On Friday afternoon I attended a seminar by Professor John Christodoulou titled “Genomic Medicine: What is its place in the Australian healthcare system?”. One of the interesting points he brought up was how genomics had changed the ability to diagnose many genetic diseases. In the past, diagnoses would often require a three step process: Clinical …

As I’ve been writing my thesis I came across a paper with such an excellent conclusion I wanted to share it. I think there are two lessons we can take from it: Use a title no-one can disagree with Quote Star Trek – I particularly like seeing Paramount in the location that you would normally …

Whilst writing my thesis, I came across an interesting paper discussing how you can get fruit flies hooked on alcohol, whilst honeybees will consistently turn their noses up to a tipple unless you literally give them nothing else to drink. Drosophila [fruit flies] develop a preference for alcohol that increases with repeated alcohol consumption, and …

I’m extremely excited to announce that I was one of the 20 young Australians selected by Startup Catalyst for their Future Founders Mission to Silicon Valley at the end of the month. As part of the trip I’ll have the opportunity to visit Stanford University, as well as multiple tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and …

Earlier in the year I had to reset the observation hive and sadly that process resulted in the death of a fair few bees who ended up on the ground. Now, I knew that there were large carnivorous bull ants in the area and I completely expected them to clear away the bodies within a …

On Friday afternoon I presented my exit seminar to the biology department. Things went really well, and I rather enjoyed the questions session that came after – there was a lot of great discussion about honeybee behaviour and machine learning techniques. My focus for October is to finish writing my thesis, and once that is …

Recently, I was reading through a thesis titled “On Honey Bee Colony Dynamics and Disease Transmission” and on page vi I came across a page of quotes. Nothing too out of the ordinary. Then I read the second quote on the page. Fantastic. Sorely tempted to do something similar with my own thesis.

I received an interesting scam email this morning from a person claiming to a representative of “Domain Registry China”. I thought I’d post it and hopefully prevent any business owners potentially falling victim to it. This is what it said: Dear CEO, (If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please …

This article relates to where bees prefer to build their hives. Back in the 1970s, there was a bunch of research conducted at Cornell surveying where bees build hives in the wild, and all the evidence seemed to indicate that honeybees preferred to build their hives relatively close to the ground. This finding seemed rather …