As the most visible man-made object in the night sky the International Space Station (ISS) is of significance to humankind. It takes humans from being explorers of space to being residents of space. The…
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You may have read about Sony’s plan to install a fibre-based internet service in Japan which could reach download speeds of 2 gigabits a second (Gbps). That’s 20 times faster than speeds offered by Labor’s…
Citizen sleuths were out in numbers (or holed up inside, frantically tweeting) after last week’s Boston Marathon bombings. Alongside the drip-drip from mainstream media and the trickle of information from…
Last week we learned a famous 2010 academic paper, relied on by political big-hitters to bolster arguments for austerity cuts, contained significant errors; and that those errors came down to misuse of…
Access to cloud services using personal wireless devices will have the same carbon footprint as adding another 4.9 million cars onto the roads by 2015. How do we know this? Well, read on … Over the past…
Imagine you’re a disaster manager and a large earthquake has just struck off the Australian coast. You know that part of the Australian coastline is about to be inundated by a tsunami but you need more…
The FBI has released photos and CCTV footage of the two men considered suspects in this week’s Boston bombing, and has appealed to the public to help identify them. Both are young men, wearing baseball…
At least 14 people – including a number of emergency services crew – died in an massive explosion on Wednesday night at a fertiliser plant in the small town of West near Waco, Texas. So what made the blaze…
Amateur astronomers in Russia made a discovery last week any professional would envy - it seems they may have identified the remnants of the ill-fated Soviet Mars 3 lander, 30 years after it lost contact…
You’ve heard of quantum computers – they harness the power of atoms and molecules to perform memory and processing tasks; they exist in labs but are still a long way off in practical terms. But maybe they’re…
Memories, we know, are fallible, and in the case of acts such as this week’s horrific bombings in Boston, this presents particular problems. How can those charged with gathering eyewitness accounts – and…
So you sit down in front of your computer to catch the latest episode of Doctor Who directly from BBC’s iPlayer, and you are greeted by an error message informing you that the program will play only in…
What’s the difference between selling a secondhand music CD and transferring ownership of the same songs bought from iTunes? Not much, you’d think - except one’s illegal, according to a New York court…
Privacy and technology go together like music and dance: it’s only when both work well together that the magic happens. But what about privacy in the age of big data, an era in which your every move has…
The tech press reported recently that Chinese search giant Baidu.com was working on a new “smartglasses” device, dubbed Baidu Eye – a computerised headset with a small LCD screen, voice commands, image…
Are you a mutant? Am I? The advent of personal genomics makes this question less like a Marvel Comics story idea than it did in the past. But, as Spiderman’s uncle Ben might have put it: with great power…
The higher education sector is to take heavy budget cuts to help pay for the government’s Gonski school funding plan, a key measure in Julia Gillard’s bid for re-election. About A$2.3 billion will be saved…
Ever since a year-long investigation by the Australian Crime Commission alleged “widespread use” of drugs in sport we’ve been hearing about a dizzying array of substances allegedly used by elite athletes…
Welcome to our new podcast series, which we’re delighted to have co-produced with SBS. In this episode, Eva Cox discusses the feminist legacy, or otherwise, of Margaret Thatcher; Suelette Dreyfus discusses…
In yesterday’s Business Spectator, shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull defended the Coalition’s broadband plan, released on Tuesday, as a better alternative to Labor’s National Broadband Network…
It’s probably a truism to suggest that the study of human evolution gets more that its fair share of media attention and hype. Brace yourself! There’s more on the way this week, with a set of seven papers…
In space no one can hear you scream, but you may get a bit wet. In particular, if you were thinking of journeying to take in the sights of Saturn, it would be a good idea to pack an umbrella. This is suggested…
We should forget about ever finding something as small and delicate as a dinosaur embryo, right? A few months ago I would have agreed – but now, well, things have changed. When my colleague, palaeontologist…
You may have read last week that a team of researchers has developed, for the first time, a way to detect the contents of people’s dreams. But what can we glean from this research? During the same week…
A couple of days ago on The Conversation, I set myself up with a task: to defend the usefulness of so-called “useless” maths. Today, that defence continues, with a look at the RSA algorithm. I finished…