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Neuroscientists in the US have created a device capable of decoding brain activity and translating it into speech so quickly, it almost enables a person who cannot speak to hold conversations. They’ve tested the device in clinical trial of a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who lost the ability to speak after a stroke almost two […]

A review of research into the fossil fuel industry has led an interdisciplinary group of scientists to warn that the environment, future liveability and people’s health are at risk if urgent action is not taken to stop carbon emissions. The US-focused review has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Oxford Open Climate Change. The […]

Shark loss can have major effects on their ecosystems say researchers studying great white sharks in  South Africa and reefs in northern Australia. “The removal of a top predator leads to cascading effects on the marine food web” says Dr Neil Hammerschlag of the Shark Research foundation. Hammerchlag, then at the University of Miami, Florida, […]

On March 26 NSW Health issued an alert advising people to be vigilant for signs of measles after an infectious person visited Sydney Airport and two locations in western New South Wales. The person recently returned from Southeast Asia where there are active measles outbreaks in several countries including Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. The NSW […]

Concussion during childhood – even mild trauma – can jeopardise future educational success, according to a study conducted at Tampere University in Finland. “A mild, single concussion is often considered a relatively harmless event, but our research suggests that it can have long-term effects on learning and cognitive abilities,” says Julius Möttönen, Doctoral researcher and neurology […]

Seabed mining companies want to harvest polymetallic nodules from the deep ocean floor to access critical metals like copper, cobalt and nickel for the green revolution. But how will mined sites recover? Researchers lead by the U.K.’s National Oceanography Centre, have re-explored a 5000m deep test-mine from 1979 to shed light on this question.  The […]

A new copper-tantalum-lithium alloy has been shown to remain incredibly strong even at high temperatures, making it one of the most resilient copper-based materials ever created. The material’s “exceptional thermal stability and high-temperature mechanical properties” will have applications for aerospace, defence and industrial applications. It is described in a paper in the journal Science. Martin Harmer, […]

The use of information technology (IT) has significant environmental and social impacts, including human mortality from climate change. One striking example is the carbon emissions and impacts associated with digital communication. To quantify the human cost of carbon-emitting technology, researchers use the 1,000-ton rule that estimates that for every 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide released […]

Australians were outraged this month when an Instagram “influencer” named Sam Jones picked up a wild wombat joey and separated it from its mother. A video of the action went viral. Jones left the country, leaving behind comments from many people who felt her behaviour was unacceptable. She later explained her actions, and apologised. Associate […]

Sue is an inside-out, legless, headless wonder. Apologies to any people named Sue. The ‘Sue’ is the fossil of a creature which lived 440 million years ago. The fossil’s discovery is announced in a new paper published in the journal Palaeontology which identifies it as belonging to a new species, Keurbos susanae. The organism is […]

In a surprising finding researchers say energy from waste (EfW) facilities in some parts of the world may emit more carbon per unit of electricity output than coal-fired power plants. The researchers from China and Australia, led by PhD student Ben Liu, analysed 20 years of data on waste used, energy produced and carbon emitted […]

Plant diseases are a major threat to global food security, causing about 20-30% losses in crop production each year. Climate change is worsening the problem, allowing certain pathogens to persist in new places and evolve faster to overcome plant resistance. One fungal pathogen has caused epidemics of stem rust disease in wheat across the world. […]

You might know South Australia’s iconic Coorong from the famous Australian children’s book, Storm Boy, set around this coastal lagoon. This internationally important wetland is sacred to the Ngarrindjeri people and a haven for migratory birds. The lagoon is the final stop for the Murray River’s waters before they reach the sea. Tens of thousands […]

In an event mirroring Hollywood, palaeontologists have uncovered a kind of parasitic wasp preserved in amber which lived almost 100 million years ago. Its unique parasitic behaviour is more similar to a plant than an insect. Viewers of Steven Spielberg’s classic Jurassic Park (1993) may recall the opening scene where miners uncover a mosquito trapped […]

Physicists have produced a superconductor which could help achieve room-temperature operations which would be useful in applications like medicine, transportation and lossless power transmission. The new California Institute of Technology superconductor has stronger superconductivity in some areas and weaker in others. Superconductivity is a quantum state where metals can conduct electricity with no resistance. It […]

Lepidopterist Michael Braby is sitting in his lab, peering at a photo of a butterfly specimen on his computer screen – just as he’s done countless times before. He has no inkling that he’s about to discover Australia’s greatest taxonomic fraud. But he has noticed something odd about this particular butterfly, a Flame Hairstreak (Pseudalmenus […]

Most brain surgery requires doctors to remove part of the skull to access hard-to-reach areas or tumours. It’s invasive, risky, and it takes a long time for the patient to recover. We have developed new, tiny robotic surgical tools that may let surgeons perform “keyhole surgery” on the brain. Despite their small size, our tools […]

A US advocacy group has called into question the ethics of an Australian study which assessed the impact of combined mild traumatic brain injury and non-fatal strangulation in rats, saying there was “no clinical or scientific need” for the experiments.

Archaeologists have used new techniques to study the ancient equivalents of modern kitchen tools used by Native Americans thousands of years ago. Today, we have the mortar, pestle and cutting board. Ancient peoples around the world used to use manos and metates. A metate is a large, flat stone or depression ground into a rocky […]

As the US and other major donors slash HIV funding, experts say decades of progress hang in the balance, and there is risk of a global resurgence of the AIDS crisis. New modelling from the Burnet Institute In Melbourne in Australia predicts international funding cuts for HIV assistance could result in 10.75 million new HIV […]

A breakthrough imaging technique is transforming the treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy by enabling doctors to pinpoint elusive brain lesions. At Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge in the UK, ultra-powerful MRI scanners are now identifying subtle differences in brain tissue that were previously undetectable, prompting a reassessment of treatment plans for 58% of patients in a recent […]

Australia’s coal industry is again facing questions about methane output, this time after the UN’s environment agency showed emissions at a Queensland mine may be 3 to 8 times higher than reported. The mine under question, Hail Creek in the Bowen Basin in Queensland, is owned by Glencore Mining, which hotly disputes the findings. Fugitive […]

Researchers in China say they performed the first transplant of a genetically modified pig liver into a brain-dead human recipient, publishing their results in the peer-reviewed journal, Nature. A liver transplant is the only cure for end-stage liver disease, which is responsible for an estimated 2 million deaths per year worldwide. But thousands of patients […]

Physicists at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia have found a way to use muonic atoms to better understand the magnetic structure of the nucleus. Science has known about atoms for about 200 years when English chemist John Daltan developed the modern theory of atoms. In fact, the concept of atoms is much older […]