THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Why do politicians and scientists disagree on so many issues? Are they really as different as we might think? Will J Grant and Rod Lamberts weigh up the evidence. Opinion pieces these…
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Science + Tech – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 6176 - 6200 of 6586 articles
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Is Australia at risk of becoming a “mendicant nation” with regards to science and scientific knowledge? Can its government afford to cut support for international collaboration? Cathy…
MILLENNIUM PRIZE SERIES: The Millennium Prize Problems are seven mathematics problems laid out by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. They’re not easy – a correct solution to any one results in a US$1,000,000…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: To produce good science, researchers have to be prepared to doubt themselves. Michael Brown investigates the importance of holding science up to scrutiny. Scientists and the public…
The World Solar Challenge (WSC) is a race held every two years in which roughly 40 teams race solar-powered cars from Darwin to Adelaide. I’m a member of the UNSW Solar Racing Team (called Sunswift). The…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: If there is a crisis in student enrolment numbers in school science, where does that come from? Denis Goodrum asks whether a new perspective could revolutionise both teaching and…
One of the world’s largest online video gaming networks, Steam, has been hacked and its 35 million users may have had their accounts “compromised”. And yes, “compromised” means their (encrypted) credit…
Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy passed away over the weekend. The 22-year-old was one of four former NYU student developers of Diaspora, an open source social network platform that has been the basis…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Fraud is the exception not the rule in science, but it happens, as one recent high-profile case showed. How does this occur, and what can mathematics bring to the equation? Jon Borwein…
Storm clouds are gathering in the world of weather and climate modelling – a discipline that saves lives and property every day and has revolutionised our lives in recent decades. What we might call the…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Why do people distrust science? Why do some of us reject consensus on a whole range of scientific findings? As Professor Stephan Lewandowsky explains, it often comes down to the way…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Former Chief Scientist for Australia Professor Penny Sackett explores how we deal with uncertainty in science. Listen to the podcast below for more. Professor Penny Sackett – Uncertainty…
Your data is out there, somewhere – all of your data. Encryption can protect files on your laptop or PC. Storing them on a remote server – such as DropBox is another option. And … well, that’s about it…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Should scientists communicate with the general public? Dr Danny Kingsley makes a case for speaking out. Scientific articles don’t often feature on beside tables or as bathroom reading…
When we think of the last 50,000 years of prehistory, particularly the “Ice Age”, extinct species such as the woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros often spring to mind. Did humans bring about the extinction…
What do black holes eat? And do supermassive black holes have fiercer appetites? Let’s remind ourselves of the facts. Lurking at the centre of the Milky Way is a monster, a giant black hole with a mass…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: How does science work? And how can we experiment on things that don’t fit in a lab? Dr Will Howard examines the many faces of the scientific method. As adults, our understanding of…
In recent weeks, the fractured nature of Anonymous, the hacktivist collective, has come to the fore after it declared war on Los Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel. Dubbed “Operation Cartel”, it was announced…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: What unites a geologist, a biologist, an astrophysicist and a chemist? Dr Susan Lawler explains. What’s a scientist? Let me tell you a story. A couple of decades ago, I was catching…
The major social network sites have recently been touting improved privacy settings to allow users to customise post audiences. Google+ Circles, Facebook lists, and now Unthink’s branches are engineering…
A radical discovery by my colleagues and I – reported this week in Physical Review Letters – could help explain why it was possible for life (at least as we know it) to develop on Earth, but not in other…
This month, fMRI brain imaging celebrates its 20th anniversary. And so it should. It has come to dominate cognitive neuroscience. Massive amounts of precious funding are poured into it and thousands of…
On October 25, Unthink invited public beta users to put aside their YASNS (Yet Another Social Network Site) fatigue. Since then, it claims to have attracted more than 100,000 registered users. The site…
Last month saw the passing of three pioneers of the information age – an age we more or less take for granted now. These luminaries were [John McCarthy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist…
What would the software industry look like without patents? It’s a question worth asking in the context of Apple’s recent body blow to Samsung, which will see Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 kept off Australian…