Science Illustrated Issue 92

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The Australian Federal and Western Australian State Governments have established a ‘radio quiet’ zone 520km in diameter around the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), home to the 36 dish antennas of CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, and the site where the Australian half of the SKA (Square Kilometre Array, see last issue) is being constructed. By protecting the area from noise created by modern technology, the MRO provides one of the world’s best locations to listen for radio signals from space.…

EARTH Beneath Earth’s cool exterior, under the mantle, the continental plates and pressure differences, at the centre of it all, some 5000km below Earth’s surface, lies the inner core: a solid, glowing ball of iron and nickel with a diameter of around 1300km. At least, that is what scientists used to think. But according to a new study published in the scientific journal Nature, Earth’s inner core may not be as solid as we believed, and may be in a rare intermediate state that is neither solid nor liquid – a ‘super-ionic’ state. Scientists have used seismic waves from earthquakes to examine what is going on thousands of kilometres under our feet. The seismic waves travel at different speeds through different materials, and the scientists use this knowledge to expose the chemical…

ENERGY The Joint European Torus near Oxford in the UK has more than doubled its own fusion energy record set in 1997. The new record is the result of special fuel and decades of preparations of this tokamak-style reactor. Although the reactor, run by the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), is soon to be pensioned off, the most recent record experiment will be of great importance to the new ITER reactor – a similar model that is under construction in France. Hence it also raises our chances of finding the key to the generation of near-infinite energy. Over a period of five seconds, the JET reactor generated no less than 59 megajoules – more than twice the 21.7 megajoules generated over a period of four seconds when JET set the record…

ANIMALS There is more going on under the ocean surface than we realise, according to a new study by scientists from Cornell University in New York. They have discovered that the majority of the world’s fish are probably able to talk to each other by means of underwater sound – and that some fish species have probably been doing so for more than 155 million years. Scientists have known for a long time that a few fish, such as the plainfin midshipman, make sounds. But it was not suspected that the majority of all fish can use such acoustic communication. In the new study, the scientists took a close look at a rayfinned fish, which make up some 99% of the world’s fish species. The scientists concluded that twothirds of rayfinned…

MELITTOLOGY We generally think of bees as insects which forage during daylight, and the science of bees has hitherto operated primarily on that basis. But there are species that fly at twilight or night-time. In Australia there are several species thought to be adapted to low-light conditions, but no records of night foraging existed in our scientific literature until research in 2020 by James Dorey from Flinders University and other scientists from South Australia both confirmed the nocturnal behaviour, and identified possible physical characteristics that could allow scientists to distinguish between day-time bees and those adapted to low light. They found that the low-light bee species tended to be moderate to large in size, with larger eye-to-head ratios and other specific characteristics. The team’s field research directly observed low-light flights…