Deborah Bloomfield

Suppose you’re given a message to be delivered to a specific person as fast as possible. Here’s the problem, though: you don’t personally know the recipient; you don’t have their address, only a general location; and they’re far away enough that personally going there and wandering about shouting their name is out of the question. […]

Is it possible to predict the future by slicing open a farm animal and peering inside its liver? Scientists of the 21st century would surely be skeptical about approaching this question, but for the curious minds of ancient times, it was a tried and tested method for looking ahead and foreseeing what the gods had […]

If someone asked you to weigh the planet and you had not paid close attention in high school physics, you might have no idea where to begin. How do you measure something you are standing on? It is a bit like being told to weigh your own set of scales without having another set to […]

On April 15, 1912, an iceberg brought down a ship once thought to be unsinkable. The Titanic was the largest ocean liner of its time when it began its maiden voyage from Southampton in the United Kingdom to New York in the United States. Its journey ended in tragedy just four days into the Atlantic […]

The evidence for the Big Bang is overwhelming, yet we cannot truly describe what happens in that event. We cannot even call it a moment because time as we know it did not exist. Our science stops making sense a fraction of a second after it begins. The equations simply fail. But what if there […]

This week, research into the evolutionary origins of kissing has revealed that our ancient ancestors were smooching around 21 million years ago, new footage may be the first evidence of wild wolves using tools, and 14,400-year-old paw prints are the world’s oldest evidence of humans living alongside canine companions. Finally, we share an exclusive clip […]

People over on Reddit are once again (see also: why we can’t power trucks with a big magnet) asking the big questions: is it more energy efficient to walk around on giant stilts? In a post to the “they did the math” subreddit, one Redditor asked the question, after seeing a video of members of […]

The Trump administration announced earlier this week its proposal to make changes to the Endangered Species Act (ESA), limiting protections given to plants and animals and boosting the influence of economic factors in decision-making. This isn’t the first time alterations have been made to the ESA; the previous Trump administration made changes to the act […]

How do you tell large dangerous animals apart while staying safe? Well, one way for lions has been to identify them through their roar. For a long time it was believed that lions only had one kind of roar, a full-throated noise that was a pretty iconic part of the African soundscape. Now, thanks to […]

As this is written, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission is taking images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, providing an angle Earth-based telescopes can’t offer. Yet if you look at a map of the Solar System, you might wonder why on earth Juice is in this location, well-suited to spotting the cometary interloper as it […]

A two-decade-old NASA telescope is on an unstable orbit, and there is a 90 percent chance that it might come burning down in an uncontrolled reentry by the end of 2026. NASA has awarded a private contract to space technology company Katalyst to perform a never-before operation to save this orbiting observatory. The rest of […]

Last week, Blue Origin launched its first interplanetary mission, two spacecraft bound for Mars. It also performed its first successful landing of its New Glenn rocket’s booster stage. On the wave of that success, the Jeff Bezos-owned private space company has announced it will go bigger. It plans to have a more powerful version of […]

We love seeing things in other things: rocks, houses, plugs, all become faces. In the sky, the constellations linked myths and legends with distant and often unrelated stars. A particular example of celestial pareidolia – the perception of a pattern in a random arrangement of stuff – is what in Western countries is referred to […]

Neanderthals in what is now Belgium may have eaten the weakest members of an enemy clan around 45,000 years ago. Analyzing the bones of these massacred victims, researchers have revealed that they all belong to petite females and children, suggesting that these individuals were specifically targeted by the cannibals. The rest of this article is […]

It’s that time of year again, when the Cambridge Dictionary announces the word that it feels best defines the last 12 months. For 2025, the winner is, drumroll please… parasocial.  Just as we eagerly anticipate the annual arrival of our Spotify Wrapped, we always look forward to these Word of the Year announcements. But the […]

The undisputed top chillers of the animal kingdom, capybaras seem to be pals with everyone and everything – even crocodilians, occasionally ferocious predators that aren’t known for their gestures of goodwill. But why is that?  Capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) are the largest living species of rodent (real-life Rodents of Unusual Size). Native to much of South […]

From the very first images, JWST showed that it was going to be a revolutionary instrument, and yet it continues to surprise us. New observations from the infrared space telescope have upended previous observations of a relatively close star system. It has revealed a complexity that had not been seen before in spectacularly crisp new […]

Moss spores have reproduced after nine months on the International Space Station (ISS), an announcement that sounds more impressive when you learn they were on the outside, exposed directly to the perils of space. Although single-celled organisms have demonstrated the same capacity previously, this is the first time a land plant has shown such powers […]

In 2017, the US’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and the related Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP) were made public for the first time following an investigation by the New York Times.  The programs, funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), were pretty out-there. Operating between 2007 and 2012, AATIP investigated unexplained […]

Exploring new caves during the Upper Palaeolithic was fraught with danger, which is why one group of ancient humans in Italy made sure to take their trusted four-legged companion with them when they stepped into the darkness. Analyzing the fossilized foot and paw prints left behind during this subterranean excursion, researchers say that these 14,400-year-old […]