Cosmos 104 | Saving Our Species | Subscriber Edition
Australia’s rocket launch site selections
Stroll through prehistoric Victoria Red Centre geological tours Journey to the asteroids
THE SCIENCE OF EVERYTHING
This is the first issue of Cosmos from our new home. CSIRO’s editorially independent publishing arm, CSIRO Publishing, has taken on the publication of Cosmos magazine and news services to ensure vital science information continues to be communicated.
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FEATURES
28
BIG THING
Naomi McClure-Griffiths explains how hydrogen can create incredibly detailed images
FAVOURITE PLACES
Get up close and personal with leopards as Declan Morris explores Loskop Dam Nature Reserve.
CAN GEOLOGY HELP REVIVE RED CENTRE TOURISM?
While the science of Australia’s Red Centre is complicated, Glenn Morrison wonders if it can draw visitors to central Australia.
38
UNLIVEABLE AUSTRALIA
Australia is a land of droughts and flooding rains. Bianca Nogrady investigates how we find safety in a climate-changed future.
44
WILD PLACES, WILD SPECIES
Time is running out for many iconic Australian animals. John Read is a conservation ecologist seeking solutions through rewilding strategies.
54
VICTORIA THROUGH PREHISTORIC TIME
Travel through time using fossils and geological clues with Evrim Yazgin
62 GRAIN AND GRIT
Wheat is Australia’s golden harvest. Rachel Williamson shares stories of resilience and determination from farmers and scientists.
68
LUCY IN THE SKY WITH ASTEROIDS
Follow Richard A. Lovett on a journey to the asteroids to find out where spacecraft Lucy is now.
74
INSECT CONSCIOUSNESS
Amalyah Hart enters a world of intricate research designed to explore the complexities of insect consciousness.
82 WHALE TALK
Drew Rooke wonders whether we can ever truly decode the secret language of whales.
88
READY TO LAUNCH
Why would anyone want to launch a rocket from Australia? Because they can, reports Jamie Seidel
ZEITGEIST
94 GROWING A PERSONALISED CURE
A five-year-old’s brains are behind research to cure genetic diseases. Denise Cullen explores personalised medicine.
98 SOLVING LIFE’S ORIGAMI
The artificial intelligence program AlphaFold is proving to be a gamechanger for biological research, Imma Perfetto reports.
102 DEAD AIR
Matthew Ward Agius pulls unseen killer particles out of thin air.
106 THE DAILY GRIND
Grinding is an example of the growing popularity of mechanochemistry. Ellen Phiddian examines a new twist on an old-fashioned mortar and pestle.
110 MINDGAMES
Fiendishly fun puzzles.
112
CURIOSITY CORNER
Fun challenges and facts to share with kids.
114
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Nanotube storage, artificial hearts and groundcherries.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
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Cosmos is committed to reconciliation and demonstrating respect for Indigenous knowledge and science. The use of Western science in this publication should not be interpreted as diminishing the knowledge of plants, animals and the environment from Indigenous ecological knowledge systems.
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Editor-in-Chief Ian Mannix
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Science Journalists
Matthew Agius, Ariel Marcy, Imma Perfetto, Ellen Phiddian, Evrim Yazgin
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CONTRIBUTORS
Denise Cullen, Amalyah Hart, Richard A. Lovett, Naomi McClure-Griffiths, Declan Morris, Glenn Morrison, Bianca Nogrady, John Read, Drew Rooke, Jamie Seidel, Rachel Williamson
Mind Games Tess Brady / Snodger Puzzles
Cover Image Tom Hunt
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From the Editor
WELCOME TO COSMOS FROM OUR NEW HOME AT CSIRO
PUBLISHING.
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Our place within Australia’s national science agency will also lead to an expanded constellation of networks and opportunities. This combination will help us to share a universe of scientific discoveries, including unique stories from across Australia and Oceania.
Science is a fundamentally human endeavour, a theme that runs through this issue’s articles. You will find yourself sharing a lab bench with university researchers, exploring landscapes with ecologists and Indigenous rangers, then sailing the oceans in search of answers with marine biologists.
We must know our human selves and each other to understand what we will (or won’t) accept from our science and technology. As your editor, I hope this issue allows you to explore the frontiers of research, delivering the facts you need, so you know where you stand.
There are many opportunities within these pages to consider your relationship with science and technology. Explore personalised medicine with Denise Cullen, save unique wildlife with John Read, or imagine yourself on a geotour of the rich red deserts of central Australia through the eyes of Glenn Morrison.
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Until next issue, enjoy exploring all the science in the Cosmos
JASMINE FELLOWS
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DIGEST
PLAY VIDEO
Coloured scanning electron micrograph of a tardigrade, known fondly as a ‘water bear’.
Gene modification to reveal tardigrade super powers
These quirky,
microscopic
creatures could play a leading role in lab tests thanks to a new genetic technique.
TINY, TUBBY and seemingly indestructible, tardigrades might become a little less mysterious to science today, after Japanese researchers successfully developed what they hope is a technique that will allow them to be used in labs for tests – like fruit flies.
Tardigrades are famous for their apparent ability to survive extremes, including loss of water; and even survival on the surface of spaceships in the chilling vacuum of space. They are a consistent source of speculation – how do the extremophiles do it?
Studying these aquatic invertebrates’ individual, protein-producing gene sequences is likely to reveal the key. For instance, a ‘gel’ protein is suspected to help tardigrades survive extensive periods of dehydration.
Using a type of CRISPR gene editing, University of Tokyo researchers have demonstrated the ability to ‘knock out’ or ‘knock in’ specific genes.
DIPA-CRISPR works like a knife to cut and modify gene sequences, which enables modifications to be passed to offspring. It’s hoped the successful implementation of the technique will allow a fleet of ‘modded’ tardigrades to be studied in lab settings, as is the case for lab-specific fruit flies sometimes used for scientific study.
“To understand tardigrades’ superpowers, we first need to understand the way their genes function,” says Takekazu Kunieda, a biological scientist specialising in tardigrade research at Tokyo.
“My team and I have developed a method to edit genes – adding,
ASTRONOMERS
CONTINUE to be puzzled about the formation of the so-called cotton candy planets, and now they’ve found another one that has the least density of any exoplanet yet found.
The team says the new planet, WASP-193b, is about 1,200 light-years from Earth. The gas giant is 50% larger than Jupiter but seven times less massive.
removing or overwriting them – like you would do on computer data, in a very tolerant species of tardigrade: Ramazzottius varieornatus. This can now allow researchers to study tardigrade genetic traits as they might more established lab-based animals, such as fruit flies or nematodes.”
Having demonstrated the ability to pass gene modifications across generations, the next step is to start the process of modifying specific genes to try and ascertain their function or, more simply, how they provide the tardigrade their ‘powers’.
With the ‘gel’ protein as a target, the Tokyo research team see potential for such proteins to help in human applications, like preserving organs.
“CRISPR can be an incredible tool for understanding life and aiding in useful applications that can positively impact the world,” says Kunieda.
“Tardigrades not only offer us a glimpse at what medical advances might be possible, but their range of remarkable traits means they had an incredible evolutionary story, one we hope to tell as we compare their genomes to closely related creatures using our new DIPACRIPSR-based technique.”
The research was published in the journal PLoS Genetics
According to Khalid Barkaoui, a postdcotral researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy, this extremely-low density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants.
“WASP-193b is the second least dense planet discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much
smaller,” says Barkaoui.
“Its extremely low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets discovered to date.”
Meat-for-plant swaps can cut grocery carbon bill
Researchers call for climate labelling in supermarkets
AUSTRALIANS’ GROCERY BILLS have a hidden carbon cost akin to the average emissions of 17 million cars on the road, but researchers say a simple switch could make all the difference when it comes to improving shopping basket sustainability.
One major medical research institute based in Sydney says replacing
TECHNOLOGY
meat with a plant-based alternative can trim down carbon costs. But it says without a suitable labelling scheme, consumers are unlikely to understand the full impact of their weekly shop.
Meat products, which take up just 10% of the average shopping basket, accounted for half of emissions in the average grocery buy, while fruits and
A NEW STRATEGY is cleaning up “forever chemicals” from contaminated water.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are artificial chemicals used for their heat-resistant, and water, oil, and dirt-repellent properties. Their stubbornly strong carbon-fluorine bonds are resistant to chemical and biological
vegetables account for just 5% of emissions and a quarter of purchases.
“Dietary habits need to change significantly if we are to meet global emissions targets, particularly in high-income countries like Australia, the UK, and US,” says Allison Gaines, an epidemiologist from Imperial College London who is also based at the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney.
Gaines led a study published in May in the journal Nature Food , which finds an average 26% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is possible through environmentally friendly shopping trolley substitutions.
Climate labelling is being pushed by the George Institute as a viable way to address slow progress in lowering the carbon costs of food systems in Australia and abroad.
Its researchers co-signed an editorial comment in the ANZ Journal of Public Health advocating for consumer-focused initiatives as a “partial solution” to address limited progress in making food more sustainable.
The George Institute’s food policy program director Simone Pettigrew points to the organisation’s “Ecoswitch” smartphone app which allows consumers to understand the carbon impact of products on supermarket shelves.
“We can develop innovative ways to help consumers make informed choices and create a movement for positive change,” Pettigrew says.
degradation. This allows PFAS to persist indefinitely in the environment causing health problems.
The new method detailed in the journal Nature Water involves treating heavily contaminated water with ultraviolet light, sulphite and electrochemical oxidation.
“We achieved near-complete
destruction of PFAS in various water samples contaminated by [firesuppressing] foams,” says study co-author Jinyong Liu.
Fire-suppressing foams are a major source of PFAS pollution in groundwater because they have been used for decades to extinguish aviation fuel fires at military sites and commercial airports.
PHYSICS
Electron superhighway for efficient electronics
Physicists have used a unique form of graphene – the material in pencil lead – to create a five-lane electron “superhighway”.
The research, published in Science, could be used in developing ultraefficient electronics.
Key to the work is a new material discovered by a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) just two years ago: rhombohedral pentalayer graphene.
The new work shows how the superhighway can be created without the need for a magnetic field.
It is not the first time an electron superhighway has been created. But this team has done so in a unique system which is much simpler than others and supports more electron channels.
Allowing the electrons to travel with no resistance is the quantum anomalous Hall effect. It is a different effect to superconductivity.
But both phenomena operate well below room temperature. Raising the operating temperature to make an electron superhighway useful in applications will be a critical next step.
MATHEMATICS
Universal equation predicts flapping of birds, insects and flying reptiles
›
Wings and flippers flap to the same beat.
A UNIVERSAL EQUATION has been shown to accurately predict the flapping frequency of birds, insects and even prehistoric creatures. It also translates to the flapping flippers of swimming creatures like whales and penguins.
Researchers found a simple relationship between the body mass and wing area to the frequency with which animals flap their wings or flippers. The study is published in the openaccess journal PLOS ONE
Scientists have long thought that the frequency of flaps should relate to the natural resonance frequency of the wing to save energy. But finding the relationship between wing and body shape to the rate of flapping has proven difficult.
Danish physicists from Roskilde University derived the new formula from basic concepts in physics, including dimensional analysis. It shows that
flapping frequency is proportional to the square root of the animal’s body mass divided by the surface area of the wing.
This relationship was tested by plotting predictions against published data on wingbeat frequencies for bees, dragonflies, beetles, mosquitos, bats and a variety different birds. The equation was even tested against fin stroke frequencies for penguins and several whale species.
“Differing by almost a factor 10,000 in wing/fin-beat frequency, data for 414 animals from the blue whale to mosquitoes fall on the same line. As physicists, we were surprised to see how well our simple prediction of the wing-beat formula works,” the authors write.
Applying the formula to the ancient beast Quetzalcoatlus northropi , they found it would have beaten its wings with a frequency of about 0.7 Hertz, or about 42 times a minute.
Sandhill cranes flying over a lake.
Focus: Curious creatures
2
Pairing up shelter dogs as well-matched companions could lead to more adoptions according to a new US study.
Newly designed heated shelters, or ‘mini med spas’ will help endangered frogs fight against the fungal disease chytridiomycosis, which has driven at least 90 amphibian species to extinction worldwide.
4
Hello! Elephants talk to each other using name-like calls.
1
A new project has begun to count Australia’s koala numbers for the first time. The National Koala Monitoring Program is a government-funded program to count this iconic species across its range.
Researchers have sequenced the entire genome of Australia’s greater bilby for the first time to improve conservation efforts.
6
Seagulls do not, in fact, want your chips. Offer a seagull fresh fish ‘n chips, and they’ll take the fish every time.
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ARCHAEOLOGY
Signs of Indigenous Australia ritual
The evidence is 12,000 years old.
RESEARCHERS IN PARTNERSHIP with the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC) unearthed evidence of rituals dating back 12,000 years ago in caves in southeastern Australia.
The archaeological find, published in July in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, is from the time that the last Ice Age ended. It reveals insights into the heritage, going back 500 generations, of one of the planet’s oldest living cultures.
Excavations revealed the site at Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Australian Alps – about 300km east of Melbourne.
Archaeologists uncovered two small fireplaces, each with a single shaped stick embedded in them. The sticks are stems of she-oak, or Casuarina – a pine native to Australia. Chemical analysis shows that the sticks had been smeared with human or animal fat, and date to between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago.
The link to modern practices came from nineteenth century ethnographers
who documented such fireplaces and ritual practices of GunaiKurnai medicine men and women, who are known as mulla-mullung.
In the ritual, something belonging to a sick person is fastened to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick is then stuck in the ground and a fire lit beneath it. Mulla-mullung chant the name of the sick person. Once the stick falls, the ritual is complete.
“For these artefacts to survive is just amazing,” says GunaiKurnai elder Uncle Russell Mullett. “They’re telling us a story. They’ve been waiting here all this time for us to learn from them.”
“[It’s] a reminder that we are a living culture still connected to our ancient past. It’s a unique opportunity to be able to read the memoirs of our ancestors and share that with our community.”
BIOLOGY
Last common ancestor of all life is older than expected
Go back far enough in time and you could meet the common ancestor of all cellular life – from bacteria to dinosaurs, ferns and humans.
Scientists call this hypothetical single-celled organism “LUCA” (last universal common ancestor).
All LUCA’s descendants share the same amino acids; the same energy chemical ATP; the same basic cellular machinery; and DNA used to store information.
Understanding Earth’s earliest ecosystem, and what the environment was like when LUCA lived, has been a major plank of scientific endeavour.
But first, researchers had to determine how long ago LUCA lived. Using genetic information and known time separation between species from the fossil record, scientists have now determined that LUCA lived 4.2 billion years ago.
“We did not expect LUCA to be so old, within just hundreds of millions of years of Earth formation,” says Sandra Álvarez-Carretero, coauthor of the study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution
Ritual stick in Cloggs Cave.
East Antarctica’s photographic history
Early observations of glaciers nearly lost in WWII.
A NEARLY 100-YEAR HISTORY of East Antarctic aerial photos has given a unique perspective to the region’s history.
Combining historical photos, including some dating back 87 years, researchers have compiled a short-term evolutionary history of glaciers in East Antarctica, generally considered the more stable Antarctic half.
The photography of 2,000km of coastline overlayed with current
Honnörbrygga Glacier in 1937 compared to a modern Landsat satellite image from 2023. The long floating-ice tongue in the 1937 image disappeared in the late 1950s and has not grown back due to weakening sea ice.
Are we prepared if bird flu starts spreading between humans?
AUSTRALIA IS WELL placed to quickly create a vaccine should a strain of bird flu infect the human population, according to experts.
Cases of bird flu infecting humans are rare, and only limited, nonsustained, human-tohuman transmission is thought to have occurred.
Raina MacIntyre, head of the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby
satellite technology shows two contrasting stories.
First, East Antarctica has remained particularly stable for much of the past century – withstanding much of the ice loss seen on the continent’s western side.
The analysis shows the east has grown slightly since 1937 with the aid of increasing snowfall. But more recent satellite imagery paints a different picture – where like the rest of Antarctica, warming air and ocean temperatures threaten to eat away at its critical land ice and glaciers.
“Early observations of glaciers are extremely valuable as they give us a unique insight into how the ice has evolved through a varying climate and whether current changes in the ice exceed the glaciers’ normal cycle of advance and retreat,” says lead researcher Mads Dømgaard, a glacier researcher at the University of Copenhagen.
The oldest aerial photos used to piece together East Antarctica’s glacial history were captured by a Norwegian whaler during a 1937 expedition and stored at the Norwegian Polar Institute, along with maps charted from the images.
But the invasion of Norway by the Nazis at the start of World War II meant the maps were never published and the photos remained under lock and key.
Only through reading records about the expedition were Dømgaard and his colleagues able to unlock and study the photographic records.
Institute at the University of New South Wales and an expert in influenza and emerging infectious diseases, says that we are well prepared for human vaccines in such a case.
“If a pandemic arises, once the genome sequence is known, an exact matched vaccine can be made in six weeks with mRNA technology and four months using the old egg-based methods.
“Australia is fortunate to have influenza vaccine and mRNA manufacturing capacity onshore, which many countries do not have. The regulatory process may take longer, but we can expect to have vaccines sooner than we did for COVID-19.”
MacIntyre’s remarks are supported by a review study in the peer-reviewed journal Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics
Dune-inspired ‘stillsuit’ upgrade for astronaut spacesuits
Astronauts on spacewalks have to urinate into their suits.
UNLIKE THE WASTEWATER on board the International Space Station, the water in the urine produced on spacewalks is not recycled. It’s also uncomfortable and unhygienic.
A solution to this problem would be a full-body ‘stillsuit’ such as those described in Frank Herbert’s book Dune, recently reimagined in a series of blockbuster films. In Dune, the stillsuit wearer conserves body moisture which might otherwise be lost in the form of sweat and urine.
But that’s science fiction, right?
It may become a science reality in the not-too-distant future. Researchers have designed a prototype urine collection and filtration system for spacesuits. Their study is published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Space Technology
“The design includes a vacuum-based external catheter leading to a
Urine collection cups (for males) and garment prototype. combined forward-reverse osmosis unit, providing a continuous supply of potable water with multiple safety mechanisms to ensure astronaut wellbeing,” explains first author Sofia Etlin,
Rear and side view of the whole system worn as a backpack.
a research staff member at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University in New York.
Such innovations in wearable technology may be vital as humans again embark upon an exploration of space.
For the first time since the 1970s, the Artemis missions are looking to send people to the Moon. Lift off could be as early as 2025. This is expected to be followed by crewed missions to Mars in the early 2030s.
Currently, astronauts relieve themselves into “maximum absorbency garments” (MAGs) which have been in use since the 1970s. They are something like adult nappies.
Astronauts have long complained of the lack of comfort and hygiene of the MAG.
“The MAG has reportedly leaked and caused health issues such as urinary tract infections and gastrointestinal distress,” Etlin says.
“Additionally, astronauts currently have only one litre of water available in their in-suit drink bags. This is insufficient for longer-lasting lunar spacewalks, which can last 10 hours, and even up to 24 hours in an emergency.”
Etlin’s new urine collection device includes an undergarment made of multiple layers of flexible fabric. A collection cup of moulded silicon fits around the genitals to collect urine.
Polyester microfibre draws the moisture away from the body to a vacuum pump and diverts it to the filtration system where it is recycled with an efficiency of 87%.
The system is 38cm by 23cm by 23cm and weighs 8kg.
“Our system can be tested in simulated microgravity conditions, as microgravity is the primary space factor we must account for. These tests will ensure the system’s functionality and safety before it is deployed in actual space missions,” says lead author Christopher E. Mason, a professor at Cornell.
SPACE
Fast-charging, cheap, solid-state sodium battery
Sodium batteries are set to become an important component of energy systems, providing much of lithium’s power without the high price and environmental costs.
US researchers have made a solid-state, anode-free sodium battery, which promises higher levels of safety and lower costs than traditional batteries.
“Although there have been previous sodium, solid-state, and anode-free batteries, no one has been able to successfully combine these three ideas until now,” says Grayson Deysher, a PhD candidate at the University of California – San Diego, and first author of a paper published in Nature Energy. “It can indeed work well, even better than the lithium version in some cases,” adds Deysher. The battery can be charged and discharged for 400 cycles without degrading.
Deysher has filed a patent application for the battery, along with senior author Professor Ying Shirley Meng from the University of Chicago.
Guess the object
Under the sea
Let’s head underwater for this issue’s mystery. Can you identify the subject of this image? It may appear cute and blobby, but it goes by a terrifying name. Bonus points for sharing each common or scientific name used to identify it. If you really know your stuff, prove it by telling us how and where the image was taken.
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
Oral history
How long did you chew over last issue’s object? By gum it was a tough one! Turns out it was a mold cast of a chewed pitch piece found at Huseby Klev, Sweden. These bits of chewed tar discarded by hunter-gatherers in southwestern Scandinavia nearly 10,000 years ago reveal that Stone Age people were affected by tooth decay and gum disease.
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A storm can change the flavour of your cuppa
People run from crashing waves at the promenade in Folkestone, Kent, as Storm Ciarán approaches on 2 November 2023.
considered below the minimum for an ideal cup.
“The effect of pressure on boiling temperature is long known to mountaineers, but Ciarán brought the effect to a wide region,” says study co-author Dr Alec Bennett, a meteorologist at Bath Spa University, UK.
The boiling point of liquids changes with pressure. At normal atmospheric pressure, this is around 100°C.
But storms bring with them dramatic drops in air pressure, which means that water changes from a liquid to a gas at lower temperatures. Storm Ciarán had unusually low air pressure, setting records in some parts of England.
Armed with a temperature sensor and a kettle, the researchers tracked the boiling point of water as the storm passed over Reading.
Meteorologists investigate a storm in a teacup.
› NEXT TIME you are recovering from a wild storm, and feeling the need for a revitalising cup of tea, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t give you the warmth inside you were hoping for. The storm might have changed the way tea tastes.
According to a new study, when Storm Ciarán rolled across Europe, it
End of the road for cane toad?
dropped the boiling point of water low enough to degrade black tea quality in south-east England, right around breakfast time.
The study, published in Weather, reports that the air pressure in Reading, UK, dropped so low that water boiled at just under 98°C, which is often
SOUTHWEST OF BROOME , on the northern West Australian coast, a narrow strip of pastoral land separates the Indian Ocean from the Great Sandy Desert.
In a few years’ time, this thin band of country might become a passageway for cane toads to invade the sensitive Pilbara region.
Or – if an ambitious plan succeeds – it could be the point that finally
They combined this with data from weather stations across the UK to track the storm’s movement. The centre of the low pressure system moved across England between 4am and 10am –breakfast time.
The boiling point of water dropped to just under 98°C in the lab, and the weather data suggests this happened across much of the country, which may be enough to change the flavours of tea.
halts the toads’ relentless onslaught.
The plan, cooked up by ecologists, Traditional Owners, rangers and pastoralists, aims to establish a “Toad Containment Zone”. They’ll do this by limiting access to water along the 150km stretch.
“In that corridor, there’s not a lot of natural permanent water,” explains Professor Ben
Phillips, a population biologist at Curtin University.
“We can manage the water in such a way that it’s not accessible to toads. If we do that, we basically create this impassable barrier; an area of the country that’s too dry for toads to live in,” says Phillips.
“If we get it right, the cane toad invasion stops just south of Broome.”
Old solar panels can be recycled into lithium-ion batteries
Chinese researchers have found a way to make silicon from old solar panels into powerful anodes for lithium-ion batteries.
They say their research, published in Nature Sustainability, paves the way for “gamechanging”, durable batteries.
Silicon has long been examined as a possible component for the anodes of lithium-ion batteries.
At the moment, commercial batteries usually use graphite anodes, but silicon is more abundant and capable of making a more energy-dense battery.
Unfortunately, for now silicon usually makes batteries with very short lifespans. However, the researchers made a battery with a formula that was higher performing than commercial lithium-ion batteries.
“The sustainable sourcing of silicon from discarded solar panels mitigates both the economic and environmental impacts of photovoltaic waste,” says co-first author Dr Tiantian Dong.
3D knitting could make solid but soft furniture
These objects are much more flexible than rigid 3D prints.
A hand-knitted 3D cube.
IF THE ART of knitting wasn’t mind-boggling enough, researchers have designed a prototype machine that can knit in three dimensions.
They’ve called the new fabrication technique “solid knitting” and have the aim of one day producing a machine capable of knitting furniture.
The technique works by building up knitted layers in a similar way to 3D printing. But rather than being held together by melted plastic, each knit layer is stitched to the previous one.
The team behind the research, from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, presented its research paper and prototype at SIGGRAPH 2024 – the annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Denver, Colorado.
“[Solid knitting] can easily be unravelled and re-knit, unlike other 3D
printing methods which require finished objects to be laboriously melted down and re-extruded into filament in order to be recycled,” first author Yuichi Hirose said in a SIGGRAPH blog post about the project.
The machine can produce dense, firm, triangular or rectangular prisms of varying lengths. It uses elastic cord as the yarn, as the machine needs to stretch the yarn loops quite significantly.
“Solid-knit objects have enough internal structure to hold their shape but are still much softer and more flexible than rigid 3D prints,” says co-author Mark Gillespie on the SIGGRAPH blog.
The technique can also be applied to hand-knitting to produce larger, more intricate shapes, such as a pair of sandals. A tutorial for the hand-knitting technique, as well as the software for creating machine-knittable 3D patterns, is freely available online.
PLAY VIDEO
World’s first atomic-scale quantum sensor
It provides images of materials as a rich as an MRI.
FOR THE FIRST TIME , physicists have developed a quantum sensor capable of detecting magnetic fields at the scale of atoms.
Atoms range in diameter from 0.1–0.5 nanometres. That’s about one ten-billionth of a metre, or roughly a millionth the width of a human hair. At this scale, the strange effects of quantum mechanics dominate, making it difficult to visualise and precisely measure physical quantities such as electric and magnetic fields.
Quantum sensors aim to use the same quantum phenomena – such as the spin of subatomic particles or quantum entanglement – to make precise measurements.
Several quantum sensors have been developed in recent years, but atomicscale resolution was previously thought to be unattainable for both electric and magnetic fields at the same time.
That has now changed with a new quantum sensor developed by an
Dr Taner Esat designs quantum sensors.
international team of researchers. Their design is detailed in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology in July.
Usually, quantum sensors rely on imperfections in crystal lattices. But because these defects need to be embedded deep within the crystal structure, the are often far away from the processes they are measuring.
This technology employs a new method using a single molecule.
The molecule is attached to the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope, allowing it to be brought to within nanometres of the object being observed.
“This quantum sensor is a game changer, because it provides images of materials as rich as an MRI,” says lead author Taner Esat from the Forschungszentrum Jülich research institute in Germany. “This will allow us to explore and understand materials at their most fundamental level.”
TECHNOLOGY
Nuclear SMRs too immature for Australia now, says
top body
Nuclear small modular reactors (SMRs) might be a feasible source of power for Australia in the midto late-2040s, but are unlikely to be of use before then, according to a new report.
The analysis, done by the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), finds that the “least risky” option for Australia is to wait until the SMR market is mature and the technology is proven overseas.
The report found that prototype SMRs may be built in OECD countries by the mid-2030s, with a mature market emerging by the mid- to late-2040s.
“Small modular reactors are still at the design and development stage,” says report coauthor Professor Ian Lowe, an ATSE fellow.
“You couldn’t write a cheque tomorrow and buy a small modular reactor.”
The report also points out Australia currently lacks a sufficient nuclearskilled workforce, and has moratoria on nuclear power both at the federal level, and in several states.
Lost continent crucial in penguin wing evolution
Millions of years ago, New Zealand was teeming with giant penguins.
NEW ANALYSIS of New Zealand fossils first uncovered in 1987 shows how penguin wings evolved.
