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.
Osama bin Laden is dead. Or is he? The newly-deceased Saudi militant was long a central figure for the world’s conspiracy theorists. He was actually a CIA agent said some. He really died of kidney failure…
The killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces on Pakistani soil has come at a time when relations between the two countries have been rather strained. Analysts point out that al-Qaida today is a diffuse…
The Great Barrier Reef is worth billions to Australia’s economy and is one of the world’s most significant natural features. We have a responsibility to protect it, and our other reefs, from the warming…
US President Barack Obama has released the long form of his birth certificate in order to quash questions of his legitimacy as President. Business and media identity Donald Trump had been key in questioning…
Getting research money, especially the no-strings-attached kind that government agencies give out, is difficult. Researchers spend months on each proposal with only a small chance of getting funded. Winning…
If your child were diagnosed with a taste disorder, you’d be forgiven for welcoming an impending disinterest in sweets and salty chips. But for the one in ten Australian children who can’t perceive sweet…
Can Prime Minister Julia Gillard lecture China on its human rights record given the many failings observers see in Australia’s own treatment of vulnerable groups? Australia generally has a good human rights…
It seems a simple question: “Why don’t women just leave violent relationships?” But many victims can’t simply walk away. There are many barriers to ending an abusive relationship, and financial worries…
Data just released by the Australian Government show that many girls are not completing the full course of the cervical cancer vaccine. It’s another very good reason towards an already compelling case…
This year’s Archibald prize has gone to Ben Quilty’s portrait of Australian artist Margaret Olley. It’s an award often criticised for being populist or irrelevant, and there’s no reason to think that this…
Something remarkable has happened: 1000 economists have agreed with each other. In Washington, civil society groups will present a letter signed by 1000 economists from 50 countries to the annual G20 finance…
We are living in extraordinary times. People are using social media to campaign for freedom from their governments, but their ideas are built on a much more powerful medium: literature. Protests have swept…
Innovation is not a topic that attracts much serious political debate in Australia. It improves living standards and the economy, but we’re missing out because of the government’s short-sighted approach…
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…
On March 20, the day after NATO and US air and naval forces began the implementation of a no-fly zone over Libya authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1973, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the…
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…
Objective analysis of good microdata on students can yield results that are highly relevant to educational policy. This should come as no surprise, since it is the case in most other disciplines. To learn…
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…
In the wake of the Queensland floods, the Christchurch earthquake, and the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear crisis, people are asking for advice about how we should manage the effects of disaster on…
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…