We are drowning in bad news. Two pages into the (1000pg) United Nations Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and you’ll be pleading for Tolstoy. Even David Attenborough is depressing these days. Ecosystems collapse and species loss is being documented across the planet, with profound existential ramifications. Habitat degradation and loss remains the key driver of biodiversity loss, but climate change and invasive species promise to compound the damages we have [...]

T cells are specialised immune cells that are central to the complex, adaptive immune response to infection and disease. T cells are “trained” to recognise specific fragments or components of viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens (e.g. a component of the influenza virus or tuberculosis bacterium). During an infection, those T cells that recognise the infectious agent will be activated to respond – either killing infected cells or coordinating the attack. [...]

For many years, Melbourne has dined out on being recognised by The Economist as “the most liveable city in the world;” and is now second to Vienna. While this global recognition is a source of great pride and an excellent marketing tool – is this measure of “liveable” fit for purpose, when considering the residents of Melbourne? Drawing on almost a decade of research, Professor Billie Giles-Corti will consider: What is a [...]

Human pressures on the planet as a whole – the ‘Earth System’ – have now become so great that scientists have proposed that we have now left the Holocene, the geologic epoch that has been humanity’s accommodating home for the last 11,700 years. It’s proposed we’ve entered a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, characterised by extremely rapid changes to the climate system and the biosphere, driven primarily by a range [...]

The 2021 Howitt Lecture Presented in partnership with the Geological Society of Australia (Victoria Division). Associate Professor David Kennedy is a coastal geomorphologist who specialises on the impacts of climate change, storms, tsunami and sea level rise on coastal landforms, particularly coral reefs and islands, rocky shorelines (cliffs and shore platforms) and estuaries. Surveying using total stations and remote sensing (eg. LiDAR) technologies are central to his research, which is combined with [...]

Australia installed more renewable generation in the last three years than in the thirty years prior. It seems that every week a new renewable energy record is smashed. Yet despite this, Australia has the highest per-capita greenhouse emissions of any advanced economy, we’re on track to miss our Paris Agreement commitments and we’re nowhere near achieving net zero. How did we get here, and how can we turn it around? [...]

In a ‘post-truth’ society, fuelled by soundbites and status updates, opinions and personal theories are often presented with unwavering certainty but remain untested. In this climate, it can be confusing when we hear from scientists reluctant to deal in absolutes, who instead engage in conversations about ‘degrees of certainty’. In the world of science, a ‘theory’ is the closest something may ever come to being ‘the truth’. To understand what [...]

We tend to think of Melbourne and other cities in Australia as places that are food secure; nationally, we produce enough food to support 60,000,000 people, more than twice our population, in service of our role as a major exporter of primary goods and food products. Supermarket shelves are usually filled with food, all year around. But in the last 18 months we’ve seen images of sparsely-occupied shelves, crops being dug [...]