The wing fragments were found near the town of Duntroon on New Zealand’s South Island, nearly 1,000km southwest of Auckland.
The fossils come from a species called Pakudyptes hakataramea . It lived during the late Oligocene (34–23 million years ago). P. hakataramea is described for the first time by science in a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand in August.
New Zealand today is believed to be the lost, ancient continent of Zealandia breaking through to the surface. Tens of millions of years ago, Zealandia’s rocky shores and surrounding waters were a hotbed of evolutionary development.
Among the ancient marine and coastal life found in New Zealand are dolphins, seals, crabs and ancestors of tropicbirds.
New Zealand has also thrown up ancient penguin fossils. This includes the largest ever penguin, which lived 55 million years ago, stood as tall as a person and weighed a whopping 150kg.
In fact, New Zealand seems to have been teeming with giant penguins.
“Most recent penguin species are small, but back in Oligocene times, giant penguins more than 1m tall were the norm,” Dr Carolina Loch tells Cosmos in an email. Loch is co-author of the new study and a researcher at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
This tremendous wealth of big-bodied penguins is what sets P. hakataramea apart.
“This seem to be the earliest of the small penguins, of a similar size of the little blue penguin,” Loch adds.
P. hakataramea would have been little more than 30cm tall. For this reason,
the researchers refer to this penguin as “tiny” compared to others. Little blue penguins, found today around New Zealand and southern Australia, are the smallest penguins.
The three small penguin bones were housed in the collections of the Geology Museum of the University of Otago.
“After being extracted from the rock and prepared carefully, they were analysed for their overall shape (we call this morphology) to look for marks where muscles and ligaments attached,” Loch explains. “They were also analysed via conebeam CT scanner and micro-CT scanner to study the internal details of the bone structure.”
They found a well-developed forearm bone was connected to a more archaic elbow joint. This, the authors write, “provides clues to the evolution of penguin wings.”
From the Late Oligocene, the researchers say that penguin wings evolved rapidly improving in both hydrodynamics and function to enable penguins to become the accomplished swimmers they are today.
“The appearance of the smallest body size and the evolution of modern wings may have led to the ecological diversity of modern penguins, which confirms the importance of Zealandia in penguin evolution,” the authors say.
A little blue penguin in New Zealand.
Understanding the formation of galaxies
Atomic hydrogen is a simple atom, but it’s used to create incredibly detailed images of our universe.
Naomi McClure-Griffiths explains.
Iwas born in Atlanta, Georgia. I loved doing a lot of things that kids do, but I had a strange propensity for doing mathematics on foggy car windows. I enjoyed doing scientific experiments with chemicals in my closet, which probably nearly killed me.
I was part of a program that would pull us out of school to do science experiments for an afternoon. I remember dissecting a pig’s heart. I remember taking apart a cow’s eyeball and taking the lens back home with me. But it was not until I hit high school that I found that what I really liked was doing physics.
I went to Oberlin College and I started out studying both physics and maths, and French. I found that physics was a little bit more exciting, but French has remained a passion throughout my life.
In my final year I was offered the chance to come to Australia with one of my professors. It was the perfect time to do my research project with the CSIRO Parkes telescope.
Parkes is a full body experience. You hear the telescope moving above, you feel the building vibrate a little bit. And you know that when you are telling the telescope to go to a particular position, you are in control of this most powerful radio telescope in the southern hemisphere, and you’re pointing it at the one thing that you want to look at.
Mapping with atomic hydrogen
Atomic hydrogen is the very simplest atom in the universe: one electron, one proton, emits a radio wave at 2cm wavelength. We can use that information to map out the structure of galaxies and find galaxies across the universe.
Atomic hydrogen is the most fundamental building block of the universe. Everything that we see started out from hydrogen.
If you look up at the night sky, you see a dark patch that’s blocking out all of the stars. That’s a patch that has molecular gas and will probably form stars in its future. But in its past, it was just plain old ‘vanilla’ hydrogen that was floating around inside the galaxy.
The brilliant thing about atomic hydrogen is that it’s like a radio station. If that hydrogen is moving away from us, it changes its pitch as it moves to a
different frequency. So, by looking at atomic hydrogen, and looking at the frequency with which we measure hydrogen, we can tell whether the gas is moving away from us or towards us.
It also acts like smoke particles in a room. You can tell if somebody opens a door and the smoke drifts one direction, and they open a door on the other side and it drifts the other way. Hydrogen does exactly the same thing inside galaxies. If a star explodes, it pushes all the hydrogen one way and we can see it move away from where that star exploded, or we can see it moving as it collapses into a molecular cloud.
Moving, flowing gases
I’m trying to understand the atmosphere that is our galaxy, how the gas within it moves around, how it’s formed stars, how it reacts to big stars around it.
I’m looking at chimneys of gas where gas goes flowing out of the galaxy altogether, so that it interacts with the circumgalactic medium. And I’m also looking at how our galaxy is interacting with its nearby galaxies.
Magellanic clouds, which are some of our nearest galaxies, are coming into the Milky Way. As they do, all their gas strips off behind them and looks like a big huge
Parkes is a full body experience. You hear the telescope moving above, you feel the building vibrate a little bit.
comet tail. It is something that we can trace in atomic hydrogen.
The Milky Way has been continuously creating stars for more than 11 billion years. And in order to continue creating new stars, it needs to continually receive fresh gas.
We think that magnetic fields play a role in confining where gas can move. So one of my research questions is how do magnetic fields interact with galactic scale gas that’s coming in to our own Milky Way?
The answers on how magnetic fields and gas interact are probably five to 10 years away. This is a new field of research. It’s something that we’re just really getting into and will take off with the Square Kilometre Array.
There’s no ‘aha’ moment
It’s relatively easy to see the stars traced out, but the gaseous arms of galaxies extend out twice, three times as far as the stars do. And what I found in the Milky Way was a gaseous spiral arm that was stretching out in a far outer part of the galaxy that we’d never noticed before.
It’s sort of disappointing that I never had an ‘aha’ moment of discovery. I always wondered if it could be right. Is that really a spiral alarm? No. Surely somebody would’ve thought of that before. It went on and on with my confidence gradually building.
I don’t think I was fully convinced that I’d found that spiral arm until a few years later. Another team in Japan found molecular gas associated with that, and that molecular gas is a sign there might be a few stars that could form out there.
The beginning is next
The big questions that I’d like to see answered in the next 10 to 15 years are actually not my own specific research.
I’m working on our own galaxy, but it’s just one galaxy in the scheme of billions of galaxies. I’d like to see how those other galaxies first started to form.
PROFESSOR NAOMI MCCLUREGRIFFITHS is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and the Associate Director (Research) in the Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics of the Australian National University.
Naomi McClure-Griffiths at Murriyang, CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope, circa 2008
Living among leopards
Experience close and quirky encounters with unique wildlife as conservation biologist, Declan Morris, explores every corner of Loskop Dam
Nature Reserve.
While leopards can be found in many different countries and various habitat types throughout Asia and Africa, the place I got to know them up close and personal was in Mpumalanga, South Africa. As part of my PhD project on African leopard conservation ecology, I was lucky enough to live in South Africa for almost three years studying these incredible carnivores.
I have always had a strong passion for wildlife conservation, and big cats have been among my favourite animals for as long as I can remember. My research focused on leopards living on
Loskop Dam Nature Reserve (LDNR) and in the greater Loskop region, which is located about four hours north-east of Johannesburg.
I lived on LDNR for most of my time in South Africa. After living in this wildlife haven for so long, and having so many remarkable experiences there, it is easy to say that this became my favourite place in the world.
LDNR is as unique as it is breathtaking, due to the significant changes that can be seen across different areas of the reserve. Large rocky hills and mountains with deep drainage lines stretch along the length of the reserve. Dense
woodlands lie between the base of the mountains and the banks of the dam. As you move up the river, the woodlands roll into large flat grassland plains with some spectacular ranges overlooking them.
The diversity in habitat meant there was also a large variety of animal species present including buffalo, white rhino, eland, giraffe, zebra, brown hyena and caracal. The dam is fed by the Olifants River and was constructed in the 1930s to support agricultural growth in the region. The permanent water source has supported local crocodile, hippo and African clawless otter populations to remain in the area.
During my time on LDNR, I was able to explore every corner of the reserve while setting up camera traps and leopard cage traps. I often hiked through remote areas looking for the perfect location to set up cameras and search for signs of leopards. This gave me many close and personal encounters with wildlife, including often stumbling across rhinos and hippos on foot.
To this day, nothing quite beats the rush of adrenaline experienced when you walk around a corner and meet a hippo crossing your path. If I came across rhinos, I would often take the chance to find somewhere to quietly sit and watch them graze and go about their day. Taking every opportunity to just observe wildlife in their natural habitat at length was just one of the many highlights of living in the middle of the African bush.
The vast open expanses of Loskop Dam Nature Reserve.
Living in a small researchers’ camp in the middle of a reserve also came with its own unique experiences. We often had a group of boisterous bushbabies (the smallest primate in Africa) jumping on the roof of our huts throughout the night. Over time, I befriended the nearby family of slender mongoose, and they would often come over to say hello as I sat on the stairs having my morning coffee.
There were a few periods where I had to camp out on the other side of the reserve in only a tent for weeks at a time. After a day of fieldwork, my nights were spent by a campfire listening to the hippos grunting in the distance and from time to time, being woken up by hearing a leopard calling nearby. There are a few comical memories of myself and other students chasing a troop of troublesome baboons up a nearby hill, as the baboons would attempt to infiltrate the camp and pillage supplies.
Catching a leopard is no easy feat. They are very smart, shy and agile animals that will not easily go into a cage trap. Capturing leopards was an important part of my project to collect genetic samples and put on GPS collars to study their movements around the reserve and the greater Loskop region. Although there is a lot of hard work that goes into setting up and checking cages, it was not uncommon to go weeks or months between successful leopard captures.
Catching a leopard is no easy feat. They are very smart, shy and agile animals that will not easily go into a cage trap.
Despite feeling a bit sleep deprived after weeks of fieldwork, the excitement and delight from a capture is always motivating and puts the research team on a high. We caught a total of 13 individual leopards over the course of the project. However, I had identified many more individuals based on the results of all the camera trap images collected throughout the project.
LDNR appeared rather isolated as it is surrounded by a matrix of farms and human dominated establishments. Originally this had me thinking that I would discover a smaller, struggling leopard population in the region. The main findings from my research
suggested quite the opposite, that the leopard population on LDNR was doing remarkably well.
I found many positive attributes of this population, including moderate density numbers and high genetic diversity. The results of my research place a higher conservation significance on leopards in the Highveld region of Mpumalanga. My results will be used by management authorities when making future management decisions on the population.
Outside of the incredible landscapes, nature and wildlife of Mpumalanga, there were also the many amazing people and lifelong friends I met along the way. Mpumalanga is full of friendly people, big smiles, adventure and home to multiple beautiful languages and cultures.
By the end of my project, Mpumalanga felt like it had become my second home. I will never forget the experiences I had while living in South Africa. I am sure anyone else who loves wildlife and nature as much as myself will also find it mesmerising and adventurous to visit, or even get involved in conservation research of their own.
DECLAN MORRIS is Community Ecologist at the South Australian Arid Lands Landscape Board with an interest in threatened and endangered species conservation.
geology
Walking or driving Australia’s Red Centre is a great way to learn about geology. But even geologists agree the science is, well, complicated. Cosmos journalist Glenn Morrison takes to the hills around his Alice Springs home to ask what geotourism might bring to central Australia.
From the leaves of nearby acacias, wet bulbs of late-afternoon sunlight drip like treacle.
Sunset. My wife Fiona and I hurry up Euro Ridge on Section 1 of the Larapinta Trail, a wilderness hike winding 223km from Alice Springs west to Mt Sonder.
Behind us, the Alice Springs landscape looks more of an enormous stadium than the work of water and tectonics over the ages.
In the geology to our west is also something of the Colosseum; some call it God’s amphitheatre. Fiona halts suddenly a few metres ahead on the shale and gravel path, waves me still.
An eagle rests beyond her. Carefully, Fiona withdraws her mobile from Gore-Tex and clicks.
Precious moments go by before the eagle lifts its wings – perhaps two metres tip to tip –to lurch from its rocky perch into a layer of warm air rising from the valley to our north.
The silence that follows brings an aching stillness.
Ellery Creek Big Hole in the MacDonnell Ranges.
Exploring Amadeus Basin
That walk of 2014 helped rekindle a childhood fascination with geology, and triggered an ongoing bid for Fiona and me to walk the Larapinta Trail end to end.
Doing the Trail’s 12 sections in one hit takes 15 days, give or take. Stop to smell the desert roses and it’s 20. Embarrassingly, ten years later our piecemeal bid is certainly progressed, but unfinished.
Not so lazy are an estimated 5,000 visitors each year who pull on a backpack and sturdy boots to tread the Trail.
But the Larapinta Trail is not the only show in the Red Centre.
Under an hour’s drive west from Alice are Simpsons Gap and Standley Chasm. Westward again, you’ll find major gorges and waterholes of the MacDonnell Ranges, and to the east, still more attractions. South are Uluru, Kata Tjuta, Kings Canyon. All born of the same geological formation, the Amadeus Basin.
The spectacular geology produces awe and tricky questions in equal measure, perhaps most commonly: how on earth did all this get here? As it turns out, satisfactory explanations about the geology of the Red Centre are not so easy to give.
Interpreting the landscapes
Red Centre geology looks and is complex, as many geologists agree. Questions are now being asked regarding the accuracy and scientific worth of the geological history narratives on offer for tourists and educators alike.
The questions arrive as Red Centre tourism is suffering a downturn: COVID hesitancy, a lack of flights, and widely reported social upheaval in the regional hub Alice Springs.
Visitor numbers to Central Australia were slightly up for the year to December 2023 when 571,000 visitors spent $915 million, but still down on the 796,000 who visited before COVID in 2019.
While geology won’t likely save the tourism industry single-handedly, perhaps it might help?
“The problem with the Red Centre is that the landscapes are not properly explained and interpreted,” says Angus
Nobody bothers to explain… that the rocks are all of the same age, but have different geomorphic forms.
“No one is joining the dots.”
Of course, NT Parks & Wildlife, Tourism NT and various tour companies all produce interpretive signage, brochures or guiding spiels explaining the geology for many of the locations that Angus names. Anecdotally, many tourists report such signage and information both interesting and informative.
And there is a broader narrative of Red Centre geology, one that geologists have been developing for decades. And it’s readily available in texts and journal articles.
“But that’s too technical for the non-scientist,” another geologist explains. “The information needs to be simplified and then connected into the broader story.
“At the moment the geology is described at particular places, but the thread showing where each place fits into the bigger picture is lacking.”
And my own questions loom large. What dots did Angus want to join? Might one overarching story of the geology really make a difference? What about an Indigenous telling of the landscape?
Either way there had to be a simple way to tell this multi-faceted story, no matter how complex the science. I mean, how hard could it be, right?
The language of geology
Central Australia’s experienced geologist Christine Edgoose is a softly grey-haired, generous soul who joined the NT Geological Survey in 1981.
“Maps are my main worry,” I blurt to Chris upon arriving at the Arid Zone Research Institute (AZRI) south of Alice Springs.
Chris has co-authored geological maps, journal publications and is senior regional geologist at Alice Springs.
Robinson, experienced geologist and coordinator of Geotourism Australia, part of the Australian Geoscience Council Inc.
“We take people to Uluru, Kata Tjuta, if they’re lucky Kings Canyon, along the West MacDonnells… all as individual scenic areas.
“While geology won’t likely save the tourism industry single-handedly, perhaps it might help?”
“Oh maps?” Chris says offhandedly. “Don’t worry, we have them already on the wall.”
We follow several corridors to an open plan ‘geology lab’, including a small library, kitchenette, and two lounges where we might talk.
And there it is. Chris’ map. A mosaic assembled from smaller 1:250,000 scale sheets taped into one monster sheet to cover 15m 2 of the lab wall. Impressive, though not helping my anxiety.
Chris begins, now seated and introducing several Centre landscapes at once. “It’s fantastic in the range country, well exposed. [Then] you’ve got the basement (rocks), the much older metamorphic and granitic terrains.
“And then there are places like the Amadeus Basin. But other basins as well, sedimentary basins that sit on top, and you can see the connections; it’s a long-lived history, all pretty well exposed.”
Like any specialist profession, geology speaks its own language, replete with synclines, anticlines, dip, strike and other terms largely a mystery to the layperson.
Adding to its sometimes-impenetrable nature, geology also trades in mammoth timescales and mind-boggling forces capable of shifting whole continents.
Perhaps the timescales are the more difficult. At a very human level. I mean, can our short lives ever hope to compete with ages measured in the billions of years?
To describe the Amadeus Basin – the key geological feature in a Red Centre as seen by tourists – I propose to Chris a layer cake model, which at first she doesn’t like.
But it grows on her as we talk and later converse by email.
Sunset at Mount Sonder Lookout.
Geology in plain English
A few days before meeting Chris, I see geologist Dr Anett Weisheit at a Todd Mall café. I’d interviewed Anett in 2023 when she launched her book, Behind the landscape of the Central Ranges: A Geological Guide to the Larapinta Trail and Tjoritja/West MacDonnell National Park.
The book features 60 educational stops along the route for the reader–walker, divided according to 12 sections of the trail, each colour coded as a self-guided experience of the region’s geology.
Like Chris, Anett believes geology – and Red Centre geology in particular – might be explained more simply. Except for one thing.
“Here in the Red Centre,” she begins, “there is quite a complex geology”.
A familiar story.
But Anett’s aim is plain English. As a first handhold on a regional geology, she writes that most rocks of Central Australia are “very much older than those of the Rocky Mountains or the Alps of central Asia”. In fact, the oldest rocks seen along the trail are from the Sadadeen Range gneiss, which “formed from molten rock (magma) about 1,800 million years ago”.
The ‘basement’ rocks are around this same age: granite, gneiss and metamorphosed sedimentary rocks. Examples can be spotted at Anzac Hill and Billy Goat Hill in Alice Springs’ central business district, all typical of basement granites.
Covering 170,000km2 of the Centre, the Amadeus Basin comprises sediments that were originally dumped into a saucer-shaped depression in the landscape then reworked. It stretches from the MacDonnell Ranges in the north to the Petermann Ranges and Uluru
including at Glen Helen Gorge on the Finke River, Ormiston Gorge, and Ellery Creek Big Hole, swimming spots long a favourite with tourists and locals.
in the south, and from Western Australia east to the Simpson Desert.
Its sandstones, siltstones and limestones, have been since weathered physically and chemically over millennia.
Though generally thousands of metres thick, there are deeper bits of the Amadeus Basin. Near the MacDonnell Ranges, for example, some sedimentary rocks go down a whopping 14km. Some were formed under arid climates, others during wetter times, and rock characteristics vary accordingly. Even glaciation figures in the evolution of some landscapes.
These days dry riverbeds run across the grain of the landscape, having cut magnificent gorges through the ranges in wetter times,
Top: Direct descendant from Angkerle, Colleen Mack, at Angkerle Atwatye (Standley Chasm).
Above: Geologist Christine Edgoose helped assemble this mosaic of geological maps of the Red Centre.
So even though these landscapes were all formed within the Amadeus Basin, variations in prevailing forces, degrees of uplift, climate and weathering mean any one location may well look completely different from any other.
A light bulb went on. I’d heard Angus call this “same geology, different geomorphic form”.
In the south of the Amadeus Basin, according to Parks Australia, Uluru and Kata Tjuta started forming about 550 million years ago (mya). Uluru is a course-grained sandstone, rich in the mineral feldspar. It is called an arkose, a pinkish or red sandstone primarily of quartz and feldspar, originally eroded from mountains composed of granite. Conversely, Kata Tjuta is a conglomerate, a gravel consisting of pebbles, cobbles and boulders cemented by sand and mud. Most of the gravel pieces are granite and
South–north cross section of the Amadeus Basin
Imagine the Amadeus Basin as a slab of cake. The original base layer of the cake is folded and twisted and swirled. Think marble cake, if you like. On top of this are other layers, also buckled and disrupted owing to various forces acting during the cake’s making.
1. 1800–1300 mya: sediments are deposited in a base layer, granites intrude, and the rocks are buried, cooked, deformed, altered and exhumed to the surface. Geologists call it ‘basement rock’.
2. 1000 mya: forces hollow out a saucer-shaped depression in the top of the marble cake, fashioning a ‘cake sunk in the oven’.
3. 1000–550 mya: sea levels rise and fall, dumping billions of tonnes of sediments into the hollowed saucer shape.
4. 630–520 mya: a major upset; the Petermann Orogeny (orogeny means ‘mountain building phase’). Unknown forces squeeze the cake from the south causing massive uplift at its southern end. The northern end is relatively unaffected. The south is left with mountain
basalt and give the conglomerate what Parks Australia calls a “plum pudding effect”.
The Basin’s north is different. Drive west from Alice Springs for a front-row seat to the upturned and eroded northern edge of the Amadeus Basin, a snapshot of a deep past when exposed and once horizontal layers were uplifted then eroded leaving steep jagged remnants.
This northern ridge is where Fiona and I had begun the Larapinta Trail. I’m reminded of swimming at Ellery Creek in the late 90s.
My best friend John and I float on our backs through the gorge on a day off. No rush, breathing in the broken geology, its double-folded faults and striations looking so much like grimaces of pain. “I could live here, John,” I sigh. He is smiling. Nodding, almost laughing.
On walks near Ellery Creek since, I sometimes daydream of standing atop one side of its
ranges near where the Petermann Ranges are today. Near the southern edge of the cake’s top, the sandstones of Uluru and Kata Tjuta are deposited, and eventually deformed.
5. Until about 380 mya: After everything is stable again, more deposition fills shallow seas and later rivers, particularly in the north.
6. 450–150 mya: The Alice Springs Orogeny yields
mountain ranges across the basin, including where the MacDonnells are today. Even the once-horizontal sandstone layers of Uluru are tilted vertically.
The Red Centre’s low, rounded ranges were evident by about 20 mya. Further erosion produced the jagged and steep-sided landforms seen today, and erosion continues.
grand chasm in flood, watching Nature’s violence gouge, scrape and reshape its walls.
Walking the chasm
At Easter this year Fiona and I drive 40 minutes west from Alice to Standley Chasm, or Angkerle Atwatye in Western Arrernte.
Recent rains have charged catchments, and streams are flooding across the district. Including, we’d heard, at the Chasm.
Once a tributary of the Finke River, the streambed of Angkerle Atwatye is now mostly dry under 284mm average yearly rainfall.
In wet years, however, rainwater converges at the junction of two major creeks at the back of Standley Chasm, bringing logs, rocks, and boulders surging into rapids down the creek. Floods are reportedly so strong they “reach the carpark and submerge the entrance road”.
SOUTH
NORTH
NAMATJIRA DRIVE (WEST MACDONNELL RANGES)
WALKER CREEK PETERMANN CREEK TEMPE DOWNS
A bite-sized portion of the Amadeus Basin today, looking like a marble cake that has sunk in the middle. The basin extends further in both directions, to the south and north.
Our plan was breakfast at the Chasm’s popular café homestead, after a walk of Angkerle Atwatye’s 2.4km-return stream trail and a rare glimpse of the gorge in flow.
The chasm’s Western Arrernte name means “where the water moves between”; and water flow has shaped this chasm for several million years.
From the gorge we follow the stream back to the café, shaded by river red gums and ancient cycads, the stream itself traversing a bed of grey quartzite and gravels between sometimes vertical walls.
Western Arrernte Woman and general manager of Standley Chasm Nova Pomare runs the Aboriginal-owned tourism operation with her builder husband.
For Traditional Owners like Nova, Angkerle Atwatye provides bush tucker, medicinal supplies and toolmaking, and is an important cultural and spiritual site.
The Chasm hosts 50,000 visitors in a good year, Nova tells me. “For some it’s a bucket list,” she says. “[And] obviously Uluru, that’s a huge draw card… but then just the Red Centre
project. Starting at the carpark, maybe the Ghost Gum Walk, then back into the valley and Ormiston Pound.”
Nova agrees there is strong interest. “I think some people are amazed by the formations of the rocks,” she says. “When they come to see the Larapinta Trail and then see up close the Chasm, or when they go to… all those places in the West MacDonnell Ranges… they’re in awe.
But Standley Chasm is not immune to the broader tourism downturn. “It’s really unpredictable at the moment,” Nova says. “We’re up and down. A lot of cancellations with the unrest in Alice Springs. Today we’re short staffed, but then you have too many staff. It’s just hard, you know. Things happen.”
Before COVID, Central Australian tourism had been growing.
Some 550,000 visitors to the Red Centre in mid-2010 had grown to almost 800,000 overnight visitors by late 2019, says Tourism NT. But that plunged to 389,000 overnight visitors by June 2021.
itself; the red dirt, the landscape, the people, the culture.”
In recent years, 90 cultural tours of the Chasm each season has grown to 300, which Nova attributes to rising interest in “the cultural heritage of the place”.
But that hasn’t stopped her also investing in the chasm as what is being called a “geotrail”.
The term is relatively new to Australian tourism, but familiar to Geotourism Australia, a division of the Australian Geosciences Council Ltd, newly minted this year.
Last year in consultation with Nova and her team, Angus, Anett and others developed a geotrail brochure for the site.
The brochure speaks to the short chasm walk where small changes in geology make a digestible morsel of science for tourists.
Anett describes a photo brochure that folds out then opens, a map on one panel with a satellite image as background and boundaries of the geology as lines.
“You get the names of what rock it is,” says its author, Anett. “Then points of interest along the walking trail… are all marked.”
She believes the small scale of the chasm makes a perfect geotrail. “The same would be true for Ormiston Gorge; that could be another
Similarly, Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park, which hosted more than 300,000 tourists in 2017, had declined to 164,678 in the first nine months of 2023, according to Parks Australia.
During the same widespread downturn, however, visitation to Standley Chasm grew. While other factors may well be at play, it begs the question: can geotourism help?
What is geotourism?
Australian Geoparks Network defines a geotrail as “a guided or self-guided trail of multiple (geo) sites that interprets geology and landscapes”. Several or many such geotrails may comprise a declared geopark.
Used more commonly in the United States, China and Europe, such terms are part of an international language of geotourism, focused specifically on geology and landscape.
As of 2022, there are 65 geopark members from eight different countries in the Asia Pacific Geoparks Network (APGN).
Geoparks are places where geology and nature are spectacular; think Grand Canyon or Yellowstone in the US, Shetland in Scotland or the Basque Coast of Spain; all UNESCO registered geoparks.
In March, Mount Changbaishan Geopark and five more new geoparks were declared in China by UNESCO, adding to 289 national
Right: Angkerle Atwatye, Standley Chasm.
Nova Pomare, Western Arrernte Woman and general manager of Angkerle Atwatye.
geoparks and 41 UNESCO global geoparks already declared.
If geotourism is so successful overseas, why not in Australia?
A network of geoparks
Western Australia’s Murchison Georegion was launched in 2020 with the marketing tagline: “Ancient Lands, Brilliant Skies”. The region hopes to eventually become an accredited UNESCO Global Geopark. And there are others, if some not exactly official. Some areas are nominated on aspirational site lists, such as that created by the Australian Geoparks Network.
And there is movement at a strategic level by Australian Geoscience Council, the peak council of geoscientists representing eight societies and some 8,000 members. Angus explains.
“Two years ago, the Australian Geoscience Council launched the National Geotourism Strategy,” says Angus, “to support the development of major geotourism projects in line with what has been happening overseas.
“Its goals include geo-trail development – the Larapinta Trail is one – and enhancing the quality of interpretation of the natural environment.
“Geotourism adds considerable value to traditional nature-based tourism because it brings together landscape and geology, flora and fauna, Aboriginal cultural and post-European settlement considerations.”
