If you’re in Sydney tomorrow join me for lunch at the Lawrence Creative Prize. Three remarkable young researchers are finalists for the $25,000 prize established by Neil Lawrence and the Centenary Institute:
The winner will be announced at lunch tomorrow at UBS at the Chifley Tower in Sydney. More below Other storiesToday:What are gravitational waves? And why do they matter? One Glasgow scientist can tell you. And she’s brought her yo-yos, whistles and ball-bearings to do it. She’s available today in Perth to chat to media about gravitational waves and women in science. Throughout November she’ll also be heading to Sydney, Wollongong, Adelaide and Brisbane. More below This Friday:It’s Walk to Work Day this Friday, but how easy is it for you to walk to work? How ‘walkable’ is your city? Urban research experts are asking urban planners to join the fight against obesity and the other ill effects of inactivity – they have the data, maps and tools to help make it happen. Perth and Melbourne’s north-west are the first to benefit. More below Next month:Talent in Canberra for physics congress from 7 December
They’re just three of the many eminent physicists at the Australian Institute of Physics Congress, being held from 7-11 December in Canberra. Read more below |
Gravitational waves explained in yo-yos, whistles and ball-bearing
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Keeping our creative young researchers in AustraliaCentenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize
The winner of the $25,000 Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize will be announced on Tuesday 11 November during a lunchtime reception at UBS in Sydney. “It’s a small step towards recognising that the most creative medical research is usually done by researchers early in their career-at a time when it’s hardest for them to secure funding,” says Centenary Executive Director, Professor Mathew Vadas AO. The three finalists (in alphabetical order) are: How a piece of mobile DNA could change your mind
L1 has the capacity to insert itself into the genome of individual brain cells. Just how many L1 sequences are inserted and where they occur is unique to each brain cell and may determine how it operates. Showing the impact of this is the subject of Geoff’s Lawrence Creative Prize proposal. If he’s right, it could have significant consequences for our understanding of memory and of brain disorders such as schizophrenia. Cellular decisions that affect behaviour
She has been working on the neurons in the rodent brain which receive sensory information from their hind limbs, and has shown that a lot of processing occurs in the dendrites, the long filaments of the cells where information is received. Now she wants to determine how the decisions a cell makes-to pass on information or not-affects what an animal does. Sorting out healthy embryos
Nico has already developed special microscope technology which allows him to study in single living embryonic cells the movement of individual molecules. This has enabled him to determine how the cells making up the embryo differ from those which form the placenta. And he has also documented shape changes in cells which signal the health of early embryos. He now wants to continue that work looking for other molecular and cellular signs of embryo health, and studying the possibilities for medical intervention. For interviews and more information:
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A/Prof Geoff Faulkner of the Mater Research Institute in Brisbane thinks the differences in the way each human brain functions could be determined by a segment of mobile DNA known as L1.
Dr Lucy Palmer from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne wants to know how brain cells in mammals process and integrate the information they receive from the sensory environment and how this information impacts on animal behaviour.
Dr Nicolas Plachta from the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute and EMBL Australia at Monash University is working on developing better and simpler ways of determining the health of the embryos to be implanted in IVF. And he does so by learning more about the very early stages of embryonic life.
Walk to Work Day: walkable neighbourhoods the first step
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Physics superstars available for interview from 7-11 DecemberSome of the greatest and most creative minds in physics will be out here for the Australian Institute of Physics Congress in December. And they’ll be available to talk about a range of mind-bending ideas, from the multiverse to atom-trapping. Available speakers include: Serge HarocheFrench physicist and Nobel laureate Serge Haroche has trapped photons in a cavity made from superconducting mirrors. It earned him the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he won with fellow atom-trapper David Wineland. His other achievements include the observation of quantum decoherence, in which an atom in a quantum superposition (à la Schrödinger’s cat), collapses into a single state, and entangling atoms and photons to perform quantum logic operations. Steven ChuSteven Chu is a Nobel laureate and former US Energy Secretary for Obama. Steven’s work on using lasers to cool and trap atoms earned him the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips. From 2009 to 2013 he was President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Energy, advocating for a move from fossil fuels to clean energy. He is currently Professor of Physics and Molecular & Cellular Physiology at Stanford University, where his research team studies biological systems at the single molecule level. Lisa RandallAmerican theoretical physicist Lisa Randall connects fundamental particles and symmetries with cosmological phenomena like dark matter from inflation, as well as seeking experimental tests of these theories. Her most prominent achievement is the Randall-Sudrum model, developed with Raman Sudrum, in which our universe is embedded in a five-dimensional warped space-time. Lisa regularly appears on radio and TV, and two of her books have made the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of the Year. And in keeping with the Congress theme of ‘The Art of Physics’, she has written a libretto for an opera and curated art exhibits. In 2007, Lisa was named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine. Lawrence KraussUS cosmologist Lawrence Krauss is a prolific author of popular science books and articles, as well as scientific publications. He’s formulated a model in which the universe could have potentially come from ‘nothing’, and was one of the first physicists to suggest that most of the mass and energy of the universe resides in empty space, otherwise known as ‘dark energy’. For more information and to get in touch with the speakers, contact:
Or visit the AIP Congress website
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