Environment and sustainability

IMB agricultural sciences PhD student Samantha Nixon (King Group) has been named as one of 22 exceptional young Australians to receive a Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship. Samantha is is researching the concept of spider venoms as next generation treatments to combat drug resistance in parasites in Australian livestock.

The future of medicine could be as simple as nibbling a sunflower seed or drinking a cup of tea, with the opening of a new IMB facility, officially opened the Hon Annastacia Palaszczuk, Queensland Premier and Minister for the Arts.

UQ Bachelor of Biomedical Science (honours) graduating student Samantha Nixon has been investigating compounds from tarantula venom as a potential treatment for sheep parasites which lead to huge economic losses for farmers.

Queensland researchers have made a big leap forward in their quest to eradicate the billions of cane toads wreaking havoc on our native wildlife and habitats.

Environmentally friendly cane toad traps – developed by a team of researchers from The University of Queensland and The University of Sydney – are one step closer to production, following an agreement between UQ and US-based pest control company, SpringStar Inc.

CO2 emissions and thus global warming could rise more quickly than expected, according to a new model by University of Queensland and Griffith University researchers.

Funnel-web spider venom contains powerful neurotoxins that instantly paralyze prey (usually insects). Millions of years ago, however, this potent poison was just a hormone that helped ancestors of these spiders regulate sugar metabolism, similar to the role of insulin in humans. Surprisingly, this hormone's weaponization--described on June 11 in the journal Structure--occurred in arachnids as well as centipedes, but in different ways.