The Best of Australian Science: August 2014

It’s the end of August, 2014 and it our time to review the top headlights for this month.

This would be our selection for the previous period.

From the caves to the classroom

From classrooms around the country, students will embark on a digital journey exploring the iconic Jenolan Caves, an important scientific environment full of learning opportunities. As they progress through quests, the students will explore the surrounding environment and complete inquiry based learning tasks that test their core science skills.

Genetic key to lupus shows potential of personalised medicine

Medical researchers at the Centre for Personalised Immunology, based at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR), sequenced the genes of a young girl who suffered a stroke when she was four as a result of her lupus.

A Good Defence is about Understanding Cyber Threats by Milica Djekic

In the era of the Internet and emerging technologies, we are supposed to deal with different sorts of cyber threats, risks and attacks. This modern time brought a lot of advantages to the Human Kind, but also some fast-spreading and increasing security issues. It seems we are connected with the risk more than ever before. Cyber environment may appear as so friendly and convenient, but for real it brings a lot of nightmares to its visitors. In this article, we discuss all the disadvantaging things you can face up in cyberspace and also suggest why cyber security and a good undersigning of the problem is so important for a good defence. So, let’s start.

Multi-Coloured Vision by Lizz Rice

Colour is our eye’s interpretation of light reflecting off objects. The different colours we see are different wavelengths of light. Colour-specific photoreceptors in the retina of our eyes, cones, translate the wavelengths into what we see as colour.

Interview: Simon Phipps, a computer scientist and open source advocate by Danica Radovanovic

One could call Simon Phipps a real eclectic geek, having in mind his background and activism globally: from campaigning for digital liberties, open data, open source software and political transparency, through his columns at InfoWorld to presidenting at the Open Source Initiative.

That’s basically our choice for August. Please stay tuned, new stories are coming soon.