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A research team involving ANU has invented a system that can detect chemicals in miniscule quantities and could be developed into a portable drug-testing kit to help authorities crack down on the illegal drug trade. ANU supported Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, which led the project to develop this invention.

Scientists from ANU have designed tiny optical sensors that open the door to developing a wearable device that allows doctors to medically diagnose people's health in real time. Associate Professor Antonio Tricoli said the sensors, which are 50 times thinner than a human hair, promised to one day help doctors detect diseases such as diabetes much earlier than is possible today, and better manage a range of chronic diseases.

To find an intact clay urn buried 4,000 years ago just centimetres beneath the surface is nothing short of a miracle An ANU archaeologist has hailed her excavation of a Bronze Age burial mound in south west England a huge success with the discovery of an intact 4,000 year old human cremation as well as evidence of unaccountable activity from the medieval period on the same site.

Astronomers at ANU have found the fastest-growing black hole known in the Universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalent to our sun every two days. The astronomers have looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe, when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns with a one per cent growth rate every one million years.

The odds of intestinal worm infection more than halved among children in communities that were given a community-wide intervention, compared to the school-based intervention only. The number of children suffering from intestinal worm infections could be dramatically reduced around the world by treating adults as well as children, based on the results of a new pilot study in Timor-Leste led by ANU.

This technique allows us to resurrect, in a sense, proteins that have been extinct for millions of years, so they can be studied in the lab. A study led by ANU has retraced the evolutionary history of a modern enzyme with a technique called ancestral protein reconstruction - a discovery that will help new enzymes to be engineered for use in medicine and industry.

The Yellow Box, which has the scientific name Eucalyptus melliodora, is an important tree species in a critically endangered woodland community that now occupies just eight per cent of its former distribution recorded in the mid 1700s. Researchers from ANU have developed a seed-collection strategy to help make trees or even food crops more resilient to future climate change.

Our Milky Way is more than 13 billion years old, so it is not young anymore, but the galaxy still has both a central bulge of old stars and spiral arms of young stars. A new international study involving ANU and The University of Sydney has found that galaxies grow bigger and puffier as they age. Co-researcher Professor Matthew Colless from ANU said that stars in a young galaxy moved in an orderly way around the galaxy's disk, much like cars around a racetrack.

New research from The Australian National University (ANU) has looked at the use of humour on Twitter during the 2016 US Presidential election. The study found that 35 per cent of election related posts used humour, and that Hillary Clinton supporters were almost three times more likely to use jokes than Donald Trump supporters.

Separating fact from fiction in the age of alternate facts is becoming increasingly difficult, and now a new study has helped reveal why. Research by Dr Eryn Newman of The Australian National University (ANU) has found that when people listen to recordings of a scientist presenting their work, the quality of audio had a significant impact on whether people believed what they were hearing, regardless of who the researcher was or what they were talking about.

We've provided a 3D view of how seafloor spreading takes place. Our findings confirm that upwelling beneath transform faults plays a vital role in stabilising these divergent plate boundaries. International research led by ANU and the University of Southampton has improved understanding of how ocean basins are created as new seafloor is generated along tectonic plate boundaries called mid-ocean ridges.

A research team including ANU has detected electrons outside of their regular orbits, a phenomenon that could be harnessed to develop next-generation electronics based on thin materials and superconductors. A common image of electrons has them locked in orbitals like planets around the Sun, but the international team of scientists observed electrons momentarily in different, higher energy orbits.

Plate tectonics is responsible for diverse geological phenomena including continental drift, mountain building and the occurrence of volcanoes and earthquakes. Scientists at The Australian National University (ANU) are helping to improve understanding of how rocks in Earth's hot, deep interior enable the motions of tectonic plates, which regulate the water cycle that is critical for a habitable planet.

At the distance to the centre of our galaxy, the emission from many thousands of these whirling dense stars could be blending together to imitate the smoothly distributed signal we expect from dark matter. A team of astronomers involving ANU has discovered that a mysterious gamma-ray signal from the centre of the Milky Way comes from 10 billion-year-old stars, rather than dark matter as previously thought.

An international study on glass led by ANU and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France could lead to the development of shatter-proof mobile phone screens. Lead researcher Dr Charles Le Losq from ANU said the new knowledge, based on experiments and computer modelling, could be used to alter the structure of glass to improve resistance to fractures.

When parents struggle to juggle family and work responsibilities, they become tired, stressed, cranky and unhappy, which has an impact on family relationships and their children's wellbeing. Jobs that are overly demanding at the expense of family time put the mental health of employees' children at risk, a new study led by ANU has found.

The study shows that as global temperatures increase, the amount of carbon dioxide released through plant respiration will increase significantly. A new study involving ANU and international collaborators has found plants release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through respiration than expected, and the problem will worsen with climate change.

A new study led by ANU has shed light on how the earliest forms of life evolved on Earth about four billion years ago. In a major advance on previous work, the study found a compound commonly used in hair bleach, hydrogen peroxide, made the eventual emergence of life possible. Lead researcher Associate Professor Rowena Ball from ANU said hydrogen peroxide was the vital ingredient in rock pores around underwater heat vents that set in train a sequence of chemical reactions that led to the first forms of life.

The Australian National University (ANU) has played a leading role in the discovery of a new species of orangutan, which has been described for the first time in the latest edition of the Current Biology journal. The Tapanuli orangutan is a population of just 800 apes located in a small patch of forest in the north of Indonesian island Sumatra, making it the most endangered of the now seven known species of great apes.

Age-friendly workplaces, work flexibility, retraining and promotion of healthy lifestyles are vital to address the major causes of not working, enable people to have longer careers and enhance wellbeing in later life. Australians could have longer careers and be healthier in later life if workplaces were more age-friendly and promoted healthy lifestyles to their employees, a new ANU study has found.