Science In Public
Science writers, communicators, media, training, and public relations
By Vivien Lee
The danger of sunburn for construction workers is just as high in autumn and winter as in spring and summer, a researcher told the Australian Institute of Physics Congress in Melbourne.
Just as skiers need to be careful of UV rays reflected off snow, she said, construction workers run the risk of exposure from light reflected by metals on the building site. And in winter they’re less likely to be wearing sunscreen. [Read more…] about Sun sneaks up on winter workers
By Vivien Lee
It took less than 19 days of smashing lead ions together at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland for physicists confirm a new state of matter, the Australian Institute of Physics Congress was told in Melbourne. What the huge particle detector attached to the collider, known as the ATLAS experiment, has found is the first direct evidence of the Quark-Gluon Plasma—a 200 million degree Celsius soup of subatomic particles.
“It’s the very definition of primordial,” said Dr Martin White, a postdoctoral fellow from the University of Melbourne who is working on the project. [Read more…] about First results from the ATLAS experiment
Kumar Ganesan and colleagues from University of Melbourne think they may have found the perfect material from which to build bionic eyes—diamond. They are using the ultra-strong, biocompatible material to build the electrodes needed to pass light signals to the optic nerve. And they are already testing their devices.
In fact, diamond seems so well suited to life inside the eye that the team also plan to seal the bionic eye’s light-sensing chip inside a diamond box, which should protect its contents for a projected 80 years.
A research team in New Zealand hopes to understand the physical changes that underpin the abrupt switches in brain activity between being healthy and awake, sleeping, or having a seizure.
Marcus Wilson, a biophysicist from University of Waikato, reported on the team’s efforts to understand such brain states as natural sleep, unconsciousness and seizures by using electrical measurement technology linked with computer modelling.
[Read more…] about Healthy and unhealthy brain states – what role does electrical conductivity play?
The world’s first high resolution, 3D pictures of the flexibility of living tissues could lead to significant advances in disease detection, according to Brendan Kennedy and colleagues from the University of Western Australia.
Diseased tissues such as tumours give themselves away because they tend to be stiffer than surrounding healthy cells. Doctors can try to “feel” this variation in stiffness, but the new images produced at UWA promise a much higher resolution and more objective assessment of this property.
The team’s rapidly-acquired pictures of a lacerated finger are the first step towards clinical trials for the technique, the researchers say.
Implanted medical devices may no longer need batteries, says Ajay Tikka from Victoria University in Melbourne. Instead, he and his colleagues have developed technology that can wirelessly beam power to a device implanted under the skin.
Using that power to open tiny valves remotely in implanted drug delivery technology is one potential application, according to the team from Victoria University and the University of Adelaide. Another possibility is to use such power to download data from an implanted diagnostic device, they say.
The next generation of flexible displays and electronic paper could build themselves, thanks to the discovery of a way of getting the materials comprising them to self-assemble.
A compound known to switch from transparent to opaque when triggered by an electric current can be programmed to assemble itself, says Scott Jones from the University of New South Wales. The resulting arrays could form the pixels of an e-paper display.
A sprinkle of diamond dust could help doctors to diagnose disease better. Ewa Rej and David Reilly from the University of Sydney are testing nanoparticles of the precious gem for their potential to improve MRI scans.
They are examining the possibility that giving patients tiny amounts of nano-diamond will boost the contrast of images, making it easier to spot disease.
[Read more…] about Diamond dust adds sparkle to medical imaging
US researchers reported on their ability to create diamond nanowires which could one day be used to power quantum computers with many times the processing power of today’s supercomputers.
These diamond nanowires can provide the steady stream of photons needed for light-based quantum computers, says Tom Babinec from the Marko Lončar’s Laboratory for Nanoscale Optics at Harvard University.
Dr Andrea Morello reported on the progress of a team led by University of New South Wales engineers and physicists which has developed a “single electron reader”, one of the key building blocks needed to make a quantum computer using silicon.
Quantum computers promise exponential increases in processing speed over today’s computers through their use of the “spin” or magnetic orientation of individual electrons to represent data in their calculations.
“Our device detects the spin state of a single electron in a single phosphorus atom implanted in a block of silicon. The spin state of the electron controls the flow of electrons in a nearby circuit,” said Dr Morello, the lead author of the paper entitled Single-shot readout of an electron spin in silicon, which was published recently in the journal Nature.
[Read more…] about A single electron reader for silicon quantum computing
Some recent projects: ASTRO 3D, MindEar, Cortical Labs (Dishbrain), Illumina, ABC, World Mining Congress 2023.