Biodiversity Legislation Review
The 2016 NSW Biodiversity Reforms: 6 Things You Need To Know
Proposed Biodiversity Conservation Reform Package
NPWS Says Give Seals Space To Recover And Rest
Heat Sickens Corals In Global Bleaching Event
Wet Weather Welcomes Winter
High Flying Technology Helping Conserve WA’s Threatened Black Cockatoos
SUNDAY MORNING BIRDWATCHING with PNHA
Would you like to know more about our local birds and explore our bushland reserves? Then join us on one of our bird walks:
21 August, Chiltern Track, Ingleside (birds and wildflowers)
25 September, Irrawong Reserve, North Narrabeen
27 November, Warriewood Wetlands
Most walks start at 7.30 or 8am and last a couple of hours. Bring binoculars and morning tea for afterwards if you like. Contactpnhabirdwatching@gmail.com for details of each walk.
SUNDAY MORNING BIRDWATCHING with PNHA
Would you like to know more about our local birds and explore our bushland reserves? Then join us on one of our bird walks:
21 August, Chiltern Track, Ingleside (birds and wildflowers)
25 September, Irrawong Reserve, North Narrabeen
27 November, Warriewood Wetlands
Most walks start at 7.30 or 8am and last a couple of hours. Bring binoculars and morning tea for afterwards if you like. Contactpnhabirdwatching@gmail.com for details of each walk.
Ballinas Koalas Update
BAN THE BAG: NEW SOUTH WALES
An estimated 50 million plastic bags end up in our waterways and marine environment in Australia every year.
Plastic pollution is killing our marine life. 30% of the world’s turtles and 90% of seabird species have now ingested plastic debris. We have to act now to clean up our oceans.
Petition - Plastic bag in mangroves - Careel Creek, June, 2016
BAN THE BAG: NEW SOUTH WALES
An estimated 50 million plastic bags end up in our waterways and marine environment in Australia every year.
Plastic pollution is killing our marine life. 30% of the world’s turtles and 90% of seabird species have now ingested plastic debris. We have to act now to clean up our oceans.
Petition - Plastic bag in mangroves - Careel Creek, June, 2016
How Floodwaters Can Turn Cars Into Death Traps
June 20, 2016: UNSW by Wilson Da SilvaEngineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have discovered just how easily cars can be washed away by even the smallest currents – making the crossing of floodwaters a dangerous and potentially life-threatening decision
A team at the UNSW Water Research Laboratory has been testing how small and large cars behave when they encounter flash floods, replicating scenarios faced by many stranded motorists, but doing so in an especially configured test tank in Manly Vale, in northern Sydney.
“What was surprising was just how little water it took to make even a large vehicle unstable,” said principal engineer Grantley Smith, who led the research. “They became vulnerable to moving floodwaters once the depth reached the floor of the vehicle. Even in low water depths and slow flow speeds, floodwaters had a powerful enough force to make them float away.”
In just 95 cm of water, a 2.5 tonne 4WD can be pushed by hand: Principal engineer Grantley Smith, of the UNSW Water Research Laboratory, led the team that conducted the world first experiments. Photo:Grant Turner/Mediakoo/UNSW
The tests are a world first: previous experiments to understand the force of floodwaters have relied on using vehicle miniatures, rather than actual cars. Even the engineers were surprised how easily cars weighing more than a tonne quickly became buoyant and unstable.
A small car like a Toyota Yaris, weighing 1.05 tonnes, was moved by water only 15 cm deep and with a flow speed of just 3.6 km/h. It completely floats away in 60 cm of water.
Even a 2.5 tonne Nissan Patrol 4WD can be rendered unstable by floodwater 45cm high, and a similar flow speed. Once the water reaches 95 cm, the four-wheel drive can completely float, and needs almost zero force to move it by hand.
By contrast, an able-bodied adult is much more stable in flowing water than the 4WD vehicle.
Part of the reason – modern cars are made so airtight (for comfort reasons) that they more easily float when encountering water. Another factor is that people underestimate the power of a swathe of moving water.
“People don’t realise that even slow-moving water packs a powerful punch,” said Smith. “Water is heavy: each cubic metre weighs about 1,000 kg.“If a house is exposed to floodwaters two metres deep and 20 metres wide – travelling at a steady 1 metre/second – the force is equivalent to being hit by a 40-tonne semitrailer every 15 seconds.”
Three men died recently after being swept away while trying to drive through floodwaters in separate incidents in the ACT, the NSW southern highlands and Sydney's southwest, and the NSW State Emergency Services launched more than 80 rescues of stranded cars.
NSW SES Acting Commissioner Greg Newton said the high number of flood rescues was distressing. “People need to re-think their actions and not drive into floodwater, because by doing this they are not only placing their lives at risk, but the lives of our volunteers who have to go out and rescue them,” he said. “Entering floodwater is the number one cause of death and injury in a flood, so everyone should stay out and stay alive.”
Robert McDonald, Insurance Australia Group (IAG) Road Safety Expert, agreed: “With more storms predicted over coming days, it’s a timely reminder for people to be aware of the dangers of driving through flood water. “Common sense – and now research – says regardless of the size of your car, even a big 4WD can very quickly float like a boat. So the message is very clear – it’s never safe to enter flood water,” McDonald said.
The experiments were funded by UNSW and the NSW State Emergency Service, the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, with IAG providing the cars.
“The Office of Environment and Heritage co-sponsored this research as part of the NSW government’s ongoing efforts to better understand and manage the devastating impacts of flooding on local communities,” a spokeswoman said. “As fatalities and near misses continue to remind us, floodwaters are dangerous and can be deadly. This research highlights that drivers should avoid even shallow depths of still water.”
June 20, 2016: UNSW by Wilson Da Silva
Engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have discovered just how easily cars can be washed away by even the smallest currents – making the crossing of floodwaters a dangerous and potentially life-threatening decision
A team at the UNSW Water Research Laboratory has been testing how small and large cars behave when they encounter flash floods, replicating scenarios faced by many stranded motorists, but doing so in an especially configured test tank in Manly Vale, in northern Sydney.
