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The ocean is warming steadily and setting up the conditions for stronger El Niño weather events, a new study has shown. A team of US, Australian, and Canadian researchers sampled corals from a remote island in Kiribati to build a 60-year record of ocean surface temperature and salinity. "The trend is unmistakeable, the ocean's primed for more El Niño events," says lead-author Dr Jessica Carilli, now based at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Laser physicists have built a tractor beam that can repel and attract objects, using a hollow laser beam that is bright around the edges and dark in its centre. It is the first long-distance optical tractor beam and moved particles one fifth of a millimetre in diameter a distance of up to 20 centimetres, around 100 times further than previous experiments.

Scientists have solved a long-standing mystery surrounding Australia's only active volcanic area, in the country's southeast. The research explains a volcanic region that has seen more than 400 volcanic events in the past four million years. The 500 kilometre long region stretches from Melbourne to the South Australian town of Mount Gambier, which surrounds a dormant volcano that last erupted only 5,000 years ago.

New Australian National University research has found the incidence of foodborne illness has declined slightly and that one quarter of the 16 million cases of gastroenteritis each year are caused by food contamination. The research tracked the changes in foodborne illness in Australia between 2000 and 2010.

A new study has revealed a weak spot in the complex life cycle of malaria, which could be exploited to prevent the spread of the deadly disease. It found female malaria parasites put on fat differently to male ones. "The study opens potential new ways to combat malaria," said Associate Professor Alexander Maier, from the Research School of Biology.

Neanderthal groups lived alongside modern humans for several thousand years, an international team of scientists has found, overturning previous theories about the extinction of Neanderthals. The team applied a new radiocarbon dating method which revealed that Neanderthals across Europe did not all die out at one time as modern humans appeared.

Medical researchers have used DNA sequencing to identify a gene variant responsible for causing lupus in a young patient. The development shows that for the first time, it is feasible for researchers to identify the individual causes of lupus in patients by using DNA sequencing, allowing doctors to target specific treatments to individual patients.

Physicists at The Australian National University have created a tractor beam on water, providing a radical new technique that could confine oil spills, manipulate floating objects or explain rips at the beach. The group, led by Professor Michael Shats, discovered they can control water flow patterns with simple wave generators, enabling them to move floating objects at will.

A new theory of how cancer works could lead to the next generation of treatments of the disease. The theory suggests that cancer forms when recently evolved genes are damaged, and cells have to revert to using older, inappropriate genetic pathways. Astrobiologists Dr Charley Lineweaver from The Australian National University and Professor Paul Davies from Arizona State University teamed up with oncologist Dr Mark Vincent from the University of Western Ontario to develop the new model.

Scientists from the Research School of Biology have opened the door to a new world of pain treatments with their discovery of the exact way that pain relief drugs, such as anaesthetics, work on the body. Dr Ben Corry and Lewis Martin developed a detailed computer model that revealed for the first time how benzocaine, a local anaesthetic, and phenytoin, an anti-epilepsy drug, enter into nerve cells and prevent the pain signals being transmitted to the brain.

Species could be going extinct right under the noses of scientists without them realising, researchers have found. Dr Martin Westgate from the Fenner School and Environment and Society  led the group that concluded that methods for measuring the full gamut of animal species in a particular location are flawed.

Developing countries in Asia may be set to join the first-world obesity epidemic, a new ANU study of nutrition across 12 countries has found. "We have shown that countries across Asia are on a steep upward trajectory towards diets high in fat, salt and sugar," said lead author Dr Phillip Baker from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health.

Men and women are most likely to have suicidal thoughts within a year of a marriage or de-facto relationship breakup, new ANU research has found. The vulnerability may be due to the trauma of the breakup, along with subsequent changes in social networks affecting people's sense of belonging, said lead author of the study Dr Philip Batterham, from the ANU Centre for Mental Health Research.

Scientists have discovered that the earliest living organisms on Earth were capable of making a mineral that may be found on Mars. The clay-mineral stevensite has been used since ancient times and was used by Nubian women as a beauty treatment, but scientists had believed deposits could only be formed in harsh conditions like volcanic lava and hot alkali lakes.

New ANU-led research has explained why Antarctica is not warming as much as other continents, and why southern Australia is recording more droughts. Researchers have found rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are strengthening the stormy Southern Ocean winds which deliver rain to southern Australia, but pushing them further south towards Antarctica.

Researchers for the first time have found a direct link between use of the drug ice and violence, with a six-fold increase in violent behaviour when chronic users take the drug. Lead researcher Dr Rebecca McKetin and colleagues tracked 278 chronic users of methamphetamine, commonly known as ice, and found only 10 per cent of users were violent when they were not taking the drug.

New research has found the endangered Swift Parrot is more likely to be killed and eaten by Sugar Gliders in Tasmania in areas where forests are disturbed or lost compared to areas of intact forest. The research took place over a three-year period, and compared populations of Swift Parrots from mainland Tasmania where Sugar Gliders also live, to those on islands where Sugar Gliders are absent.

The stage is set for a new, super-heavy element to be added to the periodic table following research published in the latest Physics Review Letters, by a multinational team of physicists and chemists, including researchers from The Australian National University. Led by researchers at Germany's GSI laboratory, the team created atoms of element 117, matching the heaviest atoms ever observed, which are 40 per cent heavier than an atom of lead.

Asia's rapidly developing economies should prepare for a full-throttle increase in motorcycle numbers as average incomes increase, a new study from The Australian National University has found. Using data from 153 countries, researchers Dr Paul Burke and Dr Shuhei Nishitateno found the number of motorcycles per capita increases until average incomes reach around $8,000 per person per year.

An anti-malarial treatment that lost its status as the leading weapon against the deadly disease could be given a new lease of life, with new research indicating it simply needs to be administered differently. The findings could revive the use of the cheap anti-malarial drug chloroquine in treating and preventing the mosquito-bourne disease, which claims the lives of more than half a million people each year around the world.