Cosmos 103 | Watch This Space

LIVING LANDSCAPES: EXPLORING FIRST NATIONS’ ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING

e c spa

Is this the telescope that will finally detect dark matt er?

h c t a W s

th i

ISSUE 103 THE SCIENCE OF EVERYTHING

YT

ES

G B on N i P I rm T Y a at O L I ng n D wo A isi ng F R E it ni O he g t l Di ow CE g a S N in nd N dr O I E ack c a TI r SC p d s PO fo Un o o S’ p bl N e A de s C E g ug O vin dr Di ew n

522008

AU $17.00 NZ $19.00

9 771832

103

Cosmos ˔˜ˠ˦ ˧ˢ ˠ˔˞˘ ˦˖˜˘ˡ˖˘ ˔˖˖˘˦˦˜˕˟˘ ˧ˢ ˘˩˘˥ˬˢˡ˘ʡ ˊ˘ˇ˥˔ˡ˦˙˘˥ ˜˦ ˔ ʵ ʶˢ˥ˣ ˔ˡ˗ ʶ˟˜ˠ˔˧˘ ˁ˘˨˧˥˔˟ ˖˘˥˧˜Ѓ˘˗ ˧˘˖˛ ˖ˢˠˣ˔ˡˬ ˧˛˔˧ ˔˜ˠ˦ ˧ˢ ˕˔˟˔ˡ˖˘ ˣ˘ˢˣ˟˘ʟ ˣ˟˔ˡ˘˧ʟ ˔ˡ˗ ˣ˥ˢЃ˧ʡ ˇ˛˜˦ ˣ˔˥˧ˡ˘˥˦˛˜ˣ ˔˟˟ˢ˪˦ ˨˦ ˧ˢ ˗˜˦˧˥˜˕˨˧˘ ˙˥˘˦˛ʟ high-quality content to our readers, leveraging their platform, which is used by 80 million users per month.

Please support the partnership by sharing links to the download package with friends and family.

Image Credit: Diana Robinson Photography via Getty

Take a journey into the unknown

Strap into the Cosmos/WeTransfer digital ecosystem and embark on an intergalactic voyage into the stars with the latest Cosmos content “drop” - space.

Download pack includes video about space and educational resources To access this FREE package, scan the QR code or go to

www.cosmosmagazine.wetransfer.com

CONTENTS 58 40

FEATURES

09

30

Dispatches from the world of science 10 Speed-checking neutron star jets 13 First Nations pottery find 16 Focus: Ancient animals 17 Guess the object 18 How fast can a wombat really run?

22 Webb Watch

Drew Rooke delves beneath the surface to explore the history and future of medical breakthroughs found in the ocean’s depths.

DIGEST

26

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

Head back into Tasmania’s tall eucalypt forests to get the news on the Grove of Giants. Lauren Fuge reports.

28

NEXT BIG THING

For the past decades it’s been all about lithium, but what about sodium? Maria Forsyth builds the battery of the future.

DEEP DIVING FOR DRUGS

40

INDIGENOUS INNOVATIONS

Oral history meets science in WA, where Cat Williams joins the students and Elders documenting Noongar knowledge.

48

OUR DARK MATERIALS

Could a new telescope solve the universe’s biggest mystery? Martin White gives us a sneak peek at the team searching for dark matter – using gamma rays.

58

WORM-POWERED ATHLETES

You’ve heard about the scandals, but do you know the science? Matthew Ward Agius explains blood doping.

4 COSMOS MAGAZINE

FROM TOP: GREG BARTON / MIDJOURNEY. STEVE HOPPPER.

REGULARS

COSMOS 103 WINTER 2024

S

48 66

WILDLIFE WONDERS

Take a look inside the lives of all creatures great and small in this issue’s gallery.

74

MIRROR WORLDS

Can an entire nation be digitised before it disappears? Prianka Srinivasan explores the ways digital-twin technology can help us respond to the climate crisis.

30

84

CONDENSED MATTERS

We’re living in the golden age of a field of physics you may never have heard of, according to Evrim Yazgin, who takes us to the heart of the matter.

90

FROM TOP: MATTHEW BUGEJA. NASA SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO. QI (KEVIN) GE / SUTD.

ENRICHING BUSH FOODS

David Hancock heads to the Kimberley to find the researchers improving biodiversity and restoring food sovereignity for First Nations communities.

ZEITGEIST

98

98

NEXT-GEN PRINTING

Denise Cullen meets the materials scientists fabricating 4D devices that can change shape, size and even properties.

102

SECRETS OF SATELLITES

What does it mean to be a moon? Imma Perfetto examines moon myths and mysteries in our Solar System and beyond.

106

MINDGAMES

Fiendishly fun puzzles.

cosmosmagazine.com 5

ISSUE 103

Editor Lauren Fuge Art Director Kate Timms Graphic Designer Greg Barton Science Journalists Matthew Agius, Imma Perfetto, Evrim Yazgin Editor-at-Large Elizabeth Finkel cosmosmagazine.com CONTRIBUTORS Denise Cullen, David Hancock, Drew Rooke, Prianka Srinivasan, Martin White, Cat Williams Mind Games Tess Brady / Snodger Puzzles

From the Editor WE LIVE IN A TIME DEFINED BY CHANGE, when things very rarely turn out in the way we expect. The world is full of variables, and often directions switch, paths diverge and even the limits of what is possible – and what is normal – shift.

This issue – my one and only issue as editor – is packed with stories that address these questions of uncertain ground, of transformation and of possibility. Pacific correspondent Prianka Srinivasan takes us to the rapidly submerging island nation of Tuvalu to explore their plan to move the entire country online. It’s an ambitious response to an unjust global crisis, but as Srinivasan discovers, it relies on the emerging technology of digital twins – which may help us respond to climate change in more ways than one. Meanwhile, Drew Rooke dives even further underwater to find out why the humble sea sponge has provided us with such an extraordinary number of life-saving medicines, and to ask us to shift our thinking about the ocean – this subsurface world that comprises 99% of all living space on the planet.

Turning our gaze outwards from our pale blue dot, the ever-delightful Martin White spins the tale of an international team tackling the dark matter problem from a different angle, using the most advanced gamma-ray telescope in the world. Elsewhere in the physics realm, Evrim Yazgin meets researchers working in a field that many have never heard of and yet it’s vital to our lives, while Imma Perfetto looks sky high to answer the question we may have all wondered before: what, exactly, is a moon?

Coming back down to Earth, we’re delighted to have two stories of two very different First Nations’ science projects coming out of Western Australia. On Merningar and Goreng Country south of Perth, Cat Williams investigates a series of collaborations between ecology postgraduate students and Noongar knowledge-holders, which document Noongar innovations by bringing oral history and Western science together.

Further north up in the Kimberley, David Hancock reports on efforts to revegetate and enrich native species, which could help revitalise the bush-food industry and address food sovereignity in Indigenous communities.

Plus 4D printing, the science behind performance-enhancing drugs, giant trees, puzzles and much more – all waiting for you over the page.

It’s been a great joy to put together this issue for you. I hope it’s a joy to read.

LAUREN FUGE contribute@cosmosmagazine.com

6 COSMOS MAGAZINE

THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF AUSTRALIA Executive Director Will Berryman Corporate Services Manager Sarah Brennen RiAus Editor-in-Chief Ian Mannix Engagement Manager Gavin Stone Education Manager Michelle McLeod Engagement Officer Jess Wallace Office Assistant Leif Gerhardy Digital Developer Andrew Greirson QUESTIONS? Have a question about your subscription or a change of address? Email us at info@cosmosmagazine.com +61 8 7120 8600 PO Box 3652, Rundle Mall SA 5000 Australia Published by The Royal Institution of Australia Inc. ABN 98638459658

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Cosmos is produced on unceded Kaurna land, and we pay our respects to elders past and present.

First Nations people are this country’s first scientists and we celebrate their connection to this place’s deep past and their critical role in its future.

riaus.org.au cosmosmagazine.com education.riaus.org.au scinema.org.au

COSMOS RETAIL ENQUIRIES Ovato Retail Distribution Australia — 1300 650 666 New Zealand — +61 9 979 3018 Cosmos – The Science of Everything™ is published by The Royal Institution of Australia Inc. Copyright © 2024 The Royal Institution of Australia.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner or form without written permission. The views expressed in Cosmos are not necessarily those of the editors or publishers. Cosmos is protected by trademarks in Australia and the USA. Printed in Australia by Finsbury Green.

Support our mission

ORDER FORM I WA N T TO S U B S C R I B E TO C O S M O S 8 issues (print & digital mag) for $90 SAVE $46 + MyCosmos membership

New to Cosmos?

4 issues (print & digital mag) for $50 SAVE $18 + MyCosmos membership Yes, I would like my subscription to renew automatically at the end of each term.*

YOU R D ETAILS :

We can deliver Cosmos to your door every quarter for only $50 a year.

This is a saving of $18.

First Name

Last Name

Address

State

City

Sign up using the QR code below or post the form back to us.

Postcode

Email Phone number

A N D/O R P L E A S E S E N D A G I F T S U B S C R I P T I O N TO : 8 issues (print & digital mag) for $90 SAVE $46 + MyCosmos membership 4 issues (print & digital mag) for $50 SAVE $18 + MyCosmos membership I would like my gift subscription to renew automatically at the end of each term.*

G IF T R EC IP IE N T D E TAILS : First Name

Last Name

Address State

City

Postcode

Email

PAY M E N T

Mastercard

Visa

Amex

Name on card Card number Expiry

MM

YY

CVV

Signature

Existing subscribers We will email you when it is time to renew your subscription.

We are grateful for your support so don’t delay and renew today.

TERMS & CONDITIONS:

Please contact us on (08) 7120 8600 if you wish to discuss your subscription.

No refunds on subscriptions. See cosmosmagazine.com for international subscription rates.

Subscriptions start with the next available issue. *Your credit card will be charged automatically at the end of the subscription term. Cancel anytime online. [ ] Tick if you do not want to receive special offers from The Royal Institution of Australia and trusted partners.

MyCosmos membership allows online readers to take a closer look at science. There are daily short-form stories available, plus five premium long-form stories published weekly for members.

For full subscription terms and conditions and privacy policy visit cosmosmagazine.com ABN 98 638 459 658

ALWAYS QUESTION ALWAYS WONDER At RiAus we’re committed to providing FREE ! ! # world of STEM. Join our community and explore our resource collection here education.riaus.org.au/

DIGEST DANIELLE FUTSELAAR AND NATHALIE DEGENAAR, UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

i Science news from around the globe (and even further)

Artist’s impression of a neutron star, consuming nearby star and producing an ultra-fast jet.

DIGEST

The Australia Telescope Compact Array, CSIRO.

SPACE

Cosmic speed camera reveals staggering pace of neutron star jets i How fast, you ask? One-third of the speed of light.

IN A WORLD FIRST, astronomers have measured the speed of a neutron star’s powerful jets. Turns out these energetic beams of energy and matter travel at 114,000 km per second – or about one third of the speed of light.

Neutron stars are among the densest objects in the universe. They form when a supergiant star, 10–25 times the mass of our Sun, runs out of fuel and its core collapses in on itself. A neutron star is only a few tens of kilometres across, but weighs between one and three times as much as the Sun. A single teaspoon of neutron star material weighs about a trillion kilograms.

10 COSMOS MAGAZINE

Because they are so dense, neutron stars have an immense gravitational pull. Sometimes they pull matter in from other nearby stars. This can cause thermonuclear explosions which shoot matter out into space.

Until now, astronomers knew virtually nothing about these jets, including their speed. But in this latest study, the jets were detected by the European Space Agency’s Integral observatory and then tracked for three days by the CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) to determine their speed.

“The explosion tells us when the enhanced jets were launched, and we

simply time them as they move downstream – just like we would time a 100-metre sprinter as they move between the starting blocks and the finish line,” says co-author James Miller-Jones, from Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.

“Radio telescopes are extremely versatile,” says leader of ATCA operations, Jamie Stevens, who is not an author on the recent paper. “Five of ATCA’s six dishes, for instance, take on different configurations by moving along a track. [The array] can be used to look at everything from nearby objects in our galaxy to some of the most distant objects in the universe.

“The sensitivity and stability of ATCA allowed this research team to observe rapid changes in the neutron star’s surroundings over three days.

This new method will help astronomers to better understand jets in many different environments and the complex events that build our universe.”

The results of the study – led by Thomas Russell from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Palermo – are published in Nature.

ALEX CHERNEY / CSIRO

PLAY VIDEO

BIOLOGY

CRISPR-Cas genome editing might one day be used to cure HIV i Is a functional HIV cure on the horizon?

3D render of the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing system.

CLIMATE

MELETIOS VERRAS / GETTY IMAGES

Climate records shattered in 2023

2023 SHATTERED climate records, according to the World Meteorological Office. It issued a “red alert” in its latest State of the Global Climate report, noting several markers of climate change were smashed in the previous year.

The report confirms that the planet’s average temperature measured at 1.45°C above the preindustrial baseline. Carbon

ONE OF THE most significant challenges in treating HIV is the virus’ ability to integrate its genome into the host’s DNA. This means that lifelong antiretroviral therapy is essential, as latent HIV can reactivate from reservoirs as soon as treatment ends.

Now, preliminary research shows that gene editing can be used to eliminate all traces of the HIV virus from infected cells in the laboratory.

CRISPR-Cas gene editing technology acts like molecular scissors to cut DNA and either delete unwanted genes or introduce new genetic material, while guidance RNA (gRNA) tells CRISPR-Cas exactly where to cut at designated spots on the genome.

The team of scientists from the Amsterdam Medical University in the Netherlands and the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Germany – used two gRNAs that target “conserved” parts of the viral genome. This means they remain the same or conserved across all known HIV strains. This genetic sequence does not have a match in human genes, to prevent the system going off-target.

“We have developed an efficient combinatorial CRISPR-attack on the HIV virus in various cells and the locations where it can be hidden in reservoirs and demonstrated that therapeutics can be specifically delivered to the cells of interest,” the authors write.

“These findings represent a pivotal advancement towards designing a cure strategy.”

in the atmosphere also reached record highs, and so too did ocean heat measurements. Global mean sea level reached a record high since satellite recording began, in 1993.

Last year also saw an unprecedented decline in winter sea ice in Antarctica.

“Climate change is about much more than temperatures,” says WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.

The WMO and other groups are concerned that the planet is fast losing its ability to keep average temperatures to 1.5°C, the target of the Paris Climate Agreement.

These records are tracking to predictions; the WMO suggested in that one of the next five years would be the hottest on record. That prediction has now been confirmed at the first opportunity.

cosmosmagazine.com 11

DIGEST

PHYSICS MEDICINE

i If quantum gravity exists, this telescope might spot it.

IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

SCIENTISTS ARE GOING to extreme lengths – and places – to try and understand the fundamental nature of the universe.

“Today, classical physics describes the phenomena in our normal surroundings such as gravity, while the atomic world can only be described using quantum mechanics,” says Tom Stuttard from the University of Copenhagen’s Neils Bohr Institute (NBI).

“The unification of quantum theory and gravitation remains one of the most outstanding challenges in fundamental physics. It would be very satisfying if we could contribute to that end.”

One theory that tries to marry the two is called quantum gravity. Stuttard is co-author of a paper in Nature Physics which suggests that data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located 12 COSMOS MAGAZINE

at the South Pole, might contain evidence for quantum gravity.

To validate their methodology, his team used IceCube’s data of more than 300,000 neutrinos – nearly massless “ghost” particles that rarely interact with other particles, meaning they can travel billions of light years through the universe largely unbothered. In this first stage, the team looked at neutrinos in the Earth’s atmosphere, but in the next phase they will study neutrinos from deep space.

“If the neutrino undergoes the subtle changes that we suspect, this would be the first strong evidence of quantum gravity,” says Stuttard.

“With future measurements with astrophysical neutrinos, as well as more precise detectors being built in the coming decade, we hope to finally answer this fundamental question.”

Does having 100+ COVID jabs harm your immunity?

Apparently not.

A German man who claimed to have received 217 COVID-19 vaccinations within three years has shown no signs of immunity fatigue.

In research published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, scientists investigated this case of ‘hypervaccination’ by studying blood and saliva samples from the man (known as ‘HIM’).

Some scientists believed over-exposure to the same vaccination could fatigue the immune system, as is the case with other infectious diseases like HIV. But in HIM’s case, it appears that the jabs have had little negative effect.

‘Memory’ cells present in his samples were as high as in control groups used for the study, and there appeared to be no evidence of a weakened immune system.

HIM’s samples showed no sign of the man having been infected with the virus, though it’s unclear whether this is due to his hypervaccination status.

However, the researchers “do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance adaptive immunity”.

CHRISTOPHER MICHEL VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Search for quantum gravity at the South Pole

ARCHAEOLOGY

Pottery find reshapes understanding of First Nations people i SEAN ULM / CABAH

Communities may have been connected to the Lapita.

WHAT’S BELIEVED TO be the first evidence of pottery making by Australia’s First Nations people has been unearthed at Jiigurru (Lizard Island) on the Great Barrier Reef. Small sherds – fragments of ceramic material – were uncovered in an archaeological excavation conducted by the Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) in partnership with the Dingaal and Ngurrumungu Aboriginal communities. The team found dozens of sherds less than a metre below the surface, dating between 2,000 and 3,000 years old: the oldest reliably dated pottery ever discovered in Australia.

The researchers say this finding suggests “a rich history of long-distance cultural exchanges and technological innovation long before British arrival”.

CABAH Chief Investigator Sean Ulm from James Cook University says

CABAH’s Ian McNiven at the dig site (above), where sherds (top) believed to be 2,000–3,000 years old were unearthed.

the sherds are likely from small pots, which were skilfully made and “locally produced using clays and tempers sourced from Jiigurru”.

However, Ulm notes “it is unlikely that people completely independently learned how to manufacture pottery”.

Instead, the discovery indicates that these First Nations groups had connections with the pottery-making communities of New Guinea, and knowledge was transferred between groups.

“The Jiigurru pottery appears at a time when there is significant movement of people and ideas around the Coral Sea,” Ulm says, adding that it is “clearly associated with Lapita cultural influences diffusing down the Queensland coast through exchange networks”.

CABAH Chief Investigator Ian McNiven, from Monash University, says the connections across the Coral Sea were facilitated by the advanced canoe voyaging technology and open-sea navigation skills of the Lapita, who went on to people vast areas of the Pacific.

“These findings not only open a new chapter in Australian, Melanesian, and Pacific archaeology but also challenge colonialist stereotypes by highlighting the complexity and innovation of Aboriginal communities,” McNiven says.

The research is published in Quaternary Science Reviews. cosmosmagazine.com 13

DIGEST

ARCHAEOLOGY

An ancient life revealed: Foragerturned-farmer crossed seas i Vittrup Man’s smashed skull.

A STONE-AGE skeleton found in a Danish peat bog has been analysed, fleshing out the ancient person’s life and death in stunning detail.

Nicknamed Vittrup Man, this individual died between 3300 and 3100 BCE, aged 30–40 years old. He is named for the small town northwest of Copenhagen, near where his skeleton was found in 1915 along with a wooden club, a ceramic vessel and cow bones.

14 COSMOS MAGAZINE

He would have travelled at least 75 kilometres across the open sea.

The new analysis, published in the journal PLOS ONE, shows that the Vittrup Man had a different genetic signature to people who lived in the region at the same time – his DNA had more in common with Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) people from Sweden and Norway.

Isotopes indicate that Vittrup Man’s early childhood was spent along the Scandinavian coast, and the authors note that he could be from as far north as the Norwegian coast near the Arctic Circle. Further analysis of isotopes and proteins in his teeth show that Vittrup Man’s diet shifted from coastal food (marine mammals and fish) in early life to farm food (including sheep or goat).

The transition happened in his later teen years.

It’s not clear why Vittrup Man moved south to Denmark. He would have travelled at least 75 kilometres by boat across the open sea between Sweden and Denmark’s Jutlandic peninsula, even if small islands were used as stopovers.

The authors propose two main scenarios to explain his life story. One is that he was part of an exchange for flint; previous archaeological finds suggest a reciprocal relationship between Denmark and Scandinavia.

“Another possibility,” they write, “is that he was taken prisoner, possibly far north in west coast Scandinavia” and spent the years of his life when he was in peak physical fitness “as a captive and source of labour”.

The fragmented remains include a smashed skull. This suggests that Vittrup Man met his end in a ritualistic sacrifice. Alternatively, he could have been a victim of feud or murder.

STEPHEN FREIHEIT (CC-BY 4.0)

DNA, isotope and protein analysis map his migration.

Tharsis region and Valles Marineris on Mars.

SPACE

Massive volcano “hiding in plain sight” on Mars i It’s bigger than Mount Everest, but we didn’t see it.

MARK GARLICK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / GETTY IMAGES PLUS.

A GIANT VOLCANO has been hiding on the surface of Mars. It measures 9022 metres high and 450 kilometres wide, making it nearly 200 metres taller than Mt Everest. And yet scientists have only just identified the behemoth, as well as possible glacier ice beneath its surface.

Although the volcano has been imaged repeatedly since 1971, it is

TECHNOLOGY

Swarms of drones could save us from wildfires

eroded almost beyond recognition. Its true nature as a volcano was finally given away when planetary scientists analysed the remains of a glacier in the area in 2023 – and realised they were, in fact, studying the inside of a huge, deeply eroded volcano.

The volcano has been provisionally named Noctis, as it lies at the border

MULTIPLE SWARMS OF drones could be used to manage natural disasters like forest fires, according to researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

The use of drones in tackling natural disasters is not new, though they have yet to be used in India, and Australian agencies are increasingly interested.

The IISc researchers have developed an algorithm

between the Noctis Labyrinthus (a region of deep, steep, maze-like valleys) and the vast canyons of Valles Marineris, in Mars’ Tharsis province.

Despite its size, Noctis is not the Red Planet’s biggest volcano. Mars boasts the tallest mountain and largest volcano in the Solar System: Olympus Mons, which rises 26km above the low-lying plains around it.

While Noctis is a relative minnow, the site presents a new location to study Mars’s geological evolution and expand the search for life, according to Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute and Mars Institute.

“It’s an ancient and long-lived volcano so deeply eroded that you could hike, drive, or fly through it to examine, sample, and date different parts of its interior to study Mars’s evolution through time,” he says. “It has also had a long history of heat interacting with water and ice, which makes it a prime location for astrobiology and our search for signs of life.

“Finally, with glacier ice likely still preserved near the surface in a relatively warm equatorial region on Mars, the place is looking very attractive for robotic and human exploration.

“It’s really a combination of things that makes the Noctis volcano site exceptionally exciting.”

which allows for a coordinated multi-swarm of drones to quell forest fires.

“By the time somebody identifies and reports a fire, it has already started spreading and cannot be put out with one drone,” says IISc’s Suresh Sundaram. “You need to have a swarm.”

Their new software allows the drones to make independent decisions

and communicate with each other. Each drone will independently calculate the fire’s size and potential spread.

“They figure out which cluster of fire is going to spread faster, and allocate the required number of drones to put out that fire while the others look for other fire clusters,” Sundaram says.

Full-scale field tests are in planning.

cosmosmagazine.com 15

Focus: Ancient animals

3

4

1

An ancient amphibian ancestor found in Texas has been named Kermitops gratus in honour of iconic Muppet, Kermit the Frog.

In the Peruvian Amazon, researchers have found the fossilised skull of the largest ever river dolphin, 3–3.5 metres long, which lived 16 million years ago.

New analysis of the 375-million-year-old fish Tiktaalik shows its ribs likely attached to its pelvis: crucial to support its body on land in the evolution of walking.

2

Fossilised dinosaur footprints, plants and tree stumps in Alaska’s far northwest reveal the area was a lush, warm riverine setting 100 million years ago.

5

6 A haul of 1,200 Triceratops bones and bone fragments in Wyoming supports the idea that these dinos were social animals and lived in herds.

Another record: a massive freshwater turtle fossil has been unearthed in Brazil. Its shell measured 1.8m across, bigger than any of today’s freshies.

www.cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/ 01 dinosaur-tracks-alaska/ 02 kermit-frog-fossil-amphibian/ 03 largest-river-dolphin-amazon/ 04 walking-evolution-ribs/ 05 triceratops-fossils-herd/ 06 giant-freshwater-turtle-amazon/

16 COSMOS MAGAZINE

JAIME BRAN

PALAEONTOLOGY

DIGEST

Guess the object Oral history Let’s move away from our regular focus on gadgets and devices to present these oddities. The one in the centre is the original; the others are casts. No more hints needed – the objects themselves contain all the info you need, if you know what you’re looking for. And if not, it’s a challenge you’ll have to ponder.

TECHNOLOGY

Meet the secret ingredient for metal recycling In the quest to improve precious metals recovery, Austrian scientists have turned to the key component of a favourite Aussie breakfast spread. Vegemite is made by taking spent yeast used in the beer-making process, and that same waste product shows promise for metal recovery.

Electronic waste often consists of several different materials, making the process of reclaiming them a challenge for recyclers. Bacteria, algae, clay and charcoal-like biochar have been trialled as potential options to achieve metal adsorption, but often against singular targets.

Brewer’s yeast might offer an opportunity, according to results published by a group from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna and K1-MET GmbH, showing that the addition of dried yeast waste recovered more than half of aluminium, 40% of copper and 70% of zinc from test solutions.

When added to wastewater, around 90% of suspended zinc and 50% of copper were retrieved.

We know you can Google it, but where’s the fun in that? Tell us what you think it is. The correct answer − and/or the most creative − will be published in our next issue. Send your hunches to contribute@cosmosmagazine.com

New New visions visions Space history fiends will have had a bit of a leg up for guessing last issue’s object, though it still may have befuddled a few. The object was a 3D rendering of a spacecraft that made history back in March 1965. Called Vokshod 2, it was a crewed Soviet space mission that blasted two cosmonauts – Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov – up into orbit. There, in a thrilling milestone of space exploration, Leonov suited up, exited through the inflatable airlock and became the first person to conduct a spacewalk. But that was only the first challenge they faced. What happened next was even gnarlier. When Vokshod 2 returned to Earth, a failure in the navigation system resulted in the craft touching down some 386 kilometres from their landing site, in the middle of a snowy forest. A recovery helicopter spotted them, but couldn’t get to them through the dense trees. Instead, it dropped warm clothes and supplies, and left Belyayev and Leonov to spend a frosty three days and two nights in the elements before the ground team reached them – on skis.

cosmosmagazine.com 17

DIGEST

Wombats: Debunked i Settling the debate over our favourite furry loaves.

PLAY VIDEO

BACK IN FEBRUARY, Museums Victoria debunked long-circulating claims that the southern hairy-nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus latifrons) can run at speeds of 40km/h. (For context, this almost pips Usain Bolt’s 43.99km/h world record for the 100-metre dash.)

After the public information team received a call asking for the original source, they traced the claim to a 1984

BIOLOGY

Stem cells from amniocentesis used to grow organoids

18 COSMOS MAGAZINE

publication by Flinders University archaeologist Rod Wells, who explains the 40km/h number likely came from survey vehicles in the 1960s and ’70s keeping pace with the marsupials.

“We would pursue southern hairynosed wombats and catch them using something akin to a lacrosse net,” Wells says. “I do not recall anyone using a stopwatch to check their speed.”

STEM CELLS FOUND in the fluid from the amniotic sac could be used to grow organoids, according to UK researchers. They say this technique could help to develop specific therapies for babies with congenital diseases.

Previously, the stem cells required to create organoids have mostly come from terminated pregnancies. This new technique harvests the

Museums Victoria decided that a single mention isn’t sufficient evidence to prove wombats can run at 40km/h.

