August promises
cool science, hot topics and sharp people.
With more than 2000 planned events around
Australia, National Science Week, 10 to 18 August, offers multiple story
opportunities – so the time to start scheduling is now.
Headline
local and international science stars include:
NASA exobiologist Darlene Lim —a
scientist who prepares astronauts for missions by putting them in the toughest
environments on Earth.
Sylvia Earle – nicknamed “Her Deepness”, this veteran US oceanographer
pioneered extreme diving, and lived in experimental underwater habitats.
Veena Sahajwalla – based at UNSW, Veena
is the inventor of green steel, a new building material made from old car tyres
and recycled plastic.
Eddie Wu – a
Sydney maths teacher and YouTube star, Eddie was named Australia’s Local Hero
for 2018, and fronted the ABC television series, Teenage Boss.
Other guests include US-based
astrobiologist Paul Davies, Australian Nobel laureate Elizabeth
Blackburn, and War on Waste star Craig Reucassel.
Melbourne researchers have found that 80 percent of people with quadriplegic spinal injuries have sleep apnoea. It’s having a big effect on their lives but they don’t know they have it, and they don’t know it can be treated.
The researchers are calling for everyone with quadriplegia to see a doctor if they are tired and fatigued, and they’ve produced videos demonstrating the impact on patients’ lives.
New Guinea is one of the only places in the world where frogs are safe from the species-destroying chytrid fungus. An international team of scientists has published a new paper that shows how to keep it that way, but they need help to carry out their plan.
The chytrid fungus has wiped out more than 90 frog species around the world, and it’s driving hundreds more towards extinction. New Guinea – the world’s largest tropical island, and home to 6% of all known frog species – is one of the last remaining refuges from the deadly infection.
A team of scientists led by researchers from Macquarie University and the University of New England in Australia think they know how to keep the island’s frogs safe, but they need support to establish a long-term program of monitoring and conservation.
Is the sparkler on your finger recycled seabed? Photo: Flickr CC/Stephen Durham
Most diamonds are made of cooked seabed.
The diamond on your finger is most likely made of recycled seabed cooked deep in the Earth.
Traces of salt trapped in many diamonds show the stones are formed from ancient seabeds that became buried deep beneath the Earth’s crust, according to new research led by Macquarie University geoscientists.
Most diamonds found at the Earth’s surface are formed this way; others are created by crystallization of melts deep in the mantle.
In experiments recreating the extreme pressures and temperatures found 200 kilometres underground, Dr Michael Förster, Professor Stephen Foley, Dr Olivier Alard, and colleagues at Goethe Universität and Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Germany, have demonstrated that seawater in sediment from the bottom of the ocean reacts in the right way to produce the balance of salts found in diamond.
The study, published in Science Advances, settles a long-standing question about the formation of diamonds. “There was a theory that the salts trapped inside diamonds came from marine seawater, but couldn’t be tested,” says lead author Michael. “Our research showed that they came from marine sediment.”
The squirrel glider (Petaurus norfolcensis) is listed as a vulnerable species in New South Wales. Photo: Wikimedia CC/Brisbane City Council
Location matters for species struggling to survive under a changing climate.
A new study led by Macquarie University has
found we need to provide more safe havens for wildlife and plant species to
survive under climate change in New South Wales’ west.
Along the Great Dividing Range, the vulnerable
spotted-tailed quoll will be forced to move into higher habitats as the climate
changes, but can find sanctuary in protected areas like Kosciuszko National
Park.
The squirrel glider, also listed as a
vulnerable species, will have more suitable places to live under climate
change. However, few of its potential new homes in central western New South
Wales are adequately protected.
Plastic pollution can harm both the micro and macro-organisms living in our oceans. Photo: Kevin Krejci
Ten per cent of the oxygen we breathe comes from just one kind of bacteria in the ocean. Now laboratory tests have shown that these bacteria are susceptible to plastic pollution, according to a study published in Communications Biology tonight.
“We found that exposure to chemicals leaching from plastic pollution interfered with the growth, photosynthesis and oxygen production of Prochlorococcus, the ocean’s most abundant photosynthetic bacteria,” says lead author and Macquarie University researcher Dr Sasha Tetu.
“Now we’d like to explore if plastic pollution is having the same impact on these microbes in the ocean.”
As partners in the $329 million Blue Economy CRC announced in Launceston
Chief investigators from Macquarie L-R: Dr Fatemeh Salehi, Professor Darren Bagnall, Dr Ming Li, Dr Rouzbeh Abbassi
Macquarie University engineers will
develop new technologies for ocean
infrastructure as part of the Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre
announced by Karen Andrews, the Minister for Industry, Science and Technology.
The Blue
Economy CRC will drive an evolution in marine-based industries, unlocking
enormous economic, environmental and technological benefits in aquaculture and
renewable energy in Australia’s maritime zone.
As partners in the $245 million SmartSat CRC announced in Adelaide this morning.
Eighty-four
research and industry partners are contributing $190 million investment in cash
and in kind to the new Cooperative Research Centre for Smart Satellite
Technologies and Analytics, and the Australian government is contributing a
further $55 million. The CRC is led by the University of South Australia.
“A
new generation of low-cost smart satellite technology has the potential to
enhance agriculture, mining, communication and national security,” says
Associate Professor Sam Reisenfeld, who leads Macquarie University’s
contribution to the CRC.
