Deborah Bloomfield

From mysterious purple-coated rocks to formations that look a bit like a doorway, our trusty Martian robot pals have made some cool and sometimes strange findings over the years.  Advertisement Every now and then, they capture an image of a rock that looks completely out of place in the Martian landscape. This happened on September […]

Morning Glory Pool, a hot spring that quietly bubbles in Yellowstone National Park, is famous for its dazzling display of colors, starting with blue and green in its center, before bleeding into yellows and reddish oranges at its edge. As beautiful as it might look, its rainbow-like appearance is largely due to contamination from human […]

Researchers have resurrected a strange seed that was discovered in a cave in the Judean desert during the 1980s. According to radiocarbon dating, the seed was over 1,000 years old when it was found, and its DNA links it to a genus of tree that, although lost today, was mentioned in the Bible. Advertisement Named […]

In a beautiful blend of physics and human courage, freestyle motocross maestro Tom Pagès has combined motorbike riding with paragliding against the backdrop of the French Alps. The Red Bull athlete recently pulled off the stunt, called ”Ride & Fly”, near the resort of Les Portes du Soleil in Haute-Savoie, southeastern France. Advertisement He began […]

Back in elementary school, infinity made sense. It was the number you used to win arguments: “no, you suck worse, times infinity!”  Advertisement Now that we’re older, though, we’d hope to have a more nuanced and technical grasp of the concept. Unfortunately, a recent study has found that most of us… probably don’t. “Traditional cognitive […]

Beware the creatures of the deep. While most people worry about the big scary things in the ocean such as sharks and orcas, if you’re an isopod living down there it’s the pink, fluffy-looking animals you’ve got to be wary of, as a new video that even surprised researchers shows. Advertisement On the latest EV […]

Do people in supposed “blue zones” really have an above-average chance of living over 100 years? Despite the idea’s popularity, new Ig Nobel award-winning research has kind of killed it (pun most certainly intended). It seems past research into extreme old-age demographics has been riddled with fundamental flaws that have produced distorted conclusions. Advertisement The […]

Bring on Friday! Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) is now speeding towards its closest encounter with the Sun – possibly its one and only encounter with our star. On September 27, the comet will fly a distance of 58.6 million kilometers (36.4 million miles) from the Sun; that is roughly the same as the orbit of […]

If you’re thinking of going down the unconventional route for this year’s Halloween costume, we’ve got just the inspiration for you: a brand-new species of chimaera, better known as a ghost shark or spookfish. Advertisement Scientists discovered the new species, which goes by the scientific name Harriotta avia – avia meaning “grandmother” in Latin, in […]

Six out of nine key planetary boundaries have been broken, while a seventh is set to be imminently breached, according to a “first-of-its-kind” planetary health check report. Advertisement Each of the boundaries is a bit like a cog in the machine that helps the planet to stay stable and resilient, allowing humanity to continue surviving […]

Well-fed male Pacific field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) show sexual interest in both male and female members of their own species – however, when fed a low-quality diet, they lose interest in other males and focus their attention more on females. Advertisement Some zoologists have been reported to not record data on their observations of same-sex sexual […]

Species are being lost from the wild at an unprecedented rate, and some of the most threatened ones are being protected by conservation projects that either work with or employ local people in the area where the species remains and use ex-situ conservation practices (outside of the species’ natural habitat) to protect species that can […]

Antarctica is no stranger to icy shenanigans – look no further than the giant spinning iceberg, or the “fingers of death” that lurk beneath the surface. In 2016, however, scientists were baffled when an unexpectedly massive hole opened up in the ice of the Weddell Sea. Now, we might know why it happened. Advertisement It’s […]

An estimated 50 night parrots (Pezoporus occidentalis) survive in a newly discovered colony in a remote area of Western Australia, more than doubling population estimates for colonies of a bird thought extinct for decades. Although the discovery greatly increases the chance of saving the parrot with one of the planet’s most unusual avian lifestyles (despite […]

Medical professionals are worried that an increasingly popular combat sport, known as slap fighting, could be leaving contestants brain damaged. Advertisement Slap fighting is essentially what it says on the tin. Competitors in this largely underground fast-paced sport take turns to strike one another with full force across the face with open hands. The winner […]

In an analysis of genetic data from over 1.2 million people from different ancestry groups, scientists have been able to pinpoint 115 genes associated with anxiety. Advertisement According to the World Health Organization, anxiety disorders are the world’s most common mental illness, estimated to have affected 301 million people across the globe in 2019. While […]

Mixed-species hunting packs comprised of octopuses and fish have been observed working together in the wild to improve predation success. It’s been thought that the brainy octopuses would naturally lead the pack, but new research suggests that the chain of command may be more complicated than that. Advertisement Hunting with fish is a particularly curious […]

New research has looked at an alternative idea for what black holes are, suggesting that they might not be what we thought. Advertisement Black holes are an enormous source of gravity, “bubbles“, and headaches. Predicted as a result of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they contain an outer region known as the event horizon – […]

Pythagoras was a smart guy: sure, he had some pretty rogue beliefs about beans, but the man knew his triangles, something most of us will have become acutely aware of when high school geometry drummed the Pythagorean theorem into our heads. But did the famed philosopher actually come up with the equation he’s most often […]

NASA’s Langley Research Center has finally presented a plan to learn about the Moon and Mars, by shooting them with specially designed bullets. We can learn a lot about the Moon through telescope observations, and far more from going there ourselves and taking samples. But nothing, according to a proposed NASA project, quite beats going […]