85 Cosmos

MEET THE FAMILIES AUSTRALIA’S 664 NEW SPECIES REAL LIFE STAR WARS FORCES
THE SCIENCE OF EVERYTHING

Issue 85
PACKING FOR
PLANET NEXT
THE MESS AND MASS OF EARTHLY MICROBES
SCIENCE OF SUMMER
+ FIREWORKS PHYSICS
+ TENNIS TECHNOLOGY
+ BUTTERFLY HUNTING
+ SUNFLOWER POWER
85
522008
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PILBARA & MARS CITIZEN SCIENCE HADRON HIJINKS

We need you
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Geological mates Inside CERN
LAW OF NATURE • GORILLA CONSERVATION • STEM OF SKIING • MICRO PHOTOS

Testing Mars 2020’s 20/20 vision
It’s 23 July 2019 – about a year from launch date for the Mars 2020
mission – and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California, are testing cameras on the rover’s mast and
NASA / JPL-CALTECH
front chassis. The rover carries 23 cameras. Among them, its stereo
Mastcam-Z equipment will record high-definition colour images and
video, and give a 3D view similar to human eyes. The chassis-mounted
Hazard Avoidance Cams help with navigation and in avoiding obstacles.
For more about Mars 2020 see our NASA Pilbara story, page 26.
CONTENTS
CONTENTS COSMOS 85
PAGE 44
Big space,
small problems
If we truly want to spend time in
space, the most important thing to
take will be microbes. PAUL DAVIES
looks beyond the travel basics.
32 26 102 66
(CERN) ATLAS, CERN; GETTY IMAGES
THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY MARTIAN PILBARA SNAP CRACKLE POP HADRON HIJINKS
BIANCA NOGRADY meets the Astrobiologist MARTIN VAN Everyone knows about making MARTIN WHITE shares the
men and women striving to KRANENDONK and NASA fireworks go bang – but how lighter side of life at CERN –
find and describe the 70% of Mars 2020 rover scientist do you make them in the first complete with small mammals
Australia’s biota that remains MITCH SCHULTE go bush place? NATHAN KILAH puts breaking the Large Hadron
below the radar. to see life in ancient rocks. the flame to the fuse. Collider.
4 – COSMOS Issue 85
CONTENTS
DIGEST
56
NEWS — Dispatches from the world of science 8
NOBELS 2019 — Lead scientist Alan Duffy takes in this year’s highs and lows 20
PICTURE THIS — 2019’s Kaldor awards for data visualisation 22
FEATURES
WHEN NASA MET PILBARA — MARTIN VAN KRANENDONK & MITCH SCHULTE 26
Why WA’s rocks are the best chance of finding life on Mars THE NEW ZOOS
MEET THE FAMILIES — BIANCA NOGRADY 32 An inside look at captive primates
Australia’s undiscovered species and the race to find them and the people who protect them.
PACKING FOR OUR LONGEST JOURNEY — PAUL DAVIES 44

The microbe conundrum
ORDER IN THE COURT — PAUL CONNOLLY 50

50
Tennis officiating technology in the frame
GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST — ELIZABETH FINKEL 56

The changing face of conservation
A DISCERNING CROWD — MARTIN WHITE 66

An insider’s tour of the Large Hadron Collider
GREAT AND SMALL — MICROSCOPIC WONDERS 72

Bringing cutting-edge research into focus
WHITE LINE FEVER
HOW TO SKI — RANDALL MUNROE 76 The why and how of electronic
Going off-piste with science and snow tennis line umpire Hawk-Eye.
REFRACTED GLORY — ROBIN ARIANRHOD 82

What it takes to discover a law of physics
ZEITGEIST
92
MIDI-CHLORIANS, HERE ON EARTH! — Star Wars symbionts 92
SUNFLOWER POWER — Yellow’s place in art and science 96
WINGS OF DESIRE — Butterflies need your help 99
SCIENCE OF FIREWORKS — The chemistry and physics of kaboom 102
REVIEWS — Books, podcasts, websites 108
MIND GAMES — Fiendishly fun puzzles 112 USE THE FORCE
Star Wars symptoms within us all.

PORTRAIT — Kym Abrams 114
COSMOS Issue 85 – 5
UPFRONT
COSMOS EDITORIAL About The Royal Institution of Australia

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Mind Games TESS BRADY / SNODGER PUZZLES
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UPFRONT
FROM
THE EDITORS
WITH SUMMER upon us, we’ve decided and to showcase the really exciting is made and why it’s fun to go skiing
to get some scientific sizzle into issue 85 scientific, technological and engineering from a writer and illustrator who once
of Cosmos magazine – to which welcome, breakthroughs that are happening right worked in NASA’s robotics lab.
and many thanks for joining us. here, right now. We’re particularly passionate about
We’re thrilled, and not a little In this issue, you’ll meet the people not only reading about STEM,
overawed, to have taken on editing extraordinarily dedicated taxonomists but getting involved, and we’ll be using
Cosmos. In years gone by, the magazine’s who are striving to get Australia’s the magazine’s Zeitgeist section to tell
been graced by a range of science- undocumented organisms on the record. you about the many citizen science
communications luminaries – not the You’ll spend some time in the remote opportunities available to Australians.
least of them benefactors Alan and Pilbara, in Western Australia, looking at This issue brings a call to arms – well,
Elizabeth Finkel – whose standards we very, very old rocks with an Australian to smartphones and cameras, anyway –
aim to meet, and in doing so to reward astrobiologist guiding a mob of American to help double the number of butterfly
the faith of the The Royal Institution of and European Mars Rover specialists. sightings on record in Australia.
Australia, which has brought us on board. You’ll have a chance to consider the Lastly, an invitation: we want to hear
We hope above all to bring to you, problems that our world’s smallest living from you. We think that a magazine is a
Cosmos’ readers, the excitement we feel things – microbes – might present to the conversation, not a lecture, so write us
when talking to scientists and engineers wider Universe should they ever reach an email or send a letter. We want you
about their work and aspirations – which it. And you’ll get to go behind the scenes to tell us what you’re enjoying about
we think is the best fun you can have this with some pretty arresting characters the magazine and what you think we
side of a free ride on the International that live and work at Melbourne Zoo – should be covering. We’d like you to ask
Space Station. primates the lot of them. questions – we’ll do what we can to find
We aim to share through these pages Lest it all sounds too serious, you’ll experts and get them answered.
the ideas and efforts of such professionals, also get to take a peek at the lighter side We hope that you enjoy issue 85,
and, we hope, to reveal more about them of working at the Large Hadron Collider the last of 2019, and we look forward to
as people. We think there’s never been through a particle astrophysicist and your company through issues to come.
a more important time to renew the long-time CERNian, learn about the
magazine’s commitment to explaining science of fireworks from a chemist who GAIL M AC CALLUM , Managing Editor
the facts, to draw stories from people really likes to make things explode, and IAN CONNELLAN , Editor
who cherish evidence-based knowledge, get some unexpected advice on how snow [email protected]
DIGEST
DIGEST
DIGEST SCIENCE YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED
SPACE
Long ago and

far far away…
Astronomers discover the most

distant known cluster of galaxies.
Astronomers peering at the most distant
parts of the Universe have found the
earliest known cluster of galaxies, formed
only 800 million years after the Big Bang.
In astronomy, distant objects appear
red, due to shifts in their light during the
expansion of the Universe. The amount
of “red shift” lets astronomers determine
how far away they are, and thus how long
their light has been travelling before
reaching us. In this case, the galaxy cluster
is 13 billion light years away, meaning
its light has been travelling for 13 billion
years.
The ancient cluster was spotted by an
international team of scientists using a
trio of the world’s largest ground-based
telescopes – Subaru, Keck and Gemini
– all situated atop Hawaii’s 4200-metre
Mauna Kea volcano.
The finding is the “world record” for
the most distant known cluster of galaxies,
says Hideaki Fujiwara, the staff scientist
in charge of public relations at the Subaru
Telescope.
But it’s more than that, he says,
because the discovery shows that galaxy
clusters already existed when the Universe
was only 800 million years old – 6% of its
present age.
The cluster, which bears the arcane
name z66OD, contains 12 galaxies. One
is a giant known as Himiko, which was
discovered a decade ago and named for a
GETTY IMAGES
mythological queen in ancient Japan.

Keck and Gemini telescopes
The other 11 galaxies, the scientists atop the 4200 metre summit of
say, could therefore be thought of as a Mauna Kea volcano, Hawaii.
“Queen’s court” attending the monarch.
ZEITGEIST YELLOW
DIGEST
ANTHROPOLOGY
FACIAL RECONSTRUCTION JOHN GURCHE. PHOTO MATT CROW.

Ape-like face of early human
ancestor revealed
CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.

Nearly complete skull from Australopiths are thought to be the
Ethiopia raises questions about direct ancestors of the early members
our evolution. of our own genus, Homo, which arose with
Homo habilis roughly 2.4 million years ago.
The ape-like face of one of our earliest A. anamensis is the oldest member
known ancestors has been revealed for of the Australopiths, yet it is far less well
the first time, thanks to the discovery of known, in part because of its lacklustre Natural History, US, and colleagues, and
a nearly complete skull in Ethiopia. fossil record, consisting of a smattering published in the journal Nature, could
The cranium (skull minus lower jaw) of limb bones, jaw bones and disembodied change that.
belongs to Australopithecus anamensis, teeth. The cranium is “one of the most
and its owner lived in the Afar basin in The new find, by Yohannes Haile- significant specimens that we’ve found so
Ethiopia around 3.8 million years ago. Selassie from the Cleveland Museum of far from the site,” Haile-Selassie says.
ROBOTICS
A robot glider that takes off from water

ZUFFEREY ET AL., SCI. ROBOT. 4, EAAX7330 (2019)
enough to defeat the purpose. Zufferey and

colleagues turned to calcium carbide powder
Acetylene gas offers solution to up with a potentially elegant solution to – a commonly available chemical compound
high power demand. one tricky problem – building a robotic used in industry. When mixed with water
glider than can take off from water. it produces acetylene gas, widely used in
Robotics is a challenging field. Constructing In a paper in the journal Science welding. The reaction also produces energy.
small ones makes it difficult to include all Robotics, they describe a prototype that can The researchers found that by loading just
the necessary components; making large achieve practical aerial-aquatic mobility. 0.2 grams into their 160-gram robot glider
ones means encountering uncomfortable Previous attempts to design robots and exposing it to water it blasted the vehicle
upswings in the force and fuel required to capable of making the transition between into the air and caused it to travel 26 metres.
get things to work. water and air have been hampered by the It’s early days, but further development,
Researchers led by Raphael Zufferey fact that the process is so energy-intensive. the researchers write, “offers a promising
from the Aerial Robotics Lab of the The fuel load required for small machines solution for future high-power density
Imperial College London, UK, have come to achieve enough thrust can be heavy aerial-aquatic propulsion in robotics”.
YELLOW ZEITGEI
DIGEST
TECHNOLOGY
Want invisible ink?

Just put water in your inkjet
But you’ll need this special paper prototypes of their new paper: one that
to make it work. uses plain water for everyday low-level
security, and another that uses additional
Chinese researchers have developed a new chemicals for even higher levels of secrecy.
paper that provides a cheap and convenient They write in the journal Matter that
way of keeping secrets. Anything printed their work “could be considered
on it with water is invisible to the naked eye a major step forward toward rewritable
and can be revealed only under ultraviolet and multi-level security printing”.
lighting at a particular frequency. Using fluorescent security inks that are
What’s more, the protected only visible under ultraviolet light is one
information can be erased by briefly of the most popular ways to make printed
heating the document with a blow dryer, documents secure today. However, Further, the inks cannot be erased and
and the blank document can then be reused this approach has known weaknesses, are environmentally unfriendly.
GETTY IMAGES
in the same way at least 30 times. the biggest being that fluorescent inks Zhao and his team approached the
Qiang Zhao and colleagues, from are easily identified and thus provide problem from a different angle. Instead
the Nanjing University of Posts and insufficient security for important of focusing on the ink, they worked on
Telecommunications, created two military and economic information. the paper.
ENERGY
Light-loving polymer acts like a sunflower

New smart material could be a nanomaterial that efficiently absorbs light
game-changer for solar energy. and transforms it into heat, combining it
with a thermo-responsive polymer that
Many living things exhibit phototropism contracts when heated. They shaped this
– the ability to track a light source and material into small cylinders.
align to it. Plants, for example – such as When light hits the cylinders, they
the appropriately named sunflower – self- absorb it and become hotter, but only on
orient to face the Sun throughout the day. the side facing the light source. As the
Creating an artificial material that can material contracts on the illuminated side,
do this has proved challenging, however. the cylinder bends towards the light beam.
Some “smart” materials can move in Once the top of the cylinder aligns with the
response to a stimulus without direction beam, the underside of the shaft, now in the
– known as nastic behaviour – but no shadow of the light, cools down, expands
synthetic material has been able to exhibit and stops the motion of the cylinder.
tropistic behaviour. The cylinders can follow a light beam
Now, in a paper published in Nature continuously in a wide range of directions,
Nanotechnology, researchers from the a trait the authors suggest could be
University of California Los Angeles used to improve the efficiency of light-
have revealed a nanostructured polymer harvesting materials, as the cylinders bend
material that, formed into small, autonomously to expose the tip to the
GETTY IMAGES
cylindrical, stem-like shapes, is able to maximum amount of light.

follow a beam of light. The system is called SunBOT – a
Xiaoshi Qian, Yusen Zhao and sunflower-like biomimetic omnidirectional
Yousif Alsaid used a photo-responsive tracker.
ZEITGEIST YELLOW
DIGEST
GENETICS
All people belong to a particular mitochondrial genomes from southern

Likely human haplogroup, as determined by sequences in Africans to work out where the lineage
their mitochondrial genome. Constructing first arose. “It is a unique region of the
homeland identified a genetic tree of these haplogroups can world where these pockets still live today
tell scientists where different populations in genetic isolation,” says Hayes.
first cropped up, and how people dispersed By combining genetic data with
Genetic analysis pinpoints ancient around the world. climate modelling, the team was able to
African wetlands. The most ancient haplogroup in reconstruct a vivid picture of an ancient
modern people is L0 (L-zero). The highest human homeland.
A vast inland oasis in present-day northern frequency of L0 haplotypes is in southern According to the analysis, the L0
Botswana was once home to the founder Africa in the Khoe-Sān people, indigenous lineage was born approximately 200,000
population of all modern humans, foraging communities who speak language years ago, around the same time that a
according to a genetic analysis of modern- with “click” sounds. massive prehistoric palaeo-lake twice the
day Africans published in the journal Vanessa Hayes, from Australia’s size of Africa’s largest lake, Lake Victoria,
Nature. The analysis used mitochondrial Garvan Institute of Medical Research, partially dried into a vast fertile region
sequences, which pass from generation to and colleagues homed in on this ancient called the Makgadikgad–Okavango
generation through the maternal lineage. lineage, pooling more than a thousand L0 wetlands.
GETTY IMAGES
ECOLOGY
Hibernation becomes a problem if “All previous populations thrived

Moving home because increasing temperatures mean there isn’t in cool temperate lowland rainforest
enough snow to provide the cover and thus communities – not the alpine one.”
the fossils say so the insulation the possums need while they A team from UNSW, University of
are buried deep within humid rock piles. Sydney and University of New England has
If it gets too cold, they may wake up and moved two breeding pairs to Secret Creek
Researchers taking the mountain shiver to death. Sanctuary at Lithgow, where they are being
pygmy-possum out of the “You just need two bad winters like maintained at temperatures that would
mountains. this, and the species could collapse,” have suited their ancestral species.
says Hayley Bates, co-author of a paper
Chasing the heat to avoid the impact of published in the journal Philosophical
climate change may seem counter-intuitive, Transactions B.
but it could help save Australia’s mountain But why would relocating them work?
pygmy-possum (Burramys parvus). Because, says palaeontologist Mike
Researchers led by the University of Archer, the paper’s lead author, there’s
NSW (UNSW) have started moving some evidence that B. parvus doesn’t need to be
of the diminutive marsupials from their up in the mountains in the first place.
“traditional” alpine/subalpine habitat to a “The fossil record for all other species
lower and warmer rainforest environment in the genus Burramys indicates that their
where, in theory, they won’t need to current habitat is a far cry from their comfort
UNSW
hibernate in winter. zone for the last 25 million years,” he says.
YELLOW ZEITGEI
DIGEST
NEUROLOGY
Foot painters’ toes mapped like fingers
The brain has a dramatic ability to

forge new connections.
A study of two British foot painters born the UK, used ultra-high-resolution MRI
without arms because their pregnant scans to examine the pair’s brain responses
mothers were given Thalidomide has to having their toes tapped.
shown that a part of their brains usually In most people, each finger is
devoted to finger activity has been represented by its own little section of the
repurposed to help out the toes. brain, but there’s no distinction between
The finding adds to the growing brain areas for each of our toes, says
literature on neuroplasticity – the Wesselink. This is in contrast to non-
brain’s dramatic ability to forge new human primates species that regularly
connections well into the lifespan – and use their toes for dextrous tasks such
will be leveraged in future research to as climbing. Their toes and fingers are
see if robotic limb prostheses become specifically represented in their brains.
represented in the brain in a similar way. When the toes of Yendell and
The stars of the study were Tom Longstaff’s painting foot were tapped, the
Yendell and Peter Longstaff, who also use scans showed clearly separate brain areas for
their feet to manipulate cutlery, write and four of the five digits. The sensory map for
type on the computer. their feet had also invaded the brain region
A team led by Daan Wesselink from that would usually represent the hand.
the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience The study appears in the journal Cell
at University College London (UCL) in Reports.
ENGINEERING
Robot, do what I do
New teleoperation system human data and manipulate it with Ramos and Kim now hope to improve
promises big improvements computers in an attempt to match a their system by using more advanced two-
in humanoid robotics. robot’s limitations. However, this is time legged robots, minimising communication
consuming and doesn’t provide any physical delay between operator and robot, and
Improvements in artificial intelligence feedback on what the robot is doing. exploring other ways human intention
continue apace, but the development of Ramos and Kim tackled these can be anticipated: through biosignals, for
humanoid robots capable of matching challenges by dynamically synchronising a example.
human-level movement and dexterity in human operator’s motion to that of a small The introduction to their paper
real situations has been a challenge. bipedal test robot named Little HERMES. dramatically illustrates the worth of
A study published in the journal To better scale human motion to this work. “If this technology had been
Science Robotics, suggests we’re now a few the robot, they used a simplified model available back in March 2011, the
steps closer. for two-legged dynamics called linear catastrophic outcome of the Fukushima
US-based engineers Joao Ramos, from inverted pendulum (LIP). With this Daiichi power plant nuclear disaster could
the University of Illinois, and Sangbae model, the control system generated have been vastly mitigated.
Kim, from Massachusetts Institute feedback forces to the operator “It is estimated that, if a responder
of Technology, have created a new proportional to the relative speed between had been able to endure the deadly levels
GETTY IMAGES
teleoperation (remote control) system that human and robot. For example, the system of radiation and enter the facility within
more seamlessly transfers the movement would speed up human motion to match a the first 24 hours after the cooling system
of a human operator to a two-legged robot. faster robot or generate drag to match the malfunctioned, the first nuclear reactor
Many existing approaches capture operator to a slower robot. could have been stabilised.”
ZEITGEIST YELLOW
DIGEST
PHYSICS
is carefully executed to avoid what is

The science behind Jackson Pollock’s art known as coiling instability.
“When a jet, or filament, oozes down
into itself, it may coil,” Zenit explains.
Research finds he was a master of have made a technical analysis from a fluid “The best example is honey dripping onto
fluid dynamics. dynamics perspective. toast – the filament forms coils when it
Intrigued by films of Pollock in lands.
Whatever you think of Jackson Pollock’s action, they explored how he was able to “Coiling happens when the fluid is
art, it seems there’s a bit of science to it. rhythmically pour a continuous stream too viscous. Gravity pushes down, but the
Thousands of papers have been written of paint onto a horizontal canvas, using liquid doesn’t want to flow... so it coils to
about his style, which came to be known a device such as a stick, knife or brush to find a balance.”
as fractal expressionism, and now Roberto regulate the flow. What they found is that Pollock
Zenit, from the Universidad Nacional Their key discovery, published in the moved his hand at a sufficiently high
Autonoma de Mexico, and colleagues journal PLOS ONE, is that his technique speed and a sufficiently short height such
YELLOW ZEITGEI
DIGEST
SPACE
Coming soon: a market garden on Mars

Experiments using simulated tomato, radish, rye, quinoa, spinach,
Martian soil produce surprisingly chives, pea and leek.
good results. The soils were augmented with organic
matter in the form of chopped up pieces
The idea of permanent human settlement of the same plant varieties, working on
on Mars might have shifted from the the not unreasonable assumption that
fanciful to the possible, but to become pioneering Martian or lunar market
probable we need to work on the issue of gardeners would be smart enough to dig
food sustainability. the unused parts of past crops back into the
One of the big questions is how well, soil to fertilise the next. Surprisingly, the
if at all, plants will take root and produce results were good. Most of the Moon-soil
fruit in the iron-rich dirt on the Red Planet. plants grew quite weakly, but the Martian
In an effort to answer that question, ones shot up with only slightly less vigour
researchers led by Wieger Wamelink of than the Earth controls.
Wageningen University, Netherlands, The exception was spinach, which,
used their best geochemical data to Wamelink and colleagues report in the
produce a simulant of Martian soil – and journal Open Agriculture, “started to
one of the Moon’s, as well. flower after only a few small leaves were
Into these artificial soils (known as formed” and thus produced nothing of
regoliths in the jargon) they planted 10 substance. Good or bad news, depending
popular food species: garden cress, rocket, on your tastes.
Pollock’s technique is carefully

executed to avoid what is known
as coiling instability
that this coiling would not occur. They

also showed that the paint filaments did
not fragment into droplets – suggesting
that descriptions of his painting style as a
“dripping” technique are not accurate.
GETTY IMAGES
Dripping implies that a fluid breaks up

into discrete droplets, whereas Pollock’s
fluid filaments tended to be continuous
rather than fragmented.
ZEITGEIST YELLOW
DIGEST
GEOLOGY
It was the asteroid,

not volcanoes
Evidence of ocean acidification

provides new insights into the
last mass extinction.
Researchers have resolved long-standing
uncertainty about what caused the last mass
extinction around 66 million years ago,
which killed three quarters of the planet’s
flora and fauna and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Putting to rest other causal
hypotheses, particularly a prominent one were so slow to recover. National Academy of Sciences, came from
about gradual volcanic action, they have “For years, people suggested there foraminifera – tiny plankton that grow a
confirmed that the impact of the Chicxulub would have been a decrease in ocean pH shell from calcium carbonate and have a
asteroid caused sudden ocean acidification, because the meteor impact hit sulphur- complete fossil record over hundreds of
impacting marine ecosystems and the rich rocks and caused the raining-out of millions of years.
carbon cycle. sulphuric acid,” says lead author Michael Records from a shallow marine cave
They also find that this plunge in ocean Henehan from Yale University, US, “but at Geulhemmerberg, in the Netherlands,
pH, coinciding with the mass extinction until now no one had any direct evidence to comprising part of the K-Pg boundary, gave
known more technically as Cretaceous- show this happened.” insights into the first 100 to 1000 years
Paleogene (K-Pg), explains how The clue, Henehan and colleagues after the asteroid’s impact, a timeline not
biodiversity and marine carbon recycling report in the journal Proceedings of the available from deep marine records.
ENERGY
Turning sunlight into syngas

British researchers report a mixture of hydrogen and carbon
a new benchmark in the field monoxide, and is used to produce a
of solar fuels. range of commodities, such as fuels,
pharmaceuticals, plastics and fertilisers.
This “artificial leaf” uses water, sunlight “Being able to produce it sustainably
and carbon dioxide rather than fossil fuels would be a critical step in closing the global
to produce the widely used gas known as carbon cycle and establishing a sustainable
syngas. chemical and fuel industry,” says Reisner,
It was inspired, say researchers from senior author of a paper in the journal the chemical reaction that reduces carbon
the University of Cambridge, UK, by Nature Materials. dioxide and water into carbon monoxide
the natural process by which plants use Reisner and colleagues have taken and hydrogen, forming the syngas mixture.
the energy from sunlight to turn carbon many years to finetune what appears a As an added bonus, the light absorbers
VIRGIL ANDREI; MICHAEL HENEHAN
dioxide into food – and as such sets a new novel and rather elegant approach. work even under the low levels of sunlight
benchmark in the field of solar fuels. On the artificial leaf, two light on a rainy or overcast day.
It even works efficiently on cloudy and absorbers, similar to the molecules in “This means you are not limited
overcast days, says Erwin Reisner from plants that harvest sunlight, are combined to using this technology just in warm
Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, with a catalyst made from the naturally countries, or only operating the process
and unlike industrial processes does not abundant element cobalt. during the summer months,” says first
release additional carbon dioxide into the When the device is immersed in water, author Virgil Andrei. “You could use it
atmosphere. one light absorber uses the catalyst to from dawn until dusk, anywhere in the
Syngas is currently made from produce oxygen, while the other carries out world.”
YELLOW ZEITGEI
DIGEST
ECOLOGY
Meet the loudest bird in the world
In the Amazon, the amps are de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Brazil, wonder

turned up to 11. how the “audience” can stand it.
“We were lucky enough to see females
The male white bellbird (Procnias albus), join males on their display perches,” says
which lives atop mountains in the Amazon Podos. “In these cases, we saw that the
region of northern Brazil, is – for now males sing only their loudest songs.
at least – the loudest known bird in the “Not only that, they swivel
world. dramatically during these songs, as to
Its mating call was recently found to blast the song’s final note directly at the
have a sound pressure more than three females. We would love to know why
times that of the previous holder of the females willingly stay so close to males
record – its Amazonian colleague the as they sing so loudly.”
screaming piha (Lipaugus vociferans) – and There is some relief in the form of a
is much louder than a chainsaw or a rock trade-off, however. The louder the singing,
PCH / GETTY IMAGES

concert. the less time the singers can keep going.
It’s so loud, in fact, that researchers Research into why these small birds can
led by Jeff Podos from the University of make such a loud noise is continuing.
Massachusetts Amherst, US, and Mario The story to date is published in the
Cohn-Haft, from the Instituto Nacional journal Current Biology.
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ZEITGEIST YELLOW
DIGEST
TECHNOLOGY
of carbon grown on a surface of chlorine- the research aim. Brian Wardle and Kehang
Very black is the new etched aluminium foil – it captures more Cui were experimenting with ways to
than 99.96% percent of any incoming light. grow carbon nanotubes on electrically
black The researchers reported their findings conducting materials such as aluminium.
in the journal ACS-Applied Materials After finding a way to remove a
and Interfaces and also showcased the troublesome oxide layer that forms on
Engineers get dark with achievement with an exhibit at the New aluminium when it’s exposed to air, acting
carbon nanotubes. York Stock Exchange. as an insulator, they were able to grow
Redemption of Vanity, a collaboration carbon nanotubes on the aluminium at
Engineers from the Massachusetts with MIT artist-in-residence Diemut much lower temperatures and, as expected,
Institute of Technology, US, say they have Strebe, featured a 16.78-carat natural the combination of CNTs on aluminium
created a material that is 10 times blacker yellow diamond coated with the new significantly enhanced the material’s
than anything previously reported. material, which makes the brilliantly thermal and electrical properties.
Made from vertically aligned carbon faceted gem appear as a flat, black void. What surprised them was the colour.
nanotubes (CNTs) – microscopic filaments Finding a blacker black was not actually The rest, as they say, is history.
EVOLUTION
species of four-legged animals, still develop