Still, for Australia, there may be a problem with the language. And a geotrail – while Standley Chasm is one – remains a term not much heard, especially in the Red Centre.
“It’s a terminology that doesn’t resonate here,” says Stephen Jarrett, at the time the Membership and Marketing Manager of peak regional tourism industry body Tourism Central Australia (TCA). “We just think of it as tourism generally.”
Though TCA has developed its own geology webpage and says a ‘geotourism page’ would be easy enough to create, Stephen is not alone in a wariness of geotourism. Several local guides and a tourism academic I spoke with were also unaware of or had only a vague notion about geotourism.
“Australia is falling behind in this,” says
Swimming at Ormiston Gorge.
Anett, who is also Geotourism Subcommittee Representative for the Geological Society of Australia. “About 10 years ago it started to be put forward in Australia.
“It started earlier in Europe; it has geoparks and geotrails and walking and driving experiences. But here we are a bit slow to catch up.”
Angus, who is also on the board of TCA, in 2011 promoted the geotrail called the Red Centre Way, a driving circuit from Alice Springs to Uluru via the Mereenie Loop Road (still partly 4WD only) and embracing Kata Tjuta national park, Kings Canyon, the West MacDonnell Ranges and highlights of Alice Springs.
But TCA is hesitant.
Planned with Traditional Owners, the walk is promoted by the Australian Walking Company, who proposed the idea in 2021 after the climb closure two years prior.
Parks Australia’s Visitor & Tourism Services Manager for Uluru National Park, Steven Baldwin, thinks of the walk as a geotrail.
He says a broader narrative of regional geology to connect sites across the Amadeus Basin is something he says, “has absolute merit”.
From a marketing point of view, Steven says, landscape is “integral to most of what we do. And what Central Australia Tourism, NT and Tourism Australia do”.
“Tourism is more than geology. It is ABC: A for abiotic, the geology; B is the biology; and C the culture.”
“It certainly could be referred to as a geotrail,” says Stephen. “But we don’t tell people that.
“We’re not saying Uluru is connected to Standley Chasm, we’re just saying: “look, it’s all beautiful. It’s all about place.
“But we’re not saying they’re connected (geologically).”
Beyond the Centre, however, the fledgling movement has more momentum, says Anett.
“In other parts of Australia where Geotourism has been a thing for at least a decade, there is more progress.
“The Blue Mountains near Sydney, national parks in South Australia where you get cave geology; they have maps, and local and regional geotourism projects.
“And tourism is more than geology,” Anett says; “it is ABC: A for abiotic, the geology; B is the biology; and C the culture.
“[In geotourism] all of that comes together, history, local knowledge, and how it connects to what you’re seeing in the landscape.”
A signature walk
If TCA’s response appears lukewarm, Parks Australia is excited by comparison.
An Uluru-Kata Tjuta Signature Walk due to open in 2025, is a four-day luxury walk of Uluru National Park sleeping up to 14 guests in high quality ‘off-grid’ tented accommodation in three locations.
But to leverage geotourism for a marketing advantage with international tourists, Steven warns to be careful.
“It would need to be done in an accredited way… controlled, not just: ‘Hey, let’s just call it a geopark’. There’s got to be some form of policing to ensure probity.”
Return to Angkerle Atwatye
Back at Standley Chasm, response to the geotrail brochure is positive, says Nova, based on what she’s hearing.
She sees the geotrail as a natural progression for the Chasm, part of studying the West MacDonnells more broadly.
Meanwhile, she plans to update the Chasm’s interpretive signage, some of which is “either dated or not done”, in a move to “match what the brochure says to the way Anette and her crew have done it… because they’re specialised in it”.
“I thought (the geotrail brochure) would be a great thing for us to be able to explain it under that umbrella,” Nova says. “Because people are interested, they do want to know how it’s formed.
“I thought it would be good learning for my guides to know that side of [it], as well as the Dreamtime and our way of Creation.”
GLENN MORRISON is a journalist, researcher, and author based in Alice Springs. He has written of Australia’s Centre and North for more than 25 years.
Unliveable
Australia
Today, the bush is still and cool. A faint wind tickles the blue-green tips of the eucalypt leaves, drives wisps of morning mist through the pale trunks of mountain ash and rough brown of Sydney peppermint. Birds twitter and screech, and kangaroos browse on the dewy grass.
Four and a half years ago, this idyllic scene was dead. Fire had swept through, feasting on a desiccated banquet laid for it by years of devastating drought and scorching temperatures. Those fires destroyed lives, lands, cultural heritage, property and infrastructure. The drought brought towns to a water crisis that threatened their very existence. And the record-breaking heat smothered the land, the people, the animals and the plants.
Then came the water; almost unimaginable volumes that poured from the sky, turning rivers into raging torrents, while massive swells took chunks out of the coastline and drained beaches of their sand.
The Insurance Council of Australia declared six catastrophes in the five months between
October 2019 and February 2020 and paid out billions in natural disaster claims.
WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST
Humans are incredibly adaptable, aided by a wealth of technologies to keep us cool or warm, dry or watered, sheltered and secure. But in the face of a global climatological disaster of our own making, that adaptability is being stretched to its limit, and even beyond.
“We are a land of extreme events, and they are only intensifying,” says Barbara Norman, Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Canberra. Australians face a multitude of climate-related risks, and very few will be shielded from them.
“When you start to map the risks in the country and where people live and where future urban growth corridors are planned, you start to overlay those things and you can see that a significant percentage of our population is at risk,” Norman says.
Already, around one in 25 homes is at high risk of extreme weather events, making them
Australia has always had a reputation for extremes; a land of droughts and flooding rains. For tens of thousands of years, its living systems – including humans – adapted to those extremes, flourishing everywhere from the red deserts to the lush rainforests. Now Bianca Nogrady wonders where we might find safety in a climate-changed future.
effectively uninsurable. By 2030, one in 11 homes will be considered medium-risk, which has major implications for their insurability.
Climate change risks are forcing a rethink of urban planning. In 2018, the Planning Institute of Australia released a report titled ‘The Tipping Point’, which called for a national settlement strategy to ensure the liveability of Australian towns and cities in a climate-changed future. It highlighted the many climate change risks that Australians are increasingly exposed to, including heatwaves, bushfires, droughts, floods, cyclones and rising sea levels.
“How do we need to prepare ourselves for our future, whether that be in terms of climate adaptation or in terms of economic change?” asks John Brockhoff, National Policy Manager for the Planning Institute of Australia.
There’s a hierarchy in the urban planning approach to that question. The first and preferable option is to avoid the problem. “Firstly, let’s look at where we can avoid trouble and let’s not locate new growth where we have a choice and where there is a high hazard and a clear risk of
that happening and also a potential vulnerability in communities,” says Brockhoff.
The second option is to manage those risks appropriately. “We can put houses up on stilts, we can plan for bushfire protection, but that’s got to be cost-effective,” Brockhoff says. “In some places, it’s more cost-effective than others.”
Sometimes homes and infrastructure are already in the way of the hazard, and no amount of adaptation can protect them. In those situations, climate change is forcing Australians to reckon with the third option: retreat from inhabited places that are fast becoming uninhabitable, either physically because of extremes of heat and drought, or economically because of the cost of repeated disasters and loss of protection from insurance.
But with 85% of the population living in coastal capital cities that will be exposed to sea level rise, let alone those around the country who will be exposed to dangerous heat, drought, fires and floods, it raises the difficult but essential question: in a climate-changed future, where and how will Australians live?
Avoid
With the mix of gorgeous beaches, pockets of dense bush, outdoor cafes and surfer culture, Sydney’s northern beaches have a glamorous appeal. But hemmed between scrub and sea, there’s not much room to expand. In 2016, the NSW state government put forward a proposal to develop an area to allow for around 3,400 new homes. Ingleside was to be a new suburb including apartments, shops and playing fields.
But there was a problem. The NSW Rural Fire Service assessed the Ingleside area as exposed to ‘potentially extreme existing bushfire risk’. All evacuation routes from the area, bar one, would expose evacuees or fire crews to potentially burning bushland. The one route that wouldn’t run that fiery gauntlet was likely to get choked during a bushfire, with residents from nearby suburbs also trying to flee.
The proposal was amended to drastically reduce the area to be developed, and the number of houses down to 980. But even that wasn’t enough to reassure nearby residents that the development wouldn’t end up a bushfire death trap. Finally in 2022, the proposal was scrapped entirely.
Similar concerns have been raised for other developments including Appin in Sydney’s south-west, Belrose – also on Sydney’s northern beaches – and the Perth Hills development in Stoneville, Western Australia.
“There is a much lower risk appetite in the area of bushfire than there was even five years ago, certainly a lot less than there was before the 2009 fires in Victoria,” says Alan March, Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne. “It is acknowledging what is the most powerful part of urban planning in respect to bushfire, and that is to avoid humans and structures and things we care about being in proximity to the hazard.”
The same challenge is facing flood-prone areas. The NSW Government recently rezoned parts of the Hawkesbury floodplains in western Sydney –which flooded six times between 2020–2022 – to prevent new homes being built in high-risk areas, saying it “cannot continue to develop and build new residential towns in high-risk areas, and risk putting more people in harm’s way.”
Australia has nearly 60,000km of coastline, and half the population lives within seven kilometres of it. That makes sea-level rise a major concern both for existing and future
Manage
Saturday 4 January 2020 was always going to be a scorcher. On that particular day, an awful new record was broken. The western Sydney suburb of Penrith briefly achieved the dubious honour of being the hottest place on the planet, clocking in at a tarmac-melting 48.9°C.
It was dangerously close to the limit of human survivability. Heat is the single biggest climate-related killer. Between 2000–2019, extreme heat killed nearly 490,000 people each year globally.
Australia has always had a blasé attitude to heat. “The general feeling amongst many Australians is that, look, it’s a hot country, we’ll get used to it,” says Liz Hannah, a public health researcher at the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute. But Australia loses around $8.7 billion each year
in productivity as a result of heatwaves, so evidently we’re not getting used to it.
But Penrith is already home to 217,000 people, extensive infrastructure including a major metropolitan hospital, university and shopping centre. This is not a hazard that can be avoided.
In 2022, the City of Melbourne appointed two Chief Heat Officers, recognising that the city’s residents are statistically at the highest risk of heatwave fatalities in Australia. “We’ve been taking action on heat preparedness for many years,” says Tiffany Crawford, one of Melbourne’s two Chief Heat Officers and Co-director of Climate Change and City Resilience.
Cities are notorious heat sinks that can be 1–3°C warmer than rural areas because of the dark heat-absorbing surfaces such as roads and pavements, the relative lack of trees and green spaces, and concentration of heat-emitting activities such as transport and industry.
developments. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has forecast a likely sea-level rise range of 40–80cm by 2100. But it can’t rule out a rise of as much as two metres.
Oceanographer Matthew England, from UNSW Sydney, says one metre doesn’t sound like much, until you factor in tides and storm surges. “It’s the metre of sea level rise plus a storm surge that can add another couple of metres, plus the tidal range is another metre,” England says. “You can get up to six, seven metres above mean sea level with one of these storm surge events, and it’s those events that will be the destructive ones.”
Sea-level rise isn’t evenly distributed around the world, or even around Australia. For example, sea levels are rising faster on Australia’s northern and north-eastern coastline.
The main concern is where this sea level rise impacts human settlements. “Probably far more than which bits of Australia see the worst sea level rise, it’s more which bits are the most exposed,” he says, pointing to Cairns, Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast, where there’s lots of development at low levels of elevation.
There can be competing interests, like we need more housing, but don’t put it in floodplains or areas of climate risk.”
Estuaries are where the real concerns lie, says Ian Turner, Professor of Coastal Engineering at UNSW Sydney. They’re attractive places to settle and infrastructure tends to be quite close to sea level. “The combination of slow but accelerating rise in sea level plus storminess means that estuaries are probably our canary in the coal mine, and that’s where we are already seeing impacts of flooding,” Turner says.
Coastal councils around the country are grappling with how to incorporate the threat of sea level rise into planning. For example, South Australia’s Coast Protection Board requires all new coastal development applications to consider a sea level rise of 30cm by 2050, and one metre by 2100, and consider subsidence and erosion. NSW’s Coastal Act includes requirements to “mitigate current and future risks from coastal hazards, taking into account the effects of climate change.”
Norman would like to see mandatory consideration of climate risks in all planning legislation nationally. “There can be competing interests, like we need more housing, but don’t put it in floodplains or areas of climate risk.”
Some areas and populations are more exposed than others. “We also know that our housing towers are particularly vulnerable,” Crawford says. “We’ve heard anecdotal stories of people who can’t open doors or windows at night having to seek shelter in hallways or under trees, or in carparks and down the basement.” Heatwaves disproportionately impact the elderly, people with disabilities, people in financial distress, and those in marginalised communities.
The City of Melbourne has initiatives to reduce the heat island effect, such as its urban forest strategy, which aims to increase canopy cover across the city from 22% to 40% by 2040 and diversify tree species to improve resilience.
In western Sydney, a collective of councils have developed the Turn Down The Heat strategy, which includes an urban heat planning toolkit to help local councils factor heat into their planning decisions. It includes information on everything from cool paving and
green cover to more specific house-level changes, such as reducing dark roofs, increasing passive design and use of insulation.
Heat adaptation must also help individuals manage. At Griffith University, heat epidemiologist Zhiwei Xu and colleagues have developed the Ethos Project, an appbased in-home solution to help individuals – particularly older people – monitor and manage their heat exposure. “It’s hard to recommend tailored, effective, accessible and preferable cooling measures to every single one by those population-based heat early warning systems,” Xu says.
The Ethos program monitors the temperature and humidity throughout a home, uses an algorithm to predict the person’s core body temperature, and “recommend cooling measures that are evidence-based, effective, accessible and preferable by older adults based on their personal circumstances,” he says.
In 2022, Lismore’s rains smashed all previous records. Two huge floods, just one month apart, turned the bustling and vibrant regional hub into a muddy chaos of debris. Five people died, thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed, and Lismore’s economy took a $400+ million hit. Lismore has known flooding before, but not like this.
A CSIRO report on the Lismore floods stopped short of pointing the finger directly at climate change. However the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report stated that the frequency and intensity of these heavy rainfall events have already, and are likely to further increase globally, leading to a doubling or even tripling in the frequency of
Retreat Beyond unliveable
events that previously were expected only every 10 or 50 years.
When disaster strikes, there’s inevitably defiant statements that the community will rebuild: “we’ll be back”, “we’ll build back better”. But in Lismore City Council’s report on the flooding, one phrase stands out: “depopulate high-risk areas and mitigate impacts for remaining residents”.
Retreat is an uneasy concept: an admission of defeat, of overwhelming odds, of a battle too risky to fight. But in the face of escalating extreme weather events due to anthropogenic climate change, the phrases ‘planned retreat’ and ‘managed retreat’ are being heard everywhere from local council chambers to the halls of federal government.
MANAGED RETREAT
The difference between planned and managed retreat is time. “A managed retreat is a retreat that takes place after the fact,” says Tayanah
In some cases, unliveable literally means unsurvivable. “The thing that will possibly make places unliveable is water supply,” says Lesley Hughes, a biologist and climate scientist at Macquarie University and a director with the Climate Council of Australia. “If you run out of water, or have such huge water restrictions that you can’t function, that I think is perhaps going to be a driver of unliveability.”
It’s a prospect that some communities, particularly outback Indigenous communities, are already grappling with. In 2019, the largest remote Aboriginal town in Central Australia –Yuendumu, with a population of nearly 900 people, on the traditional lands of the Warlpiri – nearly ran out of drinking water.
Water insecurity is a huge issue for central Australia, particularly as many towns depend on groundwater aquifers which may provide limited supply, the water may be poor quality, and lack of rain means the aquifers don’t get recharged.
“Aboriginal people across the NT are already living through increasingly dangerous summers in poorly built houses, putting pressure on peoples’ bodies and compounding health concerns,” says Les Turner, CEO of the Central Land Council.
Even the regional NSW town of Dubbo, population more than 40,000, came dangerously close to running out of water in 2020 as the Macquarie River all but dried up.
Unliveability can also be economic. As the risk and cost of climate-related disasters increase, the insurance industry is tightening its
O’Donnell, National Lead Partner for Climate Adaptation, Risk and Resilience at Deloitte Australia. “If you’ve already built houses, or you’ve already made decisions, and you now need to make decisions to retreat from that location, that’s a managed retreat.”
One of Australia’s most famous examples of managed retreat is the small Queensland town of Grantham, in the floodplain of the Lockyer Valley. After the devastating 2011 floods, which claimed 12 lives, the local council implemented an innovative land swap program, where almost the entire town made the decision to relocate to higher ground – a nearby cattle property. Within a year of the flood, 110 homes had been built in the new location, with 50 remaining in the old location.
“It’s a wonderful example of something that was quite localised and fit for purpose for that community”, O’Donnell says. “It was benefited by the fact that it had a really strong local leader in the mayor at the time, who really pushed for that change and had the support and goodwill of the community who were willing to follow him and his leadership in moving and relocating up the hill.”
Retreat is an uneasy concept: an admission of defeat, of overwhelming odds, of a battle too risky to fight.”
belt. “There are places where you might be able to get [an insurance] policy, but you won’t be able to afford it,” Mallon says.
The number of people who are choosing either not to insure for a particular hazard because it would make premiums unaffordable, or can’t get insurance at all because of climate risks, is growing. A Climate Council report found in the top 10 most at-risk electorates –which includes Nicholls in Victoria, Richmond in NSW, Maranoa in Queensland and Hindmarsh in South Australia – around one in seven properties will be uninsurable by this decade’s end. Without insurance, banks won’t offer a mortgage, which could soon see even multimillion-dollar coastal and bush properties become unsellable.
This is where planned retreat can offer a partial solution: councils buy back those properties or lands, and use them to create a buffer zone between the hazard and other properties. This has already been done by some coastal
PLANNED RETREAT
Planned retreat is a more long-term strategy that requires more forward thinking. Councils or state governments identify high-risk areas, or areas that will be high-risk in future, and if those risks can’t be mitigated, they look to eventually buy back that land.
“We might say, you’ve got planning rights for 20 years, you can live there for 20 years, but at the end of 20 years, there’s going to be a mandatory buyback,” says Karl Mallon, CEO of Climate Valuation, a company that provides evidence-based climate risk analysis for property owners.
Planned and managed retreat recognise that there are some areas where no amount of mitigation or adaptation can protect against the sort of climate-related risks that individuals, homes and infrastructure will face. They will be unliveable.
councils, Turner says, who turn the land into parks or return it to vegetated sand dunes. Unfortunately, Sydney’s property prices aren’t helping. “The real estate is so valuable now that my understanding is that that’s still a policy, but is now difficult to implement,” Turner says.
There is no easy answer to the question of where Australians will live in a climate-changed future. Like the idea that humanity can terraform Mars and relocate there – which ignores the fact that we can’t even fix the climate on our own planet – the idea that Australians can relocate to safer locations ignores the obvious. If those places were liveable, we would already be living there.
As Hughes says, “We have to work really hard to make sure we have a liveable environment by getting climate under control.”
BIANCA NOGRADY is based in the Blue Mountains. Her last story for Cosmos, on bushfire science, appeared in Issue 101.
WILD PLACES, WILD SPECIES
Time is running out for many iconic Australian animals. Rewilding can repair their ecosystems, but each attempt faces unique and sometimes controversial challenges. John Read poses 12 current conundrums, as a conservation ecologist seeking solutions.
Apair of eyes peeks through the open door of a petpack, placed carefully under a low bush.
A safe distance away, a throng of focused onlookers interpret nervousness, inquisitiveness and maybe jetlag in those eyes.
These witnesses collectively share an even wider range of emotions.
Traditional Owners are reconnecting with their land, culture and responsibilities through this once familiar animal.
Conservation managers are reflecting on the years of research, planning, construction and red tape required to reach this milestone.
Philanthropists and politicians, integral to this conservation program, are reluctantly following the rules not to use their flashes to capture the moment of truth.
Vets and animal keepers, who nursed and housed the little animal are handing over responsibility to wildlife ecologists, now responsible for its future.
This progression of a rare animal from captivity to the wild, mirrors our human healthcare system. Different healthcare workers tend patients from ambulances, through emergency response and recovery wards, then back home.
Conservation also requires the ecological equivalent of physiotherapists, dieticians, psychiatrists and occupational therapists who are key to successful, sustained recovery.
But with no allied health textbooks to follow, ‘rewilding’ relies on duplicating successes, learning from failures and the dedicated pursuit of novel solutions.
Our aim? For once-threatened species to be integrated into dynamic, functioning ecosystems with minimal ongoing
WARRU, THE BLACK-FLANKED ROCK-WALLABY
“Warru kuna tjuta,” whispers Sherada, as he points to the shiny black wallaby scats known as ‘kuna’, under the flowering spearbush. I nod, but with more elation than the reserved Indigenous ranger.
The plentiful wallaby scats on the burnt orange monolith of Wamitjara, just south of Uluru in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands of South Australia are cause for celebration.
Sherada was with me in 2006 when we confirmed the localised extinction of warru, or black-flanked rock-wallaby (Petrogale lateralis centralis) from Wamitjara. Now, six years after we had successfully reintroduced these 3–5kg marsupials, the wallaby scats under the pruned spearbush demonstrated the success of rewilding, or returning, free-living threatened species back to their former ranges.
Warru were historically an important food source and cultural icon for Sherada’s ancestors.
At one cave, ancient rock and log walls barricaded warru escape routes to assist hunters spear these nimble prey. The floor of the cave was piled with warru kuna, like sheep manure under a shearing shed. But the scats were now old and grey, indicating warru were long gone from even this key habitat.
Invasive foxes and cats and episodic fires wiped out all but the largest warru colonies in the safest rocky refuges. Gradually, over more than a century, hundreds of colonies – that early naturalist Hedley Finlayson described as “swarming on every hill” – blinked out.
Fearing statewide extinction, the Warru Recovery Team was established in 2007 when we only knew of two remnant populations of what had become South Australia’s rarest mammal.
Our team set out to mirror the success of Western Australian ecologists who had bolstered rock wallaby populations in the wheatbelt by poisoning foxes. However, a decade of fox baiting did not arrest the warru decline in the APY Lands.
Baiting made the situation worse. Fox baits also killed dingoes, the main predator of euros, a kangaroo that browsed important tasty perennials out of the reach of their smaller cousins.
After we had started predator baiting, Sherada and I would typically count over 100 euros on a spotlight circumnavigation of Wamitjara but not a single warru.
With fox baiting unsuccessful, the Warru Recovery Team embarked on an emergency program of harvesting small joey warru from remaining colonies and cross-fostering them to yellow-footed rock wallaby females at Monarto Zoo.
Once weaned, these young warru were returned to a feral predator exclosure, not far from Wamitjara. The whole process, from deciding where warru could be sourced from, assigning them names and welcoming them back to country was orchestrated by a group of senior Anangu women, known as the Warru Minyma.
The Warru Minyma, including Sherada’s grandmother, also added the story of ‘stolen’ warru babies being returned to their lands into their evolving warru Tjukurpa or traditional dance story.
The number one rule of rewilding is to resolve main threats before attempting reintroductions. We had been working on the assumption that foxes were the main threat, but the Warru Rangers helped make an important discovery.
Ranger Ethan Dagg found warru remains in the stomachs of five cats. He even shot a cat feeding on a freshly killed wallaby. That was all the evidence we needed to change tack.
1. How can introduced mid-level predators be controlled while retaining useful apex predators? The Warru Rangers suspended their baiting and increased their hunting frequency. Contract feral cat and fox shooters were hired, shooting hundreds of cats. Dingoes – that helped regulate euro and probably fox populations –were off limits.
Unlike in densely wooded habitats, the bright eyes of cats and foxes are visible for hundreds of metres on the rock outcrops, so easy to shoot.
Because some cats will avoid spotlights (or traps or baits), multiple control tools are required for sustainable feral cat control.
Sherada, Ethan and the other rangers also installed newly developed Felixers. These devices
Warru Rangers giving a warru an injection of vitamin E.
are designed specifically to target cats and foxes by applying toxic gel to their fur, avoiding dingoes and other wildlife.
Within a few years euro numbers declined and remnant wild warru numbers increased. With a strategy to control their main threats, we were now ready to rewild warru to new locations.
2. How can rewilding activities avoid exacerbating threats, like spreading weeds?
Minutes after Sherada and I enjoyed the rewarding sight of warru kuna once again on Wamitjara, we shared another, more troubling, observation.
A dense patch of invasive buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), locally known as ‘mamu tjampi’ or devil grass, was growing through the boulder field, largely obscuring our footsteps and making walking risky.
This was the same area Brett Backhouse, regional landscapes ecologist and fellow member of the Warru Recovery Team, had unsuccessfully treated with herbicide a couple of years earlier.
This buffel patch represented a microcosm of the most serious invasive species threat not only to warru, but to conservation and culture in central Australia.
The Pintji population doubles every couple of years in the absence of predators. By carefully adding genetics from distant warru colonies, we established a viable source for rewilding. By 2020 the Pintji supported nearly 100 warru, even after 70 had been removed for the Wamitjara rewilding.
The horrific 2018–19 drought coincided with the onset of COVID-19 access restrictions. This created a potentially catastrophic overabundance issue within the enclosure, when even ili were being debarked by hungry warru.
“THE NUMBER ONE RULE OF REWILDING IS TO RESOLVE MAIN THREATS BEFORE ATTEMPTING REINTRODUCTIONS.”
Rock figs, or ili, provide sustaining figs for warru, bowerbirds and Anangu. Normally protected from fire by bare rockfaces, these ili are now increasingly placed at risk by dense flammable buffel grass growing right up to, and through, their spreading branches.
The same holds true for groves of red gums and desert oaks being wiped out throughout central Australia by the buffel scourge.
Simply by visiting rewilding locations, and even when attempting to slow the spread of buffel with ineffective herbicides, Indigenous rangers and conservation biologists are often ironically enhancing its spread, which can only realistically be curtailed by biological control.
3. How can ‘overachievement’ of conservation programs be prevented?
The warru ‘Pintji’, or fence, is the ‘recovery ward’ for captive bred warru. The 100-hectare predator exclosure allows captive-bred warru to adapt to regional conditions and breed up prior to wild release.
Overachievement is an often overlooked challenge of conservation programs. But starving overabundant warru destroying their habitat is just as serious as buffel replacing palatable plants or cats killing warru.
In response, the Warru Recovery Team have brainstormed a meticulous plan to keep warru populations within sustainable thresholds.
Five years after warru were rewilded at Wamitjara, 40 pouched pioneers were driven in a convoy of troopcarriers to Kulitjara, over 100km south-east of the Pintji, near the community of Mimili.
A few gung-ho male warru were killed by dingoes when they dispersed away from the rocky hills. But most survived and are breeding. They’re leaving distinctive scats in quadrats monitored by a new team of Warru Rangers.
Other Anangu communities are now nominating to receive meaningful employment and training, and reinvigorating cultural ties with their country through warru rewilding.
The Warru Recovery Team is also eager to expand. The best hope for the future of warru and other threatened species in remote deserts, is to have more colonies, supported by sustainable environmental management.
In time, Anangu may once again be able to share warru hunted sustainably from their own rewilded population and cooked over a smoky fire in the traditional way.
Above: Warru Rangers release a warru.
THE GREATER STICK-NEST RAT
Black and white film of Aboriginal hunters burning rats from their nests in the early 1900s reveals how recently greater stick-nest rats (Leporillus conditor) occupied saltbush country of much of southern and central Australia.
Within decades, the arrival of sheep and rabbits destroyed the refuge habitats of these industrious herbivores. Foxes and cats also preyed on this sedentary rodent, so the last remaining stick-nest rats were marooned on the tiny Franklin Islands in South Australia.
