May 2013
22 posts
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The evolution of lying
By Rob Brooks
Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature.
Thus concludes the abstract of a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that considers the evolution of “tactical deception” using a theoretic model and a comparative study of primates.
I’m interested to see how the news media handle...
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Unknown wonders: Wolfe Creek Crater
By Kenneth McNamara, University of Cambridge
Australia is famous for its natural beauty: the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, Kakadu, the Kimberley. But what about the places almost no one goes? We asked ecologists, biologists and wildlife researchers to nominate five of Australia’s unknown wonders.
It is a testament to the size and isolation of many parts of Australia that it wasn’t until 1947...
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Rats! Why virtual reality doesn't feel 'real'
By Ken Cheng
Have you ever noticed that even detailed, sophisticated virtual reality experiences don’t feel completely “real”?
It all comes down to your inner ear – and a study published earlier this month using rats may help explain why this is the case.
Researchers from University of California, Los Angeles, let rats run along a virtual narrow hall and measured their brain activity, and...
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Smarty pants: wearable electronics will recharge...
By Adam Best, CSIRO
Imagine having a wafer-thin touchscreen on your sleeve which, like a scene out of a Philip K. Dick novel, gives you all the functionality of a smartphone without the awkwardness of a cumbersome battery.
The best part about this scenario is it may not be as far from reality as you think.
The bulky packaging of batteries limits innovation of some of the amazing new,...
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Is a scientific career worth it?
By Andrew Whitehouse, University of Western Australia
One of the most enjoyable aspects of my job is the talks that I am asked to give to graduating university classes and at awards ceremonies.
Below is a talk in which I ask the question whether a science career is worth it. The transcript is provided below the video.
Is a scientific career worth it?
Is a scientific career worth it?
Thank you...
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International Space Station astronauts land in...
By Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation
Three astronauts from the International Space Station, including the singing Canadian Chris Hadfield, landed in Kazakhstan today after a journey of nearly 100 million kilometres.
Commander Hadfield, an avid Twitter-user who recently released a video of himself singing the David Bowie classic Space Oddity, joined Soyuz Commander Roman Romanenko of the Russian...
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Deep brain stimulation: a fix when the drugs don't...
By Amy Reichelt
Neurological disorders can have a devastating impact on the lives of sufferers and their families.
Symptoms of these disorders differ extensively – from motor dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease, memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease to inescapable cravings in drug addiction.
Drug treatments are often ineffective in these disorders. But what if there was a way to simply switch...
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Climate change wiped out Australia's megafauna
By Stephen Wroe
Throughout the Ice Age that characterised our planet for much of the last two million years or so mainland Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea formed a single landmass — Sahul.
It was a strange and often hostile place – at times much drier and as much as nine degrees cooler than now – with a sometimes vast arid core that expanded to encompass 70% or more of the continent. And...
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Scientific fraud, sloppy science – yes, they...
By Jonathan Borwein (Jon), University of Newcastle and David H. Bailey, The Conversation
Fraud. It’s an ugly word, an arresting word. As with “cheating” it comes loaded with negative connotations, but can potentially lead to far greater penalties and consequences. And yet fraud in science is not unheard of.
The world of economics was shaken two weeks ago by the revelation that a hugely...
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Seneca's Child: Out from the cave: have we lost... →
senecaschild:
By Thomas William Nielsen, University of Canberra
It’s nothing new to say we have a problem in education. But I’m not here to discuss the usual gripes with teachers and test scores.
I believe we have a more fundamental problem with defining what we want education to do.
At the…
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Explainer: what is wave-particle duality
By Tim Davis, CSIRO
Our notion of reality is built on everyday experiences. But wave-particle duality is so strange that we are forced to re-examine our common conceptions.
Wave-particle duality refers to the fundamental property of matter where, at one moment it appears like a wave, and yet at another moment it acts like a particle.
To understand wave-particle duality it’s worth looking at...
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Meet the epigenome: the next genomic frontier
By Emma Beckett, University of Newcastle
Thanks to the Human Genome Project we now have a complete genomic map. But, simply having a map doesn’t give you all the information. For a map to be useful, you still need know where to go, the best way to get there and usually, how long it will take.
