New Scientist Australian Edition 18-Jun-22

Tour Land of fire and ice: Iceland Join a wonderful tour of Iceland’s majestic landscapes, with days devoted to volcanic adventure and nights spent gazing at the aurora borealis. Accompanied by volcanologist Tamsin Mather and geologist Simon Matthews, you will see erupting geysers, boiling hot springs and stunning glaciers. From 29 October for eight days. The cost is £2549. newscientist.com/tours Discovery An introduction to the biggest mysteries of the cosmos Explore the biggest questions about the universe: what does it contain, how big is it and what are the laws of nature that run it? This course will introduce you to the sweep of cosmic history, from the big bang to hundreds of billions of years in the future. But as we find answers, more questions emerge, such as whether…

Tour Land of fire and ice: Iceland Join a wonderful tour of Iceland’s majestic landscapes, with days devoted to volcanic adventure and nights spent gazing at the aurora borealis. Accompanied by volcanologist Tamsin Mather and geologist Simon Matthews, you will see erupting geysers, boiling hot springs and stunning glaciers. From 29 October for eight days. The cost is £2549. newscientist.com/tours Discovery An introduction to the biggest mysteries of the cosmos Explore the biggest questions about the universe: what does it contain, how big is it and what are the laws of nature that run it? This course will introduce you to the sweep of cosmic history, from the big bang to hundreds of billions of years in the future. But as we find answers, more questions emerge, such as whether we are part of an infinite…

THERE is nothing quite so simultaneously familiar and enigmatic as time, the focus of this week’s issue. Which is perhaps what always makes it such a joy to indulge in our unique ability to explore the many ongoing mysteries of time – and to chase a better understanding of the most puzzling dimension of all. We can’t even agree on what time is, though many people suspect answers could lie in the mismatch between how it manifests in general relativity – Einstein’s theory of gravity – and quantum mechanics, which describes the behaviour of subatomic particles and forces (see page 39). Figuring that out could finally lead us to a quantum theory of gravity (see page 45). That is proving to be a difficult quest, but fresh clues are arriving all…

THERE is nothing quite so simultaneously familiar and enigmatic as time, the focus of this week’s issue. Which is perhaps what always makes it such a joy to indulge in our unique ability to explore the many ongoing mysteries of time – and to chase a better understanding of the most puzzling dimension of all. We can’t even agree on what time is, though many people suspect answers could lie in the mismatch between how it manifests in general relativity – Einstein’s theory of gravity – and quantum mechanics, which describes the behaviour of subatomic particles and forces (see page 39). Figuring that out could finally lead us to a quantum theory of gravity (see page 45). That is proving to be a difficult quest, but fresh clues are arriving…

CONSERVATIONISTS fear that a highly pathogenic bird flu is to blame for a growing wave of mortality in UK seabirds, which were already facing severe pressure from climate change and overfishing. The H5N1 avian influenza has killed wild birds including cranes in Israel, Dalmatian pelicans in Greece, knots (a type of shorebird) in the Netherlands and now several UK seabird species, primarily gannets. More than 383,000 bird deaths from the virus have been counted by the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) since October 2021. About 16,500 of a population of 43,000 Svalbard barnacle geese, which migrate between Scotland’s Solway Firth and Norway’s Svalbard, are estimated to have died from flu during the recent winter, says James Reynolds at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a UK charity. “But the epicentre…

OUR map of the Milky Way has been upgraded and it now lets us rewind the paths of stars to look back in time. The data set that enables this, released by the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Gaia space telescope, includes the detailed chemical make-up and speeds of almost 2 billion stars. “You can point to a particular star and say, ‘I want to know where that was billions of years ago’” From its vantage point 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, Gaia has been measuring already known stars and seeking new ones since its launch in 2013. The first data release, published in 2016, contained information on the brightness and positions of 1.1 billion stars, and a second release in 2018 followed up with the colours, temperatures and radii of a total…