Pittwater Online News

 Findings of the Independent Review into the Port of Gladstone 

 Media release, 9 May 2014 - The Hon. Greg Hunt MP; Minister for the Environment

Today I am releasing the independent review into the leaking bund wall incidents at the Port of Gladstone.

It is a comprehensive document, with 37 findings and 19 recommendations and I thank the members of the independent review panel for their work.

The relevant findings will be used to inform the assessment of future developments with reclamation areas in coastal environments. 

These findings include: 

Aspects of the design and construction of the bund wall were not consistent with industry best practice. While the overall design of the bund wall and the choice of geotextile were considered appropriate, inadequate restraint of a geotextile liner, 'piping' of water and sediment through paleo channels under the wall and the erosion of mud outside the wall all contributed to changes in turbidity in the vicinity of the bund wall. 

The location of water quality monitoring sites associated with the Western Basin Strategic Dredging and Disposal Project was inadequate to determine whether changes in turbidity were attributable to the performance of the bund wall. 

The Department of the Environment's ability to respond to alleged breaches of conditions was limited by the lack of specificity in some of the previous Labor Government's conditions of approval, inadequate resourcing of the regulatory functions at the time of the incident and fragmented and complex cross-jurisdictional regulations.

It is important to note that the findings relate to events in 2011 and 2012. I am advised these issues affecting the bund wall have been resolved and do not present an ongoing threat to the environment.

I am also advised that the Department has already begun to address a number of the findings, including a significant increase in compliance monitoring staff numbers, a risk based model developed in collaboration with the CSIRO to better manage compliance resources and a review of all compliance and enforcement standard operating procedures to be completed by 30 June 2014. 

I am confident that these findings will help improve environmental practices and regulation going forward. I will respond formally to the Report by 1 July 2014. However, having spoken with members of the panel, my intention is to adopt as many of the recommendations as possible.

Information about the review is available online atwww.environment.gov.au/bundwallreview

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Gladstone Ports Corporation has approvals under Australian and Queensland government legislation for the Port of Gladstone Western Basin Strategic Dredging and Disposal Project. The approvals allow for a maximum of 46 million cubic metres of dredge spoil to be removed and disposed of both offshore and within a constructed reclamation area.

The Report, and it's 37 findings and 19 recommendations can be found at above link.

An Example:

Recommendation 8. High-quality background environmental data should be recognised as critical environmental infrastructure and its acquisition and maintenance be a high priority for the Australian and Queensland governments.

 Dredge Report: Mining industry understates impact of dredging and dumping on Great Barrier Reef - Wed 7 May 2014

A new report has revealed that the impact of dredging and dumping in the Great Barrier Reef is much worse than the mining industry or state-owned ports have indicated, raising concerns over plans to dredge and dump more than 100 million tonnes in the Reef’s waters.

The report’s key findings include:

The World Heritage Area is under threat from unprecedented industrial development including seabed dredging,

Dredging eradicates seagrass and marine animals living in the dredge area,

Dredging creates plumes that cover vast distances often underestimated by industry,

There are plans to conduct a further 140 million tonnes of capital dredging in the Reef’s waters through port expansions at Gladstone, Mackay, Abbot Point, Townsville and Cairns, and

There are significant credibility issues with claims about limited dredging impacts at Hay Point.

Felicity Wishart, the Great Barrier Reef campaign director for the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said no longer could the mining industry and the state government claim that dredging doesn’t cause the Reef damage.

“Claims that 8.3 million cubic metres of seabed dredged at Hay Point Port and dumped in the Great Barrier Reef’s waters in 2006 led to no significant or long term environmental impacts are not credible,” Ms Wishart said.

“The monitoring ceased six months after dredging stopped when corals were still covered in sediment and suffering with lesions.

“In the monitoring report, corals with dead patches were grouped together with coral that had no damage at all, obscuring the fact that these corals were damaged.

“Control sites were potentially compromised by dredge spoil. The inadequacy of monitoring at this site is deeply troubling and with so much more dredging and dumping planned for the Reef’s waters.

“The state government is both the owner and the overseer of these dredging projects, which means that it is essentially checking its own homework and giving itself top marks.

“This report highlights that the industrialisation of the Reef’s coast through expanded ports will continue to cause environmental damage to the Reef if it goes ahead,” said Ms Wishart.

UQ Coral scientist Dr Selina Ward said the many flaws exposed in the Hay Point monitoring concerned her.

"There are issues with the design of the monitoring program. The sites that were monitored as ‘no impact sites’ were well within the range of the sediment plume so they were not 'no impact sites' after all. Consequently, the corals at these ‘no impact sites’ showed similar damage to those at the ‘impact sites’. Hence, the developers claim there was no impact of the dredging,” Dr Ward said.

