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The State Government has awarded $900,000 worth of research grants as part of its shark mitigation strategy. 

It follows an unprecedented number of attacks off the WA coast over the past few years. 

One of the successful applicants is Associate Professor Nathan Hart from the University of Western Australia's Ocean Institute, who is looking at lights, sound waves and so-called 'bubble curtains' as a way of deterring the animals from popular beaches. 

"Just like us, we're afraid of certain things which are unpleasant to our senses, so if you think of a bright strobe light going off unexpectedly, you'll often recoil from that," he says. 

"The bubble curtain is a similar sort of process, a lot of animals are very wary of going somewhere they can't see or sense.

"So imagine a long pipe running along the bottom of the ocean putting out a field of bubbles... The idea is to develop something robust that could be turned on and off to protect a defined area."

Another team of researchers is taking a slightly more technical approach - developing computer algorithms to try to improve shark detection. 

"It's quite similar to face recognition technology," says Dr Ferdous Sohel from UWA. 

"First of all we'll capture images and then we'll filter them to find out if there are any mammals or any big objects.

"We'll have our shark models built in so if we get a match we'll be able to alert patrols." 

Funding has also been granted to test and improve shark shield technology and develop sonar imaging systems. 

WA's Chief Scientist Lyn Beazley is the chair of the Shark Hazard Advisory Research Committee and helped to assess the applications. 

Professor Beazley says the research will strengthen WA's position as a leading centre on shark research.

"I think this will make a material difference and allow science to play a real part in making our beaches safer," she says. 

"We have attracted the best teams in the world here. The world is now looking to us for the very best answers and I think we will provide them."

The Science and Innovation Minister John Day agrees WA is attracting world class research.

"Unless we try these things we will never know but we are certainly using the expertise of excellent scientists here in Western Australia," he says.

"The research will take either two or three years, these sort of things do need to be done thoroughly and carefully."

Mr Day says the government would share any intellectual property with the other partners. 

"Given there is tax payer funding being invested in this, the state would have some continuing interest but it's a partnership with the universities and also with industry," he said. 

Another $1 million worth of grants will be made available mid next year. 

Source  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-07/lights2c-sounds-and-bubble-curtains-to-deter-sharks/4415756?section=wa

SURPLUS rainwater should be stored underground instead of in dams to prepare for drought, a scientific study says. 

 

The National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training has made the recommendation as the federal government tables Australia's first national Murray-Darling Basin plan in parliament.

Researcher Andrew Ross says Australia should be "banking" its water underground as an alternative to traditional dams during times of heavy rain.

"There is enormous national potential to store surplus water in aquifers, ensuring sufficient water is available for cities, homes, industry, farming and the environment when drought strikes," he said in a statement.

"Historically, Australians have relied on dams to provide water for agriculture and cities.

"This strategy is not sufficient to cope with increasing climate variability or droughts as demand for food and water grows."

Up to 3000 billion litres (GL) of water a year evaporates from the Murray-Darling Basin, he said.

That level of evaporation almost matches the 3200 billion litres a year the government is hoping to flush back into the Murray-Darling Basin, under its plan unveiled last week and tabled in parliament on Monday.

Mr Ross, who has researched integrated surface water and groundwater management, said storing water underground would ensure sufficient was available for Murray-Darling Basin agricultural production and environmental flows, and avoid the shutdown of irrigation.

Source  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/store-water-underground-scientists/story-fn3dxiwe-1226524436438

China has plans to launch another manned spacecraft -- Shenzhou-10 -- in early June 2013, according to a leading space programme official.

"They will stay in space for 15 days, operating both automated and manual space dockings with the target orbiter Tiangong-1, conducting scientific experiments in the lab module and delivering science lectures to spectators on the Earth," he said, adding that the selection for the crew will begin in early 2013.

In the coming mission, Shenzhou-10 will offer ferrying services of personnel and supplies for Tiangong-1, further testing the astronauts' abilities of working and living in space, as well as the functions of the lab module, he said.

"The success of this mission might enable China to construct a space lab and a space station," he said.

