Below are examples of “good stories” for Stories of Australian Science 2010, a magazine-style collection of short science stories will put your research and researchers in front of over 1,000 science journalists and television producers.
If you wish to be involved full details including costs and PayPal payments details can be found on our Storybook page.
Example 1: Reading the hidden clock in a grain of sand (195 words)
Example 2: How astronomy freed the computer from its chains (199 words)
Zenobia Jacobs, University of Wollongong (photo credit: timothyburgess.net)
Reading the hidden clock in a grain of sand
Zenobia Jacobs wants to know where we came from, and how we got here. When did our distant ancestors leave Africa and spread across the world? Why? And when was Australia first settled?
Zenobia has developed a way of accurately dating when individual grains of sand were buried with human artefacts. And that technique (optically stimulated luminescence or OSL) is transforming our understanding of human evolution.
Working in South Africa she found a community that had been living relatively sophisticated lives-harvesting shellfish and using ochre pigments for decoration-more than 160,000 years ago, about 120,000 years earlier than previously thought. And recently she and her colleagues identified the earliest evidence of engineering – some 75,000 years ago.
Now her work has brought her to the University of Wollongong to work with Prof Bert Roberts, one of the team who discovered the Flores ‘hobbit’.
And now she wants to track the movement of the Aboriginal people into and throughout Australia.
“It’s of incredible relevance to the whole ‘Out of Africa’ theory. When did our ancestors leave Africa? Why? Which routes did they chose and how quickly did they disperse?”
Further information: www.scienceinpublic.com.au/blog/loreal
Contact: Zenobia Jacobs, zenobia@uow.edu.au
195 words
John O' Sullivan, winner 2009 PM's Prize for Science (photo credit: Bearcage Productions)
How astronomy freed the computer from its chains
Every time you use Wi-Fi to connect to the internet you’re using a little bit of Australian innovation. In homes, cafes and offices across the world a clever mathematical process—seeded by Australian astronomy—encodes and decodes the signal. It’s integral to most Wi-Fi enabled computer, printer and phone, and to almost every other wireless local area network (LAN) device.
In the heart of the transmitter and receiver chips that make fast wireless LANs possible is technology developed in 1992 by CSIRO radio engineers who used techniques first developed to find exploding black holes. That technology ensures data can be transferred wirelessly with minimal interference or error.
The CSIRO team realised that techniques they’d developed for astronomy and other applications could help solve the problem. Using fast Fourier transformation (a central tool of radio astronomy) and other techniques they created a robust wireless technology and submitted a patent application in 1992. A patent was granted in the US in 1996. Patents are now held in 19 countries.
The ideas in the patent were incorporated by the global standards body IEEE into three of the four standards used for wireless LANs: 802.11a, 802.11g, and the new 802.11n standard.
In October 2009 John O’Sullivan, the lead inventor, received the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science.
Further information: www.scienceinpublic.com.au
Contact: John O’Sullivan, john.osullivan@csiro.au
199 words
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