“What was surprising was just how little water it took to make even a large vehicle unstable,” said principal engineer Grantley Smith, who led the research. “They became vulnerable to moving floodwaters once the depth reached the floor of the vehicle. Even in low water depths and slow flow speeds, floodwaters had a powerful enough force to make them float away.”
In just 95 cm of water, a 2.5 tonne 4WD can be pushed by hand: Principal engineer Grantley Smith, of the UNSW Water Research Laboratory, led the team that conducted the world first experiments. Photo:Grant Turner/Mediakoo/UNSW
The tests are a world first: previous experiments to understand the force of floodwaters have relied on using vehicle miniatures, rather than actual cars. Even the engineers were surprised how easily cars weighing more than a tonne quickly became buoyant and unstable.
A small car like a Toyota Yaris, weighing 1.05 tonnes, was moved by water only 15 cm deep and with a flow speed of just 3.6 km/h. It completely floats away in 60 cm of water.
Even a 2.5 tonne Nissan Patrol 4WD can be rendered unstable by floodwater 45cm high, and a similar flow speed. Once the water reaches 95 cm, the four-wheel drive can completely float, and needs almost zero force to move it by hand.
By contrast, an able-bodied adult is much more stable in flowing water than the 4WD vehicle.
Part of the reason – modern cars are made so airtight (for comfort reasons) that they more easily float when encountering water. Another factor is that people underestimate the power of a swathe of moving water.
“People don’t realise that even slow-moving water packs a powerful punch,” said Smith. “Water is heavy: each cubic metre weighs about 1,000 kg.
“If a house is exposed to floodwaters two metres deep and 20 metres wide – travelling at a steady 1 metre/second – the force is equivalent to being hit by a 40-tonne semitrailer every 15 seconds.”
Three men died recently after being swept away while trying to drive through floodwaters in separate incidents in the ACT, the NSW southern highlands and Sydney's southwest, and the NSW State Emergency Services launched more than 80 rescues of stranded cars.
NSW SES Acting Commissioner Greg Newton said the high number of flood rescues was distressing. “People need to re-think their actions and not drive into floodwater, because by doing this they are not only placing their lives at risk, but the lives of our volunteers who have to go out and rescue them,” he said. “Entering floodwater is the number one cause of death and injury in a flood, so everyone should stay out and stay alive.”
Robert McDonald, Insurance Australia Group (IAG) Road Safety Expert, agreed: “With more storms predicted over coming days, it’s a timely reminder for people to be aware of the dangers of driving through flood water. “Common sense – and now research – says regardless of the size of your car, even a big 4WD can very quickly float like a boat. So the message is very clear – it’s never safe to enter flood water,” McDonald said.
The experiments were funded by UNSW and the NSW State Emergency Service, the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, with IAG providing the cars.
“The Office of Environment and Heritage co-sponsored this research as part of the NSW government’s ongoing efforts to better understand and manage the devastating impacts of flooding on local communities,” a spokeswoman said. “As fatalities and near misses continue to remind us, floodwaters are dangerous and can be deadly. This research highlights that drivers should avoid even shallow depths of still water.”
New Bacteria Discovered In Australian Ticks
The Australian Bird Feeding & Watering Study
$50 Million More For Environment And Heritage
Exhausting Our Green Shipping Options
June 24, 2016Scientists in Singapore have developed a revolutionary emissions abatement system that removes pollutants from exhaust gas to help the international shipping industry meet ambitious emissions targets.
In 2013, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) introduced new regulations to reduce exhaust emissions attributed to the shipping industry. Shipping is responsible for around 90% of global trade and the effect of reducing emissions such as sulphur oxides (SOx), nitrous oxides (NOx), particulate matter and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) will have a huge impact on global totals.
Researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) together with Sembcorp Marine Ltd and Ecospec Technology Pte Ltd have risen to the challenge of finding ways to meet the IMO's new emissions targets.
The team from Sembcorp Marine Ltd and Ecospec Technology Pte Ltd has developed an exhaust gas treatment system, called cSOx, which removes SOx and CO2 from ships' diesel engine and boiler exhaust emissions. It uses ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic waves to treat seawater, thereby optimising the system's ability to absorb sulphur dioxide and CO2.
Leveraging on the high performance computing capability of IHPC and its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) expertise, the team gained a better understanding of the flow of exhaust gases within the system and optimised the design without expensive and time-consuming physical experiments. Verification of the CFD analysis was carried out with site measurements, and this, in turn, enabled design improvements to be developed for better performance.
In early 2015, a memorandum of understanding was signed by IHPC, Sembcorp Marine Ltd and the University of Glasgow to collaborate to make ships more eco-friendly. Plans include designing vessels with improved hydrodynamics for better fuel efficiency and further enhancing the exhaust gas cleaning and ballast water treatment systems developed by Sembcorp Marine Ltd and Ecospec Technology Pte Ltd. Shipping is currently responsible for approximately 3 million tons of sulphur dioxide emissions, 4.5 million tons of nitrogen dioxide emissions and 900 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions yearly. Technology such as the cSOx exhaust gas cleaning system may soon begin to reduce shipping emissions and give us hope for a more sustainable future.
Moving forward, the team plans to utilize the IHPC computational fluid dynamics model to evaluate the scaled-up cSOx exhaust gas cleaning system's geometric parameters for better performance.
The above is reprinted from materials provided by The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). 
Shipping is currently responsible for approximately 3 million tons of sulphur dioxide emissions, 4.5 million tons of nitrogen dioxide emissions and 900 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions yearly.Credit: Agency for Science, Technology and Research
June 24, 2016
Scientists in Singapore have developed a revolutionary emissions abatement system that removes pollutants from exhaust gas to help the international shipping industry meet ambitious emissions targets.
In 2013, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) introduced new regulations to reduce exhaust emissions attributed to the shipping industry. Shipping is responsible for around 90% of global trade and the effect of reducing emissions such as sulphur oxides (SOx), nitrous oxides (NOx), particulate matter and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) will have a huge impact on global totals.
Researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) together with Sembcorp Marine Ltd and Ecospec Technology Pte Ltd have risen to the challenge of finding ways to meet the IMO's new emissions targets.
