australian science – Australian Science

The Science behind Architecture

Editorial Board — Sat, 12 Apr 2014 00:15:14 +0000

Architecture, in various forms, dates back to early man. But it wasn’t until the late Renaissance period that modern architecture that we know today came about; when engineers, artists and architects separated and formal architecture training began in the 19th century. It became less focused purely on its artistic merit, and more on its quality and function.

The Oxford Dictionary defines architecture as being: ‘the art and science of designing buildings and (some) nonbuilding structures’. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993). And now, there is more science behind architecture than ever before – from earthquake and hurricane proof to advanced soundproofing and more, a building is no longer ‘just a building’, and the design needs to be more than just aesthetically pleasing – it needs to be functional too.

Here, we take a look at some of the common problems faced by architects and the scientific developments that are used to overcome them.

Sustainability

The word sustainability has been a hot topic for several years now. Sustainable products are both environmentally friendly and more economical. From energy and transport to clothing and agriculture, engineers and scientists are constantly looking for ways to make things more eco-friendly and sustainable. Architecture is no different. There are several elements of building design and construction that can be more sustainable – including the materials used and machinery involved.

In Australia, the Green Building Council of Australia gives green ratings to new buildings, based on the environmental impact that they have. Launched in 2002, the not-for-profit Green Building Council aims to help promote more sustainable and green property developments, such as those advocated by Dion Seminara, who is looking to promote what he calls ‘intelligent architecture’.

“The Queensland homes offered many advantages, particularly in terms of lower running costs for heating and cooling. The architectural design responded directly to the local climate using simple materials to create comfortable homes.

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Weekly Science Picks

Markus — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:12:55 +0000

It is with a heavy heart that I must say, this is my final set of Weekly Science Picks here on Australian Science. In fact, it’s to be the final set of Weekly Science Picks. Unfortunately, running a site like this one is a costly affair, and it’s been an honour to be a writer here over the past year and a half. Scientific progress will, of course, always carry on and I hope there will always be places to discuss new findings, implications, and effects of it on human culture and society.

So, proudly then, here are the final set of news stories which caught my eye this week. Make no mistake – there’s been some pretty cool news recently!

Firstly, and in my opinion most excitingly, is a medical breakthrough which could actually revolutionise surgery in the future. And anyone who knows me will know that I don’t use words like “revolutionise” lightly. Quite simply, the device is a small pen, developed by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES), which will be able to deposit stem cells and growth factors directly into injuries. This means that this pen could help injured tissue – bones, muscle, and even nerves – to regrow. Oh, and did I mention it works using 3D printing technology?

BioPen to rewrite orthopaedic implants surgery

The BioPen prototype was designed and built using the 3D printing equipment in the labs at the University of Wollongong and was this week handed over to clinical partners at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, led by Professor Peter Choong, who will work on optimising the cell material for use in clinical trials.

For a long time humans were considered unique in that we use tools where other animal species don’t. But since that old idea, more and more animals – from birds to octopodes – have been shown to use tools in their daily lives. The most recent addition to this collection of smart creatures is the crocodile which has been found to use lures while hunting. Perhaps this might help show that reptiles are smarter than we give them credit for!

Alligators and Crocodiles Use Tools to Hunt, in a First

Relatively less is known about crocodiles and alligators than many animals, because, as large predators, they are difficult to raise in the lab and study up close in the wild. Their cold-bloodedness also makes them slow. “They operate on a different time scale; they do things more slowly,” Burghardt said. “Sometimes we don’t have the patience to let them strut their stuff, as it were … so this kind of study is important.”

A huge plume of water has been spotted, gushing from the surface of Enceladus, Saturn’s tiny snowball moon. While the exact source of Enceladus’ warmth is still something of a mystery, this sighting means that its activity is quite clear – this water plume is reaching an altitude of around 201 km above the surface of the tiny world. That’s nearly ten times as high as Olympus Mons, the solar system’s largest mountain (which itself dwarfs Everest, the heighest mountain on Earth).

