The idea behind ‘pet years’ is to have a simple way to compare the life stages of our pets to human life spans. The standard understanding is that one pet year equals seven human years. However, the reality is much more complex. After all, most one-year-old pets can make babies – but seven-year-old humans cannot.
Once in a while, our planet reminds us of its awesome power by releasing a little of the magma that permeates its mantle in a volcanic eruption.
The way ahead is blocked by an imposing jumble of jet-black boulders precariously stacked on each other. Beneath this is an eerie underworld of secret chambers where giant pythons and carnivorous ghost bats lurk.
A crunching of the numbers reveals some extremely sobering facts about the carnage caused by feral cats in Australia.
Ask almost anyone which planet has rings around it, and you’ll get the answer “Saturn”, especially if they’ve ever viewed it through a telescope. But not many people know that the other gas giants in our Solar System – Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune – also have rings, although they’re much fainter than those of Saturn.
When I first heard about the relic World War II tank traps hidden away in the forests of south-east New South Wales, I thought someone was pulling my leg. It was only after I discovered my informant was a rural firefighter who’d seen the timber obstacles marked on an old map, that I took the claims seriously.
One of the most enduring mysteries of astronomy and space science is something that’s come to be universally known as the ‘Wow! signal’.
Today, all traces of where inhabitants once lived now lie beneath the waves.
Australia’s thousands of kilometres of rocky coastline and shallow reefs harbour the rusting relics of more than 8000 ships.
By definition, a final resting place is final, isn’t it? Well, not always, it seems.