News that Google representatives are in talks with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic are seen as further evidence the web company is looking to set up a series of low-orbit satellites to help connect more…
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The Venus Express spacecraft has spent eight productive years orbiting the planet Venus and is now ready to take the plunge. Its orbit is slowly being lowered and from Wednesday it will repeatedly dive…
A year on from Edward Snowden’s revelations around state sponsored mass surveillance programs, some of the major players in the online and technological world (including Google, Mozilla, Twitter and Reddit…
Albert Einstein may be most famous for his mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc2, but his work also laid down the foundation for modern quantum mechanics. His analysis of the “spookiness” of quantum…
One of the most important questions we can ask – and one that continues to take up much of the time of scientists, philosophers and the religious minded alike – is why are humans so different to the rest…
It looked more like the worm on an angler’s hook than any living fish we might recognise today but it still takes the record for the oldest known fish to date. The first fossil fishes are known from scant…
The UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat last week announced plans to build a hybrid satellite/cellular (air-to-ground) network to offer in-flight internet connectivity over mainland Europe…
The Turing Test has been passed, the headlines report this week, after a computer program mimicked a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy called Eugene Goostman, fooling 33% of its interrogators into believing it…
How has our approach to saving lives at sea changed since the tragedy of the RMS Titanic in which 1,523 of the 2,228 people she was carrying died a century ago? Surprisingly, not much. Only this April…
If you thought that self-tracking and the collection of personal health and fitness metrics was just a fad then an announcement last week by Apple CEO Tim Cook at the annual Apple Worldwide Developers…
As a relatively small and young country, by population if not by landmass, Australia has played a noticeable role on the world stage when it comes to science. Contributions to new technologies, from Wi-Fi…
We humans use the euphemism for sex that “we like to get a leg over” but the first jawed vertebrates – the placoderms – they liked to get a leg in. They were the first back-boned creatures to evolve male…
As Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) winds up in San Francisco today, 1,000 Apple engineers and 5,000 developers will return to their parts of the world armed with Apple’s own programming…
Computer system administrators around the world are groaning again as six new security problems have been found in the OpenSSL security library. OpenSSL is a security tool that provides facilities to other…
The animated movie Finding Nemo is responsible for most children’s (and parents’) image of the East Australian Current. Marlin: “I need to get to the East Australian Current – E A C.” Crush: “You’re ridin…
Senior Australian Defence Force (ADF) officers confirmed during Senate estimates this week that Prime Minister Tony Abbott had ordered Defence to examine options for Australia to acquire the jump jet version…
It doesn’t matter if you’re a hard-core football nut, a once-every-four-years fan or even a psychic animal – most of us speculate on the winner of the World Cup. The 2014 competition is held in Brazil…
Vitiligo, a human skin condition that turns patches of skin and hair white, it is not a disease we hear much about, although it affects approximately 1% of the population. Most famously, Michael Jackson…
It’s almost three months since a team of scientists announced it had detected polarised light from the afterglow of the Big Bang. But questions are still being asked about whether cosmic dust may have…
AUSTRALIA 2025: How will science address the challenges of the future? In collaboration with Australia’s chief scientist Ian Chubb, we’re asking how each science discipline will contribute to Australia…
Does reading a friend’s happy post on Facebook make you happier? This seems to be the case, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) today – we may…
The claim that homosexual men share a “gay gene” created a furore in the 1990s. But new research two decades on supports this claim – and adds another candidate gene. To an evolutionary geneticist, the…
Taxi drivers often ask me what I do for a living, and when I say I work for CSIRO, they get animated and show they know and love us: “Yes, you did Wi-Fi and the plastic money.” It’s only part of the story…
Most of the time we take light for granted. It arrives with the sunrise everyday and we turn it on with a flick of a switch every night. It appears to be ephemeral and benign to us humans but there is…
The search for missing flight MH370 isn’t over in the Southern Indian Ocean – it’s just going deeper in an attempt to cover the ocean floor over a much wider area. Much of the search effort so far has…