Deborah Bloomfield

In what sounds more like the beginnings of a low budget creature feature than a real-life event, a team of scientists has discovered traces of cocaine in sharpnose sharks living in the coastal waters of Brazil. Advertisement While we often think of microplastics and oil when someone mentions water pollution, cocaine has become of growing […]

At a time when our flabbers be gasted daily, it can be hard to keep track of the biggest and breaking stories in the news cycle. One person, however, seems to have been keeping ahead of America’s latest election developments armed with nothing but asparagus. The news that President Joe Biden was taking himself out […]

To understand how the brain works scientists have been using two broad categories of experiments: ones that record and ones that manipulate brain activity. Early neuroscience studies used electricity to change the activity of neurons. Then, just two decades ago, scientists developed new technologies that used light. Now, they are using magnets.  Advertisement Does it […]

The discovery of a source of deep-sea oxygen has shocked marine researchers, and could force a radical rethink across several areas of science, including the quest for extraterrestrial life. The oxygen is produced not by photosynthesis, but by minerals on the ocean floor. Advertisement High school science classes teach that we get our oxygen from […]

The icy moons of gas giant planets are considered a possible place for the formation of life beyond Earth. Enceladus and Europa have deep oceans with intriguing chemistry buried below an outer shell of ice many kilometers thick. We can’t simply go drilling through such an icy shell. But we might not need to dig […]

One of the rarest types of black holes might have been found incredibly close to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. This new black hole is of the intermediate mass class, meaning that it’s not light enough to have formed from a star going supernova. But, it is also […]

Deep within a cave in southern Italy, a strangely atypical Neanderthal man has been stuck upside down for around 150,000 years. Named Altamura Man, this remarkable skeleton represents one of the most spectacular human fossils ever discovered and could help to clear up some of the mysteries surrounding our evolution as a species – if […]

All aboard everyone, we’re back on the funky-colored animal train – and this week’s flavor of choice is strawberry! Strawberry-patterned leopards, to be exact. They join bright blue lobsters, black lynx, and white orcas as among our favorite color morphs to be spotted (see what we did there?) in the wild. Advertisement Strawberry leopards are […]

A world-first recording has revealed the harmonious way male African elephants signal when it’s time to move on by vocalizing a bit like a barbershop quartet. One bull begins the call to action, and one by one, the others join in to create a sonorous, infrasonic chorus that rumbles across the landscape.  Advertisement The “let’s […]

After years of debate, botanists have now voted to change the scientific names of over 200 species of plant, fungi, and algae that make references to a racial slur, the first time such a move has been made. Advertisement The decision took place at the International Botanical Congress (IBC) in Madrid, where 351 out of […]

When you think of the longest-living animals, chances are your brain doesn’t automatically go for “relatively small breed of parrot”. But when Cocky Bennett, a cockatoo and local legend from Sydney, Australia, died in 1916, he had reached an age that even most humans can only dream of. Advertisement At a reported 120 years old, […]

The internet has, let’s face it, spoiled us all. Time was, if you wanted to know something like “what does a puma taste like?”, you’d have to hop on a ship bound for the jungles of South America, hunt one down, and eat it yourself. These days, it takes literally fractions of a second: you […]

Want to test your intellectual capacity without spending two hours (and probably a bunch of money) on a full-blown IQ test? Then the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) might just be the one for you – but fair warning, it’s harder to get a perfect score than you might think. Advertisement The CRT was created by […]

Health trends are fickle. What’s popular one month is more often than not passé the next, usually after being swiftly debunked – only after it’s already made a dent in your pocket though, of course. One trend that just won’t go away, however, is oil pulling, with its proponents declaring benefits all the way from […]

With the advent of mobile phones and easy access to digital broadcasts, long gone are the days of twiddling about with your radio and giving yourself a jumpscare when you accidentally switch from FM to AM (RIP to any headphone users who did this with their portable radio). But what’s actually the difference between the […]

Have you ever heard of a mimeograph machine? Unless you’re reasonably old or have a particular interest in the ways people used to duplicate information, we wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t – but it made a particularly big mark (or perhaps, ink splatter) on the history of printing. Advertisement What is a mimeograph and […]

When we hear the phrase “cradle of humanity” – the point in the world from which all human life sprang – there’s one place that usually springs to mind: Africa.  Advertisement That’s… vague, but not wrong. The group of apes that would eventually become humans first diverged from chimpanzees, our nearest relatives in the evolutionary […]

This week, butter created from CO2 tastes like the real thing (according to Bill Gates), the first cave has been found on the Moon, and a new microcontinent has been discovered between Greenland and Canada. Finally, we investigate how to tell the difference between pseudoscience and anti-science – and how to fight both. Advertisement Subscribe […]

For the last 10 months, NASA’s curiosity has been investigating a region of Mount Sharp that is of high interest. It has signs of a violent watery past and the chemical analysis has revealed the presence of many minerals including sulfates. And as the rover moved about it accidentally cracked open a rock. And inside […]

It didn’t take long from the invention of the telescope to realize that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, leaving it the largest planet we knew for almost 400 years. Now however, with so many exoplanets (planets beyond the Solar System) its size record has been broken many times. Advertisement Nevertheless, we […]