OneVentures and Vaxxas Pty Ltd investment will enable Professor Mark Kendall of UQ’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) to continue his pioneering research and development of the Nanopatch.

Nobel Prize winner Professor Peter Doherty will join the National Science Colloquium of the Australian Synchrotron.

Biotech start-up Vaxxas has received a $15m venture capital kick start to commercialise needle-free vaccine delivery system Nanopatch. [ + ]

Agilent Technologies has announced three new appointments as part of its business strategy to invest and further develop its nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) portfolio, providing greater support to its customers in the South Asia Pacific and Korea (SAPK) region.

Crown Scientific and Quantum Scientific will merge and trade as VWR International Pty Ltd.

The proposed acquisition of Plasvacc by Bioniche has been kyboshed, with Plasvacc walking away from the deal after negotiations "collapsed". [ + ]

Sequencing the human genome was the easy part. Determining the function of 23,000 human genes is a far greater challenge. The Diamantina’s new high-throughput functional genomics facility will help accelerate the process. [ + ]

13 Australian science students have come home with Olympiad medals.

gridMathematica 8, the latest version of Wolfram's widely used platform for grid computing, has been released.

The recent outbreak of Hendra virus in horses and now a dog represents no significant increase in risk to humans, says Hendra and biosecurity researcher Linfa Wang. [ + ]

The 22nd Annual International Light Scattering Colloquium will be held at the Four Seasons Biltmore Resort in Santa Barbara, California.

A new miniature frog species or ‘toadlet’ has been discovered.

Clinical trials have successfully administered the compound AVI-4658, designed to restore dystrophin expression in participants with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

Macquarie University PhD student Dimitri Douchin has helped discover a new planetary nebula in our Milky Way.

CSIRO’s Dr Lin-Fa Wang works in the depths of a national biosecurity facility jam-packed with some of the planet’s nastier viruses that call bats home. [ + ]