Friday Fish Time
Posted: December 23, 2011 Filed under: Friday Fish Time 1 Comment »
Yum
Yeah, yeah - I know they are not a fish but its Christmas and a lot of people will be eating them.
There are about 540 species of prawn in seven families. They differ from other similar crustaceans, such as the shrimp, by the branching form of the gills and they don’t brood their eggs but release them directly into the water.
They can grow to over 330mm and up to 450gms.
Prawn Salad from CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet
Serves eight people as an entrée.
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½ bunch flat-leaf (Italian) parsley
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½ bunch basil leaves
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1 red chilli, seeded and roughly chopped
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1 clove garlic, roughly chopped
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2 tablespoons olive oil
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800 g green prawns, peeled and de-veined
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1 punnet cherry tomatoes
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100 g green beans
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16 spears asparagus, halved
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100 g snow peas
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100 g mixed salad greens
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1 red capsicum (pepper), deseeded and thinly sliced
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juice of 1 lemon
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freshly ground black pepper.
Preparation
Place parsley, basil, chilli and garlic with oil in a food processor and blend until lightly chopped.
Transfer half the mixture to a mixing bowl.
Add prawns and toss to coat thoroughly.
Cover with plastic wrap and allow to marinate for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, preheat oven to 200 °C (400 °F).
Transfer remaining herb mixture to a shallow microwave-proof dish.
Add tomatoes, beans, asparagus and snow peas and toss to combine.
Cover with plastic wrap and microwave on high for three minutes, or until vegetables are just cooked.
Set aside and allow to cool slightly.
Transfer prawns to a baking tray and bake for ten minutes, or until cooked.
Remove from oven and tip prawns and cooking juices into cooling vegetables.
Add mixed greens and toss to combine.
Serve
To serve, squeeze over lemon juice and season with pepper.
Sneaky seal raids crab pots
Posted: December 22, 2011 Filed under: News 3 Comments »news@csiro was down on Largs Bay Jetty on the Adelaide coast last night seeing how many blue swimmer crabs were being hauled in when a dark shadow moved in.
Much to the delight of all (including the people with crab pots out) a large seal started a systematic inspection and collection of crabs.
Pictures: Huw Morgan
The seal spent about 5min going around the pots and diving in to them for the crabs. As you can see he pursued the pots to the surface as the crabbers tried in vain to keep their catch.
After about 10min seal was off in the sunset.
Score: Seal 10. Crabbers: 0
He/she was rather large – I would say about nearly 2m long with a “healthy” girth. Anyone able to identify?
Random Stuff – it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. Sorry, but it does.
Posted: December 20, 2011 Filed under: Random Stuff Leave a comment »Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
The above passage is often cited as a demonstration of how the brain recognises the shape of words when reading – not the order of the letters.
While it says Cambridge University carried out the research, the real story is HERE.
There are many people (mainly on the internet) who are trying to promote this “study”. One bloke in America who describes himself as a “ventriloquist, mathematician, science teacher, web designer, software developer, Bible teacher, camp pastor, musician, photographer” even has a automatic letter mixer on his web site.
It got me thinking about spelling and how even the simplest of words can sometimes look, well, just “wrong”. I have typed words like “there” and looked at it and been convinced that it was wrong.
Has there been much real science done on spelling and how the brain works with it?
There are some good works on word recognition – one from Microsoft is HERE and another from Carnegie Mellon University HERE.
Awynay, hpapy rdieang.
(see – it doesn’t work)
Friday Fish Time
Posted: December 16, 2011 Filed under: Friday Fish Time Leave a comment »
Common name: Cocky Gurnard. Scientific name: Lepidotrigla modesta. Family: Triglidae
Cocky Gurnard: Can get on everyone’s nerves, particularly in a political debate around the dinner table. Also known as Grooved, Minor and Short-finned Gurnard and 静红娘鱼 in Mandarin. Australian endemic and found in southern waters off Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Grows to approx. 22cm and loves long strolls on the beach. Not a pretty face but apparently can be quite tasty prepared ‘Italian style‘.
Food for thought: the American fighting ship Gurnard was launched in 1942 and played an integral role in the Pacific during World War II.
Stop the pop?
