International music provider Spotify is preparing for its launch into the Australian market later this year. As a subscription-based streaming service, the success of the Stockholm-based Spotify across…
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Human use of cathinones for their psychoactive properties traces back to prehistory. Known as “khat” by the people of eastern Africa, the leaves and twigs of the Catha edulis shrub have been chewed for…
Late last month the Queensland Police started a new project to highlight the urgent need for secure wireless internet connections. The “wardriving” project involves police driving the streets of Queensland…
Today in Melbourne the 2012 UCI Track Cycling World Championships get underway. Results from the five-day competition will determine which riders represent the various national track cycling teams at the…
They are everywhere: people in cafés or supermarket queues, staring at their smartphones with determined concentration, occasionally shuffling yellow tiles of letters to use all of them in a killer move…
Your friend Kate answers the phone. You remind her you’re meeting at 10am tomorrow for breakfast. You tell her your fractured wrist is healing but the doctor said there’s still some way to go. Your mum’s…
A few weeks ago astronauts on the International Space Station hid in escape capsules following concerns a piece of space junk was going to collide with the station. The collision didn’t eventuate but the…
Many forms of mental illness can affect our moods. But that isn’t all they do: they can also damage our willpower. Problems such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity…
“Our lack of ability to position our argument in the public means science has not influenced public debate as it should.” So said Australian National University’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young at…
Over the last couple of days a small furore has erupted over allegations a News Corp subsidiary, NDS, has been hacking the pay-TV smartcards of News Corp’s competitors, and even News Corp’s own companies…
As of today, the world might have changed forever. A fundamental assumption underpinning much of modern geochemistry is that the earth has the same composition as a class of meteorites called chondrites…
A report published today in Nature by Yohannes Hailie-Selassie and co-workers outlines the importance to our evolutionary story of some very ancient foot bones discovered recently in the Rift Valley of…
The Federal Government is considering allowing the US to base military surveillance drones on the Cocos Islands – an Australian territory located in the Indian Ocean between Australia and Sri Lanka. The…
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology, has recently suffered some serious knocks. His theories have been dismissed as unscientific and his achievements are now considered to be equal parts myth and…
To the uninitiated, videogames have a bit of a reputation for being a difficult media form. A control pad, for such people, can be a cold and grey device covered with alien buttons, intimidating and unwelcoming…
Today as I ate lunch, Titanic, Terminator and Avatar director James Cameron was at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the ocean. We know this for a couple of reasons. Not only did he…
A new study is tapping into a phenomenon most of us have heard about and some of us might claim to have experienced at some point – “runner’s high”. In doing so, this study touches on something fundamentally…
I’m often asked what kind of stories we look for on The Conversation, to which the obvious rejoinder is: good ones. Defining what those good ones are is a different beast. One thing I’ve noticed, a year…
Tomorrow evening in Sydney, the ball will be bounced, marking the start of the first match in the 2012 AFL season. For the 18 clubs taking the field this year, it marks the culmination of months of gruelling…
Science is like high-performance racing: today’s Formula One machine is all too soon the jalopy of tomorrow. The Australian Synchrotron, opened in 2007 and located in Melbourne, is currently at the F1…
The first Australians hunted giant kangaroos, rhinoceros-sized marsupials, huge goannas and other megafauna to extinction shortly after arriving in the country more than 40,000 years ago, new research…
“I’m still trying to understand the whole thing but there must be something to it. It’s really popular!” That’s my sister-in-law writing on Facebook in late January about Pinterest – one of the real up-and-comers…
Fans of science fiction must be disheartened when introduced to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Dreams of galactic empires, criss-crossed by roguish princesses and beautiful smugglers, go out…
On the face of it, a sperm’s work seems pretty straightforward: locate an egg and fertilise it. Job done. But in the world of a sessile broadcast-spawning marine invertebrate – immobile organisms in which…
Apple today announced it would pay its first shareholder dividends in almost 20 years, marking a distinct break from the late Steve Jobs’ “no dividends” policy. The world’s biggest corporation by market…