There is now a wealth of information to show that elephants and sea cows must share a common ancestors. New research on the embryos and fetuses of the African elephant, has revealed a series of similarities with the aquatic Sirenia (dugong and manatees), and suggest that the ancestor of elephants probably spent millions of years in the water.
Australian brown snakes are believed to have first arrived on Guam during the second world war. Since then, the tree climbing snake has decimated the animal and bird life on the island, and facing no natural predator has continuing to multiply. There are now an estimated 5000 snakes per square kilometre.
One of the stars of National Science Week was a young astronomer who won an award for his appearance at Fresh Science in Melbourne. Paul Francis, from Mt Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, has discovered that most black holes appear to be pink.
Dr Martin Hubis, a biologist in Canada has developed a vaccine which may help to eliminate Dutch Elm Disease, a fungus which devastated the landscape of Britain and is a serious and costly problem in North America.
The Book of Kells is one of Ireland's greatest treasures. The book is a copy of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John written in Latin. It was reputedly written by Irish monks on a island off Scotland about 1200 years ago. Anne-Marie Diffley is the Librarian at Trinity College Dublin where the Book of Kells is housed, describes the book and some of the treasures associated with it.
The Monotremata, the distinctly Australian brand of mammals, is being reorganised by two of our leading scientitsts, Tim Flannery and Colin Groves. According to Colin Groves, there tends to be broad assumptions that there is just one species of platypus, one species of Australian echidna, one species of New Guinea echidna, and that if we persist with these assumptions we will never learn about the true biodiversity of our native fauna. He is completing a study on water rats, which are always found in the vicinity of platypus and he has discovered that there's definitely more than one species of water rat; so a study of the platypus is next on his list. And on the subject of the platypus, Colin Groves says that there is fossil evidence of South America's first monotreme which has been
Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered neutron stars or pulsars as a graduate student and they have remained her main area of research. Professor Bell Burnell is currently working on a neutron star twinned with what she describes as "a relatively ordinary" star, making an exotic binary system, in the constellation Signus. It's known as Signus X3 and it's located right at the edge of the galaxy, about 10 kiloparsecs, which is about 30,000 light years away.
As part of National Science Week, Robyn Williams hosts a vigorous meeting of the minds between sci-fi writer Douglas Adams, musician and conservationist Peter Garrett, the editor of British New Scientist, Alun Anderson and Australian National University academic Ben Selinger in this special program: How to Survive the 21st Century.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin is the only woman to win a Nobel Prize for Science. She was fascinated with the structure of the molecules in our bodies; how our enzymes and proteins actually physically fit together to carry out the biochemical reactions that make us living beings. Wendy Barnaby joined biographer Georgina Ferry in the very small, semi-basement laboratory at the Oxford University Museum of Natural history where Hodgkin worked and
Although the giant Mitsubishi Electric is the latest of Japan's technology companies to fall into the red, Peter Hadfield reports that this hasn't affected the company's research and development. He joined a Press tour of Mitsubishi's main R&D centre near Tokyo, on display were a number of projects which will become new technology in the 21st century. The most impressive of the projects was an antenna which, when finished will join a huge array of antennaes which will hang in outer space relaying mobile telephone signals. Another project was a virtual reality conferencing system which allows virtual people to meet in a virtual room. Sounds like fun, but his isn't just a toy. The chief explained that the purpose of the system is to support remote communication among medial staff, patients and their families.
Almost 40 years ago, C.P. Snow, a former scientist turned novelist gave a controversial lecture called The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. In it, he claimed that there were two cultures - the literary intellectuals and the scientists, who didn't understand each other and didn't trust each other.
In 1997 Canadian archaeologist David Pendergast and a team of Cuban archaeologists discovered the remains of a village which might be as large as 4 kilometres long. They began examining a coastal lagoon site on the north central coast of Cuba which for much of the time is completely underwater and found pottery, stone tools and wooden artifacts such as pins, hooks, bowls, spoons and ceremonial figurines from the Taino civilisation, dating from about 1225 - 1640. The position of the artifacts led them to believe that they were not looking at the objects in their original position and that this was found to be the result of the sea excavating the coast at the rate of 1 metre per year since a breakwater was built to the east of the site around 50 years ago. They also investigated groups of underwater posts which were found to be the framework of houses. In 1998 they set out to examine the post formation and unexpectedly found not only the posts but the rafters and centre post and in some cases even remnants of the palm thatching. After talking to the local people David Pendergast believes that there are several dozen of these groups of posts in the sea and their job is now to map the underwater village.
The big news of the week is the discovery of the first real solar system similar to our own. A team of astronomers using the Anglo Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Mountain in New South Wales have found strong evidence for a trio of extrasolar planets that orbit the star Upsilon Andromedae.
After many years observing chimpanzees in the wild Harvard professor, Richard Wrangham believes that there is a good case to be made that chimpanzees invented medicine. He tells how chimpanzees use plants in carefully controlled ways to treat various infections and parasites.
How would you go about obtaining bodily samples from very large, possibly hostile apes. For instance, how would you get a urine sample from an orang utan? Dr Cheryl Knott does it with plastic sheets in the jungles of Borneo, then takes the samples back to her laboratory for testing. National Geographic's August 1998 edition features her research project with wonderful photographs taken by her husband, biologist Tim Laman. In 1997 they received the first annual Chairman's Award from the Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the first Australian computer, CSIRAC, which was only the fifth programmable electronic computer to have been built anywhere in the world. CSIRAC was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard, two scientists at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the fore-runner of the CSIRO and continued to be used until the 1960s. Unlike its predecessors in the United States and the United Kingdom, CSIRAC has not been long ago disposed of, and to celebrate its birthday is it being restored by staff of the Museum of Victoria where it will be displayed to the public in 2000. Professor Peter Thorne, the former head of the University of Melbourne's Computer Science Department has been active in CSIRAC's restoration.
Chris Burton is still fond of those old-fashioned models from the start of the computer revolution, and he's not alone. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the computer, he and other enthusiasts have formed their own society to reconstruct one of the earliest models.
A wrong turn and a chance meeting with a local farmer brought archaeologist Ed Keall to what he calls 'The Henge' because of its resemblance to Stone Henge in England. This bronze/stone-age civilization on the western coast of Yemen, pre-dates the earliest known civilization in the region by 3500 years.
What happens in the brain that makes some of us have difficulties recognising letters and words? Professor John Stein is a neurobiologist who has been looking at the wiring of the brain and has some new leads.
Neurobiologist, Dr Harald Sontheimer talks to Laura Dernford about how the venom scorpions use to paralyse their prey may offer a way to paralyse and kill deadly brain tumours in people. The announcement of the research was made at the 1999 American Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting in Anaheim earlier this year.