“We know some corals had up to 60% coverage by sediment which would have been damaging for them.

“How did they cope into the future? We don’t know because the monitoring stopped six months after the dredging.

“There are many methods for measuring coral health that weren’t used in the monitoring and as a scientist I question the results,” she said.

Download the report (3.49mb) HERE

 Adani's Carmichael mega coal mine Approved this Week by QLD Government

Adani's Carmichael mega coal mine has been approved this week by the Queensland Government. 

Although the QLD. Government’s Coordinator-General's has listed 190 conditions, and the mine is still to receive federal approval, there have been many outspoken critics of the approval, citing the Indian-owned Adani  has a history of complaints against it for breaches of environmental laws in its home country.

The project will also require a 189-kilometre rail line, water supply infrastructure, coal handling and processing plant and will produce 60 million tonnes of thermal coal every year for ninety years. 

"Coal in the Galilee Basin must stay in the ground if we are to deliver a safe climate and a sustainable economy to our grandchildren, rather than just make Campbell Newman's mining mates richer," Australian Greens' mining spokesperson, Senator Larissa Waters, said this week, 

" The Newman Government can't mitigate the climate disaster this project would be, nor can there be any confidence those conditions will be enforced when 220 workers from the Environment Department have already been slashed by the Newman Government….. The masses of coal produced would be exported through the Great Barrier Reef, treating the Reef like a shipping super highway for the big miners.”

Greenpeace Australia released the following on Friday afternoon:

Top 10 reasons why Carmichael mega mine is a REALLY bad idea - By Greenpeace Australia - May 9, 2014

Most people haven’t heard of the Indian Adani Group or its plan to a new coal mine that would outsize any other in Australia.

If current plans go ahead, Australians may become familiar with the words ‘Adani’ and ‘Carmichael’ for all the wrong reasons.

Comprised of six open-cut pits and five underground mines, the mine will require a rail corridor through farmland and would produce so much coal to be shipped abroad that it’s driving the mega-port expansion in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.

 Trout spawning season has started

Fishers are reminded that the annual trout spawning season commences in the Snowy Mountains from 1 May 2014.

Department of Primary Industries (DPI) Inland Senior Fisheries Manager, Cameron Westaway, said the annual trout spawning season fishing rules apply to the Thredbo River and its tributaries and the Eucumbene River and its tributaries (upstream of the Lake Eucumbene dam wall and including Providence Portal).

“Restrictions are in place from Thursday 1st May to provide protection for early spawning trout while also providing fishers with the opportunity to catch a trophy sized trout,” Mr Westaway said.

“The Eucumbene River in particular has provided excellent fishing for large brown trout over the past two years.

“A minimum size limit of 50cm, daily bag limit of 1 and possession limit of 2 trout will apply to these waters from 1 May to the end of the Queens Birthday long weekend on Monday 9 June.

“Anglers can use 1 attended rod and line with up to 2 hooks with artificial flies or lures and up to 3 treble hooks attached to any lure is permitted. Fishing gear rigged for bait fishing is prohibited.”

The annual closure on fishing in trout streams throughout NSW will then be in place from Tuesday 10 June 2014 allowing brown and rainbow trout to breed uninterrupted until the trout fishing season re-opens on the October long weekend on Saturday 4 October 2014.

Trout dams remain open to fishing throughout the year.

“The minimum size limit of 25cm, daily bag limit of 2 and possession limit of 4 trout will again apply to the Thredbo and Eucumbene Rivers when the season opens in October,” Mr Westaway said.

“While 150,000 rainbow trout have been stocked into Lake Eucumbene and 50,000 rainbow trout into Lake Jindabyne each year for more than a decade, it is important to provide increased protection for brown and rainbow trout during their annual spawning runs.”

Fisheries officers will be patrolling the Thredbo and Eucumbene Rivers to ensure that fishers are abiding by these rules.

All fishers are reminded to respect other users, use facilities provided, dispose of any rubbish or refuse responsibly and not interfere with other fishers by parking or camping too close to the water (where permitted) when fishing these rivers.

Detailed information on the fishing rules can be found online or in the NSW Freshwater Fishing Guide which is available from DPI fisheries offices and most bait and tackle stores

 Sustainable catch: Blue-eye Trevalla by CSIRO - Published on 6 May 2014

Blue-eye Trevalla is an iconic - and delicious - Australian seafood species. We're studying blue-eye biology, early life-history and movement to better predict its species distribution in Australian waters. This will ensure a sustainable catch for Australia's fishing industry and the continued availability of blue-eye for consumers' plates.

