After years in the waiting, Google has finally struck a deal with the European Commission regarding alleged abuses of its dominant position in online search and advertising in the European Union. The Commission…
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A year after the “darkest day in Australian sport” the catastrophic bang has led to an all too predictable whimper. The days after the Australian Crime Commission’s report Organised Crime and Drugs in…
Nanoparticles — or nanomaterials, as they are often called — are chemical objects with dimensions in the range of 1-100 nanometres (nm). Particles this tiny are hard to imagine, but it may help to think…
Debunking myths requires an understanding of the psychological research into misinformation. But getting your refutation out in front of lots of eyeballs is a whole other matter. Here, I look at two contrasting…
The fisherman who washed up on the Marshall Islands last weekend was very lucky to have stranded on a remote beach there. The currents in the Pacific Ocean would have inevitably taken him into the great…
This weekend, the moon’s fortnightly rotation cycle turns China’s lunar rover Yutu (the Jade Rabbit) and its solar panels toward the sun once again … but whether the rover wakes up or not remains to be…
The average Australian spends more than five hours watching YouTube every month. With such high viewership, it’s no surprise that interest groups are reaching out with YouTube to try to change people’s…
While cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are relatively new, there are still opportunities for new players to enter the scene and make good money. You may have seen the launch of Nyancoin, based upon the…
There was a time when science was seen as a body secure knowledge, given credibility by the scientific method and peer review. Back in the 1970s when I was a young lecturer, the task communicating science…
Surveys on public attitudes to science regularly tell us that there are swathes of the public that simply seem to not care about science, despite our best effort to engage them. But perhaps the issue is…
The word “pseudoscience” is used to describe something that is portrayed as scientific but fails to meet scientific criteria. This misrepresentation occurs because actual science has creditability (which…
Last year was Australia’s hottest on record and this year started with heatwaves. Animals feel the heat too – so how will they cope and adapt as the climate changes? Take, for example, sea turtles. These…
Dealing with mineral ores is rapidly becoming more complex as ore grade is decreasing, mines are getting deeper and the cost of energy and labour increases. The minerals industry has seen an increase in…
Research out today in leading science journals firms up estimates of interbreeding between the now extinct Neanderthals and the ancestors of living Eurasians. They also provide new explanations about the…
Over the past few days, the media has cried out the recent proclamation from Stephen Hawking that black holes, a mystery of both science and science fiction, do not exist. Such statements send social media…
Researchers John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler from Princeton University made headlines last week when they predicted that Mark Zuckerberg’s almighty Facebook would shed 80% of its users by 2017. The…
The impact of European settlement on Australia was so massive that many mammals disappeared before anyone noticed they were there, but fossils from the past 10,000 years offer excellent evidence of pre-European…
Australian industries have reached a turning point. With old industries on the way out, the Australian manufacturing sector’s biggest challenge is to move from a low-cost mass production model to one that…
Big Data, as the name implies, relates to very large sets of data collected through free or commercial services on the internet. This massive amount of data arises from sensors, posts to social networking…
The tide is changing in our understanding of old age. For a long time, behavioural scientists have thought that old age is associated with cognitive decline such as memory problems, and difficulties in…
Coinciding with ten years of the NASA Mars Exploration Rover Project, research published today in Science has found some of the oldest evidence of past water on Mars – and confirmed it was ideal to nurture…
A century-old mystery about how ancient freshwater fishes breathe has finally been put to rest, thanks to a study published today in Nature Communications by me and a team of ichthyologists. The fishes…
For most of us, walking in a straight line at reasonable speed is a simple task. But watch someone texting or reading on their mobile phone and you’d be forgiven for thinking that walking is not as easy…
As Rafael Nadal moves into the Australian Open semi-finals after beating Grigor Dimitrov yesterday afternoon, it’s a good opportunity to think about how he reached his champion status and compare him with…
Have you ever had your credit card stolen and used? Did the thief try to forge your scrawled signature, miniaturised on that impossibly tiny and slippery white line on the back of your card? I once had…