Guest Work

Video games could teach spatial skills lost to a society dependent on devices

Guest Author • Jan 22, 2019

• map reading,
• maps,
• spatial skills,
• topography,
• video games

Lloyd White, University of Wollongong Video games have long been criticised for encouraging violence and antisocial behaviour. And parents often express concern that they could have detrimental effects on their child’s learning abilities. But research has shown that off-the-shelf video games can also aid learning – particularly when it comes to the development of … Read More

Making New Year’s resolutions personal could actually make them stick

Guest Author • Jan 07, 2019

• new years resolutions,
• Psychology

Bernice Plant, Monash University If you feel you consistently fail at your New Year’s resolutions, you are not alone. Despite our good intentions, we’re pretty poor at changing our own behaviour. We continue to smoke, eat or drink too much, and exercise too little, all of which affect our health and well-being. In trying to change behaviour … Read More

Radium revealed: 120 years since Curies found the most radioactive substance on the planet

Guest Author • Dec 26, 2018

• Discovery,
• Marie Curie,
• Nobel Prize,
• radioactive,
• radium

Stephen Mansell, Heriot-Watt University Scientific discovery can be achingly slow, but it was moving swiftly in the 1890s. X-rays had been discovered in Germany just a few days before Christmas in 1895. Several months later, while researching these new X-rays, the French physicist Henri Becquerel accidentally discovered another new mysterious type of ray when he … Read More

2

Earthrise, a photo that changed the world

Guest Author • Dec 24, 2018

• conservation,
• Earthrise,
• Environment,
• NASA

Dr Simon Torok, University of Melbourne; Colleen Boyle, RMIT University; Jenny Gray, University of Melbourne; Julie Arblaster, Monash University; Lynette Bettio, Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Rachel Webster, University of Melbourne, and Ruth Morgan, Monash University December 24 is the 50th anniversary of Earthrise, arguably one of … Read More

What’s wrong with Huawei, and why are countries banning the Chinese telecommunications firm?

Guest Author • Dec 21, 2018

• 5g,
• China,
• huawei,
• telecommunications

Frank J. Cilluffo, Auburn University and Sharon L. Cardash, Auburn University The Chinese telecommunications company Huawei is under scrutiny around the globe over concerns that its close ties with the Chinese government present national security threats to the U.S., Europe and allied countries. Huawei, which denies all the allegations against it, is “the … Read More

What’s your beef? How ‘carbon labels’ can steer us towards environmentally friendly food choices

Guest Author • Dec 18, 2018

• beef,
• climate change,
• Diet,
• emissions

Adrian R. Camilleri, University of Technology Sydney; Dalia Patino-Echeverri, Duke University, and Rick Larrick, Duke University What did you have for dinner last night? Might you have made a different choice if you had a simple way to compare the environmental impacts of different foods? Most people do not recognise the environmental impact of … Read More

Seeds of Change

Guest Author • Dec 17, 2018

• climate change,
• COP24,
• IPCC

Bronwyn Hayward The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change deliberately left making decisions about what to do to achieve change up to governments and relies on citizens to press their governments to do more. This was a deliberate decision so that diverse governments could at least agree climate change was a problem (a first vital step in international change), but … Read More

2

NZ is home to species found nowhere else but biodiversity losses match global crisis

Guest Author • Dec 06, 2018

• Biodiversity,
• conservation,
• deforestation,
• invasive predators,
• land use change,
• native birds

Robert McLachlan, Massey University and Steven Alexander Trewick, Massey University The recently released 2018 Living Planet report is among the most comprehensive global analyses of biodiversity yet. It is based on published data on 4,000 out of the 70,000 known species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Rather than listing species that have gone … Read More

8

How To Make Friends And Influence People (By Being A Great Session Chair)

Guest Author • Dec 03, 2018

• academic conferences,
• conference,
• question,
• speakers

Dr Lucy Stewart Chairing talk sessions at conferences can be a weird gig. It’s a skill we expect people to learn by observation, but we rarely talk about how to do it well. Instead, we bolt our lunch while grousing about yet another overrun session, as if it had been caused by uncontrollable forces of nature. But that’s … Read More

What He said

Guest Author • Nov 30, 2018

• bioethics,
• ethics,
• gene editing

Peter Mills, Assistant Director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics I arrived in Hong Kong on Monday lunchtime for the second ‘international summit’ on genome editing amid stories circulating that gene-edited twin girls had been born to a Chinese couple. The editing, it was claimed, had targeted the CCR5 gene, with the aim of introducing a variant that confers immunity to HIV … Read More