Deborah Bloomfield

Ancient hunter-gatherers in the Atacama Desert may have begun mummifying their dead as a form of “art therapy” to help them process their grief following the loss of a loved one. More specifically, the 7,000-year-old tradition might have been initiated by bereaved mothers struggling to come to terms with miscarriages, stillbirths or infant mortality. The […]

In February 1985, Jill Lawson went into labor at just 26 weeks pregnant, giving birth to her son Jeffrey Lawson when he weighed just 680 grams, or one-and-a-half pounds. Like many premature babies (but by no means all), Jeffrey developed patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), and was booked in for open heart surgery at a local […]

Roman military officials stationed at an Egyptian port were crazy about their pets, and seem to have been particularly fond of monkeys. Specifically, these ancient warriors adored Indian macaques, which they treated almost as if they were children, even giving them their own pets and burying them alongside an array of elaborate grave goods. The […]

China Eastern Airlines is set to launch the world’s longest scheduled air route, a marathon journey spanning roughly 20,000 kilometers (12,427 miles) across the Pacific between China and Argentina. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. The debut flight will depart on December […]

While most of us are decking the halls with boughs of holly, pity the poor Christougenniatikophobiacs out there this season – and not just because it takes them so darn long to pronounce what’s wrong with them. Why? Because this condition describes a terrible fear of nothing less than… Christmas itself. And yes, that means […]

The puzzling electric charge on clouds of interstellar gas can be explained by the passage of two hot, bright stars close to the Sun. “Close”, in this case, is something of a relative term even by astronomical standards, given these stars were never within our few hundred closest stellar neighbors. Nevertheless, if a new study […]

Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole sitting at the core of the Milky Way. It has a mass of 4.3 million times our Sun’s and a radius of 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). It is not alone at the center of our galaxy; it is orbited by multiple stars and other peculiar objects. […]

A pattern in the movements of a brown dwarf that orbits a Sun-like star is likely to be caused by a moon. If confirmed, this would be the first exomoon, that is a moon orbiting a planet that in turn orbits a star other than the Sun. However, if the data is to be believed, […]

Planetary scientists have found a wide range of molecules that are crucial for life among a lot of other organic substances present in asteroids, meteors, and even interstellar space. Now, scientists report new insights into asteroid Bennu, which was sampled by the NASA mission OSIRIS-REx. The latest research suggests tentative evidence for a substance we […]

Seals, the blubbery dogs of icy oceans, have a curious habit of flipping on their backs and slapping their bellies like a drunken uncle after Thanksgiving dinner. While it may look silly, this behavior is actually a subtle and sophisticated form of communication. Seals “speak” through a system of grunts, growls, snorts, hisses, whistles, and […]

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS may be a primitive carbonaceous object, according to a new preprint study comparing the object’s spectra with pristine NASA samples from Antarctica. As well as this, our third interstellar visitor also appears to be undergoing cryovolcanic activity during its first close encounter in (possibly) 10 million years. While much recent analysis has […]

Be ready, werewolves and witches, as well as general lovers of the night sky. The last full Moon of the year is happening on Thursday, December 4, and it will be a supermoon, meaning that it will appear brighter and larger in the sky. This effect is due to the proximity of the Moon as […]

Flying is something of a Marmite as locomotion goes – you either love it, or hate it. I myself fall into the latter category, reserving flying only for those journeys where there is no reasonable alternative (such as the new world’s longest flight of *shivers* 29 hours). I don’t hate the entire journey, just take-off. […]

Watching on-screen action makes our brains respond in a very specific way, a new study has uncovered. We don’t just see what’s happening – our brains’ touch-processing regions get activated too, so in a way, we also feel it. When you’re next at the movies, if there’s a particularly gnarly scene where a character gets hurt, […]

This scrappy piece of parchment marks a world-changing moment in human history. Completed around 1500 CE – or so we think – it is the first known map to depict Europe, Asia, and Africa alongside the coasts of the Americas. The first Europeans to set foot in North America were Norse Vikings, who sailed between Greenland […]

“Buffalo” and “bison” are sometimes used interchangeably, especially in the US, but scientifically speaking, they are very different animals. Both are large, horned beasts related to cattle, but they differ in their geographical range, appearance, behavior, and taxonomic family history. A simple (though not perfect) rule of thumb to know the difference between bison and […]

A stalagmite from a cave in Kurdistan has provided unprecedented detail on local climatic conditions from 18,000 to 7,500 years ago, as Earth was leaving the last glacial period. Lying so close to the valleys where agriculture and civilization were born, the find offers great insight into the conditions that drove their rise. Moreover, the […]

A new study has reconstructed anacondas that lived in what’s now Venezuela 12 million years ago. The fossil vertebrae reveal that anacondas were giants back in the Middle to Upper Miocene and have stayed giant ever since, an unusual trend for life on Earth. Most animals that lived between 12.4 to 5.3 million years ago […]

The Malaysian earthtiger tarantula was first described in 1891 by respected Swedish arachnologist Tamerlan Thorell. However, confusions around taxonomy have led to little being known about the wild habits of this unique-looking tarantula species.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Species known […]

Thresher sharks are among the goofiest of Chondrichthyes. With big googly eyes, they seem sweet enough at the head end, but their tails? Now they’re all business. Their enormous tails can be 3 meters (10 feet) long, accounting for around half their body length. They look like whips, and they act like whips, creating changes […]