Category: News
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2012 Winners from the 60SecondScience Video Competition
Results from the 2012 60SecondScience Video Competition have been released. For the last two years 60SecondScience has been a global science event involving students and citizens from 40 countries. These citizen and student-created videos have been downloaded and viewed well over 700,000 times, and growing daily. The competition is sponsored by DEECD Victoria, Australia. Winners below share…
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The tribe that eradicated rinderpest
Karamoja region in northern Uganda is one of pastoral communities and closely dispersed ethnic groups that rely on livestock for their livelihood. It is within a semi-arid place like this that economies based on meat, milk, and blood from cattle thrive. In communities such as this one, cattle plague will always be the number one…
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Science or fringe science? Removing the ‘giggle factor’ from Near Earth Object impacts
On June 30, 7.17am in a remote, sparsely inhabited area in Siberia, Russia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, occurred an event of enormous devastation. An asteroid or comet estimated to be 40-50 meters in diameter, exploded at low altitude with an energy almost 200 times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Trees where…
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BioGrid and Victorian Cancer BioBank Join Forces for Cancer Research
September 7 2012 Cancer research has taken a major step forward in Victoria as the Victorian Cancer BioBank and BioGrid Australia join forces to improve bowel cancer management. The collaboration allows researchers for the first time in Australia to access detailed data associated with tissue and blood samples. Maureen Turner, CEO of BioGrid Australia, said today: ³Our collaboration opens…
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Lighting the Imagination in Science
Imagination in Science In my policy work in early childhood education, I get to travel and observe a few child care centers in the NYC area every year as part of our Excellence in Teaching Awards. Well, I should say I did, until the funding for this awards program was cut. Minor point. In those…
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Does my Science look big in this? August 2012 in review
August was a momentous month for science and technology. In my top five events are: NASA landed a car-sized rover on Mars; the first man to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong dies; Harvard scientist create a cyborg tissue; Swedish researchers detail how Parkinson’s disease spreads through the brain; and Voyager 2 turns 35. Without…
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Environmental Sabbath Day – A Simple Proposal
In our efforts to reduce greenhouse gases we often overlook the cultural dimensions. These days, we love the idea of “24/7” – that production and services run “24 hours a day, 7 days a week”. Certainly this makes for higher production of goods and services, as well as greenhouse gases and general degradation of life…
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The Mathematics of War
Scientists often exercise a certain detachment when doing their work. I’ve often seem friends and colleagues get “lost in the numbers” and forget precisely what it is they’re looking at and what those numbers actually mean. However, in some cases this may not be a bad thing. For instance, in the analysis of conflict data. Putting…
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The (nuclear) alchemists of Darmstadt and the doubly magic tin-100 nucleus
An international group of researchers announced in the journal Nature that they had succeeded in creating tin-100. This experiment helps us understand how heavy elements have formed. A few minutes after the Big Bang the universe contained no other elements than the lightest; hydrogen and helium. We, the objects around us, the Earth and the…
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Reducing the Digital Divide: Internet Society Supports Establishment of Internet Exchange Points across Africa
[Johannesburg, South Africa –23 August 2012] – The Internet Society announced that it has been selected by the African Union (AU) to conduct community mobilization and technical aspects workshops to support the establishment of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in AU Member States as part of the African Internet Exchange System (AXIS) project. The AXIS project aims…
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Arctic sea ice extent is plummeting to a likely new record low
The plot is from US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and shows the Arctic sea ice extent data for the melt seasons of 2007 and 2012 alongside the 1979-1999 average. 2007 was a record low year, but with about three weeks of melt season left it looks likely that 2012 will set a…
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It’s a wheel! It’s a wheel – a wheel on Mars!
NASA’s rover Curiosity was safely on Mars. It was a perfect landing. The novel sky-crane method had proved its detractors wrong and its designers right. What was needed then was signs that Curiosity was working as designed. NASA had said that the first pictures may be anything up to 2 hours after landing. A long…
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Fear of Ebola
“…the last big outbreak I experienced in Uganda [was] in 2007. When MSF arrived a lot of the staff in the hospital had died and the rest had run away because they were scared.” — Dr Kamalini Lokuge, who is about to head off to Uganda with MSF to fight the latest outbreak. At the…
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Libraries Now! Inspiring, Surprising, Empowering #IFLA2012
”The victory of book has been proved. Books should be treated as people” – Peter von Bagh The World Library and Information Congress 2012, 78th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, will take place at the Helsinki Exhibition & Convention Centre in Helsinki, Finland. The IFLA meet- ing in 2012 is one of the most significant global gatherings highlighting…