This is a surface rendering of the common cold virus. Melbourne researchers are now simulating in 3D, the motion of the complete human rhinovirus, the most frequent cause of the common cold, on Australia's fastest supercomputer, paving the way for new drug development.

The "desynchronized " calls of the Japanese tree frog has inspired the development of an artificial intelligence algorithm. Males of the Japanese tree frog have learnt not to use their calls at the same time so that the females can distinguish between them. Scientists at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia have used this form of calling behaviour to create an algorithm that assigns colours to network nodes – an operation that can be applied to developing efficient wireless networks.