It is with much regret that Australian Science and its sponsors have decided to withdraw their support of European science organisation, CROSCI. The educational website based in Croatia has revealed many fascinating studies and pieces of research with the aim of advancing science and inspiring the next generation seeking careers in academia.
We wish CROSCI, its contributors and followers all the best and hope to read about many more exciting scientific discoveries in the future.
It’s the end of November, 2014 and it is our time to summarise our contribution for this month.
Please enjoy our this month’s selection.
A modern business environment is frequently connected with many risks and uncertainties. The fact is the majority of modern businesses rely on IT infrastructure, but is a cyber threat the only thing that concerns us? Certainly, it’s not. There are a lot of different risks such as natural disasters, fires, threats to physical security and so on they can affect a business continuity and people’s safety.
What is a life form? Most of us, if asked, will think of an animal or a human being-in other words, a multicellular organism. However, life itself evolved in cells, single cells of various types that existed and propagated independently. What are, then, the factors that led cells to collaborate together and give rise to complex organisms? Collaboration is possible only if there are no cheaters -cells that exploit the collaboration of others- and cheaters always arise. How is possible, then, for a multicellular organism to develop? Do the cheaters need to be eliminated –an evolutionary impossibility- for complex organisms to occur?
Yet, despite increased global attention to violence perpetrated against women and girls, and recent advances in knowledge about how to tackle these abuses, levels of violence against women – including intimate partner violence, rape, female genital mutilation, trafficking, and forced marriages – remain unacceptably high, with serious consequences for victims’ physical and mental health. Conflict and other humanitarian crises may exacerbate ongoing violence.
It is also well-known that people are not born with such a skill; they need to master their fields of interest through their lives. That’s exactly the case with cyber! Requirements are high, every single day something new appears and what you need to have for such a career is an excellent learning curve which will allow you to cope with the change and successfully adopt and apply new things.
Well, that would be all for this monthly review. New stories are coming soon!
It’s the end of October, 2014 and it our time to review the top highlights for this month.
These would be our choice for the previous period.
The advancements in medicine have provided numerous cures and treatments for diseases that were terminal just a hundred years ago. And while there is a pill that can solve many problems, there isn’t one that can give you what a simple old-fashioned massage can – a total relaxation. But, there is more to it.
There are good bacteria and bad bacteria. For millennia, we humans never made a distinction: bacteria were associated with diseases and death, no exception. It was known that we are carrying along a large assortment of microbes in our gut, but this was considered to be an evolutionary accident or a coincidence rather than a lucky occurrence for us. Recently, in the last 10-15 years, the scientists’ view on the bacteria living in our gut has changed drastically. Now we know that they are good for us in ways that we are just beginning to understand. What is already clear is that, without the bugs in our gut, we would be way worse off than we are.
Cyber age has begun in the previous century and includes everything related to the web, computers and mobile technologies. As cyberspace has been developing, some security concerns have appeared. The future of computing technologies is clear – we are going quantum. But, how would be the future of cyber defence? Let’s say, we will get all those ultra fast, quantum-based computers in the coming decades, but how would we make them be a secure place for us? There is a lot of theories, but we will present you only some of them. So, let’s start our overview.
In 1935, Percy L. Julian (1899-1975) synthesized physostigmine, the compound that was only available in its natural source, the Calabar bean, now used in the treatment of glaucoma. This pioneering research opened a door to widespread usage of chemical materials; however, it also started a “synthetic versus natural
It’s the end of September, 2014 and it our time to review the top headlights for this month.
These would be our selection for the previous period.
Let us introduce you a leading Australian quantum physicist and probably one of the most promising scientists in the world. His name is Andrea Morello. He is an electrical engineer and a quantum physicist. At the moment he is Associate Professor in Quantum Nanosystems at University of NSW and a Program Manager in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T). His research is focused on building a quantum computer based on single spins in silicon. In addition to the research, Andrea is actively engaged in science outreach and education. So, let’s start with our talk.
Here in Australia, the GBCA are working towards a greener and more sustainable future. The past decade has seen tremendous growth within the building industry, as companies such as the GBCA and others have been working towards designing and creating a greater percentage of buildings that are certified as green and sustainable. When looking at how this has been accomplished, there are a plethora of green building certification systems throughout Australia and all over the world that have helped to create a new standard of quality within the industry. Here’s a brief look at what some of these systems are.
