Deborah Bloomfield

This week on Break It Down: study uncovers the biological basis of near-death experiences, what a camera trap captured after 55 years in Loch Ness, why it’s taken humans so long to orbit over Earth’s poles, what a sediment core from the “Great Blue Hole” can tell us about the Caribbean’s climatic past and future, […]

Australia is the fastest-moving continent on Earth, resting on top of a tectonic plate that’s drifting at about 7 centimeters (just under 3 inches) each year – that’s somewhere between the rate at which your hair and fingernails grow. By comparison, Earth’s land masses move at an average rate of about 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inches) […]

People living in North Africa today can trace their ancestry back to a unique human population that lived in the Sahara at a time when the region was lush, green, and humid. Identifying this prehistoric lineage for the first time in the genomes of two 7,000-year-old mummies, the authors of a new study confirm that […]

On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope flew aboard space shuttle Discovery, which makes this year the 35th anniversary of this incredible instrument. It is not hyperbole to say that this observatory has changed astronomy forever. It had a rocky start. Its primary mirror had a defect, with its outer edge being too flat […]

A landmark study has become the first to review the complete history of animal cloning, concluding that it is already a viable conservation tool, but one that’s being held back by common misconceptions. Despite widespread beliefs about shortened lifespan and infertility, it found that of the 56 species and subspecies cloned to date, the overwhelming […]

Having hay fever can be a pretty miserable time, with people looking for medicine or home remedies to relieve the symptoms. However, one gibbon took the task a little too far when it managed to wedge a piece of grass up its nose, requiring a quick trip to the vet to fix its handiwork. Eight-year-old white-cheeked […]

For those of us who have played videogames for a long time, there’s something special about digging out an old console and starting a new game of something you last played as a kid. Maybe it’s the polyphonic tones of the opening world to the first Mario games, or maybe the panic-inducing tempo of Sonic […]

On March 28, the city of Mandalay, Myanmar, became the epicenter of a powerful earthquake that could be felt as far away as Bangkok, Thailand, and that is estimated to have killed over 3,000 people and injured thousands more. As rescue and relief efforts continue amid the collapsed buildings and wrecked roads, geologists are uncovering […]

Last week, the Internet was puzzled by a physics problem involving a set of scales, an iron ball, and a ping pong ball of equal size. Now that that one has been cleared up, Reddit has been mulling over a new problem: why won’t this contraption turn? “I don’t know where else to ask,” Redditor […]

US Senator Cory Booker made history earlier this week when he delivered the longest speech in the Senate’s history, holding the floor for a whopping 25 hours and 5 minutes. In all that time, Booker didn’t sit down, eat, or sleep – but what does such a feat of endurance do to the body? Not […]

If asked to make the lightest (least dense) solid possible, many people would start looking at the start of the periodic table for low-mass atoms. However, nature shows there are much better ways to lower something’s density, and humans have taken the approach much further.  Volcanoes spit out lava that becomes heavy basalt, but sometimes […]

As most people know, it is possible to use a magnifying glass to focus the Sun’s light and burn a hole in whatever has angered you that day. But is it possible to harness light from the Moon in the same way? When the Moon is full, could you focus this light and use it […]

Bombardier, the Canadian jet maker, will put its Global 8000 private jet into service later this year, and it’s a speedy beast. The jet is set to be the fastest civilian aircraft since Concorde and will fly at top speeds of Mach 0.94 (1,152 kilometers per hour / 715 miles per hour), which nearly exceeds […]

An American wielding a can of cola has reportedly been arrested after attempting to visit North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean, home to the Sentinelese people, one of the most isolated and vulnerable tribes in the world. Experts have described the case as “reckless and idiotic”.   The man, a 24-year-old US national called […]

See that teeny tiny rectangle next to that pencil tip up there? That’s a pacemaker – the world’s smallest in fact, which has just been revealed in a new study. Cardiac pacemakers are up there with some of the most impressive innovations in modern medicine. After decades of refinement, today’s models are compact, capable of […]

On Monday, SpaceX made space history, as four astronauts were launched into a pole-to-pole orbit not traveled by any human before them. But judging by the reports of one of the private astronauts, their time in space didn’t get off to a great start, after the vomiting began. Though the Fram2 mission is a private […]

Even large, predatory dinosaurs occasionally had to stop for a drink. Footprints found on the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland suggest that both large predatory dinosaurs and their prey drank together from the edges of shallow freshwater lagoons 167 million years ago. At the Kilmaluag Formation at Prince Charles’s Point on Skye’s […]

It was a paranoid time. The use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few years previously in 1945 had ushered in a new age of uncertainty. Sure, the devastating bombs had demonstrated America’s military power, but for those who understood the situation, it was only a matter of time before the US’s enemies […]

The hoots and whistles of bonobos may seem like simple, wild calls, but a closer listen reveals that their communication shares more structural similarities with human language than once thought. Bonobos are the most vocal of the great apes, using a variety of high-pitched calls to communicate with other members of the species. Some of […]

Cratonic thinning, a phenomenon geologists think happened hundreds of millions of years ago, appears to be taking place far beneath researchers’ feet. Earth’s continents have regions of very old and stable rocks, known as cratons, surrounded by regions whose age is measured in tens or hundreds of millions of years, rather than billions like the […]