The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 by Elizabeth Finkel Page A

Olver DNA and one set of bones dug up at Pentridge, including a palm-size fragment of skull. So while most of Kelly’s skull is still missing, the rest of him appears to have been found.
    As for the stolen skull, it could belong to the serial killer Frederick Deeming, who died in 1892. The forensic institute is seeking a maternal relative to test DNA.
    What of Kelly’s skeleton? Should it be returned to the extended family? Or should there be a public grave? Many Australians regard Kelly as a national hero. Countless books and movies tell the story of his life. But others see him as a villain.
    â€˜You can’t just bury the man,’ Mr Olver said. ‘Someone is going to dig him up again in half an hour.’

    Iron men
    Time travel

The rise and fall of infant reflux
    Pamela Douglas
    At the dawn of the 21st century Queensland infants were in the grip of an epidemic. Babies screamed, vomited and woke frequently at night. They refused to feed, arched their backs, drew up their knees. Parents were frantic: even if they could soothe the flailing fists and the little crumpled face, the minute they put their baby down, the piercing shrieks began again.
    Once, we called this colic. We attributed it to wind, and a woman struggled through the nightmarish first months of a colicky baby’s life without much support from health professionals or even sympathy from those around her, secretly and horribly convinced of her own public failure. But by 1982, when a small group of ‘reflux mums’ formed the Vomiting Infants Support Association of Queensland, the nascent sub-specialty of paediatric gastroenterology had found in colic a cause célèbre .
    The association went national in 2000 and became RISA, the Reflux Infants Support Association, aiming to give confidence and moral support to families of infants with problems associated with gastroesophageal reflux. But the epidemic appeared to be at its worst in Queensland, a state prone to statistical exaggeration. One prominent Queensland paediatric gastroenterologist pioneered the link between infant irritability and gastroesophagealreflux disease (GORD), and took to the lecture circuit to raise professional and community awareness. He subsequently relocated overseas and remains a dedicated and caring doctor, but he saw the world, particularly crying babies, through a very special – specialised – lens.
    I subscribed guiltily to RISA News . Throughout the 1990s, as the epidemic worsened, my own robust offspring grew into preschoolers, then primary schoolchildren. They never cried much and, as the newsletters explained, only the parents of a reflux baby can truly relate to the exhaustion, despair, headaches and lack of sleep. But I’m a GP, and throughout the 1990s until the mid-2000s, infant GORD was rampant. Many of the babies I saw came pre-diagnosed with ‘reflux’ by the paediatrician, the hospital midwife, the child-health nurse, the breastfeeding counsellor, or the lady across the road. New mothers stepped carefully into the consulting room, manoeuvring the pram through the door or lugging the car capsule or carrying the baby, sat down in the chair by my desk, and wept.
    Babies from the first days and weeks of life were being given cisapride, ranitidine or cimetidine, antacids – often in double doses – and, from the end of the decade, proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs). An American study showed that PPI use in infants multiplied sixteen-fold between 1999 and 2004.
    In the Australian Family Physician, Medicine Today and Australian Doctor , diligent GPs read articles about crying babies and GORD written by paediatricians and gastroenterologists. Parents were angry with any incompetent practitioner who ‘missed’ the diagnosis. They were especially angry with the hapless doctor who ventured that maybe the baby was just a bad sleeper, or that the mother was unnecessarily worried. Having a new baby is not the blow-waved,