Deborah Bloomfield

Have you ever wondered how it is that plants avoid pollinating themselves? Walnut trees have evolved to avoid this by separating their male and female flowers in time, with the flowers of one sex blooming first, and the other coming second. Advertisement Walnut trees can differ in whether they lead with female flowers or male […]

The Magyars – or Hungarians – were among the most feared warriors of the medieval world, and were particularly renowned for their deadly skill as mounted archers. Male skeletons dating back to the 10th century are regularly found alongside bows, arrows, and other weapons, yet the authors of a new study report the surprising discovery […]

Early Cambrian fossils reveal how a small, shelled animal evolved to deal with attacks from a predator. The finds confirm a popular hypothesis, until now lacking in clear evidence, about what drove the greatest expansion in biological diversity in Earth’s history. Advertisement The Cambrian explosion saw life take on a staggering array of forms around […]

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced new draft recommendations to improve the accuracy of pulse oximeters – devices used to estimate blood oxygen levels – across the whole range of skin tones, after a wealth of studies identified inaccuracies in readings taken for people with darker skin. Advertisement Pulse oximeters: what they […]

The horseshoe crab is a living fossil that’s been scuttling along shorelines virtually unchanged for 445 million years, long before dinosaurs ever stomped across the Earth. They have very strange blue blood, and of all the species that have come to be since these marine oddities first emerged, it just might be the most valuable […]

A team of physicists has outlined a possible way of sending probes deep into interstellar space within a reasonable timescale, using relativistic electron beams. Advertisement Space is that annoying combination of “really cool” and “really big”. We can see really awesome stuff going on out there, but unless we come up with ways to significantly […]

Our Moon is surprisingly massive compared to Earth, but that ratio is dwarfed if we consider Pluto and Charon. The latter is about 12 percent of the mass of Pluto and technically doesn’t orbit it. The pair of them orbit around a common center of mass outside of Pluto. They are dancing – and this […]

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the first light that was able to freely move across the Universe. Released around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, it is a map that has been used by astronomers to understand the cosmos. To see it in full you have to go to space, measuring it all across […]

January is a good month for interesting planetary alignment. You will have a lot going on in the night sky. For most of the month, six out of the eight planets will be visible in the heavens. Mercury is currently on the other side of the Sun and you are standing on number eight (unless […]

Saturn is one of the nicer objects to gawp at when you have access to a telescope or binoculars, being large enough to get a good look at, and having a pleasing ring structure around it. In early 2025, you will get a chance to have an even more unusual view: Saturn, without its rings […]

Officials from the Louisiana Department of Health have announced the death of a patient hospitalized with H5N1 bird flu, the first such case in the United States. Advertisement The patient – who was over 65 years old and reported to have underlying medical conditions – had previously become the first known person in the US […]

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Nicky Fox, the agency’s associate administrator for science missions, will host an audio-only media teleconference to update the public on the Mars Sample Return mission. Advertisement NASA, together with the European Space Agency, has had an ambitious plan. Collecting samples of Martian soil and rocks, putting them in a spacecraft, […]

High levels of human metapneumovirus (HMPV) have been reported in parts of China. The news has sparked some concern, no doubt reminding people of a certain virus that erupted from this part of the world almost exactly five years ago. But do you really need to be worried about this latest disease outbreak? Here’s everything […]

Lunar samples collected by NASA astronauts during the Apollo Moon landings have a curious habit of being destroyed, stolen, or lost. In a bunch of newly released documents from Ireland, the story of one ill-fated moon rock has been revealed in new detail. Advertisement Documents from the National Archives in Dublin explain that one of […]

An oil spill in the Black Sea is believed to have resulted in the death of over 30 cetaceans, including several members of an endangered subspecies. Advertisement The spill, which occurred after two Russian oil tankers were damaged in a storm in mid-December 2024, spread out into the Kerch Strait – a strip of water […]

January 5, 2005, is an astronomical anniversary that is not really marked but should be. It saw the discovery of dwarf planet Eris and how those very observations led to a new way to describe the Solar System and heralded the eventual change of Pluto’s planetary status. Advertisement On that fateful January day, the team […]

What do you think the loudest animal on the planet is? An elephant? An army of Taylor’s Swifties? Well, you’d be wrong if you took relative body size into consideration, because for that, the award goes to the tiny water boatman: Micronecta scholtzi. It was crowned in 2011 when a team of researchers presented their […]

We are constantly learning more about the deep ocean and the creatures that live in these remote places, from sleeper sharks to disco worms. Underwater technology can give us a look into previously inaccessible places under the waves, and one team has now revealed the first-ever record of a roughskin dogfish swimming about deep in […]

Just over 25 years ago, the British Medical Journal published a study that suggested a single cigarette could shorten a smoker’s life by 11 minutes. Unsurprisingly, this caught the attention of the media, and the figure spread far and wide – the trouble was, the study had some pretty significant flaws. Now, new research has […]

Sex is disposable in the most literal sense for the sea slug Goniobranchus reticulatus (formerly Chromodoris reticulata). In a 2013 study, it became the first known animal to reproduce using “disposable penises” that could be jettisoned after mating and replaced with a new one, but the magic doesn’t last forever. It’s thought that these nudibranchs […]