Image credit: David Coto, Pexels
We can’t easily monitor the health of plants, by the time we see that they’re sick it’s usually too late to save that. That’s an issue for your house plants, a field of wheat, orchards and plantations.
Karina Khambatta has developed a way to use the waxy surface of leaves to monitor their health.
Continue reading Is that plant healthy?Plants need water, but if that water also comes with a hefty dose of salt it can kill the plant. But the ice plant, Mesembryanthemum crystallinum, has a clever way of storing salt in special cells, allowing it to thrive in saline coastal areas.
Continue reading How the ice plant thrives in high-salt areas
“Trait-based ecology” enables Macquarie University’s Mark Westoby to explain patterns of species occurrence and abundance and to understand the impacts of climate change and changing patterns of land use. He received the $55,000 NSW Scientist of the Year.
Nanocapsules for drugs delivery: Frank Caruso is making miniature capsules that could better deliver drugs for cancer, AIDS and cardiovascular diseases. He won one of the 2014 Victoria Prizes for Science & Innovation worth $50,000.
Continue reading Predicting change, brains, trains and mental health
Julie Arblaster’s climate research is helping to explain the climate of the Australian region, particularly the ozone hole, El Niño, the monsoon, and Australian rainfall variability.
David Warton is driving data analysis in ecology, making it a more predictive science. His tools are influencing statistics across science and industry.
Christian Turney has pioneered new ways of combining climate models with records of past climate change spanning from hundreds to thousands of years.
Maria Seton has redefined the way we reconstruct the movement of continental plates and contributed to studies on the effect ocean basin changes have had on global long-term sea level and ocean chemistry. Continue reading Australian Academy of Science Early-career Awards
“In the case of white rot, there is no existing commercially acceptable treatment and if a farmer has an infestation in their field they can’t use it for onions or similar crops for up to 15 years,” says Anthony Flynn, managing director of the agricultural chemical research company Eureka! AgResearch. “They’ve just had to move the crop on to the next paddock.”
The new granulated fungicide targets the soil-borne fungus Sclerotium cepivorum.
Continue reading Granular plant protection
Up to 30 per cent of the fuel needed for Australia’s road transport and the aviation industry could be generated through biofuels, creating tens of thousands of jobs and adding $5 billion to Australia’s economy.
And one of the prime sources of biofuel, according to Southern Cross University’s Centre for Plant Conservation Genetics, could be eucalypts.
