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Liver testing without a biopsy
A West Australian invention has become the gold standard in liver testing around the world.
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.
Motor races and science labs fuel interest in science
Each year in early July, when its 700 students are on holiday, Townsville State High School becomes the headquarters for a V8 Supercars race.
But before and after the race, Sarah Chapman’s Year 11 science students are hard at work, slopping their way through the nearby mangroves and wading into the neighbouring estuary. The data they collect is then used by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to manage the impact of the race on local estuaries. “The students are really taken by the idea that they are finding out things nobody else knows,” Sarah says.
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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.
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Australia’s newest radio telescope
Fundamental questions about the Universe are set to be answered as a new radio telescope in outback Western Australia comes online, using multiple beam radio receiver technology to view the sky with unprecedented speed and sensitivity.
The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), CSIRO’s newest telescope, uses innovative phased array feed receivers, also known as ‘radio cameras’, to capture images of radio-emitting galaxies in an area about the size of the Southern Cross—far more than can be seen with a traditional radio telescope.
Native shrubs good for sheep and the environment
Feeding livestock on native plants is the key to sustainable profits for Australian farmers, researchers have found.
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Walking again
Children with a deadly muscle-wasting disease are regaining the ability to walk and potentially avoiding life-threatening complications, thanks to a new treatment developed by researchers at Perth’s Murdoch University.
Mill mapper keeps mines working
If your pepper mill wears out, it’s annoying. But for mines it’s disastrous when their grinders can no longer smash rocks, often costing them $100,000 an hour in downtime.
Now, a three-dimensional laser system, which takes 10 million measurements in 30 minutes, can take over the dangerous work of manually evaluating mining machinery conditions.