Pioneers from the Franklin Islands were successfully translocated to nearby islands that were also free of livestock, cats and foxes, but the real challenge was rewilding the placid native rodents on the mainland.
4. How can we adapt programs to our changing climate?
I vividly recall our elation when my partner Dr Katherine Moseby and I recorded the first breeding female, in saltbush shrubland in the Arid Recovery Reserve of central South Australia. But joy turned quickly to despair when a large proportion of the new population died, virtually overnight, during their first summer heatwave.
The survivors had constructed their stick nests in airconditioned old rabbit warrens, but those living in surface nests simply couldn’t tolerate temperatures their species had not experienced for decades, maybe ever.
Despite building a cat and fox free haven in prime chenopod shrubland, we were faced with the sobering reality that just like the recent demise of the Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola), the environment may no longer be suitable for some species.
5. How can we manage multispecies rewilding?
Some warren dwelling stickies did survive, even thrive, where old warrens provided refuge. But then the next challenge came.
Boodies (Bettongia lesueur), also reintroduced from island refuges, bred up well in the Reserve. So much so that they depleted the stickies’ food resources, especially in drought.
The best way of keeping boodies at sustainable levels was the introduction of predators, including woma pythons and quolls, but unfortunately for the stickies they were more susceptible to native predators than the larger marsupials.
The stickies were caught between overabundant boodies, quoll predation and extreme summer temperatures. The rewilded population dwindled to extinction after just two decades.
While this story has a sombre ending for greater stick-nest rats, we continue to try. We learn from these failures, but rewilding will continue to be a rollercoaster of emotions for conservation biologists. The more of these questions we can answer, the better our chance of protecting Australia’s unique wildlife.
THE MALLEE EMU-WREN
The mallee emu-wren (Stipiturus mallee) is one of Australia’s most diminutive birds, sporting an improbably long tail resembling emu feathers
Like threatened sandhill dunnarts and night parrots, they are dependent upon sheltering in long unburnt spiky Triodia hummocks.
Bushfires within remnant mallee patches caused their extinction within South Australia in 2014. Fires remain a serious threat, but our drying climate was also likely contributing to their decline.
In 2018 a mallee emu-wren rewilding pilot translocated Victorian birds back into Ngarkat Conservation Park in South Australia.
Luke Ireland and his team faced the major challenge of relocating 78 of these tiny cryptic
“REWILDING WILL CONTINUE TO BE A ROLLERCOASTER OF EMOTIONS FOR CONSERVATION BIOLOGISTS.”
animals that can’t be fitted with long-term radiotracking devices, making monitoring difficult.
“Even banding these tiny birds to reidentify individuals was risky because their toothpick thin legs could potentially get stuck or even break when the birds scurried through dense spinifex,” Luke explains.
6. How can we monitor small, cryptic or delicate animals?
The easy option is to release any reintroduced species without monitoring. But as Luke attests, “Without monitoring we don’t know if they survive, we can’t optimise rewilding strategies, we can’t intervene if necessary and we can’t learn about their behaviour or ecology”.
Although the long term success of the rewilding will be difficult to assess, another of the emu-wren researchers, Tom Hunt, has already been able to document cooperative breeding in the wild for this species. This will influence how potential future rewilding projects are conducted.
THE SOUTHERN CORROBOREE FROG
The critically endangered southern corroboree frog (Pseudophryne corroboree) is just 2.5–3cm in length, but it’s an important part of its alpine ecosystem.
These striking yellow and black frogs are restricted to just the Snowy Mountains region of Kosciuszko National Park. However, these coroborree frogs would be completely extinct if not for emergency captive breeding by the Taronga Conservation Society Australia and Zoos Victoria.
7. How can we protect susceptible species from widespread disease?
Southern corroboree frogs are threatened by chytridiomycosis, a disease caused by infection with the amphibian chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis). This same pathogen has been responsible for a spate of frog extinctions globally.
The greatest challenge to rewilding corroboree frogs is the presence of another native frog, the common eastern froglet (Crinia signifera) which hosts, but is not affected by, the fungus.
Disease-free field enclosures that exclude the common eastern froglet have successfully maintained insurance populations of southern corroboree frogs. But like all threatened species recovery plans, rewilding to natural and recreated habitats is the ultimate goal. For corroboree frogs, this also means selecting areas that are not occupied by the common eastern froglet.
8. How can we keep pest herbivores from eating sensitive habitats?
Creating small wetland areas is attracting another major threat to the Kosciuszko environment; feral deer, brumbies, pigs and even cattle. These pests trample and destroy the wetland structure and fragile vegetation.
Dr David Hunter, Chair of the Corroboree Frog Recovery Team explains. “There’s no point doing all the captive breeding and reintroduction work on this iconic frog, only to have the key breeding habitat destroyed by deer and pigs.”
In addition to landscape-scale deer and pig control being undertaken by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, David’s team are also focused on protecting individual breeding pools at critical locations. Exclusion fences have been used and the team plan to broadcast human voices to scare deer from other ponds.
“THESE COROBORREE FROGS WOULD BE COMPLETELY EXTINCT IF NOT FOR EMERGENCY CAPTIVE BREEDING. ”
IDNYA, THE CHUDITCH
Known as western quolls or chuditch (Dasyurus geoffroii), 93 pioneering individuals changed their postcode and their name when flying to the Ikara–Flinders Ranges in South Australia. These nationally vulnerable, 1–2kg marsupial predators with distinctive white spots, became known as idnya in the Adnyamathanha dialect.
The rewilding of idnya back into South Australia after their disappearance in the early 1900s fulfilled both an important cultural and ecological void.
Idnya are voracious predators and were hoped to be able to limit the rabbit population.
Unlike the stick-nest rats that were quickly wiped out and cannot tolerate invasive predators, quolls can defend themselves against small cats and have managed to survive in mainland remnants.
9. How can we stop catastrophic predation?
There was initial reintroduction success for the chuditch, but the celebration didn’t last long.
“We then had a spate of killings in a short space of time,” reports Katherine, who coordinated the rewilding. DNA testing of saliva left on the quolls, or their collars, proved that a single cat was responsible.
“After the culprit was captured, the killing stopped until another catastrophic cat learned to
hunt quolls and another killing spree ensued,” Katherine explains.
These ace hunters are not so interested in baits or traps. As such, they were the biggest challenge the pioneering quolls and their team of rewilders faced.
Katherine and her team focused on the grisly task of setting cat traps around freshly-killed idnya carcasses.
In the future they hope that a stable toxic implant for threatened animals will poison a catastrophic cat after it has eaten its first prey and before it could wipe out a population.
10. How can we manage long-distance dispersal?
The other key challenge faced by the idnya rewilding was ‘hyperdispersal’, especially of males, outside the cat management zone.
With no fences or other barriers to restrict their movement, some cavalier quolls moved 18km a night. Quolls at other release sites have moved up to 150km over time.
Even if these animals could survive in an unmanaged area with high predator numbers, they are unlikely to find a mate and contribute to the population.
Hyperdispersal is not just limited to quolls. Indeed 10–20% of individuals in more than half of all reintroductions have wanderlust.
Woma pythons ( Aspidites ramsayi) are large nonvenomous snakes that weigh up to 6kg. They formerly occupied sand dunes and sandplains throughout much of arid Australia. Now they have disappeared from, or become critically endangered, in parts of their former range.
I was keen on rewilding woma pythons to the Arid Recovery Reserve in northern South Australia to keep bourgeoning populations of reintroduced mammals in balance.
11. How can naïve translocated animals be equipped for ‘wild’ challenges?
Crawling slowly to observe a released radiotracked woma in dense canegrass, I was shocked to come face to face with a very fat, perhaps even smug, mulga snake (Pseudechis australis) with a full belly. Over the next few months this fate was repeated with other womas.
Although adult womas can eat snakes, predation of half-grown womas bred at Adelaide Zoo
by mulga snakes thwarted this rewilding.
Captive bred animals are not as aware of, or skilled at avoiding, predators or even finding food or shelter sites as their wild cousins. This is a challenge we’re yet to completely resolve.
12. How can we allow wildlife, but not invasive threats, to pass through conservation fences?
At Wild Deserts in Sturt National Park, womas can become entangled in the netting fences designed to exclude rabbits, cats and foxes.
Dr Reece Pedler from Wild Deserts explains, “We have this unfortunate conundrum of needing to maintain an exclusion fence for invasive species that enables passage of native wildlife, especially rare womas”.
The Wild Deserts team is now designing and trialling a range of portals that enable womas –but not rabbits or cats – to pass through.
For this and all 12 challenges, resilient populations of once-threatened species will be our measure of success.
JOHN READ is an ecologist, innovator and cofounder of three rewilding projects (Arid Recovery, Wild Deserts and Mallee Refuge), chair of the Warru Recovery Team and CEO of Thylation.
THE WOMA PYTHON
PREHISTORIC THROUGH VICTORIA
TIME
While we can travel around the world, we can’t move around in time… unless you imagine it through fossils and geological clues. Join Evrim Yazgin as he takes you back 600 million years to imagine Australia’s past.
Where most people see a weirdly shaped rock, a palaeontologist might see how an animal lived and died millions of years ago. So how can that keen expert vision be brought to the general public?
Transporting people back in time through scientific discovery is exactly what spaces such as museums aim to do. And Melbourne Museum has a permanent exhibition that tries to get visitors to imagine what it would be like to walk through time in the Australian state of Victoria.
UNFATHOMABLE TIME
I am greeted by a large wall with the exhibition’s name: “600 Million Years: Victoria Evolves”. We all know 600 million years is a long time. But just how long is mind boggling.
If 600 million years were shrunk down to a year, then the 300,000 years or so that modern humans have been around would amount to less than 4.5 hours. The Pyramids of Giza (which are about 4,500 years old) would have appeared less than four minutes before the year was up.
Even the mighty dinosaurs were only around for about a quarter of that 600-million-year time.
To help explain representing such a vast amount of time in an exhibition, I am welcomed by Kate Phillips, Melbourne Museum’s senior curator of science exhibitions.
Phillips led the team which put the “Victoria Evolves” exhibition together – a project which was finished in 2011.
“We have a few interpretive devices to help orient people in time,” Phillips says, pointing to a series of maps which estimate how the continents moved and shorelines changed over the aeons.
“So, this was the year that life evolved in the oceans, but it’s pretty mind boggling when you’ve got that many zeroes. And you can’t recognise anything about that bit of land. Where on Earth was Victoria? It was, in fact, under the water,” she laughs.
Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Melbourne Museum’s senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology.
Phillips is one part of a team which includes designers who produce graphics, people who create mounts and handle objects, preparators who make models and do taxidermy, and specialists who create films and interactive media.
She takes me to a large knob which, when turned, animates another map. “We have more interactive elements which orient people.” Turn the knob far enough and you reach the Ediacaran period (635–541 million years ago), when the first complex life emerged.
I am then joined by Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Melbourne Museum’s senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology.
As Erich meets me at the entrance to the exhibition, his first question throws me off guard. “Do you want to do the standard forwards through time, or would you rather go back in time?” he asks.
I honestly hadn’t thought about it.
Going backwards allows you to start with the familiar and end up seeing how strange this part of the world was hundreds of millions of years ago. On the other hand, going forward you start with the alien ancient world and see how this develops into the Victoria we see today.
Kate Phillips, Melbourne Museum’s senior curator of science exhibitions.
Map
MILLION YEARS AGO
Devonian plant fossil, Baragwanathia longifolia
That the exhibition allows you to go forwards, backwards and even bounce around between the ancient to the modern is testament to this powerful tool for understanding the vast changes over millions of years.
With some existential angst, we decide to travel forwards from 600 million years ago.
VICTORIA: THE EARLY YEARS
“The fossil record of Victoria can conveniently be divided into four parts,” Fitzgerald notes.
Taking just a few steps in the exhibition, we jump forward about 200 million years.
“It’s only from around about the Devonian where we have fossils that we might start to recognise and I’m going to focus on the vertebrates, because that’s my specialty,” he says with a wry smile.
The Devonian period (420–359 million years ago) is often called the ‘Age of Fishes.’
Much of Victoria is still under water. Globally, it is much warmer than today and oxygen levels lower. In this corner of Australia, some of earliest examples of land plants can also be found. Some of them grew tall – but they weren’t trees. They were related to today’s mosses and lichens.
A fossil of one of these ancient Victorian plants, Baragwanathia , is displayed next to its modern relative.
Vertebrates – animals with a backbone – were beginning to assert themselves and diversify.
“Fishes are the dominant vertebrates worldwide,” Fitzgerald says. But he notes a major shift taking place. “Vertebrates are just starting to invade the land.”
Model of an early tetrapod which left footprints in Victoria.
The rock tassel-fern, Huperzia squarrosa, is similar to early vascular plants in the Devonian and Carboniferous.
“In Victoria, we have amazing fossils,” he says. “Perhaps the most exciting and tantalising is from a late Devonian site over in the far eastern corner at a place called the Genoa River. And here we have a cast replica of it.”
Fitzgerald points at what at first looks like a slab of dirt.
“It’s actually not bones. It’s not teeth. They’re footprints. They’re fossil trackways of what are some of the earliest evidence of tetrapods – otherwise known as four-limbed vertebrates which, of course, includes us.”
On closer inspection, though the weathered indentations don’t look exactly like footprints, the trackway is clear.
“It’s, in some ways, one of the most underrated fossils in Australia,” he says.
“You can see paired tracks. We think of these early tetrapods possibly not even walking on land, but even in the shallows. This could be impressions into soft sand or mud below the water’s surface, or even along the shoreline. They’re moving their body from side to side, much like a fish swims,” Fitzgerald explains.
To help illustrate the point, behind the trackway is a 3D model of a four-legged amphibian with strong flippers which could have been used to haul itself out of the water and traverse the muddy landscape nearly 400 million years ago.
Behind this funny looking fish are other 3D models showing how these ancient vertebrates would have evolved over millions of years to make the transition from water to land.
And behind them is not another model, but a real life pair of lungfish from Queensland. These
Near the end of the Devonian period, 385 million years ago, the first trees began to populate the Earth.
Palaeogeographic reconstruction of Earth 120 million years ago.
145-66 MILLION YEARS AGO THE CRETACEOUS PERIOD
“living fossils” are fish which have fully-developed, air-breathing lungs – considered a vital element in the ability of ancient fish to colonise land.
Lungfish fossils more than 300 million years old are virtually no different to the living examples of today. And both can be found in eastern Australia.
As if the trackway wasn’t cool enough, Fitzgerald notes that multiple such fossils have been found in Victoria, made by different species.
“It’s tantalising evidence that already there’s a relatively complex community in these tetrapods back then at the dawn of four-limbed vertebrates,” Fitzgerald notes. “I consider it one of the most internationally, scientifically significant aspects of the palaeontology of Australia and Victoria.”
through time, Victoria has attached itself to Antarctica and is in the southern polar circle.
While the global climate was much warmer, meaning no ice caps at the poles, these polar environments were not exactly what you would imagine when you think of dinosaurs.
“For three to six months of the year, Victoria is in total or near darkness at this time,” Fitzgerald says. “There were thick forests and enormous rivers on the scale of the Mississippi.”
“SCIENTIFICALLY, IT’S NOT THE DINOSAURS, IN SOME WAYS, THAT ARE MOST IMPORTANT FROM THAT TIME.”
IN THE SHADOWS OF DINOSAURS
A few strides push us another 250 million years forward in time to the heyday of the dinosaurs.
Fitzgerald notes that the fossil record in Victoria is limited until about 150 million years ago. What happened in that large gap? Oh, nothing much. Just another 200 million years of evolution, the Permian mass extinction event which saw 90% of life on Earth eradicated and the emergence of dinosaurs as the dominant vertebrates on the planet.
By the time we reach the Cretaceous period (145–66 million years ago) on our journey
“We find fossils from this polar world of forests and swamps. Of course, their most famous representatives are dinosaurs,” Fitzgerald notes.
Among these polar dinosaurs of Victoria are small plant eaters such as Leaellynasaura and Qantassaurus. Australia’s top predatory dinosaur, a type of megaraptorid, also lived in Victoria about 120 million years ago. These predators probably grew to about six metres in length and had large forearms with massive claws, likely for slashing at prey.
Other animals shared this strange ancient landscape in Victoria. Among them is the crocodile-sized amphibian Koolasuchus
But Fitzgerald is keen to show me the other inhabitants of Cretaceous Victoria.
“Scientifically, it’s not the dinosaurs, in some ways, that are most important from that time,” he says. “The next sort of global ‘box office hit’ of scientific significance are actually some of the
Genoa trackway fossilised slab of mud featuring two sets of footprints with individual fingers and toes, and sweep marks from a tetrapod’s belly.
PTEROSAURS OF THE POLAR WILDERNESS
Australia’s oldest pterosaur comes from Victoria’s ancient polar wilderness.
Pterosaurs were flying reptiles which lived alongside dinosaurs and went extinct 66 million years ago. They include species as small as pigeons, to the largest animals to ever have flown.
The biggest had a wingspan of more than 10 metres and stood as tall as a giraffe.
In Australia, however, pterosaur fossils are few and far between.
Last year, Adele Pentland, a PhD candidate at Western Australia’s Curtin University, led research on Australia’s oldest pterosaur fossils – found on Victoria’s coast.
“The bones belonged to two separate pterosaur individuals,” Pentland says. “We can be confident of this
because of the relative size difference between the partial pelvis and wing bone that was found.”
The larger animal had a wingspan of more than two metres.
“The smaller specimen is the first evidence of a juvenile pterosaur found in Australia, with an estimated wingspan just over one metre,” she adds.
Pentland’s pterosaurs would have flown over the
Adele Pentland, PhD candidate at Curtin University, Western Australia
landscape 110–107 million years ago.
“Instead of eucalyptus forests and grasses,” she says, they would have soared over “conifers and gingkoes.”
“Compared with the dinosaurs that lived in Victoria 107 million years ago, relatively little is known about the pterosaurs,” Pentland notes.
“There are still a myriad of questions that remain unanswered.”
PETER TRUSLER COURTESY OF ADELE PENTLAND
This Qantassaurus animatronics display is part of the 600 Million Years exhibition at Melbourne
145-66
MILLION YEARS AGO
THE CRETACEOUS PERIOD
most inconspicuous. These are Australia’s oldest mammal fossils.”
Fitzgerald shows me some fossil jaw bones –no larger than a human thumbnail. The animals themselves would have been tiny shrew or mouse-like creatures which could fit in the palm of your hand.
“Now, of course, we have to be careful of being labelled with mammalian chauvinism. And I am a palaeomammalogist, so I am biased,” Fitzgerald laughs. “But the tiny size of these fossils belies their international scientific significance.
“What’s interesting is that there’s so many different species found in Victoria. Many of them are monotremes – relatives of today’s platypus and echidnas. Others are, frankly, mysterious and highly controversial in terms of exactly what kind of mammal they are.”
Palaeogeographic reconstruction of Earth 65 million years ago.
The ‘unzipping’ of Australia from Antarctica caused the Southern Ocean to encircle Antarctica, isolating it from warm currents going south. As a result, ice built up on Antarctica. As ice builds up, it causes an ‘Albedo effect’ where the ice reflects sunlight, fast-tracking an overall cooling of the global climate.
“IT PAINTS A PICTURE OF A REALLY DIVERSE ECOSYSTEM WITH NO MODERN ANALOGUE.”
“We flipped from a long-term trend of true greenhouse climatic conditions to what we call a ‘cool house’ world,” Fitzgerald says. “Rainforests and jungles recede around the globe. And in the oceans, there’s a huge increase in primary productivity. Lots of nutrients, lots more plankton and stronger cold currents wash over the coast of ancient Victoria.”
He notes that the fossil sites of Victoria’s ancient polar rainforests also show signs of birds, turtles, flying reptiles and fishes. “It paints a picture of a really diverse ecosystem with no modern analogue.”
A WHALE OF A TIME IN ANCIENT VICTORIA
“Our next major window kicks in about 30 million years ago,” Fitzgerald says as he takes me to a nook in the exhibition space.
He notes that 34 million years ago, there was a major turning point in the history of Earth’s climate centred around Australia.
“That spawns the earliest evolution of today’s largest living animals: whales. And in Victoria, we capture their earliest stories.”
About 300 million years after the ancestors of four-limbed vertebrates took the first pioneering steps onto land, captured at the Genoa River, the ancestors of whales high-tailed it back into the water.
These strange dog- or bear-like creatures evolved over tens of millions of years to become whales and dolphins.
“The animals living in the ocean at that time are at first sight familiar, but also quite strange,” Fitzgerald says. “There are whales like Janjucetus, but they don’t really quite look like any living whales.”
Museum.
Bishops whitmorei jaw with teeth. This fossil is from the Flat Rocks site near Inverloch.
34-5
MILLION YEARS AGO
OGLIOCENE AND MIOCENE
Janjucetus was discovered on Victoria’s southwest coast near the surfing town of Jan Juc. It lived about 25 million years ago, grew to about three metres long, had big eyes for its size and large flippers.
“It’s teeth are unlike that of any living whale,” Fitzgerald says. “They’re very complex. They have almost leaf shaped serrations on them. And most bizarrely, these are the earliest relatives or cousins of today’s blue whale.”
“This fossil showed us there was an entire chapter in the history of whales that no one ever thought existed,” he adds. “So this is the third ‘big hit’ in Victorian palaeontology.”
massive shark Otodus megalodon , which also stalked Victoria’s ancient seas.
“This is really one of the few times in Earth’s history, in the last 66 million years, where you have multiple very large predatory, or ‘macro-predatory’ we call them, vertebrates in the ocean.
“Today, there are killer whales and there’s the white shark. However, they are comparative tiddlers.”
Erich treats me to an exclusive look at a recent discovery – an inner ear bone, or periotic, from a whale which lived five million years ago.
“THERE WAS AN ENTIRE CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF WHALES THAT NO ONE EVER THOUGHT EXISTED.”
Fully in his element now, Fitzgerald tells me all about Victoria’s ancient whales.
He takes me into the backrooms where there is no public access to have a look at some real fossils (not the casts and replicas which often inhabit exhibitions) found in Victoria.
Fitzgerald estimates that 90% of the Melbourne Museum’s fossils are from Victoria. Whatever the exact percentage, he says Victorian fossils make up the “vast majority”.
He pulls out the fossil tooth of an extinct Victorian relative of today’s sperm whales, similar to those found of Livyatan melvillei in South America.
This Victorian killer lived about six million years ago at the same time as the famous
“Almost all other baleen whale fossils are from right whales, the cousins if you like of today’s blue whales, humpback whales. To be honest, pretty familiar,” he says. “This thing, though, is weird.”
Upon showing the fossil to a whale expert, Fitzgerald says he received the reply: “I can’t even assign that to a known family of whale.”
RECENT HISTORY AND THE FUTURE
Back at the exhibition, Fitzgerald shows me a find which has palaeontologists scratching their heads.
“This is not necessarily number four in the ‘hits,’ but for my money, this is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of Victorian palaeontology.”
It’s a skull fossil from an Ice Age megafauna called Palorchestes
A Janjucetus hunderi whale skull specimen close up.
An illustration of Janjucetus hunderi.
A Palorchestes skull.
“Victoria has produced the vast majority of fossils of this animal. This is one of the most bizarre mammals that’s ever existed on the planet.”
Palorchestes lived from about two million to 40,000 years ago. It grew to two metres long and weighed nearly a tonne.
“We have a reasonably good idea of what it looked like. It is this bizarre combination of a very high skull, tiny eyes placed very high on the head but forward facing. It has a long lower jaw, and what we think was probably a long giraffeor anteater-like tongue. Its teeth seemed to be well-suited to crushing up fibrous plant matter. And yet it has the forelimbs and upper body of a world champion wrestler. On the ends of its fingers are claws that would give Freddy Krueger a run for his money.
“So it is an absolute mishmash of features that, taken together, give us an idea of what this thing looked like, but leave us utterly dumbfounded as to its lifestyle.”
Finding out more about the fossils found in Victoria, Fitzgerald says, will help place this part of Australia in the broader evolution of life on our planet.
“Obviously, as you know, there’s always a bit of a lag between the discovery in the field, work on the lab, and then publication of those finds,”
he says. “I’m generally an optimist about these things, but I do think that we are in something of a golden age of Victorian palaeontology.
“The amount that we are going to be able to say in the decade, two decades to come, compared to when I was a bright-eyed, fossil-keen kid is at a level that I think will just inspire our children, both here and everywhere, and adults, frankly, to heights that we that we haven’t seen.”
Erich concludes: “At Museums Victoria, that’s our game.”
That, Kate says, is where she comes in.
“My role is as a science communicator working with a broad team of scientists, like Erich, and helping to gel the content together and to make it appropriate for a public audience. Because we have wonderful scientists, we have people who specialise in particular areas, but you need a team of people who bring all the other skills to actually create an exhibition.”
And exhibitions like “Victoria Evolves” help us do things that we never thought possible, like walking backwards and forwards through time and imagining what the world was like millions of years ago.
EVRIM YAZGIN is a dinosaur enthusiast who has written 200+ palaeontology stories for Cosmos online.
Grain
grit and
It’s Australia’s golden harvest, our largest and most valuable crop. Wheat arrived with the First Fleet, planting the seeds of an ongoing exploration to unlock its genetic secrets. Read on as Rachel Williamson shares stories of resilience and determination from farmers and scientists alike.
It’s the late 1930s and wheat croppers in Victoria are very worried.
Total wheat yield in the state has fallen for 50 years, despite the introduction of the famous designer Australia strain Federation 30 years earlier.
Farmers have tried new fertilisers and different seed varieties, but nothing is working. They are prepared to try anything – even science.
Over at the state Department of Agriculture, researchers suspect the old technique of a fallow, or idle, year between crops is part of the problem. The practice simply isn’t delivering enough nitrogen back into southern Australia’s ancient soils for intensive wheat farming.
Enter Yvonne Aitken. She’s one of the few women working in agricultural sciences — and only because a high school teacher’s brother endorsed the sector as “all right for women”.
In 1938, 27-year-old Aitken’s work into why some plants flower earlier or later might hold the key to fixing Victoria’s wheat slump. The theory is this: what if farmers add an earlier flowering crop into their rotation, which also has intensive nitrogen-fixing abilities, like peas?
“The peas could supply a high protein seed crop and also raise soil fertility through the manurial value of the pea stubble from sheep grazing and from the nitrogen-fixing activity of the Rhizobium nodules on the pea roots,” wrote Nessy Allen in her 1997 biography of Aitken for The Agricultural History Review journal.
“It was the practical problem of developing plants which could do that to which [Aitken] applied herself for so long and which she so successfully solved.”
The nine-year project would see the woman from Horsham gain the moniker “Miss Peabody”, which she told Allen was due to her then-unusual habit of wearing a hat when out in the fields, and for adding another tool to the library on how to grow wheat in Australia.
Aussie wheat, and the science of how it became one of the biggest agricultural products in the world, is a story of fighting disease, of deep knowledge of subterranean worlds, and of the God-like process of designing a bespoke seed for Australia’s unique conditions, yet adaptable enough to sell anywhere.
Throughout the 235-year history of wheat growing in Australia, there have been farmers on one side – experimenting, testing, figuring out the land’s quirks – and scientists on the other, doing the same thing.
From First Fleet to Green Revolution
The first Australian wheat grower was farmer and convict James Ruse in 1789. Australia was his sliding doors moment. He was supposed to be transported to Africa for seven years for burglary but instead did his time on a prison ship in Cornwall before being packed onto the First Fleet in 1787. Two years later he convinced Governor Arthur Phillip to let him go and work out how to make English wheat grow in the humid climes around the Parramatta River. Ruse reaped about five tonnes that first year, as seen in historical records now held by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
What followed was a rapid expansion of cropping across the temperate zones of Australia. Yet throughout the next century, droughts and
Dr Yvonne Aitken dedicated her life to the search for improved crop species.
fungal epidemics emphasised again and again the inadequacies of Northern Hemisphere wheat varieties for the land down under.
