Electricity contributes a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Solar photovoltaics and wind generation are now the lowest cost sources of new electricity capacity, and Australia is leading the world with rate of uptake of these renewable generators.

Many famous Sci-Fi movies feature artificial intelligence (AI) or robots going mad and killing all the humans. But in reality, AI is the only way we, as humans, are going to be able to cope with an increasingly digitised world...

Genomics sequencing has created opportunities and challenges to gain new insights in biology and biomedical research.
Genome sequencing data usually consists of millions or billions of short DNA sequences, called reads, that are randomly drawn from genomes.

The price of renewable electricity has dropped lower than the price of conventional electricity in recent years. Globally, solar and wind now account for more than half of new electricity capacity. This masterclass will give an overview of the astonishing growth in renewables that we’ve seen to date, and discuss what we can expect for the future.

The majority of Earth’s volcanism is concentrated at tectonic plate boundaries, where plates move away from one another to create mid-ocean ridges, or where one plate slides beneath another to form a subduction zone.

Early assumptions that the secret to complexity was tied up in our DNA led to one of the most surprising outcomes of the Human Genome Project—that we have far fewer genes than many other seemingly simple organisms! This talk will explore the hypothesis that the true origin of biological complexity lies in our proteins and their intricate chemical structures.

What do the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (1460-1524), the Italian painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) and the English poet Lord Byron (1788-1824) have in common? They all died of malaria!

While we'd like to think our knowledge of plate tectonics allows us to confidently identify the sources of large, destructive tsunamis, this isn't always the case. This is particularly true for Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelagic country in Earth’s most active tectonic region,...

In most low and middle income countries a profound transition is underway in patterns of health burden. Diseases of infection and poverty, and maternal and child health risks, are being joined by a rising tide of non-communicable disease and population ageing...

Three-dimensional printing (3DP) is gaining momentum as a leading technology, which provides personalized solutions to advanced fabrication needs. Printed objects enable a broad range of applications, including tissue engineering, pharmaceutics and robotics...

The most important characteristic of star, which determines its properties and evolutionary path, is its mass at birth. Observations show that the most common birth mass is slightly smaller than the mass of the Sun, and that masses either much lower or much higher than this value are increasingly rare...

Brain injury and disease results in neuronal loss and disruption of the brain parenchyma. Therefore, to achieve functional recovery post insult or disease, it is necessary to promote the long-term survival of neurones and circuitry reconstruction...

Semiconductors have played an important role in the development of information and communications technology, solar cells, solid state lighting.  Nanowires are considered as building blocks for the next generation electronics and optoelectronics...

The propagation of waves in space, such as that of electromagnetic waves in telecommunication, is instrumental to many aspects of science and engineering...

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, governments, public health leaders and scientists around the world have had to deal with not only a terrible virus, but an ‘infodemic' of misinformation...

The idea of a smart, autonomous future is tantalisingly close to becoming reality. In recent years, the push towards fully autonomous transport has driven large advances in enabling techniques such as machine learning, sensor fusion and the development of lower cost, higher fidelity sensors...

The “unreasonable effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” is well-argued (cf. the famous 1960 article by Eugene Wigner). However, this goes both ways...

Nearly all pathways identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that limit climate-change induced temperature rise to less than 2oC rely on large-scale diversion of carbon emissions away from the atmosphere and instead into permanent storage...

The predicted increase in the world population to around 10 billion people by 2050 will require the world to produce more food in the next few decades than in all of its previous history.

One of the most commonly asked question when a woman is pregnant is whether the parents know if it is a boy or a girl. In humans you have an (almost) 50% chance of guessing the answer correctly. But why is this? Can you correctly explain why there are as many sons as daughters born in humans?

The oceans have absorbed >90% of the heat energy and ~40% of the carbon dioxide added to Earth’s climate system over the industrial era. This heat and carbon is pulled around by the ocean circulation, which can act to push water from the surface to the deep ocean and back, or from Equator to poles...