Deborah Bloomfield

Beyond the physics we know exists lurk many possibilities that have yet to be proven, including a fifth force to add to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Our failure to confirm its existence suggests any fifth force is probably fairly weak, but it could still explain some puzzling aspects to the […]

What a week it has been for the Sun and Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). The Sun has released multiple highly energetic flares, including the most powerful this solar cycle, as well as several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – fast eruptions of plasma pushed across interplanetary space. The flares and CMEs have come right at Earth, […]

Even the longest-lived parts of continents don’t survive forever, which is why geologists and paleontologists have so much trouble reconstructing Earth’s first billion years. The reasons for this are still not well understood – however, a study of the forces affecting the North China Craton provides some likely answers. Cratons are the oldest parts of […]

A 16-year-old from the US appears to have become the first person to beat the game of Tetris, clearing the final level and causing it to reset to level 0. Tetris has been around for a while, so you might have assumed it would be complete by now. After all, it’s not like a game […]

We tend to think that poor sleep is something we can just shake off – a couple of early nights and you’ll have caught up, right? But maybe it’s not so simple. New research tracked one woman’s activity for 19 weeks, revealing the impact that daily life could be having on our minds even days […]

The results are in – the winner of Fat Bear Week 2024 is none other than everyone’s favorite mama bear, Grazer.  This is the second year in a row that Grazer (more formally known as 128) has been declared Katmai National Park and Preserve’s chonky champion, beating out her rival Chunk (32) to achieve 71,248 […]

Researchers have released the most accurate and consistent map of the magnetic fields in the Sun’s corona – its tenuous but incredibly hot atmosphere. The magnetic fields play a role in the heating of the corona, which is hundreds of times hotter than the surface of the Sun, reaching millions of degrees. It also determines […]

You might have already had the impressive, albeit slightly uncomfortable, experience of meeting Ameca, one of the “world’s most advanced human-shaped robots” that can mimic a range of human expressions. Well, she’s now got a pal called Azi. With the aid of artificial intelligence (AI), the couple can share expressive conversations that are equal parts […]

Researchers studying hydrothermal vents in the depths of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench have found tiny inorganic structures performing energy conversions associated with life. There are a number of ideas about how life began on Earth, with the most widely favored being that it emerged near hydrothermal vents in the oceans billions of years in […]

A new crowd of deep-sea weirdos and alien-like lifeforms have been captured on camera by scientists exploring the depths of the ocean around American Samoa. The beautiful footage (below) comes from the E Mamana Ou Gataifale II expedition by the Ocean Exploration Trust, NOAA Ocean Exploration, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and the Woods […]

We live in unprecedented times. With global average temperatures soaring to levels last recorded… well, never, extreme weather events set to disrupt the lives of basically everyone from now on, and sea levels rising, it’s hard to imagine how societies worldwide going to cope in the near future. But perhaps we can take some cues […]

Early modern Europe was no place for witches. Over the course of about 300 years up until the end of the 18th century, some 90,000 of the spell-casting hags were put on trial, with half being burned at the stake, thrown off cliffs, or put to death via other horrific means – and all because […]

Plunging thousands of meters beneath the ice in Alaska’s Ruth Glacier is possibly the deepest gorge in North America. Known as the “Great Gorge” because of its vast size, the icy corridor has proven difficult to accurately measure, but new research might just have changed that. Currently, Hells Canyon, on the border of Oregon and […]

You may have noticed, on a lazy day spent in a swimming pool, that it is somewhat easier to hold your breath for longer when you are underwater.  This may seem weird, given the increased pressure pushing on your chest. But it’s a phenomenon, and one that we share with our mammal friends, known simply […]

The scale of Hurricane Milton, the Category 5 storm currently predicted to make landfall as a Category 3 storm along the west-central coast of Florida late on Wednesday or early Thursday morning, has been captured in footage from the International Space Station (ISS). Several angles of the hurricane were captured, by cameras attached to the […]

Hurricane Milton, expected to be one of the most destructive Atlantic storms in recent years, is currently traveling across the Gulf of Mexico and is set to make landfall tonight (Wednesday, October 9) on the west coast of Florida around Tampa and Sarasota. As of Wednesday morning, Hurricane Milton has returned to being classed as […]

The winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry are David Baker for computational protein design, plus Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for an AI model used for protein structure prediction. The prize is worth 11 million Swedish kronor (around US$1 million at time of publishing), half of which will go to Baker and […]

The Natural History Museum, London’s Wildlife Photographer Of The Year competition has announced its winner – and the breathtaking snap offers the chance to immerse yourself in the magical underwater world of the western toad tadpole. Now in its 60th year, Wildlife Photographer of the Year celebrates the diversity and beauty of life on Earth, […]

A new study has proposed the latest in a long line of bleak solutions to why we haven’t yet found signs of intelligent life out there in the universe. The universe is a big place. With 200 billion trillion (ish) stars in the universe and 13.7 billion years that have elapsed since it all began, […]

Where in space would you explore if money were no object? What burning scientific question would you want to see answered? Professor Brian Cox has a clear answer about that. He would like to send two missions out to the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, he told us.  The distant planets have only been visited […]