The 19th century was a period of exploration. South Australian experimenters bred for early maturity and drought tolerance as well as resistance to rust, a disease that still crushes yields by 50–100% according to the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries.
During this time William Farrer – retired surveyor, self-taught biologist, failed mining investor, and farmer – perfected his designer grain, Federation wheat. It was rust resistant, tolerant of the dry, and high yielding.
Commercialised in 1903, Federation was a cross between another of Farrer’s own creations, Yandilla , and a type called Purple Straw whose origins were traced to southern Europe in a 2017 study of Australian wheat genetics.
Federation was Australia’s first big step toward becoming a cereals powerhouse.
The second big leap forward did not come from Australia, but from Mexico’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the global Green Revolution.
In the 1960s, crop-based food production took off around the world, partly thanks to genetically modified, high yield varieties of popular crops that were bred by Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug at CIMMYT. For Australian wheat growers, it was his dwarf wheat spun out of a Japanese strain, which needs less fertiliser and water, that shot the industry in a new genetic direction.
Those two leaps allowed Australia wheat yields to rise by 3,000% over the 20th Century, according to ABS data.
Today, Australia is one of the global top exporters of wheat. It was dethroned last year from first place by Russia. But ABS stats show farmers turned that first five-tonne crop in 1789 into a 36 million tonne bonanza in 2022.
Indeed, in 2022–23 wheat was Australia’s biggest export of all agricultural, fisheries and forestry products at $16.7 billion in value, with beef and veal coming in a distant second at $10.7 billion, shows Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry data.
But despite what the yield figures say today, once again, not all is well in Australian wheat. A climate-based ceiling is threatening.
Since 1990, water-limited yields have fallen by about 1% a year every year as average rainfall slowly decreases over time, says former CSIRO researcher Dr Zvi Hochman. That works out to a decline from 4.4 tonnes per hectare (T/ha) in 1990 to 3.2T/ha in 2015.
Water-limited yields are the maximum potential for any piece of land, if the only thing to worry about is water.
And yet so far Australia is not feeling the effect. Genetic modifications, finely-tuned farming practices that retain moisture in the soil, the generous application of fertilisers, rotational crops to disrupt weeds and disease cycles, and plants bred for specific conditions, allow farmers to continually magnify what their land can do.
grain by hand in Vite Vite North, Victoria, circa 1925.
Historical timeline: Australian wheat production, 1861 to 2022
The new gods
Agriculture has always been the art of manipulating genetics, be it to harvest the best wheat, sire the prizewinning bull, or grow the finest wool. But today’s gods of creation are doing it at the level of genes.
Dr Scott Boden at the University of Adelaide is working on pumping up yield, or the grains per plant.
“We’ve discovered a whole suite of genes that are responsible for controlling for a number [of grains],” he tells Cosmos.
“We want to now study those genes in more detail. We’ve already done that with two of the genes discovered in this project. [We] found that when we modified the function of these transcription factors [altering the proteins that convert or transcribe DNA into RNA], we could accelerate flowering, and we could get the plant to change how many grains it produces.”
Boden’s team wants to investigate the other 100,000 or so genes in the wheat floret. Enter the University of Adelaide’s CoreDetector plant genome-sequencing machine which can decode “gigabyte plant genomes”, says the project co-lead Dr Julian Taylor. The software can unravel wheat genomes in two hours.
The implications of the study, published this year in Current Biology, and technology such as the CoreDetector are huge. Two decades ago the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said food production needed to rise by 50 per cent by 2050 to feed the world, and that crop yields will need to do most of the heavy lifting
Threshing
Wheat varities
– they need to rise by 80%. Growers need genetics like these to beat the water ceiling, and knowing which plants have which genes allows breeders to hone their specimens more quickly.
And what if they have no good genetic mutations to work with? The next step is genetic modification.
Twelve years ago, the DNA sequence CRISPR was used to scissor genetic code for the first time. Agricultural scientists haven’t looked back. Boden says they can now introduce mutations which target genes in a specific way.
“Rather than guessing where these genetic modifications are going to happen within the plant, we can target them and we can then track them very easily afterwards,” he says.
“That’s what’s been a big game changer for genetic modifications relative to what we understand from the 1990s, where Greenpeace would protest against genetic modifications. [Back] then we knew what we were introducing into the
Below are just a handful of the wheat varieties available in Australia. Varieties are selected on yield and grain quality, as well as other traits. Planting multiple varieties helps to minimise the risk of complete crop failure. Maturity informs the optimum sowing time and helps to stagger workload.
Variety: Calibre
Region: SA, Vic, WA
Maturity: Quick–mid spring
Variety: Coota
Region: NSW
Maturity: Mid–slow spring
Variety: Intrigue
Regions: NSW, QLD
Maturity: Mid–slow spring
Variety: Sunmaster
Region: NSW, Vic
Maturity: Mid spring
Variety: Anapurna Regions: NSW, SA, Tas, Vic
Maturity: Slow winter
Variety: Willaura
Regions: SA, Vic
Maturity: Slow–very slow spring
plant, but we didn’t always know where it was going to go.”
Australia has allowed limited releases of genetically modified wheat since 2005 to improve tolerance to heat, cold, drought and salinity, to improve grain quality and yield stability as well as disease resistance, according to trial data held by the Australian federal Office of the Gene Technology Regulator.
The regulator’s records show 26 trials of genetically modified wheat have either finished, been withdrawn, or are currently underway. The current trial hubs are at the University of Adelaide’s Barossa Valley trial site, the University of Melbourne’s Dookie College east of Shepparton – the location of Aitken’s pea study – and CSIRO’s plots at Hilltops in New South Wales.
But the reward of creating more and more bespoke plants comes with risk as well: Australia’s wheat genetic base is narrowing because of the tightly controlled crossing of varieties since the Green Revolution, found Dr Reem Joukhadar in her 2017 study of wheat genetics.
“This shrinkage in diversity creates a need for urgent actions to cope with future environmental changes,” Joukhader and her coauthors wrote.
“New allelic diversity can be introduced to current Australian germplasm from pre-Green Revolution cultivars or from the geographical regions that dominated the Australian germplasm during the second period... Many of these geographical regions have similar climates to Australia and could potentially improve Australian wheat and avoid further loss of genetic diversity.”
From lab to field
Surely the Holy Grail of genetic modification and breeding is to deliver designer, almost made-to-order wheat? Queensland farmer Ben Taylor says this is almost – almost – what he’s already getting.
Taylor co-owns a 5,000 hectare farm on the Western Downs with his wife Kate and brother Sam. They’re semi-famous in agri circles for turning the business around by fixing soil health and using a tailored crop rotation system.
They give back to the industry by hosting Australian Grain Technologies (AGT) and Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) wheat trials.
“The current breeding program is doing exactly that [creating designer seed] to improve varietal traits depending on whether it’s yield, disease, drought tolerant varieties,” he told Cosmos, after dashing in the door from a chat
with the manager of the 6,000 AGT trial plots on his property.
“We’ve got a new AGT variety called Intrigue and it’s showed year-on-year in the NVT trials [National Variety Trials] some really great yield results, maybe 5% more than our current variety. If you have an incremental increase of 5% every five years, it adds up.”
The Taylors will store and use three to five grain varieties for anywhere between three and five years, before turning them over for new strains that have better protection against the likes of rust, the fungal disease that has plagued Australian growers since the first crops, and the Western Downs-specific nemesis, crown rot, a fungal root disease that sets in during dry weather.
It’s really about new technology and new genetics that enable farmers to keep up.”
The continual stream of new varieties, combined with farming practices finely tuned to Western Downs soil types, has lifted yields at Culara Farm from a top figure of 2.45T/ha in Ben’s and Sam’s grandfather’s day, to 5–6T/ha today.
While Taylor would “absolutely” buy a madeto-order seed that fixes for the bespoke wheat diseases in his area and improves yield, it’s not as simple as tweaking some genes and Ubering over the perfect plant.
That’s because, to quote the immortal film about genetic modification, Jurassic Park, “nature finds a way”.
Rust for example, has been the bane of croppers’ existence since 1803, according to a history of the fungus published last year, because rust genes change to beat the wheat mutations which resist it.
“I have previously really resistant lines but when the pathotype changes, the rust mutates. All of a sudden it’s susceptible,” says AGT breeder Dr Meiqin Lu.
It takes anywhere from eight years to breed new traits into wheat seed that can be released commercially, which means Lu has unreleased rust-resistant varieties which the fungus has already beaten.
Artificial intelligence could solve this. The University of Queensland and GRDC are running a trial now using AI to find rust-beating genetics and simulate the result, then “speed breed” wheat faster than the fungus can mutate.
The battle of the blight
If rust has been a blight on the wheat landscape forever, a host of other bacteria, viruses and pests are ever ready to blacken a farmer’s day. The GRDC’s 2009 watchlist put the average annual cost of the 41 most common diseases and pests at $913 million.
Climate change is expected to make some of these more common. The humidity and moisture loving fusarium head blight (FHB) is one that scientists anticipate will love the southwards shift in wet and humid subtropic zones. In wet 2022, FHB laid waste to crops across eastern Australia, an epidemic GRDC called “unprecedented”, and can be dangerous if eaten by animals and humans.
There are still few wheat strains around the world resistant to FHB. The best that can be done right now is to find genetics that reduce susceptibility. Genetic editing might again be a solution. A joint Adelaide–Nanjing university investigation published this year uncovered a mutation in the TaHRC gene that makes plants resistant to FHB.
Crown rot is the more pertinent challenge for Narrabri-based Lu. Like FHB there are no good genetic strains yet anywhere around the world that actively resist this disease. This means the best they can do is design a plant that doesn’t get as badly hit by an outbreak.
“Industry has been working on this disease for a long time, but the progress is not as good as good as we would like,” Lu says.
Combine harvesting of a wheat field in Nyngan, New South Wales.
“We made some progress and some varieties, such as Intrigue, is moderately susceptible. That’s all we get.”
Map of forecast water-limited wheat grain yields
Golden soil
There’s a reason why farmers like Taylor refer to their soil with words like “magic” and “gold”, because they need the bank beneath our feet to fund the continual push to get more from the same area of land.
That pressure to grow, baby, grow is beginning to recreate the troubles in Victoria in the 1930s: soil problems.
It’s been millions of years since Australia’s ancient soils were revitalised by volcanic eruptions, and never by glacial erosion. The country has the third highest rate of soil carbon loss in the world over the last 250 years, largely from land clearing, behind only China and the United States, showed a study in PNAS in 2017.
At this end of a 45-year long career, Professor Michael Bell has seen a lot of paddocks. He says a drawn-down macro and micro nutrient bank is another ceiling getting ever so slowly lower.
“The assumption was that what we yield in Australia is dominated by water availability,” he says.
“It still is to some extent, but we’ve seen increasingly that nutrient constraints are, in some cases, clearly the dominant response. The soils don’t have the give in them or the resilience that they used to have.
“The next stage of soil management is trying to feed the soil, not the crop.”
Bell and Taylor both say the problem is not fertiliser use – if the world wants more food from the same or less land, fertiliser is necessary – but how to dose it accurately.
“I can go back to my grandmother’s records in 1925 and convert the price of maize grain from pounds to dollars. And we’re not getting much more per tonne of grain now than we were back then. But they had no fertiliser inputs back in those days, [they] didn’t need it,” Bell says.
“Work we’ve done on deep phosphorous placement in Northern Australia says that if we take the opportunity to fix phosphorus deeper in the [soil], we can mine that investment over the next four or five years.”
The same experiment is being run in southwest Western Australia where soil scientists are trialling which measure of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus those soils need and how best to apply the medicine.
And during the pandemic, six researchers occupied themselves with analysing and writing up data from a GRDC-sponsored trial on whether a native fungi, the Austroboletus occidentalis or ridge-stemmed bolete, might be used as a fertiliser alternative.
The University of Western Australia researchers grew wheat in nitrogen-poor soil which they then dosed with nothing, nitrogen-fixing bacteria, the fungi, or both stimulants. The first specimen grew 25% more than the control, the second by 101%, and third by 106% – a no-brainer replacement for increasingly expensive synthetic fertiliser, the authors implied.
Nineteenth century farmers would recognise the battles still being fought today and the way farmers and scientists are waging them, but they wouldn’t recognise the predictive modelling or the gene editing techniques which can –almost – create designer plants.
“There is an absolute limit to what you can grow where,” says Hochman, who uncovered the frightening data showing the water-limited yield ceiling is falling.
“It’s really about new technology and new genetics that enable farmers to keep up. For how long, that is a really good question.”
Since 1788 wheat farming in Australia has been squeezed by disease and drought, sensitive soils and ill-suited plants, and now climate change. To date, scientific advances have beaten them all. But for how much longer is anyone’s guess.
RACHEL WILLIAMSON is a science and business journalist based in Naarm/Melbourne.
Map showing forecast of water-limited wheat grain yield potential as at 15 June 2024. The map assumes median rainfall and temperatures up to crop maturity.
Lucy in the sky with asteroids
It’s 16 October 2021. An Atlas V rocket blasts off from Cape Canaveral carrying an 821-kg spacecraft called Lucy. Its destination: a pair of asteroid clusters called the Trojans. Follow Richard A. Lovett on a journey to the asteroids to find out where Lucy is now.
Lucy’s long, looping trajectory will visit more asteroids than any prior mission ever dreamed of. It will pass through a pair of asteroid clusters called the Trojans in the same orbit as Jupiter – one 60 degrees ahead and the other 60 degrees behind – held together by a delicate balance between the gravity of Jupiter and the Sun.
There are just two problems.
First, the entire process was designed to take 12 years, including nearly six years before it reached the first of the Trojans. That’s a long time to drift in space.
Secondly, the spacecraft suffered a glitch shortly after launch that impeded its ability to deploy one of its solar panels, a potentially serious problem for a solar-powered spacecraft. Especially one headed for a part of the Solar System where sunlight is only one-sixth as strong as at Earth.
Let’s take a closer look at these challenges.
Snagging a solar panel
Lucy’s solar panel was designed to unfurl like an old-fashioned hand fan, then latch into a full circle. But it snagged on a lanyard.
NASA engineers studied the problem for months then decided to pull the lanyard tighter, in the hope that that was all that was needed. It didn’t entirely work – the panel only managed to unfurl to somewhere between 353 and 357 degrees – but that was close enough to 360 degrees to be 98 to 99% of optimal.
Not to mention that there are two panels, the other of which had unfurled without a hitch. “So, power is not an issue for the spacecraft – nor will it be through the entire mission if we have to fly it like it is,” says Harold “Hal” Levison, even before the current fix, according to Space.com. Levison is a planetary scientist from the Southwest Research Institute, Colorado, and the mission’s principal investigator.
Right: An illustration of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft with one solar panel not quite completely deployed. This image: Lucy made an exceptionally close flyby of Earth on 16 October 2022.
LUCY’S TIMELINE
Lucy is one of the most complex missions ever attempted, with a trajectory that could not possibly have been calculated without modern computers. According to NASA lore, it was an engineer from Lockheed Martin named Brian Sutter who figured it out, using, of all things, an Excel spreadsheet with which he spent months comparing Lucy’s trajectory to the orbits of 750,000 asteroids.
16 October launch 2022 16 October Earth flyby for gravitational boost 2023 1 November Dinkinesh flyby
2033 2 March trailing Trojans encounter with flyby, 617 Patroclus–Menoetius
26 December close flyby of Earth for gravitational boost back out to Jupiter
2027 12 August first encounter with leading Trojans, Eurybates and its moon Queta 2027 15 September second encounter with leading Trojans, Polymele and unnamed moon 2025 20 April Donaldjohanson flyby 2028 18 April third encounter with leading Trojans, Leucus 2028 11 November fourth encounter with leading Trojans, Orus and possible moon 2029 deep dive back into the inner Solar System
13 December return to Earth for second gravitational boost
Donaldjohanson
Polymele
Eurybates
Leucus Orus
Patroclus & Menoetius
First stop: Dinkinesh
Meanwhile, astronomers on Earth discovered an asteroid close enough to Lucy’s trajectory to allow an easy flyby halfway through its long cruise to the Trojans.
The asteroid, dubbed 152830 Dinkinesh, looked to be a good opportunity to test Lucy’s instruments, especially because, with minimal use of maneuvering fuel, Lucy was able to get to within 425km.
And what an opportunity it turned out to be! Dinkinesh is tiny – only 720 meters across –making it not just the smallest asteroid scheduled to be visited by Lucy, but the smallest ever to be visited by any spacecraft.
Even so, Levinson’s team found it to be “unexpectedly complex” – complex enough to merit a three-hour symposium at the 2024 Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference, held this March in Texas.
To start with, it sports two prominent ridges tens of meters high (equivalent to hundreds of kilometers high on Earth). But it also has troughs, plains, and a polar depression – enough to give planetary geologists much to discuss for years to come. But the most stunning discovery involved Dinkinesh’s moon, Selam, itself discovered by Lucy during the flyby.
Finding that Dinkinesh had a moon wasn’t all that surprising –lots of asteroids, including others on Lucy’s agenda, have them. But Selam is unique,
because it is a ‘contact binary’. That means it is composed of two pieces, each about 200 meters in diameter, snuggled up against each other like a couple of cats keeping company on your couch.
“We’d been puzzling over variations in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us a hint that Dinkinesh might have a moon of some sort,” John Spencer, the mission’s deputy scientist said in his presentation, “but we never suspected anything so bizarre.”
“ I evahdluow en v e r expectedasystem thatlooks like t h i s . . . . isihT s g o ing tobefun for thescientif c .ytinummoc ”
“It is puzzling, to say the least,” added Levison. “I would have never expected a system that looks like this. In particular, I don’t understand why the two components of the satellite have similar sizes. This is going to be fun for the scientific community to figure out.”
Not that a fortuitous finding like this was even remotely on the radar when Lucy was launched. Back then, the targets were five asteroids (plus one moon) in the Trojans and a closer-in asteroid called 52246 Donaldjohanson intended as the instrument test.
Since then, two more of the targeted Trojans have been found to have moons, which means the total number of asteroids to be explored by Lucy has risen to either 11 or 12, depending on how you count Selam’s contact binary. Not to mention how many more moons Lucy might discover as it gets closer to its main targets.
Left: ‘Moonrise’ of Selam from behind asteroid Dinkinesh, as captured by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager.
Right: NASA’s Lucy Mission Flies By Asteroid Dinkinesh.
Next asteroid on the list
Donaldjohanson is still on the list, scheduled for flyby on 20 April 2025. It’s not very big, though probably bigger than Dinkinesh. When pressed, Levison guesses it might be about 5km in diameter. “Plus or minus 5km,” he adds in a remark that tends to draw a laugh.
This asteroid was discovered back in 1981 by an astronomer at Australia National University’s Siding Springs Observatory, but it wasn’t named until Lucy was well into development. That’s because Lucy wasn’t named for the famous Beatles song but instead for the 3.2-millionyear-old Australopithecus fossil nicknamed Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974.
Lucy-the-fossil played an important role in unlocking our understanding of humanity’s origins. Lucy-the-spacecraft is hoped to do the same for our understanding of the Solar System’s origins. Donald Johanson was the paleoanthropologist who discovered the original Lucy (and, named her for the Beatles song).
Trapped Trojans
There are two clusters of asteroids that have been swept up in Jupiter’s gravitational traps (see page 70). One is called the leading Trojans, because it precedes Jupiter around its orbit. The other is called the trailing Trojans, because it follows. The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center’s latest tabulation lists 13,409 of them, but nobody thinks that’s all there are.
As mentioned, Lucy’s mission is to fly through the leading Trojans, loop outward, then dive back through before descending deep into the Solar System (to get a gravitational boost from a close flyby of Earth) before zooming back out for a return visit to Jupiter’s orbit, to the trailing Trojans.
The process, Levison says, will take advantage of the fact that the asteroids collected in Jupiter’s Trojan clusters don’t all have the same origin. Some may have formed at their present distance from the Sun, while others might have formed farther out, before gravitational interactions with giant planets swept them together, billions of years ago, like a cosmic, gravitational broom.
“These asteroids represent objects that formed in very interesting region[s] of the Solar System and are now trapped in a place where it’s easy for us to send a spacecraft to study them,” Levison says.
The process by which such a diverse array of asteroids were swept together is also important, because it is related to the migration of the giant planets early in the Solar System’s history, before they settled into their present orbits. Lucy’s team hopes studying the Trojans can teach us not just about asteroids Lucy visits, but about how that entire process worked.
Worthy targets
Several of the asteroids scheduled for visitation are interesting in and of themselves. Donaldjohanson, for example, appears to be a remnant of a collisional breakup of a larger asteroid that occurred only 100 million to 150
Lucy’s encapsulation protects the spacecraft
million years ago. That means that, until then, the rocks now on its surface were tucked deeply inside its parent body, preserved from the effects of solar radiation and other types of space weather. Its surface may be quite young, offering a glimpse into the heart of an ancient asteroid, where primordial material might have passed through billions of years unaltered.
Out in the Trojans, Lucy will encounter larger bodies, 20km to 100km in diameter. Two, Levison says, would be “worthy targets even if they weren’t Trojans.”
One is 3548 Eurybates. Like Donaldjohanson, it appears to be part of a “collisional family”, meaning that it too is the result of a long-ago breakup, albeit not as recently as Donaldjohanson’s. “It is the largest remnant of an asteroid family – the only
BEYOND THE PRIME MISSION
NASA has a long history of repurposing spacecraft after their primary missions have expired, and it’s quite possible that a bright engineer, armed with the 2033+ version of Excel, could find a way to use Lucy’s last
gasps of maneuvering fuel. Perhaps it may tweak its orbit to slingshot yet again past Earth for a return to the leading Trojans in, say, 2038, and, perhaps even the trailing Trojans again in, say, 2043.
will explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids thought to be “fossils of planet formation.”
At the moment, all we know is that NASA is referring to the first two Trojan visits as Lucy’s “prime mission” – a phrase that certainly opens the door to an “extended mission,” once the prime is complete.
major collisional asteroid family in the Trojans,” Levison says. “It’s going to teach us how collisions work, particularly on primitive bodies.” It is also interesting, Levison says, because its color is different from most Trojan asteroids.
Another asteroid, which won’t be visited until Lucy’s second Trojan pass-through in 2033, is 617 Patroclus. It’s interesting in part because it and its moon Menoetius are among the largest objects in the Trojans, but also because both are about the same size, each about 100km across.
Farther from the Sun, pairs like that are nothing unusual – out beyond Pluto, Levison says, they comprise about 40 percent of all known objects. But closer in, at distances comparable to the Trojans, equal-size binaries are rare.
Humberto Campins, a planetary scientist from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, who is not part of the Lucy team, agrees there’s still a lot to be understood. He says Lucy’s upcoming discoveries may help planetary scientists better understand how that early system became the one we see today.
Levison compares it to crime scene investigation. “The blood spatter on the wall can tell you more about what’s going on than the bodies on the floor,” he says. “That’s what small bodies [such as asteroids] represent in the Solar System.”
RICHARD A. LOVETT is a science writer and science fiction author based in Portland, Oregon.
Lucy
Insect consciousness
The insect world is abuzz with life, but is there anything on their minds? Follow Amalyah Hart into a world of intricate research designed to explore the complexities of insect consciousness.
Dinis Gökaydin plucks a vial from the counter and holds it up to the light. Inside, a female fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is crawling up its glass sides towards the false promise of freedom. Fruit flies do this when trapped – they travel upwards, buoyed by an instinct that tells them sky means salvation.
“It’s a bad morning because I’m feeling shaky for some reason,” Gökaydin says. Nervous energy punctuates the air.
What follows is one of the most precise and nerve-wracking pieces of practical science I’ve ever seen. First, he places Drosophila’s tube into a small opening in a metal block on the bench in front of us. The inside of this block is 2°C which, after three minutes, immobilises the fly.
Next, Gökaydin opens the vial and teases the fly out with a tiny instrument. He dabs some glue on the back of her body, and fastens her to a small metal plate, not much larger than a sim card. She’s ready for the final, macabre insult.
Peering down a microscope, Gökaydin uses another instrument to peel open the back of her head, into which his supervisor Bruno van Swinderen, will embed an electrode. I breathe a sigh of relief – he’s managed to achieve all this without killing her, a crucial part of the plan.
Gökaydin and van Swinderen, a professor at the University of Queensland’s Queensland Brain Institute (QBI), study how fruit fly brains function in different states – awake, asleep, or anaesthetised. They hope their work may throw up clues to an enduring scientific mystery – how, and when, did consciousness evolve?
A short history of consciousness
Seventeenth century philosopher René Descartes believed that consciousness was a uniquely human trait. Animals, he argued, made no effort to communicate their experiences. Plus, they lacked the ability to reason. He therefore believed that, while animals might cry or run from pain, they had no thoughts or sensations – their behaviour was pure reflex.
This view became culturally widespread and, just a few decades ago, any attempt to investigate animal consciousness scientifically would have been derided.
In 1974, American philosopher Thomas Nagel published a provocative essay titled What is it like to be a bat?, which parsed out the problem of creature consciousness. Unlike Descartes, Nagel believed consciousness was widespread in the animal kingdom, but impossible to understand. To be conscious is a completely subjective experience, while science is governed by objective inquiry, Nagel argued.
Bats were the perfect poster-child for this quandary: like us, they navigate the physical world but unlike us, they do so through echolocation. Biohacking notwithstanding, humans will probably never know how it feels to navigate the world through ricochets of sound.
Nagel had a point. The hunt for consciousness in the animal kingdom is hamstrung by the fact that no one can agree on what exactly consciousness is, or how it got here, let alone how to prove it’s there.
Scientists remain divided on whether consciousness is a profound but accidental
by-product of cognitive evolution, or a central driver of our species’ evolutionary success. Some think it emerged as early as the invertebrates of the Cambrian explosion, more than 500 million years ago, while others think it appeared much later, in mammals and birds.
Numerous studies identify brain regions that may be involved, but there, too, disagreement reigns: is it housed in the front or the back of the brain? Is it in the neocortex, which only mammals have, or the brainstem, a region we share with most animals on Earth? And is consciousness tied to just one brain region, or made through the combined efforts of different neural circuits, thrumming together as one?
To make matters worse, there is no universally agreed upon definition of consciousness. Some researchers refer to ‘consciousness’, while others call it ‘sentience’, which refers specifically to the ability to feel and sense.
Other theorists divide it into ‘cognitive consciousness’, the ability to process information and solve problems, and ‘phenomenal consciousness’, which describes the capacity to have a subjective experience – to feel pain, see the colour red, taste the sweet flesh of a peach. Many scientists believe that subjective experience – this trait that, for us, gives life its richness – is not present in all animals.
Despite this lack of consensus, theories of consciousness are already pushing the needle on policy decisions. In 2022, the UK government moved to protect all vertebrates and some invertebrates, such as lobsters, crabs, and octopuses,
Left: Professor Bruno van Swinderen at the Queensland Brain Institute.
Centre: A female fruit fly is suspended in front of a screen in one of van Swinderen’s experiments.
Right: Dinis Gökaydin in front of the fly brain recording rig.
under its updated Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. That change was fuelled by a growing body of research that suggests these creatures may experience pain.
In 2009, Robert Elwood, a professor at Queen’s University, Belfast, exposed hermit crabs to a series of electric shocks of gradually increasing intensity. Hermit crabs demonstrate clear preferences for certain species of shells, and Elwood wanted to understand how pain might influence their choices.
