Cosmos
Curated content from the editorial staff at Cosmos Magazine.
While 2022 has in many ways been the year of AI-generated pictures (is it real art?), we at Cosmos believe that scientists can generate some terrific – or at least very interesting – images and videos without the help of a bot.
Here are eight of our favourite pictures and videos of the year, taken or made by scientists.
A deep-sea batfish
Museums Victoria took the CSIRO ship RV Investigator out for a spin to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands this year, and saw some terrific things, like this batfish. Read more.
Lego timelords
How do you illustrate a story about a physics-breaking theory of time travel that’s being experimentally tested in a security-restricted nuclear facility? With Lego, of course. Professional timelord Michael Wouters made this rendition of a caesium clock, nuclear reactor and scientist (not to scale). Read all about it in Issue #94 of the magazine.
JWST’s Jupiter
We could spend all day just looking at James Webb Space Telescope images, to be honest, but this one of Jupiter’s aurorae sent the newsroom into a real tizzy. Read more.
What if borane was a lion?
Illustrating chemical breakthroughs is hard because molecules are too small to see. This stunning picture represents a catalyst that could safely store hydrogen fuel – the lion catalyst is choosing hydrogen, rather than all of the carbon-based rocks around it. Read more.
Octopus mudslingers
A throw by a female octopus that hits a male attempting to mate with her / Credit: Godfrey-Smith et al, 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0
Australia’s ‘Gloomy Octopuses’ have been caught throwing debris – sometimes at each other. Read more.
In the year of the Football World Cup, a computer learns to play soccer from scratch
Video demonstrating the machine learning study. Credit: Liu et al., Sci. Robot. 7, eabo0235.
This video, demonstrating a soccer match simulated by a machine learning program with no knowledge of football, its rules, or tactics, had the whole newsroom cackling. Read more.
Sandy, the purest, cutest, dingo
It turns out that dingoes have almost completely pure ancestry – and we know this thanks, in part, to Sandy Malaki, a wild-born pure Australian desert dingo. Awww. Read more.
Surprise glow-in-the-dark spider fossils
When a team of French scientists popped this spider fossil under UV light, “more or less on a whim”, they were astounded to discover it glowed, thanks to tiny creatures called diatoms. Read more.