Hubble Space Telescope Sees Evidence of Water Vapor Venting off Jupiter Moon

“By far the simplest explanation for this water vapor is that it erupted from plumes on the surface of Europa,

Cite this article:
Hammonds M (2013-12-15 00:12:55). Weekly Science Picks. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 27, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/news/weekly-science-picks-58/
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The Best of Australian Science: May 2013

Danica Radovanovic — Thu, 30 May 2013 00:23:26 +0000

The month of May saw us publish a plethora of interestingness – a wonderful variety of science and technology stories from within the fields of education, technology, space, internet technology, biology, environmental science, and more. We hope you enjoy them!

For those interested in science blogging and contributing to Australian Science – contact us and check out the Editor’s note.

All You Need is a Minute to Learn Physics, an interview with Henry Reich by Magdeline Lum

I was skeptical when I stumbled on Henry Reich’s MinutePhysics Youtube channel one night. How could anyone explain light, The Big Bang or relativity in just minutes and be understood? I decided to watch one in the expectation that I would be sent to sleep. It was well past midnight. In the end, I didn’t go to sleep until after I had watched every MinutePhysics video in existence. I was hooked. It all started with an explanation of what fire is. Read more>>

Quantum computing: Australian researchers store data on a single atom! by Markus Hammonds

Quantum computers will work using quantum bits, or qubits for short, which are analogous to the digital bits used in computers like the one which you’re using to read this article. Recently, a team of engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time ever, how a single atom can be act as a qubit, effectively showing the first step in building an ultra fast quantum computer. And they might just have created the best qubit ever made.

A quantum computer is, simply, a computer which makes use of quantum mechanical phenomena to perform calculations.Well, I say “simply

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Asteroids, extinctions, and biodiversity: Wiping the slate clean for new life to flourish

Markus — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:24:56 +0000

The recent meteor strike in Russia has been a rather sobering reminder that Earth has been regularly battered during its history, by space rocks. Actually, the amount of meteoritic material constantly landing on Earth is startling – on average, over 100 tons every day which we don’t even notice. Now, most of that is in the form of tiny rock fragments and dust; with most being small enough to be vapourised as they burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, relatively few meteorites ever end up on the ground. The part which may make us uneasy, however, is the fact that occasionally something larger crosses Earth’s path. Something much larger.

We already know with some degree of certainty that a gigantic asteroid impact may have played a role in wiping the dinosaurs off the face of our world, and we also know it’s not the only such large impact in Earth’s history. Now there’s evidence of another huge impact – and this one was in Australia!

With a diameter spanning around 200 km in South Australia’s East Warbuton basin, an ancient impact site has been uncovered. Created by an asteroid which was probably between 10-20 km in diamater, affecting an area of terrain of around 30,000 km, this impact zone is the third largest currently known. When this particular asteroid struck Earth some 360 million years ago, its effects would have been profound and global.

Andrew Glikson, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, first started investigating the area after hearing about structural abnormalities in the rocks there. He spent time in a crystallography lab, studying the orientation of crystals in rocks collected from the site, and found that the most likely cause for what he was seeing was the result of the rocks being subjected to a huge shock. Given the extent and area of the shocked rocks, the most likely explanation is a giant extraterrestrial impact.

The most well known giant impact, known as the Chicxulub Impact Event, occurred about 66 million years ago causing the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, and quite probably being the final nail in the coffin of the dinosaurs. This newly discovered Australian impact site, however, is much older. In fact, when this asteroid struck Earth, it was around 100 million years before any dinosaurs had even evolved. In fact, it would have likely been during the Carboniferous Period in Earth’s geologic history. Interestingly enough, there was a minor extinction event during the Carboniferous. A minor extinction caused by a change in Earth’s climate.

