Deborah Bloomfield

Some stellar objects simply don’t have what it takes to become stars. Namely, they are not massive enough to start nuclear fusion at their cores. These are brown dwarfs. There are a few thousand known brown dwarfs in the Milky Way and we have never seen any beyond our galaxy. They are cool objects, which […]

Nazaré on the coast of Portugal is famous for summoning some of the biggest surfable waves on the planet thanks to the unique deepsea geology that sits on the seafloor. Elsewhere, however, bigger waves have been reported (although good luck surfing them). Sebastian Steudtner earned the world record for the largest wave ever surfed on […]

Once upon a time, the Mediterranean Sea turned into a vast salty basin for around half a million years. Hints of this geological upset can still be seen today – and there’s a chance a similar cataclysm might happen again in the distant future.  The event is known as the Messinian salinity crisis. So the […]

Finding new ways to travel through space is not easy and this is why tests are important – even though some snags might happen. NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System was launched in April, and in early September was fully deployed. The system appears to be working, but as one of the four booms deployed […]

Virtual worlds, ChatGPT, and AI seem to be all the rage in 2024, with all sorts of developments shaking up not just the technology space, but having wider implications for medicine, politics, and even the judicial system. Now, researchers from Swiss startup FinalSpark have combined a virtual world with tiny human mini brains and built […]

There are an awful lot of bad ways to die accidentally. Just look at the man who fell into a Yellowstone hot spring, or these five unfortunate people. Possibly the worst accident in history, at least amongst diving accidents, took place in the North Sea in 1983. Making dives deep into the ocean is a […]

In February 2021, I was walking home alone along an unlit path when something strange happened. It was snowing, cold, and extremely dark. I had chosen to take this lonely route as a shortcut that led me from the university campus I worked on at the time to the suburbs of the city, but to […]

Researchers have made significant strides towards restoring brain function after someone has suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. The advancements came after Chinese scientists revived the brains of pigs that had gone without blood circulation for nearly an hour, and the secret to their success came from an unexpected source – the liver. Sudden cardiac arrest […]

Equinox (aka Nox), a peregrine falcon who rose to fame on a popular webcam feed, was released to the wild last week after undergoing surgery to repair his broken wing. While the operation appeared to be a success, his return to the wild has encountered a hiccup.  Nox was born to two peregrine falcons, Annie […]

In a delightful piece of information that has so far escaped our attention; a small team of mollusks are used to monitor the water in Warsaw, Poland. Monitoring the water for pollutants is of course important work. Modern-day equipment is used to do so. But for one part of the job, in part to protect […]

A recent study into strength and balance ability in relation to aging has concluded that, due to the gradual deterioration of muscle, a few simple tests that you can perform at home could accurately predict the age of your body. With roughly 14 million older US adults reporting a fall at some point the previous […]

In 1978, geophysicist Glen Penfield noticed a series of unusual features while poring over a magnetic survey map of the Gulf of Mexico, while working for Mexican oil company Pemex. To him, a particular semi-circle arc he saw on the map was suggestive of an impact crater. He was not aware of it, but another […]

Scientists are really out there making electromagnetic vortex cannons and sound waves that only travel in one direction while the general public is still struggling to realize that staplers have a second setting. To be completely fair, it is easy to miss if you haven’t had an entry-level job in an area that requires a […]

Sometimes conspiracy theorists believe they have a “gotcha” that blows apart a whole concept – apart from the fact that the most basic of searches will prove them wrong. We recently covered the unveiling of the new spacesuit that will be donned by the astronauts who will go back to the Moon in a few […]

A multidisciplinary team has proposed a process by which the wheel might have been invented that does not rely on a single moment of insight from some ancient genius. Instead, they suggest that the invention could have come in a series of steps (or perhaps we should say were made along a gradual slope). The […]

A naval hero was struck down in the Napoleonic War when Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson wound up on the receiving end of a musket ball. The ship was damaged and with no quick way of making it to England, the crew had to get creative with a way of storing his body so it would survive […]

Keeping up with your COVID-19 vaccines is a good idea for lots of reasons – not least the fact that the virus keeps throwing new variants our way. A new study may have added one more to that list by finding that receiving multiple mRNA shots could boost antibody levels in the nose, often the […]

A beloved bear, known as the world’s most famous grizzly, has died after being struck by a vehicle at Grand Teton National Park in western Wyoming, part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Grizzly 399 died on Tuesday night, October 22, on a highway in Snake River Canyon south of Jackson, according to the National Park […]

A newly discovered species of mammal has provided a snapshot of terrestrial North America that goes back 70–75 million years ago, a time slice that’s typically not well known. Thankfully, Colorado preserves it well, and this is where a team of scientists retrieved fossil evidence of a Late Cretaceous “swamp dweller”. The fossil remains included […]

A small, implantable device that detects a drop in respiration that can signal an opioid overdose and automatically administers the lifesaving drug naloxone – aka Narcan – has been tested successfully in animals. It even has the ability to alert the emergency services, and the researchers say the same kind of technology could be applied […]