Every decade, Australian astronomers get together to create a plan for our community. This is an exercise we are currently undertaking for release in 2015. Here I look at how astronomy will help Australia fulfil its aspirations towards a strong, prosperous and secure future
What is matter? What is energy? What holds matter together? How do the various constituents of the universe interact at the most basic level? Where does the Earth sit in relation to the rest of the universe? Can we predict the movements of the stars?
At first sight these seem like very strange bedfellows. In this chapter, I will explain how seeking to understand swarming in locusts has led to new discoveries on the dietary causes of human obesity and ageing, as well as provided an understanding of locust swarming that links neurophysiological events within the brains of individual insects to continental scale mass migration
Although artificial intelligence is already mainstream, experts have only recently started looking into the short- and long-term impacts of AI on human rights. Recently in 2018, artificial intelligence was a key topic at RightsCon, a global conference on the future of the internet hosted by Access Now. There we worked with partners to draft and publish the Toronto Declaration on protecting the rights to equality and non- discrimination in machine learning systems. We then released a report in November 2018, Human Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, as a preliminary scoping of the intersection of AI and human rights
We are all familiar with many instances of statistics in everyday life: the statistics of sport, weather, population, the stock market ... the sort of thing that might appear in the ‘number crunch’ column in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald
It took over 10 years and US$3 billion to sequence the first human genome. Next generation sequencing (NGS) technolo- gies have made it possible to replicate this feat in a matter of days and at a fraction of the cost, and have led to an explosion in our understanding of the genetic determinants of health. Genomic testing is set to transform healthcare, from disease diagnosis to personalised risk assessments, tailored treatments and preventative interventions. Where are we going to be in 2050, and what challenges lie ahead?
As an undergraduate student, I encountered an unexpected love; a love for cell biology and a compartment found within the confines of each of our cells, the mitochondrion. For cell biologists like myself, the term ‘mitochondria’ can evoke a feeling of enquiry and a reminder of the joy we experienced when learning about these marvellous cellular compartments. But for many, their first encounter with the term ‘mitochondria’ comes with a feeling of confusion and despair, often associated with their diagnosis, or that of a loved one with a mitochondrial disease
There is a saying that you can never dip your toe into the same river twice. The same applies to the brain because at a quite fundamental level it is continuously changing. Indeed, it is somewhat incredible that throughout our lives we are able to maintain a more-or-less unified concept of who we are given there is little constancy of substance to anchor this most basic of notions
In the course of a generation, the information available to families regarding the health and future of their unborn children has been transformed. In the era of our parents and grandparents, even the number of babies to be born was a mystery. Following delivery of the first baby, careful checking for the appearance of another head or foot was routine. The arrival of the second twin made for a crowded bassinet in the back seat of the car on the way home, as well as hasty modifications to the cot, sleeping arrangements and siblings’ expectations
How will Artificial Intelligence change war? Hollywood has it wrong. It won’t be Terminator, robots with sentience, that transform warfare. It will be much simpler technologies that are, depending on your perspective, at best or at worst less than a decade away. Indeed, it is stupid AI that I fear. We will soon be giving machines that are not sufficiently capable the right to make life or death decisions