Glikson went on to explain that this impact was likely one of part of a cluster which caused a number of impacts around that time. This cluster of impacts was very likely behind an extinction event. Simply, a huge impact like the one discovered in the middle of Australia would cause devastation. The effects locally would be severe, splattering molten rock into the air which would then rain back down to the ground hundreds of kilometres away, and a blast wave of superheated air would cause widespread forest fires near the impact zone – particularly in the oxygen rich atmosphere of Earth’s Carboniferous forests.

The global repercussions of such an impact, however, would be much worse. A huge amount of dust would be thrown up into Earth’s atmosphere, choking out the sunlight. This would cause Earth’s surface to cool, and the reduced light would make plants die off. A big enough impact – or a series of them – would throw enough dust into the skies that this could happen on a global scale. With the food chain cut off at the plants which are its source, a mass extinction would follow as animals would have trouble finding food to survive on.

These events are mercifully rare. A giant impact may happen on Earth once every ten million years or so. Interestingly enough though, researchers in a different study have found evidence that extinction events on planet Earth may actually be beneficial to biodiversity.

Kale Sniderman, part of a group of researchers working at the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania, focussed on an event much more recent than the East Warburton impact. Instead, he and the others looked at the last ice age, around one million years ago and together they constructed a hypothesis that extinction events may be even more important for biodiversity than rapid evolution. While their work concerns species which went extinct during ice ages as opposed to impact events, a suitably large meteor strike may be a factor in what causes an ice age to begin.

The traditional view of most biologists is that some areas have greater biodiversity due to evolution in those places progressing more rapidly. Evolution has always been the only thing emphasised in biodiversity studies, but Sniderman and his colleagues have taken the first step in overturning this picture.

Their work looked at regions in South Africa and Australia – notable as two of the most diverse areas on planet Earth. South Western Australia is known among botanists for having a huge variety of plants, particularly tough leaved shrubs and trees. The very tip of the South African cape is even more diverse, populated by very similar types of plant. For a long time, biologists have theorised that the diversty in these rather similar areas was down to the dry, arid summer conditions and the nutrient poor soils in these areas. The exact connection, however, has never been entirely apparent.

As it happens, the status may not be quite so quo here. Studying fossils from an ancient lake in South Eastern Australia, it was found that plant life in Australia tended to die off as the continent has gradually become drier – a process taking millions of years. In particular, during the last ice age, a huge amount of rainforest plants died off. This allowed other hardier plants to fill the space they’d left and plant diversity expanded as they did so – creating what was described by University of Tasmania’s Greg Jordan as “a remarkable number of tough-leaved, shrubby plants.” Thinking about this process logically, it seems to make perfect sense. In any place on Earth where there’s a vacant ecological niche, life will typically evolve to try and fill that niche. Where an extinction occurs, a huge niche will suddenly become empty. This would prompt a veritable explosion of new life forms to fill in the gap.

This study not only gives new insight into how extinction events can affect diversity of life forms, but also has implications for current and future climate change, and how species may be able to cope with it. As I mentioned previously when talking about the Great Barrier Reef, Australian wildlife is already suffering from climate change. However, at least for plant life on land, there’s a good chance that the species most easily affected by rapid environmental changes may have already died off during the last ice age.

To loop this discussion back to the beginning, if an extinction due to an ice age could help to boost biodiversity, logically an extinction due to an asteroid impact event could do the same. To my knowledge, there are no studies in this context concerning what happened to biodiversity after the Chicxulub impact event (though I’ll admit that I may be wrong on this), but it would be very interesting to see what such studies might find. Similarly, it would be interesting to know if any such flourishes of biodiversity occurred after the newly discovered East Warbuton impact too. It could be that only certain types of extinction event can boost diversity of life on a planet. That said, if the same thing can occur after an asteroid impact then it may have implications reaching beyond Earth.

If a giant impact event could serve to actually boost life on a planetary scale, then it may imply that once life has taken hold on a planet, it’s more robust than we’ve been giving it credit for. The implications for astrobiologists and the search for life elsewhere in the galaxy are quite clear.

