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. [...]

Skunk cabbage, Stinking iris, dead horse flower...the names of these plants certainly don’t make you want to buy a bunch of them and inhale deeply. Some plants produce an unpleasant smell, often of rotting flesh, to attract insects that would normally feed on dead animals. Insects landing on the plant then get covered in the plants seeds or pollen, and then spread the seeds or pollen as they move around.  The species that earns the title of ‘World’s Stinkiest Plant’ is the Titan Arum, or ‘corpse flower’. This plant is native to Indonesia and can grow to an enormous height [...]

Did you know that some plants eat animals? Carnivorous plants get some of their nutrition by trapping, digesting and absorbing animals, usually insects and other arthropods. There are over 600 species of carnivorous plant, but by far the most famous one is the Venus Fly Trap. The ‘trap’ is made from the end of a leaf and consists of two halves that are hinged in the middle. It looks like a clam shell, albeit one with fearsome spikes around the edges that lock together when the trap closes. An insect walking across the trap will touch tiny surface hairs that [...]