Guest Work

An extragalactic mystery: Where do high-energy cosmic rays come from?

Guest Author • Apr 24, 2012

by David Jones, Postdoctoral Fellow in High Energy Astro-particle physics at Max Planck Institut fur Kemphysik New findings from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole have brought us closer to understanding the origin of these strange ’rays’ — charged particles that originate somewhere beyond our planet and that reach Earth with varying energy … Read More

Videogames, aggression, Anders Breivik — let’s not join the dots

Guest Author • Apr 23, 2012

by Adam Ruch, PhD candidate, videogame studies at MacQuarie University ’Violent videogames cause people to become violent in real life’. It’s a familiar refrain for anyone who has read a newspaper in the last 15 years. Today, the media reporting surrounding the trial of accused mass-murderer Anders Breivik has dusted off this old chestnut to … Read More

Funding giant toughens support for open publishing

Guest Author • Apr 11, 2012

by Justin Norrie, editor, The Conversation One of the world’s biggest science funding bodies will strengthen its support for free online publishing by sanctioning errant academics who take its grants but publish in subscriber-only journals. The Wellcome Trust, Britain’s largest non-governmental funding body for medical research and the world’s second largest after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, … Read More

Rise of the machines: how computers could control our lives

Guest Author • Mar 15, 2012

by Professor Tony Walsh, research director at NICTA (National ICT Australia Ltd), Australia’s Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence Predicting the future is a risky business. If it wasn’t, we’d all be very wealthy by now. The Danish physicist Neils Bohr famously opined: ’Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future’. Despite this, … Read More

Truth or lie? Can MRI help scientists read our minds?

Guest Author • Mar 09, 2012

By Dr Donna Rose Addis, Centre for Brain Research, University of Auckland It’s the slogan of a new game show on TV3, but can science help us tell the two apart? Mind Reading has always been thought of as a superhuman skill, but fMRI technology is bringing us ever closer to this goal. So-called ‘functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging’ tracks blood … Read More

Antarctic report – wrap up

Peter Griffin • Feb 28, 2012

A busy last morning at Mario Zuchelli Station involved packing our pile of gear onto the back of a tractor trailer for the trip up the hill to the local airfield to be picked up by a Twin Otter aircraft. These planes work in remote conditions throughout the world. Our flight was the crew’s last flight of the season … Read More

Antarctic report – Berg-tastic!

Guest Author • Feb 15, 2012

Our last full day at Mario Zuchelli Station took sublime to new levels.  We had the opportunity to use their coastal vessel, The Skua, for a few hours. It was great to look over the boat.  There are no small boat operations out of Scott Base, nor have there needed to be for there has been a distinct lack … Read More

When doc don’t know

John Pickering • Feb 04, 2012

I had my 13th general anaesthetic yesterday for the same thing!  It was, yet another, 50/50 call by the surgeon as to whether this new procedure would work.  50/50 calls are not unusual in medicine – to the contrary they are probably the norm.  Most of us have had the experience of having a doctor … Continue reading … Read More