nanophotonics

Five years of L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellows

2011 marks the fifth year that L’Oréal Australia will award its For Women in Science Fellowships to Australian early-career female scientists.

Since its inception in 2007, the Fellowships, worth $20,000 each, have been awarded to 14 outstanding female scientists who have used the award to increase their impact in their chosen field of science, provide support to managing both families and lab work, and jumpstart their independent careers in science.
[continue reading…]

National Science Week 2010: make a robotic dinosaur, hear about the laser and celebrate science with poetry

Welcome to this special bulletin from the Australian Institute of Physics for National Science Week (14 – 22 August).

We’ve identified 121 Science Week events around the country with a physics component.

You can make a robotic dinosaur; hear about the laser; celebrate science with poetry; see Australia’s brightest light (or at least its home at the Australian Synchrotron); join science quizzes; learn about black holes at the Large Hadron Collider; catch the AIP 2010 Women in Physics lecturer, Elizabeth Winstanley and much more.

[continue reading…]

Spinning the world clean

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.” [continue reading…]

Killing bugs with gold and laser beams

Scientists have been able to kill an infectious parasite using non-toxic gold nanoparticles and laser beams.

“Our first target is Toxoplamosis gondii, a parasite that infects one in three people and causes problems especially in the young and old, and people with a compromised immune system says Michael Cortie from the University of Technology Sydney, speaking on behalf of his team at ICONN 2010 the international nanotechnology conference in Sydney.

[continue reading…]