It’s absolutely NORMAL.”
UNBELIEVABLE 😶😶😶🙄


























