Blog

Dip below the surface to discover the extraordinary plants and animals that call Sydney Harbour home.

Is there a chemical element you love the most? To celebrate the International Year of the Periodic Table in 2019, Double Helix is running a poetry competition for school-aged students with support from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI). Meet our chemistry expert and competition judge, Michelle Neil!

Have you ever wished you had superhuman reflexes? In a simple but effective experiment, scientists from Sony Computer Science Laboratories and the University of Chicago used electrodes to improve people’s reaction times.

Have you ever looked through your old school books? You might be surprised at how many mistakes you used to make, or the things you didn’t understand. Human brains take decades to fully develop, but eastern blue-tongue lizards might be born as clever as their adult counterparts.

Time to get creative! With some permanent markers and methylated spirits, you can use chemistry to make some cool looking t-shirt designs.

Plenty of owners will tell you their cats are smart, compassionate and wonderful creatures. Scientists are curious about whether this is actually the case. Until this year, scientists weren’t even sure if cats knew their own names.

Written by Mike McRae Your pets might like a good scratch, but new research suggests your beloved pot plants might not be so fond of having their fronds fondled.

As long as a thumb and with a six-centimetre wingspan, you’d think it would be hard to miss Wallace’s giant bee.

Imagine bacteria, clinging to a rock, floating deep in space. The rock was once blasted off its planet by a cataclysmic explosion. Hundreds of years in the future, the rock encounters a new planet, bringing these lonely bacteria with it. The question is, could the bacteria survive?

A walk in the Australian bush can occasionally reveal piles of strange, cube-shaped poo, carefully balanced on top of rocks. Although it might seem like a prank, they’re perfectly natural. Chances are, this cube poo has been ejected from a wombat’s rear end.