News & events
News
Konzo is a neurological disease that causes irreversible paralysis of the legs, often in women and young children. It's caused by malnutrition and consumption of high levels of a cyanide compound found in the cassava plant - which happens to be a common staple food in tropical Africa.
On Monday, 28 November, Emeritus Professor Howard Bradbury passed away.
Howard worked tirelessly to translate science into effective actions to improve the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. His passion, humour and determination inspired many of us and one of his greatest wishes was to see that work to prevent konzo continue. We will do our best to honour his legacy.
Howard Bradbury followed in his father’s footsteps. “Dad was a chemist and he used to keep telling me stories about it all the time. I couldn’t understand what he said, but somehow something just rubbed off and so I always thought science would be real fun, so I just went into it. I must say I’ve enjoyed every minute."
Tackling one of tropical Africa's crippling epidemic diseases has been an interesting and demanding retirement project, as HOWARD BRADBURY AM writes. Through our work, konzo has now been prevented in 16 villages, which has involved more than 10,000 people.
Events
Classical weed biocontrol refers to the deliberate introduction of co-evolved host-specific natural enemy of a weed.
In nature, organisms do not exist in isolation. They interact with surrounding biotic and abiotic components to form complex ecological networks, such as food webs. It is the states and dynamics of these networks that then foster biodiversity at the community level or beyond.
Information about danger is vital for wildlife, yet can be difficult to gain in complex environments. Anthropogenic and other noise can disrupt acoustic communication, and predators may be visually hidden in cluttered environments.
New Guinea is the heart of global linguistic diversity. New Guinea makes up 1% of the global land area as an island, containing less than <0.2% of the world's population and 20% of all languages. The obvious linguistic and anthropological question is why?
Bushfires are a major disturbance process in the Australian landscape, affecting our native wildlife and their habitat. The dry sclerophyll forests of south-eastern Australia are one of the most fire-prone regions in the world and are dominated by tree species from the Eucalyptus genus.
The Australian Acoustic Observatory (A2O) was created five years ago, a unique infrastructure to monitor vocal fauna across Australia using a network of solar powered acoustic recorders.