Artist’s impression of the polaritonic photon conversion platform. Laser photons enter through the top mirror and leave through the bottom mirror exhibiting quantum ‘granularity’ – after interacting with the semiconductor layer. Image: Andrew Wood
An international team of researchers led out of Macquarie University has demonstrated a new approach for converting ordinary laser light into genuine quantum light.
Their approach uses nanometre-thick films made of gallium arsenide, which is a semiconductor material widely used in solar cells. They sandwich the thin films between two mirrors to manipulate the incoming photons.
The photons interact with electron-hole pairs in the semiconductor, forming new chimeric particles called polaritons that carry properties from both the photons and the electron-hole pairs. The polaritons decay after a few picoseconds, and the photons they release exhibit distinct quantum signatures.
The teams’ research was published overnight in the journal Nature Materials.
The flooded gum or rose gum (Eucalyptus grandis). Photo: Geoexplore
An Aussie eucalypt can ‘remember’ past exposure to extreme heat, which makes the tree and its offspring better able to cope with future heatwaves, according to new research from Macquarie University.
This finding could have important implications for restoring ecosystems and climate-proofing forestry, as the number of hot days and heatwaves increase due to climate change.
A slightly exaggerated impression of the real shape of our warped and twisted Milky Way. Image: Xiaodian Chen (National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
The first accurate 3D map of our galaxy reveals its true shape: warped and twisted.
Astronomers from Macquarie University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have used 1339 ‘standard’ stars to map the real shape of our home galaxy in a paper published in Nature Astronomy today.
They found the Milky Way’s disc of stars becomes increasingly ‘warped’ and twisted the further away the stars are from the galaxy’s centre.
A juvenile cane toad (Rhinella marina) in Emma Gorge, Western Australia. Photo: M.G. Swan
Cane toads are picking up some shady habits, according to a new study co-authored by a Macquarie University researcher.
Toads in Western Australia have been spotted awake and active during the day in deeply shaded habitats, despite the species usually being nocturnal in Australia and other parts of the world.
However nearby cane toad populations at more exposed sites remained only active at night.
A promiscuous female fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) marked with paint. Photo: The Wigby Lab
Males have to make less of an effort to mate with promiscuous female fruit flies, making the quality and quantity of their semen all the more important in the competition to fertilise the females’ eggs.
This also leads to male flies repeatedly mating with the same female, according to a paper published overnight in Nature Communications, by researchers from Macquarie University, the University of Oxford and the University of East Anglia, who looked into the eyes of thousands of fruit flies.
Scientists available for interview – details and photos below.
Correction: an earlier version stated the tool is being formally trialed by the NSW Rural Fire SERVICE. It is currently in use, but formal trials ended in 2016.
A fully developed pyrocumulus cloud, formed from the smoke plume of the Grampians fire in February 2013. Credit: Randall Bacon
Firestorms are a nightmare for emergency services and anyone in their path. They occur when a bushfire meets a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental conditions and creates a thunderstorm.
Dr Rachel Badlan and Associate Professor Jason Sharples are part of a team of experts from UNSW Canberra and ACT Emergency Services that has found the shape of a fire is an important factor in whether it will turn into a firestorm.
Fires that form expansive areas of active flame, rather than spreading as a relatively thin fire-front, are more likely to produce higher smoke plumes and turn into firestorms, the researchers found.
This finding is being used to underpin further development of a predictive model for firestorms. The model was trialed in the 2015 and 2016 fire seasons by the ACT Emergency Services Agency and the NSW Rural Fire Service, and now forms part of the national dialogue around extreme bushfire development.
Rice (Oryza sativa) is the major food source for more than half the world’s population. Photo: Pille-Riin Priske/Unsplash CC
Researchers have identified over 5,700 new proteins in rice and are calling for a global effort to find the remaining missing proteins, in a new study co-authored by Macquarie University.
The international team of scientists from Australia, Iran and Japan say there’s an estimated 35,000 proteins encoded by the rice genome, and yet we still don’t have experimental evidence for 82 per cent of them.
This is important because rice is the major food source for more than half the world’s population, and in order for it to grow in warmer climates and with less water we will need to better understand rice at the molecular level. [continue reading…]
From Sydney to Cairns to Darwin to Perth, we want to hear about your sightings – a live fish, a saw on the wall of your local pub, or a photo from your family album.
“Your sightings, no matter how long ago they happened, will help us work out how many sawfish there used to be, how many remain, and how we can help them recover,” says Dr Barbara Wueringer, a zoologist and the director of Sharks and Rays Australia (SARA).
A sawfish caught at Manly, Sydney in 1926. Photo source: Queensland State Library.
Forty years ago, sawfish were regularly seen off Sydney and the east coast, and Perth and up the west coast. Today they’re rarely seen outside of the Gulf of Carpentaria, NT and the Kimberley.
A Melbourne student researcher and doctor has helped Nigerian hospitals halve the number of children dying from pneumonia—just by improving training and access to oxygen.
Dr Hamish Graham has been awarded with the inaugural $20,000 CSL Florey Next Generation Award for top PhD candidate in health and biomedical sciences. [continue reading…]
A jumping spider commonly found in Australian backyards. Photo: Jim McLean
Do you love or loathe your creepy-crawly house guests? Are you an insecticide at the ready kind of person? Or do you take a more live and let live approach?
Researchers from Macquarie University and the University of Sydney want to know about the insects and spiders living in and around your home, how you feel about them, and what you do to control them. [continue reading…]