Posted: December 14, 2011 Filed under: Events, Field Expeditions, News, Ocean Expeditions Leave a comment »An earlier post raised the problem of old helium-filled balloons turning up on beaches along the east coast of Australia.
Should they be banned from being released into the environment?
Have your say.
Critical eyes search for debris on Australia’s beaches
Posted: December 14, 2011 Filed under: Field Expeditions, News, Ocean Expeditions | Tags: coastline, Marine Debris, plastic bags 1 Comment »Never let it be said that news@csiro is a party-pooper but maybe it is time for an end to releasing thousands helium-filled balloons at sporting events and other celebrations.
A team of our scientists is making its way along the east coast of Australia at the moment to determine how much rubbish and other marine debris is along the Australian coastline. The work is part of the National Marine Debris project. So far they have gone from Cairns to Melbourne – and balloons with the strings attached are making an unusually high appearance. When you come to think about releasing balloons is like throwing thousands of plastic bags out the car window.
The team are stopping about every 100km along the coast (as you can imagine it was not hard to find people willing to do this trip) and doing a survey of the beaches to see what is being washed up. The information collected will be used to see what risk marine debris poses to wildlife.
One of the team, Genevieve Perkins who is normally based at our Townsville site, said the team has found the odd missing thong, popped balloons, plenty of bottles, plastic bags. The good news is that they have also found the odd debris free beach.
The bar codes on bottles and other packaging will be used to try and trace the origin of some of the debris.
We will keep you posted on how the team is going and what they have found over the coming months. The team are in Melbourne now and will be heading off in February along the Victorian west coast to South Australia and then to WA.
There is an ABC PM interview with with project leader Denise Hardesty HERE.
A new life for empty gas reservoirs
Posted: December 13, 2011 Filed under: News | Tags: carbon dioxide, CO2, geosequestration, greenhouse gas Leave a comment »
Exhausted gas reservoirs could provide the solution to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
Researchers working on the CO2CRC Otway Project in Victoria have shown that depleted gas fields can be used to store significant amounts of our carbon dioxide emissions.
Since 2008, over 65,000 tonnes of CO2 rich gas has been injected, stored and monitored two kilometers underground in a depleted natural gas reservoir in the Otway Basin.
The project has demonstrated that the deep underground storage (‘geosequestration’ in technical terms) of CO2 is a technically and environmentally safe way to make deep cuts into Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Link to CO2CRC media release: http://www.co2crc.com.au/dls/media/11/OtwayProjectPNAS_final.pdf
Get poetic… and get rewarded
Posted: December 12, 2011 Filed under: Random Stuff | Tags: #carolforCarol, christmas, competition, twitter 3 Comments »You’ve got to love this time of year. The thrill of the first beach dip, the eyebrow-singeing joy of the BBQ, the imminent time off work.
Ok, ok- we know it ain’t all peaches and cream. December brings heat, mosquitoes, tinsel and a dangerously long family gathering on the 25th. Oh, and the Christmas carols… playing endlessly… everywhere. It’s enough to make you want to crawl into a time-machine, or go to Bali.
Well, we decided we wanted to reclaim Christmas. Not just for the sake of science, but for the sake of poetry too. Oh, and we want to give some stuff away, while we’re still in a good mood.
Go on, write a #carolforCarol
Curious?
Well before we tell you about the free stuff we need to introduce you to one of our Tweeps, Carol. She’s the ^CS behind the tweets on @CSIROnews. For obvious reasons, she’s got a vested interest in all those tunes that harangue us at this time of year. She’s usually the butt of all kinds of silly jokes about naughty reindeers and the jolly Santa Claus. So we thought Carol needs a bit of cheer, science cheer. Yes, a bit of CSIRO-themed Christmas cheer is exactly what’s needed. And that’s when it all came together…
We want you smart and creative Tweeps out there to tweet us a CSIRO-flavoured #carolforCarol and you could win a pretty nifty CSIRO hamper. From the high brow to the downright farcical, we want them all, and we want them on Twitter! They have to integrate CSIRO science in some way but that’s the only restriction.*
So, what do we mean by CSIRO science? This may come as a shock to some but our organisation has been around some 85 odd years and we now employ almost 7,000 people. We work across a wide spectrum of ‘science stuff’ ranging from plastics to insects to statistics. To name a few of our big-ticket achievements; Aerogard insect repellant, wireless LAN, super-safe children’s pyjamas, Softly woolen detergent and the Total Wellbeing Diet book. Check out CSIROpedia or our website for info to jam into your carol.