The genome project identified all the genes (about 25,000) that are needed to make a human. Every...
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We want to work, but research funding cuts will...
By William Bennett, Griffith University
More than 1,000 senior university academics this week signed an open letter to the prime minister, Julia Gillard, opposing A$2.3 billion worth of cuts announced to fund the Gonski reforms to school education.
So why do I care, besides the fact the cuts sound like robbing from Peter (tertiary education) to pay Paul (primary and secondary education)?
Of...
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The science of magic: it's not all hocus pocus
By Michele Barker
Think of your favourite magic trick. Is it as grandiose as David Copperfield’s Death Saw, or is it as simple as making a coin disappear in front of your very eyes?
These two very different tricks have the same effect; they delight and astound, leaving the audience to ponder (usually unsuccessfully):
How did they do that?
But while magic has entertained us for thousands...
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once were triathlete: Bacterial genomics offers... →
onceweretriathlete:
Colorized low-temperature electron micrograph of a cluster of E. coli bacteria. The individual bacterium are rectangular and brown. Microbe World/Flickr
By Slade Jensen, University of Western Sydney and Sebastiaan van Hal, University of Western Sydney
Bacteria are single-celled…
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Explainer: geothermal energy
By Hal Gurenci
Geothermal means, literally, “earth heat”. The temperature of the earth increases as we drill deeper towards its core. We can use that heat for energy by circulating water through hot subterranean reservoirs, bringing the hot water or steam to the surface. We can then convert the energy in the hot fluid to mechanical and electrical power at the surface using a heat engine.
The...
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NASA pics reveal huge rose hurricane on Saturn
By Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation
The US space agency has released fresh pictures of a hurricane with a 2000km wide eye locked over Saturn’s north pole and spinning at around four times the speed of earthly hurricane winds.
The pictures, captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, show the huge hurricane being held in one spot inside a hexagon-shaped weather pattern.
A video of the storm can be...
April 2013
43 posts
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A satellite to save Australia? We should have one...
By Gordon Roesler
Does Australia need space capabilities? Well, as Senator Kate Lundy said this month when announcing the government’s new space policy: “Australians, whether they know it or not, rely on satellites every day.”
While this importance is indeed reflected in the policy, now is the time for specifics: to assess national space needs and develop programs to meet them. I want to...
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Virgin Galactic demonstrates it has the Right...
SpaceshipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s rocket powered space vehicle, broke the speed of sound in its first rocket-powered test flight. The test, conducted by teams from Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic, officially marks Virgin Galactic’s entrance into the final phase of vehicle testing prior to commercial service from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Virgin Galactic is the world’s first...
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Variomics seeks to understand what makes us unique
By Richard Cotton, University of Melbourne and Timothy Smith, University of Melbourne
Announcing the completion of the first draft of the human genome in 2000, then-US president Bill Clinton spelt out what this monumental achievement would mean for humankind, “With this profound new knowledge, humankind is on the verge of gaining immense new power to heal. Genome science will have a real...
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Explainer: the International Space Station
By Kevin Orrman-Rossiter, University of Melbourne
As the most visible man-made object in the night sky the International Space Station (ISS) is of significance to humankind. It takes humans from being explorers of space to being residents of space.
The Russians launched Zarya, the first module of the ISS, on November 20, 1998. It has grown considerably since then and has been continuously...
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Faster-than-superfast internet, and why we can't...
By Arthur Lowery, Monash University
You may have read about Sony’s plan to install a fibre-based internet service in Japan which could reach download speeds of 2 gigabits a second (Gbps).
That’s 20 times faster than speeds offered by Labor’s National Broadband Network (NBN), and even twice as fast as Google Fiber, a 1Gbps connection currently being rolled out in the US.
To put that in more...
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Across the Zooniverse – keeping an eye on citizen...
By Kevin Pimbblet, Monash University
Amateur astronomers in Russia made a discovery last week any professional would envy – it seems they may have identified the remnants of the ill-fated Soviet Mars 3 lander, 30 years after it lost contact with Earth.
Photos taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in 2007 show what...
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Computing 1-0-1: quantum information in an atom's...
