One of the world’s leading immunologists, Professor Rossjohn’s research on the immune system, how the body reacts to infection and what happens when the immune system fails, has led to a sustained advancement of knowledge in the field of immunity.
Professor Rossjohn is currently co-leading a study supported by an ARC Discovery Projects grant that has found that T-Cells, which play a crucial role in the body's immune system, need to ‘see’ pathogenic antigens in order to be activated. This has clarified a critical mechanism essential for effective T-cell immunity.
Professor Rossjohn joins numerous ARC-supported researchers and more than 60 exceptional scientists from around the world who have been elected as Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society. The 51 Fellows and 10 Foreign Members along with one Honorary Fellow have been selected for their outstanding contributions to science.
An immersive visualisation platform that virtually recreates the experience of being in a wildfire will help artists, designers, firefighters and scientists better understand and communicate the dynamics of these extreme events.
iFire, based at the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at UNSW Sydney, is a sector-first Artificially Intelligent (AI) immersive environment that visualises the unpredictable behaviour of wildfires. It gives users and researchers a visceral understanding of the dynamics of wildfires, at 1:1 scale and in real time, within a safe virtual environment.
The five-year project is funded by the ARC Laureate Fellowship of lead researcher Scientia Professor Dennis Del Favero, Director of the iCinema Research Centre, UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture. The philosopher-turned-artist uses artistic simulation to sensorially explore diverse risk-laden scenarios, directly addressing issues like global warming in visceral and compelling ways.
“Wildfires are a whole new generation of fires,” says Prof. Del Favero. “We’re experiencing accelerating levels of global warming which are leading to fires of a scale, speed and violence never before seen in recorded human history.”
“It uses real-world data to visualise not only what they look like, but also what they feel [and sound] like. Sound is very important … [because] wildfires have a particular acoustic that is entirely unique.”
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An AI-driven immersive visualisation suite that recreates the experience of being in a wildfire will transform how we understand, respond to and prepare for the phenomenon. Image: Supplied
Researchers from The University of Western Australia have unearthed new data about how wheat root tips respond to salinity, which is an important first step towards improving salt tolerance.
The study, published in theJournal of Proteomics, was led by UWA PhD student Bhagya Dissanayake from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology and co-authored by The UWA Institute of Agriculture and School of Molecular Science’s Dr Nicolas Taylor and fellow UWA researchers Dr Christiana Staudinger, Emeritus Professor Rana Munns and Professor Harvey Millar.
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) contributes almost 20 per cent of total dietary requirements worldwide, making it the most significant cereal crop for human nutrition.
Wheat production is impacted by salinity in many parts of the world, accounting for up to 60 per cent yield loss, which in turn leads to food insecurity.
Western Australia has more than two million hectares of land currently impacted and a further four million hectares at high risk of salinity.
Exposure to salinity limits both the growth and yield of wheat crops by causing osmotic stress in plants during the initial phase of exposure and ion toxicity in the later stages of development.
Roots are the first plant organ to perceive salt, and the stunting (decrease in the length of axile roots) of the wheat root system is understood to be caused by the root tips’ higher sensitivity to salinity.
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PhD student Bhagya Dissanayake with wheat plants grown under fully controlled conditions in the Plant Growth Facility.
Researchers at Curtin University have recovered a meteorite from the Western Australian outback using a new ai-powered drone.
The meteorite was recovered from the remote Kybo cattle station in 2021 by lead researcher graduate student Seamus Anderson, after it had been tracked by the ARC-supported Desert Fireball Network.
Before the meteorite was recovered, its likely 'fall zone' could be predicted based on its approximate mass and trajectory. The drone was sent in to take thousands of images of the ground in this area, and these images were then processed on a computer using a special algorithm that searches for meteorite-like objects. Mr Anderson said the successful deployment of this method could greatly increase the number of meteorites that are recovered, especially when combined with the tracking capabilities of the Desert Fireball network.
Normally to recover a meteorite, teams of people spread out over the landscape and try to locate it on foot. The drone-powered method cuts down on time and labour and is likely to be more successful as well.
Mr Anderson said that increasing meteorite recovery not only has the potential to facilitate scientific research, but also presents significant commercial opportunities.
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The team led by Seamus Anderson were able to find the meteorite within four days of being on site. Image credit: iStockphoto.com
A world-leading research program funded by the ARC, that aims to incorporate unique aspects of peoples’ needs and abilities into software engineering practices has been launched at Monash University.
The HumaniSE (Human-Centric Software Engineering) Lab, part of the Faculty of Information Technology (IT), has been established to focus on engineering intelligent, human-centred future software systems.
Four key interconnected themes of the Lab:
Engineering future software systems - new human-centred software engineering paradigms for future AI-driven systems
Future machine intelligence - better harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for human benefit
Trust and security for future software - addressing critical issues including fairness, privacy, security, auditability, transparency, verifiability and socio-legal aspects of trust like ethics and regulation
Future software for humans - advancing multi-disciplinary research in human-led design to ensure future AI-based software systems understand and meet diverse human needs.
The Lab has already led research projects to create software to :
Better support end users with physical and mental disabilities
Make advertisements for software engineering jobs more gender inclusive
Address privacy issues in mobile applications
Create user-friendly options to observe and assess emotions of team members in Agile work environments.
Australian Laureate Fellow and HumaniSE Lab Director Professor John Grundy said the purpose of software is to solve human problems but current software development techniques forget to take into account the various diversities of end users.
