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The article focuses on the association of employee loyalty and wage growth. It pays attention to a research paper by Nathan Deutscher, a Treasury official in Australia, which found that higher rates of job-hopping in local Australian labour markets were associated with faster wage growth both for workers who switched jobs.

The article discusses the impact of open source on biotechnology. In a paper published in Nature on February 10th and co-authored by Richard Jefferson, a group of researchers describe a way to transfer genes into plants that bypasses the now most commonly used technique, agrobacterium transformation, which is protected by hundreds of patents. The new process may provide an alternative method of modifying certain types of crops in order to, say, improve harvests. But what makes the invention particularly notable is that the authors, affiliated with CAMBIA, a non-profit biotech research group in Australia, have made the procedure free for use under a novel "open-source" licence. Although open-source approaches have already been used in biotech-related computing (called bioinformatics) and database sharing, CAMBIA's license represents an actual technique being provided in an open-source form. Pedants will note that CAMBIA's approach is not pure open source, since the group relied on grants from foundations to develop the technology rather than on volunteers.

MARKETING is everything. Dinosaurs were introduced to the public in the 1850s, when life-size models of them were used to decorate the most popular tourist attraction in the world--London's Crystal Palace. And the creatures' spectacular lives were rounded with a spectacular death when it was demonstrated to the satisfaction of most palaeontologists that they were wiped out by a collision between the Earth and an asteroid. A paper in this week's Science purports to identify an impact crater as big as the famous" dinosaur killer" at Chicxulub, in Mexico. The presence of iridium--a metal rare at the surface of the Earth, but relatively abundant in meteorites--was the first clue pointing towards the dinosaur-killing impact. A Verneshot would, according to Dr Phipps Morgan, produce almost all of the evidence thought to indicate an asteroid strike: iridium (which would be brought up from deep in the Earth), shocked quartz, buckyballs, spherules--and big impact craters caused by the return to Earth of huge gobbets of material the explosion ejected. The idea that mass extinctions are caused by impacts from outer space has been one of the best marketed pieces of popular science--it has even inspired Hollywood movies. It would be ironic, indeed, if Dr Becker's Australian crater, on the face of things such eloquent evidence for the extraterrestrial nature of mass extinctions, turned out to be a crucial nail in that theory's coffin.

Looks at plastic cash. The Reserve Bank of Australia's shipping the first banknote made from plastic film rather than paper to Western Samoa; How the Reserve Bank has eradicated previous glitches in plastic cash; The two main advantages over paper money; The healthy export business of the Reserve Bank.

The article discusses the Australian businesswoman Gina Rinehart, a mining tycoon, and her efforts to gain control of Fairfax Media, publisher of the influential Australian newspapers "Sydney Morning Herald," and "Age," of Melbourne. Topics include Rinehart's stake in the media company, the financial situation at Fairfax as of June 2012, and journalists' fears that the papers will become propaganda for the mining business.

The article focuses on the White's tree frog, a large green amphibian found in Australia, which can climb slippery slopes and perch upside down. White's tree frog secretes mucus from its toe pads, and experts in the field have long thought that it is this fluid which helps the frog to cling on. In a paper published in "Interface," a journal of Britain's Royal Society, Walter Federle, of Cambridge University, and his colleagues demonstrate that the toe pads of the frogs are in direct and dry contact with whatever they are standing on, squeezing out the mucus layer. Whatever is holding the frog to the surface, it is not its mucus.

The article discusses how the facts concerning the discovery of the hominid homo floresiensis on the Indonesian island of Flores may be hard to confirm because most of the remains have been borrowed by Teuku Jacob, a researcher at Gadjah Mada University in Jogjakarta, who was not involved in the original excavation. This is rather irregular behavior, and seems to contradict an agreement between the Indonesian and Australian institutions involved in the dig that the remains would be kept at the Centre for Archaeology, and made available for study by outside researchers. Dr Jacob, a doyen of Indonesian paleoanthropology, has a reputation for sitting on specimens and preventing others from examining them. In the case of Homo floresiensis, it seems he was miffed that he was not involved in the original project, even though the idea of digging in Flores was not to find new species, but rather to look for evidence of exactly how and when humanity first arrived in Australia. However, since Florence's existence was announced in a paper in Nature, he has been trying to get in on the act.

The article suggests that vaccinating livestock may be a way to slow global warming. Burping sheep and cattle may not sound much of a hazard, but their burps contain methane, and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. André-Denis Wright, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's laboratory in Perth, has an idea. The methane is generated not by the animals directly, but by bacteria that live in those animals' stomachs. So a vaccine against methane-generating bacteria should switch off the gas supply. On top of that--and of more direct interest to farmers--methane-producing microbes consume over a tenth of the food the animals eat, making cattle less beefy. In a forthcoming paper in "Vaccine," Wright and his colleagues describe the progress they are making towards such an inoculation. Wright is now extending his "library" of sheep methanogens by taking samples from around Australia, in order to discover how much variation there is. He is also planning to extend the work to cattle,.

In January 2002, Nicholas Brown, an amateur astronomer in Australia, noticed something had changed in the sky. It is what happens when a star "goes nova" in a dramatic explosion. However, as observatories around the world turned their telescopes (including the Hubble Space Telescope, which took the picture shown) towards V838, astronomers were baffled. In a forthcoming paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, two other researchers in Australia contend that they have solved the mystery. Alon Retter and Ariel Marom, professional astronomers at Sydney University, believe that the star, a so-called red giant, swallowed three of its planets.

Focuses on the leaking of a government document by the Australian government which belittled New Zealand. The document as a confidential briefing paper for Australian ministers attending a conference of the South Pacific Forum; Details on what the document stated; Where the document was discovered.

Reports on the Australian Reserve Bank's use of plastic currency notes. Benefits of using plastic, including the difficulty in counterfeiting; Potential for expanding plastic currency to other world markets; Cost of paper money; Details.

The article focuses on a proposed wood pulp mill at Bells, Bay, Tasmania, that has emerged as a contentious issue in Australia's elections scheduled for November, 2007. Environmentalists have made preventing the plant's construction a priority, and opposition is so fierce Minster of the Environment Malcolm Turnbull could lose his seat in Parliament. The ruling Liberal party trails the Labor opposition in opinion polls.