Adding broccoli powder to coffee—A new taste sensibility

“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 […]

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 […]