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When you’re installing solar panels, it’s important to point them at the Sun. But the Sun isn’t always in the same place – it moves across the sky over the course of a day. If you can aim the panels towards the Sun as it moves, they can produce up to 40 per cent more power…

In the latest issue of Double Helix magazine, we feature solar powered cars racing from Darwin to Adelaide. They zoomed to the finish line last week. The winner is Dutch team Nuon with their car Nuna 8!

Make your own crazy climbing frog, using the power of friction. You will need A 20cm x 20cm piece of cardboard Two 5cm long pieces of drinking straw String Sticky tape Scissors Coloured pens, pencils, crayons, paints or textas Other decorations What to do

2015 is the The International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies. To celebrate, we’re sharing some light-based articles and activities:

A big congratulations to Dhruv Verma from Victoria and Jackson Huang from Queensland, the two winners of this year’s BHP Billiton Science and Engineering Awards. Dhruv was recognised for his PROTEGO project, and Jackson for his investigation into heartburn medication alternatives. See 2015 student winners for details of the winners and place getters. For more…

Researchers have made sticky hand pads that let you climb walls like Spiderman. Inspired by gecko feet, a research lab at Stanford University in America developed the climbing device, which recently allowed a person who weighed 70 kilograms to climb a sheer glass wall. The team have also used the structure of gecko feet to…

What will make our future brighter? For thousands of years our lives have been lit by the Sun, by stars, by fire. Electricity brought new types of lights, ones we can summon at the flick of a switch. Not all lights were created equal. Some lights use more energy than others to create a glow….

One of our readers requested an article about time keeping devices, and it’s a great time for the topic. Scientists set a new record in clock precision early this year with an atomic clock that ‘ticks’ 430 trillion times in a single second. Most wristwatches and wall clocks today use a quartz crystal to keep…

Can we power our homes with the process that powers stars? Nuclear fusion offers to do just that, and scientists are looking for ways to harness this energy with experiments that run hotter than the Sun. The Sun is heated by fusion – a process where the nuclei of two small atoms, such as hydrogen,…

A whispering gallery of light has made the world’s most sensitive thermometer yet. This thermometer sets a new record in precision. Made by an Australian team of researchers, it is three times better than the previous record holder, and can measure temperature differences of just 30 billionths of a degree. This is the smallest change…