Bright ideas working in the real world: clean power, clever materials and tools that make it easier to live lightly.
Innovations
Paaru Natural Products was founded by three Malyangapa and Barkandji women on medicinal plant knowledge handed down through their mothers' lines. With CSIRO they have turned it into a process six times more efficient, and the plant's identity never left the room.
Peter Hegemann simply wanted to know how a single celled pond alga finds the light. Thirty years on, the protein he and Georg Nagel found, and that Karl Deisseroth slipped into nerve cells, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine. In Basel, eye doctors are already giving a little sight back.
Fitting a prosthetic arm begins with the socket, and that is slow, skilled work. Laura Echeverri Giraldo of Pereira has won Colombia's James Dyson Award for a system that does it from a phone scan, cuts eight hours of design to one, and prints it in the person's own town.
Once a year the Great Barrier Reef spawns in a pink snowstorm, and most of that new life drifts away. A small clear box built by CSIRO and Southern Cross University holds it where it is needed, and the corals are settling in numbers nobody has managed before.
Ten years ago a team in Brazil chose a tree seed over a chemical. Now that seed pulls microplastics out of drinking water as well as the industry standard, and it is cleaning river water in their laboratory. Professor Adriano Reis and his team sent us their photographs and their story.
Off the Oregon coast the first grid connected wave energy test site in the United States is open after fifteen years of work, with room for twenty machines and a promise to study how they sit with marine life. A Fremantle company is about to put its own wave machine in the sea in Spain.
A researcher in Queensland has built a tool that reads drone photographs and counts every bird in them, and he has given it away to the world.
A water scientist in central New South Wales has built a plant that takes contaminants apart rather than straining them out, and his town now gets to use the same water twice.
An Anindilyakwa owned sea farm in the Gulf of Carpentaria is growing sandfish in a closed loop where nothing is wasted, and training the island's own kids to run it.
Published in Nature Health: satellite readings across 150 Chinese cities show fine particle pollution 23.8 per cent lower than it would have been without electric cars, and a great deal of breathing made easier.
A shoebox sized satellite built in Europe is the first of six that will hear from tiny tags on wild animals up to six times a day, a cheetah in Namibia among them.
Published in Nature this week: a plastic film that is brilliantly white and sheds water like a lotus leaf, with no titanium dioxide and none of the forever chemicals that usually do that job.
