computing – Australian Science

The Highlights of 2013

Danica Radovanovic — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 10:04:12 +0000

This year our writers churned out a host of fantastic articles, including a series of posts dedicated to women in space, written by Sharon Harnett. One of the most notable of the series was all about Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman astronaut. This year was the 50th anniversary of her historic spaceflight. We also had a few great interviews, including one with Henry Reich, creator of the YouTube series Minute Physics. We’ve managed a number of achievements. We’ve helped several science writers gain exposure and reputation world wide, we’ve appeared on ABC’s Newsline, and we’ve been listed in TED’s top 10 science and technology websites.

So, in no particular order, here are ten of our favourite articles from 2013. We hope you’ll enjoy these stories. Stay curious and scientifically passionate!

A Tale of Two STEM Women by Buddhini Samarasinghe

When I first read this story, I was struck by how often we focus on happy stories like Marie Curie’s, and how the story of someone like Clara Immerwahr remains largely forgotten. She had a tremendous amount of potential, as evidenced by her being the first female to receive a Ph.D at the University of Breslau, an endeavor that is certainly not for the faint-hearted even now. One can only wonder at the ‘might-have-beens’ if she had had the same support and encouragement that Marie Curie did, if she had not married Haber, or if Haber had been a different kind of person. These examples highlight that talent alone is not enough; we need to encourage that talent by promoting equality and recognizing our own biases when it comes to women in STEM. Read more>>

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman (in science) by Amy Reichelt

Obtaining a senior academic position for any aspiring young academic is one of those uphill struggles with roads lined with self doubt, setbacks and sacrifice. Some call it the way to tenure-track, in my mind it’s one of those ill-defined paths through a potentially haunted forest inhabited with monsters, gigantic poisonous spiders and creepy people who communicate by screaming. It can be harder still to even reach that point, particularly for young women. While the number of women professors in Europe, N. America and Australia has increased over the last decade, universities still have a disproportionately small number of women in senior professorial positions. Read more>>

Spiders on Mars? No, An Australian Radio Telescope! by Elizabeth Howell

The MWA is a powerful telescope in its own right, but what is even more exciting is it will form part of a larger project in the coming years. The Square Kilometre Array will link radio telescopes on two continents — Australia and Africa — to get a fine look at the sky in radio wavelengths. MWA is just one part of this array. There will also be dish receptors in eight countries in Africa, with the core and some mid-frequency aperture arrays in South Africa’s Karoo desert. Read more>>

Hopeful results in latest HIV vaccine trial, but many hurdles to overcome yet by David Borradale

A HIV vaccine, known as SAV001-H has shown promising results in an early clinical trial, with no adverse effects reported and importantly, a significant increase reported in HIV specific antibodies in participants who received the vaccine. In this trial, 33 HIV positive participants were randomly allocated to one of two groups: half into a treatment group receiving the vaccine and half into a placebo group who did not receive the vaccine. The participants were followed up at regular periods, testing safety of the vaccine and antibody response over a one year period. Read more>>

Are Australians Really Getting Dumber? by Magdeline Lum

The Australian Academy of Science has found that when it comes to science Australians are getting dumber in its latest report on science literacy. Compared to three years ago, less people in Australia know that the Earth’s orbit of the sun takes one year. Among 18-24 year olds 62% surveyed knew the correct answer, a fall from 74% three years ago. Other results would also send scientists into a tail spin of despair, with 27% of respondents saying that the earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs, though an improvement from 30% of respondents in 2010 who thought this. What does this all say? If you take the face value of the press release and the ensuing media coverage, Australians are getting dumber. Read more>>

From fables to Facebook: Why do we tell stories? by Lauren Fuge

Storytelling is one of our most fundamental communication methods, for an obvious reason: narrative helps us cognise information. Telling intelligible, coherent stories to both ourselves and others helps our brains to organise data about our lives and our world. But when we askwhy stories are so effective at helping us cognise information, the answers are surprising: it seems that somewhere in the otherwise ruthless process of natural selection, evolution has wired our brains to prefer storytelling over other forms of communication. Read more>>

Plastic’s Reach by Kelly Burnes

Plastic. Seems it has extended its reach into the farthest corners of the universe. An earliest post described how plastic has changed our lives, for better…and for worse. ADD link to earlier post. That post largely reflected on the growing problem of plastic in the oceans and the effect on plant and animal life. Now, it seems that plastic threatens our freshwater lakes now too. Read more>>

Postcard from Spitzer: weather on 2M2228 is hot and cloudy by Kevin Orrman-Rossiter

