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The post The Highlights of 2013 appeared first on Australian Science.
]]>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!
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>>
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>>
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>>
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>>
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>>
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. 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>>
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>>
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>>
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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The post The Best of Australian Science: August 2013 appeared first on Australian Science.
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It is always a bad sign when crowds gather. On the morning of Wednesday March 21 in the year 1900, a crowd began to gather in Sydney. A thousand people had gathered outside the offices of the Board of Health in Macquarie Street. They had gathered because bubonic plague had broken out. People had already started to die from the Black Death. Panic was the only course of action.
The Government had stockpiled Haffkine’s serum (named after the Russian bacteriologist that developed it in a makeshift laboratory in a corridor of Grant Medical College) — a new plague vaccine, and had used it to inoculate front
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The post The Best of Australian Science: May 2013 appeared first on Australian Science.
]]>For those interested in science blogging and contributing to Australian Science – contact us and check out the Editor’s note.
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 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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The post Best of Australian Science: February 2013 appeared first on Australian Science.
]]>If you are interested in science blogging and contributing to Australian Science – contact us and check out the Editor’s note.
Until next Australian Science month review, stay curious, and geeky, scientifically and artistically passionate. I hope you’ll enjoy these stories.
Women in Space – Valentina Tereshkova by Sharon Harnett
This article is the first in a series of articles in which I will profile every woman astronaut, cosmonaut and taikonaut who has been into space. The last time I checked 58 women have travelled into space, by the end of this year there may be a few more! We’re going to start this series at the beginning – with Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Read more>>
Could the next generation of electronics be made with graphene? by Markus Hammonds
One of the biggest potentials for graphene, however, is in electronics. As graphite (a naturally occurring mineral), carbon is semiconductive. Due to the way carbon atoms are arranged in this hexagonal pattern, it leaves some electrons free to move across the material in a way not entirely unlike the way the motion of free electrons allows metals to be conductive. However, pure graphite isn’t really very conductive. Read more>>
Australia’s National Science Agency – Focused on the Future by Kelly Burnes
Wanting to learn more about this group’s work and impact, I reached out toDr Stefan Hajkowicz, the Theme Leader for CSIRO Futures. This is our digital conversation about science, education, energy, and what Australia must do to secure its future.
To our readers, if you have not done so already, check out the CSIRO Futures website for reports and projects to learn more. You’ll find some thought-provoking, fascinating topics guaranteed to make you put your strategic thinking cap on and get lost in a world of ‘what-ifs’. Read more>>
Australian Science travelled to Canberra for the linux.conf.au (Linux Conference Australia) at the beginning of the month that brought plenty of interesting keynote speakers. For Open Source fans and advocates, don’t miss to read and listen to the interviews as well as the wrap up of the conference: Linux.conf.au 2013: ‘Nerdvana’ in Canberra. Interview transcripts are available with each article.
Radia Perlman at LCA 2013 by Jessica Smith
Later in the week, I had the pleasure of heading off to lunch with Radia and a small group of fellow delegates during a break in technical sessions. She is engaging and thoughtful, and concerned as much with solutions for societal issues as solutions for thorny networking challenges. Radia is eternally self-effacing, and repeatedly claimed that she had “never done anything difficult
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The post Best of Australian Science: January 2013 appeared first on Australian Science.
]]>In 2013 expect the comet Ison to garner some column inches towards the back end of the year. In early 2013 October it will pass very near Mars and possibly be visible to rovers and orbiting spacecraft. The newly discovered comet could develop a spectacular tail, becoming as bright as the full Moon as it passes by our Sun. The comet is currently falling toward the Sun from between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. There is a chance it won’t survive this encounter. Whatever survives will then pass nearest the Earth in late 2013 December. Read more>>
Physicists are interesting folk, and I’m sure some would be fascinated if this turned out to be something new. Fabiola Gianotti, director of the ATLAS experiment at CERN has appeared noticeably excited before by the prospect of new and unknown physics being discovered. However, the other thing about physicists is that by their nature, they need to be highly skeptical, particularly when it comes to their own work. Adam Falkowski, a Paris-based particle physicist, states what most researchers are probably thinking on his blog Résonaances – that the result is most likely due to a “a systematic problem
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The post Best of Australian Science: January 2013 appeared first on Australian Science.
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The post Weekly Science Picks appeared first on Australian Science.
]]>The internet has already had a major impact on how people find and access information, and now the rising popularity of e-books is helping transform Americans’ reading habits. In this changing landscape, public libraries are trying to adjust their services to these new realities while still serving the needs of patrons who rely on more traditional resources. In a new survey of Americans’ attitudes and expectations for public libraries, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that many library patrons are eager to see libraries’ digital services expand, yet also feel that print books remain important in the digital age.
In the past generation, public libraries have reinvented themselves to become technology hubs in order to help their communities access information in all its new forms,
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The post The Highlights of 2012 appeared first on Australian Science.
]]>The news that CERN had detected a signature matching the much sought after Higgs boson was the biggest news this year in physics. While physicists at the LHC still aren’t 100% certain what they’ve found, one thing is for certain – they’ve definitely discovered something never before seen, and it definitely seems to match what’s expected for the Higgs boson. Now it’s up to the theorists to work out if this will confirm existing theories, or if it will require brand new physics to be devised to explain it!
“It’s a bit like spotting a familiar face from afar,
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The post Best of Australian Science: November 2012 appeared first on Australian Science.
]]>Also, we started the new initiative called Education Thursdays (hashtag #EducationThursdays) where teachers and curriculum leaders at different levels of education blog and write about their experiences and share their ideas on gender issues in science, STEM, participation, and engagement. I invite here, both students and teachers/educators, if interested, to write and join our team and, each Thursday, contribute and share with others.
Take a look at the wonderful stories and articles on neuroscience, space, genetics, biology, environment, astrobiology, cosmic evolution, physics, quantum mechanics, education, publishing, and technology. The best of Australian Science for November 2012:
Tasting colours and seeing sound: Synaesthesia by Lauren Fuge
“One hears a sound but recollects a hue, invisible the hands that touch your heartstrings,
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