Improved telescopes are showing us pictures of a universe that we never suspected. Most of the matter in the universe is 'dark matter', stuff too dark and cold to register to the human eye. But astronomers are discovering helium wisps in the great spaces between galaxies; these are remnants of the 'Big Bang' that were very light, and far from any centre of gravity, and so have never been captured by a heavier body. This helium has never experienced gravity, pressure or light, trapped in the endless wastes between the oases of the galaxies.

Robots are often used to help overcome design questions; such as, why are some fish so fast and other types of fish so manoeuvrable? Scientists are creating robot tuna, which have flexible bodies that mimic the swimming motion of the real fish. As well, little white balls with four, flexible fins are being programmed to twist and float in the water like a blowfish. These robots are helping refine the data relating to aquatic motion, that one day may be used to design better submarines and marine probes.

The middle of Australia was once an inland ocean, with the land between the Great Dividing Range and the inner sea forming great fertile plains. It was here that the Muttaburrasaurus lived and thrived. The first specimen of this animal was discovered by a grazier, Doug Langdon, on his property in Western Queensland. This large herbivore probably roamed the plains in herds, and would have eaten plants such as cycads, conifers and ferns; at seven metres in length, it was the reptilian equivalent of the elephant.

These days, it is a forgone conclusion that birds are the descendants of the dinosaurs, thanks to several blockbuster movies that have presented this theory as fact. Birds and dinosaurs are related, just like chimpanzees and lemurs are related; in both cases, these animals are cousins rather than one descending from the other. The proto-avians branched out from the dinosaur line well before the dinosaurs became the dominant life form of the Jurassic, both types of animals existed simultaneously. Archaeopteryx, a winged dinosaur, is an example of convergent evolution, in the same way that dolphins resemble fish even though they are mammals.

Okay, now it's time for a quick quiz: is the DNA strand of a frog longer or shorter than a human being's DNA strand? Humans are more complex than frogs, right? So, most people would expect that the human being has the longer DNA strand. This is actually incorrect, thanks to the controlled temperature in which we develop as foetuses. A lot of the coding on the amphibian genome is a series of 'recipes' that have to vary with changes in temperature; our mammalian development has only to 'cook' within a very narrow temperature range. This means that our mammalian 'recipe' only needs to follow the one set of instructions, and so our genome is the shorter.