The team from Sembcorp Marine Ltd and Ecospec Technology Pte Ltd has developed an exhaust gas treatment system, called cSOx, which removes SOx and CO2 from ships' diesel engine and boiler exhaust emissions. It uses ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic waves to treat seawater, thereby optimising the system's ability to absorb sulphur dioxide and CO2.
Leveraging on the high performance computing capability of IHPC and its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) expertise, the team gained a better understanding of the flow of exhaust gases within the system and optimised the design without expensive and time-consuming physical experiments. Verification of the CFD analysis was carried out with site measurements, and this, in turn, enabled design improvements to be developed for better performance.
In early 2015, a memorandum of understanding was signed by IHPC, Sembcorp Marine Ltd and the University of Glasgow to collaborate to make ships more eco-friendly. Plans include designing vessels with improved hydrodynamics for better fuel efficiency and further enhancing the exhaust gas cleaning and ballast water treatment systems developed by Sembcorp Marine Ltd and Ecospec Technology Pte Ltd. Shipping is currently responsible for approximately 3 million tons of sulphur dioxide emissions, 4.5 million tons of nitrogen dioxide emissions and 900 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions yearly. Technology such as the cSOx exhaust gas cleaning system may soon begin to reduce shipping emissions and give us hope for a more sustainable future.
Moving forward, the team plans to utilize the IHPC computational fluid dynamics model to evaluate the scaled-up cSOx exhaust gas cleaning system's geometric parameters for better performance.
The above is reprinted from materials provided by The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).
Shipping is currently responsible for approximately 3 million tons of sulphur dioxide emissions, 4.5 million tons of nitrogen dioxide emissions and 900 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions yearly.
Credit: Agency for Science, Technology and Research
Sunburn Sensor Among Top Techs At Sydney Nanomedicine Conference
21 June, 2016: MYLES GOUGH: UNSW
A ‘smart’ paper-based patch that changes colour in sunlight could provide an affordable tool to help prevent sunburn and deadly skin cancers, researchers say.
A ‘smart’ paper-based patch that changes colour in sunlight could provide an affordable tool to help prevent sunburn and deadly skin cancers, researchers say.
Chemists from the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine (ACN) at UNSW have developed a low-cost sensor that warns people if they’ve had too much exposure to ultraviolet sunlight.
The paper sensors can be worn like stick-on patches and use food dyes that visibly change colour after sun exposure. Importantly, they can be tuned to individual skin types.
When the sunburn sensor is exposed to UV light it gradually changes from blue to colourless, due to the photo-degradation of food dye contained in the sensor (Photo: Supplied)
“Australia has one of the highest incidences of skin cancer in the world, and too much exposure to ultraviolet light is the primary cause,” says developer Parisa Sowti Khiabani, a PhD candidate at UNSW.
“We wanted to develop a technology that could address this serious health problem, and we wanted it to be safe, affordable and easy to use,” she says.
UNSW Scientia Professor Justin Gooding, who supervised the research, says the technology is ready to be commercialised immediately: “It’s so simple it could be fabricated at home using an inkjet printer, and tested in your backyard.”
The UV sensor is one of many experimental technologies and research projects set to be discussed at the 7th International NanomedicineConference in Sydney next week (June 27-29).
The Conference is hosted by the ACN – an interdisciplinary partnership between the UNSW Faculties of Engineering, Science and Medicine, and Children’s Cancer Institute. It brings together some of the world’s top scientists and clinicians working in the field.
“We know the vast majority of cancers are curable if they can be detected early enough, and if you can deliver drugs to the precise areas where they need to go. Nanomedicine gives us the power to do both,” says Professor Gooding, who is co-director of the ACN.
He says the field of nanomedicine has progressed enormously over the last decade: “It’s gone from a stage where we were showcasing amazing capabilities, to a stage where we are now working with clinicians at ground-level to solve targeted problems.”
“This type of collaboration makes sure we’re asking the right questions. It enables a more strategic approach to research and means the output will be more practical for the end-user,” he says. “It means our work will have a real-world impact sooner.”
Conference highlights
• Professor George M. Whitesides – Harvard University, USA. A winner of the U.S. National Medal of Science, Whitesides helped pioneer the “lab on a chip” technology. His talk will focus on paper-based diagnostic tools, which can improve public health in the developing world and resource constrained environments.
• Professor Fiona Wood – University of Western Australia. A former Australian of the Year, Professor Wood is a plastic surgeon who worked with survivors of the Bali bombing. She will discuss ways that nanotechnology can be used to engineer tissue, and treat serious burns and other skin injuries.
• Professor Vincent Rotello – University of Massachusetts, USA. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Rotello will address research around self-assembling nanomaterials, and the development of nanoparticles that can go inside individual cells to assess the effectiveness of drugs.
Other speakers and research stories to watch
• Clinical Challenges Series (Monday June 27) – this session will feature some of the real-world challenges faced by clinicians and medical practitioners.
• Social aspects of nanomedicine (Monday June 27) – delve into the legal and ethical issues associated with nanotechnology and the future of medicine.
• Can computers predict the behaviour of nanomaterials in the body? – Professor David Winkler, CSIRO Manufacturing – this talk will focus computational models, which have been used to accurately predict the behaviour and biological responses of untested nanoparticles.
What: UNSW presents the 7th International Nanomedicine Conference
Where: Crowne Plaza, 242 Arden Street, Coogee Beach, Sydney
When: Monday 27 to Wednesday 29 June 2016
Visit: http://www.oznanomed.org/
What is nanotechnology?
Nanotechnology is focused on engineering incredibly tiny particles and devices. The term gets its name from the nanometre, a miniscule unit of measure equal to one-billionth of a metre – or about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair.
Nanomedicine works with materials at the same scale, but is focused on developing technologies with specific medical applications. These could be devices that interact with biological systems in highly controlled ways to better diagnose and monitor diseases, or deliver drugs to targeted sites in the body.
'Holy Grail' Of Breast Cancer Prevention In High-Risk Women May Be In Sight
June 20, 2016: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute
A potential new strategy to prevent breast cancer in women carrying a faulty BRCA1 gene has been discovered by Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researchers (L-R) Professor Geoff Lindeman, Ms. Emma Nolan, Professor Jane Visvader. Credit: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Australia
Australian researchers have discovered that an existing medication could have promise in preventing breast cancer in women carrying a faulty BRCA1 gene.
