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Sagittarius A* – The Monster at the Milky Way's Heart
On a clear, dark night, away from city lights, the Milky Way arcs overhead as a soft river of stars — and buried in the dense, glowing crowd of that …
3 weeks, 3 days ago
Fossils – How Life Turns to Stone
Turning into a fossil is far rarer than a museum full of skeletons might suggest - it takes a specific, unlikely sequence of chance and chemistry, an…
3 weeks, 5 days ago
Friction – The Force That Wears the World Down
Friction is so ordinary that it's easy to overlook - it's the reason your shoes grip the footpath and your car can stop at a red light - but it's als…
4 weeks ago
Blood – The Most Complicated Fluid You Own
Blood looks simple - a red liquid that appears whenever you're cut - but it's actually one of the most sophisticated tissues in the human body, carry…
1 month ago
Meteorites – Rocks That Fall from the Sky
Every day, tonnes of material from space drift down through Earth's atmosphere, and every so often a fragment survives the fall intact enough to land…
1 month ago
Minerals and Mining – The Rocks Underneath the Economy
Every phone, car battery, kitchen bench and steel beam traces back to rock pulled out of the ground somewhere, shaped over geological time by process…
1 month ago
Pressure – From the Deep Sea to Diamond Anvils
Your ears popping on a flight, a sealed bag of chips ballooning up at cruising altitude, a pressure cooker cutting a stew's cooking time in half — al…
1 month, 1 week ago
Anaesthesia – Switching Consciousness Off and On
Every day, in operating theatres all over Australia, people are deliberately, reversibly switched off, their pain, memory and movement suspended long…
1 month, 1 week ago
Radio Astronomy – Listening to the Invisible Sky
The night sky isn't only the pinpricks of starlight we see with our eyes — it's also quietly broadcasting on wavelengths we can't see at all, and for…
1 month, 1 week ago
The Arid Zone – How Life Works in the Australian Outback
Roughly seventy per cent of Australia is arid or semi-arid, yet the outback is far from empty: it runs on a distinctive boom-and-bust rhythm built ar…
1 month, 2 weeks ago