FOUR TYPES of animal-to-human viral infections have been increasing at an exponential rate, with epidemics becoming larger and more frequent over the past 60 years. In a study in BMJ Global Health, researchers say that on current trends, zoonotic eve

The computer screen radiates line after line of strange text: black letters, numbers and symbols on a light grey background. Scrolling through, it seems to be never-ending and – at least for me – mostly unintelligible; I’m not fluent in Fortran, the

When Colleen Knowles heard that researchers at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital, in Melbourne, were looking for volunteers to trial a bionic eye prototype, she signed up without hesitation. “I have always liked history - I thought I could be

There are many practical problems associated with cloud computing. For a start, it is basically an infrastructure that is owned by a third party – we, the users, don’t own the hardware. Yet we entrust our data to this third party. To me, the analogy

AN INVESTIGATION of the Curracurrang archaeological site south of Sydney has revealed that dingoes were buried alongside humans as far back as 2,000 years ago, and that their remains were often treated in the same manner. “In all areas in which the b

Butterflies were probably the first animal I ever learned to draw. I don’t remember exactly when I was taught that these ethereal, winged creatures are the same animal as creepy, crawly caterpillars - perhaps it was when I read The Very Hungry Caterp

IN THE year 1054, a nearby star burst into a supernova so bright that 11th-century Chinese astronomers recorded it. The resulting dust cloud, called the Crab Nebula, has been a favourite study of astronomers since. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope

Helen Frazer has a hot take: “The AI revolution in breast cancer screening is here.” That doesn’t mean that the pink buses criss-crossing Australia offering free mammograms will soon be staffed by robots. But artificial intelligence will soon radical

1 A private lunar mission was over before it began, with a fuel leak preventing the Peregrine spacecraft (launched January 8) from landing on the Moon 2 NASA’s Artemis program has been delayed: humans will not return to the Moon until 2025, and will

ASTRONOMERS PEERING into the nearby galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud have spotted something that has never been seen outside our own Milky Way: a disc of gas and dust around a young star. The disc is identical to those which form planets wi

AMARANTH (AMARANTHUS SPP.) When Sognigbé N’Danikou was a small boy, his grandmother cooked meals with yantoto, a wild green that grew on his mother’s farm in Ouèssè, a small village in Benin, West Africa, about 250 kilometres north of the capital Por

One of the first astronomical concepts we all come across is the planet. It’s easy to get our heads around because we live on one: Earth. We know planets orbit around a central star like our Sun, come in different sizes and have different composition

The science of weather is both simple and hard – we know the physics, but the vastness of it all means errors abound. The atmosphere is a huge beast. The bit that most of our weather happens in is just the lowest level, but even that stretches from t

In June 2023 the internet lit up with excited physicists hinting they had found something ground-breaking. Imaginations ran wild: had we heard from aliens? Broken general relativity? Uncovered a hidden dimension in the universe? When the secret spill

RESEARCHERS AT the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have achieved a world first by trapping electrons in a three-dimensional crystal. Usually, electrons move freely through conducting materials. They bump into each other, but their overall

Last year, when the International Pulsar Timing Array announced the first detection of a gravitational wave background, Monash University PhD student Rowina Nathan was on the front line. “I was involved in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array, so the Austr

University, for many, is the first real taste of freedom. Behind the O-Week parties, the huge lecture halls and soon-to-be-friendships is an almost unbridled hopefulness for the years to come. This was the case for Suzanna Reece*. When she first arri

A UTAH telescope has spotted the secondlargest cosmic ray ever detected, leaving astronomers stumped. Cosmic rays are highly energetic streams of subatomic particles that travel at nearly the speed of light. These particle streams are constantly rain

Join Cosmos editors Ian Connellan and Gail MacCallum for a special Antarctic expedition cruise. ANTARCTICA’S IMPORTANCE as a place set aside for scientific study isn’t just about understanding its exploration past and present; it’s also about shaping

RESEARCHERS HAVE developed a new 3D inkjet printing system that makes it easier to combine soft, elastic and rigid materials for the field of soft robotics. The new 3D printer uses computer vision to automatically scan the 3D printing surface and adj

Send us a pic of where you’re reading Cosmos to win a limited edition notebook. “Decided to take my latest copy of Cosmos down to Indented Head on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula with me to read on the hot summer Sunday we just had,” says Daniela Basa

On October 29, 2020, German surfer Sebastian Steudtner rode a 26.2 metre-high wave (86 foot) at Nazaré, Portugal. It’s considered to be the biggest wave ever surfed. Aside from the obvious questions of Why would you surf a six-storey high wave? and W

WHERE WOULD you place a miniature hat on a starfish? Would you put it right in the centre, or on top of one of the points? If so, which one? This question has puzzled zoologists and developmental biologists alike: where is a sea star’s head? Now, a n

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD? By the time you’re reading this, it’s possible that life other than this small blue dot’s has been found in the universe; that the cure to many cancers has been unlocked; that particles have been discovered that change our

THE MELTING of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) may now be “locked in,” according to a new analysis. Previous research has estimated that complete collapse of the sheet will cause about five metres of global sea level rise over several centuries.