Sodium bicarbonate or sodium hydrogen carbonate, better known as baking soda is a chemical compound with the formula NaHCO3 . It is primarily used in cooking and baking as a leavening agent, and as a very effective cleaning agent.
A modern cyber security can be defined as a process of maintaining an acceptable level of cyber risk. So, security is about a risk management. It’s a never-ending process which requires you to invest new and new efforts in order to keep thing secure. Bad guys will always do bad things and good guys should find a way to respond to all of that. There are a lot of malicious persons in a cyber world – hackers, criminals, terrorist and security is the one which would be ahead of all in order to protect us from harm.
Experiments are great. What better way is there to spend time with your kids, have fun with them and teach them a thing or two about science? Even better when they’re messy and dramatic like the “volcano experiment
It’s the end of August, 2014 and it our time to review the top headlights for this month.
This would be our selection for the previous period.
From classrooms around the country, students will embark on a digital journey exploring the iconic Jenolan Caves, an important scientific environment full of learning opportunities. As they progress through quests, the students will explore the surrounding environment and complete inquiry based learning tasks that test their core science skills.
Medical researchers at the Centre for Personalised Immunology, based at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR), sequenced the genes of a young girl who suffered a stroke when she was four as a result of her lupus.
In the era of the Internet and emerging technologies, we are supposed to deal with different sorts of cyber threats, risks and attacks. This modern time brought a lot of advantages to the Human Kind, but also some fast-spreading and increasing security issues. It seems we are connected with the risk more than ever before. Cyber environment may appear as so friendly and convenient, but for real it brings a lot of nightmares to its visitors. In this article, we discuss all the disadvantaging things you can face up in cyberspace and also suggest why cyber security and a good undersigning of the problem is so important for a good defence. So, let’s start.
Colour is our eye’s interpretation of light reflecting off objects. The different colours we see are different wavelengths of light. Colour-specific photoreceptors in the retina of our eyes, cones, translate the wavelengths into what we see as colour.
One could call Simon Phipps a real eclectic geek, having in mind his background and activism globally: from campaigning for digital liberties, open data, open source software and political transparency, through his columns at InfoWorld to presidenting at the Open Source Initiative.
That’s basically our choice for August. Please stay tuned, new stories are coming soon.
Here we are at the end of one more exciting July and we would like to present you a brief review for this month. A lot of that have happened during the last 31 days and we would like to provide you with the top stories for the previous period.
Hope you will enjoy this journey. So, let’s start with our monthly review.
The delicate state of the European honeybee (Apismellifera) can be traced back to 2006, when the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) began wiping them out. Adult honey bees went missing from their hives, and no bodies were to be found. Since, apiaries have struggled – the US reports a yearly loss of about 30% – leaving the future of the honey bee in a precarious position.
Sticky snakeroot, Mexican devil or Crofton weed – call it what you want – since the early 1900s this weed has been causing grief in Australia. But now the release of a new biological control agent brings some hope.
The report by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR), based at the Crawford School of Public Policy, provides the first National Transfer Accounts (NTA) measure for Australia, based on figures from 2009-10.
In the previous articles, we’ve been discussing cyber security throughout different angles and perspectives, but we’ve never talked about its maturity model and how it’s important in the modern world. First of all, we should define what the term cyber security means. As it is known, security represents a process of maintaining an acceptable level of risk. So, does that mean that, by the same definition, cyber security is a process of maintaining an acceptable level of cyber risk? Basically, that’s exactly what it does. In this article, we will try to define a cyber security maturity model, explain approaches to cyber operations and introduce some maturity levels. Well, let’s start with our story.
That would be all for this monthly editor’s selection. Please stay thirsty and scientifically passionate. The new stories are coming soon.
It’s the end of June, 2014. It’s our time to summarise what we have done during this month. In fact, we are going to recount the best highlights for June.
Here are the most exciting and interesting articles of this month.
Henry Story studied Analytic Philosophy at Kings College London, Computing at Imperial College, worked for AltaVista where he developed the BabelFish machine translation service, worked at Sun Microsystems on Blogging platforms and the development of the Social Web where he developed the decentralised identity and authentication protocol known as WebID, which is under standardisation at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). He contributed to the Atom syndication format at the IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force), to the Linked Data Protocol at the W3C, and is currently writing an Open Source platform for co-operating systems in Scala based on all those standards.
