Pinched nerve
What do you do if someone is bleeding? If you answered, ‘Put on a bandage or torniquet’, well, that’s so last century. And while a bandage is okay if you’ve scratched
yourself, it’s inefficient if a person has a traumatic injury. For the last decade, researchers have been investigating bioelectronic medicine as an alternative to traditional treatments. It involves using electrical stimulation of your nervous system to prompt the body to do something you want, like stopping bleeding. Enter Sydney industrial designer Kathy Ky, who has created a neural tourniquet—a device that stimulates the vagus nerve (the body’s largest nerve, that regulates internal organ function) to stop uncontrollable bleeding in under a minute. Portable, simple to use, and effective, it has the potential to save millions of people around the globe.
Find out more at https://kathyky.myportfolio.com/neural- tourniquet
Creative science
As part of this year’s Adelaide Fringe Festival, but running until November, the FLEX exhibition looks at cutting-edge questions around the boundaries between our bodies and minds and the world around us. It’s all about blending real scientific research with 
creative ideas. Spread across multiple galleries in the Bradley Building at the University of SA’s City West campus, you’ll see examples of current and developing research like OSCAR, a living organism built from human cells. Elsewhere, you can situate yourself within a virtual model of the solar system, zooming in and out to travel through and around planets. Or you can stand within an interactive sculpture that changes according to your response to ethical dilemmas.
Find out more at https://mod.org.au/ exhibitions/flex/
The web of the world 
Down in Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Argentinean Tomas Saraceno imagines a future where humans become as sensitive to the environment as a spider in its web. He's a Berlin-based artist, interested in collaborations with research institutes to further our collective knowledge around atmospheres and arachnids. In Oceans of Air, his exhibition that runs until 24 July, he plays with beams of light and the twisting turns of Mona's labyrinthine galleries to make participants slow down and engage in a multi-sensory experience. You'll be faced with glass and metal frames containing exquisite spider web architectures, or threads of spider web floating on air currents which are then translated into sound.
Find out more at https://mona.net.au/museum/exhibitions/ tomas-saraceno
In the Quantum realm
Earlier this year, The University of Sydney announced a $7.4 million investment to expand its quantum technology facilities to establish the Future Qubit Foundry at the Sydney Nanoscience Hub. The foundry will be a national-leading facility to invent the technology of tomorrow's quantum computers, enabling them to operate at scale and be of use to society. Quantum computers operating at scale promise to solve intractable problems in drug design, cryptography and engineering outside the reach of classical computing. CSIRO predicts that quantum technology will be a $6 billion industry in Australia by 2045, employing 19,400 people.
SXSW comes out
SXSW Sydney has revealed the first look at its highly anticipated 2023 event, which will see the famed Austin conference, expo and festival expand outside North America for the first time in its history. Taking place over a packed week from 15 to 22 October, SXSW Sydney will showcase the best and brightest minds from tech & innovation, games, music, screen and culture. All of this will happen in a number of key precincts in Sydney. The areas of Haymarket, Darling Harbour, Central, Ultimo and Chippendale will come alive and transform into an interconnected hub for the duration of the event, so you can wander the city and encounter new experiences on pretty much every corner.
Find out more at https://sxswsydney.com
Read about it
Anyone with a Linkedln account knows people in the business world seem obsessed by leadership and creativity. A lot of it springs from a series of psychological studies from the middle of last century, although it didn't really take off until the early 2000s, when Stanford University started teaching design thinking as an approach to innovation. Now a new book-Design Leadership Ignited-helps business leaders recognise a 
pathway to design excellence, shaping an organisation to drive progress, advance innovation, and enhance meaningful customer experiences. Based on these insights, Design Leadership Ignited delineates a pathway to design excellence, which includes establishing a forward-looking strategy and an adequate organisational structure for the design function, empowering the design team, and scaling the impact of design across the entire organisation. This book takes the position that a core challenge in the journey towards design excellence is the need to recognise and balance the often contradictory objectives and activities that design leaders encounter. Written by Eric Quint, former senior vice-president and chief brand and design officer at 3M Company, along with Gerda Gemser, Professor and Chair of Entrepreneurship at the University of Melbourne, and Giulia Calabretta, Associate Professor in Strategic Value of Design at Delft University of Technology, the book examines the foundations of successful design leadership, through in-depth interviews with design leaders working for Fortune 500 organisations across industries.
Find out more: https://www.sup.org/books/tit1e/?id=32935
The bots are coming!
