Life is chemistry. You, me and every living thing – we’re all just spectacularly complex chemistry sets. Inside you, every second of the day, thousands of tiny chemical reactions are taking place.

Chemical reactions powered your transformation from a single cell into a colony of trillions of cells, and they allow you to harvest energy from the environment and transform it into yet more cells. They maintain the delicate balance in which all the components of your body function. In fact, they are that balance. They even drive your thoughts and emotions.

The aviation industry is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2011 aviation contributed around 3% of Australia’s emissions. Despite improvements in efficiency, global aviation emissions are expected to grow 70% by 2020 from 2005. While the industry is seeking new renewable fuel sources, growing biofuels takes up valuable land and water that could be otherwise used to grow food.

But what if you could grow biofuels on land nobody wants, using just seawater and sunlight, and produce food at the same time?

The discovery by an undergraduate student of tubes of plasma drifting above Earth has made headlines in the past few days.

Many people have asked how the discovery was made and, in particular, how an undergraduate student was able to do it.

The answer is a combination of an amazing new telescope, a very smart student and an unexpected fusion of two areas of science.

Much media attention is being given to the rising toll of methamphetamine-related harm in Australia, fuelled by the increased availability and use of high purity crystalline methamphetamine (crystal meth or ice).

Unlike other forms of methamphetamine available in Australia (speed or base), ice (crystalline methamphetamine or crystal meth) can be smoked. This gives a rapid drug effect because it gets into both the bloodstream and the brain quite quickly.

Physicists around the world (myself included) are hoping that this week will mark the beginning of a new era of discovery. And not, as some fear, the end of particle physics as we know it.

After 27 months of shutdown and re-commissioning, the Large Hadron Collider has begun its much-anticipated “Season 2”. Deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the first physics data is now being collected in CERN’s freshly upgraded detector-temples at the record-breaking collision energy of 13 teraelectonvolts (TeV).

Amateur cook-offs like the hugely popular MasterChef series now in its seventh season in Australia have been part of our TV diet for almost two decades.

These shows celebrate the remarkable lengths we humans will go to to whet the appetite, stimulate the senses, fire our neural reward systems and sustain the body.

Yet, few of us pause to reflect on the hugely important role diet plays in the ecology and evolutionary history of all species, including our own.