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The universe has been growing since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. But cosmologists can’t agree on how fast it is expanding. A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests a radical new idea that might resolve this astronomical problem – perhaps the universe is spinning very slowly. For […]

An 1800-year old human skeleton unearthed from a Roman cemetery has revealed bite marks consistent with a large cat, like a lion, and is being called the first hard evidence of human-animal combat in England during the Roman Empire. Archaeologists say the man may have died as part of a gladiator show or execution, and […]

Water is critical to life on our planet, but the conventional theory of how it ended up being so abundant on Earth might be completely wrong. The most popular theory is that water made its way to Earth from asteroids bombarding the surface of our planet for about 100 million years when it was very […]

Giant kangaroos should have giant home ranges, but researchers were shocked to find that the largest of them all, Protemnodon, was a real homebody. Habitat, not body size was the key says lead researcher, Dr Chris Laurikainen Gaete, from the University of Wollongong. Protemnodon was a genus of the giant forest kangaroos that lived until […]

The fascinating behaviour of origami has inspired engineers to design a structure that twists when compressed and shrinks when twisted. The structure is a “metamaterial”; a class of engineered materials that exhibit behaviour not seen in nature and whose properties depend on their structure rather than chemical composition. These materials can have applications ranging from […]

In the 11th century in Cairo, the foundations for modern science were laid through the detention of an innocent man. The mathematician Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham had been tasked with regulating the flow of the Nile, but when he saw the river that had shaped 4,000 years of human civilization, the hubris of the […]

A new study of Australian birds examines how for some species their personality shines through in the songs. The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, is based on observations of wild superb-fairy wrens (Malurus cyaneus), a common, small bird in southeastern Australia. Very few previous studies have sought to understand the relationship between the […]

A new nickel-based super-metal alloy that maintains strength and flexibility over an 800oC temperature range has been developed in Korea. A team at researchers at the Republic of Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) called its high entropy allow (HEA) the first of the ‘hyperadaptors’. “Our HEA breaks through the limitations of existing […]

El Niño, a climate troublemaker, has long been one of the largest drivers of variability in the global climate. Every few years, the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean seesaws between warm (El Niño) and cold (La Niña) phases. This reshuffles rainfall patterns, unleashing floods, droughts and storms thousands of miles from the Pacific origin. The 1997-98 […]

Scientists from 19 nations, including Australia and New Zealand, have been selected to compete for the annual Frontiers Planet Prize, the world’s largest science prize.  Each “National Champion” has been chosen for their scalable solutions to help keep humanity safely within planetary sustainability boundaries. In June the Swiss based science philanthropic organisation will whittle down […]

Wild fig trees may provide a biomonitoring tool for illegal gold mining in the Amazon. Gold, sought after and fought over for millennia, is found in the Amazon rainforest although artisanal and small-scale gold mines are often illegal. Mercury, (Hg) used for separating gold, is a major health and environmental problem. Mercury is added to […]

Storing compressed air in old oil wells and releasing it later to drive energy turbines looks promising as a more sustainable energy source according to the latest models from the USA. The process is known as Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES). Pennsylvania State university researchers have turbocharged the performance of CAES, a struggling renewable energy […]

The Andean glaciers, predominately located along the border between Chile and Argentina, are in rapid decline. These ice reserves which are critical to the water supplies of 90 million people across South America, are thinning by 0.7 metres a year—35% faster than the global average.            In late March, at the first-ever World Day for […]

An international study has revealed fresh insights into global methane emissions using innovative multi-isotopic atmospheric measurements. Researchers using advanced isotopic analysis, including radiocarbon and stable isotopes of carbon and hydrogen, were able to accurately distinguish between the different sources of methane (CH4) emissions. Essentially, by looking at the “fingerprints” of methane molecules, the researchers could […]

By Richard Musgrove Scientists will be able to better identify which amphibian species will be most impacted by climate change, thanks to a new study by UNSW researchers. Amphibians, including frogs, toads, salamanders and newts, are the world’s most at-risk vertebrates, with more than 40% of species facing anthropogenic threats.  [IM1] [RM2]  Ectothermy, also referred to […]

Here’s how the story of the Taung Child fossil skull is usually told: In 1924 an Australian anthropologist and anatomist, Raymond Dart, acquired a block of calcified sediment from a limestone quarry in South Africa. He painstakingly removed a fossil skull from this material. A few months later, on 7 February 1925, he published his […]

The phrase ‘animal architect’ may conjure up an image of a beaver adding one last stick to its dam, or a termite scurrying inside its 3-metre-tall mound. The feats of these individual species are impressive – but a new way of interpreting animal impact has resulted in a calculation which adds up the combined engineering […]

