Deborah Bloomfield

According to our best possible understanding of the universe, regular matter is only a small fraction of the matter-energy content of the universe. The energy we interact with and the matter we are made of and see is at most 5 percent of the total. What’s the rest? We don’t know exactly. About 70 percent […]

It’s a fairly common scenario: Someone (usually me) in your home informs you that there is a gigantic spider in the bathroom that needs dealing with, only for you to go up there and find a teeny tiny spider minding its own business, far smaller than described. A new study has looked into this size […]

Far from the fearsome reputation implied by their name, “killer whales”, orcas sometimes offer people gifts of food. Why orcas do this is a mystery we will probably take a long time to solve, but by collecting all the accounts they could, scientists have shown the behavior is surprisingly common. One of the less desirable […]

For millennia, the way we found our way home has been using the stars. The tech we have sent towards those stars also uses the position of distant shining dots to find their orientation and not lose “sight” of Earth. But researchers have just demonstrated that once you are far away from the planets of […]

A second nova has joined V462 Lupi in the sky, providing a brief window where both are visible at once without binoculars or telescopes under the right conditions. Such an event has only been recorded once before, and happened so quickly that no one noticed at the time. Astronomers spent much of 2024 anxiously awaiting […]

A long-lost city dating back some 2,400 years has been discovered next to a temple dedicated to the ancient Egyptian cobra goddess Wadjet. Unearthed in the eastern Nile Delta, the once-bustling settlement of Imet supported a large population during Egypt’s Late Period, yet the empire’s defeat at the hands of Alexander the Great appears to […]

The thing most people know about lemmings – their tendency to follow each other off a cliff – is not actually true (more on that later), but scientists have just learned something new about them: they are one of the newest mammal species on Earth. Genetic comparisons of the Norwegian lemming and its nearest relative, […]

The ancient Greeks believed that the city of Delphi was the Omphalos, the navel of the planet, the very middle of the world. In general, humans do like to find the center of things; it confuses us when there is none. The surface of our planet, being close to the surface of a sphere, doesn’t […]

A genus of around 20 burrowing frog species found mostly in South Africa is famous for its members’ short limbs, flat, angry-looking faces, and rounded “golf-ball” like bodies. Now, this collection of tiny frogs is adding one more member, after a new species was discovered almost by accident in South Africa. It began with a […]

An after-dinner cheese board? Can’t beat it. Silly little knives, fruity little chutneys, and mounds of glorious cheese, but the evening can take a turn when it’s time to go to sleep and the nightmares come knocking. Now, a new study has found that it could all come down to intolerances and allergies. The study […]

As nightmare fuel goes, the movie adaptation of The Martian author Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary is really up there: Waking up alone (well, almost) on a spaceship that’s light-years from home with almost no memories except that when you left Earth, it was in dire trouble. It doesn’t really get much worse, does it? […]

Imagine you open up the hood of your car and take a look inside. You see an engine, the battery, various fluid reservoirs; all the normal stuff… and then it catches your eye. An extra component, never noticed before – but evidently doing something as it chugs away in front of you. That’s basically what […]

It is a truth universally acknowledged among mathematicians that some of the most challenging problems are those that, on paper, sound incredibly simple. Take Fermat’s Last Theorem, for example: the statement fits into almost a single sentence, but a proof took more than 350 years and the development of a handful of brand-new areas of […]

A team of researchers, together with cavers in Australia, have crawled their way quite literally into a treasure trove of new invertebrate species. Many of the new-to-science species, which include spiders, cockroaches, centipedes, and even a wasp, exhibit cave adaptations such as eyelessness and were found mummified and perfectly preserved within the Nullarbor cave system. […]

One hundred and seventeen years ago, on June 30, 1908, the world changed. For the people of Eastern Russia, near the Tunguska River, the world came close to ending. Something fell from the sky with such strength that it threw people back into the air for meters. They were tens of kilometers from the impact. […]

There are bad days, and then there are “I fell butt first onto an air hose and now I’m inflating like a balloon” days. In 2011, a trucker from New Zealand experienced the latter. On May 21, 2011, Steven McCormack fell between the cab of his truck and the trailer behind it, and onto an […]

DNA from more than 100 individuals buried in Çatalhöyük’s East Mound reveals the inhabitants were more likely to live with relatives on the female line, and the social structure changed slowly over centuries. Along with Göbekli Tepe, also in modern Turkey, Çatalhöyük is one of the oldest known permanent settlements in the world. No records […]

The planet Venus is like Earth’s worst twin – roughly the same size but with a thick layer of acid clouds over a crushing, hellish atmosphere. Its clouds in particular have been a source of interest, but it is difficult to understand how they change long-term: most missions around the planet don’t last long. New […]

A new study has identified common factors in people who have had out-of-body experiences (OBEs), the odd phenomenon where people describe experiencing the world as if from a location outside their own bodies. A surprising number of people have had OBEs, with some surveys finding that they have affected between 10 and 20 percent of […]

Fishing has been a vital source of protein for humans for millennia, but there was a time you got a lot more meal for your reel. Cod used to be enormous fish, stretching to over a meter (3 feet) in length and weighing up to 40 kilograms (88.2 pounds). Now, a fully-grown adult cod barely […]