Transcripts
Judith Stutchbury is teaching students our role in conservation
I am Judith Stutchbury. I'm a teacher at Kalkie State School in Bundaberg in Queensland.
Kalkie State School is a small school of about 300 children and we are very passionate about the environment. I'm a full-time classroom teacher and I also manage the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Reef Guardian Programme for our school.
The Reef Guardian Programme encourages schools to become involved in marine science and environmental science.
Successful breeding of the loggerhead turtle is critical for their survival. Some of the issues that the children have been studying are artificial light, which impacts the nesting and hatching turtles, and plastic pollution and coral bleaching.
They've been studying that so much so that they inspired me to write a children's chapter book. The book is called Hatch Saves the Reef. It is to communicate to a wider audience that we all have a part to play in protecting the environment and the world's oceans.
I often get photos from parents about their children collecting rubbish at the beach, and that's really beautiful.
It's very important for us to look after the planet, and if we can inspire the young children today to educate their families and want to look after the environment, then it should stay with them for life.
Happy National Science Week.
Dr Chris Greening is studying microbes that float on air
I'm Chris Greening. I'm a professor in microbiology at the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University.
As a microbiologist, we study a single-celled organisms known as microbes. The vast majority of microbes are positive, and they're actually really critical for everything we do.
Our world first discovery is that microbes can live on air. They can take up tiny amounts of hydrogen and carbon monoxide from the atmosphere and use that to continually tick over.
So this process means that 350 million tons of carbon monoxide and hydrogen are removed from the atmosphere every single year, and that in turn regulates climate change, but it also removes toxic gases like carbon monoxide from the atmosphere and counteracts air pollution.
Through this research, I became a chief investigator of the organisation called Securing Antarctica's Environmental Future. Our mission is to understand how climate will change on the continent, how life will be affected, and then feed that into policy.
When I was a kid, I had no idea I wanted to be a scientist. I thought that science was mostly about learning facts., but actually, science is really creative.
When I finally realised I could actually create new knowledge but also make a wider difference in the world, that was when science really became a massive passion for me and it was genuinely exhilarating.
Anyone can be a scientist, and there's multiple ways that one can make an impact.
Happy National Science Week.
Growing better crops with LLEAF
Hi, I'm Alex, I'm the co-founder and CEO of LLEAF.
LLEAF stands for luminescent light emitting agricultural film.
Basically, what we are doing is we create a material, a luminescent material that shift the wavelength of light, in this case, sunlight. We take some of the green part of the sunlight and change that into red, because we know that the red part of the spectrum is more beneficial for the plant to grow.
So in the very beginning, first is we need to create the luminescent material. So we do that research to look at the libraries of possibilities. The next step is then to make it into a prototype, to make it into a product that can be applied in the field.
And then the bit that we are doing right now, we are in a greenhouse, or in a glasshouse environment and that's where we are testing our prototypes to see what is the effect on the crop.
In the industry, you already optimised nutrition, you optimised water, you optimised energy, and we see that sunlight, or light in general, is this next frontier that has the opportunity to be optimised. So being able to modify the light or engineer the light will allow production of certain crops closer to where the demand is.
For our company, the benefit to the environment is embedded in the products. So allow us to grow, I believe that that's our goal is to make a product that's good for the environment.
