Tools once used just to diagnose human diseases are being used to save coral reefs; depression patients will be able to monitor their mental health using a computer and a bodybuilder’s health supplement could be the key to treating a life-threatening muscular dystrophy affecting hundreds of Australian children.
These are just some of the interesting stories that emerged from Australian research published in the last week. Find over a dozen other stories below.
The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science were presented by the Prime Minister and the Innovation Minister at the Prize Dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House on Wednesday 12 October. Read the full article →
The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science were presented by the Prime Minister and the Innovation Minister at the Prize Dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House on Wednesday 12 October 2011. Read the full article →
The Prime Minister is pleased to announce this year’s Prize for Science has been awarded to Professors Ezio Rizzardo and David Solomon from the CSIRO and the University of Melbourne. Read the full article →
The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science for 2011 were presented by the Prime Minister and Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research at the Prize Dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House on Wednesday 12 October.
Below is the text of the minister’s speech.
Changing the world one molecule at a timeIn the coming years when you buy a tyre, lubricant, adhesive, paint, computer or any one of hundreds of other products, there’s a good chance that some of its component materials will have been produced using revolutionary chemical theories and processes invented in Australia by research teams led by Professors Ezio Rizzardo and David Solomon.
Their techniques are employed in almost every university chemistry department, and the laboratories and factories of DuPont, L’Oréal, IBM, 3M, Dulux and more than 60 other companies.
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about mobile drug labs; the corpse flower; Easter Island; dolphin gangs; and more Read the full article →
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about ozone-hole recovery; the brightness of wealth; seal whiskers; the smell of death; and more Read the full article →
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about dinosaurs of the dark; Arctic erosion; drugs in space; toads with clean minds; and more Read the full article →
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about golden earthquakes; chaos and stereotypes; greener fireworks; virtual whiskers; and more. Read the full article →
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about shock absorbing woodpeckers; polluted perfume; off-the-shelf blood vessels; telling lies; and more Read the full article →
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about galactic voting; what playing on-line games reveals about you; executions by lethal injection; plants that feed on bat dung; and more Read the full article →
Next Wednesday evening the Prime Minister will present her Prizes for Science. The embargo is 5 pm on Wednesday 17 November 2010.
Other science news coming up includes: a black comedy on biodiversity staged in the skeleton gallery of the Australian Museum; Chinese science leaders in Australia marking 30 years of collaboration; CERN director here soon for physics congress; the end of the world; the future of transport and more.
Here’s the details: Read the full article →
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about slowing wind; love and pain; cane toad caviar; shining light inside your body; and more… Read the full article →
We’ve identified 135 Science Week events around Australia with a biodiversity connection. So we thought we’d share them with you in this special Science Week edition of our Biodiversity Year bulletin.
You can learn how to keep bugs alive, immerse yourself in flora and fauna on a walk through the forest, hear about the unique environment of Barrow Island in Western Australia and discover how a genetic disease in the Royal Family relates to biodiversity.
What does food do – time to move beyond the glycaemic indexIt’s time to get smarter about food labelling according to Dr John Monro, speaking at the international chemistry conference in Melbourne this week.
“We need to know not just what is in the food, but what the food is going to do in our bodies,” he says. John is a researcher with the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research.
“And we need easy to follow guides that make sense when we’re pushing our trolleys around the supermarket.”
Prof Colin Raston and his colleagues in the Centre for Strategic Nano-Fabrication at the University of Western Australia are setting about cleaning up the world—and chemical industry in particular—through developing a suite of technologies to enable continuous, rather than batch, processing.
“We’re working at getting rid of the round-bottom glass in the laboratory, and the array of tanks and pipes in chemical plants.” Read the full article →
IUPAC Symposium 6B – Crop Biofactories: Plants as Sustainable Bio-Production Systems for Industrial Raw Materials, Wednesday 3:30pm
Sten Stymne, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Vegetable oil is the agricultural product that chemically most resembles fossil oils and has therefore great potential to replace it, says Sweden’s Sten Stymne.
He’s part of an 11-million-Euro global project to engineer seed oils for bio-lubricant uses.
IUPAC Symposium 4A – Natural Products, Tuesday 1:45PM – 3:00PM
Leslie Weston, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga
Leslie Weston has discovered and patented two weedkillers made by plants. Now she’s investigating Patterson’s curse to see what tricks it uses to invade grasslands and repel herbivores. Her vision is to use plants or plant extracts to control plants, as an alternative to synthetic pesticides and herbicides.
