Research Highlights

Media issued by UWA Institue of Agriculture
Cutting-edge technology is being used by researchers at The University of Western Australia and Department of Agriculture and Food (DAFWA) to identify differences in the top Cabernet Sauvignon grape clones to benefit the local wine industry and consumers.The project will apply cutting-edge techniques in genomics to several clones on which extensive knowledge is already available from Western Australian and South Australian improvement programs. In addition to the genomic component, the project will include vineyard studies. The three-year project has received total funding of $574,000 from the Australian Research Council. The research is supported by 24 companies represented by the WA Vine Improvement Association, prominent national retailer Yalumba and the Australian Wine Research Institute.

Media issued by The National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training
Scientists at The National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training  (part-funded by the ARC) and University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have devised  a better way to protect groundwater from acids, heavy metals and toxic  chemicals, helping to secure the Earth’s main freshwater supply. The  advance is a major step towards shielding groundwater from mining, industrial  and domestic waste, all of which can contaminate the water for decades, rendering it unusable and undrinkable.

Media issued by Reuters.com
Scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) centre at the University of Wollongong in Australia have found a new way to split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen, and use those gases as fuel. Click here to view video and transcript.

Media issued by The University of Sydney       
A breakthrough which brings us closer to solving problems more complex than any current supercomputer can address, in codebreaking, physics, and clean energy, has been achieved by researchers from the University of Sydney and Dartmouth College in the US. "This work brings us closer to creating a quantum computer powerful enough that it could one day be used in developing new materials for clean-energy distribution or in rapidly searching through massive amounts of unsorted data to identify security threats online: problems on which even today’s most powerful supercomputers fail," said Dr Michael Biercuk, Director of the Quantum Control Laboratory in the University of Sydney’s School of Physics and ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems. The details of how the researchers developed an entirely new way of designing a practically useful quantum memory, a key need for future quantum computers, will be published in Nature Communications on Thursday, 19 June.