Deborah Bloomfield

Quicksilver, also known as mercury, has long been used in the process of gold extraction. Its unique ability to bond with gold has made it a useful tool in mining, but this ancient practice comes with its own set of dangers. So, how exactly is mercury used to extract gold, what are the implications of […]

If you Google “what is the largest star” you’ll probably get the answer UY Scuti, but if it was as simple as that we wouldn’t be adding much value here. Fortunately, the universe is a more interesting place than that, so let’s explore a bit deeper. Advertisement The largest star It might seem easy to […]

It’s old news by now that Columbus was far from the first European to make it to the Americas. We know for a fact, for instance, that there were Vikings in Newfoundland 1,000 years ago – but what they were up to while they were there has always been a little more mysterious.  Advertisement A […]

While the world waits to see comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) brighten up our skies a little later this month, astronomers bring more good news. A newly discovered comet should be visible later this month, possibly outshining Venus.  On September 27, the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on Mauna Loa in Hawai’i spotted the […]

Charon is the largest among the five peculiar moons of Pluto. It was studied briefly as NASA’s New Horizons flew by the system in 2015, a quick encounter that revealed a lot, including a dark patch on its Northern pole called the Mordor Macula. Planetary scientists have now conducted follow-up studies using the James Webb […]

Researchers have witnessed and filmed oxygen and hydrogen merging to form tiny, nanoscale water bubbles for the first time. Advertisement Back in 2024, the team from Northwestern University, Illinois, developed a new method for viewing and analyzing gas molecules in real time. The method involves trapping gas molecules within honeycomb-shaped nanoreactors using ultra-thin glassy membranes, […]

Are you a whisky fan? Yeah, us too, but it recently occurred to us that we didn’t have a scooby when it came to how the amber nectar is made. So, we set out on a quest to uncover the science of whisky, a quest that led us to Scotland. Advertisement First, we spoke to […]

Montana resident Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, aged 81, was handed a six-month prison sentence on Monday, September 30, for perpetrating a long-running scheme to breed enormous – and illegal – hybrid sheep.  Advertisement Between 2013 and 2021, the court heard, Schubarth conspired with at least five other individuals to get his criminal enterprise off the ground. […]

Astronomers have found a planet around Barnard’s star, the closest single star to the Sun. It is the fourth closest star overall, after the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system, which already have planets around Proxima Centauri. Still, this new world is very exciting. Advertisement It is estimated to be half the mass of […]

COVID-19 wrought – and continues to wreak – havoc on the Earth. According to a new study, its effects were not limited to our planet; the surface of the Moon may have been indirectly affected by the resulting lockdown. Advertisement At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, before vaccines were developed, lockdowns were used by […]

The release of the tournament bracket for this year’s Fat Bear Week has been delayed after a fight between two of Katmai National Park and Preserve’s brown bears resulted in the death of one of the event’s competitors. Advertisement Fat Bear Week is usually a celebration of all things chonky as Katmai’s resident brown bears […]

Does it get any more Indiana Jones than a jewel that can glow? Such a piece of jewelry has been made possible thanks to jeweler-turned-scientist Sofie Boons of the University of the West of England (UWE). The ground-breaking gemstone is the world’s first single stone lab-grown crystal that can glow in the dark. It was […]

A team of physicists has taken a step towards creating more powerful lasers out of sound instead of light, which could have a huge number of practical uses beyond just being pretty neat. Advertisement Typical lasers themselves are pretty cool, and these devices haven’t actually been around on Earth that long, being first created by […]

Scientists seeking an intact ice core stretching back 1.5 million years have found what they think could be a Rosetta stone in the quest to almost double the current record. This still won’t be the oldest ice ever obtained, but will provide something much more valuable when it comes to understanding the planet’s climatic past […]

Canada and parts of the US were hit with some serious rainfall earlier in September, and now we might know why – it’s suspected to have been the result of one of the most intense atmospheric rivers seen in the northeast Pacific since 2000. Atmospheric rivers are often described as “rivers in the sky”; they’re […]

Every century there are 240 solar eclipses, which makes it roughly two per year. We had a gorgeous total solar eclipse on April 8, which was seen by hundreds of millions of people. On Wednesday, October 2, there will be another eclipse across the Americas, but it will be seen by a lot fewer people. […]

Despite being absolute behemoths, the tallest peaks in the Himalayas are all close together in height – except for one. Mount Everest towers over its esteemed neighbors by hundreds of meters, and new research has finally revealed the cause of the famous peak’s unusual height. Advertisement Standing at an incredible 8,849 meters (29,032 feet) high, […]

A molecule with two carbon atoms sharing a single electron, in defiance of chemistry textbooks, has been revealed. Examples of atoms from differing elements sharing single electron covalent bonds have been reported recently, but this is the first case of it occurring between two carbon atoms. Given the central status that carbon bonds have in […]

They say there’s nothing new under the Sun, and most TikTok trends are no exception, with users repackaging old fads into shiny Gen Z and Gen Alpha-friendly parcels. One that is currently causing concern among child health experts, however, is the practice of “chroming” – otherwise known as huffing. Chroming is the act of inhaling […]

In 1804, the world population finally reached 1 billion. Over the next 218 years, the gaps between reaching the next billion mark would become shorter and shorter until, in 2022, the UN announced that there were 8 billion people alive on Earth. With the number still ticking up, where are we now? Advertisement The figure […]