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Drones are everywhere — from pizza delivery to terrorism, civilian medicine to warfare — particularly over the last three years with the Ukraine conflict. Now project funding is enabling the development of heavy-fuel cargo drones for deployment to potential Northern Australian battlefields to carry medical supplies which its designers say will: “…revolutionise healthcare in modern […]

Dolphins, playful, elegant and approachable, are loved worldwide but despite these interactions with humans – as attractive as it is – it puts them at risk. The South Australian government declared an area of a busy port and waterway a dolphin sanctuary in 2005. Researcher Mike Bossley says dolphin numbers declined a decade ago but […]

Australian marine scientists are using an ingenious, if peculiar method to extract semen from wild male leopard sharks. It isn’t an experiment. It’s a bid to boost the species’ numbers and genetic diversity through artificial insemination. The technique relies on “tonic immobility”, also known as animal hypnosis, a reflex seen in a wide variety of […]

The earliest evidence that humans inhabited rainforests has been found in Africa, a surprising find which pushes human settlement in these habitats much further back than previously thought. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved about 300,000 years ago in Africa. The ecological and environmental circumstances in which our species evolved are still not well understood. It […]

Fish cognitive abilities have been underrated for years, even the butt of jokes. But slowly researchers are coming to understand how they think and feel. A new observational study has revealed that Siamese fighting fish are often kept in containers which are a quarter the size they need to thrive. Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens) […]

A new data tool is expected to allow the residents of one Australian city to work out how much heat their neighbourhood receives, and find ways of lowering heat stress. The Darwin Living Lab Portal designed to help make Australia’s tropical capital, in the Northern Territory (NT), a more liveable, sustainable and resilient city. “The […]

Asteroid 2024 YR4 has made international headlines since its discovery in December last year because of its (very low) chance of hitting Earth sometime in the next decade. Initially, NASA scientists predicted that the 40–90m asteroid had a 1.3% chance of hitting Earth in 2032. That probability increased to about 3% earlier this month thanks […]

NASA’s latest space telescope, SPHEREx, scheduled for launch on 28 February in tandem with another mission called PUNCH, has been hailed for both the colour range of the images it will produce and its ability to “peer back” to the first second after the Big Bang. What the telescope will actually do, however, is somewhat […]

The movement of massive glaciers during global ice ages contributed to the rise of complex life, new research reveals. By analysing zircon crystals in ancient rocks, geologists found that as glaciers flowed across the Earth’s surface, they carved deep into the crust and released key minerals from below. These minerals were later flushed out to […]

Australian scientists have identified 2 new species of whirring tree frogs in northern Queensland, which are already being pushed to the limits of their habitable ranges by the impacts of climate change. According to Michael Mahony, emeritus professor at the University of Newcastle and co-author of a study describing the new species, “the frogs are […]

As global immunologists race to get ahead of bird flu there’s some good news from Australia where scientists have found that molecules on the inside of highly pathogenic influenza A H5N1 virus could be promising targets for human vaccines. A new study found these proteins remain largely unchanged among different viruses, which suggests that vaccines […]

There’s more evidence, if it was required, that Mars once hosted cool water in large volumes, which would have been an environment well-suited for microbial life to evolve on the Red Planet. Two new pieces of research released this week dovetail nicely with a third which describes a new method to detect fossils of microbial […]

Is the evolution of intelligence partly driven by love? A new study involving tiny fish swimming in mazes suggests that smarter fish have a better chance of mating and reproducing. “Evolution of animal intelligence has long been thought to have been driven by natural selection,” says lead author Ivan Vinogradov, a biologist at the Australian […]

Analysis of ancient DNA has shed light on the origins and diversity of the Hun empire, revealing far-reaching genetic ties. The Huns suddenly appeared in Europe in the 370s CE. The influential but short-lived empire extended from Europe to the Caucasus and Central Asia until the 6th century. As world-leading historian of Central Asia Denis […]

A recent analysis of global breast cancer rates has found that, while Australia and New Zealand substantially decreased the disease’s mortality rate over the past decade, the countries’ breast cancer incidence rates were the highest in the world in 2022. For every 100,000 women living in Australia and New Zealand, 100.3 cases of breast cancer […]

In the not very distant past, the Arabian Peninsula was likely a savannah, with wolves, lions and leopards. That’s the conclusion from new research into ancient rainfall patterns in Arabia going back thousands of years, which reveals the region was much wetter than today. The findings raise questions about the region’s preparedness amid growing urbanisation. […]

You might be surprised to hear that there’s anything “inside” a proton. But scientists have mapped the forces between the quarks inside protons in unprecedented detail, adding to the understanding of fundamental characteristics of the universe and potentially leading to future proton-based technologies. Atoms are made of electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are […]

Across south-west Australia, Aboriginal peoples have long built lizard traps by propping up rocks on granite outcrops. Now, it’s been found that these traps are not just culturally important but ecologically important too, providing reptiles with habitat and vital shade. “Granite outcrops are ancient, biodiverse, and culturally significant ecosystems that are at risk from contemporary […]

NASA will soon launch a new telescope which it says will create the “most colourful” map of the cosmos ever made. The SPHEREx telescope is relatively small but will provide a humongous amount of knowledge in its short two-year mission. It is an infrared telescope designed to take spectroscopic images – ones that measure individual […]

Climate change is forcing sea turtles to nest earlier. Researchers monitoring nesting green and loggerhead turtles on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus have discovered that they are returning to their regular nesting spots earlier each year to compensate for rising temperatures. “Migratory marine species are some of the most endangered species globally, and among this […]

The threat of climate change has spurred the UN’s Green Climate Fund to provide a grant for 14 Pacific Island nations to purchase fish aggregation devices and other tools to manage food security risks associated with future tuna catches. The grant programme is worth almost $250m (US$156.8m). A third of the world’s tuna catch comes […]

When you wake up from a dream, is your brain full of vivid details that you recount to your friends and family? Or does the memory slip away by breakfast time? Our ability to remember dreams upon waking is called dream recall. But the factors that influence this ability are little understood. Now, new research […]

Chemical engineers have discovered a greener way to make an industrial chemical used to produce many everyday products – from plastics and textiles to antifreeze and disinfectants. The manufacture of ethylene oxide is estimated to be a US$40 billion per year global market. But its current production process requires the use of toxic chlorine gas, […]

Glaciers worldwide have lost a staggering 6,542 billion tonnes of ice in just 23 years – contributing 18mm to the global rise in sea levels and reducing vital supplies of freshwater. “To put this in perspective, the … [water] lost in one single year amounts to what the entire global population consumes in 30 years, […]