Deborah Bloomfield

When it comes to toughness, jade sits at the top of the hardy gemstone list. This might be surprising if you’ve heard that diamonds are the hardest, so which is the strongest? For gemstones, it all comes down to whether a stone is more resistant to scratching or breaking.   Jade has been an important material […]

Evolution is a constant process, and humans are still changing as we adapt to the various environments we inhabit. Some of the best places to see this is in the harshest places, as demonstrated by a new study linking increased oxygen delivery and number of live births in native ethnic Tibetan women living at high […]

A snow day is always an exciting day (ok, less so as an adult who has to actually do things), but now imagine a snow day where you wake up and the fields are covered in white, cinnamon roll or donut-esque cylinders. No, snowmen haven’t become sentient and had their own Bake Off technical challenge […]

Venus is the world next door. An Earth-sized planet that couldn’t be less like Earth, it is a hellish world with acid clouds. Several missions are planning to go there over the next decade, including NASA’s DAVINCI, which will drop a probe into the atmosphere. The goal will be to study the atmosphere and the […]

Back in 2008, a miniature mystery unfolded at Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany. Staff turned up for work in the morning to find the aquarium was eerily silent and dark. It transpired that the entire building’s electrical system had short-circuited. The technical difficulties were fixed until the problem was reported the following morning. And […]

They say it’s only by being wrong that we learn what’s right, and in the field of forensics, scientists had to learn the hard way that you can’t catch criminals by taking out eyeballs. The working theory was that the human retina could capture the last thing a person saw by locking it in photosensitive […]

In the worlds of extinct elephant species and ancient humans, the science powers that be have granted us a rare double whammy. Not only have researchers identified the remains of an ancient elephant species from some pretty incredible fossils, but those fossils have revealed how they might have provided a food source to early humans […]

Since the day of the Apollo missions, Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs) have become the quintessential spacesuits – but the world has changed in the last 50 years, and the next generation of astronauts going to the Moon needs a new version. Axiom and Prada have unveiled this new spacesuit, and it looks great. Called the […]

Gunung Padang sits on top of an extinct volcano in West Java, Indonesia. In recent times, the beautiful hilltop has attracted bold theories that suggest it was an elaborate pyramid built by a long-lost civilization thousands of years before the pyramids of Egypt. As enticing as this idea may be, it’s one that’s founded on […]

“I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the ‘Law of Frequency of Error’,” the British polymath Francis Galton wrote in 1889. “The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it.” Now, Galton may have […]

Following the removal of dams along the Klamath River earlier this year, fall-run Chinook salmon have made a long-awaited return to the Oregon portion of the Klamath Basin, having recently been spotted there for the first time in 112 years. The first salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) was discovered by biologists with the Oregon Department of Fish […]

In the Ediacaran Hills, researchers have found one of the first moving animals – and an even more distinctive feature is a question-mark-shaped ridge that makes this the oldest known animal to show left-right asymmetry (in other words, to not be a mirror reflection of itself). The first animals appeared in the fossil record during […]

Earth would not have been a nice place for humans 3.26 billion years ago. There was not much oxygen for a start. There was water and life, though. Unfortunately, an enormous asteroid was about to hit our planet. Boom – but despite what you may think, this impact could have led certain organisms to thrive. […]

Billions of years of evolution have made modern cells incredibly complex. Inside cells are small compartments called organelles that perform specific functions essential for the cell’s survival and operation. For instance, the nucleus stores genetic material, and mitochondria produce energy. Another essential part of a cell is the membrane that encloses it. Proteins embedded on […]

New modeling research has shown that the natural global climate phenomena known as El Niño and its cold counterpart, La Niña, have been occurring for the last 250 million years. Although these complex weather patterns are the drivers of extreme weather changes today, the research suggests they were significantly stronger in the past. El Niño […]

At some point in human history, our ancestors decided to urbanize, building sprawling metropolises to live and work in. Some of these ancient cultural and economic hubs are still standing today, and have been inhabited ever since their construction – but which is the oldest? It’s not an easy question to answer – these cities […]

Researchers have discovered a brand new species of sawfly from an amazingly preserved fossil found in Australia. This is a great discovery – but we need to remember that sawflies are not flies at all. The new species is long extinct but would have been flying around what is now Australia in the Miocene Period. […]

Daylight saving time (DST) has been around in the US on and off since 1918, but after 106 years’ worth of back and forth – both in terms of political decision-making and, y’know, clocks – is it time to ditch it for good? What is daylight saving time – and why do we have it? […]

Extinct volcanoes that lurk around Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, may challenge some parts of the standard explanation about how tectonic plates move around our planet. It’s often taught that Earth’s rocky tectonic plates sit on top of a syrup-like bed of viscous rock, known as the mantle, that moves along with those plates like […]

There are a small number of isotopes that offer clues regarding ancient supernovae that helped shape the Earth and the rest of the Solar System. Of these, the one astronomers and planetary scientists turn to most often is iron-60, so what makes it so useful? Most of the elements that make up the Earth are […]