Deborah Bloomfield

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 […]

Modern chimpanzees select rock tools in similar ways to Oldowan hominins, early humans who used stone tools that date back to around 2.5 million years ago. According to a new study, these observations may provide new ways to understand the differences between technology use by nonhuman primates and ancient hominins, as the archaeological record extends […]

Uranus is undoubtedly the most oddly named planet in our Solar System, but things could have been worse. After all, being the only Greek god in a sky full of Romans is one thing; sounding like a butt is another; but a planet called George would just be silly. Still, that’s what we almost had. […]

Our lofty friends, the giraffes, are slowly and quietly disappearing from the wild. Some organizations are trying to help these majestic beasts by investing in animal in vitro fertilization (IVF). Now, the first artificial fertilized, matured, and preserved giraffe embryo has been created in a historic and groundbreaking milestone. When you think of endangered mammals in […]

While cleaning out a drawer during a recent house move, I found the diary I kept in high school. Obviously, I couldn’t resist the temptation of reading the things 14-year-old me had seen fit to document – friendship dramas and getting braces featured heavily – and while a lot of it made me cringe, it […]

When you get sick, it’s easy to point the finger elsewhere. Maybe the fault lies in your genes; perhaps it was that sniffling lady on the bus; what about the last thing you ate? In reality, it could have been any number of things. Don’t get us wrong, genetics has a lot to answer for […]

The frogfish is an epic-looking sea creature that has a face only its mother could love. One of its most bizarre adaptations is the “fishing rod”-like appendage that sits on top of its head and helps lure prey into its gaping mouth. Previously, it was unknown how these “fishing rods” evolved or how the fish […]

On Earth today, there is only one species of humans. Us. Homo sapiens to use our scientific term. But this was not always the case – multiple species of humans existed at the same time for most of the last several hundred thousand years. Then, they all disappeared, leaving us as the only extant member […]