Deborah Bloomfield

The first person known to have been infected with the H5N5 strain of avian influenza has died, the Washington State Department of Health announced Friday.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. “Out of respect for the family’s privacy, we are not releasing […]

Worrying levels of “forever chemicals” were detected in the waters of certain pockets of North Carolina in recent years. These human-made pollutants appeared everywhere, from rivers and sewers to drinking water. Now, a new study may have uncovered the culprit. “Forever chemicals” is the nickname given to PFAS, a synthetic group of compounds added to […]

From October 2007 until mid-2022, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) looked at the millimeter and microwave universe. It discovered the most extreme galaxy cluster and many other peculiar things, though its true focus has always been studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB).  This is the light echo of the Big Bang, the first light that […]

The Hayli Gubbi shield volcano, thought to be dormant since almost the last ice age, has erupted, and the volcanic plume is reaching heights at which intercontinental aircraft fly. Hayli Gubbi is located in the Afar region of Ethiopia where the Arabian tectonic plate meets the Nubian and Somali parts of the African Plate, creating […]

There are a number of candidates for the title of the quietest natural place on Earth. It’s difficult to pinpoint the absolute quietest natural location, as it is highly variable due to the influence of, for example, noise produced by wind, wildlife, rustling vegetation, tourists and those goddamn aircraft flying overhead. But a good candidate, […]

If you’ve spent a little time wondering about how the cosmos works (as you should) you have likely stumbled across one of the so-called “constants” of the universe. These are physical quantities which cannot be derived through theory, and must be gained through going out there and measuring them through experiment. Classic examples include the […]

A massive 40-year study in the US has concluded that adding fluoride to drinking water does not reduce people’s cognitive ability. In fact, kids who grew up with fluoridated tap water performed slightly better in mathematics and reading in later life compared to those who didn’t. Scientists at the University of Minnesota looked at data […]

Guatemala’s rainforests support a remarkable diversity of cat species, including jaguars, pumas, ocelots, and the lesser-known margays. It’s unusual to have so many medium to large predators in one ecosystem, let alone from one family, and now scientists have worked out how they manage. Two species follow Michelle Obama’s philosophy: “When they go low, we […]

Happy birthday, Hannah Shirley! This year marks 52 trips around the Sun for the world’s oldest living pygmy hippopotamus in managed care, and what better way to celebrate than with a bash based on everyone’s favorite hippo-themed game? The team at San Diego Humane Society’s Ramona Wildlife Center, where Hannah Shirley is resident, really went […]

Whether it’s a frosty December morning or a breezy summer day, Germans will embrace the ancient art of lüften, part health practice, part cultural quirk – and many experts would recommend you give it a try yourself. Lüften, meaning “to air” in German, simply involves opening windows and doors to replace stuffy, stale air with […]

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to own your own bit of lawn, you have probably at some point moaned about the sheer number of weeds that you have to remove from it. You, along with many people over on Reddit and other areas of the Internet, may have wondered at some point; what is […]

Some of Earth’s creatures are capable of extraordinary migrations, covering thousands of kilometers every year. But how do they know which way to go? For loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) the answer to that question rests inside their ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field – but how are they doing this? The rest of […]

It’s an often-repeated statement that there aren’t enough hours in the day. Work. The commute. Chores. The to-do list of the everyday keeps us very busy and rarely doing what makes us happy. It’s hardly surprising that many of us aren’t clocking as many hours with loved ones as we used to, and the World […]

Seasonal flu is a bit of a guessing game. A very scientific, high-stakes guessing game, but still. We can never know for sure exactly how a flu season will play out, so scientists make predictions based on the season in the opposite hemisphere of the globe, and use their best guesses of which virus strains […]

The Chinchorro culture that inhabited Chile’s Atacama Desert from about 7,500 years ago is famous for its mummies, which predate those from Ancient Egypt by several millennia. Scanning the heads of these wrinkled corpses, researchers have now revealed that the average Chinchorro individual possessed a brain that was about 12 percent smaller than that of […]

A new paper has explored what would happen if a tiny black hole were to pass through a human body. Rather than a disappointing “not much”, the physicist behind the paper specifically tried to determine the minimum size of such a black hole that would cause “significant injury or death” to the human unlucky enough […]

Suppose you’re given a message to be delivered to a specific person as fast as possible. Here’s the problem, though: you don’t personally know the recipient; you don’t have their address, only a general location; and they’re far away enough that personally going there and wandering about shouting their name is out of the question. […]

Is it possible to predict the future by slicing open a farm animal and peering inside its liver? Scientists of the 21st century would surely be skeptical about approaching this question, but for the curious minds of ancient times, it was a tried and tested method for looking ahead and foreseeing what the gods had […]

If someone asked you to weigh the planet and you had not paid close attention in high school physics, you might have no idea where to begin. How do you measure something you are standing on? It is a bit like being told to weigh your own set of scales without having another set to […]

On April 15, 1912, an iceberg brought down a ship once thought to be unsinkable. The Titanic was the largest ocean liner of its time when it began its maiden voyage from Southampton in the United Kingdom to New York in the United States. Its journey ended in tragedy just four days into the Atlantic […]