Communicating with Wild Life
We hear a lot about science communication these days. More and more, scientists are attempting to convey something of the fascination and wonder of their work to a general audience. But imagine for a...
View ArticleNo standing back
‘Australian scientists are wimps. They spend all their time working away in the background, investigating some topic that nobody else in the world understands. They might make a contribution to our...
View ArticleA passion for physics
Funnily, much of what we call ‘big science’ is concerned with observing very small entities. Large, expensive machines are built to harness the unimaginable forces necessary to open the sub-atomic...
View ArticleA model scientist
A relief map is a three-dimensional model that shows the features of a particular region, like mountains and valleys, to scale. You’ve probably all seen one at some stage, perhaps you’ve even built...
View ArticleFrom beetles to a Nobel Prize
Early this century in the Victorian country town of Terang, the young son of a local bank manager was often seen wandering alone through the countryside, on the look-out for beetles to add to his...
View ArticleA war against disease
Amidst the carnage of Gallipoli, a young stretcher-bearer named Esmond Keogh struggled under enemy fire to drag his comrades to medical aid. Twenty-five years and another war later, Keogh was again far...
View ArticleLife in ancient corals
Dorothy Hill’s fascination for corals was sparked not by the beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, but by a visit to the small Queensland town of Mundubbera, about 160 km inland. There, in the late 1920s,...
View ArticleThe many battles of Jock Marshall
In January 1945, a small Australian Army reconnaissance unit pushed through the jungles of New Guinea, narrowly avoiding the enemy Japanese forces. With the assistance of the local inhabitants, the...
View ArticlePolitical fallout
The atomic bomb is deployed more often as a symbol than a weapon. No discussion of the ‘dangers’ of science is complete without it. But the accompanying stereotype of scientists blinkered to the...
View ArticleLooking at the sun
From Wallal, in Australia’s far north-west, to Goondiwindi, near the New South Wales-Queensland border, local and international scientists watched the sun and waited. A total solar eclipse was due on...
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