The Conversation

Last summer’s Lake Erie toxic algae outbreak shut down the water supply for almost half a million people in Toledo and the surrounding suburbs. Bottled water ran out in stores across the area, and residents fled the city in search of clean water — an option not available to Lake Erie’s diverse and fascinating array of wildlife.The resulting call for action focused on setting toxin standards and reducing discharges of the fertilizer phosphorus, the primary driver of the toxic algae, to Lake Erie.

With only nine months to go before the most important international meeting on climate change since Copenhagen in 2009, what are the chances of success at this year’s Paris talks? What might “success” mean? And can the mistakes and challenges that have befallen previous meetings be avoided and tackled?To help address these questions, let’s first dispense with three pervasive myths that continue to make the task of achieving an adequate global response to climate change harder.Myth 1: the international climate negotiations have failed

There are few geographical areas that have seen as much military action as the Gallipoli region, the site of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp (ANZAC) landings in 1915. The conflicts in the region include some of the most renowned wars from Greek antiquity.

When Jonas the fat-tailed dwarf lemur died recently in captivity at the ripe age of 29 years, he was the oldest known of his species. But Jonas not only outlasted members of closely related lemur species held in captivity; he also lived much longer than science would predict based on his small size.

Human beings are information seekers. We are constantly taking in details – big and small – from our environment. But the majority of the stuff we encounter in a given day we rarely need to remember. For instance, what are the chances that you need to remember where you ate lunch with a friend last Wednesday?But what if later on you learned that there was something important to remember about that lunch? The brain has a remarkable ability to store information that seems inconsequential at the time.

The diversity within grapevine varieties is incredibly rich. This is good news for viticulturists – grape cultivators – and wine makers because it allows them to adapt their wine production according to the conditions in their vineyards and to the wines they want to make.Pinot is one of the most ancient grapevine varieties and the Pinot family is an invaluable source for the production of a wide range of wines from around the world. There’s the Pinot noir from Burgundy, California or New Zealand, Pinot Meunier in Champagne, Pinot gris in Alsace or Pinot blanc in Italy.

Teaching any sort of academic program with religious content can be a tricky undertaking. Religious passions, whether pro or con, can be volatile; religion is a matter about which people can become upset.My doctoral studies were in the relatively safe arena of Greek philosophy – no-one really cares what you say about Socrates and his mates these days – but I taught Religious Studies for many years and it was, by comparison, a minefield of sensitivities. In all those years, however, I managed to only really upset somebody once.

Have you ever texted somebody saying how “ducking annoyed” you are at something? Or asked Siri on your iPhone to call your wife, but somehow managed to be connected to your mother-in-law?If you have, you may have been a victim of a new challenge in computing: that fine line where we trust a computer to make predictions for us despite the fact that it sometimes gets them wrong.

BP’s annual Energy Outlook report, released in February, details the results from modelling of what it sees as the “most likely” energy scenario out to 2035. In this scenario global fossil use increases by 33%, consistent with a scenario the International Energy Agency (IEA) uses to describe the trajectory towards global warming of 6C – far beyond the accepted “safe” limit of 2C.

Australia’s CSIRO has come up with some pretty amazing inventions over the past 86 years of research, from polymer banknotes to insect repellent and the world-changing Wi-Fi. But we can also lay claim to something a little more esoteric – we actually invented a whole new word.

Anti-vaccination beliefs can cause real, substantive harm, as shown by the recent outbreak of measles in the US. These developments are as shocking and distressing as their consequences are predictable. But if the consequences are so predictable, why do the beliefs persist?
It is not simply that anti-vaxxers don’t understand how vaccines work (some of them may not, but not all of them). Neither are anti-vaxxers simply resistant to all of modern medicine (I’m sure that many of them still take pain killers when they need to). So the matter is not as simple as plain stupidity. Some anti-vaxxers are not that stupid, and some stupid people are not anti-vaxxers. There is something more subtle going on.

There was an article on the ABC site this morning which gave us this alarming headline “Pesticide banned worldwide still used to grow 70pc of Australian strawberries”. Shocking!Except, well, there were a few teeny tiny but important details missing. Like the fact that the rest of the world is still using the “banned” pesticide too.