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Engineers are looking for better ways of dealing with equipment failures on autonomous spacecraft to make them safer. Autonomous spacecraft, sometimes costing billions of dollars to design and produce, are a now staple of human attempts to explore outer space. These uncrewed vehicles have to traverse millions of kilometres. While they’re up there, there’s very […]

Spiders don’t need a tight-laced corset to achieve their shapely hourglass figures, according to a new PLOS Biology study they’ve got it covered with a single gene. US researchers discovered the gene, which they have named “waist-less”, in the Texas brown tarantula (Aphonopelma hentzi). Waist-less (wsls) is responsible for forming the narrow boundary that separates […]

South of the city of Melbourne, beneath the surface of Port Phillip Bay, lie vast forests of kelp. Just like trees in terrestrial ecosystems, kelp provides shelter and food for a complex living community. And just like our forests on land, the kelp of Port Phillip Bay is struggling with assaults on multiple fronts – […]

A newly discovered doughnut-shaped region thousands of kilometres beneath the surface of the Earth is helping scientists understand the dynamics of our planet’s magnetic field. The discovery, made by Australian National University (ANU) seismologists, is published in the journal Science Advances. Earth, like ogres and onions, is layered. Our planet’s crust – the outer layer […]

Droughts, fires, and floods can have devastating consequences for farmers’ mental health. The suicide rate for Australian farmers is also almost 59 percent higher than the general population, and research has confirmed a link between farmer suicides and extreme weather. Having said that the number of farmers seeking help  for mental health reasons doubled in 2023. With climate […]

Biologists have studied an extreme gymnast of the animal kingdom, watching as it moves so quickly it appears to all but vanish. The globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta) is a small but mighty bug that can backflip more than 60 times higher and 100 times longer than its own body length. This tiny bug grows to […]

Australian engineers have designed a new silicon chip doubling the amount of data which can be transmitted, propelling forward the development of 6G communications. 5G – or 5th-generation technology for mobile networks – was introduced in 2016. Both 4G and 5G operate on frequencies up to the gigahertz (GHz) range. Higher frequencies support faster data transfer. […]

Yihong Du is Professor of Mathematics at the University of New England. He is developing partial differential equation (PDE) theory and techniques to improve the understanding of population phenomena occurring in ecological invasion, disease spreading, krill swarming and elsewhere. “I grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China. During this period, universities accepted students according […]

Non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid which slammed into Earth 66 million years ago – which saw about 75% of plant and animal life wiped out – but other mass extinctions occurred during the “Age of Dinosaurs.” Scientists are now uncovering how a “tag-team” of oceans and continents led to the devastation of […]

A shortage of intravenous (IV) fluids has been causing serious problems for hospitals worldwide. While the Australian government this week announced it had secured 22 million additional bags for the next 6 months, it’s likely the shortage will still be affecting healthcare until at least the end of the year. Several types of IV fluid […]

Flow batteries promise longer-lasting and safer grid energy storage than their lithium-ion counterparts. But, while they don’t need lithium, commercial examples still currently need metals to work, with the highest-performing being vanadium. Now Chinese researchers have developed a class of carbon-based materials that can work in a flow battery. They’ve published their findings in Nature […]

Using a telescope in Western Australia, astronomers in the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program are expanding the hunt for aliens to exciting new frontiers. SETI has teamed up with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) to use the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in the Australian outback to look for clues of alien intelligence […]

New python research could inspire treatments for cardiac fibrosis, a common human heart condition in which heart tissue stiffens. “We found that the python heart is basically able to radically remodel itself, becoming much less stiff and much more energy efficient, in just 24 hours,” says lead researcher Leslie Leinwand, a professor at the University […]

About 20 million years ago, one dugong had a very rough day indeed. The ancient sea cow’s fossil shows evidence of bite marks not just from one nightmarish predator, but two – a crocodile and a shark. Discovered in northwestern Venezuela, analysis of the fossil of the dugongine sea cow belonging to the extinct genus Culebratherium […]

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has made the highest resolution observations from the surface of Earth as it gears up to take images of black holes in distant galaxies. The new results have made crisper images of the supermassive black holes at the centres of the Messier 87 and Milky Way galaxies (the black […]

Planting trees has long been viewed as a cost-effective and useful method of helping offset the ravages of climate change. After all, trees (and other plants) take planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air and convert it to wood, roots, and other forms of carbon-containing biomass. But what happens when climate change causes large portions […]

Three mortuary houses in Norway dating to the Iron Age and Viking Age are slowly revealing ancient funerary rituals. The sites were discovered in 2019 and 2020 when a road was being constructed in the village of Vinjeøra, central Norway. They date between 500 and 950 CE. Excavations confirmed a pre-Christian cemetery, first seen in […]

A large new Nature Human Behaviour study has found that non-cognitive emotional and social skills, which are known to be as important as intelligence in determining children’s academic success, become more important as children age. The research highlights the importance of continuing to foster the development of non-cognitive skills during primary and secondary education. “We’ve found […]

Guppies exposed to antidepressants over a 5-year period grow up with huge changes in their behaviour and reproduction, according to results from a lengthy study by Australian and Italian researchers. The researchers say their findings, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, have serious implications for pharmaceutical contamination in waterways. Medicines have become common pollutants, […]

Researchers in the US believe they have found the mechanism which prevents anti-herpes drugs from working in some people. With repeated use there is a risk that antiviral drugs, which are usually helpful in treating herpes simplex virus (HSV), can become ineffective if the virus changes and acquires resistance to the treatment. HSV-1, the main […]

Between 97% and 99.99% of scientists agree that humans are causing climate change and new research suggests that telling non-scientists about this consensus may help strengthen their beliefs. A study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, draws on an online survey of 10,527 people across 27 countries. Participants, who were recruited via social media, had been […]

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted 6 new “rogue worlds” in a young star-forming nebula about 1,000 light-years away. Rogue worlds are objects with planet-like masses that traverse space alone, untethered to a star. The lightest and most intriguing of these 6 new worlds is surrounded by a disc of space dust the […]

Nearly 1.5km underground in the US state of South Dakota, scientists have narrowed the search for dark matter particles using the world’s most sensitive detector. Astronomical observations suggest that gravity around galaxies only makes sense if there is more matter than the objects we can see. In fact, this elusive dark matter, should be 5 […]

An international team of researchers has made a manganese-based lithium-ion battery, which performs as well as conventional, costlier cobalt-nickel batteries in the lab. They’ve published their discovery in ACS Central Science. Lithium is not the only precious metal involved in making batteries. Lithium-ion battery cathodes typically use cobalt and nickel, which both present their own […]