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In a mixture of good news and bad news, all rolled into one, Dave Gell is making a move down south and moving his laboratory to the University of Tasmania in Hobart. It is bad news for us, because Dave has been an absolute cornerstone of the lab, from the time he first risked everything to come to Australia on a Wellcome Trust fellowship and work for a complete unknown with almost no experience in running a lab (no prized for guessing who). Dave brought with him a vast amount of experience and expertise, a very strong commitment to understanding how things work, and an unassailable thoroughness in everything he did. Over the intervening years, he has become a close friend, a frequent...

A couple of days ago, Jacqui and I attended a dinner for the announcement of the Prime Minister's Science Prizes in Canberra. We were surprised to bump into the mother of one of Jacqui's former PhD students (Janet Deane). As it turned out, her father was part of a team at CSIRO that pioneered the technology that became wireless networking (wiLAN). The leader of that team, John O'Sullivan won the prestigious Prime Minister's Price for Science as a result of that team's work. It turned out that they were all radio astronomers that were trying to come up with practical applications of algorithms they had developed for noise reduction etc in radio signals from space. It was only then that I...

A/Prof. Siavoush Dastmalchi is visiting the lab for 6 months from Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in Iran. Siavoush did his PhD at the University of Sydney with Bret Church (and also did some NMR work with us during that period). He has come to brush up on his NMR spectroscopic skills.