Archives
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
Inspiring Australia
Over the past three years Australia has established and advanced a unique national engagement model—working with governments at all levels, with science sector agencies and organisations, as well as industry.
Citizen science: eyes in the skies and on the seas
Australian citizen scientists are helping to catch shooting stars in the vast skies of outback Australia and to track the impact of climate change on species in our warming oceans.
Curtin University’s Fireballs in the Sky project invites people to use a smartphone app to record and submit the time, location, trajectory and appearance of meteors they spot.
By triangulating these reports with observations from an array of cameras in remote Western and South Australia, scientists can try to determine where the meteorite may have come from and where it landed.
Continue reading Citizen science: eyes in the skies and on the seas
How India and Australia broke up
The end of any relationship can be rocky, but a Tasmanian geoscientist has dug into the ocean floor to understand how Australia, India and Antarctica parted ways 130 million years ago.
The dingo: from sinner to saviour
Dingoes play a vital role in reducing damage caused by kangaroos, foxes and feral cats, according to University of Tasmania’s Chris Johnson and his colleagues.
Putting off joint replacement
Advanced medical imaging has allowed Tasmanian scientists to trial new therapies for osteoarthritis and to potentially delay the need for joint-replacement surgery.
Graeme Jones and his team from the Menzies Research Institute used dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry to see what was happening to a joint’s internal structure as osteoarthritis developed, allowing them to spot changes long before a conventional X-ray could.
Academy recognition
The Australian Academy of Science recognised five individuals for their career achievements in 2013.
- The search for dark matter was kicked off by Ken Freeman’s discovery that there wasn’t enough matter to hold spiral galaxies like ours together. Continue reading Academy recognition
Fresh Science 2013
Each year we identify early-career scientists with a discovery and bring them to Melbourne for a communication boot camp. Here are some of their stories. For more information go to freshscience.org.au
Regular source of ocean data now underway
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.