Cosmos is a science magazine produced in Australia with a global outlook and literary ambitions, published by the Royal Institution of Australia. It appears four times a year in print, and browser-based subscriber editions. It has a readership of 87,000 in print, and 130,000 via browser subscribers. Its Internet sister, Cosmos Online, publishes daily news and has an audience of 400,000+ unique visitors and 1 million+ page views monthly. It is subtitled "The science of everything" and is described as "a magazine of ideas, science, society and the future". The magazine was established in November 2004 by the Melbourne-based neuroscientist and entrepreneur Alan Finkel, Sydney magazine publishing executive Kylie Ahern and science journalists Wilson da Silva and Elizabeth Finkel. Launched in 2005, it has won 47 journalism and industry awards, including Magazine of the Year in 2009 and 2006, Editor of the Year in 2006 and 2005, and Best Internet Site at Australia's Bell Awards for Publishing Excellence, Best Magazine at the Bell Awards in 2009, as well as a Reuters/World Conservation Union Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting, an Earth Journalism Award and the American Institute of PhysicsScience Writing Award. The magazine is published by Cosmos Media Pty Ltd, a boutique publishing house that was named Best Publisher at the same awards ceremony in 2009 and 2006. It was founded in Sydney, where da Silva and Ahern were based. In June 2013 the company moved to Melbourne following its acquisition in February 2013 by co-founders Alan and Elizabeth Finkel, who purchased the remaining stake they did not already own from co-founders Kylie Ahern and Wilson da Silva, both of whom chose to leave the business to pursue other interests. In 2018, custodianship of the magazine was transferred to RiAus, a not-for-profit science media organisation based in Adelaide. Writers whose work have featured include Margaret Wertheim, Jared Diamond, Tim Flannery, Richard Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson, Michio Kaku, Susan Greenfield, Steven Pinker, Paul Davies, Simon Singh and Oliver Sacks. Cosmos is produced in Australia and sold internationally, with a news-stand presence in New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and Asia. In June 2006, the magazine launched a daily Internet news and features service. It also produces a weekly email newsletter, Cosmos Update, and the educational supplement Cosmos Teacher's Notes, which reach 70% of Australian high schools and hundreds in the United Kingdom and New Zealand. The magazine was the originator of Hello from Earth, a web-based initiative to send messages from the public, each just 160 characters in length, to Gliese 581d, the nearest Earth-like planet outside the Solar System. Created as a science communication exercise for 2009 National Science Week in Australia, it collected nearly 26,000 messages that were beamed by NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex on 28 August 2009.
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The name Cosmos has also been used for other magazines, including two different U.S. science fiction magazines between 1953 and 1954 and 1977, a British astronomy journal launched in April 2005 and produced in association with the European Space Agency and the scientific journal of the Polish Copernicus Society of Naturalists entitled 'Cosmos. Problems of Biological Sciences'.