Story over? No; the plot thickens.

After reading about Museums Victoria’s debunking, South Australian wombat researchers came forth with a counterclaim. Wildlife biologist David Taggart says he has consistently seen the vehicle odometer hit 40km/h while tracking running wombats in the field.

But there are a few caveats.

Firstly, he can only attribute this top speed to southern hairy-nosed wombats, the species he works with. That leaves a question mark over the northern hairy-nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus krefftii) and the common ‘bare-nosed’ wombat (Vombatus ursinus).

Secondly, it’s only been witnessed in southern males during mating season.

“They’ll be cruising around looking for females and they’ll get a long way away from the warrens or burrows they know, and then you’ll come across them, and they’ll see you,” Taggart says.

“These big male wombats – they can get up to 38kgs – they’re just solid muscle and they’ll just take off.”

Taggart thinks that the scientific survey utes accidentally spook the males, who bolt back home.

So, how could scientists accurately measure a wombat’s dash? It’s not as easy as grabbing a stopwatch and pitting the wombat against Usain Bolt.

Wombat-spooking would be a matter for the ethics committee.

cells using amniocentesis, which is often used during pregnancy to test for conditions such as Down Syndrome. To demonstrate how this might work with a developmental disorder, the researchers created organoids from babies with a genetic lung condition called congenital diaphragmatic hernia. The organoids showed clear features of the disease.

“At present, some parents can be told their developing fetus has a disease, but not how severe it will be. This makes it very difficult … to make informed decisions regarding potential interventions,” says bioethicist Evie Kendal from Swinburne. But this technique could enhance their autonomy by providing better information.

MLHARING / GETTY IMAGES

NATURE

2015

2017

2019

CLIMATE

Remarkable resilience of Pacific forests after cyclone i Determined science tracks forests across the years.

A REMARKABLE AND long-lived research program on Vanuatu has revealed the resilience of the nation’s environment to severe tropical cyclones.

In 2015, Tropical Cyclone (TC) Pam became the strongest storm on record in the South Pacific with maximum sustained winds of 278km/h and gusts up to 320km/h. It affected Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Kiribati and New Zealand, producing high winds, coastal storm surges, heavy rains and flooding in the affected countries. Vanuatu was worst hit; the storm killed 16 people and caused widespread damage.

In the years prior, researchers in Vanuatu had established and surveyed eight transects across three regions (leeward, windward and north-central) on Tanna Island, one of Vanuatu’s biggest islands. A transect is a straight line that cuts through a landscape so that standardised observations and measurements can be made. The eye of the cyclone crossed over the leeward and north-central sites, but not the windward site.

The rapid, post-cyclone recovery of forest canopy on Tanna Island.

Researchers monitored the transects post-TC Pam for nearly five years.

The team included researchers from University of Hawaii (UH) Mānoa, The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), the University of the South Pacific, the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and the Vanuatu Department of Forestry.

The results of the study, published in Science of the Total Environment, documented what the authors describe as a “remarkable recovery”.

“Compared to cyclones on other Pacific islands, Pam caused relatively low levels of severe damage to Tanna’s trees,” says UH Mānoa’s Tamara Ticktin, lead author on the paper. “In addition, there was high resprouting, widespread recruitment of most tree species present, and basically no spread of invasive species.”

The authors conclude that Tanna’s historical cyclone frequency likely

fostered the abundance of resilient species, and that Tanna’s stewardship practices appear to augment the capacity for resilience “because they promote a diversity of tree species, life histories and life stages; as well as a wide range of pathways for regeneration”.

“Tanna stewards value a wide range of species useful for food, medicines and building materials,” says ethnobotanist and co-author Michael Balick.

“And customary stewardship involves management practices that enhance the survival and reproduction of these species.”

For example, after a cyclone, people weed around native tree species and even plant them.

The study also showed that forests that had previously been subject to grazing by cattle and pigs were slower to recover and will likely be more vulnerable to future cyclones.

“This highlights the key role of forest management in building resilience to climate change,” says Gregory Plunkett, NYBG’s Director. “As the world comes to grips with more frequent extreme weather events, our work suggests that the right kind of human interaction can play a significant role in the survival of forests.” cosmosmagazine.com 19

Ultra-Luxury Antarctica Expedition Cruising Scenic Eclipse, The World’s First Discovery Yachts™, are designed to deliver the ultimate 6-star experience of a lifetime for only up to 200 guests. Guests will enjoy more time on shore to be immersed in the natural wonders of Antarctica and ultra-luxury on board.

Antarctic Peninsula S 65° 14’ W 64° 00’

King Penguins at St Andrews Bay

Discover Antarctica Your Way in 2024 to 2026

Scenic Neptune, Scenic Eclipse II, East Antarctica

Antarctica in Depth

Departs from Buenos Aires 11 Day Voyage

Soar Above & Dive Below

EZg[ZXi [dg i]Z Ðghi"i^bZ igVkZaaZg id Antarctica. Visit locations such as Deception Island and Paradise Bay, where you can witness breathtaking scenery teeming with wildlife like penguins, seals and whales.

Venture beyond the horizon in one of two state-of-the-art on board helicopters^.

Marvel at the bird’s-eye views over the bdhi bV\c^ÐXZci YZhi^cVi^dch! V perspective few will ever experience.

Dive below the surface for an immersive experience by submersible^, for unrivalled underwater views.

South Georgia & the Falkland Islands 22 Day Journey

Discover this pristine archipelago of more than 700 islands off the south-eastern tip of South America. Marvel at the abundant wildlife and world’s largest concentration of King penguins.

Beyond the Antarctic Circle 13 Day Voyage

Voyage to the rarely visited Marguerite Bay and enter Crystal Sound, a fairy-tale world of icebergs, snowclad mountains and the ill-fated Base W on Detaille Island.

East Antarctica & the Ross Sea

Departs from Hobart or New Zealand 24 Day Journey Witness mother nature’s majesty and unique wildlife, such as penguins, whales, Albatrosses and seals. From exploring the Ross Sea, deemed the most pristine ocean on Earth, to legendary explorers’ huts made immortal. The ultimate journey conveniently departures from Hobart or New Zealand.

Verandah Suite

The most all-inclusive ultra-luxury Antarctica voyage Close to 1:1 staff-to-guest-ratio, only up to 200 guests

Up to 10 dining experience, nine bars and lounges

Discovery Team of up to 20 experts‡

550m² Senses Spa# and dedicated yoga and Pilates studio

Unrivalled exploration by Zodiac, kayak and stand-up paddleboard All verandah suites with butler service

All tipping, hotel transfers and ^ciZgcVa Ñ^\]ih

All meals and premium beverages+

Complimentary parka and water bottle

#Spa treatments at additional cost. ^Flights on board two helicopters, helicopter experiences and submersible at additional cost, subject to regulatory approval, availability, weight restrictions, medical approval and weather and ice conditions.

Gain a behind the scenes view of the World’s First Discovery Yacht’s world-class crew as they deliver exceptional experiences in Antarctica and the Americas.

Watch all 10 episodes on our Scenic YouTube channel.

Visit scenic.com.au, call 138 128 or contact your local Travel Advisor

SPACE

Webb watch: JWST zooms in on distant starburst i

A GALAXY 12 MILLION light-years from Earth is brimming with new stars, NASA scientists have found.

Pointing the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at a patch of space in the constellation Ursa Major, they discovered a galaxy where new stars are blooming at 10 times the rate of the Milky Way. This star factory is called Messier 82 (M82) and has long been considered a prototype starburst galaxy. Like many of JWST’s assignments, M82 has been previously observed using both the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes.

Using its onboard Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), JWST peered into the galaxy’s centre to study the conditions that foster star formation. The lens cut through layers

stars and star clusters and the elements surrounding them, such as hydrogen and iron.

It was also able to see long swirling patterns of material extending from the galaxy’s core – a galactic wind. The researchers sought to understand how this product of mass star formation is created and propelled out from the galactic plane.

Using NIRCam to track polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons – basically, specks of space dust carried through this wind – the research group was able to observe its journey out from the star-forming galactic centre.

“M82 has garnered a variety of observations over the years because it can be considered as the prototypical starburst galaxy,” says Alberto Bolatto, a professor in

department and leader of the study. “It was unexpected to see the PAH [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon] emission resemble ionised gas. PAHs are not supposed to live very long when exposed to such a strong radiation field, so perhaps they are being replenished all the time. It challenges our theories and shows us that further investigation is required.”

The study team will shortly have detailed spectroscopic data and larger-scale images of M82’s wind patterns for analysis.

Bolatto expects this to enable calculations of the galaxy’s age and the environment of the early universe.

“Webb’s observation of M82, a target closer to us, is a reminder that the telescope excels at studying galaxies at all distances,”

of dust and gas to clearly spot emerging

the University of Maryland’s astronomy

he says.

22 COSMOS MAGAZINE

NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI, A. BOLATTO (UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND)

New clarity on stellar nurseries at the heart of the Cigar Galaxy.

DIGEST

BIOLOGY NATURE

HONGHUI ZHANG

With their high nutritional value and low environmental impact, insects are an alternative to animal proteins.

Researchers believe understanding their flavour profiles is essential to create insect-based food products that can overcome psychological barriers.

“If there are desirable flavours, scientists can investigate ways to promote their formation, and if there are undesirable flavours, they can find ways to eliminate or mask these odours,” says Changqi Liu, from San Diego State University in the US. Liu and his team analysed the odour profiles of four edible ant species: the chicatana ant, common black ant, spiny ant and weaver ant.

Black ants have a pungent, acidic and vinegary smell, primarily because of the high content of formic acid secreted from their venom glands, while chicatana ants’ predominant smell was nutty, woody,and fatty, which the researchers attribute to the presence of aldehydes and pyrazines.

How the brain begins to create memories i

The chemistry behind the many flavours of edible ants

Direction matters.

RESEARCHERS HAVE witnessed a new phenomenon in the brain as humans store memories, shedding light on the how the brain coordinates its many regions and billions of neurons.

The team recorded participants’ brain activity while they performed tasks that required memorising and recalling lists of words or letters.

“Broadly, we found that waves tended to move from the back of the brain to the front while patients were putting something into their memory,” says Uma R. Mohan, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institutes of Health in the US. “When patients were later searching to recall the same information, those waves moved in the opposite direction, from the front towards the back of the brain.”

Brain waves are electrical oscillations that represent patterns of neural

Travelling wave propagation directions reveal how the brain quickly coordinates activity and shares information across multiple regions.

activity. Travelling waves spread out across the cerebral cortex – the outermost layer that supports higher cognitive processing – not unlike ripples on a pond.

“We’re looking at neural oscillations not as independent stationary things but as things that are constantly and spontaneously moving across the brain in a dynamic way,” Mohan says.

This way of understanding brain waves offers a pathway to explaining how the brain quickly coordinates activity and shares information across multiple regions. The research is published in Nature Human Behaviour. cosmosmagazine.com 23

DIGEST

First database of Indigenous Australian message sticks i New resource may answer old questions.

THE FOUNDER OF a rich database of Indigenous Australian message sticks believes it showcases historic communication techniques of First Nations people.

Piers Kelly, a linguistic anthropologist at The University of New England, and his team created the Australian Message Stick Database (AMSD), a digital repository of more than 1500 Indigenous Australian message sticks (and their associated metadata) in collections around the world.

These wooden objects were once widely used to facilitate long-distance communication. The practise was transformed by colonisation, though message sticks were still used in Western Arnhem Land up until the 1970s.

“It’s not accurate to say ‘message sticks are just like Western literacy’,” Kelly says. “They’re addressing a different kind of problem that written practice isn’t adapted for … Message sticks aren’t writing but some of them can do things very similar to writing: convey accurate information over time and distance.”

He adds that early literature makes assumptions about the message sticks 24 COSMOS MAGAZINE

A message stick sent by Nani in Goodooga to Pilay at Tinnenburra in 1897, to coordinate a ceremony between two tribes on the Cudnappa River.

being an aid to memory. “Nineteenth century scholars were very interested in the possibility that they represented language, but they don’t,” he says. “My argument is that comparing message sticks to writing is the wrong way to approach it. They’re doing social coordination, validation, reinforcement and encoding of non-linguistic information.”

Kelly’s research defines message sticks as “a coherent system of longdistance communication that connected Australia’s First Nations across geographical, cultural, and linguistic space”.

“Over time, I’ve become less convinced that message sticks are about memory and are much more about social coordination.

“What is reinforced is the validity of the message and not so much the memory of the messenger.”

Kelly says the sticks solve problems with communicating over long distances, and also let “people in and out of [their] territory without undermining [their] territorial integrity”.

“Certain sticks … depict the route of the messenger rather than the content of the message [which] suggests a passport-like function. Other message sticks have a ‘signature’ of the sender on them to validate who it came from.”

The AMSD collects every known observation or description of the sticks surviving in archives, collections, and museums. It currently has 1,572 entries, including photographs and sketches.

Kelly and his team are engaged in talks with the Indigenous Data Network “to ensure that the data remains available and under Indigenous control for future generations”.

THE BRITISH MUSEUM / DR PIERS KELLY

This message stick, from the British Museum collection, is incised with designs including images of a ship, a house, trees and topographic features.

DISCOVERY

Inclusive sport?

We’re making it happen.

Sport that inspires. Sport that is safe. Sport that is inclusive.

That’s what drives our research at Victoria University (VU).

International overhauls of sports uniforms for women and girls, spotlighting the lack of women coaches and off icials, national campaigns exposing violence and abuse in sport – our work is challenging norms, shifting behaviours, and removing real barriers.

It matters at every level. From professional athletes to girls playing school sport or training in community clubs.

Sport is for all and our research is working to change lives.

And we’re only getting started.

Discover more about our research with impact

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

What happened i

NEXT?

In this series, we follow up on some of our favourite research projects to see where they went next. This time, Lauren Fuge revisits her adventure to the dizzying heights of Tasmania’s tall forests.

26 COSMOS MAGAZINE

IT’S BEEN 18 MONTHS since I climbed the biggest blue gum in the universe in the Grove of Giants in southern lutruwita/Tasmania. My arboreal journey into Lathamus Keep was made possible by canopy scientist Jen Sanger, photographer Steve Pearce and their crew at the non-profit The Tree Projects, whose work I wrote about in our March 2023 issue.

At the time, the Grove of Giants was slated to be logged, but by July 2023 it had been taken off the year’s logging schedule. Since then, The Tree Projects has been working hard to study these forests and protect them long-term – and when I called up Sanger and Pearce (on a day they weren’t out climbing), they’d just had a big win.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve been lobbying Sustainable Timber Tasmania to update their giant tree policy,” Sanger says. “Their old policy was a bit ridiculous. A giant tree was anything

THE TREE PROJECTS

PLAY VIDEO

As well as attending international conferences to teach climbing (above), The Tree Projects is also working with researchers to install cameras high up in the canopies of Tasmania’s eucalypt forests (left).

These cameras take photos every 10 minutes to measure changes in the leaf’s petiole (stalk) size as it swells and contracts due to water use. This will help us understand how trees respond to drought.

over 85 metres tall … [or] over 280 cubic metres in volume. That’s a huge tree, and it’s also really hard to measure.”

For context, this policy would not protect any living tree on the Australian mainland.

In recent months, Sanger and Pearce have spent a lot of time in Sustainable Timber Tasmania’s (STT) boardroom to present research on other giant tree policies around the world and hash out a new policy for Tasmania. And it paid off. In March, STT announced it will protect any tree more than four metres in diameter (about 12 metres in circumference).

“It makes it a lot easier to measure, but it also includes potentially thousands of trees across the logging area,” Sanger says. “With those protections, there is meant to be 100-metre radius buffer around each tree. So that could potentially be thousands of hectares of forest saved, which is a really big win … We’re stoked.”

Pearce explains that this change has greatly broadened the definition of a giant tree. “We would laugh, before, that 12 metres [in circumference] was a medium tree,” he says. “I would have walked past a 12-metre tree and not even thought twice about it.”

While the new policy won’t save hundreds of hectares of continuous forest, it will protect smaller, more fragmented patches of remnant forest.

“We’re basically going a very long way – in tall, wet eucalypt forests – to ending old-growth logging,” Pearce says.

So what does this mean for Lathamus Keep?

“If you look at the Grove of Giants, under the old policy, there were about 13 trees that met the definition of a giant,” Sanger says. “Now there’s about 150 trees that meet that definition.”

With the 100-metre buffer, the whole grove should become an informal reserve.

“It’s the best level of reserve that we could hope for, for such a small area,” Sanger says.

In the meantime, their scientific work is also forging ahead. Sanger is busy studying the role of forest biomass in proposed future hydrogen plants, while Pearce is working with scientists at the University of Tasmania to install tiny cameras in the canopy (see caption).

The Tree Projects has also gone further afield. In May, Pearce jetted off to West Africa with two professional tree climbing instructors. They spent a week teaching climbing skills to local scientists at Ghana’s University of Energy and Natural Resources, then a few days out in tropical rainforest to apply their new skills, conducting an epiphyte diversity survey.

“It’s actually a pretty big deal,” Pearce says. “Most of their canopy science has been conducted by Western scientists, and the tree climbing skills and equipment leave with the scientists.”

Now, the university will become an independent research hub in West Africa, able to train other local researchers and spread climbing skills through the scientific community.

“We were able to secure a whole bunch of climbing equipment to take over and donate to the university,” Pearce adds. “They’ll have the training but also the A-grade equipment to carry out their research with.”

To stay tuned into future tree science, check out thetreeprojects.com. cosmosmagazine.com 27

PLAY VIDEO

Advanced materials scientist Maria Forsyth is trying to build the battery of the future.

Maria Forsyth with Deakin University Vice-Chancellor Professor Iain Martin (left) and Professor Patrick Howlett (right) at the university’s Battery Research and Innovation Hub in Burwood, Victoria.

28 COSMOS MAGAZINE

W

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY

Sustainable sodium

hen I was doing my PhD, there was no such thing as a lithium-ion battery. The first was commercialised in 1992, and for the next two decades or so, it was all about lithium.

My work was always parallel to that.

For the last 30 years I’ve been investigating how we can improve the chemistry of all sorts of batteries, capacitors, fuel cells and solar cells. These are hugely important for the transition to clean energy, but we’ve got to be careful that they don’t create new problems. It’s important to make these devices safer, to make them last longer and to get more energy out of them.

The technologies we’re creating must also be sustainable, and designed for recycling in a circular economy.

For example, in Australia we’re blessed with a lot of spodumene – a mineral from which we extract lithium. But the majority of lithium comes from the salt lakes of South America, where mining has an environmental impact.

So for me, the “next big thing” is sodium. It’s in seawater; it’s everywhere.

Sodium batteries aren’t going to replace lithium, but because of the demand for more and more energy, we’re going to need to look at multiple technologies.

NEXT BIG THING

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY

Most types of modern batteries work on the same principles. It’s the materials that are different. Then it comes down to how much voltage you can get out of the battery, how much it weighs and its capacity – how much energy you get per kilogram, or per volume.

Lithium is one of the lightest elements on the periodic table and also one of the most energetic. Sodium is heavier and slightly less energetic, so you’re not going to have the same amount of energy coming out of a sodium battery as you get out of the same-sized lithium battery.

You’re not going to drive a car 1000 kilometres on a sodium battery just yet, and you’re probably not going to fly aeroplanes on sodium.

But sodium uses the same manufacturing process as lithium: it has very similar chemistry and it’s far more sustainable. In a lithium battery, the electrode on the anode side is graphite, a form of carbon.

This is something we mine – it’s a critical mineral, which means it’s expensive.

The beauty of sodium is that you can use a much cheaper form of carbon called hard carbon. My colleagues and I are currently working in the lab on producing hard carbon using waste biomass.

One example: we’re carbonising waste textiles and turning them into different carbons with different materials properties, different porosity and different surface chemistry. We’re also using the biochars that you get from bio solids.

Basically, what comes out of our bodies gets turned into biochar, which we then treat and refine and characterise. We control the porosity, the chemistry on surface

As we transition to net zero, we’ve got to be careful that the technologies we develop don’t create new problems.

and the structure, and that becomes the electrode in a battery. This is obviously more sustainable.

Sodium is what makes the juice, but every material that we combine in the battery has to work efficiently. To this end we’re also working on the cathode material. This is the other end of the battery, and it is the structure that allows sodium to insert in and out as you charge and discharge your battery. For example, the sodium goes into your hard carbon electrodes during charge, and then it goes into the other electrode (the cathode) during discharge. When this happens, the sodium travels through the electrolyte, which can be a liquid, a solid or a polymer.

But what’s really important is the interface between those components.

When that material is touched during the charge and discharge process, chemistry happens. And while that chemistry has to allow ions through, it also has to protect you from reactions that you don’t want to happen, because those ions will lose energy. We call these “parasitic” reactions, because they destroy the life of the battery.

The magic comes in designing each of these materials – the hard carbon anode, the cathode and the electrolyte – and controlling the reaction that occurs between them at that interface.

My first-ever research project in 1990 was on sodium electrolytes, but then when lithium hit the world, everyone started working on it.

We’re now seeing companies in China making sodium-ion batteries to demonstrate them in smaller vehicles. Here at Deakin University, with the help of the Victorian government, I’ve helped establish Australia’s first pre-commercial prototyping facility, where we go from the materials through to the components that go into a battery cell.

I’m passionate about translating this technology out of the lab to commercialise sodium batteries – and seeing safer, sustainable batteries become the next big thing.

PROFESSOR MARIA FORSYTH is a world leader in developing advanced materials for energy technologies. She is the Chief Scientist, Energy Storage CRC and an Alfred Deakin Professorial Fellow at Deakin University.

cosmosmagazine.com 29

What lies 30 COSMOS MAGAZINE

CURES FROM THE DEEP

JIM BEAUDOIN / UNSPLASH

Earth’s surface is 70% water, but this number doesn’t begin to explain the vastness of the ecosystems beneath the waterline. Drew Rooke dives into the groundbreaking research that is deriving medicines from the depths to transform our lives on land.

beneath

O

n 5 June 1981, the US Center for Disease Control published an article in its regular newsletter, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, which described a strange cluster of sudden cases of pneumonia in Los Angeles. All of the patients were young gay men who did not know each other, had no known common contacts and no knowledge of sexual partners who had similar illnesses. Despite courses of treatment, two of the men had already died and the other three remained seriously ill and died shortly after the article was published.

“Pneumocystis pneumonia in the United States is almost exclusively limited to severely immunosuppressed patients,” the editorial note read. “The occurrence of pneumocystosis in these five previously healthy individuals without a clinically apparent underlying immunodeficiency is unusual.”

This article marked the first official reporting of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. By the end of the 1980s, more than 100,000 people in the United States alone had died from AIDS and it was the leading cause of death among young adults – especially men aged between 25 and 44 years old.

The severity of the situation triggered an intense effort to develop a medicine to treat HIV/AIDS. As part of this push, scientists investigated the potential of abandoned drugs that had been developed decades earlier for other

Altitude 8,333 5,000

Water level

0

-6,430

metres

PLAY VIDEO

32 COSMOS MAGAZINE

Shirley Pomponi (above and opposite), marine biotechnologist at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute

We often think of the ocean as homogeneous, but beneath the surface are 361 million sq. km of complex geography: mountain ranges and valleys, plateaus and volcanoes. This NASA visualisation ‘drains’ the ocean to reveal some of these vast features.

illnesses but had been shelved because they were ultimately ineffective.

Azidothymidine was one such drug. Also known as AZT and belonging to a class of drugs called nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, it had first been developed in 1964 as a possible treatment for cancer. In 1985, scientists involved in a screening program run by the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, US, to identify possible medicines for the deadly new virus discovered that AZT suppressed HIV replication without damaging normal cells.

Shortly afterwards, a British pharmaceutical company called Burroughs Wellcome funded a clinical trial to evaluate the drug in people with AIDS. The results offered a twinkle of hope: although it had adverse side effects, including severe intestinal problems, damage to the immune system, nausea, vomiting and headaches, AZT did significantly decrease the fatality rate.

In March 1987, AZT became the first drug to gain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating AIDS. Further clinical trials followed, testing different doses to attempt to reduce the side effects. One of these trials – known as ACTG 019 – proved particularly pivotal: it showed that AZT effectively delayed the onset of AIDS in asymptomatic people with HIV.

LEFT: NOAA. BELOW: NASA SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO (NSVS).

CURES FROM THE DEEP

Since then, AZT has radically improved and prolonged the lives of countless people with HIV; decades later, the drug remains a common component of a HIV patient’s treatment plan. But what many people might not know is its oceanic, spongey origin – which is also the source of many other lifesaving drugs in use today.

F

or millennia, humans have explored the natural world and collected resources from it, including medicines. Most of these medicines have come from land-based organisms; perhaps the most famous examples are penicillin – first discovered from bread mould in 1928 – and aspirin, which was first isolated from the willow tree.

But recently, scientific attention in this field has also turned to the ocean and the creatures that reside in it.

In the last 40 years, more than 30,000 new chemicals have been discovered from marine-based species including microbes, algae, sponges and bryozoans. According to a 2016 study in the journal Biomolecules & Therapeutics, these chemicals “are often characterised by structural novelty, complexity, and diversity”.

Marine sponges in particular have proved to be an especially rich source of new biochemical compounds.

There are nearly 10,000 known species of sponges worldwide (for comparison around 6,400 extant species of mammals have been described). They’re among the oldest lineages of animals on the planet, with research published in Nature in 2021 indicating they first emerged on Earth nearly 900 million years ago – a time when the planet was populated by simple multicellular organisms like algae.

Found at all depths in the ocean, they can form vast gardens that can be several hundreds of years old, cycle huge amounts of carbon and store a record of Earth’s climatic history. In February 2024, for example, a study published in Nature Climate Change used 300 years of ocean temperature records contained in marine sponges to show that global warming has increased by 0.5°C more than previous estimates.

Being such ancient creatures, marine sponges lack complex organs and tissues. Most survive by filter feeding, actively pumping large quantities of water through their porous body tissue to capture microscopic, organic organisms – although some, such as the harp-like Chondrocladia lyra, are carnivorous and capture

PLAY VIDEO

prey with barbed hooks that cover their ghostly, branching limbs.

But their survival is also aided by something else. Because sponges are immobile and cannot flee or attack predators, they have evolved to protect themselves by producing novel toxic chemical compounds, which also enable them to thrive in some of the most extreme and inhospitable places on Earth. In fact, every year, more than 200 new chemicals are discovered just from sea sponges.

One scientist who has discovered many of these new chemicals is Shirley Pomponi. A self-described “medical sponge hunter”, Pomponi is a research professor and the executive director of the Cooperative Institute for Ocean Exploration, Research, and Technology at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. She has spent nearly 40 years collecting sea sponges from around the world and analysing their chemistry in search of new medicines.

Pomponi says she “got hooked” on marine biology in college. In 1984, soon after she had completed her PhD in biological oceanography, she received a call from the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, which had just founded a marine drug discovery program and needed someone to assist in collecting and identifying sponges and other marine organisms.

“A lot of chemicals that showed promising medicinal properties were coming from sponges, and they really wanted to get a feel for what these sponges were and refine the sample acquisition program,” she says.

