Cosmos Magazine

Estuaries on the southeast coast of Australia are warming at twice the rate of oceans and the atmosphere, according to a new study. The findings are based on more than 6200 temperature observations taken over 12 years in 166 rivers, lakes and lagoons

It’s iconic. It’s literally on posters. The Pillars of Creation (above) reveal newly forming stars from cold, dense and – even to Hubble’s extraordinary eye – dark clouds of gas about five light-years in height, all 6500 light-years away in the Eagle

Scientists say they now know how old whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) can get, thanks in no small part to the radioactive legacy of the arms race. Fallout from nuclear tests in the 1950s and ’60s left clearly recognisable timelines in the vertebrae of

Of sturdy brass construction, the device is about 45 millimetres long and 15 millimetres wide. In case you’re not sure, we can confirm that it was developed by James W W Gordon, a medical doctor based in Catonsville, Maryland, and patented on 27 Janu

Compared to humans and other mammals, M. myotis shows a unique, age-related pattern of gene expression that correlates with an age-related increase in DNA repair, the removal of damaged cell material, immunity and tumour suppression. A network analys

4 plague bacteria bacillus could fit in a line across a single blood cell 17 virions of coronavirus could fit in a line along a single plague bacilli (Yersinia pestis) It would take 200 blood cells to make a line across the head of a pin A coronav

Whether you’re a female human, orca, lion or elephant seal, you have a good chance of outliving your male counterparts, according to a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This phenomenon, well known in humans, has lo

IN THE TALL CHURCH TOWERS OF BRITTANY in northwest France, the fountain of youth stirs to life each night. In scenes that might be cut from a Gothic novel, colonies of small Myotis myotis (greater mouse-eared bats) awaken from their roosts, flying ou

An international team led by Australia’s La Trobe University has discovered the earliest known skull of Homo erectus, the first of our ancestors to be nearly human-like in its anatomy and aspects of its behaviour. The two-million-year-old fossil – be

Capping the ends of chromosomes, telomeres might be likened to the aglets on the ends of shoelaces, or bumpers on a car. They were first identified in the 1930s by US geneticist Hermann Müller in fruit fly cells, taking their name from the Greek word

Male ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) appear to make themselves more attractive to females by secreting a fruity and floral aroma from their wrists. That’s more than just a fun fact. If it’s right, it marks the first time that pheromones have been id

When it comes to storing carbon, all trees are not the same, according to an analysis published in the journal Science. Those that grow quickly, live to ripe old ages and reproduce slowly account for the bulk of the forest’s biomass, at any age – and

WORD BEGAN TO SPREAD LATE on 10 January this year. A file containing only a few hundred lines of genetic code had just appeared on a public database run by the National Institutes of Health in the US. It had been uploaded by a small team of researche

01 Astronomers may have a handle on how ’Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to visit our Solar System, was formed. A new scenario based on computer simulations suggests the elongated, cigar-shaped body may be a fragment of a planetary body

MUCH LIKE CAR KEYS when you’re in a hurry, you know atoms exist, but you just can’t see them. Greek philosopher Democritus, who lived from roughly 460 to 370BCE, is generally regarded as the originator of the term “atom”. The peer-reviewed Stanford E

Touchscreens are activated by anything that can transfer electrons, which is why gloves (whose purpose is to be insulating) often don’t work. Either buy a “screen friendly” pair (which have tiny metal fibres woven into the tips) or navigate your devi

RAMI MANDOW explains how – and why it matters. I LIVE IN BALMAIN, about two kilometres from the centre of Sydney. I have an optical telescope on the roof, but the lights from the metropolis create a fog that covers the night sky, stealing a large po

PATRICK NUNN explores the human tendency towards denial and the difficult choices ahead. ■

WHAT BETTER SPOT TO WATCH OUR FABULOUS WORLD IN ACTION AND ENJOY SCIENCE? Matthew Scutter (left) and Michael Scutter (right) from Willaston, South Australia. Reading Cosmos before take-off at Kiripotib, 183km south west of Windhoek, the capital of Na

ORCHIDS ARE DIVERSE in every way – including size, form, colour, habitat and distribution – and there’s plenty of them to enjoy. With around 28,500 species described globally, orchids are one of the world’s two most common flowering plant families (a

