In 2018, Canadian mum of two Donna Strickland became only the third woman ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, following in the footsteps of fellow science mums Marie Curie (1903) and Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963). Donna shared her prize with her collaborator Gerard Mourou, for their work on high intensity laser pulses, and with Arthur Ashkin for his work on 'optical tweezers'. In her acceptance speech, Donna quoted the Cyndi Lauper song 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun', saying 'I don't want to wait 'til the working day is done. I want to have fun at work.' You can read more [...]

The town of Winton in outback Queensland is one of Australia's most important locations for dinosaur fossils. Last week it was revealed that a team of volunteers and paleontologists had worked together on nearby Karoola station to excavate a very rare find: a set of footprints belonging to three different types of dinosaur, including the first set of sauropod footprints found in Australia. They removed the prints just before the arrival of destructive monsoonal rains and took them to the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum in Winton, where they will go on display. In this video, paleontologist Dr Stephen Poropat discusses how the [...]

In late 2013, palaeontologists in Patagonia, Argentina made an exciting discovery. Now, more than six years of careful work later, their discovery has finally been unveiled to the world: Bajadasaurus pronuspinax, a new species of dinosaur that lived approximately 140 million years ago. From the fossil evidence uncovered, it is believed that Bajadasaurus was a sauropod (the family of dinosaurs with long necks and long tails) with a very distinctive feature: A row of fearsome-looking spikes running down its spine that probably served as a deterrent to predators. This image is an artists impression of what Bajadasaurus may have looked like. [...]

All magnetic objects contain a metal, but not all metals are magnetic. The most common magnetic metals are iron, nickel and cobalt. Neodymium is a rare earth metal that is combined with iron and another element called boron to make very powerful magnets that are capable of lifting a thousand times their own weight! Magnets have two distinct ends called ‘poles’ (North and South). The north pole of one magnet will attract the south pole of another magnet,  but it will repel (push away) the north pole of the other magnet. (This is easily remembered with the phrase ‘opposites attract’.) [...]