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One of the pleasures of a show like Doctor Who that features near-unlimited time travel is that it can go anywhere and anywhen. That includes going to cosmic extremes.

On multiple occasions, the Doctor has gone billions of years into the future, to the end of the Universe. The Tenth Doctor went to the Universe’s dying days in the episode Utopia, and the Twelfth Doctor went there in Season Eight’s Listen and Season Nine’s Hell Bent.

The Doctor has also been into the most extremes of the distant past, for example to the creation of the Earth in The Runaway Bride.

And on one occasion he triggered a second Big Bang: the incredibly rapid expansion of matter and energy that cosmologists think marked the birth of the Universe.

In reality, the beginning and end of the Universe continue to challenge our understanding. In particular, there is still uncertainty about how time began and what it was like in the early Universe. As for the distant future and whether time will end, that’s even harder to say – and it depends partly on what we mean by “time”.

Cosmologists generally agree that the Universe began 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang. This is based on decades of observations showing that all the galaxies in the Universe are flying apart: in other words, the Universe is expanding. If you run the tape backwards, it looks like everything in the Universe was originally clumped together. The implication is that, at the very beginning, everything was compressed into an infinitely tiny dot or “singularity” – when then expanded astonishingly fast in the Big Bang.

It’s tempting to ask what happened before this, but most physicists will say this is meaningless. “Time only exists as the Universe exists,” says astrophysicist Emma Osborne at the University of York in the UK. “The moment the Universe came into existence is when time started.”

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Once upon a time, time began – so what will happen when it ends? (Credit: Edouard Taufenbach/Bastien Pourtout)

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I live in a one-bedroom “garden” apartment, which means that I get to have my own front door, porch, and small strip of flower bed. The only downside? The flower bed is under the porch roof, which means it’s constantly damp and shady, and also an ideal mosquito habitat.

So this year, after frantically trying to squash a few rogue mosquitoes that snuck indoors while I was carrying in groceries, I’ve decided to get myself some mosquito-repelling plants.

Yes, there are some plants that mosquitoes don’t like, due to their potent smell. The oils of some of these plants are used to formulate natural mosquito repellents, but there’s also some preliminary research to suggest that some live plants can also help keep at least some mosquitoes away.

I’m not expecting my mosquito-repelling plants to work miracles, but hopefully, they’ll discourage a few of those blood-suckers from coming too close. If you’re out doing a bit of weeding, or flipping burgers on the grill, try crushing the leaves of these plants and rubbing the oils on your skin to get the most protection.

Want to try growing your own mosquito-resistant garden? Here’s what you should plant.

Citronella Grass

The essential oil from citronella grass is used to make those insect-repellent candles you’ve probably come across at a summer barbecue. Make sure you’re buying the tall spiky grass Cymbopogon nardus, not “citronella plant” (Pelargonium citrosum), which is actually a type of geranium that smells similar to citronella but doesn’t contain the same mosquito-repelling oils. Citronella grass prefers partial sun and moist, loamy soil, so water every day if you’re growing it in a container. It is a perennial in tropical climates, but can be grown as an annual in colder places.

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Photo by Lana Kenney

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For the first time in over 60 years, a rare egg-laying mammal has been spotted by scientists. Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi) was caught on camera during a major expedition in the Cyclops Mountains in Indonesia’s Papua Province.

A sacred animal

The long-beaked echidna is named for wildlife documentarian and conservationist Sir David Attenborough and has only been recorded by scientists once, in 1961. It is considered a monotreme, or an evolutionary distinct group of mammals who can lay eggs. The platypus is also a monotreme and there are only five remaining species of these strange types of mammal on Earth. 

They live in burrows and mainly eat insects, earthworms, and termites. They are listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and are only known to live in the Cyclops Mountains.

“Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna has the spines of a hedgehog, the snout of an anteater, and the feet of a mole. Because of its hybrid appearance, it shares its name with a creature of Greek mythology that is half human, half serpent,” University of Oxford biologist James Kempton said in a statement. “The reason it appears so unlike other mammals is because it is a member of the monotremes–an egg-laying group that separated from the rest of the mammal tree-of-life about 200 million years ago.”

The echidna also has cultural significance for the people in the village of Yongsu Sapari. They have lived on the northern slopes of the Cyclops Mountains for eighteen generations. Rather than fighting during conflicts, the tradition is for one party to go up into the Cyclops to find echidna while the other party goes to the ocean to search for a marlin. Both of these creatures were difficult to find, and it would take decades to even whole generations to locate them. However, once they were found, the marlin and echidna would symbolize the end of the conflict.

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Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, photographed by a camera trap. Expedition Cyclops

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Indians looking to escape the country’s chronic unemployment rut frequently fall prey to rackets. One such ring has reportedly conned at least 50,000 people since 2020, making it one of India’s biggest job frauds in recent times.

The success of such criminal syndicates is an indication of how bad the conditions are for job seekers in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies that is simply unable to generate enough employment opportunities.

Job rackets lure the gullible

India’s latest organized job scam episode has affected people in the Indian states of Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, and Odisha. They were duped of crores of rupees after being promised jobs, reports said.

“The scam was being run by a group of tech-savvy engineers from Uttar Pradesh with the help of some expert website developers. This core group was assisted by around 50 call center employees. These employees were paid 15,000 rupees ($181) per month and were from Jamalpur and Aligarh localities of Uttar Pradesh,” according to Jai Narayan Pankaj, a senior Odisha police officer.

Candidates paid up to Rs70,000 for training and other orientation programs, including Rs3,000 in registration fees. However, the training never happened, Pankaj said.

In another incident unearthed in December, around 30 people were tricked into counting the arrival and departure of trains at the New Delhi Railway Station for a month, BBC reported. They were told this was part of their training for the positions of travel ticket examiner, traffic assistant, and clerk. Each of the duped candidates had paid up between Rs2 lakh and Rs24 lakh for the coveted Indian Railways job.

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Photo: ANUSHREE FADNAVIS (Reuters)

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This is happening today!

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In mathematics, simple rules can unlock universes of complexity and beauty. Take the famous Fibonacci sequence, which is defined as follows: It begins with 1 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. The first few numbers are:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 …

Simple, yes, but this unassuming recipe gives rise to a pattern of far-reaching significance, one that appears to be woven into the very fabric of the natural world. It’s seen in the whorls of nautilus shells, the bones in our fingers, and the arrangement of leaves on tree branches. Its mathematical reach extends to geometry, algebra, and probability, among other areas. Eight centuries since the sequence was introduced to the West — Indian mathematicians studied it long before Fibonacci — the numbers continue to attract the interest of researchers, a testament to how much mathematical depth can underlie even the most elementary number sequence.

In the Fibonacci sequence, every term builds on the ones that came before it. Such recursive sequences can exhibit a wide range of behaviors, some wonderfully counterintuitive. Take, for instance, a curious family of sequences first described in the 1980s by the American mathematician Michael Somos.

Like the Fibonacci sequence, a Somos sequence starts with a series of ones. A Somos-k sequence starts with k of them. Each new term of a Somos-k sequence is defined by pairing off previous terms, multiplying each pair together, adding up the pairs, and then dividing by the term k positions back in the sequence.

The sequences aren’t very interesting if k equals 1, 2 or 3 — they are just a series of repeating ones. But for k = 4, 5, 6 or 7 the sequences have a weird property. Even though there is a lot of division involved, fractions don’t appear.

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Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine

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