As you stand around the BBQ this Australia Day, savouring that quintessential aroma of grilling lamb, spare a thought for the selfless service of our unsung national heroes – our estimated 140 million…
Late last week CSIRO announced that a new species of horse fly had been named after pop diva Beyoncé’s bottom. The story generated a real buzz across traditional and social media both in Australia and…
A popular misconception in the public mind is that science “proves” things by turning them from ideas and theories into absolute “facts”. This more or less confuses science with mathematics. Mathematical…
As the climate gets warmer, growing conditions and ripening times of crops will be affected. This raises all kinds of challenges for food security, but as we hit the festive season you may also be wondering…
In the Chinese zodiac, 2011 is the year of the rabbit but for those of us working on viruses from wildlife animals, it was much more like the year of the bat. In February, the deadly Nipah virus re-emerged…
2011 saw a couple of unusual outbreaks of food-borne disease, one from a previously unknown pathogen and the other from a well-known one in a food not usually associated with such outbreaks. The outbreaks…
Every five years the Australian Government must report on how our environment and heritage are fairing. The 2011 State of the Environment Report gives Australians the clearest and most comprehensive assessment…
Which is the greater deprivation for an animal: to live a good-quality life abbreviated at less than its natural term by painless slaughter for meat, or to never live at all? How much of an animal’s life…
Phosphorus fertiliser might not spring to mind as highly important to our everyday lives in Australia, but it is critical for our grazing and cropping farms. This is because the majority of Australian…
DURBAN CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE: A paper published yesterday shows global industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, overwhelmingly from fossil fuels, jumped by 5.9% from 2009 to 2010. This is a big increase…
CSIRO, like many other research institutions, has helped provide research, models and data to inform the development of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. But the proposed Basin Plan, which was released on…
The world’s population has just hit seven billion and nearly one billion people do not get enough to eat. Agricultural land is being degraded at the rate of 12 million hectares a year and the world faces…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Is Australia at risk of becoming a “mendicant nation” with regards to science and scientific knowledge? Can its government afford to cut support for international collaboration? Cathy…
SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE: In the early 1970s, three leading American scientists were locked in a passionate debate about what had made the greatest contribution to humanity’s impact on the environment. The…
Responding to oil spills, like that in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty, is a very complex, high pressure situation. Decisions must be made based on whatever data are available at the time. One of the difficulties…
For over 200 years, since the industrial revolution, we have seen economic growth strongly coupled with the consumption of more and more resources. The more we grew, the more we consumed. This model works…
Models, forecasts, scenario projections … they’re all viewed with a certain degree of scepticism. And, for the most part, rightly so – we’ll never know the future with complete certainty. But what modelling…
Billions of energy-investment dollars are exposed to the vagaries of climate. Those billions include dollars committed to or planned for renewable energy generation in this country. Now a new branch of…
Mental health has been an issue in rural areas for the past few decades. Climate change will only add more stress to the lives of rural people. While a report by the Climate Institute shows broad scale…
The Conversation asked CSIRO scientist, Richard Richards, to look at the top five myths about genetic modification (GM), and correct the public record. Myth one: GM is just haphazard, imprecise cross-breeding…