Embryonic muscles an ancient echo during the early weeks of gestation.
The muscles included those known as
epitrochleoanconeus, dorsoepitrochlearis,
Early muscles reflect ancestral Natalia Siomava, from Howard University contrahentes, and dorsometacarpales,
change, imaging reveals. College of Medicine, US, and Yorick all in the upper limb, and contrahentes,
Gitton from the Sorbonne in France. dorsometatarsales, and opponens digiti
Muscles thought discarded during the Using recently developed staining and minimi in the lower limb. Of these, the
long descent that shaped humanity are in high-resolution imaging techniques, the dorsometacarpales merged with other
fact still present in embryos, providing a trio were able to track the development of muscles by the end of the first trimester,
fascinating insight into the workings of limb muscles across the first 13 weeks of while all the others simply disappeared.
evolution. development. Diogo and colleagues note that in some
That’s the central finding arising They discovered that several muscles rare cases the muscles have been retained
GETTY IMAGES
from the sophisticated three-dimensional absent in modern humans but present in in adult humans, where they are regarded
imaging of 36 first trimester embryos and ancient hominin ancestors, other primates, as congenital malformations – albeit,
foetuses, carried out by Rui Diogo and and in some much more distantly related generally speaking, not very serious ones.
YELLOW ZEITGEI
DIGEST
ECOLOGY
Endangered birds leave genetic clues in their drinking water
eDNA proving a powerful tool that from the University of Western Australia, enough quality to be amplified. If the
could aid conservation. saw an opportunity to track the Gouldian Gouldian test is then negative, we can be
finch using water sample analysis, as it confident that the eDNA test worked,
Australian researchers have worked out needs to drink several times a day. but there just weren’t Gouldian finches
how to trace an endangered bird species by To do this, they developed a test at that site.”
analysing water from its drinking holes. that can identify estrildid finches from First, they piloted the method in
Using environmental DNA (eDNA), a fragment of mitochondrial DNA, and wildlife park aviaries before a series of field
a team led by Karen Gibb from Charles a probe specifically designed to detect trials at the Yinberrie Hills in the Northern
Darwin University identified the Gouldian finch DNA. Territory, where scientists and rangers had
movements of the stunning rainbow- This was necessary to distinguish the good observation data to validate the tests.
coloured Gouldian finch (Erythrura colourful finches from masked finches With a 200-millilitre water sample they
gouldiae), a species native to tropical (Poephila personata) and long-tailed finches could successfully detect Gouldian finch
savanna woodlands in Australia’s north. (P. acuticauda) – other estrildid species eDNA from waterholes the birds had visited
eDNA is used to detect the locations that often flock together at the same in the previous 48 hours, and where there
and numbers of rare and threatened waterholes. were lots of birds, it was still measurable
species from water samples and to date has “It’s a much more accurate test,” says from the samples two weeks later.
mostly been applied to freshwater animals. Gibb. “By having primers that pick up The study is published in the journal
Gibbs and team, including colleagues other finches it tells us the eDNA is good Endangered Species Research.
celebration of the power of the moving

SCINEMA returns image to tell stories about the world, how it
works, and our place in it.
Other new award categories for 2020
The science film festival is back in include an Indigenous/First Nations
2020 with new awards categories. Award – celebrating the scientific
endeavours, stories and voices of
SCINEMA International Science Film Indigenous people. There are also awards
Festival, the largest of its kind in the for films developed for social media, and
southern hemisphere, is back for 2020 – films which inspire compassion or social fans – and category winners will also take
and they want your science films! transformation about current or pressing home an Instagram-worthy trophy.
They are especially looking for films issues that define our time.
from filmmakers 17 years and younger SCINEMA gives filmmakers an Don’t miss your chance to put the science
for a newly established award called opportunity to have their films seen by in cinema! Submit your films now for 2020.
SCINEMA Junior. a large audience – in 2019 the festival For entry details and further info visit:
The science-based film festival is a attracted over 100,000 science and film scinema.australiascience.tv
Contributors to Digest: PAUL BIEGLER, MARK BRUER, NICK CARNE, IAN CONNELLAN, BARRY KEILY, DYANI LEWIS, RICHARD A. LOVETT, NATALIE PARLETTA. COSMOS Issue 85 – 19
Can the Nobel Prize
learn a lesson from
Australia?
A medal (above)
This year’s Nobel Prize winners tick the boxes for relevant and commemorating the 1921
Nobel Physics Laureate Albert
deserving. But wouldn’t it be nice, writes lead scientist Alan Duffy, Einstein rests in the hands of
if the Nobel Committee took a leaf from Australia’s book? British professor M Stanley
Whittingham. The medal was
The Nobel Prize truly is to science what beyond your awarded area of expertise) presented to Whittingham, co-
the Olympic Games are to sport. There and invitations to numerous functions (not winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize
are other competitions and awards, some least with the King and Queen of Sweden). for Chemistry, for his work
on lithium-ion batteries, at an
perhaps more prestigious in a purist sense, It has long been that way, and no doubt
international battery congress
but it’s a Nobel or Olympic gold that will be that way for some time to come. in Ulm, Germany – Einstein’s
everyone wants to win. The Nobel Committee was, I suspect, birthplace.
To be a Nobel Laureate is to be pretty happy with this year’s events. After
recognised by your peers and the a few years of bad headlines and questions
wider community as someone who has over the concept’s relevance, the focus was
discovered or created something almost pretty much on science (plus economics,
beyond compare. literature and the pursuit of peace) and
Along with the gold-medal success high achievement.
comes global media coverage (often with From my perspective, the award of
offers to share your thoughts on topics far the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to John
YELLOW ZEITGEI
DIGEST
American professor and solid-state

Goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham physicist John Goodenough (top),
and Akira Yoshino “for the development British professor M Stanley Whittingham
of lithium-ion batteries” was one of the (middle) and Japanese chemist Akira
standouts. This is work that truly has Yoshino (bottom) shared the 2019 Nobel
changed the world – and may help save it. Chemistry Prize for the development of
lithium-ion batteries, which paved the
I could say the same about the award of
way for smartphones and a fossil fuel-
the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine free society. “The cathode [Professor
jointly to William G Kaelin Jr, Sir Peter Goodenough] developed for the lithium
J Ratcliffe and Gregg L Semenza “for ion battery built on the work of his fellow
their discoveries of how cells sense and laureate Professor Whittingham, and was
adapt to oxygen availability”. This is work made commercially viable by the work of
Professor Yoshino,” Royal Society President
fundamental to our understanding of
Venki Ramakrishnan told The Guardian.
ourselves and of life on Earth. “Scientific breakthroughs are rarely – if
In my own field I am a little conflicted. ever – a solo endeavour and it is absolutely
One half of the Nobel Prize for Physics fitting that this year’s Nobel Prize for
went to Jim Peebles, the cosmologist who Chemistry should be shared in this way.” .
wrote the book (I mean this literally, it’s
on my shelf ) “for theoretical discoveries in
physical cosmology”, and the other half to
Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz “for the The Nobels shine a public spotlight
discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar- on science, which is important as we need
type star”. greater awareness of science, but they also
I do wonder how it was that just this give a slightly skewed view as to how it is
exoplanet discovery was the one cited, carried out.
as opposed to the very first exoplanet The second issue – and this is the one
discovered, or even how these researchers that the Nobels seem unable to deal with,
were selected above others in such a even if they are willing – is the simple
competitive field – especially as their question: where are all the women?
pioneering technique is no longer the one Of the 950 Laureates just 53 have been
with most detections to its name. But female. This year there was one. Discount
gossiping about the Nobels is something Literature and Peace and the figures
scientists have enjoyed almost as long as are even worse. In my field of Physics,
they have existed. just three women from 213 Laureates;
Of course, deciding who gets a Nobel Chemistry five out of 184; Physiology or
is no easy task and I am grateful I am not Medicine, 12 out of 219.
on the panel of experts that has to work That might have been understandable
through thousands of nominations. Of 50 years ago, when women were regularly
course, the secrecy of the panel is such that denied the chance to participate, let alone
I would have to say that even if I was on it. achieve, but – to borrow from Justin
But I’m not. Trudeau – this is 2019.
However worthy the winners – and I Perhaps the Nobel Committee should
have been fortunate to have met several take a lead from Australia. In our peak
Nobel Laureates who are uniformly awards, the Prime Minister’s Prizes for
wonderful on a personal level and Science, detailed guidelines are in place
stunningly brilliant on an academic to ensure nominations and assessments
level – each year I am always left a little of candidates are as free from bias and as
disquieted, for two reasons. representative as possible.
The first is that science doesn’t The result in 2019 – the 20th
work the way the Nobels would seem to anniversary year of the prizes – was a
imply, with titanic geniuses who change backlog of stunningly brilliant entries with
the world. It really is the ultimate team five of the seven awards being accepted by
effort, with research groups big and women. That’s an achievement of Nobel
small, constantly checking, doubting and proportions.
GETTY IMAGES
testing, all building atop one another. It is a

constant challenge of prizes to deservedly Nominations for the 2020 Prime Minister’s Prizes
highlight the few, when the work is done for Science open on 6 February. Find out more at
by all. industry.gov.au/pmscienceprizes.
Picture this:
The Oscars of data visualisation are on
again, with another selection of the weird,
the wonderful and the worthy.
Space Junk
by Federica Fragapane
Artwork for BBC Science Focus. Art Editor: Joe Eden; News Editor: Jason Goodyer; Data visualisation by Federica Fragapane
PICTURE THIS
A GOOD INFOGRAPHIC can convey in one paper page (or web with a vision, from creative agencies and news agencies to
screen or PowerPoint slide) a dataset that might otherwise require students and non-professional data nerds. Shortlisted in the 2019
thousands of words to explain. No prizes for guessing how many Science and Technology category, Federica Fragapane’s elegant
people will happily look at a graphic instead of ploughing through exploration of space junk for BBC Science Focus had us thinking
several pages of text. back to Alice Gorman’s story “The Cane Toads of Space”, in Issue
Entries in the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards are 83 of Cosmos.
enlightening, thought-provoking, and above all, never boring. Winners were announced at a gala ceremony in London on
Now in its eighth year, the 10 Kantar prize categories – including 20 November. Visit www.informationisbeautifulawards.com to
Maps, Places & Spaces, Leisure and Unusual – are open to anyone admire, and be inspired. Entries for 2020 open in June.
SPECIAL FEATURE
BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE

AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL OF DEANS
OF AGRICULTURE
FROM THE
FRONT LINE
Heat treatment
With the world’s population heading towards 10 billion, we need to increase food Dr Surinder Singh Chauhan, animal scientist
production over the next 30 years by an estimated 50–75%, in a climate that is at The University of Melbourne
both warming and unpredictable. University of Melbourne lecturer and researcher
Dr Surinder Singh Chauhan has discovered some of the secrets to maintaining
meat and dairy production despite rising temperatures.
When he was working as a veterinarian to expend much energy, but – because This problem can also cause the muscle
with sheep, goats and dairy cattle, in sweating isn’t an effective cooling system tissue to become more alkaline, meaning
India in the heat of summer, Surinder for them – once dairy cattle are exposed that as a final product, the meat becomes
Singh Chauhan was aware production to temperatures above 25°C, or sheep tougher, discolours quicker and has a
was declining. “People would say, ‘Oh, above 28°C, there’s a problem. reduced shelf life.
that’s just because it’s summer,’ and I “The energy which was going to be Long-term, one of the solutions
said, ‘Why? Why is production going used for growth rates or milk, wool or to this problem will be an increasing
down?’” meat production is now being directed understanding of genetics, selecting
In 2011, Dr Chauhan received elsewhere,” Dr Chauhan says. “An animal breeds and genetic strains with better
a scholarship from the Australian under heat stress will eat less and increase ability to handle heat. But in the shorter
Government’s Department of Foreign efforts to lose heat – it will increase blood term, Dr Chauhan has hit upon one
Affairs and Trade to come to the Dookie flow towards the skin. In the effort to do solution: feeding sheep a concentrated
campus of the University of Melbourne, that, some blood supply to the intestine dose of vitamin E and selenium. “Food
near Shepparton in rural Victoria, where is reduced, leading to insufficient oxygen intake goes down about 14–15% in
climate-controlled facilities and 7000 in the gut, leading to leaky gut syndrome, heat-stressed sheep but, with the
sheep and other livestock awaited his and long-term damage. So, the animal’s supplementation, we prevented that
research on the effects of heat stress in not only eating less food, but it’s unable to decline,” he says.
animals. A PhD, postdoctoral research in properly utilise the food that it has eaten.” “The animals that were given the
the US, and eight years later, Dr Chauhan In addition, the animals pant. “It’s antioxidants did not show any open-
has some of the answers – answers that a very shallow respiration,” Dr Chauhan mouth panting. And those animals’ free
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
could help the world produce enough explains. “They are not getting enough radical production did not increase.”
food in the coming decades. oxygen, but they are losing too much One challenge is detecting heat
“Animals such as sheep and goats CO2”, creating a damaging pH imbalance. stress early enough to be able to make a
and dairy cattle are homeotherms,” he As the animals eat less, their bodies can’t difference. “Once you see the behavioural
says. “Like us, they maintain their core get enough antioxidants, and instead signs, the production losses have already
temperature within a narrow zone. That produce more free radicals. These occurred,” Dr Chauhan says. He is
zone is their comfort zone.” At reasonable problems lead to a lack of weight gain and looking at everything from thermal
temperatures, homeotherms don’t have a decrease in milk or wool production. cameras (to be used when transporting
SPECIAL FEATURE
animals, for example, in live export) He says the research is vital for the animals couldn’t be transported,” he says.
or sensors that can measure gases. future of agriculture in Australia as “That was the first time I thought I would
“For example, if sensors can monitor the frequency, length and intensity of like to be a vet.”
expiration levels of carbon dioxide or heatwaves continue to rise. Years later, after training as a vet, he
hydrogen peroxide, it will give us an idea Living on campus at Dookie, realised he could contribute even more to
of pH balance and oxidative stress.” Dr Chauhan is aware how far he has animal welfare and solve global problems
LIU KAIYOU / GETTY IMAGES
Dr Chauhan says the climate- come from growing up on a farm in by becoming an agricultural scientist.
controlled facilities at Dookie allow a small village in northern India. His “Looking for solutions is very exciting
researchers to compare animals’ parents owned five dairy cows and two research. The demand for food is going
responses in a normal climate with bulls, and he remembers that when up, and with temperatures going up,
climates up to 42°C. In the summer he was in second grade there was an the production is affected. At the same
of 2020/21, more extensive trials will outbreak of foot and mouth disease. time, we need to be more efficient at food
hopefully take place on large sheep “There was no veterinary hospital in production, because we can’t use any
properties in natural conditions. my village and there were no roads, so more resources than we already are.”
ASTROBIOLOGY
ASTROBIOLOGY
In 2020, two rovers will be launched from Earth

in the treasure hunt for signs that life was once on
Mars. Astrobiologist MARTIN VAN KRANENDONK
took NASA Mars 2020 Program Scientist MITCH
SCHULTE and rover instrument scientists to the
vast and precious Pilbara, in WA, to show them
how to travel through geological time to spot
biology hidden in plain sight.
Here are their accounts of what happened next…

UNSW
ASTROBIOLOGY
WE’VE BEEN INVOLVED in the study of two different processes: it can happen through
ancient life but also in the search for magmatism, where heat and fluids come up out of
life on Mars and on early Earth for the mantle, or it can be precipitated by the activity
many years now. of microbes. Some microbes take a molecule of
a in northwest Australia – the Pilbara – sulphate – SO4 – and reduce it to make H2S, which
oldest, best-preserved evidence of life on is highly reactive with iron. On early Earth there
ome natural systems get bashed around was no free oxygen in the atmosphere or the oceans,
not so much. So the Pilbara has really so the seas would have been full of iron. As soon as
uke of preservation. It’s because of the microbes made H2S, it would have combined with
of melting that took place beneath the iron to make pyrite.
Martin Van Kranendonk, Pilbara during its long period of formation, which left The oldest stromatolites in the Pilbara are all made
Director of the behind a depleted, buoyant, and cold residue that has from pyrite, precipitated by microbes. It’s what gives
Australian Centre kept the interior part of the craton protected from the rocks at the surface a rusty red colour; it’s rusted
for Astrobiology, damage through the pyrite. Other microbial
University of NSW later aeons. The other
factor is that Earth was
You can feel like you’re communities precipitated
calcium carbonate – a
subject to strong impacts walking a shoreline light brown mineral. The
by large meteorites until 3.5 billion years ago, activity of life is actually
about 3.8 billion years
ago in the Late Heavy
seeing life get a start changing the geology and
we can see those textures
Bombardment. So the and minerals in the
Pilbara rocks are really some of the first that were rocks as exclusive and unique to life. So that provides
formed and didn’t get pummelled; they were able to also another way of exploring for life – not just the
survive because Solar System evolution was dying textures, but the mineral assemblages themselves.
down at that time. We spend our careers looking at the features and
There’s an aspect to life that most people minerals associated with the earliest microbial life
are probably not aware of. Early microbial life on Earth and thinking in great depth about ways to
precipitates rock – and these microbes deposit positively discriminate between biology (life) and
different minerals through their metabolism to geology. We humans are biology, but we are also a
make food energy. So when you see the different chemical system, although a chemical system alone
colours in the rocks, sometimes that’s a function of doesn’t necessarily mean it’s biology.
the geology, but often it’s the microbes themselves So right at the forefront of our scientific field
that have precipitated different minerals. You might is the challenge to discriminate between geology
be familiar with fool’s gold – pyrite, one of the most and merely chemical processes, and those that are
UNSW
common shiny metals. It can actually form from uniquely made by biology. We spend a lot of time
ExoMars and Mars 2020
scientists exploring
outcrops in the Pilbara,
about 100km southeast of
Port Hedland
ASTROBIOLOGY
finding techniques and new methodologies to be able For many of the scientists it was their first time
to discriminate between those two. seeing traces of early life. They found it a real eye-
Because if you go to Mars you don’t want to say, opener: the complexity of the science that goes into
“Oh look we just found some interesting chemistry, investigating life on Earth and the importance of the
or some interesting-looking rock textures”. You context of the rocks. Rocks are rocks, but when you
want to be able to prove that the remains were look in more holistic ways at the environment, where
made exclusively by life. And when you’re dealing they were deposited and the things around them, that
with ancient rocks, you’re actually dealing with the context is really important to understanding life itself
chemical traces and the fingerprints of microscopic – not just where it lived, but how to identify it, and
micro-organisms. That’s when you have to find ways determine how it made its living.
to be confident – to be able to say “yes, this was There were two things I’ll take from the trip.
made by life – biology – and not just by some kind of One was the understanding that when people see
chemistry or physical process”. these features in the outcrops, when they’re actually
The rocks in the Pilbara are 3.5 billion years old, surrounded by the geology, it’s very different to seeing
which is about the age of most of the crust on Mars. We a picture of a close-up rock texture at a conference, or
know now that Mars had a warm and wet atmosphere a rock in the lab. We had a chance to discuss that and
1. early in its history – and that this all happened to show how the context from the outcrops was an
around the same time as the rocks in the Pilbara were important part in the search for life on Mars.
being formed, including their stromatolites. And But I also gained an appreciation of the enormity
it’s tremendously exciting to think that perhaps life of the task that these scientists face. It’s one thing for
flourished on Mars just as it did on Earth. me and others to walk around free – we can go and
Basically, the record of life in the Pilbara is the look where we want. I have the luxury of being able to
ancestry of all life on our planet. When you touch take as many samples as I want and bring them back
it and walk around it – on these ancient rocks I can to my lab. But the Rover scientists might only be able
still see the ripples on the beach and which way the to collect one sample from a layer. And their kind of
water flowed – you can actually transport yourself search is very dependent on the instruments that they
back in time and feel like you’re walking along the have – they’re highly sophisticated, but they’re still
edge of a shoreline 3.5 billion years ago, seeing life extremely limited in a number of ways.
getting a start on this very young planet. It’s a tremendously complex business. It really
In 2019 we hosted the instrument specialists for comes down to the detail: how physically can I drill
the Mars Rovers that are being launched by NASA on this outcrop if we’ve got a slant of more than 10
and the European Space Agency, as well as the heads degrees? And even if I can identify a layer of interest,
for Mars Exploration for NASA. These scientists is it better to sample five centimetres to the left, or
came to look at these rocks to think: How can I five centimetres to the right? What would give me
use my instrument? What am I trying to look for? the best chance of success? All from a million miles
2. Where are we going to sample for life on Mars? away. ->
Proof of life?
FROM TOP: MARTIN VAN KRANENDONK (3); UNSW
1. Wrinkly laminations produced by life

(below) vs the smooth layers of sediment
with no life (above), all just a few
centimetres across.
2. Wrinkly laminated and broad domical
structures built by communities of micro-
organisms 3.48 billion years ago.
3. Tiny layered bumps in a rock hint at
the presence of life – but how to know for
sure? Detailed chemical analysis would
have to be done in order to prove these
structures were made exclusively by the
activity of life.
3.
ASTROBIOLOGY
I’M A GEOLOGIST by training – my PhD for these space missions are not geologists and they
was in geochemistry – and when you’re don’t always know what they’re looking at when
going through school, the rocks in WA they’re looking at the rocks. That makes sense,
are one of those bucket-list places that because when you’re trying to figure out the optics
see, because they contain some of the of the spectrometers, for example, you really need
nce for life on Earth – they’re a really big more of a physics background.
the kind of thing that we’re hoping to I don’t know if you’ve seen the Pilbara rocks –
s. and if you haven’t you should go – but the outcrops
face there now is cold and dry and of bedrock are not really that large. You have to
here’s no liquid water, so we don’t think use the clues to tell you what kind of environments
Mitch Schulte, we’re going to find anything alive in the rocks on were there three-and-a-half billion years ago to
NASA Program Scientist the surface. But we think there were conditions figure out where to look for the evidence for life in
for the Mars 2020 Rover conducive to life on the surface of Mars or near the the rocks. So it’s the exact kind of thing that these
surface of Mars when there was liquid water at the Rovers are trying to do on Mars from hundreds of
surface, with the evidence of river channels and millions of miles away, with just a robot rather than
alteration of minerals by liquid water, for example. a person who can walk around and return to the area
I really wanted to get the mission teams to a number of times.
the Pilbara to get an appreciation of a) what we’re The NASA Rover has a payload of seven
looking for and b) how difficult it is here on Earth to different instruments that are designed to look at
do this and see how special these rocks are here. A the chemistry, mineralogy and the geology of the
lot of the people who work on building instruments materials on the surface of Mars (the rocks and
MARS 2020 SPECS

The Mars 2020 Rover is car-sized: about 3 metres
long, 2.7m wide, and 2.2m tall, with an arm that can
extend 2.1m. At 1050kg it weighs around 200kg less
than a compact car.
Based on Curiosity, the Rover has narrower, more

robust wheels, a stronger arm to accommodate the
increased instrumentation, a bigger, faster computer
system and the all-important sample cache.
The Mars 2020 Rover is also transporting

a helicopter for a technological test flight
in the thin Martian atmosphere.
Mastcam-Z
SuperCam
Brains
PIXL (Planetary
Instrument for X-ray
Lithochemistry)
Sample handling SHERLOC
WATSON
NASA / JPL-CALTECH; UNSW
ASTROBIOLOGY
the sediments). We’ll also be looking for organic those and bring them back to Earth to study. The
material. They all work together and there’s overlap very earliest we could send that mission would be
in the kind of things they can do. Some work a little 2026, and the samples wouldn’t come back until the
bit more rapidly, some do a little bit more detailed end of the decade.
analysis, but they all tell us what we want to know. One of the biggest lessons the scientists learned
The Europeans are also sending the ExoMars in the Pilbara is that they have a hard job ahead of
Rover to Mars next year. NASA has an instrument them. Which is fair, and that was part of what I
flying along with the ExoMars and our Rover has wanted to impress upon them. If the Rover landed
a couple of European instruments. There’s a lot of in the valley where you know that there’s material
collaboration going on. that contains evidence of
We’re going to be life but you don’t know
very careful not to touch It’s the exact thing we’re that it’s there, would you
the rocks on Mars that trying to do on Mars, do all the right things to
we sample with the
instruments because
from millions of miles lead you to the evidence-
of-life goldmine?
we want them to be as away with just a robot So it’s important to
pristine as possible when get a sense of scale in
they come back. terms of appreciating
NAME THE We’ll use the instruments to understand the how precious and rare these samples are.
geology and the context of where we are and then There were a great number of discussions
ROVER
once we’re convinced that we have found the one among the Mars2 020 team and between the
School children in the that we actually want to sample we’ll make sure Mars 2020 and ExoMars teams about how to
US have written essays that we go to a spot where the rocks haven’t been approach operations on the surface after seeing
in a competition to touched with those instruments. We’ll collect those these rocks for themselves. It was very useful for
name the Mars 2020 cores into tubes and the tubes will be sealed up and non-geologists especially to get an appreciation for
Rover.
left on the surface of Mars for us to come get later. “okay, this is what your instrument is trying to do
From January 2020, We have 43 sample tubes, which will have to and this is the kind of stuff you’re actually going to
go to mars.nasa. include a number of blanks – “witness” tubes that be looking at on Mars”.
gov/mars2020/ can be used to monitor Earth-based contamination. Martin’s spent so much time out there and he
participate/name-the- We’re planning to collect 15–20 containers during knows the area really, really well, so he was able
rover/#Public-Poll to the prime mission. We’re working very hard to help all the instrument specialists see that the
vote for the winning at NASA to get congressional and presidential context matters. When you start reading, the rocks
name. administration approval to begin a mission to go get really do tell you a story.
The Rover can choose just 20 Martian samples for

analysis back on Earth. Here’s how it will decide:
BRAINS: The computer collating the instrument data PIXL: PIXL’s X-ray spectrometer can then analyse the fine
has 256MB of RAM and just 2GB of flash memory, detail, detecting more than 20 chemical “fingerprints” of
but that’s 8x as much as Mars Rovers Spirit and elements present at only a few parts per million.
Opportunity.
SHERLOC & WATSON: This dynamic duo work together
MASTCAM-Z: The job of these two cameras is to act at close range – 5cm from a rock’s surface – the camera
in stereo as the “eyes” of the Rover. A 360° range and WATSON alongside SHERLOC’s combination of UV
high magnification zoom – which could focus on a laser and a Deep UV and fluorescence spectrometer
house fly from the length of a soccer pitch – will allow to collect more precise data about the presence of
scientists to choose the best spots to examine more organic chemicals.
closely.
SAMPLE CACHING: When scientists agree on a possible
SuperCam: We should all be so lucky to have a camera life-proving rock, the Rover’s rotating drill carousel and
with a laser. The Rover fires its laser at rocks from robotic arm assistant will fill one of 43 tubes to store in
7m to create a “light signature” that its spectrometer the Rover’s belly. Scientists will need to choose an easy-
can analyse for chemical traces of life (as well as any to-refind depot location at which to drop their tubes of
elements harmful to humans). geological treasure for later retrieval.
SPECIES DISCOVERY
TOP, L–R: LEPANUS PYGMAEUS NICOLE GUNTER & THOMAS WEIR; OEDURA PICTA CONRAD HOSKIN; MARATUS
FELINUS JOSEPH SCHUBERT; SATHAN OREO ERINN FAGAN-JEFFRIES; HIBBERTIA SPECTABILIS KEVIN THIELE
SPIDERS AND THEIR
CRUSTACEANS
RELATIVES
FISH CORAL AND SEAJELLIES
INSECTS BIRDS AND MAMMALS

Ocean to ocean and Bight to sea, this map
shows the discovery location of 553 of the
FUNGI AND LICHENS SNAILS AND WORMS 664 Australian species so far named in 2019.
Taxonomy Australia Director Dr Kevin Thiele
estimates that, at current rates, it would take
Australian taxonomists more than four centuries
MILLIPEDES AND RELATIVES PLANTS
to discover, classify, name and document all of
Australia’s biodiversity. In the following pages
we reveal just some of 2019’s “new” organisms,
REPTILES OTHERS and get an insight into the work and ideas of the
taxonomists who described them.
SPECIES DISCOVERY
FAMILI Each year in