Crabs in higher quality shells would suffer higher-intensity shocks than those living in lower-grade shells before they finally, reluctantly evacuated. What’s more, when exposed to the shocks, crabs behaved in ways that looked achingly like true pain. Some crabs made escape bids, desperately trying to scale the walls of their tanks, while others furiously groomed the place on their body where the shock was administered.
“That’s exactly the sort of profile of behaviour we would expect to see if crabs had a state that does for them the sort of thing pain does for us,” says Dr Jonathan Birch, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics (LSE), who was asked to review the evidence by the UK Government ahead of the 2022 change to the Act.
“Admittedly this is an area where there’s a huge amount of uncertainty,” adds Birch, who heads the Foundations of Animal Sentience (ASENT) project at LSE. “But I think the evidence is pushing us to take seriously a realistic possibility of conscious experience being extremely widespread.”
The oddball paradigm
The fly is suspended in front of an LED screen, which is divided in half. Every few seconds, a panel of light will appear on either side. The light has an equal probability of appearing on the left or right side each time – a computer generates the patterns at random. Meanwhile, the electrode in Drosophila’s brain is registering her reaction to each flash – unusual patterns create pulses of electrical activity in her brain.
Gökaydin and van Swinderen investigate attention, sleep, and memory in fruit flies, and van Swinderen has been probing fruit fly brains for the better part of two decades. About a decade ago, van Swinderen set about designing a system that could monitor Drosophila brains while they slept. He found that in fruit flies, as in humans, sleep consists of both active and quiet phases. In humans, our active phase of sleep is known as REM sleep – the kingdom of dreams. Van Swinderen’s data forced him to take seriously the possibility that fruit flies, too, may dream.
But today’s experiment requires this fly to be wide awake. It’s based on a psychological concept
“In fruit flies, as in humans, sleep consists of both active and quiet phases.”
called the ‘oddball paradigm’. When the brain encounters a novel stimulus – an ‘oddball’ – it experiences a spike in activity as it attempts to understand what’s going on, and assess for threat. That spike is connected to the feeling of surprise; in humans, surprise is a jolt that funnels our awareness to the stimulus. But surprise is also costly.
“If you have a trillion synapses in your brain, even if you increase the synaptic release by one per cent, you’re looking at a tremendous amount of extra energy requirements,” van Swinderen says.
So, brains need to optimise their function while minimising wasted energy: “One way to do that is to be predictive, rather than reactive”.
Van Swinderen believes consciousness is an evolutionary adaptation that helps animals make predictions about the world around them, by focusing attention on difficult problems.
“I would really be of the opinion that consciousness is adaptive,” he says. “If you had a simple animal that, within its very limited environment, was making 100% perfect predictions, it wouldn’t need it.”
Van Swinderen and Gökaydin aren’t the only ones interested in fruit fly cognition and behaviour. Another 2021 Drosophila experiment, from a US-based team of researchers, found that chronic social isolation interrupted fruit flies’ sleep cycles, and led them to overfeed – a phenomenon linked to loneliness in humans.
It’s important to note that data that hints at loneliness, or dream-like states, doesn’t prove that these experiences are anything like ours, or that these creatures are necessarily having an ‘experience’ at all.
Van Swinderen himself is not certain that insects are conscious in a way we might relate to. But he sees Drosophila as a chance to investigate the origins of subjective experience in the animal kingdom –there’s no fire without a spark.
The psyche of bees
“You might want to tie back your hair,” says Andrew Barron, a neuroethologist at Macquarie University’s Minds and Intelligences Initiative in Sydney. Neuroethologists study the neural mechanisms of animal behaviour.
It’s a month after my visit to Brisbane, and this time I’m chasing the psyche of an altogether different insect.
“Don’t worry, we’ve always got EpiPens onsite,” adds Barron’s PhD student, Théo, who strikes me as someone who has felt the keenness of a bee sting many times before.
I’ve pulled my hair up and under a giant beekeeper’s hat, my head and shoulders veiled. But my arms are bare on this sweltering January day, a fact about which no one seems particularly concerned.
The metal gate swings open and the three of us step into a giant, house-sized cage, filled with thousands of honeybees. Barron asks me not to step any further, because this particular hive is a little ‘spiky’. The lexicon suggests that hives, like people, have minds of their own – and this one has a short temper.
At the near end of the cage, Dr Marie Geneviève Guiraud, a researcher at the Institute, has set up a small white box on a trestle table. Inside the box is a miniature arena, in which she tests whether bees can distinguish between different human faces, rewarding correct answers with sugar water. (Spoiler alert: they can.)
Next to the box, a single bee is sitting patiently, a small, square chip fixed to her abdomen. This is the bee Guiraud has been training, and she tells me she’ll often find her there waiting, obedient as a trained puppy.
In the insect world, bees have a monopoly on charisma – famously intelligent, admirably cooperative, and cheerfully patterned. Along with Drosophila , they’re also some of the most
widely studied insects, in part because their cooperative nature and work-horse mentality makes them easy to train.
Bees possess a particularly flexible intelligence. They can plan and remember complex routes, and make rapid, accurate decisions as they drift from flower to flower. Bee cognition is being studied to inform robotics and AI.
There is also evidence that bees may have some basic emotional states, such as the capacity for optimism and pessimism.
In one 2011 study, scientists agitated honeybees by vigorously shaking their containers to simulate a predatory attack. Agitated bees were more likely to predict a negative outcome when exposed to an ambiguous stimulus than unmolested honeybees exposed to the same stimulus. The agitated bees also displayed lower levels of dopamine and serotonin, neurotransmitters associated with pleasure and happiness in humans.
“I think it’s at least reasonably likely that bees and some other insects are conscious,” says
Lars Chittka, a neuroethologist at Queen Mary University (QMU), London, and author of the book The Mind of a Bee, though he acknowledges it’s impossible to prove.
A 2022 experiment from Chittka’s team at QMU showed that bumblebees will go out of their way to roll wooden balls around, despite no obvious incentive for doing so, with all the hallmarks of playfulness. And younger bees roll the ball more often than older bees, just as older mammals play less than their young.
“They return to this activity again and again, when there’s no reward present, so that’s a hint that they enjoy the activity itself,” he says.
In 2016, Barron, who heads up the Macquarie Initiative, co-wrote a paper with Colin Klein, now a philosopher of neuroscience at the Australian National University, arguing that insects may well possess at least a basic form of subjective experience.
Their argument centred on the midbrain, a small part of the brainstem at the very centre of the brain. This handy part takes in sensory feedback from the outside world, and uses it to create an internal simulation of an animal’s position in space.
Barron and Klein argue that this representation of the world, as a physical space through which a ‘self’ moves, is enough to make subjective awareness – and structures in the tiny insect brain perform a similar function.
Other ideas of consciousness
“While the majority of philosophers and scientists think [phenomenal consciousness] is relatively primitive, in other words that’s where consciousness began and other computational, intellectual forms of consciousness arrived later, I think it’s the other way around,” says Nicholas Humphrey, a renowned English neuropsychologist who has been working away at the problem of consciousness for most of his life.
In the 1960s Humphrey, then a talented young PhD, began working with a lab monkey called Helen. Helen had had her visual cortex removed –the part of the brain that, in mammals, is responsible for processing visual information from the eyes. She could distinguish between light and dark, but could not seem to see shapes or distance.
In mammals and birds, the visual cortex is the main brain region involved in sight, but we also share a second, more ancient visual pathway with other animals such as fish, reptiles, and amphibians. In most animals, this pathway travels from the eyes to a region of the brain called the optic tectum; in mammals, it travels to the superior colliculus, the optic tectum’s evolutionary descendant.
Helen’s superior colliculus was intact and, through hours of observation, Humphrey suspected something interesting was going on with her vision. While Helen behaved as if she were blind – staring into space, colliding with objects, and moving cautiously in new spaces – she
Professor Andrew Barron (right) from Macquarie University with Simon Klein (left).
would sometimes reach for items Humphrey placed in her view.
Over several years, Humphrey trained Helen to negotiate obstacles, navigate the room, reach for fruit and nuts, and climb trees. When she was nervous or overwhelmed, her newfound visual abilities seemed to vanish, and she would behave as though blind again.
What Helen was living with was a neurological phenomenon we now know as ‘blindsight’, which also occurs in humans. Human blindsight patients who have damage to the visual cortex believe they cannot see – they have no conscious sensation of seeing. But, when asked to locate or identify an object placed within their visual field, they show much higher accuracy than if they were simply guessing.
For Humphrey, blindsight began to seed an idea about consciousness. Was it possible that animals like frogs were ‘seeing’ like Helen? Was it possible to have perceptions without sensations – to see without seeing?
If animals with an optic tectum but no visual cortex are capable of sight, but lack the
Studying
“We’re this giant, looming presence in [insect] lives, as inscrutable to them as they are inscrutable to us.”
corresponding sense of seeing, the same might be true for other sensations. In some animals, sensory information, like other major bodily processes, might exist solely in the realm of the subconscious. If true, those creatures would lack sensations altogether.
Humphrey believes phenomenal consciousness – the rich, vibrant experience that sensations give – is a recent adaptation present only in birds and mammals, and that it evolved to help those creatures negotiate complex social environments. Knowing your own inner world is crucial to operating in what Humphrey calls the “society of selves”.
“I think phenomenal consciousness is a sophisticated brain operation,” Humphrey says.
When it comes to other creatures, including lobsters, crabs, fruit flies, and bees, Humphrey believes they, “just don’t have this feeling, living in the present tense of sensation – they have a more robotic consciousness”.
But Chittka believes the accretion of pieces of evidence that hint at emotion and sensation in insects are unlikely, taken together, to be an accident.
“If you were asking this question about robots or computer programmes, then yes you can get them to pretend to be sentient,” says Chittka. “But I don’t think that nature has room for the kind of profligacy to generate beings that just pretend they feel something.”
bee congition at Macquarie University.
On pain and suffering
When the experiment is over, the fruit fly’s prospects of a normal life are nil, so Gökaydin will euthanise her in the most humane way he knows how: the squish method.
Australia does not publish annual figures for the number of animals used in lab research, but global estimates suggest nearly 200 million creatures are tested on in labs worldwide each year.
The term animal here is not all-inclusive. Biologically, the animal kingdom encompasses all multicellular, eukaryotic organisms that consume, reproduce, and breathe oxygen, but UK law, for example, only classes vertebrates and cephalopods as animals, based on this contested concept of sentience. That means that universities and research centres try to use “lower” species like worms and insects wherever possible.
Drosophila , in particular, are a darling of the research world. They live fast, die young, reproduce prolifically and have just four chromosome pairs, making them simple creatures to study. Countless numbers of them have given their lives to science: six Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Drosophila scientists alone.
Meanwhile, around 23 billion animals are factory farmed annually, and the burgeoning insect protein market is forecast to reach US$9 billion by 2030, to feed a growing population in the face of climate change and biodiversity collapse. That’s not to mention the gruesome toll of pesticides, which lead to a harrowing death for insects.
Science and agriculture both have the unenviable task of balancing their ethical responsibilities to humans and to animals. Since the science of animal consciousness is so unsettled, most invertebrates remain unprotected by welfare legislation. Jeff Sebo, a philosopher at New York University, would like that to change.
“My view is that as long as a being has a non-trivial chance of being conscious, we should give them at least some consideration when making decisions that affect them,” he says. “A one per cent chance that insects are conscious means a one per cent chance that we might be causing trillions of insects per year pain and suffering.”
Both Sebo and Birch were among the authors and signatories of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. That statement, published by a group of philosophers and scientists in April this year, argued that evidence for consciousness was widespread in the animal kingdom, and may well extend to insects.
For Birch, our failure to empathise with insects is really a failure of imagination.
“We struggle to engage with them as a fellow sentient being, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual,” he says. “We’re this giant, looming presence in their lives, as inscrutable to them as they are inscrutable to us.”
But Birch is hopeful that a mounting body of evidence will give policymakers pause.
“There’s this sea change in the culture of science, and people are now daring to ask questions about animal consciousness,” Birch says. “We hope this will send a signal to policymakers that they cannot simply ignore the interests of animals completely, because they’re capable of suffering.”
AMALYAH HART is a freelance science journalist based in Naarm/Melbourne.
The ocean’s unique soundscape includes a vast array of distinctive whale vocalisations. Drew Rooke wonders whether we can ever truly decode the secret language of these majestic giants.
When Shane Gero first travelled to Dominica in January 2005 to study the sperm whales who live in the sparkling, squid-rich waters that surround the Caribbean islandnation, he did not anticipate how transformative the trip would be. “I thought we were just going to go there for that one season,” he says, laughing.
Back then Gero was a young master’s student at Dalhousie University in Canada. He had loved whales and had dreamt of becoming a marine biologist ever since he was a small child and now, he was living out his dream.
Accompanying Gero were his supervisor, biologist Dr Hal Whitehead, and several other graduate students – all living and working together aboard Balaena, Whitehead’s 40-foot cutter-rigged sailboat. They had chosen the waters around Dominica as a research site after learning that there were many more young whales in family units there than elsewhere.
“And I wanted to study what it was like to grow up sperm whale,” Gero says.
As it turned out, there was no better location in the world to do so. For 41 consecutive days, the group sailed alongside one family of sperm whales – nearly triple the longest amount of consecutive time Whitehead, who was one of the foremost sperm whale researchers in the world, had spent in the company of these ocean nomads.
“I’d love to tell you that it’s my acumen as a biologist, but we just kind of found this amazing place to study these amazing animals,” Gero says.
To continue his research, Gero founded the Dominica Sperm Whale Project and began making regular trips to Dominica to study its resident cetaceans. He hasn’t stopped: these days, he spends roughly three to four months every year in the field to continue working on his long-running research program, which over the last two decades has collected the largest sperm whale data repository in the world.
“We’ve seen calves born and have followed them through weaning. Each time we go back we notice particular individuals have grown up, or that they suddenly have new marks on their bodies. They’re really part of our lives, kind of in the same way as a distant colleague or a friend that you only see once or twice a year,” says Gero.
Now he hopes to further deepen his connection with these gentle giants of the deep – by cracking the code of their complex communication system and maybe, just maybe, talking with them.
Sperm whale mother and calf (Physeter macrocephalus) Caribbean Sea, Dominica.
Whales find their voice
Cetaceans appeared on Earth roughly 60 million years ago when their land-dwelling ancestors began to venture further from the shore, evolving traits to survive their new, aquatic home.
Over time their front limbs were replaced with flippers, while their obsolete hind limbs disappeared. Their tails grew wide and fluked, their bodies became insulated with a thick layer of blubber, and the haemoglobin levels in their blood swelled to enable more efficient storage of the precious oxygen they inhaled at the surface. In addition, this new order of mammals developed the ability to communicate with each other underwater.
Vocalisations are not uniform among different species. Toothed whales, such as sperm whales and dolphins, produce short sequences of clicks and whistles known as ‘codas’, by releasing a high-pressure blast of air which passes through a vibrating structure in their nose known as ‘phonic lips’.
In the case of sperm whales, these sounds are one the loudest single-source noises on Earth, reaching 200dB – equal to the 1967 launch of the Saturn V space rocket, and loud enough to burst a human eardrum – and help with echolocating and hunting prey in the deep, dark depths.
In contrast, the melodic songs of baleen whales such as humpbacks are produced as air passes from their lungs and through a U-shaped fold of tissue, causing it to vibrate. The resulting sound then resonates in an inflatable organ called the laryngeal sac.
Speaking to scientists?
Communicating with these highly vocal and social marine mammals has been a long-held pipe dream of scientists – one that has historically attracted some eccentric personalities.
Most notable is American neuroscientist John Lilly, who in the late 1950s established the Communications Research Institute (CRI) on the shores of Nazareth Bay, on the eastern side of the island of St. Thomas, in the Caribbean Sea.
Up until that point, Lilly had conducted most of his pioneering – albeit highly unethical –research into brain function, behaviour and consciousness using monkeys and cats as experimental subjects. He had been interested in studying cetaceans since 1949, when he and two colleagues extracted the brain of a pilot whale which had fatally beached in Maine; its large size, he believed, indicated a high degree of cognitive complexity, equal to – or perhaps greater than – our own.
Lilly’s interest deepened throughout the 1950s when he made several visits to Marine Studios, an oceanarium in Florida, to conduct experiments on some of the bottlenose dolphins held captive there and heard for the first time their complex vocalisations.
These experiments proved fatal for many dolphins. But they proved life changing for Lilly, inspiring him to build “the world’s first laboratory devoted to the study of the intellectual capacities of the small, toothed whales,” as he wrote in 1959 to a friend at NASA, which soon thereafter provided funding for the CRI in the
Shane Gero and team in Dominica.
hope that its research would help lay the foundations for communicating with extra-terrestrial intelligence.
As well as studying the creaks, clicks and whistles of the captive dolphins at the CRI –which, in Lilly’s mind constituted a language he termed “dolphinese” – the research program at St. Thomas was aimed at teaching these animals a human language: “a primitive version of English,” as Lilly wrote in his 1961 bestselling book, Man and Dolphin
This would require, Lilly reasoned, “constant and continuous attention and awareness of detail”. Therefore, one of his assistants, Margaret Howe, lived full time with a dolphin named Peter on the flooded and waterproofed second floor of the building, attempting to teach him basic words and phrases. Over time, Peter managed to produce sounds that bore some resemblance to English words (much like some parrots can) in exchange for fish treats but made little other progress.
These meagre results contributed to the CRI – and, by extension, Lilly – losing its scientific credibility and much of its funding. This decline rapidly accelerated when reports emerged that Lilly had dosed his captive dolphins with LSD to hopefully help them learn human language skills – and that Howe had manually relieved Peter of his sexual desires, which were becoming increasingly disruptive to the institute’s interspecies communication work.
By the end of the 1960s, the CRI had closed down. But Lilly continued his quest to communicate with cetaceans all the way up until his death in 2001, believing that the benefits of succeeding would be extraordinary.
As he wrote in 1978, “Let us learn to communicate with the ancient macrobiocomputers of the Cetacea and learn something of the complexities of their computational capacities. Such communication may enrich our lives beyond anything that we have heretofore conceived and may open up possibilities for the future evolution of man beyond his present limits.”
Whale phonetics
Founded in 2020, the Cetacean Translation Initiative – Project CETI, for short – agrees with Lilly about the huge worth in learning to communicate with cetaceans. But it has taken a very different approach in its quest to achieve this.
Instead of using hallucinogenic drugs on captive whales and trying to teach them English, it is using the combined skills and experience of biologists, linguists, cryptographers, acoustic engineers, roboticists, computer scientists and
artificial intelligence experts to try to understand their ancient communication systems.
Gero is the lead biologist on the project, and earlier this year he co-authored a study which he believes marks a significant step towards breaking the interspecies communication barrier.
Published in Nature Communications, the study sought to shed new light on the communication system of sperm whales and was based on more than 8,700 sperm whale codas.
This enormous dataset had been collected as part of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project between 2005 and 2018 using towed listening devices plus sound tags placed on individual animals.
Analysing it manually – by trawling through reams of printed spectrograms, as scientists once had to do – was practically impossible. Instead, Pratyusha Sharma, a PhD student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT and the lead author of the study, used a combination of statistical and machine learning methods to look for patterns and features within the whales’ click sequences.
This proved ground-breaking. It revealed, firstly, that sperm whales make fine-grained adjustments to their codas depending on the conversational context, such as adding an extra click – “kind of like a suffix”, explains Sharma –or varying the duration of their calls.
Statistical and machine learning methods look for patterns within the whales’ click sequences.”
Secondly, the analysis found that the whales freely combine these variations to construct a repertoire of distinct vocalisations far larger than was previously believed. “And the interesting thing about combinatorial communication systems like this one is that there are not that many examples of it in the world,” Sharma says. One of the only other examples is human language. “We have alphabets that combine to form words and words that combine to form sentences, and that’s how we can use finite sounds to like express infinite meanings.”
The researchers catalogued these newly discovered variations into what they called a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” – like the International Phonetic Alphabet for human languages – which they believe provides a foundation for future research into the semantics of whale calls.
Acoustic exchanges
Key to the next stage of research are what are known as “interactive playback experiments”, which are already being conducted with some other whale species.
Most notably, in November 2023 a team of researchers from the SETI Institute, University of California Davis and the Alaska Whale Foundation, published the results of an interactive playback experiment they conducted with an adult female humpback whale named ‘Twain’ in southeast Alaska two years’ earlier.
The experiment involved broadcasting via an underwater speaker a high-quality contact call, known as a “whup” call, which had been recorded the previous day from a group of nine humpbacks. This attracted the attention of Twain, who approached and circled the team’s boat and began responding with her own call. This “acoustic exchange”, as the researchers described it, continued for 20 minutes.
Later analysis of the recording revealed that Twain was, as the study said, “actively engaged in a type of vocal coordination [with our playback system]… she was also exhibiting changes to both arousal and valence during the encounter.”
According to the study’s lead author, Dr Brenda McCowan, this marked an unprecedented step in interspecies communication research. “We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in the humpback ‘language’.”
Uncertain understanding
Not everyone agrees with the findings to date. There’s some contention among scientists about the significance of these recent studies with sperm and humpback whales, as well as about the possibility of interspecies communication more broadly.
In fact, when I ask Rebecca Dunlop – an associate professor in physiology at the University of Queensland who has been researching humpback bioacoustics for over two decades – if she thinks that we are on the cusp of being able to communicate with cetaceans, she chuckles and says bluntly, “nope”.
Dunlop acknowledges that interactive playback experiments can help determine the function of whale calls. But she dismisses the idea that scientists are in some way conversing with a whale if they broadcast a call and receive an engaged response, as happened with Twain. To claim this implies that “the whale heard them and then decided to say something back, like
there was some cognitive decision making going on, which I think is a bit of a stretch.”
Instead, she sees the interactive playback experiment with Twain as demonstrating “an animal responding to a sound, as it’s preprogrammed to do”.
Dunlop is also sceptical of some of the claims made by the Project CETI team in their paper about a sperm whale phonetic alphabet. While she accepts that sperm whales’ clicks are very complex, she doesn’t believe that they can be equated to human language.
“Humans have evolved language with syntax, and we can change the meaning of a sentence by just putting words in a different order. How we use language is highly, highly complex, and other animals – as far as we know – are nowhere near that level complexity. They can use sounds to mean certain things. But to say that that’s a language is I think one step too far.”
A breaching humpback whale in Alaska.
Dr Jenny Allen – a biologist from the BioTelemetry and Behavioural Ecology Lab in the Department of Ocean Sciences at the University of California with more than 15 years’ experience researching humpback whales – has other criticisms.
There is, Allen says, “tremendous value” in conducting interactive playback experiments, adding that scientists have been conducting them with birds “for ages”. But to frame the one conducted with Twain as a kind of primitive conversation between humans and a whale makes the mistake of “pushing these animals through a human shaped hole”.
“Animals communicate to each other in such a variety of ways that are so different to what we know.”
Allen is also critical of how the Project CETI team characterised sperm whale vocalisations, noting that while the previously undiscovered features are “really fascinating”, the idea of a phonetic alphabet is “beyond the scope of the study”.
“We don’t make any claim that this formal communication system of sperm whales is like human language.
“It means that each individual component doesn’t have a meaning. And we can’t really say sperm whale codas by themselves have no meaning.”
Speaking more generally about the quest to translate whale vocalisations and talk with them, she says, “I worry that we’re so busy looking for signs that point to other animals being like us, rather than looking at the similarities that we do find and asking, ‘What does it mean for that species? What does it say about evolution?’”
But Josephine Hubbard, postdoctoral researcher in the Animal Behaviour Graduate Group at the University of California Davis who co-authored the study involving Twain, says that her team was “careful not to anthropomorphize our interpretation of the data, which is why we were very strict in how we define a communicative exchange.” She also emphasises that there is “robust evidence” the female humpback was engaged during the experiment.
“And we can debate about whether it was a conversation or not, but I think what’s worth highlighting is the fact that we are using and trying to promote these interactive playbacks.”
Likewise, Pratyusha Sharma of the Project CETI group disagrees with the criticisms levelled at the study she led. “We don’t make any claim that this formal communication system of sperm whales is like human language. But there are aspects of it that are similar.”
She also points out that the word ‘alphabet’ is widely used by scientists to characterise many complex structures, including DNA, and cites the example of the hieroglyphs to point out that in some alphabets, even the smallest units do indeed carry meaning.
Adding to this response, Gero insists that the Project CETI team isn’t “trying create a hierarchy which ends in humans. But I do think that we’re at a stage now where we can ask more detailed questions about animal communication.”
More broadly, he believes all of us should keep an open mind about the intellectual capacity of nonhuman species. “I think we do a disservice to whales if we assume they have some kind of stimulus-output quality, when we know that they have a brain that rivals ours at least in terms of the capacity for cognition.”
The desire to communicate
Many books have been written over the years that envision what it would be like if humans could communicate with other animals. Laura Jean McKay’s science fiction masterwork, The Animals in that Country, in which a new virus emerges whose chief symptom is that its victims are able to understand what animals are saying, is one the wildest examples to date.
If science fiction does indeed one day become science and we manage to understand whales and how to communicate with them, I wonder what we might say?
I ask Sharma this question. After a few moments of trying to find an answer, she says, “You know, I would not say anything. I would just want to listen and hear everything they have to say about their world.”
Gero, likewise, sees Project CETI as being a “listening project” – which will hopefully enable us to better understand what’s important to whales and thus help conserve them.
“I feel very strongly as a scientist and just someone who spent a huge amount of time with these whales that we need to do excellent science and ask what’s going on in their world. But then, importantly, we also need to deliver on that and ask ourselves, ‘Well, what are we going to do about it?’”
DREW ROOKE is based in Sydney. His story on cures from the deep appeared last issue.
READYFORLAUNCH
Why would anyone wanttolauncharocket from Australia? Becausetheycan,reports Jamie Seidel. AndAustralia’spioneerlaunch providers say there are somesurprisingbenefts.
Putting a commercial satellite into orbit isn’t a problem in Europe. You can’t yet. It’s easier in the United States. But you’ll have to wait. For Australia, it’s a matter of navigating new legal and legislative territory.
It’s about guaranteeing people on the ground are at no greater than the one-in-10-million risk of death presented by an overflying aircraft or passing fuel truck.
Once that path is beaten down and the Australian Space Agency (ASA) regulatory body is ready to go, Australia’s launch startups believe they can throttle up.
It’s not just about launching rockets. It’s about the satellites these rockets carry.
Mostly, it’s about putting those satellites where they’re needed when they’re needed. Reliably. With a minimum of costly fuss. It’s called direct orbital delivery. And it’s difficult –and expensive – to do from the world’s handful of established launch sites.
They are already very busy. Worse, they’re in very busy places. And their limited number of commercial services offload at a restricted list of destinations.
But many smaller low-Earth orbit satellites need a far more personalised taxi service. And those taxis need suitable cab ranks.
South Australia’s Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex, the Northern Territory’s Arnhem Space Centre, and Queensland’s Bowen Orbital Spaceport (along with Gilmour Space’s 25m-tall Eris rocket) are counting on it.
“Our first homegrown rocket is poised for launch,” says Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA) Chief Executive Officer Michael Jones. “We’ve got requests for launch queuing up. How this all evolves and plays out over the next 12 months will set the pace of things to come.”
Getting off the ground
“The rocket manufacturers we’re currently attracting to the site are akin to an Uber or taxi service,” says Southern Launch Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Damp. “These will never displace the bus service, the trains, or anything like that. But they provide a necessary niche service to the market.”
Australian orbital rocket developer Gilmour Space wants to offer just such a ride. From its own Queensland launch facility.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Adam Gilmour says it’s a fundamental matter of supply and demand.