With her previous experience studying sea sponge ecology, Pomponi was an ideal person for the job – and was soon leading the Institute’s acquisition program. Her work is global in scope and has taken her to some of the most biodiverse

FAU HARBOR BRANCH

“A lot of chemicals that showed promising medicinal properties were coming from sponges”

cosmosmagazine.com 33

CURES FROM THE DEEP

Sponge salves Marine sponges are a rich source of novel bioactive compounds that have produced new pharmaceuticals. Some tackle cancer, such as 1, which led to the chemotherapy drug trabectedin; 3, which produces chemicals that can kill liver cancer cells; and 5, which contains an alkaloid shown to inhibit cervical cancer cells. Meanwhile, 2 and 6 produce compounds with antibacterial and antifungal activities, and a nucleoside from 4 led to the breakthrough HIV drug AZT.

1. Ecteinascidia turbinata

2. Amphimedon compressa

3. Neopetrosia exigua

4. Tectitethya crypta

5. Acanthostrongylophora ingens

6. Tethya aurantium

FAR LEFT: NSVS. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: GLOBAL SEAFOOD ALLIANCE. SHIRLEY POMPONI. UNCW SPONGE GUIDE. ED BIERMAN / WIKIMEDIA. INATURALIST. BEESOO R, BHAGOOLI R, BAHORUN T, NEERGHEEN VS.

regions of the planet, including the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo Reef in the late 1980s. “That was a really successful trip,” she says. “We were looking at not only the tropical organisms, but more warm temperate ones as well.”

According to Pomponi, her work is underpinned by a simple concept: “find and grind”.

First, she searches for organisms that are in some way unusual – either because of their shape, colour or size – which can be an indication of a novel chemical composition. These organisms are not confined to one region of the ocean; rather, they are spread throughout it and at various depths, from the shallows to several kilometres underwater.

To collect those living in shallow waters, Pomponi and her colleagues will dive using SCUBA gear. For those residing in the dark depths, they now use remotely operated submersibles; however, up until 2011 they used human-operated ones.

Back in the lab, Pomponi will then make an extract of a sample by grinding it up and mixing it in with a solvent. “And then we test that extract, which might contain dozens or even hundreds of different chemicals to see if it’ll, say, kill cancer cells or inhibit microbial growth.”

If the extract achieves this, the next step involves isolating which particular molecules are the active ones, using a series of chemical procedures such as spectroscopy or chromatography.

“And gradually,” Pomponi explains, “you narrow it down to a single molecule. And ideally, at the end of the day, it’s a novel molecule that’s never been discovered before with a novel biological activity, or it’s a known molecule that has hasn’t previously been reported to have that particular type of activity.”

PLAY VIDEO

With the active molecule identified, the process of identifying its exact mechanism of action begins.

“You have to figure out: how does the chemical actually work – how does it kill cancer cells, for example? Because it’s not good enough just to say that it kills cells; you have to be way more specific than that.”

A

n oft-quoted fact about the ocean is that it covers more than 70% of Earth’s surface, or roughly 361 million square kilometres. But this only gives a superficial sense of the scale of what marine biologist Rachel Carson once called “that great mother of life”, for it explains very little of the vast world beneath the waterline.

That world is one which we are still – despite decades of research and huge leaps in technology – in the nascent stages of perceiving, let alone understanding. It harbours 99% of all living space on the planet, more than three quarters of which has never been mapped, explored or observed by humans.

What we do know is that the ocean is far from being physically featureless. It contains huge volcanoes, seamounts, canyons, trenches, abyssal plains and mountain ranges that dwarf many of those found above the waterline. In fact, it’s home to the biggest mountain range on Earth: the mid-ocean ridge,

Currents – like those of the Atlantic (above and opposite) – are driven primarily by wind at the surface and by water density differences deep below. These immense conveyor belts regulate global climate.

Without them, land temperatures would be far more extreme.

which stretches 65,000km. Its average depth is roughly 3,800m – four times deeper than the average land elevation is high – and its deepest point, the Mariana Trench, east of the Philippines, is nearly 11,000m deep, into which Mount Everest would fit with almost two kilometres to spare.

This space does not contain a monoculture, even though it might seem like it from our landbased vantage point. Within it are five distinct zones of life, which are defined by the amount of sunlight that reaches them. The most extreme – the Hadal zone, from 6,000m below – is characterised by complete darkness, freezing temperatures and crushing pressure more than 1,000 times higher than at the surface.

In all of these zones live an array of strange and wonderful species – 91% of which scientists estimate are yet to be classified.

And among the most strange and wonderful forms of life that exist down there are the sponges.

NSVS

“More than three quarters of the ocean has never been mapped, explored or observed”

I

t was a German-American chemist from Yale University named Werner Bergmann who – quite accidentally – pioneered scientific interest into Earth’s underwater pharmacy nearly 80 years ago.

In the autumn of 1945, Bergmann – who had a stern, serious face punctuated by a toothbrush moustache that overshadowed his small, thin mouth – travelled to Florida Keys, where he cosmosmagazine.com 35

found a previously undescribed sea sponge in shallow waters, which was eventually taxonomised as Tectitethya crypta.

Within a few hours of collecting samples, he preserved them in a solution of seawater and formalin, then dried them in a vacuum oven. Bergmann was looking for fat molecules called sterols which he knew play a key role in biological systems, but four years passed before he investigated his samples for them.

When he did, he found something quite different – and very strange.

When he placed the samples in boiling acetone, a “rather copious amount of a nicely crystalline material” began to form in the flammable, pungent liquid. He later showed it to be a nucleoside, but, oddly, not one of the four types that were already known (and would later be found to form the structure of DNA): thymidine, cytidine, guanosine and adenosine. While it resembled thymidine in structure, this new compound, instead of being linked in a chain with other nucleosides, was all alone.

As a testament to both the organisms from which it was derived and the nucleoside it resembled, Bergmann named this compound spongothymidine. He also isolated from this sponge two other previously unknown

nucleosides: spongouridine and spongosine.

Bergmann got to work synthesising these “unusual nucleosides”, which ultimately paved the way for the release in 1969 of cytarabine – a drug that blocks DNA replication in acute leukaemia and lymphoma tumours, effectively killing them. A synthetic nucleoside modelled after spongothymidine, cytarabine was the first-ever marine-derived medical drug. It is still used to treat leukaemia patients, though it does come with a number of side effects, including gastrointestinal disorders, pneumonia and confusion.

After the approval of cytarabine, research in the field of marine pharmacology “lapsed for a while”, according to Pomponi. But in the mid-1980s, “everything started up again” – with the benefit of increased funding from large pharmaceutical companies like Merck.

This led to the development of new drugs that were modelled after the strange nucleosides Bergmann found within Tectitethya crypta.

One of these drugs was the HIV/AIDs treatment, AZT. Another was aciclovir – the first antiviral medication. Discovered in 1984, it was approved for the treatment of herpes, chickenpox and shingles seven years later and is now considered by the World Health Organization to be an “essential medicine”.

36 COSMOS MAGAZINE

NSVS

“These ‘unusual nucleosides’ ultimately paved the way for the release in 1969 of cytarabine”

NSVS

PLAY VIDEO

In the years since, marine pharmacology research has continued. Trabectedin – which was isolated from Ecteinascidia turbinata, a sea squirt species that lives on corals in the Mediterranean – is a chemotherapy drug first approved for use by the European Union (EU) in 2007 and eight years later by the FDA. The FDA has also approved eribulin mesylate: a medication used in the treatment of patients with breast cancer. It’s a synthetic analogue of the molecule halichondrin B, which is produced by dinoflagellates that live symbiotically in marine sponges.

In October 2023, a team from the University of Mauritius, led by Rima Beesoo, published the results of their study into the sponge Neopetrosia exigua.

Collected from coral reefs near Amber Island off the northeast shore of Mauritius, the sponge was transferred to the lab under seawater, cleaned

Barotropic or surface tides (above) are very long-period waves that move across the globe in response to the forces of the Sun and Moon.

They produce internal tides as water moves up and down steep topography (below).

of debris and frozen at minus 80°C, before being ground into a powder and soaked in solvent to obtain different chemical extracts. The extracts were then tested at the University of Edinburgh for their efficacy in fighting human cancer cells.

The results were enormously promising.

One particular extract not only killed liver cancer cells at very low doses by activating various proteins that led to their breakdown, but it also displayed very low toxicity towards normal cells. Many more marine-derived drugs are currently in clinical trials.

I

PLAY VIDEO

n May 2023, a team of researchers led by Muriel Rabone, a deep-sea ecologist at the Natural History Museum in London, published a landmark paper in Current Biology: “How many metazoan species live in the world’s largest mineral exploration region?”

The region in question is the ClarionClipperton Zone (CCZ), which spans approximately six million sq. km – about twice the size of India. It lies in the Pacific cosmosmagazine.com 37

between Hawai‘i, Kiribati and Mexico and is the focus of deep-sea mining explorations due to the abundance of potato-sized nodules – found in mud 4,000 to 6,000 metres below the surface – that are rich in minerals critical for the renewable energy transition, like nickel, cobalt and copper.

Rabone and her fellow authors said the paper represented the “first comprehensive synthesis” of biodiversity within “the largest ecosystem on our planet” on “the eve of possible large-scale mining operations” (currently, there are 17 contracts for mineral exploration covering more than one million sq. km).

They parsed through more than 100,000 records of creatures found in the CCZ gathered from numerous deepsea research cruises, and found evidence for 5,578 different species, with as many as 92% being entirely new to science.

But, according to Rabone, the paper “barely scratches the surface” of the biodiversity found in the CCZ. Indeed, she believes there could be up to 8,000 more unknown species located there.

And even of those species that have been identified, our knowledge of them is extremely limited.

“We don’t know about their ecology or their functional role,” she says, “and we certainly don’t know about their chemistry.”

Based on what is already known about marine organisms like sponges, however, there is good reason to believe that the chemistry of at least some of those found in the CCZ will be novel – and so, according to Rabone, could potentially be the foundation of “lifesaving, blockbuster drugs”. Deep-sea mining poses a serious threat to these potential discoveries. “If we don’t protect [the CCZ], what are we potentially losing?

It’s a difficult question to answer, but one we will never answer if we aren’t looking at potential applications of the organisms found there.”

According to Pomponi, deep-sea mining and trawling are the “biggest threats to the biodiversity of the deep sea” – and by extension to the potential development of new, marine-based drugs that could help in the fight not just against cancer but also deadly diseases that, over time, become resistant to antibiotics. As Rabone points out: “There are predictions that in 20 to 40 years’ time, bacteria diseases are going to be number one killer because of antimicrobial resistance.” (See ‘Rebelling against resistance’, Issue 100.)

Deep-sea mining is just one of the challenges affecting the development of new marine-based drugs. Another is the sustainable supply of sponges and other oceanic organisms. Part of this problem is that, as Pomponi says,

NSVS

“We don’t know about their ecology … and we certainly don’t know about their chemistry.”

CURES FROM THE DEEP

FROM TOP LEFT: ESRI / NASA. SMARTEX / NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM / NOAA.

Deep-sea species on display

“deep-water sponges are very difficult to access”.

But in addition to this, it’s often necessary to collect a huge amount of sponge samples to conduct useful experiments.

Indeed, scientists were only able to produce 300 milligrams of halichondrin B from the one tonne of a rare, deep-water sponge they collected.

As the 2016 paper in Biomolecules & Therapeutics said: “This very low yield did not allow the sustainable isolation of halichondrin B.” In the case of halichondrin, this problem was solved by chemical synthesis in 1992. For others, it has been solved with aquaculture. But Pomponi is working on another solution: in vitro cell development.

“How can we get cells from these sponges that produce chemicals that have human health applications and grow those cells in the laboratory, so we don’t have to keep going back and collecting from the natural environment?” she asks.

Her process is to take small fragments of cells from sponges and then cryopreserve them so they stay alive, before thawing and attempting to grow them in the lab – a process she says can be applied to other marine organisms as well.

Four years ago, she made a “big breakthrough” on this front when she and colleagues grew sponge cells in culture for the first time.

“It took me 30 years to successfully do it. And we just got a grant from the [EU] to scale up production for anti-cancer compounds.”

O

ur standard world maps centre the land.

Looking at them, we have our land-bias reinforced; we see the continents fringed by segregated oceans, which exist almost in the background. But one map flips this representation.

Known as the Spilhaus projection, it was developed by South African-American

The Clarion-Clipperton Zone – a region of the Pacific between Hawai‘i and Mexico – is a treasure trove of biodiversity. In 2023, scientists discovered more than 5,000 deep-sea species there, from the ‘gummy squirrel’ (Psychropotes longicauda, top left) to strange new sea cucumbers (Oneirophanta mutabilis, middle right) to worms, corals, glass sponges and members of the spider family.

Author Arthur C. Clarke once wrote: “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it’s quite clearly Ocean.”

The Spilhaus projection (above) would have been more like Thrillhaus for Clarke, as it visualises the oceans as a single, continuous body of water, with Antarctica at the heart. He may have been similarly taken with the image opposite, which shows seasurface chlorophyll – a proxy for phytoplankton, the microscopic algae on which virtually every marine food web depends.

geophysicist and oceanographer Athelstan F. Spilhaus more than 80 years ago. It shows Antarctica floating in the middle of one continuous body of blue water – around which lay the other land masses, like an audience.

This map provides an opportunity to reimagine the ocean and see it for what it is – namely, the protagonist who plays the starring role in the grand narrative of life on Earth.

The research by Pomponi, Rabone and others offers a similar kind of opportunity. It expands how we think of the ocean, transforming it from simply a flat expanse stretching to the horizon into a multi-dimensional, multi-zonal space.

It’s an opportunity to appreciate just how vast and complex the ocean really is. But it also helps us appreciate something else about it as well: the seemingly infinite discoveries to be made underwater, including those hidden in the porous tissue of ancient marine animals which, quite literally, can save our lives.

DREW ROOKE is based in Sydney. His last story, on the rich history of climate modelling, appeared in Issue 102.

cosmosmagazine.com 39

K A A R TA D I J I N : NOONGAR KNOWLEDGE

INDIGENOUS INNOVATIONS

In the southwest of Western Australia, postgraduate science students are working with Indigenous families to put Noongar knowledge on the map, reports Cat Williams.

“W

estern technological societies continue to fail biodiversity,” Stephen Hopper tells me bluntly.

A world-renowned ecologist and professor of biodiversity at the University of Western Australia (UWA), Hopper believes that Indigenous land management practices could be the secret to saving Western Australia’s landscapes. This is why he works with Traditional Owners to combine Indigenous knowledge with scientific research.

He’s spent a decade on Merningar/Menang and Goreng Country near Kinjarling/Albany, WA. It’s a rugged landscape near the coast, with tall marri forests and large granite outcrops.

“You learn something different every time you have a yarn or go out bush,” he says. “I’m continually amazed by the generosity of Elders to share their knowledge.”

During the first few years, Hopper built relationships with Noongar Elders and families, including Merningar Elder Lynette Knapp, who has a very close relationship with the university.

“They’re my family,” she says. “It’s like going out bush with my family.”

Together, Hopper, Knapp and another UWA academic Alison Lullfitz supervise a number of postgraduate students in projects that document Noongar innovation and knowledge (kaartadijin, pronouced cart-a-jin), ranging from traditional burns to animal traps. These collaborations are combining Noongar kaartadijin and Western science to produce important new Australian research – and an exciting model of how to combine such different knowledge systems.

Noongar groups

Amangu

Bunbury

Nadji Nadji

Wilma

i and

rd Wa B il

elm

B alard

Whadjuk

Pindjarup

PHOTOTRIP / GETTY IMAGES

Perth

ong

Yuat

n

Kaneang

an

G or

Wudjari eng

Njunga Esperance

Mirningar Albany

cosmosmagazine.com 41

Fire is central to Noongar life and is the focus of one of Hopper, Knapp and Lullfitz’s PhD students, Ursula Rodrigues. With a background in ecology, Rodrigues is researching prescribed burning, as well as investigating storytelling in science.

Eliza Woods, a Goreng Noongar Elder, says it’s exciting to be involved in Rodrigues’ work.

“We haven’t had access to our land for many, many years; it’s only through UWA that we can do this,” she explains.

This is primarily due to government restrictions around fire in areas such as national parks, of which Merningar and Goreng Country have many, including the Stirling Ranges, Waychinicup and Porongurup.

There are plenty of published ecological studies using historical information to describe Aboriginal fire practices. But Rodrigues says there is little research working with contemporary Noongar people to understand current fire 42 COSMOS MAGAZINE

In May 2023 (above), Goreng Elders led a burn in a cleared and salt-affected area at Nowanup, near Boxwood Hill. This is the second season running that Elders and caretakers have regenerated Country and revitalised cultural knowledge through fire practice.

regimes, how they have adapted and how they might adapt in future.

Knapp, for example, believes that current Western burning practices do not help land management. “There’s absolutely no way you can just chuck fire sticks from the air,” she says.

Both Woods and Knapp say that traditional burns were seasonal to benefit the plants, as well as the humans and animals who ate them. “That was their supermarket,” Woods says.

Part of Rodrigues’ research is to assess “cultural resource species”, which includes bush foods. Noongar people are concerned that bush foods are less common than they were historically, so research is investigating whether smaller burns can increase the abundance of specific species.

For Rodrigues, a typical day in the field involves everyone rolling out onto Country: open land, with some thick bush. “There’s a couple of

URSULA RODRIGUES X2

FIRE

INDIGENOUS INNOVATIONS

Noongar seasons

o n of t h e yo u n g : Se as d r y a n d h ot h: ds

h

Aunty Eliza Woods (below) uses porrong bush to spread flames along the ground at an Elder-led burn in York Gum Woodland at Bush Heritage’s Red Moort Reserve, midway between Stirling Range and Fitzgerald River national parks.

Fe r t i

l it y s e a s o n: t cold e s t a n d w e t te s t i m e o f t h e ye a r

Across Australia, different language groups recognise different seasons, based on weather patterns, harvests and animal abundance.

In the Noongar season Birak, for example, rainfall decreases and

Se

a

ol

er

a n of d

as

so no f we a d u l t hoo d: ath er b egins

Se l o n g ason e r d of r y bir pe t ri o ts

Se

nce: sce o l e of e ad of t t i m on ttes year o he t

f no x so mi S e a i o n: s ay e pt c o nc rm d igh n a w et , w , c o l d r clea

4WDs, four or five Elders … maybe a few kids or grandkids.” She describes an army of people including land managers, land owners, rangers and researchers.

“We spend quite a bit of time deciding where [to burn] and just spending time in that place,” Rodrigues says. Before they burn, the team sets up camp and has a yarn. Rodrigues says they discuss the weather, how they will light the fire, and listen to the aspirations of the Elders for the burn. These Elders have burned plenty of Country before, and this knowledge was passed down from generations before them.

The yarn is important for Woods and her family to share stories. “We can train the young ones, teach them about the weather,” she says.

But before the yarn and the burn, there’s work to do for Rodrigues’ research. “We spend a couple of days doing some really in-depth … data collection at the site,” Rodrigues says. She developed a data-collection method combining fire behaviour and species composition into a simple format, so anyone can be involved. This means that Elders and Indigenous rangers can participate to gather data suitable for research standards. “It’s learning for us too,” Woods says.

At each burn site, they make a field herbarium: a sample of the plants growing in the area.

These are taken three times: before the fire, a week after and then in the following spring.

co

temperature rises; days mostly see morning easterly winds and afternoon ocean breezes. This is the fire season, as the winds create conditions that burn some patches while leaving others untouched.

FAR RIGHT: BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY

“ Tra d i t i o n a l b u rn s we r e s e a s o n a l to b e n efi t t h e p l a nt s , a s we l l a s t h e h u m a n s a n d a n i m a l s w h o ate t h e m ” “We measure the arrangement of biomass … at the surface level, and then move all the way up into the trees,” Rodrigues says. Biomass refers to the total amount of organisms living in the area.

When the team is ready to begin burning Country, it is always an Elder who lights the fire.

It’s too early in Rodrigues’ research to have data to confirm the burns’ success, but she says there is anecdotal evidence for landscapes recovering well from the fire. Rodrigues is looking at how to apply fire depending on what plants are present, and how fire could be applied at a metreby-metre scale, across the Noongar seasons – which hasn’t been done before.

Woods says “it’s healing” to participate, and is grateful to UWA for continuing connection to Country. “We keep telling our story [because] we want people out there to know our culture is alive and well,” she says. cosmosmagazine.com 43

44 COSMOS MAGAZINE

ANNA ISCHENKO

W AT E R

INDIGENOUS INNOVATIONS

For thousands of years, Indigenous people have found ingenious ways to collect and contain water. While many rivers flow on Merningar and Goreng Country, Noongar people also created gnaama boorna (pronounced narma borna), which translates to ‘waterhole in a tree’.

Anna Ischenko completed her master’s project last year on gnaama boorna, and describes one as “a tree that was horticulturally managed

by Noongar families … over generations”.

To create gnaama boorna, Noongar people would remove the middle shoot of a tree sapling, creating a circular depression. As the tree grew, they would make the hole bigger through fire or manual carving. “Basically, over generations, you have a tree with a hole in the middle that stores water,” Ischenko says. Funnels were also carved into side branches to direct rainwater into the waterhole.

During the research, Ischenko worked with Knapp to confirm the cultural and historical importance of the trees.

“Aunty Lynette [Knapp] … has driven this project. She was told about these trees by her father, and they hadn’t been recorded before – until she showed Steve [Hopper],” Ischenko says. “There’s evidence of these trees in early colonial diaries, but they haven’t been documented in any [scientific] literature.”

STEVE HOPPER

“Th ere’s evi d en ce of t h ese t rees i n ea rly co lo n i a l d i a ri es , b ut t h ey h aven’t b een d oc u m ented [by sc i en ce].”

The first part of Ischenko’s work was to identify and measure gnaama boorna in order to create a foundation of knowledge. Alongside Elders, she developed identification criteria to distinguish a gnaama boorna from a random hole in a tree – namely, that a gnaama boorna has an unusual branching structure, has been altered by people and has a basin-type hole in the trunk.

In the second stage of Ischenko’s research, she interviewed Elders about the most important factors that influence travel across Country. She found out these were distance to water, avoiding dense vegetation and avoiding sacred sites. From this information, Ischenko created a model to trace the most efficient path to travel across Country, and found that many known gnaama boorna lay along these routes. “The factors going into the model is what Indigenous people said was important, not necessarily what the literature presumes to be important,” she says.

A gnaama boorna (opposite) – tree waterhole – on the Kalgan River, which flows to sea near Kinjarling/Albany, shows the characteristic basin-type hole in the trunk. UWA researcher Anna Ischenko created a model that links gnaama boorna to travel routes – which Elder Lynette Knapp (above) said gave her “a feeling you just can’t explain”.

From the model, Ischenko walked some of these routes and found more gnaama boorna.

When Ischenko showed Elders her model, they thought it looked accurate based on their knowledge of Country, and could imagine where their ancestors may have walked. “It was a feeling you just can’t explain,” Knapp says. “Getting to see that map was really awesome.”

Gnaama boorna are mostly found in marri trees (Corymbia calophylla), which Ischenko says hold medicinal properties in the sap and bark that could seep into the water. There is anecdotal evidence that the water can reduce stomach aches and have anti-microbial effects, resulting in debate over whether gnaama boorna were primarily created for water or medicine.

The trees are at risk from being cut down or burnt in wildfires or prescribed burns. Ischenko, alongside Knapp, is working to get gnaama boorna trees on a cultural heritage tree register, to protect them for future generations. cosmosmagazine.com 45

FOOD

Another one of Hopper, Knapp and Lullfitz’s students is Susie Cramp, who recently submitted her PhD thesis investigating food sources on Noongar Country.

Cramp’s research documented granite lizard traps, which look like a slab of granite, around one metre long and held up by a smaller ‘prop’ stone, creating a space underneath for reptiles.

They have been constructed by Noongar people for thousands of years, to lure animals into a ‘safe’ spot, so reptiles could be caught and eaten, providing the necessary calories for survival.

According to Knapp, many people still use them.

stories. Cramp says that without Elders, she wouldn’t know anything about where to find the traps. “It’s their cultural knowledge that reveals so much,” she says.

Cramp measured 750 lizard traps across 100 granite outcrops over three years, and says she didn’t scratch the surface of how many traps are present. Aside from measuring the trap’s size, Cramp used cameras to identify seven reptile species using the traps for various behaviours, including basking and hiding from predators. Animals included karda (goanna, Varanus rosenbergi), noorn (tiger snake, Notechis scutatus) and yondi (king skink, Egernia kingii).

Like Rodrigues and Ischenko, Cramp’s fieldwork approach is different to Western science.

“The main activity is to set up chairs in a nice spot and making sure everyone’s got a cup of tea, and usually a biscuit,” she says.

They yarn about where they should research, and who should come along. Once everyone is out bush, they talk about lizard traps and share 46 COSMOS MAGAZINE

Knapp says that if the trap was built on a steep outcrop, it could even catch small wallabies.

Cramp’s research found no difference in the presence and behaviour of reptiles between traps and natural uplifted sheets of granite, which are a well-established reptile habitat. These data are yet to be published, but the study provides the first evidence that the traps – artificially created

ANDREW PEACOCK / GETTY IMAGES

“ Th ey ’r e c u l t u ra l l y ve r y i m p o r t a nt , a n d n ow t h e r e’s d at a to s h ow t h at t h ey ’r e e c o l o g i c a l l y ve r y i m p o r t a nt ”

INDIGENOUS INNOVATIONS

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SUSIE CRAMP. NOONGAR BOODJAR LANGUAGE CENTRE. HOPPER.

THE FUTURE OF NOONGAR KAARTADIJIN Granite lizard traps (above) targeted animals such as goannas (Varanus rosenbergi, opposite) and various snake species, including pythons (above top). Elder Gail Yorkshire (right, at left) has worked with UWA botany professor Steve Hopper (right) for many years.

environments – have now become natural habitat for reptiles, whether Noongar people are using them as traps or not. “They’re culturally very important, and now there’s data to show that they’re ecologically very important,” Cramp says.

Granite outcrops are sacred for Noongar people, but lizard traps are increasingly under threat. Rock crawling in cars had damaged 70% of surveyed traps, while rock stacking (where people create cairns) had altered 50% of surveyed traps. “It’s great that people are connecting with nature,” Cramp says, “but we need to make sure disturbances are minimised.”

Cramp says that the best way to conserve lizard traps is by management strategies led by Elders, along with minimising disturbances and removing the barriers for Traditional Owners who care for Country.

There is anecdotal evidence that like gnaama boorna, lizard traps are found along commonly travelled paths across Country. “They created the pathway for where we walked,” Knapp says.

The collaboration between Noongar Elders, their community and these postgraduate students has connected scientific and cultural knowledge to reach a common goal: restoring natural landscapes in a culturally sensitive way.

This work has built a significant knowledge base and demonstrated a successful method of scientifically combining Indigenous knowledge with Western science.

“We continue to be surprised and elated by the depth of insight and breadth of conservation actions inherent in traditional Noongar life in this global biodiversity hotspot,” Hopper says.

He, Knapp and Lullfitz will keep supervising postgraduate students at the University of Western Australia. They hope the research projects will lead to increasing levels of biodiversity on Merningar and Goreng Country, as well as demonstrate the importance of Noongar people’s knowledge.

“When we first started working with the girls down at the uni … they didn’t know much about Aboriginal survival techniques,” Knapp says. “Now, I can’t say anything in language in front of them! It’s been a brilliant journey.”

CAT WILLIAMS is a freelance science writer, interested in zoology, the environment and Indigenous knowledge.

cosmosmagazine.com 47

A

TALE OF

PLAY VIDEO

48 COSMOS MAGAZINE

TWO

DARK MATTER

Dark matter’s revelatory moment is near, writes Martin White.

