Yearly Archives: 2015
Your memories in DNA?
A Queensland researcher thinks that long-term memory could be stored in DNA. It’s a radical concept that he’s going to test over the next year.
Repairing the brain with its own stem cells
Kaylene Young believes she can persuade lazy stem cells in our brain to repair brain injuries and even treat diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s.
Continue reading Repairing the brain with its own stem cells
Securing Australia’s offshore oil and gas industry, literally
How do you secure a ship 500 metres long and six times heavier than an aircraft carrier to the seafloor for 25 years?
Continue reading Securing Australia’s offshore oil and gas industry, literally
From little things, big things grow
Michelle Simmons’ work building silicon atomic-scale devices is paving the way towards a quantum computer with the capacity to process information exponentially faster than current computers.
She is also Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, acknowledged to be a world-leader in the field of quantum computing—which uses the spin, or magnetic orientation, of individual electrons or atomic nuclei to represent data.
In the past five years, Michelle’s research group and collaborators have made a number of notable advances. They have fabricated the world’s first single-atom transistor in single-crystal silicon, and the world’s narrowest conducting wires, also in silicon, just four atoms wide and one atom tall with the current-carrying capacity of copper.
Turning groundwater into wine
An investigation into groundwater underneath South Australia’s McLaren Vale wine region will help to ensure the local hydrologic cycle and world-famous wines keep flowing freely, and contribute to better groundwater management across Australia. About a third of Australia’s water comes from underground sources.
Shared data reveals radio bursts, and a lunch break
In May 2014, a team led by PhD candidate Emily Petroff from Swinburne University was the first to see ‘fast radio bursts’ (FRBs) live, using the Parkes radio telescope in central New South Wales. The search was triggered by signals found in recycled data. They also discovered that someone was opening the kitchen microwave.
Continue reading Shared data reveals radio bursts, and a lunch break
Where did the antimatter go?
Antimatter has been disappearing and Melbourne researcher Phillip Urquijo wants to know why.
He’s hoping that the Belle II experiment, commencing in Japan in 2017, will give him an answer—and if he’s lucky it will answer many other questions about the beginning of the Universe too.
“What I hope we’ll discover is clear evidence of new quarks, leptons or other force-carrying particles,” says Phillip. “And I’d be really excited if we found a new kind of Higgs particle using this indirect approach.”