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At the end of April 2004, hidden away among the high-rise hotels and beaches of Australia's Gold Coast, 85 top biotechnology company bosses from all over Australia and New Zealand came together for the first time. Their mission: to work out how to hot-house the fledgling Australian biotechnology industry. The timing could hardly have been better. The week after the meeting, the CEOs heard the details of the federal government's revamped programme of aid for the sector. To the delight of the CEOs, and AusBiotech, the main industry body, the new cash on the table amounts to $5.3 billion to invest across the board in research and innovation. INSETS: THE POSEIDON MISADVENTURE;THE STATES VERSUS GM;HOW THEY LINE UP.

Australia is battling to turn scientific strengths and excellent natural resources into major biotechnology bucks as of December 2003. It's been a hot few months for Australia's young biotechnology industry. About half of Australia's 280 or so biotechs are in the medical sector, with core strengths in stem cell research, immunology, medical devices and neuroscience. Australian drug discovery is certainly in its early days, but there have been important breakthroughs. When the New York-based Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation was looking for a site for the world's first type 1 diabetes vaccine research centre, there was only one choice which was Australia. INSETS: DIABETES: THE FIGHT IS ON;BIOPROSPECTING: A NATURAL ADVANTAGE.

The article reports on the benefits of including historically and naturally significant places of Australia as World Heritage areas. It reports on the several instances where the listings helped in the protection of such areas in Australia which include the halting of mining projects in Kakadu, Northern Territory and stopping of logging in Wet Tropics, Queensland. It also reports on how the World heritage listing boosted tourism in the Wet Tropics.

The article offers information on an ocean research carried out by the marine scientist Ron Thresher of Australia. The aim of this research was to locate and collect deep-sea corals off Tasmania's southern coast. He carried out this research with the help of his remotely operated submersible named Jason. It is said to be the deepest dive ever in Australian waters. In January 2009, Jason made 14 dives into this frigid zone and spotted strange creatures like black sea cucumbers etc.

The article presents information on intestinal parasites found in Australia. They are--Dientamoeba fragilis, Blastocystis hominis, Strongyloides stercoralis, single-celled giardia, and Cryptosporidium. As stated, pinworms or Enterobius vemicularis come out onto the anus and lay their eggs on the anal skin. Some of the others are hookworms, and whipworms.

The article looks at the language of dolphins. Liz Hawkins of the Whale Research Centre at Southern Cross University in Lismore, New South Wales, Australia, studied bottlenose dolphins living off the western coast of Australia for three years. She recorded 1647 whistles from 51 different pods, in Byron Bay, New South Wales. There were 187 different whistles identified with 20 being especially common, all of which she put in five tonal classes which coincided with specific behaviors.

The article focuses on figures revealed by the International Shark Attack File (ISAF), according to which shark attacks have fallen for the fifth year in a row, with 58 unprovoked attacks recorded worldwide during 2005, including four deaths. That might sound reassuring, but in the longer term the threat from sharks remains as great as ever. Decade on decade, shark attacks are increasing as more people hit the beaches and take up recreational water-sports. During the 1990s, the ISAF recorded 470 unprovoked attacks. Overfishing is taking its toll on shark numbers, while mesh nets, such as those strung up at popular beaches in Australia and South Africa, are reducing attacks locally by catching and killing sharks--and other marine creatures with them.

This article focuses on a study conducted by researcher Bryan Fry at the University of Melbourne, Australia, which states that people bitten by their pet lizard can suffer a painful swelling and prolonged bleeding. Venom was considered the preserve of advanced snakes and just two species of lizard, the gila monster and the Mexican beaded lizard. Now Fry's team has found that two other groups, the monitor lizards and iguanians, which includes iguanas and chameleons, are also venomous. Fry suggests that blaming bacteria had become dogma. Komodo dragons, for example, are monitor lizards that eat carrion, and their mouths are blooming with bacteria.

