“We just need to educate people and build awareness of spiders, to show that they’re not actually the bad guys we want them to be.”

What happens to all those stories which start with the promise of an exciting new scientific breakthrough, but don’t end that way?

For more than a century, the Night Parrot has inspired gripping tales of obsessive odysseys and miraculous discoveries. But now the truth has gotten in the way of a good story. And Dr Penny Olsen is wearing the cost.

The tradition of burning their PhD thesis has been handed down from student to student at Mount Stromlo ever since the 2003 bushfires.

Death cap mushrooms don’t actually want to kill us. In fact, mushrooms don’t care about us at all. 

Professor Neeman has solved two open problems in mathematics which have, for the past 20 years, thwarted the efforts of the best algebraists in the world.