“Producing a rocket that works is very, very important because there are so few rockets going to orbit anywhere in the world,” he tells Cosmos “But if you have that rocket – you also need somewhere that will let you launch in as wide a variety of directions as possible.”
Adelaide-based Southern Launch may have been the first Australian launch company to have a fuelled rocket ready on its Whalers Way pad (near Port Lincoln) in 2021. But teething problems with the prototype Taiwanese Hapith (Flying Squirrel) kept it on the ground.
“The small rockets that want to launch from our sites carry a couple of satellites into very specific, very detailed orbits. And they need to be ready to go when those satellites are ready to go,” says Damp.
ELA took the honour of being Australia’s first commercial spaceport to get into (sub)orbit. NASA fired three experimental rockets from the Arnhem Land facility’s first pad in June and July 2022.
Jones says he expects a launch to orbit by the middle of 2025. “We actually have nine launches tentatively booked from June next year through to March 2026,” he says. “After that, once they’re established at the site, the only holdup will be how quickly they can build their rockets.”
Gilmour Space says it is ready to test its Australianmade Eris orbital vehicle from its personal
LaunchTopleft:Equatorial Australia TopCEOMichaelJones. Launchright:Southern CEOLloyd SR75DampwiththeGerman soundingsub-orbital(test)rocketKoonibbalaunchedfromtheTestRangein CoastSouthAustralia’sFarWestOrbitalQueensland’sOppositeinMay.page:Bowen Spaceport(along25m-tallwithGilmourSpace’s Erisrocket).
launch pad once it gets Australian Space Agency approval to do so.
“All of us would say they need to do it faster and more efficiently,” says Gilmour. “Our hope is that this is the early stage where everyone’s learning. We hope from here on it goes a lot quicker and easier.”
Time (and weight) is money
Launching a rocket carrying hundreds or thousands of tonnes of fuel over population centres is out of the question. And air and shipping lanes are increasingly congested. These must be halted every time a rocket’s launch window opens. There are three solutions.
One is for the launch rocket to change course mid-flight. “When you’re travelling at 7,000m per second in one direction, it’s not like turning a steering wheel,” says Damp. “The only way a rocket can do this is to thrust in a different direction. That means burning extra fuel that could have been paying cargo. Even changing course a couple of degrees can cost you 10, 20, 30 per cent of your payload mass.”
The second is to add bigger thrusters, more fuel and navigational computers to the satellites themselves. This either increases their size and weight (and thus launch cost) or deducts from the mission payload.
“They’ve had all these sunk costs upfront just to build the satellite,” explains Jones. “But
PLAY VIDEO
every time they fire a thruster, they shorten its life. And they’re earning no revenue for the six to 11 months it takes to move into position. So the underlying economics are pretty horrible.”
The third is to find a launch facility that will allow a rocket to deliver a satellite exactly where it needs to go. It won’t have to change orbital lanes. It won’t need the thrust and fuel to do so. That makes it more productive. And it can start earning much sooner.
Market forces
“Elon Musk, with his SpaceX, is changing the world, but he’s made it all look too easy,” Jones tells Cosmos from his Adelaide headquarters. “We forget the complexity of what he does, of how hard it actually is.”
Musk is launching more satellites, faster and cheaper than ever before. But it’s not enough.
The July launch of SpaceX Transporter-11 is its 11th dedicated commercial satellite delivery service since 2021.
How far ahead do you have to book? “The answer is four years,” says Jones. “And it’s like airline ticketing. Price per kilo increases for anybody running late.”
The service is unashamedly economy class. “If you launch on SpaceX, it’s cheap,” adds Jones. “But you get spat out in a daisy chain with everybody else in an orbit that suits SpaceX.”
It can take ground stations considerable time to single one satellite’s signal out from among the crowd. And a disturbingly high number inexplicably never phone home.
“You don’t see the same thing on a smaller rocket because you’re just not putting out the same amount of satellites,” says Gilmour.
Australia’s launch providers believe they can pair satellite operators with rocket providers and get them into space far faster than the wait for a seat aboard SpaceX’s next available lift.
The rockets are ready, Gilmour says. The launchpads are ready. Impatient satellite operators are knocking on doors.
“In the Western world, there’s probably only two rockets that go up more than four times a year,” he explains. “And they’re both in America. That’s why we’re in this race right now.”
Right place, right time
“A lot of the companies we talked to all around the world don’t want to go where SpaceX is going,” says Gilmour. “And from our orbital spaceport, we can directly go to most places they want to go.”
He explains that the Abbot Point launch facility for the Eris rocket was chosen because of the lack of nearby islands. Open water means less risk.
Likewise, the expanse of the Southern Ocean offers a broad swathe of open skies from South Australia’s Whalers Way. And the (relatively) nearby Koonibba Test Range on the Nullarbor Plain provides a 350km-long, 41,000km 2 desert landing zone.
“Where Cape Canaveral is fantastic is that it has a lot of really skilled individuals who have done space launches many, many times,” says Damp. “But there’s a hell of a lot of boats and aircraft and all the rat race going on around Florida.
Likewise, Vandenberg is just north of Los Angeles International Airport, not to mention the maritime traffic. We don’t have that problem here.”
ELA’s Jones says the Arnhem Space Centre Top:ELAArnhem
benefits from Australia’s geography in several ways. Being close to the equator can give rockets a fuel-saving slingshot-like boost on their way to orbit. But the sparsely populated Northern Territory is another.
“We’re not a one-trick pony,” Jones adds. “One of the massive benefits for us is that we can launch to the southwest – so we’ve got over 110 degrees of sky open to us. You can travel over land for nearly 4,000km here and not fly over a human. You can’t do that anywhere else.”
his Arnhem Land launch site piggybacks the shipping port, roads, airport and town built nearby by Australia’s long-established mining industry.
While the very remoteness of places like Whalers Way makes regular direct orbital insertion possible, Damp argues Australia’s first-world infrastructure makes it economically viable.
“A lot of rockets can be containerised. A lot of fuels can be transported as if they were standard cargo. And if you can get the economy of scale offered by a series of launches over a couple of months, it’s cost-effective to bring out a large contingent of people.”
Staff can catch regular commercial flights. Their equipment can be carried over existing trucking routes on good roads already delivering direct to remote communities.
The emerging space industry is on the brink of becoming far more than anyone expected, believes Damp.
OFAVAILABLEORBITALINSERTIONTRAJECTORIES.” “WE’RESEEKINGAPPROVALSTO OFFER A ROLODEX
It’s all about managing risk.
“We’re seeking approvals to offer a rolodex of available orbital insertion trajectories,” says Gilmour. “We’re not there yet. The [Australian Space] Agency does a huge amount of due diligence on every single trajectory.”
All aspects of each operation are put under the microscope. What’s it carrying? What will it fly over? When and where will it start dropping booster stages, the faring doors, and the batteries? And how wrong can things go?
“It’s only hard because it’s possible”, explains Jones. “The number of checks is way more because it only requires a cursory review to go: ‘You can’t do this’. But to ensure that you can do it with optimal safety requires an order of magnitude more checking.”
Turning around the tyranny of distance
“We have a geographical, geopolitical, economic and technical advantage out of Australia, but we also have some disadvantages,” says Jones. “Australia is a long way from everywhere.” But
We could make zero-gravity forged silicon wafers pure enough for use in quantum computing. Exotic chemicals that bond in ways only space can produce. Rapidgrowth cancer samples for on-Earth diagnosis…
“Ultimately, we want Australia to step up to the ability to take these exotic materials produced in orbit and use them in local industry.”
All such specialist services, however, are time-sensitive.
“These guys are on deadlines,” says Jones. “We mandate that we be contracted 13 months before the planned launch date because there is so much to be done. If it isn’t, they won’t be able to launch. That’s how long it takes to get an Australian launch permit.”
And that, adds Gilmour, is Australia’s last big hurdle: “If it takes too long to approve our launches, we lose all the competitive advantages we have just mentioned.”
JAMIE SEIDEL is a freelance journalist based in Adelaide.
Brain organoids under the microscope.
GEIST
GROWING A PERSONALISED CURE
Organoids are behind groundbreaking research to cure debilitating genetic diseases.
98
SOLVING LIFE’S ORIGAMI
Google’s AlphaFold program could be a gamechanger for protein researchers.
102 DEAD AIR
Breathing is a fundamental part of life. But how much do you know about the dangers of air?
106
THE DAILY GRIND
Grinding offers safer chemical reactions with lower environmental impact.
110 PUZZLES
Science-inspired brain bogglers.
112
CURIOSITY CORNER
Fun challenges and facts to share with kids.
114
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Nanotube storage, artificial hearts and groundcherries.
GROWING A PERSONALISED CURE
A five-year-old’s brains are behind groundbreaking research to cure debilitating genetic diseases in children. Denise Cullen explores the frontier of personalised medicine.
Open the incubator door in a locked laboratory on the fourth floor of the University of Queensland’s Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) and you’ll find hundreds of tiny ‘brains’ belonging to a five-year-old girl called Tallulah Moon.
Nestled in rows of petri dishes, and ensconced in a solution containing salts, sugars, vitamins and growth factors, each one is barely the size of a grain of raw couscous.
Although they’re tiny, they sleep and dream, grow and change, develop new synaptic connections and prune old ones, and display the same alpha, beta and gamma waves as would any living human if you were to hook them up to an electroencephalogram (EEG).
Though researchers refer to them colloquially as ‘mini brains’, Senior Research Fellow with the AIBN, Hannah Leeson, admits this is a bit of a misnomer.
“These are cortical organoids, they don’t have a mid or hindbrain, and there’s no cerebellum,” she says.
More correctly, they are brain organoids – miniature, simplified parts of the cortical brain which have been grown in vitro from stem cells.
They can mimic the structure and function of a real brain, but on a much smaller scale.
Below: Organoids displaying cell division.
Bottom: Neural stem cells in a brain organoid.
For five years now, Leeson has been trying to unravel the mysteries they contain, by observing their electrical activity.
They were created using skin cells from Tallulah, then aged three, after she was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease called Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia Type 56 (SPG56).
The degenerative condition causes progressive weakness and spasticity (stiffness) of the lower limbs and arose due to a mutation in just one of Tallulah’s 30,000 genes –the CYP2U1 gene.
SPG56 is typically inherited in an autosomal recessive manner, meaning that Tallulah inherited two copies of the mutated gene, one from each of her parents, to manifest the disease. Her older brother is perfectly healthy.
The nightmare for Chris and Golden Whitrod, Tallulah’s parents, started in 2020, when she was 14 months old.
Within months, the bright-eyed toddler had reverted to crawling and, soon after, Tallulah could no longer talk or even hold up her head.
“When she started to choke on food and drink, we hurled ourselves into all-consuming state of terror and the hurried referrals for neurologists, blood tests, MRIs and nerve conduction studies could not come quickly enough,” says Golden, in a statement on the family’s Our Moon’s Mission website.
After months of medical investigations, Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) mapped
every gene in Tallulah’s body and identified the disease-causing mutation.
The devastating news was that there was no treatment and no cure.
In August 2021 the Moon family established a charitable foundation called Genetic Cures for Kids, with its first mission being to find a cure for SPG56.
Chris and Golden met with researchers at AIBN in 2021 to plot the route forward.
Animal models were unlikely to yield answers, says AIBN Senior Group Leader Ernst Wolvetang.
“The mouse model (of this disease) was happy as Larry, just walking round, doing his thing, even though it was missing the same gene as these kids who are ending up in wheelchairs and getting desperately sick,” he explains.
“For diseases affecting the brain, mouse models just don’t recapitulate the disease effectively.”
Researchers’ attention then turned to investigating how the mutation caused its effects and how gene therapy might ameliorate them.
THE GENE THERAPY APPROACH
Leeson began by taking a sample of skin cells from Tallulah via a simple skin punch.
She then used the ground-breaking process called induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) reprogramming to revert these cells to a pluripotent state. In this state, they held the potential to develop into any cell type in the body, including the brain.
She took the same samples for Tallulah’s parents, who were used as controls. Leeson estimates she has created around 800 brain organoids each from Tallulah, Chris and Golden. At the time of writing, Leeson was in the process of creating hundreds more.
Then, by carefully observing and comparing the brain organoids through multiomic analyses (which combine data from genomics, transcriptomics, epigenetics, and proteomics) and by
Top: Whitrod Family and Ernst Wolvetang.
Above: Tiny ‘brains’ have the potential to unlock gene therapy treatments.
measuring the neuronal activity via multielectrode array, she sought to identify something that stood out about the disease.
“I was looking for differences that were specific to the patient, because if you see a difference somewhere, then you’ve got something you can measure when it comes to looking for a treatment,” Leeson explains.
It emerged that Tallulah’s mutated CYP2U1 gene metabolised glucose differently. Leeson also observed changes in fatty acid levels, which are crucial for healthy brain function.
“Normally, you get your sugar molecules and then that feeds into the citric acid cycle and that makes your adenosine triphosphate (ATP),” she explains.
ATP is a crucial molecule in cellular metabolism which acts as the primary energy provider.
“These cells don’t seem to follow that same mechanism.”
It took two years of investigation to slot these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into place – but many unknowns remain.
“We haven’t figured out exactly how CYP2U1 controls these processes, or why this causes spastic paraplegia. But now we have something to work with – we have things that are different in patients, compared to controls.”
HOW COMMON ARE RARE DISEASES?
SPG56 is just one of around 7,000 rare diseases – life-threatening or chronically debilitating conditions that affect a small percentage of the population.
In Australia, a disease is considered rare if it affects less than 5 in 10,000 people, according to the federal Department of Health and Aged Care.
Besides SPG56, there are other forms of hereditary spastic paraplegia. Combined, they’re still so rare that there are only 0.1–9.6 instances in every 100,000 people around the world and the majority are children.
As with other rare diseases, correct diagnosis can take time because these conditions are complex, doctors don’t see them frequently enough, and they require genome sequencing before a mutation can be identified.
Meanwhile, there’s minimal appetite among big pharmaceutical companies to sink funds into research. Their investment won’t be recouped because of the small number of people who will benefit from the product developed.
And even if Big Pharma was willing, Wolvetang points out practical problems associated with researching rare diseases.
“Clinical trials are not even possible because there’s only five kids in Australia that have this disease,” he says. (Tallulah is, in fact, the only known child in Australia with SPG56.)
“A clinical trial with controls and the double-blind placebo crossover design? You can forget it.”
Above: Mohita Singh (left) and Hannah Leeson (right).
Below: Self-organised axial organoid.
Bottom: Choroid plexus cortical organoid.
Collectively, however, it’s estimated that 8% of Australians live with a rare disease, making them surprisingly prevalent.
Given that four in five rare diseases are genetic, it’s anticipated that rapidly developing gene therapies will provide hope not just to people with SPG56 but many other rare diseases.
Gene therapy highlights the modern march towards personalised medicine, which focuses on individual differences in genetics, environment and lifestyle to tailor diagnostics, treatment and preventive strategies.
As such, it inverts the traditional ‘one size fits all’ approach to medical research and treatment, perhaps best exemplified by the race to mass vaccinate the planet against COVID-19.
DEVELOPING A TROJAN HORSE
With the differences in metabolism and electrical activity between Tallulah’s brain organoids and those of her parents identified, the next step is delivering the functioning gene to replace the faulty one.
“The problem is that it’s very difficult to test this in humans, because you only get one shot at it,” says Wolvetang.
The functioning gene is delivered via a viral vector – a common adeno-associated virus (AAV) – which has been gutted and replaced with desirable genes.
ORGANOIDS HELP PAVE THE WAY TOWARDS PERSONALISED MEDICINE
BRAIN ORGANOIDS
can be used to model neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and motor neurone diseases; and to test neurotoxic drugs. At AIBN, studies are underway using brain organoids cultivated from people with drugresistant epilepsy.
LIVER ORGANOIDS
provide a useful way to study liver diseases such as hepatitis and cirrhosis and to test drug metabolism and toxicity. A Curtin Universityled project is using them to study liver cancer to better understand disease mechanisms and develop new treatments.
“It’s like a Trojan horse,” says Wolvetang. This is because the AAV is used to ‘sneak’ the correct copy of the gene into the cells.
The vector is placed in the solution surrounding the brain organoid – the laboratory equivalent to delivering drugs via cerebrospinal fluid.
In 2023 Leeson and a student assistant, Mohita Singh, conducted a series of assays, to ensure that there were no toxic impacts upon the brain organoids.
They’ll soon find out how effective introducing the functioning gene will be.
“We know it’s not going to be toxic, but will replacing this gene actually fix the problem?” Leeson asks.
“Are we delivering enough (of the gene therapy)? Are we getting it into enough cells?”
Another outstanding question is whether the deleterious effects of SPG56 can be rewound, or whether the gene therapy needs to be introduced before a critical period of development.
“Tallulah’s five, and I don’t have five-year-old brain organoids, so I’m not really going to be able to answer questions like that,” says Leeson.
“There is a factor of the unknown, when we eventually make it to the stage of putting (the gene therapy) into Tallulah, which we anticipate will be next year.”
Intensive physiotherapy is credited with preserving some of Tallulah’s muscle function against the ravages of SPG56, but even still, she
INTESTINAL ORGANOIDS
can be used to model intestinal diseases and test oral drugs. University of Otago researchers are using intestinal organoids to explore inflammatory bowel diseases, which can be caused by various gene mutations.
LUNG ORGANOIDS
are helping researchers at the University of Sydney explore the effects of silica dust or air pollutants, while diseased lung organoids that mirror obstructive pulmonary disease are being used to test drug effectiveness.
currently uses a wheelchair, and it’s unknown whether gene therapy will change her condition significantly.
Leeson hopes it will, and she speaks about Tallulah with obvious affection.
“She zooms around in her wheelchair and thinks it’s funny to sneak up behind people and bang you in the ankles, like playing tag,” Leeson says.
ENTERING THE UNKNOWN
With hopes riding high, there are no guarantees of success.
Even though gene therapies have already been used to treat a range of different diseases, Tallulah’s treatment represents the first to be tested in brain organoids – and that creates uncertainty.
“We don’t know if a brain organoid is going to respond the same way a patient does,” says Leeson.
Weighed against these considerations is the tantalising possibility of seeing the therapy change lives.
“There’s so much we don’t know,” says Leeson, “but this work could change people’s lives – and that’s both exciting and important.”
DENISE CULLEN is based in Brisbane. Her story on 4D printing appeared last issue.
Solvinglife’sorigami problemstructureTheprotein
The artificial intelligence program AlphaFold is proving to be a gamechanger for biological research, Imma Perfetto reports.
Aprotein is made from of a chain of amino acids strung together like beads on a necklace. This chain spontaneously folds, like origami, into intricate pleats, folds, and loops through interactions between its amino acids. The resulting unique 3D structure largely determines its vital function within the lifeform. Solving the structure allows biologists to better understand how the protein works and design experiments to affect and modify it.
The smallest known protein, TAL, influences development of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and has just 11 amino acids. The largest, Titin, is found in human muscle cells and is made up of roughly 35,000.
Proteins are far too tiny to inspect under a regular microscope. For decades researchers used complex experimental techniques, such as X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, and cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to solve their structures. It’s painstaking, time-consuming work that takes specialised skill and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, as Kate Michie can attest, success is not always guaranteed.
“I spent four years trying to solve the crystal structure of a complex of two human proteins and got scooped. You know, I got nothing out of four years. I worked really hard at it, and it was a really difficult project. AlphaFold can calculate those in a few hours,” says Michie, who is chief scientist of the Structural Biology Facility at the Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre, of the University of New South Wales Sydney.
On 8 May 2024 Nature dropped a paper introducing the third and latest iteration of the artificial intelligence (AI) system AlphaFold, which predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, both subsidiaries of Alphabet, co-developed the new model. They say AlphaFold 3 (AF3) is “a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy”. But, while AF3 has generated significant interest since its release, it has simultaneously sparked criticism among those in the scientific community.
Let’s take a closer look at how AI is changing the world of structural biology.
A revolution in protein structure
AF3’s predecessor, AlphaFold 2, was released as open source code in July 2021 and immediately changed the game in structural biology.
Above: A test case of solving a small protein in AlphaFold 2 prespore-specific protein A (PspA) from Dictyostelium discoideum, a species of soildwelling amoeba commonly referred to as slime mould. Its structure has not yet been submitted to the Protein Data Bank.
Opposite page: AlphaFold 3 output of a protein sequence isolated from an archaean (singlecelled organism) from stromatolites in Shark Bay, Western Australia.
“I contacted the high-performance computation people and said, ‘we really need to get this piece of code running’. And then I asked my colleague, ‘Do you have any structures that you never submitted to the Protein Data Bank?’” says Michie.
The Protein Data Bank (PDB) is the global archive of all the experimentally solved structures for large biological molecules. As of June 2024, its estimated to include more than 220,000 proteins, which sounds like a lot until you consider the number of proteins we know of exceeds 200 million.
“My colleague sent me a sequence of a small protein he never submitted to the PDB, I ran it, and I just sent him the result. His email response to me was: ‘My mind is blown!’ And he said, ‘I immediately thought someone else must have solved the structure.’”
But they hadn’t, AF2 had accurately predicted the 3D structure of the protein from its amino acid sequence alone. What had taken years to describe experimentally had been done in just a few hours.
AF2 is a deep learning algorithm. In the world of AI that means it simulates the neural networks found in human brains. First, it takes the protein sequence of interest and searches several databases for similar proteins. By comparing these sequences, it can identify areas of similarity and difference to understand how the protein has changed across evolution.
For instance, if two amino acids are in close contact in 3D space then a mutation in one will usually be accompanied by a mutation in the other (to conserve the structure of the protein). But if they are far apart then they tend to evolve independently from each other. Using this to work out the relative positions of the amino acids, AF2 then takes its training on PDB structural data and iteratively constructs a 3D model of the protein’s structure with relatively high accuracy.
Scientists can take advantage of that predicted structure to accelerate their science by doing smarter, more strategic experiments in the laboratory right off the bat. “I’ve done work with some scientists working with immune complexes, and the models coming out of AlphaFold enable them to really trim down the number of animal experiments they do,” says Michie. “So instead of making say 20 CRISPR mice, they only might make two.”
Crystal clues
An accurate AlphaFold structure can also be the crucial missing piece of the puzzle that allows researchers to experimentally solve the structure using X-ray crystallography.
“One of my other colleagues is virologist and he’d been working on a protein that had eluded structural elucidation for 20–30 years. It was from the world’s first known retrovirus,” says Michie.
“The trick of crystallography is you need to know two components of the maths to solve them,” she continues. The diffraction data provided by X-ray crystallography gives you one of those components, but you don’t have the other: the phase.
Traditional methods of obtaining phase information had proved unsuccessful, until Michie suggested using AlphaFold instead.
“Immediately the structure came out. AlphaFold helped him get the crystals but then actually enabled him to phase the structure. It told us that the Alpha Fold model was very good, but it also fixed up this problem in structural biology.”
To Michie, AlphaFold represents a massive step forward: “it’s genuinely the biggest scientific advance in my career”.
Predicting the structures of life’s molecules
Proteins don’t exist in a vacuum. They move around, bind to and modify each other, and even form large, complicated complexes.
Peter Czabotar, joint head of the Structural Biology Division at WEHI, the oldest medical research institute in Australia, says one of the early limitations of AF2 was you could only ever get structural predictions of one protein, alone. “Often what you’re interested in is how different proteins will interact with each other. For example, we work on proteins that are involved with cell death and the interactions between those proteins will dic-
The gap has since been bridged by other research groups adapting and building upon AF2’s open source code, and with the AlphaFold-Multimer extension in October 2021.
As seen in AlphaFold 3, a structural prediction of Fos and Jun transcription factors with the DNA sequence they bind. The top panel shows the model and confidence data, and the green chart shows the high confidence of them binding to each other.
The newest version, AF3, extends upon this capability by predicting interactions of multiple proteins, and nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). It can predict the impact of ions and post-translational modifications – the addition of chemical groups to amino acids – on these molecular systems too. AF3 can also be used to predict how a selection of small molecules called ligands bind to proteins, though this is restricted to ligands that have high-quality experimental data available in the PDB.
“But where the real power is, something that we do a lot of, is in the drug discovery world,” says Czabotar. “And it is extremely powerful for that, potentially, but they haven’t enabled that in the way that it’s released. We’ve done drug discovery against cell death proteins, for example. I can’t take one of the drugs that we’ve worked with and see how it interacts with my target protein, I can only use the [ligands] that they’ve enabled us to use.”
That capability to predict the structure of novel drug molecules interacting with target proteins seems to be restricted to Isomorphic Labs, which was launched in 2021 to pursue commercial drug discovery.
AF3 uses a very different approach for this new suit of predictions: generative AI. After pro cessing the sequence inputs, it assembles its pre dictions using a diffusion network, the likes of which power AI image generators. According to Isomorphic Labs’ website: “the diffusion process starts with a cloud of atoms, and over many steps converges on its final, most accurate molecular structure”. Diffusion has been applied to protein structure prediction before, for example, in the seminal RoseTTAFold diffusion (RFdiffusion) by the Baker Laboratory at the Institute for Protein Design, the University of Washington.
But generative AI is not without its limita tions. AF3 will occasionally produce structures with overlapping atoms (this is physically impossible) or replace a detail of the structure with its mirror image (chemically impossible).
As a generative model, it is also prone to halluci nations in which it invents plausible-looking structures – particularly in disordered regions of the protein that lack a stable 3D structure –similarly to how a text to image AI struggles to create realistic-looking hands. In-built confi dence measures help to identify when AF3 isn’t so sure about its structural prediction, but ulti mately it takes a scientist with understanding of the underlying structural biology to come along and identify what’s gone wrong, and why.
“It’s very, very powerful. But it doesn’t exclude the need to necessarily confirm things experimentally. Whether that is by solving structures themselves or by, for example, testing the structures in some way in an experiment,” says Czabotar.
Concerns about code
In a major departure from AF2, access to the newest iteration of AlphaFold is limited to a web server and for non-commercial research only.
“We have various structure-based drug discovery projects and some of them are purely academic, as students, PhDs and honours projects. But we also have had commercial partnerships, because that’s a way to push your discoveries into a clinical setting,” says Czabotar. “So generally, anything that is going to make an impact is done by an academic lab in a commercial partnership. Now, I guess it puts us in a bit of an awkward situation. Even if we could look at our compounds bound to the target [protein], there’s some projects where we won’t be able to do it because, you know, we’ve ticked a box.”
AF3’s accompanying Nature paper was also published without the source code, but with a ‘pseudocode’ instead – a detailed description of what the code can do and how it works. This
An AlphaFold 3 prediction of a complex of two proteins: ScpA and ScpB. The complex is important during cell division in bacteria.
Top: ScpA is cyan and ScpB is green.
Bottom: Confidence measures, where dark blue is very high confidence, light blue is confident, yellow is low confidence, and orange is very low confidence in the structural prediction.
prompted an open letter to the Editors of Nature, published 16 May and endorsed by more than 1,000 scientists as of June. The letter raised concerns that “the absence of available code compromises peer review” and that the pseudocode released would “require months of effort to turn into workable code that approximates the performance, wasting valuable time and resources”. Access to the web server was also initially capped at 10 predictions per day, which the letter stated, “restricts the scientific community’s capacity to verify the broad claims of the findings or apply the predictions on a large scale”.
The sentiments appear to have hit home. Shortly after the letter’s release, DeepMind’s Vice President of research, Pushmeet Kohli announced via X that they would double the daily job limit to 20 and are “working on releasing the AF3 model (incl weights) for academic use … within 6 months”. On 22 May Nature responded in an editorial, stating its reasoning for publishing the paper without code: “the private sector funds most global research and development, and many of the results of such work are not published in peer-reviewed journals. We at Nature think it’s important that journals engage with the private sector and work with its scientists so they can submit their research for peer review and publication.”
