Great Moments In Science

Are you a perfectionist, a crisis maker, a defier or a dreamer?Dr Karl Kruszelnicki discovers the four kinds of personalities that are especially prone to being chronically late—and what might help to change these habits.

In our complex world, the cure can sometimes be as bad as the original problem. For example, you would think that if you had a fire in a data centre, it would make sense to deprive the fire of oxygen by flooding the room with an inert gas. But what if the noise of the escaping gas is loud enough to kill the spinning hard drives—potentially causing more damage than the fire?

In our complex world, the cure can sometimes be as bad as the original problem. For example, you would think that if you had a fire in a data centre, it would make sense to deprive the fire of oxygen by flooding the room with an inert gas. But what if the noise of the escaping gas is loud enough to kill the spinning hard drives—potentially causing more damage than the fire?

Most of us have heard of the Nobel Prizes, awarded for work that is unexpected, important—and deep. But not everybody has heard of the comedy version, the Ig Nobel Prizes. In 2016, they were given for research involving rats in tiny trousers, pseudoscientific gibberish, rocks with personalities—and seven other topics.

Most of us have heard of the Nobel Prizes, awarded for work that is unexpected, important—and deep. But not everybody has heard of the comedy version, the Ig Nobel Prizes. In 2016, they were given for research involving rats in tiny trousers, pseudoscientific gibberish, rocks with personalities—and seven other topics.

Many of us access the internet, and the world wide web, via wi-fi. Wi-fi lets us into a fabulous world of shared knowledge and social interaction. On the flip side, it seems that wi-fi can look at us, and perhaps even spy on us. It can even recognize moving humans on the other side of a wall. And this happens by examining not the content of the wi-fi signal, but its strength and timing.

Why are some people mosquito magnets, while others seem to be blissfully bite-free?

Even without having ever learnt the language, there is probably one Latin word we all know—'vomitorium'. Dredging through our memory banks, we all 'know' that the vomitorium was the special room where, back in rather debauched Roman times, gluttonous eaters would go to vomit.

There are two types of time travel—into the future, and into the past. Past time travel might be impossible—but on the other hand, we already travel into the future all the time, as Dr Karl explains.

From the cradle to the grave, Australians are taught to use sunscreen to avoid sunburn and skin cancers. But the universe is complicated, with unexpected links—and so, everything has a cost. In this case, the cost appears to be that one popular sunscreen chemical seems to attack coral.