Deborah Bloomfield

Geologists don’t have a crystal ball that can foresee future earthquakes, but seismic specialists in the Japanese government believe that the odds of a big one are creeping upwards. According to Japan’s Earthquake Research Committee, there’s an 80 percent chance that a megaquake could occur in the Nankai Trough within the next 30 years. That’s […]

The World Monuments Fund (WMF) has just announced its biennial list of 25 cultural heritage sites that are under threat – and for the first time ever, it’s gone lunar. Advertisement The preservation organization’s list, the World Monuments Watch, usually sticks to cultural heritage sites within Earth’s bounds. However, with humanity recently ramping up (uncrewed, […]

There are concepts in physics that you probably shouldn’t claim to know until you’ve studied them in depth. Don’t believe us? Tell a physicist you understand quantum mechanics after watching a video about Schrödinger’s cat on YouTube. Advertisement But straws, surely, aren’t that difficult to understand? Suck on one end, liquid comes out? Well, it’s […]

Rare and endangered animals are often hidden away in hard-to-reach locations and might require trekking through a jungle or hacking through thick vegetation to catch a glimpse. Their limited populations sometimes only live in one specific area – and for the world’s rarest insect, this is a small, uninhabited sea stack in the Pacific Ocean. […]

Astronomers have announced the discovery of three new ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, the likes of which have not been seen before. These galaxies are small and isolated, with just a few hundred to a thousand stars and no gas. This is dramatically different from our massive galaxy, which has around a hundred billion stars and is […]

You ever notice how you spend most of your time with only a few of your friends? Or how, at work, it always seems like most of your colleagues don’t really do much, and the whole company would probably flounder if not for you and like, three other people? Advertisement How about your gadgets? They […]

If you’ve ever had a cat, you might have heard your veterinarian mention “cat flu”, probably telling you that you don’t need to worry about catching Felix’s sniffles. It’s true that the infections we traditionally call “cat flu” aren’t transmissible to humans – but what about actual influenza viruses? Are our feline friends vulnerable to […]

For those of us with siblings, the thought that our parents might secretly favor one over the rest has probably crossed our minds at least once. But it can’t be true, right? Wrong – and new research has also explored what might make a child more likely to be the favorite. Advertisement To do so, […]

At 2:03 am EST on January 16, Blue Origin’s New Glenn lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket is 98 meters (322 feet) tall, among the tallest around, and this first launch was a demonstration as part of the US Space Force’s National Security Space Launch program. It tested the Blue Ring […]

A lot of work has explored the noses of dogs, and rats have even been trained to sniff out illegally tracked wildlife – however, most research on smelling focuses on mammals and insects, not spiders. An orb-weaving spider species was specially chosen as the subject of a new study because the females emit sex hormones […]

A massive release of sulfur has been largely blamed for the dramatic cooling that followed Chicxulub’s crash landing, but did it really happen like we thought it did? A new study is raising questions about the long-held belief that an eruption of sulfur (among other things) triggered a severe and lasting “impact winter”, arguing that […]

A gigantic volcanic eruption some time around the year 2900 BCE may have darkened the sun, leading to freezing temperatures, crop failures, and famine across the northern hemisphere. At roughly the same time, a Neolithic community in Denmark sacrificed hundreds of so-called “sun stones”, possibly in an attempt to restore the natural order and save […]

In Doctor Who, an alien species called the Silurians exists – technologically-advanced humanoid reptiles who lived long before humans, going into hiding and being basically undiscovered again until everyone’s favorite time-traveling alien came along in his phone box. So far, so not science. However, in 2018 two University of Cambridge scientists named their paper The Silurian […]

The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 not only heightened geopolitical tensions but also unleashed an unprecedented environmental event, releasing the largest recorded amount of methane from a single human-caused incident – 465,000 metric tons – into the atmosphere and surrounding waters, according to three new studies. The Nord Stream pipelines, which […]

Features of the famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment have been applied in the real world using a single antimony atom embedded in a silicon chip. Surprising as it may seem, the atom has a more complex quantum life than even the theoretical cat manages. Whether it can match the endless variation of real cats remains […]

More than 1.2 million years ago, our ancestors Homo erectus developed the tools and intellectual capacity to survive in very dry conditions, new findings indicate. The adaptation was important to human survival, breaking us out of our dependence on a relatively scarce ecosystem. It may also have been crucial to our first great expansion into […]

Researchers have developed a new approach in optical atomic clocks that brings forth a major goal in science: the redefinition of a second. The fundamental unit of time could soon be based on something beyond the transition of two hyperfine ground states of cesium, which has been the definition since 1967. The first concrete step […]

For possibly the first time ever, a meteorite has been captured on video and audio as it struck the Earth, just outside one man’s home. Advertisement Joe Velaidum, of Marshfield, Prince Edward Island, Canada, was standing outside his home last July, before setting off for a walk with his dog. If he had lingered a […]

A bear-sized bluefin tuna has been sold at a Tokyo market for ¥207 million ($1.3 million), boasting enough fishy flesh to create a sashimi platter that could satisfy an entire school of sharks. Advertisement The 276-kilogram (608-pound) fish was auctioned at the Toyosu Market, the largest wholesale fish market in the world, and bought by […]

Not happy with the way you’re feeling? What if there were a simple solution, one where you could simply slap a sticker on your wrist, and lo and behold, your whole mood changes? It sounds like something from sci-fi (and you’ll know that it is if you’re familiar with Doctor Who), but there are companies […]