“Green, nutrient-rich coffees may be on the horizon after researchers have developed a powder made from imperfect-looking broccoli that would have previously been wasted,” says a press release sent out earlier this year by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. Mary Ann Augustin is the lead researcher on the experiment. Ashitha Nagesh wrote an essay about this […]
Tag: australia
Improbable Music – The Gumleaf
Herb Patten, above, is an expert Gumleaf player – a.k.a. a ‘Leafist’. Put another way, he’s a renowned ribbon-reed aerophone actant in the field of vegetal musicology. But does the gumleaf really qualify as a musical instrument? This question is examined in one of the very few scholarly studies of leafism. Dr. Robin Ann Ryan,. […]
Intentional Fire-Spreading by Raptors in Australia [research study]
Some birds intentionally spread fire from place to place, sometimes in cooperation with other birds, says this new study. “Intentional Fire-Spreading by ‘Firehawk’ Raptors in Northern Australia,” Mark Bonta, Robert Gosford, Dick Eussen, Nathan Ferguson, Erana Loveless, and Maxwell Witwer, Journal of Ethnobiology, vol. 37, no. 4, 2017, pp. 700-718. The authors write: “We document Indigenous […]
Beach study suggests tourists like good weather
Do not assume that tourists prefer good weather when they visit a beach. A study published in the International Journal of Biometeorology in 2013 challenges that easy-to-make assumption. The researchers gathered evidence – rather than relying on mere guesses and assumptions – as to what kind of weather brings beachgoers to the beach. Here is […]
To license Australia’s National Public Toilet Map dataset…
To license Australia’s National Public Toilet Map dataset, you must agree to a set of terms and conditions. To use the National Public Toilet Map, you go to the National Public Toilet Map web site. There you can: Enter a location, address or postcode to find nearby toilets. Plan a journey, to get a list of toilets along […]
Wombat Crossing
Question : How do bare-nosed wombats cross roads? Answer : ‘Bare-nosed wombats (Vombatus ursinus) use drainage culverts to cross roads.’ (See: Australian Mammalogy, 2013, 35 , pp. 23–29.) At least they do in this vicinity of Thunderbolt’s Way, near Nowendoc on the Northern Tableland, North-Eastern New South Wales, Australia, where researchers found that: “The estimated probability […]
CONVERSATION STARTER: Testosterone in self-employed Australian men
If you’re stuck in an awkward social situation, and need some convenient way to switch the conversation to a different topic, mention this study: “Testosterone is associated with self-employment among Australian men,” Francis J. Greene, Liang Han, Sean Martin, Song Zhang, Gary Wittert, Economics & Human Biology, Volume 13, March 2014, Pages 76–84. The authors, at University […]
Your eminent guide to the cockroaches of Australia
What more pleasing guide could one have to the cockroaches of Australia than one of the scientists who was awarded the 2011 Ig Nobel prize for biology, for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle? David Rentz, who shared that Ig Nobel Prize with Darryl Gwynne, has written […]
Further studies on wallaby tendon
Wallaby tendon is not just a useful material for surgical sutures.; it can be analyzed for its elastic properties in comparison to the tendons of other animals, and can be used as a model in surgical studies. Physiologists have also been interested in the kinetics of kangaroo and wallaby hopping, to address issues such as […]
Nurse, please pass the 27-gauge wallaby tendon
The Australasian Medical Gazette was a normal medical journal in most respects, with the addition of occasional features relevant to the unique concerns of the doctor practicing in rural Australia (or New Zealand). These ranged from advice on how to avoid being outcompeted by fraudulently subsidized Friendly Societies in the western goldfields, to the report […]