Deborah Bloomfield

This week on Break It Down: clues inside Pompeii victims’ casts reveal they’re not who we thought they were, the frogs of Chernobyl are doing just fine, cat physics and a crime of authorship, the North Atlantic is getting saltier and saltier, good news for double jabs, and a DNA scientist who picked up the […]

The summer of 1946 saw a lot of shocking scenes. There were the atomic bomb tests that tore up the waters off the Marshall Islands, leaving parts of the region more radioactive than Chernobyl. There were the bombs themselves, great hunks of metal that would demonstrate, for the first time, what this horrific technology could […]

America’s freshwater rivers and lakes are losing their secret weapon: freshwater mussels. As an invaluable part of nature’s clean-up crew, their absence could have a nasty knock-on effect on countless bodies of water across the US and beyond.  To highlight the importance of these shelled beings, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) recently shared […]

For the first time ever, researchers have uncovered the mummified remains of a woolly rhinoceros with a big old hump on the back of its neck. Curiously absent in all other known specimens of the Ice Age megafauna, this fatty bulge attests to the remarkable accuracy of ancient cave paintings depicting rhinos with hunched backs. […]

The formation of planets is not completely understood, but it is believed that it is not just gravity pulling matter together. Magnetism in the protoplanetary disk, too, is seen as a player in the formation of small and large bodies. Meteorite samples agree with this idea for the inner Solar System, but we had no […]

In 1975, a paper was published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters that was co-authored by a cat. This wasn’t a joke, at least initially, but rather a response to one of the journal’s policies and the challenges of making changes before the days of word processing technology. The tale of F.D.C. Willard, feline […]

Astronomers have lost a star. This is not carelessness, but the possible discovery of a rare stellar event in the Andromeda galaxy. A red supergiant star got brighter and brighter,as if it was about to go supernova – and then dramatically dimmed, disappearing from view from most telescopes. Researchers believe they may have caught a […]

The Chief Executive Officer of COP29, Elnur Soltanov, has appeared to discuss investment opportunities in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas operations with a man posing as an investor in a secretly recorded video.  The filming, reported by the BBC, sinks the already low expectations many people had for meaningful actions against the climate crisis to be […]

Human evolution is complex and fascinating, but it is filled with various terms and names related to past humans and hominin species that can get quite confusing. One example of this is the famous Cro-Magnon people who lived in Europe around the time of the last Ice Age (c. 40,000 to 10,000 years ago). Although […]

The “world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist” has sold a portrait of Alan Turing – the codebreaking trailblazer of modern computer science – for over $1 million. The sale marks the first work of art by a humanoid robot to be sold at auction (although, technically, the money will go into the pockets of the robot’s […]

The police department in Yemassee, South Carolina, has warned locals to keep their windows and doors secure after 43 rhesus macaques escaped from a nearby research facility. “At approximately 1pm on Wednesday November 6, 2024, the Yemassee Police Department received an alert from Alpha Genesis regarding the escape of numerous Rhesus Macaque primates from their […]

When hairy mammals feel something on their back, they’ll pull out the “wet dog shakes”. If you’ve ever been within the splash zone of a dog just getting out of the pool, you’ll likely have been on the receiving end of its efficacy. We’ve all seen it, but the neural mechanisms underpinning the behavior have […]

Many grim-looking (and smelling) balls washed up on the beaches of Sydney, Australia in October. First believed to be balls of tar, further analysis and chemical tests have revealed them to be far more disgusting than that. Last month, eight beaches in Sydney, including the famous Bondi Beach, had to be closed in order to […]

Combine big dark eyes, a tall body, beautiful feathers that perfectly mirror a tree branch, an enormous mouth, and a loud, terrifying call – what do you get? It’s time to meet the biggest ghost bird in South America. What is a ghost bird? The ghost bird in question is actually a species known as […]

In 1985, a biochemistry scientist was murdered at her home in southern California. It was a horrific crime that would go without prosecution for 14 years. That is, until the very research she had brought to her employer just before her death pinpointed the murderer. “Without advances in DNA, this murder might have gone unprosecuted. […]

A team of researchers has produced vortices within a supersolid, confirming superfluid behavior within this state of matter. As well as all the states of matter you learned about in school – solids, liquids, and gases – there are plasmas, time crystals, Bose-Einstein condensates, and superfluids. Adding to an already long list are supersolids. Advertisement […]

In our attempts to identify how human culture differs from that of other animals we have been focusing on the wrong things, a new paper argues. What is distinctive is how flexible our culture is, allowing development in many directions, rather than a capacity to build on previously transmitted cultural behaviors. Humans have spent so […]

Mars is a planet divided in two. The southern hemisphere is made of highlands, marked with many large craters, volcanoes, and canyons. The northern hemisphere is instead marked by smooth lowlands. The Red Planet had a wet past and it is believed to have had an ocean covering the northern hemisphere. New data from the […]

The private jets of the rich and famous are becoming a growing burden on the environment. New research has shown that the annual carbon emissions from private aviation increased by 46 percent between 2019 and 2023, significantly contributing to the growing climate crisis. Private jets are used by 0.003 percent of the world’s population, yet […]

The surprising identities of some of the doomed inhabitants of ancient Pompeii have been revealed by a new analysis of their DNA, re-writing the life histories of these unfortunate souls. Based on their findings, the study authors suggest that certain long-standing narratives regarding some of the Roman city’s residents are wide of the mark, and […]