Category: News

“Mental recreation is a thing that we all of us need for our mental health.” Long before he met the real-life little girl who inspired him to write Alice in Wonderland under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a prominent mathematician and logician. In addition to his scientific bend and his love of…

Physicists at The Australian National University have created a tractor beam on water, providing a radical new technique that could confine oil spills, manipulate floating objects or explain rips at the beach. The group, led by Professor Michael Shats, discovered they can control water flow patterns with simple wave generators, enabling them to move floating…

Why why all creative culture is built on “plagiarism, literary debt, appropriation, incorporation, retelling, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, reprise…” When Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism, her dear friend Mark Twain wrote her a heartfelt and lively letter of support, in which he asserted that “all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million…

One more amazing week has finished and here we are to share with you the best stories by our selection. This week offers quite good news, but not that spectacular as we have from time to time. Through the following descriptions we intent to provide you with our this week’s choice. Hope you will enjoy…

Working with his colleagues, Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, took Freebase (Google’s “community-curated database of well-known people, places, and things”) and gathered data on 150,000 important artists and cultural figures who lived during the long arc of Western history (6oo BCE to 2012). The scholars then mapped these…

Many of Australia’s leading animal and human infectious disease experts are joining forces this week to identify challenges that might benefit from greater collaboration across Australia’s research institutions. The Forum will be held at the Geelong high-containment facility and is a joint initiative between CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) and the National Health and…

We developed our 6 steps pedagogy of blended learning as a way to support the integration of social media and apps in lessons. The integration of social media and apps often happens nowadays though the use of tablets. The last few years we co-created with our customers a way of working with tablets using the…

Get me a piano teacher, stat! When I was a child, my father, enchanted by the notion that I might someday provide live piano accompaniment to his evening cocktails, signed me up for lessons with a mild-mannered widow who—if memory serves—charged 50¢ an hour. Had I only been forced to practice more regularly, I’d have…

The case for the Reserve Bank of Australia to increase interest rates is building, although the central bank should leave rates unchanged after its August board meeting, The Australian National University RBA Shadow Board has found. “New inflation and growth data suggest that the RBA’s low interest rate setting ought to come to an end…

“I probably worry less about the real future than the average person,” says William Gibson, the man who coined the term “cyberspace” and wrote books like Neuromancer, Idoru, and Pattern Recognition. These have become classics of a science-fiction subgenre branded as “cyberpunk,” a label that seems to pain Gibson himself. “A snappy label and a…

We are around the first Sunday in this exciting month of August. For this occasion, we have selected very interesting stories, but the main focus should be on the frightening fact that our world could suffer a new Ebola epidemic. The crucial problem is this sever and deathly illness could spread around through air travel.…

Queensland families will have better protection against tropical diseases with work under way to build a globally significant health research institute in north Queensland. Science Minister Ian Walker said the new Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine in Townsville would put Queensland at the forefront of tropical health nationally and internationally, part of the…

Seven frog species could be saved from extinction by a Townsville scientist thanks to a Queensland Government grant. Science and Innovation Minister Ian Walkersaid Dr Alexandra Robertsfrom James Cook University’s College of Public Health, Medical and Veterinary Sciences, would use the $180,000 research grant to develop a treatment to stop a fungal disease killing the…

World War I began 100 years ago, on 28 July 1914. The initial trigger, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, produced something of a “domino effect,” where European powers, bound by pre-existing international alliances, chose sides and fell rather obviously into a catastrophic war. It started as a European war, pitting Allied powers…