Indonesian and Australian researchers are working together to combat two big killers: pneumonia, and tuberculosis.
Around six million young Indonesians catch pneumonia each year, according to a 2008 study, and it’s the number one killer of children under five. Researchers now think there might be a link to how much time kids are spending out in the sunshine—more specifically, their level of vitamin D.
‘Perfect entanglement’ of two light beams has opened a major step towards highly secure quantum communication systems.
The University of Queensland’s Professor Tim Ralph and his colleagues from Canada and Russia have developed a technique to restore entangled light beams that have been distributed between distant points.
Continue reading Shedding ‘spooky’ light on unbreakable security
“I’m fascinated by why people love objects so much,” says Dr Melissa Norberg, Director of the Behavioural Science Laboratory at Macquarie University.
“What is it about the items (or the person) that makes objects so appealing?”
While we’re all guilty of holding on to a few sentimental things, Melissa’s interest is in studying those who meet the criteria for hoarding disorder.
With Associate Professor Jessica Grisham at the University of New South Wales, Melissa has been investigating how mood affects peoples’ ability to throw things out.
Continue reading Hoarding disorder: why is it hard to part with stuff?
‘Artificial leaves’ are bringing us one step closer to cheap, renewable and commercially-viable fuels that could power your car, house or whole community, thanks to researchers at Monash University.
Professor Doug MacFarlane and his team at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science are using sun, water and CO2 to produce hydrogen and methanol fuels.
Their artificial photosynthesis takes its inspiration from the way plants convert sunlight into energy, and then recreates it in an industrial setting.
Continue reading Renewable fuels turn over a new artificial leaf
The chances of surviving melanoma are getting better every year. But some cancers still become ‘resistant’ to treatment, and others don’t respond at all.
A collection of over 10,000 blood and 4,900 tissue samples from the biobank at the Melanoma Institute Australia is being used to hunt for clues to predict which patients won’t be responsive to treatment from day one. The researchers, from Macquarie University, are also looking for the basis of developed resistance by the cancer.
Continue reading Expanding treatments for the ‘Australian’ cancer
Statisticians have revealed the surprising source of dust that plagues townships beside a Hunter Valley rail line delivering coal to Newcastle’s busy port.
Airborne dust increases as trains pass. But it wasn’t clear exactly how—for example, whether the dust was escaping uncovered coal wagons or coming from the diesel engines pulling the wagons. The answer was surprising.
Mathematicians from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers correlated air-pollution data against information on passing trains and weather conditions.
Recent advances pinpointing genes involved in the inherited form of Motor Neurone Disease (MND) are now being used to hunt for the culprits of ‘sporadic’ cases.
Sporadic MND is the most common form (around 90 per cent), and unlike the ‘familial,’ disease, it appears in patients without a family history.
The design of a 3D silicon chip architecture clears another hurdle in the international race to build quantum computers.
Researchers at the University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have designed a chip based on single atom quantum bits, creating a blueprint for building a large-scale silicon quantum computer.
Continue reading Build it and they will come – chip design creates computer blueprint
Subterranean caves in the Blue Mountains have been
converted into observatories to quantify how water moves through buried rock structures into groundwater.
Groundwater forms the world’s largest active repository of fresh water—more than a hundred times larger than rivers and lakes combined.
To use that groundwater resource sustainably, we need to know that we are only using as much water as is being continually replaced, mostly via rainfall and underground leakage from rivers.
Pairing psychology with cancer treatment has a profound impact on the wellbeing of patients, Associate Professor Maria Kangas and her team at the Centre for Emotional Health have found.
In a recent clinical trial, head and neck cancer patients were offered weekly cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) sessions concurrent to their radiation therapy appointments.
After just seven sessions, patients reported a significant decline in cancer-related anxiety and/or depression. And after a year, 67 per cent were no longer experiencing any anxiety or depression and were doing better than the control group who had received regular counselling, but not CBT.
