Yesterday I was thrilled again to MC the BHP Billiton Science Awards presentation function, after attending the student finalists camp across the weekend. Once again both the camp and the presentation were a source of fun and inspiration. We climbed rocks, launched rockets, gazed at stars and ate loads. We also changed tyres and some of us got stuck in lifts. The future of science is in good hands. Congratulations to all the student finalists!

The Adelaide Fringe Festival is on in nearly a month and we’ll be there! There are hundreds of shows during the Festival and this year ‘Pre-Coital – the Science of Dating’ will be one of them. With support from RIAus, we’ll be performing ‘Pre-Coital’ at the Science Exchange on 12-13 March. I’ve never performed in the Fringe before, so I’m excited!

Image by Bedwetting in AustraliaI love this. Researchers from the Queensland Department of Primary Industries & Fisheries are teaching Murray Cod fingerlings how to recognise the bad guys in the wild. It might seem like the sort of thing that you’d expect the baby fish to have an instinct for, but there are now so few of the fish in our river systems that they need a bit of help when they make the move from research facility to river.

The scientists are releasing a fear hormone into the water at the same time as they show the fingerlings predator. In just a few days the young fish have learned to associate predators with fear, which will hopefully give them a survival edge when they graduate out of the tank.

Once widespread throughout the mid-altitude sections of the Murray-Darling Basin, Murray Cod (Maccullochella peelii peelii – how cool is that name!?) are now listed as threatened. Overfishing on a huge scale (sorry – fish pun), habitat destruction through sedimentation, altered river flows and the removal of structural woody habitat (old logs and snags, etc) have resulted in tough times for the Cod. It seems a bit sad that science needs to step in to fix another human mess, but if it works more power to their fins! No word yet on whether the fish have been taught to recognise anglers.

Check out this news story for some footage of the wee codlets.


Photo by ScholzI love kangaroos. Macropods in general are really cool. Their reproductive biology, their fascinating social systems, the efficiency of their movement, they way they scratch themselves. Now researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Free Radical Chemistry and Biotechnology think they have found a whole new reason to love roos – they might be able to repair DNA. Specifically DNA that - left unrepaired – is linked to cancer.

More than 1,700 people die of skin cancer each year in Australia alone, so this work Dr Linda Feketeová and Dr Uta Wille might turn out to be very important. Basically kangaroos (and other organisms, but not humans) produce an enzyme that is able to repair this particular type of DNA damage that has been linked to some skin cancers. Working with scientists from The University of Innsbruck, Austria, Drs Feketeová and Wille are hoping that a greater understanding of exactly how this process happens in kangaroos could lead to treatments or – better yet – preventative measures for humans.

There is there is the possibility of some sort of preventative treatment containing useful enzymes for use after significant sun exposure. Now that does sound ambitious, but let’s face it, we already slop on sun screan as a preventative measure. The idea of some sort of product that acts on a biochemical level is really cool, and this research is a step along that path. Thanks roos!


Image: University of WashingtonMany years ago a friend of mine turned up at our house with a new toy. It was basically a combat game and came complete with head-piece, vest and gun for each of 4 players. The gun “fired” some sort of signal – presumably infra-red – which was detected by sensors on the back, front and shoulders of the vest. As the number of shots inflicted upon you increased, you became more “injured” and eventually dead, just like in countless video games.

We proceeded to run about a local park hiding behind play equipment, hillocks and public toilets and taking shots at each other whenever we could. Other people in the park seemed rather bewildered as we ran, stumbled and giggled our way around them. We were in our twenties and I can only imagine what people thought when they emerged from the public toilet to come face to face with a young man in red goggles holding a gun.

I only remember playing this game once and I don’t think any of us were very good at it, possibly because we were distracted by the cool-ness of the head-up display in the head-piece. It was by this display that each player knew how dead they were becoming and what the team scores were.

Since then (and with added input from various science fiction movies) I have had a special place in my heart (and possibly corneas) for head-up displays. I have been quietly looking forward to the day when mobile phones and perhaps laptops could have their screens replaced by some sort of tiny virtual display. That day is a step closer with the announcement by Babak Parviz and his team at the University of Washington of a new contact lens embedded/imprinted with visual display circuitry. The idea is to produce images that appear to float between 50 cm and 1 metre in front of the user. More . . .