AKIHIRO IKESHITA, MERO-TSK, INTERNATIONAL

PHYSICISTS

cosmosmagazine.com 49

50 COSMOS MAGAZINE

After first meeting while working on the Large Hadron Collider (bottom and opposite), Martin White (below, centre) and Emmanuel Moulin, at right, have formed a crack team of physicists – including Sabrina Einecke, at left – to hunt for elusive dark matter using highenergy gamma-ray telescopes.

underground where smashed protons reveal their secrets. It took us more than a decade to realise that looking both ways is the key to unravelling one of the biggest remaining mysteries in physics: dark matter.

When Emmanuel and I first met, no one had any idea what dark matter was made from. We resolved to one day combine our expertise to find out. Seventeen years later, feeling somewhat guilty about the long pause, I invited him to spend six months in Australia assembling a plan to finally end the season of darkness.

As I write this tale in 2024, we are on the verge of opening a new window to the heavens that will take us further than ever before, using one of the most powerful astronomical observatories ever built.

THE SEASON OF DARKNESS But first, let’s take a step back to shed light on what we currently know about dark matter.

Look up on a clear night, and you’ll be dazzled by the immense number of points and smudges that are comprised of stars, planets and more exotic objects such as nebulae. Indeed, Australia’s exceptionally clear skies gave rise to the first astronomy, created by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scientists.

Tens of thousands of years later, we now know that what you don’t see in the night sky is as compelling as the visible. A multitude of apparently disparate measurements – from observations of the motion of galaxies orbiting each other, to detailed measurements of the microwaves reaching us from the early universe – indicate that 85% of all matter consists of a mysterious form of “dark matter”, so-named because it does not interact directly with light. It is spread like a net of fibres through the universe, with galaxy clusters forming where the fibres intersect. For individual galaxies like our own Milky Way, we expect the dark matter to be concentrated in the middle of the galaxy, slowly becoming less and less prevalent towards the edge.

But what is dark matter?

In school, we learn the startling fact that everything around us is made of a small set of atomic elements, summarised conveniently in the periodic table. In fact, we even know what atoms are made of – particles called quarks and leptons, held together variously by three types of glue called the strong force, the weak force

TOP: MATTHEW BUGEJA. LEFT: R WHITE (MPIK) / K BERNLOHR (MPIK) / DESY

A

2023 poll to decide the most famous opening line of a book yielded “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, the first words of Charles Dickens’ Victorian blockbuster A Tale of Two Cities. Set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, the action zips along in customary Dickensian fashion, told almost exclusively in sentences longer than his own gargantuan beard.

In February of this year, a different tale of two cities commenced with the arrival in Adelaide of Parisian astronomer Emmanuel Moulin. Although this new yarn exchanges revolutionary politics for the less deadly terrain of high-energy astrophysics, it is otherwise eerily reminiscent of that famous opening sentence, taking in the age of wisdom, the season of light and the season of darkness.

Our tale truly begins in 2007, when I first met Emmanuel at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Particle physics is my bread and butter, and at the time, I was busy testing bits of the ATLAS experiment of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest underground particle accelerator that would go on to discover the Higgs boson in 2012. As an astrophysicist, Emmanuel was using high-energy radiation from space to map and understand some of the strangest regions of the cosmos. Both of us shared a passion for unravelling the fundamental laws of the universe.

However, Emmanuel was looking directly to heaven, whereas I was looking the other way – deep

DARK MATTER

CERN

“WE ARE ON THE VERGE OF OPENING A NEW WINDOW TO THE HEAVENS THAT WILL TAKE US FURTHER THAN BEFORE” and the electromagnetic force. The theory of this is now so well understood that it is known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics (see Issue 95).

Dark matter unfortunately does not appear in this Standard Model, but we do get some clues about its nature from current observations. For example, since all visible matter is made of a small set of particles, it seems natural to assume that dark matter is a new type of particle.

Furthermore, it is dark – which means that it can’t have electric charge (since anything with electric charge interacts directly with light). We also do not expect it to interact via the strong force, since that would give rise to behaviour that we have not observed.

Taken together, these properties are restrictive. We’re left with a particle that must only interact via gravity (which is how we discovered it in the first place), plus either via the weak force or via some new force similar in strength to the weak force. Finally, to get the shapes, sizes and types of galaxies that we see today, the dark matter particle must be fairly heavy and slow-moving, or it would have blasted galaxies apart as they tried to form in the early universe.

The hunt is thus on for what has been dubbed a WIMP – a Weakly-Interacting Massive Particle, the catch-all name for a hypothetical dark matter particle that interacts via gravity and some other force. To truly understand dark matter, we need to see the particle interacting through this other

cosmosmagazine.com 51

force and work out what sort of particle it is, in the same way we have classified the existing particles of the Standard Model. And for that, we must move beyond theory and into experiment.

THE AGE OF WISDOM Mathematical theories of dark matter have helped us invent three basic ways of discovering a dark matter particle. The first is to study it in the laboratory, using the Large Hadron Collider to smash protons together at near the speed of light. When the protons strike each other, they create a region of enormous energy density from which any other particle can emerge, provided the energy is high enough. Very occasionally, therefore, one expects to produce dark matter particles, and we could then precisely measure

WHAT IS CHERENKOV RADIATION?

the properties under perfect laboratory conditions. This is why Emmanuel and I first worked together all those years ago at CERN. The second way is to exploit the fact that as the Earth whizzes through space, it is constantly racing through and towards dark matter. If we put a tank of special material underground to shield it from other interactions, we should very occasionally see the direct interaction of dark matter particles with nuclei inside the detector.

This approach is popular with several large international teams, including those constructing the SABRE experiment at the Stawell gold mine in rural Victoria (see Issue 94).

Finally, and with the greatest of irony, one can search for dark matter using light. Although dark matter has no direct interaction with light,

Ȗ-ray enters the atmosphere

Primary Ȗ

Electromagnetic cascade

0.1 km2 “light pool” – a few photons per m2

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (c) – but this maximum speed only occurs in a perfect vacuum. Light travels slower through other mediums; in our atmosphere, for example, it travels at about 99.97% of c. So when a high-energy gamma ray hits the atmosphere and produces particles (electron-positron pairs), these actually travel faster than the speed of light in air, creating the light equivalent of a sonic boom. They trigger a cascade of secondary particles and Cherenkov radiation: optical photons that travel down to Earth in a blue cone, lasting only a few nanoseconds. The more energetic the original gamma ray, the bigger the shower of particles it creates, forming a cone of light spreading over large areas and requiring more widely spaced telescopes to detect.

52 COSMOS MAGAZINE

R WHITE (MPIK), K BERNLOHR (MPIK) DESY

10 nanosecond snapshot

DARK MATTER

our theories predict that when dark matter collides with its antiparticle and they annihilate, this produces particles that themselves produce light. For example, dark matter could produce other particles of the Standard Model that immediately decay to yet more particles that then decay to produce photons.

Dark matter is therefore not completely dark, though the theories tell us that the light produced would be gamma rays – light of such high energy that it wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye. Since light travels to Earth from distant objects in a straight line, all we need to do is point a special type of telescope at regions of the universe expected to be rich in dark matter, and we should see a steady stream of gamma rays.

This is precisely what Emmanuel and I plan to do, by collaborating with the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), which will soon be the world’s most powerful ground-based observatory for very-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy.

THE SEASON OF LIGHT Decades in the planning, CTAO marks the first time that almost the whole community of international gamma-ray astronomers – more than 1,000 scientists around the world, including an Australian team led by Gavin Rowell at the University of Adelaide – has come together to

This cutaway shows the inside of the SABRE experiment, deep underground in Victoria.

Using sensors (the globes), it aims to detect dark matter particles that interact with the crystal modules inside the shielded vessel.

Cherenkov radiation can then be picked up by ultra-fast cameras.

Such cameras form the basis of special telescopes called Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes, which pack many highly sensitive electronic sensors onto a robust frame that can be pointed at different regions of the sky. To get the most precise picture, you need multiple telescope dishes all pointing at the same source. The images in each individual dish can then be combined to better measure the direction the gamma ray came from, along with other properties such as its energy.

I first heard about the Cherenkov Telescope Array from my University of Adelaide colleague, astrophysicist Sabrina Einecke. Sabrina serves as Australia’s commissioning scientist in CTAO, leading the data analysis for the Small-Sized Telescopes.

Over coffee in her office, she explains to me how these telescopes work together. “Each individual telescope records a particular gamma-ray event from a different view. By combining all these different views, we obtain a 3D recording, similar to how two cameras are used to film 3D movies.

The more telescopes contributing to this recording, the more precisely we can reconstruct where the gamma ray came from.”

Another crucial factor is the area of the telescopes. As Sabrina explains: “The larger the area covered with telescopes, the more gamma rays we

MICHAEL MEWS (UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, SABRE MEMBER)

“AS THE EARTH WHIZZES THROUGH SPACE, IT IS CONSTANTLY RACING THROUGH AND TOWARDS DARK MATTER” build a single experiment. Sixty-four telescopes are currently under construction in two locations across hemispheres: La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands and the Atacama Desert in Chile.

These are not your garden variety optical telescopes. Gamma rays are at the high-energy extreme of the electromagnetic spectrum, with wavelengths of roughly a millionth of a millionth of a metre, so to see them, CTAO’s telescopes must exploit a special property of light called Cherenkov radiation (see diagram, opposite). A gamma ray striking the upper atmosphere produces a faint cone of blue light that hurtles down to the Earth’s surface, lasting just a few billionths of a second. This short-lived flash of

detect. This is essential for observing the highest-energy gamma rays, as their number decreases rapidly with energy, but also to collect sufficient gamma rays in the case of faint signals.”

There are currently three arrays of two to five Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes around the world, which have undertaken some searches for dark matter – without finding it.

CTAO, however, will outstrip them all. It’s 10 times more sensitive than current instruments, with more than 60 individual telescopes of different sizes, covering a larger energy range.

The arrival of CTAO marks a step change in our ability to image the universe at its highest energies – which is excellent news not just for

cosmosmagazine.com 53

THE FUTURE OF GAMMA-RAY ASTRONOMY CTAO will be the world’s largest and most sensitive observatory for gamma-ray astronomy, 10 times more sensitive than any existing instrument. Between three classes of telescopes – each using segmented mirrors to reflect Cherenkov radiation into highspeed cameras – CTAO will cover an energy range between 20 GeV and 300 TeV. Its full science program will be much broader than unravelling the nature of dark matter. Other goals include studying the

universe’s most extreme particle accelerators, understanding what is going on close to neutron stars and black holes, and searching for quantum gravity effects.

CTAO will also lead the way in the emerging field of transient astronomy, which studies events that change brightness over short timescales, such as supernovae, explosive bursts of radiation from collisions and various processes near black holes. These transients could send us signals in all sorts of ways, including gamma

rays, radio waves, neutrinos, X-rays and gravitational waves.

With current instruments it is possible to observe all of these signatures simultaneously, combining images to write new theories of astrophysics.

Plans are also underway to place future Cherenkov telescopes in Australia, which – combined with the other sites – would allow for continuous all-sky monitoring of transient gamma-ray events for the first time. The future is very bright indeed.

12M MEDIUM-SIZED TELESCOPE

Camera using photomultiplier tubes as sensors, where the Cherenkov light is focused, digitised and processed; it observes a sky field of 9° (about 18 times the size of the Moon)

86 hexagonal-shaped mirrors, with a total reflective surface of 88m2

Primary mirror, with 18 hexagonal segments and a total reflective surface of 4.3m2

54 COSMOS MAGAZINE

2048-pixel camera with silicon photomultiplier sensors to record 128-frame videos; each frame lasts one billionth of a second

Counterweight structure

GABRIEL PÉREZ DÍAZ / IAC

1.8-m-diameter secondary mirror to focus light from the primary mirror onto the camera

Camera calibration box

4M SMALL-SIZED TELESCOPE

DARK MATTER

23M LARGE-SIZED TELESCOPE

Two-tonne, 3m2 camera with 1855 photomultiplier tube sensors, covering 4.5° of sky

Rail the telescope moves on to reposition; it can point at any part of the sky within 20 seconds, which is important for following up transients

Camera support structure

198 hexagonal mirrors with mirror area of 368m2

Camera calibration box Camera access tower

cosmosmagazine.com 55

56 COSMOS MAGAZINE

astrophysicists, but for physicists like me interested in new ways to detect dark matter. There is now a very real prospect of solving the dark matter problem within the next decade.

Not that it’s been easy. The telescope is currently under construction, and when telling me about her experience of working in such an international collaboration, Sabrina relates tales that make Dickens’ bizarre plot tangents seem tame.

For example, whilst working on a CTAO prototype housed near Mount Etna in Italy, she had to contend with being rained on by small lava rocks that were also threatening the telescope itself. At the future CTAO site of La Palma, a volcanic eruption in 2021 paused astronomical observations altogether for a short period of time.

Nevertheless, Sabrina describes La Palma as a truly magical office environment. “One of the most amazing experiences was to drive through the clouds to the top of the mountain and then work above the clouds, seeing nothing of the world beneath. That’s how it must be in heaven.”

GOING DIRECT TO HEAVEN Cue Emmanuel’s arrival on Australian soil in early 2024, to spend six months planning how to best use CTAO for our dark matter search. Since arriving, he and I have assembled a crack team of dark-matter hunters comprising astronomers, particle physicists, cosmologists, statisticians and

CONSORTIUM CTA

CTAO prototypes are already in operation across the globe to test their design and technology. In 2019, for example, a 9.7-m-diameter telescope was inagurated at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona (above).

Based on SchwarzschildCouder two-mirror technology, it is one of many pathfinders for CTAO’s MediumSized Telescopes, and is currently studying gamma rays in the energy range from 100 GeV to 10 TeV.

machine-learning experts at three Australian universities and many international institutes, all of whom are essential if we are to make progress.

Our starting point is my own work with an international team of collaborators called GAMBIT. Over the past decade, this team of nearly 100 people has developed a computer program – the catchily titled Global and Modular Beyond-Standard Model Inference Tool – that draws on decades of experimental data to suggest which theories of WIMPs are still viable. Theorists over the years have posited a number of different WIMP candidates with different properties and interactions, and GAMBIT has told us which ideas meet all currently known experimental tests.

By combining Sabrina’s simulation expertise, Emmanuel’s astrophysics knowledge and my own GAMBIT-derived knowledge of viable WIMP theories, we are currently performing detailed computer simulations that tell us exactly what the pattern of gamma rays measured by CTAO would look like for each theory. The mathematics of WIMP theories tell us that the photons coming from dark matter annihilation can be released with a range of energies, the only firm constraint being that the energy cannot exceed the mass of the dark matter particle.

In an experiment such as CTAO, we can graph the number of photons that were detected at each energy, which is called the energy spectrum. This is like a barcode: each different WIMP theory produces a unique pattern of characteristic bumps and lines in the spectrum that can be predicted and simulated. In principle, the dark matter problem can then be solved: simply point CTAO at the centre of our galaxy, observe the gamma-ray spectrum, then see which of the expected simulated patterns the observation corresponds to.

Unfortunately, like a Dickens novel, life is not that simple, for a multitude of reasons. The first is that the number of gamma rays reaching us from dark matter annihilation depends on the amount of dark matter we’re looking at. Whilst we know this amount very roughly, we need to get much more precise. To this end, a new collaboration of Australian physicists is being formed that will, for the first time, see world experts in galaxy formation work side-by-side with particle physicists to determine the precise distribution of dark matter.

By combining particle physics theory with detailed simulations of the universe’s history, we’ll be able to make much stronger predictions of the expected distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way. The second spanner in the works is that dark matter is not the only process in the galactic

DARK MATTER

(the forthcoming Square Kilometre Array) to cosmic rays (Pierre Auger) and very-high-energy neutrinos (IceCube). Working with experts such as high-energy astrophysicist Roland Crocker at the Australian National University, plus a team of observational astronomers, we are developing and calibrating mathematical models that can predict the signatures visible to all of these different types of telescope. This will eventually allow us to determine if our final measured spectrum contains a dark matter component and, if so, which particle model explains it. If the Large Hadron Collider discovers a WIMP in the meantime, we can even use our detailed knowledge of the interactions in the collider to improve our models and accelerate the CTAO discovery.

centre that sends gamma rays in our direction.

Picture a supermassive black hole, exploding stars and rapidly rotating neutron stars that blast out radiation and high-energy particles, which interact with each other, with powerful magnetic fields and with the gas between stars to generate a cosmic tantrum of radiation. Gamma rays, radio waves and X-rays emerge from the stew to reach Earth, giving us what we call the astrophysical background.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, we also don’t have a clean view of the galactic centre. It’s like looking through a dirty window and seeing distant objects that are obscured by things much closer to home. In astronomy, gas and dust between us and the object we are trying to look at

“IN AN EXPERIMENT SUCH AS CTAO, WE CAN MAKE A GRAPH OF THE NUMBER OF PHOTONS DETECTED AT EACH ENERGY”

CONSORTIUM CTA

are called foregrounds, and we need to know exactly what they are if we want to get a true image. When we count the number of gamma rays at each energy seen by CTAO, we can tell the direction and energy of the gamma ray, but not which process produced it.

To make progress, we therefore need to not only calculate the energy spectrum of gamma rays expected from dark matter, but also to develop and test detailed models of the astrophysics involved. This work is being accelerated by the brilliant data coming from the trailblazing experiments of the 21st century that measure everything from X-rays (e.g. the Chandra X-ray Observatory) and radio waves

THE AGE OF BELIEF Other CTAO prototypes have been built across the world, including Spain, Germany, Italy and France (below). This 4-m-diameter telescope has been picking up gamma rays between a few TeV and 300 TeV since 2015, helping test the tech for CTAO’s Small-Sized Telescopes.

By the time Emmanuel returns to Paris, we hope to have our first detailed predictions of gamma-ray patterns in CTAO for the most popular dark matter candidates, plus a strategy for developing the astrophysical models that will take us the next few years of painstaking work to accomplish. I will spend a decent chunk of next year performing that work in Paris – making this both a tale of two physicists and a tale of two cities.

Having first visited Paris in 2017 to chase a Higgs-like particle with colleagues on the Large Hadron Collider, I was amazed to find that the graves of the mathematician Jules Henri Poincare, astronomer Urbain Le Verrier, philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and pop provocateur Serge Gainsbourg all lie in the same cemetery, along with poet Charles Baudelaire.

Given this multidisciplinary history, perhaps Paris will be a fitting location for the next chapter of this story.

With the first CTAO telescope already in operation, we hope to have completed most of our theoretical work by the time the full array is finished in 2028. By 2030, we will finally be in a position to know whether A Tale of Two Cities’ closing line is as appropriate to our case as his opener: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.”

MARTIN WHITE is a particle physicist and professor at the University of Adelaide. His last story – on the W boson – appeared in Issue 95.

cosmosmagazine.com 57

DOPING IN SPORT

FASTER HIGHER STRO NGER DOPE R To d o

pe o

GREG BARTON / MIDJOURNEY

W

r no t to do p scie e? M atth nce ew b eh Wa ind t he s rd Ag hat the hell? c an i There was dals us loo no other way to react ks .

to the bizarre headlines that dropped in November last year.

“Tour de France rider tried to obtain marine worm haemoglobin for blood doping boost,” read Cycling News. “I never thought the next breakthrough in doping would be fishing worms,” wrote an op-ed from Cycling Weekly. More poetically: “Opening a can of worms” from the bike journalism project Escape Collective. It certainly had.

Any mention of doping in cycling probably sends fans into a nail-biting chatter as they remember the halcyon years of 1990s juicing.

This story, though, is something far odder.

We’re not just talking about blood from a human.

Not even another mammalian species; we’re climbing the ladder of Linnaean classification: Genus – Family – Order – Class (looking back at all our fellow mammals) – Phylum (saluting every animal with a backbone) – and up to Kingdom, where we neatly jump over to the annelids (the segmented worms) and scramble all the way back down to the genus Arenicola.

That’s where oceanographer Franck Zal landed in the noughties, when he was based at the French national scientific research organisation CNRS and the Sorbonne University. His motivation wasn’t juicing his favourite French pedallers. Instead, his research had identified potential applications for haemoglobin – that allimportant protein responsible for transporting oxygen to our tissues – extracted from a species of European lugworm (Arenicola marina).

at th e

W o r m haemoglobin is far more potent than the haemoglobin humans possess, and Zal saw its promise as a therapeutic that could support the preservation of transplanted organs.

But that unnamed Tour de France athlete clearly saw the possibilities of harnessing worm blood to turbocharge his circulatory system for the big race.

To understand why the frontier of performance enhancement has athletes looking elsewhere in the animal kingdom, it’s important to consider where these biological boosters come from, and what they do.

Power of the protein Almost every vertebrate contains haemoglobin proteins in their red blood cells. Its job is vital: delivering oxygen to tissues through the blood.

In mammals, haemoglobin consists of four subunits, each a long, folded chain of amino acids that determine the protein’s properties and function. These subunits are each connected to a heme group: a ring of organic compounds that contain a single iron ion. This iron binds with a single oxygen molecule and aids its transportation around the body. cosmosmagazine.com 59

With four subunits, each haemoglobin can carry four oxygen molecules. Think of haemoglobin as a four-seater car. The car itself is the haemoglobin, its four seats the subunits, and the driver and their three mates are the oxygen molecules being transported to their destination.

In other mammals, and in most vertebrates, haemoglobin is similarly structured – including having four seats for oxygen – and performs the same role. This consistency has enabled the development of new blood transfusion products from the haemoglobin of cows and pigs.

Worm your way cross-kingdom, and you’ll find that A. marina haemoglobin performs the same role too. Except it has not four, but 156 of these oxygen terminals: that’s 39 times more carrying capacity than paltry

has n i b oglo ing m e ha rry a a n i c r e a r od” “A. m imes mo man blo 39 t than hu city a p a c hu m a n

60 COSMOS MAGAZINE

CE certification by the EU in 2022, enabling it to be sold across Europe.

But the big question for our potential blood-doping cyclist: how do they actually work?

Doping deep dive Through training, skill development, a rigorous diet and sometimes a rare mix of genetic gifts, humans have pushed themselves to go faster, higher and stronger since the first Olympics.

Records tumble every year, across every sport.

But where winning and losing are separated by wafer-thin margins – sometimes requiring a photo finish – the dark arts of performance enhancement are seductive.

According to data from the World AntiDoping Authority (WADA), nearly one in 80 athletes globally use performance-enhancing drugs, and one in every 215 Australian athletes.

Those who take the bait seek an edge to run a little faster or lift a little more, using a chemical shortcut. Shortcut is the keyword here. There’s no magic pill that transfigures a scrawny layabout into medal-capable mega specimen.

GREG BARTON / MIDJOURNEY

blood.

This advantage led Zal to start his own company – Hemarina – 15 years ago, with the goal of producing A. marina-based blood transfusion products at scale. The benefits are a clinician’s dream: A. marina haemoglobin is a universal donor and appears to lack the side effects of other non-human and artificial sources such as in early haemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs), which caused hypertension, vasoconstriction and oxidation.

The lack of side effects may be thanks to the way the molecule has evolved in worms: it is highly stable, resists oxidation and floats freely in the animal’s bloodstream as opposed to being embedded within blood cells, as it is in vertebrates.

Mouse studies using common earthworm Lumbricus terrestris haemoglobin (with 144 oxygen terminals by the way) have also shown an absence of adverse physiological responses.

Lugworm blood is now being adopted as a support mechanism for those in need of oxygen, especially organ donor recipients. Hemarina’s HEMO2life product has been used to support organ preservation during an upper limb transplant in India and a facial transplant performed on a French soldier. The product was granted

DOPING IN SPORT

Performance enhancement – whether substance or technique-based – simply enables the body to do more, work harder, or recover more quickly than would otherwise be possible.

Historically, there have been two favoured methods of performance enhancement. Anabolic steroids were once the drug of choice for athletes looking to build muscle mass and recover faster – and are still used today. But the rise of blood doping from the 1980s onwards as a way to enhance aerobic capacity is where the promise of worm blood lies. How it works is remarkably simple.

Muscles have an enormous capacity for work, but our circulatory system is the limiting factor.

The performance of endurance athletes relies on their ability to use oxygen to produce energy. Oxygen is essential to cellular respiration, where glucose from food is subject to oxidation, resulting in the release of carbon dioxide (exhaled), water (sweat) and energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate.

All of this takes place in what’s commonly called the “powerhouse of the cell” – the mitochondria. But glucose and oxygen don’t simply materialise there; they need to be ferried through the blood. Haemoglobin is transported by red blood cells, which are the body’s cargo ships. But we only produce so many. Along with cardiac output (the amount of blood the heart is pumping around the body), the amount of oxygen in each litre of blood provides a performance ceiling.

Kenneth Graham, former principal scientist for the NSW Institute of Sport and now an anti-doping policy and research consultant, explains that expanding the fleet of red blood

RUJIRAT BOONYONG / GETTY IMAGES

The structure of human haemoglobin

Iron

Polypeptide chain

Heme group

Oxygen molecule

Located within our red blood cells, haemoglobin is a protein that is necessary for oxygen transport. In humans, it consists of four polypeptide chains (two alpha and two beta chains). On the end of each chain is a single iron ion, which acts as the terminal for oxygen molecules to be transported around the body.

RISE OF THE ROIDS Prohibited in and out of sanctioned competition, anabolic steroids are the moststudied class of performanceenhancing drugs. In the simplest terms, these synthetic products assist the development of muscle mass.

Whether a powerlifter, sprinter, rower or cyclist, an athlete’s muscles need to be in peak condition to provide the strength and power needed to effectively perform their role. And just as doping shortcuts red blood cell delivery, certain hormones can prompt the body to build muscle and recover from exercise quicker. Some of these

hormones are steroidal; others – like human growth hormone and insulin – are not.

When used as part of a weight training program, they promote the growth of new muscle (thus giving athletes more forcegenerating ability), as well as aid recovery by accelerating protein synthesis – effectively enabling the user to do more work, more often.

“So you can reduce the training time between sessions because you’ve got an accelerated recovery,” Graham says. “That, combined with more training, you get the contribution for an enhanced performance capacity.”

cells available to move oxygen is a handy way to boost an athlete’s energy stocks.

“If we increase red blood cells and haemoglobin, we have more oxygen being transported per litre of blood around the body, we have a higher VO2 Max [an individual’s maximum oxygen capacity], we have a greater capacity to do aerobic work,” says Graham, who worked with many Australian Olympic and Commonwealth gold medallists between 1992 and 2020.

This increase can be done naturally through good diet, exercise and innovative training. Some athletes will, for instance, travel to higher altitudes, where the body adapts to less available oxygen by producing more haemoglobin and red blood cells.

Or you could just dope.

There are typically two ways to cheat your way to higher haemoglobin.

The first: extract the blood, centrifuge out and then reinfuse the plasma, and refrigerate or freeze the rest, to be reinfused before competition. Since your blood naturally replenishes the missing blood, an athlete will basically be injecting a bonus later on, like buying an iced cosmosmagazine.com 61

62 COSMOS MAGAZINE

inclinations. Orr describes such scientists as “enterprising chemists”. “[They] see these new developments and they can see the potential application to performance enhancement.”

The Hemarina product is no different: developed to offer a human-compatible oxygen carrier to supplement limited blood stocks, it’s a possible doping agent as well.

So with new and different products being taken from medical science and used for performance enhancement all the time, how do sporting bodies keep up?

Hunting the dopers If, instead of going to Paris in mid-2024, you jumped in a time machine back to the first Olympics in Greece, you’d find a lot of naked athletes strutting their stuff in the ancient arena.

