Inventors and Remarkable People
Australian science aids America's Cup Victory
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When Swiss yacht Alinghi won the 2003 Americas cup from Team New Zealand, it wasn't just the result of a badly timed snapped mast or New Zealand sailors on the opposing side - behind the scenes Australian science played a critical role in providing accurate weather predictions for the Swiss team Read More
Refrigeration efficiency breakthrough
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Kelix Energies has developed a heating and cooling system that performs effectively without the use of a refrigeration compressor. Read More
Aerogel: The World's lightest solid
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Aerogel is 99.8% air and 1,000 times less dense than glass yet it can withstand high temperature, is robust enough to survive a space launch and delivers 39 times more insulation than the best fibreglass. This exotic substance was invented in the 1930s but recently refined by NASA for the purpose of catching space-dust, Aerogel was used on the Mars Pathfinder rover and its latest assignment is to capture both cometary samples and interstellar particles aboard the Stardust mission. Read More
The rise and rise of the Internet
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Tim Berners-Lee took the disparate threads of the "Internet" and created the level playing field "World Wide Web", allowing browser based surfing of documents stored on servers all over the world for the first time... Read More
Extra help for oil stricken seabirds
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A more efficient method of cleaning oil from seabirds' feathers has been invented using a magnetic-cleansing technology devised by scientists at Victoria University... Read More
Charles Babbage: the brain that invented the computer
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Though Silicon Valley may be the heart of the commercialisation of all things digital, it is the British who can proudly boast having invented the computer. Indeed, so proud are the British of the work done by eccentric British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, that the Science Museum in London has subsequently built the machines he conceived and the Royal College of Surgeons has preserved his brain - the brain that invented the computer. Babbage proposed the first computer, a machine he called "the difference engine", in 1822 - it was the size of a house, could store a program, was powered by steam and could even print results.
All of a sudden, old fashioned wind-up energy makes sense
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Only in the last decade has the seemingly obvious connection between wind-up energy generation and power reliant modern devices been made... Read More
Douglass Engelbart - father of the mouse
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At a Computer Conference in 1968, Engelbart demonstrated a personal computer with a one-handed keyboard, word processing, split windows, shared documents, e-mail filtering, desktop conferencing and a mouse. Read More
Lemelson-MIT Prize won by eyeglass printing machine
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Australian Saul Griffith, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate, has won the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventing a machine which quickly tests vision and a desktop machine which manufactures low-cost eyeglass lenses. These machines could dramatically improve life for billions of people in developing countries who cannot access, nor afford, prescription glasses.”
