June 2008 - Issue #2
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All aboard the time giant
With access to the world's largest and most powerful optical telescopes, Swinburne astrophysicists are journeying back in time to the earliest phases of the universe. They hope to take Swinburne students and staff and the Australian public along for the ride
How rents are crushing quality of life
When housing affordability is raised in the media, the story is invariably about how hard it is for first homebuyers to plant a foot on the property ladder. But the real housing affordability crisis is among those not even in the hunt for home ownership.
Pilots to take off with a brand new qualification
Aspiring pilots can fast-track their path to a job while improving their general education through a new aviation qualification backed by Australia's major airline.
Blogging bliss in online oratory
A Masters project that found blogging to be quite therapeutic has triggered a global upwelling of feel-good feedback
Service with a 'one-click' smile
A new paradigm of computing - service-oriented computing - has emerged to better integrate web services and, in so doing, make them capable of handling increasingly complex requests that might rely on real-time information from several sources at once.
Disease arms-race looks to powerful new X-ray tools
A new X-ray tool could help biologists shed light on the body's innermost workings, providing details that could have enormous value to chemists designing drugs, such as new antibiotics to defeat drug-resistant bacteria
Mending broken hearts - naturally
Using a soluble synthetic scaffold, researchers are pioneering a way to build replacement body parts.
No place like home - but no home to place
An inquiry into youth homelessness has ripped the cloak of apathy from the plight of Australia's homeless and pushed the Federal Government to get serious about finding answers.
Small-scale technology with large-scale benefits
The two-photon fluorescence microscope can create high-resolution, 3-D images of tissue deep in the body, and thus can diagnose very early-stage cancer. However, it requires a huge, non-portable machine - or does it?
How memories of past injustice can travail the future
Societies attempting to confront past injustices may benefit from a new initiative on social memory being developed by a Swinburne historian
The dragons that breathed fire into an art student's dream
Once upon a time, the creator of Animalia was just an enthusiastic design student. Today he has the guilty pleasure of believing he has created for himself "the best job in the world"
Innovation pipeline the lifeblood of sustainable cities
Australia's population is growing rapidly and is being directed almost entirely into big, seaboard cities, straining infrastructure, housing availability and services such as transport, health and education. It is a circumstance that seems to have caught policy-makers off-guard and which now presents some very formidable challenges for governments, corporations and professionals whose job it is to bolster and sustain urban development.
No waste spared for travel in the fast lane
Dr Arulrajah, a senior lecturer in civil engineering at Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Sustainable Infrastructure, believes biosolids would be an ideal material to recycle into such civil engineering applications.
