Deborah Bloomfield

In November 2005, Alex Simpson was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Her diagnosis wasn’t good. At first, everything seemed fine – until she was 2 months old. Then, the problems began: Alex was crying 20-22 hours a day; she was having trouble digesting milk – and when her parents took her to the hospital, the reason […]

Astronomers have calculated the risk posed by interstellar visitors such as ‘Oumuamua and 3I/ATLAS hitting the Earth. They conclude that, unlikely as such an event is within anyone’s lifetime, it’s possible to calculate the most vulnerable places and times. Before revealing their conclusions (still to pass peer review), we’d like to stress that the difference […]

As bird flu continues to cause problems around the world, a patient in the US has tested positive for H5N5, a subtype of avian influenza never before seen in humans. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. The Washington State Department of Health […]

The much-loved astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan once recorded a message for the future astronauts who will one day set foot on Mars. Sagan was a big advocate for the exploration of the Red Planet. Co-founder of The Planetary Society, he believed we should go to the planet to study it as an analog […]

Given to the United States by France in 1884, the Statue of Liberty has become one of the world’s most iconic landmarks. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Picture it, and you probably see its distinctive shade of green (though it hasn’t always […]

This week, a long-standing mystery of how lupus is linked to the Epstein-Barr virus has been solved, the first radio detection from interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has been observed by astronomers and the first coronal mass ejection from a star that is not our Sun, bumblebees are doing Morse code now, and sperm whales are using […]

There are many features on a car that have a clear purpose (even if it seems like some people don’t know what the stick on the side of the steering wheel is for), but spend enough time in one and you’ll notice things that have no obvious explanation. What’s that weird thing on the dashboard? […]

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and CEO of private space firm SpaceX, has weighed in on the topic of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, and the hypothesis that it may be an alien mothership (spoiler alert: it isn’t). On July 1, 2025, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System spotted an object hurtling through our […]

As the search for life on Mars continues – with promising potential biosignatures recently identified by NASA at the Bright Angel formation – there are a few scientists out there who think we may have found life on the Red Planet already. According to four authors of a recent letter to the journal Science, NASA’s […]

Acting like a natural time capsule, permafrost can perfectly preserve the prehistoric remnants of the Ice Age, including species that have fallen into extinction. For the first time, scientists have successfully recovered RNA from incredibly preserved woolly mammoths, offering fresh insights into the biology of these long-lost giants. DNA – very, very old DNA – […]

There’s no denying it: We need to radically transform our relationship to resources and consumption if we want to combat climate change. One way to do that is to develop new low-carbon technologies, but there’s still a challenge here that’s often overlooked. Take electric cars, for example. They’re the quintessential representation of efforts to transition […]

What could be more festive than a big bowl of Mini Eggs at Easter? Brown, white, green, and speckled, they reflect the diversity of egg décor we see in nature, but how far back do pretty eggs go? Were dinosaur eggs colorful? The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or […]

Some species capture the internet’s attention more than most, from feisty pygmy hippos to giant penguin chicks. One group of spiders, however, has mesmerized those on the World Wide Web with their hypnotic dance moves. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. In […]

For the first time, researchers have confirmed a human death caused by “meat allergy”, an uncommon condition that is caused by tick bites. The death occurred in an otherwise healthy, 47-year-old male airline pilot from New Jersey, USA, who in the summer of 2024, had been on a camping trip with his family when he […]

The longest land border in the world is between Canada and the United States, stretching 8,891 kilometers (5,525 miles). From afar, it appears to be a relatively boring border – clean, crisp, and dead-straight – but a closer look reveals this territorial boundary is very strange. The US-Canada border has two main bits: the long […]

We love a good astronomy picture, thanks to prizes like the Astronomy Photographer Of The Year, the quality of astrophotography continues to grow with ever better composition and ideas. Yesterday, however, will be remembered as the day astrophotography had its bar raised by literal kilometers. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please […]

It’s off! The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission is on its way to Mars. It was sent into orbit by New Glenn, the heavy-lift launch vehicle from Blue Origin, the private space firm headed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The rocket flew successfully after a previous scrubbed launch on November 13. The […]

An engraving on an ancient silver cup from the West Bank may represent the oldest known illustration of the creation of the cosmos. The item, known as the ˁAin Samiya goblet, was discovered in 1970 in the tomb of a high-ranking Bronze-Age individual who resided in the Judean Hills, and may have been interred to […]

The pursuit of becoming a world-first fossil is one of dogged determination. The majority of life on Earth doesn’t get preserved, so you’ve got to die just right, bathed in just the right conditions. For one filter-feeding pterosaur, that meant spending an eternity encased in vomit. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. […]

On October 8, golden comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) had its closest pass to the Sun. It was just 49 million kilometers (31 million miles) away, closer than Mercury, a distance that very few comets manage to escape intact. Many of us celebrated the successful survival of this chunk of interplanetary ice when it became visible […]