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This might be the breakthrough coffee drinkers have been waiting for. Yanni Bouras, a Melbourne based structural engineer, thinks there might be a way to recycle the single-use takeaway coffee cups that Australians can’t seem to live without. Bouras has devised a method of replacing some of the sand used in concrete mix, with used, broken down, disposable coffee cups:

The cups are ground up and mixed in as a substitute for a proportion of the sand that goes into a typical concrete mix. So far, testing has found the material is weaker than standard concrete but has a higher thermal performance. That means it could be useful for non-structural purposes, like footpaths or even insulation. If 10 per cent of sand was replaced by takeaway coffee cups, there could be up to 700 coffee cups used per cubic metre of concrete.

I’ve always heard drinking too many cups of coffee could be a health risk. But “too many” must be defined. One hundred cups a day might pose a risk, in the same way excessive consumption of anything can be detrimental to our health. Recent research though has found drinking coffee in moderation, about four cups a day, may have health benefits for some people.

Compared to people who didn’t report drinking coffee, the researchers found, people who drank coffee (up to and above 4.5 cups a day) were less likely to die of any cause over a seven-year follow-up period. This pattern held true after accounting for other factors like a person’s lifestyle, and even when people reported drinking sugar-sweetened coffee. “Moderate consumption of unsweetened and sugar-sweetened coffee was associated with lower risk for death,” the study authors wrote.

According to Empire, American actor Julia Garner has been offered the lead role in the upcoming Madonna biopic. I always say you know you’re doing something right when a biopic is being made of your life, but the difference here is Madonna herself is behind the production.

Biopics are often subject to greater critic scrutiny than other features, because of the way they deal with their subject matter. Filmmakers have the difficult task of selecting which part of a subject’s life to include, and what not to, and can also be chastised for appearing to show bias of any sort.

In many cases the subject of a biopic has died, which can result in further complications. Not this time though. But the story of Madonna, by Madonna? That will be something to see.

Love & Virtue by Diana Reid won Book of the Year, and Literary Fiction Book of the Year, in the 2022 Australian Book Industry Awards. In other categories, Before You Knew My Name, by Jacqueline Bublitz, won General Fiction Book of the Year, while the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year went to Amani Haydar for The Mother Wound.

Books + Publishing have posted a full list of ABIA 2022 winners across all award categories.

A Guardian Australia investigation has turned up numerous similarities — fifty-eight in fact — between The Dogs, the 2021 novel by Australian author John Hughes, and The Unwomanly Face of War, a 1985 non-fiction title, written by Belarusian journalist and Nobel laureate, Svetlana Alexievich.

After uncovering some similarities between the books, Guardian Australia applied document comparison software to both texts, which revealed 58 similarities and some identical sentences. Guardian Australia also found conceptual similarities between incidents described in the books, including the central scene from which The Dogs takes its title.

Yes, there’s a lot of published fiction in the world. Many authors, just about all I’d think, are influenced to some degree by the work of other writers. From time to time then, some comparisons may be drawn between two quite different titles, and one or two minor overlaps may also be observed. But fifty-eight instances? That’s quite a stretch.

In a statement to Guardian Australia Hughes offered an apology, saying he’d started writing The Dogs — which has also been included on this year’s Miles Franklin longlist — fifteen years ago. Part of this process involved talking to his Ukrainian grandparents, whose accounts of the Second World War where similar to some of the testimonies Alexievich gathered while writing her book.

He had first read The Unwomanly Face of War when it came out in English in 2017, he said, and had used it to teach creative writing students about voice, acknowledging Alexievich as the source. “I typed up the passages I wanted to use and have not returned to the book itself since,” he said. “At some point soon after I must have added them to the transcripts I’d made of interviews with my grandparents and over the years and … [had] come to think of them as my own.”

Update: a joint statement from Hughes and his publisher Upswell in response to the Guardian Australia article.

QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection, published by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), is not only a catalogue for the exhibition of the same name running until Sunday 21 August 2022 in Melbourne, but also a collection of LGBTQIA+ stories and histories, edited by Ted Gott, Angela Hesson, Myles Russell-Cook, Meg Slater, and Pip Wallis.

More than 60 essays from authors with comprehensive knowledge of the historical and contemporary subjects encompassed by the NGV’s QUEER project are presented along side stunning reproductions of more than 200 works from the NGV collection, either by queer artists or engaging with queer issues. The essays in QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection explore the history of LGBTQ+ activism; the creation of queer spaces and communities; queerness as an artistic strategy; the expression of love, desire and sensuality; queer aesthetics; and the concepts of camp and the fantastic.

Seven middle-grade and young adult writers have been named on the 2022 Text Prize shortlist for unpublished manuscripts.

• Bellamy Jones and the Lost Treeheart, by Emily Beck
• How to be Normal by, Ange Crawford
• One Thing You Can Feel, by Robbie Taylor Hunt
• Year of the Dog, by Kate McCabe
• Finding Liminas: The Sudden Tree, by Bria McCarthy
• The Collector of Gifts, by Jamie Ramjan
• Let’s Never Speak of this Again, by Megan Williams

The winner of the 2022 Text Prize, along with the recipient of the Steph Bowe Mentorship for Young Writers, will be named in late June.

The Australian Federal Court has given social networking service Twitter fourteen days to hand over subscription information for the PRGuy17 account, that may reveal the identity of the anonymous operator. The order is in response to a defamation case being bought against PRGuy17 by conservative media journalist Avi Yemini.

PRGuy17, whose avatar displays Simpsons character Troy McClure, built a following during the pandemic, often in vociferous defence of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and critical of various conservative political leaders and mainstream news media. Yemini filed proceedings in the Federal Court in February promising to unmask the identity of the Twitter account. Yemini, a journalist at far-right media outlet Rebel News, was critical of the Andrews government’s management of the pandemic and clashed with the account on Twitter.

Subscription data includes any name and email address details used to create the PRGuy17 account, along with internet protocol (IP) addresses used by the account’s operator. It remains to be seen how useful any of this data may be in uncovering the identity of the person operating the page.

The winners in the 2022 Australian Book Design Awards (ABDA), which recognise outstanding book cover design, were announced on Friday 3 June 2022.

In Moonland (published by Scribe Publications, August 2021), by Melbourne based Australian author Miles Allinson won the Best Designed Literary Fiction Cover, while Catch Us the Foxes (published by Simon & Schuster, July 2021), by Sydney based Nicola West, took out the award for Best Designed Commercial Fiction Cover.

Cover designs in twenty categories were nominated, and all winners can be seen on the ABDA Instagram page.

Still from Kimi, courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Angela (Zoe Kravitz) is a housebound voice stream interpreter who spends her days correcting errors a virtual assistant named Kimi makes. Typically Angela is required to familiarise Kimi with slang terms and clarify user instructions the virtual assistant doesn’t understand.

But when Angela hears what sounds like a violent assault on a recording that’s been flagged for review, she urges her managers to inform the authorities. But the would-be crime is an inconvenience CEO Bradley Hasling (Derek DelGaudio) has no time for.

The company is about to float on the sharemarket, and Hasling is more focussed on the payout due to him. He wants Angela to drop the matter, insisting the recording is some sort of glitch. When Angela refuses to relent, she finds herself pursued by people who will stop at nothing to protect their interests.

Kimi, trailer, directed by American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, is choke full of references to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window. Soderbergh still delivers us the neighbours peering into each other’s windows, but adds COVID, face masks, and smartphones to the mix. The storyline may be on the straightforward side, but the brisk runtime means there’s seldom a dull moment.