From monitoring Antarctica’s delicate ecosystem and navigating treacherous bushfire zones to designing innovative amphibious robots, Australia’s next generation of female roboticists are tackling transformative projects. Brittany Gorry, Angelina Fantasia, and Jessica Gumowski have begun their postgraduate research studies at QUT’s Centre for Robotics and at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, supported by our Alberto Elfes Memorial Scholarship Fund. […]

A new model is the first to explain how the lightest known neutron star formed. The binary system, called J0453+1559, was first reported in 2013 which involves a pair of neutron stars orbiting each other every 4.07 days. The system has been subject to detailed observations as it is only 4,000 light-years from Earth. One […]

Coconut trees are iconic plants found across the world’s tropical regions. They’re called “nature’s supermarket” or the “tree of life” in several cultures because every part of the coconut tree is used. Its leaves can be used to thatch homes, its heart can be eaten and its roots have medicinal uses. The refreshing liquid found […]

A 30m sediment core extracted from an underwater cave has given scientists a glimpse into the past, showing how tropical cyclones have changed in the Caribbean over 5,700 years. The research team, led by Eberhard Gischler from Germany’s Goethe University Frankfurt, identified and dated 574 different storm events visible in the sediment core. What they […]

For 170 years, botanists have believed that the rare daisy fleabane (Erigeron conyzoides) is an Australian native flower. First described in 1855, the species is restricted to the alpine areas of NSW and Victoria. But it hasn’t been collected in NSW since 1978, and was recently listed as endangered in Victoria after not being sighted […]

An accidental discovery could provide clues to a chicken-or-egg question which has puzzled scientists for decades: what came first – oxygen production by photosynthesis or oxygen consumption by aerobic metabolism? Roughly 2.4 billion years ago, a major shift occurred that would change our planet and its life forms forever. Known as the Great Oxidation Event, […]

Chinese researchers were surprised to find growth in coastal glaciers in East Antarctica two years ago, prompting them to remind the scientific community to pay more attention to the region. Antarctica is losing about 136 billion tonnes of ice per year, with Greenland almost double that, at 267 billion tonnes, says NASA.  These two ice […]

Scientists have cooked up a non-hallucinogenic version of LSD which they say has “extremely high therapeutic potential” for conditions like schizophrenia. Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, gained a reputation for its potent hallucinogenic effects following its synthesis in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, and his “accidental” discovery of it’s psychedelic properties 5 years later. […]

Climate change will impact all aspects of life as we know it, including blood donation with a new review in The Lancet Planetary Health now suggesting that climate change poses serious risks to the safety, stability, and availability of the global blood supply. “As natural disasters intensify, disease patterns shift and health challenges climb, the […]

Ecologists aren’t too concerned for the survival of native bilbies in outback Queensland, which has experienced record breaking rains and flooding since Cyclone Alfred formed on February 20 this year. Severe Tropical Cyclone Alfred was a powerful, long-lived, and erratic tropical cyclone which eventually crossed the coast in south eastern Queensland on March 8. It dumped widespread rain […]

Seismologists who created their own artificial earthquakes to peer inside the Yellowstone caldera have revealed important hidden features of its reservoir of molten and superheated rocks and gas. Due to limitations in imaging techniques, researchers haven’t been able to precisely locate the reservoir’s upper boundary, nor get a good understanding of its contents, before. These […]

Crocodiles are often thought of as living fossils – unchanged over millions of years. New research has shown that their evolutionary history is a lot more complicated than that. Crocodilia is the surviving family of a lineage which emerged about 230 million years ago (mya) called crocodylomorphs. This group split from other reptilian species including […]

The colossal squid was first described in 1925 based on specimens from the stomach of a commercially hunted sperm whale. A century later, an international voyage captured the first confirmed video of this species in its natural habitat – a 30-centimetre juvenile, at a depth of 600 metres near the South Sandwich Islands. Colossal squid […]

New research from the Kings Park Seed Bank in Perth has shed light on the surprising life and death of seeds, important for the conservation of species and research into plants which can cope with climate change. Seed banks around Australia store the seeds of thousands of species, but even when stored in ideal conditions, […]

NASA spacecraft Lucy is just days away from its second close encounter with an asteroid. Lucy was launched in 2021 and is on its way to Jupiter’s orbit to explore a group of asteroids known as the 10 Trojans. The spacecraft has to pass through the solar system’s main asteroid belt to get to Jupiter’s […]

Ice Age hearths in Ukraine have been studied using innovative archaeological techniques to better understand how ancient humans used fire. Human ancestors have been using fire for a long time. Homo erectus may have been the first human to control fire up to 2 million years ago. There is evidence from nearly 800,000 years ago […]