Australia as many as
1000 new species are
named, but it’s the great
tragedy of taxonomists
to know that thousands
more will vanish before
they’re discovered. In a country
where 70% of the flora and fauna
remains completely unknown,
BIANCA NOGRADY talks to those
on the frontline about the thrills
of and threats to the field.
SPECIES DISCOVERY
DR JACQUELINE NGUYEN,
AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM
“Our continent has an
important role in the
evolution of songbirds. At
18 million years old, it’s
the world’s oldest record
of the bristlebird family.
Before this study, the
oldest known bristlebird
fossils were only tens of Hyalopale sapphiriglancyorum
thousands of years old.”
Dasyornis walterbolesi
illus. Peter Schouten
Caridina malanda
DR SATISH CHOY
“I was drawn to marine
biology as a child. I’m a
crustacean taxonomist
and aquatic ecologist. For
me, [finding new species]
is like a treasure hunt,
never really knowing what Kapalana wadei
you will find.”
Pultenaea glabra, currently under survey
DR MATT RENNER
“There’s a degree of DR PENNY BERENTS
obsessive-compulsion “Taxonomy gives you
that comes from a handle on the first
being a botanist… The point of understanding
scientific element an ecosystem,
is best described a habitat, an
as one of reciprocal environment, because
illumination where, for you can name all the
Bircenna hinojosai
every insight, it throws parts and understand
new light elsewhere.” how all the parts work.”
SPECIES DISCOVERY
I
T’S A WARM SPRING DAY in the Blue where you didn’t have any species with names or
Mountains, west of Sydney. Whipbirds slash the an understanding of what’s what and how they are
air with their distinctive whip-crack mating call, related; you wouldn’t be able to see very far.”
competing with golden whistlers and a low-level It is by standing on the shoulders of taxonomists
insect buzz. that other life scientists can see so far.
There’s an intense discussion going on about What they see has not just environmental and
yellow. conservation implications. There are also significant
“Processed cheddar yellow?” economic implications; for example, in correctly
“Yeah, like a Kraft single.” identifying a potential new agricultural pest,
“Egg yolk?” conserving the habitat of a marine worm that is the
“But you know the spectrum of egg yolks; yellow main source of food for an important commercial
right through to orange? It certainly does have fish species, or establishing which native mosquitoes
orange.” might act as hosts for emerging human pathogens.
It’s here I make my greatest – only – But taxonomy – like an increasing number of
contribution to taxonomy. “It’s free-range-chook- the species it works on – is under threat. This most
egg-yolk yellow.” fundamental of life sciences is largely invisible,
In the end, egg-yolk yellow wins the day. forgotten and neglected. Funding is dwindling,
We’re clustered around a plant by the side of a and a generation of taxonomists is retiring with
quiet road near the village of Mount Wilson. The tall relatively few younger colleagues to pass their
bush is a riot of yellow flowers, and it’s the reason knowledge, wisdom and experience on to.
Dr Matt Renner has travelled all the way from the The museums, herbaria and institutions that
Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney today. house collections of Australian native flora and
Renner is a taxonomist. He doesn’t look like fauna – going back to specimens from Captain
TOP, L–R: PETER SCHOUTEN © AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM; WATSON, TILIC & ROUSE; NICK LANGLEY; SATISH CHOY; BENJAMIN
what most people would imagine to be the part; the Cook’s first voyage to Australia – are racing time
pith-helmeted, butterfly net-wielding adventurer of and a rising extinction rate to classify the estimated
MOS; BIANCA NOGRADY X 2 ; ANNE-NINA LORZ & LAUREN HUGHES; ANDREW TREVOR-JONES; JOSEPH SCHUBERT
old. Granted, he is wearing sturdy walking boots and 70% of Australia’s native flora and fauna that still
gaiters, but we’re supposed to be doing some bush- remains undiscovered, unnamed and undocumented.
bashing later – so that’s sensible. The library is burning down, and we have only
The plant whose tiny egg yolk-yellow flowers catalogued around 30% of the books in it.
he’s puzzling over is ostensibly the smooth bush-pea
– Pultenaea glabra; a native pea found only in the INTO THE WILD
Blue Mountains, and which is listed as Vulnerable on Dr Kym Abrams doesn’t often get out in the field,
account of its limited distribution and threats from so it’s a particular treat when she gets to see her
habitat loss and disturbance. favourite insects – the schizomids, or whip-
Except this plant is not Pultenaea glabra. Under sprickets – in the wild.
the close scrutiny of someone with a keen eye for plant “We get a big pile of leaf litter, put it into a sifting
morphology, some key differences become apparent. tray, and then you sift through it,” says Abrams, a
The lack of hairy ovaries, for example, and the way taxonomist at the University of Western Australia,
the flowers on this plant erupt along the length of its and research associate at the WA Museum. “It’s lots
branches rather than gather around the tip. of patiently looking and sorting; sometimes you can
Splitting hairs? Perhaps, except the correct pick up 10 different bits of leaf litter and still not find
taxonomic classification of this plant – and possible anything you’re interested in, and other times you’re
identification of a new species of bush pea – could lucky and you get lots.”
impact conservation decisions, and even influence Most people will go through their entire lives
development in the area. not knowing that, in the dark soil beneath their
Taxonomy is the starting point for all the feet, the whip-spricket is hunting. Whip-sprickets
biological sciences. Taxonomists draw the map that are in the same family as spiders – the arachnids –
all life scientists use to navigate their way around and Abrams describes them as looking a bit like a
the tree of life, says Dr Kevin Thiele, former curator cricket viewed side-on. When Australia was thickly
of the West Australian Herbarium and director of forested more than 30 million years ago, they would
Taxonomy Australia. have been found on the surface, but successive
“Taxonomy produces the framework for cycles of aridification over the millennia have driven
understanding species and their relationships, that them underground to protect their exoskeleton
we can then use to ask – and hopefully answer – from drying out. Instead of eyes, they feel their way
some of these big questions about the evolution of around with a pair of long, delicate front legs that
Maratus felinus (front)
life on Earth,” he says. “Imagine being on a planet they tap in front of them.
SPECIES DISCOVERY
DR KYM ABRAMS
“Once they realise why an ecosystem
needs all these different pieces to work
together properly, then you have a better
chance of conserving the little things
that people might not see.”
Draculoides anachoretus
Lepanus podocarp Lepanus pungalina
Echiniscus siticulosus
Calyptorete falkorae
Maratus combustus Maratus aquilus
DR KEVIN THIELE
“Discovering and naming a species isn’t going
to save it from extinction – it’s not a sufficient
condition for saving it from extinction – but I regard
Hibbertia spectabilis
it as a necessary condition. It’s a first step.”
Membranobalanus
porphyrophilus
SPECIES DISCOVERY
But don’t let their size and appearance fool you. If that fly doesn’t resemble anything else in the
“They’re tiny but they’re actually really fierce little collection, a whole new adventure begins.
hunters,” Abrams says. They tap-tap-tap around “You play a really scientific game of ‘spot the
until they detect something that might be prey, then difference’, comparing how it’s different in its
they freeze, and pounce. morphology – its appearance – to the species that
Before June 2019, 53 species of whip-spricket have names,” Lessard says. “You might also even
had been identified and named in Australia. Then remove a leg and sequence the DNA of the new species
Abrams led a team studying whip-sprickets in WA’s to get a genetic fingerprint to identify it that way as
Pilbara region. In an heroic taxonomic effort they well, and then you take high resolution images of the
discovered at least 56 new species. Worldwide, there new species as well, so other people can identify it.”
are only around 350 known species of schizomid, so Next, a scientific description is written up in a
Australia can now lay claim to one-third of them. scientific paper and submitted for review by other
In some ways, field work is the easy part. The independent experts in the field. If those experts agree
hard work is the careful photographing, dissecting, with the assessment that this is indeed a new species,
analysing, preserving, documenting, researching, the paper is published and the new species makes its
classifying and reporting of the many new official debut. The whole process can take years.
discoveries that comes after the specimens have With the current rate of new species discovery
been collected in the wild. in Australia being around 1000 per year, Thiele
Dr Bryan Lessard, also estimates it would take Australian
known as “Bry the Fly Guy”, is taxonomists more than four
an insect taxonomist based at “You play a centuries to discover, classify, name
the Australian National Insect really scientific and document all of Australia’s
Collection at CSIRO in Canberra. biodiversity. “That’s obviously not
game of ‘spot
His passion is – you guessed it good enough,” he says.
– flies. “You think flies are really the difference’,
basic, and there’s one species comparing how OLD ARCHIVES,
FROM TOP, L–R: KATE DAWSON; KYM ABRAMS; NICOLE GUNTER & THOMAS WEIR; PIOTR GASIOREK; WA MUSEUM;
that’s boring and black, and it it’s different to NEW TRICKS

spreads disease, but they are so While the traditional image of a
the species that
biodiverse,” he says. “Once you taxonomist is someone who goes
put a fly under the microscope, have names” traipsing into the wild to collect
you can see how beautiful these hitherto undiscovered specimens,
animals really are.” a significant amount of taxonomic
Flies are also essential: if it wasn’t for them we discovery actually takes place in museums and
would be knee-deep in decaying flesh. “The larvae, collections. Some taxonomists have never laid eyes
JOSEPH SCHUBERT; ANDREW HOSIE ET AL; KEVIN THIELE X 2; JOSEPH SCHUBERT
the maggots, they get a bad reputation but they’re on a living specimen in the wild of a plant or creature
really good at eating organic waste, and turning that they might have spent much of their life studying.
into nutrients that can be used by other plants and At CSIRO’s Australian National Herbarium in
fungus in the soil.” Canberra, Dr Ulf Swenson – a plant taxonomist
Like so many other living organisms in Australia from the Stockholm Museum of Natural History in
– particularly insects – relatively few flies have Sweden – is visiting to delve into the herbarium’s
been taxonomically classified and named. Lessard extensive collection of plants from New Guinea –
alone has named 50 new species just of soldier flies the largest of its kind outside New Guinea itself.
and horse flies, and he’s only getting started. Like Many of these dried, pressed samples were collected
Abrams, he often goes out in the field armed with in the 1950s and 1960s.
insect traps, collects as many specimens as he can In just one month riffling through the
find, then brings them back to the lab and tries to collection, he’s discovered 15 new species in the
identify what he’s got under his microscope. family Sapotaceae, a flowering plant that includes
“We have identification guides, or taxonomic species from which shea butter and a type of latex
keys, that are kind of a step-by-step, ‘choose your are derived. Dr Brendan Lepschi, curator of the
own adventure’ to identify the species,” he explains. Australian National Herbarium, describes the
Does the fly have a pale yellow band on its leg? Yes? collection as priceless, but worthless.
Okay, go to the next step. If this process lands on “You can’t sell this stuff,” he says. “They’re
a known species, the newly-collected specimen not actually worth anything – but in terms of the
is compared to the holotype of that species – the scientific record, it’s beyond price.
original specimen that the species description and “It is a record of Australia’s biota over time and
name is based on – in the collection, to make sure. in space. You could go back to all these places and Maratus felinus (side)
SPECIES DISCOVERY
collect the same things again, if they’re still there, specimens, making it one of the largest of its kind in
but you can’t go back in time.” the southern hemisphere. Even a single workshop
Each ‘voucher’ – a set of dried, pressed, labelled on amphipods, which Berents and a colleague ran
samples – is an independently verifiable record for in 2005, documented 112 new species in a couple
all time, says Matt Renner. of weeks.
“That’s one of the beauties of herbarium
specimens; anybody can access them and verify for WHAT’S IN A NAME?
themselves the inferences that have been made on Naming approaches are one of the more delightful
that body of material.” aspects of taxonomy, and one that regularly captures
Computers and the internet have also media attention. The first fly Bryan Lessard ever
revolutionised how taxonomic collections are used. named was a rare golden-bottomed horse fly that
“When I started my career we did everything he named in honour of American singer, songwriter
by hand,” says Dr Penny Berents, a marine and actor Beyoncé. The specimen of Scaptia
taxonomist and senior fellow at the Australian beyonceae had been collected back in 1981, the year
Museum Research Institute in Sydney, whose that the singer was born, but had sat, unnamed, in
work has focused on tiny marine crustaceans called the collection until its shiny gilt abdomen caught
amphipods. “We wrote in big ledgers, we wrote on Lessard’s eye during his PhD. “I wanted to do
3" x 5" cards, we wrote on labels, and everything was something playful and memorable for my first
done manually.” species, so I named it Beyoncé because I’m a massive
While this was the standard of the day, it made fan,” he says. He did try to make contact with
it difficult to search the collections. “If someone the star to let her know of the honour, but never
had said to us, ‘What lives in received a formal response.
Sydney Harbour?’, you couldn’t Kym Abram’s naming of
do that other than flipping Visit the Sydney new whip-spricket species is a
through 3" x 5" cards looking for fish market and nod to darker heroes, namely
‘Sydney Harbour’.” In a collection there’s a good famous vampires in literature.
that now numbers more than The trend started when her
20 million natural history
chance some colleague Mike Harvey named
specimens, to flick through each of the octopi a newly-discovered schizomid
one would take approximately on sale will be Draculoides bramstokeri. Since
eight months. undescribed then, she’s planning to name one
GARDENS; ERINN FAGAN-JEFFRIES X 2; ANDY JENSZ; MARCO DURETTO; JOSEPH SCHUBERT

With the information and “Nosferatu”, another “Claudia” in
species
FROM TOP, L–R: DC GLEDHILL; CONRAD HOSKINS X 4; LESLEY ELKAN © ROYAL BOTANIC
communication technology a nod to the young female vampire
revolution, taxonomic collections in Anne Rice’s The Vampire
are now just a few clicks away. Chronicles series. “They’re little
While this has made specimens more accessible, it predators that live in the dark,” she explains.
has also increased the pressure on collections to be Apart from the rule that taxonomists can’t name
more comprehensive. a new species after themselves, the guidelines are
“In the old days, collections were solely based on pretty broad, says Dr Marco Duretto, manager of
the taxonomic group someone was working on, so plant diversity and senior research scientist at The
if you had a person working on crabs, you’d have a Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, and an expert on
good crab collection, but you wouldn’t have a good the flowering plant genus Boronia.
lobster or barnacle collection,” Berents says. “Once “It has to be unique, so it can’t have been done
we had this accessibility of our collections, I felt before – that’s the critical thing,” he says. “And part
that we really needed to have collections that were of the recommendations is it has to sound okay,
representative.” which I always think is quite cute.” The naming of
Berents instituted annual field trips up and plant species is governed by the International Code
down the east coast of Australia, collecting as many of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, while
specimens as possible, sorting them with the help of animals are governed by the International Code Of
an army of trained volunteers, and incorporating the Zoological Nomenclature.
new finds into the Australian Museum’s collection. But apart from following certain nomenclature
“The numbers of papers and species that have been conventions, it’s open season. Duretto has named
described and documented as a result of those one new botanical species after a colleague in
collections is actually quite amazing.” Cairns, where the specimen was originally collected.
Maratus felinus The Australian Museum’s marine invertebrate Another was named after his mum, because it was
(antereolateral) collection now contains more than 511,000 collected close to where she grew up.
SPECIES DISCOVERY
Upeneus caudofasciatus
Oedura picta
Oedura lineata
Oedura elegans
DR CONRAD HOSKIN, JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY

“Over the years I’ve chosen different types of name.
Sometimes I’ve named species with locally important
indigenous names, but for some areas in Queensland
Zieria wilhelminae, illus Lesley Elkan
that’s really hard, because there’s no way of accessing
local language. Otherwise I tend to name species after
some quite distinctive feature of the creature.”
MARCO DURETTO
“Zieria wilhelminae is named for
my mother and is known from
a single collection made in 1991
from Mount Jukes near Mackay
(Qld), where she grew up.”
DR ERINN FAGAN-JEFFRIES
UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE
“The antennae reminded
me of an Oreo chocolate Sathon oreo
biscuit! Sometimes we
have a bit of fun naming
new species, as it can
help people to relate
to these tiny and not
very well-known wasps.
We think we've only
described 10% of the Boronia citriodora subsp citriodora
Australian species.”
SPECIES DISCOVERY
Lanice viridis, named by Pat in 2015
DR BRYAN LESSARD
“This tiny soldier fly is
so different from the
other Australian flies
that it belongs in its
own genus. The genus
and species name I
gave it translates from
the Latin for ‘tiny black
DR PAT HUTCHINGS
fly without spines’.”
“Marine worms occur
Scutellumina parvatra
in virtually all marine
and estuarine habitats,
so that gives you
plenty of opportunities
to work in coral reefs
or in mangroves or
seagrass beds.”
Chaeropus yirratji, illus. Peter Schouten
DR KENNY J. TRAVOUILLON
WA MUSEUM
“The new species has
Yoyetta timothyi Yoyetta spectabilis
more square shaped teeth
– more suitable for eating
plant material. This is quite PROF. DAVID EMERY
unusual because all other UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
bandicoots are omnivorous. “I was raised on a farm
Eating grass only would and was hooked by nature
make it one of the smallest and insects. Cicadas were
grazing mammals that ever a favourite because they
lived.” signalled summer, summer
holidays and Christmas…
Australia has the greatest
Yoyetta grandis cicada diversity in the
world, approaching a
thousand species.”
SPECIES DISCOVERY
“I had a little rule with Boronia, which I worked image for our grain and a lot of countries would just
on a lot and of which I’ve named nearly 100 species, stop taking our exported grain,” Yeates says. “It
that I wanted to use up every letter in the alphabet,” would stop a $6 billion industry overnight.”
Duretto says. “I got my ‘z’ a couple of years ago.” The problem is Australia has its own native
Sir David Attenborough has numerous species Trogoderma beetles that happily live on decaying
named after him, and Swedish climate activist Greta organic matter in the wild, and don’t even glance at
Thunberg was recently honoured in the naming our granaries.
of a new beetle species. There’s even a proposal to “When you’ve got a ship coming into port and
name a species of blind, serpentine amphibian – like you’re beginning to load grain on it, you do an
a giant worm – after Donald Trump. The naming inspection and there’s members of this genus on
rights were won in an auction, and were intended as the boat; are they native ones that just blew in or is
a protest against Trump’s environmental policies. it the Trogoderma that will get into the grain you’re
“Entomologists and taxonomists do have a sense exporting and then could potentially stop export
of humour,” notes Lessard. “You have to throw trade?” Yeates asks. “You’ve got to be able to tell the
subtle shade.” pest from the rest.”
While there are plenty of economic arguments
BORDER PATROL in favour of taxonomy – which are outlined in detail
Is taxonomy nothing more than stamp collecting? in A decadal plan for taxonomy and biosystematics
It’s a difficult misconception to shift. in Australia and New Zealand, released by the
“I think there is, in general, a lack of Australian Academy of Science and New Zealand’s
understanding as to why taxonomy – not only Royal Society Te Apārangi last year – Kym Abrams
marine, but terrestrial – is so important,” says Dr Pat argues the need for taxonomy shouldn’t just be
Hutchings, a marine taxonomist and senior fellow pinned to its benefits for humans.
at the Australian Museum Research Institute. “You “I know most people think that everything that
hear people say, ‘But we know all the species of birds exists should have a purpose for humans,” she says.
and mammals’, and you say ‘Yes, but there’s only “I believe that things should be protected because
three or four hundred species of birds in Australia’.” they have inherent value, because they exist.”
But visit the Sydney fish market and there’s
a good chance some of the octopi on sale will be TAXONOMY’S FUTURE
undescribed species. Among the marine worms Charles Darwin was an expert barnacle taxonomist.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: A. SEMENOV; PAT HUTCHINGS; NATHAN EMERY X 3; WA MUSEUM;
that Hutchings has spent her career working on, the “All sorts of grand figures of science were essentially
beach worms and blood worms collected and sold as taxonomists,” Kevin Thiele says. It’s a science firmly
bait are treated as though they’re one species, “but rooted in the past, but which also enthusiastically
PETER SCHOUTEN © WA MUSEUM;BRYAN LESSARD (CSIRO) X 2; JOSEPH SCHUBERT
there are several species involved, and each of those embraces the future.
species have a different reproductive strategy so In contrast to its old-fashioned image, Thiele
they need to be managed as independent species”. says taxonomists have always been early adopters
Taxonomy is the infrastructure that the life of technology. One of the first uses of microscopy
sciences is built on. Unless that infrastructure is was for the study and classification of microscopic
maintained and invested in, it can start to crumble, creatures, and taxonomists have also pounced on
and things can slip through the cracks. new scientific technologies such as genetic analysis
Maintaining Australia’s precious biosecurity and 3D scanning.
has long been the strongest economic argument On the Pultenaea glabra excursion, Matt Renner
for investing in taxonomy. Taxonomists are the not only collects whole branches of the bush for
frontline sentinels for invasive species that could flattening in a wood-and-cardboard press whose
wreak havoc on the country’s multi-billion-dollar design hasn’t changed in centuries, he also takes
agricultural industry. samples from the plant’s shooting tips for genomic
On a tour of the Australian National Insect study. The DNA analysis will look at anywhere
Collection, after marvelling over tray after tray from 2500-6500 single-nucleotide polymorphisms
of iridescent beetles and giant butterflies – the – single-letter variations in the plant genome –
collection houses more than 12 million insect that could help differentiate between species and
specimens in total – director Dr David Yeates shows determine how they are related.
me a small vial containing a dead insect that looks There’s also increasing recognition of, and
like a dark grain of rice. engagement with, the taxonomic knowledge held
It’s a Khapra beetle – Trogoderma granarium; by Indigenous Australians. “Indigenous Australians
one of the world’s worst grain pests. are the first Australian taxonomists,” Bryan Lessard
“If we ever got it here, we’d lose our clean, green says. “If a species is new to science, it doesn’t mean Maratus felinus (top)
SPECIES DISCOVERY
that it hasn’t been known for thousands of years by But with fewer and fewer taxonomists, the
Indigenous communities.” chances to collaborate and debate important
Western scientists are now starting to work taxonomic decisions – like choosing the best colour
more closely with indigenous scientists. The description for a bush-pea flower – diminish.
Australian Marine Sciences Association, of which Duretto feels that loss keenly.
Penny Berents is president, has a growing program “I wish there was someone else working in my
of Indigenous engagement, particularly with the sea group, so we could have an argument.”
country people of tropical regions. The strange thing is that Australia shouldn’t
“It’s just starting,” she says. “The awareness is need so many taxonomists. Its incredible
growing on both sides; Indigenous people wanting biodiversity is a global anomaly. There is a
to engage with western scientists and western decreasing gradient of species richness from the
scientists realising that there is a lot to be gained by lush tropics to the frozen poles. And yet Australia
Indigenous engagement.” – particularly Western Australia – stands out. No
Australia and NZ taxonomy’s decadal plan one really knows why we enjoy such extraordinary
highlights a need to understand and recognise biological riches. One theory is that Australia got
“the deep connections Indigenous peoples in off relatively lightly in glaciation cycles that acted
both our countries have with biodiversity and as a biodiversity bottleneck for other parts of the
biodiversity knowledge”, and world, wiping out huge numbers
calls for respectful partnering of species and resetting the
with Indigenous communities biodiversity count.
for a “mutual exploration of “If a species is It’s one reason Matt Renner
biodiversity”. new to science, – who originally hails from New
It’s ironic that just as it doesn’t mean it Zealand – finds it easier to switch
technological advances open up off his taxonomy antennae when
hasn’t been known
whole new avenues of taxonomic he’s off the clock: there’s simply
investigation, and accelerating for thousands too much to see otherwise. He
extinctions and globalisation of years by used to walk around looking down
demand even more from Indigenous at everything. Now he just takes
taxonomy, that its workforce is in the scenery.
communities”
dwindling. “Because I did a lot of
“I can’t see myself getting a vegetation survey work in NZ,
long-term taxonomic position,” where I was responsible for
Abrams says. The biosecurity issue may be driving identifying everything at a plot level, I would look
renewed demand for taxonomists, but these jobs around and I would think there’s nothing in this
are often contract positions. “We can’t publish very forest that I don’t know,” he says. “Here’s just so
high-ranking papers so we can’t get good university much I don’t know.”
jobs, and we can’t get high-impact grants,” she says. But for a nation like Australia to only know less
Around one-quarter of the taxonomic workforce than a third of its living organisms is problematic,
consists of people who have retired but who still Thiele says. There are 200-300 unnamed species of
come in to work as volunteers. mosquitoes, for example, any of which could act as
“We’re losing the expertise of people like me,” vectors for emerging diseases. What we don’t know
says Pat Hutchings. “Who is going to replace us? could, literally, kill us.
AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL INSECT COLLECTION CSIRO
Where’s the next generation?” “We have no idea what they are, what they do,
Taxonomists are often characterised as what roles they play, what opportunities they can
scientific loners; focused, determined individuals bring, what risks they pose,” he says. “How the
who spend a lifetime exploring just one tiny hell do you manage a country sustainably when
branch on the tree of life. But it’s actually a very 70% of the species in that country are completely
collaborative profession. Renner names at least unknown?”
five individuals who have been intimately involved
in the effort to reclassify this new Pultenaea BIANCA NOGRADY is the author of The End: The
species; the citizen scientist who spotted the plants Human Experience Of Death and editor of the Left. Collections such as
and deduced they were different, several other 2019 and 2015 Best Australian Science Writing the Australian National
Insect Collection (opposite)
taxonomists who have studied the bush pea, or who anthologies. She worries that there are not enough are a record of species both
have been involved in the molecular studies, and hours left in life for all the science stories she wants in location and over time,
giving future scientists
Renner’s partner – a biologist who donates her to write but she’s burning the candle at both ends to a bank of knowledge to
time as his field assistant. give it her best shot. elaborate on.
INTERSTELLAR MICROBIOLOGY
ILLUSTRATION: CAROL PERKINS