People who carry a faulty BRCA1 gene are at high risk of developing aggressive breast cancer. Currently many women with a gene mutation choose surgical removal of their breast tissue and ovaries to reduce their chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer.
By pinpointing the cells that give rise to breast cancers in women who have inherited a faulty version of the BRCA1 gene, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researchers have identified that the drug denosumab may have potential to prevent breast cancer from developing. If confirmed in clinical studies, this would provide a non-surgical option to prevent breast cancer in women with elevated genetic risk.
Using samples of breast tissue donated by women carrying a faulty BRCA1 gene, Ms Emma Nolan, Professor Jane Visvader and Professor Geoff Lindeman were able to pinpoint the cells that give rise to breast cancer. The research, which also involved researchers at the Australian familial cancer consortium kConFab and US biotechnology company Amgen was published inNature Medicine.
Cancer precursor cells in BRCA1-mutant breast tissue had many similarities to aggressive forms of breast cancer, said Ms Nolan, who is a PhD student at the institute enrolled through The University of Melbourne's Department of Medical Biology. "These cells proliferated rapidly, and were susceptible to damage to their DNA -- both factors that help them transition towards cancer," she said. "We were excited to discover that these pre-cancerous cells could be identified by a marker protein called RANK."
Professor Lindeman, who is also a medical oncologist at The Royal Melbourne Hospital, said the discovery of RANK as a marker of cancer precursors was an important breakthrough, because inhibitors of the RANK signalling pathway were already in clinical use. "An inhibitor called denosumab is already used in the clinic to treat osteoporosis and breast cancer that has spread to the bone," he said. "We therefore investigated what effect RANK inhibition had on the cancer precursor cells in BRCA1-mutant breast tissue."
The research team showed that RANK inhibition switched off cell growth in breast tissue from women with a faulty BRCA1 gene and curtailed breast cancer development in laboratory models.
"We think this strategy could delay or prevent breast cancer in women with an inherited BRCA1 gene mutation," Professor Lindeman said. "A clinical trial has already begun to investigate this further."
"This is potentially a very important discovery for women who carry a faulty BRCA1 gene, who have few other options. Current cancer prevention strategies for these women include surgical removal of the breasts and/or ovaries, which can have serious impacts on people's lives. To progress this work, denosumab would need to be formally tested in clinical trials in this setting as it is not approved for breast cancer prevention," Professor Lindeman said.
Professor Visvader said the discovery had its basis in more than a decade of investigations of breast stem cell function. "By thoroughly dissecting how normal breast tissue develops, we have been able to pinpoint the precise cells that are the culprits in cancer formation," she said. "It is very exciting to think that we may be on the path to the 'holy grail' of cancer research, devising a way to prevent this type of breast cancer in women at high genetic risk."
Emma Nolan, François Vaillant, Daniel Branstetter, Bhupinder Pal, Göknur Giner, Lachlan Whitehead, Sheau W Lok, Gregory B Mann, Kathy Rohrbach, Li-Ya Huang, Rosalia Soriano, Gordon K Smyth, William C Dougall, Jane E Visvader, Geoffrey J Lindeman. RANK ligand as a potential target for breast cancer prevention in BRCA1-mutation carriers. Nature Medicine, 2016; DOI: 10.1038/nm.4118
High levels of education linked to heightened brain tumor risk
June 20, 2016
A university degree is linked to a heightened risk of developing a brain tumor, suggests a large observational study, published online in theJournal of Epidemiology & Community Health.
Gliomas, in particular, were more common among people who had studied at university for at least three years than they were among those who didn't go on to higher education, the data show.
The researchers base their findings on more than 4.3 million Swedes, all of whom were born between 1911 and 1961 and living in Sweden in 1991.
They were monitored between 1993 and 2010 to see if they developed a primary brain tumor, and information on educational attainment, disposable income, marital status, and occupation was obtained from national insurance, labour market,and national census data.
During the monitoring period, 1.1 million people died and more than 48,000 emigrated, but 5735 of the men and 7101 of the women developed a brain tumor.
Men with university level education, lasting at least three years, were 19% more likely to develop a glioma--a type of cancerous tumor arising in glial cells that surround and support neurons in the brain--than men whose educational attainment didn't extend beyond the period of compulsory schooling (9 years).
Among women, the magnitude of risk was 23% higher for glioma, and 16% higher for meningioma--a type of mostly non-cancerous brain tumor arising in the layers of tissue (meninges) that surround and protect the brain and spinal cord--than it was for women who didn't go on to higher education.
Taking account of potentially influential factors, such as marital status and disposable income, only marginally affected the size of the risk, and only among the men.
High levels of disposable income were associated with a 14% heightened risk of glioma among men, but had no bearing on the risk of either meningioma or acoustic neuroma--a type of non-cancerous brain tumor that grows on the nerve used for hearing and balance.
Nor was disposable income associated with heightened risk of any type of brain tumor among the women.
Occupation also seemed to influence risk for men and women. Compared with men in manual roles, professional and managerial roles (intermediate and high non-manual jobs) were associated with a 20% heightened risk of glioma and a 50% heightened risk of acoustic neuroma.
The risk of glioma was also 26% higher among women in professional and managerial roles than it was for women in manual roles, while the risk of meningioma was 14% higher.
Single men also seemed to have a significantly lower risk of glioma than married/co-habiting men, but, on the other hand, they had a higher risk of meningioma. No such associations were evident among the women.
This is an observational study so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect, and the researchers point out that they were not able to glean information on potentially influential lifestyle factors.
But they emphasise that their findings were consistent, and they point to the strengths of using population data.
Amal R Khanolkar, Rickard Ljung, Mats Talbäck, Hannah L Brooke, Sofia Carlsson, Tiit Mathiesen, Maria Feychting. Socioeconomic position and the risk of brain tumour: a Swedish national population-based cohort study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 2016; jech-2015-207002 DOI: 10.1136/jech-2015-207002
Creation Of A Leading Centre For Visual Art And Design
21 June, 2016: University of Sydney/UNSW
UNSW and the University of Sydney have signed a Heads of Agreement for the Sydney College of Arts to merge into UNSW Art & Design.