Move over Easter bunny, the greater bilby bounced back in some places in Australia this year. According to fifth Annual Bilby Census at the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) reserves, populations of the iconic Australian marsupial have been booming. They now total an estimated 3,330 individuals in 6 populations which are all protected by large, feral […]

About 100 million years after the animals that left them behind died, researchers have found the world’s first footprints from club-tailed dinosaurs. The most famous and largest of this armoured, herbivorous group of dinosaurs is Ankylosaurus – a creature built like a tank that could grow to 8m long, 8 tonnes and have a beach […]

The year of quantum is playing host to a vast number of new quantum research papers and slowly they are filling the void of what is known, and what might prove useful to our future. Physicists have for the first time seen entanglement of the “total angular momentum” of light particles in nanoscale structures. The […]

Gout Gout, the seventeen-year-old sprinting prodigy from Australia, has blitzed yet another milestone on his way to global domination. Gout clocked in at 19.84 seconds to win the men’s 200m final at the Australian Athletics Championships in Perth this past weekend. The effort would have secured him a new record, but for an illegal wind speed […]

In the 1987 classic film RoboCop, the deceased Detroit cop Alex Murphy is reborn as a cyborg. He has a robotic body and a full brain-computer interface that allows him to control his movements with his mind. He can access online information such as suspects’ faces, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help detect threats, and […]

Compressed air energy storage is coming to Australia. Hydrostor, a Canadian company has given the go-ahead to build a 200MW  facility at Broken Hill in far western NSW. Construction of the Silver City Advanced Compressed Air Energy System (A-CAES), only the second in the world, is slated to cost at least $652 million, with $45 […]

Dr Sarah Scholten and Dr Chris Perrella, University of Adelaide researchers and COMBS Associate Investigators, describe the use of optical frequency combs for breath analysis. Credit: COMBS Imagine standing in your kitchen at home, feeling a little off colour. You grab a handheld device from the medicine cabinet and breathe into it, looking for an […]

Physicists in Germany have performed the most accurate measurement of the mass of the fundamental particle neutrinos. The finding deepens physicists’ attempts to uncover laws of nature beyond even the best current theories. The standard model of particle physics – the best theory which explains the fundamental forces and particles of nature – posits that […]

Visitors to the site of Pompeii, the ancient Roman town buried (and so preserved for thousands of years) by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD, don’t often think to look beyond the city walls. And it’s easy to understand why: there’s plenty on offer within this monumentally well-preserved town, from jewel-like wall paintings of […]

Good nutrition by athletes doesn’t only play a role in sports performance, it can also prevent injury. That’s one of the surprising findings of new research from sports dietitian and University of South Australia researcher, Erin Colebatch, who says her recent systematic review totalling 6,000 runners shows nutrition plays a crucial role in reducing injury risk. […]

Imported “holy water” has been identified as the culprit behind multiple cholera outbreaks which were identified in Germany and the UK in February, and which landed 3 people in hospital with 1 in intensive care. Genetic testing revealed the water was contaminated with a multidrug-resistant strain of the Vibrio cholerae, according to a new study […]

The fossilised teeth from herds of massive hippo-like rhinos (Teleoceras major) have revealed their grazing habits and movement patterns on the ancient North American savannah during the Miocene Epoch. Nebraska’s Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park, an active research and dig site, provides a window into life around the mid-Miocene 12 million years ago. As […]

Visitors to Australia are often shocked at having to declare an apple or wooden item under our biosecurity policies. Biosecurity policies are used to keep out pest species and diseases. But they’re expensive to uphold and people can question their worth. The good news is, they work – and Antarctica’s strict biosecurity policies prove it. […]

Catalysis is the process where a chemical reaction is sped up. For the first time, scientists have directly observed a catalytic reaction at the atomic scale in real time. The reaction involves the removal of hydrogen atoms from alcohol molecules. In amazing new videos, individual atoms are seen moving and shaking during the reaction. The […]

In India, the snakebite capital of the world where about half of all snakebite deaths occur, a single deadly serpent causes more death and disability than any other. Russell’s viper (Daboia russelii) is found across the Indian subcontinent, but its venom varies wildly between regions. This means that a person bitten in one place will […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover has stumbled upon intriguing rocky outcrops on the rim of Mars’s Jezero crater. The abundance of diverse rocks will help scientists understand the planet’s history, including whether it was habitable in the past and if it is today. Perseverance landed on Jazero crater in 2021 and since January has been analysing and […]

There have been several headlines over the past week about an AI chatbot officially passing the Turing test. These news reports are based on a recent preprint study by two researchers at the University of California San Diego in which four large language models (LLMs) were put through the Turing test. One model – OpenAI’s […]