Pure Science

Cosmos

Knowing how much methane is leaking into the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources like oil, gas, coal and cows is critical as humans heat up the planet. Now UNSW researchers are trialling  a new plane-mounted hyperspectral camera to...

Cosmos

Chicken produced with 1125-fiber bioreactor. Credit: Shoji Takeuchi, The University of Tokyo Cultured or lab-grown meats have been touted as next great alternative to animal products since the first artificial burger patty was grown in...

Cosmos

A disintegrating planet orbits a giant star. Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT. Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet 140 light-years from Earth which is disintegrating, leaving a 9-million-km-long comet-like tail. For now, the...

Cosmos

The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51, is a spiral galaxy located 31 million light-years away. Credit: NASA. The universe has been growing since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. But cosmologists can’t agree on how fast it is expanding. A new study...

Cosmos

Water is critical to life on our planet, but the conventional theory of how it ended up being so abundant on Earth might be completely wrong. The most popular theory is that water made its way to Earth from asteroids bombarding the surface...

Cosmos

Origami-inspired metamaterials deforming within a changing magnetic field. Credit: Aaron Nathans/Princeton University The fascinating behaviour of origami has inspired engineers to design a structure that twists when compressed and shrinks...

Cosmos

Female superb fairy-wren at Cleland Wildlife Park, Adelaide SA. Photo Andrew Katsis. Credit: Flinders University. A new study of Australian birds examines how for some species their personality shines through in the songs. The research,...

Cosmos

A new nickel-based super-metal alloy that maintains strength and flexibility over an 800oC temperature range has been developed in Korea. A team at researchers at the Republic of Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology...

Cosmos

Storing compressed air in old oil wells and releasing it later to drive energy turbines looks promising as a more sustainable energy source according to the latest models from the USA. The process is known as Compressed Air Energy Storage...

Cosmos

An international study has revealed fresh insights into global methane emissions using innovative multi-isotopic atmospheric measurements. Researchers using advanced isotopic analysis, including radiocarbon and stable isotopes of carbon...

Cosmos

From monitoring Antarctica’s delicate ecosystem and navigating treacherous bushfire zones to designing innovative amphibious robots, Australia’s next generation of female roboticists are tackling transformative projects. Brittany Gorry,...

Cosmos

A new model is the first to explain how the lightest known neutron star formed. The binary system, called J0453+1559, was first reported in 2013 which involves a pair of neutron stars orbiting each other every 4.07 days. The system has...

Cosmos

An accidental discovery could provide clues to a chicken-or-egg question which has puzzled scientists for decades: what came first – oxygen production by photosynthesis or oxygen consumption by aerobic metabolism? Roughly 2.4 billion years...

Cosmos

A cortical neuron treated with JRT, a synthetic molecule similar to the psychedelic drug LSD. Credit: Lee E. Dunlap, UC Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics Scientists have cooked up a non-hallucinogenic version of LSD...

Cosmos

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,...

Cosmos

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...

Cosmos

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...

Cosmos

Gout Gout of Queensland crosses the finish line in the Men’s 200m Final during the 2025 Australian Open and Under 20 Athletics Championships at WA Athletics Stadium on April 13, 2025 in Perth, Australia. Credit: Cameron Spencer/Getty...

Cosmos

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...

Cosmos

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...

Cosmos

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...

Cosmos

Scanning electron microscope image of Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium which causes cholera, coloured green. Credit: Callista Images via Getty Images Imported “holy water” has been identified as the culprit behind multiple cholera outbreaks...

Cosmos

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...

Cosmos

Russel’s viper. Credit: Kartik Sunagar 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)...

Cosmos

This mosaic showing the Martian surface outside of Jezero Crater was taken by NASA’s Perseverance on Dec. 25, 2024. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS. NASA’s Perseverance rover has stumbled upon intriguing rocky outcrops on the rim of...

Cosmos

There have been several headlines over the past week about an AI chatbot officially passing the Turing test. These news reports are based on a recent preprint study by two researchers at the University of California San Diego in which four...

Cosmos

A juvenile Atlantic salmon. Credit: Jörgen Wiklund While modern medicine allows us to manage or cure previously untreatable diseases and conditions, pharmaceuticals and their metabolites have untold consequences when they make their way...

Cosmos

Jumping on a pogo stick isn’t as easy as it looks, and it looks quite difficult to begin with. But robotics engineers seem to have identified the issues to create a hopping robot. Their robot, which is smaller than a human thumb, can bound...