 As carbon dioxide levels rise, some crop nutrients will fall, researchers find

May 7, 2014 - Researchers have some bad news for future farmers and eaters: As carbon dioxide levels rise this century, some grains and legumes will become significantly less nutritious than they are today.

The new findings are reported in the journal Nature. Eight institutions, from Australia, Israel, Japan and the United States, contributed to the analysis.

The researchers looked at multiple varieties of wheat, rice, field peas, soybeans, maize and sorghum grown in fields with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels like those expected in the middle of this century. (Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are currently approaching 400 parts per million, and are expected to rise to 550 ppm by 2050.)

The teams simulated high CO2 levels in open-air fields using a system called Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE), which pumps out, monitors and adjusts ground-level atmospheric CO2 to simulate future conditions. In this study, all other growing conditions (sunlight, soil, water, temperature) were the same for plants grown at high-CO2 and those used as controls.

The experiments revealed that the nutritional quality of a number of the world's most important crop plants dropped in response to elevated CO2.

The study contributed "more than tenfold more data regarding both the zinc and iron content of the edible portions of crops grown under FACE conditions" than available from previous studies, the team wrote.

"When we take all of the FACE experiments we've got around the world, we see that an awful lot of our key crops have lower concentrations of zinc and iron in them (at high CO2)," said University of Illinois plant biology and Institute for Genomic Biology professor Andrew Leakey, an author on the study. "And zinc and iron deficiency is a big global health problem already for at least 2 billion people."

Zinc and iron went down significantly in wheat, rice, field peas and soybeans. Wheat and rice also saw notable declines in protein content at higher CO2.

"Across a diverse set of environments in a number of countries, we see this decrease in quality," Leakey said.

Nutrients in sorghum and maize remained relatively stable at higher CO2 levels because these crops use a type of photosynthesis, called C4, which already concentrates carbon dioxide in their leaves, Leakey said.

"C4 is sort of a fuel-injected photosynthesis that maize and sorghum and millet have," he said. "Our previous work here at Illinois has shown that their photosynthesis rates are not stimulated by being at elevated CO2. They already have high CO2 inside their leaves."

More research is needed to determine how crops grown in developing regions of the world will respond to higher atmospheric CO2, Leakey said.

"It's important that we start to do these experiments in tropical climates with tropical soils, because that's just a terrible gap in our knowledge, given that that's where food security is already the biggest issue," he said.

Samuel S. Myers, Antonella Zanobetti, Itai Kloog, Peter Huybers, Andrew D. B. Leakey, Arnold J. Bloom, Eli Carlisle, Lee H. Dietterich, Glenn Fitzgerald, Toshihiro Hasegawa, N. Michele Holbrook, Randall L. Nelson, Michael J. Ottman, Victor Raboy, Hidemitsu Sakai, Karla A. Sartor, Joel Schwartz, Saman Seneweera, Michael Tausz, Yasuhiro Usui. Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition.Nature, 2014; DOI:10.1038/nature13179

Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE) systems, like this one at the University of Illinois, allow researchers to simulate future atmospheric conditions to determine their effects on plants. Credit: Don Hamerman

 Ban cigarette filters to save environment, suggest researchers

May 6, 2014 – Ban  cigarette filters. Start a deposit-return scheme for used butts. Hold manufacturers responsible for clean-ups. Place warnings on packets about the impact of simply flicking one's used cigarettes away. These are among the policy measures that Thomas Novotny of the San Diego State University in the US and Elli Slaughter advocate to curb the environmental harm done through the large-scale littering of cigarette butts, packaging and matches. The suggestions are part of a review article in Springer's journal Current Environmental Health Reports.

Cigarette butts and other tobacco product waste are the items that are most commonly picked up during urban and beach clean-ups worldwide. An estimated 4.5 trillion of the annual 6 trillion cigarettes sold worldwide do not end up in a dustbin or ashtray, but are simply flicked away along a roadside or on a pavement.

The ban on indoor smoking may have exacerbated this.

Tobacco waste products contain the same toxins, nicotine, pesticides and carcinogens found in cigarettes and cigars, and can contaminate the environment and water sources. Studies show that the chemicals within cigarettes, such as arsenic, nicotine, lead and ethyl phenol, could leach into salt and fresh water and be acutely toxic to aquatic micro-organisms and fish.

It is not only the cigarette ingredients that harm the environment, but also the materials they are made of. Plastic cigarette filters are practically non-biodegradable and can leach chemicals for up to ten years. In the US alone an estimated 49.8 million kilograms of filters are discarded annually. This excludes the weight of remnant butt tobacco, discarded packages, lighters and matches, and other tobacco products such as cigars and smokeless tobacco.