To end on an aside, a large enough asteroid strike even on Earth today would cause widespread fires kilometres away from the impact site. Back in the Carboniferous Period, around the time when the East Warbuton impact occurred, the situation would have been much more dramatic; the oxygen content of Earth’s atmosphere was up to 15% higher then, than it is today. In such a combustible atmosphere, where fires could have been started by a simple lightning strike, a large asteroid impact could cause a widespread inferno. However, South Africa (one of the places considered in the biodiversity study) is home to a number of species which have evolved specifically to survive fires. In particular, the highly diverse Fynbos region is known for a number of plants for which fire is actually an integral part of their lifecycle. Some seeds belonging to protea species simply don’t germinate unless they’re exposed to the intense heat of a wildfire. Provided they could gather sufficient amounts of sunlight under the darkened skies, plants like these may be able to rapidly repopulate an area after an impact event.

Life on Earth, evidently, has resilience which can still surprise us.

Image credits:
Top – Artists impression of a large scale impact event – Don Davis/NASA
Upper Middle – Australia seen from orbit – NASA
Lower Middle – League Scrub sub tropical rainforest, near Bowraville NSW, Australia – Peter Woodard/Wikimedia Commons
Bottom – Garden – https://croatia-real.estate

Cite this article:
Hammonds M (2013-03-08 00:24:56). Asteroids, extinctions, and biodiversity: Wiping the slate clean for new life to flourish. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 27, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/environmental-science/asteroids-extinctions-and-biodiversity-wiping-the-slate-clean-for-new-life-to-flourish/
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Talking the Language of Science

Danielle Spencer — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:35:34 +0000

I have mentioned before that part of the reason why I like science so much is that you get to play with stuff. It might come as no surprise then that I begin each year with a game called “Mrs Spencer Says

Cite this article:
Spencer D (2013-02-21 00:35:34). Talking the Language of Science. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 27, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/education/talking-the-language-of-science/
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We’re Just Playing. Science by Stealth

Danielle Spencer — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:25:23 +0000

One of my students asked me the other day why I like science so much. “Easy

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The smoking guns of dying stars

Markus — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 01:28:21 +0000

VY Canis Majoris, the largest known star in our galaxy, with it's huge smoky clouds of gas and dust being lost into interstellar space. Credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Humphreys (University of Minnesota)

The ancient Greeks once believed that the heavens were immutable. A vast starry vista, eternally unchanging above our heads. But we now know this to be untrue in the slightest. A lot has changed since then, however, and over the past few hundred years, astronomers have unfurled ever increasing knowledge of the lives of stars. Look out across a starry night sky and you can see stars in all stages of their lives, from brightly burning newborn stars, to ageing giants in their final gasping breaths. As stars near the ends of their lives, they begin to shine a rich red colour as they expand and dramatically increase in size.

As red giants, these stars are burning the last of their fuel, and as they do so they begin to sputter and gasp. Just as a candle flame does when it starts to burn out, red giant stars flicker – though for these, the largest stars in the universe, those flickers can take thousands of years each. These final bursts of energy are known as thermal pulses, and they mark the star’s final days. During the last couple of million years of its life, a red giant star will lose incredble amounts of material to interstellar space. Even when not caught mid-pulse, these stars lose several times the mass of our planet every year. And the puzzle of exactly how they do so has been recently been unravelled by a team of astronomers led by researchers at the University of Sydney.

All stars emit a stellar wind – a steady stream of particles being constantly accelerated outwards by the star. Even the Sun emits its own solar wind (with a speed measured at 535 kilometres per second as I write this). The wind from red giant stars is slightly different. As the star loses more mass, stellar material cools and condenses into dust. This dust then catches starlight which is so intense near to the star that it actually pushes that dust outwards. This effect, known as radiation pressure, causes the tiny reflective dust grains to act like minute sails and accelerates them away. Each dust grain is tiny compared to the kind of dust we find on our bookshelves, much more like fine smoke than any dust we’d recognise. Instead of being called stardust, it could easily be called starsmoke!