So we want science to meet poetry. Well, Christmas carols anyway. Here are some examples to get the creative juices flowing:
On the 3rd day of December my true love gave to me a box of BARLEYmax, Aerogard and The Dish DVD
CSIRO’s making temperature lists, and checking them twice, gonna find out that climate change is not very nice
Silent night, holy night, son of astronomy, discovers wireless LAN, wifi beams from thy holy modem, with the help of John O’Sullivan
All kinds of CSIRO-flavoured goodies to enjoy
We’re hoping you can do better! We’ll pick 5 of our favourites and send them a hamper that showcases some of the best of CSIRO science and innovation. It will include stuff you can eat and drink, stuff you can read, stuff you can watch, stuff you can clean with and stuff you can cool off with. It’s no small hamper!
Our #carolforCarol competition officially opens right now (Monday 12th) and will run for 7 days. We’ll announce the winners on Monday 19th. So, follow @CSIROnews, send us your CSIRO-inspired carol by using #carolforCarol and let’s spread some science cheer.
*Not strictly true. You have to be a follower of the @CSIROnews account to be in the running and hampers are only deliverable to Australian addresses. Huge apologies to all our international friends. We’d still love to read your #carolforCarol. You might even get a notable mention.
Competition now closed!
A big thank you and congrats to our 5 winners:
@significance:
Away in a laboratory, No pause for a rest, Our nation’s best scientists put hypotheses to the test!
@UTLAU:
We scientists of CSIRO are, bearing degrees we reasearch far, field and glass house, lab or your house, Discovering things we are.
@jacksonface:
Joy to the world, polymer bank notes are come, we can put them through the wash, and then go spend the dosh, and heaven and nature sing, for a currency secure against forging, and heaven, and heaven and nature sing.
@DianeMann1:
Dashing through CSIRO, In a mist of Aeroguard, O’er the Dish we go, Across Australia’s great backyard, Children in safe PJs, sing and use the wireless LAN, To see what CSIRO will bring Softly, Relenza or Coalscan, Jingle Bells, CSIRO spells Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation, That’s all you need to know!
@millieso:
Silent Night, Holy Night, All is calm, No insects in sight, Put yon Aerogard mother and child, Repellent tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace.
To everyone else thanks for you entries and better luck next time. Merry Christmas!
No lunar eclipse but great view of King Brown capturing and eating a lizard
Posted: December 11, 2011 Filed under: News 1 Comment »UPDATE: There is a suggestion the snake may in fact be a Western Brown. Experts are considering.
news@csiro was hoping to bring you some shots from Lake Mungo in western NSW of the lunar eclipse which happened across Australia on Saturday night. Alas, clouds and rain thwarted our expedition and we had to high-tail it out before muddy roads kept us there for a week or more (I was OK with that but the boss may have had another view).
Anyway, we did manage to come across a King Brown snake cruising the sand dunes for a meal. King Brown was a bit narky at first with us being there but soon settled down and continued on its way with us in tow.
Pictures: Huw Morgan
He/she (we didn’t get that close) came across a lizard and got a hold of it before we knew what was happening.
It took about a minute for the King Brown’s venom to work but within 30 seconds the lizard started to convulse and died.
King Brown then worked his way up to the lizard’s head, pointed him in the right direction and had him tucked away in about 15 seconds more.
From go to whoa was about 3min.
Friday Fish Time
Posted: December 9, 2011 Filed under: Friday Fish Time Leave a comment »
Common name: Bigeye Ocean Perch. Scientific name: Helicolenus barathri. Family: Sebastidae.
Bigeye Ocean Perch: What a cracker! Found on the continental shelf and continental slope. Was also known as Coral Perch, Ocean Perch, Red Gurnard Perch, Red Perch, Red Rock Perch and Sea Perch. It is found in Australia from off southern New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and the Great Australian Bight off South Australia. Grows to about 40cm and lives on flat, hard seabeds in upper continental slope waters at depths between 250m and 800m.
