Deborah Bloomfield

The population of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, interbred with Native Americans before Europeans arrived, despite 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) between them, ancient DNA suggests. The islanders, once the poster child for a people who brought about environmental collapse through overharvesting of resources, also appear to be innocent of this charge, according to […]

Neanderthals and other prehistoric humans have a reputation for being bloodthirsty brutes, existing on a diet of megafauna meat and the flesh of their enemies. But it wasn’t just flame-grilled scraps of mammoth on the menu. A wealth of evidence shows that Neanderthals had a taste for meat, but also understood the value of fine […]

While you’re walking around you don’t notice it, but muons are passing through your body at the rate of about 10,000 muons per minute. Advertisement These fermions, identical in most respects to electrons except for their higher mass and baffling magnetic moment, are created in the Earth’s atmosphere as cosmic rays collide with it. Despite […]

A fossilized Neanderthal skeleton unearthed in France may have belonged to a previously undescribed lineage that split from other Neanderthals around 100,000 years ago. Just like modern humans, it looks like Neanderthals were a diverse and varied bunch.  The remains were discovered in 2015 within a cave system of France’s Rhône Valley that was known […]

After a bumpy few years, we have good news about NASA’s Voyager 1 mission to share. NASA has successfully switched thrusters on the aging spacecraft from an impressive 24,630,000,000 kilometers (15,310,000,000 miles) away. Advertisement Voyager 1 has traveled further than any human-made object, crossing the heliopause and heading into interstellar space. While doing this, it […]

A pair of supermassive black holes have been observed on the road to merging as their galaxies come together. The pair, seen by both the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory are 300-400 light-years apart, which for most purposes is a great distance, but makes for the least separation ever confirmed between behemoths like […]

It was announced this week that a fatality had been reported at Poncho’s Kitchen in the Grand Canyon National Park. It marked the seventh death in little over a month, bringing the count for 2024 to just shy of the annual average. As the National Parks Service (NPS) updates its website with warnings of exceptional […]

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission run by the European Space Agency (ESA) has made its first detection of the ingredients of life.  Advertisement JUICE has a long mission ahead of it. Launched in April 2023, the spacecraft has to make several gravitational assists before it reaches its target of Jupiter and three of […]

Footprints made by large theropod dinosaurs have been found on Australia’s south coast, from a time when the region was still connected to Antarctica. The prints prove that big dinosaurs lived there when it almost touched the Antarctic Circle, putting the area in near-total darkness for months at a time. Advertisement The Wonthaggi Formation southeast […]

A new study suggests that the Sun may have had a close encounter with another star, explaining the unusual orbits of objects in the outer Solar System. Advertisement “When we think of our Solar System, we usually assume that it ends at the outermost known planet, Neptune. However, several thousand celestial bodies are known to […]

The higher atmosphere is full of peculiar phenomena and an important one for communication and navigation is equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs). These are hot pockets of superheated gas that form at low latitudes, usually after sunset. They remain poorly understood, and given that they impact Earth’s connection to space, it is important to know what […]

Cape fur seals at popular beaches across South Africa have been exhibiting uncharacteristically aggressive behavior, including biting beachgoers and other animals along a roughly 650-kilometer (404-mile) stretch of coastline. With more and more seals tested for diseases as a result of this, experts are concerned about the rise of rabies within the species.  Advertisement As […]

A moderate geomagnetic storm is predicted to engulf Earth’s atmosphere tonight, with the northern lights likely to become visible further south than usual. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the aurora may reach as low as New York, and it’s all thanks to a wave of “dark plasma” […]

Typhoon Yagi has become one of the most intense typhoons to ever hit Vietnam, and it has left behind death and devastation, not only in that country but across the Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland China. This is the 11th named storm of this year’s typhoon season, which started in late May, and the […]

Within the depths of an ancient Chehrābād salt mine in Iran, multiple miners met a grisly end thousands of years ago. Over the last few decades, their mummified remains, some of which show the terror they faced at the time of their deaths, have been excavated by archaeologists. Now, recent research has offered fresh insights […]

According to a new study, adolescents who lived through the COVID-19 lockdowns experienced rapid premature brain aging due to the social restrictions, but girls were more significantly impacted than boys. The results indicate that female brains are more vulnerable to changes in lifestyle resulting from pandemic lockdowns. Advertisement The COVID-19 virus caused illness and death […]

The speed of light in a vacuum is the absolute speed limit of the universe. Nothing will go faster than 299,792 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second), according to Einstein’s work, as it would require an infinite amount of energy to do so. Advertisement However, that doesn’t mean that light can’t be beaten in […]

Archaeologists have found an extremely unusual Neanderthal artefact at an excavation site in Spain, which is forcing them to rethink what we know of these extinct humans and their technologies. The researchers found the only known example of a horse bone spearhead, which shows that these ancient hominins could make hunting weapons out of such […]

With summer drawing to a close, an algal bloom in Lake Erie that began forming around June is still going strong, bursting with a glow of emerald green (or should that be blue?). Advertisement The Landsat-9 satellite snapped images of the algal bloom in Lake Erie on August 13, revealing it covered approximately 830 square […]

Orcas, or killer whales, are known to some as the velociraptors of the sea for the incredibly orchestrated attacks they carry out in the wild. From spy hopping to wave washing, a simple seal faces a hell of a fight in getting out alive, and as a human I don’t much fancy my chances, either. […]