Deborah Bloomfield

The US has hit a regrettable new measles milestone, with over 1,500 cases reported in the country so far this year. This is the highest number since the disease was locally eliminated at the turn of the century. Although weekly cases are well down compared to the peak of the outbreak in March of this […]

Not an accolade anyone wants, but for the Xerces blue butterfly, its extinction is considered the first of any American insect species to have been directly caused by humans. Last seen in 1941, genetic testing proved that the Xerces blue butterfly was a distinct species, and its disappearance was the first human-led insect extinction. Back in […]

Comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar visitor to the Solar System, will get closest to one particular planet in the Solar System. Bad news: it is not Earth, so we can’t get the best view of this object. Still, of all the planets of the Solar System, it is passing near Mars, where humanity has […]

India is home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s tigers. After a few precarious years due to hunting, conflict, and habitat loss, its population doubled between 2006 and 2018 thanks to conservation efforts, even increasing its range by 30 percent. However, some of the smaller populations are facing a common problem, one that tends to […]

The latest COVID-19 subvariants to spread around the world are causing a rise in cases that’s been noted in a number of countries. Should you be worried? Stratus and Nimbus variants If you’re struggling to keep up with all the variant names at this point, we get it. As a reminder, we’re onto clouds now, […]

An international team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have spotted a rogue planet breaking a new record; growing at a rate of 6 billion tonnes per second. Rogue planets – sometimes called free-floating planets – are interstellar, planetary-mass objects that are not gravitationally bound to a star or […]

We know how the universe began. An event we call the Big Bang started it all about 13.8 billion years ago. How the universe ends, though, is an open question. The path forward depends on the properties of two hypothetical components of the universe: dark matter and dark energy, and one recent study suggests that […]

A new study on interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has found unusual and as-yet-unexplained metals in the object’s coma. On July 1, 2025, astronomers spotted an object moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The object was confirmed to be an interstellar comet with its own […]

A recent paper has proposed a new idea for what is causing the observed accelerated expansion of the universe, and dark matter, suggesting both of them may a “cosmic illusion” caused by the changing constants of the universe.  By observing the universe from the cosmic microwave background to our nearest galaxies, we know that our […]

Animal life is a recent addition to Earth, relatively speaking. The planet formed about 4.5 billion years ago, with microbial life likely emerging between 4.3 and 3.7 billion years ago. It was not until several billion years later that animals started to rock up in a humble and vaguely familiar form: sponges. In a new […]

Women, generally speaking, live longer than men. That’s true of humans across nearly all countries and historical time periods – and the male-female gap is even observed in other species. But why? A new study may shed some light on this long-standing mystery, hinting that it is deeply rooted in evolutionary history. An international team, […]

Dame Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91, her institute announced on October 1. Tributes have poured in as people mourn the loss of one of the most important scientists and conservationists of the 20th century.  British-born Dr Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, in 1960. What followed was a 65-year […]

Did her plane crash into the sea? Was she captured by Japanese soldiers? Was she eaten by giant crabs? Nearly 90 years after her disappearance, new details about the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart could soon come to light.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the […]

It was exactly two decades ago that the Cassini mission discovered that underneath the surface of Enceladus, one of the icy moons of Saturn, there is a deep ocean. Thanks to the mission, we have learned that the moon is releasing geysers into space, forming another ring of Saturn: the E Ring. In those geysers, […]

In a study taking data from across the USA, children and adolescents were found to have double the risk of developing long COVID after their second infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19. This goes against what many people assumed to be true – that your second run-in with the virus is generally less severe […]

Long before its days in the Bible, the Red Sea had a strange and turbulent history. Millions of years ago, this narrow strip of water between Africa and Asia totally dried out and turned the seabed into a salty plain. It then suddenly refilled due to a catastrophic megaflood. The rest of this article is […]

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)-Virgo collaboration may have detected evidence of another universe, according to a new pre-print paper looking at unusual gravitational wave event GW190521. Gravitational wave detectors are awesome even without the potential for spotting wormholes. When LIGO was built, it was aimed at detecting gravitational waves (GWs) – ripples in spacetime, […]

A team of physicists say they have found a way to sidestep Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one of the more troublesome and irritating rules of our universe. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for the uninitiated, states that it is not possible to exactly measure or calculate both the position and momentum of an object at the same time.  […]

It’s a breakthrough that sounds straight out of sci-fi. A team at Stanford University announced in a recent preprint that they’ve used AI to generate a virus genome, and from that produced functional virus particles. The viruses in question are bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria – they can’t infect humans, or any other animals for […]

Some creatures are only known from very few specimens, like the pocket sharks, which were discovered once in 1979, from one specimen, then were not seen again until a slightly different species turned up in 2015. To date, these remain the only known pocket shark specimens to have ever been found.  The rest of this […]