We’ve been working with the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) to come up with a more accurate scoring method for amateur boxing. And we’re not pulling any punches.

In amateur boxing (think red and blue head guards rather than Rocky Balboa), a fighter scores by delivering an effective blow to the head or the body. During a bout, scoring shots are added up by the judges and at the end of the fight the competitor with the most points wins.

While this scoring system has been in place for a long time, some in the boxing world believe it’s too subjective. Rather than throwing in the towel, we’ve come up with a reliable and automated scoring system to detect impact in contact sport.

Using electronic fabric, our Automated Impact Sensing System detects contact between one contestant’s boxing glove and the other’s vest or head guard. When contact is made, it sends a signal to a computer via Bluetooth, which analyses its placement and impact. If there is instantaneous impact between one competitor’s glove and a scoring area, a point is awarded. Best of all, the fabric is easy to manufacture and is tough enough to withstand exposure to water and sweat.

It has been used in training by the boxing program at the AIS. It has also been used across the country in Box ‘Tag competitions – an emerging form of modified ‘safe’ boxing that develops skill, speed and physical conditioning, while reducing the risk of copping a right hook to the head.

Read more about the Automated Impact Sensing System on our website.

Galileo did it. So did Da Vinci. Darwin too. It’s science, right? Nope. It’s art. More specifically, art as a tool to communicate science. For centuries, scientists have used diagrams and illustrations to explain their inventions or the intricacy of natural objects.

Art vs Science: Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Today, scientists wanting to communicate about their work can harness the power of technology. They can bring together stunning imagery and gripping narrative, combined with a killer soundtrack. State-of-the-art computer animations, the stuff of Hollywood movies, are now being used to help scientists connect with a wider audience.

To show how, we’re hosting a public event at the VIVID Ideas program (part of VIVID Sydney 2013) on May 30. The evening event at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is called Connect with Science, and will feature two world-renowned biomedical animators, Graham Johnson (UCSF, USA) and Drew Berry (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne), whose work has received international recognition including a prestigious BAFTA Award (the UK Oscars). Check out one of Drew’s impressive videos below:

Connect with Science is co-organised by VIZBI+, a new project about visualising the future of biomedicine that’s funded by the Federal Government’s Inspiring Australia initiative. The project is training computer animators to bring biological and medical process to life in a way that’s true to the science. It involves the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute, and our researchers at CSIRO.

VIZBI+ Project Leader, Sean O’Donoghue is MC and co-organiser of the event which, he says, aims to bring together scientists and the creative community.

“Many biological experiments are now so complicated that we need engagement with the creative community to help visualize, understand, and communicate the data and insights obtained. This event is a fantastic opportunity to do so”, he said.

Sean and his team are looking for more participants. So if your work bridges art and science or you’re a scientist with interest in art and creativity, you have an opportunity to showcase your work to like-minded individuals following the talks on 30 May.

Head to the VIZBI+ website for more details about the event, including how to participate. We’d love to connect with you.

Today, 22 May, is the International Day for Biological Diversity and this year the theme is ‘Water and Biodiversity’. So, I thought I’d share some interesting information about Australia’s freshwater ecosystems.

Australia is a dry continent and so that has repercussions for our biodiversity. For example, there are only about 300 species of freshwater fish on the Australian continent, which is the lowest of any continent of a similar size—the US has about 1000 species. But we have a wealth of aquatic ecosystems in this country that support more than just fish and a large number of species that are found nowhere else.

The Australian Lungfish is one of only three Australian primary freshwater fishes (those that evolved entirely in freshwater). It is thought to have evolved before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, between 125 and 150 million years ago. Image: Loren Javier/Flickr

There are over 900 wetlands in Australia listed as being of national importance and 64 of those are also listed as being of international significance. As recently as the 1980s, our wetlands supported over one million waterbirds. Unfortunately with a decline in the state of our wetlands—about half of Australia’s wetlands have been lost to other uses—the average annual waterbird numbers had dropped to about 200 000 in 2004.

Across the 40% of Australia that is most intensively used, over 85% of the rivers have been degraded by human activity to some extent. In the Murray-Darling Basin, the most heavily affected area, 20 of its 23 rivers were rated in 2008 to be in poor or very poor ecological condition and more than half of its native fish considered threatened or rare.

So what does CSIRO know anyway? We’re doing a bit of work in the water space; check out our Water Book and a couple of our projects below:

Murray-Darling Basin Multiple Benefits Project

CSIRO was commissioned by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) in 2011 to lead a study of the environmental benefits to Australia that may arise from implementing MDBA’s Proposed Basin Plan and, where possible, to place a monetary value on these benefits.