PHOTS: GETTY IMAGES
PACKING FOR
OUR LONGEST
JOURNEY
While the transport required to make an interstellar
journey has been much debated, the biggest – and
smallest – problem has been largely overlooked.
PAUL DAVIES reports.
T wo overarching questions confront would-

be human spacefarers: where to go and how
to get there.
Much attention has been given to the latter
question. For interstellar travel to become a reality,
involved and dwell instead on a much trickier and
more basic problem – the ecological requirements,
especially those relating to microbiology.
Long-term human survival means more than
growing enough food to eat and making enough
major engineering advances are required, probably oxygen to breathe. It demands creating a complete
involving radically new propulsion systems. Many self-sustaining ecosystem. On Earth, complex
proposals are highly speculative, but we know of multicellular organisms (e.g. animals, plants) form
no fundamental physical principles that forbid merely the conspicuous tip of a vast biological
interstellar travel; whether or not it becomes a reality iceberg, the majority of which is microbial.
boils down to technology, cost and motivation. Almost all terrestrial species are microbes –
I wish to address the oft-neglected first bacteria, archaea and unicellular eukaryotes – and
question: the destination. Leaving aside fantastical to date microbiologists have scratched only the
speculations about faster-than-light travel, it is clear surface of the microbial realm.
that journeying between the stars will take a very Microbes are everywhere – in the soil, in the air,
long time, even on the most optimistic estimates in water, in the rocks beneath our feet, in the Earth’s
of technological advance. Therefore, interstellar crust to a depth of several kilometres. These busy
tourism, or trade in physical substances (as opposed little creatures are a vital part of the life-support
to information), is inconceivable. system of our planet, both via their metabolic
Travel beyond the Solar System will be one-way activity (such as recycling material) and through the
only. Two possibilities then arise: that spacefarers exchange of genetic components. Even within your
will seek out and colonise other worlds, or that they own body, microbes play a crucial role.
will create permanent artificial habitats in space. The microbial inhabitants of your gut, lungs,
Both scenarios have been popular in science fiction. etc – known as your microbiome – outnumber
I’m going to leave aside the vast engineering issues your own cells. Without them you would die. So
astronauts cannot be sent to the stars without, at the on a planetary scale. The biosphere, it seems, is the
very least, their own microbiomes. original World Wide Web.
But it doesn’t stop there. Microbes do not live Given that we can’t send the entire biosphere
in isolation; they form a vast network of biological to another world, a fundamental problem arises:
interactions that remains very ill-understood. The what is the minimum complexity of an ecosystem
basic Darwinian process – replication with variation necessary for long-term sustainability? At what
plus natural selection – is now recognised as an point, as more and more microbial species are
incomplete account of evolution. Darwinism can be dropped from the inventory of interstellar
regarded as the vertical passengers, does the
transfer of information remaining ecosystem
(from one generation It’s not just bacteria – a become unstable
to the next), but there and collapse? Which
is also much horizontal
fraction of space worms microbes are crucial
information flow, via came back with two heads and which would be
gene transfer, cell-cell irrelevant passengers, as
signalling, collective far as humans (and their
organisation of cells and much else. animal and plant food supply chain) are concerned?
Interwoven into this network are the activities
of viruses, which infect microbes just as they do
larger organisms. The subtle interplay of viruses,
microbes and metazoa constitutes an ecological
web of such staggering complexity that scientists
have hardly begun to unveil it. The daunting nature
T his is a Noah’s Ark conundrum with a
vengeance: which species get chosen to go?
Not only have we no clue as to the answer,
we have little idea of the solution to a much simpler
problem: identifying the smallest self-sustaining
of the problem may be glimpsed from the work purely microbial ecosystem.
of my Arizona State University (ASU) colleagues Can we pull the web of life to bits, extract a tiny
Hyunju Kim and Harrison Smith, who compiled data subset of it, and expect such mini-webs to function
from over 28,000 genomes and 8658 biochemical forever in isolation? Any plan to terraform a planet
reactions to create a map of information flow ahead of human colonisation cannot proceed without
taking place, not just in localised ecosystems, but a far deeper understanding of microbial ecology.
EXPLAINER
A WORLD OF MICROBES
Microbial life has been evolving for more than 3 billion years, and its diversity and quantity
on our planet – and in our bodies – is a vast and complex ecological web.
Humans
Formation
Dinosaurs of Earth Prokaryotes Visible
first appear organisms
Jellyfish 12
Seaweeds
9PM 3AM
MIDNIGHT
Bacteria
Multicellular
organisms 6PM
EARTH’S 6AM
SPECIES
HISTORY IN DIVERSITY
24 HOURS
The clock covers
4.6 billion years:
> 191 million years per hour
> 3 million years per minute NOON
3PM 9AM
> 53,000 years per second
1 2 PM Invisible
organisms
Eukaryotes
Imagine making a list of the minimum number And it’s not just bacteria that change under
of plants and animals needed to accompany humans space conditions. Michel Levin’s lab at Tufts
on a one-way mission, and leave aside the logistics of University experimented with planaria worms
growing, feeding and breeding all these organisms that had flown on the space station. Planaria can
in space, many of which may require environmental regenerate both head and tail if chopped up. Levin
conditions (temperature, pH, oxygen levels, etc.) found that a fraction of the space worms came back
very different from those congenial to humans. with two heads.
FREEMAN We might think of cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, Some of these difficulties might be mitigated by
some fish, a few vegetables – that would do for a biotechnology. The visionary physicist and futurist
DYSON start. But how many, and which, microbial species Freeman Dyson has articulated a hope that we may
do these animals and plants depend on? How many, eventually map the genome of the entire biosphere,
A visionary physicist and which, other microbes do those animal-and- then use the colossal computing power envisaged
with stars in his eyes plant-servicing microbes depend on? Which of to be available in future decades to make sense of it
these might be pathogenic to humans, yet vital for all. We might then be able to design an ecosystem
Born in Britain in 1923, some other part of the ecosystem? Without a full customised to a target planet.
Dyson is an American
physicist and educator
understanding of the principles of the networks I am far less confident, however, that the
known for his speculative involved, how can we be sure that we have done our behaviour of an ecosystem can be captured in
work on extraterrestrial
civilisations. A longtime
ecological accounting exercise correctly? this manner by mere number-crunching. Even if
advocate of exploration and It would be no good getting half-way to Alpha it was, the supercomputer may tell us that there
colonisation of the Solar
System and beyond, Dyson
Centauri only to find that a key bacterium was is no solution at all that matches the physical
studied ways of searching overlooked and left back on Earth. environment of our intended destination. Or it may
for evidence of intelligent
extraterrestrial life. In the
An added complication is that the activities of specify that tens of millions of species are required.
1950s he was a member of microbes depend on which genes they express (i.e. And that is not all. Because biological evolution
the Project Orion research
team, which developed
switch on). My ASU colleague Cheryl Nickerson involves a large element of chance, a transplanted
a working model of a found that bacteria can change their gene expression ecosystem will not endure indefinitely as originally
spacecraft meant to carry
humans to Mars. He has
in zero g, and is working with NASA to study designed, but may evolve in ways incompatible with
written a number of books, changes in astronaut microbiomes when they go human habitation, requiring complex “mid-course
including Origins of Life
(1985), and Imagined
into orbit. Of concern is whether a relatively benign corrections” entailing planet-wide bioengineering.
Worlds (1998). bacterium might turn into a toxin in space. In my view, the best hope lies not with
assembling an inventory of genes, but with our
discovering the underlying laws and principles that
govern the flow and organisation of information
One drop of sea water in living systems – what we might call “the
contains
software of life”. I believe that there are universal
informational patterns or motifs in biology, which
1 MILLION would be hallmarks of life whatever its chemical
BACTERIA
basis. If we understand the properties of these
10 MILLION Researchers have patterns and how they change with time, or how
VIRUSES identified more than they can become disrupted, we might be able to
10,000 microbial create a transplantable ecosystem small enough
species living in and on the to be transported off Earth and robust enough to
human body. withstand space conditions.
The genes in your microbiome Rather like software engineers can design a
outnumber the genes in your computer game without mapping a computer’s
genome by 150:1 . circuitry, biological software engineers might be
Your body’s microbes would able to reprogram the organisation and management
CIRCLE EARTH 2.5 TIMES of information in terrestrial ecosystems without
if you laid them end to end. unravelling all the genetic details, and produce a
Gut microbiota can weigh up to system suitable for “playing” on another world.
2KG in an adult human. Suppose the solutions for a sustainable mini-
A single human provides the ecosystem are indeed one day worked out, and
habitat for 100 TRILLION a mighty one-way mission departs for the stars,
microbes. destination: a planet many light years away, where
There are 1.3 TIMES AS the spacefarers or, more likely, their very distant
MANY microbes in your body descendants, will make a new home. Astronomers
as actual body cells. are now fairly certain that the Milky Way contains
millions, possibly billions, of Earthlike planets
(depending a bit on your definition of Earthlike), so mirror world in which familiar organic molecules
there’s plenty of real estate to choose from. are replaced by their mirror images (e.g. right-
handed amino acids instead of left-handed). It
I n many science fiction stories, the heroic

adventurers touch down and step out onto
an equable and verdant planet, hosting a rich
indigenous biosphere, though preferably not a
hostile civilisation, and take up joyful residence.
is highly likely that this alien foodstuff would be
unpalatable and indigestible. (The same reasoning
makes nonsense of the whimsical suggestions that
aliens coming to Earth might choose to eat humans.)
Worse still, the indigenous biota would serve
Unfortunately it’s not that simple. There is a as a barrier to the establishment of a secondary
vanishing chance that the neatly-excised and self- transplanted terrestrial ecosystem.
sufficient truncated terrestrial micro-ecology would There is, however, a flip side to the biological
peacefully co-exist alongside the (presumably more incompatibility problem. An alien biochemistry
extensive) alien equivalent, and proceed to carry on that offers little scope for consumption also poses
business as usual. little threat for infection. Alien microbes and viruses
But this problem highlights a much deeper and (if they exist) would probably be unable to invade
more substantive obstacle to human colonisation terrestrial organisms, or to make much progress
of other planets, which is the very existence or if they did. And vice versa. Wells’ “happy ending”
otherwise of indigenous life. to the War of the Worlds, in which the Martians
Many fictional scenarios envisage humans in succumb to terrestrial germs, is simply not credible.
search of a planet with abundant life to take care of The foregoing issues would disappear if the
the colonists’ needs thereafter. An ideal world for host planet had no indigenous life; that is, if it
human colonisation is one with oxygen to breathe was habitable but uninhabited – terra nullius on a
and edible indigenous plants and animals. But this planetary scale. Unfortunately, this scenario has its
vision flies in the face of basic biology. own difficulties, one of which is crucial to human
Microbial organisms Organic matter is edible only when its survival: oxygen.
are a vast, unseen and biochemistry closely matches that of the consumer. Oxygen is a very reactive element, and does not
essential part of life on Even on Earth, the vast majority of organisms are not endure for long in planetary atmospheres unless it’s
Earth. (1) A planktonic suitable for human consumption. There is no reason replenished. A planet with breathable atmospheric
unicellular alga of to suppose that terrestrial biochemistry, which is oxygen implies the presence of photosynthetic
genus Actinocylcus. highly specific to both the conditions on our planet plants, or at least microbes. (An important project
(2) Lactobacillus genus and the accidents of evolutionary history, is universal. in astrobiology is the construction of a space-based
bacteria are a natural It is easy to imagine carbon-based life on other optical system capable of detecting the spectral
part of human intestines worlds using different amino acids, different signature of oxygen in the atmospheres of extra-solar
and the vagina. They informational molecules, different membrane planets as a surrogate for detecting life.)
help maintain an acidic molecules, and so forth. It is also easy to imagine a If there is no life on the destination planet, then
environment that’s
hostile to disease-
causing bacteria.
(3) A nitrogen-fixing
cyanobacteria – blue-
green alga – of genus
Gloeocapsa. (4) Diatom
algae are an important
part of marine plankton.
(5) Tardigrades (water
bears) are known to have 1 2 3
survived exposure to
outer space. (6) Breast
milk bacteria includes all
beneficial types found in
the infant gut. Studies
have found that 30%
of infants’ gut bacteria
GETTY IMAGES
come from breast milk,

and another 10% from
the skin around the
mother’s nipple. 4 5 6
it very probably would not have breathable amounts comes to the prospect of humans encountering an
of free oxygen in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, extraterrestrial civilisation, all bets are off.
setting up home on a previously sterile planet, and It seems to be generally accepted that
breathing manufactured oxygen, would be far easier interstellar travel should, and could, become part of
than coping with an indigenous biosphere. our destiny. Why? A familiar answer is that humans
have always had wanderlust, a sense of curiosity, a
Q uite apart from the practicalities of

colonising another planet, there are
serious ethical issues at stake. If a planet
already hosts some form of life, the question arises
of whether human beings have the right to limit or
desire to explore the world about them and to push
on to pastures new. That may be true, but people
have always fought wars and oppressed minorities
too; just because something is deeply ingrained in
human nature does not make it a noble motivation.
threaten it by transplanting Earthlife in its midst. Rather easier to justify is the argument that
Attitudes to this issue will depend on how important human society has produced much that is good,
human colonisation is deemed to be and how which it would therefore be good to preserve for
complex the alien life posterity. Humans may
forms are. choose to undertake
One motivation for interstellar colonisation to
Earth organisms might
sending humans into keep our species, and the
space is as an insurance spread like rabbits and flame of our culture, alive
policy against a mega- elbow indigenous life aside somewhere in the cosmos.
catastrophe on Earth. By establishing a
Often cited is the permanent settlement on
impact of a large comet another planet, human
or asteroid which might destroy our civilisation or culture could continue even if disaster struck at
even our entire species. More likely in my view is home. It could be countered that this argument
a sudden pandemic, either naturally occurring or adopts an inflated view of human significance and
through the accidental release of a virulent bio- human worth, and that it is life, as opposed to our
warfare pathogen. specific species or culture, that should be perpetuated
In any case, over a period of millennia, there is no and perhaps disseminated around the cosmos.
lack of potentially species-annihilating hazards. If all We could already begin sending microbes in
that stood in the way of human survival were some tiny capsules out of the Solar System if we were so
indigenous microbes on another world, few people minded, but it is hard to imagine much enthusiasm
would have scruples about ignoring their “rights”. for the project. Seeding a barren galaxy with DNA
If a planet had complex plant and animal may one day fire people’s imagination (assuming the
TO COLONISE life, there should be strong ethical objections to galaxy is not already teeming with life), but today
contaminating it with terrestrial organisms. Even if the appeal of interstellar travel is deeply rooted in
OR NOT the two forms of life were so biochemically different ideals of human adventure and advancement.
that direct infection was avoided, it may still be the When Neil Armstrong took that first small step
Further reading on
interstellar travel: case that the terrestrial invaders would plunder on the Moon, it was widely hailed as the initial step
some vital resource and deplete the indigenous on a stairway to the stars. Half a century on, with
Gerard K O’Neill ecosystem. Earth organisms might spread like the humans seemingly stuck in low-Earth orbit, the
The High Frontier: Human
Colonies in Space
rabbits in Australia, and elbow the indigenous life prospects for interplanetary, let alone interstellar,
Apogee Books, 2000 aside, driving it to extinction. travel look bleak. These microbiology problems
Robert M Krone
That issue would be greatly sharpened if a target compound what is already a formidable challenge
Beyond Earth: The Future planet is found to host intelligent life. In the movie in spacecraft design, propulsion systems and
of Humans in Space
Apogee Books, 2006
Avatar, resource-hungry humans muscle in on the medical technology. Yet if humans wish to secure
planet Pandora to the extreme discomfort of its a long-term future in an uncaring and occasionally
indigenous population, although in the interests of dangerous cosmos, some form of cosmic diaspora
Hollywood-style justice, the pesky human invaders needs to be part of our long-range plan.
eventually receive their comeuppence. There is no
guarantee that future generations of humans would
exercise respect for the rights of alien beings, nor Physicist PAUL DAVIES is a professor at Arizona
can we be sure that aliens would respect ours. State University in the US. His latest book about life
Even aliens far in advance of us in technology on Earth and beyond is The Demon in the Machine.
and social development may not share our ethical This essay is adapted from the afterword in Starship
values. Because we cannot begin to guess the Century, edited by Gregory and James Benford.
motives and attitudes of truly alien beings, when it
ORDER
IN THE
I
T'S FIVE GAMES ALL in the third set of a women’s The ball-tracking technology that made the call
CAMERON SPENCER / GETTY IMAGES
tennis major final and a second serve at deuce – and has come to play an increasingly influential
is called long. The courtside crowd utters a role in officiating a number of sports, not least
collective “oooooooooh”. The server gestures to the tennis – is called Hawk-Eye.
umpire, and an electronic review process begins. Currently a product of Sony-owned company
Within seconds, a 3D graphic of the ball in flight Hawk-Eye Innovations, it was developed in 1999 by
appears on stadium – and television – screens and English amateur cricketer Dr Paul Hawkins. A few
the stadium resounds with a slow handclap, which years earlier – as a PhD student studying artificial
builds to a “waaaaaah” crescendo as the ball’s intelligence – Hawkins was so chagrined by an
elliptical-shaped landing point is revealed to be… LBW decision that went against him that he began
just touching the service line. Advantage server. thinking of technological solutions to bad umpiring.
TECHNOLOGY
Summer means tennis – and white line

fever amongst the players as electronic
line-judging takes an ever greater role.
PAUL CONNOLLY reports.
By the early 2000s, cricket and tennis broadcasters an officiating aid. “This is getting ridiculous.” Canadian Eugenie
were using his system as an illustrative tool. By the end of 2005, after working with Hawk- Bouchard (above) serves
In a 2012 interview, Hawkins said the catalyst Eye to test and further develop the system, the in her quarterfinal match
behind Hawk-Eye’s adoption as an official International Tennis Federation (ITF) – which against Maria Sharapova
adjudication tool in tennis was the 2004 US Open runs the Grand Slam tournaments –adopted of Russia at the 2015
quarter-final between Serena Williams and Jennifer the technology. In 2006 it was used at 10 events, Australian Open, at
Capriati. Williams lost in three sets and was, including the US Open. Today it’s used at more Melbourne Park.
according to then-illustrative-only Hawk-Eye, than 80 events, including three of the Grand Slams.
on the wrong end of some contentious line calls. Under current rules, players get three unsuccessful
“Hawk-Eye … please”, commentator John McEnroe challenges per set, so they have to be judicious when
said at one point, advocating for the tech’s usage as calling on Hawk-Eye to settle the matter.
TECHNOLOGY
So how does Hawk-Eye work?

Used for tennis, Hawk-Eye relies on the
information provided by 10 high-speed video
cameras – five trained on one side of the court and
five on the other. These cameras don’t, as you might
expect, move in order to track the ball in flight.
Considering the average speed of a first serve on the
men’s professional tour is around 180 kilometres per
hour (or 50 metres per second), that would be difficult
to do over the 23.77-metre length of a tennis court.
Rather, the cameras are in fixed, precisely
located positions, which differ from court to court
due to differences in stadium design. Before a
tournament, Hawk-Eye staff set up the cameras in
their various positions. Some will be at relatively
high and distant elevations (such as on the underside
of a stadium roof, up to 20 metres high), others
might be secured to the lower tier of a grandstand,
or even – on an outside court – to poles little higher
than an umpire’s chair.
The more elevated cameras capture something
like a bird’s eye view of the ball – approximating, if
you like, the x- and y-axes on a grid – while cameras
at lower levels supply information on the height of
the ball above the playing surface, or the z-axis.
After installation, the cameras are calibrated to
the court – an hours-long process.
While the dimensions of all pro-standard
tennis courts are ostensibly the same, there are tiny
variations that must be accounted for, for instance
in such things as line painting and surface flatness.
For these, Hawk-Eye technicians measure all court
lines and use a laser to determine if and where the
court has undulations – and they’re just two of the
many things measured for input to the system in
order for it to be consistently accurate.
Next, Hawk-Eye techs distribute more than
70 tennis balls all over the court in precisely
measured locations. Using the balls as markers,
the techs ensure that each camera works in concert
with the others so that their combined views, when
stitched together, cover the entire playing area NEW BALLS
(including the spaces outside the court lines).
Once the calibration procedures are completed,
PLEASE
REBECCA NADEN - PA IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES
both Hawk-Eye staff and the ITF rigorously test On the rebound
and verify the system – the ITF uses high-speed
(2000 frames per second) cameras mounted one The rule specifying how
centimetre above the court surface to track balls the ball should bounce
was set in 1925 and is
fired from an air-cannon onto the court. Once
still in use today. The test
the ITF has reviewed their high-speed camera involves dropping a ball
footage and is satisfied that the system is tracking vertically from a height
accurately, it’s passed for use. of 254 cm and measuring
Serena Williams (above) vented her feelings over A ball in play passes through multiple cameras’ the rebound, which should
several questionable calls that went against her in (for all Type 2 balls) be
fields of vision and at least three of them, at any one
135–147 cm (53-58 inches).
her 2004 US Open women’s singles quarter-final time, capture the passage of the ball through the air The range for balls for use
loss to Jennifer Capriati. The match was a catalyst (some cameras may be obscured by a player running at high altitude is 122-135
for Hawk-Eye’s introduction as an officiating tool. for, or making, a shot). cm (48-53 inches).
TECHNOLOGY
EXPLAINER
TENNIS BALLS, TRIANGULATED
Hawk-Eye’s success combines ever-improving modern technology
and good, old-fashioned trigonometry.
Frame by frame, a very fast squishy ball

In the high-speed sequence below, frames (1) and (2)
Hawk-Eyed line umpire
Up to 10 cameras are set up in different positions, high and low, around the court, then painstakingly calibrated to the show a tennis ball approaching its bounce, which at
court’s dimensions. In real time, vision processing is used to identify the centre of the ball in every frame from every (3) shows it just touches the line upon landing. At (4),
camera. The system triangulates information from at least three cameras to provide a 3D position of the ball. The
the ball’s about midway across its elliptical-shaped
process is repeated for each frame so that 3D positions of the ball can be combined to produce a single trajectory
contact area but completely past the line. (The time
of the flight of the ball, which algorithms use to calculate the ball’s exact contact area on the court. When a player
challenges a line call, the trajectory and ball bounce displayed is created in virtual reality software. elapsed between frames (1) and (4) in this sequence is
is the same as a single frame of broadcast footage.)
At (5), the ball is still touching the ground but now
at least 10cm (the width of a line) beyond its point of
first contact. Line call: in.
4
OLI SCARFF / GETTY IMAGES
TECHNOLOGY
From each individual frame in every video feed, Reid. “Beyond three or four cameras, depending on
Hawk-Eye’s computers identify the centre of the the capture volume, the benefit of having additional
ball among the pixels in the image. Given the ball cameras begins to reduce.”
is captured by a number of cameras covering that Perhaps not surprisingly, Hawk-Eye isn’t
particular area of court, its position in space can be infallible. A ball travelling at 160km/h would move
pinpointed using triangulation. 44 centimetres between the frames taken by a
Because the process is repeated for every camera operating at 100 fps. Hawk-Eye’s website
frame, Hawk-Eye can capture and re-create the says its “ultra-motion cameras” operate at 340 fps –
trajectory of the ball, literally by joining the dots but even using those, our 160km/h ball would travel
(the triangulated position of the ball at any given 12.3 centimetres between frames.
time) to make a smooth Pixel resolution
curve. By extrapolating might also affect the
this curve, the ball’s While the margin for error isn’t measured accuracy of
landing point can then acknowledged, Hawk-Eye’s the ball’s position during
be projected. When a flight. Hawk-Eye’s
line call is reviewed,
estimations are thought to be self-confessed average
television viewers, notably more accurate than margin for error is 2.2
spectators, players those made by the human eye millimetres – shorter
and officials see this than the length of the fuzz
curve as a virtual reality on a tennis ball.
graphic laid over a 3D rendering of the court. But the result of all this is that some estimation
According to Machar Reid, head of innovation of the ball’s trajectory must be made in the moments
at Tennis Australia, who works with Hawk-Eye before it bounces, and that the mark the ball makes
technicians at the Australian Open, 10 cameras is on landing – its “footprint” – seen on Hawk-Eye
about the right number to strike a balance between recreations may not be the actual footprint the ball
accuracy and cost. Reid doesn’t elaborate on the made.
price tag but it’s been estimated that Hawk-Eye “You have to infer [the ball’s footprint],” Reid
costs from US$60,000 to $100,000 – AU$87,000 to says. “Hawk-Eye talks about millimetres of error,
$145,000 – per court. and that error will be borne out of that [footprint]
“You get to the point of diminishing return,” says estimation.”
The view from the

Hawk-Eye control booth
(left) during the 2014
Brisbane International
Tournament. Around
GETTY IMAGES
the globe, more than 80

tennis tournaments now
use the technology as an
officiating aid.
TECHNOLOGY
The 2007 Wimbledon It’s understood that Hawk-Eye uses a series There were early teething problems, such as at
men’s singles decider of algorithms – based on the playing surface and the 2007 Wimbledon men’s final when, locked in an
between Roger Federer the speed and trajectory of the ball before it lands epic five-set struggle against his great rival Rafael
(above, at left) and – to calculate the crucial ball mark. The predicted Nadal, the normally unflappable Roger Federer
Rafael Nadal was the first compression of the ball is also taken into account. flapped when convinced that balls called in were not
Wimbledon final to use A lob, for example, will drop at a steeper trajectory, – only to discover that, well: “computer says no”.
Hawk-Eye. The system leaving a wider and more rounded mark than the But as officiating tools, electronic line judges –
controversially reversed a more elongated skid marks left by flat, hard strokes whether Hawk-Eye or its newer competitors such as
set point against Federer or slices, which come in at more oblique trajectories. Foxtenn (which uses slow-motion video replay from
at the end of the first set. While the margin for error isn’t acknowledged 40 cameras with speeds of up to 2500 fps) – seem set
REBECCA NADEN - PA IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES
Later, after a series of in Hawk-Eye’s graphics, its estimations are thought to stay. Perhaps the best reason is that the players
reviews went in Nadal’s to be notably more accurate than those made by the like it and accept it.
favour, the usually calm
human eye. When we watch tennis, we add more “I think they appreciate [Hawk-Eye] holds an
Federer asked chair
subjective decision-making inputs to our sensory advantage over the human eye, and it’s been around
umpire Carlos Ramos to
data – such as considering how well a stroke was long enough that the system is reliable, and trust has
switch off Hawk-Eye: “It’s
played – to identify where a ball has landed. been built through that,” says Reid. “There’s also
killing me today,” he said.
Reid acknowledges that triangulation to track uniformity in knowing the technology is not biased
objects in space has been utilised in many fields long against you. It’s the same for everyone.”
before Hawk-Eye. “But Hawk-Eye has just done
that in a far more accessible way than anyone before
them,” he says. “And they were clever enough to try PAUL CONNOLLY is a Melbourne-based journalist
and tackle real problems in sport – ones anchored in and author.
officiating.”
CONSERVATION BIOLOGY
A close encounter with the gorilla

matriarch at Melbourne Zoo inspired
ELIZABETH FINKEL to tell her story and that
of the zoo that transformed itself around
her into a conservation organisation.
WAYNE TAYLOR / THE AGE
RECENTLY I HELD the hand of an African western But while she’s here for contraception, Yuska Previous pages:
lowland gorilla. The hand belonged to Yuska, the is getting the full service. Vet Kate Bodley takes the Melbourne Zoo
48-year-old matriarch of Melbourne Zoo. She was opportunity to explore her teeth and gums. Wielding veterinarians examine
undergoing a procedure in the operating theatre a dental scaler and mirror, she scrapes food bits lodged mature male gorilla –
housed in one of four quaint, conjoined cottages, between her molars and gives the teeth and gums a “silverback” – Motaba,
which since 1930 have served as the zoo’s hospital. clean. Chronic dental infections are just as painful and who they suspect has
As I enter the room, several men and women debilitating for gorillas as they are for us. a dental problem, in
are moving purposefully around, attending to the Head vet Michael Lynch has just finished September 2005. Scenes
patient, checking the flashing monitors or hovering replacing the Norplant device in Yuska’s mighty such as this are common
in the background. There’s the same atmosphere of shaven left forearm. He invites me to touch her in zoos throughout the
calm intensity you’d see in any operating theatre. hand. For a moment I demur. Then gingerly I cup world: captive gorillas
Yuska, covered by a pale yellow blanket, rises like a my fingers over the long, curled fingers of her left suffer from a range of
mountain on the central operating table. At the far hand and softly stroke her black leathery palm. ills, most notably heart
end I see her imposing head with its prominent brow Lynch points out her dainty thumb, then placing his disease, and they’re
ridges and flattened crown. Her open jaw is stuffed hand on hers in his expertly way, tests the creakiness regularly monitored
with tubing, the pink tongue lolls to her left side. of her finger joints. “She’s not too bad,” he says. by animal health
Her unseeing pale brown eyes are half closed. Her Nevertheless, Yuska’s keepers say she groans when professionals.
very long furry arms are splayed out to the sides and she gets up – a problem that’s been helped recently
each hand is warmed by a green fleecy muff. by regular high-dose capsules of paracetamol.
Yuska suffers the ailments of many a middle- Astonishingly, keeper Damian Lewis has taught
aged female primate. She has arthritic joints and her to swallow the slow-release pills.
decaying teeth, and is at risk of heart disease. But On the other side of the yellow mountain,
these are not the main reasons for her procedure. Elske Posma, an obstetrician and gynaecologist
It’s been scheduled to replace her expired who usually treats women at Western Health, is
contraceptive device, which slowly releases probing Yuska’s abdomen to check the health of
progesterone and is known to many women by its her uterus. Her heavy menstrual bleeds have the
trade name: Norplant. At 48, well past the 35-year vets concerned about uterine cancer. A moment
average lifespan of a wild gorilla, Yuska still has later, anaesthetist Sebastien Bauquier, based at
menstrual cycles. U-Vet Werribee Animal Hospital, moves in from
A CLOSER
LOOK HEALTH ISSUES AS WE AGE
48-yo CAPTIVE GORILLA 48-yo AUSTRALIAN WOMAN

life expectancy 50 YEARS life expectancy 75 YEARS
(35 YEARS in the wild).
GUM INFECTIONS as a WEIGHT GAIN due to

result of a high fruit diet. inactivity, stress and diet.
CARDIOVASCULAR PERIMENOPAUSE
DISEASE Leading cause of Hormone changes associated
death for captive gorillas due with menopause lead to
to fibrosing cardiomyopathy. issues including bone density,
increased risk of breast cancer
ARTHRITIS Common and weight gain.
problem; paracetamol used
to help relieve pain. CARDIOVASCULAR
DISEASE Leading cause of
MENSTRUATION Captive death in women due to
gorillas may continue to clogging of the arteries.
menstruate well past their
wild life span. Some require DIABETES risk increases for
contraceptive implants. women over 45 years.
The grande dame

of Melbourne Zoo’s
Western lowland gorillas,
Yuska is 48 years old –
13 years more than the
average lifespan of a
wild gorilla.
his watch on the outer circle to take hold of Yuska’s My five minutes in the operating theatre is up.
curled left hand. He strokes it roughly and I gasp, When I leave I am full of questions. How is it that a
concerned he might wake her. But that’s precisely 48-year-old female gorilla is still having menstrual
what he is trying to do: an animal about to tip out cycles? Why would gorillas, with their vegan diet, be
of anaesthesia will signal its arousal in the twitch of at high risk of heart disease? And how is it possible
its hands. Yuska’s state needs to walk the fine line to get a gorilla to swallow a pill? It’s something I
between life-threating sedation and life-threatening failed to achieve with my teenage son.
(for the surrounding staff ) arousal. Occupational In searching out answers to my questions, I soon
health and safety requires that a keeper, positioned found myself writing a “life and times” of Yuska. And
just outside the room, is equipped with a rifle. of the zoo that had reinvented itself around her –
Hospitalising “category from an old-fashioned
one” animals – which menagerie preoccupied
includes lions and the Why would gorillas, with with collections to a
pig-like peccary – has world-class conservation
risks for all parties. their vegan diet, be at organisation fighting
But that’s not to high risk of heart disease? extinction with every
say things have been means at its disposal (see
ARTHUR XANTHOPOULOS / BARCROFT M/GETTY IMAGES
overly stressful for Melbourne Zoo, page 64).