You’d also find some of them, according to historians, trying to enhance their performance through the use of plants and fungi. Some scholars suggest that the use of these external substances wasn’t discouraged.

Wind the clock towards the present day and the cases of performance enhancement begin to rack up. The first bans on stimulants were introduced in 1928; in 1960 a Danish cyclist who died at the 1960 Rome Olympics was found to have amphetamines in his system; in 1967, the International Olympic Committee listed the first banned substances. Tests for drug use were slowly introduced – once a substance is known, it’s possible to develop a process to spot it. A notable moment in the early fight against drug cheating came at the 1988 Seoul games, where Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of

The power of worm haemoglobin

Annelids (segmented worms) have large bi-layered hexagonal haemoglobin.

Each of the two hexagon layers has six polypeptide chains (12 in total). In a saturated state they can transport 144 oxygen molecules. A. marina has a 13th central polypeptide chain to enable the transport of 156 oxygen molecules.

THERAPEUTIC POTENTIAL OF HEMOGLOBIN DERIVED FROM THE MARINE WORM ARENICOLA MARINA (M101)MAR. DRUGS 2021.

coffee and dropping in an extra teaspoon of instant for a bonus caffeine hit. This is classic blood doping: an instant haemoglobin booster.

The second: inject yourself with hormones.

EPO – erythropoietin – is the glycoprotein utilised in massive doping scandals like cycling’s 1998 Festina Affair and by the US Postal Service team, led by Lance Armstrong, described by the US Anti-Doping Agency in 2012 as “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping program that [cycling] has ever seen”.

EPO is naturally produced by the body’s endocrine system in response to low blood oxygen.

“In the body, we have self-regulating mechanisms,” explains Graham. “EPO is produced in the kidneys, the renal medulla, in response to reduced oxygen levels … The kidneys are basically saying, ‘we’re getting less oxygen, we will fix this up, we’ll release EPO, it will go and cause the production of new red blood cells, which will increase the O2 transport and the body will get the oxygen we need’.”

When athletes head to higher altitudes, the hypoxic environment stimulates the kidneys to release EPO. This signals the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells, thus enabling blood oxygen levels to normalise. When they come back down the mountain, they’re better equipped to tackle that next demanding event.

But EPO can also be unnaturally topped up through injections, much like the reinfusion of blood products.

So, Graham says, “even if the body shuts down its own production of EPO, it’s still got this exogenous supply that’s stimulating the production of red blood cells”.

But how do athletes get their hands on new substances to dope with?

“Many of the products that are used for performance enhancement have actually been derived from clinical use,” says Rhonda Orr, director of movement sciences at Sydney University’s School of Health Sciences.

“New drugs and processes have been developed because there’s a clinical need,” she adds, giving the example of synthetic red blood cells, which were developed for people with severe anaemia.

Natural or synthetic EPO is also a vital therapeutic for people with damaged kidneys (as with chronic kidney disease) or some forms of blood cancer. Anabolic steroids can treat a range of hormonal issues such as delayed puberty in males, as well as encourage muscle growth in those suffering illnesses like cancer or HIV. But advances in medicine can be nurtured, massaged and modified by scientists with other

DOPING IN SPORT

en

and urine samples for EPO use. Four years later, in Athens, a screen for human growth hormone was introduced.

Today, anti-doping authorities test athletes’ biological samples for hundreds of banned substances, all inscribed on WADA’s prohibited list, including anabolic agents, peptide hormones, Beta-2 agonists, hormone and metabolic modulators, diuretics and masking agents, stimulants, narcotics, cannabinoids and glucocorticoids.

Banned methods are listed too, including the administration or reintroduction of any quantity of blood to the body, and the manipulation of the blood through physical or chemical means, as well as chemical or physical alteration of samples.

According to Mario Thevis, a biochemist who heads the Centre for Preventative Doping Research at the German Sport University in Cologne, three main techniques are used by testing labs to find performance-enhancing drugs.

The first is mass spectrometry, where the molecular mass of a sample is measured to discern the presence of target analytes – profiles of banned chemicals.

Immunological assays (tests) are performed to screen for the presence of other molecules, for example human growth hormone.

GREG BARTON / MIDJOURNEY

ha “M nc an em y p en rod t h uc av ts e b us ee ed n d fo er r pe ive d f rfor ro ma m cli nce nic his 100m gold after testing positive for the al Electrophoresis banned steroid stanozolol. us (a process that separates Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunie” molecules based on size and fication of Germany, and the opening of records from the former East Germany (GDR) confirming that drugs had systematically been administered to its athletes, helping catapult the Soviet state to sporting success in the 1970s and ’80s.

Tests of athletes’ blood and urine were conducted at approved labs – including ones in the GDR – but without a uniform body to oversee sample acquisition and analysis. That changed following the Festina Affair at the 1998 Tour de France, where evidence of a sophisticated EPO doping program was uncovered by police raids on that team’s vehicles and hotel rooms. The World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA) was subsequently established in 1999.

At the Sydney Olympics, the International Olympic Committee debuted a test to screen blood

electrical charge) is also often used to find abnormal blood proteins. As red blood cells tend to reduce in size when extracted for storage and reinfusion, this technique can identify instances of blood transfusions of EPO. Biochemists like Thevis don’t just analyse athlete samples for current banned substances or methods: they also develop tests for new ones.

It’s not easy to find substances previously unknown to tests. Both Thevis and Graham relate the story where an anonymous syringe arrived in the mail at the headquarters of the United States Anti-Doping Authority in 2003.

The clear liquid within was tested and retested, until eventually, analytical chemists at

cosmosmagazine.com 63

the University of California Los Angeles cracked it: the syringe contained tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG – a steroid never made available for medical use.

Thevis says designer steroids like THG are modified from existing structures – just enough to retain

“E ve ryb o

dy is

so d

iffe re

their anabolic properties – “but they were not immediately on our radar because they were slightly modified”.

Within three months, the California laboratories of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) were raided. Seized records shed light on who was taking THG: four track and field athletes during the 2003 national meets, as well as National Football League and Major League Baseball (MLB) players; one in 20 MLB tests were positive. US runner Marion Jones was stripped of her five Sydney Olympic medals after admitting to taking THG. Without that syringe, it would have taken anti-doping authorities much longer to hook onto THG. But identifying a questionable chemical is not the only signal testers need. Knowing what the body does with it provides further clues.

“If you take a drug, a urine sample is collected and we analyse it, we can either target the substance you took or the biotransformation product – the metabolite,” says Thevis. “The entire drug might disappear entirely and we need to look for breakdown products.

“Once we know about a general structure of a new therapeutic class or a specific substance … then we can start developing test methods. We do biotransformation experiments with cell cultures, or animal experiments, or, if it’s a [clinically] approved drug, we collaborate with clinics where the drug is therapeutically administered to patients [and] we get approval to sample those patients to have authentic material to work with.

“Eventually, all we need to have is an analytical platform that allows us to identify those prohibited substances in blood or urine.”

nt –

the re’ ss uc h

Platform testing So what about our lugworm blood? Is it a gold pass to an ill-gotten gold medal?

When French colleagues sent A. marina their way, Thevis and his team set about seeing whether it could be detected. They employed a 64 COSMOS MAGAZINE

liquid-chromatography-mass-spectroscopybased method, which has been used for about two decades to detect doping with oxygen-carrying products like transfused haemoglobin and HBOCs. They modified this existing mass spectrometry test and injected Hemarina’s HEMO2life – containing 40mg/mL of the active worm hemes – into three male lab rats.

“We saw that [lugworm haemoglobin] can be detected because its amino acid sequence is different from bovine and porcine and also from human haemoglobin,” Thevis says. “With some minor modifications to our sample preparation procedure, we were able to include that new analyte into our testing platform with the information that it might have advantages over earlier first or second generation HBOCs.”

va ria tio n

in

the h

The results were encouraging. The test could detect 10 micrograms of lug heme per millilitre in a 50-microlitre sample. Lugworm haemoglobin doesn’t last long. In rats it could be “unambiguously detected” for 4–8 hours after administration, though in one sample traces were found after two days.

That, says Thevis, means it would only likely be used in competition, not training. Athletes using haemoglobin from fishing bait are rolling the dice. “If you’re tested in competition, a detection window of eight or even 12 to 24 hours for lugworm haemoglobin is probably sufficient, because that covers the most relevant period of the drug’s assumed action on the athlete.”

But assuming that a best-case 48-hour window exists for testers to detect worm blood, a well-timed doper could plan their transfusion strategically. Say you have a three-hour marathon – you might get sampled immediately after the race, then it takes a few hours for the sample to be transported to a lab for testing, then it’s tested, then verified. If you doped two days before, you could still derive some benefit from the short-lived annelid haem before it becomes undetectable by testing time.

Thevis hears that, and raises the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP). An ABP is a data catalogue of your biology, broken down into steroidal, haematological and hormonal modules. Every blood and urine sample informs and refines this profile over time.

um an ”

GREG BARTON / MIDJOURNEY

DOPING IN SPORT

Unlike lab tests, which hunt for specific banned substances or resulting metabolites, the passport works over extended periods to identify abnormal biomarker readings that last well after the act. Those stand out as red flags when compared to the rest of the profile, indicating the need for further investigation. Even blood donations – the ones you do every three months for the Red Cross – show up in the profile.

“That’s a change that is accepted,” Thevis says. “But if there’s a change in the profile that indicates blood withdrawal and blood retransfusion … that will end in [disciplinary] proceedings.”

Keen to shake its reputation as the sport of dopers, professional cycling became the first sport to implement ABPs back in 2009. Other sports have followed, including running. But ABPs don’t yet entirely protect athletes.

A strong passport In January 2023, Australian runner Peter Bol was provisionally suspended from competition after an EPO test showed he had elevated levels as compared to his ABP baseline. A second sample, drawn to confirm the result, returned an “atypical finding”. Bol’s samples were then analysed by other accredited labs, and WADA experts were consulted. By August 2023, the first sample was deemed negative and Bol’s name was cleared. It’s since been suggested that Bol may have naturally elevated levels of EPO – a blessing for his athletic prospects, but a curse when a test flags it as a potential sign of doping.

“Hormones have really put those tests to the limit,” Orr says, “because you can’t just say ‘let’s just measure someone’s growth hormone and, aha, it’s higher than we expect – they must be doping!’ Because hormones are endogenous [produced by the body] and everybody is so different – there’s such variation in the human – they’ve had to come up with other tests.”

The solution to situations like Bol’s could be to test early and test often, building up a time machine of biology that establishes an athlete’s natural ranges starting early on in their career.

Frequent testing could also help pinpoint the window of time in which the change occurred: for example, if an athlete tested positive for a certain metabolite just two weeks after their last test, then authorities could more easily narrow down a potential cause – possibly an accidental diet change – within that window of time.

“As counterintuitive as it might sound to an athlete, the more you’re tested, the less likely it is that you receive an anti-doping rule violation,” Thevis says. “If you’re tested with a tiny amount today, and your last test was negative, and your follow-up test is also negative, then in most instances you can’t have had a pharmacologically relevant dose – or a doping dose – in between.”

But if there was a six-month gap between samples, plenty could happen naturally to an athlete’s body chemistry – including changes to a training program, illness or altitude training – that may instead be flagged as suspicious.

“Overall, the more tests that these athletes do, the greater and more reliable their Athlete Biological Passport is going to be,” Orr says.

With that in mind, worm blood doesn’t sound like the secret sauce to Paris gold. That misguided athlete digging up lugworms from their local beach would be better off putting the worms on the end of a hook instead.

MATTHEW WARD AGIUS is a journalist at Cosmos. His story on planetary art appeared in Issue 99.

cosmosmagazine.com 65

Wild world Swimming, screaming, snacking, snuggling: the Sony World Photography Awards offer an intimate glimpse into the multi-faceted lives of animals.

Mirror mates It’s a bird, it’s a plane – no, it’s a mammal!

Bats are set apart from others of the Mammalia class by their ability to achieve true and sustained flight, though they lack the wing-strength to take flight from the ground. Instead, they need to get a head-start from the height of trees. They are also one of the very few mammals to snooze upside down. That said, these two seem to be wide awake and highly alert.

Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife)

Photographer: Pedro Jarque Krebs

Muscovy moves in Some animals, like this Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata), are both wild and feral.

Captured here in the city of Chattanooga in the US state of Tennessee, this slick-haired waterfowl is actually a tropical bird native to the Americas, from Texas and Mexico down to Argentina and Uruguay. Yet small, patchy, breeding populations can now be found not just in Tennessee but as far north as Canada.

Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife)

Photographer: Stuart James

66 COSMOS MAGAZINE

GALLERY: WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

PLAY VIDEO

cosmosmagazine.com 67

Spawning season It is not yet dawn, but this coral reef is already hard at work. Off the coast of Japan’s Kagoshima Prefecture – which spreads across the island of Kyushu and the Ryukyu Islands – a colony of coral stirs up an underwater blizzard.

The coral simultaneously release tiny eggs and sperm (called gametes): billions of floating jewels that will rise to the surface, join together as embryos and then return to the ocean floor to grow.

Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife)

Photographer: Rina Saito

68 COSMOS MAGAZINE

GALLERY: WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

It’s not just you and me, babe A mother and her calf share a tender moment in this shortlisted photo. Baby elephants are born into complex, female-led herds, where members rely on their elders and particularly on their matriarch. In such herds, the family group consists not just of mothers and their young, but other elephants that fill the roles of sisters, aunts and grandmothers.

Elephants have a long childhood; a male will leave the herd between the ages of nine and 18, while a female will likely stay with the same herd her whole life.

Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife)

Photographer: Jesus Frias

Want a bite to eat?

Talk about capturing intimate moments of animal worlds – UK photographer Ian Ford takes the cake with this snap of a jaguar’s feast in central South America’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area.

Ford nearly missed the shot; he was leaving on the last day of his trip when he heard a jaguar had been spotted nearby.

“We raced to the scene and encountered this sleek female jaguar stalking her prey.

Our boat – and my camera – were perfectly positioned as she pounced on an unsuspecting caiman.”

Winner (Natural World & Wildlife)

Photographer: Ian Ford

cosmosmagazine.com 69

GALLERY: WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

Too close for comfort Who would have thought that the humble bumblebee could look so eerie? Up close, the fuzz and buzz turns to sharp intensity, and its compound eye’s 6,000 hexagonal units – called ommatidia – become visible.

Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife)

Photographer: Francis Principe-Gillespie

Eye to eye

Where’s Wally?

Each year, the Great Migration rolls into Masai Mara, a vast wildlife reserve in Kenya. Up to 1.7 million wildebeest follow the rain by trekking from Tanzania through the Serengeti National Park and towards Masai Mara, where they stay for the dry season through the middle of the year. They make their journey along with 470,000 gazelles and 260,000 zebras – one of which can be spotted here, if you look very hard.

Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife)

Photographer: Pui Sun Tang

70 COSMOS MAGAZINE

This breathtaking shot was snapped in Washington state, US, where the endangered Cascade red fox (Vulpes vulpes cascadensis) can be found roaming subalpine meadows, parklands and open forests. “As the light was fading I got very lucky, as a parent and pup appeared on the path with a brilliant sunset glow behind them,” the photographer says.

Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife)

Photographer: Christopher Ratcliff Iverson

cosmosmagazine.com 71

Golden hour Usually found in waterways and coasts across North America, these gloriously sunlit otters are playing in their enclosure at Caldwell Zoo in Texas, US. As semi-aquatic mammals, river otters (Lontra canadensis) are equipped with thick, water-repellent fur that allows them to build burrows close to the water’s edge and hunt in cold waters for fish, amphibians, freshwater clams, mussels, snails, crayfish and even small turtles. Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife) Photographer: Jonathan McSwain

72 COSMOS MAGAZINE

GALLERY: WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

Hey mum, hold still

Down the hatch

Whales, of course, are mammals, but we don’t often think about them nursing their young. This rare picture captures a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) mother feeding her calf, who nuzzles against her nipple cavity (the nipple is inverted at the mammary gland). The mother then squirts milk the consistency of yoghurt directly into the calf’s mouth.

To add to the difficulties, feeding must happen in short intervals, as calves can’t nurse and breathe at the same time.

In the wetlands of Madison, Alabama, US, a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) captures its breakfast. This wading bird is the largest in the heron family, standing 115–138 centimetres tall, and is found widely across North and Central America. It also occasionally appears on British shores, where it’s classed as a “vagrant”. The first flew across the pond of its own accord in 2007; a previous heron, which was transported by ship to British waters in 1968, is not counted by twitchers.

Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife)

Shortlist (Natural World & Wildlife)

Photographer: Thien Nguyen Ngoc

Photographer: Christopher Baker

cosmosmagazine.com 73

M I R R O R 74 COSMOS MAGAZINE

Can digital twins save humanity?

By Prianka Srinivasan

BRANDI MEULLER / GETTY IMAGES

DIGITAL TWINS

W O R L D S cosmosmagazine.com 75

76 COSMOS MAGAZINE

PLAY VIDEO

The Tuvalu islet Te Afualiku (below) is the first to be completely digitised. Knee-deep in water on what used to be land (above), Tuvalu Foreign Minister Simon Kofe told COP27: “As our land disappears, we have no choice but to become the world’s first digital nation.”

travel restrictions; they constructed the proofof-concept model “by eye” using drone footage and screenshots sent to them by Tuvalu residents via WhatsApp. It’s hoped that eventually clones of all 124 of Tuvalu’s islands will be accessible online and through virtual-reality headsets.

But the country’s plans extend far beyond simply making three-dimensional copies of their fragile lands. They plan to recreate an entire government on the blockchain, so that all administrative processes, institutional affairs and taxation procedures can happen virtually.

FROM TOP: TUVALU MINISTRY HANDOUT. ACCENTURE SONG.

I

n the physical realm, Tuvalu is under threat.

The Pacific nation, made up of nine atolls dotting a 676-kilometre stretch of ocean midway between Hawai‘i and Australia, is one of the lowest-lying countries in the world – its highest point peaks just a few metres above sea level. Residents fear the waves that constantly lick at the shore will one day swallow their land completely. Some have already been forced to relocate from their coastal homes as droughts, violent storms and floods become more frequent and unpredictable.

Climate change could soon push their country to oblivion. A recent technical report from NASA reveals Tuvalu is experiencing sea level rise 1.5 times faster than the global average, and predicts that by 2050, much of its land and critical infrastructure will be covered by average high tide levels.

In the digital realm, though, Tuvalu hopes to attain immortality.

Its government plans to replicate the entire nation onto a virtual platform. Te Afualiku – a small islet expected to be one of the first in Tuvalu to be completely submerged – has already been painstakingly mapped, digitised and put on the Metaverse as an interactive simulation by developers from the Australian firm Accenture Song.

The team couldn’t visit the islet due to COVID

DIGITAL TWINS

Digital Twins 101 Physical Asset

Digital Twin

IoT platform

Data analytics

Real-time or on-demand information generation

Information processing for selected applications (e.g., energy efficiency)

Sensors from the physical building collect raw or unprocessed information and send it to the digital twin

Digital twin sends feedback or intervention flows back to the physical building, where they are implemented

AND CHALLENGES, BUILDINGS 2022.

DIGITAL TWINS IN BUILT ENVIRONMENTS: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE CHARACTERISTICS, APPLICATIONS,

One of the simpler uses of digital twin technology is in the operation of a building. An existing building – say, an apartment block or a university facility – can be outfitted with a multitude of sensors that feed real-world, real-time information into a digital model, which forms a virtual replica of the building. Crucially, this isn't a one-way street – these data can be analysed to inform decisions about the building’s management, such as predicting maintenance, identifying hazards or improving energy efficiency, which flow back to influence the physical space.

Last year, Tuvalu also launched a “Digital Ark” program that will preserve copies of the country’s cultural and historical artifacts on an online database. It’s hoped these projects, collectively called the “Future Now” initiative, will allow Tuvalu’s citizens to operate within a living digital twin of their nation.

“Tuvalu is the first digital nation in the sense that we [will be able to] exist fully online without a physical territory,” says Simon Kofe, Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister. “We can use technology to preserve culture, our cultural heritage, our history, our language.”

Minister Kofe and I are speaking over a Zoom video call. We have been trying to organise a time to meet online for weeks, but a giant king tide – the worst Kofe has ever seen – recently flooded the country, cutting electricity to parts of the capital Funafuti. The storm also left newly elected parliamentary members stranded on their home islands, halting the formation of the next government and leaving the country’s leadership in limbo for almost a month, meaning Kofe did not have ministerial authority to speak to me.

Such events are a reminder of the urgency for Tuvalu to rebuild online, Kofe says. “This gives us a view of what is to come. Things are just going to get worse for us Tuvaluans.”

But the frequent storms and power outages also point to the immense challenges facing the government as it races against time to create this digital twin. Is such an ambitious project even possible, let alone worthwhile?

ENTER THE MIRROR WORLD At first glance, the concept of developing virtual replicas of physical spaces might not seem so groundbreaking. We’ve all used Google Maps or virtual simulators to explore real-world destinations through our screens.

But digital twins go one step beyond simply being a visual reproduction of our world. They are constantly fed with realtime data – wind speed, weather and traffic information – by sensors in the field, which change the way the virtual image looks and responds. A true digital twin is therefore a synchronous and ever-evolving reflection of its real-world counterpart – a complex universe trapped behind a screen.

NASA says it developed some of the first digital twins in the 1960s, when its space-shuttle simulations were used to plan and execute missions. Other experts in the field say the technology was first proposed at the beginning of the 21st century, when researchers at the University of Michigan suggested a virtual management system to improve manufacturing

“We can use technology to preserve culture, our cultural heritage, our history, our language.”

cosmosmagazine.com 77

DON’T WAIT, SIMULATE At the University of Pittsburgh in the US, researchers and engineers are testing whether a digital twin of the campus can help them understand how climate change will affect their facilities. The work is led by civil engineer Alessandro Fascetti, who says the power of the technology lies in its ability to make predictions on how different climate possibilities may affect the operation of buildings.

“The most sought-after thing right now for this particular application is transitioning to zero-carbon, or at least to lowering carbon emissions, which is the main thing we’re looking at.”

His team have begun by digitally replicating one building, the Mascaro Centre for Sustainable Innovation, chosen for the vast number of sensors that already mark its walls, constantly collecting data on energy use, occupancy, temperature levels and other variables.

The researchers have also been busy building the virtual platform to house this data. Fascetti and his research students use mobile lasers – black glass cloches about the size of a small

“Such Mirror Worlds promise to be powerful, fascinating, and gigantic in their implications.”

78 COSMOS MAGAZINE

DOCTOR EGG / GETTY IMAGES

processes. Since then, the scales of these models have grown impressively, with researchers now creating digital doppelgangers of entire buildings, cities and states.

Arguably, the idea of large-scale digital twins was first sparked by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter in his 1992 book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox.

In it, he contemplates a future both terrifying and revolutionary, where computers are so power ful they can “mimic reality’s every move”.

“This is a three-dimensional kind of reflection: The program reaches out and engulfs some chunk of reality,” Gelernter wrote. “Like a childsized play village modelled precisely on a real town and tracking reality’s every move, the Mirror World supplies a software object to match and track every real one.

“Such models, such Mirror Worlds, promise to be powerful, fascinating, and gigantic in their implications.”

Breakthroughs over the last decades have inched us closer to this future. Supercomputing has given scientists the ability to digest and analyse massive amounts of data, while artificial intelligence and machine-learning systems can ensure the models are extracting the right data to accurately mirror the real world.

That’s the hope, anyway. The field is still in its infancy – though pulsing with activity.

Digital twins are being developed across the world, in almost every industry. Healthcare professionals are looking to create digital twins of human bodies to personalise treatments without cutting the skin. Urban planners are developing virtual cities to improve transport systems. And then there are places like Tuvalu, looking to deploy digital twins to better plan for an uncertain future.

One of the most popular uses of digital twins is at this intersection of climate change adaptation and technology. Just as crash-test dummies simulate what happens to a body in a car accident, the hope is for digital twins to accurately predict what will happen to our homes, cities, oceans and countries as our climate systems face radical change.

There has been a swarm of interest in this area – the United States’ National Academies has said digital-twin technology could “revolutionise atmospheric and climate sciences”, while the European Union is creating a virtual replica of the planet to forecast the impacts of a warming climate.

More on that later – first, let’s dive in at the smaller scale.

DIGITAL TWINS

flowerpot – to take images and corresponding spatial information about the building.

“The scanner houses an array of sensors, from 360° cameras similar to the ones on Google Maps cars, to infrared imaging,” Fascetti says, then points to the black lens at the centre of the dome in his hand. “At the same time, this object here in the middle is a LiDAR sensor that collects high-resolution data.”

LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, is a way of collecting geospatial data by shooting pulses of light out from a laser to an object.

“You read the time it takes for the reflection to come back, and since you know that the laser travels at the speed of light, you know the distance.”

With this information, Fascetti and the team craft a “digital shadow” by importing the data into a graphics editor called Unreal Engine – the same software used by video game developers.

The software converts these millions of data points into an interactive, high-resolution visual model of the building.

“This shadow gets morphed into a twin when we start including all the data streams and predictive models,” Fascetti explains. For example, when temperatures rise in the physical building,

After nine damaging floods hit the nation in 2011, the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) began to create a 3D map to identify flooding risk. Later, they collaborated with GPS Lands Singapore to create Virtual Singapore, a digital twin that displays the country in a highly detailed 3D representation. The aim is for the twin to take in real-time information and help inform urban planning and design, from mitigating flooding risk to managing green spaces. Next, SLA is turning its attention to mapping below the surface to manage underground utilities.

this change will simultaneously be represented on the 3D model.

Just like that, a digital twin is born.

But then comes the hardest part– getting the twin to make accurate predictions about the future. This is done through an “alignment” process, Fascetti says – the researchers will intentionally hide certain data streams and get the model to guess the missing information over many iterations. Once it does so correctly, they’ll know it is capable of making accurate predictions about the physical world.

From here, the possibilities are endless. They can start inputting climate projections and see how the building’s twin reacts. How much extra electricity is necessary to keep classrooms cool when temperatures rise? How will building occupancies change as weather patterns begin to shift?

“We don’t have to wait and see. We can simulate,” Fascetti says.

Even at this small scale, there is something almost mystical in what these engineers are trying to create: a system that will allow us to peek into our possible futures. Until recently, even contemplating such technologies was difficult – the sheer amount of data and computing infrastructure needed simply didn’t exist. Even now, despite his optimism, Fascetti is aware of the challenges.

“If you’re talking even of a medium-sized city, this becomes daunting,” he says. “If you talk about the region – well, at this point, we really don’t know if we even have computers to do that.”

There are scientists, though, who are trying to find out.

CLONING OUR CITIES In 2015, an aircraft flew above Singapore with a very unusual passenger on board. Operated by the geospatial service AAM Group (now Woolpert), the plane carried a sophisticated LiDAR imaging system that bounced laser beams across the country.

The aircraft was commissioned by the country’s land services department as part of its plans to create a digital twin of the entire nation.

The aerial images would be combined with data collected by laser-equipped cars that traced every street in Singapore. Three million panoramic images and around 25 terabytes of data went into the system.

The SGD$73 million National 3D Mapping Programme was conceived to help the country better respond to emerging climate threats, like the flash floods that regularly wash through city streets after heavy rains. Singapore is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, cosmosmagazine.com 79

A digital twin of Earth can help us understand our planet’s past, present and future – but to create such an in-depth replica requires a multitude of smaller twins of the Earth's systems. These range from urban areas – like the model of New Zealand's Wellington (opposite), currently used to understand the city's transport capacity – to physical systems like the reconstruction of Antarctica's hydrology (below). Data-fed models of forests, oceans, river systems and more will be crucial to creating a responsive, whole-Earth digital twin.

