Author: Editorial Board

The sixth session of the Conference of the parties (COP6) to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) concluded recently in Moscow. Several landmark decisions were adopted in the course of the six-day session, regarded as one of the most successful in the WHO FCTC’s history. In her opening speech, WHO Director-General Dr Margaret…

Scientists have found evidence for a huge mountain range that sustained an explosion of life on Earth 600 million years ago. The mountain range was similar in scale to the Himalayas and spanned at least 2,500 kilometres of modern west Africa and northeast Brazil, which at that time were part of the supercontinent Gondwana. “Just…

Winning a Nobel Prize has its perks. When you talk, people listen. And you end up doing a lot of talking. And travelling. Reflecting on how the Nobel Prize changed his life, Walter Gilbert (1980 winner in Chemistry) commented, “You can find yourself spending years travelling and talking right after winning.” And what if you…

New Australian National University research has found the incidence of foodborne illness has declined slightly and that one quarter of the 16 million cases of gastroenteritis each year are caused by food contamination. The research tracked the changes in foodborne illness in Australia between 2000 and 2010. It found the number of cases of foodborne…

Last month, The New York Times Magazine published a long piece called “So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class …”, which begins with these very words: In 2008, shortly after Bill Gates stepped down from his executive role at Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the eastern bank of…

To assume that one’s voice and cultural contribution don’t count because one was born into “privilege” is as narrow and toxic as to deny one’s voice because one was born into poverty. This is by no means to discount the idea that, as Shankar Vedantam put it in his elegant and nuanced meditation on unconscious…

“Writers open our hearts and minds, and give us maps to our own selves.” The question of what reading does for the human soul is an eternal one and its answer largely ineffable, but this hasn’t stopped minds big and small from tussling with it — we have Kafka’s exquisite letter to his childhood friend,…

Australia needs to play to its strengths and transition from traditional manufacturing into new areas of competitive advantage. CSIRO proposes the direction for such a move in its discussion paper Equipping Australian Manufacturing for the Information Age: iManufacturing – Is Australia Ready? which aims to generate discussion among Australian industry to prepare them for the…

Let us introduce you a great educational tool, which name is Longform’s New.  If you have managed to keep your attention span intact during this distracting information age, then you’re almost certainly familiar with Longform.org, a web site that makes it easy to find something great to read online, especially if you like reading informative,…

Patients recovering from heart attacks are far more likely to complete life-saving rehabilitation if they have access to a new smartphone app developed by CSIRO, research has shown. A clinical trial found that cardiac patients who undertook rehabilitation in their own homes via the smartphone app were almost 30 per cent more likely to take…

“Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our true potential.” The question of what sets us apart from other animals has occupied humanity for millennia, but only in the last few decades have animals gone from objects to be observed to fellow beings to be understood,…

We have received a $14.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve the productivity and incomes of smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa. This five year humanitarian project will develop tools to generate self-reproducing hybrid cowpea and sorghum crops to help millions of farmers become more self sufficient with higher yielding crops.…

Trekking the continuum of sleep and wakefulness in a journey into metaconsciousness. As if the science of sleep and the emotional function of dreaming weren’t fascinating enough in and of themselves, things get even more bewildering when it comes to lucid dreaming — a dream state in which you’re able to manipulate the plot of…

Scientists have produced the first detailed record of sea levels over the past 500,000 years and spanning five ice ages, using microfossils from sediments in the Red Sea. The team determined accurate dates for the sea levels by linking wind-blown dust in the sediments to a climate record from stalagmites from caves in China. The…