Cosmos Magazine

AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF AUSTRALIA, we’ve been celebrating that most special of numbers with the Cosmos Pi-ku 2021 competition. A haiku in English is generally accepted to be a poem of three lines and 17 syllables arranged in a 5–7–5 pattern. A Pi

A STORY ABOUT geological time, another covering the intriguing search for an ancient human ancestor, and a third investigating the ESA’s Gaia space telescope wouldn’t appear to have much in common. In fact, they’re at the centre of this issue’s focus

A study of nearly every glacier on Earth has confirmed they are losing more ice every year. The international research team, led by Roman Hugonnet from the Université de Toulouse in France, found that on average these icy rivers have lost 267 gigaton

South Australian researchers, led by Daryl Wesley of Flinders University, working with the Mimal and Marrku traditional owners of the Wilton River area in the Northern Territory, took a look at rock art in Arnhem Land to examine how it transformed st

01 Fish of the Cirrhilabrus genus (below) can thank the last ice age for their diversity. Sea level flux isolated some populations and allowed others to mix, so males developed colour patterns to differentiate themselves. 02 Fish have been leaving e

About 78,000 years ago, at the mouth of a cave complex in modern-day Kenya, someone placed the body of a three-year-old child on its side in a purpose-dug grave and covered it with earth from the cave floor. This intentional act – described in a pape

Last year, scientists used gravitational waves to detect an elusive intermediate-mass black hole for the first time. Now, Australian astronomers have spotted another – this time using gamma-ray bursts. Black holes are formed when massive stars reach

Scientists have located a protein that lets teeth sense cold temperatures in a new paper published in Science Advances. The protein, TRPC5, is an ion channel: a molecular tube that can open and shut, letting ions through that trigger electrical impul

On 6 December 2016, a high-energy particle hurtled from outer space and through an Antarctic ice sheet, where it slammed into an electron at nearly the speed of light. The enormously energetic collision created a completely different particle, which

New analysis of Chinese tree fossils has revealed that they are the ancestors of the seed-bearing plants that dominate the Earth today. Noeggerathiales was a peat-forming order of plants that lived 325 to 251 million years ago (mya), before the rise

In a bizarre story of lost and found, scientists have learnt Greenland might have been forest green only a million years ago. An international team of scientists, led by Paul Bierman of the University of Vermont, analysed a 1.6km deep, 54-year-old sa

Since its first appearance in Wuhan, China, SARS-CoV-2 has been acquiring random mutations. In recent months several new variants have been observed. Some of those cause significant changes in how the virus behaves, including how contagious or deadly

Storm-chasing drones, smart water bombers and a constellation of bushfire-spotting satellites could be the key to reducing Australia’s devastating bushfire toll. Imagine if lightning strikes a tree in a remote valley. A satellite detects it via infra

Has anyone noticed that we’re excitable about scientific discovery? The pleasure lies in bright minds wondering about, and then creating, experiments, equations or apparatus to help solve their question. These men – one of them the patentee of a devi

Anew study of the famous iron-red rocks in Western Australia’s arid Pilbara region has revealed that the formation of Earth’s first continents occurred in a different way than originally thought. The research, published in the journal Nature, sought

We find ourselves on the cusp of what could be a turning point in fundamental physics. Within weeks of each other, the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab in the US and the LHCb experiment at CERN, in Switzerland, reported eagerly anticipated results, wh

It was a display of… well, ingenuity. A tiny, 1.8kg helicopter called Ingenuity hitched a ride to Mars on the Perseverance rover. On April 21, it flew – the first powered and controlled flight on another planet. In a sense, NASA was just showing off

Have you ever tried to spot a planet in a sky full of stars? If you know what you’re looking for this could be an easy task, or you might make use of a handy sky guide app on your smart device to help point you in the right direction. But Australia’s

It’s a warm winter’s morning and I’m standing in a bone-dry creek bed at the precipice of deep time. I’d rolled out of my tent early – dusty and tired and distinctly unshowered – to hike along Enorama Creek in the heart of the arid, ancient Flinders

This “clock” represents the major units of geological time and defining events of the Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. Bjornerud argues that as a metaphor, it is alienating – the fact that humanity appears at the end makes people feel unimportant. E

Snapshots from the first full-plate tectonic reconstruction of the last billion years. White areas represent oceanic crust, while green areas are modelled continental lithosphere, and blue areas are additional present-day continental crust. To create

One afternoon in the 1980s a small boy sat in a house in Hyderabad in southern India watching television. There wasn’t much on but one show had captured his attention. It was Star Trek, and on that particular afternoon, Dr Spock was bent over a prost

Stimulus in the receiver’s cap would recreate an image from the sender’s brain. ■

Just over four centuries ago, the Dutch mathematician Willebrord Snellius measured the approximately 116 kilometres from Alkmaar, in North Holland, to Breda, in the country’s south, by breaking it up into quadrangles built upon a chain of 33 carefull

Deadline for entries to the 2021 World Nature Photography Awards is June 30, at www.worldnaturephotographyawards.com/enter Photographer: Thomas VijayaAward: Gold in Animals in Their Habitat;Grand Prize of World Nature Photographer of the Year ■

Gaia travels in a controlled orbit around the L2 Lagrange point – one of five positions where the competing gravitational pull of Earth and the Sun hold a satellite relatively stable. Gaia spins at a constant 60 arcseconds/second; each five years in

Gaia’s second data release precisely mapped 556,869 quasars. Astronomers used this information to create a celestial reference frame: a fixed but imaginary grid against which everything else moves, comparable to Earth’s lines of longitude and latitud

In 2018, a Dutch pensioner tried to legally change his age. Having to admit to a chronological age of 69 was torpedoing Emile Ratelband’s swipe-right rate on the dating app Tinder, and besides, his doctors claimed his “true” biological age was a spri

It’s the biggest “whodunnit” in the mystery of human evolution. Who were the Denisovans? All they left behind were a few ancient fragments of bone and teeth. Human – clearly. But not enough to match anything in the fossil record. Incredibly, some of

As far as theories go, “Out of Africa” has a fairly recent origin. In 1970, “no palaeoanthropologist of whom I am aware held the view that Africa was the evolutionary home of modern humans,” says anthropologist Chris Stringer. While Louis and Mary Le

Since 2003, scientists have been able to directly retrieve DNA from dirt – identifying the signatures of everything from ancient mosses to woolly mammoths, with some soil samples dating back 400,000 years. DNA ends up in the soil in a number of ways.

Show of hands: who has become infinitely, intimately more familiar with soap recently? If 2020 was the year we learnt to wash meticulously in between our fingers and all the way up our arms, it was also the year we discovered just how long 20 seconds

As a kid I loved Ferris Bueller. As an adult I think he has all the makings of a sociopath. But back then I didn’t see such flaws. Instead I saw him as a teenage Robin Hood – taking from the old to give to the young, namely himself. But as much as I

As Australia burned through 2019’s devastating Black Summer, a Change.org petition circulated calling for the cancellation of Sydney’s New Year’s Eve fireworks show. While the spectacular display of pyrotechnics has been an annual tradition since 197

Ioana Ciuca remembers the moment she fell in love with the universe: on the afternoon of August 11, 1999, when a total solar eclipse threw Romania into shadow. “I was with my mum and my brother in western Romania, and we didn’t have much,” Ciuca expl