Yuska. Arguably it’s
been one of her more pleasant days, beginning as it THE BEGINNING OF YUSKA’S STORY leads
did with a nice drop of Valium in a dollop of honey, inevitably to head primate keeper Ulli Weiher.
spoon-fed by her keeper at 7.30am. An hour later, Weiher was just 18 when in 1969 she became
she sat in her night pen and pressed her arm to the one of Melbourne Zoo’s first female keepers, having
side of the cage, as requested, for the injection that just emigrated from Germany where she’d trained
would put her to sleep. at Cologne Zoo. Her first impressions weren’t
One of the final checks for Yuska is her heart. favourable.
Royal Melbourne Hospital cardiologist Leanne “I experienced culture shock at the backward
Balding usually wields her ultrasound wand over state of the zoo. The hygiene and diets were poor;
human patients. Apart from being slightly larger there was no enrichment; it was a stamp collection
and lying more horizontally in the chest, the gorilla mentality with large numbers of animals crammed
heart is very similar to ours. Balding is probing for in small cages.”
the sluggish muscle movements that signal heart Four years later, two-year-old Yuska and a three-
disease – one of the major killers of captive gorillas. year-old male, Rigo, arrived from the Netherlands.
Melbourne Zoo head

primate keeper Ulli
ZOOS VICTORIA; JAMES D MORGAN / GETTY IMAGES
Weiher (top) nurses

baby Jumantano while
youngsters Ganyeka,
left, Yakini, centre, and
their mother Yuska look
on. Weiher is relaxed
about coming between
Yuska and one of her
babies: “Of course, you
have to know how to
read their signals.” In
March 2015, new mother
Kimya (left) embraces
her – then unnamed –
baby daughter Kanzi.
Both had been poached from the lowland forests around two, when Yuska started carrying him on her
of western equatorial Africa, their mothers back. “She was the sort of parent who shows interest
presumably killed. Though Weiher had taken once the baby becomes a toddler,” explains Weiher.
leave to give birth to her own son, she visited every He was gradually integrated into the group – a
evening to watch the gorilla toddlers being given tense time for Weiher. “I felt a lot of pressure. The
their evening bottle. whole world was watching in case we did something
Eleven years on, the orphaned gorilla pair made wrong.”
history. Their male baby, Mzuri, born in June 1984, For a long time she hated doing media. “It took
marked Australia’s first gorilla birth and a world my time away from my animals. Until I got older and
first via artificial insemination. The birds and the realised I could use the media to bring attention to
bees didn’t work for the pair – perhaps because the plight of gorillas.”
they’d never seen how it was done. Yuska was not
only clueless about sex, she had no idea how to care WESTERN LOWLAND GORILLAS are critically
for her baby. endangered. Their habitat ranges across the African
Weiher, who watched the birth closely, says central equatorial countries of Angola, Cameroon,
Yuska left the newborn lying on the straw. For four Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea,
hours she encouraged her to pick up the infant, to no Gabon and the Republic of Congo – home to 60%
avail. Finally Weiher took the infant to warm him in of the population. It’s shocking to learn that their
the humidicrib. Was it frightening to get between
mother and baby, I ask? “No, we have a strong
bond,” says Weiher. “Of course, you have to know
how to read their signals.”
Those were the days before occupational health A CLOSER GORILLAS IN THE
and safety rules required keepers to stay on the LOOK CROSSFIRE
other side of the bars. Weiher and another keeper,
Peter Courtney, spent 18 months working in
12-hour shifts to care for the baby.
In the 1990s, while raising my own babies, I’d To date, the greatest threats to Western lowland
been mesmerised by a newspaper clipping showing gorillas are to be butchered for bush meat, loss of
Weiher proudly cradling a gorilla baby. It’s still their forest habitat to logging and the spread of
tacked to the wall of my study, I tell her. Weiher human diseases – especially outbreaks of Ebola,
quickly dismisses my romanticising. “People think, which in 2008 tipped their conservation status on
‘Oh, it’s so cute to raise a baby gorilla.’ It’s the last the IUCN Red List from Endangered to Critically
thing you want to do. It’s so much work.” Endangered.
Notwithstanding the look of motherly pride The outlook continues to be gloomy. Africa,
in the newspaper clipping, Weiher keeps her particularly the Congo basin, has become the new
emotion for the gorillas she’s raised at a professional frontier for palm oil plantations and the best areas
distance. It’s part of a zookeeper’s self-preservation for palm growing coincide with gorilla habitat.
toolkit, she acknowledges. “You have to; they Then there’s the world’s insatiable hunger for
get sick and they die. You can’t afford to get so coltan – a contraction of columbite-tantalite – the
emotionally attached that you have a breakdown valuable metallic ore from which tantalum and
each time.” niobium are refined.
Still, she can’t hide her affection. “Mzuri has Niobium and tantalum are both regarded as
Yuska’s nature. Yakini [Yuska’s second son] was the technology-critical elements. Tantalum is used to
same. That gene going back to Yuska, all of them make capacitors for electronic equipment such as
have the same personality, really nice to work with.” mobile phones, DVD players, computers and cameras.
Raising Mzuri involved long days of cradling, Niobium – along with titanium and tin – is used in
feeding and play. His toys included a plastic jungle various superconducting alloys, which are widely
VIVIANNE MOOS / GETTY IMAGES
gym, a half-metre diameter plastic tub he liked used in the magnets of MRI scanners. Niobium’s
to throw around, and some enduring favourites: other uses include welding, electronics and optics.
hessian bags filled with wool or popcorn, as well as Not only does mining clear forests, it finances
metres and metres of paper. “They love mucking armed conflicts, placing gorillas in the crossfire.
around with it,” says Weiher. “But you have to come Especially at risk are the mountain gorillas studied
up with new ideas.” by Dian Fossey on the border of the Democratic
Part of each day was spent in the company of Republic of Congo and Rwanda.
Yuska, who was gentle and curious about her son but
showed no inclination to hold him, until Mzuri was
major existential threat is to be butchered as bush safe. To that end, Zoos Victoria has long been part
meat – typically for weddings and funerals, explains of an international captive breeding program that
Fiona Maisels, a conservation scientist based at aims to increase genetic diversity. And so it was that
the University of Stirling in Scotland: “It’s by far Mzuri, aged six, was sent off to Jersey Zoo in 1993.
the biggest threat to wildlife in Central Africa.” Located on an island in the English Channel, it was
All animals are fair game. Maisels recounts how established by naturalist and iconic author of animal
her colleagues have hiked for days in the forests stories, Gerald Durrell.
of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC – the In return for Mzuri, Melbourne Zoo got six-
larger country to the east of the Republic of Congo) year-old Motaba. Mzuri fathered two infants at
without hearing a single monkey or hornbill. Jersey. Motaba was also a great success. Weiher
The second greatest threat to gorillas is the chuckles recalling how, upon arriving in Melbourne,
destruction of their forest habitat for coltan mining six-year-old Motaba grabbed and mated with
and palm oil plantations. Illicit coltan mining also matronly 35-year-old Betsy, right under the nose
funds bloody conflicts in the DRC that place both of the infertile silverback Buluman. Their male
humans and gorillas at risk. In 2021, the European offspring, Buzandi, also required Weiher’s gorilla
Union will introduce the Conflict Minerals fostering talents – and it is the picture of Weiher
Regulation to ensure that member states import cradling Buzandi that I have on my wall.
tantalum, as well as gold, tungsten and tin, from The virile Motaba also fathered Yuska’s second
responsible and conflict-free sources only. son Yakini, born in 1999 – also hand-reared by
But the thing that tipped the gorilla population Weiher.
from “endangered” to “critically endangered” was
Ebola. Gorillas share 98% of our DNA, which not
only explains why they seem like big furry people
but also why they are susceptible to the same
diseases – everything from colds and flu to Ebola.
Because of the risks, zoos and wildlife reserves try
EXPLAINER GORILLAS GO GLOBAL
to keep people and gorillas well apart. But human-
to-gorilla transmission is not the way Ebola infected
gorillas in Central Africa. Most likely the initial To maintain the genetic diversity of the Western lowland gorilla captive
source of the infection was bats, says Maisels. But, population, zoos and conservation reserves regularly exchange and
as in humans, once an individual is infected, their resettle individuals. The total population and all births, deaths and
body fluids become wellsprings of the virus, which transfers are recorded in an international studbook.
spreads through the family via touch. And, just as in
humans, the mortality rate is devastating. Yuska 1971– Buzandi 1991– +
In 2004, a team of researchers tracked what WEA > TN > MZ (1973) MZ > Hannover (1991)
happened to one closely studied group in the
Rigo 1970–2013 Bahasha 1994– +
Republic of Congo. Over four years their numbers
WEA > TN > MZ (1973) MZ >JZ (2001)
crashed from 377 to 40.
In 2018, a comprehensive survey by Maisels Mzuri 1984–2017 + Ganyeka 2000– +
and her colleagues estimated that 361,900 western MZ > JZ (1993) > Zoo d'Amneville MZ > WZ (2011)
lowland gorillas survive across their range, of (2012)
Otana 2001–
which only about 20% live in protected areas. As
Motaba 1983– HW > MZ (2013)
their report in Science Advances put it, their major JZ > MZ (1990) > WZ (2011)
enemies are “guns, germs and [the felling of ] trees”. Kimya 2005–
They estimate the population is reducing by 2.7% Betsy 1959–2007 TZ > MZ (2013)
per year, which means it will halve in 25 years and WEA > TZ (1961) > MZ (1980)
Kanzi 2015– +
experience an 80% decline in just three generations
Julia 1982–2015 MZ
(one generation is 22 years) – the criterion for The Gambia > TN (1982)
critically endangered status. > JZ (1990) > MZ (1997) Key to locations:
HW = Howletts, UK
G-Anne 1979– JZ = Jersey Zoo
DESPITE THE BEST EFFORTS of conservationists, MZ = Melbourne Zoo
Oklahoma (1979) > JZ (1983)
Maisels and Weiher show little optimism for the MoZ = Mogo Zoo
> MZ (1997) > MoZ (2016) TZ = Taronga Zoo
plight of wild gorillas – living as they do in some of
TN = The Netherlands
the world’s poorest and most war-torn countries. Yakini 1999– + WEA = West Equatorial Africa
The grim reality means that today’s zoo gorilla MZ > WZ (2011) WZ = Werribee Zoo
populations are largely seen as an “ark” species to
be safeguarded until their wild habitats become
Since then, the zoo’s gorilla mothers have greatly missed by his keepers in Jersey, France and
mostly raised their own babies, thanks to some Australia, where he was born.”
creative thinking by zoo staff – such as enlisting
human mothers to breastfeed their infants in front MZURI’S DEATH FROM a heart attack was no
of expectant gorilla mums. However, the current surprise to zoo vets. His father Rigo met the
breeding female, Kimya, learned her mothercraft same fate in 2013. According to a 2018 review
skills from other gorilla mums during her early years in the International Zoo Yearbook, 75% of male
at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo. When she gave birth to zoo gorillas die of heart disease. It might seem
Kanzi in 2015, she was an adept mother. odd that gorillas, who apart from the occasional
But for all the moments of delight and wonder, insect are largely vegans, would suffer from heart
gorilla keepers know only too well that tragedy is disease. But unlike us, it’s not caused by cholesterol
never far away. deposits constricting their arteries. Rather, their
In May 2017, 32-year-old Mzuri – after five heart muscle becomes scarred and loses elasticity
years as Jersey’s dominant male – was challenged – a condition called fibrosing cardiomyopathy.
by a younger male and seriously bitten on the groin. Just why male zoo gorillas are at such high risk is
SHAWNEE WILLIS
During surgery he suffered a heart attack and died. an area of active research. The Great Ape Heart
Richard Johnstone-Scott, Mzuri’s keeper at Project led by Zoo Atlanta in the US has several
Jersey Zoo for 18 years, eulogised him in a letter to hypotheses, including high blood pressure and
the Jersey Evening Post: “Powerful and majestic, dietary deficiencies. A recent study of 69 gorillas in
he was a great and loveable character who will be US zoos linked the condition in males to obesity.
That supports Melbourne Zoo’s decision several she explains, because researchers have access to
years back to stop the bananas – in fact, all fruit. thousands of obliging subjects. Gorilla researchers
Not only are the gorillas leaner, they have better are limited to zoo residents that number in the
teeth. Contrary to what one might imagine, fruit tens – and they are not quite as obliging as humans
makes up a small portion of their natural diet, which when it comes to being poked and prodded. Imagine
is mostly leafy material or “browse”. They use their trying to put a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope
immense strength – a silverback is as strong as 10 on a gorilla. But that’s exactly what Zoo Atlanta has
men – to pull down small trees, strip the branches trained gorillas to accept. They even hold still for the
and stuff the leaves in their mouths. When jungle slithery probe of an echocardiogram. “We’d love to
trees do bear fruit, these tend to be small, green, do that here,” says Melbourne Zoo vet Kate Bodley,
bitter and full of seed – nothing like your Cavendish “if we can find a human sonographer willing to put
banana. Sourcing the in the time.”
immense volumes of
Today’s zoo gorilla It’s just the latest
willow, poplar and other example of how training
palatable browse is an populations are largely yields enormous
immense challenge for seen as an “ark” species dividends for zoo
the keepers: gorillas at
to be safeguarded animals, which explains
the zoo need four sticks the extraordinary
– about two kilograms time and manpower
– a day. Werribee Zoo is also introducing a west Melbourne Zoo expends on training its animals. At
African plant from the ginger family, Aframomum least twice a day, for instance, each gorilla receives
melegueta, known to be a favourite of wild gorillas, several minutes of training.
in the hope its anti-inflammatory effects might help Watching keeper Damian Lewis train the
ward off heart disease. silverback Otana, you can’t help being struck by
Nailing the major factor behind gorilla heart the geniality of the exchange. Facing each other
disease remains challenging, says vet Patricia squatting, one bearded red-haired man, one
Dennis at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, author of a silverback gorilla, they make a mirror image of
recent paper linking heart disease and obesity in sorts. They touch hands through the bars, then
males. Human heart research has galloped ahead, Lewis inspects each of Otana’s feet. Responding
of Zoos Victoria, which includes Healesville Sanctuary and

MELBOURNE ZOO Werribee Open Range Zoo. It was a moribund organisation
staffed by passionate people hungry for change.
Gray harnessed their fervour to fight extinction and
Back in the 1970s, Australia’s oldest zoo was still fixated on redefined the zoo’s mission: it was to be a “zoo-based
its collections: the more types of animals the better. Today conservation organisation”. Her resolve was hardened
it’s all about conservation. with the extinction of one of Australia’s tiniest bats, the
“Many zoos talk about conservation as something far 40mm-long Christmas Island pipistrelle – its last calls
away. We pull no punches; we say go home and think about recorded in Christmas Island rainforests in August 2009 by
your choices as consumers,” says zoo CEO Jenny Gray. a rescue team including Zoos Victoria members. “No more
Melbourne was the first zoo in the world to be certified extinctions on our watch” became Gray’s rallying cry.
carbon neutral, and one of the first to employ an animal That promise is being fulfilled. Emergency breeding
welfare officer. Keepers tend to animals’ needs, and no programs by the zoo and its partners have staved off the
visitor gets to gawk at the residents without also learning extinction of species including the mainland eastern barred
about such things as habitat destruction. bandicoot, the helmeted honeyeater, the Baw Baw frog, and
But no visitor is left in despair. even Hong Kong’s tiny Romer’s tree frog. When the building
One large, leafy exhibit educates gorilla visitors of the new airport in the 1990s consumed much of the
about recycling their mobile phones to reduce the frog’s habitat, Chris Banks at Zoos Victoria answered the
demand for coltan; another features a “zoopermarket”, desperate call from naturalists to help save the species.
where supermarket items are scanned to see if they use In July 2019, Zoos Victoria unveiled its new five-year
sustainable palm oil. For more than 2.5 million annual zoo Wildlife Conservation Master Plan, which pledges to stop
visitors, such messages are everywhere. 27 endangered Australian species following the Christmas
It’s all part of a meticulous strategy engineered by Island pipistrelle into the endless dark of extinction.
the charismatic Gray and her team. Gray’s a former civil They include Leadbeater’s possum, the Tasmanian devil,
engineer and banker who in 2008 took on the directorship corroboree frogs and the Lord Howe Island stick insect.
Melbourne Zoo’s
Western lowland gorillas
are given several
minutes of training at
least twice daily: time
relished by keeper
Damian Lewis, shown
here with young female
Kanzi. Lewis’s successes
include training Yuska,
who suffers from
arthritis,
to swallow her
paracetamol pills.
to a signal, Otana whizzes around to allow Lewis menopause? It’s one of many questions about gorilla
to inspect his back. For all his bulk, Otana is health that remain for the future.
surprisingly fast. Each request is rewarded by a nut
but there is a keenness on both sides. It’s not about ON A FRESH AUTUMN morning a couple of weeks
barking orders but an eager conversation with warm after her procedure, I visit Yuska in the company
grunts from both parties throughout. of Weiher. It’s great to see the heroine of this story
It’s here that I learn how Lewis trained Yuska fully recovered, sitting in her quiet grandmotherly
to swallow her arthritis pills. He began by offering way in the night enclosure, leaning against the
her a spoonful of smooth peanut butter, followed by grating while playful four-year-old Kanzi and
a chaser of coconut water poured into her mouth. her mum, Kimya, rustle about. The females are
Then he progressed to crunchy peanut butter. separated from Otana the silverback, and I can’t
After several weeks, Yuska learned to swallow a help a shiver of primal terror at being caught ever so
pill the same way. “She’s now just as happy to have briefly by his intense black gaze.
plain water as coconut water,” says Lewis, “and Weiher looks over her charges with a mixture of
sometimes she needs no water at all. It’s helped her warmth and concern. We’d heard Kanzi shrieking
arthritis a lot. She seems to walk more easily.” moments before and she’d rushed from our
But undoubtedly the most valuable training interview to check them. Most likely Kanzi had
advance is that gorillas accept being injected by been rebuffed by her mum when she tried to nurse.
their keepers. That frees Bodley from the bad old It’s high time for her to be weaned.
days, when she would have to use a rifle to dart a My interview with Weiher comes to an end.
gorilla. “They know exactly what we’re doing and Clearly this pesky journalist is keeping her from her
they remember us. It causes anxiety and aggression charges. But the parting words express pride in her
for the silverback protecting his group. That’s the 45 years at Melbourne Zoo, most of them shared
last thing you want for an animal with a suspected with Yuska. “I’ve had the best times seeing the old
heart condition.” style of zoo progressing to the modern day. We are
Bodley tells me that Yuska’s examination on par with any zoo.”
MELBOURNE ZOO
gave her a clean bill of health. Both her heart and

uterus were deemed clear of disease. As to her ELIZABETH FINKEL is Cosmos’s editor at large and
prolonged menstrual periods, Bodley says she’s a regular contributor. Her most recent story about
yet to encounter a great ape that stopped cycling as infant stunting in PNG appeared in Issue 83. She
they aged in captivity. Is there such a thing as gorilla serves on an advisory committee for Zoos Victoria.
PARTICLE PHYSICS
A DISCERNING
CROWD
With the European Organisation for Nuclear Research
ATLAS EXPERIMENT / CERN
working towards the Large Hadron Collider’s next

run, we asked particle astrophysicist MARTIN WHITE
what life’s really like at the one ring that rules them all.
PARTICLE PHYSICS
Bishop Stortford railway platform. Trips from

Adelaide are necessarily less frequent, and I have
become ever more comfortable over the years
with the necessary 24 hours of air travel, which is
equivalent to one series of The X-Files, or 12 films
by Alfred Hitchcock.
I
T’S LUNCHTIME, and I am standing with a The intense lure of CERN is that it remains
colleague under the main site of the CERN the best international facility for discovering
laboratory, trying to work out whether to go the new particles and laws of nature that
right or left. With the rainy Geneva winter in full would explain both how the Universe works
swing, he informs me that he’s found a hidden on its smallest scales, and how it operated
entrance to a network of tunnels under the foyer of 0.0000000001 seconds after the Big Bang.
CERN’s main building, and has worked out how to The Standard Model of particle physics that I
get to the fabled Restaurant 2 without getting wet. learnt as an undergraduate, and now pass on to
All we have to do is follow his secret route my students, remains incapable of explaining
through the tunnels, which it transpires is so secret most of the matter in the Universe, and it is
that he himself has forgotten it. After half an hour widely believed that the LHC will finally shift us
squeezing past hanging cables and scary radiation to a higher plane of understanding. As I stagger
warnings, we emerge starving exactly where we through Dubai from a 13-hour night flight with
started out. no sleep, this single thought is all I need to power
This is life at CERN in a nutshell – an endless my legs towards the Geneva gate.
search for the unknown conducted in a spirit of
frivolity by permanently hungry practitioners. MY WORK AT CERN has involved the ATLAS
Established in 1954, the European Organisation for experiment, one of the seven experiments of the
Nuclear Research (CERN) hosts the largest particle LHC whose job is to filter and record the results
accelerator ever built by humankind, named, rather of proton-proton collisions that occur more
appropriately, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). than one billion times a second. The middle of
It also has an ambitious and wide-ranging this detector is effectively a giant digital camera,
program of other experiments, which test various consisting of 6.3 million strips of silicon, and my
aspects of particle and nuclear physics, and develop first job at CERN was to write the software that
practical spin-off applications of the cutting-edge monitored each of these strips individually to
technology required to push our understanding of confirm that the system was operating smoothly.
the universe to deeper and deeper levels. I rapidly fell in love with CERN’s charming
Having lived there on and off for many years, the blend of high and low technology. During early
question I get asked more than any other is: “What testing of this monitoring system, the detector
does a person at CERN actually do all day?” would randomly turn off, endangering millions
of dollars of sensitive electronics. This was
I AM ONE of CERN’s 12,000 users, and like most eventually traced back to our computer having
Above: Associate professor of them I have worked for various universities and an off button that was placed exactly where a foot
Martin White. research institutes scattered around the world, swings when a coffee-drinking human sits down,
Opposite: CERN location with frequent travel to the CERN laboratory as an after which the system was hurriedly augmented
GLENN HUNT
showing the structure of the external participant. Long gone are the days when by a polystyrene cup and some sticky tape.
ring upgrades, enlivened I would commute from Cambridge to CERN each It is no exaggeration to state that that cup
by White’s hand-written week after teaching on a Monday, only to return was a crucial element in the 2012 discovery of the
annotations. on the following Friday for a freezing wait on a Higgs boson in the ATLAS data, a feat that finally
PARTICLE PHYSICS
The sublime and the delivered a Nobel Prize to Peter Higgs and François village of Saint-Genis-Pouilly. Most of the roads
ridiculous (clockwise Englert, and resolved a 50-year mystery regarding are named after famous physicists, and a simple
DEAN MOUHTAROPOULOS/GETTY IMAGES; (CYCLIST) FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP

from top left): a staff the origin of particle mass. Since that time, my walk between meetings can often involve changing
member works in the primary focus has been on searching for new particles countries two or three times. Security is provided by
Antimatter Factory; the that would solve the deficiencies of the Standard an armed guard at the main gate, and by a random
mascot of the T-REX Model, including “supersymmetric particles” that approach to numbers on buildings that leads to such
(Transfer Radioactive are hypothesised to resolve most of the mysteries of cartographic anomalies as having building 41 located
beam EXperiment) at our current theory, and new Higgs-like particles. between buildings 216 and 222.
ISOLDE, which studies I never had a typical day at CERN, since my
the properties of atomic CERN STRADDLES the French-Swiss border and, work brought me into contact with computer
nuclei; each champagne when based there full-time during the first runs of scientists, civil and electrical engineers, medical
bottle marks a milestone the LHC, I chose to live on the French side in the physicists, theoretical physicists, accelerator
in CERN’s history; a town of Ferney-Voltaire. It seemed fitting to choose experts, and detector physicists. The only common
maintenance check a town named after a mischievous Enlightenment thread was attendance at a large number of meetings
on the LHC’s 26.7km philosopher whose large body of work includes which, when located at opposite ends of the main
circumference is easier on both popular accounts of Newton’s theories and site, led to frantic daily runs of a few kilometres that
wheels; brightly lit danger a seminal early work of science fiction. contributed to a significant weight loss – until I
signs are a routine sight Each day would start with either a 30-minute discovered the CERN cake selection.
in this workplace. cycle to CERN or, in the winter months, a 70-minute The preferred language is English, but it’s not
walk over thick piles of snow. Of the various CERN easy to recognise it as such, due to a heavy reliance
sites scattered through the countryside, I was based on jargon and acronyms. Moreover, I met physicists
on the Meyrin site, 80 hectares of permanent and who could answer me in English, before translating
temporary buildings that reach across the border for an Italian colleague, and mocking my question
from the Swiss village of Meyrin to the French in German to a bystander. Nevertheless, I am
PARTICLE PHYSICS
always surprised at how quickly the exotic becomes based group who were the first ever band on the
normalised at CERN, whether that means getting now-crowded internet. Their repertoire of haunting
acclimatised to constantly being surrounded by doo-wop ballads that satirise life at CERN would
extraordinarily smart people, or becoming used definitely have met with Voltaire’s approval.
to dinner party statements like “I have a terrible
day tomorrow – I have to reassemble the positron CERN HAS AN AWESOME collective expertise in
accumulator!” problem-solving that is vital during times of strife,
Work hours are very much determined by the such as the aftermath of the LHC accident that
machine schedule, with some weeks bringing days occurred during the first attempt to ramp up to full
of writing computer code 9am–5pm, and others energy in 2008. My research almost failed before it
bringing nights of watching particles flying through began when, only nine days after a raucous champagne
the detector from midnight until 8am. celebration accompanied the first turn-on of the
machine, a bad connection between superconducting
A LARGE PART of the CERN experience is the unique magnets caused thousands of amps to be passed
blend of cuisines, from the fondue, pizza and steak through a wire which was effectively a bad fuse.
restaurants scattered through the surrounding The resulting explosion released two tonnes
villages, to the multiple dining options on site. I of helium into the LHC tunnel and moved a multi-
would generally have breakfast in Restaurant 1 of tonne magnet several metres down the corridor.
the Meyrin site, which provides delicious almond As a sense of numb shock hovered over Meyrin,
and custard croissants engineers carefully worked
alongside more healthy out how to locate and fix
options. For lunch, the
I met physicists who similar issues around the
same restaurant offers could answer me in ring without warming up
freshly cooked steak English, translate it the whole accelerator, which
frites, and a couple of would have caused months
daily specials listed
for an Italian colleague, of additional delay. In the
as Menu Proton and and then mock me in meantime, I continued
Menu Neutron. German to a bystander to better prepare the
Better still, ATLAS detector for future
however, is my operation, and develop novel
favourite restaurant up the hill, that has a wood- techniques for particle discovery that we could apply
fired pizza oven, themed menus that change weekly when the time came.
(including the still-discussed “Moules menu” of Even when the LHC is ostensibly stable and
2009), and a spectacular view of the local vineyards, running, there are myriad problems to solve day-
which I would enjoy as frequently as possible with a to-day. In April 2016, a small weasel chewed through
glass of the local gamay wine. a 66,000-volt transformer, taking the collider offline
Occasionally if the weather was good – or when for a week. When a second weasel took the collider
someone had broken the LHC – I could go out down after entering a substation in November
into the fields after lunch, and observe the on-site of the same year, the Rotterdam Natural History
wildlife that includes sheep, deer and a trout farm Museum successfully requested the charred remains
in which the trout regularly swim through a muon for public display.
beam, but which calculations have shown are safe to Grisly interactions with the local wildlife are
sell in the local market. in fact only one part of a complex and fascinating
In the evenings, I served my own beer and wine relationship between our collider and the local
from the taps provided, and gossiped physics to environment. When CERN’s previous Large
whoever was around until we found someone with Electron-Positron Collider was sitting in the same
a CERN van who could drive us to La Chaumaz, a tunnel as the LHC, its measurements of fundamental
well-kept local secret which serves steak cooked on particles got so precise that the physicists of the day
vine leaves in a stone oven. had to factor in effects from the local tides and the
The long hours and regular pressure of tight TGV train from Geneva to Paris.
deadlines means that it is essential for CERN users
to actively seek relaxation. I was a regular user of THE RESULTS of our collective endeavours have already
the CERN music club, playing guitar and bass (well) transformed the landscape of particle physics, with
and drums (badly) in various amateur bands that the Higgs discovery supplemented by a huge range of
played in the annual CERN music festival. Much as results that have excluded some natural solutions to
I enjoyed our rock covers, nothing we played was as the problems of the Standard Model, whilst providing
charming as Les Horribles Cernettes, the CERN- hints of anomalies that tell us where to look next.
PARTICLE PHYSICS
White’s offbeat guide to We are currently at a pivotal moment in the of our current particle searches. This can easily
the ATLAS experiment history of CERN. Two runs of the LHC have happen when the signal that we are looking for is
that’s transforming our concluded without producing direct evidence for hidden in a background of other processes that is
understanding of the physics beyond the Standard Model, and we now over a million times larger, and it is prompting me
birth of the universe. have a shutdown to prepare for a third run in 2021. to completely rethink how we perform searches for
Most particles lose Future runs of the LHC will collect about 30 times new phenomena.
all their energy in the more data than we have currently analysed, meaning We are thus in the most exciting and productive
calorimeter. Without the that we are effectively only just getting started. period for particle physics that I have experienced
jumble of other signals, Much of this work is focussed on finding in my lifetime, and the leading role played by
muons leave clean tracks particles of the mysterious dark matter that we Australia in the Large Hadron Collider programs
for physicists to analyse. know is five times more abundant in the universe means that, within four years of starting a physics
One of the ways the Higgs than anything that our children currently study degree at Adelaide, Melbourne, Monash or Sydney
boson was found was in school. We will also be able to study the universities, you too could be building detectors at
to look for its decay to interactions of the Higgs boson with unprecedented CERN, or crunching LHC data with the aid of good
two Z bosons and their precision, which will give us clues to the origin of wifi and croissants.
subsequent decay into a phenomenon which drove the evolution of the I have only one wish: if you ever figure out how
muons. Universe, but for which we lack any satisfactory to get to Restaurant 2 the back way, please let me
ATLAS EXPERIMENT / CERN
underlying explanation. know.