PLAY VIDEO

80 COSMOS MAGAZINE

twin to identify which trees are obstructing motorists and need pruning.

“We are constantly looking at how we can harness the potential of geospatial data and technologies further to support Singapore’s sustainability efforts,” Singapore’s Land Services department said in an email, calling the future of digital-twin technology “limitless”.

Digital twins are also in the works for Dubai, Wellington, London, Paris, Melbourne and dozens of other places. Experts, like infrastructure engineer Abbas Rajabifard from the University of Melbourne, say that digital twins offer decision-makers the seductive ability to witness the impacts of climate change virtually, before they confront them in reality.

“If we bring this [digital twin] system to life, it becomes like a live testbed – you can bring anything into it, and it provides the solution,” Rajabifard says. He gives the example of planning your morning commute. The simulation would not only tell you if it will rain today, but also the impact of driving versus taking the train – how much time you might save, what the road conditions will be like, how much fuel your trip will consume.

“You can put yourself into that situation virtually … and then you can choose your option,” he says.

But there is some danger behind this hype.

As the amount and complexity of information fed into the digital twin grows, and its engineers rely on artificial intelligence models to extract useful information, it will become harder to understand how and why the twin makes its predictions. There’s a risk a digital twin could be treated more as an impenetrable digital oracle.

Rajabifard and his colleagues call this problem the “black box” of digital twin and AI development. “In some areas, [a prediction] can be totally meaningless until the system becomes more mature,” Rajabifard says.

For example, a predictive, AI-powered digital twin used in farming may prioritise a larger harvest over worker safety, without the endusers knowing what it’s doing. Rajabifard says governments must ask themselves an important question.

“How can we validate that information before we apply it to our decision processes?”

The answer lies in developing powerful “auditing” systems, Rajabifard says – though there’s still “more room to learn” about what those systems might look like. Most likely, it would mean widening the type of data the model wrestles with – in the above example, an auditing system could ensure variables around employee wellbeing, like rates of injury or

EARTHWAVE X2

so figuring out how to build infrastructure to best assist its citizens can challenge city planners. It was hoped a digital twin could help take the guesswork out of social, economic and environmental intervention.

“The software offers visualisations of 3G/4G network coverage areas; simulations of crowd control and evacuation measures; and planning scenarios for delivering municipal services, analysing pedestrian flows, as well as projecting science research outcomes,” Singapore’s Land Authority said at the project’s launch a decade ago.

Touted as the world’s first digital twin of a country, the 3D simulation of Singapore is exquisite in its detail. Any point in the country can be inspected in 360° of clarity. Users can fly over the city model like a virtual drone.

The model has allowed city planners to identify flood-prone areas and create a tailored coastal protection plan. Singapore’s 3D building models have also been used to establish a national “solar potential map” that reveals suitable rooftops for solar panel installations. Even the country’s parks department is using the digital

DIGITAL TWINS

PLAY VIDEO

working hours, are provided alongside the twin’s farming recommendations.

But the solutions are not all technologyrelated. Rajabifard has been developing workshops for community and government leaders on how to use digital twins, comprehend their outputs and validate their simulations.

“Let’s engage as much as we can with different authorities so that they can bring their own data sets into this,” he says.

BUILDMEDIA

PLANET NO. 2

less data and therefore cost less – but the twin would also quickly lose its synchronicity with its physical doppelganger, and its powerful prediction capabilities would be greatly diminished.

Peter Dueben from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast is part of a new initiative to create a digital twin of the entire planet. He is very familiar with the complications posed by the butterfly effect.

“That’s one of the reasons why it’s getting more and more complicated to make good predictions as we go into the future,” Dueben says. “The degrees of freedom are overwhelming.”

The European Commission-funded project, called Destination Earth – DestinE for short – is combatting this problem by using highly sophisticated sensors and massive computing power to wrangle the “overwhelming” amount of information needed to create a virtual planet.

The MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, unveiled in Barcelona last year and capable of executing 314 million billion calculations per second, will be tasked with analysing the data needed to create our planetary twin. Dueben says simulations with the highest resolution will include more than 250 million horizontal grid points, 137 vertical levels and at least 10 different prognostic variables per grid point – which include things like temperature and pressure.

“As the scale of digital twins increases, engineers have a difficult balancing act to maintain.”

There is a further problem presented by the vast sea of data needed by digital twins to make accurate predictions.

Take the butterfly effect: chaos theory’s thought experiment first proposed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. It holds that miniscule changes to our weather systems can have massive yet unpredictable flow-on effects – like how the flapping of butterfly wings can eventually lead to a tornado on the other side of the world.

As the scale of digital twins increases, engineers have a difficult balancing act to maintain.

At high resolutions, the twin is able to better take into account granular interactions at the level of butterfly wings, but this would require an explosion in data and computational costs. On the other hand, a lower-resolution model would require

cosmosmagazine.com 81

PLAY VIDEO

“What would happen if the rainforest in the Amazon was to disappear? You can look at how it would work.”

82 COSMOS MAGAZINE

‘WORST-CASE SCENARIO’

While digital twins offer some countries a revealing glimpse into their future (and with it, the possibility to alter its course), for small island countries, those dire predictions are already coming true.

In Tuvalu, leaders don’t need technology to witness the impacts of climate change – they can just look out the window. “Certain areas that used to be land are now underwater. We’re also seeing salt water seeping through the land, which is making it very difficult for us to grow things on the island,” Foreign Minister Kofe says.

I ask Dueben if the money and attention put into cloning the planet is really worth the cost, given that the science is conclusive around the impacts of increased fossil fuel emissions.

FRANK RAMSPOTT / GETTY IMAGES

“It’s something that a normal human can’t really comprehend,” he says.

But if the team pulls it off, DestinE could supercharge our ability to visualise our climate futures. Current forecasts run at the ninekilometre range, at best covering large suburbs or townships, predicting the weather over the next week or so. Meanwhile our existing climate models analyse components like atmosphere chemistry, oceans, land surface and ice to provide broad, global temperature predictions years or decades into the future.

DestinE would provide much greater detail over larger timeframes and smaller areas. Its scientists are aiming to push enough data into the system – from satellites, weather stations and sensors around the world – to develop a model with a powerful one-kilometre grid resolution of our meteorological system. At these higher resolutions scientists would be able to pinpoint paths storm clouds might take as they form over villages in the Pacific, or determine risk levels of bushfires in Australia before they even strike.

“If you go to the one-kilometre range of resolution, you basically end up with a model simulation of the atmosphere that is very hard to distinguish from the observation,” Dueben explains; if you were to take a satellite and ask it to focus on a one-kilometre-square patch of land, the images it produces would be identical to what the digital twin simulates.

Two years into the project, Earth’s digital twin is still early in its lifecycle. It’s still unknown precisely how the system will be used, and by whom.

But Dueben believes, ultimately, DestinE can empower governments and policy makers around the world to prepare for climate-changed futures.

“What would, for example, happen if the rainforest in the Amazon was to disappear?” Dueben asks. “You can … look at what the Earth would actually respond to and how it would work.”

This visual component to the digital twin can’t be overstated. It’s true, complex climate modelling is already available to us, including studies into how deforestation can change our communities and the world.

But Dueben explains that DestinE, and digital twins like it, could allow anyone to witness these impacts with their own eyes.

“It’s not only about the model development, but also about how we make the data available to users and how the society can interact with the model simulations as well,” Dueben says.

The next phase of the project is to embed powerful machine-learning technologies into the simulation.

DIGITAL TWINS

Extreme weather fluctuations, major biodiversity loss and food insecurity have already been predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without the need of a digital twin.

“We know basically that it’s going to be bad if we increase climate change. But we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in our local area,” Dueben responds. He says providing such localised images of the future can also be an important tool for communities and governments to understand the impact of climate change, and advocate for a better response.

But what happens if our environments are already facing extinction, or if we are accelerating too fast down a path of climate collapse?

Such questions are front of mind for Kofe.

According to him, Tuvalu's government is using digital-twin technology to preserve an image of

The European Union’s digital-twin-Earth project – DestinE – aims to accurately forecast conditions at a 1 sq. km scale.

the nation today, rather than imagine possible disasters tomorrow.

“Part of our advocacy and messaging is to try and get people to understand how climate change is really affecting countries like Tuvalu that are at the forefront,” he says.

There’s frustration in Kofe’s voice when I speak to him about how technology can help his country.

“The media likes to put the attention on the Metaverse stuff but the core of it is just looking at how we can harness the power of technology to improve the lives of Tuvaluans,” he says.

I ask Kofe if he believes developing a digital twin is really a viable solution to the country’s climate change vulnerabilities. Does he really expect Tuvaluans to relocate to an online, virtual country and abandon their physical homes?

On one hand, he hopes contemplating such a future serves as a wake-up-call to the rest of the world, allowing them to avoid entering the digital twin altogether.

“We feel that the more people understand the situation that we’re facing … hopefully that will have a chain reaction to the leadership in their countries,” Kofe says. “Pressure can be put on the leaders to take stronger climate action.”

But he also says his government’s digital twin endeavours aren’t simply “PR stunts”. The country is legitimately preparing for what could happen when their land disappears.

“Scientists are predicting that our islands could be fully submerged within a matter of decades,” Kofe says. “This is a plan for that worst-case scenario.”

Kofe doesn’t know when the government will finish creating Tuvalu’s digital twin. The plans are, after all, ambitious – to preserve an entire country’s history, culture and geography virtually. Is it fair to ask a vulnerable nation to consider such a future for its people? Can a digital twin provide more than a shadow of its reality?

Such questions can only be answered as twins become better at mimicking our real worlds. Engineers in Europe expect the “full digital replica” of Earth to be completed in 2030.

Climate scientists predict that around 2030, global temperatures will exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, pushing many countries into irreversible peril.

At that stage, we may all be faced with the same “worst-case scenario” that Tuvalu contemplates today: pondering if a mirror world can ever truly replicate our real one once it becomes uninhabitable.

PRIANKA SRINIVASAN is a reporter and photographer specialising in the Pacific.

cosmosmagazine.com 83

C O N D E M A T O

n a hot, dry day in February, I arrive at Charles Sturt University just outside the New South Wales town of Wagga Wagga. I’m here to meet a special breed of physicist.

One by one, they arrive at the shady outdoor seating area of a campus café.

Seasoned, retired professors are joined by up-and-coming postdocs and freshfaced master’s students.

Within half an hour, about 50 restless physicists crowd around tables adorned with bowls of chips and nuts.

They begin to make conversation in an endearingly awkward way. There’s no small talk, no mention of the weather or the trip to Wagga Wagga. It’s straight into the physics.

“What kind of plot matches your data?”

“Are you using machine-learning algorithms to model the energies?”

“What if you use a ferrous metal and fluctuate the magnetic field?”

You may be wondering: Who are these people, what on Earth are they talking about and why are they all gathered in rural NSW on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River?

Fair questions.

These physicists conduct research in the fields of condensed matter physics and materials science, and they are attending an annual conference – affectionally called “Wagga” – organised by the Australian Institute of Physics.

What, I hear you ask, is condensed matter physics? In the grand scheme of physics, this 84 COSMOS MAGAZINE

The most important field of physics you’ve never heard of. Evrim Yazgin reports.

field isn’t that well known. I completed my master’s at the University of Melbourne in theoretical condensed matter physics, and my family could only remember the field by referring to it as “condensed milk”. It was the joke that never grew old – for them.

But while it doesn’t have the same recognition as, say, particle physics or astrophysics, condensed matter physics plays a critical role in the physical sciences and our daily lives.

It’s been essential in developing semiconducting chips that led to modern computers, green technologies like solar panels, superconductors, nanotechnology, electronics, energy storage, magnetic materials and applications in medicine such as drug delivery.

Wagga 2024, the 46th installation of the conference held in early February 2024, was a celebration of these aspects of condensed matter physics and materials science.

As a science journalist, I was in heaven. Over four days of presentations, discussions and casual chats over lunch or coffee, I met a cast of interesting characters at the forefront of surprisingly diverse research into condensed matter physics.

But before I introduce you to them, let’s delve into the intriguing history of this field.

FUTURE PHYSICS

N S E D T E R S

BACKGROUND: MDLOTHFOR / ADOBE STOCK

A MATTER OF TIME Millions of years ago, our human ancestors began shaping materials like stone and wood into useful tools. As our technology developed, so did our understanding and our ability to use more specialised materials for specific purposes, and we began making pottery, weaving fabrics and smelting metals.

Skipping ahead to the 19th century, physicists and chemists were grappling with more advanced questions around why materials behave as they do. In particular, they were trying to work out why electricity and magnetism came about.

An early model to explain the flow of electricity was developed by German physicist Paul Drude in 1900. Drude suggested that a metal atom’s outer-shell electrons move freely through the material, but his model couldn’t explain other properties of metals.

A theory that could peer into the subatomic to make sense of the macroscopic was just around the corner. In the first decades of the 20th century, one of the greatest shifts in our understanding of the natural world occurred: quantum mechanics.

Quantum theory tells us that on the tiny scale of particles, atoms and molecules, you cannot take what you know about a particle right now and predict what it will be doing in the future. You can only work out the probability that the particle will be in one of a given set of states.

No longer was our knowledge of materials just based on what we could sense. Quantum mechanics could help explain the different properties of materials through the combined effects of all the quantum states of all the atoms and molecules that make them up.

This new, bizarre theory could explain why some materials are magnetic, rigid, soft, liquid at room temperature – and why some are conductors.

Drude’s model of free electrons was helpful to this end; it was built upon in 1926 by another German physicist – Arnold Sommerfeld, one of the fathers of modern quantum mechanics.

Austrian quantum pioneer Wolfgang Pauli then used this to explain the heat capacity of metals.

This was also based on the quantum statistical model developed by English physicist Paul Dirac and Italian Enrico Fermi.

Unlocking this weird and wacky quantum world led physicists to finally understand more exotic properties of materials like superconductivity and superfluidity, by combining quantum mechanics with statistics.

Up until the 1940s, physicists working in metallurgy, crystallography, elasticity, magnetism and other areas were considered separate. They were then brought together under the umbrella of “solid-state physics.” Then, in the 1960s, those studying liquids were brought into the fold.

A new field – condensed matter physics – was born. cosmosmagazine.com 85

ENERGETIC THINKING

PLAY VIDEO

carbon materials are critical for the green transition, but they’re quite energy intensive to prepare,” Martin says.

“The sheets wrinkle, get cut and interweave. To get rid of the defects that allow the sheets to come apart – which is what you need for lithium-ion battery – requires an enormous amount of energy. That’s the big issue.

“Our focus is on reducing the energy requirements to make graphite so that we can make lithium-ion batteries with fewer emissions.”

Martin’s team is trying to understand how graphite forms in order to make production faster and more energy efficient.

Because carbon is so stable, Martin says that to get atoms to rearrange into the graphite sheets requires heating the material to 3,000°C – halfway to the temperature on the surface of the Sun. “We’re talking about extreme temperatures,” he enthuses.

“Graphite has a high heat capacity, which means that it takes a lot of energy to raise its temperature.”

Martin has showed that, on paper, graphite should take much less energy to make than

“WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO FORM GRAPHITE ON THE SECONDS TIMESCALE”

86 COSMOS MAGAZINE

Jacob Martin (above and opposite) is working on an energy-efficient method of creating graphite (below right).

ABOVE LEFT: CURTIN UNIVERSITY. RIGHT: DR JACOB MARTIN X2.

Condensed matter today is the most diverse field in physics – a variety reflected in the range of scientists at Wagga 2024. It would take several books to give a true state of the field, but I’ll give you a taste of this world by introducing you to a few of the scientists working in it.

Jacob Martin, a materials scientist and nanotechnologist from Western Australia’s Curtin University, caught my attention when he won an award for his presentation – not a fancy plaque or formal certificate, but a tattered sculpture of a galah named Jacko. He’s the first to admit that he may have edged out other presenters for the prize by bringing props to his talk – 3D-printed pieces and even a VR headset.

“There’s nothing better than getting a joke prize,” he says with a laugh. “It’s an honour of course to be given the prize, but also that we don’t take it too seriously.”

Martin says that what he loves about Australia’s condensed matter physics community is how it blends serious science with a laid-back attitude. “When you find a group of people that are in it for the science and are willing to kind of give each other a bit of hell, it’s quite enjoyable.”

Plus, he adds: “they’re quite practical people.

The other thing I love about condensed matter physicists is that they’re very grounded in experiments.”

Martin’s work is highly practical too. At Curtin, he leads a team which is trying to turn carbon from a problem into a solution – in particular, a useful form of carbon called graphite.

Graphite is a stable, crystalline form of carbon, made up of thin sheets composed of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern. The atom-thick layers are loosely held together, meaning they can slide off each other – a very useful property.

Graphite is not only used as a dry lubricant and as pencil “lead”. By mass, it’s the largest component in lithium-ion batteries, making up nearly a third of the energy storage devices which are used in many household applications, including electric vehicles.

When lithium-ion batteries are charging, the lithium gets “pulled” into graphite sheets where it is stored and its chemical energy can be accessed.

But there’s a catch. “It turns out that a lot of

FUTURE PHYSICS

current methods. “I worked out theoretically how much energy it would take to heat carbon up to 3,000°C from the heat capacity. It’s about a tenth of the energy that we use currently to heat it up to those temperatures.”

“It takes 14 hours to heat up, then you hold it there for three hours. All the heat is lost by just radiation and convection. It’s a very inefficient process. It means graphite has the same energy input per kilogram as steel,” Martin explains – though he’s quick to point out that some electric vehicle batteries are at least two times better in terms of carbon emissions than petrol.

His team built an instrument which could measure how quickly carbon transforms into graphite.

They found something unexpected.

“When you heat it up, it actually goes twice as fast as you’d expect,” he says. “That means that we should be able to form graphite on the seconds timescale and not on the hours timescale.”

Their instrument also allowed them to see that graphite formation is a completely different process to that which physicists had previously theorised.

Martin and his team discovered “screw defects” – structures which wind between the layers like spiral staircases – developing as the graphite was forming. The screw

defects form at high temperature but disappear within seconds. Heating graphite up for hours essentially encourages the formation of new screws, drawing out the process of producing graphite without the defects. Instead, to make the process more energy efficient, Martin’s team suggest a “pulsed” production process where carbon is heated for a matter of seconds, forming graphite, before quickly being brought back to room temperature.

“If you only need to heat the material for 10 seconds, it changes the way you think about this completely,” he says. “You could have a smaller amount of material and feed it continuously through.

We’re now commercialising that.”

One of Martin’s students developed 3D virtual environments showing computer simulations of graphite formation (hence the VR goggles which won him the galah prize). The team then examined how these visualisations feed into experiments.

“I call it a sort of experimental-computational approach,” Martin says. “We jump between doing virtual experiments and real experiments. The virtual experiments give us things to look for and the real experiments give us things to look at in the simulations.”

A “HOLE” LOT OF FUN Among the conference attendees were a few starry-eyed students just sinking their teeth into the field of condensed matter physics. One of them is Matthew Smith, a master’s student from Adelaide’s Flinders University. When I met him over coffee between presentations, he told me that what he enjoys about the field is how it links to real-world outcomes.

“Often in physics and physical sciences, it can be a little bit hard to draw a yellow line from what you’re doing to how someone’s going to benefit,” he says. He adds that pure science research is still vitally important, “but one of the things I like about condensed matter physics and the research I’m doing at the moment is that it’s extremely easy to draw a yellow line between what I study and things that are actually going to help.”

Like Martin, Smith’s research has potential in developing game-changing green energy sources. In Smith’s case: hydrogen fuel.

Hydrogen gas combusts to make water and energy. It is, therefore, a carbon-emission-free fuel source which is already being used in transport systems like buses and is even powering new drones. But, like current graphite production, hydrogen is not energy efficient to make. cosmosmagazine.com 87

Nearly 95% of industrial hydrogen is made by breaking down organic materials such as fossil fuels and biomass. The downside – and it’s a biggie – is that this releases more carbon into the atmosphere.

A more environmentally friendly way of producing hydrogen is a process called electrolysis: splitting water molecules, H 2O, into hydrogen and oxygen gas. But current electrolysis methods are energy intensive because they require a current to pass through a catalyst which is submerged in water.

“I work on solar photocatalytic hydrogen,” Smith explains excitedly.

This is a way of making hydrogen using only a catalyst, water and sunlight.

“No electronic equipment – just the photons from the Sun, which power the water-splitting reaction.”

Smith’s team is using semiconductors as the catalyst for hydrogen electrolysis.

Semiconductors are vital to our daily lives.

They underpin all kinds of electronic devices from diodes and transistors to the circuits in computers and mobile phones.

They’re useful because they have electrical conductivity somewhere between that of a conductor – like copper – and an insulator, which can’t conduct electricity. This means the flow of electrical current through a semiconductor device can be controlled.

Semiconductors are made from compounds like silicon, which are “doped”. Doping is a process in which impurities – other elements – are introduced into the crystal structure. When two differently doped regions are in the same crystal, a “junction” is created through which electricity can flow.

Electricity normally flows via the negatively charged electron. In semiconductors, electricity is transmitted through both electrons and “holes” – the positively charged spots where electrons used to be. Like electrons, these holes move from atom to atom through the crystal. Smith is one of many researchers looking at semiconductors as catalysts for hydrogen electrolysis. But the electron and “hole” pairs don’t always play dice.

“The problem with most of them is it’s actually quite hard to get the electron and the hole to where you need them to be,” he says.

But the team at Flinders is working with a semiconducting material in which electrons and holes cross the semiconductor junction when the material is struck by photons, creating an electric current and catalysing electrolysis.

88 COSMOS MAGAZINE

Smith says the details of the project are still confidential – he can’t tell me what stage the research is at or even what compound the team is using in their semiconductor. But it’s an exciting piece of research in the works.

ACCELERATING PHYSICS Wagga 2024 isn’t just for pure condensed matter physicists. Those who use the field’s methods come in a variety of packages – including researchers who work with particle accelerators, like Krystina Lamb.

“The Wagga conference is always fun,” Lamb says. “It’s a legendary conference among condensed matter physicists.”

Lamb is a physical chemist working at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne’s southeast. Operated by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), the synchrotron’s main purpose is to facilitate research.

“It’s here for researchers around Australia and internationally to do their science,” Lamb says.

“We have a very large group of physicists who run the machine itself.

I’m a beamline scientist. I manage, maintain, operate and train other people [in] how to

The work of Matthew Smith (left) involves creating an energyfriendly semiconductor with the capacity to produce hydrogen from water by electrolysis.

FUTURE PHYSICS

LEFT: ANSTO

THE SYNCHROTRON IS A CANDY SHOP, AND SCIENTISTS OF ALL STRIPES ARE THE KIDS.

The Australian Synchrotron, opposite, holds a cornucopia of tools for research, under the careful operation of scientists like Krystina Lamb (right).

use a specific instrument. In my case, it’s the X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) instrument.”

She explains that the XAS instrument has many uses. “You can do whatever you want on it, to be honest,” she laughs.

A sample, like a rock or a grain of wheat, is bombarded with X-rays which “excite” its electrons, making them reach higher quantum energy levels.

When the excited electrons calm down, they release energy in the form of X-rays. By measuring which X-rays were absorbed and then released, beamline scientists can tell how much of which elements are present in a sample.

It can even be used to map the structure of a sample down to micrometre precision.

“This technique is an element-specific technique,” Lamb explains. “For example, there are people who do studies on mercury, and particularly mercury in very low concentrations.

Depending on the specific oxidation state of the mercury or the other elements that it’s attached to, mercury can be toxic or it can be benign.”

Organic mercury is extremely toxic – very small concentrations will kill you – while inorganic mercury is more benign. “We can tell the difference between those mercuries in very low concentrations: in soil, food, mining runoff or all those sorts of things.

“But you can do it on any element in the range of the energy that we can look at.”

And that range basically includes the whole periodic table other than hydrogen and helium.

Lamb says she’s supported researchers looking into catalysis, batteries, soil research, geochemistry, metal accumulation in steel pipes and other engineering processes, food science, cells and bioaccumulation of elements in cells. Even palaeontologists have brought fossils for analysis.

The Synchrotron is basically a candy shop, and scientists of all stripes – including materials and condensed matter scientists – are the kids.

“Users come in and they have a research question. They might say, I have this flour that’s made from wheat that’s genetically modified, or we’ve grown it in these specific kinds of soils, and I want to know what the speciation of iron is.

How available is the iron in these flour samples

for humans who consume it?”

Lamb’s job is to bring the synchrotron expertise. “One of the things that I really enjoy about it is there is that really big range of research,” she says.

“People from all different areas come and have a chat about what they’re doing.”

CMP: THE PLACE TO BE One of the great advantages of condensed matter physics is its breadth. At Wagga 2024, the question-and-answer periods after presentations were often filled with helpful suggestions from the floor – coming at the same problem from a different angle. An atomic physicist might have a unique approach to a problem that a materials scientist is working on. But they’re both in this glorious condensed matter world.

“That was one of my first conferences,” Smith says. “I must admit, I didn’t understand all of the presentations as well as I would like to. I think it’s really cool when people are bringing ideas from other places.”

Martin says condensed matter physics is one of the “unsung heroes” of physics. “I don’t think people appreciate how much condensed matter physics has changed their lives,” he says.

And it will continue to change our lives.

Quantum computing promises to be millions of times more powerful and faster than current computers. And it’s condensed matter physics. Finding better ways of storing and producing energy – also condensed matter physics. Producing a room-temperature superconductor to conduct electricity with no power loss and no need for an industrial refrigerator – you guessed it: condensed matter physics.

“It’s the largest branch and the most practical,” Martin says. “So much of what we consider key technologies to decarbonise is to do with condensed matter physics. It requires that theoretical, fundamental understanding to enable it, and we still don’t have a lot of the solutions. We need more people in condensed matter physics.”

EVRIM YAZGIN is a journalist at Cosmos. His story mythbusting our Solar System appeared last issue.

cosmosmagazine.com 89

BUSH FOODS

A partnership between a young Brazilian scientist, a veteran horticulturalist and First Nations people of the West Kimberley, in Western Australia, promises to improve biodiversity and heal Country damaged by wildfires and land clearing.

Story and photographs by David Hancock.

W

hen she first arrived in the West Australian Kimberley six years ago, Sara Cavalcanti Marques felt a strong affinity with the region. This vast area of dramatic and relatively undisturbed landscapes, cut by pristine rivers, forms a haven for rare plants and animals. The lush, warm ecosystem with a strong tradition of Indigenous land stewardship reminded her of her birthplace of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon in northern Brazil.

Initially based in Perth at Murdoch University, the young scientist – who holds a bachelor’s degree with honours in terrestrial ecology from São Paulo State University – was so entranced by the West Kimberley that she sought opportunities to work with First Nations people in native food production and land stewardship practices.

She contacted First Nations research institutes in Broome including North Regional (NR) TAFE, which works with Traditional Owners and trains First Nations students in conventional horticultural techniques, such as large-scale irrigation. Almost by chance, Cavalcanti Marques came across Kim Courtenay, one of northern Australia’s most experienced

Courtenay is particularly interested in the concept of “savanna enrichment”, where certain native flora species, usually trees, are planted within existing vegetation. Coupled with regular early-season burning, the practice results in productive woodlands where natural biodiversity is preserved and enhanced.