The University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney and the National Art School have been exploring opportunities since last year for a closer association between the three institutions, with the aim of strengthening the delivery of visual art and design education in NSW.
In an important step the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney have signed Heads of Agreement for the Sydney College of Arts (SCA) to merge into UNSW Art & Design. The agreement envisages that undergraduate students currently studying at SCA will have the opportunity to transfer to one of the courses offered by UNSW Art & Design, or to continue to graduation with their SCA course, delivered at the UNSW Art and Design campus in Paddington. Arrangements will also be made for all research students and postgraduate coursework students. The arrangements will allow currently enrolled SCA students to graduate with a degree from the University of Sydney. Discussions with the National Art School about increasing its involvement with the arts program will continue once this first step is implemented.
The agreement also supports greater engagement between the two universities with the broader arts community and promotion of the flexible arrangements for students at both UNSW and Sydney to study individual subjects at the other institution, providing more student choice.
The University of Sydney is working with UNSW to ensure that as many of its current SCA staff as possible have employment opportunities at UNSW. A consultation and communication process is underway with SCA staff. The University of Sydney will continue to engage with SCA staff in accordance with its Enterprise Agreement.
Arrangements will be operational from Semester 1 2017.
Commenting on the discussions, University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence said, “This proposed arrangement will help to ensure a strong future for visual art and design education in NSW”.
“Both institutions have strengths in the visual arts that can be enhanced through a greater concentration of students and resources, with the result being better visual arts education and research outcomes.”
UNSW Vice-Chancellor Ian Jacobs said, “This is an exciting step towards the creation of a national centre of artistic excellence that will put NSW at the forefront of art and design education and research in Australia, building on the best qualities of both centres.”
Based in inner-city Paddington with interconnectivity throughout Sydney’s dynamic cultural and creative industries, this expanded art and design centre has been made possible by co-operation between the University of Sydney and UNSW.
Both art and design schools have played a central role in the rich fabric of our nation, producing some of the most significant names in Australian art and design, past and present.
UNSW Art & Design alumni include Del Kathryn Barton who has twice won the Archibald Prize, Hany Armanious, Melissa Chiu, Brenda Croft, Shaun Gladwell, Bronwyn Oliver and the Blake Prize winner Angelica Mesiti. SCA alumni include Marc Newson, Archibald Prize winners Ben Quilty and Cherry Hood, Jane Campion, Lindy Lee and Bronwyn Bancroft.
Fish Out Of Water Are More Common Than Thought
June 22, 2016: University of New South Wales
A land-dwelling blenny from Mauritius that leaps around in the splash zone on intertidal rocks and hides in moist crevices when the tide is low.
Credit: Dr. Georgina Cooke
Fish have evolved the ability to live on land many times, challenging the perception that this extreme lifestyle shift was likely to have been a rare occurrence in ancient times, new UNSW Australia research shows.
"A fish out of water might seem an extraordinary thing, but in fact it is quite a common phenomenon," says study first author and UNSW evolutionary ecologist Dr Terry Ord. "Amphibious behaviour has evolved repeatedly in a wide diversity of present day fish, and the move onto land does not appear to be as difficult as has been presumed."
In the first study of its kind, Dr Ord and Dr Georgina Cooke looked at the evolutionary relationships of all living fish reported to be active on land. They also examined the environmental factors that might have promoted their emergence from the water. The study is published in the journal Evolution.
The UNSW researchers found that 33 different families of fish have at least one species that demonstrates some terrestrial activity and, in many cases, these behaviours are likely to have evolved independently in the different families.
"These forays onto land have occurred in fish that live in different climates, eat different diets and live in range of aquatic environments, from freshwater rivers to the ocean," says Dr Ord, of the UNSW Evolution and Ecology Research Centre.
"While many species only spend a short time out of water, others, like mudskippers and some eels can last for hours or days."
The researchers also conducted detailed observations of the behaviour of one remarkable group of intertidal fish called blennies, which include some species that never emerge from water and others that stay full-time on land as adults, leaping around in the splash zone on intertidal rocks and hiding in moist crevices when the tide is low.
The researchers studied blennies in seven locations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans -- in Guam, Okinawa, Taiwan, Rarotonga, Tahiti, Mauritius and the Seychelles.
"In this one family of fish alone, an amphibious lifestyle appears to have evolved repeatedly, between three and seven times," says Dr Ord.
The emergence of fish onto land more than 350 million years ago was a critical step in the history of life on Earth, leading to the evolution of all land vertebrates, including humans.
"Because of the challenges fish face in being able to breathe and move and reproduce on land, it had been thought this was a rare occurrence. Now we have shown this initial transition to land is quite common, it seems these challenges can be readily overcome," says Dr Ord.
"The real difficulty in developing a fully-fledged terrestrial lifestyle may be in preventing drying out. This has direct consequences for them breathing on land because they still require their gills, which need to stay moist to function properly."
Terry J. Ord, Georgina M. Cooke. Repeated evolution of amphibious behavior in fish and its implications for the colonisation of novel environments. Evolution, 2016; DOI: 10.1111/evo.12971
See blennies leap about
Present-Day Subsurface Ocean On Pluto?
June 21, 2016
The New Horizons spacecraft spied extensional faults on Pluto, a sign that the dwarf planet has undergone a global expansion possibly due to the slow freezing of a subsurface ocean. A new analysis by Brown University scientists bolsters that idea, and suggests that ocean is likely still there today. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
When the NASA's New Horizons spacecraft buzzed by Pluto last year, it revealed tantalizing clues that the dwarf planet might have -- or had at one time -- a liquid ocean sloshing around under its icy crust. According to a new analysis led by a Brown University Ph.D. student, such an ocean likely still exists today.
The study, which used a thermal evolution model for Pluto updated with data from New Horizons, found that if Pluto's ocean had frozen into oblivion millions or billions of years ago, it would have caused the entire planet to shrink. But there are no signs of a global contraction to be found on Pluto's surface. On the contrary, New Horizons showed signs that Pluto has been expanding.
