Thrilled to be joining Bohdee Media as a science advisor! Adam Boland and his colleagues are astonishingly creative and accomplished storytellers *and* social/traditional media creators. And never have those communication skills been more needed… the challenges facing our world will require more science and technology not less, and that tech positive view needs to be heard more widely than ever.

A rather brilliant paper from my student Mitchell Dixon focussed on exploding stars, known as supernovae, and finding ways to make them more accurate distance measurement tools to map the expansion of the universe itself. In the end he found that nearby ‘calibrator’ supernovae had a systematic shift with the specific star formation rate (i.e. how rapidly the galaxy is doubling its mass in stars) and taking that into account he improved the accuracy of the expansion rate of the universe known as the Hubble Rate (or H0 of the title).

A truly unique experience getting to share the research and commercialisation collaboration between mDetect - Swinburne University of Technology and the The University of Tokyo’s Prof Hiroyuki Tanaka at the Australian Embassy Tokyo. A parntership that is delivering for education, resilience in critical infrastructure, and the resource sector. Getting to be part of an official Trade Delegation is also a first for me and one I cannot thank Austrade, DFAT, and the State of Victoria enough for allowing me to join.

I was fortunate to have the chance to discuss Hydrogen and Swinburne's role in understanding the economic and societal implications, as well as technological opportunities and challenges, for its adoption in Australia, particularly in partnership with Japan, with leading companies Honda and Kawasaki. An unforgettable trip!

My student Adam Ussing show that simulated galaxies, with different dark matter properties can form the same numer of stars but with observable consequences elsewhere in the amount of dust produced… a unique and potentially powerful probe of the nature of dark matter itself.

One of the coolest ways I get to support my sector of science, technology, and innovation is to help assist those events that celebrate the pioneers and exemplars of our field - and they don’t get any bigger than the night of nights for Australian innovators and technologists with the incredible Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering's ATSE Awards 2024. So it was truly wonderful to be allowed to host the evening (and also see honoured colleagues I have been privileged also to call my friend for over a decade!)

The transition to green steel production is pivotal for reducing global carbon emissions. My student Matthew Humbert undertook this study on a comprehensive techno-economic analysis of various green steel production methods, including hydrogen reduction and three different electrolysis techniques: aqueous hydroxide electrolysis (AHE), molten salt electrolysis, and molten oxide electrolysis (MOE).

The analysis reveals that MOE, despite its ongoing development, offers a promising route for iron production given its ability to process a wide range of ore qualities and the potential to sell electrolyte as a cement product. However, the best balance between deployment ready technology and economic benefit is AHE.

A whirlwind 2-day tour in Kuala Lumpur learning about the incredible investments and ambitions this nation has in creating an advanced economy through science and technology - the opportunities for Australia to support and learn from this generational shift are enormous, and I’m proud that together with our colleagues at Swinburne’s Sarawak and Australian campuses we can support that change through cutting edge research to enhance businesses as well as staff training in these new economies, but just as importantly creating industry-ready graduates thanks to guaranteed work placements throughout their courses.

Earth Observation is a powerful tool for mapping and monitoring the world from space, but satellites have limitations in their ability to scan - but can AI enhance that scanning capability? An extraordinary project that included the biggest EO fleet operator in history with Planet Labs, the leading Space Lab team at EY, and of course our own team at Swinburne with Stephen Petrie and Kai Qin - and our former student Jack White (now at EY!)

My extraordinary student Thomas Venville undertook an exhaustive study into the use of a nearby galaxy (that is currently being consumed by our Milky Way galaxy) as a potential source of gamma-radiation that could be from the self-annihilation of that dark matter that surrounds this galaxy. The challenge as Thomas conclusively demonstrated is that these signals appear both weaker than previously estimated, and together with the fact that the galaxy has recently been shown to emit gamma-rays of astrophysical origin, complicate the use of it in indirect DM detection searches.

The last paper of the extraordinary Thesis of my student (now Dr!) Grace Lawrence focussed on the challenges of dark matter detectors on Earth (particularly those like the SABRE project I have been involved in for many years). We have a simple picture in mind in which the dark matter is a cloud within which the galaxy (and our own Sun!) turns, meaning from the perspective of the Solar System there is a constant ‘wind’ of dark matter rushing towards us - which is our motion through it - familiar to anyone who has put their hand out of the car window and felt that wind even on the stillest of days. The issue is that we have many ‘gusts’ in that wind of dark matter as it is far from a smooth and still cloud of particles and instead has a history of cannibalised galaxies that retain their clumpy structure in the dark matter streams to this day drastically complicating the interpretation of any future discovery!

How do you measure distances in space? There’s no tape measure to stretch between the stars of course, but instead there are a series of techniques that work over ever increasing distances with one technique handing over to the next - the first rung on that distance ladder is Parallax (I once tried to explain this live on national Breakfast TV!) and my student Mitchell Dixon has just published a definitive study on that technique as it maps to the next rung of a special class of stars known as Tip of the Red Giant Branch (TRGB) stars which have a known (or at least calibrated!) brightness that depends on how rapidly the brighten and fade.

You're looking at Swinburne University of Technology's new Pro Vice Chancellor, Flagship Initiatives 🙌The PVCFI is a new role tasked with driving large and ambitious transdisciplinary research across our flagship research areas by actively engaging with external organisations (including government, industry, NGOs) to identify large-scale opportunities that require university-wide collaboration and the formation of coalitions of universities and partners.

