If you had a watch with glowing hands in the early 20th century, there is a good chance it was painted with a newly discovered element called ‘radium’. Radioactive chemicals such as this were used in everything from clocks to toothpaste to health tonics. The technology might have been new and exciting, but was also potentially dangerous. Workers who painted those watch hands fell ill, most of them dying of cancer.
Of course, today’s world wouldn’t be the same had we never discovered radioactivity. It’s used in medical diagnostics, scientific research and technology such as smoke alarms. However it’s vital that we remain cautious about new discoveries to reduce any possible risks they pose.

Half a century ago, the very idea of transplanting an organ from one person into another was considered by many as somewhat ghastly. Whispers of head transplants and Frankenstein-style monsters could be heard as people feared what might possibly come from such new technology. Today, countless people owe their lives to this relatively common form of surgery.
But are we prepared to use animals for their body parts instead? That is the question being asked as we look for new ways to meet the need for organ transplants.
The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has recently announced it would permit trials on ‘xenotransplantation’ – the process of replacing a person’s organs with those from another species. Given animals such as pigs have organs that are rather similar to our own, it could provide a way of saving the lives of those who would otherwise never find a compatible donor.

If you had a pair of boxes labelled ‘plant’ and ‘animal’, how challenging would it be to find items to put in each of them? Easy, you’d say! A frog could go into ‘animal’ because it chases and eats flies. You could put a daisy into the ‘plant’ box because it gets energy by absorbing light and not other organisms.

Where would you put the aquatic slug, Elysia chlorotica? Well, it’s a slug, so you’d assume it would get its energy by eating algae or plant material. Obviously it’s an animal. Yet its dusky green colouration reveals quite an interesting trick – this slippery gastropod can also soak up the sun to feed itself.

Old man emu isn’t well known for his swimming ability, nor is his cassowary cousin. The flightless African rhea can’t operate small aircraft, ostriches aren’t very good at teleportation and as large as the extinct New Zealand moa was, it’s unlikely it got there by jumping across the Tasman.

They are all related as a group of birds called ‘ratites’. Biologists from the Australian National University wondered just how it was that these birds managed to spread to different parts of the globe if they couldn’t fly. Yet the DNA of the moa revealed an interesting secret – its closest ancestor is a small South American bird called a ‘tinamous’.

There’s an old saying they have on Neptune – ‘Nothing is richer than a penguin’. At least, there would be if anything could survive the intense heat and massive pressure it takes to create the ‘icebergs’ of diamond floating on a sea of liquid carbon.

According to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics, diamonds behave a lot like ice when they are melted at high pressures. Stranger still, astronomers believe this might actually be happening on Neptune and Uranus.

Flowering plants aren’t just pretty to look at; if they had never evolved, the human species probably wouldn’t have either. The brains of our primate ancestors grew large on a diet of fruit and flowers provided by a group of plants known as ‘angiosperms’.

But over 140 million years ago there was no such thing as a flower – plants such as conifers and ferns used other methods other than flowers to reproduce. A few million years after the last dinosaur walked the planet, flowering plants took over conifers as the most common type of tree. Today there are thought to be between 250 000 and 400 000 species of flowering plant.

Pinching the mug of the Science by Email editor should be considered a crime. Fortunately, it has been returned, and no harm was done. But if it could only talk! What adventures did it have? Where did it go? Who stole it in the first place?

If it had have been armed with a small device called a FLECK nano, such questions might have been answered.

A few years ago, CSIRO developed a wireless device called a FLECK, consisting of a central processing unit, flash memory and a radio transceiver. FLECKs could be outfitted with a range of different sensors to record conditions in their surroundings, such as the temperature or moisture.

Watch any science fiction movie and you’ll quickly get the impression that weapon of choice in the future will be little more than a flash of light. Whether it’s a tiny pistol or a cannon capable of bringing down entire spaceships, lasers seem to define war in centuries yet to come.
We mightn’t have spacecraft shooting bolts of light at each other quite yet, but going on a recent demonstration in California we might be blasting slightly smaller enemies from the sky. The mosquito is set to be the first real-life victim of the laser gun.
Microsoft’s billionaire founder, Bill Gates, and his wife Melinda, set scientists a challenge to find cost-efficient ways of reducing the number of deaths from the parasitic disease malaria. The research company ‘Intellectual Ventures Laboratory’ took up the challenge and began work on a device that used a tiny laser to quickly zap any mosquito unlucky enough to get too close.

If a cyclone tore through a book shop, how would you react if you were told it was your job to glue all of the books back together again? With ripped-up pages scattered all over the place, where would you start? A team of French microbiologists faced a similar dilemma when studying the diversity of bacteria in the human gut.
The long tube that is your digestive system is home to an immense zoo of microscopic organisms. Researchers from the National Institute of Agricultural Research in France wanted to know if we all shared similar zoos, or if the ‘animals’ in each of us varied.
Telling the difference between animals in a real life zoo is easy. Lions don’t look much like chimpanzees, and penguins are easy to pick out from the seals. Bacteria, on the other hand, can often be hard to categorise. So the microbiologists ripped them up and looked at a soup of their genes.

Australia looks after one of the largest areas of ocean in the world – an area more than twice that of our land mass. That gives us a lot of water to look after. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea has declared 16 million square kilometres of ocean surrounding Australia falls within our responsibility. In order to look after our vast marine ecosystems, we need to understand what lurks beneath its surface.
Over 80 per cent of the life in the Southern Oceans is found no where else on Earth. Not only do we have vast areas of coral reef, we have the highest diversity of both mangrove species and sea grasses. Climate change, overfishing and irresponsible recreational activities can have a disastrous impact on these environments, in turn upsetting the balance of other surrounding ecosystems.