In this excitement, however, it is important not
to neglect the data that we already have. Recent Particle astrophysicist MARTIN WHITE is an
work I have performed with an international associate professor at the University of Adelaide.
collaboration of particle astrophysicists called the As a member of the ATLAS experiment, he searches
GAMBIT collaboration has demonstrated that for supersymmetric particles and new Higgs-like
the best-motivated supersymmetric explanation particles.
of dark matter would have slipped under the radar
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GALLERY
GREAT
& SMALL
A student-run imaging competition
aims to focus wider public interest on
the cutting-edge science occurring at
institutions around Australia.
Seed of Origin by Sukanya Varape.

Varape is a PhD candidate in the Faculty
of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences at
the University of Melbourne. Her winning
image shows immature seeds developing in
the silique (seed pod) of an Arabidopsis –
rockcress – plant. It shows both the placental
connection of seeds and the fragile nature
of the underdeveloped yet orderly seed coat,
reflecting splashes of light.
GALLERY
Under the Coverslip is a student-run scientific imaging competition open to Above: Goldilocks by Michael Dixon.
PhD, Masters and Honours students from universities and research institutes Dixon’s second-placed image shows the gold
nationally. The University of Melbourne’s Students of Neuroscience and strands of the superhighway carrying visual
Anatomy (SONA) group aims to “not only celebrate our work as scientists information from eye to brain and the blood
but spark interest and debate in scientific methods and breakthroughs from vessels (in blue) that nourish them. The
the larger non-scientific community”. SONA president Anna Yang says there actual size of the area shown is 1.64 mm2.
were 102 entries from a wide range of fields – biological science (anatomy Understanding how these vessels are affected
and neuroscience, physiology, pharmacology) to clinical science (optometry, is crucial to preventing blindness from retinal
dentistry), biomedical engineering, veterinary and agricultural sciences, diseases such as diabetic retinopathy – Dixon’s
ecosystem and forest sciences and microbiology. Yang hopes such images PhD topic, which examines the interaction
will “break down barriers between art and science by showing that there is between the retina’s immune cells and its
undiscovered beauty beneath the microscope that anyone can appreciate”. neurons and blood vessels.
GALLERY
Top left: Portrait of a stem cell scientist by Top right: A Sticky Situation by Above: Molecular Dimple by Zakir Hussain.
Jemima James. Anita Leembruggen. Hussain is a PhD candidate in
James is a BSc graduate. Her image shows Leembruggen is a PhD candidate in enteric nanotechnology. This image shows
directed staining of pluripotent stem cells, neuroscience. She’s investigating plasticity metal organic semiconductors copper
which can produce any cell type in the human in the neurons and glia in the gastrointestinal tetracyanoquinodimethane (known as
body; she used fluorescent staining to ensure tract. This 40x magnification image shows CuTCNQ), synthesised in an organic solvent
development into the correct cell type. The neuron cell bodies in red, with the glial by adding a faction of water. These materials
highlighted cells here are dopaminergic fibrally acidic protein in orange. Known show great potential as an alternative
neurons – specifically, those that are lost in as the “glue” that provides support for material for organic-based electronics,
Parkinson’s Disease. nerve cells, glia also have their own roles because they exhibit ideal semiconducting
in synaptic communication and plasticity. behaviour.
PHYSICS OF SKIING
How to ski
Best-selling author Randall Munroe takes an entertaining slide
into the STEM of skiing – including some lateral solutions to our
lack of summer snow.
S
KIING INVOLVES STRAPPING long, flat Depending on what material your skis and the
objects to your feet and sliding across a surface are made of, you might not start sliding
surface or down a slope. The surface is easily. If the skis are made of rubber, and the surface
usually water, either in frozen or liquid form, but is cement, you’ll need quite a steep slope to ski,
it doesn’t have to be. which is presumably why rubber-on-cement skiing
is so unpopular.1
You can slide down any slope if it’s steep enough.
When an object sits on a slope, gravity partly pulls For any combination of surface material and ski
it downward and partly pulls it along the slope. An material, you can use a simple physics relation to
object starts to slide when the force pulling it along calculate how steep the slope will have to be to slide.
the surface overcomes the force of friction.
It seems like it might be a hard problem, but
thanks to a convenient coincidence, most of the
complicated parts cancel out, and you wind up with
this extremely straightforward equation:
coefficient of friction = tan (slope angle)
If you want to know the slope angle, you can reverse

the equation:
slope angle = tan-1 (coefficient of friction)
This equation is delightfully uncomplicated, right

up there with E=mc2 2 and F=wma.
1. Ironically, it’s never really gained traction.

2. The second 2 is a footnote, not a superscript.
PHYSICS OF SKIING
Unlike those more famous equations, it’s only useful In a sense, skiers are really just mountain climbers
for this very specific problem, but it’s still neat how who are unusually bad at climbing but make up for it
simple it is. with very good balance.
Here’s a table of coefficients of friction of different Ice is slippery compared with most surfaces, and
ski/surface materials: snow – which is really just fancy ice – is similarly
slick. This makes them a good choice for skiing and
similar activities, which is why every sport in the
Winter Olympics involves sliding in some way.
The reasons that ice is slippery are actually a little

mysterious. For a long time, people believed that the
pressure from a skate blade melted the surface of the
ice to create a thin, slippery layer of water. Scientists
and engineers in the late 1800s demonstrated
that the pressure of an ice skate blade could lower
the melting point of ice from 0°C to −3.5°C. For
decades, pressure melting was accepted as the
standard explanation for how ice skates work. For
Here’s a table of coefficients of friction and the some reason, no one pointed out that it was possible
corresponding minimum slope angle you need to to skate at temperatures colder than −3.5°C. The
start sliding: pressure melting theory suggests it should be
impossible, but ice skaters do it all the time.
0.01/0.6° (bicycle on wheels) 3
0.05/3º (teflon on steel, ski sliding on snow)
0.1/6º (diamond on diamond)
0.2/11º (plastic shopping bags on steel)
0.3/17º (steel on wood)
0.4/22º (wood on wood)
0.7/35º (rubber on steel)
0.9/42º (Rubber on concrete)
Wooden skis would work on a 16° steel ramp. If the

skis were made of rubber, a steel ramp would need
to be 35° before you could slide. The coefficient of
friction between rubber and concrete is even higher
– 0.9 – and you’d need a pretty steep slope of about
42° in order to slide down. This also tells you that
a person in rubber-soled sneakers can’t walk up a
ramp with a slope steeper than 42°.
The actual explanation for why ice is slippery is,

surprisingly, still the subject of ongoing physics
research. The general explanation seems to be that
there’s a layer of liquid water on the surface of ice
because the water molecules aren’t firmly locked
into the ice crystal lattice. In this way, an ice cube
is sort of like a piece of cloth with fraying edges. In
the middle of the cloth, threads are locked into a
well-organised form, but on the edges, they’re less
constrained and more likely to come loose and move
around. In the same way, water molecules near the
edge of a piece of ice come loose and move around,
creating a thin layer of water.
3. Bicycles have wheels, but they’re still subject to friction — the wheels just move the location of some of the friction from
the ground to the bearings of the axle.
PHYSICS OF SKIING
However, the properties of this water layer and how Once you’re sliding down a slope, you’ll continue
a skate interacts with it aren’t fully understood. accelerating until you either run out of snow or
you reach a speed at which air resistance is pulling
backward harder than gravity is pulling you
forward.
Since air resistance doesn’t really start to kick in

until higher speeds, even a gentle slope can let a
skier or sledder go pretty fast if it’s long enough.
The theoretical top speed of a skier or sledder on

a 5° slope of unlimited length is around 48 km/h
– 72 km/h if they’re particularly aerodynamic.
On a 25° slope, speeds of over 160 km/h should be
possible for an aerodynamic skier or sledder.
Given how much time modern physics spends

on deep and abstract mysteries like searching for
gravitational waves or the Higgs boson, it can be
surprising how many basic everyday phenomena
aren’t well understood. In addition to ice skates,
physicists don’t really understand what causes
electric charges to build up in thunderstorms, why
sand in an hourglass flows at the speed it does, or
why your hair gets a static charge when you rub it
with a balloon. Fortunately, skiers and skaters can
slide on snow and ice without waiting for physicists
to finish figuring things out.
Snow is already pretty slippery, but to gain a little

extra slickness, skiers add a layer of wax to their
skis. The wax serves as a semi-liquid layer, keeping The world record for top speed achieved on skis
sharp ice crystals from digging into the hard is around 250 km/h, but people don’t keep close
material of the skis and slowing them down. track of that record, because it turns out not to be
a particularly interesting boundary to push. The
way to reach higher speed is simply to find a longer,
steeper slope.
If you keep doing that, skiing gradually morphs

into skydiving – only an even more dangerous
version of skydiving, since instead of falling through
open air, participants are skimming across ground.
Obstacles are very hard to avoid when skiing at
250 km/h, and even if you find what seems like a
smooth slope, a small bump or gentle turn could
be instantly fatal.
Waxed skis on snow have a coefficient of friction of When a competitor’s score in a sport is strongly
about 0.1, which drops to 0.05 once the skis start correlated with their odds of dying, it creates
moving4. This means that you need a slope of 5° to obvious problems for the sport. Speed skiing was
start sliding under your own weight, but once you briefly featured at the 1992 Olympics, but, after
get moving, you only need a slope of about 3° in a number of deadly accidents, has been mostly
order to keep going. abandoned at the competitive level.
4. Objects have a lower coefficient of friction when they start moving. This is the reason why, when you slip on a patch of
ice, your feet go out from under you so abruptly. As soon as your shoes start to move, they lose their grip completely.
PHYSICS OF SKIING
WHEN YOU REACH THE BOTTOM

If you’re skiing down a slope, eventually you’ll reach
a point where you can’t go forward any more.
This can happen for a few reasons:
• There are trees, rocks, or hills in the way

• You reached the bottom of the mountain Almost all of Australia’s ski destinations and about
• There’s no more snow 90% of American ski resorts use artificial snow to
ensure that ski slopes are covered as soon as it’s cold
enough for snow to stick, and to keep them covered
for the whole ski season even if the weather doesn’t
cooperate. The artificial snow also helps to replenish
snow lost throughout the season due to melting and
erosion from skiers.
Snow machines make artificial snow by using

compressed air and water to create a stream of tiny
ice crystals, and then misting the ice crystals with
more water droplets as they float in the air. As the
mist drifts down to the ground, the water droplets
freeze onto the ice crystals to form snowflakes.
If you’re having fun and don’t want to stop skiing,

you have a few options.
If there are trees in the way, you can try removing

them; for more on how to do this, read my useful
book, How To. If there are rocks in the way, read
How To for advice on whether you can move them.
If you’ve reached the bottom of the mountain, you
can try continuing to accelerate yourself forward.
If you’ve run out of snow, read on.
WHAT TO DO IF YOU RUN OUT OF SNOW

From our discussion of friction, we know skis
don’t work very well on most non-snow surfaces.
There are some artificial ski slopes that use special
low-friction polymers, with a bristly hairbrush-like
texture that provides some softness and lets the
skis dig in when turning. There are also special skis
designed for use on grass and other surfaces, but The snowflakes formed in this way are more
they use wheels or treads rather than sliding. compact and misshapen than the delicate shape
of natural snowflakes. Natural snowflakes have
If you want to keep skiing on snow, but there’s no much more time to grow slowly in a cloud, one
more snow to slide on, you’ll have to make some water molecule at a time, which allows intricate and
yourself. symmetrical shapes to form.
PHYSICS OF SKIING
Artificial snow forms quickly, in the short time Snow from typical snowmaking equipment needs
it takes water to descend from the nozzle to the a lot of time to drift down to the ground, which
ground, from a handful of drops clumsily jumbled means you’ll have to produce the snow far ahead of
together. your current position to give it time to settle, and
the movement of air currents may make it hard to
concentrate enough of it along a narrow path.
Suppose you need a 1.5-metre-wide path to ski on,

and you’re going to descend at a speed of around
30 km/h. Natural snow might be 10% water and
90% air by volume, although this ratio varies quite
a bit depending on how light and fluffy the snow is. The long, slow descent is necessary because it takes
For simplicity’s sake, let’s also assume you want a long time for the water droplets to lose heat to the
about 20 centimetres of somewhat heavy snow to ski air through evaporation to attach to the ice crystals.
on, with snow that’s ⅛ as dense as water, equivalent There are ways to cool the water droplets down
in mass to a layer of water an inch thick. The total more quickly – but they have some drawbacks.
amount of water you’ll need is therefore:
If you inject low-temperature substances like liquid
1.5 metres x 20 cm x 1/8 x 20 km/hour = 310 litres/second = 1125 m /hour
3
nitrogen into the air/water stream, they can reduce
the temperature and cause almost-instant freezing.
Skiing the length of a football field will require These techniques can produce snow quickly, and are
more than 30,000 litres of water, along with the used by some snowmaking companies for special
equipment to turn it to snow. events in areas where the air temperature is too high
for normal artificial snow to be produced.
Cryogenic freezing techniques are generally not

used by ski resorts – it’s far too expensive and
energy intensive to freeze water this way compared
to letting it freeze on its own in the air.
For your small, very narrow ski slope, liquid

nitrogen just might be affordable. If you buy the
liquid nitrogen in the form of small tanks, your ride
could cost $50 per second, but industrial suppliers
You’ll have a hard time finding equipment that can can get you a much better price if you buy in bulk.
produce snow fast enough for you. The biggest
snowmaking machines might produce snow at rates
of 100 cubic metres per hour. That’s just 10% of
what you need, so you may need a lot of them.
PHYSICS OF SKIING
If you lay down some kind of a tarp under the snow,

you can pick the whole sheet of snow back up and
reuse it with minimal losses.
The tighter you make the snow-transfer loop, the

less snow you’ll need.
You don’t have to use liquid nitrogen – you

could also try other cryogenic gases. Liquid
oxygen is similar to liquid nitrogen and just as
easy to produce, and could in theory be used for
snowmaking. However, this is not recommended.
Liquid nitrogen is a popular cryogenic fluid in part
because it’s so inert and nonreactive. Liquid oxygen
is neither of those things.
You can even make the loops smaller than your body
if you pass the stream of snow around your legs,
rather than over your head. . .
MAKE THE PROCESS MORE EFFICIENT

You could reduce the snow consumption if you
could somehow scoop up the snow behind you
and reuse it, rather than producing more snow
as you go.
. . .at which point you’ll realise you’ve effectively
reinvented roller skates.
RANDALL MUNROE studied physics before working for a short time at NASA Langley Research Centre building
robots. He created the webcomic xkcd in 2006, and now draws and writes full-time. He has been nominated for
a Hugo Award three times and has had an asteroid named after him – 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause mass
extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth. This is an extract from How To …, his third book.
Would you like to ask Randall a puzzling or entertaining question? Email us at [email protected]
LAW OF REFRACTION
REFRACTED
GLORY
Before Galileo, Descartes and
Newton, Thomas Harriot made
some of the breakthroughs
ascribed to his famous peers
– but as ROBYN ARIANRHOD
explains, it’s his investigation
into an everyday occurrence
that shows just what it takes to
discover a scientific law.
DAVE KING / IMAGE SOURCE
LAW OF REFRACTION
THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO straw in a glass of water seems to bend towards the
people must have wondered at liquid’s surface. Dutch astronomer and mathematician
the shadowy images reflected back Willebrord Snell found the long-sought mathematical
at them from pools of water. The relationship – widely known as Snell’s law – some
great thing about science, of course, time around 1621. It predicts the precise angle
is that wonder leads to curiosity, and through which a given ray of light will bend when
eventually someone figured out the law refracted into a different transparent medium.
of light reflection. It’s incredibly simple Snell didn’t publish his discovery, and no-
but marvellous nonetheless, because it’s one really knows how he arrived at it – his only
one of the first ever laws of physics. surviving manuscript on the subject gives just
It says that when a light ray is reflected, a brief, geometrical outline of the law that now
it makes the same angle with the reflecting bears his name. There is no extant evidence of
surface as the incoming beam, and that both his carrying out measurements of angles, and he
beams lie in the same plane. Its discoverer didn’t specifically give numerical values to various
is lost in time, but Euclid and Aristotle left substances’ light-bending qualities (known now
written references to it, several hundred years as indices of refraction). It turns out, though, that
before the Common Era. someone else did – 20 years before Snell. This
Surprisingly, it took 2000 more years for mysterious Elizabethan didn’t publish his discovery
someone to discover the law describing another either, but he left scores of manuscript pages that
simple trick of the light: refraction. show just how he did it. His name was Thomas
You may not know the maths, but you’ll be Harriot.
familiar with the phenomenon. It shows up in the
way your feet seem askew when you step into ankle- FIRST, THOUGH, SOME BACKGROUND. The law
deep water, or the way the lower part of a drinking of refraction is more complicated than a simple
LAW OF REFRACTION
proportional relationship between angles, as in the THE EARLIEST KNOWN ACCOUNT of a search
law of reflection. Instead, it says that the ratio of for the secret of refraction is in the second century
the sines of the angles of incidence and refraction is work Optics by Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria.
constant (see box below). He measured a number of angles of incidence and
The ability to predict the amount of bending refraction and thought that they were proportional
when a light beam meets a transparent surface to each other, but couldn’t find an exact ratio
such as water or glass has many applications: the that covered all possible angles. Nine centuries
design of high-precision lenses for telescopes, later, not even the greatest of all medieval optical
microscopes and cameras; explaining why rainbows researchers, Abu Ali Ibn al-Haytham, was able to
form; determining the true depth of an underwater uncover the elusive law.
object; remote sensing devices; correcting for One of the exciting things about the history of
atmospheric refraction in astronomy; and many science is that there’s always scope for rewriting
more. Closer to home, there’s a rather surprising or reinterpreting the history books. Recently
and very significant application: fibre optics (see box discovered manuscripts by Ibn al-Haytham’s
on page 88). predecessor, the 10th century Baghdad-based
Many readers will recall doing simple lab scholar Abu Sa’d al-‘Ala’ Ibn Sahl, appear to show
experiments in physics class to confirm the law of that in his analysis of lenses he used a geometric
refraction. In one such setup, students shine a beam construction that illustrates the correct relationship
of light across a circular disc with a scale marked on between incident and refracted rays.
it like a protractor; a plastic semicircular lens in the But does this qualify as the discovery of a new
middle of the disc refracts the beam, and the angles law of physics?
of incidence and refraction can be measured from A number of scholars say no. The scientific
the scale. Rotating the disc (or the light beam) allows method requires laws of physics to be derived
many pairs of angles to be measured, and students from the real world by experiment, or from a
can verify that the ratio of the sines of each pair of quantitative mathematical theory that can be tested
angles is the same. by experiment. Roshdi Rashed, who discovered and
Of course, in centuries past there were no handy reconstructed Ibn Sahl’s lost manuscripts, admits
sources of narrow, focused light beams – and, more that, “At no time does any kind of experimentation
importantly, there was no hindsight. whatsoever intervene as part of the proof.” Rather,
EXPLAINER THE LAW OF REFRACTION
The law of refraction is generally written today as
n1sin 1 = n2sin 2,
or sin 1/sin 2 = n2/n1 = k

DAVE KING / IMAGE SOURCE / GETTY IMAGES
n1
1 is the angle of incidence of the light ray in medium 1, say air, and 2 is
the angle of refraction from the air into medium 2, which might be glass
or water, or any other transparent medium besides air. The number n1 is
called the “index of refraction” of medium 1 with respect to a vacuum, and
similarly for n2. The index of refraction of a vacuum is defined to be 1, and k
n2
is the index of refraction for medium 2 with respect to medium 1.
Clearly the angles 1 and 2 will vary as the light rays approach from
different directions, but the amazing thing about the law of refraction is that
for any two given media, sin 1/ sin 2 is constant.
LAW OF REFRACTION
Ibn Sahl was trying to show geometrically how to

construct the best lenses for focusing light so that it
could be used for burning. He wasn’t looking for a
law of refraction, and he certainly didn’t generalise
his result to all refractive media.
What’s more, even with his single pair of
media – the air and the lens – “the sine ratio, or
its reciprocal, is never stated as a constant, nor
is it assigned a numerical value or supported by
theoretical considerations of any kind”, as the
late professor of the history of Islamic science
Abdelhamid Sabra put it.
It may seem extraordinary that an adequate
derivation of this relatively simple law eluded the Thomas Harriot’s
greatest scientific minds for 2000 years. A closer life was rich with
look, however, shows the importance of motivation achievement. He
and method. Ibn Sahl’s motivation appears to travelled to the New
have been purely practical – burning lenses. While World, becoming
technological needs have always been drivers fluent in the Algonquin
of science, the discovery of fundamental laws of language. He was a
physics generally requires the desire to understand pioneer in telescopic
the natural world just for its own sake. Yet even astronomy and the first
the most passionate curiosity may not be enough if to use fully symbolic
there’s no clear way ahead. algebraic language.
Today, we take the scientific method for granted, He also discovered the
but even in Snell’s time physics hadn’t yet become law of falling motion
a separate discipline with its own methodology, independently of Galileo.
distinct from the magic, theology and philosophy
that also underpinned the natural human drive to of the small but growing band of early 17th century
understand the universe. researchers who did carry out careful experiments
Until Newton and his modernising 18th century – in his case, most notably on falling motion.
disciples, there simply wasn’t a “road map” – no Johannes Kepler – famous today for his marvellous,
articulated, widely accepted dictum about replicating observation-based discovery of the laws of planetary
experiments independently, basing hypotheses on motion – was also interested in refraction, but
solid data and expressing them quantitatively so that when he intensified his hunt for the elusive solution
their predictions could in 1602, he relied on
be tested. Witelo’s medieval
Instead, most No-one had had the version of Ptolemy’s
“natural philosophers” 1450-year-old tables
mixed commonsense
patience to undertake the of angles of incidence
observation and measurements required and refraction. It seems
rational deduction with to quantify refraction no-one else had had
wild, often mystical the determination and
speculation in order to patience to undertake
make sense of nature. There was a problem with the meticulous measurements needed to quantify
TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY
language, too. Definitions of concepts that are now the bending of refracted light. No-one, that is, until
considered fundamental – such as acceleration, Thomas Harriot turned his mind to the topic.
force, and even the index of refraction – had not yet
been wrestled into a coherent, quantitative form. ONE OF THE BEST ASTRONOMERS of his era,
As for experiments, the inherited medieval tradition Harriot was a young Oxford graduate in the early
had focused on “thought experiments” – such as 1580s when he began his career as navigational
hypothetical designs for lenses – justified by reason advisor to Sir Walter Ralegh (or Raleigh: spelling
rather than physical testing. wasn’t fixed at the time, and Ralegh himself used
Of course, there’d always been occasional various versions of his name, most often Ralegh).
geniuses intuiting something akin to the By the early 1590s, the colourful and controversial
“Newtonian” method. Galileo, for instance, was one Ralegh had fallen from Queen Elizabeth’s favour,
LAW OF REFRACTION
and soon afterwards he and Harriot had also fallen various pairs of angles of incidence and refraction.
foul of key religious authorities, who looked askance In other words, he didn’t directly measure his angles
upon their free-thinking approach to science. of incidence and refraction (designated here as i and
(Galileo famously suffered under similar suspicion.) r), but calculated them from his measurements of
It was a stressful time, but one of Ralegh’s friends the image of his stick via the trigonometric ratios
– Henry Percy, the Ninth Earl of Northumberland – sin r= bc/bf and tan i= bc/cd .
was so impressed with Harriot’s inquiring mind that As you might have noticed in your straw
in 1597 he offered to take over as his patron. With experiment, it takes a dexterous and persistent
this newfound financial security, Harriot began to experimenter to take reasonably accurate
explore the question of refraction. measurements using this method, and Harriot
His first measurements were taken on 11 August, eventually devised a better approach. He didn’t
1597, but in modern scientific style he also took them have a convenient rotating protractor, plastic
the next day, and again on August 21. He carried out prism and narrow beam of light, but he did have
these early observations by immersing a stick and a handy astrolabe – a disc with a scale marked
marking off the position around the edge for
of its image when viewed
It takes a dexterous and taking astronomical
through the water. observations. So, in
You can get the idea persistent experimenter 1601, he experimented
by dropping a straw into to take measurements with immersing his
a glass of water. Hold the
using this method astrolabe in water, its
straw at an angle, and if circular scale making it a
you look at the top of the convenient protractor.
water, you see the immersed part of the straw bent When he plotted his observed refracted images
towards the water surface. Put your finger on the of these scale marks, he found that, within the
outside of the glass, level with where the bottom end limits of experimental approximation, they all
of the refracted image of the straw appears to meet lay on a smaller, concentric circle inside the circle
the side of the glass: the point marked f in the diagram of the actual astrolabe scale. He had arrived at a
below. Looking from the outside of the glass you will geometric form of the sine law of refraction, akin
see that your finger points to a spot that is higher than to that defined by Ibn Sahl and later Snell – except
the actual lower end of the straw, marked d. Harriot that Harriot’s was more detailed, and was clearly
marked off these points carefully, repeating the constructed from experiment.
process as he changed the angle of the stick. And unlike the others, Harriot used his diagram
After taking these measurements, Harriot used to calculate the refractive index of air with respect
them to calculate, from trigonometric tables, the to water – where the refraction is measured for
light going from the water into the air: his result of
A recreation of Harriot’s 0.748955 is within 0.5% of the modern value. He
experiment, in which he also realised that these indices hold in reverse, so
painstakingly took measurements that the index of refraction for light going from air to
for multiple angles of the straw. water is the reciprocal of the index from water to air.
His adeptness at trigonometric Then he went even further – and in doing so
calculations (opposite) is preserved showed just what it takes to discover a general law of
in his notebooks. nature. He’d already demonstrated the importance
of the repeated, replicable measurements that
b c now underpin the modern scientific method –
but only for refraction from air into water. So he
painstakingly set about measuring the angles for
f light going from air to water, from air to glass, and
IMAGE SOURCE / GETTY IMAGES
r°
from water to crystal.
b In each case, the ratio of sines was constant,
f
although the value was different for each different
i° pair of media – so he’d found that each refracting
substance has its own refractive index. And once
d again, he calculated his indices to six decimal places.
But there’s still more to Harriot’s discovery. He
was not only one of the best astronomers and best
experimenters of his time, but also one of the best
PETWORTH HOUSE/LECONFIELD, HMC240V(240 F404); REPRODUCED WITH THE
KIND PERMISSION OF LORD EGREMONT AND THE WEST SUSSEX RECORD OFFICE
LAW OF REFRACTION
LAW OF REFRACTION
algebraists. He was the first to use a fully symbolic, research, let alone publishing it. Instead, his algebraic
recognisably modern form of algebra – traditionally, version of the sine law appears in the calculations for
it was done in the form of word problems, and his own tables of refraction for several different media.
even by 1600 relatively few symbols were used. He The tabulated angles of incidence run degree by degree
also implicitly recognised the concept of algebraic from 1° to 90°, and in each case the corresponding
trigonometric functions – as opposed to the geometric angles of refraction are found from the sine law in the
measurements of the sides of triangles used by Ibn Sahl form sin r=k sin i, using his experimental values of k,
as well as Snell and his contemporaries. and interpolation of sine tables.
Harriot was so advanced in this that he had to That’s 90 separate calculations for each
invent his own symbols for trigonometric functions. table, all done by hand to six decimal places, and
He used a kind of U symbol for sines – as on the left of systematically set out around the explicit sine law. It
the image on the previous page, and in the remarkable was an extraordinary achievement.
manuscripts where he uses the modern algebraic form
of the sine law. In the case of air and water he takes HARRIOT HAD FOUND HIS LAW by 1601, but Kepler
the sines of various angles of incidence and multiplies wasn’t having the same success. He’d recognised
them by the refractive index 0.748955. This gives him some fudging in Ptolemy’s figures but his own
the sines of the corresponding angles of refraction. It’s experiments frustrated him; in May 1603, he wrote
an extraordinary enough experience simply sifting to a friend: “Measuring refractions, here I get stuck.
through his pages and pages of calculations, lost to Good God, what a hidden ratio!”
history for so long. Imagine the patience required just Finally, in 1606, he wrote to Harriot. A mutual
to carry out the long multiplications by hand. You can acquaintance had told him of Harriot’s success, and
feel the effort when you look at his work, where he’s Kepler sent a letter requesting Harriot’s laborious
multiplying out, in a different context, sine values with experimental measures. But Harriot was exhausted.
13 significant figures! He’d continued to act as Ralegh’s accountant, and
Harriot didn’t rush into print with his general law had helped prepare evidence for him in his treason
of refraction – he rarely got around to writing up his trial at the end of 1603. Then, at the end of 1605,
EXPLAINER TOTAL INTERNAL REFLECTION
Fibre optic cables are now well known in the context of telecommunications
and high-speed data transfer, when digital signals are sent not as electric
current along copper wires, but as pulses of laser light. Optical fibres are glass
or plastic, roughly the diameter of a human hair. Such fragile filaments need
to be encased in flexible, shock-absorbing coatings, and the cables often need
to bend. You’d expect light to be absorbed by the protective coating at each
bend, causing it to become weaker and weaker. But if the fibre is also given
an inner cladding of the right transparency, the light beam can be oriented so
that an unusual consequence of the law of refraction – total internal reflection
DAVE KING / IMAGE SOURCE / GETTY IMAGES
– enables virtually all of the beam to bend with the fibre.