Vaccinations are not mandatory in Australia, yet it is relatively standard for most children to be vaccinated against diseases such as polio, hepatitis and meningitis. However, in recent years questions have been raised about whether the problems outweigh the advantages of vaccinations, sparking intense debate amongst parents, scientists and the general public.
We live in a world driven by hyper-competition where the supply of businesses exceeds the demand. In order for an organisation to survive in such an aggressively competitive environment, a better understanding of its competition and competitive forces that affect its success is required. Companies should know how to remain competitive and how to anticipate and react to changes inside and outside of their industries. In order to manage such an achievement firms should have a process in place for turning data into actionable intelligence, from which strategic and tactical decisions can derive.
Around the world, over 35 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and over 2 million new cases are reported every year. All this for a disease that was only first discovered in 1981. (WHO, 2013) It’s clear that something needs to be done, and fortunately millions of dollars are being put into HIV research. The research being done can largely be broken up into three categories: prevention, treatment and cure.
As we live in a very dynamic and constantly changing world, where new information and ideas are appearing and disappearing at really fast pace, we should notice that data protection and critical information security play a crucial role in maintaining our everyday’s lives. For that reason, invoking the technique of dynamic encryption could be strategically important in this digital time. In this article we should attempt to provide the answers to the following questions. What is critical information? Are we going more intelligent? Why the concept of dynamic encryption matters? What could be the future of modern cyber security? Well, let’s begin.
Please stay curious and scientifically passionate! New stories are coming soon.
It’s the end of May, 2014. It’s our time to summarise what we have done during this month. In fact, we are going to recount the best highlights for May.
Here are the most exciting and interesting articles of this month.
Cloud Computing is a jargon, in other words a new computing model, in which the public Internet is used to connect to provider’s hosted network, infrastructure, platform and/or applications to leverage reliable services. Cloud has left all other distributed computing structures/mechanisms far behind both in competition and in terms of popularity and success.
Internet research is the practice of using Internet information, especially free information on the World Wide Web, in research. Internet research has had a profound impact on the way ideas are formed and knowledge is created. Common applications of Internet research include personal research on a particular subject, students doing research for academic projects and papers, and journalists and other writers researching stories.
The idea of taking a space holiday, once the stuff of science fiction, is no longer a far flung fantasy. The major hurdle to a viable commercial space holiday venture has long been the provision of a reusable launch system. Until an orbital launch system similar to the reusability of aircraft is developed, we will remain earthbound. Efforts to overcome this barrier have been underway since an international conference on the subject in Bremmen, Germany in 1997. More recently, the Space X reusable launch system development program has progressed to the active test program stage.
Satellites are vital to sustaining the current balance in the global economy, society, and advanced militaries. As such, states are increasingly recognizing satellites as critical infrastructure. They provide a significant role in climate and natural disaster monitoring, communication, early warning systems, global broadcasting, meteorology, navigation, precision strikes, reconnaissance, remote sensing, surveillance, and the advancement of science and understanding.
Please stay curious and scientifically passionate! New stories are coming soon.
It’s the end of April, 2014. It’s our time to summarise what we have done during this month. In fact, we are going to recount the best highlights for April.
Here are the most exciting and interesting articles of this month.
Big Data refers to technology (tools and processes) and large amounts of data that is difficult to store, manage, analyse, share, and visualise with the traditional database software tools. From the semantic perspective, big data isn’t new concept at all: every time we generate data, we also generate metadata, “data about data
It’s the end of March, 2014. It’s our time to summarise what we have done during this month. In fact, we are going to recount the best highlights for March.
Here are the most exciting and interesting articles of this month.
Over the decades security experts all around the world have been debating what sort of protection is the most suitable for a PC. So, what do you think you should do to keep your computer cyber safe?
Fusion is a process by which two light nuclei join together (fuse) to form a heavier nucleus, and in doing so release considerable energy. Achieving this requires high temperatures such as those that drive the fusion processes which power the sun and stars. The aim of fusion research and development is to create conditions on earth which are sufficient to generate many fusion reactions which may be harnessed to produce large amounts of thermal and/or electrical power.