Long distance weather reports are now a commonality. The report for 2MASSJ22282889-431026 is somewhat unusual. It forecasts wind-driven, planet-sized clouds, with the light varying in time, brightening and dimming about every 90 minutes. The clouds on 2MASSJ22282889-431026 are composed of hot grains of sand, liquid drops of iron, and other exotic compounds. Definitely not the first place to spend a summer holiday. Not that 2MASSJ22282889-431026 (or 2M2228 as it is known in The Astrophysical Journal Letters) will appear on a travel itinerary anytime soon. For 2M2228 is a brown dwarf, 39.1 light years from earth. Read more>>

The bacteria that live inside hurricanes by Charles Ebikeme

Seven miles above the Earth’s surface, where the weather is born, lies the troposphere – the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. Up there, where the clouds dance around, are bacteria that can make it rain, and are important for the formation of clouds. The atmospheric microbiome is a concept and field of study that is gaining importance. As we come to grips with a changing climate and environment, understanding more and more our Earth ecosystem remains vital. With hurricane damage in the US and elsewhere seemingly on an exponential increase in recent decades, it is important to mitigate for the worst. Read more>>

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

Computing is also an incredibly fast moving field of technology, and research is finally taking us towards the exciting world of quantum computing! 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. Read more>>

Happy 2014 from Markus, Charles, Kevin, Kelly, and Danica!

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

Markus — Thu, 16 May 2013 07:10:32 +0000

Computers are everywhere these days. They play us music, tell us when to wake up, remind us that we’re late for an appointment, and provide us with entertainment. Even if we don’t realise it, so ingrained in our lives are computers that the world would be a very different place without them. Computing is also an incredibly fast moving field of technology, and research is finally taking us towards the exciting world of quantum computing!

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”… Let’s step back a moment. The simplest form of computers involve actual moving objects, and using the positions of those objects to perform calculations. This is essentially how an abacus works, if you’ve ever used one. The earliest computers to be designed, automated this process, using mechanisms. Charles Babbage’s famous, albeit never built, Analytical Engine worked on exactly this basic principle, and if it had been constructed it would have truly been the world’s first computer.

Essentially, the way these old mechanical computers work is to use the positions of their mechanical parts to perform mathematical and logic functions. This is actually the fundamental way in which all computers work. Since the discovery of electricity and the invention of electronics, computers have worked using electric circuits – effectively using the position of electrons instead of the position of actual moving parts. As technology has progressed, computers have become faster, smaller, and more reliable, until the world around us today.

In modern electronics, silicon is king. Silicon-based electronics are the standard used everywhere, though they’re reaching the limit of what they’re capable of. For the next generation of electronics, some people are beginning to advocate new materials, such as graphene, over silicon. But ultimately, others have a higher goal. Proponents of quantum computing believe that in the future, the most vital components of computers will not be electronics at all, but single atoms.

In quantum mechanics, any single particle, from an electron to an atomic nucleus, has a set of properties which can often be changed quite easily. Where past computers used motion of mechanical parts and modern computers use motion of electrons, quantum computers will use changes in the properties of these particles to perform their calculations.

One such quantum property is known as spin (the same property behind magnetism), and this is what the UNSW engineers managed to manipulate. They based their qubit on a single silicon atom and demonstrated how they used changes in the nuclear spin of the nucleus to store and retrieve information. Andrea Morello at UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications described how; “We have adapted magnetic resonance technology, commonly known for its application in chemical analysis and MRI scans, to control and read-out the nuclear spin of a single atom in real time.

Cite this article:
Hammonds M (2013-05-16 07:10:32). Quantum computing: Australian researchers store data on a single atom!. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 08, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/technology/quantum-computing-australian-researchers-store-data-on-a-single-atom/

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Linux – The Open Source Ecosystem

Kelly Burnes — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:33:12 +0000

Australian Science travelled to Canberra for the linux.conf.au (Linux Conference Australia) last week and had the opportunity for exclusive one-on-one interviews with a number of the keynote speakers. You may have been a little hesitant reading the first word of the title of this article, ‘Linux’, but perhaps the ‘Open Source Ecosystem’ in the latter part put your mind at ease. We are a computing world, a society heavily dependent upon computers. Computers, in their many shapes and sizes, are touching even greater areas of our lives and reaching a far greater number of people than ever before. Open source is revolutionizing the way we communicate. So while we all may not understand coding and app development, we can understand the end products that allow us digital consumers to produce and share our experiences and stories. The person who has had a tremendous impact in the Linux world is Bdale Garbee. And this is his open source ecosystem.

Bdale Garbee is a computer genius. Although he retired in 2012 after a long career with HP, serving as Open Source and Linux Chief Technologist, he shows no signs of slowing down. Quite the contrary, his workload may be picking up with the number of projects he is involved with, such as serving on the boards of The Freedombox Foundation and The Linux Foundation.

“Linux – euphemism for entire open source ecosystem and idea of collaborated development and maintenance of software and related data

Cite this article:
Burnes K (2013-02-07 14:33:12). Linux – The Open Source Ecosystem. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 08, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/interviews/linux-the-open-source-ecosystem/
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