A challenge for university researchers is to make the best use of any funding on their projects and anything that can save money should be welcomed. University representatives are already asking the federal…
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Think of your favourite piece of music. Do you get shivers when the music swells or the chorus kicks in? Or are the opening few bars enough to make you feel tingly? Despite having no obvious survival value…
Australia is world famous for its venomous critters, including its many highly venomous snakes. The snake that holds the popular title of “world’s most venomous” is the inland taipan (Oxyuranus microlepidotus…
Have you ever been snorkelling or scuba diving on a windy day when there are lots of waves? Did you notice how much that flow of water against your body affected your ability to swim and control your movements…
One of great challenges of the 21st century has been to develop ways to manipulate matter on smaller and smaller dimensions. As the great physicist Richard Feynman noted in his famous 1959 lecture, “There’s…
Evidence of the first people to settle in Australia can be found in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area, in western New South Wales, informally referred to as Australia’s Rift Valley. Hundreds of archaeological…
It’s been a while since Fred Astaire played a CSIRO scientist in the 1959 movie of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach. Still one premise of the film holds true: you can’t always predict where your research…
High-tech robots called PackBots will be unleashed during the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil to help boost security and examine suspicious objects. The Brazilian government purportedly spent US$7.2 million…
When disaster strikes – such as January’s bushfire in Victoria or the recent cold spell that froze much of north America – it’s vital for emergency services to get the latest information. They need to…
Metadata related to lawful interception has been in the news a bit lately. You may have seen last week the Australian Federal Police (AFP) called for more access to electronic metadata as a Senate committee…
Imagine this: you’re surfing the web while out at lunch. You decide to buy concert tickets, so to save having to put your sandwich down you ask a passer-by to log in to the ticketing website for you. As…
A black hole with extremely powerful jets has been found in the nearby galaxy Messier 83 (M83) by a team of Australian and American researchers, as we report in the journal Science today. Black holes are…
While the world’s largest circular particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – will continue operation for the next few years, scientists have already started the conversation to build a much…
Close your eyes and picture a scientist. What do you see? Perhaps an Albert Einstein, staring intently at a blackboard covered in incomprehensible equations, or of Alexander Fleming, hunched over the laboratory…
In Australia, honeyeaters are far and away the most abundant and important nectar-feeding birds, so also the most important avian pollinators of flowers. What effect has their visual perception had on…
The recent death of television personality Charlotte Dawson and the possible role that online abuse played in her struggles with depression shows how damaging this behaviour can be. The former model had…
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…
The structure of the brain reveals a network of massively interconnected electrochemically active cells. It is known that information can be represented by changes of state within this network, but that…
Australia finally has its first digital technology curriculum which is mandatory for all Australian children from Foundation, the name replacing kindergarten, to Year 8. The Technologies area now has two…
Our unfolding understanding of the universe is marked by epic searches and we are now on the brink of discovering something that has escaped detection for many years. The search for gravity waves has been…
Sometimes in research the answer is right under your nose. In our case, we spent nearly two decades developing exotic materials as artificial muscles – to now show in a paper published in Science today…
Dogs really are our best friends. A study published today in Current Biology shows not only do dogs and humans read emotions in each other’s “voices”, but both are more attuned to “happy” sounds. And the…
While much focus and discussion of the so-called “Big Data revolution” has been on the data itself and the exciting new applications it is enabling — from Google’s self-driving cars through to CSIRO and…
As International Women’s Day approaches on March 8 and my time as NSW Premier’s Woman of the Year draws to a close, I have been thinking about diversity in the workplace, and in particular, the relationship…
For many parents who caved into the pressure and splashed out on a new tablet computer for their children this Christmas, the not inconsiderable initial purchase bill may almost be a distant memory. Yet…