Category: Australia
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Queensland competition winner touring CSIRO’s research vessel
Nearly three years ago a 10-year-old Queensland primary school student beat the rush of entries in a national competition to find a name for Australia’s new Marine National Facility research vessel. The Federal Minister for Science deemed Clare Cameron’s entry, The Flinders Investigator, the joint winner as it linked the planned A$120 million research vessel to…
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Setting up a science club in a primary school: Why you should!
Last week, I dissected a chicken leg and while many may believe such a thing is not extraordinary having done it so many times, the ordinary became the extraordinary when I saw it through the eyes of a child in our recently established science club. The research on extra-curricular clubs is growing and with it…
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The Gender Myth and Science. Our Response at SC@M
Girls are just not as good at science as boys. Men do hard sciences, women do soft sciences. Gender stereotypes have existed long-term throughout the spectrum of sciences. Most people have witnessed it first-hand. Patients question expert female doctors, yet implicitly trust their male counterparts. Laboratories are full of female scientists with male leads. Why…
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Weekly Science Picks
It seems the rate of everything has increased exponentially. A very bold, vague, yet intriguing statement, you might say. During the course of the past 2 weeks, Hurricane Sandy devastated the East Coast of America, followed closely by a nor’easter. So my science picks for this week center on the themes of natural disasters, planning,…
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How Have Marsupials Evolved?
The phylogenetic relationships between two orders of marsupials have been intesively debated. Authors benefited from recent sequencing projects which provided two marsupial genomes: this of the South American opossum (Monodelphis domestica) and the one of a kangaroo, the Australian tammar wallaby (Macropus eugenii). Retroposons are suitable and homoplasy-free markers: their insertion sites are random; parallel…
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BioGrid Australia wins People¹s Choice Excellence in BI Award for 2012
BioGrid Australia has won the hotly contested People¹s Choice Excellence in Business Intelligence Award for 2012 for its application of information technology in e-health. The Excellence in Business Intelligence Award, sponsored by BusinessMinds, was won by Telstra for a customer centric solution using nearreal time BI. In the People’s Choice Award, the delegates at the Big Data Summit…
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OKFN Australia Group re-launching again
The Open Knowledge Foundation is dedicated to promoting the creation, sharing and application of Open Knowledge in the Digital Age. Yesterday, a working group at OKFN Australia gathered data geeks from around the country. The opening the Australian chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation happened via a Google hang-out. The group includes internet public servants, data scientists, data…
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Great danger for the Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef is easily among the world’s great natural wonders. A world heritage site since 1981, it’s known everywhere as a showcase for the beauty which Earth’s oceans are capable of producing. The world’s largest system of coral reefs, it’s actually composed of over 2900 smaller reefs, stretching along Australia’s coastline for 2600…
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Breaking plates
What do Australia and India have in common? The answer is that they both share one of Earth’s tectonic plates – the drifting eggshell-like pieces of Earth’s crust, on which all of our planet’s continents sit. However, the Indo-Australian Plate is a slightly unusual one, and the two countries may not share it for much…
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Payload
Science Fiction This may not be the usual topic for a blog post normally displayed on Australian Science, but when our editor Danica mentioned she saw this great Aussie short and asked if one of us writers wanted to do a narrative, I jumped at it. The next 17:55 of my lunch break left me…
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Snappy meals for a hungry plant
I’m a big fan of carnivorous plants. Seriously, they’re plants which eat animals, placing them oddly higher up the food chain than other plants – That always fascinated me. But a recent study on one Australian sundew has shown it to be even more fascinating than was previously thought. This sundew, with the rather poetic…
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What do polls and climate change have in common? It’s not what you think! Brian Schmidt at TEDx Canberra
Here’s the talk by our own Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt at the recent TEDx Canberra. He talks about the certainty in uncertainty, showing how credible statistical analysis can reveal unexpected results. You may be surprised…
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Botanist Wins Prestigious Nature Conservancy Award to Work on Grass Trees
24 September 2012. MEDIA RELEASE Botanist Todd McLay has won the 2012 prestigious Australian Conservation Taxonomy Award to delve further into the mysteries of the iconic Xanthorrhoea genus or, Australia¹s native grass trees. The Nature Conservancy and The Thomas Foundation launched the award last year to foster research by young scientists into important taxonomic works with significant implications…
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Got Science? Australian Science on Display at Mitchelton State School
In my last post, I talked about the role of imagination in science and early childhood education and the U.S. efforts on encouraging students to pursue careers focused on STEM (Science, Technology, Education and Mathematics). I also mentioned that I would be featuring a primary school in Brisbane, Australia to gain an understanding of their…