Much of northern Australia’s vegetation is dominated by various fire-tolerant acacias. In many places fires come through, the acacias burn and then regenerate more thickly, creating even hotter fires next time there’s a burn. During intense fires, a lot of long-lived native trees are destroyed and the landscape effectively changes from tropical woodland to scrub. Where once stood large eucalypts (such as bloodwoods, stringybarks and woollybutts), boabs, bauhinias, kurrajongs and others, often there are burned, twisted skeletons.

Savanna sustenance Community members at Bidyadanga harvest gubinge (Kakadu plum) from the plantation of trees they raised and irrigated over the past 15 years. The highly valued native fruit is gathered in a wild harvest in other parts of Western Australia and the Northern Territory by First Nations people.

horticulturalists, who has spent decades working with First Nations people of the Kimberley.

Courtenay has been on the payroll of NR TAFE for 29 years and has long-established links with Traditional Owners and remote communities.

Aside from training, NR TAFE staff help communities establish their own gardens and native food plantations, assist pastoralists with restoring degraded land and provide skills to inmates at rehabilitation institutions such as the West Kimberley Regional Prison.

Importantly for Cavalcanti Marques, one of the first initiatives Courtenay launched for NR TAFE was an on-Country learning centre, called Balu Buru, “place of trees” in the local Yawuru language: a 20-hectare site outside Broome dedicated to training, cultivating native species and developing sustainable land-management practices.

“This means you lose biodiversity,” Courtenay says. “And you lose the bush foods so important to Aboriginal people. Those are plants that they used to go and collect and obtain so much goodness from. Savanna enrichment is basically reversing that process [of losing bush food plants]. We are re-establishing the valuable native plants and using various methods to suppress or replace the acacia thickets.”

It is a land-management technique used by Courtenay for decades and First Nations people for generations, yet they have only been able to provide anecdotal evidence of its success.

Savanna enrichment uses traditional practices such as cool, patchy fires and caring for bush produce plants that have always been part of First Nations culture. For Western science, savanna enrichment is yet to be proved.

Enter Sara Cavalcanti Marques. cosmosmagazine.com 91

The Brazilian is undertaking a PhD project at Murdoch University called “Assessing the Social and Ecological Benefits of Bush Tucker Inclusion and Land Stewardship Practices”. Its main aim is to scientifically prove the ecological process and benefits of savanna enrichment. It’s also expected to open up extensive economic opportunities for First Nations businesses and communities.

“TAFE and Kim [Courtenay] have been doing this for several years,” Cavalcanti Marques says.

“We know that it works on the ground as a model for bush produce cultivation, but the idea is trying to quantify those benefits in order to get more support behind it, so this activity can be rolled out on a bigger scale.

“So far, it has happened in very specific, punctual cases from the TAFE and across a couple of different communities. The idea is to try and bring more evidence of the ecological and social benefits of this model, so it can be supported and incentivised to be carried out across regional areas.”

applied to different types of country – the species you would incorporate would depend upon where you want to implement this model. Here, in this case study we are looking at with TAFE, we are looking at the pindan scrub – this tropical savanna – so the species reflects that local context.”

Pindan is a name given to the red soil country of the south-western Kimberley region, and the flora associated with it. The pindan forms a transitional zone between the wetter areas of the north Kimberley and the Great Sandy Desert to the south-east. It is a low, open woodland of

“Kakadu plum has the potential to combat many prevalent diseases.”

Cavalcanti Marques points out that while there is evidence showing that savanna enrichment works as a means to grow native bush foods and medicines – that it’s providing social benefits and increasing diversity of bush tucker plants – so far that evidence is strictly anecdotal.

“Through research you can actually prove whether or not this model is also contributing to things like restoration, and whether it is, for instance, contributing to carbon sequestration, carbon offsetting and that sort of thing,” she says.

“What I think is interesting about this savanna enrichment model is the principle can be 92 COSMOS MAGAZINE

Above, Sara Cavalcanti Marques (right) celebrates a planting at Balu Buru with a NR TAFE student (left); their techniques to improve the native food industry could apply even to the sub-tropical climate of NSW and Queensland, where native fingerlimes (top of page) are grown in large numbers.

scattered trees dominated by wattles, eucalypts and tall shrubs. Higher ground is home to paperbarks and larger trees.

The native species with the biggest potential to generate income for First Nations people in the Kimberley, including the pindan scrub region, is Terminalia ferdinandiana. It grows across northern Australia between Broome and the Gulf of Carpentaria in sandy soils and harsh terrain where other plants struggle to survive. The fruit is a traditional Aboriginal food and medicine known by several names including gubinge in the west and billygoat plum in the east. The name Kakadu plum was created to standardise the product name for the native-food industry.

BUSH FOODS

The small, green fruit sells well in Australia as a gourmet bush-food ingredient for jams and chutneys. Local and global companies are also seeking Kakadu plum for cosmetic products (primarily skin care), nutraceuticals (health food and drink supplements) and as a natural food preservative.

According to some experts, Kakadu plum has the potential to combat many diseases prevalent in Western society: inflammation, cancer, diabetes and other afflictions. It has the highest known levels of Vitamin C of any plant in the world and is full of antioxidants. According to biologist Ian Cock of Griffith University, Queensland, people are starting to take notice of the plant.

“The more we work on this plant the more we find,” he says. “It has possibilities with Alzheimer’s [disease] and as a natural antibiotic to assist the old, sick and infirm in fighting bacteria. It has possibilities as a natural antibiotic in animal husbandry where there is a trend towards plant extracts instead of manufactured

Horticulturalist Kim Courtenay (above) has pioneered the concept of savannah enrichment in northern WA, where it helps grow traditional foods with the potential for commercial development, such as the Kakadu plum and the Pindan walnut (top right).

antibiotics that animals develop resistance to. It has major potential in many fields.”

A member of the Centre for Planetary Health and Food Security at Griffith University, Dr Cock says Kakadu plum may be the stand-out native plant that could provide value and income to communities, but others are ideal to rehabilitate the environment and provide medicinal benefits.

He cited Scaevola spinescens (also known as prickly fanflower, currant bush and maroon bush), which has potential to treat cancer, heart disease and kidney complaints. He said plants from the Eremophila genus (sometimes known as Emu bush) also have well-documented antibacterial and antiviral properties.

The native plant industry Kakadu plum is gathered primarily from Aboriginal lands; often, it is Indigenous women who pick the fruit by walking through the bush after the wet season to harvest up to 20 kilograms per day from trees that grow to three metres.

Around Darwin, non-indigenous pickers target crown land or pay a royalty for gathering on Aboriginal country; they can earn $10–20 per kg.

In some cases, plums are frozen and shipped away while other fruit are converted to powder (essentially, the plums are pulped and dried) and sold for $300–500 per kg. It takes about 10kg of fresh plums to create 1kg of powder. In a good year there is potential to harvest 40–60 tonnes of Kakadu plums from Western Australia, and 20–40 tonnes from the Northern Territory.

Courtenay believes Kakadu plum and other native plants, in combination with conventional food gardens, could underpin the economies of remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia and elsewhere. Through practical training programs, he and Traditional Owners around Broome have planted more than 2,500 gubinge trees in the past 15 years. Nearly 600 trees were planted at Bidyadanga community, 180 kilometres south of Broome, and another 1,000 in a plantation-like situation at GoGo Station, about 400km east of Broome, near Fitzroy Crossing. The trees at Bidyadanga provide a regular harvest and income for the community; initially they were well-irrigated but now survive under normal seasonal conditions.

“Gubinge is our hero plant,” Courtenay says.

“But across the north there are a number of other plants such as the wild mango or green plum (Buchanania obovata), the pindan walnut (Terminalia cunninghamii), also known locally as kumpaja, a very oil-rich nut. cosmosmagazine.com 93

“There is another nut which occurs in the desert which is called the desert walnut (Owenia reticulata) that has prized oil in it, very important to the traditional Aboriginal people from the desert; they applied the oil to their skin,” Courtenay says. “One of the old priests at Bidyadanga saw several of the people coming out of the desert, emerging from the traditional life.

He said their skin shone like polished ebony and it was because they regularly applied oil of the desert walnut to their skin.”

These native plants have long been established at Balu Buru and form the backbone of Cavalcanti Marques’ program to prove the benefits of savanna enrichment; over time, there have been extra plantings in and around Broome, where First Nations people collect them to eat or to sell when in season.

“The horticultural techniques used for growing bush foods are very similar to those used in

Rangers and students from all over the Kimberley came to Balu Buru near Broome to plant trees that will form the basis of the savanna enrichment project.

The core of Cavalcanti Marques’ PhD research looks at social and ecological benefits of Indigenous involvement in savanna enrichment.

“That is really my focus,” she says. “Looking at what are the opportunities for communities and Indigenous groups to be able to implement savanna enrichment.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have findings or publications yet I can share about what the data tells us regarding the potential of savanna enrichment as a tool for land stewardship (namely restoration and carbon farming). However, anecdotal evidence suggests it might be an opportunity that fits in with the wants and needs of Aboriginal Rangers working on caring for Country.”

Cavalcanti Marques also works closely with the ARC Training Centre for Healing Country.

“I feel very frustrated by the fact that in Australia 2% of the Indigenous bush-tucker sector nationally is held by Indigenous people,” she adds. “It’s outrageous because the knowledge is 100% Indigenous knowledge – the whole

“Native foods can become a mainstay of remote Indigenous economies.” conventional horticulture, including market gardening,” Courtenay says. “Teaching these skills can contribute to the big-picture issue of food security [in] remote communities.”

In other parts of Australia native plants such as finger limes (Citrus australasica), Davidson plums (Davidsonia spp.) and lemon myrtle (Backhousia citriodora) are popular ingredients in foods, drinks, cosmetics and medicines, and demand is high.

However, in southern Australia there are relatively few First Nations people directly involved in the native-food, or bush-tucker, industry. In Australia’s north, hopes are high that native foods can become a mainstay of remote Indigenous economies.

94 COSMOS MAGAZINE

BUSH FOODS

should support First Nations groups and families who want to return to Country to grow and harvest bush tucker.

“Western agricultural methodology, including grazing by cattle and horses, has meant many native species have become extinct,” she says.

“Aboriginal people are more aligned with a holistic way of looking after the land. Targeted burning and savanna enrichment is part of that.”

Torres says it is essential governments legislate to recognise and protect Indigenous knowledge, and provide as much infrastructure funding to remote communities as is provided to large corporates and pastoral interests.

Cavalcanti Marques says working at Balu Buru feels like a “very lucky occurrence”: “Having that site there that TAFE has looked

viability of the bush-tucker industry in Australia relies heavily on this Indigenous knowledge.

“I think economic benefits are what stand out first and foremost – we know that the demand for bush tucker in Australia far outstrips supply, and we know that there is a big global interest in a lot of Indigenous products. There is not enough to actually meet that demand, so economically there is a big opportunity there – but I think that is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of social and cultural benefits.”

(Horti)cultural matters At Balu Buru, Cavalcanti Marques and Courtenay work with Indigenous rangers and students planting, irrigating and recording details about the flora – information that forms the basis of the study project. They dig long, shallow channels in the red, sandy soil to lay poly pipes that will bring water to young saplings. These new plants exist in a time capsule, because they are alongside the same species that were established more than 15 years ago.

Recently, representatives of several Indigenous groups – the Nyangumarta Women Rangers, Bardi Jawi Rangers, Karajarri Women Rangers and the Kimberley Mineral Sands Rangers – visited Balu Buru and worked with Cavalcanti Marques and Courtenay to plant a variety of native species.

The rangers said there was potential for their communities in a variety of ways: to regenerate burnt country, establish seed banks and nurseries for native-food industries, bring native plants closer to communities so old and young people don’t have to travel long distances to gather and learn about traditional tucker, even to re-establish culturally important trees that have been destroyed by natural disasters, such as cyclones.

Lynette Wilridge, Roberta Hunter and Lisa Toby, of the Nyangumarta Women Rangers, say they had Elders who were born under some of those large kumpaja trees along 80 Mile Beach, south and west of Broome. “They were very important places for our community,” the women say. “Cyclones took all that. We would like to grow those plants and put them back there. It won’t be the same, but it is important that we take those plants back to Country as a way to remember our ancestors.”

The rangers agreed elements of savanna enrichment could bring a community back to doing things they have been doing (traditionally) in the past, and help protect plants and animals as well as providing shelter and food.

Pat Torres, of Mayi Harvests, who helps develop native-food ventures, says governments

Operated by North Regional TAFE, Balu Buru has become a highly successful site for training people in cross-cultural horticultural techniques.

after for so many years, having the ability to take students through and show them that this area we just planted out will look like in 15 to 20 years, people can experience the transformation before their eyes,” she says.

“They can examine mature, enriched savanna areas … you can see their eyes light up immediately when they start looking at the plants, identifying the plants, talking about how it compares to their Country. I think that site has power and impact.

People can go there and not only get the training and the skills but get inspiration of what the potential is and what it could look like.”

DAVID HANCOCK is based in Darwin. His last story, on Stone Country ecology, was in Issue 101.

cosmosmagazine.com 95

ZEIT Europa is one of Jupiter’s 95 known moons – and one of its most interesting.

Its surface is covered in ice, forming a frozen crust beneath which a saltwater ocean may lurk; evidence suggests it is twice as big as all of Earth’s oceans combined. This icy mini-world is crisscrossed by streaks and gashes that make it look a little like an eye, bulging with veins. But these features are actually cracks and ridges – some thousands of kilometres long – that form at weak points in the icy crust and are exacerbated by the tidal forces the moon experiences from Jupiter’s immense gravitational pull. To learn more about Europa and its fellow satellites of the Solar System, head to page 102.

96 COSMOS MAGAZINE

STOCKTREK / GETTY IMAGES

PLAY VIDEO

GEIST i Science meets life 98 PRINTING THE FUTURE Meet the researchers harnessing materials science to make shapeshifting, 4D-printed objects.

i 102

MOON MADNESS What’s in a moon?

And what is a moon, anyway? All the questions orbiting your head answered.

106 PUZZLES Science-inspired brain bogglers.

cosmosmagazine.com 97

iNtO tHe fOuRtH dImEnSiOn

m

aterials scientist Liwen Zhang dips a pair of tweezers into a beaker of iced water (0°C) and plucks out a small grey object the shape of a lotus flower in full bloom.

He plunges it into a second beaker filled with tepid water (15°C). When Zhang retrieves it after a few seconds, the flower has flattened out to form a disc shaped like a picture-book sun.

This demonstration, unfolding during my tour of The University of Queensland’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), may seem simple, but it’s an example of the remarkable and pioneering field of four-dimensional (4D) printing.

This emerging process – which is how the shapeshifting object was made – has profound implications for a range of fields, from manufacturing and medicine to fashion and furniture.

The AIBN’s Group Leader, Senior Research Fellow and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, Ruirui Qiao, explains that 4D printing is an extension of three-dimensional (3D) printing.

“3D printing is the technology – 4D printing is just the process,” she says. “The fourth dimension is actually time – these structures can change their shape over time.”

98 COSMOS MAGAZINE

MIT’s Skylar Tibbits (below) highlighted the essential weakness in 3D printing in a 2013 TED talk: once fabricated, 3D-printed objects couldn’t be altered. 4D printing would correct that flaw, he said.

There’s no such thing as a 4D printer. Rather, items assume the mantle of 4D by the way in which specific ingredients are combined to give the finished product useful qualities and abilities. Using a readily available 3D printer purchased for about $300, Qiao and Zhang turn out solid objects with the capacity to morph into different forms when exposed to stimuli such as heat, water or light.

4D printing is already in use in the medical device sector to create coronary stents, artificial muscles and other devices that adapt and change shape inside the body.

But having the ability to customise and shape materials after printing opens up the possibility of broader manufacturing breakthroughs and consumer innovations, from self-healing plumbing pipes to clothes that react to weather. And in good news for anyone who’s ever struggled to put together an IKEA cabinet, 4D printing might also lead to self-assembling furniture.

“4D printing is a rapidly evolving field that is really only limited by imagination,” Qiao says.

tHe fOuRtH dImEnSiOn It’s been almost five decades since the advent of 3D printing.

Sometimes called additive manufacturing, 3D printing creates three-dimensional objects layer by layer, using a digital file.

This permits the creation of complex structures with minimal waste.

The two most commonly used techniques are fused deposition modelling – where molten material is deposited on a bed layer by layer using a heated nozzle – and stereolithography (SLA), which uses a UV laser to

STEELCASE

An Australian institute is designing and printing objects that can shapeshift after they’re made.

Forget next-gen – Denise Cullen reports from the next dimension.

ZEITGEIST 4D PRINTING

the concept to life by dipping a 4D-printed single strand structure into water to reveal how it changed shape into the letters MIT; meanwhile, a different strand self-folded into a cube.

Tibbits didn’t tell the audience exactly how he worked this magic. However, the authors of a 2021 review in the journal Polymer noted that it was done by using a moisture-responsive material over plastic. On contact with water, the material expanded due to the formation of a hydrogel. It worked, but there was only a 30% expansion, and the structure gradually degraded over successive folding and unfolding cycles.

PLAY VIDEO

tRiGgEr pOiNt

TOP: AIBN. FLOWERS: 4D PRINTING SELF-MORPHING STRUCTURES, MATERIALS 2019.

UQ materials scientists Liwen Zhang (above, at right) and Ruirui Qiao (left) are among the 4D printing leaders in Australia. Qiao says the field is limited only “by imagination”.

selectively cure a polymer resin and thus build successive layers.

A range of objects, from architectural models to dental crowns, can be built by printing successive layers in plastic, metal, resin or other materials.

In a 2013 TED talk, Skylar Tibbits – founder and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – highlighted the flaw inherent in 3D-printed objects: they were static, inanimate and unable to change their form or function after they were made.

“Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate, or maybe even undulate like peristalsis to move the water themselves,” he said.

In his eight-minute presentation, he unveiled a new concept called 4D printing, in which objects printed using “programmable” or “smart” materials could transform from one shape to another directly on their own “like robotics without wires or motors”. He brought

Despite these early limitations, the idea of 4D printing caught on quickly.

In 2015, US doctors treated three infants with a potentially fatal airway condition by implanting 3D-printed splints that changed shape as the children grew.

Writing in Science Translational Medicine, they explained that the splints – hollow, porous tubes – were stitched over the affected airways to provide scaffolding, improving the children’s breathing.

Made with a “bioabsorbable” material known as polycaprolactone (PCL) that dissolves in the body over time, the splints stayed in place until the airway cartilage naturally strengthened with age and the associated risks of cardiopulmonary arrest abated.

An MRI follow-up in one patient at 38 months post operation showed fragmentation and degradation of the splint “with no problems related to the device”. According to paediatric otolaryngologist and co-author Glenn Green, the splints were gone within four years.

His subsequent 2021 paper, and another published in RadioGraphics in 2022, reports that the same procedure has been since used in other children and adults.

cosmosmagazine.com 99

How 4D-printed objects react to stimuli like temperature, light or moisture depends on the intrinsic properties of the materials they are made from. A jacket made from polymers with “shape memory” properties could stiffen to provide extra insulation during cold weather and then revert to a more flexible, breathable state in warmer weather. Drug-delivery patches or implants based on hydrogels can swell in response to moisture (releasing medication) and contract in dry conditions (reducing the release of medication).

But a gamechanger arrived in 2017, with the introduction of nanoparticles to 4D printing.

iNtO tHe nAnO-vErSe

Mixed in, the liquid metals tended to clump together or expel themselves during the printing process, and they were susceptible to oxidation.

These factors detrimentally altered the properties of the printed materials.

So Zhang, Qiao and colleagues developed a method that is breaking new ground for 4D printing. They take small organic molecules responsible for controlling growth – called reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer polymerisation (RAFT) agents – and graft them onto liquid metal nanoparticles. They then synthesise nanoparticles into a polymer matrix during the polymerisation process, which improves the dispersal of liquid metal nanoparticles in solutions and prevents surface oxidation.

Qiao says the spherical liquid metal nanoparticles are created from bulk liquid metals. A bulk alloy of gallium and indium is added to 3D printing liquid resins; the metals are then directly reduced to nanosized liquid SPACESHIP MATERIALS NASA is metal particles creating a foldable, shapeshifting through the applicafabric that could be useful for large tion of high-frequency sound antennas and other deployable waves (ultrasound) in a process devices. The material could one day known as sonication. be used to shield a spacecraft, make Finally, the liquid is placed in astronaut spacesuits, or capture the 3D printer’s resin tank and objects on the surface of another printed using the stereolithograplanet. One side of the fabric reflects phy method, in which a laser light, while the other absorbs it, acting solidifies or cures the liquid as a means of thermal control, the resin with ultraviolet light. space agency reports.

Nanoparticles are tiny materials ranging in size from one to 100 nanometres. (As a point of comparison, a single human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nanometres wide.) Their size gives them unique physical, chemical and biological properties.

Integrating nanoparticles into polymers or other materials for 3D printing allows creators to exercise enhanced control over how these materials respond to stimuli, without the challenges posed by other materials including stability and compatibility.

By enabling more precise and efficient shape changes, the integration of nanoparticles paves the way towards more complex and functional 4D-printed structures.

AIBN’s director Alan Rowan likens it to the difference between working with the big clunky Lego Duplo sets versus the much smaller Nanoblocks.

“When you have the micro, you can 4D-PRINTED FASHION In his book build a far more intricate pattern,” he Things Fall Together: A Guide says. to the New Materials Revolution One conventional way to incorporate (Princeton University Press, 2021) nanoparticles into 4D printing is to synTibbits documented his team’s thesise the nanoparticles and then experimentation towards a selfimmerse them in the resins, or “ink”. assembling shoe that sprung into However, writing in Nature shape when released from a rigid plate.

Communications late last year, Qiao, He also explored climate-adaptable Zhang and colleagues explained that clothes, the fibres of which would blending nanoparticles directly into a expand or contract based on external molten polymer matrix didn’t always temperature or moisture change. imbue the 4D-printed materials with the desired shapeshifting capabilities.

100 COSMOS MAGAZINE

FROM TOP: NASA / JPL-CALTECH. MIT SELF ASSEMBLY LAB.

“wHeN yOu hAvE tHe mIcRo yOu cAn bUiLd a fAr mOrE iNtRiCaTe pAtTeRn”

ZEITGEIST 4D PRINTING

DRUG DELIVERY 4D-printed devices can release drugs when the target environment provides the correct stimulus. These scanning electron microscopy images show one such device: a thermo-responsive “theragripper” (B), which changes shape to latch onto mucosal tissue in the gastrointestinal tract and then release an encapsulated drug.

The design of its sharp microtips is based on the teeth of a hookworm (A).

Like the lotus flower I saw, the resulting objects have shape memory properties.

This means that they can return from an altered state (the flower) to their original shape (the sun) when induced by an external trigger – in this case, shifting from a chilled to a tepid beaker of water.

Unlike Tibbits’ 2013 demonstration, Qiao, Zhang and colleagues found that their 4D-printed materials remained “unaffected” through at least 25 cycles of programming.

In real-life medical and other applications, though, the trigger would not be water but a laser – near-infrared light irradiation, which increases temperature due to the excitation of molecules. So what it is about the shift in temperature that causes the object to change shape?

Qiao explains that this is due to a fundamental property of polymers. At a critical temperature threshold, they transition from a rigid, glassy state to a more flexible, rubbery state, due to the movements of the carbon chains polymers are composed of. Polymers are often chosen for applications based on their capability to be both rigid and flexible.

Incorporating nanoparticles into polymer matrices allows researchers to further tailor the glassy-to-rubbery transition behaviour.

Other stimuli that can induce change in 4D-printed objects include moisture, magnetism, UV light, electrical energy, pH value, glucose and enzymes. The mechanisms of change are similarly diverse, potentially including an expansion in mass due to absorption (as in Tibbits’ shapeshifting strands), thermal expansion, molecular transformation or organic

FROM TOP: HUMAN PARASITOLOGY, 4TH ED. QI (KEVIN) GE / SUTD.

Ruirui Qiao’s team have created a “soft gripper” (centre x 3) that can grasp and release small objects.

4D-printed objects may have application in fields as diverse as robotics and medicine.

A

B

growth – though it depends upon the precise combination of materials used.

a nEw eRa While I saw a lotus flower, Qiao and her team have also designed a claw, or soft gripper, capable of grasping a cap and then releasing it. In much the same way, other 4D structures can be coaxed into performing a range of different mechanical tasks with infrared lasers – meaning they can bend, grasp, lift and release items five times their weight.

Zhang says this method allows the researchers to produce objects that can be customised, shaped and prompted to change over time without the need for wires or circuits. “This is a new era for robotics applications and a gamechanger for additive manufacturing,” he says.

There is also huge potential for the use of such devices in the medical field.

“For example, you could print a stent structure, and you could put it in the vascular [system] and use light to trigger a change in shape which causes the stent to expand [inside the blood vessel],” says Qiao.

While further research is required to develop a stent with sound biocompatibility and the right level of responsiveness, Qiao anticipates that this research will be in market within two years.

She’s also planning to upgrade the laboratory’s $300 printer. While most 3D printers can incorporate nanoparticles into 4D printed composites, cheaper models have limitations in terms of the intricacy of the structures they can create, and the maximum size of the object.

Such a printer may cost in the ballpark of $20,000 – a massive upgrade. What will they make with it? In time, I’ll have to come back and see.

DENISE CULLEN is based in Brisbane. Her story on the Mandela effect appeared in Issue 99.

cosmosmagazine.com 101

s e a k m a m o t o a n? h W

PLAY VIDEO

Th e Mo

mp

102 COSMOS MAGAZINE

an

tu r

ion

e of

. Im

th e n

ma P

ight sky, but Ear t

e r fet to l a s s o e s

’t t n s i h

h

yt m e th

n eo

hs

d an

fm

l

m

te s y

ANDREW MCCARTHY, CONNOR MATHERNE / REDDIT

t

co

fi x

a

so

wi

nt

l yp

ri e

o

ta

ne

t

ac

ha

oo

is

ns .

on

ns

ZEITGEIST MOONS

F

or as long as humans have gazed up into the night sky, our closest celestial neighbour – the Moon – has peered back. So, while Neil Armstrong may have been the first man to step foot on it, cultures have been telling stories about the “man in the Moon” for millennia.

In 1610 we learned that moons aren’t unique to Earth when Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope near Jupiter and discovered the first moons away from Earth: the Galilean quartet of Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa.

Humankind has made some giant leaps in moon-related knowledge. Recently it was announced that scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science had discovered a new moon orbiting Uranus – provisionally named S/2023 U1 – and two new moons orbiting Neptune, S/2002 N5 and S/2021 N1. As of May 2024, the current moon count in our Solar System is a whopping 293!

You might be thinking: That’s all very well, but what exactly are moons? Let’s take a look.

How does a moon differ from a planet?

For a celestial body to be considered a full-sized planet in the Solar System, it has to tick three important boxes. First, it must be in orbit around the Sun. Second, it has to have sufficient mass, and therefore gravity, to pull itself into a

spherical shape. And third, it must have “cleared the neighbourhood” around its orbit. (It’s that last criterion that caught out Pluto in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) updated its definition of a planet and downgraded Pluto to dwarf-planet status.)

Moons are what’s known as a natural satellite – a solid object in orbit around a planet. But quasi-moons also travel through the void of space near planets. They’re not really moons: it’s more accurate to say that they appear to orbit a planet, but they really orbit the Sun. In February 2024 the IAU confirmed a name for the first quasi-moon discovered in our Solar System. Discovered in 2002 and originally designated 2002-VE, Zoozve has a funky moniker that comes from a typo, spotted by US podcaster Latif Nasser on a Solar System poster. Zoozve is an asteroid that, from the perspective of an observer standing on Venus, appears to circle the planet during one Venusian year.

