Science Illustrated

Win the holiday of your dreams with a $15,000 voucher! Thanks to Since 1918 Collette have been creating extraordinary guided travel experiences. Collette tours come with benefits that take your guided travel experience to another level. Their inclusi

Botanical art has a long history, and is enjoying a resurgence. Russian artist Anastasia Maksimova is currently in Australia studying a PhD in scientific communication at Charles Darwin University, and she is creating biological paintings of 30 threa

The Hubble space telescope has imaged the Veil Nebula interstellar cloud several times before, but new image processing methods have made the latest results even more stunning. The Veil Nebula is a supernova relic that formed when a star of 20 solar

PREHISTORIC ANIMALS You might think it would be impossible to plot the life journey of a single animal that lived 17,000 years ago. But scientists have done just that, using a new method to map a mammoth’s 28 years of wandering through what is now Al

THE MOON Nearly 50 years after the last astronaut left the Moon, new analyses of samples collected during NASA’s Apollo missions are changing our idea of the Moon’s geological history. The Moon today does not, like Earth, have a magnetic field which

AIRCRAFT On 24 October 2003, Concorde landed after its last commercial flight. For 27 years, the British-French plane type had been the world’s only supersonic airliner, but in the end it proved too expensive to operate, and Concorde had to be pensio

DISEASES For 100+ years, two sets of lungs have been kept in formalin at the Berlin Museum of Medical History. The lungs belonged to two young soldiers who died of Spanish Flu on 27 June 1918, and now geneticists have found the old virus in the lung

HERPETOLOGY Green sea turtles play a crucial role in protecting the health of the Great Barrier Reef by helping vital seagrass meadows flourish, concludes a paper co-authored by Dr Samantha Tol as part of her PhD with James Cook University in Queensl

PEOPLES The first tribes of Homo sapiens that populated Asia succumbed to the hostile conditions of life there, according to a new Chinese DNA analysis of bone fragments. The scientists studied bone finds from people who lived in Asia 3400-40,000 yea

CLIMATE Water vapour is certainly far more instrumental in governing what happens to energy in the atmosphere than CO2 . Water vapour is responsible for about 60% of the greenhouse effect that raises Earth’s average temperature from well below freezi

125,000 inhabitants per km2: Around 500 people live in the 83 houses located on the Caribbean island of Ilet a Brouee. The small sand bank off the south coast of Haiti is only some 4000m2 in size, so it is the world’s most densely populated island. I

PHYSICS Several different optical illusions provide the Sun and the Moon with apparently varying colours over time. But the most crucial point in answering your question is that the Sun generates light, whereas the Moon only reflects it. Sunlight is

ASTRONOMY Earth’s gravity does indeed slowly suck up dust and meteorites from space, contributing 40,000 tonnes additional weight annually. Earth’s mass also increases due to global warming – heat equals energy, and as Einstein famous equation indica

HUMANBODY Sweat helps the body control its temperature, and for best results you should remove it from your forehead (or other places) only if it is dripping inconveniently. Sweat works by creating a thin film of moisture on the skin, from which the

Diver Height = 180cm • Whale gullet Ø = 30-38cm NATURE Last June, an American lobster diver claimed to have been swallowed by a humpback whale, which then spat him out again. The spectacular account drew a blizzard of media attention, but could a wha

NATURE Eagles are a broadly-defined group of big birds of prey with relatively large wing spans, and powerful, typically crooked beaks. They all have one thing in common: their wings are long and wide. Australia’s wedge-tailed eagle is one of the wor

AERO SPACE The first animals launched by humans into space were fruit flies in 1947, loaded by American scientists onto a V2 rocket that had been confiscated in Nazi Germany. The rocket reached an altitude of 109km, so passing the Karman line – the i

ECOLOGY “This is Australia’s sliding doors moment – a tale of two very different futures rests in our control.” So warns a new report on Australia’s path towards a pest and weed-free future, published by CSIRO and The Centre For Invasive Species Solu

BIOLOGY It’s been suggested that as many as three billion vertebrate animals were in the way of the fires that burned more than 12 million hectares in eastern Australia in 2019/2020. “But there haven’t been enough studies to confirm the numbers,” say

The evolution of species is driven by the competition to survive. This concept, defined by British naturalist Charles Darwin, still applies more than 150 years after he presented his findings. In modern human society, however, few of us compete to ac

The PHD2 protein (green) ensures that the tissue is not harmed when the air includes sufficient quantities of oxygen. Under such conditions the protein is passive, and functions as a brake that does not send signals to the tissue. When the human body

Men are attracted to women with large eyes and pupils. Since these women gain a better chance of having babies and passing on their genes, this trait is likely to spread more widely in the future. Over the past 10,000 years the brain has streamlined

Some loris species secrete venom from glands in their armpits. The animals lick the glands and use the venom against rivals and others. The venom breaks down tissue, which can cause disease and ultimately death. Shrews have venomous saliva that can p

