From the Editors

LET’S SAY FROM the start that this issue wasn’t meant to be all about sound, but – just as a noisy party slips under doorways and echoes across valleys – the theme of our cover feature seems to be striking a chord in more than a few of Cosmos 92’s stories.

Speaking of the cover: John Birmingham’s take on how remote audio recording is making a huge difference to finding elusive birds is part of our “New ways of seeing” series, supported by a grant from the Copyright Agency’s cultural fund. The story’s underpinned by the research that extended into Australia’s groundbreaking Acoustic Observatory, but its real wonders are false colour spectrograms – visual “scores” of a day of acoustic data. The other singalong favourite is Martin White’s investigation of using AI to write song lyrics. Interesting idea: could the next Beatles spring from an algorithm? (Only if it had Epstein-level management, we think.)

The unexpected sound bonus is a revelation in Krystal de Napoli and Duane Hamacher’s story about First Nations Australians’ Aurora Australis traditions: that given the right conditions, it’s possible to hear the Southern Lights. Wow.

Elsewhere in the issue, Manuela Callari takes a look at the MRNA technology’s possibilities for medical treatments beyond COVID; Ellen Phiddian dives deep into COVID-19 vaccine ingredients; Robyn Arianrhod delivers a fascinating look at Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz and the birth of calculus; Lauren Fuge considers Ediacarans and the dawn of animal life on Earth; and Paul Davies takes us on a cosmological mystery tour.

Just before we went to press, IPCC Working Group I’s contribution to the sixth assessment report was released; we’ll see few more extensively researched and sobering documents this year. All our climate hopes and fears now skid towards Glasgow in November. Keep reading cosmosmagazine.com and Cosmos Weekly for updates.