Deborah Bloomfield

In the volatile world of cryptocurrencies, crashes are common. However, one of the largest was not just a random event, new research indicates, nor a result of the inherent instability of a product without underlying value. Instead, a handful of apparently coordinated individuals brought two of the largest digital coins down. The identities of this […]

If you’ve ever watched any track and field events, horse racing, indoor cycling, or (shudders) baseball, you may have noticed that they all run in a counter-clockwise direction. Why is this, and why does it appear to be the standard worldwide?  While the tradition has not been continuous – for instance, Oxford and Cambridge runners […]

Would you live underground? As the world heats up, there are some people who think that humans becoming a subterranean species is an inevitability – that moving under the Earth’s surface will be the only way to survive the effects of climate change.  Of course, there are others who’d live underground just to escape their […]

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) ran a two-day pandemic preparedness exercise dubbed Exercise Polaris. The exercise was the first test for a new global coordination mechanism to tackle health emergencies and simulated an outbreak of a fictional viral disease. When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic five years ago, it sometimes felt like we’d […]

In 1954, Egyptian archaeologist Kamal el-Mallakh made a remarkable discovery when excavating beneath the southern side of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Within two huge rock-cut pits, carefully sealed with limestone blocks, lay a pair of spectacular ships resembling the mythical “solar barges” that the sun god Ra was believed to have traveled on as […]

The quantum cat state is probably one of the most famous – the idea that a quantum system can exist in the superposition of two different states. It was exemplified by Erwin Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment where an imaginary cat is trapped in a box with a vial of poison activated by a quantum process. […]

Two white dwarfs are trapped in a decaying orbit that will eventually turn them into a Type Ia supernova. It’s a common enough story in the universe, but this pair is around 160 light years from Earth. That’s outside most estimates of the danger zone, but within some more cautious ones, and would certainly make […]

From “atomic editing”, to “lasso antibiotics”, to mining the remotest forests and deepest oceans, the search for new drugs is endlessly fascinating. But even we have to admit, this is a new one on us: antiviral chewing gum. A new study unveils this marvel of mastication, which the authors say can significantly reduce viral loads […]

In 1989, a team armed with specialist crossbows collected skin samples from whales that would lead to a remarkable discovery three decades later. Those skin swatches came from southern right whales (Eubalaena australis), and when study author Carla Crossman of Saint Mary’s University, Canada, got the chance to analyze their genes, she discovered something science […]

Every quarter of a million years or so, Earth’s magnetic field “flips” direction. North effectively becomes south, and south becomes north. You don’t have to take our word for it; physical evidence of geomagnetic reversal is built into the seafloor in the form of “zebra stripes”. These vast stripes appear next to underwater mountain ranges […]

You’ve been tasked with representing the whole of humanity in an image. What do you do? If you’re anything like Carl Sagan, who was asked to design such an image to be launched with NASA’s Pioneer spacecraft, you would draw an image of a male and female human in the nude, as was etched onto […]

Spiders have a reputation for being cunning – just look at the Ghanaian folktale Anansi. Now, research suggests that a species of cave-dwelling spiders have cleverly adapted their weaving style to form intricate tripwire-like mechanisms that trap unfortunate prey.  The European cave orb spider (Meta menardi) inhabits the caves of western and central Europe, though […]

Were you to take a time machine to the Triassic Period (252-201 million years ago), not only would you meet ancient dinosaur species but some of the earliest known mammals to roam (or, should we say, scuttle) across the planet.  There are over 5,000 species of mammals alive today inhabiting all regions of the Earth–from pink river dolphins […]

Spiders seem to hang out in all kinds of places, from those that build trapdoors, to some that live in caves or even in your back garden. Now, six new species have been described after being discovered in a mountainous region of China.  The six new spider species in the Pholcus phungiformes species group have […]

Mommy, a centenarian resident at Philadelphia Zoo, has officially lived up to her name – she gave birth to four hatchlings, becoming a mom at the grand old age of 100 (or thereabouts).  The births are a cause of celebration as this marks the first time in the zoo’s 150-year-plus history that a critically endangered […]

A new proposal offers an easy route for our ancestors to have made one of their earliest and most important technological advances. Instead of some australopithecine genius coming up with the idea of carefully striking stones to produce sharp blades, early humans may have begun by using those they found precut. The idea might refashion […]

If you’ve ever watched a Formula 1 race through to completion, you may have a few questions, such as “What happens if they need to pee?”, “Why do the drivers get weighed after a race?”, and “Why am I essentially watching traffic?”. Well, there are good answers to the first two questions, while the third […]

A “major disruption” has recently rocked the Arctic polar vortex, causing it to weaken and reverse direction from west-to-east to east-to-west. Amid the chaos, the vortex shifted off the pole and drifted down towards Northern Europe. For a bit of context: the polar vortex is a swirling mass of cold, low-pressure air that forms high […]

The Breakthrough Prize has announced its 2025 Laureates in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics. Among them are Professors Alberto Ascherio from Harvard University and Stephen Hauser from the University of California, San Francisco, who won the prize for their work in understanding multiple sclerosis (MS) and how to treat it. It was established by […]

This week, a study has revealed a biological basis of near-death experiences, a Loch Ness monster trap that’s been lost underwater for 55 years has been recovered, revealing some eerie images, and scientists have drilled to the bottom of the Great Blue Hole and uncovered 5,700 years of history. Finally, we ask the experts why […]