Deborah Bloomfield

Gorillas talk a big game, what with all their chest thumping and basically continuous farting. But there’s one very specific, very human metric by which they come up humiliatingly short – literally. That’s right: it’s dick time again.  Advertisement Your basic silverback gorilla, whether Eastern or Western, will be up to 1.8 meters tall and […]

Researchers looking into a 50-year-old mystery surrounding a rare missing antigen have discovered a new blood group system called MAL.  Advertisement Your blood type is determined by the presence or absence of specific antigens, with the main types people know being A, B, O, and AB (positives and negatives). However, blood groups are slightly different.  […]

The jets shooting out from an enormous black hole are larger than was thought theoretically possible, and may change ideas about how galaxies developed. This pair are the longest, and therefore most powerful, jets we have yet found, with a combined length of 23 million light-years, more than 10 times the distance between the Milky […]

Rejoice! There’s a new tiny chameleon on the block. Hailing from Madagascar, it joins other miniature chameleons in the Brookesia genus, subgenus Evoluticauda. At little bigger than the end of your forefinger, it was a remarkable spot in what’s presently a highly threatened habitat in Madagascar. The new-to-science species has been named Brookesia nofy after the forest […]

Space is full of radiation. Charged particles swarming interplanetary space mostly originate from the Sun with the occasional interloper from the rest of the Universe. On Earth, we are protected by it thanks to the planet’s magnetic field and the atmosphere – astronauts are not. Two mannequins were sent on board the Artemis I mission […]

In the Karoo Basin of South Africa, an unusual tusked beast is painted on a rock wall. Archaeologists have previously pondered whether the artwork depicts a mythical creature from the realm of fantasy, but new research makes the bold claim it was inspired by a dicynodont, an extinct species that lived long before humans. Advertisement […]

Io is one of the largest moons of Jupiter and the closest of the four Galilean moons. It’s also the most volcanically active place in the Solar System, and it continues to confirm this record by revealing that it’s formed a brand new volcano in less than three decades. The moon was last observed up […]

A taxonomist’s work is never done, as the title of a recent study that identified 22 new species of tiny parasitic wasps would suggest. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy: Integrative taxonomic characterization of 22 new Ceroptres species” dives into the curious world of gall-raiding wasps, discovering a host of new-to-science species that have been given […]

Face transplants are still a cutting-edge procedure. From 2005 to 2021, only 50 of these surgeries were carried out on 48 people, across 11 countries. As we’re approaching 20 years of these groundbreaking operations, scientists have conducted the first study to assess how the patients fared after their transplants, and the results are encouraging. Advertisement […]

In 2021, it was announced that a group of remarkable lizards had become the first vertebrates known to use bubbles for breathing underwater. It seemed anoles were using their air accessories as a kind of rebreathing equipment, but it was still up for debate as to whether it served a function or was simply a […]

In an out-of-this-world first, Earth and Phobos have been photographed together in the sky by NASA’s Curiosity. The rover has previously snapped this moon and its companion Deimos, including in a beautiful eclipse, something also seen by Curiosity’s sibling Perseverance. The rover has also seen the Earth in the Martian sky, a bright dot like […]

A plane has captured the first photo of a spacecraft reentering the Earth’s atmosphere from a high-speed orbit as it flew over the South Pacific Ocean. Advertisement On September 8, the first of the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Cluster satellites – named Salsa – made its final journey to Earth. Launched in the year 2000, […]

China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, is an absolute beast of an infrastructure project. If you’ve come across the mindblowing claim that it’s so vast it affects the spin of Earth, the idea is not as ridiculous as it sounds.  Advertisement Located in central China’s Hubei province, the Three Gorges Dam spans […]

Is there life out there in the universe? This is perhaps one of the most compelling questions that haunts humanity. This is why some people take supposed evidence of extra-terrestrial visitation seriously – and the case of the strange metal shard that was recently subjected to scientific assessment (and no, it’s probably not aliens) is […]

The ozone hole over Antarctica is relatively small and healthy at the moment, providing further proof that the ozone layer is on the path toward a full recovery. Advertisement That’s the good news. The bad news is that the current size of the ozone hole is linked to sudden stratospheric warming over Antarctica in July […]

Vitamins and health supplements are popular products in the modern era, but how many of us really look at what’s going into them? Humans have formulated all kinds of creative ways to capture chemicals that can do us some good – and when it comes to vitamin D, it seems the recipe is sometimes more […]

COVID-19 may not meet the criteria for a seasonal infection – at least not yet – but that doesn’t mean there’s been no pattern to its peaks and troughs over the last few years. In a first detailed analysis, public health experts have revealed that the US has been seeing six-month waves of COVID that […]

Bubbles. Whether in a jacuzzi or being blown into your eyeballs by a child, you’ve got to love them. And behind the general aesthetics, they’re pretty interesting physically. Advertisement For a time, they were even used to model atomic behavior, with “bubble rafts” on a water surface creating a surprisingly good analog of the structure […]

Picture the scene: you’re out walking when an almighty smell catches your attention. A whale has died and washed ashore. Do you: Cut its head off, I’m not one to turn down a knick-knack Leave it be, nature’s best left well alone Consult the internet: am I allowed to keep dead animals? It’s an interesting […]

How often do you see your friends? Do you find yourself trying to make plans, spending time synchronizing your calendars just to scratch together a few hours a week? Do you feel more isolated from the people you used to spend so much time with? If so, then you are not alone (ironically) – the […]