Surgeons may soon be able to regrow patients’ nerves, such as those in damaged spinal cords, using technology adapted from the type of inkjet printer most of us have connected to our computer at home.
Gordon Wallace is developing the technology to print human cells. Credit: IPRI
Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES), University of Wollongong (UOW) node in NSW, have spent the past three years developing the technology to print living human cells—nerve cells and muscle cells onto tiny biodegradable polymer scaffolds. They’ve also developed a special “ink” that carries the cells.
New Australian technology will enable real-time monitoring of wine throughout its fermentation and maturation process, reducing spoilage and improving quality.
Smart Bungs use sensors based on optical fibres to continuously monitor the health of wine during the fermentation and maturation process. Credit: IPAS/Jennie Groom Photography
The “Smart Bung” technology has been pioneered at the University of Adelaide by the Institute for Photonics & Advanced Sensing (IPAS) and the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine (SAFW). The work is led by Prof Tanya Monro, Director of IPAS.
An optical fibre sensor incorporated into the bung of a wine cask can detect substances that might cause the wine to spoil. The optical fibres have tiny holes that take up minute samples of the wine. The sensor shines light through the fibres to determine the concentration of certain important chemicals, such as hydrogen peroxide and sulphur dioxide—all without having to open the cask. The system will enable continuous, real-time cask-by-cask monitoring and an immediate response if problems are detected.
Australia’s birds are bright and noisy compared with birds elsewhere, so perhaps it is no surprise they account for over 18 million of the more than 30 million observations in the Atlas of Living Australia; including records from before European settlement.
Now, funded by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), a team led by spatial ecologist Dr Jeremy VanDerWal of the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change at James Cook University (JCU) is developing a website, known as “Edgar”, to clean up existing records and augment them with reliable observations from enthusiastic and knowledgeable bird watchers.
China has a large community of astronomers awaiting the construction of new telescopes to study pulsars.
When CSIRO pulsar researcher Dr George Hobbs described the high-quality data stored in the Parkes Observatory Pulsar Data Archive—which is openly available—it led to Australian pulsar data being the basis of collaboration between Chinese and Australian pulsar researchers. And they have already published several papers on what they have discovered. The archive is also serving as a major resource in an international search for gravitational waves.
A new computer chip, which uses light instead of electronic signals to process information, could lead to high security, energy-efficient internet links more than 1,000 times faster than today’s networks.
Melbourne shared in the announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle in 2012, and the city is expected to reap millions of dollars in economic benefits brought by the conference at which this discovery was announced.
The Melbourne Convention Centre hosted the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics, where the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle was announced in 2012. Credit: MCVB
The announcement that a suspect matching the elusive subatomic particle’s description had been found came at the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics, held at the Melbourne Convention Centre in July, in a joint announcement with CERN in Switzerland. Continue reading Melbourne takes centre stage in physics→
In 2012, scientists celebrated at the announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, a subatomic particle that completes our model of how the Universe works.
Director of the High Energy Physics Conference, Geoff Taylor (right) celebrates the Higgs-like particle announcement at the Melbourne Convention Centre with Pauline Gagnon of CERN. Credit: Laura Vanags/ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale
The announcement was made simultaneously at CERN in Geneva, and to hundreds of physicists gathered in Melbourne for the International Conference on High Energy Physics.
“As scientific discoveries go, this is up there with finding a way to split the atom,” says Prof Geoff Taylor, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP).
More than 50 different environmental measures routinely collected by Australia’s national ocean research vessels—including sea surface temperature, dissolved oxygen concentration, and salinity—can now be accessed online almost as they are recorded.
The data is incorporated, often automatically, into predictive meteorological and ocean models, improving their accuracy. “So we end up with an improved representation not only of the weather but of processes like large scale ocean circulation or the state of the seas during tropical cyclones,” says Dr Roger Proctor, director of the e-Marine Information Infrastructure Facility of Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System.
In the future, the entire roof of your house could be a solar panel, and you could harness the power of the sun to charge your mobile phone while on a remote bushwalk, thanks to cheap, printable solar cells.
In the future, your entire roof of your house could be tiled with printed solar cells like this one. Credit: DJ Jones, University of Melbourne
Work is underway to perfect the “printing” of a film-like layer of solar cells that can be applied cheaply to hard or flexible surfaces to generate electricity from sunlight. Continue reading Victoria in race to print solar cells→
Hundreds of Aussie science achievements that you can share in speeches, posts and publications
