Deborah Bloomfield

Chicxulub, that pesky asteroid, really did a number on the dinosaurs. It wiped them off the Earth as it cleaned up around 76 percent of all species on the planet (apart from the birds, of course) – and yet while they died, the crocodylomorphs survived. That’s not the only mass extinction this animal group has […]

We may have visually led predators to thank for some of the most dazzling marine species: sea slugs. Luminous greens, blues, pinks, oranges, and even rainbow coloration are all on the cards when it comes to these gastropod mollusks (also known as nudibranchs). Often, it’s sending a very clear message: eat me and you’re going […]

If you are in the Southern Hemisphere, you can see the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) with your naked eye. It’s a dwarf galaxy satellite of the Milky Way looking fuzzy in the sky. What you wouldn’t know from looking at it, is that it’s being torn apart by another satellite, also visible to the naked […]

Cosmology these days is dominated by the search for things we are confident exist, but can’t find or explain: dark energy, dark matter, and “missing matter”. Now a large collaboration claims to have found the last of these. While the failure to find missing matter has not drawn anything like the resources or attention of […]

The ocean’s chatter is getting a high-tech translator. A new AI model is diving into the clicks, whistles, and pulses of dolphins, bringing scientists closer than ever to cracking the code of one of the animal kingdom’s most sophisticated forms of communication. Dubbed DolphinGemma, the new AI system is a dolphin-friendly large language model developed […]

The quest for longer, healthier lives has been a central concern for many throughout human history. People have strived to achieve this in many ways, whether practicing with a bow and arrow to avoid falling prey to predators in one swift strike or by analyzing our diets to ensure we eat the best foods.  In […]

Tourists and researchers on a whale-watching boat off the coast of Western Australia got a little more action than they bargained for when they witnessed a pygmy blue whale being hunted and eventually predated upon by a huge pod of orcas. Pygmy blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda) are a subspecies of the largest creature ever […]

“Cock-a-doodle-doo” at sunrise is heard around the world as nature’s alarm clock, but roosters don’t just do this morning ritual out of duty or tradition. As shown by several scientific studies, roosters crow at dawn to assert their dominance and signal their social status to others. Chickens are social animals with a surprisingly strict hierarchy […]

What do you get if you cross a rockhopper penguin with a macaroni penguin? According to National Geographic’s new series, Secrets Of The Penguins, you get a “rockaroni”. There’s been just a handful of documented sightings of these extremely rare hybrids to date, and they are one of several remarkable penguin spectacles captured in the […]

“Claiming that […] only humans can detect geometric regularity, is now falsified,” Andreas Nieder, a cognitive neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told NPR. “Because we have at least the crow [also].” It’s a bold claim – no other non-human animal has ever been shown to possess this ability – but the evidence […]

It’s an often-repeated “fact”, and an oft-debunked “fact”, that Inuit languages have over 50 words for “snow”. But is there any truth to the idea that the language has more words than elsewhere to describe solid precipitation? And are there other concepts in other languages that have a similar excess of words? A new study […]

Computed tomography (CT) scans could soon account for 5 percent of all new cancer cases diagnosed annually if current practices persist, a new study has concluded. That sounds scary; but how serious is this risk, and what does it mean for the use of CT scans going forward? We take a look at the study […]

Here’s a sentence which, while technically correct, will make you sound like the most hardened of conspiracy theorists: no astronaut in history has ever left the Earth’s atmosphere. Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, Valentina Tereshkova, Katy Perry, William Shatner – name any astronaut, cosmonaut, or space tourist you like, and none of them have left the […]

Several footprints found in western Canada must have come from ankylosaurid ankylosaurs, paleontologists have concluded, making them the first of their kind discovered. Although other ankylosaur tracks have been found, these represent the first footprints from the most charismatic part of the family, whose thick armor and lethal sledgehammer-like tail club have made them among […]

Back in March, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), now helmed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, announced a major study into the debunked “link” between vaccines and autism. Now, Kennedy has claimed that a definitive cause of increasing autism diagnoses will be announced this September. But that’s not how scientific investigations work. […]

When the United States Army Air Forces dropped their nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the world changed forever. Not only did these weapons declare the start of the nuclear age, but they also announced a new explosive weapon that was an order of magnitude higher than anything that had come before. […]

The world’s oldest analog computer may be no more than a 2,000-year-old lemon, according to the findings of an as-yet un-peer-reviewed study. Discovered at the site of an ancient shipwreck, the world-famous Antikythera Mechanism is lauded as one of the technological marvels of the Greco-Roman world, yet it turns out that the gadget might not […]

A new study on processing speech has found a handy trick for anybody who struggles to hear conversation within noisy environments. If you cannot hear conversation when you are in a noisy environment (say a pub, or Katy Perry’s spaceship capsule) it can be a sign of hearing loss, or an auditory processing disorder, and […]

Selenium – it’s an essential mineral that most of us probably don’t give a second thought to, at least compared to the likes of calcium and iron. It is, however, vital to our functioning. Does that mean that it could have medical uses too? Or can too much selenium be a problem? What is selenium? […]

If you catch this creature in the US, chop off its head immediately. That’s the message coming from wildlife authorities who are attempting to control the invasion of northern snakehead fish in Missouri and many other states. In a new announcement, the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) is reminding anglers that northern snakehead fish are […]