Deborah Bloomfield

Were you to find yourself holding the tail-end of a certain parasite that infects whales, you could be pulling for 40 meters (131 feet) before you got the disgusting thing out. That’s the eye-watering standard set by Tetragonoporus calyptocephalus, previously known as Polygonoporus giganticus, a giant tapeworm that lives deep inside the guts of whales.  […]

When considering your future plans, how much weight should you give to the possibility of an asteroid (or comet) striking the Earth in what ought to be your lifetime? Probably not a lot, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. How often do asteroids strike? Some people like to compare science to magic, and one […]

There are plenty of rules in US National Parks that are to be expected: don’t vandalize, don’t stray off permitted paths (we’re looking at you, Pierce Brosnan), and please, please don’t touch the wildlife. It turns out though, that there are a whole bunch of other regulations that are super specific – although still very […]

We’ve seen Game Of Thrones and secretly dreamed about what it would be like to have an absolutely massive dire wolf as a pet. However, since the reality is that they’ve been extinct for over 10,000 years, we might have to content ourselves with some big wolf watching from a respectable distance. But exactly what species […]

In 1878, the James R Bentley was headed for Chicago when it sank in Lake Huron. The crew were rescued, but its shipment was not: bucket-loads of a rye variety that no longer exists today. However, the capsizing schooner would not be the seeds’ end, as 145 years later a team of scientists have retrieved […]

Exercise has undeniable benefits for body and mind, but a new study from engineers at MIT has found that the gains could reach far deeper. The team’s results show how physical activity that contracts the muscles leads to the release of biological signalers that could have the power to repair damaged nerve cells. Uncovering the […]

In an incredible breakthrough, scientists have created a mouse using ancient genetic tools older than animal life. By taking a gene from single-celled lifeforms and introducing it into mouse cells, researchers generated stem cells, which, when injected into a developing embryo, helped give rise to a living, breathing mouse. Hundreds of millions of years ago, […]

Between 1974 and 1978, a long and grisly conflict between two factions of chimps was documented in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park by the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall. It came to be known as the Gombe Chimpanzee War or the Four-Year War. Some researchers have been uneasy with the label of “war” – we’ll go into […]

Scientists challenging the problem-solving capacities of rare birds of prey on the Falkland Islands have found them astonishingly quick to learn when food is on offer – and remember those skills a year later. The finding supports Darwin’s assessment of the birds’ remarkable intelligence when he visited during the voyage of the Beagle, and also […]

Regular physical exercise is associated with all kinds of benefits, not least protecting the brain from the damaging effects of aging and helping to stave off dementia. But exercise is not accessible to all people, so researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California Los Angeles are investigating whether these […]

Earth’s magnetic poles aren’t set in stone (or ice). Over the past centuries, Earth’s magnetic north has been drifting east at an accelerating pace, shifting thousands of kilometers across the globe. The massive, compass-wobbling trend is being driven by vast oceans of liquid metal in Earth’s interior and some fundamental principles of electromagnetism. Since the […]

The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle accelerator at CERN, has a big announcement: They have observed top quarks in the collision between lead ions for the very first time. This observation is another step forward in understanding the conditions present just a fraction of a second after the beginning of […]

While there might be a pretty incredible array of creatures living on planet Earth at the moment, let’s take a second to wind back the clock and have a closer look at perhaps one of the most appealing clades that existed back in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of Earth’s history. Meet the Anurognathidae. Pterosaurs […]

An international team of astronomers has detected a record-breaking planet orbiting a Sun-like star. The system is called K2-360 and it has two known planets K2-360 b and K2-360 c. The innermost orbits the star in just 21 hours. It is an ultra-short period super-Earth, rocky but larger than our planet. That is not all; […]

Photographers from around the globe have been getting up close and personal with some of the natural world’s best and most interesting subjects in a bid to become Close-up Photographer of The Year 2024. From insects and intimate landscapes to underwater scenes and alien-like fungi, we take a look through a small selection of the […]

An exceptionally preserved fossil fills in an enormous gap in the evolution of pterosaurs, the largest animals capable of flight. Of all the major reptile orders of the age of dinosaurs, pterosaurs may be the least understood. It’s puzzling enough how they managed to take off while being the largest flying creatures until airplanes became […]

Eating spicy food can spark a variety of reactions: a euphoric buzz, a racing heart, a tingling tongue, gastrointestinal apocalypse, existential dread, and tears of pain/joy. A gullet full of chili-loaded foods can also, unusually, cause a runny nose. What makes food spicy? A chemical called capsaicin is usually the culprit when we feel the […]

Africa is home to a rich array of carnivorous animals, from ferocious felids like lions and cheetahs to smaller creatures like foxes and mongoose. However, many such predators are also some of the continent’s most endangered – perhaps none more so than the highland-dwelling Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis). An ancient African species… You’d be forgiven […]