Deborah Bloomfield

While carrying out surveillance of bats in Brazil, scientists have identified multiple different coronaviruses, including a brand-new one that they discovered was closely related to the virus behind Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). ADVERTISEMENT The discovery came as part of a project to identify new pathogens with zoonotic potential – meaning they can jump from […]

Everyone loves a thought experiment, from Maxwell’s demon to the classic bootstrap paradox. But there is one thought experiment – briefly banned by the Internet forum where it was first posted – which you might regret reading about, known as “Roko’s basilisk”. ADVERTISEMENT Basilisks, as anyone familiar with ancient folklore or Harry Potter will know, […]

This week on Break It Down: An unknown lifeform has been making micro-burrows in the Namibian desert, the secret to living until 117 has been revealed, sauropods were not doing handstands in Texas 100 million years ago (boooo), should we be attempting to de-extinct animals, an Australian man achieves a double world-first with a titanium […]

Feathers belonging to a griffon vulture that died around 30,000 years ago have become the first fossils of their kind, mineralized in a way not previously reported in soft tissues. The vulture fossil was found in volcanic deposits of the Late Pleistocene Colli Albani volcanic complex near Rome, Italy. It was first discovered way back […]

Joining southeastern Virginia with northeastern North Carolina, the Great Dismal Swamp is a stretch of forested wetland that, in hindsight, doesn’t really live up to the “dismal” part of its name. While its past is marked by some of the darker parts of American history, this swamp has long served as a refuge for both […]

Alaska’s wilderness is back on the market for big oil. The US government has announced it’s taking steps to open up oil and gas leasing in the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve and the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. ADVERTISEMENT The US Department of the Interior said on Thursday, March 20, that it […]

From the Mechanical Turk to Rosey Jetson to Data himself, robots have often been imagined as sophisticated machines, capable of running a household while winning at chess and enjoying a good Sherlock Holmes mystery. But here’s a counterpoint: what if, in real life, we just made them do sick heelflips and ollies instead? ADVERTISEMENT It’s […]

Between getting squeezed through a tube so tight it literally squidges your skull into a weird shape, having teeth force themselves out of your gums at random intervals, and, let’s face it, pooping and peeing yourself near-constantly, it’s probably a kindness, really, that we can’t remember life as a baby. But why we enjoy that […]

Something that distinguishes current robots from living creatures is rigidity. Cells are often squishy, while robots’ usual plastic and metal structures are not. There are some examples of softer robots but researchers from Gachon University and Seoul National University might have come up with something even trippier: a liquid robot. ADVERTISEMENT The robot is not […]

There are only a handful of people who have experienced seeing Earth from space and what lies at the bottom of the ocean, but even among those select few, Dr Kathy Sullivan has a record that is unique. She’s the only person ever to have spacewalked and visited the Challenger Deep, the deepest point in […]

What do you get when you combine chicken embryos, a gene named after a video game character, and a couple of scientists? A brand-new study that’s confirmed a key element in feather evolution, after it temporarily caused developing chicks to have primitive feathers resembling those thought to have been found in some dinosaurs. ADVERTISEMENT The […]

When is the Blaze Star going to go nova? T Coronae Borealis has earned that nickname because it is capable of a sudden increase in brightness, a phenomenon that repeats every 80 years more or less. We are due for such an explosion, and a recent research note posited a few possible dates for the […]

One of the most remarkable apes ever to be studied by scientists has passed away at the age of 44. Kanzi the bonobo – who was able to communicate complex ideas using symbols – died suddenly on March 18 at the Ape Conservation and Cognition Initiative (ACCI) research center in Des Moines, Iowa. ADVERTISEMENT Born […]

Forget your sk8er bois and surfers, there is officially a new coolest way to get around and it’s riding on the back of a shark, as demonstrated by an octopus in Hauraki Gulf near Kawau Island. Stunning footage of what’s being described as a “mysterious sight indeed” was shared by the University Of Auckland (UoA), […]

If you had spent time and effort creating a set of art pieces for the world, you might be a bit upset if someone immediately threw them into the deepest darkest ocean, never to be seen again. For Lakshmi Mohanbabu, however, that was the point: her latest art project was designed specifically to end up […]

A series of footprints once attributed to a “swimming brontosaur” has a far more likely explanation, new research has found. Although the work focuses on a single famous case, it has implications worldwide for tracks that bafflingly only show front, or rear, prints from large four-legged sauropods. Despite this, the lead author of the research […]

The most distant and earliest known galaxy is called JADES-GS-z14-0 and its light comes from when the universe was less than 300 million years old. The object itself is much smaller than our galaxy but it is a powerhouse of star formation, and now two different teams of scientists have detected oxygen in it, the […]

Fossilization is a tricky business; some species preserve only a few bones, while others are discovered with a one-in-a-billion level of completeness. Most would count themselves lucky to find a fossil or two of either kind, but this latest remarkable fishy find comes complete with a belly full of food.  ADVERTISEMENT Discovered in the McGraths […]

Humans are living longer than ever – but even today, few of us will make it past 100. Even fewer will reach 110, or 115. In fact, in the entire world, there are less than 250 of these “supercentenarians” – aka people older than 110 – and only three of those are 115-plus.  ADVERTISEMENT They’re […]

A video going around Reddit shows the terrifying moment NASA astronaut Dale Gardner flew completely untethered in space in order to capture a satellite. ADVERTISEMENT There are a lot of terrifying things you can find in space, from mysterious massive voids 250 to 330 million light-years across, to tiny droplets of water in your space […]