A gigantic study by my student Matt Shaw on how we might access the resource of the Moon - a technique known as InSitu Resource Utilisation (ISRU) - can take advantage of the conditions of the Moon itself. In particular, the fact that we have a vacuum that changes the way in which the metals might evaporate out of the soil of the Moon (called regolith) in a way different to that on Earth, and very much in a way that might help us access iron for future building!

Our Universe is expanding, and indeed accelerating in that expansion, and primary means to that discovery last century was measuring the apparent brightness of exploding stars known as supernovae. A special kind of supernova explodes at (almost!) the same brightness, known as Type 1a, and hence if you measure that brightness you can figure out how far away they are relative to each other. My student Mitchell Dixon published an exhaustive analysis of how to better calibrate that brightness of the Type 1a supernovae, in particular showing that they depended on the dust in the galaxy (slightly dimming them, or else perhaps causing a slightly different explosion brightness).

This work led by the ANU’s Dr Roland Crocker and an absolutely gigantic list of the best and brightest in astronomy - with my student Thomas Venville proudly holding his head high amongst such giants - explored all the evidence we had from Fermi and found that sadly the signal from these pulsars can reasonably explain this… there is a hint of more but at this stage, we must be conservative and presume that this is the case for other such signals in more distant galaxies too. The search for the dark matter signal continues!

I spoke to Australian space pioneer Dr Chris Boshuizen at the Powerhouse Museum about his efforts in space… from a small country town, to co-founding Planet Labs (now the largest Earth Observing satellite fleet in history) to provide open and accessible satellite-based planet monitoring (if you have used Google Maps, you’ve used his company’s images!) and then fulfilling his lifelong dream of space travel onboard the second Blue Origin New Shepard flight in October 2021, making Chris the third Australian in space

An exhaustive study by the amazing Swinburne PhD student Matthew Humbert into creating a more accurate framework for exploring the extraction of desired metals from lunar regolith (i.e. the Moon’s soil) that might support future astronauts exploring the Solar System.

It was an incredible honour to host the inaugural Australian Space Summit held in Sydney, bringing together inspiring industry leaders to share with colleagues nationwide the tools and strategies to break into the domestic and global supply chain. I can’t wait for next year!

The final published work from my PhD student Adam Batten’s excellent Thesis centred around the use of the enigmatic, and very much still unknown, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) as probes of the nature of the galaxies they shine through.

After years of work from teams worldwide, we are finally nearing the completion of the deepest underground physics laboratory in the Southern Hemisphere all searching for dark matter!

So it was a double thrill that I could take one of Australia's biggest shows - Network 10's #TheProjectTV - on a tour of this Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory

he incredible Gaia spacecraft has been monitoring the almost imperceptible drift of the stars in our Milky Way for the last decade, allowing us to measure their exact 3D position using the powerful parallax method. Yet even these measures can be improved in time as this work by Swinburne’s Dr Chris Flynn shows.

I’m beyond thrilled to celebrate our Space Institute PhD student Matt Shaw and his incredible win at the 3MT APAC international finals. Against entries by 54 universities from around the region his work on mining the moon to provide metals for constructing moonbases (seriously how cool is his Thesis) was found the most engaging - considering you have just Three Minutes(!) to explain three years of work, his efforts to connect with the audience are nothing short of amazing

When it comes to mining the Moon, and how best to extract those critical resources, for fuelling our further exploration of the Solar System this massive review paper will be seen as a critical resource itself! Incredibly work by Matthew Shaw and Matthew Humbert, two doctoral candidates within the Extraterrestrial Resource Processing group led by Profs Geoff Brooks and Akbar Rhamdhani, at Swinburne’s Space Technology and Industry Institute.

Incredible news as one of the largest Federal Government’s Modern Manufacturing Initiative grants ($2.325M from Gov, for a total expenditure of $4.65M) is awarded to Titomic and Swinburne!

A seamlessly connected world, where information streams effortlessly across people, industry, cities, farms and satellites. In which data that originates from Earth is conveyed and used as easily as the data generated from sensors in orbit. All of which is combined to inform decisions in either domain.

This is the Internet of Space Things (IoST), and it is the natural future extension of the internet as the predominant communications and data-exchange structure of our time. We already have half a dozen devices connected to the Internet of Things for every person on Earth, producing 79 ZETA bytes of information (that’s nearly a million million 4k movies worth of data!) by 2025, the options in using this data are endless and the future is seamless.

In this outstanding work my PhD student Matthew Shaw has explored ways to process the Moon’s surface (known as regolith) into its valuable metals and oxygen using concentrated sunlight. This technique, known as pyrolysis, can liberate these resources for use by NASA’s program Artemis and their return to the Moon in a framework called In Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU).

A wonderful new paper by my student Adam Batten. Mysterious explosions occur across the sky from distant galaxies, visible only with radio telescopes, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). There illuminate the intervening material as they travel to our telescopes, allowing us to probe that otherwise hard to image Cosmic Web. But how do we know what that should look like? Simulations like EAGLE predict that distribution and in this beautiful work by Adam we can therefore shine simulated FRBs through this to create predictions for the dispersion measure. This then is directly tested by the telescopes.

This paper was a delight to write, with two young scientists (Jamie Heredge and Jay Archer) undertaking an incredible amount of work to generate muon events passing through a model-plastic scintillator and demonstrating that AI can recover the potential intersection of that event better than an analytic model.

The final paper from Shanti Krishnan’s extraordinary PhD! This work is focused on a general purpose slow control system to remotely monitor experiments with a range of sensors, in a cost-effective but still entirely reconfigurable setup that scales as your experiment does. Amazing work and one that will support others in their research efforts we hope, as the designs are all provided for further use!