China plans to build its own space station in around 2020. It had initiated the manned space programme in 1992 by sending Yang Liwei, the country's first astronaut, into the orbit on Shenzhou-5 spacecraft in 2003.

Source  http://www.ianslive.in/index.php?param=news/China_to_launch_manned_spaceship_in_June-390567/SCIENCE%20and%20TECHNOLOGY/36

A RUSSIAN billionaire has a plan to make himself, and others, live forever. 

 

Dmitry Itskov, a 31-year-old media mogul, implored other magnates to fund cybernetic immortality and the artificial body - basically transferring human consciousness into a robot body.

In open letter to the Forbes richest list he wrote, "Currently you invest in business projects that will bring you yet another billion."

"You also have the ability to finance the extension of your own life up to immortality. Our civilisation has come very close to the creation of such technologies: it's not a science fiction fantasy. It is in your power to make sure that this goal will be achieved in your lifetime."

According to Mashable, his timetable is tight:

1. By 2025, scientists will be able to transfer the human brain into a robotic skeleton.

2. By 2035, an avatar brain will be created and your personality inserted within.

3. By 2045, humans will walk around in holographic avatars that will never die.

Indeed, Wired magazine reported that the Russian wants to end the need for surgery and troubleshoot our robo-bodies instead.

Itskov has said that he has already assembled a team of scientists for the job but still needs more funds to continue the project, reported the National Turk.

Source  http://www.news.com.au/national/invest-in-immortalitybillionaire/story-fndo4bst-1226442044299

The existence of the Higgs boson particle has been a hypothesis for several decades, yet much of what we know about the universe has been formed around the assumption that it does in fact exist.

The results of what scientists call a potentially "revolutionary" and extremely important experiment regarding its existence will be announced simultaneously in Geneva and Melbourne - where the international High Energy Physics conference is taking place - from 5pm (AEST).

The findings may, or may not, confirm existing theories of the way the universe - and our world - are held together.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has been leading the search for the Higgs boson, an elusive sub-atomic particle dubbed by some as the "God particle", which is believed to confer mass.

The Higgs has led scientists on a chase since 1964, when British physicist Peter Higgs helped lay the conceptual foundation for it.

If the particle exists, it would vindicate the so-called Standard Model of physics, which identifies the building blocks for matter and the particles that convey fundamental forces.

On the eve of the announcement, rumours are flying about what CERN has in store.

"Whether or not the Higgs has been found, tomorrow will be exciting," Professor Sir Peter Knight, president of Britain's Institute of Physics, told AFP overnight.

"If the Standard Model is confirmed via the discovery of the Higgs boson, or whether we need to abandon and start re-writing the textbooks, it's a historical day in science that we should all be proud of."

A big question concerns the degree of probability scientists need to make a claim.

CERN physicists have said they will not make an announcement until they have proof - from two laboratories working independently at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - that the risk of a statistical fluke is vanishingly small.

In scientific parlance, the goal is "five sigma," meaning that there is just a 0.00006 per cent chance that what the two laboratories found is a mathematical quirk.

In a news report, the British science journal Nature said CERN will announce that the two labs saw signals of a new particle with a probability of between 4.5 and 5 sigma.

But CERN will stop short of calling it the Higgs until more is known about what the particle does, Nature said.

"Crucially, they will want to know whether it behaves like a mass-giving Higgs, and more specifically whether it behaves like the Higgs predicted in the Standard Model," the journal said.

Last week, CERN boss Rolf Heuer cautioned about the need for verification.

"It's a bit like spotting a familiar face from far. Sometimes you need closer inspection to find out whether it's really your best friend, or your best friend's twin."

Because the Higgs cannot be seen, its existence - or not - has to be inferred.

This is done by smashing protons together in an underground tunnel, providing a tiny but fierce collision that causes sub-atomic debris to fly into detectors built into the 360-degree walls of a car-sized lab.

The trick then is to sift through the signals from this smash up and look for a pattern that points to the Higgs.

The boson has been so slippery because it is believed to decay almost instantly after it interacts with other particles to endow them with mass.

