International research supports a warning from the outgoing University of Canberra vice-chancellor that Australia’s universities perpetuate inequality. Earlier in February, soon-to-retire professor Stephen Parker challenged the perceived purpose of higher education in remarks made to the TJ Ryan Foundation. In his ...

Research has found that, in academia, work is life. For Academic Work/Life Balance: Challenges for theory and practice, sociologists Dr Nick Osbaldiston from James Cook University, Monash University’s Fabian Cannizzo and Christian Mauri from Murdoch University surveyed 155 early- to mid-career academics. The ...

Australia needs new infrastructure. Now. Over the next 25 years, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane collectively will need to accommodate an extra 5.9 million people. This week, the nation’s population hit 24 million. The boom has contributed to the damnable ...

Scientists said they had, for the first time, detected gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesised by physicist Albert Einstein a century ago. The landmark discovery opens a new window for studying the cosmos. Researchers said on Thursday they detected gravitational ...

A University of New South Wales student has used the toilet seat to marry two of his passions in a master’s of philosophy thesis – architecture and altruism. Nick Papas partnered with the Sago Network to research how to rollout low-cost, eco-friendly toilets ...

A device implanted in a brain blood vessel may one day enable people with spinal cord injuries to walk again, University of Melbourne researchers have announced. Limbs wouldn’t be reactivated, but the person’s direct thought might be able to control equipment ...

“The children, as soon as they have become at all expert in this tracing of the letters, take great pleasure in repeating it with closed eyes, letting the sandpaper lead them in following the form which they do not see.” This ...

Those who live closer to a university are more likely to aspire to attending one, research has found. An Australian Catholic University study analysed data from 12,000 adolescents, surveyed in a federal government Longitudinal Study of Australian Youth, to explore the ...

An academic will explore Antarctica on an icy hunt for dinosaurs. This isn’t the plotline for a Jurassic Park spinoff; but what one University of Queensland paleontologist will be doing from February 2 through March 24. Dr Steve Salisbury is part of a 12-person ...

Evidence of a ninth planet in Earth’s solar system, recently discovered by California Institute of Technology researchers, has sent the space science community into a spin – and imaginations are once again looking out to the stars. Caltech astronomers Mike Brown, and ...