Deborah Bloomfield

It’s always a good day to celebrate vaccines. As one of the all-time great achievements in medicine, vaccines are the reason humanity has been able to eradicate smallpox, end the “summer plagues” of polio, and slash the incidence of cervical cancer, to name just a few. But there’s one disease that gets a bit less […]

If you go to the Eastland County Courthouse in Texas, you may lay your eyes on an unusual sight: a dead Texas horned lizard on display in its own velvet-lined coffin. According to local legend and newspaper reports from the 1920s, the reptile certainly earned this honor, living an unusually long time trapped in a […]

Imagine closing your eyes and rolling a billiards ball across a table. Where it goes; what angles it hits the sides at; how much it spins or swerves – all that is, for our purposes, basically random. And then, imagine you’re asked to roll it back to exactly its starting point. Could you do it? […]

An Ice Age giant was tumbling around North America during the Late Pleistocene. About the size of a bear, it was actually a kind of enormous sloth that had evolved to thrive in freezing conditions. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Known […]

Mormons don’t drink coffee or tea because of guidelines set out in the “Word of Wisdom”, a health code that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, claimed he received from God in 1833. It essentially argues that Mormons should take care of their health by regularly exercising, practicing proper hygiene, and eating nutritious food – […]

If you’d swung by to see the chimps at Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden, back in 1997, there’s a good chance you might’ve received a rock to the head. It was around this time that a male chimpanzee called Santino had started exhibiting an impressive – albeit slightly problematic – behavior. You see, Santino had […]

Material scientist Brian Haidet has filmed laser light moving at 2 billion frames per second, showing the results on his YouTube channel AlphaPhoenix. Haidet has previously attempted to record the speed of light at 1 billion frames per second, using some (fairly) basic equipment available to him in his garage.  The results of that experiment […]

The best time to watch Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) is upon us. Grab your binoculars, telescope, or just get into a very dark area and use your eyes. This is the best comet of 2025, and it is making its closest approach to Earth today, October 21. The rest of this article is behind a […]

The results of the first clinical trial of “enteral ventilation” have been published, and are considered a success, a step along the road to a treatment that could save many lives and prevent even more injuries. Such events happen every day as medicine progresses, but this one stands out because “enteral ventilation” is more popularly […]

Hinduism is often considered the oldest surviving religion in the world, although there are some competing ideas that make this a very knotty (and fascinating) question to answer. What is the oldest religion? The first glimmers of what would become Hinduism emerged in the Indus River Valley around 4,000 years ago. However, its origins are […]

Strange dragons can be found lurking at the bottom of a lake in Mexico. Known as achoque salamanders, these mysterious amphibians are among the rarest in the world, found only in Lake Pátzcuaro. Now, an ambitious new project has microchipped these creatures for the first time, making it easier to identify individuals. Something that really […]

The “alien mothership” hypothesis for interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is about to have a key test, as it hits solar conjunction and perihelion. What does that mean, and why is a Harvard professor of astronomy telling people to book their vacation ahead of October 29? Let’s find out. On July 1, astronomers from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact […]

In the 1980s, a combination of persecution and habitat loss led to America’s red wolf being declared extinct in the wild. Conservation efforts to restore their numbers in the eastern United States have been up against it as debates about everything from livestock safety to their hybridization (they’re not hybrids, FYI) have tried to derail […]

Every year, around Halloween, fireballs fall down from the sky. Rather than a sign that God is displeased with us, or we are wearing too many dinosaur costumes, these fireballs are the result of “parent comet” 2P/Encke. Though far less settled, the comet is also proposed as the origin of the swastika symbol here on […]

A United Boeing 737-8 MAX flying from Denver, Colorado, to Los Angeles, California, was diverted to Salt Lake City on October 16, following an incident in which the glass of the windshield cracked. While an investigation is underway, it has been widely reported online to have been caused by a piece of space debris. This […]

A new study highlights just how flexible the human body can be by demonstrating that in adult transgender women receiving gender-affirming hormone therapy, several key proteins became altered to more closely match their forms in cisgender women. As well as changing the way someone’s body looks on the surface, the results show that feminizing hormones […]

People are ever so slightly horrified after learning the truth about how cranberries are grown and harvested. Every now and then on the Internet, people discover something about food that they thought everyone already knew. Hey, we’re all learning, right? Recently it was the turn of paprika and allspice, but now it’s our old friend […]

Back in 2017, scientists finally described what became the world’s newest great ape species: the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis). It should’ve been cause for celebration, but at the same time, the new species became the most endangered great ape of them all. There are estimated to be fewer than 800 Tapanuli orangutans left in the […]

Polar Bears International (PBI) is serious about protecting bears, and in the pursuit of reliable data, has gone to some extremes in the past. From burying scientists alive out in the snow to novel collar-camera setups that have enabled them to predict when polar bear moms and their new cubs are going to emerge from […]

The world of botany is usually pretty good at following certain rules. It was previously thought that because the Fibonacci sequence is present in the structure of so many extant plant species, it must have evolved in some of the earliest living plant species. However, an ancient species, one of the first examples of a plant with […]