Deborah Bloomfield

A multidisciplinary team has proposed a process by which the wheel might have been invented that does not rely on a single moment of insight from some ancient genius. Instead, they suggest that the invention could have come in a series of steps (or perhaps we should say were made along a gradual slope). The […]

A naval hero was struck down in the Napoleonic War when Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson wound up on the receiving end of a musket ball. The ship was damaged and with no quick way of making it to England, the crew had to get creative with a way of storing his body so it would survive […]

Keeping up with your COVID-19 vaccines is a good idea for lots of reasons – not least the fact that the virus keeps throwing new variants our way. A new study may have added one more to that list by finding that receiving multiple mRNA shots could boost antibody levels in the nose, often the […]

A beloved bear, known as the world’s most famous grizzly, has died after being struck by a vehicle at Grand Teton National Park in western Wyoming, part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Grizzly 399 died on Tuesday night, October 22, on a highway in Snake River Canyon south of Jackson, according to the National Park […]

A newly discovered species of mammal has provided a snapshot of terrestrial North America that goes back 70–75 million years ago, a time slice that’s typically not well known. Thankfully, Colorado preserves it well, and this is where a team of scientists retrieved fossil evidence of a Late Cretaceous “swamp dweller”. The fossil remains included […]

A small, implantable device that detects a drop in respiration that can signal an opioid overdose and automatically administers the lifesaving drug naloxone – aka Narcan – has been tested successfully in animals. It even has the ability to alert the emergency services, and the researchers say the same kind of technology could be applied […]

Climate scientists have signed an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers, warning of catastrophic consequences that could impact “the entire world for centuries to come” if the slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is not addressed. The world’s oceans are constantly circulated by currents, with those from the surface down to […]

New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts might be home to five impressive whale skeletons, but the blue whale in particular might leave its mark on you. Literally – its skeleton is dripping oil, and it hasn’t stopped doing that for over a quarter of a century. The blue whale in question is KOBO, standing for […]

A filmmaker claims that scientists hunting the skies for signs of intelligent alien civilizations have found an alien technosignature, to be revealed to the public very shortly. So, is this the real deal? Have we found aliens? Is it time to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?  In 2019, Australia’s […]

Just when you thought eels couldn’t get any weirder, we’ve got shocking news. It turns out electric eels’ ability to generate enough electricity to “light” a Christmas tree isn’t the only thing that makes electric eels slippery freaks – once you take a look at their anatomy, they make even less sense. There are three […]

People in the United Kingdom are being urged to place bowls of salt in their windows this winter, in an attempt to prevent damp conditions and mold. But is that really good advice? When water vapor in your home or vehicle hits a cold surface, such as your windows, it changes back into a liquid […]

Releasing carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases is easy, but it takes work to capture them again. Removing carbon from the air is a way to reduce the effects of the climate crisis, but a lot of the technology is still at the design stage or is not efficient enough to balance out the emissions. A […]

There are always more species to be discovered. Whether it is a bizarre-looking worm lizard or something that has been hidden in a drawer for decades, the implications for naming something new can include helping with conservation as well as other benefits. Now the king cobra has received the same treatment, with researchers putting in […]

A new USGS survey, made possible through machine learning and environmental testing, has led to the discovery of an estimated 5 to 19 million tons of lithium reserves under southwestern Arkansas. It’s an amount that, if recoverable, would triple the US’s stockpile and make it a global leader in access to the mineral – not […]

You can stamp all you like but the ground beneath your feet still ain’t solid, not really. We all live our lives atop a complex network of puzzle pieces that, thanks to Earth’s hot gooey center, are constantly shifting, generating earthquakes, building mountains, and tearing continents apart – which, by the way, is currently happening […]

The largest prime number ever discovered has been found by an amateur mathematician using Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Prime numbers, as you likely learned in school, are numbers that can only be divided by one and themselves. There are an infinite number of them, with all numbers greater than 1 being either a […]

Two cities that flourished as part of the Silk Road have been mapped though drone-borne LiDAR, revealing them as two of the largest cities on the mountainous part of that world-changing path, or indeed anywhere at such altitude. The Silk Road helped make the modern world, allowing not just goods but technologies and ideas to […]

The decomposition ecosystem makes quick work of our corpses when we die, letting loose a rich diversity of microbes and luring in flies from miles away. It’s a handy process for getting rid of carcasses out in the wild, but it can cause problems depending on the kind of funeral you’re after. Humans have a […]

An X-ray binary system composed of a black hole and a star in the process of being consumed turns out to have a third member circling. Unless some unlikely scenarios occurred, the existence of what the discoverers are calling a “black hole triple” indicates a previously unseen method for making black holes. Since we can’t […]

We humans really did something when we learned how to resuscitate people who had gone into cardiac arrest, because (by our understanding of biology at the time, at least) it meant we had learned how to bring people back from the dead. They may have been without a heartbeat for only a matter of seconds, […]