Learning to collaborate with the non-human will soon be an essential skill. A new, free online exhibition hosted by ACMI in Melbourne, 'The Building' is part five of an ongoing series of works, The Close World, an experiment of fantasy world building in
collaboration with human and non-human actors. Written in collaboration with OpenAl's GPT-3 trained on key texts of fantasy and philosophy of language, 'The Building' is realised in 3D sound and vision by Daniel Jenatsch, performed by artist and philosopher Franziska Aigner and brought to the world by full stack web developer Tim Busuttil. In the spirit of collaboration, 'The Building' explores the imaginative capacity of Al and its unique voice in intersection with our own.
This FREE online exhibition is showing in Gallery 5 on the ACMI website https://www.acmi.net.au/gallery-5-onlineexhibitions/.
More than a prawn
The web is an amazing medium for creative expression, but most websites look a bit same same. Which makes the australianwildprawns.com.au website so impressive. Driven by a need to communicate best practices in the local wild prawn industry, 'More than a prawn' is a provenance and community engagement campaign launched by the Australian Council of Prawn Fisheries and created by Brisbane design house Romeo Digital. The idea of the site is to give people a greater sense of connection between the food on their plate, the wild regions it's from and the values of the people who provide it. Decreased trust in government regulation and absence of a compelling industry voice put Australia's wild prawn fishers' social licence to operate at risk. Limited budgets excluded any mass media, but a smart website and instore campaign could gather these stories for all to watch. Sixteen compelling stories were collected at australianwildprawns. com.au and delivered through social media, point of sale and an augmented reality experience.
See it for yourself: https://www. australianwildprawns.com.au
Mining without mining
Fleet Space Technologies, Australia's leading space company, operates from Adelaide, SA, but is looking to eventually connect the Earth, Moon and Mars. In the short term, 
Fleet designs, builds and operates a constellation of small satellites which deliver universal connectivity. Recently, Fleet launched ExoSphere, a solution for the mineral exploration industry providing lightning-fast, highly scalable 3D mapping solutions to pinpoint minerals and increase accuracy in drilling targets. This cutting-edge technology is already helping the world transition to clean-air mobility technologies by creating a faster, more sustainable and less expensive route to finding critical mineral deposits. Fleet's sensors, the geodes, are deployed in a survey area and leverage real-time passive seismic methods to 'scan' the land. This is enabled through unobtrusive ambient noise tomography (ANT) which listens to seismic waves. This is then rapidly processed and transmitted through Fleet's low power satellite network.
Find out more at https://fleetspace.com
The global watchtower
Even though we seem to have emerged from the other side of the pandemic, there’s a general consensus that sometime, somewhere, another disease will emerge. The impossible challenge is, how do we stop it in its tracks before it sweeps across the world? Sydney-based tech company EPIWATCH has created a solution—an AI and open-source data platform that provides real-time decision support tools with meticulously researched and validated data. It is an artificial intelligence-driven, automated, event-based surveillance system for rapid detection of epidemic signals in vast open-source data, including news reports and social media in multiple languages. EPIWATCH was developed by University of New South Wales’ Kirby Institute’s Professor Raina MacIntyre and funded under a National Health and Medical Research Council Centre of Excellence program from 2016 to 2022. Last year it won the prestigious People’s Choice award at the InnovationAus Awards for Excellence. Hopefully its adoption by global leaders will mean the next pandemic won’t be, well, a pandemic.
Find out more at https://www.epiwatch.org
Kick it to the curb
We all thought we had sorted the problem of recycling soft plastics when we could take our plastic bags back to the supermarket. But when the company behind that program, REDcycle, paused its collection program at the end of last year, another option popped up on the NSW central coast. And with this one, you don’t even need to walk up to the shops. Curby partners with councils to collect targeted materials such as soft plastics and coffee capsules from the community via the existing yellow recycling bin. Households who download the Curby app (from either the App store or Google Play) and register, simply collect the targeted material in a bag and when they’re ready to recycle…they attach a CurbyTag and place it in their yellow bin! Curby’s fun and interactive app has a built in QR scanner so you can scan each bag before you recycle, follow your bag’s journey and help measure the success of the Curby program. Once your bag reaches the sorting facility, IQ Renew then separates your bag from the other recycling materials and their recycling journey continues where they are fashioned into
‘new’ materials to be recycled once again.
Find out more at https://www.curbyit.com
