Author: Editorial Board

A human disease pandemic, European honey bee colonies wiped out and an invasion of a devastating wheat disease are just three potential biosecurity threats facing Australia, according to a report released this week. These three events alone could devastate Australia’s agricultural industries, economy and environment, and could severely alter our way of life. But, how…

A new national research centre based at ANU will investigate how language works and how it makes us who we are. Based at the University, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language draws together the nation’s top linguists, philosophers, psychologists and roboticists to puzzle out the complex mechanisms of human communication. The…

Current efforts to prevent violence against women and girls are inadequate, according to a new Series published in The Lancet. Estimates suggest that globally, 1 in 3 women has experienced either physical or sexual violence from their partner, and that 7% of women will experience sexual assault by a non-partner at some point in their…

Chemists have developed a revolutionary new way to manufacture natural chemicals and used it to assemble a scarce anti-inflammatory drug with potential to treat cancer and malaria. The breakthrough could lead to new and cheaper ways to produce rare drugs in large quantities. “We took small molecules and clipped them together like Lego,” said lead…

You might think that a movie about information from 1953 couldn’t possibly be relevant in the age of iPhone apps and the Internet but you’d be wrong. A Communications Primer, directed by that power couple of design Charles and Ray Eames, might refer to some hopelessly quaint technology – computer punch cards, for instance –…

Physicists at ANU have engineered a spiral laser beam and used it to create a whirlpool of hybrid light-matter particles called polaritons. “Creating circulating currents of polaritons – vortices – and controlling them has been a long-standing challenge,” said leader of the team, theoretician Dr Elena Ostrovskaya, from the Research School of Physics and Engineering…

WHO warned recently that progress towards the elimination of measles has stalled. The number of deaths from measles increased from an estimated 122 000 in 2012 to 145 700 in 2013, according to new data published in the WHO Weekly Epidemiological Report and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly…

The ocean is warming steadily and setting up the conditions for stronger El Niño weather events, a new study has shown. A team of US, Australian, and Canadian researchers sampled corals from a remote island in Kiribati to build a 60-year record of ocean surface temperature and salinity. “The trend is unmistakeable, the ocean’s primed…

New research has found Mountain Ash forests provide more value to the community and the global climate when protected and not logged. Research scientists at the ANU, in partnership with information and communication technologists at Fujitsu Laboratories in Japan, have used long-term field data from the Central Highlands in Victoria to calculate the social, economic…

Most people know that Mark Twain wrote about Jim and Huckleberry Finn navigating down the Mississippi. Less well known is that he occasionally dabbled in the burgeoning genre of science fiction. His 1898 short story “The Great Dark” is about a ship that sails across a drop of water on a microscope slide. His novel…

A new agreement between the ANU and the National University of Malaysia (UKM) will deepen links between Australia and Malaysia, and boost the studies of Malaysia in both Australia and around the globe. Witnessed by Malaysia Deputy Prime Minister YAB Tan Sri Dato’ Haji Muhyiddin Bin Haji Mohd Yassin, the Memorandum of Understanding was signed…

Using genetic analysis, scientists have for the first time been able to conclusively establish that insects originated approximately 480 million years ago, and that they developed the ability to fly approximately 80 million years later. Published last week in Science, the study, which involved more than 100 researchers from 16 countries including five from Australia’s…

A major new Series on health and ageing, published in “The Lancet”, warns that unless health systems find effective strategies to address the problems faced by an ageing world population, the growing burden of chronic disease will greatly affect the quality of life of older people. As people across the world live longer, soaring levels…

Farmers who use plant varieties that become invasive weeds should pay a levy to cover any environmental management costs under a plan put forward by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU). The levy is one recommendation in a new paper which aims to combat the global problem of invasive plants caused by agribusiness. “It’s…