At the national physics congress this week:

• Why Australia should take part in the world’s largest energy project
• A handheld probe for detecting cancer
• Do the Prime Minister’s favoured education markers work
• Overcoming the energy challenge with science – the word from Oak Ridge

And from Fresh Science

• Who are Australia’s smallest and worst-paid miners? Termites and ants show us where the gold is. [continue reading…]

• Unlimited clean power
• Sophisticated, targeted treatment for cancer;
• Measuring schools – is the new PISA test a wrong turn
• Overcoming the energy challenge with science.

These and more at the national physics congress starting today in Sydney. [continue reading…]

The winner of the Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize will be announced at 12.30 pm, Thursday 15 November 2012, at a lunch at UBS in Sydney.

He will receive $25,000, and a glass trophy designed by Australian sculptor Nick Mount.

The 2012 finalists are:

• Robert McLaughlin, a medical engineer from the University of Western Australia (UWA), who has developed an optical probe that fits inside a hypodermic needle and can help surgeons accurately determine the boundaries of breast cancer tumours.
• Marc Pellegrini, from Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI), whose discoveries about how the body regulates its immune system are being applied to clinical trials of cancer vaccines and treatments for HIV and hepatitis.
• Jian Yang, from the Diamantina Institute at the University of Queensland, who has solved a major puzzle of missing heritability by developing software and methods to determine the multiple genes involved in conditions such as schizophrenia, obesity and diabetes.

It’s science prize season: we’ve just celebrated three outstanding young women at the 6th L’Oréal Australia and New Zealand For Women in Science awards, and the Prime Minister’s Science Prizes will be awarded next month.
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Dr Kylie Mason has set herself the goal of developing new ways of treating diseases that are considered incurable.

A desire to improve the survival of people with blood cancers and reduce the side-effects of their anti-cancer treatments has seen Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researcher Dr Kylie Mason today win one of three 2012 L’Oreal Australia For Women in Science Fellowships.

And yet the latest research reported in Perth this week suggests they have little to fear from ‘nano-sunscreens’.

Posted on behalf of ICONN 2012: Australia’s International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

More than three in five Australians are concerned enough about the health implications of nanoparticles in sunscreens to want to know more about their impact. And while the initial scientific information released suggests little cause for alarm, it does justify the community’s confusion.

That’s the message that emerges from a survey and three research papers on nanoparticles in sunscreens presented at the 2012 International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICONN) in Perth this week. [continue reading…]

Eggs that talk to each other, the stressed hearts of the broken-hearted and online chat fighting depression are just some of the interesting stories that emerged from Australian research published in the last week.  Find over a dozen other stories below.

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This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about diabetes in pregnancy, X-ray body scanners, the language gene, those slippery neutrinos, and more…
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