Contact:

Science in Public Pty Ltd
26 Railway Street South
Altona VIC 3018
Australia
ph +61 3 9398 1416

Niall Byrne
+61 417 131 977
niall@scienceinpublic.com.au
(backup address - niall@scienceinpublic.com )

Sarah Brooker
mobile +61 413 332 489
sarah@scienceinpublic.com.au

Are you a scientist who was awarded a PhD less than five years ago? Do you have interesting results that have not received any publicity?
Why not enter Fresh Science and tell your story.
 

Looking for science stories?

We send out a collection of science stories every couple of weeks. If you would like to receive the media bulletin, please email Niall.

Science story archive
Read previous science story bulletins.

In April 2007, Australia hosted the 5th World Conference of Science Journalists.

We helped organise the event for the Australian Science Communicators. 




Australian Science Communicators

We help organise the Victorian activities for the Australian Science Communicators, an association of writers, journalists, teachers, communicators and generally anyone with an interest in communicating about science.

In Melbourne we generally meet every third Thursday of the month at the Redback Brewery hotel, 75 Flemington Road North Melbourne.

If you would like to receive email bulletins about the upcoming events, please email Niall.
 

Current stories:

We are trialling a new blog, so when you follow our recent links it will look a bit different.

Stories from the Australian Institute of Physics 18^th National Congress in Adelaide.

3 December 2008
From menace to Mexico; physics education gets real and revealing crystal structures

2 December 2008
Giant icecubes, giant telescopes and pulsars

Jocelyn Bell Burnell talks about the properties of pulsars, which she discovered as a student. Jenni Adams describes how detectors in the ice at the South Pole are used to search for cosmic neutrinos. Australia's new Chief Scientist, Penny Sackett, discusses plans for the international Giant Magellan Telescope.

1 December 2008
The world’s largest solar plant, the sun and climate change, the physics of violins and the Large Hadron Collider

29 October 2008
Counting viruses and mustering molecules

How many viruses are there in your blood? How many dangerous nano-particles in your car exhaust? qViro is a revolutionary New Zealand invention that offers the potential to quickly and cheaply answer these questions. It’s a feature of Ausbiotech – the national biotechnology conference.

A clean, safe vaccine booster

Most vaccines need a ‘magic’ booster or adjuvant to boost our immune response to the vaccine. But the best adjuvants are too toxic for human use. Now NZ scientists believe they have created a powerful and safe adjuvant and are trialling it as part of a new cancer vaccine.

27 October 2008
Put the Lord of the Rings supercomputer on your desktop

From today, thousands of Australian researchers have access to the power of the computing cluster that created the Lord of the Rings and King Kong. By using a new service called Green Button, professional scientists and students will get instant access on their desktop to a cluster of 3,000 processors based in Wellington, New Zealand, to perform fast genetic analysis.

14 October 2008
Prime Minister's Prizes for Science

The prizes were awarded at a dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday night, 16 October 2008.

7 October 2008
New head of synchrotron science hits the spot
- Queenslander scores top science job at the Australian Synchrotron

University of Queensland researcher Prof. Ian Gentle has today been appointed the Australian Synchrotron’s Head of Science. His own research includes plans to use the facility to study and improve the effectiveness of drugs treating acne and other skin diseases.
 

6 October 2008
Bringing life to dying languages

Australia and its immediate neighbours are home to a third of the world’s languages, most of which could disappear without trace. A national archive project is capturing what it can, and making the resource available online to researchers and regional cultural centres.

The miracle of milk revealed online

Milk is complex, and understanding its molecular biology is a difficult but rewarding challenge. Not only are human and cow milk of huge social and economic importance, the milk of other animals reveals much about the evolution and development of mammals – including us.

1 October 2008

$2.9 million computer to track single cancer cells

The Victorian government announced today that they will contribute $1.45 million towards a $2.9 million high performance computer facility at the Australian Synchrotron.

Fast crystallography for high profile research

Australian protein chemists and drug developers will be able to access synchrotron light within weeks and without leaving home thanks to a new service at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne.

Monday 22 September
Trains, trams and cable cars show their emotions to children with autism

A revolutionary animated DVD is teaching children with autism aged two to eight years to recognise emotions.

Produced by leading scientists and film makers, the DVD features real human faces on animated toy vehicles. The DVD will be launched in Australia on Monday 22 September.

Preview DVDs, broadcast quality footage from the DVD, interview material with autism expert and family, and stills are available.
 

15 September 2008

New disease threats to Australia: chikungunya, Hendra/Nipah and more
- Are we ready? A new intelligence-gathering team will have the answers

• Hundreds of people have died from chikungunya disease. Millions have been infected across the Indian Ocean and South East Asia. Australian mosquitoes are capable of carrying it. But most of us have never heard it.

• Tassie devils, frogs, woylies, abalone, kangaroos and other native animals are being struck down by new diseases.

10 September 2008

Landmark study reports breakdown in biotech patent system
- Authors call for overhaul of intellectual property laws worldwide

The world’s intellectual property system is broken, stopping lifesaving technologies from reaching the people who need them most in developed and developing countries, according to a report released in Ottawa today by an international coalition of experts.

9 September 2008

Australia’s role in the LHC: the world’s largest physics experiment

Just after 6pm tomorrow, Wednesday 10 September, the Large Hadron Collider will start up. Twenty years in the making, the A$6 billion machine will smash particles together in an attempt to recreate the conditions of the early universe fractions of a second after the Big Bang. It’s the result of a collaboration between scientists from eighty five countries. 

