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Saving young lives by the million wins national honour for Ruth Bishop

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Presentation 8.30pm, Wednesday 30 October, in the Mural Hall, Parliament House, Canberra

HD Australian and international vision available

Saving young lives by the million wins national honour for Ruth Bishop

Because of the rotavirus Ruth Bishop found in Melbourne babies in 1973:

  • 10,000 Australian kids won’t go to hospital this year
  • half a million young lives could  be saved every year as the Gates Foundation and GAVI roll out rotavirus vaccines to the world’s poorest 30 countries by 2015
  • a new Australian rotavirus vaccine is being trialled in New Zealand and Indonesia.

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Coral chemicals protect against warming oceans

EMBARGO LIFTED: 4am AEDT, Thursday 24 October 2013

Nature paper reveals coral animals produce the ‘smell of the ocean’ – influencing cloud formation and protecting themselves against rising seawater temperatures. 

Australian marine scientists have found the first evidence that coral itself may play an important role in regulating local climate.

They have discovered that the coral animal—not just its algal symbiont—makes an important sulphur-based molecule with properties to assist it in many ways, ranging from cellular protection in times of heat stress to local climate cooling by encouraging clouds to form.

These findings have been published in the prestigious weekly science journal Nature.

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Celebrating Australia’s best at the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science

Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science: Wednesday 30 October, Canberra 

Later this month, the Prime Minister will announce the winners of the 2013 Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science at a formal dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House, Canberra.

We’re helping again with the media program for the prizes, and we’ll have profiles, print-quality photos and broadcast-quality footage available for journalists.

If you need to know who’s winning this year drop me a line on niall@scienceinpublic.com.au. We welcome the opportunity to brief longer lead-time programs and publications.

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A human systems biology centre for Sydney

Ramaciotti invests $1 million in a new approach to understanding human disease

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“We’ll be able to ask individual immune cells where they’ve been and who they’ve been talking to…”

The University of Sydney and The Centenary Institute will establish the Ramaciotti Centre for Human Systems Biology in 2014 following the announcement earlier this evening of the $1 million Ramaciotti Biomedical Research Award.

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RIKEN and JSPS visits, sharing coral genomes, grants for Europe visits: EMBL Australia in October

In this month’s newsletter:

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Prostate cancer’s Achilles’ heel uncovered

‘The Holst effect’ opens up new therapeutic options for prostate cancer treatment.

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24 September 2013

A team of researchers from Sydney, Vancouver, Adelaide and Brisbane are getting closer to a new treatment for prostate cancer that relies on starving tumours of essential nutrients they need to grow.

In work just published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Dr Jeff Holst, from Sydney’s Centenary Institute and his colleagues have shown they can slow the growth of the cancer by blocking the proteins which pump the amino acid leucine into tumour cells.

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