Deborah Bloomfield

Homo sapiens may be the last humans standing, but we weren’t always alone. For much of our history, we coexisted with other members of our genus, and our prehistoric ancestors didn’t waste the opportunity to hook up with their Neanderthal and Denisovan relatives. Many millennia have passed since these inter-hominid affairs, yet we all still […]

A child in California has been infected with H5N1 avian flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed. This is the first such case reported in a minor in the US and brings the total number of confirmed human cases in 2024 to 55.  CDC figures as of November 22, 2024, show […]

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has announced a proposal to list three subspecies of giraffe as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and a further two species as threatened. If finalized, this would see all five entitled to federal protections that it’s hoped will help combat their decline. The proposal, which is […]

A man browsing Google Maps of the Nullarbor Plain in Southern Australia stumbled upon a strange “scar” pattern, prompting further investigation by scientists. People have discovered all sorts of oddities while browsing through Google Maps, from “aliens” and camera-hogging cats to the answer to decades-old cold cases and meteor impact sites. In this latest find, […]

Ancient Greek sailors returned home with stories of mermaids and sirens. In the 1960s, a group of submariners returned home from the Southern Ocean with a much odder tale. They had heard the ocean quack. Strange as it might sound, it was not a one-off event and it has even earned itself a quacking name, […]

There’s no getting around it: Earth has a trash problem. Particularly in the West: we throw away more than two billion – with a “b” – tonnes of the stuff every year, and only a tiny proportion of it ever gets recycled. The rest? Eternal garbage.  Of course, nobody likes living surrounded by their own […]

For more than 40 years, scientists have known of the existence of a mysterious “phantom chemical” that lurks in US drinking water. And yet, they have been unable to determine its identity – until now.  A team of researchers from the US and Switzerland have discovered the chemical chloronitramide anion (CI-N-NO2). Chloronitramide anion is a […]

Medical and technological advances have allowed more of us to survive and to live longer, healthier lives. Does this make evolution irrelevant?  In the most basic sense, evolution refers to the process of genetic change in a population over time. It occurs because gene variants are more likely to survive and prosper if they offer […]

Mosquitos get a bad rep – and for good reason. Not only can these flying insects leave a nasty bite, they are responsible for transmitting the parasite that causes malaria. However, if new research is anything to go by, mosquitoes may also provide a creative solution to the disease. By infecting mosquitoes with a genetically […]

The more we learn about planets inside and outside our Solar System, the more difficult the question “Well, where the hell are aliens then?” seems to become. As well as finding a slew of planets in the habitable zones around their stars and locating new classes of exoplanets that may be good candidates for life, […]

In a world that seems to be pretty much designed to make us feel stressed and out of balance, our lord and master the social media algorithm loves to dish us up some apparently simple solutions. One of the most recent? Adaptogens. If your “For You” page is yet to explain what on Earth they […]

This week, fat cell “memory” could help explain why weight loss can be difficult to maintain, researchers might have figured out what made the Earth’s inner core go from molten to “frozen”, and first-of-its-kind footage zooms in on the life cycle of a giant virus. Finally, meet the shark-hunting dog that spent nearly a year […]

Atmospheric rivers have been gaining a lot of media traction lately. But while atmospheric rivers have played an integral role in the water cycle long before the birth of the dinosaurs, the term was first described surprisingly recently – in 1994. It refers to the long, narrow columns of water vapor that flow through the […]

While AI may be more commonly used for stealing art and hallucinating bullshit – that’s a technical term, by the way – the last couple of years have also seen what seem to be some genuinely extraordinary feats from the nascent technology. And that’s particularly true in the field of math: where computers were once […]

Imagine walking down a dark corridor, filled with looming shadows and jump scares at every corner. Your heart is rapidly beating in your chest, and you feel twitchy and ready to flee at a moment’s notice. Then suddenly a person dripping in “blood” rushes towards you carrying a loud chainsaw. You are in a haunted […]

Many people scoff at the sheer speed with which Snow White and her prince realized they were made for each other, or at The Little Mermaid‘s Ariel for tripping over her as-yet-imaginary feet to sign a dodgy contract in pursuit of a man she’d spent about eight seconds with. But if you think Jack and […]

Some animals have a “third eye”, and some spiders have as many as eight, but what about bees? A quick glance might lead you to answer “two”, and two pretty massive ones at that, but first impressions can be deceiving. How many eyes do bees have? Bees actually have five eyes: two compound eyes and […]

There’s lots of water in Antarctica, but most of it is frozen. You’d be forgiven, then, for thinking that rivers aren’t really a thing on the continent – however, you’d be mistaken. Antarctica is home to a number of waterways (at least for a few months a year) – the longest of which, called the […]

Located in one of the most remote corners of the Central Pacific is a small, uninhabited coral reef island known as Palmyra Atoll. Composed of 50 islets measuring no more than 2 meters (7 feet) in elevation, the U-shaped Palmyra Atoll is surrounded by 6,475 hectares (16,000 acres) of shallow and submerged barrier reefs.  One […]

On the jagged coast of Scotland lies an island that has stood deserted for decades, haunted by its legacy as a biological warfare testing ground during World War II. Gruinard Island is around 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) long and a short boat ride from the shore of Ross-shire in the Inner Hebrides of western Scotland. […]