MARIJUANA AND THE BRAIN
Cannabis divides people: some see it as unfairly demonised, others as a medical catastrophe in the making. Elizabeth Finkel breaks through the panic and the hype to find out what science has to say. Read the full article here. |
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BRIGHT SPARKS
Who are Australia's brightest young minds? Cosmos searches high and low for this year's "Cosmos Bright Sparks", the top 10 scientists under the age of 45 in Australia. Read more
CRADLE OF LIFE
Was the early Earth a hellish maelstrom sterilised by meteorite impacts, or did it boast warm oceans that made life possible? Cheryl Jones discovers how the answer may lie in exotic crystals buried billions of years ago.
TERMITE FUEL
Margaret Wertheim explains how the plethora of strange organisms living in the gut of termites could one day power your car. Seriously.
PACIFIC ANCESTORS
The Lapita are ancestors of modern Polynesians and, before disappearing, dominated human expansion in the Pacific. Now the discovery of an ancient cemetery, and headless skeletons, sheds new light on the life of this elusive people as Veronika Meduna reports.
ROCKET MAN
What's it like to ride the shuttle into orbit? Karen McGhee asks Andy Thomas, Australia's most famous astronaut. He has hitched a lift on NASA's space bus four times.
Fabienne Mackay-Fisson, immunologist.
Short bits for a fast read.
The lowdown on MP3 players.
Tommaso Rivellini tells how he dealt with the weight of NASA's Pathfinder mission to Mars riding on his airbag design.
Our planet from space: some of the most beautiful images of our home world from orbit.
Surfboard design has gone high-tech with computers extending the art of the possible, Alison Aprhys discovers.
In the future, finding replacement organs for a transplant operation may be as simple as pressing 'print', says Susan Brown.
Next time you have itchy bumps on your belly, your behind or your arms, they will probably be mosquito bites, or even chicken pox; but they might also be a clump of little lipid volcanoes.
Inside computer games, there is money to be made and fun to be had. Richard Giles discovers why some people may never want to leave.
It has traditionally been painted as a lecherous act of debauchery. But, as Kate Holdsworth finds, studies suggest that cheating may in fact be a selfless sacrifice to advance the species.
Not faster than a speeding bullet but certainly equipped with amazing powers, tardigrades - also known as water bears - can survive conditions that would leave most superheroes for dead.
They once walked on land: Nadia El-Awady visits the Egyptian valley where whale fossils litter the landscape, providing insights into these ancient beasts.
Antimatter has long been hypothesised as the perfect (if impossible) fuel of rockets in science fiction. But this fiction may become a reality, Annemarie Lopez discovers.
We learned them in school, and mostly take them for granted. But the story of how the symbols for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and equals reached our blackboards is not ancient history. Sarah Belfield tells the tale.
In a region where as much as a quarter of the population is HIV positive, one country is fighting back, reports Bette Flagler.
In the largest and most diverse rainforest on the planet, Erica Harrison witnesses a mesmerising cacophony of sensations with no equal. Behind the foliage, however, she finds a wilderness fraying under the pressure of rampant development.
We used to think the 21st century would be a time when full-size humanoids took care of the daily chores, freeing us from the drudgery of everyday life. So where are these multipurpose slaves?
The experiment she signed up for was meant to ease stress and tension. But somewhere along the way it went horribly, terrifyingly, wonderfully wrong. Original fiction, "Not alone", by Pamela Sargent.
Reviews of books and DVDs
Animal experimentation is fundamental to science: to oppose it is to oppose all of the life-saving advances of modern medicine, say Tipu Aziz and Laurie Pycroft.