This is only possible if the light meets the fibre’s edges at angles of n2
incidence greater than a certain “critical angle”, ϴc – the angle corresponding
90°
to a 90° angle of refraction, where the light is refracted along the edge of the Tota
n1 l inte
cladding, parallel to the fibre. rnal
refle
ction
Since sin 90° = 1, the law of refraction shows that the sine of the critical
angle is n2/n1. This must be less than 1 (the maximum sine value), which
means that n1 > n2, so the cladding (medium 2) must have a lower index of
refraction than the fibre (medium 1). Given these refractive indices, the critical
angle can be easily calculated from the law of refraction. For larger angles of
incidence, the light is not refracted, but internally reflected along the fibre.
LAW OF REFRACTION
Northumberland, too, was imprisoned, swept up in

the political paranoia that followed the Gunpowder
Plot. Harriot himself was tainted by association and
spent an anxious three weeks in prison.
He replied to Kepler that his poor health meant
“it is difficult for me to write or think or argue
clearly about anything at the moment”. He held
back from sending his hard-won refraction data,
forwarding instead a sample of measurements
to clarify a misunderstanding that Kepler had
expressed in his letter, about the relationship
between refraction and density.
Kepler also wanted to know about Harriot’s
reputed discoveries on rainbows. These were new
and unfinished results, but Harriot told Kepler that
rainbows are formed because light is reflected and
refracted through each raindrop – something he’d
worked out himself, although historians now know
that several 14th century scholars in Persia and
Europe had come to the same conclusion.
Harriot said he would tell Kepler more about his
rainbow theory when he had more time and energy
to write up his work, which he never got around to. Word of Harriot’s genius began to get out in Harriot’s map of the
He was often sidetracked by the needs of his patrons the latter half of the 20th century but it is only moon shows 49 different
and the dramas surrounding them in their political recently that scholars have collectively attained a features. Its accuracy
misfortunes. Nevertheless, his manuscripts reveal clear understanding of his broad-ranging research. was unsurpassed for
the amazing breakthroughs he’d hinted at. He not only discovered Snell’s law before Snell decades.
First, he discovered the phenomenon of and the secret of the rainbow before Descartes
dispersion – the splitting of sunlight into colours via and Newton, he found the law of falling motion
refraction through a prism – half a century before independently of Galileo, used a telescope to study
Newton famously rediscovered it. Careful quantifier the moon and sunspots – again independently of
that he was, Harriot measured the amount of bending Galileo – and made many other original discoveries
for various colours, and found that different colours in mathematics and physics.
KIND PERMISSION OF LORD EGREMONT AND THE WEST SUSSEX RECORD OFFICE
PETWORTH HOUSE/LECONFIELD, HMC240V(240 F404); REPRODUCED WITH THE
have a different index of refraction in the same He never achieved the fame he deserved, and
pair of media. Unlike Newton, he focused only on there are few surviving clues as to what he was
two or three colours. Still, he’d made a remarkable like. Yet his presence felt palpable when I held his
discovery, and he went on to find the different colour quill-penned, 400-year-old manuscripts in the
indices for a variety of media. British Library and studied them for myself. They
Finally, using the law of reflection and his new embody his power of concentration and the breadth
law of refraction, he gave a brilliant mathematical and depth of his enquiring mind. Occasionally they
analysis showing why the rainbow has its reveal an idle doodle, or a shopping list scribbled in
characteristic size and shape, anticipating René the margin.
Descartes by several decades. But it’s the pages showing his geometric
presentation of the sine law, and the neat,
IN THE FOLLOWING YEARS, Kepler took the study laboriously calculated tables of refraction built
of optics into new territory, publishing a seminal explicitly around the algebraic form of the law,
work on geometric optics and the nature of vision that stand out from most of his papers. They’re
in 1604 – the most substantial advance since Ibn al- discoloured with use. I can’t think of a more
Haytham – and a work on refracted images in 1611. eloquent testament to their importance, first of all to
He never did find the correct law of refraction. Harriot, who surely used them in his further optical
As for Harriot, he went on to make further researches, and now to modern historians.
unpublished breakthroughs, but he died in 1621 and
his manuscripts were lost for 150 years. Even after ROBYN ARIANRHOD is an affiliate in the School of
their discovery in an ancient English castle, most of Mathematics at Monash University. Her biography
the 8000 rediscovered pages remained unstudied of Harriot was published by OUP in 2019.
for two more centuries.
ZEITGEIST
SCIENCE MEETS LIFE
STAR WARS SYMPTOMS

The phantom menaces within us all 92
SPECTRUM: YELLOW
Sunflowers and the sun 96
INSECTS NEED YOU!

Chasing butterflies 99
SKYROCKET SCIENCE
WHIZZ BANG
The chemistry of fireworks 102
REVIEWS 108 We thrill to see them, but have you ever

wondered what goes into the tubes, and
PUZZLES 112
just how they snap, crackle and pop?
PORTRAIT
Kym Abrams, taxonomist 114
NATHAN KILAH explains on page 102
ZEITGEIST STAR WARS
Midi-chlorians,
here on Earth!
KURITA KAKU / SOTCKTREK IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES
Anakin’s home enclosed inside an eukaryotic

cell: the nucleus (the perforated sphere),
sitting in a half shell of the rough endoplasmic
reticulum sprinkled with blue speckles of
ribosomes (blue dots) and the tube-like smooth
endoplasmic reticulum. Green mitochondria
and tiny nutrient spheres float amongst the
cytoskeleton lines.
STAR WARS ZEITGEIST
Does the Force run strong in

us all? To celebrate the 20th
anniversary of Star Wars:
Phantom Menace, Bill Sullivan
looks at some real-life
microscopic powerhouses,
including one which could
make sense of Jar Jar Binks.
A LONG TIME AGO… well, 20 years ago. the Force runs strong in certain people, like One, we’re going to discuss some “phantom
That was when George Lucas ended a Anakin Skywalker. menaces” that are not so far, far away.
16-year dry spell to bring Star Wars back The majority of fans greeted the idea of
to our galaxy in the form of a prequel midi-chlorians with an iciness that rivals a THE CLEAREST PARALLELS to midi-
trilogy. The primary story revolved around night of camping on Hoth. Their existence chlorians right here on Earth reside in all
the transformation of Anakin Skywalker implied that not everyone could train to be living cells in the Kingdom of organisms
into Darth Vader, and gave us the chance a Jedi. The midi-chlorians suggested that we call “Eukaryota”. Eukaryotes include
to see a young Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda becoming a Jedi was more about being born plants, fungi, and animals, as well as
in their prime. Lucas also introduced with excessive microbes rather than soul single-celled protozoa like amoebas. What
memorable new characters like Padmé searching on Dagobah. Sensing the disdain eukaryotes do not include are bacteria.
Amidala, Mace Windu, Darth Maul, and fans had for midi-chlorians, future Star Bacteria are the microbes that gave
the midi-chlorians. The midi-what? Wars films never mentioned them again— rise to midi-chlorian-like entities that are
Most people are trying to forget that as if millions of microbial voices cried out essential for every organism in Eukaryota
Lucas ever injected this concept into Star in terror and were suddenly silenced. to live: the mitochondria. Mitochondria
Wars mythology. In the words of Jedi As misguided as the idea might have are cellular organelles that make energy
Master Qui-Gon, the midi-chlorians are been, there are many Earthly examples of from respiration (oxygen). Plants have an
microscopic symbionts that live inside cells microbes dramatically changing a host’s additional symbiont of bacterial origin
and are somehow conduits of the Force. behaviour. Some can even turn a good called the chloroplast, which generates
The midi-chlorians provided a biological person to the Dark Side. In honour of the energy from sunlight. These are powers
basis for Force powers and explained why 20th anniversary of Star Wars: Episode that are just as awe-inspiring as the Force.
ZEITGEIST STAR WARS
Don’t believe me? I find your lack of faith

disturbing.
Perhaps Obi-Wan new genes into your system called your
“microbiome”. The number of bacteria in
Over three billion years ago, Earth should have slipped a person’s microbiota is estimated to be
was a cell-eat-cell world. One day in the
primordial Rootleaf stew, a large cell
some probiotics into greater than the number of human cells
in the body. Consequently, these tiny
engulfed a bacterium. But instead of being Anakin’s Bantha microbes can have enormous effects on
slowly digested for over a thousand years,
the bacterium somehow evaded destruction
milk to keep him how someone feels and behaves. Judge
them by their size, we should not.
and made itself at home inside its predator. from turning to the Many of the startling findings about the
The bacterium started replicating into a
clone army that evolved into mitochondria.
Dark Side intestinal microbiota come from studies
performed on germ-free mice, which
Mitochondria act like the power have no microbes in or on their bodies.
converters you’d pick up at Tosche to “mitochondrion” and “chloroplast” is This allows scientists to implant various
Station, enhancing its cellular home probably not a coincidence. microbes into their guts (we don’t need to
with an abundance of energy. Some of Let that sink in for a minute. If you go into the unsavoury ways this is done)
these mitochondria-containing cells also thought midi-chlorians were incredulous, and observe their effects on personality and
engulfed a photosynthetic bacterium that keep in mind that every cell in your body behaviour. The results of these experiments
became a chloroplast. In other words, has mitochondria, an ancestral bacterium suggest that gut microbes influence a wide
chloroplasts and mitochondria used to be that now gives you power. range of traits, from appetite to mood.
two separate types of free-living bacteria In a study by the Center for Genome
that were eaten by larger cells – as Qui- MITOCHONDRIAL SYMBIONTS dwelling Sciences and Systems Biology, Washington
Gon said, “There’s always a bigger fish”. inside your cells are only the beginning. University School of Medicine, germ-free
In this case, there was indigestion, and Your body is home to trillions of bacteria mice implanted with intestinal bacteria
it allowed a partnership to flourish that that live inside your intestines, inside taken from obese people began to overeat
was mutually beneficial – a process called your orifices, and all over your skin. Got a and became obese; if given bacteria from
endosymbiosis that’s likely to be the bad feeling about this? Collectively, your lean people, the mice remained lean.
same one used by midi-chlorians. The microbial inhabitants constitute your In another example from Ireland,
resemblance of the term “midi-chlorian” “microbiota,” and they bring a bounty of reported in the Journal of Psychiatric
How rude: Obi Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn weren’t sure if Jar Jar Binks was intelligent life when they met.
Could he merely have been suffering from a bad bout of bacteria?
STAR WARS ZEITGEIST
Research, germ-free rats given intestinal

bacteria from people who are clinically
depressed soon developed symptoms of
depression, too – becoming anxious and
uninterested in sweets. Germ-free rats
given bacteria from people who are not
depressed did not develop symptoms of
depression. If gut microbes can indeed
affect mood, perhaps Obi-Wan should
have slipped some probiotics into Anakin’s
Bantha milk to keep him from turning to
the Dark Side.
The intestinal microbiota appear to
have a commlink to our brain, possibly
through the vagus nerve, which connects
the brainstem to various parts of the body,
including the digestive system.
Some of the ways these intestinal
microbes can exert their surprising effects
on our mind could be through the myriad Jedi mind trick: Qui Gon could control many species’ behaviour with a tone of voice
of chemicals they produce. Some of and a wave of his hand – Toxoplasma in action?
these microbes manufacture important
neurotransmitters like serotonin, some harbour bacteria that grant superpowers. sense that Toxoplasma would hijack the
influence the immune system, and some A study published in Nature Medicine rodent brain to turn it into an easy meal for
make butyrate, which can affect levels of reported that when bacteria from elite cats. The creepiest part is that Toxoplasma
gene activity in our cells. One recent study athletes were given to mice, the mice can infect the brain of any animal, including
published in Cell Metabolism isolated a were able to run on a treadmill for longer. humans. Unless the person is immune
rare type of alcohol-producing bacteria compromised, Toxoplasma produces no
from the guts of people with auto-brewery WHILE MIDI-CHLORIANS are characterised overt symptoms of illness, but strange
syndrome, a bizarre condition that gets as symbionts, viral infections or parasites correlations have been made suggesting
them drunk even though they’ve consumed can also manipulate behaviour in their that the presence of the parasite transforms
little to no alcohol. Perhaps this could host. Sometimes this has catastrophic how that person behaves.
explain the silly high jinks of Jar Jar Binks? consequences, such as in the case of rabies, A Brazilian study from 2018 showed
The microbiota makes it conceivable a virus that can transform a gentle porg that people infected with Toxoplasma
how bacterial symbionts can bestow into a beastly wampa. By turning its host have a higher frequency of risk-taking,
superpowers of sorts, albeit not the kind into an aggressive monster, the rabies virus rage disorder, and anxiety. Consistent
that can levitate rocks or Force push increases its chances of spreading to a new with increased risk-taking, people with
an enemy. Clear demonstrations of victim through the bite wound. Toxoplasma are more likely to exhibit
symbiont superpowers have mostly been A stealthier pathogen that can alter host entrepreneurial behaviour, be in a traffic
demonstrated in other species. behavior is Toxoplasma gondii – a single- accident, or attempt to navigate an asteroid
The coffee berry borer, for example, celled parasite that causes rodents to lose field despite the odds being 3720 to 1.
draws its sustenance solely from coffee their instinctual fear of cats. Cats are the The idea of midi-chlorians was not
berries – consuming the equivalent of only host in which the parasite can complete welcomed into the Star Wars universe, but
230 cups of coffee per day. This little the sexual stage of its life cycle, so it makes like it or not, microbial symbionts have
beetle can tolerate such extreme levels of a profound influence on just about every
caffeine thanks to a bacterial species in lifeform on Earth, including you. Their
its gut called Pseudomonas fulva, which A rare type of alcohol- Force will be with you…always.
carries a gene that makes an enzyme that
cuts through caffeine like a lightsabre
producing bacteria BILL SULLIVAN is the author of Pleased to
through a battle droid. gets people drunk Meet Me: Genes, Germs, and the Curious
Another superpower bacteria can
grant is thermal tolerance. The “plant lice”
even though they’ve Forces That Make Us Who We Are (National
Geographic Books). He is a professor at
insects known as aphids can withstand consumed little to no the Indiana University School of Medicine
LUCASFILM
hotter temperatures better when carrying

a symbiotic bacteria called Buchnera
alcohol. Could this in Indianapolis, where he studies infectious
disease. Visit him at authorbillsullivan.com or
aphidicola. Some of us humans may also explain Jar Jar? follow on Twitter @wjsullivan.
ZEITGEIST YELLOW
Yellow, ancient
and modern
There’s nothing mellow about

the colour of sunflowers, says a
tint-tingled Ashley Hay.
IN THE CHILDREN’S GAME of Spotto, a point
is earned for every yellow car identified
next to his brother’s shop in The Hague,
and he sought to honour that memory with
That the Dutchman’s
along a random stretch of street. In the past this painting. sunflowers could
few years, walking with my son to and from
school, I’ve played hundreds of games of
It was part of a series he painted to
greet Paul Gauguin into their shared
blaze so brilliantly in
Spotto, and the thing that always amazes workspace in the south of France; it was 1888 was thanks to
me is just how many yellow vehicles – cars,
scooters, trucks – you see on the streets
the painting that van Gogh liked most,
and the one he hung in the bedroom he
ongoing development
of pigments in the
GETTY; VIVIANA BARREDA / EKELY/STUART C WILSON
once you start to look for them. was preparing for Gauguin in Arles. To
The first time I saw the colour yellow,
I was 23 years old. I don’t mean I’d seen
van Gogh, the canvasses expressed not only
“certain qualities of colour” but also “an
19th century
no yellow before that, or never noticed it, idea symbolising gratitude”.
but I don’t think I’d registered it properly.
Then, in the National Gallery in London THE POWER of van Gogh’s sunflowers
in 1994, I found Vincent van Gogh’s also comes from how utterly new – how
Sunflowers, painted in the summer of 1888. unprecedented – they looked at the time of
Sunflowers, Helianthus (L.), from the their creation. Charles John Holmes, who
family Asteraceae, are native to north and went onto become London’s NG director,
south America and had been domesticated wrote in 1910 that they “seem to be alive,
there well before they were taken to their petals seem to writhe and flicker like
Europe in the 16th century. Van Gogh flames, their hearts to be quivering with
had a clear memory of an arrangement of intense unearthly fire. I know no other
sunflowers in the window of a restaurant painting of such uncanny attractiveness.”
YELLOW ZEITGEIST
Left: van Gogh’s Sunflowers, 1888.

Above: 47-million-year-old Asteraceae fossil,
from Argentinian Patagonia.
What’s curious is that sunflowers picked crocuses to yield 100 grams of at the back of the eye have to be excited
had presented themselves this way – as a saffron threads), arzica (made by stewing simultaneously and nearly to the point of
different kind of arrangement – millions of weld plants, also known as dyer’s rocket), peak sensitivity. This makes it a colour
years earlier. The oldest known example of and orpiment (a highly toxic sulphide that’s as visible to people who are colour
the sunflower is a Patagonian fossil dated to of arsenic) – were suddenly replaced by blind as it is to those who are not. The only
around 47 million years ago: it documents the brightness of cadmium yellow (first greater excitement the cones in your eyes
the ancestors of modern Helianthus in discovered in 1817, but not commercially can experience is to see pure white.
South America after the great break-up of produced for more than 20 years after But yellows can also be unstable. The
Gondwana. And it looks extraordinarily that, thanks to the scarcity of the zinc ore industrial pigments that van Gogh was
like van Gogh’s own later images. on which it depended) and chrome yellow using are all susceptible to darkening and
It’s rare to find Asteraceae fossils – they (put to use as a pigment shortly after the discolouration with age. However brightly
usually leave only pollen in the record. But identification of the element chrome in bright van Gogh’s original yellows had
this specimen shows two flowers, complete 1797). With their powerfully different blazed, they proved to be impermanent
with seeds, petals and stems, which gives chroma and tones, it’s easy to see how things – and toxic. Chrome yellow, for
it an uncanny resemblance to van Gogh’s they brought canvasses to life – van Gogh instance, contains the toxic heavy metal
interpretations. Even the fossil’s tones himself described the colour as “light lead, and carcinogenic chromate.
suggest a match with van Gogh’s palette. on light” and admitted he’d “had to key
myself up a bit to reach the high yellow THERE AREN’T MANY WEEKS that pass
THAT THE DUTCHMAN’S sunflowers could note” he needed to make this series. without me thinking of van Gogh’s
blaze so brilliantly in 1888 was thanks And yellow is an exciting colour. Its sunflowers, of their yellows, and of the
to ongoing development of pigments in wavelength range is 570-580 nanometres links that splay out from them like petals
the 19th century. The ancient yellows and to register this hue – to discern to ideas of gratitude. Perhaps they register
– Persian yellow (requiring 8000 hand- it – both the red and green cone cells as an elemental or fundamental thing, like
ZEITGEIST YELLOW
sunshine – which van Gogh described as “a relation, at a certain moment, of a man and a To discern yellow,
light which, for want of a better word I can sunflower”.
only call yellow – pale sulfur yellow, pale I can imagine the artist’s excitement, both the red and
lemon, gold.” spreading these new bright yellows onto a green cone cells at
But the Sun itself presents an interesting palette for the first time, and understanding
colour question. Most children in Western their shocking dazzle. I can understand the back of the eye
cultures would choose to colour a Sun the bulk orders he placed, like one in April have to be excited
yellow or orange: in The Day the Crayons 1888 that called for quantities of double
Quit (2013), a picture book by Drew tubes of lemon chrome yellow (10), No. simultaneously and
Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers, the green crayon 2 chrome yellow (10), and No. 3 chrome nearly to the point of
seeks mediation for the yellow and orange yellow (three). Seven of these yellow tubes,
crayons, both of whom claim to be “the true he wrote, were needed “urgently”. peak sensitivity
colour of the sun”. “Please settle this soon,” His starry night; his wheat field. Some
says the green crayon, “because they’re researchers believe he suffered xanthopsia, exploring the intersections between art and
driving the rest of us crazy.” If the owner of or yellow vision; others that he saw yellows technology, divides van Gogh’s work into
those crayons had been from Japan, they – even haloes – as a side effect of the different periods and notes the correlation
would have chosen to colour their sun red digitalis he was prescribed. A study by Jason between his time in Arles, in the bright
instead. Bailey of ArtNome, a blog dedicated to summer of the south of France, and his peak
And the true colour of the sun turns out yellow consumption. Bailey suggests it’s as
to be neither van Gogh’s sunflower-yellow simple as the fact that van Gogh was living
nor orange of any kind. At one level, it’s in more brightness, and saw it – noticed it –
white, the combination of all colours; and then transferred that to his work.
Isaac Newton’s rainbow-spectrum
spun back into something whole. SOME METEOROLOGISTS suggest
But its highest output of that increased levels of CO2 in
visible light is neither yellow the atmosphere will not only
nor orange: it’s green. change what we perceive
The green crayon in that as the sky’s colour
story book should have (tilting it more towards
been advocating for orange), but the colour
himself. of the Sun itself
(tilting it towards
THE NOVELIST that red). I’ve tried to
D.H. Lawrence picture the Sun of my
described van Gogh’s childhood – is it the
sunflowers as “the same now, or has its
offspring of the colour changed along
sunflower itself and with me? Was it closer
van Gogh himself… a to sunflower then, or
revelation of the perfected has it always been the
saffron I see now?
On our most recent
walk from school there were
a handful of yellow cars, and the
bonus of a bright courier truck just at
the end. I wonder sometimes how many
we miss, on the days we don’t start up with
NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/JAXA
counting, or how many we might have seen,

if we’d taken another path. They’re there,
In a composite image from Nuclear of course, like so many things – whether we
Sppectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)
notice or not.
teelescopes, the roiling mass of energy that
is our Sun reveals the true colour of its most
visible light: green. The Sun’s a bonus. NuSTAR’s ASHLEY HAY is a novelist and editor of
prrimary scientific goals were to survey black The Griffith Review. Her most recent book
hooles and supernova remnants. is A Hundred Small Lessons.
CITIZEN SCIENCE ZEITGEIST
Wings
of
desire
Guaranteed to see you flying high: a citizen-led

effort to double Australian butterfly sightings.
THE FUNNY THING about butterfly citizen Braby, but heard nothing until “[Braby] using photos from Google image searches.
CREDIT: AUSCAPE / UIG / GETTY IMAGES
science is that you might have contributed found one himself and contacted me and “There was all this wealth of data
already – you just don’t know it. said, ‘I think I just found your butterfly’ ”. there from photographs that people were
It’s a story that starts in 2012, when The distinctly spotted insect – a tawny taking anyway, and they were correctly
ecologist and manager of the Butterflies coster, now established across Australia’s identifying the butterfly even though it
Australia Project, Chris Sanderson, was Top End – had been previously found only wasn’t known in their country. And no
visiting some friends near Darwin. He in Sri Lanka and India. “We wondered, one in the professional lepidoptery world
photographed a bright orange species ‘What’s going on here? This is not an had written anything up about this – there
that he couldn’t find in his butterfly bible Australian butterfly – why are they here?’,” were just these records sitting there on
– The Complete Field Guide to Butterflies says Sanderson. “It turned out that this Google and we were able to track the
of Australia. Intrigued, he emailed the butterfly had been moving through Asia by spread and measure the rate of expansion
picture to the guide’s author, Michael stealth and we were able to track its spread of the species completely on an ad-hoc
ZEITGEIST CITIZEN SCIENCE
Clockwise from top: Bronze ant-blue basis. So we thought – what if you did this if you don’t have any reliable information
Acrodipsas brisbanensis; tawny coster a little bit more formally?” on range or population you fail on all
Acraea terpsicore; Kakadu four-barred
Thus were sown the seeds for the categories to be able to list a creature [as a
swordtail Protographium leosthenes
geimbia. Butterflies Australia Project. Launched threatened species].”
in November 2019, its centrepiece is an The Atlas of Living Australia is the
app that can run on a phone or a tablet. No central open data hub for this country’s
special skills required – just a device with biodiversity. It has more than 87 million
GUIDE & SEEK the app and a camera. Simply take a photo records, including 40 million sightings of
Two species to watch out for: and log it into the app. Even if you’re not in birds – but just 250,000 for butterflies.
mobile data range, the system will capture Sanderson would like to double that, and
1. Australian laced fritillary your location, and log the species when your has set the project an ambitious target of
Argynnis hyperbius inconstans phone connects. Part of the fun is to try to gaining 100,000 records by the end of 2020.
Possibly Australia’s first butterfly identify your spot using the field guide’s “We want to get people all round
extinction, with a range thought to shortlist of local likelies, but you can also Australia out looking at butterflies… at
be in the coastal strip from Gympie upload your picture as an unknown species. the places that are close to them – private
(Qld) to Port Macquarie (NSW). You might think it’s merely an properties, local parks, random parts of the
A large orange butterfly with a entertaining diversion on a sunny stroll, map that people just happen to be at,” he
wingspan of about 60mm, it’s been but that photo is so much more important. says. “Citizen scientists have the enthusiasm
seen only once since 2002. For such an easy-to-spot and and the ability to get to more places than we
2. Northern ant-blue widespread group, butterfly data in could ever reach in a structured way.”
Acrodipsas decima Australia is surprisingly patchy. For Citizen observers have a lot to
CHRIS SANDERSON
A tiny grey butterfly with a many species, range maps are, Sanderson offer scientists, and Sanderson sees the
wingspan of 20mm, known only mourns, a “weird mix of expert elicitation relationship as one of give and take. “One
from a single hilltop on a property and hand drawn based on gut feeling. It’s a of the things… in the app is a field guide
three hours’ drive south of Darwin. situation where it’s best available and best so people have a reference guide in their
available is way better than nothing. But pocket,” he says earnestly. “But we also want

CITIZEN SCIENCE ZEITGEIST
“Citizen scientists
have the enthusiasm
and the ability to get
to more places than
we could ever reach in
a structured way”
population. Some butterflies have a co-
dependent relationship with other species,
such as ants, so these behaviours might also
be revealed or expanded.
Clockwise from above: orange lacewing Cethosia penthesilea; tailed emperor Charaxes And then there’s the chance of butterfly
sempronius; northern Jezebel Delias argenthona; common Australian crow Eupolea core. El Dorado. “I’d love somebody in this
project to find a new species – I think it’s
possible,” says Sanderson. “We’ve done
pretty well on butterflies in Australia, but I
really think that someone who’s out there –
visiting somewhere or on a property that has
the right conditions – will find something
that no scientist has found before.”
The other hope is to rediscover “lost”
species – those only seen a handful of times
or less. Two are listed opposite: the laced
fritillary, and the northern ant-blue, about
which, Sanderson says, “we know literally
nothing – we’ve never seen a juvenile, we
don’t know what the host plant is.
“A record or a photograph of these
to teach people how to identify butterflies, is not what would be useful for a skipper would have me out of my chair and dancing.”
how to do a survey, how to take a photo. The butterfly… People often take these And that’s something we’d love to see.
data will be vital for us, and hopefully enrich cracking great photos – full focus frame-
people’s experience of nature.” filling of the subject – and then expect that THE BUTTERFLIES AUSTRALIA PROJECT
Sanderson says photographing you’ll definitely be able to identify it, but will be running spotting workshops across
butterflies is easier than it sounds, but if you just can’t see the right bit of a wing the country in coming months. Cosmos
there are a few things to pay attention to. and it’s one of those difficult species then will follow the project in future issues and
(LACEWING & EICHHORN’S CROW) CHRIS SANDERSON; GETTY IMAGES
“You need photos from different angles, you’re stuffed.” through its social media channels. Tune
because there are different features for Every record will add lepidoptera data in for regular updates, and please – walk
different species that are important. So that’s desperately needed – knowledge early and snap often. Tell us how you go at
what would be useful for a swallowtail about a species’ range, habitat, habit and [email protected]
HOW TO TAKE ID PHOTOS

1. Take photos from as many angles as 3. Be patient. Many butterflies will
possible, but aim particularly for one tolerate even phone photos from quite
photo with wings open and one with close if you move slowly and carefully.
wings closed. 4. Use the field guide. On it, there are
2. Some butterflies can’t be identified notes for each species about what
from photos, but the plants or feature is important for identification,
habitats they are associating with may and which species it is similar to.
help reach an ID, so consider taking a Understanding these things will tell
broader area photo of where you saw you what angle to photograph the Eichhorn’s crow – even a distant photo
the butterfly. butterfly from. can be used for ID.

