Deborah Bloomfield

R/P FLIP, quite possibly one of the strangest maritime engineering feats ever built, has been saved from the scrapyard at the eleventh hour. Also known as the FLoating Instrument Platform, FLIP is 108-meter (355-foot) long oceanic research platform that can be partially flooded and flipped by 90 degrees, allowing it to stand vertically in the […]

Entropy is one of those concepts that is so fundamental that it needs to be explained far and wide in accessible terms, but has consequences that baffle us when we think about it for a while. It is the measure of disorder of a system, and in an isolated system – such as the universe […]

A team looking into dark energy and the holographic principle have modeled what the end of the universe may look like, assuming that the universe is a hologram after all. As with a lot of the stranger hypotheses about the universe, the holographic principle has its roots in the theoretical study of black holes. Tackling […]

A communications satellite has been lost in Earth’s geostationary orbit, breaking up into several pieces of debris after an “anomaly” occurred over the weekend. Intelsat 33e, also known as IS-33e, was reported to be out of service on Saturday, October 19, leading to a loss of power and service to customers across Europe, Africa, and […]

The Atacama Desert in Chile is a harsh environment. Yet, once upon a time, humans were traipsing across the landscape committing enormous drawings to the earth – drawings that would endure for thousands of years. Today we know them as geoglyphs, and while they’re found in various sites across the globe, Atacama is home to […]

Spot a funnel emerging from the bottom of a cloud and you’d be forgiven for feeling like you might need to start legging it towards the nearest sturdy building. However, if it looks like it’s struggling to reach the ground, you’re not necessarily about to witness a tornado – it could be a cold air […]

Six complete eggs have been found in a partially preserved clutch in the Ganzhou Basin, China, which the discovery team report are the smallest dinosaur eggs ever found – at least if you don’t count modern birds. Features besides size indicate these are from a different species than any eggs we have seen before. The […]

When it comes to toughness, jade sits at the top of the hardy gemstone list. This might be surprising if you’ve heard that diamonds are the hardest, so which is the strongest? For gemstones, it all comes down to whether a stone is more resistant to scratching or breaking.   Jade has been an important material […]

Evolution is a constant process, and humans are still changing as we adapt to the various environments we inhabit. Some of the best places to see this is in the harshest places, as demonstrated by a new study linking increased oxygen delivery and number of live births in native ethnic Tibetan women living at high […]

A snow day is always an exciting day (ok, less so as an adult who has to actually do things), but now imagine a snow day where you wake up and the fields are covered in white, cinnamon roll or donut-esque cylinders. No, snowmen haven’t become sentient and had their own Bake Off technical challenge […]

Venus is the world next door. An Earth-sized planet that couldn’t be less like Earth, it is a hellish world with acid clouds. Several missions are planning to go there over the next decade, including NASA’s DAVINCI, which will drop a probe into the atmosphere. The goal will be to study the atmosphere and the […]

Back in 2008, a miniature mystery unfolded at Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany. Staff turned up for work in the morning to find the aquarium was eerily silent and dark. It transpired that the entire building’s electrical system had short-circuited. The technical difficulties were fixed until the problem was reported the following morning. And […]

They say it’s only by being wrong that we learn what’s right, and in the field of forensics, scientists had to learn the hard way that you can’t catch criminals by taking out eyeballs. The working theory was that the human retina could capture the last thing a person saw by locking it in photosensitive […]

In the worlds of extinct elephant species and ancient humans, the science powers that be have granted us a rare double whammy. Not only have researchers identified the remains of an ancient elephant species from some pretty incredible fossils, but those fossils have revealed how they might have provided a food source to early humans […]

Since the day of the Apollo missions, Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs) have become the quintessential spacesuits – but the world has changed in the last 50 years, and the next generation of astronauts going to the Moon needs a new version. Axiom and Prada have unveiled this new spacesuit, and it looks great. Called the […]

Gunung Padang sits on top of an extinct volcano in West Java, Indonesia. In recent times, the beautiful hilltop has attracted bold theories that suggest it was an elaborate pyramid built by a long-lost civilization thousands of years before the pyramids of Egypt. As enticing as this idea may be, it’s one that’s founded on […]

“I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the ‘Law of Frequency of Error’,” the British polymath Francis Galton wrote in 1889. “The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it.” Now, Galton may have […]

Following the removal of dams along the Klamath River earlier this year, fall-run Chinook salmon have made a long-awaited return to the Oregon portion of the Klamath Basin, having recently been spotted there for the first time in 112 years. The first salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) was discovered by biologists with the Oregon Department of Fish […]

In the Ediacaran Hills, researchers have found one of the first moving animals – and an even more distinctive feature is a question-mark-shaped ridge that makes this the oldest known animal to show left-right asymmetry (in other words, to not be a mirror reflection of itself). The first animals appeared in the fossil record during […]

Earth would not have been a nice place for humans 3.26 billion years ago. There was not much oxygen for a start. There was water and life, though. Unfortunately, an enormous asteroid was about to hit our planet. Boom – but despite what you may think, this impact could have led certain organisms to thrive. […]