Article archive

Going, going, gone: the where and why of memory erasure

09/12/2013 17:26
By Jee Hyun Kim If you could erase your memories, which ones would you choose? As a neuroscientist, one of my raisons d’etre is to achieve, in a way, some form of memory erasure, especially for individuals that suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety or drug addiction. Each of these...

Explainer: quadruple-helix DNA

09/12/2013 17:25
By Friederike Mansfeld, Monash University DNA has been called many things: the king of molecules, the blueprint of life, and less excitingly but perhaps more accurately, the genetic code. DNA’s double helix, discovered in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick, is one of the most recognisable...

Meet the largest structure ever discovered in our galaxy

09/12/2013 17:24
By Ettore Carretti, CSIRO It’s not every day that you discover a huge structure that stretches more than half way across the sky. But this exact thing happened to the international team of astronomers I was leading, as we pored over observations taken with the CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope...

Explainer: quarks

09/12/2013 17:22
By Takashi Kubota, University of Melbourne One of humanity’s eternal questions surrounds what we are fundamentally made of. Many ancient philosophies believed in a set of classical elements: from water, air, fire and earth of ancient Greeks; to water, fire, earth, metal and wood of East Asian...

Explainer: what is a gene?

09/12/2013 17:18
By Merlin Crossley There’s a very confusing exchange in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” [Read more] ...  

Male, female – ah, what’s the difference?

09/12/2013 17:16
By Paco Garcia-Gonzalez,  Damian Dowling, and Magdalena Nystrand What is a male? What is a female? If you were to conduct a survey, most people would probably have little difficulty expressing some fundamental differences. After all, we learn to tell boys apart from girls in early childhood....

An open book: the next chapter of ‘reading’ dreams

09/12/2013 17:14
By Russell Conduit, Monash University You may have read last week that a team of researchers has developed, for the first time, a way to detect the contents of people’s dreams. But what can we glean from this research? [Read more] ...  

Bees, pesticides and … what are chief scientists for?

09/12/2013 17:12
By Peter Ellerton Without good advice, governments are in extreme danger of creating erroneous or damaging public policy. So it’s a serious matter when a government science adviser is accused of ignoring scientific evidence in favour of engaging in political machinations. [Read more] ...  

Explainer: what is intuition?

09/12/2013 17:10
 By Ben Newell The word intuition is derived from the Latin intueor – to see; intuition is thus often invoked to explain how the mind can “see” answers to problems or decisions in the absence of explicit reasoning – a “gut reaction”. [Read more] ...  

Explainer: what are stem cells?

09/12/2013 17:05
By Merlin Crossley In a paper published in Cell yesterday, scientists from the US and Thailand have, for the first time, successfully produced embryonic stem cells from human skin cells. That sounds interesting, but what are stem cells and where do they come from? If you take a limb from a rose...
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