Deborah Bloomfield

Strange things are occurring beneath Earth’s surface (as ever). Some 2,896 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the planet’s crust, about halfway to the center of the Earth, two giant blobs can be found on roughly opposite sides of the planet. One is situated beneath Africa, while the other lives under the middle of the Pacific Ocean. […]

For close to 40 years, a simple little hypothesis has been quietly sitting in a corner of graph theory, minding its own business. Known as the “bunkbed conjecture”, it always seemed kind of self-evidently true – sure, nobody could prove it, but it made sense – and certainly, nobody had ever found a counterexample.  Until […]

Orcas have been up to all sorts of things in 2024 – from sinking boats to reinstating fashion trends, these super-intelligent marine predators often make the news. While they have been up to some more wholesome antics, they are still capable of predatory behavior, and this latest report suggests they have turned their attention to whale […]

Imagine that, for billions of years, you’re a grain of material unbothered on asteroid Ryugu. All of a sudden, a spacecraft flies down, shoots you with a pellet to kick you up, and collects you, taking you back to Earth. There, you are opened under the most pristine conditions – scientists are keen to study […]

If you’re one of those sit-com families that sit around the table on Thanksgiving and tell everybody what you are grateful for this year, maybe your answer should be “plumbers”. While you eat your turkey, various potatoes, squashes, vegetables, and cranberry sauce, spare a thought for plumbers, who are preparing for what has become known […]

Complex problems often require creative solutions, and the increasing global burden of Alzheimer’s disease certainly qualifies as a complex problem. Few diseases so capture the public’s attention, and few spark as much fear. Yet those not spending every day closely following this research might be surprised to learn how much debate still rages over its […]

A new study has found that less than a quarter as many women under the age of 25 died of cervical cancer in the United States from 2019 to 2021 as died in an equivalent period from 1992 to 1994.  The fall occurred for reasons besides the widespread adoption of the Gardasil and Cervarix vaccines […]

For the first time ever, scientists have found direct evidence of multiple ancient hominins living in the same place at the same time. Such a discovery represents a huge step forward in our understanding of human evolution, as it indicates that the first ever truly human species shared its environment with one of our more […]

NASA’s aging Voyager 1 spacecraft has resumed regular operations, sending useful science data back home from about 24.9 billion kilometers (15.4 billion miles) away. The Voyager probes, launched in 1977, have performed spectacularly well over nearly half a century, flying past various planetary bodies and studying them on their way to the outer reaches of […]

The solar maximum continues to deliver. As the Sun is experiencing its peak of activity, coronal mass ejections and solar flares are happening more and more often. One of those plasma releases is now on its way to Earth, where it is expected to cause a minor geomagnetic storm today and a more sizable one […]

In 2007, Inuit whalers in Alaska made a surprising discovery. In the carcass of a whale, they found fragments of a weapon embedded in its flesh – but this wasn’t a modern piece of equipment. The harpoon was traced back to the 1900s, and after investigation, scientists estimated that the whale itself was around 115 […]

Whilst Devils Tower might’ve been the first national monument to be established in the US, it’s not the only one that’s fiendishly named. Hop a few states southwest to California, and there you’ll find the Devils Postpile, an unusually beautiful reminder of this region’s fiery history. Residing in the national monument named after it, the […]

Think Earth is just a static rock? Dive deep, and you’ll find a dynamic world where metals leak, water seeps, and its insides churn. Inside the belly of planet Earth, a giant solid ball of metal is surrounded by a swooshing layer of liquid iron and nickel, making up the two innermost stages of Earth’s […]

A tiny skeleton became the subject of a big debate as scientists went back and forth over the identity of a reptile retrieved from a quarry near Bristol, UK. Now, the authors of the original study that crowned it the world’s oldest lizard have addressed criticism made about their discovery, confirming “that the little Bristol […]

Humans like to think we’re unpredictable beings, to a certain extent, governed by free will emerging somehow from physical processes. Well, here’s one weird thing to send you into a linguistics-based existential crisis; most languages appear to follow an equation known as Zipf’s law, and we have no idea why. Words are used with varying […]

A surprising finding in a mouse model could lead us to a new way of treating some types of cancer, with a helping hand from an unlikely source: COVID-19. An immune mechanism that was activated in the mice when they were given drugs to simulate severe COVID-19 had the side effect of fighting cancer, causing […]

A detailed investigation of the expansion in human brains over 7 million years finds faster growth in modern humans and our nearest relatives than our predecessors. Nevertheless, brains have grown as species evolved, rather than suddenly jumping when one branch of humanity replaced another. Brain size and intelligence do not correlate perfectly, but the findings […]

Get ready to meet your new favorite amphibian, because today we’d like to discuss the desert rain frog, Breviceps macrops. Also known as the marshmallow frog (for it is about the size of a marshmallow) these mini critters have evolved to thrive in desert ecosystems, and they have some pretty bizarre adaptations to show for […]

China has struck gold — literally — after geologists discovered an estimated $83 billion worth of gold in central China’s Hunan Province, though accessing the underground deposit might be easier said than done. The Geological Bureau of Hunan Province announced their geologists have detected over 40 gold veins with a reserve of 300 tonnes of […]

Uranus and Neptune were only visited once by human spacecraft when Voyager 2 passed by them almost 40 years ago. During those visits, scientists measured peculiar magnetic fields unlike those seen around other planets. A recent paper suggests that the Uranus measurements might have been messed up by the Sun, but in general, it has […]