“The winds that stream from the upper atmosphere of the red giant stars are responsible for removing massive amounts of matter. The grains that we have discovered here will come as a real shock to the accepted wisdom in the field. They are both much larger and much closer to the stellar surface than anyone expected.” said Barnaby Norris, a PhD student at the University of Sydney, and lead author on the research published earlier this year in Nature.

This stardust emitted by these smoky smouldering old stars is transparent, not unlike finely powdered glass. The implications of this stardust being detected to close to an ageing star could help us to better understand the processes that occur in stars as they die, and how they manage to lose such prodigous amounts of mass so rapidly. As Norris said, “Hopefully our findings will help to illuminate a key step in the grand cycle as matter is expelled from stars into the galaxy only to seed new generations of stellar and planetary birth.”

On a final poetic note, all of the chemical elements essential to life are created within stars, before being seeded back into the cosmos when stars die. This means that this condensing stardust contains the fundamental raw materials needed for life to eventually form. As Carl Sagan so often used to muse, we are literally made of stardust.

The Cat's Eye nebula, a star which has now ended its life and is casting its outer layers into the cosmos. The concentric rings show material lost as stellar wind during the star's final thermal pulses.. Credit: ESA, NASA, HEIC and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

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Radio quiet, please!

Markus — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 05:28:28 +0000

Originally conceived over 20 years ago, there’s a project being undertaken by scientists and engineers across the whole world to help us all better understand the mysteries of the galaxy and the very beginnings of the Universe. It’s estimated to be completed by around 2024,costing $1.85 billion AUS (€1.5 billion). Once completed, it’s set to be the most complex and technologically advanced machine ever built by humanity. It will use enough optic fibre to wrap twice around the Earth and will need a computer capable of performing 10^18 operations per second – about three million times the number of stars in our galaxy. It will produce over 980 Exabytes of data every day (equivalent to about 15 million 64GB iPods) and to cope with that, it will need to handle data transfer rates over 10 times as high as the current global internet traffic. No, it isn’t a starship. But it might just be the next best thing.

One of the first components of the SKA, constructed in Western Australia. Credit: Dave DeBoer, CSIRO.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is one of the most ambitious scientific projects ever devised, and when completed it will comprise a huge number of telescope antennae which will work as one to form a single radio telescope so powerful that it could detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away. The sensitivity of any telescope is defined by the area it uses to collect data. With optical telescopes, this is the size of the mirror, and with radio telescopes it’s typically the size of the dish. The SKA gets its name because when fully constructed, all of the detectors and antennae that make it up will have a combined area of one square kilometre, or one million square metres. To put that properly into perspective, the Green Bank Telescope is currently the largest steerable single dish radio telescope, and its area is just under 8000 square metres.

Being astronomy’s answer to the large hadron collider, the SKA is a staggeringly large international collaboration. I was lucky enough to attend a major meeting regarding the planning of the SKA (the headquarters are to be based here in the UK in Manchester), and the myriad different languages and nationalities represented was impressive to say the least. Over 24 major organisations from countries spanning 5 continents are involved in the project, ranging from universities to industrial engineering companies. New technologies, both software and hardware, are still being developed as a result of this project. Based on the huge data storage and transfer requirements of a machine as complex as the SKA, many of those new technologies are likely to feed straight back into society by offering profound improvements to computing resources like the internet. In fact, as the world’s largest project for sorting and storing data, the SKA is expected to be literally bigger than Google!

The Warkworth antenna in New Zealand – an important part of early SKA science. Credit: Alex Wallace.

