Deborah Bloomfield

New Zealand’s South Island is home to many treasures. Some vast, like Milford Sound, some small, like the blue mushroom to be found there, and some treasures that are literal gold, albeit very, very tiny. Yes, the beaches here are sometimes littered with the stuff, but do we casual beach strollers stand any chance of […]

Sweet, savory, sour, bitter, and umami are the five classic tastes our tongues are trained to detect. But lurking on the edge of this flavorful lineup is a lesser-known sensation: ammonium chloride. Best known as the tongue-tingling punch behind salty licorice, this sharp taste might just deserve a spot among the basic five. Taste is […]

How many meters above sea level do you live? Buckingham Palace sits at only 16 meters (52 feet) above sea level, while Paris sits 50 meters (164 feet) above. By contrast, the top of Japan’s Mount Fuji sits 3,776 meters (12,388 feet) above sea level and is still less high than the highest city of […]

Scans of the wreck of the Titanic appear to show evidence for heartbreaking reports from the ship’s final few hours. The wreck of the Titanic, which sank in April 1912, is slowly disintegrating and may soon disappear, the inevitable result of rust, sea salt, bacteria, and a plethora of deep-sea creatures. “The future of the […]

If you’re quite happy with a cup of instant – or worse still, prefer tea – we’ll be honest, this one’s probably not for you. But if you own coffee scales, can argue passionately about the importance of grind size, and time your espresso pull to the second, you may be interested to learn that […]

A new study has found an entire new primary category of microbes hidden within Earth’s Critical Zone, sometimes referred to as the planet’s “living skin”. Back in the 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci once said, “We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot,” and that’s a sentence which – […]

Colossal Biosciences have introduced a new kind of wolf to the world, but had you been alive over 12,500 years ago you might’ve seen a similarly enormous predator stalking across the Americas. They have functionally de-extincted the dire wolf by genetically modifying a gray wolf, giving life to three puppies that share some of the […]

Uranus is so weird. Its magnetic field doesn’t go through the center of the planet, it rotates on its side, and it is fairly featureless. Some of the peculiarities might be due to a colossal impact in its past. Still, they make it difficult to assess even simple properties like the length of a day […]

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 […]