This year 17,000 Australians will be diagnosed with bowel cancer and every week 80 people will die from this disease. Meanwhile Australia’s National Bowel Cancer Screening Program (NBCSP) has run out of…
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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 we talk of ‘two cultures’ today, it’s not the divide between arts and sciences that we should have in mind. The crucial issue is the gulf between commerce and higher education - especially between business…
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…
The intense public interest in protective headgear following recent cases of high-profile AFL players sustaining concussion and other head or face injuries, is understandable. Unfortunately we have limited…
GREENHOUSE 2011 - People’s belief or scepticism when it comes to climate change may not be as important as we think. What matters is how we behave. A lot of fuss has been made about whether people believe…
My family has just come home from a barbeque, the second we’ve attended this weekend. That’s been quite a common occurrence for us in the last couple of months. Our house in Fairfield, a residential suburb…
There are two main fears about the possible implications for Australia in China’s latest five-year economic plan, but in reality, we have little to worry about. In fact, Australia has much to gain from…
There are several reasons why Australians should welcome the imminent demise of Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. But none of them relate to the triumphal claims recently expressed by the likes of…
Throughout history and across many cultures, changes in mood, thinking and emotional responses have been related to hormone changes in women. Unfortunately, the connection between hormones and mood have…
Objective analysis of good microdata on students can yield results that are highly relevant to educational policy. This should come as no surprise, since it is the case in most other disciplines. To learn…
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…
Bashing planning has become a national sport, and in NSW, we’re the best at it. Stuck in traffic? Blame the planners. Housing stress? Planners are too slow and too stingy with land release. In the perception…
The behaviour of credit rating agencies is back in the spotlight, as Portugal struggles with its large debt burden. Credit rating agency Fitch has copped some criticism for cutting Portugal’s credit rating…
If you’re in politics, population matters. Rival studies on what constitutes a sustainable Australian population project wildly different statistics. But behind the figures are real people whose lives…
Australians worry about the environment but they do little to protect it. Psychological research offers one possible solution: stop worrying! Feeling happy is in fact the best way to encourage environmentally…
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…
Despite increasing uptake of complementary medicine, professions within its range remain unregulated, undocumented and their impact on health generally unknown. This has created an informal ‘black market…
In the ongoing debate around the resources tax, there has been little focus on the fundamental difficulties and complexities presented by a tax on profits in the resource-extraction industry. There are…
Australia prides itself on its attractiveness to tourists, but for many, to the eternal frustration of Melbourne, visiting Australia is synonymous with the Great Barrier Reef and Sydney Opera House. It…
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…
Australia is one of the ten worst offenders in the OECD when it comes to generating solid waste. The construction industry is a leading contributor, throwing out a third of our gross national pile of (potentially…
Recent reports that the Queensland government may build its $2B Sunshine Coast hospital by using a public-private partnership appear to indicate a continuing love affair with this form of funding. State…
What happens to the brain in a collision? A blow to the head can cause any form of damage to the brain. On the serious side, it can cause a large haemorrhage and damage to a large amount of brain tissue…