This article presents information on a vaccine for pigs, developed by a team at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The vaccine could help save the 50,000 people a year in poor countries killed by a gruesome parasite. The Australian group has created a vaccine based on two proteins found on the oncosphere. The vaccine triggers the production of antibodies by the immune system that cause oncospheres to burst. Small-scale trials, in which eggs isolated from adult tapeworms were fed to up to 30 pigs, have already been conducted in Mexico, Peru, Cameroon and Honduras.

This article reports that many more species are at risk of extinction than the people thought. That is because some species depend on another for their survival, so if one disappears, many more that have gone largely unnoticed by conservationists will follow. There are 12,200 species at risk according to the World Conservation Union Red List, the definitive audit of rare, threatened and endangered species. But the true number is likely to be much higher, says a team led by Lian Pin Koh at the National University of Singapore and Robert Dunn at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. In addition to 399 extinct host species of plants, fish, birds or mammals on the Red List, they estimate another 200 affiliate species have already been lost. And of the 9536 endangered host species on the Red List for which there is sufficient data to run the model, another 6300 affiliate species are likely to go with their hosts.

Whale strandings are no longer quite such a mystery—on the beaches of south-east Australia at least. An analysis of data collected over more than 80 years has revealed that a disproportionate number of cetaceans beach themselves in the region every 10 to 12 years. The stranding events appear to be triggered by a climate phenomenon called the zonal westerly winds. Tasmania is one of the world's hotspots for cetacean strandings. Common dolphins, sperm whales and long-finned pilot whales are three of the species that most commonly beach themselves.

Tiny flakes of gold have been grown in the laboratory by microbes from gold-bearing soil. Australian researchers says that their ability to concentrate traces of gold could help explain why flakes and nuggets of gold are often found far from a seam and could lead to improved prospecting techniques. Researcher Frank Reith of the Australian National University in Canberra collected soil and gold samples from the Tomakin mine in New South Wales. In the mine itself, gold is very finely dispersed through the quartz rock, but if you pan for gold in the surrounding area, you find whole flakes. Gold crystals began to form, with the gold building up in layers, atom by atom. Understanding all the different mechanisms is critical for gold exploration, says Ernst Kohler, a gold specialist at CSIRO Exploration and Mining in Western Australia, an offshoot of the science research agency.

Australian Aborigines have differences in a few immune genes that might explain why they suffer such high rates of certain medical problems. Research shows that Aborigines are much more likely to have gene variants thought to increase the expression of the pro-inflammatory immune signaling protein IL-1 and decrease expression of IL-10, which shuts down IL-1 production. Whether having these genes actually translates into higher levels of IL-1 has yet to be investigated. But Aborigines suffer much higher rates of a number of diseases compared with white Australians.

Australia is considering building an exclusion fence in an effort to stop the northward advance of one of the country's most devastating pests cane toads, as of September 6, 2003. The fence would be built across the neck of the Cobourg peninsula north-east of Darwin, Northern Territory, part of the Gurig national park. No more than 9 kilometers long, it would be dwarfed by the 1600-kilometer rabbit fence erected in Western Australia. Cane toads were introduced into Queensland in 1935 and have steadily spread north and west, advancing at a rate of about 30 kilometers a year. They cannot jump, so the fence would only need to be around 60 centimeters high.

Studies the behavior of an Australian lizard. Observation on the behavior of lizard to live in a nuclear family; Possible reasons for the pattern of living in nuclear family by lizard.

Focuses on the analysis of a skeleton recovered from Australia. Estimated age of the skeleton; Information obtained from the analysis regarding the early Australian Homo sapiens; Procedure involved in age estimation of the skeleton.

Focuses on the efforts of engineers at Australia-based Intelligent Interaction Technology to monitor the standard of software manuals. Plans to record mouse clicks of people who use computer software for long periods; Storage of information on hard discs; Translation of the information into English.

The article focuses on the risk faced by different parts of Australia against destruction by Tsunamis. It states that most Tsunamis are triggered by earthquakes, meteorite strikes and volcanic eruptions. It reports that the biggest quake threat to Australia is the subduction zone around Java and Sumatra.