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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
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.
Is your city making you sick?
Fiona Bull can tell if your city is making you sick just by looking at how easy it is to walk around—and she plans to use this knowledge of good city design to help reduce global physical inactivity by 10 per cent by 2025.
In your face: new role found for blood vessels
Blood vessels act as tissue engineers during facial development, guiding the formation of jaw structures in mice, according to research from South Australia.
Continue reading In your face: new role found for blood vessels
Leading the quantum computing race
Physicists at the University of New South Wales are leading the race to build computers exponentially faster than any we currently use, according to an assessment published by the scientific journals group, Nature.
Could your lab have the next antibiotic?
Could your newly synthesised molecule kill a superbug? Matt Cooper can tell you.
His team is offering a free screening service for the world’s chemists to test their compounds against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, helping them to potentially find a new antibiotic that will fight the rise of these ‘superbugs’.
“We’re helping the community unlock the hidden value of these chemicals,” says Matt, whose team is from the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD), a not-for-profit, global initiative of The University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience. The screening began in February 2015, and Matt has already received thousands of samples from locations including India, Singapore, New Zealand, France, Israel, UK and the USA.
Insulin in a plant seed
An edible plant seed could deliver your insulin or cancer drugs if David Craik’s research progresses as hoped. His team’s work at The University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience centres on cyclotides, which are a family of exceptionally stable circular proteins that occur naturally in many plants, such as violets and petunia.
Inspired by the stability and diversity of natural cyclotides, David’s team has developed a way to join the two ends of a linear protein, allowing them to create ‘designer’ cyclotides that can be incorporated into crop plants, turning them into production factories for therapeutic drugs and insecticides.