Cosmos Magazine

IT SEEMS TO BE AN INNATE QUALITY of all of us that we look at aspects of our world and ask, “why” or “how”. We are born innately curious. This curiosity is at the heart of all discovery. It is the impetus of science. Science is merely the method by w

Cosmos isn’t just in print; our website produces daily news stories; we’re expanding podcasts (see above) and occasionally we sneak out of the office to go behind the scenes of science around Australia. This year we’ll be producing videos about some

Editor Gail MacCallum Digital Editor Ian Connellan Art Director Kate Timms Graphic Designer Greg Barton Science Journalists Lauren Fuge, Amalyah Hart, Imma Perfetto, Ellen Phiddian, Jamie Priest Subeditor Graem Sims Social Media Manager Simon Garlick

In December 2020, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft dropped its treasure through the Earth’s atmosphere and into the South Australian desert. This package held five grams of dust and rock from the primordial asteroid Ryugu (cover story, Cosmos 88). Now, t

Two thousand kilometres south of the southernmost tip of Latin America lies the Weddell Sea. These cold, iceberg-filled waters are home to krill, emperor penguins – and a massive breeding colony of icefish. Cameras towed behind a German research vess

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has announced its confirmation of the longest ever lightning strike, a gargantuan mega-bolt that stretched for more than 750km across three American states. The flash actually occurred in April 2020, and

In the first demonstration that a non-human brain can differentiate two languages, researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary have shown that dog brains can detect speech. The brain imaging study – published in Neurolmage – trained 18 dogs to

Scavengers are known for their lack of discernment – they’ll eat whatever they can find, whenever they can find it. But one Australian animal is breaking all the rules: the Tasmanian devil. “We’ve found that most Tasmanian devils are actually picky a

Roaming bison in Canada’s Wanuskewin Heritage Park have uncovered 1,000-year-old petroglyphs and the tool used to carve them, revealing the practices of ancient peoples in North America. The heritage park is situated on the historic lands of the Dako

The newest warrior in the fight against antibiotic resistance may come with a copper shield. A team of nanotechnologists has developed a copper-based substance that kills more than 99.99% of bacteria on it within a couple of minutes. Copper has long

The rare sight of 40 million-year-old seeds sprouting from a pinecone fossil has been found immortalised in amber. This unusual method of development – called precocious germination – isn’t common among plants in general and is almost unheard of in

Growing up under the clear night skies of the state of Georgia, in the south-east of the United States, I remember lying in the back of my dad’s pickup truck looking up at the constellations, and even from that very early age of nine or 10 there was

Have you ever felt an atom? Being made of atoms ourselves, we are always in contact with them, both in our own bodies and in every aspect of the physical world. But we don’t feel them, per se. Even when you lay your palm on the top of a table, you’re

• RLSA Radial Line Slot Array antenna; the primary communication link with Earth; assisted by two low gain antennas (LGA). • DRACO Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical. “Traditional navigation techniques would only get DART somewhe

DART is based on the idea that the best way to shift an asteroid’s course is to push it. But it’s also possible to pull it using nature’s own science-fiction-style tractor beam: gravity. Gravity works both ways. If you are near an asteroid, its gravi

If gentler measures fail, nukes are still an option for warding off an incoming asteroid. But not in the blow-it-up manner depicted in the 1998 movie Armageddon. Instead, a bomb (or bombs) could be detonated close to the asteroid, and energy from the

The most spectacular asteroid impact in recent memory was in 2013, when a 20m space boulder exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, blowing out windows and injuring nearly 1,500 people, mostly with flying glass. But the biggest in recorded history was in

Zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) which share parenting in male-female pairs sometimes make a unique call – a form of vocal panting – when incubating a nest alone in high temperatures. Research has shown that hearing the call prompts developmental

With any scientific question comes the need for a method to test the hypothesis – and the solution’s not often something you can buy off a shelf. Below, to find out if mite embryos delayed hatching in response to egg predation attempts, Kyoto Univers

Male glass frogs (family Centrolenidae) care for their young by keeping the eggs moist and warding off predators. Somehow embryos are able to distinguish between predators and their parents. Researchers suspect the cue is vibrational. When a predato

Recent research has shown that yellow-legged gull (Larus michahellis) embryos perceive the alarm calls of adults that alert them to the presence of predators such as mink. As a result, the embryos alter their behaviour inside the egg, delaying their