science wire

Astronomy is an area of science in which ANU and Australia, more broadly, excels and much of our success can be attributed to the Anglo-Australian Telescope, which has been operating for more than 40 years.

Young people are spending less time in unsupervised environments where opportunistic offending may be more attractive, such as 'hanging out' on the streets.

A study led by ANU has discovered how a mother knows her chicks and can spot an imposter in her nest, even if it looks almost identical to her chicks. Brood parasitic cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and abandon their young to the care of the nest's host, leading to significant disruptions to the birds involved.

A new website that visualises climate change data from 112 locations around Australia started life as a set of drink coasters.

This can tell us about changes in sea level and it can give us a complete map of the melting of ice in Greenland or Antarctica, but it can also tell us how the ground water changes in the Murray Darling Basin from one month to the next.

Supernovae are explosions as bright as 100 million billion billion billion lightning bolts, and so we can use them as markers to measure how the Universe is growing and what's causing its expansion to accelerate.

"Australia needs solid investment like this in research facilities and infrastructure to help our nation's researchers make the important discoveries of the future.

We were able to reconstruct the 3D structure of a gas cloud in its very early stages of making new stars and planets, which will ultimately take millions of years to form. A study led by ANU and the University of Crete in Greece has shed new light on the mystery of how our solar system formed in a cloud of gas and dust in space billions of years ago.

Forty-eight thousand year-old crayons and shell beads were among a treasure trove of items unearthed by archaeologists at a cave in Kenya. Archaeologists have discovered more than 30,000 items at the site which is shedding new light on the crucial time period when Homo sapiens first started showing signs of modern behaviour.

Researchers have a new understanding of the genetic makeup of a fungus that causes the disease Wheat Stripe Rust, one of the most destructive wheat diseases globally costing $1 billion annually.

The Australian National University (ANU) is poised to play a key role to support a new national space agency and to help drive education, research and industry collaborations as Australia grow its space industries.

Wildfires and over-logging have tipped the Mountain Ash forest very close to collapse - populations of animals living there have halved, and in some cases have declined by more than 65 per cent during the past 20 years. A landmark study from ANU has found that a vital forest in Victoria faces imminent collapse, which poses a major threat Melbourne's water supply.

Prominent Australians who made their mark after World War II, including actors, writers, artists, sports stars and aviators, have been immortalised in the latest additions to Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), based at the Australian National University (ANU).

This survey allows us to trace the ancestry of stars, showing astronomers how the Universe went from having only hydrogen and helium - just after the Big Bang - to being filled with all the elements we have here on Earth that are necessary for life. Astronomers from ANU, other Australian institutions and Europe have mapped the chemical profiles of 350,000 stars in the Milky Way that will help them find the lost siblings of our Sun that were separated after birth by our galaxy.

Through the Bruny Island trial we have demonstrated how the NAC approach can solve wider grid problems, in particular those that can arise through the mass deployment of renewables and battery storage.

If they are successful, China could well be the leader of the next generation of global carbon markets in industrialising and developing countries.

Pizzagate is a really interesting case, where it starts off as a form of trolling by people who didn't like Hillary Clinton, but then others were willing to pick it up seriously and take it further.

China's first space station, Tiangong-1, which is now defunct, is set to crash back to Earth over the coming days in a manner similar to the final scenes of the Hollywood movie Gravity .

An Archaeologist at The Australian National University (ANU) has discovered a prehistoric Bronze-Age barrow, or burial mound, on a hill in Cornwall and is about to start excavating the untouched site which overlooks the English Channel.