Deborah Bloomfield

It’s difficult to work out what is going on in your own mind, let alone anyone else’s. That’s one of the reasons why people with aphantasia, or who do not have an inner monologue (anendophasia), may not realize that their minds work differently from other people’s. Aphantasia is a difference in the way the brain […]

Did you know that Elasmosaurus was once depicted as being the other way around? And by that, I mean Edward Drinker Cope put its head on its tail? Then we have Iguanodon, an animal we once thought had a fierce horn on its nose because we erroneously put the thumb spike on its face. It’s […]

Google Maps has got fresh competition. Using machine learning, computer engineers have developed an interactive map that shows 3D models of the world’s buildings – practically every single one of them. Here’s how it works and how you can tinker around with it yourself.  Called the GlobalBuildingAtlas, the freely available map features nearly all of […]

Snakes are pretty impressive creatures, living in a variety of habitats and populating every continent except Antarctica. Across this diverse group of animals is a wide range of defensive behaviors, but nothing can beat the hognose snakes for their acting skills.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe […]

Titan is the only other world in the Solar System with lakes and rain. Unlike Earth, those are not made of water, but methane and other hydrocarbons, because it is too cold for liquid water. There is plenty of water ice on Titan though, and observations in the 2000s suggested that the moon might be […]

Some of the longest-living animals on Earth have likely been alive for over 2,000 years. That includes sponges, and in 2015, scientists discovered the largest sponge in history, at around the size of a minivan, living its life around 2,134 meters (7,000 feet) under the ocean.  Writing of the discovery, made in the remote Papahānaumokuākea […]

Winter is hard work, but it’s also bloody beautiful. Hair ice, Moon bows, and those peculiar ice pancakes – it all gets a bit wacky when the temperature drops, but my most recent obsession is glaze ice. If you’ve ever seen a branch locked inside a crystal-clear popsicle, then congratulations, you’ve seen glaze ice. It […]

In mythology, the whale’s belly represents a place of death and rebirth, a watery abyss in which one must face one’s own darkness before emerging transformed. In reality, being swallowed by a whale is nigh-on impossible – though there is one species that might be capable of gulping down a human body. One thing’s for […]

Nature can be pretty metal when it wants, and a testament to this is the recent discovery that bees sometimes use hollowed out tooth sockets in fossilized skulls as a nesting site. That’s according to remains that date back to the late Quaternary period found in a cave, and it marks the first-known instance of […]

A wild female polar bear in Canada’s Churchill, Manitoba, had been observed and captured on camera with an adopted cub that is not her own. Adoption among polar bears isn’t unheard of, but it is extremely rare, and it’s even rarer still for scientists to identify and film the adopted polar bear family. The rest […]

Evolution can be pretty tricky to study, not just due to the complexity of the processes involved, but also because of the enormous timescales involved. Major changes to a species can take place over thousands or even millions of years. With that constraint, you might think that evolution – or the process by which organisms […]

Back in January 2025, we launched the Vault with the first collection of deep dive articles into the weird and wonderful. Like some digital cabinet of curiosities, we’ve now accumulated a rare collection of unusual but revealing stories touching on the absurd, the worrying, the whimsical, and the weirder aspects of our world, science, and […]

How fast were dinosaurs? If we’re talking medium-sized theropods: very. That’s according to a new fossil discovery that has become the fastest theropod trackway ever documented from the Cretaceous. By figuring out the size of the dinosaur that left behind the fossil footprints and the distance between each step, scientists were able to determine that […]

Despite popular mythology, nobody has ever seriously thought that the Moon is made of cheese. But exactly what it is made of has been a question we’ve only very recently been able to answer.  And the more we learn, the more interesting things get. Not only can we now physically touch pieces of the Moon […]

In 1054 CE, humans saw a new star appear in the sky. It was so bright that for 23 days it was visible during the day and for almost two years at night. At its peak, it was four times brighter than Venus, usually the brightest thing in the night sky. A phenomenal spectacle witnessed […]

A new paper has taken a look at the orbits of megaconstellations around Earth, and found that we may be tiptoeing dangerously close to the catastrophic “Kessler syndrome” first hypothesized in 1978. Simply put, the Kessler effect, or Kessler-Cour-Pallais syndrome (KCPS), is where a single event (such as the explosion of a satellite) in low-Earth […]

In the Northern Hemisphere, astronomical winter runs from around December 21 or 22 until March 20 or 21, while meteorological winter runs from December 1 to February 28 (or February 29 if it’s a Leap Year). This difference isn’t to annoy climatologists and confuse migratory birds – there’s an understandable reason why these two systems […]

We’ve all watched Jaws with baited breath, laughed our way through Cocaine Bear and secretly wondered whether it would be possible to get a few pets in before being mauled to death by a tiger Gladiator style. But are there actually any animals that would actively hunt and eat a person in the real world? […]

Since the 1990s, humanity has discovered some truly bizarre exoplanets. Very hot, very big, orbiting multiple stars, or at a weird angle. Still, no matter how familiar you are with the strange worlds out there, you are not ready for the utter all-you-can-eat weirdness of exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b. PSR J2322-2650b is already peculiar because it […]

Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a toddler or puppy chomp might argue that it feels like the strongest bite ever, but which animal really has the most powerful bite of them all? The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. And the crown […]