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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 […]

While modern medicine allows us to manage or cure previously untreatable diseases and conditions, pharmaceuticals and their metabolites have untold consequences when they make their way into the environment. “Pharmaceutical pollutants are an emerging global issue, with over 900 different substances having now been detected in waterways around the world,” says Dr Marcus Michelangeli of […]

A jawbone found in Taiwan has been identified as belonging to a Denisovan. The fossil has altered perceptions about the ancient human species. It is the first time a Denisovan fossil has been confidently identified outside central Asia. Denisovans were first discovered in 2010. So far, only a few fossils have been confirmed using molecular […]

Large galaxies like our own, the Milky Way, are often orbited by smaller satellite galaxies that buzz about like bees around a hive.  The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and its larger companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), are some of our closest dwarf galaxies. They can even be seen with the naked eye in the […]

Jumping on a pogo stick isn’t as easy as it looks, and it looks quite difficult to begin with. But robotics engineers seem to have identified the issues to create a hopping robot. Their robot, which is smaller than a human thumb, can bound across ice, wet surfaces, and uneven soil. It can even hop around […]

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope continues to break new scientific ground despite being usurped by the more advanced James Webb Space Telescope. A new study published in Nature reveals images from Hubble which are the first to show ongoing mergers of star clusters near the centres, or nuclei, of dwarf galaxies. Dwarf galaxies are the most […]

A massive increase in solar power generation capacity is already putting Australia on the fast track to a 100 percent renewable energy future. An academic living in cold Canberra retired his gas heaters a few years ago and installed electric heat pumps for space and water heating. His gas bill went to zero. He also […]

Global restoration efforts are failing to protect coral reefs from the effects of climate change, pollution and overfishing, says an international team of researchers The report comes as Australia’s coral reefs have been bleached yet again, for the sixth time in nine years. Coral reef bleaching is a global phenomenon, its effects felt not only […]

Researchers have created a “lab-in-a-tube” tuberculosis test, with all the ingredients necessary to detect the disease in under an hour. Costing just AUD$4.3 (US$2.70) per sample, the lab-in-a-tube tuberculosis (LIT-TB) test may fill the critical need for easy-to-administer tests in low- and middle-income countries. “There’s increasing recognition of the need for affordable, rapid diagnostic tests […]

Palaeontologists have analysed the fossil of a complete 3.5m-long ichthyosaur which was preserved so well that it includes the animal’s last meal as well as its unborn baby. Nicknamed “Fiona”, the marine reptile’s story is detailed in a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Fiona was airlifted in 5 pieces from the glacial […]

Spanish engineers have made the world’s first holograms that you can touch and manipulate, bringing science fiction into reality. The achievement is detailed in a paper posted on the HAL open research archive. “What we see in films and call holograms are typically volumetric displays,” says first author Elodie Bouzbib from the Public University of […]

Australian researchers are taking the final steps towards being the first in the world to take pancreatic islet cells from genetically modified pigs and transplant them into human patients. Their goal: to cure type 1 diabetes (T1D). The culmination of decades of work was supported by multiple National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants […]

About 66 million years ago, the history of Earth changed forever. A 10km-wide asteroid struck Earth, wiping out 75% of all life. This event marked the end of the Cretaceous period and the “Age of Dinosaurs.” With the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, our mammal ancestors were able to come out of the shadows and […]

Korean researchers have developed a new method that might one day restore vision to patients with retinal disease. “Our goal is to provide a solution for patients at risk of blindness who lack proper treatment options,” says Eun Jung Lee, from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Lee and team identified that […]

On April 1, 2025, the Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC introduced the world’s most advanced microchip: the 2 nanometre (2nm) chip. Mass production is expected for the second half of the year, and TSMC promises it will represent a major step forward in performance and efficiency – potentially reshaping the technological landscape. Microchips are the foundation of […]

Swedish researchers may have helped to prevent premature deaths from Sudden Arrhythmic Death syndrome (SADS). Exploration of a decade-long patient database has revealed what was happening in the lead-up to the sudden unexplained deaths of 900 young people from SADS. About 32,000 Australians go into Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) each year, Professor Jamie Vandenberg, Head […]

Researchers have revealed the Arabian Peninsula’s green past. Though a desert today, ancient Arabia had lakes and rivers due to high rainfall. Geological evidence even points to a mass flooding event which carved out a 150km-long valley. The research comes out of fieldwork done in the Rub’ al Khali, or “Empty Quarter” – one of […]

Scientists have recently taken unorthodox approaches to tackling the global challenge of infectious human disease, looking to artificial sweetener to address antibiotic resistance, and chewing gum to stop the oral spread of viruses. The clinical grade chewing gum was tested on a “mastication simulator,” with promising results. But it is the surprise of saccharine likely […]

Rising seas are already affecting coastal communities in Aotearoa New Zealand. On a global average, the sea level is now 18 centimetres higher than it was in 1900, and the annual rate of increase has been accelerating to currently 4.4 millimetres per year. This may not seem much, but it is already amplifying the impact […]

While most of the planet has warmed over the past 40 years, scientists have observed an unusual cooling trend in the surface waters of the Southern Ocean, contrary to predictions and modelling. A recent study published in Geophysical Research Letter has found that underestimated movement of fresh water into the Southern Ocean – called freshwater […]

In some regions of the world, including parts of Africa, Asia, Americas and Australia, the conditions are right for megastorms to form. These weather systems, known as “Mesoscale Convective Systems” (MSCs), span thousands of square kilometres and are accompanied by extreme weather conditions, such as destructive winds, lightning, flash flooding and hail. According to Dr […]

A new archaeological discovery at Kach Kouch in Morocco challenges the long-held belief that the Maghreb (north-west Africa) was an empty land before the arrival of the Phoenicians from the Middle East in around 800 BCE. It reveals a much richer and more complex history than previously thought. Everything found at the site indicates that […]

As the material left the curing oven, the Alt. Leather team knew it had worked – what they held in their hands looked and felt just like leather. That moment marked a breakthrough for the Melbourne-based start-up, which has developed a revolutionary, 100 per cent bio-based alternative to traditional leather. Made from agricultural waste and natural fibres, […]

An extremely rare binary system involving high-mass white dwarf stars just 150 light-years away are on a collision course. When they collide, the type 1a supernova explosion will be 10 times brighter than the Moon. The discovery of the doomed pair is described in a paper published in Nature Astronomy. Type 1a supernovae are referred […]

Researchers in Germany have recreated Moon dust to show that the lunar soil can be used to make glass for solar panels to power future human habitats on the Moon. The production of solar cells from Moon dust is described in a paper published in the Cell Press journal Device. The team showed that the […]

Picture an ocean world so deep and dark it feels like another planet – where creatures glow and life survives under crushing pressure. This is the midwater zone, a hidden ecosystem that begins 650 feet (200 meters) below the ocean surface and sustains life across our planet. It includes the twilight zone and the midnight […]

Many soldiers carry the psychological weight of taking another life — but is killing always an unbearable burden, or can some soldiers rationalise it and find ways to cope? A study of more than 14,600 Norwegian Armed Forces veterans suggests that killing in combat is not always detrimental to a soldier’s mental health. Context appears […]

Researchers have made significant headway towards determining the genetic risk factors driving spina bifida, a birth defect which can cause severe disability. The findings of a Nature study open new avenues to diagnose, treat, and potentially even prevent the condition, which effects roughly 1 in every 3,000-10,000 births. “Our research identifies specific steps in embryogenesis […]