One of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons (below), Io (above) is the Solar System’s most volcanically active body (molten silicate lava!) – quite a contrast to Earth’s stable satellite, the Moon (opposite).

Are moons made of cheese?

On April Fool’s Day 2002, NASA announced the Hubble Space Telescope had resolved an expiration date on the surface of our

FROM TOP: NASA / JPL. NEMES LASZLO / GETTY IMAGES.

PLAY VIDEO A WORLD OF FIRE AND ICE A 2016 study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets found that Jupiter’s huge shadow causes Io’s atmosphere to drop to about -170°C, freezing sulphur dioxide gas into ice. This falls to the surface of the planet as frost, which then sublimates to gas when Io steps back into the light once more.

cosmosmagazine.com 103

PLAY VIDEO

pressurised space suit. But since the atmosphere is mostly composed of nitrogen and organic compounds, a spacesuit would be recommended – if you like breathing.

104 COSMOS MAGAZINE

FROM TOP: NASA / JPL. NASA / JPL/ SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE.

How do moons form?

The Solar System was born from a cloud of gas and dust about 4.6 billion years ago, with the Sun at its centre and the planets combining from the disc of orbiting material. Most moons probably clumped together from the discs surrounding the planets as they formed, but not all.

Earth’s Moon is estimated to be at least Zoozve’s orbit from the year 1600 to 2500 4.46 billion years old, according to a 2023 Quasi-moon study published in Geochemical Perspectives Zoozve’s orbit (above) Letters. The leading idea behind its formacheesy Moon – 2002APR01. “To be cautious, we seems to circle Venus, but tion is known as the Giant Impact should completely devour the Moon by tomorrow,” mapping shows it’s really Hypothesis. In this scenario, a Mars-sized a spokesperson advised. orbiting the Sun at a similar celestial object called Theia smashed into But despite what the almost 500-year-old speed to the planet.

Earth, causing a violent collision that ejected myth says, the Moon isn’t made from cheese. If debris into orbit which eventually coalesced, you tried to eat it, modern astronomy tells us due to gravity, into the Moon. you’d more likely chip a tooth. Like Earth, it’s LITERATURE The gas giants, on the other hand, don’t composed of layers – a dense iron alloy core, a IN SPACE! have to wait for an object to come to them. mantle of minerals such as olivine and Fun fact: The planitias – low They have such enormous gravitational pyroxene, and a rocky crust. In 2018, we plains on its suface – of Titan pull that sometimes they can just steal a even got confirmation that frozen water (below) are all named for fictional moon. Neptune’s largest moon Triton exists in the permanently shadowed planets in Frank Herbert’s Dune scienceis unusual because it’s the only large craters at the Moon’s poles. This was folfiction novels. Planitia names include moon with a retrograde orbit – moving lowed in 2020 by confirmation of water Arrakis, Caladan and Giedi. Meanwhile, in the opposite direction to its planet’s in the sunlit Clavius Crater, one of the Titan’s colles – small hills or knobs – are largest craters visible from Earth. named for characters in J.R.R. Turning our telescopes to Jupiter Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, reveals that moons come in hot’n’spicy flaincluding Arwen, Bilbo vours too. Unlike most outer-Solar-System and Gandalf. moons, which are comprised of frozen water, Io is made of silicate rock with a molten iron core.

It’s also the most volcanically active world in the Solar System, due to the competing gravitational pulls of Jupiter and neighbouring moons Europa and Ganymede. These tidal forces cause Io’s solid surface to bulge by as much as 100 metres, which generates an incredible amount of heat and results in hundreds of continually erupting volcanoes spewing molten silicate lava onto its surface.

One planet over, orbiting around Saturn is the surprisingly Earth-like Titan – the only other known place in the Solar System that has liquid flowing on its surface. Titan PLAY is much too cold for liquid water; liquid VIDEO hydrocarbons like methane and ethane rain from its sky to form rivers and lakes on the thick crust of frozen water covering its surface.

Titan is also the only known moon to have a substantial atmosphere. Its surface pressure is about 50% greater than Earth – so dense that a human walking on its surface wouldn’t require a

ZEITGEIST MOONS

harbouring a 100km-deep, salty, liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust. It may also have chemical energy sources from surface radiation from Jupiter and potential interactions between the water and a rocky seafloor heated by tidal forces flexing Europa’s interior. This October NASA will launch its Europa Clipper mission to send a spacecraft to the moon and determine if there are places below its surface that could support life.

Are there moons beyond our Solar System?

Moons that could exist outside of our Solar System get the prefix ‘exo’ – short for extrasolar: beyond the Sun. But while there are more than 5,600 confirmed exoplanets discovered so far, scientists haven’t yet been able to confirm the existence of an exomoon.

Exoplanets have been spotted using several different methods. The most common ones detect how the gravitational pull of orbiting exoplanets causes their stars to wobble in space, changing the colour of light observed by astronomers. Or, astronomers search for The sharp eye the shadow of an exoplanet passing of NASA’s Hubble directly between its star and the observer, Space Telescope dimming the star’s light by a slight but captured the tiny moon measurable amount. rotation. This means it must have been captured Phobos during its orbital But because of their small size and from elsewhere – probably the Kuiper belt, the trek around Mars in 2016. immense distance from us, exomoons are ring of icy objects extending past Neptune’s orbit. much more difficult to detect. Despite the No known moon orbits closer to its planet challenge, scientists have found two possible than Phobos, which is just 6,000 kilometres above BEWARE exomoon candidates orbiting different exothe surface of Mars and getting even closer. Its THE DARK AND planets – Kepler-1625 b i and Kepler-1708 b i, orbit is decaying by about two metres every LIGHT SIDES OF THE discovered in 2018 and 2022 respectively hundred years – so in about 50 million MOON – but their existence is hotly contested. years, it’s bye-bye for Phobos. (In conBecause the scant lunar atmosphere In December 2023, a paper published trast, our own Moon is edging away can’t trap the Sun’s energy, temperatures in Nature Astronomy re-analysed the from us by about 3.8 centimetres per fluctuate extremely between sunlit and data collected by the Hubble Space year. But don’t fret! The Sun will shadowed areas on the Moon. If you were to Telescope and Kepler Space engulf both the Earth and Moon stand at the equator in daylight, temperatures Telescope and concluded that neither about 7.59 billion years from now, could rise to a toasty 121°C. Venturing into the exoplanet is likely to be orbited by a well before calculations suggest the permanent inky shadows inside craters large exomoon.

Moon could escape Earth’s gravity.) near its poles could plummet you below But thanks to the James Webb Space -246°C. Better pack a jacket!

Telescope (JWST) – which is a hundred Could moons harbour life? times more powerful than Hubble – we Life flourishes here on Earth but we haven’t may not have to wait much longer for our first detected it elsewhere in the universe… yet. confirmed exomoon. In its next phase of Astrobiologists searching for the three essential observations, JWST is set to check out the conditions to support life as we know it – liquid planetary system TO1-700, 101.4 light-years water, the presence of certain chemical away, in search of rocky moons the same size as compounds and a source of energy – are turning Earth’s. Watch this space – or rather, that space to the Solar System’s moons as potential habitaout there. ble environments.

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is one place that might have all three of those ingredients cooking IMMA PERFETTO is a journalist at Cosmos. Her story beneath its surface. All evidence points to Europa on mysterious metamorphosis appeared last issue. cosmosmagazine.com 105

WHERE IN THE COSMOS?

Send us a pic of where you’re reading Cosmos to win a limited edition notebook.

NO.29

MIND GAMES Who Said?

“Eventually, we’ll realise that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.” (5,4)

, ,, ,,, ,9 9 9, 9,, 9,,, ,;

Hot off the press On an early train to uni in her first year, Lana Hughes of Kyneton, Victoria, cracks open the latest copy of Cosmos. “Since I’m up to date with all my homework, I’m looking forward to reading about ‘A year in Antarctica’,” she wrote in. Meanwhile, Pam and Peter Smith from Queensland took Issue 101 on a trip to Big White Ski Resort in Canada. We’d love to see where you’re reading. Send us your shot: contribute@cosmosmagazine.com.

Instructions Answers to each of the clues in columns 1 to 9.

Row IV reveals the answer.

Clues and columns GUESS WHO?

Question Whose Law?

Decode where i = P

OL H N H H

1

2 3

J z LK zPNO H LH KPMML L

4

5

PM OL` KPMML P LP OL K P H H LzL N O, z P H JL

6 7

P `.

8

Hint: He was a nineteenth-century German mathematician and scientist who has a number, a graph and an integral named after him.

9

106 COSMOS MAGAZINE

What is the SI unit, 10 to the power of 18 of a Newton, that moves one metre in the direction of the force? (8) What is the fourth stage of mitosis or cell division? (9) What was the largest piece of continental crust of the Palaeozoic Era? (8) What is a regular shallow water wave caused by effects of gravitational pull between the Sun, Moon and Earth? (5,4) Dating back to the sixteenth century, which type of camera consists of a darkened box, tent, or room with a small hole or lens at one side through which an image is projected onto a wall? (7) Which set of posterior thigh muscles are between the buttock and the knee? (9) Found in the Cetus constellation, which binary star contains a variable star of 330 days? (4,4) Which Australian marine architect, born with the surname Miller, designed Australia II, winning the America’s Cup in 1983? (3,6) What type of images does the Rorschach Test use? (8)

ENDPOINT

COSMOS CODEWORD

NO.29

IT FIGURES

1

Codeword requires inspired guesswork. It is a crossword without clues. Each letter of the alphabet is used and each letter has its own number. For example, ‘A’ might be 6 and ‘G’ might be 23 .

Through your knowledge of the English language you will be able to break the code. We have given you three letters to get you started.

B

C

D

6

Using the clues below place the numbers 1 to 16 correctly in the grid. How many clues do you need?

1

2

Instructions

Level 1 – Chief Scientist

0

4

3

A

&

2

NO.29

3 4 5

Level 2 – Senior Analyst 6 7

The smallest number is directly above the largest.

There is only one two-digit number in Column 3.

Level 3 – Lab Assistant 8

ALL PUZZLES DESIGNED AND COMPILED BY SNODGER.COM.AU

Each column (outside the first) contains exactly three multiples of that column number.

The product of the first three numbers in Row B is equal to the last.

The numbers in Row C have a range of 3.

The column ending with a two-digit prime number contains three square numbers.

The product of the three ascending numbers ending Row D is 280.

The sum of the last two numbers in Row C is 28.

SOLUTIONS: COSMOS 102 CODEWORD H O M I N O I D I N F A N T A E I R H E N H Y O U N G E R R E G U L A R A E P R R I M V O P H T H A L M O L O G Y E O E G N E N R E M O V A L S Q U I D I T E A Y S C U Z I I N A C C U R A T E S T E S G N J I M P E D E C A F F E C T R O B I L R R E P O X Y G U E R R I L L A A E O S R P O N A K E D W O R K S H E E T 1

T

14

R

2

X

15

U

3

L

16

S

4

Z

17

Q

5

V

18

C

6

Y

19

7

N

20

8

B

21

O W K

9

D

22

P

11

12

13

23

24

25

26

I

A

F

H

WHO SAID?

Paracelsus Hailed as “the father of toxicology”, Paracelsus was a Swiss physician, alchemist and philosopher who pioneered the use of chemicals and minerals in medicine.

$ 6 ( - / 5 7 7 3 * 5 ) 6 8 $ $ 0 2 ( 5 1 / $ 5 . ' 2 5 & ( 6 2 7 $ ( , 6 % 7 1 7 5 ( 6 0 2 3 $ 5 $ & ( / 6 8 6 + 1 8 & + 6 / , 1 2 ( , 0 + $ 6 , & * 1 5 7 ( , ( 7 2 ' 1 $ ( ( ( (

WHOSE PRINCIPLE? ANSWER:

10

G M

IT FIGURES

J

E

The product of the sine of the angle formed between the ray of light, the normal straight line and the refractive index of the media must be constant.

Willebrord Snellius

cosmosmagazine.com 107

proudly present

Trailblazers Driving innovation and shaping the future

Are video games good for you? y Research beyond boundaries y Inspiring First Nations youths

One path.

Two degrees.

Fast forward to a Master of Data Analytics Meet soaring industry demands and graduate with a bachelor and master in four years. Combine data analytics with a bachelor in: • information technology • mathematics • science.

QUT vertical data analytics 2 TRAILBLAZERS TEQSA PRV12079 | CRICOS 00213J | © QUT 2024 26117

Bold ideas, real-world impact

W

ith a commitment to real-world applications and a legacy of producing industry-ready graduates, we’re not just preparing students for the future here at the QUT Faculty of Science, we’re actively creating it. Discover how our global community, leading research centres, and strong industry ties are pioneering advancements in science, mathematics, data science and information technology.

Our commitment to multidisciplinary research bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, ensuring our students are not just educated but real-world ready.

We’re at the forefront of translating academic inquiry into real-world impact, nurturing a new generation of thinkers and doers who are well-prepared to meet the complex challenges of our time.

I’m incredibly proud of the pioneering spirit of our faculty, which is a hub of creativity and problem-solving, where trailblazing scientists and ambitious students come together to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

The projects and profiles featured here exemplify our dedication to creating solutions that matter. They illuminate how our community of scholars and learners contribute to solving real-world problems, embodying the essence of QUT’s mission to develop industry-ready graduates who are poised to make a difference.

I’m honoured to represent a faculty that’s not just part of the academic landscape but drives research that has real impact, locally and globally. Join us in celebrating the achievements and aspirations that drive us forward, steadfast in our pursuit of knowledge and innovation for a better world.

Professor Troy Farrell Executive Dean, Faculty of Science, QUT

CONTENTS beyond 04. Research boundaries

QUT acknowledges the Turrbal and Yugara as the First Nations owners of the lands where QUT now stands. We pay respect to their Elders, lores, customs, and creation spirits. We recognise these lands have always been places of teaching, research, and learning. QUT acknowledges the important role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

08.

Inspiring Indigenous scientist empowers First Nations youths

people play within the QUT community.

games might be 09. Computer good for you

cosmosmagazine.com/cosmos-studio 3

Research beyond boundaries Discover how interdisciplinary PhD programs are redefining research paradigms and creating a new era of scientific innovation.

I

n a world inundated by complex global challenges and new technology, innovative solutions are no longer born out of traditional research silos. Instead, they emerge from the fusion of diverse disciplines that ignites innovation and drives significant breakthroughs. Therefore, to hit the ground running, PhD scholars must now consider whether a narrow specialty or cross-disciplinary PhD research project is going to better equip them to achieve their goals.

The question is, what does a good multidisciplinary PhD program look like?

Breaking academic silos Throughout academia, a significant transformation is underway.

Traditionally, research projects, especially PhD projects, have largely been confined within the boundaries of a single discipline. However, as the complexities of the world’s challenges grow, a more integrative and cross-collaborative

4 TRAILBLAZERS

research approach has become increasingly necessary. So, as senior researchers increasingly participate in multidisciplinary projects, there’s a lot of growth in opportunities for postgraduate students to build skills across several domains.

Interdisciplinary endeavours have proven vital across a variety of sectors, most notably when addressing climate change and advancing autonomous vehicle technology. These areas exemplify how combining ecological, meteorological, economic, sociological, and policy expertise yields comprehensive strategies for climate action, while the fusion of mechanical engineering, artificial intelligence, urban planning, and ethics propels innovations in self-driving car development.

Such collaborations enhance understanding and drive technological progress, underscoring the necessity of nurturing professionals and researchers who understand and integrate the breadth of knowledge from several domains. Bringing such multifaceted experts together creates a rich tapestry of perspectives that single-discipline pursuits might overlook, resulting in more comprehensive solutions and visionary advancements.

The power of data science Data science is revolutionising entire industries and creating opportunities for innovation and progress in almost every field. From transforming business strategies to advancing healthcare, data analytics is at the forefront of the push to develop solutions to some of the most daunting challenges we’ve ever faced.

Learn how mastering data science skills could empower you to be a part of this dynamic field, shaping the future and solving real-world challenges so you can be part of the change you wish to see in the world.

https://link.cosmosmagazine.com/L_yE

Multidisciplinary research in action Multidisciplinary research produces exceptional impacts. Here are some examples of how QUT’s multidisciplinary research, at the postgraduate level and beyond, shapes a brighter future for us all.

Pioneering virtual geology Imagine exploring the rugged terrain of Mars or delving into the geological wonders of Earth, all from the comfort of your

Cael Gallagher using a virtual geology teaching tool in a first-year QUT Earth science workshop. classroom. This is no longer the stuff of science fiction, thanks to the groundbreaking work of PhD student Cael Gallagher and her colleagues in QUT’s Virtual Geology research group. Supervised

by Associate Professor Selen Túrkay and Associate Professor Christoph Schrank, Cael’s research is a key part of a larger ARC Discovery Project that blurs the lines between IT and geoscience. Creating virtual environments, this initiative revolutionises geoscience education and research, and it’s an excellent example of interdisciplinary impact.

Geology is a notoriously challenging subject to teach at university. After all, astronomy students can view the universe through a telescope, and chemistry students can conduct experiments

in university labs, but geology teachers have to organise expensive field trips if they want to give their students hands-on experience in some of the most educationally valuable locations. At least that was the case until Cael and her team began developing virtual geology field trips for undergraduate science students.

These digital excursions offer accessible, interactive learning experiences, allowing a wider range of students to explore geological wonders from their classrooms. And the applications of this research don’t stop at Earthly geology.

Beyond Earth’s landscapes, Cael’s team has crafted a virtual Mars surface, granting students unprecedented access to extraterrestrial geology, a domain once reserved for astronauts and elite scientists. By harnessing the power of virtual reality (VR), this research opens up new frontiers in education and our understanding of the universe.

Cael’s endeavours showcase the synergy of IT and geology, fostering innovative educational solutions and broadening the scope of scientific inquiry. Her work exemplifies the power of interdisciplinary research to break new ground in both educational methodology and the understanding of our planet and beyond, thereby inspiring future generations of scientists and revolutionising the educational landscape.

Fashion meets function with wearable tech Current Australian guidelines advise us to ‘slip, slop, slap, seek, and slide’ to protect against harmful UV radiation, while also recommending sufficient sun

Meet Vanessa Zepeda, trailblazing astrobiologist

From marine biology to environmental science to astrobiology, Vanessa’s path has been a little curvy.

It’s even taken her to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory! For her PhD at QUT, she studied the possibilities of life beyond Earth. Vanessa’s research explores how organisms survive in extreme marine environments, drawing parallels to potential conditions on other planets.

Discover more about Vanessa’s journey and her groundbreaking research.

https://link.cosmosmagazine.com/L_yG

cosmosmagazine.com/cosmos-studio 5

exposure to obtain a vitamin D-effective dose. But how can we know when we’ve had enough UV exposure?

UV-sensing wearable technology could offer a handy way to monitor your exposure and is becoming more commonplace. But not everyone wants, or can afford, to wear expensive smartwatches and VR glasses, and single-use alternatives are neither cost-effective nor environmentally friendly.

Fortunately, QUT is well on its way to resolving those issues thanks to a project that spans several traditionally siloed fields.

Chemists have developed a groundbreaking switchable dye that changes from colourless to pink after UV exposure and can be reset using nothing more complicated than LED light. And fashion designers are designing super stylish 3D-printed earrings, bracelets, and bag clips that are impregnated with this dye, allowing anyone to seamlessly integrate this technology into their daily routine. In the future, people may even be able to create personalised designs.

Researchers are working on ways to enhance the speed of the reaction. So, eventually, this tech will be instrumental in monitoring UV exposure over time and alerting to the wearer when they need to seek shelter. The integration with digital technology may also allow long-term exposure monitoring.

This fusion of expertise from distinct fields is setting a new standard in wearable technology — one that protects, informs, and styles, all in a single, sustainable package.

Harnessing AI for wildlife Imagine a world where the vast chorus of wildlife can be understood and preserved through the power of technology. This is

no longer a dream, but a reality being sculpted thanks to a collaboration between QUT and Google Australia, through their visionary A2O sound search engine.

Until recently, researchers had to manually sift through hundreds of years’ worth of audio records to find sounds that match or are similar to the animal sounds they’ve recorded. Now, thanks to A2O, they can upload a recording and

Collaborative research at QUT developing wearables that change from colourless to pink when exposed to UV light.

Introducing Bailey Richardson, biomimicry innovator

Winner of the ATSE Ezio Rizzardo Polymer Scholarship, Bailey Richardson, is using his PhD research to prepare for a future where biomimetic chemistry transforms healthcare and other industries. He builds peptides that fluoresce or change colour when exposed to light or a change in pH for use in diagnostic medicine. Other applications include targeted drug delivery and smart solar cells.

Dive deeper into Bailey Richardson’s innovative work and the exciting possibilities of biomimicry in material science.

https://link.cosmosmagazine.com/L_yH https://link.cosmosmagazine.com/L_yH

6 TRAILBLAZERS

AI will automatically match it to any recordings in the extensive A2O database, allowing scientists to more quickly and easily make connections between species and locations.

This will save thousands of hours of manual labour and presents opportunities for using recordings made by citizen scientists to widen the scope of ecological studies.

Professor Paul Roe, Head of QUT’s School of Computer Science and the Lead Researcher at the Australian Acoustics Observatory, says, “You have to understand the environment before you can protect it”. A2O is now a powerful tool that will enable scientists to better understand Australia’s ecosystems to protect them from threats like deforestation, bushfires, and invasive species.

Through the A2O search engine, QUT and Google Australia aren’t merely bridging silos and innovating technologically.

This collaboration marks a crucial step towards understanding and preserving our natural world. It also demonstrates the immense potential of AI in contributing to conservation efforts.

How to get started shaping tomorrow’s world through interdisciplinary research Some of history’s most celebrated experts had a very narrow focus and remained focused on their specific fields.

However, a traditional PhD in a narrow, well-defined field of study isn’t your only option. As this research snapshot shows, scientists at all levels are also developing incredible solutions thanks to multidisciplinary research.

If you’d rather not be limited to a narrow field of expertise, QUT offers an array of PhD research projects that will enable you to develop multidisciplinary skills, equipping you to make a significant impact on the world — not just a substantial contribution to the body of knowledge. So, stop dreaming and start doing. Check out the QUT PhD projects actively looking for students now.

Applied maths to the rescue: the Jack Powers story

https://link.cosmosmagazine.com/L_yD

QUT PhD student, Jack Powers, may hold the key to solving Australia’s elective surgery waiting list problems. His superpower?

Applied mathematics. Currently, category one patients are disproportionately prioritised, meaning category three patients often have to wait an inordinately long time before they can access the surgery they need. By developing a dynamic priority scoring system, Jack gives hospitals a more objective method of equitably prioritising patients.

Learn more about Jack’s journey and the transformative power of applied mathematics:

QUT ecoacoustics research team, Professor Paul Roe and Dr Danielle Teixeira (2023).

https://link.cosmosmagazine.com/L_yI

cosmosmagazine.com/cosmos-studio 7

Dr Katrina Wruck is excelling in academia and sharing her knowledge with remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities

Inspiring Indigenous scientist empowers First Nations youths Dr Katrina Wruck, industrial chemist and proud Mabuigilaig and Goemulgal woman, is revolutionising the field of environmental chemistry and standing out as a beacon of hope for young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who often mistakenly believe they’ll never be able to go to university or become a scientist.

Like many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, from an early age, Katrina faced significant challenges that could easily have derailed her future career. From having her academic abilities underestimated to battling logistical challenges that had her waking at 4 am for lectures, the road to becoming a postdoctoral fellow has been anything but smooth. But she never let the challenges defeat her.

Thankfully, she caught a break when her dedication was rewarded with a CPME top-up PhD scholarship and later, the opportunity to become the inaugural participant in the QUT Indigenous Australians PhD/Professional Doctorate to Postdoctoral Fellowship (P2P) program, which gave her funding for a

8 TRAILBLAZERS

They tell me I’m the first Indigenous scientist they’ve ever met. And that really tells me that what I’m doing with this outreach is so important.

postdoctoral fellowship and the chance to diversify her professional development with a year-long secondment to another university (Katrina chose the University of Melbourne).

This support has allowed her to conduct truly groundbreaking research.

Her PhD work on zeolites, transforming mining waste into beneficial zeolite LTA, is set to be patented. And her postdoctoral research is crucial, focusing on breaking down harmful forever chemicals into safer elements. The latter offers hope in addressing global contamination and environmental preservation challenges, with especially significant implications for vulnerable polar regions where forever chemicals are bioaccumulating despite no significant human presence.

Katrina’s impressive skills earned her the 2022 Queensland Women in STEM Prize as well as several prestigious appointments, including the 2024 Deadly Science Ambassador and a position on Science and Technology Australia’s Reconciliation Action Plan Working Group. As a result, she’s asked to speak at a wide variety of events. She then uses her speaker’s fees to fund outreach trips to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities where she’s inspiring the next generation of First Nations scientists and academics.

Katrina’s story is not just one of scientific achievement but also of empowering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth, making her work both immensely impactful and transformative. You too can become an inspirational scientist when you choose a course from QUT’s Faculty of Science.

KICKSTART your academic career with QUT’S P2P program.

https://link.cosmosmagazine.com/L_yC

Computer games might be good for you Professor Daniel Johnson is redefining the narrative around interactive media, merging his academic prowess and passion for gaming to challenge prevalent misconceptions about video games, presenting them not as mere sources of entertainment but as significant societal tools. He argues the medium, often criticised for promoting violence or antisocial behaviour, has far-reaching positive impacts that are overlooked. In fact, his work on human-computer interaction sheds light on how gaming can improve mental health, foster community, enhance learning, and even act as a catalyst for social change.

Like many of us, Daniel was, from a young age, captivated by the narratives and interactive worlds offered by video games. But while many video game enthusiasts fear it’s not a sustainable job option, he’s proving it’s entirely possible to build a career around games. In fact, as a psychologist with only a fundamental knowledge of coding, he’s living proof you can enter the field even if you’re not enthused by coding.

So what exactly does Daniel do?

He studies how people interact with computers with the aim of designing technologies that allow us to interact in novel ways. And what his research is uncovering is utterly fascinating, not least for parents worried about how much time their children spend gaming.

“There are some amazing quotes and pieces of research about the dangers of things like fiction novel reading,” Daniel says. “Contrast that with today and how excited parents might be if their children pick up a fiction novel. Yet, it was not that long ago that there were real concerns about that. I believe we’ll one day be in a similar situation with computer games.”

He goes on to say that popular media has cast gaming as a bit of a villain and that parents often tell him they personally see their children having a great time but that they ‘know they should be worried’. When asked what advice he’d

give to concerned parents, he said, “the best advice we have for parents is for you to play computer games with your kids. See what they’re playing, play with them, find out who they’re playing with, get engaged”.

Daniel’s work shows that interactive media is more than mere entertainment.

His findings demonstrate that gaming can enhance problem-solving skills, foster creativity, promote emotional resilience, facilitate human connections, and a whole lot more. Perhaps most surprisingly, his work reveals games have therapeutic potential, offering hope for innovative approaches to preventing and treating mental health challenges, and even rehabilitation.

LOVE GAMES and keen to understand what makes us tick? Check out QUT’s Bachelor of Games and Interactive Environments.

Video games can be an outlet that’s absolutely what’s keeping you above water and keeping you on track.

https://link.cosmosmagazine.com/L_yA

Human-computer interaction researcher, Professor Daniel Johnson, believes the benefits of video games are underrated

cosmosmagazine.com/cosmos-studio 9