Australia has taken the podium alongside Japan and China as one of the top three science performers in a dynamic Asia-Pacific region. The Nature Publishing Index is a snapshot of the region’s scientific research in the past year based on publication output in Nature and the 17 Nature research journals.
And from chart topping to myth busting – the Mythbusters are coming to Australia during National Science Week.
Read on for more…
New ideas on our energy future; hand-held cancer probes; ultra-powerful, high speed quantum computers; and freeing up space on the mobile network.
These stories and more were presented at the national physics and optics conference, AIP/ACOFT 2012, at the University of New South Wales, Kensington.
A West Australian invention that’s keeping atomic clocks accurate, searching for gravity waves, and improving radar systems has won its creators a national physics prize.
And, as mobile networks become increasingly congested, Sydney engineers have designed new technology that can be retrofitted into mobile communication systems to increase their capacity and reduce the cost of mobile calls.
Read on for more stories from the final day of the national physics congress in Sydney.
Posted on behalf of the University of New South Wales
It’s not every day that school students get to present their science project to a major scientific conference, and rarer still to receive a prize for it from a Nobel Laureate.
That’s the happy experience today for a team of four Year 11 students from Gosford High School, who have won a national competition conducted by UNSW and the Australian Institute of Physics.
Quantum computers promise ultra-powerful, high speed number crunching. They’ll help us to search vast databases and model biological molecules at an atomic level. They will crack the encryptions we rely on for banking and online security but also help us make new, unbreakable codes.
How close are we to building a quantum computer? Australian scientists are working on it.
Also at the national physics congress today: meet the man in charge of planning and designing the NBN; designing a cheaper high-precision clock for GPS, astronomy and space tracking; and fighting greenhouse gases and arc-welding fumes with super-heated thermal plasma.
A new, cheaper way to deliver accurate time across Australia: instead of using hydrogen maser clocks costing hundreds of thousands of dollars we can bounce signals through the national’s optical fibre network according to physics leaders speaking today and tomorrow.
Also today at the national physics congress in Sydney, meet the man whose job it is to figure out how to build the NBN.
And hear about the magic of thermal plasmas, from safer arc welding to saving the ozone layer.
A research team led by Australian engineers has created the first working quantum bit based on a single atom in silicon, opening the way to ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future.
In a landmark paper published today in the journal Nature, the team describes how it was able to both read and write information using the spin, or magnetic orientation, of an electron bound to a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon chip.
“For the first time, we have demonstrated the ability to represent and manipulate data on the spin to form a quantum bit, or ‘qubit’, the basic unit of data for a quantum computer,” says Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak. “This really is the key advance towards realising a silicon quantum computer based on single atoms.”
From Marc Duldig, President of the Australian Institute of Physics Welcome to my bulletin covering physics news and events for September 2012 and beyond. In a busy September we have gravitational waves in Adelaide, ultra-cold atom optics in Victoria, a…
The global race to develop high efficiency, low cost solar energy is fierce. And Baohua Jia and her colleagues are front runners.
Welcome to my bulletin covering physics news and events for August 2012 and beyond: National Science Week is here again and the AIP is bringing the science of invisibility, solar cars and optics to Queensland; and in Sydney we’re exploring the strange world of quantum physics in the 2012 Einstein Lecture. There also other physics-themed […]
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