2008 Fellows (L-R) Angela Moles, Erika Cretney, Natalie Borg, Amanda Barnard 26 August 2008 L'ORÉAL Australia For Women in Science Fellowships announced The 2008 Fellows are:    Amanda Barnard, The University of Melbourne    Erika Cretney, The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne    Angela Moles, The University of New South Wales    Natalie Borg, Monash University, Melbourne. These four young women are already leaders in their fields. They were chosen from 213 applicants. Each receives a $20,000 Fellowship which we hope will help them through the most challenging part of any science career – the transition from PhD to independent researcher. This is the second year of the L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowships. Big ecology: from tundra to rainforest, desert to savanna Evolutionary geneticist Angela Moles visited 75 ecosystems in her effort to understand the big picture – how and why plants vary. She and her team are still mining the data but are already making intriguing findings. For example: plant seeds in the tropics are, on average, 300 times bigger than seeds in colder places; and vines are left-handed: 92% of vines around the world twist anticlockwise as they climb. She is a leader in developing a new approach to ecology—one that could allow us to accurately model and predict the impact of climate change on ecosystems. Unravelling the complexity of the immune system Immunologist Erika Cretney is fascinated by the human immune system. With the help of her L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowship, she is pursuing a new target: a small group of T cells that play a role in controlling inflammation and in auto-immune diseases. The Fellowship will help with childcare costs as she balances a full-time research career with the needs of her young son. 2008 winner Erika Cretney discusses her work. View full profiles and video interviews with all winners here. Are nanoparticles safe? Nanotechnology is being used in catalysts, in surface treatments for glass, in cosmetics and in drug delivery. Many more applications are just around the corner. But how will these particles behave in the environment? Theoretical physicist Amanda Barnard will use her L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowship to create computational tools to predict the behaviour of nanoparticles in the environment.  Crystallising a career in immunology Protein chemist Natalie Borg is analysing protein crystals with synchrotron light, to figure out how our bodies mount a rapid defence when we are attacked by viruses. The L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowship will help her become established as an independent researcher at Monash University. “This is the basic research that needs to take place before we can make better drugs and vaccines to treat and prevent viral infections,” she says.  View full profiles, images and video interviews with all winners here.

2008 Fresh Science

Silicon back in the race for quantum computers

The odds that a futuristic quantum computer will be built of silicon have received a boost, thanks to new technology recently invented by researchers in the Centre for Quantum Computer Technology (CQCT).

They’ve made a silicon chip that can control and observe individual electrons and they are now using this chip to make quantum test chips.

The potential speed and power of a quantum computer is known to far exceed even the biggest supercomputers of today. What is still unclear though is the best method to build one.

3 August 2008

Cleaner flights, smaller footprint

Smarter air traffic control could save 500 kg of fuel and reduce airport noise by 35% for a typical Boeing 747 flight between Sydney and Melbourne according to a team of Canberra-based researchers.

They’ve developed a unique air traffic simulator which produced these estimates. The UNSW sponsored research, which has been funded by the Australian Research Council and subsequently by AirServices Australia is now being trialled with the support of Eurocontrol (the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation).

They hope the system will transform the management of airspace – saving fuel, reducing carbon emissions and reducing ground noise.

15 July

Does my asinina look big in these genes?

The world’s fastest growing abalone—the tropical donkey’s ear abalone, Haliotis asinina—can be bred to grow rapidly and reliably for aquaculture, Queensland biologists have found. And that makes it potentially a high value alternative crop for struggling prawn farmers.

The researchers looked at whether they could speed up breeding of abalone for aquaculture using modern technology to identify and select genes that are activated in fast-growing animals. By linking the abundance of specific genes with fast growth rates, they have now shown their proposal is practical.
 

12 July

Turning on the atom laser

The first practical atom laser is a step closer today thanks to Australian researchers.

The researchers have shown how to refuel the laser with ‘quantum foam’ allowing continuous operation. The results, reported today in Nature Physics, hold great promise for precision measurement in navigation, industry and mining and for fundamental tests of quantum mechanics.

Scientists hope to use this ‘atom laser’ as the basis for a swathe of new devices, some offering staggering improvements in measurement sensitivity.

“We discovered how to refuel the material, potentially allowing continuous operation of the atom laser,” says lead author, Nick Robins from the Australian National University.
 

10 July Big babies and small families make evolutionary sense Why don’t elephants (and humans) have thousands of little babies instead of one big one? Sydney researchers have discovered and modelled the key factors responsible for offspring and family size.

• Clue to anti-male gene action: an extra gene can stop boys being boys

3 July

• Child crash test dummies not crashworthy?

Stories issued Tuesday 24 June:

• Change your sidestep, save your knee (WA)

• How brains go from digital to analogue (ACT)

Stories issued Thursday 19 June:

• Ocean warming on the rise (Tas/Vic)

• Bone breaking tests (WA)

• Man tests own tears: New treatments to result (NSW)

Stories issued Tuesday 17 June:

• Fin tips reveal the secret of underwater flight

• The future of foot-and-mouth disease control: new test makes vaccines an option (Vic)

• Soy milk shouldn’t put you off peanuts (Vic)

PNG running out of forests to protect
2 June 2008
As Papua New Guinea pushes for payments for forest conservation, new analysis says the nation may be running out of forests to protect. Satellite images show that PNG is rapidly losing its extensive forest cover, under pressure from industrial logging, agricultural expansion and forest fires.

• Press release

L'ORÉAL Australia For Women in Science Fellowships are now closed for 2008

 

James Watson’s genome published today

Today the co-discoverer of the double helix, James Watson, had his genome published in the journal Nature.