Cosmos Magazine

On a cattle station in remote South Australia, sandstone slabs have eroded out of the Earth – revealing fossils from half a billion years ago. This alien-looking imprint captures Dickinsonia, a limbless, disc-like animal that rippled over the ancient

LET’S SAY FROM the start that this issue wasn’t meant to be all about sound, but – just as a noisy party slips under doorways and echoes across valleys – the theme of our cover feature seems to be striking a chord in more than a few of Cosmos 92’s st

Palaeontologists have officially named and described Australia’s biggest dinosaur – Australotitan cooperensis, the southern titan. This colossal sauropod was as long as a basketball court (25–30 metres) and up to 6.5 metres tall at the hip. This plac

A team of US biologists has shown that even a brainless slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, can compute where to grow next based on mechanical cues. “People are becoming more interested in Physarum because it doesn’t have a brain but it can still per

In a result that won’t come as a surprise to dog lovers, US researchers have found that puppies are born with an innate ability to interact with humans. The team studied eight-week-old puppies to see how they responded to human gestures without much

01 Random nanowire networks – a type of computer made from crisscrossed microscopic wires – work best when stimulated “at the edge of chaos”: they produce their most interesting results when just slightly more stimulation would make them totally unpr

Some of the world’s earliest known cave art in Indonesia is “weathering at an alarming rate”, according to a study in Scientific Reports. Local archaeologists and site keepers for the ancient artworks of Maros-Pangkep in Sulawesi, including intergene

Plants may have colonised land because of an alliance with fungi, according to a study published in Science. Plants began life as aquatic species and started to move onto land around 450 million years ago. In the 1980s, a fossil study led to a hypoth

Animals may have evolved because the Earth’s rotation slowed, resulting in longer days and increased oxygen, according to new research published in Nature Geosciences. The rise of oxygen was necessary for animals to evolve, but for decades researcher

Sea levels have affected volcanic eruptions on the Greek island of Santorini over the past 360,000 years. Research in Nature Geoscience found that lower sea levels, which happen during ice ages, were linked to higher rates of eruption. The researcher

For the first time, astrophysicists have caught sight of light reflected from behind a black hole, proving Einstein right yet again. You may have heard that nothing – not even light – can escape a black hole, but this isn’t strictly true. Anything th

Geophysicists have been using “marsquakes” to figure out the depth and structure of the Martian interior, resulting in the first interior map of another planet. It shows that Mars is markedly different to Earth, with a warm and gooey core much bigger

It began as a joke. A paleoanthropologist, a geneticist and a blood specialist were hanging around an espresso machine – and one of them wondered: how would you give a Neanderthal a blood transfusion? They reported their surprising results in PLOS 1

If you’re scared of spiders but also need really strong silk, have no fear, because engineers at Washington University, US, have developed bacteria that can make super-strong spider-inspired fibres. The bacteria were genetically engineered to artific

Many of the modern technological marvels of science are derived from very basic prototypes, but beat this! This apparatus was conceived and built around 1820, but in its current form you will find it has transcended its utilitarian design to attain i

There is a cartoon that I keep at my desk. It is of a person telling a cat, “Don’t you dare step outside of this box” – the box being a litter box! I feel this is the way most of the medical community is approaching cancer therapies these days – thin

Have you ever looked south on a dark night and noticed a faint glow of light arching across the horizon? For those in the far south of Tasmania, you might have even seen red and green waves dancing across the sky. These are the Southern Lights, also

Unless you’re a fugitive, an ecologist or a crocodile, swamps are terrible. Yes, yes, yes – very important ecological super niches and all that. But the mud, the quicksand, the insects, the predators; the deep, abiding discomforts of brute creation;

The liposome, or nanoparticle, is swallowed by the cell through endocytosis, the process by which cells absorb external material by engulfing it in a pouch – vacuole – of cell membrane called an endosome. The endosome’s membrane breaks down, and the

In 1989, when Katalin Karikó submitted her first grant application to develop messenger RNA-based gene therapy, she knew she had a game-changing technology in her hands. But the Hungarian biochemist, then a professor at the University of Pennsylvania

mRNA therapies show promise in treating cardiac diseases, which affect 64 million people worldwide. Regenerative therapy aims to direct heart cells to produce proteins to regenerate damaged heart tissue (below left). mRNA protein replacement therapie

Cancer vaccines could revolutionise cancer treatment by encoding the recipe for cancer-specific antigens of each patient. The vaccine “wakes up” the patient’s immune system to recognise cancer cells and kill them. The DNA from a single patient’s canc

On a hillside just west of the Flinders Ranges, geologist Mary Droser lounges casually on a slab of 550-million-year-old sandstone. The sun has just hit its golden afternoon angle; it illuminates squiggled lines in the rocks, throwing into sharp cont

Visit www.rmg.co.uk to see the winners. ■

In the year 1909, a little-known astronomer named Vesto Slipher began a series of painstaking observations at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in the US. The observatory had been built primarily to look for evidence of Martian canals, bu

Our laws of quantum physics explain quite a lot about our universe and its origins – but not this, not yet. This weird cold spot, located in the constellation of Eridanus in our Southern Hemisphere sky, is baffling. The insets show the environment of

It began, as many things do, with a need, a curiosity, and an intriguing story. In the 18th century, smallpox was a global scourge. About a third of those who caught the disease died; survivors were left scarred, sometimes disfigured. From uncertain

Almost 14 billion years of our universe’s history are condensed into this one illustration. Shown here are the main events that occurred between the initial inflation of the infant universe and the rich variety of cosmic structures that we observe to

In many ways, the hardest part of vaccine manufacture isn’t making the ingredients, which relies on lab techniques that have been around for decades. It’s doing it at scale, and doing it in a way that is verified as safe to put in human bodies. In Au

You are radiating. You always have been. You are radiating at a frequency of 24,000GHz. Perhaps, by the end of this article, you will be radiating at a higher frequency as you discover the exciting link between quantum physics and dogs. Or you may ju

Here is a quick pub quiz question for you. Which megahit began as “Scrambled Eggs”, with the working lyrics: Scrambled eggs Oh my baby how I love your legs Not as much as I love scrambled eggs... It is, of course, “Yesterday” by The Beatles, wh

In February 2019, Mark Magee was scraping the bucket of his 40-tonne excavator through a hillside when it hit something 10 metres down that wouldn’t budge. Magee, a construction foreman, was clearing a platform for a new geothermal power plant near N

“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare’s Juliet Capulet four centuries ago. Nothing, she decided: it is Romeo himself that matters, not his Montague name; after all, a rose will smell as sweet no matter what we call it. And yet, while Juliet may feel

If there was a High School Musical for fruit, watermelons would be the sporty types – the jocks. You know the typecasting: a bit thick, but very popular; heavyset but pretty harmless; rarely left out of parties – and they don’t spend too much time ex

Light is an electromagnetic wave: it is a ripple through both the electric field and the magnetic field simultaneously. These two fields exist perpendicular to each other, so a wave through them is represented as two sine waves at right angles to eac

Growing up, Emmy and Ian Hughes took summer holidays they’ll never forget. Each year they flew from their home in California to South Australia’s Flinders Ranges, where they spent six weeks roaming the semi-arid hills and creeks around the Nilpena fo

From last issue’s youngsters, to the young at heart this time around. Wendy takes a break from volunteering on the Pichi Richi railway at Quorn, SA, to dive into epic asteroid adventures, while one of our favourite Object Guessers (see page 21) consi