The ongoing copyright arms race between content owners and internet users has taken a new turn. Israeli firm Hola! has recently launched a suite of products that are variously designed to bypass geoblocking…
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Science + Tech – Articles, Analysis, Comment
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Sports scientists have taken something of a media beating over the past week following revelations of alleged widespread illegal doping across Australian professional sporting codes. While this may be…
Should an athlete advocacy organisation be established to help athletes navigate the minefield of banned and permitted substances in sport? We believe it should be. Last week’s report by the Australian…
To state the obvious: human evolution is not without its drama – and the latest salvo in the ongoing Hobbit, or Homo floresiensis, battle confirms this yet again. The 2004 announcement of Homo floresiensis…
When you open a science textbook or magazine, it’s often the images that capture your attention. Some of these images help you visualise the topics, while others - such as diagrams - can be instrumental…
Striving for agreement between theory and experiment and pushing the boundaries of precision are important parts of the scientific process. With each step in this process we move closer to enlightenment…
By now you’ll have heard the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) is investigating Essendon Football Club. At this stage, there has been speculation about the injection of “peptides” by players…
Google has won its long-running legal battle with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), after the High Court today overturned a ruling that the company had engaged in “misleading and…
We stalk our ex-partners on it, we are friends with celebrities on it, we play games on it, and we post photos of ourselves on it. But what are we really getting out of the time we spend on Facebook? We…
In the past few days news has come to light of the confirmation that skeletal remains discovered in an excavated site of a Leicester car park are indeed that of the famous English king Richard III. But…
If you’ve ever watched a professional bike race such as the Tour de France on TV, you might have thought to yourself: “Just how good are the professionals?” And if you do a bit of cycling yourself, you…
When you’re a 10-gram fairy-wren living with the constant threat of being killed and eaten it’s important to stay alert, and understanding which calls of other species signal danger can help you stay one…
Any major sporting triumph without euphoric emotion or a serious opening of the floodgates would seem strange. Commentators tell us that tears show “passion”. Fans seem to demand them. It wasn’t always…
If you were born before 1985 there’s a good chance you watched Looney Tunes on a Saturday morning and followed the exploits of Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Poor old Daffy, at times disguised…
It’s not every day that you discover a huge structure that stretches more than half way across the sky. But this exact thing happened to the international team of astronomers I was leading, as we pored…
Earlier this week, NASA announced the development of a mining robot called RASSOR: the Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot. RASSOR has been designed to assist in extracting water, ice and…
News that Google has successfully constructed and published maps of North Korea is stirring the imagination of social media aficionados around the world, but may also stir international political tensions…
DNA has been called many things: the king of molecules, the blueprint of life, and less excitingly but perhaps more accurately, the genetic code. DNA’s double helix, discovered in 1953 by James Watson…
A recent article in Nature Geoscience suggests that at least one large, deep crater on Mars may once have supported an alkaline lake that was fed by water from kilometres below the planet’s surface. This…
Just 12 months after being arrested for copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering for his involvement with now-defunct cyberlocker Megaupload, and despite facing extradition from New Zealand…
If you could erase your memories, which ones would you choose? As a neuroscientist, one of my raisons d’etre is to achieve, in a way, some form of memory erasure, especially for individuals that suffer…
Will an extra day’s rest and recovery give Novak Djokovic an advantage over Federer or Murray in Sunday’s Australian Open final? In case you missed it, Djokovic, the defending Australian Open champion…
In a sort-of Ice Age version of Jurassic Park, Harvard University’s Professor George Church has suggested – to much media coverage – that, one day soon, scientists somewhere will place a very unusual personal…
Whether you’re a tennis fan or not, it’s impossible not to admire the sublime skills on display at the Australian Open. From Roger Federer’s brilliant backhand to Serena William’s sensational serve, we…
Biological systems have been using DNA as an information storage molecule for billions of years. Vast amounts of data can thus be encoded within microscopic volumes, and we carry the proof of this concept…