The research showed implementation of the plan could bring significant benefits for the basin’s biodiversity. The increased water likely to be delivered under the proposed plan could benefit red gum forests and other vegetation communities on the lower floodplains, and fish such as Macquarie perch, golden perch and silver perch, and could also provide more minor breeding events for water birds, which should help sustain populations.

Healthier river environments would also benefit people living in the basin, through the social values they provide and their spiritual significance to Indigenous communities, and could deliver economic benefits, such as reduced water-treatment costs.

The River Murray. Image: Ian Overton

Read more

Drawing upon Indigenous water knowledge

In the first study of its kind in Australia, CSIRO, as part of the Tropical Rivers and Coastal Knowledge program, worked closely with Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia to understand their values and record their knowledge of freshwater ecosystems. Indigenous knowledge can tell us much about the ecology of Australia and yet historically this is an area that has been poorly documented.

To address this issue and capture important knowledge, the project drew on the knowledge of six language groups over four years to develop a series of calendars representing Aboriginal seasonal knowledge. The language groups are: the Gooniyandi and Walmajarri from the Fitzroy River area in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, the Ngan’gi, MalakMalak and Wagiman from the Daly River region in the Northern Territory, and the Gulumoerrgin/Larrakia from the Darwin region.

Read more

Recipes on a budget: the latest from the Total Wellbeing Diet series.

We’re big on maintaining a healthy lifestyle and a nutritionally balanced diet. The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet lets you do this with a little pizzazz. It’s nutritious, delicious, high in protein and facilitates sustainable weight loss. Our latest book, Recipes on a Budget, shows how you can eat well without breaking the bank or compromising on quality or nutrition. It’s packed with more than 135 new recipes that use inexpensive cuts of meats, use leftovers in clever ways and show how to make your own dips, spice mixes and dressings.

Here’s a sneak peek that’s perfect for winter.

Why does the atmosphere over Tasmania record lower levels of CO2 than that over Hawaii? Image: Ula Majewski.

By Paul Fraser, Stream Leader, Changing Atmosphere.

Last week the greenhouse gas monitoring site at Mauna Loa in Hawaii recorded daily levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide that approached the 400 parts per million molar (ppm) benchmark.

Annual mean Southern Hemispheric levels of carbon dioxide, as recorded at the Cape Grim Air Baseline Air Pollution Monitoring Station in north-west Tasmania, are expected to reach the 400ppm milestone during 2016.

Where do we measure atmospheric carbon dioxide?

Cape Grim is a key international monitoring facility, operated by the Bureau of Meteorology, and is where much of CSIRO’s international global atmospheric research is centred. Measurements have been made here since 1976.

Cape Grim is one of three key sites identified by the World Meteorological Association for long-term carbon dioxide measurements. The others are Mauna Loa in Hawaii (since 1956), which last week measured daily recordings exceeding the 400ppm benchmark, and Barrow in Alaska (since 1973).

CSIRO has also measured Southern Hemispheric carbon dioxide over the past 2000 years in air trapped in Antarctic surface ice – called firn – and deeper ice cores.

Why do we measure atmospheric carbon dioxide?

Carbon dioxide is one of the primary greenhouse gases. Others include methane, nitrous oxide and synthetic gases such as refrigerants and fire retardants.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising mainly because of the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

Increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere leads to climate change. The amount of warming produced by a given rise in greenhouse gas concentrations depends on feedback processes in the climate system, such as the water vapour response. This both amplifies, by water vapour, and dampens, by cloud formation, the temperature increase due to these long-lived greenhouse gases.

Over half of the carbon dioxide input to the atmosphere is absorbed by natural sinks in the land plants and oceans.

Land and ocean carbon dioxide sinks respectively removed 30% and 24% of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions over the period 2000-2008. This constitutes a massive natural ecosystem service helping to mitigate humanity’s emissions.

Why are southern hemisphere carbon dioxide levels lower?

Carbon dioxide is currently rising at close to, perhaps a little above, 2 parts per million molar (ppm) per year.

The annual mean carbon dioxide level at Mauna Loa is not expected to exceed 400ppm until 2015, although both Cape Grim and Mauna Loa may reach 400ppm a year earlier if the current growth rate of 2ppm per year accelerates.

Cape Grim baseline CO₂ measurements in April 2013 averaged 392ppm for the month.

There is a clear difference between levels of carbon dioxide measured in the Southern and Northern hemispheres, because industrial and other population-based sources of carbon dioxide emissions are concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere.

