Author: Editorial Board

As Commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield “captivated the world with stunning photos and commentary from space.” Perhaps you remember him singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on board the International Space Station, or, on a more practical level, explaining what happens when astronauts shed tears in space –an important question, no doubt, but maybe not as…

For the first time, the body of Australia’s most famous racehorse Phar Lap will be brought together virtually using CSIRO’s Museum Robot at the National Museum of Australia. For many years Australia’s most famous horse has been in pieces. Phar Lap’s heart — currently preserved in a jar of formaldehyde – is at the National…

Our Galaxy may have been swallowing “pills” — clouds of gas with a magnetic wrapper — to keep making stars for the past eight billion years. That’s the conclusion of CSIRO astronomer Dr Alex Hill, lead author of a study of the Smith Cloud, a large gas cloud falling into our Galaxy from intergalactic space.…

A team of international scientists has isolated a very close relative of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) from horseshoe bats in China, confirming them as the origin of the virus responsible for the 2002-3 pandemic. The SARS-CoV pandemic killed 774 people of the 8094 people infected, a case fatality ratio of almost 10…

Bushfire has been part of the Australian landscape for millions of years but while we consider it a threat, some of our flora and fauna depend upon it. Much of Australia’s vegetation has evolved with fire and curiously, like the vegetation in other harsh dry environments, it has developed characteristics that promote the spread of…

Scientists from CSIRO made the discovery and have published their findings in the journal Nature Communications. “The eucalypt acts as a hydraulic pump – its roots extend tens of metres into the ground and draw up water containing the gold. As the gold is likely to be toxic to the plant, it’s moved to the leaves…

Look at this perfectly looped image sequence. It’s link building, chain making, Futurama, factory… it’s satisfying, and hypnotic. Google, however, won’t be able to link these concepts well enough unless it’s fed structured semantic data. They must find creative ways to correlate “strings” and understand “things” as webmasters don’t always have a habit of structuring…

At a celebration attended by Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, the European Patent Office marked the 40th anniversary of the European Patent Convention (EPC). On 5 October 1973, the EPC was signed in Munich, establishing a legal framework for the transnational grant of patents in Europe. The Convention was inspired by the vision of a group…

A paper in recent issue of the journal Science [18 October] pits the front-running ideas about the growth of supermassive black holes against observational data — a limit on the strength of gravitational waves from pairs of black holes, obtained with CSIRO’s 64-m Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia. The study was jointly led by…

CSIRO scientists have custom made and 3D printed a set of titanium shoes for one Melbourne race horse in a first for the sport. The horse, dubbed by researchers as ‘Titanium Prints’, had its hooves scanned with a handheld 3D scanner this week. Using 3D modelling software, the scan was used to design the perfect…

Twenty years ago we could never imagine using computers as extensively in our daily lives as we do today. With technology evolving at such a fast pace, what could possibly be next? Many believe that brain control interfaces (BCI) are the future of computing – that’s right, we could soon be controlling computers with the…

An innovative new approach to sugarcane plantation weed management trialled in select Great Barrier Reef (GBR) catchments have shown a dramatic 90 per cent reduction in runoff of highly soluble herbicides into waterways. In the lower Burdekin region of northern Australia, scientists from CSIRO’s Water for a Healthy Country Flagship trialled a new technique for…

In a time when Australia’s liquid transport fuel supplies are declining and our transport needs are growing, a research partnership between Australia and India could provide a solution to a number of energy concerns and ultimately reduce the reliance of both countries on imported fuels.  The widespread introduction of a clean-burning synthetic fuel, dimethyl ether…

This weekend happened something that attracted our attention. Namely, Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D, the Urban Scientist blogger at Scientific American, has been mistreated twice: once by the blog editor at biology-online.org and now by SciAm itself. The blog editor asked Dr. Lee to contribute a blog post at Biology-Online, and when she declined, the blog…