A prolonged period of hotter-than-average temperatures in the crater lake of New Zealand’s Mt Ruapehu has seen the country’s media questioning whether another eruption is on the cards. Mt Ruapehu (Māori…
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For the public, the jury is still out on nanotechnology – the media simultaneously extols its promise and warns of the potential calamity facing humanity. But what is it? How does it work? Is it dangerous…
War has been declared, and those who recognise the fundamental role science plays in everyday life need to decide where they stand. Building on the budgetary and rhetorical slights of recent months, rumours…
FOOD SECURITY - Here’s how things stand. More than 500 million farmers produce crops and livestock that can feed nearly 7 billion people, and yet 1 billion still go hungry. It’s estimated that the world’s…
Where are we within our galaxy? How did our galaxy form? How did it evolve over the aeons? Astronomers have been asking these questions for the past century, and have recently begun discerning the answers…
The World Health Organisation’s World Health Day is dedicated to the threat posed by the rapid emergence of drug resistant organisms. Viruses, parasites and bacteria have all developed some resistance…
Since 1950, more than 150,000 people have died in motor vehicle crashes in Australia. The worst year was 1970, when 3,798 people lost their lives – more than 10 deaths each day. Annual deaths are now below…
There’s nothing like an unexpected result to get physicists excited. So in 2008, when some strange behaviour was detected from a rarely-produced particle known as the “top quark”, there was much interest…
Let’s be clear: the world’s animal resources are rapidly declining. Globally, more than 5,000 wildlife species are threatened with extinction. Some 25% are mammals, and 11% birds. Of the reptile, amphibian…
Unless you’ve been chained to a fax machine for the past seven years, you’ll have noticed that Facebook is immensely popular. Users numbered 641 million by February of this year. Making and maintaining…
Australians expect paper-based elections to provide privacy, integrity and transparency. Why should we abandon these principles just because the election uses a magical device called a computer? The iVote…
In 1973, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) first aired The Six Million Dollar Man, a made-for-television movie in which Steve Austin, an astronaut test-piloting a prototype aeroplane, experienced…
Before the Fukushima reactor was swamped by a tsunami, there had been a wave of enthusiasm for nuclear power. The problems in Japan have probably ended the risk of Australia going down the nuclear path…
Do-it-yourself bloggers, video diarists (vloggers), artists with their pixel-palettes of innumerable hues, sounds and images – the explosion of online content creation is one of the contemporary wonders…
If you’re the sort of person who relies on the internet every day, you’ll maybe have twitched slightly on hearing rumours that the world is running out of internet addresses. Is this true? Well, yes and…
In the late 1980s, when I was a young whipper-snapper just starting out as an astronomer, it was quite obvious some fields had an incredibly high profile and others were outré. The sexy ideas at the time…
Can an ant’s strategy for moving around be useful for building robots with autonomous navigation? Working with experts in the field of artificial intelligence, we have just begun to explore this possibility…
Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be called a time machine in one sense: it enables us to examine conditions as they were during the universe’s early stages. But is the 27km-long particle accelerator…
Of all the known particles in our universe, neutrinos are perhaps the most elusive; their origins are mysterious, their purpose unknown and they are notoriously difficult to detect. You’ll already know…
One consequence of the global rise of GPS (Global Positioning System), and its inherent ability to track and record information, is that people feel their privacy is cramped, their movements recorded…
Science has long had an uncomfortable relationship with Australian politicians. Indeed, throughout the decade of the Howard government, Australia’s scientists, researchers and higher education folks became…
The big picture Australia’s plan for a National Broadband Network (NBN) represents one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world at present. The estimated $43 billion price tag has stirred up…
Until a few years ago, there was only one name in the world of web browsing: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. But now, in 2011, users have more choice than ever when it comes to searching online. Before…
As a society, we seem to be obsessed by sex. So wondering out loud why we have it is likely to invite a highly bemused response. And yet sex remains one of the great, enduring mysteries of evolutionary…
Does the design and construction employed at Fukushima really represent the best that can be done in nuclear power? Is it inevitable that a nuclear power plant will be overwhelmed by a magnitude nine earthquake…