Deborah Bloomfield

Humans learned the hard way in 1908 that sometimes classical conditioning can come back to bite you in the arse – or, as it were, shove your kids into a river. The tale goes that a “hero” dog who was rewarded with a steak for saving a drowning child decided to make it into a […]

Life in the city can be dangerous, but one way you don’t expect to perish on the streets of London is by drowning, and least of all in beer. Yes, yes, , but this horrifying nightmare became reality on Monday October 17, 1814, when the city was literally flooded with beer. The disaster began at […]

Astronomers have been studying star WOH G64 for a while. It’s a red supergiant in the galaxy next door, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and it is believed to be in the last stages before going supernova. Researchers have now broken a record by actually photographing it in detail – this had never been done before. […]

We know that viruses infect cells, but what does that process actually look like? Sure, diagrams can be helpful, but there’s nothing quite like seeing the real thing. Trouble is, doing so with the kind of microscopes you get in a classroom can be pretty difficult – but in some first-of-its-kind footage, researchers have successfully […]

A new study has thrown into question the link between cannabis use and the development of psychosis spectrum symptoms in adolescents – though not in the way you might be hoping for. While the association between the two factors remains solid, what is now less certain is the direction between them – in other words: […]

Solar Orbiter, a European Space Agency mission with support from NASA, has been studying the Sun like never before. It just delivered some incredible new observations of the Sun, which include the highest-resolution view of the full disk in visible light. Get ready to see our star in unprecedented detail. The spacecraft’s Polarimetric and Helioseismic […]

Nutritionally speaking, tuna is an outstanding source of nourishment, offering high-quality protein, fatty acids for heart and brain health, and essential vitamins and minerals like vitamin D, B12, and selenium. However, not to mention its huge sustainability concerns, this nutrient-loaded fish has a major downside: it’s packed with mercury, a neurotoxic heavy metal. How much […]

Satellite imaging captured four tropical storms present over Southeast Asia at the same time. The phenomenon is not something that scientists have recorded before in the month of November.  On November 11, NASA’s EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) imager on the DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) satellite saw something not seen in this month of […]

An important milestone has been reached on the journey to map every cell type in the human body. The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) project, which has been running for eight years so far, today unveiled several significant steps forward, including the best-ever map of the human gut and a unique insight into how our skeletons […]

NASA’s Curiosity rover is ready to move out of the valley of Gediz Vallis and travel slow and steady for a month to a fascinating new area of great interest on Mount Sharp, a 5-kilometer (3-mile) tall mountain at the center of Gale crater. The new area has been called the boxwork, and views from […]

The sole dolphin living in the Baltic Sea isn’t letting the lack of company silence him. Quite the opposite – he’s chatting away, emitting bursts of sounds of the type members of his species use to communicate, rather than to catch food, but with more diversity. The observations provide an insight into the psychology of […]

At a well-known hangout of Neanderthals, archaeologists have uncovered a structure they believe was used to cook up a form of prehistoric glue. The discovery was made in Vanguard Cave, part of Gorham’s Cave complex, in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. Located on the seafront overlooking the western Mediterranean, the caverns are thought to […]

There are a lot of numbers in science that are so big as to be mind-boggling. The number of atoms or molecules in a substance is an example of that. Physicists seem to delight in the weird and wonderful ways to convey these kinds of numbers, and one example that has been repeated for several […]

A planet has been found orbiting a three-million-year-old star. Better still, it transits across the star’s face from our perspective, offering opportunities to see the starlight passing through the planet’s atmosphere. The star is three times younger than any other previously observed to have a transiting planet – and since planets are thought to form […]

The Minoan Civilization of Crete, often hailed as Europe’s first literate society, left behind a strange writing system that continues to mystify modern scholars, remaining an unsolved enigma to this day. Sometimes regarded as the first true European civilization, the Minoan culture rose to prominence on the Greek island of Crete between 3100 to 1100 […]

The emperor scorpion, Pandinus imperator, is one of the largest scorpions in the world. At a whopping 20 centimeters (7.9 inches), it carries around a huge set of pincers that can crush a mouse to death. It figures that such an arachnid might be hiding a few tricks up its enormous sleeves, one of which […]

The first-ever example of an ancient Egyptian petroglyph depicting a zodiac sign has been discovered at a rock art site on the western bank of the Nile. Consisting of a crudely engraved creature with the head of a goat and the body of a fish, the image has been identified as Capricornus, the mythological figure […]

Lakes with impressive depths or unique geological features that obscure their true scale are often, misleadingly, labeled as “bottomless lakes”. Despite lakes being found at staggering elevations and being able to produce their own tsunamis, they still lack one feature: an actual bottomless depth. While no lake can truly claim to be bottomless, some appear […]

If you too suffered through the cinematic experience that was The Happening, you’ll know it’s hard to feel that threatened by a plant – but there is a tree out there that seems hell-bent on cruelty. The manchineel has been declared “the most dangerous tree in the world” by the Guinness Book Of World Records, […]

Just over 3,200 years ago, it must have felt as if humanity was reaching never-before-seen heights. Across the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Near East, a collection of complex and highly organized civilizations became interconnected through diplomacy, trade, and exchanges. Cultures boomed and cities rose. Then, it all fell apart – and no one […]