Deliberately inflicting pain or injury by cutting oneself or some other form of self-mutilation seems incomprehensible to many people. But it’s a common, typically secretive, experience for about 8% of…
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Londoners will be aware that there is a lot of work going on under their feet at the moment. There is the new Crossrail railway with eight subterranean stations, expansion of Tottenham Court Road, Bond…
Chikungunya is a virus transmitted to people by mosquitoes; it usually causes a non-fatal but debilitating illness. Despite thousands of people being infected each year in Africa, Asia and Melanesia, chikungunya…
Humans respond to cute. Show us just about any little critter with a big round head and a pair of large, blinking-in-the-headlights eyes and cooing will ensue. Add to that a set of chubby cheeks, a button…
“Muscle memory” is a frequently used term to describe the learning of motor skills, be they sport, music, or everyday activity. But interestingly, despite the widespread usage of the term, controversy…
Anyone who looked at The Guardian’s website this week will have seen a picture of one of the newspaper’s own laptops smashed and in pieces. Why did this Mac have to die? The article accompanying the photo…
Sinkholes seem to be popping up everywhere this year. March saw the tragic death of Jeff Bush in Seffner, Florida, when his bedroom collapsed into a sinkhole below his house. The same month saw the disappearance…
Space is Big. Really Big. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pretty much nailed space with those five words. And space is so really big that our earthly measures of distance struggle. The distance to…
Shaking hands. Kissing babies. Throwing snags on the barbie, or wandering through a suburban shopping centre. These are the familiar scenes of “retail politics”, a campaign style in which candidates sell…
Natural gas has been extracted from Australia’s North West Shelf and exported as liquefied natural gas (LNG) for almost 30 years. It is Australia’s fastest growing resource export. But the recent introduction…
The Coalition has raised concerns that the Memorandum of Understanding with Papua New Guinea over the Manus Island asylum seeker processing deal was entered into after the caretaker conventions commenced…
Many, if not most, of us are now connected to the internet, and we have become familiar with it: we shop, we bank, we socialise online. The Internet of Things is not a different internet but refers to…
Prime minister Kevin Rudd has indicated that he would like to revisit Australia’s obligations under the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. We are yet to learn what this may mean…
When you stand in the 27km-long Large Hadron Collider tunnel deep under Switzerland and France it looks as if the chain of blue magnets simply stretches off to infinity. So when people talk about putting…
It is still far too early in the investigation into the accident involving Asiana flight 214 at San Francisco airport to draw any conclusions about the events leading up to the accident. However, some…
In the past few days, a great deal of media attention has been paid to Leanne Rowe, a Tasmanian woman who has lived eight years with a French accent she acquired after a car accident. This phenomenon is…
For half the population, it comes three to five days each month, 12 months each year, for 40 years of our lives. Menstruation can be debilitating, relieving, disappointing, or simply an inconvenient fact…
You are walking through the bush when you see an enormous tree trunk, tens of metres long, lying across the forest floor. Imagine you and several dozen friends lifting it by hand. Now you’ve literally…
A virus that can cause paralysis in children has been circulating in New South Wales during autumn and has recently spread to Victoria. Around 30 young children, mainly from Sydney’s northern and southeastern…
The word epigenetics means things imposed “on top of genetics”. But what sort of things? Imagine a white mouse breeds with a black mouse – say you get three white babies and three black babies. That’s…
Top contributors
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Professor of Infectious Diseases, Monash University
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Associate professor in law and public policy, University of Oxford
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Professor of Dermatology, The University of Melbourne
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Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic Quality and Professor of Molecular Biology, UNSW Sydney
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Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University
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Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museums Victoria and Honorary Fellow at University of Melbourne, Museums Victoria Research Institute
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Clinical Associate Professor and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney
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Post Doctoral Research Associate, Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter, University of Adelaide
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John Curtin Distinguished Professor of Health Science, Curtin University
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Project Manager; Centre for Advanced Training Systems, University of Newcastle
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CBRN defence scientist, Charles Darwin University
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Senior Research Fellow; Rheumatology Research Group, Centre for Inflammatory Diseases, Monash University
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Lecturer in Law, Murdoch University
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Senior Lecturer in Networking, The Open University
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Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University
