Fresh Science

Ants have the answers when it comes to assessing the effects of land management on the environment. Up to 20 million ants from 100 species live in any single hectare of the Australian bush, says CSIRO ecologist, Dr Ben Hoffmann.

A naturally occurring bacteria has been shown to control diseases that attack cereal crops such as wheat, and at the same time boost the growth of crops. The research conducted by Flinders University PhD student, Justin Coombs, found the bacteria in a place it had never been discovered before – the tissues of cereal crop…

Scientists have developed a new environmentally-friendly way of killing boneseed, a weed listed among Australia’s top twenty “Weeds of National Significance”. The new methods combines controlled fires, herbicides and revegetation, and replace the old ‘hit or miss’ method that threatened to wipe out rare and endangered plant species as it killed the boneseed.

320 tonnes of acid spills into river- Ben Wilson Research into acid-producing soils along major rivers in northern NSW has illustrated the threat posed by Mother Nature, not only sugar cane farmers, on fish stocks in the region, according to Dr Ben Wilson from Charles Sturt University.