Biology

Meeting Mary Finsterer

What Happens Next

By Andrew Ford

Mary Finsterer says she wants to write a Mass. As one of Australia’s finest composers, she’s entitled; composers have been making new musical settings of the Mass for the best part of 2000 years. But it is not such a common occurrence in the twenty-first century, especially not among composers with Finsterer’s impeccable modernist credentials. Finsterer is that most interesting of figur

'Sex: An Unnatural History'

What’s Sex Got To Do With It

By Anne Summers

If I were to nominate the key milestones in the history of human sexual activity – where ‘progress’ is considered to be sex becoming more enjoyable due to the removal of unpleasant, dangerous or even fatal consequences – these would be, without argument: the invention of penicillin, the legalisation of abortion, the decline in maternal mortality and, of course, the introduction of the

Howard Florey & Alexander Fleming

By Shane Maloney

On 2 September 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged, a short, grey-headed man with a dapper bow tie presented himself at the pathology laboratory at Oxford University. “Hullo,” he said to the grouchy, work-absorbed Australian in charge. “I hear you’ve been doing things with my old penicillin. I’d be interested to look around.” Thus Alexander Fleming met Howard Florey. As a battlefield doctor in the Great War, Fleming had fou

'The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution' By Francis Fukuyama

By Tim Soutphommasane

Most scholars have in them at best one major work. Had Francis Fukuyama ceased writing after The End of History and the Last Man, his hugely influential book of 1992, he could have been content with having produced a magnum opus. In the years since, Fukuyama has continued writing well-received, thoughtful books, but only now has he created something to rival

Richard Dawkins' 'The Greatest Show on Earth'

Unbelievers

By Ian Lowe

You wouldn’t believe me if I claimed that almost half the people in a rich, modern country still thought the earth was flat, or that the Roman Empire never existed. It would be a ridiculous assertion. Yet almost half of all adults in the United States believ

Ningaloo Sharks

By James Bradley

It takes little more than two hours for the spotter planes to locate the first whale shark of the day. Along with the two-dozen or so others who have paid several hundred dollars to spend a day diving with the sharks, I don my mask and flippers in readiness to

Martin Jones’s ‘Feast’

Cooking Brains

By Gay Bilson

Near the beginning of William Golding's 1955 novel The Inheritors, an old woman makes fire, opening a ball of clay, placing it over an old patch of the same and breathing on it. She places twigs, leaves and rotting organic material on the clay and blows again. "She bega

How Do Creatures Think?

Toots's Kismet

By Robyn Davidson

As I do. And have always done.I have studied them in the wild, worked with them, shared my homes with them. Though ‘pets' seems too diminished a term to give to those aliens who have, throughout my life, kept me company, amused me, amazed me. Dogs, cats, par

Ticked Off

By Ashley Hay

The unlikely combination of a small seaside village in Crete and an Adelaide-born Kylie Minogue look-alike would not have suggested, to the casual observer, news from the frontiers of science. But in the northern summer Dr Catherine Hill of Purdue University, Indiana, a

The Fencing Lesson

By Kate Holden

Kim closes the door of her room. It's only seven in the morning and the child of her housemate is squalling ferociously on the other side. Kim would say something to the mother, but she doesn't want to get kicked out of this place. She's a nice Hong Kong girl.