"Thanks to the incredible data returned by New Horizons, we were able to observe tectonic features on Pluto's surface, update our thermal evolution model with new data and infer that Pluto most likely has a subsurface ocean today," said Noah Hammond, a graduate student in Brown's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, and the study's lead author.
The research, which Hammond coauthored with advisors Amy Barr of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona and Brown University geologist Marc Parmentier, is in press in Geophysical Research Letters.
The pictures New Horizons sent back from its close encounter with the Kuiper Belt's most famous denizen showed that Pluto was much more than a simple snowball in space. It has an exotic surface made from different types of ices -- water, nitrogen and methane. It has mountains hundreds of meters high and a vast heart-shaped plain. It also has giant tectonic features -- sinuous faults hundreds of kilometers long as deep as 4 kilometers. It was those tectonic features that got scientists thinking that a subsurface ocean was a real possibility for Pluto.
"What New Horizons showed was that there are extensional tectonic features, which indicate that Pluto underwent a period of global expansion," Hammond said. "A subsurface ocean that was slowly freezing over would cause this kind of expansion."
Scientists think that there may have been enough heat-producing radioactive elements within Pluto's rocky core to melt part of the planet's ice shell. Over time in the frigid Kuiper belt, that melted portion would eventually start to refreeze. Ice is less dense than water, so when it freezes, it expands. If Pluto had on ocean that was frozen or in the process of freezing, extensional tectonics on the surface would result, and that's what New Horizons saw.
There aren't many other ways on Pluto to get such features. One way might have been through a gravitational tug of war with its moon, Charon. But the active gravitational dynamics between the two have long since wound down, and some of the tectonics look fairly fresh (on a geologic timescale). So, many scientists believe that an ocean is the strongest scenario.
But if Pluto had an ocean, what is its fate today? Could the freezing process still be going on, or did the ocean freeze solid a billion years ago?
That's where the thermal evolution model run by Hammond and his colleagues comes in. The model includes updated data from New Horizons on Pluto's diameter and density, key parameters in understanding the dynamics in Pluto's interior. The model showed that because of the low temperatures and high pressure within Pluto, an ocean that had completely frozen over would quickly convert from the normal ice we all know to a different phase called ice II. Ice II has a more compact crystalline structure than standard ice, so an ocean frozen to ice II would occupy a smaller volume and lead to a global contraction on Pluto, rather than an expansion.
"We don't see the things on the surface we'd expect if there had been a global contraction," Hammond said. "So we conclude that ice II has not formed, and therefore that the ocean hasn't completely frozen."
There are a few caveats, the researchers point out. The formation of ice II is dependent on the thickness of Pluto's ice shell. Ice II only forms if the shell is 260 kilometers thick or more. If the shell is thinner than that, the ocean could have frozen without forming ice II. And if that were the case the ocean could have frozen completely without causing contraction.
However, the researchers say there's good reason to believe that the ice shell is more than 260 kilometers. Their updated model suggests that Pluto's ice shell is actually closer to 300 or more kilometers thick. In addition, the nitrogen and methane ices that New Horizons found on the surface bolster the case for a thick ice shell.
"Those exotic ices are actually good insulators," Hammond said. "They may be helping Pluto from losing more of its heat to space."
Taken together, the new model bolsters the case for an ocean environment in the furthest reaches of the solar system.
"That's amazing to me," Hammond said. "The possibility that you could have vast liquid water ocean habitats so far from the sun on Pluto -- and that the same could also be possible on other Kuiper belt objects as well -- is absolutely incredible."
Noah P. Hammond, Amy C. Barr, Edgar M. Parmentier. Recent Tectonic Activity on Pluto Driven by Phase Changes in the Ice Shell.Geophysical Research Letters, 2016; DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069220
RedEye Could Let Your Phone See 24-7
June 20, 2016
The RedEye team from Rice's Efficient Computing Group includes (from left) Robert LiKamWa, Yuan Gao, Yunhui Hou, Mia Polansky and Lin Zhong.
Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
Rice University researchers have just the thing for the age of information overload: an app that sees all and remembers only what it should.
RedEye, new technology from Rice's Efficient Computing Group that was unveiled today at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2016) conference in Seoul, South Korea, could provide computers with continuous vision -- a first step toward allowing the devices to see what their owners see and keep track of what they need to remember.
"The concept is to allow our computers to assist us by showing them what we see throughout the day," said group leader Lin Zhong, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice and the co-author of a new study about RedEye. "It would be like having a personal assistant who can remember someone you met, where you met them, what they told you and other specific information like prices, dates and times."
Zhong said RedEye is an example of the kind of technology the computing industry is developing for use with wearable, hands-free, always-on devices that are designed to support people in their daily lives. The trend, which is sometimes referred to as "pervasive computing" or "ambient intelligence," centers on technology that can recognize and even anticipate what someone needs and provide it right away.
"The pervasive-computing movement foresees devices that are personal assistants, which help us in big and small ways at almost every moment of our lives," Zhong said. "But a key enabler of this technology is equipping our devices to see what we see and hear what we hear. Smell, taste and touch may come later, but vision and sound will be the initial sensory inputs."
Zhong said the bottleneck for continuous vision is energy consumption because today's best smartphone cameras, though relatively inexpensive, are battery killers, especially when they are processing real-time video.
Zhong and former Rice graduate student Robert LiKamWa began studying the problem in the summer of 2012 when they worked at Microsoft Research's Mobility and Networking Research Group in Redmond, Wash., in collaboration with group director and Microsoft Distinguished Scientist Victor Bahl. LiKamWa said the team measured the energy profiles of commercially available, off-the-shelf image sensors and determined that existing technology would need to be about 100 times more energy-efficient for continuous vision to become commercially viable. This was the motivation behind LiKamWa's doctoral thesis, which pursues software and hardware support for efficient computer vision.
In an award-winning paper a year later, LiKamWa, Zhong, Bahl and colleagues showed they could improve the power consumption of off-the-shelf image sensors tenfold simply through software optimization.
"RedEye grew from that because we still needed another tenfold improvement in energy efficiency, and we knew we would need to redesign both the hardware and software to achieve that," LiKamWa said.
He said the energy bottleneck was the conversion of images from analog to digital format.
