• Searching for hidden gold and copper
• Finding the Hobbit and more
• Making artificial tsunamis
• Where are Asia’s lost ‘elephants’ ?
• Re-evaluating Jakarta’s seismic risk
• Predicting Indonesia’s weather
Indonesian and Australian teams are digging, sifting, and scanning the earth to discover treasures, secrets of the past, and the hazards of the future.
Credit for banner image: David Elkins.
• Sharing expertise, not pests
• International demand for Indonesian coffee
• Safer farms for poultry and people
• Indonesia’s “cocoa-boom” threatened
Ways to improve the sustainability and productivity of various forms of agriculture are being approached in many ways by Indonesia and Australia.
• Putting a figure on the cost of algae to ships
• Better, safer lithium batteries
• Designing the coolest tropical houses
• The Australia-Indonesia Energy Cluster
• An end to Indonesia’s hospital power blackouts?
The geography of Indonesia and Australia—one a densely populated network of many islands, the other a vast continent containing remote and rural communities—can make energy a challenge. Both countries are working towards cleaner, more efficient energy.
Credit for banner image: Nadia Astari.
• Using mangroves to fight climate change
• Clever spending for orangutans, elephants, and people
• Lemons to keep elephants out of trouble
• Manta rays ingesting toxic plastics
• Bali’s ocean sunfish vulnerable?
• What do indigenous practices have to offer in conservation?
• Conserving the world’s centre of marine biodiversity
• The Australia-Indonesia Centre Urban Water Cluster
• Women in fishing communities
Indonesia and Australia both enjoy biologically rich and diverse natural environments, on land and in their surrounding waters. Despite their unique species and ecosystems, the two countries face many similar environmental challenges—which is why researchers are working together on ways they can be conserved.
Credit for banner image: Sun Wook Kim.
• Giving start-ups a fair go
• Better shelters for street vendors
• Bringing science to the community
• How did Indonesia’s furniture companies boost product efficiency?
Australia isn’t the only one pushing to be an “innovation nation,” with Indonesia announcing a government-backed ‘1,000 start-ups movement’ in mid-2016.
These are just some of the areas in which Indonesian and Australian researchers are innovating for better health in our two nations.
Read on for more about these and other health innovations.
Dr Muireann Irish discovered which parts of our brain are essential to imagine the future, ranging from simple things like “I must remember my keys and my wallet” to imagining complex events such as “my next holiday”.
And she’s shown that people with dementia don’t just lose the ability to remember the past, they also lose the ability to envisage the future.
While working at Neuroscience Research Australia and the University of New South Wales, Muireann has demonstrated that patients with dementia are unable to imagine future events or to engage in future-oriented forms of memory, and she has revealed the key brain regions that support these complex functions.
How can a doctor in a small practice with only one or two GPs learn from the mistakes of doctors across the country?
In any small practice, there’s a risk that an error can be interpreted as a one-off event, as there is limited awareness that the same incident could be occurring in other practices.
The Monash scientists who led the creation of the world’s first 3D-printed jet engine in 2015 are now improving the design and cost of manufacturing medical implants, surgical tools, aerospace components, and more.
They’ve been working with surgeons to design tools for specific operations, to replace ‘one-size-fits-all’ tools currently available.
Continue reading From jet engines to personalised surgical tools
Almost everyone has had their blood pressure measured with an inflatable cuff around the arm. But as useful as this is, it can differ from the reading at the heart itself.
Twenty years ago Sydney scientists found a way to get that extra information. They created a model that gives the pressure at the main artery of the heart, using the wrist’s pressure pulse (the shape of the ‘waves’ that both travel along arteries when the heart pumps blood, and travel back to the heart as it fills with blood).
The model wasn’t applicable to children, since their limbs are still growing – so now they’re adapting it to fit.
