What’s behind the fall in the figures for patent applications in Australia? Is it just a lack of innovation or is something else to blame?
Some of the earliest applications of photography came in the fields of archaeology and botany. Pictured is a photograph from botanist Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843).
Because a photograph came from a machine – not a human hand – many were not entirely sure if it could be called art.
If you’re in favor of copyright extensions – and aren’t a corporation holding the rights or a descendent of the original author – you probably need some sense knocked into you.
Flickr
In 1998, if Congress hadn’t extended copyrights by 20 years, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind would all be in the public domain…
The many colours of visible light just part of what James Clerk Maxwell’s theory was to explain.
Flickr/laura peta
It’s hard to imagine life without mobile phones, radio and television. Yet the discovery of the electromagnetic waves that underpin such technologies grew out of an abstract theory that’s 150 years old…
It’s what comes after the great scientific discoveries that Russia has traditionally missed out on.
Bin im Garten
Loren Graham, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Russia’s economy is highly dependent on the price of oil, as are a few other countries, such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Russia differs from those other countries, however, in having a very strong scientific…
Almost anything can be labelled ‘innovation’ - invention is a little harder.
Shutterstock
Australia’s Senate Economics Committee is currently undergoing a review of the National Innovation System in light of the “challenges to Australian industries and jobs posed by increasing global competition…
Inside an early version of the black box flight recorder.
DSTO
The search operation for missing flight MH370 continues to hear signals that could be from the plane’s black box recorders. It’s only when those recorders are recovered that investigators will be able…
Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, died on Tuesday, aged 88.
Javier Martínez Ortiz
This week saw the passing of Doug Engelbart, one of the giants in the history of computing. Today he is mostly known for his invention of the computer mouse in 1963. Many of his other big ideas lay waiting…
What use are Vulcan salutes when other life-forms see you as bacteria?
Gage Skidmore
The latest Star Trek movie, opening tomorrow, raises an eternal question: why are the Klingons (or Cylons or Daleks) always at roughly our technological level? For any sense of drama, interplanetary protagonists…
Statuettes and a reproduction of the automatic theatre of Hero of Alexandria.
Alan Dorin.
As humans, we create life. And we’re all familiar with the idea of artificial intelligence. But what about artificial life? What is it, and why should we care? Artificial Life is a recently labelled but…