Deborah Bloomfield

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) are bright releases of energy caused by a supermassive black hole having a snack. The snack in question is usually a star that got so close it was ripped apart. Part of the snack is thrown out, but the rest of the stellar plasma forms a hot accretion disk around the […]

Eel reproduction was a famous animal mystery that was solved back in 2022, but did you know that there are lots of animals that humans have never seen give birth? For some species like snow leopards, we’ve been able to witness births in captivity, but for other animals we don’t have the first clue where […]

Quick pop quiz: how many moons does the Earth have? If you said one, you are correct – but Earth occasionally picks up quasi-moons, which are not gravitationally bound to our planet but share our orbit for a time and are influenced by our gravity during their orbit around the Sun. But as well as […]

A distinctive pattern of brain activity that fires up when we let our minds wander has been identified in a new study. The researchers found that patterns called “sharp-wave ripples”, which originate in the brain’s memory centers, seem to happen more often when our brains are left to start making stuff up. The human brain […]

On May 21, startup BrainBridge unveiled its concept for a world-first head transplant system, promising to combine artificial intelligence with the latest in robotics to literally remove a human head and put it on a new body. If everything works as intended, once the head is in place, the person will apparently be able to […]

Corneous scales are a type of skin appendage most associated with reptiles, but they are thought to have made fur and feathers possible, thus playing a big part in our own evolution. A new fossil provides evidence they evolved in the Permian era, before the first major split in land-dwelling vertebrates’ family tree. Few things […]

The US remains a deeply religious – and deeply Christian – place, especially compared to other high-income “Western” countries. However, dig into the data and you’ll find the nation’s religiosity varies wildly from state-to-state and contains a fair amount of diversity. According to the 2020 US Religion Census, the states with the highest percentage of […]

A new study on toxicity in gaming has found that 69 percent of gamers admit to smurfing, despite hating it when others smurf against them.  The uninitiated may be wondering what smurfing is, or perhaps are envisioning 69 percent of gamers daubing themselves in blue and replacing all their verbs with “smurf” for the duration […]

The planet Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, give or take, and it’s changed a lot in that time. What started as a ball of molten, churning magma eventually chilled out and developed a few small tectonic plates; a few billion years later or so the planet was bedecked in various formations of […]

Cats come in a glorious variety of colors and coat patterns, and back in 2007, a brand-new flavor of feline appeared in Finland, looking like the black printer ink had run out. Named after a type of licorice popular in the country, scientists have now figured out the genetic basis for these distinctive and delicious-looking […]

NASA is, as always, looking into the next generation of thrusters to enable ever-more-ambitious space missions. One idea currently moving to phase II of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) program is a Pulsed Plasma Rocket (PPR).  The PPR “uses a fission-based nuclear power system to rapidly cause a phase change in a fuel projectile […]

Freezers are important inventions. Whether they are in a domestic environment or a professional scientific laboratory, freezers play a vital role in helping preserve objects and substances that would otherwise perish beyond use. It is no surprise that a faulty freezer can cause catastrophic loss if not caught quickly. As with any technology, freezer failures […]

There is a problem (or not, for fans of being alive) within physics, in that the universe appears finely tuned for life – at least of the kind we find on Earth – to emerge and thrive. If gravity was substantially weaker than it is (and it’s already pretty weak, just ask any magnet), stars […]

Any dog owner will know that when their four legged friend looks up at them with big puppy dog eyes it’s pretty impossible to resist. Research from 2019 suggested that dogs evolved more complex facial muscles compared to wolves and other wild canid species so they could mimic the expression of their humans to encourage […]

Over 200 people, including more than 60 children and infants, have entered a landmark legal battle against the South Korean government over their response (or lack thereof) to climate change. Four cases between 2020 and 2023 were merged and put in front of South Korea’s Constitutional Court last month. As reported by Nature, the South […]

In 1989 and 1990, a pair of 1-million-year-old skulls belonging to an unknown human species were unearthed in Yunyang District of Hubei province, Central China. A third similar skull was found nearby in 2022, but the mystery didn’t become any less hazy; were they Homo erectus or early Homo sapiens? Might they even be related […]

As you read these words, do you hear them being narrated inside your head? If so, whose voice are you listening to? Chances are you probably do experience each word as though it were literally being read to you by some miniature being who lives inside your brain. Research has shown that the majority of […]

General anesthesia has been performed countless times since it was first developed in the late 1840s. Its introduction into medicine was revolutionary, allowing surgeons to perform increasingly complicated procedures on patients who no longer had to endure painful surgery while awake. However, would you believe me if I told you that, 180 or so years […]

Behold, the tiny arms of a new species of abelisaurid dinosaur, Koleken inakayali. Retrieved from La Colonia Formation in Patagonia, it dates back 70 million years and has an impressively miniature set of arms. Think T. rex’s were mini? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The new tiny-armed species looks similar to the iconic “meat bull” […]

At a flashy mall in South Korea’s capital, shoppers can gather round for selfies with a lonely beluga as she swims around her tank. Despite promises the whale will be released as soon as possible, campaigners are continuing to push for her release before she suffers the same ill-fate as her former tankmates. Bella the […]