Deborah Bloomfield

Communities found in South Africa called microbialites look like green-tinged rocks, but they grow. Although they resemble some of the oldest evidence for life on Earth, new evidence indicates they are growing much faster than we thought, and drawing abundant carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they do it – even at night. As their […]

Where do lizards go to fall in love? For the Lesser Antillean iguana, “Love Island” can be found on Prickly Pear East, where scientists have embarked on an ambitious conservation project. These critically endangered reptiles were facing extinction on Anguilla not long ago, but following a matchmaking meet-cute that’s successfully established a new population, the […]

NASA has released a short timelapse video of Perseverance’s record-breaking drive on Mars, as engineers determine the rover should be operational until at least 2031. In July 2020, the Perseverance rover was launched, landing in the Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. The rover’s primary objective is to search for signs of ancient […]

Deep in interstellar space, about five times farther from us than Pluto, a message is waiting to be heard.  It’s found on a pair of golden disks, decorated with dates and instructions, and containing natural sounds and greetings in dozens of languages, which were sent away from our planet in 1977 in the hope that […]

The doomed occupants of Pompeii may have been sweating even before Mount Vesuvius began spewing deadly volcanic debris on August 24, 79 CE. Dressed in heavy woollen garments, these cursed souls were poorly decked out for a summer apocalypse, suggesting that the famous disaster may actually have occurred on a different date to that reported […]

Luminous fast blue optical transients (LFBOTs) are the very unsexy name for something spectacular and mysterious: a bright flash of light lasting a couple of days with a dramatic blue hue. They have a distinct ultraviolet signature, leaving behind faint X-rays and radio waves. The source? Unknown. Although, the brightest one yet might have finally […]

What’s the biggest rock in the world? Well, it depends on how you define a rock. But without stepping too far into a geological, philosophical, and linguistic minefield, there are several colossal contenders for the title, including a bunch in the Aussie Outback. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in […]

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 […]