The Lab will be collaborating with international teams across the world ranging from Canada, Singapore, Vienna and the United States. In Australia, the team will be working with local and federal government agencies, community organisations and industry collaborators from the health, finance and software sectors.
ARC-supported researchers have developed a smart and super-efficient new way of capturing carbon dioxide and converting it to solid carbon, to help advance the decarbonisation of heavy industries.
Decarbonisation is an immense technical challenge for heavy industries like cement and steel, which are not only energy-intensive but also directly emit CO2 as part of the production process.
The new technology, which builds on an earlier experimental approach that used liquid metals as a catalyst, offers a pathway for instantly converting carbon dioxide as it is produced and locking it permanently in a solid state, keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere.
'Our new method still harnesses the power of liquid metals but the design has been modified for smoother integration into standard industrial processes,' Associate Professor Daeneke says.
'As well as being simpler to scale up, the new tech is radically more efficient and can break down CO2 to carbon in an instant.'
'We hope this could be a significant new tool in the push towards decarbonisation, to help industries and governments deliver on their climate commitments and bring us radically closer to net zero.'
A provisional patent application has been filed for the technology and researchers have recently signed a $2.6 million agreement with Australian environmental technology company ABR, who are commercialising technologies to decarbonise the cement and steel manufacturing industries.
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Image: PhD researcher Karma Zuraiqi with Dr Ken Chiang and Associate Professor Torben Daeneke. Credit: RMIT.
The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and The University of New South Wales (UNSW) have been awarded $2.1 million in funding through the ARC's Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities scheme, to establish a Space Resources Environmental Analogue Facility (SREAF). As part of this, QUT will build Australia’s largest covered outdoor facility for testing equipment, robotics and materials processing techniques in realistic Moon, Mars and asteroid conditions.
The first of its kind in Australia, the 20 x 10 m 'lunar testbed' will be capable of simulating different planetary environments with high-fidelity simulated regolith (fabricated moondust) slopes and boulders, a gantry crane for micro-gravity simulation, realistic lighting conditions, and high ceilings to facilitate tests between collaborative airborne and ground technologies.
Leading development, Associate Professor Thierry Peynot from the QUT Centre for Robotics said autonomous rover navigation, materials instrumentation, simple construction and mining activities were among immediate applications.
'The QUT lunar testbed will allow researchers and partners to safely test operating rovers in the presence of airborne dust and is expected to support the development of a lunar rover for launch by 2026 as part of Australia’s first moon mission,' he said.
Professor Andrew Dempster, director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research at UNSW led the SREAF bid and said the grant came at a critical time to support Australia’s space research.
'This is a great boost for the collaboration between UNSW and QUT. We have worked together on a range of projects and the facilities themselves are a huge leap forward for space resources research in Australia.'
A research team, led by University of Southern Queensland chemical engineer and ARC Future Fellow, Professor Pingan Song, has developed a non-toxic, fire extinguishing coating that could save buildings from being engulfed in flames.
Professor Song said lava sparked his idea of a hybrid coating that would melt and then gradually form a flowing but non-combustible ceramic layer when exposed to extreme heat.
'Molten lava is like a viscous flowing liquid but non-flammable,' Professor Song said.
'Once cooled, it solidifies to become a ceramic layer that does not support fire.
'Inspired by this interesting phenomenon, we designed a fire retardant coating that can create a non-combustible ceramic layer which can offer fire protections for the underlying substrates, just like a fire shield.'
Professor Song says that the new fire retardant coating produces a very robust and thermally stable ceramic layer, in comparison to existing commercially available coatings, which usually produce a protective layer that is fragile and degrades at high temperatures.
The fire-retardant coating now has to undergo further testing and refinement before it will be commercialised and put to widespread use, which Professor Song hopes will be within the next three years.
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Image: ARC Future Fellow, Professor Pingan Song leads a research project developing a lava-inspired fire retardant coating. Credit: USQ.
Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES), at the University of Wollongong (UOW) have discovered a new form of graphene, known as Edge Functionalised Graphene (EFG) that promises to improve the performance of the rechargable Lithium-ion (“Li-ion”) batteries that power our portable devices and electric cars.
This new form of graphene is both highly conductive and processable, and made of nano platelets that have excellent potential as a valuable carbon additive for a variety of electrochemical devices.
The researchers have announced a collaboration with a private next-generation battery material company, Sicona Battery Technologies (Sicona), that they say may be a game-changer for the creation of cheaper and more efficient Li-ion batteries in the future.
The team is already working with Sicona to demonstrate scale-up of production of EFG, and Sicona have executed binding agreements with UOW for the acquisition of all the relevant intellectual property.
ACES Director and former ARC Laureate Fellow, Professor Gordon Wallace says: 'This material, EFG, was discovered in our labs in 2017 and we have since tackled the fundamental research questions around determining what it actually is and, in parallel, issues that will assist translation, including simplifying the manufacturing process.'
'Taking amazing discoveries out of the research lab and into industry is a complex process. Often, we do not have common interests nor agree on the best way forward. But for different reasons we want to get great technologies to those that can use it, so everyone wins.'
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Image of UOW and Sicona Battery Technologies personnel: (Left-to-right) Gordon Wallace, David Officer, Christiaan Jordaan, George Tomka, Zahra Shahbazian, Andrew Minett. Credit: UOW.
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