Deborah Bloomfield

Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole sitting at the core of the Milky Way. It has a mass of 4.3 million times our Sun’s and a radius of 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). It is not alone at the center of our galaxy; it is orbited by multiple stars and other peculiar objects. […]

A pattern in the movements of a brown dwarf that orbits a Sun-like star is likely to be caused by a moon. If confirmed, this would be the first exomoon, that is a moon orbiting a planet that in turn orbits a star other than the Sun. However, if the data is to be believed, […]

Planetary scientists have found a wide range of molecules that are crucial for life among a lot of other organic substances present in asteroids, meteors, and even interstellar space. Now, scientists report new insights into asteroid Bennu, which was sampled by the NASA mission OSIRIS-REx. The latest research suggests tentative evidence for a substance we […]

Seals, the blubbery dogs of icy oceans, have a curious habit of flipping on their backs and slapping their bellies like a drunken uncle after Thanksgiving dinner. While it may look silly, this behavior is actually a subtle and sophisticated form of communication. Seals “speak” through a system of grunts, growls, snorts, hisses, whistles, and […]

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS may be a primitive carbonaceous object, according to a new preprint study comparing the object’s spectra with pristine NASA samples from Antarctica. As well as this, our third interstellar visitor also appears to be undergoing cryovolcanic activity during its first close encounter in (possibly) 10 million years. While much recent analysis has […]

Be ready, werewolves and witches, as well as general lovers of the night sky. The last full Moon of the year is happening on Thursday, December 4, and it will be a supermoon, meaning that it will appear brighter and larger in the sky. This effect is due to the proximity of the Moon as […]

Flying is something of a Marmite as locomotion goes – you either love it, or hate it. I myself fall into the latter category, reserving flying only for those journeys where there is no reasonable alternative (such as the new world’s longest flight of *shivers* 29 hours). I don’t hate the entire journey, just take-off. […]

Watching on-screen action makes our brains respond in a very specific way, a new study has uncovered. We don’t just see what’s happening – our brains’ touch-processing regions get activated too, so in a way, we also feel it. When you’re next at the movies, if there’s a particularly gnarly scene where a character gets hurt, […]

This scrappy piece of parchment marks a world-changing moment in human history. Completed around 1500 CE – or so we think – it is the first known map to depict Europe, Asia, and Africa alongside the coasts of the Americas. The first Europeans to set foot in North America were Norse Vikings, who sailed between Greenland […]

“Buffalo” and “bison” are sometimes used interchangeably, especially in the US, but scientifically speaking, they are very different animals. Both are large, horned beasts related to cattle, but they differ in their geographical range, appearance, behavior, and taxonomic family history. A simple (though not perfect) rule of thumb to know the difference between bison and […]

A stalagmite from a cave in Kurdistan has provided unprecedented detail on local climatic conditions from 18,000 to 7,500 years ago, as Earth was leaving the last glacial period. Lying so close to the valleys where agriculture and civilization were born, the find offers great insight into the conditions that drove their rise. Moreover, the […]

A new study has reconstructed anacondas that lived in what’s now Venezuela 12 million years ago. The fossil vertebrae reveal that anacondas were giants back in the Middle to Upper Miocene and have stayed giant ever since, an unusual trend for life on Earth. Most animals that lived between 12.4 to 5.3 million years ago […]

The Malaysian earthtiger tarantula was first described in 1891 by respected Swedish arachnologist Tamerlan Thorell. However, confusions around taxonomy have led to little being known about the wild habits of this unique-looking tarantula species.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Species known […]

Thresher sharks are among the goofiest of Chondrichthyes. With big googly eyes, they seem sweet enough at the head end, but their tails? Now they’re all business. Their enormous tails can be 3 meters (10 feet) long, accounting for around half their body length. They look like whips, and they act like whips, creating changes […]

Looking for Near-Earth objects (NEOs) has demonstrated a simple fact: there are a lot of rocks in space, and many of them come very close to Earth. We have tracked the orbit of all the biggest NEOs, but the smallest ones reflect so little light that our telescopes can only snap when they are close. […]

For the seventh time on record, a patient with both HIV and cancer has had the virus eliminated from their body. As in most previous cases, a cure came after the transfer of stem cells designed to address the cancer, rather than the HIV itself. What makes the announcement, coinciding with World AIDS Day, particularly […]

Hunting an entire herd of aurochs was no mean feat, and would have required sophisticated levels of cooperation and communication between multiple groups of ancient humans. According to a new study, the organizational skills required to pull off such a massacre were only developed around 50,000 years ago and may have helped Homo sapiens outlive […]

Studying Earth is built into the world’s space agencies’ directives. After all, Earth is a planet in the Solar System, and, unusually, it harbors life. It is, in fact, the only place in the entire cosmos that humans can live, so the more we know about it and try and secure its future, the better.  […]

But equally striking is the flourishing wildlife. Flora and fauna abound, harkening back to an America not yet touched by colonialist hands: bison roam wild (indeed, sometimes they’re positively livid); grizzly bears are born and live in safety; cougars are… well, the cougars aren’t doing too hot, to be honest, but they’re trying their best. […]

Imagine a beautiful vase filled with roses on a spring day, by an open window. A sudden gust of wind enters the room, the roses act as a sail, and the vase tumbles from its perch and onto the floor. The shards of that vase are, of course, a chaos of sizes and shapes. However, […]