The researchers call filtered cigarettes a "farce" in terms of consumer safety, with a recent National Cancer Institute review showing that these are not healthier or safer than non-filtered ones. Novotny and Slaughter therefore propose a ban on filtered cigarettes.

Jonathan Samet from the University of Southern California and the editor of the article recently advised the California State Legislature that "…it is evident that filtered cigarettes have had little impact on the risks of smoking over the last half century."

Because existing anti-littering laws have not changed smokers' littering habits, Novotny and Slaughter ask for new environmental interventions and partnerships between tobacco control and environmental groups. They propose litigation to hold the tobacco industry legally responsible for clean-up and nuisance costs associated with their products, advocating the use of labels on cigarette packages about the toxicity of discarded butts, and a deposit-return scheme similar to that used for glass and metal beverage containers. Other options include requesting the industry to pay an advanced recycling fee or to take back all discarded tobacco waste products.

"Tobacco waste products are ubiquitous, environmentally hazardous and a significant community nuisance," says Novotny. "With two-thirds of all smoked cigarettes, numbering in the trillions globally, being discarded into the environment each year, it is critical to consider the potential toxicity and remediation of these waste products."

Thomas E. Novotny, Elli Slaughter. Tobacco Product Waste: An Environmental Approach to Reduce Tobacco Consumption.Current Environmental Health Reports, 2014; DOI:10.1007/s40572-014-0016-x

 Dolphin whistle warnings: Remotely monitoring acoustical changes in dolphin whistles may be powerful new tool for conservation

May 6, 2014 – A team of researchers in Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Britain and the United States has demonstrated that remotely monitoring the acoustical structures of dolphin vocalizations can effectively detect "evolutionary significant units" of the mammal - distinct populations that may be tracked for prioritizing and planning conservation efforts. This finding, presented at the 167th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, to be held May 5-9, 2014, in Providence, Rhode Island, suggests that placing remote acoustical monitoring platforms on ocean buoys and the like may be a viable, low-cost and automated way of monitoring populations of dolphins and rapidly alerting ecologists to the threats that confront them.

"Acoustical changes can be used for constant and continuous monitoring of population belonging to endangered species," said Elena Papale of the University of Torino, who led the research. "We found that [by remotely monitoring dolphin whistles], it is possible to distinguish between evolutionary significant units."

The discovery emerged from a large, multinational collaboration that pulled together data from five research groups based in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Britain and France. Those groups were already monitoring dolphins for a number of existing scientific studies. Other groups in the United States collaborated by providing sound analysis equipment. Shepherding all these groups of people and the flood of data they produced was a challenge, Papale said, but the greater challenge was working out how to distinguish the flood of whistles from one group of dolphins from another.

Animal vocalizations have acoustic characteristics that reflect an organism's genes, its adaptation to ecological conditions and the interactions between their genes and the environment. The differences between groups of dolphins within the same species may be slight and hard to detect however, because morphological features, ecological conditions and socio-behavioral aspects of the creatures influence the structure of whistle. The problem is also a dynamic one, since vocalizations may vary in short time scale.

So at the start of the research, it was not clear whether acoustical analyses alone would be able to tease apart the common threads for given groups of dolphins and differentiate between them.

Papale and her colleagues compared 123 sightings of three dolphin species from the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea (Stenella coeruleoalba, Delphinus delphis and Tursiops truncatus). They analyzed whistles from 49 hours of audio recordings made at the same time as the sightings and tested whether they could definitively identify dolphin populations by analyzing the acoustical parameters of the whistles.

This allowed them to correctly assign more that 82 percent of data to the correct dolphin population, based solely on the acoustic structure, a proof of principle that the acoustic structure of whistles can be used to monitor recent or rapid changes in the local population biology.

"More work is still needed to develop an automatic system for population recognition," Papale said. She added that other research groups are focusing on the development of software but for the moment only for species-specific identification, not intra-specific recognition.

The above story is based on materials provided by Acoustical Society of America (ASA)

Anger motivates volunteers as much as sympathy

May 6, 2014 - Anger can be just as effective at motivating people to volunteer as sympathy. This is one of the findings of research by Professor Robert Bringle and his students Ashley Hedgepath and Elizabeth Wall from Appalachian State University who present their findings at the British Psychological Society annual conference on 7 May 2014, at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham.

Professor Bringle explained: "Although there are many reasons why individuals help, empathy is prominent. Empathy occurs when an individual has a similar response to a suffering person and this is usually sadness. Empathic sadness motivates a person to help in order to alleviate the other person's suffering and to alleviate one's own discomfort."

"This research focused on circumstances when empathy elicits anger. Whereas anger is usually seen as evoking an aggressive response, we wanted to anaylse empathic anger as a basis for helping. This seems most likely to occur when the attribution is made about the unfairness of the circumstances that caused the victim's suffering."

