By utilizing the famous Parkes radio telescope, CSIRO astronomers have joined forces with NASA and are working diligently to unlock one of the greatest mysteries of our universe – pulsars.

These scientists are using equipment at Parkes, as well as NASA’s fermi Gamma-Ray Space telescope, in hopes of understanding how these objects create their immense waves of radiation.

This project has tracked down 25 super-fast ‘millisecond’ pulsars in two years. This is significant because it is the the same number uncovered over the last 20 years of research.

Head Parkes researcher, Dr. Simon Johnston states, “This has been a hugely productive collaboration, and it is generating unprecedented returns for physics and astronomy.”

Kim Carr, Innovation Minister, has this to say: “We have a proud history of cooperation and involvement with NASA on a number of fronts, from assisting with communicating with the Apollo missions to the moon, to deep space exploration, and understanding how our universe works.”

Pulsars essentially emit beams of radio waves and gamma waves, sometimes simultaneously. Radio telescopes like the one at Parkes can detect radio waves as they sweep through the Earth. Unfortunately, gamma-rays are blocked by our atmosphere and can only be studied using space telescopes.

NASA and CSIRO have shown that the best results are achieved by combining both land and space-based techniques. The Fermi space telescope finds unidentified sources of gamma-rays and Parkes investigates for radio wave pulses. Parkes is also currently timing 168 radio pulsars which Fermi might then be able to study.

“We work out exactly when the pulsar’s radio beam sweeps over us. That tells us how fast the pulsar is rotating,” Dr Johnston continues. “If Parkes can get the timing precisely right through the radio wave pulses, we can build up a picture of the gamma-ray pulses by collecting a few photons every time the pulsar beam sweeps past.”

So far, this group project has seen intriguing results. Of 60 objects which have been found to emit gamma-rays by Fermi, 20 of them do not emit radio pulses.

“The most likely explanation is that these pulsars do have radio beams, but they are just not sweeping across the Earth, so we can’t detect them.”

Scientists have now observed new and growing sunspots below the surface of the sun. Sunspots are vast in size, some growing bigger than the earth itself. The nature of these cyclical patches of greater magnetic motion is still somewhat mysterious. Nevertheless, scientists continue to make advances in studying the phenomenon.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO run by NASA used the seismic technology referred to as helioseismology to predict the arrival of a sunspot on the sun’s surface accurate within two days. This prediction and new technique has prompted its consideration as a forecasting instrument for space weather.

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections result from sunspots and can be the cause of power outages on earth, as well as the disruption of satellites and telecommunication devices. Although the potential for damage is large, scientists have had little success with predicting such storms until now. To put the potential harm into perspective, it would be applicable to consider a solar storm like the one experienced in 1921. An event of that magnitude today would leave over 130 million people without electricity or telecommunication.

Large sunspots are associated with more powerful solar storms. Stathis Ilonidis, the lead researcher at Stanford University stated, “Every time we detect a very large sunspot, we know that there is higher probability for solar storms.” This new technique will become even more important as the risk for solar storms becomes greater over the next ten years. In that period, the sun is expected to have lower solar activity with fewer sunspots. However, these tend to be greater in size and therefore produce stronger storms.

Despite the new technology, some still do not know how well this will help forecast solar storms. The timing of sunspots is easily identifiable, but that of the solar storms remains unknown.

A group of researchers including paleontologists from Monash University and Museum Victoria report that they have found the fossilized neck vertebra of a type of dinosaur called a spinosaur. This is the first evidence of these creatures to be discovered in Australia, and it brings a new understanding of their evolutionary line.

In the article Monash University’s Professor Patricia Vickers-Rich pointed out that at the time spinosaurs lived, about 110 to 120 million years ago, Australia was not geographically isolated as it is today. The new find seems to argue that its fauna was not isolated either, but instead included many species that could also be found in other parts of the world.

Science education may be changing in schools thanks to a new National Academies’ report on science in elementary and secondary schools in the United States. In a report that took two years to write, there are 282 pages that lay out a framework that covers science education in grades K-12. The authors hope that this in depth study will help develop new science standards in the curriculum currently taught in American schools.

In the report, the authors state that teachers need to do a better job of communicating to their students just how science and engineering impact their daily lives. Rather than teach little pieces of a broad range of topics, it is suggested that certain core ideas are covered extensively and that teachers emphasize the way that science enters and affects other disciplines. Integrating principles used by scientists into each lesson is thought to be paramount in the teaching of science in the K-12 classroom.

Sometime ago the BBC–British Broadcasting Corporation Trust–conducted an in-depth assessment of the science coverage at BBC, and reported that the review of BBC Science coverage finds room for improvement. The conclusion was that on controversial issues such as the possibility of links between autism and vaccines, genetically modified crops and climate change, impartiality needs to take a back seat to accuracy more often. The report stated the BBC could do better at presenting fringe views as opposed to scientific consensus, in more correct proportions. Steve Jones, geneticist of University College London who authored the report, however, drew the conclusion that the quantity and quality of the BBC‘s coverage of scientific matters are as good as, or perhaps better than, public news media reporting as a whole.

Despite the many branches of science, they all gather information in similar ways. The scientific method is a way to organize and standardize the method of data gathering during experiments. This makes it easier to replicate experiments which adds credence to the initial results.

Steps in the scientific method are:

• naming the problem to be addressed
• making a hypothesis or educated guess about the problem
• testing the hypothesis through an experiment or observed correlation
• gathering the data
• organizing the data in a graph or other form for examination
• examining the results
• checking the results
• drawing a conclusion
• publishing the data

By following the scientific method, scientists allow others to verify their results and add to the increasing wealth of knowledge about the world.

Rabbits may seem awfully cute, but they’re a dreadful pest in Australia and wreak severe environmental damage. They also cost Australia’s agricultural industry about 200 million dollars a year. Now rabbit numbers are on the rise again.

Rabbits were introduced to Australia 150 years ago. Just 24 introduced rabbits multiplied into a population of about 600 million by 1950. They have been able to adapt to most Australian habitats.

Rabbits graze upon and destroy agricultural and native grasses, shrubs and trees. This includes vegetation that would otherwise provide food and shelter for native animals or farm animals. Rabbits can also cause soil erosion by removing vegetation and by burrowing.

Tiny magnetic sensors have been found in the antennae of ants. Ants may use these magnetic sensors to find their way from one place to another, similar to an in-built compass.

The ant being studied is a species called Pachycondyla marginata, which is found in the rainforests of South America. These ants migrate, moving from place to place depending on the season. This particular ant species migrates in a direction 13 degrees from the north-south axis of the Earth on average.

“Behavioral experiments suggest that ants can use the Earth’s magnetic field and the Pachycondyla marginata ants seem to take into account such information for migration,” says Jandira de Oliveira, a PhD student working on the study.

The skeleton of a giant prehistoric elephant has been uncovered by an Australian and Indonesian research team.

The skeleton was found in Indonesia after a sand quarry collapsed, revealing the bones. It then took the researchers four weeks to dig up the skeleton.

The bones are thought to be 200 000 years old, from an extinct species much bigger than today’s Asian elephants.

This is one of the most complete elephant skeletons ever recovered in Indonesia. It may be well preserved because it died in an unusual way.

“Normally, such dead animals would get ripped apart and eaten by carnivores. But it appears that the elephant became bogged in the river shallows, perished and was quickly covered by sands,” says Dr Gert van den Bergh, a participating palaeontologist from the University of Wollongong.

Once the skeleton is properly conserved and assembled, it will be put on display at the Geology Museum in Bandung, West Java.