Research published in Nature warns that rising seas will devastate coastal habitats, using evidence from the last Ice Age.

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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 oceans rose quickly by one metre a century on average.

Vast swathes of coastal habitat were wiped out. Recovery took thousands of years.

Rapid sea level rise and coastal habitat retreat will happen again if warming levels rise above Paris Agreement targets, warns a global research team led by Macquarie University.

Research published today in Nature warns that rising seas will devastate coastal habitats, using evidence from the last Ice Age.

• Images
• Supporting materials

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 oceans rose quickly by one metre a century on average.

Vast swathes of coastal habitat were wiped out. Recovery took thousands of years.

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 die due to AMR by 2050. But we have few tools to keep track of its spread in the environment.

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 boy in the US has a mutation in a gene called GPX4, which he shares with just 10 other children in the world. The condition causes skeletal and central nervous system abnormalities. There are likely to be other children with the disorder recorded in hundreds of health and diagnostic databases worldwide, but we do not know of them, because their privacy is guarded for legal and commercial reasons.

But what if records linked to the condition could be found and counted while still preserving privacy? Researchers from the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub have developed a technique to achieve exactly that. The team includes Dr Dinusha Vatsalan and Professor Dali Kaafar of the University’s School of Computing and the boy’s father, software engineer Mr Sanath Kumar Ramesh, who is CEO of the OpenTreatments Foundation in Seattle, Washington.

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 published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

They say that one billion years of evolution has led to five fundamentally different types of brains, each suited to its purpose.

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 eLife today reveals how millions of years of evolution has engineered honey bees to make fast decisions and reduce risk.

The study enhances our understanding of insect brains, how our own brains evolved, and how to design better robots.

The paper presents a model of decision-making in bees and outlines the paths in their brains that enable fast decision-making. The study was led by Professor Andrew Barron from Macquarie University in Sydney, and Dr HaDi MaBouDi, Neville Dearden and Professor James Marshall from the University of Sheffield.

• Tam Pà Ling, a cave in northern Laos, reveals new secrets about our earliest human journeys from Africa through to Australia
• Between 86,000 and 68,000 years ago, modern humans passed by a cave in mainland Southeast Asia on their way through Asia to become Australia’s First People
• Evidence for a human presence in this region lasting at least 56,000 years was found in approximately seven metres of cave sediment
• This evidence demonstrates our abilities to move through forested areas and along inland river systems, and could represent a previously used migration path among our ancestors

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 of us, about ten per cent, will do anything to win.

You are playing The Great Fire, a narrative computer game. It’s all about Frankie, an usher in a cinema in regional Australia in the 1940s, who is confronted by a murderous psychopath.

Equal to more than 10 million home broadband connections

Invented in Japan with Macquarie University support

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An optical fibre about the thickness of a human hair can now carry the equivalent of more than 10 million fast home internet connections running at full capacity.

A team of Japanese, Australian, Dutch, and Italian researchers has set a new speed record for an industry standard optical fibre, achieving 1.7 Petabits over a 67km length of fibre. The fibre, which contains 19 cores that can each carry a signal, meets the global standards for fibre size, ensuring that it can be adopted without massive infrastructure change. And it uses less digital processing, greatly reducing the power required per bit transmitted.