"Real-world signals are analog, and converting them to digital signals is expensive in terms of energy," he said. "There's a physical limit to how much energy savings you can achieve for that conversion. We decided a better option might be to analyze the signals while they were still analog."
The main drawback of processing analog signals -- and the reason digital conversion is the standard first step for most image-processing systems today -- is that analog signals are inherently noisy, LiKamWa said. To make RedEye attractive to device makers, the team needed to demonstrate that it could reliably interpret analog signals.
"We needed to show that we could tell a cat from a dog, for instance, or a table from a chair," he said.
Rice graduate student Yunhui Hou and undergraduates Mia Polansky and Yuan Gao were also members of the team, which decided to attack the problem using a combination of the latest techniques from machine learning, system architecture and circuit design. In the case of machine learning, RedEye uses a technique called a "convolutional neural network," an algorithmic structure inspired by the organization of the animal visual cortex.
LiKamWa said Hou brought new ideas related to system architecture circuit design based on previous experience working with specialized processors called analog-to-digital converters at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
"We bounced ideas off one another regarding architecture and circuit design, and we began to understand the possibilities for doing early processing in order to gather key information in the analog domain," LiKamWa said.
"Conventional systems extract an entire image through the analog-to-digital converter and conduct image processing on the digital file," he said. "If you can shift that processing into the analog domain, then you will have a much smaller data bandwidth that you need to ship through that ADC bottleneck."
LiKamWa said convolutional neural networks are the state-of-the-art way to perform object recognition, and the combination of these techniques with analog-domain processing presents some unique privacy advantages for RedEye.
"The upshot is that we can recognize objects -- like cats, dogs, keys, phones, computers, faces, etc. -- without actually looking at the image itself," he said. "We're just looking at the analog output from the vision sensor. We have an understanding of what's there without having an actual image. This increases energy efficiency because we can choose to digitize only the images that are worth expending energy to create. It also may help with privacy implications because we can define a set of rules where the system will automatically discard the raw image after it has finished processing. That image would never be recoverable. So, if there are times, places or specific objects a user doesn't want to record -- and doesn't want the system to remember -- we should design mechanisms to ensure that photos of those things are never created in the first place."
Zhong said research on RedEye is ongoing. He said the team is working on a circuit layout for the RedEye architecture that can be used to test for layout issues, component mismatch, signal crosstalk and other hardware issues. Work is also ongoing to improve performance in low-light environments and other settings with low signal-to-noise ratios, he said.
The above is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University.
Inspirational Men - David Unaipon
David Unaipon (born David Ngunaitponi) (28 September 1872 – 7 February 1967) was a well-known Indigenous Australian of the Ngarrindjeri people, a preacher, inventor and writer. Unaipon's contribution to Australian society helped to break many Indigenous Australian stereotypes, and he is featured on the Australian $50 note in commemoration.Born at the Point McLeay Mission on the banks of Lake Alexandrina in the Coorong region of South Australia, Unaipon was the fourth of nine children of James and Nymbulda Ngunaitponi. Unaipon began his education at the age of seven at the Point McLeay Mission School and soon became known for his intelligence, with the former secretary of the Aborigines' Friends' Association stating in 1887: "I only wish the majority of white boys were as bright, intelligent, well-instructed and well-mannered, as the little fellow I am now taking charge of."
Unaipon left school at 13 to work as a servant for C.B. Young in Adelaide where Young actively encouraged Unaipon's interest in literature, philosophy, science and music. In 1890, he returned to Point McLeay where he apprenticed to a bootmaker and was appointed as the mission organist. In the late 1890s he travelled to Adelaide but found that his colour was a bar to employment in his trade and instead took a job as storeman for an Adelaide bootmaker before returning to work as book-keeper in the Point McLeay store.
On 4 January 1902 he married Katherine Carter (née Sumner), a Tangane woman. He was later employed by the Aborigines' Friends' Association as a deputationer, in which role he travelled and preached widely in seeking support for the Point McLeay Mission.
Unaipon took out provisional patents for 19 inventions but was unable to afford to get any of his inventions fully patented. His most successful invention (provisional patent 15 624), a shearing machine that converted curvilineal motion into the straight line movement which is the basis of modern mechanical shears, was introduced without Unaipon receiving any financial return and, apart from a 1910 newspaper report acknowledging him as the inventor, he received no credit.
Other inventions included a centrifugal motor, a multi-radial wheel and a mechanical propulsion device. He was alsoknown as the Australian Leonardo da Vinci for his mechanical ideas, which included pre World War I drawings for a helicopter design based on the principle of the boomerang and his research into the polarisation of light and also spent much of his life attempting to achieve perpetual motion.Unaipon was obsessed with correct English and in speaking tended to use classical English rather than that in common usage. His written language followed the style of John Milton and John Bunyan.
Unaipon was the first Aboriginal author to be published after he was commissioned in the early 1920s by the University of Adelaide to assemble a book on Aboriginal legends. He published three short booklets of Aboriginal stories in 1927, 1928 and 1929. In this time he wrote on topics covering everything from perpetual motion and helicopter flight to Aboriginal legends and campaigns for Aboriginal rights.
Unaipon was inquisitively religious, believing in an equivalence of traditional Aboriginal and Christian spirituality. His employment with the Aborigines' Friends' Association collecting subscription money allowed him to travel widely. The travel brought him into contact with many intelligent people sympathetic with the cause of Aboriginal rights, and gave him the opportunity to lecture on Aboriginal culture and rights. Although he was much in demand as a public speaker he was often refused accommodation and refreshment due to his race.
Right: From frontpiece of Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (1924) by David Unaipon, courtesy the State Library of New South Wales
Unaipon was the first Aboriginal writer to publish in English, the author of numerous articles in newspapers and magazines, retelling traditional stories and arguing for the rights of Aborigines.
Some of Unaipon's traditional Aboriginal stories were published in a book, Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals, under the name of anthropologist William Ramsay Smith FRSE, a Scottish physician, naturalist, anthropologist and civil servant, active in Australia later in his career. Some sources state David sold a manuscript of the work to Smith to finance other works. Smith subsequently attributed the work to himself when he published it. The stories have recently been republished in their original form, under the author's name, as Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines.
