freelance science journalist and author
From the Guardian, 25 June 2022: Ben wants to quit vaping. He has a few times already. It’s easy, he says, despite the tremors and headaches, feeling hot then cold, the irritability. But then he says vapes – also known as e-cigarettes – containing nicotine are so easy to get despite being illegal to sell … Continue reading Teens and vaping: ‘We would have had a nicotine-free generation’
From WIRED, 14 June 2022: First came the drought. Then the bushfires. Then the floods. And then, on May 21, 2022, came the federal election. After nearly four years as Australian prime minister—a term in office marked by repeated and record-breaking natural disasters—the conservative Scott Morrison was ousted following a contest that hinged on climate … Continue reading Australia has finally woken up to climate change
From Nature Middle East, 6 April 2022: Lewy body disease, or dementia with Lewy bodies, is characterised by a brain build-up of a particular form of the protein alpha-synuclein, forming clumps called aggregates. These aggregates are mostly made up of the phosphorylated form of alpha-synuclein, in which a single amino acid – serine 129 – … Continue reading Rethinking Lewy body dementia
From Nature News, 10 March 2022: Researchers in Australia have endorsed a proposal to remove government ministers’ power to veto grant-funding decisions made by expert science committees. They say this veto ability is just one example of Australia’s political overreach in research, and is a threat to academic freedom. Legislators in Australia are considering whether … Continue reading Australian researchers push to end politicians’ power to veto grants
From The Medical Republic, 21 March 2022: There was a time before covid, which seems a distant memory now, when the concepts of “immune” and “immunised” seemed relatively straightforward to anyone outside the field of immunology. Either by virtue of childhood infection or vaccination, a person believed that they were now protected from further assault … Continue reading What do we mean by Covid immunity?
From Nature Middle East, 17 March 2022: A new genome sequencing method has enabled the rapid sequencing of a highly disease-resistant wheat variety, which could guide the breeding of cultivars that have long-lasting immunity to the devastating fungal stripe rust disease.The wheat genome is difficult to sequence because it is around five times larger than … Continue reading Rapid wheat genome sequencing offers hope for disease resistance
From The Medical Republic, 18 February 2022: “It’s no worse than the flu” has been the rallying cry of covid-deniers, anti-vaccination campaigners, and anyone with a financial or political interest in downplaying the devastating impact that SARS-CoV-2 has had on humanity. While they have been proven spectacularly wrong on so many fronts, there is one … Continue reading Is Covid becoming endemic?
From The Medical Republic, 10 March 2022: Covid can develop resistance to the monoclonal antibody that was thought to be “variant-proof”, Australian research suggests. A research letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports on four patients with covid who experienced treatment failure with sotrovimab, and were then found to have variants of … Continue reading Sotrovimab-resistant covid ‘could spread’
From The Scientist, 28 December 2021: When the pandemic struck in the US last year, a group of researchers from the University of Chicago was in the process of analyzing the results of a 2019 survey about the job satisfaction and career plans of more than 6,000 postdocs. “We realized that we needed to do … Continue reading Pandemic amplifies postdoc struggles
From The Scientist, 4 March 2022: Australia’s east coast has been drenched with record-breaking rainfall, causing floods that have submerged major cities including the Queensland state capital Brisbane, killed at least 16 people, and wreaked major devastation across both Queensland and New South Wales. Around 90 centimeters of rain fell in the space of one week on some areas … Continue reading Flooding and storms wreak havoc for Australian scientists