Today, video plays an ever-increasing role in education. However, there is a major difference between an ad hoc, disjointed approach to video and a joined-up approach that sees video embraced as an integral part of university life.
It was a wonderful opportunity and space for interaction, discussion, learning and exchange of ideas and experiences: for social workers, academics, researchers, educators, Internet experts, NGOs, activists, young people and anyone interested in the issues surrounding discrimination on the Internet, especially in regards to social networking sites.
Please stay curious and scientifically passionate! New stories are coming soon.
It’s the end of February, 2014. It’s our time to summarise what we have done during this month. Basically, we are going to recount the best highlights for February.
Here are the most exciting and most interesting articles of this month.
All of the greatest explorations undertaken by humanity have been hindered by unexpected variables, the Mars One mission is no exception. The first settlers on Mars are currently projected to begin colonization in 2025, making homo sapiens an inter-planetary species. With so much progress and many promising suppliers to propel the mission there are plenty of reasons to be excited!
With technology expanding at incredibly rapid rates and businesses today under constant pressure to perform and keep up with the global economy, technological tools and appliances are reaching new levels of innovation.
Every year it seems a new movie comes out that tells a story of robots going out of control and taking over the world. In reality, some of the world’s brightest minds are developing robots and software to help assist humans in a range of important work, including surgery, bomb detection and natural disaster assistance.
Cyber forensics is a new and fast growing field that involves carefully collecting and examining electronic evidence that not only assesses the damage to a computer as a result of an electronic attack, but also to recover lost information from such a system to prosecute a criminal. With the growing importance of computer security today and the seriousness of cyber crime, it is important for computer professionals to understand the technology that is used in cyber forensics.
Whether you are a web creator, blogger, engineer, educator, journalist, marketing specialist or a scientist, with ever-emerging opportunities to share information on digital platforms, the importance to keep digital skills up-to-date is vital.
Please stay curious and scientifically passionate! New stories are coming soon.
It’s the end of January, 2014. It’s our time to summarise what we have done during this month. Basically, we are going to recount the best highlights for January.
Here are the most exciting and most interesting articles of this month.
As an advocate of women in science, I am illustrating why supporting the presence of women researchers as the voices of science today plays the crucial role, by presenting four stories of women who have changed the world in the male-dominated world of science, and still have been overlooked throughout their careers.
As a source of energy, nothing can be compared with the sun. Solar energy is so called renewable source of energy which means it has very vital and promising role on our whole civilization. Nowadays humans have to be very efficient and capable to use all these sources of renewable energy to harness our economical and social growth.
Australia is one of the world’s most eco-friendly countries. We have banned plastic bags in South Australia, put a tax on carbon and most homes have a government-issued recycling bin. However, much of the country’s environmental efforts happen behind the scenes – in construction, building and mining.
The concept of time as a way to measure the duration of events is basically intuitive. Some researchers believe that this Newtonian idea of time as an absolute quantity and fourth dimension in spacetime is incorrect. They propose to replace these concepts of time with a completely new view: time as a measure of the numerical order of change.
Spies, communication, and secret codes! Cryptography is the art of encrypting and decrypting messages. It has existed as long as people have distrusted each other and looked for the forms of secure communication. Cryptographic techniques have evolved over the centuries. The aim is always the same – the code-makers work to stay ahead of the code-breakers. Today’s most common encryption methods are threatened by the potential creation of the quantum computer. In other words, quantum cryptography promises more secure communication than any existing technique.
Stay curious and scientifically passionate! New stories are coming soon.
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!
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>>
It is time to recount November’s highlights, the most read and interesting articles from the month in the fields of science, education, internet technologies, biology, environment, health, among others.
If you are interested in science blogging and contributing to Australian Science – contact us and check out the Editor’s note.
Stay curious and scientifically passionate! I hope you’ll enjoy these stories.
I have written before about the need to encourage our girls to pursue science in school and beyond. From my experience, girls at school are often reluctant to participate in science at first, until they are shown the possibilities that science offers. Girls need people to aspire to. Girls need to be shown that they are just as capable. With the recent celebration of Ada Lovelace Day last month, I set two of my young 12 year old female students on a mission: to find out about the significance of the day and explore the roles of females in science. The following piece is their writing. Read more>>
“Canicule!