Cosmos Magazine

WHEN YOU LIVE IN REGIONAL AUSTRALIA, you live with science. You see it in the adaptation of animals to the climate, in the technology used on farms, and in the smart ways people address challenges. You see science in its purest and most practical for

Speaking of change, it’s been a busy autumn for our newsroom as we find news ways to communicate science into the wider world. Our newsroom and its journalists celebrated the launch of the Huh? Science Explained podcasts on SCA’s LiSTNR platform (Imm

Research suggests that people who grow up in grid-pattern cities are more likely to have a poor sense of direction. The study shows that people who have spent their childhoods in rural areas have the highest levels of navigation skill. People who g

The Venus of Willendorf, one of the world’s oldest pieces of artwork, was made of oolite rock mined in Italy, more than 600 kilometres from her final resting place in Austria, according to new research. Gerhard Weber at the University of Vienna use

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, have created fabrics that can ‘hear’ sounds. Publishing in Nature, they describe their fabric yarn interwoven with an electrical, or ‘piezoelectric’ fibre. The resulting fabric uses a me

A research team from Germany and China has announced the first sequencing and assembly of a potato genome. Potatoes have a tetraploid genome – they have four copies of each chromosome, two copies inherited from each plant parent. Four copies of each

Editor Gail MacCallum Digital Editor Ian Connellan Art Director Kate Timms Graphic Designer Greg Barton Science Journalists Matilda Handsley-Davis, Amalyah Hart, Qamariya Nasrullah, Imma Perfetto, Ellen Phiddian, Evrim Yazgin Subeditor Graem Sims Soc

Palaeontologists have used laser imaging on a rock found in England in 1852 to reveal on its surface fine scales and “goosebump-like structures” called papillae on dinosaur skin. The papillae, which have also been observed in other sauropod species,

A team of researchers from the University of Minnesota have obtained promising results in a trial testing a non-hormonal male contraceptive on mice. “Scientists have been trying for decades to develop an effective male oral contraceptive,” says Unive

I was part of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute when it was first formed back in the late 1990s – we were trying to figure out how life forms out in space. We had biologists, astronomers and geologists all coming together to talk to each other. But we di

The simplest way this can happen is for the W boson to move from here to there, which we conventionally draw with a wiggly line (1.) following rules proposed by Richard Feynman. Quantum funkiness, however, means that the W boson could just as easily

Globally, at least 200 species of frogs have either declined catastrophically or been wiped off the face of the earth by chytridiomycosis. In Australia alone, the fungus has brought about the decline of at least 43 of the country’s 200 frog species.

A study by medical researcher Steve Cole explored the relationship between subjective social isolation (or loneliness) and gene expression in leukocyte cells in a group of chronically lonely and socially integrated people. Analysis identified 209 gen

Dr Louise Hawkley is a principal research scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago and has studied loneliness for more than two decades. When the pandemic hit, Hawkley was on a team that had been surveying a group of older adults as part of the

If Y then X is true even if Y and X are false, prove “If 2+2 = 5, you are the pope” If 2+2 = 5, then since 2+2 = 4 5 = 4. 5-3 =2 and 4-3 = 1 so 2 = 1. The pope and I make two, so the pope and I are one. ■