By John Mathews, Macquarie Graduate School of Management
In 2014, Australia will host the G20 Summit. The Prime Minister’s Office has been canvassing privately for a Big Idea to present, something to take the green debate forward and put Australia’s stamp on…
Immunity has been central to cracking down on cartels – but does it work the way it’s supposed to?
Image sourced from www.shutterstock.com
Australia’s competition watchdog is reviewing one of its most powerful weapons in its cartel enforcement arsenal – its immunity policy.
Widely seen as the most harmful type of anti-competitive conduct…
The skills that underpin science should be better incorporated into the rest of the curriculum.
Thinking image from www.shutterstock.com
MATHS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION: We’ve asked our authors about the state of maths and science education in Australia and its future direction. Today, Rachel Grieve discusses why we need to spread science-specific…
The Australian government pays $50 a month for a drug that costs $2 a month in New Zealand.
e-MagineArt.com/Flickr
A government-appointed committee makes a recommendation that would save taxpayers $260 million within a year, but it’s ignored. And people at risk of heart attacks lose out.
Let me explain via a ripping…
Our attitudes towards religious institutions – in particular the Catholic Church – has changed as scandal and controversy afflicts the former bastion of faith.
AAP/Simon Mossman
As a young girl in the 1960s, I attended a Catholic boarding school. The nuns could be scary. When they walked the wintry and un-illuminated corridors of the convent, their knee-length rosary beads jangled…
The sensationalist coverage of the domestic violence inflicted in public on celebrity chef Nigella Lawson has the potential to normalise the behaviour.
EPA/Sebastien Nogier
There is something concerning about the media coverage of Charles Saatchi’s violence against his wife, celebrity chef Nigella Lawson. It is the willingness of the news media to reproduce images of Lawson…
Using nanotechnology, researchers have developed a technique to increase the data storage capacity of a DVD from a measly 4.7GB to 1,000TB.
Nature Communications
By Min Gu, Swinburne University of Technology; Yaoyu Cao, Swinburne University of Technology, and Zongsong Gan, Swinburne University of Technology
We live in a world where digital information is exploding. Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years. The obvious question is: how can we store it all?
In Nature Communications…
Rising public transport prices have been the trigger for protests across Brazil, but there are wider societal issues at play.
EPA/Sebastião Moreira
In the past week, there have been demonstrations in Brazil of a magnitude not seen since the movement for direct elections in the mid-1980s, and for former president Fernando Collor de Mello’s impeachment…
Moves to increase protection of national parks have been voted down.
Flickr/Marc Dalmulder
This week Greens Senator Larissa Waters proposed significant amendments to the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Some sought to better protect farmers and water resources from…
Creating ways for PhD graduates and other science researchers to go into teaching could be a way to improve our science education.
Phd student image from www.shutterstock.com
MATHS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION: We’ve asked our authors about the state of maths and science education in Australia and its future direction. In this instalment, Marguerite Evans-Galea, Darren Saunders, and…
Patients deserve to know whether their doctor receives payments from pharmaceutical companies.
Image from shutterstock.com
Patients will remain in the dark about whether their treating doctors receive payments from pharmaceutical companies that could influence prescribing habits, after a bill aimed at increasing transparency…
Welcome to part two of our interview with Dr Ken Henry, the latest in our series of video collaborations with SBS.
In the first part of his interview with SBS business business journalist Ricardo Gonsalves…
While it seems unbelievable, there’s a scientific explanation for foreign accent syndrome – and it may surprise you.
Baturix
In the past few days, a great deal of media attention has been paid to Leanne Rowe, a Tasmanian woman who has lived eight years with a French accent she acquired after a car accident. This phenomenon is…
President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai and US President Barack Obama shake hands at a press conference in 2010.
Mike Theiler, EPA
US president Barack Obama has formally announced the beginning of negotiations with the Taliban aimed at achieving a lasting peace in Afghanistan.
The talks will be held in the Qatari capital of Doha…
Modern Australian exhibitions, like the recent “Turner from the Tate” exhibition, shows just how spoilt Australian audiences are.
J.M.W. Turner's Regulus, 1828, reworked 1837. AAP Image/Supplied by the Art Gallery of South Australia
When visitors come to the Turner from the Tate exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, the experience is to travel through time and space to early 19th century Britain. It was a time of social…
It’s easy to make fun, but anti-wind power protestors are quite serious.
Will Grant
There’s a longstanding critique of the environmental movement which argues that somewhere along the road between the fight against the Franklin Dam and the fight for a carbon price everything changed…
Despite the popularity, a national container deposit scheme isn’t the right way to clean up our litter.
Flickr/nist6ss
The old-fashioned approach to recycling in which consumers pay a redeemable deposit on drink containers is popular among all kinds of people, from Greenpeace members to traditional Coalition voters. But…
Pregnant and breast-feeding women have iodine needs that are 50% higher than the general population.
Teza Harinaivo Ramiandrisoa
Iodine is naturally present in a range of food, especially seaweed and fish. So it may seem odd that the people of an island nation (most of whom live along its vast coastline) are not getting enough of…
Confessed doper Matt White (second from right) has been reinstated as sports director of cycling ‘clean team’ Orica-GreenEdge. But is this a conflict of interest?
AAP
The official reinstatement of confessed doper Matt White as sports director of Australian World Tour pro-cycling team Orica-GreenEdge passed with surprisingly little media or public scrutiny last week…
There needs to be a fundamental shift in how a scientist is viewed and measured.
Søren Rajczyk
By Jee Hyun Kim, The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health
MATHS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION: We’ve asked our authors about the state of maths and science education in Australia and its future direction. In this instalment, Jee Hyun Kim examines how the culture of academia…
There’s more information than ever before today but less journalists to cover it. Can institutional corruption still be brought to light?
Ahmad Hashim
More then ever, we are awash in information. With the advent of the internet, search engines and now more than two billion people wired users globally, information “has become the modern era’s defining…
Welcome to the first in our two part series of video collaborations with SBS, with Dr Ken Henry, former Treasury Secretary and the Prime Minister’s Special Adviser, responsible for the Australia in the…
They aren’t just pretty birdies – superb fairy-wrens teach each other to identify and fend off parasitic species such as cuckoos.
William Feeney
Can superb fairy-wrens learn to respond to brood-parasitic cuckoos by simply watching other fairy-wrens react to a cuckoo? That’s the question posed in a new Biology Letters study by myself and Naomi Langmore…
High demand for cannabis has led some people down the ‘synthetic drugs’ route – but are these drugs actually trusted by the users?
Schorle
For decades, cannabis has remained the most popular illicit drug among Australians. The strong demand among cannabis and other drug users for methods to evade detection and legal trouble has made online…
The sacking of Melbourne Demons Coach Mark Neeld has parallels to business management.
AAP
It’s often said the AFL has become a big business, increasingly embodying many of the rules of the marketplace. But people rarely look at it the other way – that is, how business is like the AFL.
The…
