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Children who have at least one parent working in IT, business or engineering are the best performing students in Australia.

An OECD report into the connection between student performance and their parents’ occupations has also found the kids of subsistence farmers, salespeople and machine operators are the lowest performing students in the nation’s schools.

Not only were the kids of information and communications technology (ICT) workers top of the country in maths and science, they were also the best in terms of reading.

By Australian Information Industry Association, ICT workers’ skills include the analytical, the innovative, the creative thinking, the can-do, curiosity and solving business problems.

These means that the children of ICT workers are enjoying the benefits of being exposed to all of those skills and being inspired in their family environment to take risks.

But, that’s not the end of the story. The gap between Australia and the top maths performers is so big that the children of a Shanghai (China) subsistence farmer will perform as well as the offspring of an Australian health or teaching professional.

Bureau Chief Executive Dr Rob Vertessy said temperatures across Australia were, on average, almost 1°C warmer than they were a century ago, with most of the warming having occurred since 1950.

“Australia’s mean temperature has warmed by 0.9°C since 1910,

Computers and robots will become smarter and more adept than human beings in 15 years time. Computers develop an almost-organic intelligence gleaned from experience, and will be able to tell jokes and flirt with humans.

How real is this? Well, it’s quite real. Internet search giant Google has spent billions buying up the world’s top robotics companies. These corporations include DeepMind, a British company which specializes in machine learning, and Boston Dynamics, which makes advanced military robots.

We present you some of their solutions in the following video material.

Queensland’s researchers, scientists and their commercial partners are encouraged to apply for grants of up to half a million dollars under the state government’s new science and research funding program.

The Accelerate Partnerships funding program was opened by Queensland Chief Scientist Dr Geoff Garrett AO who said universities and research organisations with their industrial or commercial partners could apply for research grants from the $8.75 million Accelerate Science and Innovation Program.

Dr Garrett said collaboration and the translation of research into tangible outcomes were the key focuses of the program. “The Queensland Government will be supporting new projects that will deliver benefits for Queensland through the creation of innovative products, technologies or processes that will have practical application within five years,

It’s Sunday again! It’s our time to give a brief review of the most amazing science and technology news that have appeared on the web during this week. The task was quite challenging, but we made it. We proudly present you the top stories of this Weekly Science Picks.

Body bacteria: Can your gut bugs make you smarter?

Far from being freeloading passengers, many of these microbes actively help digest food and prevent infection. And now evidence is emerging that these tiny organisms may also have a profound impact on the brain too. They are a living augmentation of your body – and like any enhancement, this means they could, in principle, be upgraded. So, could you hack your microbiome to make yourself healthier, happier, and smarter too?

Geoengineering side effects could be potentially disastrous, research shows

Science academies around the world as well as some climate activists have called for more research into geoengineering techniques, such as reflecting sunlight from space, adding vast quantities of lime or iron filings to the oceans, pumping deep cold nutrient-rich waters to the surface of oceans and irrigating vast areas of the north African and Australian deserts to grow millions of trees. Each method has been shown to potentially reduce temperature on a planetary scale.

Proteins to plastics: chemistry as a dynamic discipline

Chemistry is the most central of scientific disciplines and underpins the physical, material and biological world. Opportunities are abundant in the field of chemistry, as most major advances take place at the interface of two or more disciplines and chemistry sits at the core of trans-disciplinary research.

Water detected in a planet outside our solar system

Water has been detected in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system with a new technique that could help researchers to learn how many planets with water, like Earth, exist throughout the universe. The team of scientists that made the discovery detected the water in the atmosphere of a planet as massive as Jupiter that is orbiting the nearby star tau Boötis.

That’s all for this time. Please stay thirsty for new scientific stories and news!

PhD Comics has released the third video in an animated series explaining Quantum concepts and devices.

This one focuses on Quantum Entanglement and features the work of Caltech physicists Jeff Kimble and Chen-Lung Hung. Meanwhile Jorge Cham, creator of PhD Comics, provides the accompanying animation.

Source and image.

A quick note: Shaye J.D. Cohen, a professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard, has recently released his second free course on iTunes.

The first course was called The Hebrew Scriptures in Judaism & Christianity. The new one, simply titled The Hebrew Bible,

Scientists using CSIRO’s Parkes telescope and another telescope in South Africa have found evidence that a tiny star called PSR J0738-4042 is being pounded by asteroids — large lumps of rock from space.

“One of these rocks seems to have had a mass of about a billion tonnes,” CSIRO astronomer and member of the research team Dr Ryan Shannon said.

PSR J0738-4042 lies 37,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Puppis.

The environment around this star is especially harsh, full of radiation and violent winds of particles.

“If a large rocky object can form here, planets could form around any star. That’s exciting,” Dr Shannon said.

The star is a special one, a ‘pulsar’ that emits a beam of radio waves.

As the star spins, its radio beam flashes over Earth again and again with the regularity of a clock.

In 2008 Dr Shannon and a colleague predicted how an infalling asteroid would affect a pulsar. It would, they said, alter the slowing of the pulsar’s spin rate and the shape of the radio pulse that we see on Earth.

“That is exactly what we see in this case,” Dr Shannon said.

“We think the pulsar’s radio beam zaps the asteroid, vaporising it. But the vaporised particles are electrically charged and they slightly alter the process that creates the pulsar’s beam.”

Asteroids around a pulsar could be created by the exploding star that formed the pulsar itself, the scientists say.

The material blasted out from the explosion could fall back towards the forming pulsar, forming a disk of debris.

Astronomers have found a dust disk around another pulsar called J0146+61.

“This sort of dust disk could provide the ‘seeds’ that grow into larger asteroids,” said Mr Paul Brook, a PhD student co-supervised by the University of Oxford and CSIRO who led the study of PSR J0738-4042.

In 1992 two planet-sized objects were found around a pulsar called PSR 1257+12.  But these were probably formed by a different mechanism, the astronomers say.

Source and image.