ZEITGEIST FIREWORKS
11
Na 56
Sodium
Ba
Barium
38
Sr
Strontium
22
Ti
Titanium
29
Cu
Copper
FIREWORKS ZEITGEIST
The science
of fireworks
Ever wondered THE BACK OF LAUNCESTON-BASED
pyrotechnician Tony Sumner’s shirt reads:
“Pyrotechnician. If you see me running,
about what’s
try to keep up.” It’s an old joke, but it
makes sense. Fireworks are dangerous
things. Seemingly harmless sparklers
caused over 500 emergency room visits
behind the in the US in 2018. At times, even the

professionals get things wrong. In San
Diego in 2012, a 7000-firework, 17-minute
big bangs
Independence Day display was fired in a
ferocious – and blinding – 30 seconds.
Fireworks are integral to many cultural
celebrations: what would Chinese New
and bright Year, New Year’s Eve or the Fourth of

July be without them? I’ve found that
demonstrations combined with professional
sparks of
firework displays are a great way to
engage the community with chemistry. To
paraphrase the American physicist Richard
Feynman, the beauty isn’t just at the larger
New Year’s scale, but also in the smaller dimensions,

and how they work together.
Fireworks are broadly defined as
Eve? Nathan
explosive devices that emit a combination of
coloured flames, sparks, and noises, and can
be made to climb high into the sky before
exploding. It’s fundamental chemistry and
Kilah ignites the physics coming together in the blink of an

eye in an awe-inspiring display. There are
few all-encompassing sensory experiences
discussion.
like watching a fireworks display: the
visceral thud of the lifting charge, the
anticipation as the faint glow of the lit fuse
GETTY IMAGES

ZEITGEIST FIREWORKS
rises like a tiny flare, the smell of heavy The solid potassium nitrate, charcoal released is
smoke and sulfur oxides in the air, and and sulfur combine to produce the gases characteristic
Na
the revelry as colour and sparkle explode carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2), of the element AlF
3
across the sky. which rapidly expand when the powder (and is known 6
explodes, while solid products potassium as its emission
A TALE AS OLD AS TIME carbonate (K2CO3 ) and potassium sulfate spectrum), as
The breakthrough for the development of (K2SO4 ) are suspended in the air as thick all atoms have
fireworks was the creation of gunpowder. smoke. Many other by-products are the same “staircase”
Ninth-century Chinese alchemists were produced, including oxides of nitrogen and of quantised electron
searching for elixirs to extend life, and sulfur, carbon monoxide (CO), metal salts energies.
stumbled across mixtures of honey, and particles. Fireworks rightly don’t have So, adding certain metal salts to the
potassium nitrate a particularly clean fireworks will dependably give specific
and sulfur that
erupted into flames
Alchemists searching reputation: many of
these compounds
colours: barium salts – BaCl2, BaCO3,
Ba(NO3)2, and Ba(ClO3)2 – for green,
when heated in a fire. for elixirs to extend are environmental copper salts – CuCl, CuCO3, and CuO – for
Over time the
honey was replaced
life stumbled across pollutants. blue, sodium salts – NaNO3, Na2(oxalate),
and Na3AlF6 – for orange, strontium salts –
by charcoal, and mixtures of honey, LET’S GET PHYSICAL SrCO3, Sr(NO3)2, and SrSO4 – for red, and
a proto-scientific
method of trial
potassium nitrate The colours we
see in fireworks
mixtures for other colours.
Burning pieces of solid metal also
and error gave and sulfur that are a result of the contribute to the colour effects seen in
rise to gunpowder
mixtures very
erupted into flames quantum physics of
atoms. Atoms have
fireworks, sparklers, and lance-works
(“firework” words and shapes, usually on
closely resembling a nucleus containing a ground-based frame). The hot
those used today. The general formulation protons and neutrons surrounded burning pieces of metal
for gunpowder (also known as black by electrons. These electrons are ejected while
powder) is 75% potassium nitrate (KNO3, are present at specific, reacting with
an oxidant), 15% charcoal (a carbon-rich known energy levels. A oxidants, and
fuel) and 10% sulfur (S, a flux that lowers the useful analogy is to think of
u C O 3 with oxygen in
ignition temperature of the mixture). the electrons as balls sitting C the air. Metals
These ingredients need to be present on a staircase. The electrons used include
in the correct quantities; the size of the can rise or fall between the aluminium (Al),
particles and how well they’re dispersed steps, but the distances between magnesium (Mg) and
will have a direct impact on how rapidly the steps remains the same. titanium (Ti), which burn
they burn, deflagrate (a subsonic, but rapid, In fireworks, metal atoms are excited with intense white light, while iron (Fe)
oxidation) or explode. by the combustion of gunpowder, raising gives the sparks an orange colour.
The ingredients are simple, but the their electrons to higher energy levels. The
chemical reactions taking place are very electrons don’t stay at the higher energy WHISTLE WORKS
complex. Below is a simplified, balanced levels, but quickly return to their lower Colours aren’t the only effects: noise
equation for the combustion of gunpowder. energy state by releasing light. The light is an important feature of fireworks
Gunpowder:
10 KNO3(s) + 8 C(s) + 3 S(s) ➔ 6 CO2(g) + 5 N2(g) + 2 K2CO3(s) + 3 K2SO4(s)
FIREWORKS ZEITGEIST
displays. Thuds and bangs are sonic pipe or a whistle. As the composition is
booms (exploding gases from gunpowder burnt away, the length of the pipe changes,
expanding faster than the speed of sound), shifting the pitch.
while crackling effects are made by mixing
a magnesium-aluminium (Mg-Al) alloy PACKING FOR FUN
with a metal oxide – historically, lead (II, The streaks of light we see from aerial
IV) oxide (Pb3O4), but increasingly bismuth fireworks come from small pellets of
oxide (Bi2O3) as an environmentally gunpowder, metals and metal salts, and
conscious choice. This mixture is divided binders, which are poetically named Iron = orange
into granules that burn rapidly to give the “stars”. These are formed by cutting a
crackling noise. block of the mixed materials into small
Whistles are made from highly volatile cubes (think a party platter of cheddar
compositions, for example mixtures of cheese), pressing them into round pellets,
oxidants – such as potassium perchlorate or even rolling them into spheres in
(KClO4) – and fuels like sodium benzoate, tumbling machinery.
sodium salicylate, or highly unstable The rolling technique allows for the
potassium picrate. This mixture is packed manufacture of layered “gobstoppers”
within a partially filled tube. As the of different compositions, which display
compound burns, rapidly expanding gases changing colours and sparkles as they
create standing waves within the tube, burn. The stars are typically packed
resonating like into spherical shells or cylinders ready
an organ for ignition.
Barium sulfate = green
r ( N O 3) 2
S
Aluminium = white
GETTY IMAGES
Pyrotechnician Shaun Gibson setting up some of the 2.6 tonnes of fireworks along
the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle, ahead of the Hogmanay fireworks display.

ZEITGEIST FIREWORKS
Modern ignition systems make use

of “e-matches” – small match-shaped
mixtures of oxidants like potassium
perchlorate (KCIO4) or potassium nitrate
(KNO3) with metal or metal-hydride fuels,
connected to wires.
An electrical charge is passed through
the wire, igniting the e-match and
creating hot sparks that are directed at
the firework fuse. E-matches allow the
modern pyrotechnician to impeccably time
computer-controlled sequences, which may
be synchronised with music, or co-ordinated
across multiple firing positions.
UP, UP AND AWAY

The majority of fireworks at a modern
professional
display are
shells fired
from
mortar
a C l 2 tubes.
B The fuse
is ignited,
setting off
a gunpowder
lifting charge that hurls
the spherical shell high into the air. The The arrangement of the stars within the fired shell creates the different shape effects,
burning fuse reaches the interior of the such as these chrysanthemums and sparkling showers above Sydney’s Opera House.
shell and ignites the bursting charge, which
explodes the shell and ignites the stars that More complex and expensive The typical, up-in-the-sky, public–
have been carefully cylindrical fireworks display fireworks described here are just
packed inside. allow for the the tip of the pyrotechnic nose cone: this
The arrangement The fuse is ignited, layering of effects, collection of chemicals can be used to create
of the stars around
the bursting charge
setting off a such as an initial
colour, followed by
rockets, crackers, fountains, roman candles,
cakes, wheels, spinners… and many more.
allows for the gunpowder charge a different colour So, next time you see some fireworks,
creation of shapes
in 360°. These
that hurls the higher, then a larger
sparkling charge.
take a moment between your ooohs and
aaahs to consider the physics and chemistry
can be floral- spherical shell high The possibilities that put them there. And if you see the
named spherical
arrangements like
into the air and combinations
are endless and
pyrotechnician running away – well, yes; it’s
probably a good idea to follow them, and fast!
GETTY IMAGES
chrysanthemums limited only by the

and peonies (incorporating coloured stars creativity of the pyrotechnician and your DR NATHAN KILAH is a Senior Lecturer in
with or without sparkling trails), hearts, bank balance – it’s genuinely a case of more Chemistry at the University of Tasmania. This
smiling faces, letters and more. bang for your buck. is his first article for Cosmos.

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ZEITGEIST REVIEWS
The Last Butterflies: he studies to other animals listed as

A scientist’s quest to save a endangered, he says that “the collective
rare and vanishing creature weight of all individuals of the five rarest
by Nick Haddad butterflies that I discuss in this book would
Princeton University Press weigh only three pounds five ounces
RRP $45.99 [1.6kg] – as much as one panda’s paw”.
However there is an urgency to address
BUTTERFLIES ARE that rare breed which their situation: “Global habitat loss and
capture our hearts, yet for most of us climate change have relegated each species
remain an unknown and uninvestigated to minuscule land parcels, areas as small as
species. Their beauty and innocence a single golf course or even a football field.
is about as far as most people go with I have found rare butterflies in unexpected
their appraisal. Yet The Last Butterflies: places, their populations restricted to
A Scientist’s Quest to Save a Rare and artillery ranges or beaches or backyards.”
Vanishing Creature tells the tale of the There are eight butterflies investigated
challenges faced by the rarest of butterflies, in the book, most rare (and one extinct) but
but also investigates the resilience they I found it interesting that he included the
have in the face of crisis. monarch (Danaus plexippus). It’s seen as a
Nick Haddad tells this tale with a common one; even the layperson may have
great ability to share his knowledge with heard of it. Haddad himself says including
both the informed and the uniformed. He it was the toughest decision because people
not only discusses the specific concerns know about the monarch. That said, time. Indeed, the stories of how knowledge
butterflies face, but also suggests ways to the western monarch has declined from that we take for granted came to be known
reverse the situation. millions to 28,000 over recent years. is where the book shines.
As the Professor of Biology at Michigan This is a special book in so many ways. If you’re a hardcore stargazer, some
State University and Senior Territorial Despite acknowledging that “the rarest sections might not bring much new. But if
Ecologist at MSU’s W K Kellogg Biological [butterflies] produce no measurable value you’re up for a wide-ranging exploration
Station northeast of Kalamazoo, Haddad to human economies or to ecological with Australia’s Astronomer-at-Large
studies the application of ecological systems”, it addresses the big ecological (a title apparently chosen as it required
principles to the conservation of and climate issues we all have to accept. As the fewest changes to the sign on his
biodiversity, from individual rare animals Haddad says, the rarest butterflies should office door) it is approachable, with new
to all species living within a community. be saved because “people just should not be information and obscure facts to keep the
He focusses on strategies – such as the use the cause of extinction”. most curious-minded entertained. Solid
of habitat corridors – that are intended to CHUCK SMEETON fodder for summer reading.
overcome the negative effects of habitat BEN LEWIS
loss and fragmentation.
When comparing the butterflies Cosmic Chronicles:
A user’s guide to the Universe Bird Bonds:
by Fred Watson Sex, mate choice and cognition
NewSouth Books in Australian native birds
RRP $32.99 by Gisela Kaplan
Pan MacMillan
DID YOU KNOW that the first female radio RRP $34.99
astronomer in the world (Ruby Payne
Scott) was Australian? Or that the Sun IF YOU’VE EVER found yourself wondering
seems to release a green flash just as it rises about birds and their relationships and
or sets? Fred Watson’s Cosmos Chronicles is sex lives, Gisela Kaplan’s Bird Bonds is the
full of facts and discoveries about the wild book for you.
Universe we exist in. Animal relationships can be technical
While the book’s selling point is its stuff, but Kaplan, a field biologist and
up-to-the-minute information, with many Professor of Animal Behaviour at the
sections containing discoveries made in University of New England, does a striking
2019, it is Watson’s undoubted mastery of job of creating empathy with birds.
the yarn that is the book’s true value. With Bird Bonds is based on her original
humour, grace, and obvious enthusiasm research and could have been dry, but at
for the subjects, he spins stories as he takes times it feels more like a work of fiction,
readers on a journey throughout space and with extra-marital affairs, spoilt children

REVIEWS ZEITGEIST
and the heartbreaking effects of the death Super science-writing

of a partner.
Kaplan writes that she has taken The Best Australian Science Writing 2019
the “risky step” of comparing birds to extends the established form of its eight
humans. It’s a comparison that we rarely predecessor anthologies.
hear. After all, humans have long believed Of the 35 stories included, six were
that our behaviours, emotions and social shortlisted for the UNSW Press Bragg Prize
connections are unique. for Science Writing – Melissa Fyfe won for
But Kaplan’s writing is seductive, and her story “Getting Cliterate”. The anthology
she takes the reader through the trials of includes Cosmos stories by Lauren Fuge,
finding a compatible mate, house-hunting Natalie Parletta, Dyani Lewis, John Pickrell and
and the business of parenthood. She also Phil Dooley – and the editing skills of our new
explores research on same-sex affiliations contributor Bianca Nogrady. Bravo, all.
and birds who don’t mate.
As she says: “What is sometimes
overlooked is that on matters of partner
choices and matters of sex, humans and
birds may have so much more in common
than was once believed, despite millions of
years of evolution”.
She controversially proposes that
attachments between birds aren’t just
about reproduction – they can also be observation, this book provides an
about cooperation, mutual support, and interesting insight into an array of species.
commitment. With diagrams and beautiful After finishing Bird Bonds, you can’t
images, the science is easy to follow; you help but ponder: while physically we might
don’t need to be an expert to enjoy. And be worlds apart, just how similar are we to
for those who may be familiar with the our feathered counterparts?
habits of some birds through personal AMELIA NICHELE
NOW WE’RE
TALKING!
PODCASTS
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A NO SUCH THING AS A FISH OLOGIES

PODCAST (above)
This long-form interview’s great for those The four QI Elves (researchers from the Presenter Alie Ward takes on a different
for whom too much space is never enough. hit BBC show) bring their favourite fact of niche -ology each week, such as
Their one-on-one interviews with people in the week to the table, giving each other the cucurbitology or Potterology. Accessible
the know – for example Nujoud Merancy, chance to interrupt with (sometimes highly and easy to engage with, Ward uses cut
Exploration Mission Planning Chief – gets tangential, often obscure) related trivia. away and comedy to make it relevant to
into the kind of engineering, robotic and The repartee is hilarious, and you – and a the layperson. Not just mind-expanding,
policy detail that’ll having you sounding million fellow subscribers – are guaranteed it’s perfect for a heroic pub-quiz save when
astro-astute faster than an Apollo mission something weird, wacky and shareworthy the “what is the study of x called?” section
orbit. each episode. inevitably appears.
WHEN weekly WHEN weekly WHEN weekly
HOW LONG around an hour HOW LONG around an hour HOW LONG 60–90mins
ZEITGEIST REVIEWS
Rage Inside the Machine: algorithms. Far from a dry work that’s
The prejudice of algorithms focused on maths and engineering, Rage
and how to stop the internet Inside the Machine shifts seamlessly
making bigots of us all between history, philosophy and
Robert Elliott Smith technology to create a savvy discourse that
Bloomsbury allows ordinary folk into the somewhat
$29.99 obscure world of the techno elite. Those
clever nerds writing code in Silicon Valley:
WITH TECHNOLOGY an ever-growing and what do we know of them, really?
increasingly intrusive feature of our daily “At large technology corporations
lives, Robert Smith’s book is perfectly like Google and Facebook,” Smith writes,
timed and uncannily thought-provoking. “there are whole communities of scientists
Most of us comfort ourselves with like me interacting and working on the
the idea that technology – and the creation of algorithms that now frame and
algorithms that drive it – is free of the act upon our lives.”
morals and prejudice that characterise Algorithms might treat society as a body
human intelligence. Smith’s thesis is clear: of statistics, says Smith, but their creators
machine intelligence isn’t as objective as are individuals from different cultures and
we’d like to think, and it’s high time we very much imbued with their own ideas.
acknowledged this and acted accordingly. Smith’s message is to be aware,
Most entrancingly, Smith – who “because the only way to really understand
trained as an engineer and has spent the impact of algorithms is to understand
his career in computer science and AI them in relationship to the individuals and
– explores the historical and cultural society to which they are bound.”
foundations that shaped the creation of IAN CONNELLAN
WORLD
WIDE
WANDERING
FUTUREFEST.ORG DUDE PERFECT FIGURES IN THE SKY (above)

“The future is not something that Imagine making a living from hanging out An interactive starmap showing the
happens to us, but something we have with five of your best mates, filming your constellations created by 28 cultures.
to shape in line with our values.” As very-much-less-than-serious competitions Infographics by Nadieh Bremer are
mission statements go it’s not too shabby. with them – and attracting a global searchable by constellation or culture –
FutureFest is an annual one-day festival, YouTube audience in the tens of millions. Sirius transforming from canis major in
launched in 2013 by Nesta, the UK’s Our absolute top pick is their “Model western cultures to an Egyptian triangle,
innovation foundation. Nesta says they Rocket Battle 2”: the boys as backyard Boorong wedge-tail eagle and Hawaiian
wanted “to start an optimistic conversation rocketeers – an enviable career path. If you canoe bailer. A night sky tour ranges from
about possible futures. And we found there need to cajole a science-reluctant relative the minimalist curve of Japanese moon
was a lot to talk about”. From challenging into the joys of physics, engineering or stations to the riot of the 318 Chinese
debates to fabulous tech installations, this making stuff move in hilarious ways, these “xingguan”. Now if we could just carry the
is one cool space full of ideas. are the dudes for you... computer outside...
futurefest.org dudeperfect.com datasketch.es/may/code/nadieh/
REVIEWS ZEITGEIST
Botanical Revelation: Through this utterly gorgeous illustrated volume,

European encounters David Mabberley takes readers into the world of
with Australian plants the European “discoverers” of Australia’s flora.
before Darwin The book considers science, art, horticulture
David J. Mabberley and economics while revealing the way in which
NewSouth Books Australian plants were taken to Europe, cultivated
RRP $89.99 and eventually spread throughout the world.

ENDPOINT
WHERE IN THE COSMOS? MIND GAMES

Send us a pic
of where you’re
reading Cosmos to Who Said? NO.11
win a prize pack!
“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms

that go into it, but the way those atoms are put
together.” (4,5)
WHAT BETTER SPOT TO WATCH OUR FABULOUS WORLD IN ACTION

AND ENJOY SCIENCE?
Reading our Cosmos while cruising past Margerie Glacier in Alaska.
This Cosmos cover is appropriate!
Sincerely, Ivana & Scott Brubaker McLean, Virginia, USA.
INSTRUCTIONS
Put the answers to each of the clues in columns
from 1 to 9. Row III reveals the answer.
QUESTION
COMPETITION
Whose Law? Decode Where i=
CLUES AND COLUMNS
1 Which hypothetical particle has a mass less
than zero and can travel faster than the speed of
light? (7)
2 What can be red, yellow, white, blue, black or
brown and have the luminosity of class V? (5,4)
3 What is the harmless skin condition
characterised by a scaly growth, as in a wart? (9)
4 What term for diffuse reflection of solar
HINT:
radiation was introduced by Lambert in his
He is a nineteenth century Dutch chemist and meteorologist who also
Photometria (1760)? (6)
gives his name to a table and a lunar crater.
5 What common name is given to any sirenia
especially the dugong? (3,3)
6 In the plural, which genus of a perennial
cormous flowering plant of the iris family is
Email your answer to:
associated with Dame Edna Everage? (8)
[email protected]
7 Which US-Swiss zoologist proposed the theory
with your name and address by 1 February, 2020.
of an Ice Age? (7)
Three correct entries will win a copy of
8 What is the common name for the metamorphic
Cosmic Chronicles: A user’s guide to the
rock, also known as steatite, which is composed
Universe by Fred Watson, from
of magnesium rich material and has soft
NewSouth Books.
properties that make it ideal for carving? (9)
9 What is the study of being? (8)

ENDPOINT
SOLUTIONS: COSMOS 84
CODEWORD
Cosmos Codeword NO.11
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 IT FIGURES
knowledge of the
English language you
will be able to break
the code. We have
given you three letters
to get you started.
WHO SAID?
(Rosalind) Franklin
COMPETITION WINNERS
ALL PUZZLES DESIGNED
AND COMPILED BY
WHOSE LAW?
SNODGER.COM.AU
The magnitude of the
electrostatic force of
attraction or repulsion
between two point charges is
directly proportional to the
It Figures NO.11
product of the magnitudes
of charges and inversely
proportional to the square of
3 The row below the row starting with multiples the distance between them.
of 6 contains only odd prime numbers.
INSTRUCTIONS 4 The first row, column and upward sloping Charles Augustin de Coulomb
Using the clues below diagonal all contain three single-digit
place the numbers 1 numbers. Congratulations!
to 16 correctly in the 5 The number 4 shares Column 2 with three Three lucky winners will
grid. How many clues multiples of 3. receive a copy of The
do you need? Rational Universe, Einstein’s
LEVEL 2 - SENIOR ANALYST Best Idea by Ralph Bourne.
6 The sum of each column is 34.
LEVEL 1 - CHIEF SCIENTIST 7 There is a -teen in every row and column. Gary Shaw,
1 All the numbers with an odd amount of SA;
factors are in Row B. LEVEL 3 - LAB ASSISTANT Lachlan Macintyre,
2 The sum of every column is the same, 8 Row A contains two factors of 15. NSW;
which is 2 less than the down sloping 9 The product of the first three numbers in Jonathan Piggott,
diagonal. Column 4 is 180. NSW

PORTRAIT
Kym Abrams
Taxonomy
addict
A WORD OF WARNING to anyone considering a future in I thought it sounded pretty boring, but once I had something
taxonomy – watch out, it can take over your life. So says Kym practical to look at, I found I was really interested in it”.
Abrams, taxonomist and co-discoverer of one new genus and 16 Kym found a range of lineages in subterranean crustaceans,
new species (with descriptions underway on another 54). which led to a PhD in which she described the new genus
When Kym enrolled in her BSc degree in Cape Town, South Arkaroolabathynella. “It’s hard in the beginning – I was having
Africa, she thought of becoming a palaeontologist: “I love to dissect tiny things under a microscope and you have to stare
dinosaurs, and that’s where I got interested in names – I liked at things for ages. Over time you start to notice things you didn’t
learning their names and understanding what they meant.” notice before.”
But an entomology course – chasing dragonflies, identifying Now, “if I get busy doing other things, after a while I start
species and trading bugs – awakened an interest in invertebrates. feeling: ‘I need to go back into the lab and draw. I need to look at
KATE DAWSON
Moving to the University of Adelaide, she did an honours project specimens.’ It’s hard not to go back to them. And you try to finish
in molecular systematics. “It felt like a real area I could explore,” off one thing but you keep finding new things and you can’t stop
she says. “Invertebrates in Australia are shockingly diverse.” looking. It’s really a bit of an addiction.”
Kym says didn’t know a lot about taxonomy at first, “and KYM APPEARS IN OUR STORY ABOUT TAXONOMY, PAGE 32

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MEET THE FAMILIES AUSTRALIA’S 664 NEW SPECIES REAL LIFE STAR WARS FORCES

THE SCIENCE OF EVERYTHING

PILBARA & MARS CITIZEN SCIENCE HADRON HIJINKS

Geological mates Inside CERN

LAW OF NATURE • GORILLA CONSERVATION • STEM OF SKIING • MICRO PHOTOS

PICTURE THIS — 2019’s Kaldor awards for data visualisation 22

PACKING FOR OUR LONGEST JOURNEY — PAUL DAVIES 44

ORDER IN THE COURT — PAUL CONNOLLY 50

GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST — ELIZABETH FINKEL 56

A DISCERNING CROWD — MARTIN WHITE 66

GREAT AND SMALL — MICROSCOPIC WONDERS 72

REFRACTED GLORY — ROBIN ARIANRHOD 82

SUNFLOWER POWER — Yellow’s place in art and science 96

WINGS OF DESIRE — Butterflies need your help 99

SCIENCE OF FIREWORKS — The chemistry and physics of kaboom 102

REVIEWS — Books, podcasts, websites 108

MIND GAMES — Fiendishly fun puzzles 112 USE THE FORCE

Star Wars symptoms within us all.

COSMOS EDITORIAL About The Royal Institution of Australia

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