The first accurate 3D map of our galaxy reveals its true shape: warped and twisted. Background information and further images below. 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…
High-power diamond lasers, invented at Macquarie University, Eureka finalist High-power lasers have many potential applications: from medical imaging to manufacturing, shooting down drones or space junk, or powering deep space probes. But current laser technologies overheat at high power. Rich Mildren and his team have developed a technique to make diamond lasers that, in theory,…
Looking for life, dark energy and the beginning of time Southern Africa, Australia and NZ are to share the Square Kilometre Array – a giant radio telescope that will consist of thousands of separate radio dishes and other antennae spread across an area the size of a continent. We’ve pulled together links to our stories…
A fly named in honour of Beyoncé; plum extracts as food preservatives; and the crucial role of social media during the 2011 Queensland floods are just some of the interesting stories that emerged from Australian research published in the last week. Find over a dozen other stories below.
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about diabetes in pregnancy, X-ray body scanners, the language gene, those slippery neutrinos, and more…
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about solar soldiers, cocaine cravings, nanobots, Venetian acoustics, and more…
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about travelling faster than light; ancient proteins; a vaccine for acne; missing planets; and more…
What we see in the night sky is only five per cent of the Universe. So what’s the other 95 per cent of the Universe made of – a young physicist has the answers across Tasmania this week. One of Australia’s leading young physicists will reveal the dark secrets of the Universe in Tasmania this…
In 1768 the British Admiralty sent Captain James Cook to the Pacific to monitor the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun. On his way home to England, Cook mapped Australia’s east coast, and claimed New South Wales. For about 40,000 years before that, the indigenous peoples of Australia had been developing remarkably sophisticated…
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about electronic tattoos, bacterial wires, symbiotic threesomes, sensing date-rape drugs, and more…