Deborah Bloomfield

When Earth and the hazardous asteroid 99942 Apophis pass by each other in five years’ time, the passage through Earth’s gravitational well could reshape the space rock’s surface. A new paper seeks to predict what that could look like, and finds there could be both dramatic short-term effects and more subtle ones that will take […]

Does fungus think? A curious new study from researchers at Tohoku University and Nagaoka College has provided food for thought, as it showed that the activity of a wood-decaying fungus changed depending on the formation its food sources were placed in. The secret life of fungi unfolds underground where hyphae form spindly threads of mycelium […]

US federal authorities are investigating after the partial remains of a dolphin were discovered lying on a New Jersey beach.  On Wednesday, October 30, the Marine Mammal Stranding Center team were called to Allenhurst, New Jersey to look at the remains of an animal. Upon arrival, the stranding coordinator found that the short-beaked common dolphin […]

When did humans start “putting pen to paper” and expressing their thoughts through a series of complex symbols? An important piece of the puzzle might have just been identified in the form of ancient artifacts from Mesopotamia. An ancient city called Uruk emerged as one of the earliest sites of urbanization in Mesopotamia around 3500 […]

The Earth’s magnetic field is why we are here today. It protects life from harmful radiation from the Sun and many other cosmic events. It is generated in the liquid outer core of our planet, but exactly how it emerges has been a matter of discussion. A new study brings forward a new view, one […]

Physicist Dr Anxo Biasi of the Instituto Galego de Física de Altas Enerxías believes he has found something almost as elusive to his discipline as grand unified field theory: the equation of cat motion. Like a kitten faced with an insufficient restraining wall, Biasi has even leapt over the most basic case of feline behavior in […]

Lip skin is different from the rest of our skin, and lip cells are hard to grow in the lab and difficult to acquire from donors, which has been a hurdle for research into treatments for lip-related conditions. Scientists have now developed a way to grow continuously replicating lip cells on a dish in the […]

Dancing sprites, heavenly landscapes, and apocalyptic-looking skies are some of the top picks as the Royal Meteorological Society has recently unveiled the winners of the Standard Chartered Weather Photographer of the Year Competition 2024. The judges selected their winners from a shortlist of 25 images submitted by photographers from 84 countries around the world, with […]

A small supermassive black hole from the early universe is showing just how incredible these objects can end up being. It is feeding on surrounding gas at an exceptional rate, and possibly suggesting how supermassive black holes grow to their impressive size in a brief amount of time. The light from this object has traveled […]

The Salton Sea in southern California is getting stinkier, saltier, and potentially more dangerous than previously realized. Once a popular tourist spot, the largest lake in California (by surface area) is drying up at an alarming rate, causing its exposed bed to crumble and kick up toxic dust into the surrounding air.  Two new studies […]

A cynic, Oscar Wilde famously quipped, knows “the price of everything and the value of nothing.”  Well, we live in an age of unprecedented cynicism, so it behooves us to be able to answer: what is the price of everything? How much money is there in the world, if you add it all up? And […]

In a record-breaking sale, a specimen of mold from the original experiments that led to Alexander Fleming’s world-changing discovery of penicillin has scooped $76,000 at auction.  Many were excited for the sale, which was predicted to come in at closer to $50,000 earlier this year – but instead, the “mold medallion” set a world record […]

In the 1997 movie Contact, Dr Ellie Arroway, played by the excellent Jodie Foster, travels via a wormhole past Vega, showing a system with no planets but lots of debris. Hollywood might have gotten that completely right – it seems that Vega is not building any planets like other stars. The star is one of […]

Stargazers are set to witness a double-whammy of meteor showers in November as Earth makes its annual passage through a stream of debris left by a comet. The South Taurid meteor shower is set to peak on November 5, while the North Taurids are due to peak on November 12, according to the American Meteor […]

The fossils of the Yixian Formation in northeast China represent the greatest collection of superbly preserved dinosaurs in the world. Their remarkable state has usually been attributed to being buried in volcanic ash, preventing disruption by scavengers or even microbial decay. However, a new study disputes this, attributing their deaths to much less spectacular processes. […]

So long Cassius – the world’s largest captive crocodile has died at his home Marineland Melanesia Crocodile Habitat in Green Island, Australia.  The gigantic Australian saltwater croc (Crocodylus porosus) was awarded the Guinness World Record for the largest crocodile in captivity in 2011. Cassius measured a whopping 5.48 meters long (17 feet 11 inches) and […]

Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) is normally associated with cold sores – they can be annoying and unsightly, but for otherwise healthy adults they’re not normally a serious threat. However, it seems we might have to take a second look at this virus as a growing body of evidence suggests that it can make […]

A man whose brain was more than double the average weight holds the record for the heaviest thinking organ ever recorded. Sadly for the owner of this giant cerebrum, however, bigger doesn’t always mean better, and in this case resulted in intellectual disabilities before an untimely death in a mental health institute. According to Guinness […]

There could be a pretty simple scientific explanation behind one of Jesus’s most famous miracles, recent research has revealed. It seems the fishy (in all senses of the word) goings on in the Sea of Galilee may be the result of a curious natural phenomenon. The Sea of Galilee, also called Lake Tiberias or Kinneret, […]

A newly discovered leg bone from Columbia is likely to be from the largest member of the Phorusrhacid family – appropriately known as “terror birds” – we have yet found, and could have stood more than 3 meters tall. The team describing the fossil thinks the individual it came from was 5-20 percent larger than […]