Deborah Bloomfield

What do zinc, bitter orange, lavender, saffron, and vitamin D all have in common? No, they’re not the ingredients to a bizarre-sounding salad, but they are all products that have been touted as natural antidepressants. The real question is – do any of them actually work? What are natural antidepressants? Natural antidepressants are pretty much what […]

Two exceptionally well preserved reptile skeletons dating back to the Triassic period have totally rewritten our understanding of the evolution of skin appendages such as feathers and hair. Known as Mirasaura grauvogeli – meaning “Grauvogel’s Wonder Reptile” – the strange prehistoric creature appears to have sported a crest of odd accessories on its back, demonstrating that […]

Researchers have been able to heat up a sample of solid gold to over 14 times its melting temperature for a fraction of a second, bypassing a theoretical limit known as the entropy catastrophe. The approach, known as superheating, might lead to a better understanding of how substances change phase at a fundamental level and […]

Attempting to model astronomical systems can often involve supercomputers, but scientists have also looked for alternative analogue systems to model the astronomical systems they are studying. This can involve varying degrees of complexity. In the past, they have simulated black holes in the lab using “quantum tornados” inside superfluid helium, but even old-fashioned water has […]

The regular matter that makes us, planets, stars, and galaxies is about 5 percent of the matter-energy content of the universe. The rest is made of dark matter and dark energy, though we are not sure what they are. There is also uncertainty around the regular matter, since for a long time over one-third of […]

A scholar has recently discovered a previously unknown Sumerian myth inscribed on a long-overlooked 4,400-year-old tablet. Although the story is incomplete, due to the tablet’s fractured nature, there is enough text to indicate an exciting narrative of a cunning fox infiltrating the netherworld in order to rescue the storm god, Ishkur. The tablet, known as […]

If you noticed the sky suddenly turn a vivid green, it could be nature’s way of telling you to buckle down and find shelter.  A greenish sky is often associated with incoming tornadoes, and while that belief holds some truth, it’s not quite that simple.  Meteorologists note that a green hue usually signals that storm […]

Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana is no ordinary lake. If it looks a little bit out of place in the surrounding landscape, that’s because it is. It is the only natural lake in the country, formed just over 1 million years ago when a meteorite from outer space crashed into the rainforest, leaving behind a crater […]

A new study has concluded that Earth’s mini-moons may not have come from the asteroid belt as we once thought, but a source far closer to home. According to the team, Earth likely has around 6.5 minimoons captured at any one time. Mini-moons are small asteroids or comets that can become captured by a planet’s […]

For some of us more than others, waking up in the morning is a special kind of torture. Your alarm blares its anthem into your head; the sunlight blasts in at you through the window; you try in vain to burrow back down into your bedcovers but alas, your boss, or kids, or partner, or, […]

Leonardo da Vinci was, by any metric, a genius – but he was still limited by his time. The man may have been a secret authority on anatomy, music, art, engineering, and even frickin’ paleogeography, but we wouldn’t expect him to understand the best way to, say, design an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle – that is, […]

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It’s hard to find a single common denominator that links all human societies and underpins all of our achievements as a species, but some scientists think that alcohol may be the most likely candidate. Known as the “drunk hypothesis”, this idea is based on the rationale that booze enhances social bonding and creativity, and that […]

If you go down to the ocean today, you might just be in for a big surprise. From deep-sea disco worms to orcas giving each other kelp massages, there’s no end to what the ocean can offer. Some of the more unusual characters to be found include fish species that can walk, and one of […]

Love black olives but turn your nose up at the green ones? We have news for you: they’re fundamentally the same thing. In fact, some so-called “black olives” aren’t naturally different from their green comrades at all; they’ve just been artificially altered with chemicals to give them a jet-black color and milder taste.  Botanically, green […]

Between the orbits of Saturn and Neptune, there is a population of minor space bodies known as the Centaurs. There could be up to 10 million of them, but they tend to have unstable orbits due to the gravitational influences of the giant planets. Occasionally, some enter a temporary stable orbit, joining one of the […]

A video filmed in Canada appears to show a strange glowing blue-white orb oscillating as it slowly moved across a field. Ed and Melinda Pardy, weather enthusiasts from Alberta, Canada, were attempting to look for funnel clouds after a recent storm when they spotted the highly unusual orb in a field behind their property. According […]

Forty-six years after it was first recorded, the magnetic data collected by Voyager 1 as it sailed past Jupiter, crossing its bow shock, continues to be hauntingly beautiful. You don’t need to know anything about particles, magnetic fields, bow shocks, or anything else to appreciate the weirdness of it and how the fateful crossing shifts […]

The universe is, as you are probably already aware, pretty big. Though we have found absolute proof of life on precisely one planet (intelligent life, still uncertain), there is plenty of hope that there are intelligent beings out there in the cosmos, potentially seeking other lifeforms themselves. While the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) continues […]

There are some great animal mysteries on Planet Earth. Where do whale sharks give birth? How did the starfish become a star? How did this mystery circle form? One such mystery is related to one of the slowest creatures in the world: are sloths too slow to fart? Sloths have super slow digestion and metabolism […]