Deborah Bloomfield

In a record-breaking sale, a specimen of mold from the original experiments that led to Alexander Fleming’s world-changing discovery of penicillin has scooped $76,000 at auction.  Many were excited for the sale, which was predicted to come in at closer to $50,000 earlier this year – but instead, the “mold medallion” set a world record […]

In the 1997 movie Contact, Dr Ellie Arroway, played by the excellent Jodie Foster, travels via a wormhole past Vega, showing a system with no planets but lots of debris. Hollywood might have gotten that completely right – it seems that Vega is not building any planets like other stars. The star is one of […]

Stargazers are set to witness a double-whammy of meteor showers in November as Earth makes its annual passage through a stream of debris left by a comet. The South Taurid meteor shower is set to peak on November 5, while the North Taurids are due to peak on November 12, according to the American Meteor […]

The fossils of the Yixian Formation in northeast China represent the greatest collection of superbly preserved dinosaurs in the world. Their remarkable state has usually been attributed to being buried in volcanic ash, preventing disruption by scavengers or even microbial decay. However, a new study disputes this, attributing their deaths to much less spectacular processes. […]

So long Cassius – the world’s largest captive crocodile has died at his home Marineland Melanesia Crocodile Habitat in Green Island, Australia.  The gigantic Australian saltwater croc (Crocodylus porosus) was awarded the Guinness World Record for the largest crocodile in captivity in 2011. Cassius measured a whopping 5.48 meters long (17 feet 11 inches) and […]

Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) is normally associated with cold sores – they can be annoying and unsightly, but for otherwise healthy adults they’re not normally a serious threat. However, it seems we might have to take a second look at this virus as a growing body of evidence suggests that it can make […]

A man whose brain was more than double the average weight holds the record for the heaviest thinking organ ever recorded. Sadly for the owner of this giant cerebrum, however, bigger doesn’t always mean better, and in this case resulted in intellectual disabilities before an untimely death in a mental health institute. According to Guinness […]

There could be a pretty simple scientific explanation behind one of Jesus’s most famous miracles, recent research has revealed. It seems the fishy (in all senses of the word) goings on in the Sea of Galilee may be the result of a curious natural phenomenon. The Sea of Galilee, also called Lake Tiberias or Kinneret, […]

A newly discovered leg bone from Columbia is likely to be from the largest member of the Phorusrhacid family – appropriately known as “terror birds” – we have yet found, and could have stood more than 3 meters tall. The team describing the fossil thinks the individual it came from was 5-20 percent larger than […]

A massive blob lives in Utah and its name is Pando, which literally means “I spread”. The sprawling lump of quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) has lived up to its name in spreading across 42.6 hectares (105.3 acres) in Fishlake National Forest with a network of 47,000 stems that were created through asexual reproduction, essentially making […]

When energy sources are discussed, solar and wind often go together like a high school couple whose identities seem to have fused. Supporters hail them as the twin solutions to both the environmental crisis and the domination of fossil fuel markets by hostile countries, whereas opponents dismiss them as too variable, too expensive, and too […]

The peak size of the ozone hole over the Antarctic in 2024 was the seventh smallest since recovery began, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have found. Even its maximum extent was smaller than it has been in five years, since the even smaller hole in 2019. The monthly average was around […]

Ancient DNA from the skeleton of a baby who lived and died in southern Italy 17,000 years ago has painted a fascinating picture of the ill-fated infant and offers a rare snapshot into ancient life. His remains were found in such good nick that, all these millennia later, researchers have been able to reconstruct details […]

The world is full of scary things. Jellyfish and hair loss, to name just two. And while the middle of the night is clearly not the most practical time to start worrying about these threats, many of us find ourselves wide awake at 3am thinking about how we might have to pee on ourselves if […]

For all our fancy telescopes and particle accelerators, we still haven’t managed to detect even a smidgen of dark matter. In a dramatic change of course, researchers at Virginia Tech are now taking a staggeringly low-tech approach to the hunt by looking for the elusive stuff in a bunch of old rocks. While most scientists […]

At Georgia’s Fort Mountain State Park, a historical marker erected in the 1960s tells of a mysterious race of “moon-eyed” people that are said to have occupied Appalachia until they were vanquished by the Cherokee hundreds of years ago. Nearby sits an ancient stone wall, thought to be the remains of a battlement that some […]

A signal beamed towards Earth from Mars has finally been decoded after thousands of people from around the world spent more than a year examining the message. In the end, a father and daughter duo from the US managed to crack the code and reveal the contents of the dispatch, yet the process of interpreting […]

That old saying about death and taxes being the only certainties in life has been disproven by physicists, who have revealed that our existence is governed by a third – and equally terrifying – inevitability: all of our cables are doomed to become tangled. This awful discovery was made in 2007, and was recognized with […]

Microwaves are the undeniable king of convenience; bung last night’s leftovers in one and a few minutes later you’ve got a delicious hot meal. Unfortunately, they can sometimes get a bit of a bad rap, with claims that microwaving food can cause us harm. It is, however, safe – here’s why. Radiation Long before the […]

This week, an “extremely rare” fool’s gold fossil revealed the soft tissue of a 450-million-year-old new-to-science sea creature, Voyager 1 has phoned home from 24 billion kilometers away, and we ask: what is the rarest gemstone? Finally, as we celebrate the 70th year since the creation of the Godzilla franchise, we discuss the lessons learned […]