Cosmos Magazine

It defies belief that little more than a year has passed since the SARS-CoV-2 genie escaped its biological bottle and began its capricious rule of our lives. Yet we wade into 2021 knowing that by year’s end, COVID vaccines will likely have been deliv

Quantum physicist Richard Feynman once called turbulence “the most important unsolved problem of classical physics”. Now, in a study published in Nature Astronomy, Australian and German scientists have used the computing power of the Leibniz Supercom

Among its other dubious distinctions, the year 2020 marked the approximate tipping point between anthropogenic mass and living biomass, scientists say. The Israeli team has calculated that the mass of human-made products exceeds that of all of the Ea

01 The first non-avian dinosaur described from Brazil’s Crato Formation is also the first from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana with preserved skin. Ubirajara jubatus had a prominent mane of long fur down its back and stiff ribbons projecting f

Physicists in the US say they have been able to measure sound diffusion in a “perfect fluid” for the first time. That’s not just technically impressive – it could, they suggest, be used as a model for more complicated perfect flows to estimate the vi

Fans of the 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War will know the scene where Tony Stark taps a panel on his chest to release a billion tiny robots, which rapidly assemble into an Iron Man suit around him. Tony Stark did something real-world scientists are

A team of astrophysicists, palaeontologists and mathematicians used machine-learning algorithms – originally developed by gravitational wave astrophysicists – to improve the accuracy of a “paleothermometer”, which looks at fossil evidence of past cli

There’s nothing quite as pleasurable as exceeding expectations. Japanese scientists have peeked inside the sample capsule from Japan’s Hayabusa2 sample-return mission and found it to contain 5.4 grams of material from asteroid 162173 Ryugu. “[That’s]

If you need a material that can literally be changed to suit you over time, read on. Metamaterials – meaning “beyond matter” – are engineered materials with properties not found in nature. Tian Chen of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switze

A little mathematics has shown exactly how some animals get their extraordinary patterns. Previous studies have revealed how animal patterns assist survival – colours and shapes help them hide, scare away predators and regulate their body temperature

Whether ancient humans made sea crossings by choice or by chance is a common topic of debate among historians. In the case of the migration of people from what is now Taiwan to the Ryukyu Islands of southwestern Japan some 30,000 years ago, choice se

New technologies need all kinds of things that seem obvious in retrospect – and were anything but in the moment. Before there were passenger trains there was no need for standard time; most places had a clock that was set to “local time”. So new thin

Astronomers may have witnessed a new way for galaxies to “die”, using the super-sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The array watched as a galaxy nine billion light-years away ejected nearly half of its star-formin

I’ve been a farmer, so it wasn’t such a huge decision to start Black Duck Foods. I’d been harvesting native grain for a few years and growing tubers. I realised I needed more room, and a place where people could visit and learn about production metho

Søren Solkaer is a Danish portrait photographer specialising in film and music personalities, but in his spare time he has always had a fascination for photographing the mass migration of the common starling – Sturnus vulgaris. “The phenomenon leans

THE DOZEN APOLLO ASTRONAUTS WHO WALKED on the Moon between July 1969 and December 1972 left more than 100 objects behind after their missions. Some were United States flags, of course. They also left four defecation collection devices, three golf bal

Salamanders range in size from Mexico’s minute salamanders – 2.7cm nose to tail – to the Chinese giant salamander, which reaches 1.8m and weighs up to 65 kg. Salamanders can regenerate lost tails, limbs, toes and even severed spinal cords within wee

This false-colour image of the Moon’s surface composition is a mosaic of 53 frames taken through spectral filters as the probe Galileo flew over the Moon on in December 1992. Pinkish areas indicate highlands materials, mainly igneous rocks, such as t

Gregor Aljančič enters a concrete tunnel and descends into a subterranean world below the city of Kranj, in northern Slovenia. Lamps illuminate his one-minute walk down the claustrophobic passageway, which fades to pitch black as he reaches the main

