Deborah Bloomfield

Anatomists will tell you that every corpse tells a story, and the same is true of fossils. Long dead, animals can reveal strange clues as the passage of time compresses them into an imprint of a life. It means that sometimes you find stuff that just doesn’t make sense. Case in point, a new species […]

A giant blanket of radiation fog has smothered California’s Central Valley for several days and is expected to linger for days more. But fear not, the fog has nothing to do with nuclear meltdowns or the splitting of atoms. What is radiation fog? Radiation fog is a perfectly normal type of fog that’s most common […]

In less than two weeks, interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will be the closest it will ever get to Earth, just 269 million kilometers (167 million miles) away, or 1.8 astronoical units (the Earth-Sun distance). As the cosmic encounter rushes towards us, there will be a lot more opportunities to observe this incredible object. Still, some new, exciting, […]

Neanderthals in France may have been strutting around in leather clothes with matching handbags more than 100,000 years ago. OK, that’s a bit of a claim, but the discovery of a bone tool used for flaying animal carcasses does suggest that these extinct hominins were adept at skinning prey and using their hides to make […]

Take a look at any overhead power lines in the US and you’ll perhaps see a number of big yellow, orange, red, or white balls gripping the wires. Some people have speculated that they are weights for the lines, weather sensors, or even surveillance systems. However, none of these guesses are correct.  The rest of […]

Have you ever found a mermaid’s purse? These leathery pouches that wash up on the beach are actually the egg sacs baby sharks develop in, a process we usually only get to see from the outside. For cinematographer and shark researcher Richard Fitzpatrick, that wasn’t quite enough. The rest of this article is behind a […]

Of the more 6,000 planets that have so far been discovered, most are deeply unsuited to life – at least life of the forms we are familiar with or can plausibly imagine. A substantial minority look like they might be able to support something limited, a planet of bacteria or slime molds. A handful hold […]

We hope you enjoyed the Supermoon last night. The last full Moon of the year was quite splendid from our location, and it’s just one of the lovely things that will be visible in the sky this month. The next big thing is happening just this weekend. Not all of you will be early risers, […]

Imagine you were able to stand on the surface of Mars, Venus, or even Titan without the need for protective gear. Now, imagine you were speaking. Do you think you’d sound the same as on Earth? The answer is no. Sound is a mechanical wave, which means that it doesn’t travel through a pure vacuum, […]

The giraffe with the wonky neck sounds like a whimsical children’s book, but the story of Gemina is very much the real deal.  On July 16, 1986, a giraffe was born at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. By age 1, she had traveled across the state to the Santa Barbara Zoo, where she would […]

Evolution really popped off the day it made a seal. The playfulness of a dog with the attitude of a fat happy cat who occasionally gets dolphinesque zoomies. What’s not to love? Seal finger, that’s what. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. […]

Nature, as majestic as it is, can be extremely cruel – especially to stepchildren. Lions that take over an existing pride make infanticide the first order of business; dolphins kill off unrelated calves specifically so they can mate with the mother; heck, even in humans, a new partner is more likely than the biological parent […]

Currently, there are 100 trillion neutrinos flowing through you. Don’t worry though; they hardly interact with matter. In those occasional interactions, captured by some of the most sophisticated experiments on Earth, there are insights into some of the most complex events in the universe. As a new paper reports, we could be getting insights into […]

We’ve just survived the barrage of Black Friday emails only to jump straight into the chaos of the Christmas countdown – but alas! Something’s coming to rain on your winter parade, and it’s seasonal flu. Yes, the Northern Hemisphere respiratory virus season is well underway, with flu cases across parts of Asia and Europe peaking […]

It has been just over two years since NASA’s OSIRIS-REx brought back to Earth 121 grams of precious samples collected from Asteroid Bennu. The material has already delivered incredible insights into what this space rock is made of, including all but one of the molecules needed to kickstart life as we know it on Earth. […]

Scientists with the British Geological Survey (BGS) have been given a unique opportunity to study rock core samples taken from deep inside the Great Glen Fault – the United Kingdom’s largest fault zone that slices through Scotland. At around 1,000 kilometers (62.1 miles) long and 40 kilometers (24.9 miles) deep, it runs from Ireland through […]

NASA and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) have both landed exploratory rovers on Mars, with the aim to understand if life could, or ever has, existed on the Red Planet, our second closest neighbor.  While these missions focus on interesting areas of the planet, which may once or still be host to alien life, […]

It’s got to be a great day as a scientist when you’re called upon to perform magic tricks for monkeys. That’s what the authors of a 2023 study found themselves doing when they used “The French Drop” as a tool for studying an animal’s capacity to anticipate another’s actions. “Magicians use intricate techniques to mislead […]

In early November, Google announced Project Suncatcher, a moonshot project that aims to create satellite constellations that work as a data center in space. The plan itself has merit, and the tech giant is not the first to have thought of it. What raised quite a few eyebrows was a comment Google CEO Sundar Pichai […]

It’s no secret the deep sea is home to some strange-looking animals, so might we introduce you to yet another weirdo: the seven-arm octopus, AKA “the blob octopus”. This ocean giant can weigh up to 75 kilograms (165 pounds), but despite its huge size, it’s rarely been seen alive. The rest of this article is […]