~cosmos-magazine | Bookmarks (499)

Scientists have cooked up a non-hallucinogenic version of LSD which they say has “extremely high therapeutic potential” for conditions like schizophrenia. Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, gained a reputation for its potent hallucinogenic effects following its synthesis in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, and his “accidental” discovery of it’s psychedelic properties 5 years later. […]

Climate change will impact all aspects of life as we know it, including blood donation with a new review in The Lancet Planetary Health now suggesting that climate change poses serious risks to the safety, stability, and availability of the global blood supply. “As natural disasters intensify, disease patterns shift and health challenges climb, the […]

Ecologists aren’t too concerned for the survival of native bilbies in outback Queensland, which has experienced record breaking rains and flooding since Cyclone Alfred formed on February 20 this year. Severe Tropical Cyclone Alfred was a powerful, long-lived, and erratic tropical cyclone which eventually crossed the coast in south eastern Queensland on March 8. It dumped widespread rain […]

Seismologists who created their own artificial earthquakes to peer inside the Yellowstone caldera have revealed important hidden features of its reservoir of molten and superheated rocks and gas. Due to limitations in imaging techniques, researchers haven’t been able to precisely locate the reservoir’s upper boundary, nor get a good understanding of its contents, before. These […]

Crocodiles are often thought of as living fossils – unchanged over millions of years. New research has shown that their evolutionary history is a lot more complicated than that. Crocodilia is the surviving family of a lineage which emerged about 230 million years ago (mya) called crocodylomorphs. This group split from other reptilian species including […]

The colossal squid was first described in 1925 based on specimens from the stomach of a commercially hunted sperm whale. A century later, an international voyage captured the first confirmed video of this species in its natural habitat – a 30-centimetre juvenile, at a depth of 600 metres near the South Sandwich Islands. Colossal squid […]

New research from the Kings Park Seed Bank in Perth has shed light on the surprising life and death of seeds, important for the conservation of species and research into plants which can cope with climate change. Seed banks around Australia store the seeds of thousands of species, but even when stored in ideal conditions, […]

NASA spacecraft Lucy is just days away from its second close encounter with an asteroid. Lucy was launched in 2021 and is on its way to Jupiter’s orbit to explore a group of asteroids known as the 10 Trojans. The spacecraft has to pass through the solar system’s main asteroid belt to get to Jupiter’s […]

Ice Age hearths in Ukraine have been studied using innovative archaeological techniques to better understand how ancient humans used fire. Human ancestors have been using fire for a long time. Homo erectus may have been the first human to control fire up to 2 million years ago. There is evidence from nearly 800,000 years ago […]

Move over Easter bunny, the greater bilby bounced back in some places in Australia this year. According to fifth Annual Bilby Census at the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) reserves, populations of the iconic Australian marsupial have been booming. They now total an estimated 3,330 individuals in 6 populations which are all protected by large, feral […]

About 100 million years after the animals that left them behind died, researchers have found the world’s first footprints from club-tailed dinosaurs. The most famous and largest of this armoured, herbivorous group of dinosaurs is Ankylosaurus – a creature built like a tank that could grow to 8m long, 8 tonnes and have a beach […]

The year of quantum is playing host to a vast number of new quantum research papers and slowly they are filling the void of what is known, and what might prove useful to our future. Physicists have for the first time seen entanglement of the “total angular momentum” of light particles in nanoscale structures. The […]

Gout Gout, the seventeen-year-old sprinting prodigy from Australia, has blitzed yet another milestone on his way to global domination. Gout clocked in at 19.84 seconds to win the men’s 200m final at the Australian Athletics Championships in Perth this past weekend. The effort would have secured him a new record, but for an illegal wind speed […]

In the 1987 classic film RoboCop, the deceased Detroit cop Alex Murphy is reborn as a cyborg. He has a robotic body and a full brain-computer interface that allows him to control his movements with his mind. He can access online information such as suspects’ faces, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help detect threats, and […]

Compressed air energy storage is coming to Australia. Hydrostor, a Canadian company has given the go-ahead to build a 200MW  facility at Broken Hill in far western NSW. Construction of the Silver City Advanced Compressed Air Energy System (A-CAES), only the second in the world, is slated to cost at least $652 million, with $45 […]

Dr Sarah Scholten and Dr Chris Perrella, University of Adelaide researchers and COMBS Associate Investigators, describe the use of optical frequency combs for breath analysis. Credit: COMBS Imagine standing in your kitchen at home, feeling a little off colour. You grab a handheld device from the medicine cabinet and breathe into it, looking for an […]

Physicists in Germany have performed the most accurate measurement of the mass of the fundamental particle neutrinos. The finding deepens physicists’ attempts to uncover laws of nature beyond even the best current theories. The standard model of particle physics – the best theory which explains the fundamental forces and particles of nature – posits that […]

Visitors to the site of Pompeii, the ancient Roman town buried (and so preserved for thousands of years) by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD, don’t often think to look beyond the city walls. And it’s easy to understand why: there’s plenty on offer within this monumentally well-preserved town, from jewel-like wall paintings of […]

Good nutrition by athletes doesn’t only play a role in sports performance, it can also prevent injury. That’s one of the surprising findings of new research from sports dietitian and University of South Australia researcher, Erin Colebatch, who says her recent systematic review totalling 6,000 runners shows nutrition plays a crucial role in reducing injury risk. […]

Imported “holy water” has been identified as the culprit behind multiple cholera outbreaks which were identified in Germany and the UK in February, and which landed 3 people in hospital with 1 in intensive care. Genetic testing revealed the water was contaminated with a multidrug-resistant strain of the Vibrio cholerae, according to a new study […]

The fossilised teeth from herds of massive hippo-like rhinos (Teleoceras major) have revealed their grazing habits and movement patterns on the ancient North American savannah during the Miocene Epoch. Nebraska’s Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park, an active research and dig site, provides a window into life around the mid-Miocene 12 million years ago. As […]

Visitors to Australia are often shocked at having to declare an apple or wooden item under our biosecurity policies. Biosecurity policies are used to keep out pest species and diseases. But they’re expensive to uphold and people can question their worth. The good news is, they work – and Antarctica’s strict biosecurity policies prove it. […]

Catalysis is the process where a chemical reaction is sped up. For the first time, scientists have directly observed a catalytic reaction at the atomic scale in real time. The reaction involves the removal of hydrogen atoms from alcohol molecules. In amazing new videos, individual atoms are seen moving and shaking during the reaction. The […]

In India, the snakebite capital of the world where about half of all snakebite deaths occur, a single deadly serpent causes more death and disability than any other. Russell’s viper (Daboia russelii) is found across the Indian subcontinent, but its venom varies wildly between regions. This means that a person bitten in one place will […]