Deborah Bloomfield

You may have noticed, perhaps around the time you started studying magnets in school, that we don’t power vehicles by strapping a magnet to the front of them and propelling them forward with a second magnet just out of reach in front of it. Instead, we continue to power our cars using electricity and the […]

What’s the longest lightning storm you’ve ever seen? For the people of Venezuela, seeing an electrical display that goes on for up to nine hours isn’t out of the ordinary. Here, at the mouth of the Catatumbo River, specific conditions for heat and humidity give rise to one of the most dramatic lightning displays on […]

An area of anomalously hot rocks 200 kilometers (120 miles) beneath the northern Appalachian Mountains could be the product of a continental divorce when dinosaurs still ruled, geologists claim. The presence of this deep heat has been known for a while, but the most common explanation has been an even older rift with Africa. The […]

Neutrinos are fundamental particles with a tiny mass and no electric charge. This allows them to move undisturbed through solid objects, such as the whole planet. Every second, 60 billion neutrinos from the Sun go through every square centimeter of us. To capture these so-called “ghost particles”, researchers need enormous detectors. A new method for […]

People have been searching for the mysterious “sixth sense” ever since… well, since 1761 at least, but potentially since the days of Aristotle. It was he, after all, who originally declared the number of senses to be five, and labeled them too: touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing.  But Aristotle said a lot of garbage. […]

K2-18b is back in the news thanks to new research that quells a controversial claim made in April. Researchers at the University of Cambridge had claimed that in the light filtered through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, they had seen the “strongest hint yet” of biological activity. New observations from a different team, which await peer review, […]

For almost 800 years, scholars and clerics have been locked in dispute over whether a piece of linen known as the Shroud of Turin was used to wrap the body of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. And white believers are unlikely to be easily swayed, a new study suggests that the markings left on the […]

Our memories may not be as stable as we thought. A growing body of evidence suggests that they can “drift” across different populations of neurons, and this latest study has demonstrated that that can be true even when talking about memories of the same environment.  We tend to think of memory as static, unchanging, like […]

Perhaps surprisingly, a horse can generate far more than a single horsepower, at least in short bursts. Some estimates suggest a galloping horse can briefly produce between 12 and nearly 15 horsepower. What Is Horsepower? Horsepower (hp) is a unit of measurement of power that describes the rate at which work is done. It’s most […]

A derivative of the metal-organic complex ferrocene has 20 valence electrons in a stable configuration, overturning the expectation for the last 100 years of a ceiling at 18 valence electrons.  Combinations of metals and carbon-based molecules show rich possibilities for unusual chemistry. One class of these metal-organic complexes is metallocenes, where organic rings sit either […]

Science and music YouTuber Benn Jordan has stored an image of a bird within a bird, before getting the bird to reproduce the image at an estimated rate of 2 megabytes per second. Though parrots take all the popular glory for their ability to parrot back human speech, they are not the only species of […]

If people were to know anything about the animals of the Falkland Islands, it’d be likely to be the fact that there are a lot of sheep – but there never used to be. Before the arrival of European settlers in the late 1700s, there was only one land mammal native to these isles. Only […]

Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) is everywhere. A growing body of evidence is showing that this human-made compound may be the most prolific “forever chemical” in the environment. It’s found in the organs of animals, the leaves of trees, the water you drink, house dust, and the rain that falls from the sky. There’s a good chance […]

Gobi bears are the most endangered of Earth’s eight bear species. Just 40 individuals are thought to be left surviving in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, a place of extreme temperatures and little water. Recently, a film crew captured sight of Gobi bears in this environment, and they even have a little one in tow.  […]

Alligators aren’t picky eaters. Given half a chance, they will consume all kinds of fish, birds, turtles, small mammals, and – rarely, but it has been known – the odd human. But among the more bizarre items found in their stomachs are rocks. There are many reasons why animals swallow rocks, which are called “gastroliths” […]

A new study has taken a look at how plausible the idea of “Dyson swarms” is, how long they could feasibly be maintained by an advanced civilization, and whether it would be possible for us to detect them. As well as finding that they may be plausibly detectable around certain star types, the author suggests […]

If you’ve spent a little too long on the creepier corners of the Internet, you have likely stumbled across the Dyatlov Pass Incident.  For those that haven’t, in 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers were climbing Kholat Syakhl Mountain when they went missing. Months later, rescue workers found their tent with most of their […]

Zebras may be the flashiest members of the equine family, but they’re surprisingly versatile when it comes to hybridization. Known collectively as zebroids, these hybrids result from breeding a zebra with another type of equine, most commonly horses, donkeys, or ponies.  Some of the most common combinations include: Zebra + Horse = Zorse Zebra + […]

The universe is big, and thanks to innovation and technology, we have seen some of it across incredible distances, all the way to some of the most distant galaxies and the first light that ever shone, the cosmic microwave background. It is undeniable that telescopes have been fundamental to understanding space, but it doesn’t mean […]

Baryons are subatomic particles made up of an odd number of quarks. Protons and neutrons found at the center of atoms are a type of baryon, but there is a whole menagerie of other baryons made of rarer and more unstable quarks. Because of that, these baryons decay into other particles, and the rarest known […]