When a virus infects us, our immune system responds by generating antibodies to clear the infection, while establishing a “memory” for a rapid second response to repeat infections. A simple way to make a vaccine is to produce copies of the spike prot

Keith Chappell is a laconic man with sideburns that wouldn’t be out of place in a hipster brewery. His tone is quiet and calm, even as he discusses the news that derailed 11 months of intense research to try and solve the global problem that has chan

The “train tracks” shown are lipid membranes. The top layer represents the target cell membrane, and the bottom layer represents the virus with spike in pre-fusion form, at A. Because SARS-CoV-2 has a lipid membrane, it requires a protein spike to fu

Molecular clamps help the synthetic spike protein remain stable, compressing it top and bottom and preventing it from falling apart or changing structure. This stabilisation ensures the vaccine is able to accurately teach the immune system to recogn

As the climate warms, sea levels rise and droughts, heatwaves and bushfires multiply, the need to usher in the green-energy future is increasingly urgent. But that doesn’t mean it can be done without significant challenges – not just in the economy (

Tired of waiting for your mobile phone to recharge? Or worse, your electric car, which can take a lot longer, even if you have access to a 220-volt power source? Building on research published in Nature Energy in January, the Israeli company called S

In Nuenonne traditions of Bruny Island, Tasmania, the Sun is a man named Punywin and the Moon is his wife, Venna. In the beginning they travelled from horizon to horizon together, creating life on Earth before setting into the sea each night. But Pun

While highly diluted, the lithium in seawater is estimated at 210 billion tonnes. An extraction method proposed by Sixie Yang in Joule involves an array of solar-powered electrolysing inflatables. Driven by the electric field, cations in seawater (Na

To explore the full exhibition, visit www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/msf-spoty ■

Early one October morning in 2018, a small boat dropped 10 cavers and one scientist into the ocean off the northern coast of Christmas Island. With food, cameras, maps and scientific gear stashed in drybags, the team began a three-hour swim into the

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) allows researchers to amplify a small sample of DNA into longer strands for genetic analysis. The sample DNA helix (in blue) is separated to make a kind of template (1). Purple primers are added as endpoints from which

ON A SEASONABLY warm day in August along a rugged stretch of the Southern Californian coast, work crews put on their reflective vests and hard hats. They directed a fleet of heavy vehicles known as cask handlers to haul great white concrete barrels f

If one thing became synonymous with the pandemic lockdowns over the last year, it was baking bread at home. As many countries went into lockdown and flour flew off supermarket shelves along with toilet paper, many found themselves iso-baking bread fo

Most flying insects have wings with water-repellent qualities, made possible by tiny knife-like structures that sluice water away from them while they’re in flight. “That’s quite important,” says Eser Akinoglu, a physicist at the Centre of Excellence

In the hilly folds of southeastern Australia, coarse shrubs grow, scrubby and dry, between the domed nests and dusty foraging tracks of meat ants. Among these bustling Formicid citadels a special spider is waiting for its prey. It lurks near the entr

Nuclear accidents above ground can be disastrous. Beneath the Earth’s surface, not so much. Deep Isolation is a company that is testing the storage of capped canisters of radioactive waste in tunnels drilled up to several kilometres deep, beyond aqui

ALL MANNER OF UNUSUAL JOBS EXIST in science, but perhaps one of the most remarkable is the expertise of Phil Bell, of the University of New England. Bell is a dinosaur-skin specialist. It’s a field so niche that he’s the only person in Australia who

GROWING UP ON A FARM south of Perth, West was always out in the bush. That love of nature still shines through in her fieldwork as an adult – from caving on Christmas Island to diving on the Great Barrier Reef. She’s now working in the field of envir

Abdallah Ghazlan and his team are working on a project that could see lightweight sections of their bio-inspired padding (a) fitted to the underbelly of vehicles deployed in war zones. Trabecular bone (b) has a porous, complex, lattice-like structure