Ten years ago, on February 7, 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people. More than 2,000 houses were destroyed in Victoria, including at Kilmore, Kinglake, Vectis (Horsham), Narbethong, Marysville, Strathewan, Beechworth, Labertouche (Bunyip), Coleraine, Weerite, Redes … | Continue reading
Ten years ago, on February 7, 2009, I sat down in my apartment in central Melbourne to write a job application. All of the blinds were down, and the windows tightly closed. Outside it was 47℃. We had no air conditioning. The heat seeped through the walls. | Continue reading
Every year Tasmania is hit by thousands of lightning strikes, which harmlessly hit wet ground. But a huge swathe of the state is now burning as a result of "dry lightning" strikes. | Continue reading
extensions to fancyvrb, including automatic line breaking and improved math mode - gpoore/fvextra | Continue reading
At the time of writing, Jekyll’s performance is still actively being worked on by the Core Team for an upcoming version 4 release. One of the main complaints about Jekyll for users is often the build times of larger websites. I want to take this opportunity to see just how much I … | Continue reading
Games can help people engage with science outside of the traditional realm of research and academia. And using games in ecological research is on the rise, helping ecologists answer questions they'd never be able to in a laboratory experiment. This is particularly true when it co … | Continue reading
There's no two-ways about it, the Universe is an extremely big place! And thanks to the limitations placed upon us by Special Relativity, traveling to even the closest star systems could take millennia. As we addressed in a previous article, the estimated travel time to the neare … | Continue reading
A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has found that black soldier fly larvae maximize their eating efficiency by pushing non-eaters out of the way, causing the emergence of a fountain shape made up of larvae bodies. In their paper published in Journal of t … | Continue reading
Daimler on Wednesday reported its worst year since 2015 as trade tensions and costly investments drove a slump in profits, months before chief executive Dieter Zetsche relinquishes the wheel at the Mercedes-Benz maker. | Continue reading
After more than three decades of talk about the potential of building green, we've still failed to change the way we design and construct buildings so that the built environment stops being a dominant contributor to runaway climate change. | Continue reading
If you've ever walked past a bees nest on a hot summer day, you've probably been too focused on avoiding getting stung, rather than stopping to wonder how all those bees stay cool. Don't worry, Harvard scientists have braved the stingers to ask and answer that question for you. | Continue reading
A team of researchers with the Swedish Natural History Museum and Uppsala University has found evidence of hopping by a 20-million-year-old kangaroo relative. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes their study of fossils unearthed … | Continue reading
The polar vortex, a swirl of low-pressure air six miles up in the atmosphere, blasted much of the American Midwest and Northeast in late January 2019 with temperatures cold enough to bring on frostbite within minutes. | Continue reading
The fact that historical archives, libraries, museums, writing workshops and even monasteries, currently conserve medieval manuscripts is not only a question of heroes or ordinary people who went through the trouble to save them, passing them down from one generation to the next, … | Continue reading
Southwest Research Institute has developed a high-reliability, high-voltage optocoupler for spaceflight applications. NASA has selected the device as a power interface between the Europa Clipper spacecraft and three instruments aboard, bound for Jupiter's moon Europa in the next … | Continue reading
Luminescent emission in the form of phosphorescence commonly occurs in daily life as a result of a quantum mechanically small transition probability. A luminescent emission lifetime can last from microseconds to several hours. Popularly known for its use in glow-in-the-dark prod … | Continue reading
The lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and phones charge and discharge by ferrying lithium ions back and forth between two electrodes, an anode and a cathode. The more lithium ions the electrodes are able to absorb and release, the more energy the battery can stor … | Continue reading
Just like the mythical creation stories that depict the formation of the world as the story of order from chaos, the early Earth was home to a chaotic clutter of organic molecules from which, somehow, more complex biological structures such as RNA and DNA emerged. | Continue reading
We know that safe, adequate, affordable and appropriate housing is essential for our health, well-being and social and economic security. However, even as house prices subside from recent record highs, many Australians struggle to obtain the housing they need to be as healthy, w … | Continue reading
Drones have been given 'eyes' and a new algorithm to help them fly intelligently, reaching their target position when GPS is not available. | Continue reading
School is back, so students new to secondary school will be beginning to adapt to their new school environments. This adaption commonly involves suddenly having multiple classes with different teachers and locations, many more students, different peer groups, becoming the younges … | Continue reading
Plants need sunlight to feed and grow. Without light, photosynthesis, the reaction by which the plant chloroplasts convert atmospheric CO2 and water into sugars and oxygen, cannot take place. In some situations, such as in forest areas or in high-density cultivated fields, plants … | Continue reading
Music streaming service Spotify is buying podcast companies Gimlet and Anchor as it looks to take on Apple's popular iTunes' podcasts. | Continue reading