Two questionnaire studies focused on the nature of those reporting empathic anger using a new measure, the "Revised Empathic Anger" scale. In Study 1 (involving 132 participants) found that those scoring high on empathic anger were publically spirited and more likely to support community projects and organisations as a way to affect change rather than charitable volunteering. Study 2 (involving 152 participants) found those reporting high empathic anger were not aggressive people, but were concerned and altruistic individuals who rejected group-based discrimination and inequality among groups.

Professor Bringle added: "This research adds a new dimension to motives for volunteering. Empathic anger is probably a more extreme or intense motive than others that have been described or studied in the previous research on volunteering and prosocial behavior."

"By developing our understanding of empathic anger we can better appreciate why some volunteers are motivated to assist certain social causes. The new scale provides opportunities for future research to study the nature of empathic anger, its development, and it journey across time."

The above story is based on materials provided by British Psychological Society (BPS)

 Plants in action (1983) - Published on 7 May 2014

CSIRO - We tend to think of plants as being essentially stationary incapable of movement other than that generated by the wind. But all plants do move as they grow and respond to aspects of their environment.

This film looks at a variety of plants in action. Some movements, like that of Mimosa, the sensitive plant, or that of the Venus flytrap are quite conspicuous.

Much plant activity, however, takes place too slowly for direct human perception it can be revealed only by time-lapse cinematography.

 Enabling Australia's Digital Future: Cyber Security Threats and Implications - by CSIRO - 5 May 2014

We've released a report exploring cyber threats of the future for the energy, health and government sectors. Australia's hyper-connected and technology dependent future means we will become more reliant on digital services for basic needs such as healthcare, energy and government services.

Embracing these exciting digital opportunities will lead to greater levels of social and economic prosperity, but also leaves us vulnerable to cyber security threats.

Our latest report, called Enabling Australia's Digital Future: Cyber Security Trends and Implications, looks at how a far greater number of future online attackers - anyone from disgruntled employees to organised cybercriminals and nation-states - could cause widespread disruption and financial losses by hacking into Australia's digital services and infrastructure, including public services like patient health records and taxation data.

Focusing on three key areas - health, energy and government, this report explores digital trends, future cyber  threats and implications for Australia.

The report contains a series of three potential cyber‐security scenarios for the future, covering the following sectors:

Energy: By 2025, the electricity grid is highly automated and use of 'smart' digital meters is widespread. A disgruntled employee, operating alone, is able to tunnel into an unprotected part of the system and shut down the grid during a heatwave, causing major power outages across the country, lost earnings in the billions of dollars, and several suspected fatalities.

Healthcare: Digital services are now used widely throughout Australian healthcare, but security and compliance processes have struggled to keep up. By 2023, widespread fraud from both individual practitioners and cybercrime rings is costing the system up to $16bn in fraudulent claims – equivalent to 10 per cent of Australia's total healthcare spending. Some criminals are even hacking into sensitive patient records and charging hospitals 'ransoms' of up to millions of dollars to get control back.

Government: When 'hacktivists' – hackers motivated by ideological or political values – breach a set of classified Government records, an unknown third party uses the same method to steal large volumes of citizen data. The Government reacts by taking every impacted department offline – resulting in widespread public outcry at the disruption caused to trade and public services, in addition to fears about identify theft and exposure of individuals’ personal data.

Enabling Australia’s Digital Future: Cyber security trends and implications is available to download on our website. (2.61MB)HERE

 Connecting as a whole - one step process - 8 May 2014

University of Sydney civil engineers worked on the Beijing Bird's Nest image copyright Dr Hao Zhang

A design process that makes steel structures safer, more reliable,less expensive and gives Australian businesses the competitive edge is being developed by University of Sydney civil engineering researchers.

Structural reliability expert Dr Hao Zhang says the team will complete a four-year analysis of the steel structures used in the Australian construction industry.

"In the project we shifted the focus of design from the individual components and its connection strengths to the overall structural behaviour and strength of the entire system," says Dr Zhang, Senior Lecturer in the School of Civil Engineering and co-investigator on the project.

"The component-based design approach can overestimate the load carrying capacity of structural systems, causing unsafe designs.

"The core of this project has been a rigorous statistical assessment of the system strength which considers structural redundancy, consequences of failure and statistical variations in loading and variables affecting the frame strength."

The advanced structural analysis process developed by the University's team that combines examination,evaluation and capacity checking into a single step has highlighted failure modes within the system currently used.

"The one-step process provides the opportunity to consider the consequences of failure during the design phase of the process. This is vital when designing any building including magnificent structures such as Beijing's Bird Nest or National Grand Theatre, or the Water Cube whose engineering team included Australian experts," says Dr Zhang who worked as a structural engineer for the Atlanta based company Uzun & Case prior to joining the university.

