Deborah Bloomfield

Welcome to 2025! A lovely year, filled with excellent things. Obviously, we’re not talking about the state of the planet – that’s pretty terrible, all things considered. But the math? That is delectable. Advertisement The geometry of 2025 Let’s start with arguably the simplest fact about this new year: 2025 is a perfect square. It’s […]

Animals and their offspring can either look like copy and paste versions, or have radically different appearances from each other. While clearing up some debris on the seafloor, NOAA got more than they bargained for with an adorable king crab baby hitchhiker.  Advertisement While working in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer in 2024, […]

The recent rise in popularity of the True Crime entertainment genre has demonstrated that some of us go giddy for gore and get a thrill out of scaring ourselves silly, which raises the question: why are so many of us drawn to the darker side? New research may have found an answer. Advertisement Content about […]

Dementia is a huge public health challenge, and the situation is expected to get even worse in the coming decades. New research predicts that by 2060, around a million US adults will develop dementia every year. In 2020, the figure was 514,000, highlighting the growing need for preventative measures and care strategies to protect this […]

The Mississippi River Delta is under siege – a multi-pronged attack of sediment erosion, rising sea levels, and flooding is putting immense strain on the wetlands between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the wildlife and millions of humans that call the region home. Advertisement The disappearance of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is […]

It’s 2025 and high time you learned that just 3 percent of birds have penises. Perhaps a shocking statistic for we member-wielding mammals, but nowhere near as shocking as the genital ingenuity seen among the 3 percent of birds that do boast a penis. So gather round folks, and let’s go on exploration of avian […]

Delicately detailed tattoos have been discovered etched onto the bodies of 1,200-year-old mummies uncovered in Peru. Although the passing of centuries has faded these once-living artworks, new research is uncovering the remarkable skill and complexity with which they were created. Advertisement The body art is found on the mummified remains of individuals from the Chancay […]

As the Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst fires continue to burn through large areas of Los Angeles, millions of people are likely to be affected by the smoke generated by these urban blazes. Yet while the dangers of forest fire emissions are well documented, the composition of metropolitan wildfire smoke is something that scientists are just […]

The brains of people with aphantasia may have unusual wiring, according to new research. The study suggests that in people with the condition – which involves having no “mind’s eye”, or an inability to conjure up mental images – the brain’s visual cortex is still active and producing visual information. The only trouble is, these […]

Step inside London’s Grant Museum of Zoology and among the many things in jars you may spot a grass snake unlike any you’ve ever seen alive. Its flesh has turned see-through revealing a vibrant pink skeleton underneath, rib bones jutting out into tissue that has been transformed, how? Why, it’s the art of diaphonization. Advertisement […]

More than a hundred volcanoes lie beneath the Antarctic ice, and the release of some of the weight upon them could spur them into life. According to a new study, the danger of this depends on the rate at which their icy burden lightens. Advertisement Human-induced hotter temperatures are making a variety of natural disasters […]

It might be called the curse of comets – over and over again, hopes have been raised of a dazzling curve of light across the sky, only for nothing to be visible to the naked eye. The pattern runs so deep that when bright comets do appear, some people miss them because they can’t believe […]

The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has almost completely depleted the cold gas propellant that kept it spinning and able to scan the sky, so it has decided to nominally end science operations of this revolutionary mission on January 15. It will truly be the end of an era. Advertisement Gaia is first and foremost […]

Ah, it’s January, and we all know what that means: we’re all turning over new leaves, becoming gym bunnies, eating healthily, saving money instead of spending, reading eight books a week, and giving 10 percent of our income to charity. Or at least, that’s our intention – but it’s so hard to stay motivated, isn’t […]

Exposure to radiation kills cells from the same tumors in different ways, and some are far more useful for saving lives than others. A new study that claims to have explained the processes might open paths to finding ways to better target cancers, with fewer side effects. Advertisement A simple story can be told about […]

If you pick up a mirror and look at the inner corners of your eyes, you’ll notice some pink stuff. The bigger bit right at the edge is the lacrimal caruncle, a structure that protects the glands that are crucial for keeping our eyes nice and moist. Just next to it is a thin strip […]

This week, the oldest equatorial dinosaur in the world was discovered dating back 230 million years, the world’s oldest 3D map may be accompanied by sexually suggestive cave art, and we ask: what is “Nobel disease”, and why do so many Nobel Prize winners seem to develop it? Finally, we investigate the mysterious metal that ancient […]

The Atacama Desert in Chile is home to some of the most pristine dark skies on the planet. Among the astronomical sites, Cerro Paranal has the darkest and clearest skies – it is no accident that some of the most advanced observatories are located there. Now, all of them are being threatened by a new […]

Archaeologists have found a medieval spinning whorl in Tønsberg, Norway, which has some distinct symbols on its surface: three swastikas. But while we may associate this symbol with the Nazis, it actually has a much older history among various cultures and was used as a decoration in the Iron Age and Middle Ages. Throughout the […]

For BepiColombo,  2024 was a turbulent year. The mission is a joint project by the European and Japanese Space Agencies – ESA and JAXA – and a thruster problem forced the ground team to change plans for the probe’s arrival into orbit around Mercury. After a risky maneuver in September, BepiColombo has now completed its […]