The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we […]
Science
So about five hundred million years ago, give or take, there was this little creature called Plectronoceras. It was about 2 cm long — just under an inch — and it had a conical shell with a bunch of tentacles sticking out. It was a cephalopod, an early member of the group that includes octopuses […]
John Mitchinson explores why perception is as much about what we know as what we see
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has released a new report today warning that consumption of the ‘super-food’ kale over a period of time can lead consumers to have heightened levels of arrogance. The study was conducted in several cafes in... Read More ›
Okay so, we all know how the Earth ends, right? In six billion years or so, the Sun swells up into a red giant, and the Earth gets melted. Pretty straightforward. But it turns out that /life/ on Earth will end long before that. There are reasons to think that the biosphere will collapse about […]
Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die. Let’s start with the “billions of miles”. Voyager 1 was launched in early September 1977. Jimmy Carter was a hopeful new President. Yugoslavia and the USSR were going concerns, as were American Motors, Pan […]
Australian health officials are reportedly set to ban a childhood favourite, fairy bread, in schools and day care centres and replace it with mung beans. The move is designed to get children away from sugar and used to a life that... Read More ›
An interesting paper: researchers inserted a gene for photosynthesis* into ordinary brewer’s yeast. It worked! The yeast began to photosynthesize, tapping energy from the sun. I’m not generally alarmist about this sort of thing. But this is… maybe very slightly alarming. Why? 1) Baker’s yeast is a single-celled fungus. A fungus, like a mushroom. You […]
Scientists are abandoning Elon Musk's Twitter amid a "mass extinction event" on the social media network, says Philipp Markolin.
With Australia facing potentially catastrophic bushfires this summer like the 2019–2020 season, one of its favorite animals, the koala, is under threat on a number of other fronts as well.