What we are seeing at present in the Mauna Loa May measurements are observations fluctuating around 400ppm. These will return to sub-400ppm levels later this year (September) when absorption by vegetation – what’s known as the “annual carbon dioxide draw down” – will affect Northern Hemisphere atmospheric CO₂ levels.

From measurement to action

Air and ice measurements allow us to trace the dramatic rise in carbon dioxide levels from about 280ppm before the start of the industrial era around the year 1800, to 392ppm in 2012. That’s an increase of 40%, largely due to human activities.

To have a 50:50 chance of keeping human-induced average global warming below 2°C, it will be necessary to stop almost all carbon dioxide emissions before cumulative emissions reach one trillion tonnes of carbon.

The world has already emitted more than half of this quota since the industrial revolution. At current accelerating growth rates for the combustion of fossil fuels, the rest will be emitted by the middle of this century.

Cape Grim measurements of carbon dioxide are publicly available at –http://www.csiro.au/greenhouse-gases/.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Our fire testing lab got a hot and very smoky workout last week when the NSW Fire & Rescue teams came to visit.

We played host to the crew who were launching their winter fire safety campaign and warning Aussies not to leave fire safety to Chance.

Chance, of course, was the inhabitant of a man made lounge room at our North Ryde fire testing facility.

Going about his business, Chance was hanging the washing on the clothes horse next to a heater. He then left the room, and the heater, unattended.

The lounge room was engulfed in flames within only a few minutes and after four minutes the firies stepped in to hose it down.

See how it all went down, or up rather, in flames..

Note: Some readers may find this footage confronting. 

Electrifying stuff: your clothes could power your gadgets – and soon. Image: Stephen Poff

By Adam Best, Senior Research Scientist, Energy Technology.

Imagine having a wafer-thin touchscreen on your sleeve which, like a scene out of a Philip K. Dick novel, gives you all the functionality of a smartphone without the awkwardness of a cumbersome battery.

The best part about this scenario is it may not be as far from reality as you think.

The bulky packaging of batteries limits innovation of some of the amazing new, ultra-slim electronics today.

If you open up an iPhone 5, you’ll see that a large proportion of the phone’s volume is taken up by the battery.

But flexible batteries that can be incorporated into fabrics offer a game-changing way of powering personal devices – and take us into a new world of wearable electronics.

My colleagues and I form one of several applied research groups developing both flexible batteries and the energy harvesting systems needed to charge them.

A printed, flexible electronic film. Image: pennstatenews

The body electric

Piezo is a term derived from a Greek word meaning to squeeze or press, and piezoelectric materials generate electricity when they are pressured or twisted – enabling development of shoes, clothing or recreational gear that generate electricity from movement.

Flexible batteries can be used to store the captured energy from human movement via piezoelectric materials woven into fabrics or inserted into silicone rubber.

You could have a jacket that’s a wearable mobile phone, with a flexible electronic screen printed on the cuffs, flexible phone circuit boards woven into the fabric, and a microphone in the collar. Just input the number on your cuff, and start talking.

There would be no risk of running out of power mid-conversation – you’d just move your arms about to charge the batteries. The jacket would be washable – but you’d need another “phone jacket” on the day it was in the wash.

In a similar advance, a cocktail dress wired for Bluetooth that lights up when the wearer gets an incoming call won a design competition for a London College of Fashion student. It’s hard to ignore that kind of phone call.

Running with it

The same technology can power smart sports clothing, so that your jogging suit or cycling shorts could carry a global positioning system (GPS) unit and a fitness monitor powered by your movements as you pedal or run.

You could monitor and analyse your workout before you hit the shower. Australian Football League players already optimise their playing performance using GPS trackers carried between their shoulder blades.

Smart cycling shirts with pedal powered light emitting diode (LED) panels could help keep cyclists visible on the road – or give a turning signal on the back of their jacket.

CSIRO researcher Dr Anand Bhatt models a shirt with a pocket incorporating the CSIRO flexible battery, which can be used to power small consumer electronic devices.

In leisure applications, flexible batteries have multiple applications. Incorporating a flexible battery into a backpack means that you could charge your phone, MP3 player, or GPS unit from your backpack after a day’s hike.

Tent panels that incorporate flexible batteries could capture wind energy and use it to charge a personal computer, GPS or personal locator beacon, such as an Emergency Position Indicating Radiobeacon (EPIRB) – making searches for skiers and hikers lost in the bush easier.

The same technology is being used to capture and store energy to power military electronic equipment, so that soldiers in the field don’t have to carry extra weight of batteries.

