Deborah Bloomfield

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 […]

Anyone who has had a dental implant knows how alien it is to have a tooth-like thing in your mouth that isn’t really yours. Although millions of people have these long-term, natural-looking implants to replace missing teeth, traditional ones pretty much fall short of mimicking real teeth. However, researchers at Tufts University School of Medicine […]

A group of bat coronaviruses closely related to the virus behind Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) could be only a small mutation away from spilling over into the human population. Should that happen, we may find ourselves facing the next coronavirus pandemic.  Until recently, there hadn’t been all that much attention paid to the merbecoviruses, […]

Megastructures from the European Stone Age are incredibly rare. Long before agriculture, cities, or authoritative kings, moving massive stones and organizing large labor forces was nearly impossible. Despite anything, this was a time before metal tools, wheels, or written language. Yet along the Baltic Sea coast in Northern Europe, an archaeological discovery suggests that prehistoric […]

Last week, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS released the data behind an incredible catalog of galaxies, spanning further into the past than ever before, with a size that makes the Hubble Ultra Deep Field look like a postage stamp. This is COSMOS-Web. When the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was released in 2004, it was the […]

Some concepts seem so normal to us that we might assume they are naturally used around the world, despite the fact that they aren’t. The color blue, for instance, was not really described in ancient times, and is a more modern development. And then there’s the concept of “left” and “right”, describing people or objects […]

The Caspian Sea is dropping and revealing new islands to the world. In a recent discovery, Russian scientists have confirmed the presence of an emerging island in the world’s largest inland body of water. The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said the new island is located in the Astrakhan […]

If ever you were to fall in love with a spider, it would surely be Salticidae. Known as the jumping spiders, they are gloriously fuzzy with eyes straight out of Pixar, and the world has just been gifted a whole new genus discovered in the alpine regions of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their popularity shines through […]

Exercise is supposed to be good for us, and yet every so often, our body rewards our efforts to keep ourselves healthy with what we can only assume is the same level of pain as a xenomorph breaking out of your belly… Okay, maybe we’re being a bit melodramatic, though stitches are still pretty unpleasant […]

There’s that great sequence in Finding Nemo where Bruce, the great white shark seemingly in recovery for eating fish, gets a nostril-full of Dory’s blood following a scuba-mask accident. He sniffs, and it triggers euphoria before sending poor Bruce (it’s a disease!) on a bloodthirsty rampage. Yes, I know it’s a kids’ movie, but bear […]

Bioengineers have created a soft, thin, and stretchable bioelectronic device that can be implanted into frog embryos’ developing brains, effectively making tiny cyborgs. This technology, they suggest, could help us understand and treat neurodevelopmental conditions in children in the future. The device is implanted into the embryo’s neural plate, a flat structure that eventually folds […]

The idea of plate tectonics – which describes how Earth’s crust is arranged into slowly moving plates, with volcanic activity and earthquakes taking place along the boundaries – is so normal to us now that it might be surprising to learn it was only really accepted by geologists during the 1960s. Before that, and the […]

The Moon is certainly not a colorful world. Forget the crimson hue of Mars or the blue of Neptune. Our natural satellite is instead in grayscale, a magnificent desolation that only changes color in eclipses. However, there are pockets of color on the Moon, and some of them tell us of dramatic events in the […]

Camera traps are an invaluable resource when it comes to conservation; they can help scientists see “ghosts” in the dark, rediscover lost species, and build up a picture of how different members of a habitat are using the space. Camera traps can also provide a sneaky secret window into the lives of these creatures, revealing […]

Have you ever heard of an octopus map? If not, you’ll likely see them everywhere after this, as a new study demonstrates. In short, an octopus map is a map that depicts some enemy as a centralized menace with various tentacle-like threats dispersing from them across other territories, or indeed the whole world. Traditionally, these […]

A YouTuber has created what might be the world’s strongest handheld laser, and it is capable of punching through titanium. “The legal power limit for a laser pointer is 5 milliwatts. Well, I think it would be funny to build one that’s  50,000 times stronger than that,” Drake Anthony, who goes by “styropyro” on YouTube, […]

Thought we’d seen the last of it? Sorry to disappoint, but there’s a new COVID-19 variant gallivanting across the globe. Its official title is NB.1.8.1, but some have taken to calling it “Nimbus”. In the Southern Hemisphere, where flu season is just starting to ramp up, medics are bracing for a new wave of cases, […]