The 400-metre-long lump of carbon, magnesium, oxygen and “a whole bunch of other stuff” whizzing by, closer to the Earth than the moon, could have been nudged out of our path had it needed to be, says…
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The Gillard Government’s Clean Energy Bill enters legislation after today passing the Senate 36 votes to 32. Voting ‘no’ were the Coalition, independent Nick Xenophon, and the Democratic Labor Party’s…
Peter Shergold has worked at high levels of academia and the public service, and speaks here about how too much of the evidence-based knowledge of academia is not informing public policy. One approach…
Professor Hank Weiss, director of the Injury Prevention Research Unit at New Zealand’s University of Otago, has a startlingly straightforward suggestion for reducing the number of young people killed and…
China has for the first time successfully docked two orbiting spacecraft, with Thursday’s locking together of the Shenzhou 8 (“Divine Vessel”) capsule and Tiangong 1 (“Heavenly Palace”) module broadcast…
The Therapeutic Goods Administration has warned that an attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder drug, Strattera (atomoxetine), is linked to an increased heart rate and blood pressure in some patients…
Visiting British expert David Sweeney could have star appeal for academics frustrated by the bureaucratic inflexibility of Australia’s research auditing system and metrics-based assessments blind to the…
Honey bees are trapped in a Catch 22 where antibiotics used to protect them from bacterial illnesses ravaging hives are making them die from commonly used pesticides, some of which are used to ward-off…
Women drinking just three to six glasses of alcoholic beverages per week face a small increase in their risk of developing breast cancer, according to new research. The US research, published today in…
When a race is as prominent as the Melbourne Cup, betting is far from the preserve of wizened, semi-alcoholic, rollie-smoking, form guide-reading wager junkies. But do the relatively uninformed bets of…
Multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and other conditions involving muscle spasticity will be better understood following the discovery by Australian researchers that muscle fibres buckle when at rest…
The biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) has concluded for 2011 in Perth. The customary communique to accompany the end of the conference has been released and is available here. Where…
Recent outbreaks of deadly bat-borne diseases could be a sign of things to come as rising heat and changing rains help the spread of infectious disease in Australia. Such is the warning that Professor…
The United Nations has set Halloween as the day when homosapiens are estimated to reach seven billion, up from six billion in 1999 and five billion in 1987. Two centuries ago there were one billion people…
The public’s openness to asylum seekers depends largely on the perceived threat that would-be immigrants pose to traditional Australian values, new research has found. Academics from Monash University…
The Sri Lankan-born Australian who yesterday filed an indictment in the Melbourne Magistrates Court against his homeland’s leader is not alone in believing that President Mahinda Rajapaksa might be a war…
Changing the funding of vocational education and training (VET) away from head-counts of enrolments to focus instead on how many students graduate might help turn around the sector’s massive drop-out rates…
First 2011 brought us a Nobel prize in Physics. Now Australia can also boast the winner of the Science Magazine “Dance your PhD” award. University of Western Australia PhD student Joel Miller has taken…
Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year-rule of Libya has come to an violent end in a manner reminiscent of the dispatch of Fascist Italy’s Benito Mussolini. Libya under Gaddafi, like Libya before him, had a complex…
High blood pressure in pregnancy may itself cause birth defects rather than a type of drug used to treat the condition in early pregnancy, a study published today suggests. Researchers led by Dr De-Kun…
Tests on mice have given German researchers fresh hope that existing drugs could be used to reverse the debilitating effects of emphysema but experts have cautioned that the results may not apply to humans…
Dennis Ritchie, whose invention of the Unix operating system and programing language C paved the way for the creation of the internet, smart phones, e-banking and modern computer software, has died aged…
For the first time, scientists have been able to fix a genetic liver defect in tests on mice using stem cells created from human skin, marking a potential major breakthrough in the repair of genetic disorders…
Two Australian chemists have won the 2011 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science for the invention of “smart plastic” technology, a technique that revolutionised the way paints, contact lenses, solar cells…
The Gillard government’s carbon pricing legislation passed the House of Representatives by 74 votes to 72, and is expected to pass through the Senate with the support of the Greens next month. Under the…