On a larger scale, buildings made with fabrics which capture wind energy are proposed as a renewable power source.

Footpaths which capture energy from footsteps are on the market – there is even a dance floor which powers the air conditioning for an eco-nightclub using kinetic energy (energy of motion) from dancing patrons.

Clinical applications

In medical care, wearable electronics provide an opportunity for revolutionary advances. Wearable electronic shirts capable of powering automated injection devices could make life easier for patients who need regular injections of insulin or other drugs.

Temperature and EKG sensors and LEDs wrapped around a cardiac balloon catheter. The wires are stretchable coils. Image: jurvetson

A shirt incorporating a heart rate monitor could sense changes in heart rhythm in elderly or cardiac-impaired patients – and summon emergency services if patient health is severely compromised by a change in heart rate.

Best of all, wearable electronics provide non-intrusive monitoring – enabling patients to pursue normal daily life activities under medical care.

But for those of us for whom batteries are a constant item on the shopping list, perhaps the biggest change that wearable electronics offers is freedom from needing to buy spare batteries.

Now that will make a difference to my personal retail experience.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

The soft and fluffy cotton grows in a boll around the seeds of the plant.

Happy Fascination of Plants Day! That is, if you’re not too busy celebrating Sea Monkey Day, Museum Day, or preparing for Pick Strawberries Day on Monday. It’s true there are many ‘days’ competing for our attention. But unlike picking strawberries, appreciating plants only takes a few moments. And plants are seriously amazing.

As a city dweller, plants were something I never really appreciated. Once I tried to grow a veggie patch on my balcony and I got a rash as soon as I put my hand within an inch of the tomato vine. I’m sure many city dwellers are plant aficionados, so maybe “naive urbanite” is a more fitting title for me.

When I moved from Inner Sydney life to the NT. It was a serious adventure.

Anyway, a few years back I moved to the Northern Territory. When I was walking to pick up the keys to my house I was fascinated, and somewhat confused, at the plants lining the footpath. The bush looked almost dead, but had an odd ‘flower’ on it. At the time I could only describe this as “a cotton bud”. Like the ones you buy in a packet from Coles. When I expressed my surprise to my new colleagues, they laughed at me. A lot.

I had no idea what a cotton plant looked like. I was just beginning a postgraduate degree in Environmental Management, and I only had a vague idea of where my food came from. Or how my clothing was made. I felt silly, and quite ignorant. As I spoke to more people about it, I realised it’s a common problem.

Generally people don’t have a strong appreciation of what plants do for us. We know that they convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, provide food, clothing and building materials. But we don’t appreciate this as these processes are so foreign, because our food comes from Coles, our clothes from Myer and our building materials from Bunnings. The appreciation in lost in not knowing how food travels from farm to plate, how fibres like cotton are spun into fabric.

Cotton, for example, has been cultivated for over 5,000 years all around the world. Despite the geographic divide between cotton farmers, the crop has been cleaned, spun and weaved in the same manner everywhere. Tiny cotton seeds are super durable, and can survive been blown for thousands of kilometres and even across bodies of water. And if you don’t think cotton is sexy, it’s a relative of the hibiscus, both belong to the Gossypium genus of plants.

CSIRO have been researching and growing cotton in country NSW for 40 years. Over that time, our research has improved yield, disease resistance and fibre quality. All while supporting a rural economy.

Next time you think plants are boring, think again. Think about what you had for breakfast, what your clothing is made out of and the amazing fact that they actually convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Plants are seriously fascinating.

Cotton plants. Seriously, this still amazes me.

For many of us, a ‘good hack’ might seem like a foreign and almost illegal concept. Some may even find the subject a little bit dirty.

We are tackling this misconception head-on through our new Apps4Broadband competition, aimed at helping Australians better understand what is possible through the smart use of broadband. It also hopes to help accelerate the ability of Australian developers to realise these new business opportunities and connect with service providers, technology partners and end users to build game-changing apps.

As part of the competition we are running two ‘Hack Days’. These are a fun and practical way for developers and other people interested in participating in the competition to come along, work on their projects, find other potential collaborators, meet with industry experts and advisers, and present their ideas and prototypes at the end of the day over drinks.

We recently spoke with the host of our Hack Days, John Allsopp (the organiser of the influential web directions and Code conferences), to try and de-code  what this hacking business is all about and find out if it really is dirty business.

What is a hack day and how do you run them?