In the meantime, other researchers won’t be sitting idly by until the code release at the end of 2024. Already, multiple teams are racing to develop their own open source versions of AlphaFold 3, without any strings attached.
IMMA PERFETTO is a journalist at Cosmos. Her story on what makes a moon appeared last issue.
Dead air
Breathing is a fundamental part of being alive. But how much do you really know about the air you breathe? Matthew Ward Agius pulls unseen killer particles out of thin air.
Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Just a fifth of a lungful of air is life-giving oxygen. The rest? It’s about four-fifths nitrogen, an unreactive gas that goes into our lungs and sits around waiting to be expelled as we breathe out. Plus there’s a 0.9% skerrick of argon, an inert gas used in fluoro lights.
That said, no two huffs of air are truly alike. It’s the remaining 0.1% of air that gives a gulp its distinguishing features. Mixed with those majority gases are tiny traces of neon, carbon dioxide, water vapour and hydrogen.
This gassy mix is mostly the same anywhere on the planet. But open your car window as you drive down a busy road in peak hour? The air is likely to be noticably polluted compared to a breath riding your bike on a quiet country lane.
Air is also alive! It’s choc-full of bacteria, fungal spores and pollen, which – for better or worse – find their way into the airways of far bigger and more complex organisms like us. There are also viruses, which activate the moment they find an unassuming host.
These biological materials confer air with a deadly attribute. Bad microbes can cause disease, pollen and dust can trigger allergies. For some, this is a temporary nuisance, for others, a killer.
These are not the only ways air can kill, so health scientists around the world are sounding an alarm.
What is particulate matter?
Particulate matter is microscopic solid material. Abbreviated to PM alongside the material’s width in micrometres (PM10, PM2.5 or PM0.1), it can be made of just about anything.
PM is a catch-all term because it’s frankly impossible to classify every unique speck of floating solid.
Tiny flecks of dust and pollen – both classed as PM – are best known for exacerbating allergies, causing acute lung symptoms and, if exposure is prolonged, leading to chronic cardiovascular or respiratory issues.
There are also many chemical transformations that turn gaseous pollutants into PM. Potentially dangerous pollutants include sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other products of natural and anthropogenic combustion.
Pollution in the air
Long unseen, the hidden influence of PM, and air pollution in general, is slowly being exposed. The fact remains that 99% of the world’s people live amid air pollution that exceeds the limits outlined by the World Health Organization.
“Every breath you take, you inhale about a million particles, and we know through in silico [computational] modelling that the deposition of at least 50% of those will go into the lowest parts of our lungs,” says Martin Clift, an inhalation toxicologist at the University of Swansea, UK.
While half of these particles might make it to the extremes of lung tissue, the other half will be blocked in the nasal passage. In the nose they’ll be cleared by mucus transported up and away from the lungs, or by a good sneeze.
For particles that remain in the lungs, the body’s immune system will attempt to finish them off. “The human body’s great like that,” says Clift. “But some of them will stick around and they’ll just reside there over time.”
Particulate exposure
In November 2023, a study published in the journal Science revealed the power of particulates. It revealed that 460,000 Americans had deaths attributed to PM2.5 exposure from coal power stations between 1999 and 2020, following an analysis of US Medicare records.
Australian-led research released in March this year evaluated the impact of PM2.5 on a global scale. Led by Yuming Guo, a biostatistician at Monash University, it put about a million deaths per year globally down to short-term PM2.5 exposure.
“Many of these gases that we’re breathing in can also exchange down the concentration gradient to the lungs and enter our bloodstream,” says Jason Kovacic, a cardiologist and chief executive of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney.
Martin Clift, an inhalation toxicologist at the University of Swansea, UK.
Gases in Earth's atmosphere
“They circulate through the body, where they can have a whole range of adverse effects. There’s a whole raft of different things that we know about and there are probably effects we’re not even aware of that are going on.”
As well as the health burden, estimates show substantial financial impacts. The OECD estimates the global cost of premature death, and pain and suffering from pollution-related illness, was US$3.2 trillion in 2015, and could rise to US$18-25 trillion by 2060. The European Commission puts the cost at €1 trillion annually.
“They’re even likely to be conservative estimates,” says Kovacic, “because the true, pervasive nature of the cost of pollution is hard to quantify.”
The lung lab
Clift’s research group is trying to plug a vital gap in the practical understanding of what epidemiologists and statisticians are seeing play out in health data.
We visit a shelf in Clift’s laboratory in Wales. Here you’ll see ‘lungs-in-a-dish’: in vitro human lung cell cultures spun up by scientists at the University of Swansea. They mimic sections of the lungs with LEGO-like modularity.
These aren’t fragments of lungs from a human, but they are about as close as you can get to the real thing. Of course, subjecting a living human to a nitrogen dioxide chamber would fail the first ethical hurdle. And, as the Swansea researchers have argued, rodent models aren’t able to suitably mimic human lung function.
In one experiment, Clift’s team has dished up the lungs’ alveolar region, the place “where the air meets the blood”. Cells mimic cauliflower-like buds at the end of the lungs’ bronchiole branches. Some are designed to imitate susceptibility groups, such as those with asthma.
Yuming Guo, a biostatistician at Monash University.
The researchers expose these dish lungs to different scenarios using an aerosol machine.
“We can mimic occupational exposure in a warehouse, for example, but then we can also mirror just consumer exposure walking through the streets of London,” Clift says.
The Swansea researchers are careful to replicate particle concentrations that a set of lungs might encounter in the real world. When their models are exposed, they can see how these emulated structures respond.
“We know when we’re exposing [the lung cultures] to all of those different pollutants, or particles, or fibres, that the cell system is mimicking what would be happening in the healthy human lung. We can very much control the [particle] concentration that’s deposited, so we can relate that with what humans are actually exposed to.”
It’s hoped that subjecting these dish lungs to relevant aerosol exposures could help guide new air quality standards and policies adopted in cities around the world.
Pollution and policy
With almost everyone on the planet experiencing sub-standard air quality, some scientists see policy as the fast route to improved air.
At the forefront of efforts to communicate the risks of air pollution is physicist Lidia Morawska, a distinguished professor and director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at Queensland University of Technology.
Jason Kovacic, a cardiologist and chief executive of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney.
Morawska was recognised as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2021, thanks to her determined effort to show that SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19) was spread by aerosols, raising the importance of air quality as a health issue during the height of the pandemic.
After the World Health Organization took heed of her counsel, ventilation quickly became the buzzword for improving indoor air quality. “Our aim is clean indoor air, and it has to encompass protection against all the risk from inside, from outside, and taking into account other aspects like thermal comfort,” Morawska says.
To emphasise the importance of pollution as an issue, she relates a simple metaphor: “Imagine you are coming to a restaurant, and they give you a glass of water. That water looks murky, so you look at it with disgust and express what you think… they quickly bring you a clean glass of water. But what if they offer you bad air quality?” she asks.
When alfresco dining on a busy, high-traffic street, would you like a lungful of particulate matter with that?
Brandishing her carbon dioxide monitor, Morawska says these simple devices could be a small step towards improving how people think about air.
As well as being a pollutant, carbon dioxide can be treated as a proxy for exposure risk to airborne disease pathogens.
In March, Morawska led the publication of a ‘blueprint’ for indoor air quality regulations in Science. Morawska’s group emphasises that indoors is where air is breathed most of the time.
Their proposal would see authorities legislate new indoor thresholds for PM2.5 (at 15 micrograms/cubic metre/hour), carbon dioxide (800 parts per million) and carbon monoxide (35 milligrams/cubic metre/hour).
The challenge, Morawska says, is fashioning regulations that are actionable.
For most, improving air quality won’t be a cheap solution. Countries willing to take on the short-term cost, they hope, could lead major change in quick time.
Where such measures are cost-prohibitive, other steps could be used to regulate indoor pollution, such as smarter ventilation methods, air filtration, purification and disinfection.
“In general, this is not something which should be left to individual responsibility, or even the responsibility of individual building managers,” she says. “It should be mandated such that it’s very clear what to do, how to do it, and such that individuals don’t have to worry that there’s pollution in the air.”
There’s still a long way to go, but policy to protect human health could also help – or be
helped by – the other great challenge of the times: climate change.
Twin predicaments
Not only does rising atmospheric pollution from human activity drive up global temperatures, it’s also the cause of the air taint scientists are worried about.
Fossil fuel-based electricity generation and industrial processes together account for more than half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, with the agriculture-forestry-land use sectors (22%) and transportation (15%) the other big emissions sectors contributing to carbon rise.
Nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide? Look to your tailpipe or internal stove. Sulphur dioxide? Fossil fuel combustion for power and industry. Ammonia? Fertiliser and agricultural animal dung. PM? It comes from of the above, plus, of course, the natural combustion of biomass in wildfires, which may become more frequent or intense in some parts of the world as temperatures rise.
Writing in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Kovacic and his colleagues warn of these twin predicaments. Reviewing hundreds of studies covering millions of patients, the risk of long-term cardiovascular problems such as ischemic heart disease, circulatory mortality and stroke are significantly increased by pollutant exposure, with impacts experienced from within the womb until a person’s dying day.
Some studies suggest around five million lives could be saved each year by turning off fossil fuels and switching to clean energy sources.
“Some of the things we need to do about global warming, they’re the same things we need to do to fix cardiovascular health,” Kovacic says.
Already in Australia, some jurisdictions are intervening to scrub out sources of pollution. Victoria, for instance, has banned gas connections for new buildings. Last year, the ACT government announced a new policy to phase wood heaters out of Canberra by 2045.
Kovacic’s recommendations extend beyond merely achieving the ‘green switch’ that moves away from combustible fuels for energy, though that’s his key aim. He also sees the value of public and clinician education programs to improve air quality literacy.
“That was why we did [the research], to raise awareness and make sure that physicians, doctors, politicians and patients are all aware of this problem.”
MATTHEW WARD AGIUS is a journalist at Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster.
Lidia Morawska, distinguished professor and director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at Queensland University of Technology.
The GRIND daily
Grinding is an example of the growing popularity of mechanochemistry: a field that promises faster, safer reactions with lower environmental impact. Ellen Phiddian examines this modern twist on an old-fashioned mortar and pestle.
The device can recycle batteries and solar panels, make magnets and pharmaceuticals, and pull individual gas molecules out of a mixture. It can do all of these things with less energy, and fewer additives, than industry currently uses. The tool could dramatically improve the environmental impact of chemical manufacturing, while making it more productive. It might even end up providing water and air in space.
This technological marvel, capable of so much, is a ball mill.
It’s a 19th century invention: a rotating cylinder filled with steel ball bearings, designed to grind materials into fine powder. The ball mill is more systematic than your kitchen mortar and pestle, but it’s doing essentially the same thing.
Yet ball milling – and the field it belongs to, mechanochemistry – is enjoying a renaissance.
Professor Tomislav Friščić
“There is inherent greenness to it,” says Professor Tomislav Friščić, a chemist at the UK’s University of Birmingham. Friščić says this sustainability is one reason mechanochemistry is getting so much attention.
“And another reason is that it actually works.”
Trapping gas and circular batteries
The first time Dr Srikanth Mateti used a ball mill, the experiment worked so well that he thought he’d made a mistake. The results were just too good to make sense.
“I was a second year PhD student,” Mateti, now a research fellow at Deakin University, recalls. He was using a ball mill to combine a hydrocarbon gas with a compound called boron nitride (also called white graphene), made from boron and nitrogen.
“It’s like using a front loader washing machine. You pull it closed, you put liquid inside, and it starts,” says Mateti. Instead of water, he was pumping in gas, monitoring it by checking the pressure inside the mill.
“But after some time, the gas disappeared,” he says. According to the meter, the pressure inside the chamber was zero. Mateti’s supervisor, Professor Ying Chen, suggested things he could be doing wrong. Was there a leak? Was the gas cylinder empty? Did he not fill the mill properly? Should he redesign the experiment? He retried the process “20 or 30 times”.
“Whatever I did, it’s a zero. Zero, zero, zero.”
After a couple of “frustrating” months, verifying every piece of equipment was working properly, Mateti reached another conclusion. The gas was being completely absorbed by the boron nitride. He theorised: “If all the gas goes into the material, I should expect this kind of gas will be there when I heat it. It should release.”
Lo and behold, he had not discovered an error, but a shockingly efficient way to store and transport gas. Pump it into a ball mill with some boron nitride, run the mill for up to a day, and your gas is now a solid, safe, easy-to-transport powder. When you want the gas back, just heat the powder and collect it.
The method started with hydrocarbons, but Mateti’s team has shown it can work with a variety of other gases, including carbon dioxide, ammonia, and hydrogen. The storing and transport of these three gases is an increasingly important problem: CO2 captured from the atmosphere and industrial processes needs to go somewhere, while hydrogen and ammonia both have big roles to play in energy and agriculture. In gaseous form, they’re leaky and dangerous. But combined with boron nitride in a ball mill, they become far more malleable.
Dr Srikanth
Professor
Ball milling is a more familiar concept to battery researchers, particularly those interested in recycling. Lithium-ion batteries are complicated mixtures of precious metals, with no two manufacturers using exactly the same recipe. Plants normally need to disassemble each battery, then mill them into a sand-like substance called black mass. The black mass is submitted to either pyrometallurgy or hydrometallurgy – a series of high temperatures, or corrosive solvents, respectively – to extract the lithium and other precious metals for re-use.
Last year, Dr Oleksandr Dolotko, an engineer in battery recycling, and his colleagues at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, published the details of a new technique. The team found that adding battery cathodes to a ball mill, along with a reducing agent like aluminium, yields a mixture rich in an oxide of lithium. Conveniently, the lithium is the only part of the mixture that dissolves in water.
“By simple water leaching and filtration, we can separate lithium from all other byproducts,” says Dolotko.
The “universal” battery recycling method requires no high temperatures, and no additional chemicals. Aluminium is already a component of lithium-ion batteries, which simplifies the process further. The other precious metals in the battery are also changed into forms that are much easier to recover.
“Other critical components such as cobalt, nickel and manganese, are also chemically reduced,” says Dolotko. They can be extracted at room temperature, using acids a tenth as strong as those currently used in industry.
Dolotko is continuing to collaborate with the KIT researchers to optimise and scale the technique.
The process is also selective: you can tune it to just suck one type of gas, like CO2, out of a mixture.
“We are happy with the results, because the method and the material is versatile,” says Mateti. He and his colleagues are now pursuing several different applications for the ball mill and boron nitride method, filing patents as they go.
“Currently, the scalability of our process is constrained by the design of the milling machines,” he says. The milling and leaching works perfectly at the biggest size they have, in the lab. Now, the game is to iron out safety concerns – fine particles of metal do, unfortunately, carry some ignition risk – and find an industry partner to help make the process even bigger.
Inside the mill
So why does it work?
Reactions – or at least, reactions that chemists are interested in – don’t usually happen spontaneously. Extra energy is needed to break and make bonds between atoms.
If you’ve ever baked a cake, you understand this intuitively. Cake mix will stay just that – a
Dr Oleksandr Dolotko
Above:
Mateti and
Ying (Ian) Chen. Below: A simple ball mill.
mixture – until it’s put in a hot oven. Heat is necessary to make the ingredients react into cake.
If you’re putting clothes in a washing machine, you’re also using a chemical reaction: one between soap in the washing powder, and dirt on the fabric. But this reaction doesn’t necessarily need heat; the “cold wash” setting still gets your stuff clean. Instead, washing machines use mechanical energy to work. The machine spins, and clothing, water and washing powder crash into each other. This movement spurs the soap–dirt reaction.
Ball mills employ the washing machine method.
“In the ball milling process, balls collide with each other and the vial walls, generating mechanical energy from these impacts,” says Dolotko. The energy and high pressure forces chemical bonds to break and reform.
“The materials undergo stress, friction, deformation… a fresh surface area is created, you’re getting shear force, and different impacts on the materials,” says Mateti. “This mechanical energy triggers the chemical reactions.”
That’s the heart of mechanochemistry: mechanical energy triggering chemical reactions. Mateti and Dolotko are far from the only researchers who have discovered its value.
Mechanochemistry moves onwards “Fifteen years ago, there were maybe 30–40 papers per year in mechanochemistry,” says Professor James Batteas, a chemist at Texas A&M University, USA. “Now what we’re seeing is more on the order of 800 papers a year, and it’s continuing to grow.”
Batteas, who takes his martinis shaken and not stirred, is the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Mechanochemistry, which was launched by the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry in March 2024. It’s the first journal dedicated solely to the field.
“We’d heard quite a lot from people working in mechanochemistry that they’d struggled to get peer review on their papers from mechanochemistry experts,” says Dr Laura Fisher, executive editor of the journal. Mechanochemistry crosses many different disciplines, from engineering to biology. Alongside conferences and associations, the journal is aiming to coalesce the community.
Friščić, the other editor-in-chief of the journal, says that people frequently approach him after conference presentations with revelations about the value of grinding.
“They might say: ‘Hey, 15 years ago my grandmother was grinding something in a mortar and pestle, and it changed colour – I think that was mechanochemistry’. I say ‘yeah, absolutely!’”.
Making chemicals in a ball mill
An illustration of a process for making perovskite, a chemical used in solar cells. Two salts and grinding balls are put into a container and rotated continuously. The slow reactions in rotating mills divide the process into several steps, which allows researchers to see the intermediate phases of the reactions. The photo in the bottom–right shows the experimental setup.
Results in Grandma’s mortar and pestle are very difficult to reproduce – there are just too many variables involved. But ball mills are much more replicable. This has made them a staple of the field.
“I for one am quite certain we will see mechanochemical reactors on the Moon and Mars,” says Batteas.
“Ball mills have come out on top as a simple, and relatively affordable, solution to do mechanochemistry that’s reproducible,” says Friščić.
“It’s very easy to scale up. If somebody has parameters which work in the lab scale, it’s a cakewalk to fine tune the parameters in the large scale,” says Mateti of ball mills. He adds that it typically only needs a one-step reaction to get the product you want – the fewer steps, the higher your yield and the lower the risk of contamination.
It’s such a successful method that it prompts another question: given grinding is a prehistoric technique, why are chemists only discovering its value now?
One reason is sustainability: ball milling is a textbook example of green chemistry. “10–20 years ago, that wasn’t such a hot topic,” says Fisher.
Chemists, like many makers, are increasingly motivated by environmental concerns. Mechanochemistry can be done at room temperature, and it doesn’t need reagents to be in liquid form to mix. This removes the need for chemicals to dissolve the reagents – solvents are a huge drain on resources, and a huge source of waste, in chemistry.
The pharmaceutical industry is another influence. “There’s a big drive to make new medicines and new drugs, particularly after COVID,” says Fisher. Mechanochemistry offers new reaction pathways to new molecules.
But central to the interest is the ability to properly understand mechanochemistry.
“What does it mean to shake, to vibrate, to compress, to move materials around, to push particles together, to create compression waves? What does it really mean for chemistry?” asks Friščić.
“We now have different toolsets that allow us to start to really understand what’s happening in these reactor systems on the molecular level,” says Batteas. “I like to talk about mechanical effects as martini shaker chemistry – I throw
some things in there and get some things out. But scientifically, there’s a real drive to understand: how do you make mechanochemistry controllable and predictable?”
Chemists need newer analytical technology to do this. Spectroscopy – shining different types of light through molecules to understand their shapes – became much more useful for these purposes over the 2010s.
For example: “There’s a lot of really nice work that’s been going on for almost a decade by sticking ball mills into synchrotron X-ray paths,” says Friščić.
At Deakin, Mateti has one student who is dedicating a PhD to studying the boron nitride and gas reactions inside a ball mill in real-time, using X-Ray and Raman spectroscopy. At the moment, the team has to “reverse-engineer” reactions to figure out why they work. If they could watch them proceed, they’d be able to optimise all sorts of parameters – including speed and type of rotation, ball-to-powder ratio, temperature and pressure – to get the fastest results.
“Instead of doing 10 hours blindly, maybe you’d do one hour of ball milling. You’d save a lot of time, energy, everything,” says Mateti.
Ball mills are a compellingly simple piece of technology. But they conceal a world of far more complicated molecular interactions. Chemists are just beginning to commercialise their grinding work, but they understand the field has potential.
“I believe this could be the best way to do manufacturing, and even synthesis,” says Friščić.
Applications of
“I for one am quite certain we will see mechanochemical reactors on the Moon and Mars, because that’s how you’re going to do manufacturing there,” says Batteas. No one wants to ship tonnes of solvents into space. So if you’re going to turn the rocks up there into anything, it will probably need to happen with grinding.
“Can we do mechanochemistry to produce water or oxygen from the materials that are there? You’ve got lots of silicates, there’s lots of oxygen bound up in there. You’re going to find materials with trapped water crystals,” suggests Batteas. “Hopefully, someone will fund this!”
Whether or not the sky is the limit, it’s clear that mechanochemistry, and the humble ball mill, has many more successes rolling inside it.
“It can be simple, it can be fast. And sometimes you get things out of it that you don’t quite expect,” says Friščić. “The element of surprise keeps us busy.”
ELLEN PHIDDIAN is a journalist at Cosmos. She has a background in chemistry, and her favourite colour is green. Now she often writes about green chemistry
Professor James Batteas
Dr Laura Fisher
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Cosmos in the lab
Conservation geneticist Dr Erin Hahn has been flipping through our last issue. She’s been spotted outside CSIRO’s new Trace DNA Lab in Canberra, which will be opening in 2025.
We’d love to see where you’re reading. Send us your shot: contribute@cosmos.csiro.au.
SPEED ROUND
Instructions
Get your pen and paper ready, then set your timer. We want to know precisely how fast you can answer these questions.
Questions
1 Which planet appears brightest in the night sky?
2 Aedes aegypti is one of the deadliest animals on Earth, but what is its common name?
3 What is the maximum number of right angles that can be found in a triangle?
4 Which element has the symbol W on the periodic table?
5 What type of rock metamorphoses into marble?
Email us your correct answers and record time at contribute@cosmos.csiro.au. We’ll publish the names of our fastest correct readers next issue.
Who Said?
“Theories come and go, but fundamental data always remain the same.”
Instructions
Answers to each of the clues in columns 1 to 10. Row VII reveals the answer.
Clues and columns
1 What is represented by R and can be rational, irrational, algebraic, transcendental, positive, negative, or zero? (4,6)
2 In which field of study did Peter Kropotkin, Milton Santos and Evelyn Stokes excel? (9)
3 Which type of riddle poses a question where the answer can be found in a pun? (9)
4 What is 10 to the power of 18 bytes? (7)
5 What is the expanding supernova remnant in the northern constellation which contains the star Deneb? (6,4)
6 What is an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock? (7)
7 With Australia dubbed a continent, what is the largest island in the world? (9)
8 Who, in 1623 and 1624, sent letters to Kepler outlining possibly the first calculating machine, the arithmeticum organum? (9)
9 Who designed the internal combustion engine? (7)
10 In biochemistry, what are isoforms of enzymes? (10)
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.
SOLUTIONS: COSMOS 103
CODEWORD
WHO SAID?
Jonas Salk
Instructions
Using the clues below place the numbers 1 to 16 correctly in the grid. How many clues do you need?
Level 1 – Chief Scientist
1 The product of the digits of the first three numbers in each of the first three rows and columns equals 36.
2 There are three factors of 14 in the same row.
3 One of the diagonals contains four powers of 2.
4 The first three numbers in every column are written in descending order.
5 The product of the final two numbers in Row D is 42 more than the first number in that row.
Level 2 – Senior Analyst
6 There are two square numbers in Row B.
7 The number beginning Column 3 has more unique factors than the rest of the numbers sharing that column combined.
Level 3 – Lab Assistant
8 Column 4 contains all the multiples of 5.
Born in New York, Jonas Salk was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines.
WHOSE LAW? ANSWER:
Two coloured lights appear different if they differ in either dominant wavelength, luminance or purity. Hermann Grassmann
CURIOSITY CORNER
Crack out your crayons and prepare your play dough. It’s time to draw or create an Australian prehistoric creature!
Australia, which was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana, is the oldest continent on Earth. This means we have an amazing fossil record! In VICTORIA THROUGH PREHISTORIC TIME (page 54), Evrim and friends from Melbourne Museum take us on a journey of what it was like to be in the area we now know as Victoria millions of years ago.
Send us a drawing or photo of a real or imagined Australian prehistoric creature. Think dinosaur, reptile, megafauna or more! And if you create your own, make sure to give it a name. Send your drawings to education@cosmos.csiro.au
DO TRY THIS AT HOME, KIDS
BALLOON ROCKETS
Get ready to blast off!
You’ll need:
1 long piece of thin string (3 to 5 metres)
1 balloon (round ones work, but longer sausage style ones work better)
1 paper straw
1 small bulldog or other clip
Masking tape
Let’s go:
1. Tie one end of the string to a chair, door knob, pole, or other support.
2. Put the other end of the string through the straw.
3. Pull the string tight and tie it to another support. Make sure the area is clear and the string is a straight line.
4. Blow up the balloon, but don’t tie it. Fold the end over and use the clip to seal it. Now line up the middle of the balloon with the straw and tape them. Use a few pieces of tape. Your rocket is ready for launch.
5. Place your balloon rocket at one end of the string, release the clip and watch it fly!
Hints:
Keen to race – you can set up more than one rocket string line or you can time different runs. Rocket enhancements – decorate or enhance your rocket with your favourite craft supplies. No clip – no problem, just use your fingers to keep the balloon sealed while you set it up for launch.
Learn more about why we launch rockets from Australia with Jamie in READY FOR LAUNCH,
232
The length of the Larapinta Trail in kilometres (km). Located in central Australia and winding from Alice Springs to Mt Sonder, the trek travels past a landscape created over millions of years by water and tectonic shifts. Visit page 28 to discover how geology is inspiring tourism with Glenn.
6
The maximum number of kilograms (kg) a woma python can weigh. This nonvenomous snake, once found across arid Australia, is now becoming critically endangered. Learn how John and his friends are helping womas and other native animals in WILD PLACES, WILD SPECIES on page 44.
2
The wingspan in metres (m) of an Australian pterosaur, a flying reptile that lived alongside dinosaurs. Pterosaurs made the Australian state of Victoria home when it was attached to Antarctica. At this time the area was an ancient polar wilderness. Learn more with Evrim in VICTORIA THROUGH PREHISTORIC TIME on page 54.
Do you have a science question you need answered? Then get the Science Detectives on the case. Contact them at
› Carbon nanotubes can store threetimes more energy per unit mass than advanced lithium-ion batteries, according to a newly published paper in Nature Nanotechnology
They could be used for storing energy in devices that need to be lightweight, compact and safe, such as medical devices and sensors.
“Humans have long stored energy in mechanical coil springs to power devices such as watches and toys,” says study co-author Sanjeev Kumar Ujjain, from the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology at the University of Maryland Baltimore City, USA.
“This research shows twisted carbon nanotubes have great potential for mechanical energy storage.”
Twisted carbon nanotubes have great potential for mechanical energy storage.
› The BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart (TAH), invented by Australian Dr Daniel Timms, has been successfully implanted in a human for the first time.
The implantation occurred on 9 July as part of a US Food and Drug Administration Early Feasibility Study, which aims to evaluate the safety and performance of the device as a solution for patients with severe biventricular or univentricular heart failure.
› Groundcherries (Physalis grisea) are a little-known relative of tomatoes that taste like a cross between a pineapple and a tomato.
They’re grown in gardens and small farms across North America, but scientists are attempting to transform them into a mainstream crop using CRISPRCas9 to change their genetic makeup.
Already, the researchers have created plants with a more compact growth habit, making them easier to cultivate. They have also increased fruit size and are working on ways to keep the fruit attached to the plant longer to make harvesting easier.
Scanning electron microscope images of carbon nanotube ‘ropes’ subjected to different twist strains.
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