Nanotech technique could revolutionise neurological treatments.
Light could replace invasive techniques to measure brain temperature– eliminating the need to place a thermometer in the brain when treating a range of neurological disorders.
Researchers from Victoria’ Swinburne University have teamed up with Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain and Stanford University in the US to develop a technique for measuring sub-degree brain temperature changes using near-infrared light.
Animals play critical roles in ecosystems, but they are broadly overlooked in assessments of mine site restoration success says Sophie Cross, an ecologist at Curtin University.
She tracked Australia’s largest lizard species, the perentie, using VHF radio and GPS tracking, and walked hundreds of kilometres through unmined and restoration bushland on a mine site in the mid-west region of Western Australia for her study published in the Australian Journal of Zoology.
Scarring and major lacerations due to vessel collisions
becoming more common, study finds.
The tail of a whale shark (Rhincodon typus), showing massive scarring. Image: Jess Hadden.
Almost one-fifth of the whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) in Western Australia’s Ningaloo
Reef Marine Park show major scarring or fin amputations, with the number of
injured animals increasing in recent years, new research reveals.
Distinctive scar patterns strongly suggest many of the injuries are caused by boat collisions, says whale shark scientist Emily Lester from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).
Lisa
Kewley has transformed our understanding of the early years of the Universe, the
development of galaxies, and what happens when they collide.
2020 James Craig Watson medal winner Professor Lisa Kewley in her office. Credit: ASTRO 3D
For her pioneering investigations across theory, modelling and observation, she will receive the US National Academy of Science’s biennial James Craig Watson Medal in Washington DC.
“At school I thought physics would be too hard. But I had a wonderful physics teacher whose
love for astronomy was contagious!” says Lisa.
Researchers discover how whooping cough is evolving paving the way to a new
vaccine.
Whooping cough strains are adapting to better infect
humans, a team of Sydney researchers has found.
The scientists, led by microbiologist Dr Laurence Luu of the University
of New South Wales, may have solved the mystery of why, despite
widespread vaccinations, the respiratory disease has been resurgent in
Australia across the past decade. There have been more than 200,000 cases
recorded during the period.
Maths model
helps rangers protect national parks, despite tight budgets.
Math could be used to prevent elephant poaching. Image credit: Pixabay
Mathematics can help reduce poaching and illegal logging in national parks, researchers have found.
A
team of applied mathematicians including Macquarie University’s David Arnold
has developed an algorithm that predicts which areas inside park boundaries
offer the greatest possibilities for criminals – and how rangers can most
efficiently combat them.
Researchers
close in on an objective measure for physical distress.
Pain self-assessments are naturally subjective. An independent pain measure will help treatment. Image credit: Jim De Ramos
A new microscope-based method for detecting a particular molecule in the spinal cord could help lead to an accurate and independent universal pain scale, research from Australia’s Macquarie University suggests.
An accurate way of
measuring pain is of critical importance because at present degrees of
discomfort are generally assessed by asking a patient to estimate pain on a
one-to-10 scale. The situation is even more acute in the treatment of babies,
the very old and animals, where speech is absent.
New tech means cars can power houses, as well as the other way round.
A
new device turns electric vehicles into chargers for houses and stranded cars.
Researchers
led by Seyedfoad Taghizadeh from Australia’s Macquarie University are looking
to commercialise the technology, which may significantly increase the appeal of
the vehicles.
Filtering out social bots can help critical response teams see what’s
happening in real time
Network visualisation of genuine users (at the right side) and social bots (in purple on the left side). Bots form a densely connected graph by tweeting similar messages at the same time. Two users in this network are connected if they repeatedly tweeted similar messages about the same topics in a given time duration. Bots are very loosely connected to rest of the users.
Researchers have created an algorithm that distinguishes
between misinformation and genuine conversations on Twitter, by detecting
messages churned out by social bots.
Dr Mehwish Nasim and colleagues at the School of Mathematical
Sciences at the University of Adelaide say the algorithm will make it easier
for emergency services to detect major events such as civil unrest, natural
disasters, and influenza epidemics in real time.
“When something really big is going on, people tweet a
huge amount of useful information,” says Mehwish.
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