Giganto were the biggest apes that have ever been – 3 metres tall and weighing in at 250 kg. Related to orang-utans, and distantly to humans, they died out over 200,000 years ago at a time when other great apes were thriving. The first evidence of Gigantopithecus blacki came from teeth found in a Chinese…
An eight-billion-year-old burst of energy has been discovered, demonstrating that we can detect and measure matter between galaxies. The discovery opens a path to using fast radio bursts to explore the expansion of the Universe and ultimately even ‘weigh’ the Universe. But it will require even more powerful telescopes.
Research published in Nature warns that rising seas will devastate coastal habitats, using evidence from the last Ice Age. 17,000 years ago you could walk from Germany to England, from Russia to America, from mainland Australia to Tasmania. Sea levels were about 120 metres lower than today. But, as the last Ice Age ended, the…
Research published today in Nature warns that rising seas will devastate coastal habitats, using evidence from the last Ice Age. 17,000 years ago you could walk from Germany to England, from Russia to America, from mainland Australia to Tasmania. Sea levels were about 120 metres lower than today. But, as the last Ice Age ended,…
Insects prove their strength as environmental biomonitors Bees could become biomonitors, checking their neighbourhoods to determine how far antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has spread, according to research by Macquarie University scientists. At least 700,000 people die each year due to drug-resistant diseases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which estimates that 10 million people will…
Macquarie University researchers have demonstrated a new way of linking personal records and protecting privacy. The first application is in identifying cases of rare genetic disorders. There are many other potential applications across society. The research will be presented at the 18th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Melbourne on 12 July. A five-year-old…
A path to cognition Five major changes in the computational capacity of brains have led to the world of intelligent life around us. That’s the conclusion of Professor Andrew Barron from Macquarie University with Dr Marta Halina from the University of Cambridge and Professor Colin Klein from the Australian National University (ANU), in a paper…
Research reveals how we could design robots to think like bees Bees available to film at Macquarie and Sheffield, video overlay and graphics available. Honey bees have to balance effort, risk and reward, making rapid and accurate assessments of which flowers are mostly likely to offer food for their hive. Research published in the journal…
Photos, video and visualisations available in Dropbox at https://bit.ly/3oSUd4L.
Researchers have built their own computer game to test the impact of meters that show players the morality of their decisions. Two papers published by Macquarie University researchers reveal that most of us ignore the meter when a moral choice is clear, but we use it when the choice is more morally ambiguous. And some…