CSIRO

Water filtration may be one of graphene's most directly beneficial capabilities. Now scientists have demonstrated how effective a specially-designed form of graphene can be at purifying water with a pretty challenging test: the filter made water from Sydney Harbour safe to drink in one step.

Seawater is a complex cocktail of useful minerals, but it’s hard to separate the ones we need. Now a team of scientists from Australia and the US has developed a new water desalination technique that can not only make seawater fresh enough to drink, but recover lithium ions for use in batteries.

​Australian research group CSIRO will be using aquatic drones to explore the Southern Ocean. The government agency has announced a partnership with San Francisco-based Saildrone, and will be utilizing three of the startup's unmanned vehicles for the next five years.

Some see hydrogen as the energy medium of the future, but getting it from the producer to the consumer is one of the biggest problems in creating a hydrogen economy. To help bridge this gap, CSIRO is developing a metallic membrane that helps convert ammonia into high-purity hydrogen.

Graphene, the new wunderkind for all sorts of emerging technologies, is still a little too expensive to produce on a commercial scale. Now scientists at CSIRO have come up with a way to create graphene from soy beans, cheaply, quickly, and without all the nasty chemicals usually needed.

A new technique developed at Australia's CSIRO not only reveals fingerprints in cases when dusting won't, but makes them glow under UV light, enabling high resolution images to be easily captured for analysis.

Following a 3D-printed heel bone, a 3D-printed mouth guard and the world's first 3D-printed jet engine, the CSIRO's Lab 22 has added to the growing list of 3D-printed medical implants by designing and printing a replacement titanium sternum and rib cage for a 54-year-old cancer patient.

Australia is wasting billions of dollars of potential value by shipping its world-beating titanium reserves out of the country as raw ore. That's why the CSIRO, is trying to kick-start a local 3D printing revolution that could add massive value to the raw resource.

Working with colleagues from Deakin University and CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), researchers from Australia's Monash University have created the world's first 3D-printed jet engine. While they were at it, they created the world's second one, too.

The olfactory experience that accompanies a real Christmas tree comes at the cost of a floor covered in pine needles as the tree inevitably loses its grip on life. Now a group of Australian schoolgirls has discovered an easy way to prolong the life of the tinsel- and ornament-covered tree.

Slowly but surely, 3D printing is making its way through the human anatomy, replacing everything from hips to jaws to cancerous vertebrae. The latest body part to be ticked off the list is the the heel, an achievement which has put a 71-year-old cancer patient back on his feet.

A new online tool aims to create a real-time emotional map of how people all over the world feel. Called "We Feel," the tool analyzes 32,000 tweets a minute to monitor people's collective mood swings and how their emotions fluctuate over time globally.