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Domain: qut.edu.au

Stories and comments across the archive that link to qut.edu.au.

Stories · 4

  1. Robot Submarine Poisons Sea Stars To Save Coral Reefs

    Hardware · Robot · · posted by Soulskill · from the hopefully-seanet-won't-learn-from-skynet dept. · 106 comments
    schwit1 writes: A 30-kilogram robotic yellow submarine is keeping sea stars in check with poison. The sea stars periodically have huge population booms, and a square kilometer of reef can be home to 100,000 of them. They'll kill off the reefs if left unchecked, but humans can only kill a couple sea stars per minute. The task is overwhelming but simple and repetitive, and thus ripe for automation. The COTSBot has "a maximum speed of over two meters per second and an endurance of over six hours. Five thrusters give it the capability of briefly hovering in the water column, giving it time to attack crown of thorns sea stars with an integrated poison injection system. It's completely autonomous, down to the identification and targeting of [sea stars] lurking among coral."

  2. Scientists Discover Link Between Trees and Electricity

    Hardware · Power · · posted by samzenpus · from the lightning-leaf dept. · 173 comments
    An anonymous reader writes "Everyone knows trees give us all oxygen so we can breathe, but according to Australian scientists, they also affect the concentration of positive and negative ions in the air. A team from the Queensland University of Technology's International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health ran experiments in six locations all over Brisbane and found that positive and negative ion concentrations in the air were two times higher in heavily wooded areas than in open grassy areas, such as parks."

  3. Intelligent Absorbent Removes Radioactive Material

    Science · Science · · posted by samzenpus · from the in-with-the-bad-out-with-the-good dept. · 107 comments
    Zothecula writes "Nuclear power plants are located close to sources of water, which is used as a coolant to handle the waste heat discharged by the plants. This means that water contaminated with radioactive material is often one of the problems to arise after a nuclear disaster. Researchers at Australia's Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have now developed what they say is a world-first intelligent absorbent that is capable of removing radioactive material from large amounts of contaminated water, resulting in clean water and concentrated waste that can be stored more efficiently."

  4. 802.11 WiFi Denial of Service Exploit Discovered

    Hardware · Wireless · · posted by simoniker · from the block-block-kick dept. · 251 comments
    CRC'99 writes "The Queensland University of Technology has today announced yet another flaw in 802.11 products. AusCERT has the official statement, noting: 'An attacker using a low-powered, portable device such as an electronic PDA and a commonly available wireless networking card may cause significant disruption to all WLAN traffic within range, in a manner that makes identification and localisation of the attacker difficult.' Nice to know that a simple PDA could bring a WiFi network to its knees."