Deborah Bloomfield

This week on Break It Down: one of the most significant mammal recoveries ever recorded (and four other wildlife wins), a once-in-a-lifetime event is about to kick off in space, spookily accurate predictions made by a “professor” 100 years ago, an undersea volcano is about to erupt, scientists achieve a world-first embryo milestone on the […]

When a quarry worker in Oxfordshire, England, noticed some “unusual bumps” beneath the site’s clay surface, he could never have dreamt that he was in fact following in the footsteps of dinosaurs. As it happens, the lumpy anomalies were made by some of the Middle Jurassic period’s largest beasts – including the ferocious Megalosaurus – […]

A party trick performed using fruit in a microwave oven could lead to more sensitive detectors of microwave radiation, with applications in fields such as dark matter detection, quantum computing, and satellite communication. Adding a pair of grapes either side of a doped diamond might seem an eccentric habit, but it could signal a low-cost […]

Academic math, you’d probably assume, is a kind of dry topic, filled with tedious equations and the like. Not so, if a new paper is to be believed: in fact, it’s an area in which you hack a common schoolyard game by teaching robots to hula hoop. Advertisement “We were surprised that an activity as […]

Welcome to True Crime in Science. Over six episodes, we have discussed some well-known true crime cases, as well as some cases you may not have heard of, and then looked further into the science and the forensic details behind them. Watch our sixth and final episode now. In episode one we covered Colin Pitchfork, episode two examined the case […]

For a long time, archaeologists interpreted the many bones of small carnivores they found in early Neolithic settlements in the Levant as coming from fur hunters, but new analysis suggests they were exploited for other purposes – foxes and wildcats were actually on the human menu. The results indicate that these small predators should be […]

For thousands of years, thinkers argued about whether light is made of particles or waves. At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists realized it was both: massless particles and waves. An even more upsetting realization came a few years later though, when Louis de Broglie put forward the idea that all matter also has […]

The Earth is a wondrous place, but some of the most stunning things sometimes come from off-world. Take, for example, pallasite meteorites – extra-terrestrial rocks that are strung through with gemstones, offering tantalizing glimpses into our Solar System’s deep history. Advertisement Oh, you haven’t heard of them? Well, you’re in for a treat. Advertisement What […]

A plane full of jet setters was given the rare opportunity to ring in the new year twice this week after their flight set off in the early hours of 2025 and landed in the last moments of 2024. Cathay Pacific flight CX880 took off from Hong Kong International Airport at 12:21 am local time […]

While there may be no magic number for minutes of exercise a day to keep us all healthy, new research has found that people who report doing over 150 minutes of vigorous exercise a week do appear to have a significantly reduced risk of developing 19 chronic diseases. Amounting to just under 22 minutes a […]

This year – 2025 – marks the beginning of a new generation. All kids born from now until 2039 will be branded as Generation Beta, a band of humans that will see a mind-boggling integration with technology and huge cultural shifts. Advertisement That’s according to Mark McCrindle, the social researcher and futurist who coined the […]

Identifying individuals of wild, free-roaming animals is a tricky and time-consuming task. Visually confirming this is also more difficult for species that live elusive lives, such as solitary big cats, or that might be nocturnal, or live in hard-to-reach areas. Given the need to protect and conserve species such as leopards, scientists have come up […]

After invasive rats caused their disappearance from the island of Kamaka over a century ago, Polynesian storm-petrels have now been spotted returning to the area, with the hopes that the site will become a safe haven for the endangered seabirds to nest in. Advertisement The birds’ long-awaited comeback is the result of a years-long, multiorganization […]

Deep beneath the Yellowstone Supervolcano, reservoirs brimming with explosive magma are hinting that future bouts of volcanism may now be more likely in the northeast of the region. Advertisement By studying the natural electromagnetic fields around the Yellowstone Caldera, scientists at the US Geological Survey and Oregon State University found at least seven reservoirs of […]

On New Year’s Day, 1925, attendees at an astronomical conference heard one of the most influential scientific presentations of all time. It proved the Andromeda Nebula is immensely distant from Earth, demonstrating that the Milky Way is not the whole universe, but one island of stars among many. It took much longer to grasp just […]

New research challenges the decades-old myth that ancient mines were environmentally hazardous sites. The researchers from Tel Aviv University show that copper production associated with King Solomon’s Mines had minimal polluting impacts on modern or ancient populations. The results upturn our understanding of early metallurgic industries and how they impacted the environment. Advertisement Since the […]

The world was recently blessed by the return of Wallace & Gromit’s Feathers McGraw in the movie Vengeance Most Fowl. In it, we see McGraw up to his old tricks as he hacks into Wallace’s secret files in a nail-biting scene that has him sweating at the controls of a homemade device. It got us […]

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are incredible releases of energy – as much as the Sun releases in days – that last for a fraction of a second. Only very few have been tracked down to their sources and their actual origin continues to be uncertain. Astronomers have now been able to track an FRB to […]

Not all vaccines are created equal – some give us lifelong protection from disease after a short course, while others need a regular top-up. It’s not easy to predict which scenario will be true for a given vaccine, but a new study may have hit on a way to forecast how long immunity will last […]

It’s now a quarter of a century since Y2K, which means we’re well into the futuristic age imagined by the science-fiction writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. And while we’re yet to populate the cosmos or invent robot butlers, the predictions made about the year 2025 by one scientist were remarkably accurate. Advertisement Professor […]