Sep
12
2018
At the right time every season, Australians gather at whale-watching points along the east and west coasts, or take to the water in boats and canoes in the hopes of seeing the giants of the deep, mostly humpback whales, making their way up and down the coast, travelling to and from their breeding grounds.
Sep
12
2018
Jeannie Rea was one of the lucky ones, one of the generation offered a free university education, along with a living allowance, courtesy of reforms introduced by the pioneering and polarising prime minister Gough Whitlam.
Sep
5
2018
David Lloyd may wear the mantle of the youngest vice-chancellor in Australia. Now 44, he was 38 in 2012 when he was appointed to lead the University of South Australia.
Aug
22
2018
Rufus Black is a man of many parts. The vice-chancellor of the University of Tasmania is an ordained minister in the Uniting Church, a lawyer and a philosopher. He overcame dyslexia to become a Rhodes scholar and study philosophy at Oxford.
Jul
27
2018
Combustible tobacco could be relegated to the ashtray of history one day if health authorities in the US manage to push through unprecedented and highly controversial rules limiting nicotine in standard cigarettes. The US Food and Drug Administration appears committed to the idea of introducing a rule to set a maximum nicotine level for cigarettes, …read more
Jul
25
2018
A spiritual leader’s criticism of a Griffith University academic in a parliamentary hearing was one of the few public skirmishes in a hard-fought battle behind the scenes, now set to culminate in an official misconduct hearing at the university next month.
Jul
18
2018
A new battle in the world’s mosquito wars is being fought around Innisfail in far north Queensland, where an international research team released three million male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. This species can transmit a range of potentially lethal diseases including dengue, yellow fever and Zika, which can cause birth defects.
Jul
16
2018
How about saving the Great Barrier Reef with a one-molecule-thick layer of natural calcium carbonate that floats on the sea surface and reduces the damaging heat of the sun on corals? Maybe the answer is cloud-brightening — spraying microscopic droplets of seawater into the atmosphere to form clouds and provide more shade for the heat-battered …read more
Jul
14
2018
Amateur anatomists, or perhaps anyone interested in all the odd dead ends of the human body, will like Nathan Lents’s Human Errors. Human anatomy, as the American biologist points out, is a clumsy jumble of adaptations, including some useful life-saving features such as the opposable thumb — without which we would be unable to hold a …read more
Jul
11
2018
On Sandra Harding’s first day as vice-chancellor of James Cook University in far north Queensland she saw what looked like a tombstone of Eddie Mabo. The famous Torres Strait Islander was behind the Australian High Court decision in 1992 that overturned 200 years of “terra nullius” — the notion that Australia was uninhabited when it …read more