The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science recognise excellence in science and science teaching. This year, we asked three prizewinners to reflect on their work and factors that influenced their careers…
What do bankers and bacteria have in common? Finite resources, quick decision-making and an appreciation of trade-offs, according to a study in Ecology Letters. So could bacterial modelling ever help us…
With the royal baby due soon, there is much speculation on whether the family will be welcoming a Prince or a Princess of Cambridge. But perhaps science can tell us the answer, as new research from Stanford…
Japanese PM Shinzō Abe has a problem, and he might end up killing an awful lot of frogs to solve it. Shares are up in Japan, but everything else has flatlined: kick-starting the stubbornly moribund economy…
The fossilised teeth of kangaroos and other extinct marsupials reveal southeastern Queensland three million years ago was a mosaic of tropical forests, wetlands and grasslands, and much less arid than…
The rate of extinction of species today is many thousand times the natural rate. There are even examples that such loss can have serious impact on humans. So a critical question is: what is the role species…
The Green Revolution that began in the 1940s brought modern methods to farming through selective breeding, machinery, and agrochemicals. But 60 years on a new, more sustainable approach is required. Published…
There can be few words as poignant as “endling”, the name given to the last surviving individual of a species. The picture (below) of Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, is heartbreaking…
How can art and literature help us imagine a climate-changed world? In 1995, ecocritic Lawrence Buell argued that apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that environmentalism has at its…
When I started my PhD to gain understanding of factors affecting the plight of bats living in our cities, I had no idea I’d be stuffing a freezer full of faeces one day. Sorry - I’m getting ahead of myself…
In a paper published today in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Barry Brook and colleagues argue against the idea of an ecological global-scale “tipping point”. Here, Professor Brook outlines the paper’s…
The more we look, the more we realise just how important intact ecosystems are for our own well-being - and it really doesn’t matter at which scale we are looking. When Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian…
At the beginning of the 20th century, around one in three children in countries such as Australia and the United States died of infection before the age of five. But since Howard Florey first described…
As Australia gears up for another risky bushfire season this summer, some of its most iconic and valuable forests are at risk. Giant eucalpytus trees rely on fire to regenerate, but an increase in major…
The landing of the explorer Curiosity on Mars is a fantastic affirmation of the extraordinary technical capacities of humans. A series of remote, high risk choreographed moves saw a small mobile laboratory…
Climate change is causing the leaves of at least one subspecies of Australian plant to narrow in size, a team from the University of Adelaide has found. Their study shows that the leaves of the Narrow-leaf…
The splendour of nature diminishes day by day despite the strenuous efforts of ecologists and all manner of scientific understandings and interventions. Biodiversity is in decline, and crucial resources…
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University