Hack days are about bringing together people to hack on things. Whether they’re designers, developers, domain experts, whatever their expertise. The idea is to get people to explore problems, and possible solutions. For example, GovHack focusses on working with government data, or providing services and applications that help citizens better interact with governments. Random Hacks of Kindness brings together people to work on solving problems to make the world a better place. Many hack events, including these, are about getting a working prototype or demo of a solution up and running in a few hours. The Apps4Broadband event is more open ended as it looks to help people explore ideas and opportunities they may then further develop over time.

John Allsopp at the Sydney ACBI Apps4Broadband Hack Event

Is hacking really a dirty word?

The popular understanding of hacking certainly is more negative than positive. It is often something associated with illegal or anti-social behaviour such as hacking into banking systems, and other networks. In the developer world, the term has been used in a positive way since the 1960s, (the term “crackers” is sometimes used by this community refer to what in popular terms are called “hackers”.)

Perhaps the earliest definition of hacker in this sense come from a legendary compendium of developer terminology known as the Jargon File (and otherwise known as the Hackers Dictionary). Here, a hacker is one “who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary”.

Among developers, hacking, hackers and hacks are far from negative things.

Foxtel’s Robyn Elliot mentoring developers at the Sydney ACBI Apps4Broadband Hack Event

Why is failing an important part of hacking?

Traditional, more enterprise oriented IT projects are what I call the “fail slowly” approach. Requirements are gathered, specifications are put together, development takes place, then testing, then deployment. And it’s often only at the end of the project that we find out whether the project was a good idea. Of course, this is the right model for many types of projects. But in less well defined fields, exploring the problem space, developing some possible solutions and then quickly testing them can be a very powerful way to come up with possible solutions. Does the technology to achieve this actually exist? What existing products and services already address this issue? Is there a viable business model? What pathways to market might there be for this?

All this is about asking questions in order to knock down ideas, rather than taking forward ideas that really should be dismissed as unfeasible for all kinds of possible reasons.

On a hack day, you might generate several possible ideas, and dismiss most, before taking one forward, and this “fail fast” approach is an important part of this winnowing process.

Developers workshopping ideas at the Sydney ACBI Apps4Broadband Hack Event

Do you believe next generation broadband networks will drive innovation in app development?

The glib answer I tend to give is “I don’t know”. But in truth, predicting the future, even a short way out (ask any economist) is basically impossible. The future of the 1950s and 1960s, as exemplified by the Jetsons was all about flying cars, immersive video conferencing, and yet an essentially unchanged social structure.

In the 1950s, futurists imagined a world of holidays in space, and colonies on mars and the moon, but not a globally connected network enabling anyone to connect to anyone else in real time for almost no cost.

If I were to try to make a case beyond “the future will be great with broadband, just wait!” it would be about identifying that on a world where increasingly more things are digital, things we have traditionally called film, TV, music, games, books, news media, but also physical things are becoming digital via 3D printing. The ability to upload (or to use a better term, publish) as much as to download quickly (where most of the focus on broadband typically is) will be a fundamental opportunity for creative individuals and groups to participate fully in a global digital economy.

Australia has always been heavily dependent on “uploading”, as we are such an export economy. We build multi billion dollar LPG pipelines, shipping facilities, airports, which are all about “uploading” physical exports. Just as we’ve recognised such facilities as potentially constraints on our competitive place in the world economy, network speeds are clearly such a constraint.

Beyond that, if I knew, I’d be implementing it already (well, I am working on some ideas)…

iiNet’s Budii system, an example next generation broadband app

Keen to code? 

Further details about the Apps4Broadband competition and the wider opportunity for broadband connected homes can be found at www.acbi.net.au/broadband4apps   

Media: Dan Chamberlain. P: +61 2 9372 4491. M: 0477 708 849. Email: daniel.chamberlain@csiro.au

Common name: Moon Jellyfish. Scientific name: Aurelia aurita. Family: Ulmaridae.

Moon Jellyfish: It is rare for these to live more than six months in the wild but they are really interesting.

All species in the genus are closely related and is hard to pick them apart except by genetic sampling.

They grow to about 25–40cm in diameter and can be recognized by its four horseshoe-shaped gonads, easily seen through the top.

It is not really a strong swimmer and it mainly drifts with the current feeding on plankton, fish eggs, small organisms and molluscs. It captures food with its tentacles and scoops it into its body for digestion.

Moon Jellyfish are found throughout most of the world’s oceans, from the tropics to as far north as latitude 70°N (runs through the middle of the US and Spain) and as far south as 40°S (runs through Tasmania).

It has also been found in waters as cool as 6C to as warm as 31C.

They do not have any respiratory parts such as gills, lungs, or trachea so it respires by diffusing oxygen from water through the thin membrane covering its body.