Professor Kim Rasmussen,head of the School of Civil Engineering, emphasises the importance of changing the model of steel structural design.

"What is important is the strength and weight of materials used to design reliable steel frames," says Professor Rasmussen.

"However, the veracity of the structural components and the parts that connect them as a whole are the hidden key."

He suggests the researchers'one-step process will give Australian businesses the competitive edge on the international market.

"The outcomes of this project will help Australian structural design firms and engineers to be at the forefront of design methodology. It also can assist Australian companies competing in South East Asia, Middle East and European markets.

"We envisage that over time our one-step methodology will be adopted throughout the world," predicts Professor Rasmussen.

The research was conducted by a team at University of Sydney including Professor Kim Rasmussen, Dr Hao Zhang and five PhD students. Leading international researcher Professor Bruce Ellingwood from the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, USA, also collaborated on the project.

 Sustainable catch: Blue-eye Trevalla by CSIRO - Published on 6 May 2014

Blue-eye Trevalla is an iconic - and delicious - Australian seafood species. We're studying blue-eye biology, early life-history and movement to better predict its species distribution in Australian waters. This will ensure a sustainable catch for Australia's fishing industry and the continued availability of blue-eye for consumers' plates.

 Playing Outside Could Make Kids More Spiritual May 2014   

Children who spend significant time outdoors could have a stronger sense of self-fulfillment and purpose than those who don’t, according to new Michigan State University research linking children’s experiences in nature with how they define spirituality.

In the study, published recently in the Journal of the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, children who played outside five to 10 hours per week said they felt a spiritual connection with the earth, and felt their role is to protect it.

“These values are incredibly important to human development and well-being,” said Gretel Van Wieren, assistant professor of religious studies. “We were surprised by the results. Before we did the study, we asked, ‘Is it just a myth that children have this deep connection with nature?’ But we found it to be true in pretty profound ways.”

For example, the children in her study expressed feelings of peacefulness and some believed that a higher power had created the natural world around them. They also reported feeling awestruck and humbled by nature’s power, such as storms, while also feeling happy and a sense of belonging in the world.

The study also measured children’s aesthetic values, finding that those who engage in free play outside on a regular basis have a deep appreciation for beauty (i.e., balance, symmetry and color), order and wonder (i.e., curiosity, imagination and creativity). For example: lush green bushes, pattern-like blue spots in water and fascination with bees’ nests.

Van Wieren and co-researcher Stephen Kellert, from Yale University, used a mix of research methods, including in-depth interviews, drawings, diaries and observation, as well as conversations with parents. Seven of the 10 children in the study – who were 7 to 8 years old – were from families with a Christian background.

The researchers also found parents of the children who expressed the highest affinity toward nature and the strongest spirituality spent significant time outdoors during their childhoods. And many of the parents believed such experiences shaped their adult lives and spirituality.

So what is it about nature?

It offers a diverse display of colors, sights and sounds; uncertainty; multisensory qualities; and above all, aliveness, Van Wieren said. Nature is usually in a state of flux, which fosters problem-solving opportunities that build self-confidence.

But we could be in trouble if kids continue their technology habits, she said.

“This is the first generation that’s significantly plugged in to a different extent and so what does this mean?” Van Wieren said. “Modern life has created a distance between humans and nature that now we’re realizing isn’t good in a whole host of ways. So it’s a scary question: How will this affect our children and how are we going to respond?”

See more at HERE

 A virtual Universe - Published on 7 May 2014

Scientists at MIT have traced 13 billion years of galaxy evolution, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day. Their simulation, named Illustris, captures both the massive scale of the Universe and the intriguing variety of galaxies -- something previous modelers have struggled to do. It produces a Universe that looks remarkably similar to what we see through our telescopes, giving us greater confidence in our understanding of the Universe, from the laws of physics to our theories about galaxy formation. 

Read the research paper: here

 Conquest of Space at Galleries UNSW - 07 May 2014

The first Australian exhibition to explore the historical connections between science fiction and contemporary art, Conquest of Space, opens at Galleries UNSW, College of Fine Arts (COFA) this month, May 22.

Featuring more than 40 Australian artworks, the exhibition builds on three major themes of science fiction and contemporary art: the sublime, the uncanny, and the exploration of time and space.

“Science fiction and contemporary art share more than a heritage – they are profoundly connected, and not just in the way they express related ideas, but in the manner in which they do so,” said exhibition curator and UNSW academic Dr Andrew Frost.

“Artists are drawn to science fiction because it speaks about our time and place in the world in a way no other genre does,” said Dr Frost.

