Unless you’ve been chained to a fax machine for the past seven years, you’ll have noticed that Facebook is immensely popular. Users numbered 641 million by February of this year. Making and maintaining…
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Science + Tech – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 6551 - 6575 of 6579 articles
Australians expect paper-based elections to provide privacy, integrity and transparency. Why should we abandon these principles just because the election uses a magical device called a computer? The iVote…
In 1973, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) first aired The Six Million Dollar Man, a made-for-television movie in which Steve Austin, an astronaut test-piloting a prototype aeroplane, experienced…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
Of all the known particles in our universe, neutrinos are perhaps the most elusive; their origins are mysterious, their purpose unknown and they are notoriously difficult to detect. You’ll already know…
One consequence of the global rise of GPS (Global Positioning System), and its inherent ability to track and record information, is that people feel their privacy is cramped, their movements recorded…
Science has long had an uncomfortable relationship with Australian politicians. Indeed, throughout the decade of the Howard government, Australia’s scientists, researchers and higher education folks became…
The big picture Australia’s plan for a National Broadband Network (NBN) represents one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world at present. The estimated $43 billion price tag has stirred up…
Until a few years ago, there was only one name in the world of web browsing: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. But now, in 2011, users have more choice than ever when it comes to searching online. Before…
As a society, we seem to be obsessed by sex. So wondering out loud why we have it is likely to invite a highly bemused response. And yet sex remains one of the great, enduring mysteries of evolutionary…
Does the design and construction employed at Fukushima really represent the best that can be done in nuclear power? Is it inevitable that a nuclear power plant will be overwhelmed by a magnitude nine earthquake…
Why have so many lives been lost in Japan and New Zealand recently? And why have so many survivors – the so-called “lucky ones” – had their livelihoods and homes destroyed? As a seismologist, I ask myself…
In February this year, game shows got that little bit harder. And at the same time, artificial intelligence took another step towards the ultimate goal of creating and perhaps exceeding human-level intelligence…
Japan relies on nuclear power for about 30% of its electricity. It has few natural resources and imports large quantities of coal, gas and oil at an ever increasing cost. Some Japanese people are not in…
Do we control our body clocks or do those clocks, ticking imperceptibly, control us? It’s the kind of question that keeps sleep scientists awake at night. Rhythms are a good place to start. They are a…
While the Japanese earthquake aftershocks will stop in a few months time, allowing Japan to recover, the shocks may prove terminal for the green nuclear renaissance. In the week since Japan was rocked…
Foundation Essay – Getting certain points across can be difficult. And yet democracies don’t function properly in the absence of broad, public discussion based on well-sourced information. Especially when…
It is inevitable that we will one day venture into space beyond the moon not just with robots but in person. Exploration is part of the human psyche: we are risk-takers with an insatiable curiosity. No…
In 2002 when I visited Santa Barbara, I went to a grocery store called Trader Joe’s. It had its own line in milk. Trader Joe’s Vitamin D Milk (Grade A, pasteurized, homogenized) had some ‘nutrition facts…
Foundation Essay – Universities are at permanent risk of getting a bad rap.. They are too remote, too elitist, too unworldly, too expensive (especially in the US). They are ‘irrelevant’ to the needs and…