Science In Public
Science writers, communicators, media, training, and public relations
Background information and further images below.
Astronomers from Macquarie University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have used 1339 ‘standard’ stars to map the real shape of our home galaxy in a paper published in Nature Astronomy today.
They found the Milky Way’s disc of stars becomes increasingly ‘warped’ and twisted the further away the stars are from the galaxy’s centre.
High-power lasers have many potential applications: from medical imaging to manufacturing, shooting down drones or space junk, or powering deep space probes. But current laser technologies overheat at high power.
Rich Mildren and his team have developed a technique to make diamond lasers that, in theory, have extraordinary power range. Five years ago, their lasers were just a few watts in power. Now they’ve reached 400 watts, close to the limit for comparable conventional lasers.
Their calculations suggest that their diamond laser technology could handle over a thousand times the current power. They’ve also shown that they can use diamond to focus multiple laser beams into a single beam. And they can create almost any frequency of light.
Diamond is an outstanding optical material and exceptionally good at dissipating heat. But it’s not very good at generating a laser beam as its dense structure makes it difficult to introduce the impurity additives normally needed to amplify light. Until now.
Looking for life, dark energy and the beginning of time
Southern Africa, Australia and NZ are to share the Square Kilometre Array – a giant radio telescope that will consist of thousands of separate radio dishes and other antennae spread across an area the size of a continent.
We’ve pulled together links to our stories and to other sites about SKA. Feel free to use our stories as raw material for your own accounts. [Read more…] about $2 billion telescope good for Africa, Australia and the world
A fly named in honour of Beyoncé; plum extracts as food preservatives; and the crucial role of social media during the 2011 Queensland floods are just some of the interesting stories that emerged from Australian research published in the last week. Find over a dozen other stories below.
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about diabetes in pregnancy, X-ray body scanners, the language gene, those slippery neutrinos, and more…
[Read more…] about Diabetes in pregnancy, X-ray body scanners, the language gene, and those slippery neutrinos
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about solar soldiers, cocaine cravings, nanobots, Venetian acoustics, and more…
[Read more…] about Solar soldiers, cocaine cravings, nanobots, and Venetian acoustics
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about travelling faster than light; ancient proteins; a vaccine for acne; missing planets; and more… [Read more…] about Travelling faster than light, a vaccine for acne and missing planets
What we see in the night sky is only five per cent of the Universe. So what’s the other 95 per cent of the Universe made of – a young physicist has the answers across Tasmania this week.
One of Australia’s leading young physicists will reveal the dark secrets of the Universe in Tasmania this week with a series of school and public talks in Burnie, Launceston, Devonport and Hobart.
Dr Tamara Davis is a L’Oréal Australia Fellow, the 2011 national Women in Physics lecturer, an astrophysicist at the Universities of Queensland and Copenhagen, and good talent. [Read more…] about Revealing the dark side – in Tasmania this week
In 1768 the British Admiralty sent Captain James Cook to the Pacific to monitor the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun. On his way home to England, Cook mapped Australia’s east coast, and claimed New South Wales.
For about 40,000 years before that, the indigenous peoples of Australia had been developing remarkably sophisticated explanations of the workings of the Southern Sky. [Read more…] about Born from astronomy…Creating a future with astronomy
This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about electronic tattoos, bacterial wires, symbiotic threesomes, sensing date-rape drugs, and more… [Read more…] about Electronic tattoos, bacterial wires, and sensing date-rape drugs