Established in 1949, UNSW Sydney is one of Australia’s leading research and teaching universities, renowned for the quality of its graduates and its commitment to academic excellence, innovation and social impact.
Your team is decimated. You’re surrounded by zombies. And they’re closing in. Normally, you lean forward, turn off your console, step away and play again once you’ve had the opportunity to regroup. But…
UNSW engineer Nic Bingham at a refueling stop half way between South Pole and Ridge A, January 2013.
Geoff Sims
Russia’s Vostok station in Antarctica must be one of the scariest places on Earth. Temperatures regularly drop below -80C, and there is no way in or out for nine months of the year. The inhabitants become…
When it comes to science communications, the only thing to keep quiet on is PR.
bookgrl
An independent review of an Australian federal government science communication initiative – made public in November – found that educational and information materials lacked balance and fairness, and…
Social media and science are already intertwined – so why not embrace it?
NASA HQ PHOTO
With each passing year, technology percolates further into academic life. The year 2013 might look, in hindsight, like the year academic social media use went mainstream. Numbers of tweets and Facebook…
Games like Minecraft can be retooled to be used for spatial math puzzles, proportions, spacing and creativity, but do all games have the same educational value?
Dean Groom/Flickr
The re-purposing of video games as learning tools continues to gather pace with the recent release of high-profile educational incarnations of games like SimCity and Minecraft. Different educational games…
The best-film award for Bamboozled has angered many movie fans.
Tropfest
It would have been hard to avoid the news that the best-picture award at Sunday’s Tropfest short-film festival in Sydney was given to filmmaker Matt Hardie for Bamboozled – and even harder to ignore the…
Our current trajectory suggests that the world system will realise a decline in living standards.
Image sourced from www.shutterstock.com
In 1972 a group of scientists, known collectively as the Club of Rome, constructed a detailed mathematical model to test whether population growth and economic development could continue indefinitely and…
What does the future hold for research funding under an Abbott government?
AAP/David Crosling
SECURING AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE: As the Commission of Audit reviews government activity and spending, The Conversation’s experts take a closer look at key policy areas tied to this funding – what’s working…
Garry Shead’s portrait of Martin Sharp shows the artist as he lived, orchestrating a magic theatre of people and objects.
Felicity Jenkins/EPA
The tributes have been flowing in from friends and art critics for Martin Sharp, who died this week aged 71. The common thread linking all the tributes, all the memories, is that the artist was never alone…
Strawberries with a side of fish genes, anyone? Don’t worry – it’s all perfectly fine to eat.
the half blood prince
Eating DNA sounds scary but it’s completely safe. I do it every day. Let me explain. DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. The words “acid” and “nucleic” are in the name so it is hardly surprising that…
We’ve seen Australia from space. Now let’s see it in space.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
India’s recent launch of a mission to Mars should cause us to contemplate Australia’s potential role, or lack of one, in such ventures. We presume India mounted this project at amazing speed to give China…
When is a selfie a selfie? And when does it become act of war? Over at mamamia.com, Bec Sparrow has the answer. When the selfie is of six-packing fitness-blogging Norwegian Caroline Berg Eriksen posing…
Can environmental humanities help us understand the fame of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta?
Alejandro Sosa Briceño
Have you watched the movie Grease recently? From one perspective, it is a schlocky film about coming of age in the 1950s. From another, it’s a striking representation of post-war America’s romance with…
The British Film Festival offers much to please audiences – but how connected is it to the Brit diaspora?
nickwheeleroz
When it comes to film festivals, Australian audiences have plenty to choose from. Virtually every week there is a film festival from a different ethnic, national, religious or cultural group vying for…
Treasury’s superannuation paper should be examined through the lens of the government’s commitment to reduce regulation.
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The consultation paperreleased by Treasury on the governance of superannuation funds doesn’t include any surprises. There are no policy recommendations of the type the Grattan Institute called for in its…
Analogue TV may be on the way out – but it’s been an involving medium for artists.
Tele Visions/Lucy Parakhina
2013 will be remembered as the year analogue television was switched off in Australia. The curators of Tele Visions are celebrating the final days of analogue TV with a set of new and historically significant…
Most people haven’t actually seen many vulvas up close, and don’t know about the vast anatomical range of normality.
Philippa Willitts
ABC TV’s The Vagina Diaries investigates the worrying trend for increasing numbers of labiaplasty procedures being performed in Australia. Labiaplasty is a surgical procedure to remove or reduce the labia…
It’s hard to replace plain flour with self-raising flour in a cake, but luckily, our chromosomes are more like cars.
juni xu
Every now and again you might read about gene therapy and efforts to correct serious genetic diseases. But I’m betting that very few readers have had gene therapy, nor have they ever met anyone who has…
The UN has criticised Australia’s housing and transfer of asylum seeker children in offshore processing facilities on Manus Island and Nauru.
AAP/Eoin Blackwell
Recent reports that three asylum seeker children have been transferred from Nauru back to Australia because of concerns about their health raises a more fundamental question that lies at the heart of Australia’s…
The Coalition government’s deal with the states over schools funding should not be broken so easily.
AAP Image/Tim Dornin
Education minister Christopher Pyne has announced the new government will dump the agreements with the states on the Gonski school funding reforms, negotiated by the former Labor government. Pyne has said…
Group Leader, LGBTQ+ Population Health Research Group, and Research Fellow, HIV Epidemiology and Prevention Program, Kirby Institute, Faculty of Medicine and Health, UNSW Sydney