Cosmos Magazine

If a proton event produces sparticles from the energy that’s released in the collision, it is referred to as a SUSY event. SUSY events usually share some distinguishing features, some of which relate to the lightest neutralino. When this invisible pa

The lack of activity during the COVID-19 lockdown between March and May caused human-linked vibrations in the Earth to drop by up to 50%. According to research led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium, the net effect of social distancing measures, clo

Collecting samples from a tiny asteroid hundreds of millions of kilometres away isn’t easy. You can’t just scoop sand into a bucket like a kid on a beach. Among other things, the gravity on Bennu and Ryugu is so slight that the merest exertion would

IT’S FUNNY HOW small moments in childhood can shape our interests growing up. For amateur astronomer Peter Reeve, an interest in space was piqued by a book his uncle won for him at a sideshow when he was eight. “It was based on the movie Meteor, whic

Hands up if you started this story by looking at the photograph and saying: “what’s that”? While lemurs are the most famous Madagascan inhabitants, the isolated island is home to many extraordinary mammals found nowhere else, including the endemic Te

THE RACE IS ON FOR A VACCINE that will bring the COVID-19 pandemic to heel. Dozens of contenders from around the world have leapt from the starting blocks, dashing towards the finish line as the whole world looks on with bated breath. “It’s definite

Flowering plants first appeared around 140 million years ago, heralding the birth of what have become the most diverse, ecologically important plants on Earth. But it took another 40 to 50 million years for this diversification to occur, according to

When you marvel over inspirational things in nature, the earwig (Proreus simulans) doesn’t come to mind. A group of engineers and palaeobiologists says it should. Earwigs, they say, have the most compact wing folding of any insect, which gives them u

RECENTLY, I FELL IN LOVE. It was a whirlwind romance that caught me completely off guard, but there I was, entranced by Ptolemy’s 1870-year-old astronomy treatise, Almagest. (Or rather, by GJ Toomer’s 1984 English translation of Ptolemy’s ancient Gre

German researchers led by Christian Wolf assessed brain activity associated with specific cues in relation to smartphones. Participants saw pictures showing neutral (NEU) stimuli (eg furniture, plants, landscapes); non-operating smartphones (OFF); or

TASMANIAN ARTIST LUCIENNE RICKARD had a moment of clarity about species extinction some months ago after binge-watching natural history films – David Attenborough docos; ABC Four Corners’ “Extinction Nation”; a Greta Thunberg TED talk about climate c

JOAO PAULO BURINI, GETTY IMAGES ■

To identify people with addictive smartphone use, study participants were first investigated using the Smartphone Addiction Inventory (SPAI) – a questionnaire (and associated result scale) specifically designed to measure and quantify excessive smart

The Continuous Plankton Survey’s 1931 foundation goal was to support the North Sea fishing industry: know where the plankton are, find more fish. This June, the Marine Biological Association of the UK (MBA) celebrated its latest milestone: seven mill

THE PERFECT INDOOR ENTERTAINMENT: an online citizen science project platform that allows people from all over the world to participate in various expeditions by transcribing data from historical collections. This collaboration between the Atlas of Li

The search for new physics points us to new particles, structures and symmetries, but these additions could take many forms. Among the top theories, many of which have exotic names like “technicolour” and “extra-dimensions”, the most promising is sup

SPARTICLES. If a cheeky opponent were to confront you with this in Scrabble, you could be forgiven for thinking that they had either invented a new word for sequinned tights, or misspelt the name of Kirk Douglas’ most famous role, Spartacus. First hy

AS A YOUNG BOY, JULIAN JEAN DONEHIL would often go out searching for insects. Always the tastiest, Donehil tells me, are rhinoceros beetles (Oryctes nasicornis), which clamber around the corrals of zebu cattle. To youngsters, the beetle’s thick exosk

Mars is about to become crowded. When the spacecraft carrying NASA’s Perseverance rover safely launched from Cape Canaveral on 30 July, it became the third in a small fleet now heading for the Red Planet. Any Mars launch is exciting, but with the tri

An armillary sphere is a mechanical model of the heavens with adjustable concentric rings representing the observer’s horizon R–S, meridian (the arc passing overhead P–A–O–D), the poles, P and Q, and the celestial equator A–D and ecliptic E–L – the a

Yes, that is a beetle wearing a camera backpack. Not because it needs to: just because it can. Or, more accurately, so researchers at the University of Washington, US, can show that it’s possible. They have built a camera that weighs just 250 milligr

Some of nature’s father figures: (1) clownfish Amphiprioninae (2) poison dart frog Dendrobates tinctorius azureus (3) emu Dromaius novaehollandiae (4) leafy seadragon Phycodurus eques (5) emperor penguin Aptenodytes forsteri (6) gharial Gavialis gang

THERE’S A BEE BUZZING about 10 centimetres from my eyes, back and forth, distracting me from looking for her royal mother. She wants me to leave, and will give her life to scare me away. Her plunging stinger can deliver a biochemical attack that will

More than 40,000 years ago, Australia’s tropical north-east was home to giant birds, reptiles and marsupials, including the world’s largest kangaroo, a seven-metre freshwater crocodile and giant lizards. Discovery of their remains, fossilised during

ON A CRISP MORNING the winter before last in the Gothic university town of Heidelberg, which nestles in a valley of the Odenwald mountains in central Germany, a flyer appeared on the local campus. It seemed nothing out of the ordinary: just the image

This beautiful but incomplete system organises the 17 known elementary particles by measurable properties such as their electric charge and mass, as well as another useful property called spin. Elementary matter particles have a spin of ½, and parti

WILD ORCHID WATCH (WOW) project engagement officer Katie Irvine reports that 2020 has created challenges for the WOW project – and for most people. “Unfortunately it is unlikely we will be visiting orchid societies and community groups around Austral

The first fossil egg ever found in Antarctica has got scientists pretty excited. It is, they say, the second-largest egg of any known animal ever discovered, and at around 28 by 18 centimetres pushes the limits of how big it was thought soft-shelled

ON 6 DECEMBER 2020, pieces of a near-Earth asteroid are scheduled to fall to Earth near Woomera, South Australia. Three years later, in September 2023, pieces of another near-Earth asteroid will land in the desert west of Salt Lake City, Utah. In and

01 Researchers in Mexico have uncovered what they say is the largest and oldest known Maya monument. Aguada Fénix (pictured), at Tabasco near the border with Guatemala, suggests the Maya civilisation developed more rapidly than previously thought and

WHAT COMES TO MIND when you think of an “astronomer”? Perhaps a scientist peering through a telescope, contemplating the origins of the Universe? Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. These days, a vast majority of professional astronomers spend th

I LOOK DOWN ON MY SMARTWATCH in utter disbelief. I’ve run six lots of five-and-¾-minute kilometres – no breaks – and I’ve been at it for more than half an hour, so my heart pounds away at 160 beats a minute. I am exhausted. And yet, my smartwatch ins

WEIRDEST. YEAR. EVER. You hear it wherever you go and whomever you speak to. Even if you live in a state or country where COVID-19’s impact has been less profound, the pandemic’s presence is impossible to escape. So: how are you feeling? This is exac