Deborah Bloomfield

Russian scientists have recently studied a 32,400-year-old woolly rhinoceros that’s been preserved in permafrost like a prehistoric popsicle, revealing a bunch of new insights into the extinct species.  Advertisement The frozen carcass of the woolly rhino was unearthed in the summer of 2020 near the banks of the Tirekhtyakh River in Russia’s far eastern Sakha […]

Most US citizens underestimate the scale of inequality in their country, or at least their county, by greatly underestimating the income of the richest 1 percent. The result is consistent across four studies that challenged participants to estimate incomes at particular points in the social spread. The authors speculate that people simply don’t want to […]

An Englishman named Sir George Yeardley was likely the first person in the USA to be memorialized with a tombstone, say the authors of a new study. In addition to identifying the long-dead owner of the ancient grave marker, the researchers also reveal that the monument was quarried and cut in Europe before being shipped […]

Antibiotic resistance is a major health concern. We now have several harmful microbes that have evolved into versions unaffected by common treatments. To find new antibiotics scientists are looking further afield, including in the ocean. Host Dr Alfredo Carpineti speaks to Dr Sam Afoullouss, a marine scientist at the University of South Florida, about the […]

Astronomers have proposed a bold new detector for dark matter: the planet Mars. We know the position of the Red Planet with exquisite precision and if there was a certain type of dark matter passing through the Solar System, the planet’s orbit would change by a tiny amount. The orbit of Mars stretches to almost […]

A new paper disputes the widely accepted hypothesis that the Moon is the product of material thrown up when an object known as Theia smashed into the proto-Earth. Once just one explanation among many for why Earth is blessed with such a relatively large companion, the Theia hypothesis is now so dominant many planetary scientists […]

Once mistaken for mermaids, dugongs – also known as sea cows – are gentle marine giants. However, while some populations are surviving worldwide, a critically endangered sub-population of dugongs found along the coast of Mozambique is unfortunately not one of those. Luckily, scientists and the local community have come up with a plan to help […]

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 […]