By Andrea Morello
You’ve heard of quantum computers – they harness the power of atoms and molecules to perform memory and processing tasks; they exist in labs but are still a long way off in practical terms. But maybe they’re not as far off as we thought.
As published in Nature today, my colleagues and I have established a world-first in this area. We’ve demonstrated a quantum bit (or qubit)...
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“The idea is to look for the artifacts of advanced extraterrestrial...”
– Finding ET in the Data
As we saw yesterday, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) has been the source of data for a number of searches for unusual infrared signatures. The idea is to look for the artifacts of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, under the assumption that a sufficiently...
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Are you a mutant? Genes matter, but there's more...
By Merlin Crossley
Are you a mutant? Am I? The advent of personal genomics makes this question less like a Marvel Comics story idea than it did in the past. But, as Spiderman’s uncle Ben might have put it: with great power comes great responsibility.
A hundred years ago, the son of Tsar Nicholas of Russia, Alexis, suffered from haemophilia (a hereditary disease that affects blood clotting).
...
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Australia R&D about to Trip over Red Tape
By Carlos Duarte, University of Western Australia
A healthy R&D system is one of the underpinnings, if not sufficiently recognized, of the prosperity Australia enjoys, and a likely silver bullet to maintain our economy healthy in the unavoidable aftermath of the resources bloom.
A healthy R&D system sits on three pillars: sufficient funding, high-quality human resources, and robust and...
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Human evolution: science's golden child or spoilt...
By Darren Curnoe
It’s probably a truism to suggest that the study of human evolution gets more that its fair share of media attention and hype.
Brace yourself!
There’s more on the way this week, with a set of seven papers out in the journal Science providing new details about the anatomy and evolution of almost 2.0 million-year-old Australopithecus sediba specimens from South Africa.
The...
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Universities and the poorest billion
By Leszek Borysiewicz, University of Cambridge
The following is based on the Monash Richard Larkins Oration given by Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University last night in Melbourne.
You can read and listen to our In Conversation interview with Professor Borysiewicz here.
In the UK, and maybe in Australia as well Vice-Chancellors talk about core national...
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Space oddity: how Saturn's rings are rainmakers
By Helen Maynard-Casely, Australian Synchrotron
In space no one can hear you scream, but you may get a bit wet.
In particular, if you were thinking of journeying to take in the sights of Saturn, it would be a good idea to pack an umbrella.
This is suggested by new observations, published today in Nature, that point to Saturn’s rings being the source of “space rain” that pours down into the...
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An open book: the next chapter of 'reading' dreams
By Russell Conduit, Monash University
You may have read last week that a team of researchers has developed, for the first time, a way to detect the contents of people’s dreams. But what can we glean from this research?
During the same week that US president Barack Obama announced the US$100 million Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative to unlock the...
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The Jetsons: the all American family of the future
The Jetsons is an American cartoon sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera, originally airing in the US from 1962–1963 and the second (in my mind inferior) series from 1985–1987. It was Hanna-Barbera’s space age counterpart to another cartoon favourite of my childhood - The Flintstones.
While the Flintstones live in a world with machines powered by birds, dinosaurs, and foot-power the Jetsons live...
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The RSA algorithm (or how to send private love...
By Adrian Dudek
A couple of days ago on The Conversation, I set myself up with a task: to defend the usefulness of so-called “useless” maths. Today, that defence continues, with a look at the RSA algorithm.
I finished last time by pointing out that three mathematicians – Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman – created the RSA algorithm in 1977, in one fell swoop establishing a practical...
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Dinosaur Jr: raising 200-million-year-old embryos
By Eric Roberts
We should forget about ever finding something as small and delicate as a dinosaur embryo, right? A few months ago I would have agreed – but now, well, things have changed.
When my colleague, palaeontologist Robert Reisz from the University of Toronto, asked me in late 2011 to accompany his team of Canadian, Taiwanese, and Chinese scientists on a project in Yunnan, China to...
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Final Frontiers: space
By Alice Gorman, Flinders University
With the global population now well over seven billion people there are few remaining parts of the world relatively untouched by human activity. We assess the current state and future prospects of five final frontiers: rainforests, Antarctica, the Arctic, the deep sea and space.
For many advocates of space exploration, the Solar System is the answer to...