“Science fiction is essentially a fantasy of Western culture – it allows us to explore dramatised versions of the future, nature and exploration and encourages us to question our relationship with the world.”

Australian works by John Glover, Eugene von Guérard, James Gleeson and Jeffery Smart, on loan from the Art Gallery of NSW, complement the exhibition by illustrating the historical roots of contemporary science fiction images throughout the colonialist and modernist periods.

“Most people imagine spaceships, ray guns and robots when they think about science fiction but the genre has a long history that stretches back to the 18th century and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – I wanted to include images from that period in the exhibition,” said Dr Frost.

The Conquest of Space at Galleries UNSW is a part of a wider program incorporating a Science Fiction Symposium at COFA on June 14 and a film program, Conquest of Space Future Screen at the Art Gallery of NSW from May 10 – July 5.

Dr Frost’s documentary The Conquest of Space: Science Fiction and Contemporary Art, profiling many of the artists featured in the exhibition, will be screened later this year on ABC TV.

ARTISTS FEATURED IN THE CONQUEST OF SPACE:  Eugene von Guerard, John Glover, Nicholas Chevalier, Shoufay Derz, Giles Alexander, Megan Jenkinson, John A Douglas, Kate Shaw, Tony Lloyd, Joel Rea, Rick Amor, James Gleeson, Laith McGregor, Shalini Jardin, Madeleine Kelly, Lionel Bawden, Phil James, Sam Leach, Hayden Fowler, Biljana Jancic, Sandra Selig, Michaela Gleave, Robert Klippel, Tristan Jalleh, Sam Smith, nova Milne, Jeffrey Smart, Callum Morton and Adam Norton.

What: The Conquest of Space: Science Fiction and Contemporary Art 

When: May 22 – July 5

Where: Galleries UNSW, COFA, Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd, Paddington

Hours: Tues – Sat, 10am – 5pm

John A Douglas, Body Fluid – Ascension (detail), 2012. C-Type photograph on aluminium, 100 × 100cm. Courtesy the artist and Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney

 Professor blazes trail with political science honour - 6 May 2014

Professor Pippa Norris is the 2014 winner of the Karl Deutsch Award, a prestigious prize awarded once every three years by the International Political Science Association (IPSA).

Professor Norris has described the award as "a tremendous and unexpected honour."

Professor Norris' selection by the IPSA marks a little piece of history for the Karl Deutsch Award: she is its first female recipient.

The Karl Deutsch Award is a peak international prize in comparative politics and political science. The honour, named after an eminent Czech-born but US-based political scientist who died in 1992, recognizes a prominent scholar engaged in cross-disciplinary research in political science.

A political scientist and public speaker, Professor Norris' research compares elections and public opinion, political communications, and gender politics. She will receive her honour after a lecture at IPSA World Congress in Montreal, Canada, in July. She will also present at the congress, under a topic echoing the title of her new book, Why Electoral Integrity Matters.

Professor Norris directs the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), a joint research project based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University. The EIP recently released its annual report, comparing the risks of flawed and failed elections and how countries meet global standards.

Professor Norris is also a recipient of the ARC Laureate Award and the 2011 Johan Skytte award. She has previously served as Director of the Democratic Governance Group in United Nations Development Programme, NY and as an expert consultant to many international organizations such as the World Bank, Council of Europe and OSCE.

 Tool for uncovering bot-controlled Twitter accounts: Research designed to counter misinformation campaigns

May 6, 2014 - Complex networks researchers at Indiana University have developed a tool that helps anyone determine whether a Twitter account is operated by a human or an automated software application known as a social bot. The new analysis tool stems from research at the IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing funded by the U.S. Department of Defense to counter technology-based misinformation and deception campaigns.

BotOrNot analyzes over 1,000 features from a user's friendship network, their Twitter content and temporal information, all in real time. It then calculates the likelihood that the account may or may not be a bot. The National Science Foundation and the U.S. military are funding the research after recognizing that increased information flow - blogs, social networking sites, media-sharing technology - along with an accelerated proliferation of mobile technology is changing the way communication and possibly misinformation campaigns are conducted.

As network science is applied to the task of uncovering deception, it leverages the structure of social and information diffusion networks, along with linguistic cues, temporal patterns and sentiment data mined from content spreading through social media. Each of these feature classes is analyzed with BotOrNot.

"We have applied a statistical learning framework to analyze Twitter data, but the 'secret sauce' is in the set of more than one thousand predictive features able to discriminate between human users and social bots, based on content and timing of their tweets, and the structure of their networks," said Alessandro Flammini, an associate professor of informatics and principal investigator on the project. "The demo that we've made available illustrates some of these features and how they contribute to the overall 'bot or not' score of a Twitter account."

