Science writers, communicators, media, training, and public relations
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about shock absorbing woodpeckers; polluted perfume; off-the-shelf blood vessels; telling lies; and more Read More about Shock-absorbing woodpeckers, polluted perfume and telling lies
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about galactic voting; what playing on-line games reveals about you; executions by lethal injection; plants that feed on bat dung; and more Read More about Galactic voting, lethal injections and nutritious bat dung…
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about slowing wind; love and pain; cane toad caviar; shining light inside your body; and more… Read More about The caveman's kitchen, T.rex revelations, slowing wind and more. Tim on radio this week.
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about slowing wind; love and pain; cane toad caviar; shining light inside your body; and more… Read More about The caveman’s kitchen, T.rex revelations, slowing wind and more. Tim on radio this week.
Deanna D’Alessandro University of Sydney A sponge that filters hot air and captures carbon dioxide We need better ways of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power stations and industry. And we won’t be using hydrogen cars until we’ve develop…
What does food do – time to move beyond the glycaemic indexIt’s time to get smarter about food labelling according to Dr John Monro, speaking at the international chemistry conference in Melbourne this week.
“We need to know not just what is in the food, but what the food is going to do in our bodies,” he says. John is a researcher with the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research.
“And we need easy to follow guides that make sense when we’re pushing our trolleys around the supermarket.”
Prof Colin Raston and his colleagues in the Centre for Strategic Nano-Fabrication at the University of Western Australia are setting about cleaning up the world—and chemical industry in particular—through developing a suite of technologies to enable continuous, rather than batch, processing.
“We’re working at getting rid of the round-bottom glass in the laboratory, and the array of tanks and pipes in chemical plants.” Read More about Spinning the world clean
IUPAC Symposium 6B – Crop Biofactories: Plants as Sustainable Bio-Production Systems for Industrial Raw Materials, Wednesday 3:30pm
Sten Stymne, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Vegetable oil is the agricultural product that chemically most resembles fossil oils and has therefore great potential to replace it, says Sweden’s Sten Stymne.
He’s part of an 11-million-Euro global project to engineer seed oils for bio-lubricant uses.
Read More about Vegetable oil to lubricate your car, tractor and truck
IUPAC Symposium 4A – Natural Products, Tuesday 1:45PM – 3:00PM
Leslie Weston, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga
Leslie Weston has discovered and patented two weedkillers made by plants. Now she’s investigating Patterson’s curse to see what tricks it uses to invade grasslands and repel herbivores. Her vision is to use plants or plant extracts to control plants, as an alternative to synthetic pesticides and herbicides.
Read More about Could your lawn, golf course or pasture make its own weedkiller?
IUPAC Symposium 4B – Natural Products, Tuesday 4pm
John Pickett, Rothamsted Research
John Pickett and his British colleagues are creating new kinds of perfumes or attractants for pest insects.
They’re employing farnesyl diphosphate—the ‘parent’ molecule that insects use as the starting point for many chemical signals such as sex pheromones—to create new, more powerful attractants that will be cheaper and easier to make.