A weird and wonderful mammal the size of an opossum roamed what is now Madagascar 66 million years ago, according to a paper in the journal Nature. The new discovery, which then lived on the southern supercontinent Gondwana, has been named Adalatheri

RECIPE FOR INVENTION: take one European, beetle-whispering master engineer with a passion for patents (that’s Adam Osseiran), add one maverick, Kalgoorlie-born, Nobel prize-winning gastroenterologist and self-confessed gadget freak (Barry Marshall) a

BETH STALEY, WINNER OF BEST SHORT FILM FOR SCRATCHING THE SURFACE Describe your film in one sentence. Scratching the Surface explores how humans and rats are working together to clear landmines and protect communities in Cambodia. Who’s your favo

ROMAN HILL creates when art meets the fundamental laws of science. ROMAN HILL’S CANVAS is 8mm2 of glass; his media commonly available: glycerine, ink, paint and alcohol. Combined, they are aesthetically awesome, and fascinating examples of the princ

Australian engineers have accidentally solved a 58-year old mystery in quantum science. As described in the journal Nature, they have worked out how to do what Nobel laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen first suggested in 1961 but no-one has yet cracked: co

THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY (RAS) is celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2020 and to mark the milestone it is making a commemorative quilt. That may sound a little peculiar, but the craft of quilting has a long history in Britain – longer than mo

An international team of palaeontologists has discovered an assortment of intact amber fossils in Australia and New Zealand that date from the mid-Paleogene to the Late Triassic, 230 to 40 million years ago, reporting their find in the journal Scient

The thought of a gas-filled mollusc floating around the ocean on its back does not to mind a pretty sight. However, the dragon (Glaucus atlanticus)is a nudibranch with elegance. Nudibranchs are small, often intensely colourful sea creatures. Hermapho

Electrons in your finger are attracted to the positive electrodes in the sensing layer (3). That creates a charge imbalance which brings more electrons to the transmitting layer (2). The electrodes measure the increase in charge to identify the touch

IT’S A STRANGE PROFESSION that hopes its work is never used. But that’s life for pandemic preparedness specialists like Freya Shearer, a research fellow in epidemic decision support at the University of Melbourne and member of the team under James Mc

It’s a bad year from a PR perspective to be a bat, but tell that to this intriguing character – Myotis myotis, the greater mouse-eared bat. Although about the body size of a house mouse, M. myotis has been known to live for 37 human years with little

IT TOOK TWELVE YEARS for Michelle to receive a diagnosis. “I was about fourteen when I first started having symptoms,” she tells me. “I was too ashamed to go to a doctor for it.” She kept her urgent, painful, frequent, sometimes bloody bowel movement

A trip to the hardware and electronics stores, a bit of web wandering and some pantry raiding are all you need to listen to space. WAVE GUIDE Theoretically, the wave guide could be any number of shapes (cylindrical, cubic), but calculations suggest

THE FIRST VIDEOCONFERENCE – like the many that followed – was late at night. From his home in suburban Melbourne, James McCaw joined fellow disease trackers from around the world in mid-January to discuss some of the early data emerging from Wuhan, t

New world (dis)order: by 1 May, the pathogen rules human life on Earth. The only question for most is: how much longer? Global COVID-19 cases pass 1 million and deaths 50,000 on 2 Apr. Worldwide, deaths pass 100,000 on 10 Apr. “Wet” markets reopen in

INVISIBLE TOUCH Smart screen technology is a kind of everyday magic, but as LEE CONSTABLE discovers on page 96, it’s a lot simpler than it seems. ■

Dendrobium striolatum – the streaked rock orchid – adorns rocks, boulders and cliff faces from the Blue Mountains, NSW, through eastern Victoria and Bass Strait islands to Tasmania. Australian native orchids are highly specialised. They have fascinat

Whose Principle? The principle was began in 1678 by a Dutch scientist and was enhanced in 1818 by a French one. competitions@cosmosmagazine.com with your name and address by 1 August 2020. Three correct entries will win a copy of The Future We Choos

Astronaut Christina Koch had been on the ISS for about four (of 11) months when, in July 2019, she took the more than 400 time-lapse frames that make up this composite image as the space station flew northeast over Africa from Namibia towards the Red