Cosmos

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope continues to break new scientific ground despite being usurped by the more advanced James Webb Space Telescope. A new study published in Nature reveals images from Hubble which are the first to show ongoing...

Cosmos

Spanish engineers have made the world’s first holograms that you can touch and manipulate, bringing science fiction into reality. A 3D car is grabbed and rotated by a user. Credit: Iñigo Ezcurdia 2025. The achievement is detailed in a...

Cosmos

Professor Wayne Hawthorne and his team. Hawthorne is holding transgenic pig islets in culture prior to their quality assurance, counting validation and transplantation. Credit: Kylie Ironside/WIMR Australian researchers are taking the...

Cosmos

On April 1, 2025, the Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC introduced the world’s most advanced microchip: the 2 nanometre (2nm) chip. Mass production is expected for the second half of the year, and TSMC promises it will represent a major step...

Cosmos

Scientists have recently taken unorthodox approaches to tackling the global challenge of infectious human disease, looking to artificial sweetener to address antibiotic resistance, and chewing gum to stop the oral spread of viruses. The...

Cosmos

An extremely rare binary system involving high-mass white dwarf stars just 150 light-years away are on a collision course. When they collide, the type 1a supernova explosion will be 10 times brighter than the Moon. The discovery of the...

Cosmos

Researchers in Germany have recreated Moon dust to show that the lunar soil can be used to make glass for solar panels to power future human habitats on the Moon. Simulation of solar cell fabrication on the Moon. Credit: Sercan Özen. The...

Cosmos

Researchers have made significant headway towards determining the genetic risk factors driving spina bifida, a birth defect which can cause severe disability. The findings of a Nature study open new avenues to diagnose, treat, and...

Cosmos

Australia is seeing a resurgence in geothermal energy, but not for power generation. Our rocks are too deep, too cool, and too far from power grids, and earlier attempts have all ended in failure. So what’s booming? Direct use of the...

Cosmos

Similarities between the Bronze Age cultures of Denmark and Norway suggest people were making the journey from one place to the other. How did these ancient people cross the sea? A new computer model described in the journal PLOS One has...

Cosmos

A new study suggests that Earth’s first crust formed continents and plate tectonics earlier than previously thought, with potential ramifications for theories about when life on the blue planet first evolved. Modern continental rock....

Cosmos

Rechargeable batteries are an essential part of modern life and play a major role in decarbonisation. Now, 2 studies provide important new insights in the search for ways improve them. In one study in the journal Advanced Energy Materials,...

Cosmos

CERN has responded in new reports to suggestions that its proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC) is not technologically feasible, suggesting that the project’s aims to delve further into the mysteries of the universe are attainable. CERN...

Cosmos

Neuroscientists in the US have created a device capable of decoding brain activity and translating it into speech so quickly, it almost enables a person who cannot speak to hold conversations. They’ve tested the device in clinical trial of...

Cosmos

A new copper-tantalum-lithium alloy has been shown to remain incredibly strong even at high temperatures, making it one of the most resilient copper-based materials ever created. The material’s “exceptional thermal stability and...

Cosmos

Sue is an inside-out, legless, headless wonder. Apologies to any people named Sue. The ‘Sue’ is the fossil of a creature which lived 440 million years ago. The fossil’s discovery is announced in a new paper published in the journal...

Cosmos

In a surprising finding researchers say energy from waste (EfW) facilities in some parts of the world may emit more carbon per unit of electricity output than coal-fired power plants. The researchers from China and Australia, led by PhD...

Cosmos

Physicists have produced a superconductor which could help achieve room-temperature operations which would be useful in applications like medicine, transportation and lossless power transmission. The new California Institute of Technology...

Cosmos

This article contains subject matter some readers may find distressing. 1800RESPECT is Australia’s national domestic, family, and sexual violence counselling, information and support service. If you or someone you know is experiencing...

Cosmos

Archaeologists have used new techniques to study the ancient equivalents of modern kitchen tools used by Native Americans thousands of years ago. Ancient Native Americans used depressions in rock, called metates, like this one in...

Cosmos

A breakthrough imaging technique is transforming the treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy by enabling doctors to pinpoint elusive brain lesions. At Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge in the UK, ultra-powerful MRI scanners are now...

Cosmos

Physicists at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia have found a way to use muonic atoms to better understand the magnetic structure of the nucleus. Credit: bymuratdeniz / iStock / Getty Images Plus. Science has known about atoms...