From the Australian National Fish Collection
- The Australian National Fish Collection is a comprehensive reference and research facility
- It holds 145,000 finfish specimens representing 3,000 species
- The collection supports marine biology and conservation of aquatic biodiversity
- The ANFC is maintained by CSIRO in Hobart, Tasmania
Keeping a live eye on new cycling team
Posted: December 7, 2011 Filed under: News Leave a comment »CSIRO has been tracking the new GreenEDGE road cycling team during their training camp at the AIS and Thredbo and improving live tracking technology as they train.
Rides were tracked in Canberra and Thredbo. Today the team rode to Parliament and the Minister for Sport Mark Arbib rode along with the team and we got the opportunity to track him.
Live tracking technology can provide detailed information to a race audience and if a whole field is tracked, offers the potential for live web telecasts of races.
Tracking during training provides feedback to coaches to enable them to analyse performance while training is taking place.
Using an amalgam of technologies including Google My Tracks, Map My Tracks, our own CSIRO Android app and wireless sensors, we can provide cyclist position, speed, heart rate, power and cadence.
“In future we’ll be using sensors to monitor other aspects critical to human performance in sport and medicine. Its all part of connecting advanced materials with ICT’s ‘internet of things’ and ‘cloud’ to realise our best,” CSIRO research Dr Richard Helmer said.
Total lunar eclipse coming Saturday night
Posted: December 7, 2011 Filed under: News Leave a comment »
While it happens quite often, a total lunar eclipse is still something special.
There will be a total lunar eclipse on December 10 starting about midnight.
There is a good article about it at the IceInSpace website which also has a guide as to where and when it will be visible.
Australia is well placed for the eclipse so, get outside of the 10th of December and have a look.
NASA also has a good site about all eclipses.
news@csiro is heading to Lake Mungo near Mildura for a few days to see where Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were discovered and to see the eclipse. Will keep you posted.
Fewer but stronger cyclones for WA
Posted: December 5, 2011 Filed under: News Leave a comment »Fewer tropical cyclones may form off Western Australia but they may become more intense.
CSIRO climate scientist Deborah Abbs says there could be a 50 percent reduction in the number of storms in the second half of this century – from 2051-2090 – compared to the period from 1971-2000.
However, the climate model developed by Dr Abbs’ team indicates a distinct shift towards more destructive storms.
“Despite a decrease in the number of tropical cyclones, there is a greater risk that a tropical cyclone that forms will be more severe in future,” Dr Abbs said.
Read more HERE
Credit: Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC
The science behind the Murray Darling plan
Posted: December 5, 2011 Filed under: News Leave a comment »
By Dr Bill Young – Director CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country Flagship
Not unexpectedly, there has been significant public commentary in recent days about the Murray Darling Basin Authority’s proposed Basin Plan.
There have also been plenty of sensationalist headlines relating to the science that has supported the development of the Plan and in particular, the scientific sufficiency upon which the Plan is built.
Many of these views, especially those pertaining to the role and perspectives of my own organisation – CSIRO – have significantly misrepresented reality.
CSIRO has provided some – but not all – of the underlying research, models and data to help inform the development of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Continue reading HERE
Tropical fish learn to take the heat
Posted: December 5, 2011 Filed under: News Leave a comment »Some tropical fish have a greater capacity to cope with rising sea temperatures than previously thought – by adjusting over several generations.
Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University and CSIRO were looking to see how fish would cope with the elevated sea temperatures expected by 2050 and 2100.
Their findings HERE have been published today in Nature Climate Change.
Here is a Media Release about the work.
They put the damsel fish (see lat week’s Friday Fish Time) to water temperatures 1.5 degrees and three degrees above today’s temperature.
“There was a marked decline in their aerobic capacity as we’d expected,” lead researcher Jennifer Donelson said. “This affects their ability to swim fast and avoid predators.”
“However when we bred the fish for several generations at higher temperatures, we found that the second generation offspring had almost completely adjusted to the higher temperatures. We were amazed… stunned, even,” she says. “It shows that some species can adjust faster than the rate of climate change.”
