Strange little microbes living in extreme conditions will soon be put under the microscope by Australian TAFE students in a novel partnership that aims to apply biotechnology to the real world.

The convergence of nanotechnology with biotechnology will be one of the hot topics of AusBiotech 2006. Dr John Kapeleris takes a look at recent developments in nanotechnology and how they may be put to use in the biotech world.

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr talk about the future with Bioart.

One of the highlights of the 7th World Biomaterials Congress was the presentation by plenary speaker Prof Sir Magdi Yacoub, from the Imperial College London, Heart Science Centre in the UK, brought to Australia by Sydney-based company Ventracor.

If computing power were water, Australia's drought would be rapidly coming to a close. Thanks to lowering costs and steadily improving technology, Australian life scientists and other researchers are rapidly gaining access to unprecedented amounts of computing power to support their work.

Melanie Mitchell is a research computer scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, a New Mexico think tank specialising in emerging science. Her research interests include Intelligent systems and machine learning, complex systems, evolutionary computation and artificial life