Through use of these features and examples of Twitter bots provided by Texas A&M University professor James Caverlee's infolab, the researchers are able to train statistical models to discriminate between social bots and humans; according to Flammini, the system is quite accurate. Using an evaluation measure called AUROC, BotOrNot is scoring 0.95 with 1.0 being perfect accuracy.

"Part of the motivation of our research is that we don't really know how bad the problem is in quantitative terms," said Fil Menczer, the informatics and computer science professor who directs IU's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, where the new work is being conducted as part of the information diffusion research project called Truthy. "Are there thousands of social bots? Millions? We know there are lots of bots out there, and many are totally benign. But we also found examples of nasty bots used to mislead, exploit and manipulate discourse with rumors, spam, malware, misinformation, political astroturf and slander."

Flammini and Menczer said it's their belief that these kinds of social bots could be dangerous for democracy, cause panic during an emergency, affect the stock market, facilitate cybercrime and hinder advancement of public policy. The goal is to support human efforts to counter misinformation with truthful information.

The use of social bots has gained widespread attention in mass media. Menczer has been interviews by The New York Times on the use of social bots to sway elections and was sought out to consult on the topic by writers of the network television series "The Good Wife."

The team received just over $2 million in 2012 for a proposal called "Detecting Early Signature of Persuasion in Information Cascades" and last month presented results about BotOrNot and other aspects of the project at a Department of Defense meeting in Arlington, Va.

Link to BotOrNot: http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot/

 Redescription of the oldest-known dolphin skull sheds light on their origins and evolution

May 6, 2014 - Dolphins are the most diverse family of living marine mammals and include species such as the bottlenose dolphin and the killer whale. However, their early evolution and fossil record has been steeped in mystery due to lack of good specimens. A new paper published in latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology re-describes the oldest species of dolphin with a new name: Eodelphis kabatensis. Although the partial skull was previously described in the 1970s the scientific community largely overlooked it. The new re-description has important implications for the evolutionary history of dolphins. The skull of Eodelphis kabatensis was originally collected from a small tributary of the Oshirarika River in Hakkaido, Japan from an outcrop of the Mashike Formation. Researchers working on the specimen have narrowed its age to the late Miocene (13.0-8.5 million years ago), making it the earliest true dolphin species described. "The early evolution of true dolphins is still covered in mystery. Eodelphis kabatensis informs us about the morphology of early dolphins," said lead author Mizuki Murakami.

Eodelphis is an important link in the evolutionary history of dolphins. Prior to this study, there was inconsistency between the fossil record of the dolphins and molecular-based studies. The oldest true dolphin fossils found were less than 6 million years old, while molecular studies suggested they originated and started to diversity between 9-12 million years ago. "Eodelphis kabatensis, being discovered from sediments that were deposited 8-13 million years ago, has largely resolved this discrepancy and provides the best glimpse yet of what the skull of the first dolphins may have looked like," said Jonathan Geisler, a marine mammal paleontologist at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine.

In addition to its importance as the earliest true dolphin, this new study also incorporates the most comprehensive analysis of the relationships within the Delphinoidea, the group that encompasses toothed whales. By including Eodelphis in the analysis, the authors were able to get a much clearer picture of the evolution of the toothed whales. Furthermore, the presence of Eodelphis in the Pacific Ocean during the late Miocene has implications for the geographic history of dolphins. While more specimens need to be discovered, this study suggests that dolphins might have had their origins in the Pacific.

Mizuki Murakami, Chieko Shimada, Yoshinori Hikida, Yuhji Soeda, Hiromichi Hirano. Eodelphis kabatensis, a new name for the oldest true dolphin Stenella kabatensis Horikawa, 1977 (Cetacea, Odontoceti, Delphinidae), from the upper Miocene of Japan, and the phylogeny and paleobiogeography of Delphinoidea. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2014; 34 (3): 491 DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2013.816720

This is the skull of the holotype of Eodelphis in lateral view. Credit: Image courtesy Mizuki Murakami

 Sydney Living Museums Meroogal Women’s Art Prize 2014

We are excited to announce the return of the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize in 2014.

Artists are invited to create works in any medium that respond to Meroogal and its sense of place. The Meroogal Women’s Art Prize is a regional, competition and exhibition. It is open to a work in any medium made by a woman 18yrs or over whose principal residence is in NSW. 

Selected entries to this year’s Arts Prize will be exhibited in the house, garden and grounds of historic Meroogal in Nowra and go in the running to win up to $6000 and Bundanon Trust artist-in-residency scholarship! ENTRIES CLOSE AT 5PM ON FRIDAY 8 AUGUST 2014.

See more at: http://bit.ly/meroogalartprize