Vaux, of the University of Melbourne in Australia.

WSJ: Carl Bialik: Don't Let Math Pull the Wool Over Your Eyes

"People who are more likely to purchase a product show significantly higher memory encoding than those who are less likely, " explains Richard Silberstein, a neuroscientist with the Brain Sciences Institute at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

FORBES: In Search of the Buy Button

Monique Paris of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, has been working with the common wombat, trying to understand its reproductive cycles as a prelude to tackling the rarer northern hairy-nosed variety, of which only 100 or so survive.

ECONOMIST: Endangered species

In December, the University of Melbourne published a survey of 1, 200 households across Australia in which two-thirds opposed taxing food.

ECONOMIST: Australia