Deborah Bloomfield

In 1964, physicist Arno Allan Penzias and radio astronomer Robert Woodrow Wilson noticed an unusual noise always humming away in the background of their radio telescope observations. The noise – like static on a radio – seemed to be there, no matter what direction they pointed the telescope in the sky. At first, the two […]

The first image of a black hole was of M87*, the supermassive monster at the center of the enormous elliptical galaxy M87. The image was only possible thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, and follow-up observations have revealed more insight, including information about its magnetic field. Researchers have now seen that it is changing quite […]

When matter and antimatter collide, they turn into pure energy. Energy can also spontaneously turn into matter and antimatter pairs. If this happens in a vacuum under a strong electric field, this is known as the Schwinger effect. Researchers have now found a way to simulate this fascinating phenomenon in a much easier way. The […]

Surströmming is a regular cast member of viral videos where fame-hungry content creators crack open a can and (more often than not) proceed to gag, choke, and splutter as they attempt to eat this unusual-looking slurry of fish. But what exactly is this curious delicacy, and why does it smell so notoriously terrible? Fortunately, science […]

Back in 2019, researchers observed a collision between two black holes of wildly different masses. New analysis has revealed that the collision produced a massive recoil, sending the newly formed black hole moving so fast that it is no longer bound by the gravity of the globular cluster where it was born. The rest of […]

The Moon and the Earth have been dancing around each other since the Moon was first created 4.5 billion years ago, likely in a collision between planet Theia and Earth. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. But the orbits of these two bodies […]

A new NASA study has found that the Sun’s activity is ramping up, reversing the trend and surprising astronomers. Humans have known about sunspots since around 800 BCE, when ancient Chinese astronomers recorded observations of them in I Ching, the Book of Changes.  “Sunspots are areas where the magnetic field is about 2,500 times stronger […]

Earth is pretty special, and as far as we know, the only place in the universe with life. But how special is it really? There are billions upon billions of planets in the Milky Way alone; shouldn’t life be common? Maybe, but even if life is common, how common are advanced civilizations? Some new work […]

A week ago, a stunning total lunar eclipse was seen by a record-breaking number of people on the planet. This week, there is a solar eclipse, and it’s going to be the complete opposite. Eclipses often come in pairs, but these two are truly an odd couple. The lunar eclipse of September 7 was total, […]

You might be surprised to learn that the art of creating clay pots predates the development of agriculture. That’s right: our ancestors figured out pottery way back during the Last Glacial Maximum, when huge ice sheets shrouded the land and the first farmers were still millennia in the future. The oldest examples of clay pot […]

Around 10,000 years before the Egyptians developed their sophisticated embalming practices, people in Southeast Asia were already mummifying the dead. According to new research, the mortuary tradition may have been developed by the direct descendants of the very first modern humans to reach the easternmost region of Eurasia, and persists to this day among certain […]

It’s been a busy year so far for Yellowstone, with over 3.5 million recreational visits to the USA’s oldest national park up until the end of August. With all those visitors comes a whole lot of trash – some of which you’d expect to see, and some of it… well, not quite so much. In […]

It was April 1989, and the International Gold Council in New York was on the warpath. The culprit: the late AK Dewdney, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Western Ontario – and the man who, in one recent column for Scientific American, had thrown into jeopardy the entire basis of global civilization. […]

The parent world of asteroid Ryugu, the space rock visited by the Japanese mission Hayabusa2, had flowing water for over a billion years. This was not at all expected when the spacecraft collected and brought back the sample, and it adds to the record of evidence that suggests a much more peculiar early Solar System. […]

Flying foxes are some of the largest bats in the world. With a body the size of a cat and a wingspan that would make an eagle envious, these megabats are an incredible example of how mammals have developed a variety of adaptations to conquer the skies. Scientifically known as Pteropus, flying foxes are a […]

NASA has responded to claims – popularized by Harvard professor Avi Loeb – that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is a spacecraft sent to the Solar System by an advanced alien civilization. On July 1, 2025, astronomers spotted an object moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and […]

Planet Earth’s oceans hold a mindblowing quantity of gold, enough to satisfy the greed of Smaug many, many times over. Scientists have estimated that there’s around one gram of gold dissolved in every 100 million metric tons of seawater in the Atlantic and North Pacific. In other parts of the world, such as the Mediterranean […]

Last year was supposed to be when humanity went back to the Moon, this time as a prelude to staying. At the time, the schedule appeared improbable; now it looks silly to have ever suggested it. After the failures of Starship earlier this year, many people expressed doubts that America would put humans back on […]

On Monday 15 September 2025, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center issued a G3 geomagnetic storm warning, the result of a large coronal hole sending increased solar winds at Earth. Over the weekend, the northern lights were visible as far south as Maine and Connecticut, USA, as a moderate geomagnetic […]

Doctors in the United States have documented what is believed to be the longest-known case of COVID-19, lasting an extraordinary 776 days before the patient’s death. The unnamed man, who was living with HIV, shows how weakened immunity can allow the coronavirus to linger, mutate, and adapt in ways rarely seen in healthy people. The […]