Cosmos Magazine

“HOPE,” WROTE POET Emily Dickinson, “is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops – at all.” It's easy to argue now (Dickinson was writing in 1861) that there's less reason to celebrat

FLUIDS BEHAVE differently at microscopic and nanoscopic levels. If their behaviour can be manipulated, they could be used to deliver medicines to the body, spot diseases, and grow cells that become vital medical treatments. That's the theory of Nam-T

DEEP UNDER the ice at the South Pole sits a telescope that captures ghost particles. The telescope – called the IceCube Neutrino Observatory – has just analysed 10 years of data using new machine learning techniques and found evidence of neutrino emi

SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS are rarely amusing for rats, but new research by German neuroscientists involved tickling rats to investigate the brain mechanisms behind play. The study, published in Neuron, identifies a specific part of the brain called the

DANISH RESEARCHERS have calculated an essential ocean circulation process could grind to a halt mid this century, pushing the Earth closer to an irreversible climate tipping point. Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen – a brother-sister duo at the University

NASA, ESA, CSA, FEIGE WANG (UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA), AND JOSEPH DEPASQUALE (STSCI) ■

MICROSOFT QUANTUM researchers say they have achieved the first milestone in their efforts to create a reliable quantum computer, which the company regards as key to their future. Director of Sydney Nano Institute and theoretical quantum physicist Ste

ANCIENT DNA from 94 individuals buried at the Neolithic site at Gurgy ‘Les Noisats' in northern France has provided a picture of a community that existed 6,700 years ago. Two family trees have been constructed from the data. One connects 64 individua

1 A football-shaped molecule may hold the key to our clean energy future. Carbon nanotubes created by buckminsterfullerenes are light, efficient and highly conductive 2 A new genus of spiders has been named Socca, with species names such as johnnywar

PICTURE A virus. Are you thinking of the spiky ball shape of COVID or HIV? Or the alien-like spines of a bacteriophage? While virus shapes are incredibly versatile, an international team of researchers decided to get even more creative, using DNA ori

Okay, so let's be clear it's a cockpit: the cockpit of what, is the question. It's one of the more famous aircraft from the period the average aviation tragic would regard as the golden age of speed. As the photo suggests, it's not a particularly big

FOR SUZANNE DODD, Project Manager of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Mission, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are “sort of my first love – and true love”. Her love for these vintage interstellar explorers, launched two weeks apart in 1977, has blo

HYDROGEN: AN energy-dense abundant resource, but also a gas that's difficult to store and transport. Batteries: excellent at storing energy, but containing precious metals like lithium and cobalt. Now researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne have

Iam one of those tragics who decided when I was five that I was going to be a palaeontologist. But when I went through my undergrad, the university didn't offer a specific palaeontology degree. Instead, I majored in zoology and geology – because when

I 'm standing at an archaeological dig at Pang Pang, Vanuatu. About a dozen people are hard at work under the dappled light of the forest, sifting through soil, scrubbing at bits of shells and bone, and painstakingly digging in square pavilions, neat

A my Cain gets a little paranoid whenever she prepares chicken for tea. She washes chopping boards and knives twice and makes sure there's no cross-contamination happening. “Food preparation is the one thing I get funny about,” she says. Raw chicken

Every mathematician gets excited by a new breakthrough – it's like a mountain climber finding a new route to climb in the Himalayas. Sometimes these breakthroughs have applications to things we know, but most of the time the applications are not appa

Humanity has a special talent for imagining the future – encompassing both our deepest fears and our loftiest dreams. Hollywood is particularly good it. Think of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 existential conversation between an astronaut and his computer in

I am the sort of fool who bets against rain in the tropics. I decided not to pack a raincoat or an umbrella on this trip to Cairns; now, it's day one and I'm faced with crossing town on foot in a downpour. Fortunately, there's an open supermarket rig

Linda Broome pulls herself up a nearvertical slab of granite, leaps nimbly over a snow-lined fissure, and dives head-first into a crack in the rocks. At 67, she knows Blue Cow Mountain like the back of her gloved hands. Every November for the past th

On a trip to Venezuela some years ago, we took a log-canoe tour of the Canaima Lagoon – arguably the most touristy part of a World Heritage Area that's best known for a modest cascade named, in Spanish, Salto Ángel, or Angel Falls – the tallest singl

Decades of persistence are finally paying off. Australia finds itself ideally positioned to steal the march in the rapidly emerging field of hypersonic flight. But only if it seizes the moment. Hypersonic flight's been on the wishlist of countries ar

Second Life's International Spaceflight Museum is a must-visit for space exploration tragics. The virtual museum has exhibits including past, present and future spacecraft and hosts events about space travel. Best of all for your metaverse avatar: yo

It may be hard to credit, but when Cosmos Issue 1 appeared in 2005, the metaverse was in a brief renaissance, its second life. Its first life ran from the 1992 publication of Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk masterwork Snow Crash – which gave us the word

Australia's Top End has always been something of a haven for eccentrics and their activities. Perfect example: Darwin's Rocksitters Club, a Saturday evening tradition of nearly five decades' standing to which people go for a beer to watch the weather

Make no mistake. Hundreds of people and animals were killed to bring you this story. Poisons are all around us, as are people with motives to use them for their hostile and cruel intentions. At the molecular level, poisons are chemicals typically wit

Send us a pic of where you're reading Cosmos to win a limited edition notebook. This issue's Where in the Cosmos comes from one of the most exciting science projects on the planet – the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Jeff sent us the picture from Longye

Question Whose Law? Decode where o = ■ Hint: He discovered that water was made up of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. ■

Codeword requires inspired guesswork. It is a crossword without clues. Each letter of the alphabet is used and each letter has its own number. For example, ‘A' might be 6 and ‘G' might be 23. Through your knowledge of the English language you will be

Tessa Faulks, Zoe Gardner and Adele Mastroyannis are equally comfortable in a research lab or a middle school classroom – provided they're doing green chemistry in either venue. They're all completing PhDs through the ARC Training Centre for Green Ch