1 Our saliva includes enzymes known as kallikreins (white), which can cut fragments off proteins such as kininogen (orange) and plasminogen (yellow) in the blood. The cutting produces two fragments known as bradykinin and plasmin. 2 Bradykinin (orang

1 Our teeth cannot keep up with our ever longer life spans, but in the future, we may solve the problem by replacing the teeth with a beak that is more robust and durable. This has already happened with other species, such as pufferfish. 2 Smartphone

Engineers must think big to push forwards our adventures in aerospace, but also need funds to develop their big ideas. NASA’s NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts) program rewards the most innovative ideas for future space technologies with grants

NASA aims to send astronauts to the Moon again in the mid-2020s, intended to be the beginning of a permanent lunar colony. But building future lunar bases, perhaps in the 2030s, will require significant quantities of raw materials. It is more efficie

The limited space in the nose of a space rocket puts a limit on how much cargo can be launched from Earth at a time, while the more cargo in the nose, the more powerful the rocket must be. The cargo hold at the top of the rocket must also have a limi

WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS ARTICLE: Storms have become 25% more intense over the past 50 years. The trend continues. Global warming has moved the storm belt, so that some previously-immune areas are now experiencing powerful storms. “It feels like driv

The hurricane hunters use two types of planes: a Gulfstream jet flies above the storm at an altitude of 12.5 to 13.7km, while two WP-3D Orions head into the storm at an altitude of 2.4 to 3km. The tail Doppler radar analyses precipitation, storm inte

1 26.5-degree-warm water at the ocean surface evaporates. As the warm moist air rises, new air is sucked in beneath it. As still more water vapour rises, the air circulation intensifies, and clouds form. 2 The water vapour and inflowing air cause a t

1 SKY SCRAPER Burj Khalifa 2 SPACE ROCKET Saturn V 3 (SUSPENSION) BRIDGE Akashi 4 POWERFUL ENGINE Wärtsilä RT - flex 96 C 5 POWER STATION Three Gorges Dam 6 TUNNEL Gotthard Base Tunnel 7 HIGH-SPEED TRAIN Shanghai Maglev Marc Isambard Brunel was respo

1 The tunnel shield was made up of 36 cast-iron frames with a total work area of 12.5 × 6.8 metres. In each frame, there is room for a worker. In front of the shield, which is divided into three floors of 12 iron frames each, the tunnel wall is held

1 The Gotthard Base Tunnel is 57km long, includes 308km of rails, and is located 2300 m below the mountain surface in some places. This makes the tunnel the longest railway tunnel in the world and the one located the deepest below Earth’s surface. 2 

On 12 January 1828, workers are busy excavating a tunnel under the River Thames. Suddenly the ceiling collapses, bringing to a halt all the laborious work of constructing this 396-metre-long tunnel to link North London with South London Timber from t

1 Cosmic Explorer, planned for completion in the mid-2030s, will be a huge detector with 40km-long arms, so 10 times longer than the arms of existing detectors. This will also make it 10 times more sensitive. Its location has not yet been decided; it

Piltdown Man was a triumph for the UK: finally, the mighty kingdom had made a major palaeontological discovery. This national pride may be one reason that very few questioned the authenticity of the bones. One critical voice was heard. In 1914, the A

There are more scientists gathered in the Geological Society’s London residence than can comfortably be accommodated. All of the UK’s most prominent minds are trying to get a closer look at the skull being displayed in the centre of the room. The bon

In other European nations, scientists were excavating unique fossils of prehistoric humans. The British had struggled to follow suit, and the discovery of Piltdown Man in 1912 came during an intense English fossil rush. Over the previous 80 years, ar

In 1866, geologist Josiah White claimed that Californian miners had found a several million-year-old skull. Only in 1911 did one of the miners admit that they had deliberately planted the skull in the mine themselves. In 1869, two men found a statue

An unusual contribution to the Australian weather scene during the nineteenth century was made by a man who was not primarily occupied with meteorology, but was in fact the Surveyor General of South Australia during the mid-1860s. George Woodroffe Go

Very few cyclones on Earth grow to diameters of 500km, but near Jupiter’s poles, the gas swirls create 4000-7000km-wide cyclones. These swirls group geometrically around an even bigger cyclone above the poles. This image of the gas giant’s north pole

Humans are cultural creatures. We can appreciate art and science, and crucially we can pass down our knowledge and behaviour to new generations, through observation and learning. Although chimps and other animals can learn some things by observing th

For millennia, Earth’s magnetic North Pole has been located in the same area. Now it is moving south at a record speed. This could indicate a coming pole inversion, n, and when that last happened 42,400 years ago, it wasn't good news… The discovery o

1 By means of a retrovirus, blood cells are reset and then converted into induced pluripotent stem cells – also known as iPS cells. iPS cells can develop into all types of cells. 2 iPS cells and cancer cells both have a special protein known as an ep

ENERGY Wind turbines are a vital part of the solution for the many companies phasing out fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas. In the Netherlands scientists have found a method that can improve wind turbine efficiency by up to 10%. You might assum