Science

As an artist working across media, I’ve used everything from thread to my voice to poetically translate and express information. Recently, I’ve been working with another medium – geologic datasets.

While scientists use data visualization to show the results of a dataset in interesting and informative ways, my goal as an artist is a little different. In the studio, I treat geologic data as another material, using it to guide my interactions with Mylar film, knitting patterns or opera. Data, in my work, functions expressively and abstractly.

American Amara Majeed was accused of terrorism by the Sri Lankan police in 2019. Robert Williams was arrested outside his house in Detroit and detained in jail for 18 hours for allegedly stealing watches in 2020. Randal Reid spent six days in jail in 2022 for supposedly using stolen credit cards in a state he’d never even visited.

In all three cases, the authorities had the wrong people. In all three, it was face recognition technology that told them they were right. Law enforcement officers in many U.S. states are not required to reveal that they used face recognition technology to identify suspects.

NASA has re-established contact with its tiny helicopter on Mars, the US space agency said Saturday, after an unexpected outage prompted fears that the hard-working craft had finally met its end.

Ingenuity, a drone about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall, arrived on Mars in 2021 aboard the rover Perseverance and became the first motorized craft to fly autonomously on another planet.

The head of the American space company whose lunar lander failed this week in its mission to reach the Moon expressed optimism Friday that the next attempt would achieve its goal.

"I am more confident than ever now that our next mission will be successful and land on the surface of the Moon," Astrobotic CEO John Thornton told a news conference, highlighting challenges his team had overcome in the "unexpected but very exciting mission."

Sometimes astronomers come across objects in the sky that we can’t easily explain. In our new research, published in Science, we report such a discovery, which is likely to spark discussion and speculation.

Neutron stars are some of the densest objects in the universe. As compact as an atomic nucleus, yet as large as a city, they push the limits of our understanding of extreme matter. The heavier a neutron star is, the more likely it is to eventually collapse to become something even denser: a black hole.

A crippled American spaceship has been lost over a remote region of the South Pacific, probably burning up in the atmosphere in a fiery end to its failed mission to land on the Moon.

Astrobotic's Peregrine lander was launched on January 8 under an experimental new partnership between NASA and private industry intended to reduce costs for American taxpayers and seed a lunar economy.

If you are exploring our beautiful Australian wilderness this year, keep an eye out for animals behaving in interesting ways. You never know what you might see, as our research team discovered.

In 2023, our colleague from Sunshine Coast Council, Elliot Bowerman, took a two-night trip to New England National Park – its 1,500 metre-high mountain peaks are some of the loftiest on Australia’s mid-east coast.

On the afternoon of 17 August, Elliot trekked the path to Point Lookout. While inspecting some plants on the trail, he heard a rustle in the bushes ahead and peering more closely, saw something of interest. A small mammal had abruptly appeared, dragging the carcass of another mammal, which it then began to devour.

At first glance, this was not so strange. Mammals eat each other all the time. However, it is unusual to see small mammals during the day at such close quarters, so Elliot recorded the scene, taking a video on his mobile phone.

It was only several days later when looking over the footage that our research team realised it featured something rarely seen in the wild, the record of which is now published in the journal Australian Mammalogy.

A native marsupial… cannibal

The furry critter on film was an antechinus, a native marsupial denizen of forested areas in eastern, south-western and northern Australia. Antechinuses usually eat a range of insects and spiders, occasionally taking small vertebrates such as birds, lizards, or even other mammals.

But this camera footage clearly showed a mainland dusky antechinus (Antechinus mimetes mimetes), and it was eating a dead member of its own species!

Antechinuses are perhaps best known for exhibiting semelparity, or “suicidal reproduction”. This is death after reproducing in a single breeding period. The phenomenon is known in a range of plants, invertebrates and vertebrates, but it is rare in mammals.

Each year, all antechinus males drop dead at the end of a one to three week breeding season, poisoned by their own raging hormones.

This is because the stress hormone cortisol rises during the breeding period. At the same time, surging testosterone from the super-sized testes in males causes a failure in the biological mechanism that mops up the cortisol. The flood of unbound cortisol results in systemic organ failure and the inevitable, gruesome death of every male.

A mainland dusky antechinus during the mating period, with fur loss visible on the shoulder, eating another antechinus. Elliot Bowerman

Mercifully, death occurs only after the males have unloaded their precious cargo of sperm, mating with as many promiscuous females as possible in marathon, energy-sapping sessions lasting up to 14 hours. The pregnant females are then responsible for ensuring the survival of the species.

So, exactly what was happening that day at Point Lookout – why had an antechinus turned cannibal?

Cheap calories

August is the breeding period for mainland dusky antechinuses at that location. Intense mating burns calories, and at the end of winter it is cold and there isn’t as much invertebrate food about.

If there are male antechinuses dropping dead from sex-fuelled exhaustion, our thinking is that still-living male and female antechinuses are taking advantage of the cheap energy boost via a hearty feast of a fallen comrade.

After all, animal flesh provides plenty of energetic bang for the buck, particularly if its owner does not have to be pursued or overpowered before being devoured.

In many areas of Australia, two antechinus species (of the known fifteen) occur together, and usually their breeding periods are separated by only a few weeks. One can imagine a scenario where individuals may not only feed on the carcasses of their own species but consume the other species as well.

An endangered silver-headed antechinus, Antechinus argentus. Andrew Baker

Each species may benefit from eating the dead males of the other. For the earlier-breeding species, females may be pregnant or lactating, which is a huge energy drain.

For the later-breeding species, both sexes need to pack on weight and body condition before their own breeding period commences.

Plausibly then, antechinus engage in orgiastic breeding and, when opportune, cannibalistic feeding.

So, the next time you are out and about in the bush, keep your eyes and ears peeled – you never know what secrets nature might reveal to you just around the next corner.

When you use your fingerprint to unlock your smartphone, your phone is looking at a two-dimensional pattern to determine whether it’s the correct fingerprint before it unlocks for you. But the imprint your finger leaves on the surface of the button is actually a 3D structure called a fingermark.

Fingermarks are made up of tiny ridges of oil from your skin. Each ridge is only a few microns tall, or a few hundredths of the thickness of human hair.