The most difficult decision, understandably, has been where precisely to build it. Humanity has an unfortunate tendancy to fill the atmosphere of our planet with noise, bouncing radio waves to and fro and filling the air with radio frequency chatter. A radio telescope array this sensitive needs to be placed somewhere quiet to gain the full benefits, and the most recent decision has been to effectively split the SKA into two components, to be built in Southern Africa and Australia. While this may seem like an odd thing to do, it actually makes perfect sense. The SKA actually has three types of antenna operating at different frequencies. Intended to cover a huge range of radio frequencies (from 70 to 100000 MHz), three types of antenna are needed, because no single technology can actually operate across such a wide range. So the decision was made to build the lowest frequency detectors across Australia, centred at Murchison in outback Western Australia. Murchison is blessed with being one of the few places on our planet which isn’t flooded with FM radio at the low end of the frequency scale. From a radio astronomer’s point of view, it’s the quietest place on Earth.

This is set to be complemented by the higher frequency steerable dishes which are set to be constructed across Africa. Both South Africa and Australia have put extensive efforts into developing the SKA, and Australian-developed technology is still set to be implemented in the African telescopes. This will mean a huge influx to the African astronomical community and numerous African nations won’t lose out on the economic boost from contributing to such a prestigious project. It’s an ideal situation where everyone wins.

All in all, it’s an exciting time to be an astronomer. An epic project like this is likely to attract all manner of researchers from across the world to both continents. Just maybe, it could also finally help us to answer the really big questions, like how the galaxy formed, how the Universe began, and whether or not there’s anyone else out there.

A map of prospective SKA sites. Credit: anzska

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“Smarter, more competitive, more productive

Kevin Orrman-Rossiter — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:38:33 +0000

There is no doubt in the mind of Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb, the future will be shaped by science technology, engineering and mathematics. Unfortunately, he finds that at present the standing of science, as an expert authority, is being challenged. Furthermore, Ian Chubb finds that the science message is getting lost in the white noise of the mainstream media. I was heartened to hear his positive words about science communication, social media, science and technology education and innovative Australian workplaces.

These were the messages from Ian Chubb at an address he gave as part of NICTA’s Big Picture Seminar series on Wednesday March 28, 2012 at the University of Melbourne.

It was refreshing to see Australia’s Chief Scientist out and about and addressing public forums such as this one. Although judging by the faces, the suits and the overheard conversations at the drinks and nibbles prior to the address, I think this was definitely a speech to the science and technology faithful. That is a pity, his words were worth exposure and considered comment in the mainstream Australian media.

Prof. Ian Chubb at the Climate congress, Copenhagen 2009, March 10-12. Opening session.

Professor Ian Chubb emphasises Mathematics, Engineering and Science provide the enabling skills and knowledge that underpin every aspect of modern life. They help us understand the natural world and enable us to respond as humans to this world with a constructed view aimed at improving the lot of human kind.

In Australia, as in many economies, we have observed a decline in the number of people choosing a career in these disciplines. Not only that, the STEM subjects (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics), as he called them, are taken for granted or simply ignored. Although it is obvious without at least an appreciation of these subjects, a modern citizen is hampered in their ability to critically evaluate and make informed decisions about the issues that are shaping their future. Among his many roles as Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb has been charged with examining this decline and offering strategies to address it.

Professor Ian Chubb is eminently suited to this task. He was appointed to the position of Chief Scientist on 19 April 2011 and commenced the role on 23 May 2011. Prior to his appointment as Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb was Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University. Professor Chubb’s research focused on the neurosciences. Although he jokingly said on the night he would prefer not to be quizzed, on science specifics, by such an informed audience. He has co-authored some 70 full papers and co-edited one book all related to his research. In 1999 Professor Chubb was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “service to the development of higher education policy and its implementation at state, national and international levels, as an administrator in the tertiary education sector, and to research particularly in the field of neuroscience

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Australian Science Reflection

Jessie — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 01:04:06 +0000

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to travel to the land down under. I remember that my frequent response to the question “what do you want to do today?

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