Deborah Bloomfield

Remember a few months back when more of us than usual were treated to a spectacular display of aurorae? If you’re one of the people who missed out, you could soon be in with another chance of seeing the show, thanks to a phenomenon known as the Russell-McPherron effect. Advertisement While aurora season is generally […]

Utah’s Great Salt Lake is evaporating like a giant puddle due to drought and water diversion. This evaporation is exposing the lake bed and, according to a new study, releasing dangerous dust that contains heavy metal elements such as arsenic and lead. Utah’s largest city and state capitol, Salt Lake City, is close to the […]

Sometimes, you have to fake it ‘til you make it. That’s the guiding principle behind Batesian Mimicry. In this evolutionary process, a harmless species evolves to resemble a more dangerous species, warding away potential predators.  For many predator-prey pairs, evolution is a multi-generational battle. The prey evolves a hard shell; the predator evolves shell-shredding fangs. […]

A rare physical state, previously only seen in electrons, has now been recreated in atoms frozen down to near absolute zero. In this “edge state”, the atoms travel along the borders of a given material, ignoring any obstacles placed in their way. Physicists hope that a better understanding of how edge states occur could lead […]

Back in 2016, a team of geologists deep down in a Canadian mine made quite the discovery – flowing water that, when tested, was found to be over 2.6 billion years old. It became the world’s oldest water, but it took over from a find made by the same team in the same mine three […]

For scientists, 1996 was far from a quiet year: two Stanford University PhD students started a project that would go on to become Google, biologists sequenced a eukaryotic genome for the first time, and astrophysicists showed the existence of something supermassive at the center of the Milky Way. But one event in particular stands out […]

This week, the asteroid Apophis could be slightly more dangerous than first thought, people in Iceland are tossing baby puffins off cliffs, an asteroid impact in the Philippines makes history (and some great videos), a python in Bangladesh took two hours to ingest another python, and a pig in Hong Kong underwent surgery from a […]

Electric eels might be the stuff of nightmares for some, but are they really electric – and do they have the power to give you a painful zap? We break down just watt makes these eels so shocking.  Advertisement What is an electric eel? Electric eels are one of three species in the genus Electrophorus. […]

The MINI plonked on top of a BMW manufacturing plant in Oxford, England is no longer the only unusual sight meeting passersby; it’s now been joined on the roof by the UK’s first “motionless” wind energy system. Designed by the company Aeromine Technologies, the unit doesn’t exactly look like your traditional wind turbine – no […]

It’s a well-established (and slightly uncomfortable) fact that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred with one another. Recent research looked into when this inter-species kanoodling occurred and now another new piece of research has investigated where exactly it happened. Advertisement Scientists took a close look at the geographical distribution of both species in Southwest Asia and Southeast […]

Over half of the world’s population speaks more than one language. However, as little as 1 percent of the planet’s people can be considered a polyglot, defined as someone who can speak five or more languages. Moreover, there are some individuals known as hyperpolyglots, linguistic maestros that master an abundance of language (although there’s no […]

Mars is a frigid desert today but it used to be a very wet world. The jury is still out on whether it was cold and wet or warm and wet, but water was abundant. Where did all that water go? Some went underground and some escaped into space, together with most of the planet’s […]

It was mere weeks ago that the origin of Stonehenge’s Altar Stone was shockingly revealed to be hundreds of kilometers further away from the monument than previously thought. Now, another study has complicated the picture even more – by definitively ruling out the most likely location for the Altar Stone’s starting point. Advertisement There are […]

Boeing’s Starliner will undock from the Space Station in a matter of hours before flying back and landing on Earth early tomorrow morning. The capsule was supposed to be in space for just a week with its passengers, NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams, but a seemingly endless series of problems has forced NASA […]

A collision 7 billion years ago and a surge of magnification. Look at that in infrared, and somehow you end up with a question mark. It was a combination of a galaxy merger being located near the line of sight of a massive galaxy cluster that is distorting its light, creating something that has been […]

What’s in a name? Well, new research into marmoset monkeys has revealed that they join the list of creatures that use one for each other. The researchers think that they’re able to call each other by name and respond to their own names and this ability could even provide insights into the evolution of human […]

Something strange is occurring in the skies over Antarctica. Each winter, a blisteringly cold ring of wind rapidly circulates clockwise in the stratosphere above Antarctica, forming a polar vortex around the icy continent. This year, however, the polar vortex isn’t acting like its usual self. Advertisement Models produced by NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office […]

The first mission of the Polaris Program, called Polaris Dawn, is expected to launch on Monday following weeks of delays. Some of them were weather-related; since the craft will not dock with a space station, they need to make sure they have good weather at launch and reentry. It also did not help that the […]

It’s widely believed that two major compounds in the cannabis plant – THC and CBD – have a balancing effect on one another, with CBD canceling out the effects of THC in the body. However, a new clinical trial has poured cold water on that idea by suggesting that the opposite might be true, and […]

This week on Break It Down, “dangerous” asteroid Apophis has a slightly increased risk of hitting Earth, a pig in Hong Kong undergoes an operation by a team in Switzerland, people in Iceland are throwing puffins off cliffs, an asteroid impact over the Philippines just made history, a python somehow managed to ingest another python, […]