Deborah Bloomfield

“We found that sharks follow what’s known as the ‘two-thirds scaling law’ almost perfectly,” explained Joel Gayford, a PhD candidate at James Cook University (JCU) in Australia and lead author on a new study confirming a centuries-old hypothesis about how animals’ volumes scale with their surface area. “Surface area-to-volume ratios are key inputs in equations […]

The coordination shown by tiny-brained ants is even more remarkable than has previously been recognized. Film footage shows longhorn crazy ants apparently anticipating the path others will need to take to bring food back to the nest, and removing obstacles to make it easier, but the real thinking is collective. Longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) […]

The last Ice Age made mountain conditions hostile, and our ancestors mostly retreated to the lowlands if they’d been living higher up before. Even in Australia’s famously hot climate, it was thought the continents’ mountains were off limits to Indigenous people, with no record of a presence through the cold millennia. Excavation of Dargan Shelter […]

A near-complete skull of a Denisovan, one of the closest extinct relatives of modern humans, has never been recovered – or so it was thought. New research has shown that a cranium discovered nearly a century ago in China actually belongs to the little-understood human species/subspecies. The discovery means that science finally has a relatively […]

Goats have horns, cows have horns, and of course, so do rhinos. None of these creatures are even remotely surprising in that capacity, but did you know there’s a reptile species out there with horns that Triceratops would be jealous of? And that species is Jackson’s three-horned chameleon (Trioceros jacksonii).  This triple-horned species is found […]

SpaceX’s Starship continues to explode, and this latest event didn’t even take place in the air.  Starship 36 was not scheduled to fly just yet – it was undergoing a static fire test of the engines. A static fire is when a rocket is locked down and can’t fly as its engines are fired up […]

It’s one of the most widely known biblical scenes in history; even non-believers are likely familiar with it. It all starts with a serpent tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve and later Adam gave in to this temptation and, upon doing so, they gained the knowledge of “good […]

Let’s face it: claiming a connection to some foreign nationality or ethnicity on the dubious basis of a great-grandparent or two is as American as apple pie. You know it, countless comedians know it, and now, science knows it too. “We conducted the largest population genomics analysis of US samples that reflect the nation’s genetic […]

A team of researchers inspired by naturally occurring bubbles trapped in ice has come up with a novel way of using human-made bubbles to encode messages – and store those messages inside ice.  Ice cores are a pretty good way to get an idea of the Earth’s atmosphere in the ancient past, thanks to their […]

Generally speaking if you go outside and take a photo of the Sun every day at the same time (and with the proper equipment) and overlay the photos, you will find that the Sun makes a large figure of eight pattern in the sky. This is known as an “analemma”, and of course is created […]

It wasn’t a popular point of view, even at the time. The ancients, as well as their Dark Ages and medieval successors, figured adherence to the edicts of various gods should be more of a priority than annoying people in the agora with gotcha-style rhetoric. Eventually, of course, that religious outlook gave way to more […]

The Sculptor galaxy is a stunning spiral galaxy, 11 million light-years away, and it is currently experiencing an intense period of star formation. It was discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1783, yet we can guarantee that a new view of the Sculptor Galaxy by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope has never been seen […]

Material scientist Brian Haidet has weighed a plane while it was flying for his YouTube channel AlphaPhoenix.  To weigh a plane, usually you would place scales underneath the landing gears, nose gears, and wing support points. But if you don’t have access to a plane and plane scales – or you just want to do […]

Every spring, Bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) fly up 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) to take shelter in the handful of high-altitude caves that stay cold enough for them through the heat of the Australian summer. Flying that far is a mighty feat for an insect, but the more impressive achievement is for the moths to find […]

Spiders are fascinating for a great number of reasons but one of the most obvious is how they manage to scuttle around on all eight limbs. Some spiders have even developed the adaptation known as autotomy, to lose limbs in an altercation with a predator, but not have it be the end of them. Now, […]

Political polarization in the US has been increasing for decades, but it has reached new heights in recent years. However, this divide does not just involve a disagreement over policies but also a distinct dislike between supporters of the two parties. Is this personal animosity shared equally between Democrats and Republicans? According to a new […]

The sands of the Thar Desert stretch across over 200,000 square kilometers (77,000 square miles), covering parts of northwestern India and eastern Pakistan. Roughly the size of the United Kingdom, it’s only the world’s ninth-largest subtropical desert, but it claims a unique title: it’s the most densely populated desert on Earth. How many people live […]

We still don’t know exactly when humans first reached the Americas, although we do know that people were present in New Mexico by around 23,000 years ago. All that remains of these mysterious ancient wanderers are a few footprints, and while some researchers have questioned the age of these tracks, new research confirms that they […]

Out of their 300,000 years of existence, Homo sapiens have spend the majority of their time in Africa, the undisputable motherland of our species. It wasn’t until 60,000 years ago that major waves of modern humans ventured out of the home continent to spread across Eurasia and beyond. Small droves of people left in earlier periods, […]

Not only are sharks incredible apex predators, they’re also renowned for their robust immune systems. However, their ways of achieving this differ greatly from ours as they lack lymph nodes and other organs associated with combating infections, such as tonsils. They can even produce many of the protective cells and antibodies that we have. Now, […]