The overland telegraph connecting Australia to the world was completed just over 150 years ago. It was built due to the dedication of a public servant, Charles Todd.

It's the size of a sesame seed, but it could cause unfathomable destruction to Australia's forests and urban canopy.

A beetle called the polyphagous shot-hole borer (Euwallacea fornicatus) is silently spreading through Perth and its surrounds, forcing councils to chop and chip hundreds of trees — even century-old Moreton Bay figs.

So how does the tiny pest cause such massive problems?

Roger Short (1930_2021) discusses influences in his early life, and some of his research achievements including melatonin as a controller of circannual rhythms, and aspects of reproductive biology across the animal world.

First they learnt how to flip open wheelie bin lids. Now they're using water fountains.

Masters of the urban landscape, sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) are more than capable of some quirky (and sometimes messy) antics.

So what do these entertaining exploits tell us about cockie innovation — or even cockie culture?

Get ready for gravitons, dark photons and transition states. Kathryn Zurek takes us on a tour of the bewildering world of quantum physics.

A couple of months ago, a killer started mobilising off the South Australian shore — one that would wipe out marine life, make surfers feel sick, and smother picturesque beaches in thick foam.

The culprit? A bloom of tiny organisms called microalgae. We can't see them with the naked eye, but in big enough numbers, they can devastate ecosystems.

So what made the South Australian algal bloom so lethal, and can anything be done about blooms like it?

People have been in the Australian wilderness for generations. But can people be considered part of the natural landscape or will they always have an impact?

If you were impressed by generative AI such as ChatGPT, then artificial general intelligence or AGI promises to really knock your socks off.

Over the past couple of decades, tech companies have been racing to build AGI systems that can match or surpass human capabilities across a whole bunch of tasks.

So will AGI save the world — or will it spell the beginning of the end for humanity?

She could only read and write from age 10. She reared children and had a first unsupportive husband. But Mary Somerville was able to correct the work of Isaac Newton, help discover Neptune, and write a science book which became a university text.

The next time you pick up a bag of spuds from the supermarket or fill up the car with petrol, you can thank the Treaty of the Metre for the metric system that underpins daily life.

The treaty was signed exactly 150 years ago, when delegates from 17 countries gathered on a Parisian spring day to establish a new and standardised way of measuring the world around us.

But the metre's inception predates the treaty that bears its name by nearly 100 years. So how did it come about, and how has its definition changed over the centuries?