Over the years, tens of thousands of physicists have been thrown into the search for the Higgs, and billions of dollars have been spent on colliders.

A US machine, the Tevatron, came agonisingly close before it was mothballed in 2011 after 26 years of operations.

Its vanguard role was supplanted by the far bigger LHC, a behemoth that comprises four labs dotted around a ring-shaped tunnel, 27 kilometres long, straddling the Franco-Swiss border. 

In a presentation on Monday of data that was analysed after the closure, physicists at Fermilab said they had strong hints that the Higgs exists, but the signal was 2.9 sigma, which falls short of the five-sigma threshold.

According to Nature, the signature occurred at a mass of around 125 gigaelectronvolts, when a Higgs-like particle decayed into two photons, or particles of light.

The Tevatron and the LHC carried out exhaustive experiments to narrow down the mass field and to identify potential Higgs patterns, a task "much worse than [seeking] a needle in a haystack," Fermilab physicist Joe Lykken said.

Source  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-04/cern-prepares-to-deliver-higgs-particle-findings/4108622?section=vic

THE nooks and crannies of a healthy person are home to trillions of micro-organisms. Without this non-human component of the body, which makes up about 1 per cent to 3 per cent of a person by weight, we could not survive.

These minuscule helpers digest our food, strengthen our immune system and ward off dangerous pathogens.

They can also distinguish us, one from another.

Humans have more than 10,000 species of microbes living in and on them, but individuals can carry around very different sets of microbial populations, new research shows.

While most of these constant bedfellows are friendly, nearly everyone carries some potential foes that can cause disease under the right conditions.

These are the findings, released today, of the Human Microbiome Project – the first comprehensive census of the micro-organisms, such as bacteria, viruses and fungi, living on a healthy body.

More than 240 people between the ages of 18 and 40 donated samples from up to 18 sites on their body including the skin, mouth, nose, lower intestine and vagina, for the research, a five-year, $154 million project funded by the US National Institutes of Health. A team of 200 scientists used the latest DNA analysis techniques to study what microbes were present in those samples.

The director of the institutes, Dr Francis Collins, compared the efforts of the researchers to those of past heroes.
"Like 15th century explorers describing the outline of a new continent, the Human Microbiome Project researchers employed a new technological strategy to comprehensively define, for the first time, the normal microbial make-up of the human body," he said.

The results, published in the journals Nature and PLoS, would provide new insights into human health, said a team member, George Weinstock, of Washington University. "Knowing which microbes live in various ecological niches in healthy people allows us to better investigate what goes awry in diseases that are thought to have a microbial link, like Crohn's and obesity, and why dangerous pathogens sometimes, but not always, cause life-threatening illnesses."

While a person has about 22,000 genes, the researchers estimated that bacteria contributed hundreds of times more genes – about 8 million – that help make up for human deficits.

For example, people did not have all the enzymes required to digest food, said Lita Proctor, another team member.

"Microbes in the gut break down many of the proteins, lipids and carbohydrates in our diet into nutrients that we can then absorb."

They also produced vitamins and anti-inflammatory substances that our genes couldn't make, to help regulate the immune system, she said. The ecological niches in the body differed as much as a rainforest does from a desert, the researchers said.

The skin has a diverse collection of microbes, while the vagina has fewer species. The microbes living on teeth are different from those in saliva.

Healthy people can vary a lot, with one type of bacteria making up 90 per cent of the microbes in one person's gut, but less than 1 per cent in another's. But the different gut microbes can perform the same metabolic tasks.

Researchers have already started to use the new information, examining the microbes in the noses and blood of children with sudden, unexplained high fever, a common problem in those under three. They are often treated with antibiotics as a precaution, but the research shows the sick children had more species of viruses than healthy children, and viruses are not killed by antibiotics.

Other researchers are studying a gastric disease that threatens the life of some premature babies. By comparing the microbial communities in infants with and without the condition they hope to understand why some babies develop it.

The study found about 30 per cent of the healthy people had potentially harmful golden staph bacteria in their noses.

"The future of microbiome research is very exciting," Dr Weinstock said.