Unaipon was also involved in political issues surrounding Aboriginal affairs and was a keen supporter of Aboriginal self-determination, including working as a researcher and witness for the Bleakley Enquiry into Aboriginal Welfare and lobbied the Australian Government to take over responsibility for Aboriginals from its constituent states. He proposed to the government of South Australia to replace the office of Chief Protector of Aborigines with a responsible board and was arrested for attempting to provide a separate territory for Aboriginals in central and northern Australia.
In 1936, he was reported to be the first Aboriginal to attend a levée, when he attended the South Australian centenary levée in Adelaide, an event that made international news.
An interpretive dance based on Unaipon's life, Unaipon, was performed by the Bangarra Dance Theatre, while the David Unaipon Literary Award is an annual award presented for the best of writing of the year by unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors.
The David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education And Research at the University of South Australia is named after him, as is Unaipon Avenue in the Canberra suburb of Ngunnawal.
21 years after Unaipon's death in 1988, the annual national David Unaipon Award was established for unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers.
Information sourced from Wikipedia, Trove and Internet archives websites.
Inspirational Women - Maria Sklodowska Curie
On June 25th in 1903, Marie Curie defended her doctoral thesis on radioactive substances – at Université de la Sorbonne in Paris – becoming the first woman in France to receive a doctoral degree.The examination committee expressed the opinion that Curie's findings, including the determination of Radium’s atomic weight, represented the greatest scientific contribution ever made in a doctoral thesis. Of the committee’s three members, were two future Nobel Laureates Gabriel Lippmann (Physics 1908) and Henri Moissan, (Chemistry 1906).
Right: Thesis cover: Recherches sur les substances radioactives (Research on Radioactive Substances).
In December 1903, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel." At first, the Committee intended to honour only Pierre and Becquerel, but one of the committee members and an advocate of woman scientists, Swedish mathematician Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler, alerted Pierre to the situation, and after his complaint, Marie's name was added to the nomination. Marie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Marie Curie, née Maria Sklodowska (1867–1934), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1903) for pioneering research on radiation, and the Prize in Chemistry (1911) for the discovery of the elements radium and polonium.
Her achievements included the development of the theory ofradioactivity (a term that she coined, techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms, using radioactive isotopes. Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire, studing at Warsaw's clandestine Floating University, Marie began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw, which remain major centres of medical research today.
During World War I, Curie saw a need for field radiological centres near the front lines to assist battlefield surgeons. After a quick study of radiology, anatomy, and automotive mechanics she procured X-ray equipment, vehicles, auxiliary generators, and developed mobile radiography units, which came to be popularly known as petites Curies ("Little Curies"). She became the director of the Red Cross Radiology Service and set up France's first military radiology centre, operational by late 1914. Assisted at first by a military doctor and by her 17-year-old daughter Irène, Curie directed the installation of 20 mobile radiological vehicles and another 200 radiological units at field hospitals in the first year of the war. Later, she began training other women as aides.
Marie Curie - Mobile Military Hospital X-Ray-Unit
In 1915 Curie produced hollow needles containing 'radium emanation', a colorless, radioactive gas given off by radium, later identified as radon, to be used for sterilizing infected tissue. She provided the radium from her own one-gram supply. It is estimated that over a million wounded soldiers were treated with her X-ray units. Busy with this work, she carried out very little scientific research during that period. In spite of all her humanitarian contributions to the French war effort, Curie never received any formal recognition of it from the French government.
Promptly after the war started, she attempted to donate her gold Nobel Prize medals to the war effort but the French National Bank refused to accept them. She did buy war bonds, using her Nobel Prize money. She was also an active member in committees of Polonia in France dedicated to the Polish cause. After the war, she summarized her war time experiences in a book Radiology in War (1919).
The physical and societal aspects of the Curies' work contributed substantially to shaping the world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Cornell University professor L. Pearce Williams observes:
The result of the Curies' work was epoch-making. Radium's radioactivity was so great that it could not be ignored. It seemed to contradict the principle of the conservation of energy and therefore forced a reconsideration of the foundations of physics. On the experimental level the discovery of radium provided men like Ernest Rutherford with sources of radioactivity with which they could probe the structure of the atom. As a result of Rutherford's experiments with alpha radiation, the nuclear atom was first postulated. In medicine, the radioactivity of radium appeared to offer a means by which cancer could be successfully attacked.
If Curie's work helped overturn established ideas in physics and chemistry, it has had an equally profound effect in the societal sphere. To attain her scientific achievements, she had to overcome barriers that were placed in her way because she was a woman, in both her native and her adoptive country. This aspect of her life and career is highlighted in Françoise Giroud's Marie Curie: A Life, which emphasizes Marie's role as a feminist precursor.
She was known for her honesty and moderate life style. Having received a small scholarship in 1893, she returned it in 1897 as soon as she began earning her keep. She gave much of her first Nobel Prize money to friends, family, students, and research associates. In an unusual decision, Curie intentionally refrained from patenting the radium-isolation process, so that the scientific community could do research unhindered. She insisted that monetary gifts and awards be given to the scientific institutions she was affiliated with rather than to her. She and her husband often refused awards and medals. Albert Einstein reportedly remarked that she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame.
Curie visited Poland for the last time in early 1934. A few months later, on 4 July 1934, she died at the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in Passy, in Haute-Savoie, from aplastic anemia believed to have been contracted from her long-term exposure to radiation.The damaging effects of ionising radiation were not known at the time of her work, which had been carried out without the safety measures later developed. She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket, and she stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the faint light that the substances gave off in the dark. Curie was also exposed to X-rays from unshielded equipment while serving as a radiologist in field hospitals during the war. Although her many decades of exposure to radiation caused chronic illnesses (including near blindness due to cataracts) and ultimately her death, she never really acknowledged the health risks of radiation exposure.
_and_Marie_Sklodowska_Curie_(1867-1934),_c._1903_(4405627519).jpg?timestamp=1466858987803)
Pierre and Marie Curie, c. 1903 from Smithsonian Institution (USA)
Information sourced from Wikipedia, Trove and Internet archives websites.
Disclaimer: These articles are not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Pittwater Online News or its staff.