Deborah Bloomfield

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. […]

Silver has been building up in certain parts of the coastal seabed since the 19th century – and researchers believe its mounting abundance is due to a blend of furious monsoons, microscopic life, and climate change. Advertisement In a new study, scientists from the Hefei University of Technology and Guangdong Ocean University in China studied […]

Earth is not a static, unchanging ball of rock. Your day-to-day perception of the ground you stand on might suggest otherwise, but our planet is an ever-changing, shape-shifting globule of crust floating around a molten sphere of mantle and metals.  Advertisement In a beautiful illustration of this, scientists have put together a 1-minute video showing […]

A sampling of the upper troposphere has detected a wide array of microbial species, some of them human pathogens. Many of these organisms were found to be killed by the cold, exposure to increased radiation, or lack of food. However, some proved disturbingly resilient, and able to travel great distances and survive. Advertisement Carl Sagan […]

The USA is failing to learn lessons from COVID-19 as the world reconciles with a possible future bird flu pandemic, experts have warned. In a recent Perspective article, public health specialists have laid out their concerns that mistakes made during the response to COVID-19 may be repeated next time around, and that leaders in the […]

As we search the skies with increasingly more powerful telescopes, we have discovered plenty of things that our best models of the universe have not predicted, from Odd Radio Circles (ORCs) and Kýklos, to (potentially) oversized galaxies in the early universe. Advertisement One particularly gigantic surprise was first spotted by the eROSITA X-ray space telescope, […]

As anyone knows from reading a little about Albert Einstein or watching a sci-fi movie that wants to save a little on costs, it is possible to create artificial gravity in low-gravity environments. Advertisement As Einstein’s thought experiment involving a painter falling from a building and experiencing weightlessness shows, gravity and acceleration are equivalent. If […]

The doctors who performed the world’s first total eye and partial face transplant have reported on their patient’s progress one year on, and the results are promising. The patient, 46-year-old military veteran Aaron James from Arkansas, has recovered well without immune rejection – and though he is still unable to see through the transplanted eye, […]

Few people can imagine a worse death that being swallowed alive by some monstrous creature, but that is the reality for many of Earth’s critters. Fortunately, in the case of Japanese eels, being swallowed alive doesn’t have to mean certain death, and they’ve been recorded performing a rather impressive escape tactic.  Advertisement Japanese eels (Anguilla […]

For several decades, scientists have toyed with the idea of primordial black holes. In the smorgasbord of particles and forces and energy of the beginning, slight overdensities might have led to the formation of small black holes. But not too small. Because under a certain limit, these objects would have wiped out the universe already. […]

Bother a leafhopper nymph and you’ll be faced with quite the display. These insects have evolved a truly wacky way of expelling wax from their derrieres, ranging from flailing “fiber-optic” strands to cotton-like fluff. Advertisement Wax is a crucial material for insects, acting as a hydrophobic layer of protection that keeps the right moisture in […]

Humans confirmed the existence of other galaxies surprisingly late. Only 100 years ago, in fact, when Edwin Hubble found a type of star known as Cepheid variables within Andromeda, and used them to measure the galaxy’s distance. Advertisement As luck (or, in fact, proximity and gravity) would have it, astronomers soon figured out that Andromeda […]

The giant black hole at the center of our galaxy has an unexpected spin, which is likely to be the result of a merger with another large black hole. The merger almost certainly occurred with the smaller, but still technically supermassive, black hole at the heart of a galaxy that was swallowed by the Milky […]

New research shows that the overall use of cannabis across the US has been increasing since 2013, but not so much among teenagers. Advertisement Cannabis use remains a controversial topic. Approximately 200 million people use the drug worldwide, and it is the most popular psychoactive substance in the US. Over the last few decades, changes […]

Collagen is a mammal’s favorite protein, more used in the body than any other. It seems dinosaurs appreciated it too, as traces have been found in some fossils, but only now have chemists worked out how the usually fragile molecule could survive for so long. Advertisement A few decades ago, collagen was most famous for […]

Do you ever wish you had more of one particular body part? An extra pair of hands could come in well, handy, as would having another pair of eyes in the back of our heads – but what about two tongues? That might sound like the stuff of nightmares to us, but for lemurs, it’s […]

A video shared clip from the BBC’s Spy in the Ocean reveals the other-worldly POV of a robot herring diving into one of nature’s greatest spectacles: a massive school of farting fish. If you’re thinking, “Really, IFLS? Must we talk about farting?” then let me tell you, the unique swim bladder found in herring saw […]

Light pollution has a lot to answer for: wrecking our ability to study the night sky and confusing baby puffins, to name just two things. But could all this nighttime light also be harming our health? New research suggests that excessive light pollution could be a risk factor for the development of Alzheimer’s disease, particularly […]

Five years before Wuhan obtained notoriety as the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, a four-year-old child in central China contracted polio from an unknown source. Somewhat unexpectedly, researchers in Paris have now linked this infection to a poliovirus (PV) strain that has been used for research purposes since the 1950s, and may therefore have escaped […]

After an absent-minded guest left a bag of Cheetos deep within Carlsbad Caverns, the National Park Service (NPS) responded with a stern warning. Unsightly trash and plastic pollution aren’t the only issues, they cautioned; the garbage could have had a significant impact on the wider ecosystem of the ancient cave system. Advertisement The bag of […]