Deborah Bloomfield

Bird flu has been passed from an infected dairy cow to a farm worker in Michigan, marking the second occasion that the disease has been spread in this way. This strain of virus, called H5N1, has run rampant through both wild bird and domestic poultry populations and even spread as far as the Antarctic region. […]

We’re here to bring you some quite literally breaking news – an iceberg that’s bigger than the city of Las Vegas has broken off the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica. This 380 square-kilometer (147 square-mile) chunk of ice parted ways with the shelf on the morning of May 20, after a crack that first appeared […]

Tidal pressures have been observed pushing (relatively) warm water under the Thwaites Glacier, exposing a much larger area of ice to warming pressure. The observations indicate a catastrophic sea level rise could be coming much sooner than almost anyone is preparing for. Rising temperatures are contributing to higher sea levels by making the existing water […]

Over recent years, astronomers have investigated an unusual phenomenon: stars apparently disappearing, leaving behind few clues as to what made them vanish from our view. In 2019, the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project attempted to catalog how many stars have disappeared from view in the last 70 years and […]

A grieving chimpanzee has been carrying around her dead baby for months at a Spanish zoo in a tragic demonstration of the species’ intelligence and social complexity. Natalia the chimp gave birth to an infant at Bioparc Valencia in early February 2024, but it died just 14 days later. Advertisement Although infant mortality is extremely […]

A remarkable fossil of a worm has been described, estimated to be around 425 million years old and marking the youngest species of its group to have been classified. The carnivorous burrowing predator was retrieved from Leintwardine in Herefordshire and has been named Radnorscolex latus by scientists at the London Natural History Museum. Radnorscolex is […]

Circular depressions around 150 meters (500 feet) wide off the coast of Central California are quite ancient and owe their longevity to sediment flows, new research reveals. However, their original cause has yet to be discovered. The Sur Pockmark Field has puzzled oceanographers since its discovery in 1998. More than 5,000 shallow circular depressions are […]

Science is great for innovation and improving our lives, but let’s face it: there are some things we’ve pretty much got down pat. You wouldn’t expect, for example, that we could improve on something like… like counting. So it may come as a surprise that a group of computer scientists have done just that: found […]

Beachcombers just south of Cannon Beach, Oregon, came across a Pacific footballfish (Himantoliphus sagamius) washed up on the shore. While this might look like a monster from the deep – and in fact it is – Pacific footballfish sightings and specimens are extremely rare. Seaside Aquarium shared the news on their Facebook page, writing that […]

There’s something missing on our planet, but we don’t know what it is. Like trees that fall in the silence of an empty forest, entire species are vanishing with no one to witness or record their existence – or their demise. It’s a phenomenon known as “dark extinction”, and it severely undermines our ability to […]

Despite disappearing around 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals continue to live on in the DNA of most modern humans. The persistence of these ancient genes indicates that our distant ancestors had a thing for stocky, big-nosed hominids, and new research has revealed exactly how these interspecies sexy times played out. It’s estimated that between 1 and […]

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) are bright releases of energy caused by a supermassive black hole having a snack. The snack in question is usually a star that got so close it was ripped apart. Part of the snack is thrown out, but the rest of the stellar plasma forms a hot accretion disk around the […]

Eel reproduction was a famous animal mystery that was solved back in 2022, but did you know that there are lots of animals that humans have never seen give birth? For some species like snow leopards, we’ve been able to witness births in captivity, but for other animals we don’t have the first clue where […]

Quick pop quiz: how many moons does the Earth have? If you said one, you are correct – but Earth occasionally picks up quasi-moons, which are not gravitationally bound to our planet but share our orbit for a time and are influenced by our gravity during their orbit around the Sun. But as well as […]

A distinctive pattern of brain activity that fires up when we let our minds wander has been identified in a new study. The researchers found that patterns called “sharp-wave ripples”, which originate in the brain’s memory centers, seem to happen more often when our brains are left to start making stuff up. The human brain […]

On May 21, startup BrainBridge unveiled its concept for a world-first head transplant system, promising to combine artificial intelligence with the latest in robotics to literally remove a human head and put it on a new body. If everything works as intended, once the head is in place, the person will apparently be able to […]

Corneous scales are a type of skin appendage most associated with reptiles, but they are thought to have made fur and feathers possible, thus playing a big part in our own evolution. A new fossil provides evidence they evolved in the Permian era, before the first major split in land-dwelling vertebrates’ family tree. Few things […]

The US remains a deeply religious – and deeply Christian – place, especially compared to other high-income “Western” countries. However, dig into the data and you’ll find the nation’s religiosity varies wildly from state-to-state and contains a fair amount of diversity. According to the 2020 US Religion Census, the states with the highest percentage of […]

A new study on toxicity in gaming has found that 69 percent of gamers admit to smurfing, despite hating it when others smurf against them.  The uninitiated may be wondering what smurfing is, or perhaps are envisioning 69 percent of gamers daubing themselves in blue and replacing all their verbs with “smurf” for the duration […]

The planet Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, give or take, and it’s changed a lot in that time. What started as a ball of molten, churning magma eventually chilled out and developed a few small tectonic plates; a few billion years later or so the planet was bedecked in various formations of […]