Athletes are paid for pushing their bodies to the limit, but at what stage do we acknowledge that baking hot afternoons might not be the safest time for our sportspeople to ply their trade? Certainly…
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Science + Tech – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 5151 - 5175 of 6586 articles
We know museums attract visitors who come to view and wonder at their vast array of displays, but they are also used by expert researchers – locally and abroad – who make use of the ever-growing collections…
Few would argue the world isn’t facing enormous challenges: human population growth and the associated demand for resources, mass extinctions or – perhaps the biggest of all – global climate change. We…
Why does one third of the world’s population have inadequate sanitation? Hopefully I can shed a bit of light on this. You see, my work is shit – literally – which is why I call myself a water, sanitation…
After six games, the 12-game World Chess Championship Match is now led, 4 games to 2, by 22-year-old Magnus Carlsen. This is a very important advantage, but reigning champion Viswanathan Anand is no stranger…
Reports from the Philippines reveal a lack of typhoon preparation and evacuation efforts. When to evacuate – and how – spells the difference between life and death. As we know, typhoons can cause widespread…
Facebook last week was reported to have offered US$3 billion to acquire the Snapchat social network service – an offer that was rejected. The hefty buyout offer (maybe strategically leaked by Snapchat…
Australia wants to foster innovation in a digital economy, but our copyright laws discourage businesses from investing in new technologies and make it harder for individuals to access the knowledge upon…
Everyone knows what it’s like to be uncertain – at least, humans do. But are non-human animals ever uncertain? When we feel uncertainty, instead of risking the consequences of a bad or wrong decision…
A spider-like robot moves over an anaesthetised patient, deftly making controlled incisions with flexible arms while a surgeon sitting a couple of metres away peers through a console offering highly-magnified…
In the spirit of the current world championship bout between Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen and Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand, we should seriously consider the role of chess in how young students…
While we tend to think of black holes as giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, it’s not all one-way travel. As gas falls in towards a black hole, it spirals gradually inwards like water going down a plug hole…
Yesterday’s article by Geoff Cumming, based on a very recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Science paper, argued that “null hypothesis significance tests” (NHST) are flawed – and he is correct…
In a previous article in The Conversation, I presented the Norwegian chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen. He obtained the [grandmaster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmaster_(chess%29) title at the age of…
Recent reports in The Australian call for the National Broadband Network (NBN) rollout to be sped up by using optical fibre strung overhead with power lines, rather than replacing Telstra’s copper network…
Last Tuesday the Indian space agency launched a mission to Mars. Its goal is to place a satellite into orbit around that planet. The probe is currently in Earth orbit (although not quite high enough yet…
For researchers there’s a lot that turns on the p value, the number used to determine whether a result is statistically significant. The current consensus is that if p is less than .05, a study has reached…
Like many scientists, I was apprehensive in advance about the Abbott government’s approach to science policy. Would it be pragmatic but fact-based or would it be ideological and politically driven? Sadly…
New evidence is shedding light on the processes that formed Earth’s oldest rock and mineral record – processes that influenced the early evolution of life. Over the past 30 years our knowledge of the earliest…
Are you a left brain or a right brain person? I’ve never met a person who doesn’t know what I mean by this question. The idea that creative people use the right side of their brain more than logical people…
When cane toads were released in Australia in 1935, they were the latest innovation in pest control, backed by a level of consensus support that a scientist could only dream of. So what went wrong? Research…
A Swiss forensic report of the exhumed remains of ex-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat today suggests polonium poisoning may have been the cause of death – but what is polonium, and why is it so deadly…
An admirable feature of the national security bureaucracy is its persistence. If you don’t get it right (or what you think is right) try, try, try again. On Tuesday, the New Zealand Parliament passed the…
Coles and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia declared last month their intention to make use of near field communication (NFC) technology, allowing users to transfer their personal and other banking details…
Rapid developments in tools to study complex interactions are transforming biology and biomedical research. A series of powerful analytical methods coined “omics” is driving us away from reductionist approaches…