Deborah Bloomfield

It’s a metaphor beloved by the wheeliest of dealers: a shark, they tell us, has to keep on moving, or else they’ll die. But is that true? Or is it just a bunch of chum? Well, turns out it’s a bit of both. “The short answer is it depends,” marine conservation biologist David Shiffman told […]

When a tree fell in a remote region of the Brazilian Amazon, local villagers noticed something big and very strange lurking beneath its exposed roots. A team of archaeologists arrived shortly afterwards and revealed that the buried objects were in fact ancient funerary urns containing pre-Hispanic human and animal skeletons. A total of seven urns […]

Distributing seeds is among plants’ key challenges, and many have turned to animals for help. However, some get over-reliant on a single species or a few similar ones, with dire consequences when these go extinct. A live demonstration is happening in the biodiversity hotspot of Central Chile where plants with fruits that were once distributed […]

The Copernican principle is an important concept in astronomy. It states that Earth and humanity cannot have a special or privileged position in the universe. But looking at the Solar System and at the currently known star systems out there in the galaxy, we immediately spot a discrepancy: there is nothing that looks remotely close […]

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This week, the first-ever sauropod stomach fossil shows they didn’t chew their food, a new study of 14,000-year-old Ice Age puppies preserved in permafrost reveals they’re actually wolves, and this new map of the universe is the deepest yet, reaching back 13.5 billion years into the past. Finally, will granting “Mother Nature” legal rights really […]

Around 2,223 passengers and crew boarded the Titanic on its maiden voyage in April 1912, but only 706 survived when the ship sank in one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history. That means approximately 1,517 people perished in the infamous incident.  The Titanic has been the focus of countless reports, studies, documentaries, books, […]

God, Albert Einstein famously declared, does not play dice. It’s a pithy statement, but a revealing one: to the famously genius physicist, true randomness – and the new quantum framework that threatened to once again rewrite the rules of the universe – was anathema.  Well, no offence to Einstein, but he was dead wrong on […]

With our planet’s changing climate seeing increased levels of moisture in the atmosphere, new research using climate simulations has suggested that this could have a significant impact on Antarctica, with the continent predicted to experience twice as many extreme “atmospheric river” weather events by the end of the century.   Atmospheric rivers are often described […]

This week on Break It Down: Seeing the Sun’s south pole for the first time ever, Ice Age puppies frozen in permafrost turn out to be wolves, a world-first fossil discovery reveals a sauropod’s final meal, “razor blade throat” and a traveling nimbus reveal what to expect from the new COVID variant, the deepest map […]

It’s not often that nature takes on the “bad guys” and wins, but in 2021, a rainforest went head-to-head with the gold miners tearing it apart and came away victorious. In a precedent-setting courtroom battle, Ecuador’s top court ruled in favor of the threatened Los Cedros cloud forest, stripping international mining companies of their permits […]

It’s June, which means solstice time – and therefore, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest night of the year. That’s a shame, as something else remarkable is set to occur this month as well: it’s “core season” for the Milky Way. In other words: go outside this month, find yourself a […]

Green = go, red = stop is a universal code that is burned into our brains and understood almost instinctively, no matter the language or culture. Except, of course, in Japan. A country known for its distinctive traditions and cultural quirks, Japan has a difficult relationship with the color green, a peculiarity that reveals itself […]

Your body is like your best friend. For better or worse you get to know all its quirks as you journey side-by-side through thick and thin. It figures, then, that when we suddenly lose part of our body, we can often feel as if it’s still with us. Unfortunately, that feeling can be a painful […]

London in the early 1780s was a tumultuous place. At the start of the decade, anti-Catholic riots, known as the Gordon Riots, had caused chaos in the city, leaving hundreds dead and many parts of the city in cinders. Across the Atlantic, the American Revolution was in full swing, so political attention was trained on […]

Majestic. Regal. Iconic. They’re all sort of wildlife documentary buzzwords, right? Ways to describe the elegance of nature, but what about the – how do we put this delicately? – what about the right weirdos? From beetles that fight their way out of frogs’ butts, to urine-quaffing giraffes, there’s another side to nature that less […]

Jadarite is a truly unique mineral. It is rich in lithium, and given our society’s hunger for the metal – key to batteries and the energy transition away from fossil fuels – there is a lot of interest in its properties and how it forms. So far, it has been found only in one location […]

How groups travel is an interesting part of animal behavior. Elephants can form circles to protect younger members of the herd, while whales can coordinate enough to make spiral rings of bubbles to catch prey. New research has revealed why baboons travel in straight lines, and the answer is much more wholesome than you might […]

A Roman soldier stationed at Hadrian’s Wall had feet so big that he would have had trouble finding shoes that fit in today’s stores, so one can only imagine the problems he had tracking down a pair of size 15 (US) military boots at the northern edge of the Empire. Yet not only did the […]

Mars is home to the tallest mountain in the Solar System, Olympus Mons, an extinct volcano three times as tall as Mount Everest. There are several other examples of volcanoes and volcanic features across the Red Planet, though new research suggests that we might have been missing many. Evidence for a volcano has been found […]