Deborah Bloomfield

“I’m allergic to other people” sounds rather like the kind of thing you’d find printed on a novelty tee – but for some people out there, it’s an all-too-real diagnosis.  “You can be allergic to pretty much anything,” one doctor told Vice back in 2015. And yes: that includes humans – or at least enough […]

England’s capital city of London is a place of wonder, but head below the streets to the underground Tube stations and things get a bit, well, grim. It’s loud, crowded, and always seems to smell of burnt hair, and yet a host of curious creatures have made a home in those long and winding tubes […]

Due to the audio medium of radio, we tend to associate radio waves with sound, but they are a type of light. Just like we can see different colors due to different wavelengths of visible light, we can also treat different wavelengths or frequencies of radio waves as different colors. Astronomers have now used that […]

The surge in true crime’s popularity suggests something slightly uncomfortable about our media habits: many of us – this writer included – now casually unwind to real-life stories of murder, deception, and forensic investigation. But as public appetite grows, so does criticism, and it raises an uneasy question for fans: what exactly are we getting […]

The world still has at least 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups – but every one of them faces existential threats in what some have called a “moment of legislated genocide.” Mining, logging, and fossil fuel drilling are the big ones, but a new report warns of a rising threat: fame-seeking “content creators” and other outsiders attempting […]

In 2024, wildlife photographer Gaurav Ramnarayanan had a very unexpected encounter with one of the rarest big cats in the world. While exploring Kaziranga National Park in India, he saw a tiger that didn’t look like any he had seen before, with strawberry-blonde fur and large tufts of white. It was a golden tiger, one […]

Prehistoric human babies probably looked just like their parents from the moment they were born. Not only would this have come as something of a relief to new parents back in the Pleistocene, but it’s also highly useful information for modern anthropologists, as it provides new insights into the development of facial morphology in early […]

An international team of astronomers has shown for the first time that it is possible to map exoplanets using a technique called 3D eclipse mapping or spectroscopic eclipse mapping. By measuring the emission of specific wavelengths of light on a giant and very hot exoplanet, the team was able to work out the atmospheric variation […]

After years of exploitation and struggle, Bangladesh is giving its elephants a second chance. A new government project aims to free the country’s captive giants, once forced into circuses, tourist rides, or back-breaking labor, and return them to the wild. Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) once roamed widely across southern Asia, through the forests of the […]

There’s a flower that blooms in the forests of Indonesia that’s infamous for the smell it produces. It’s a rare event that it releases its stench, but when it does, a bouquet of “rotting fish, very smelly socks[…] like a food bin that’s overflowing” is released into the air – so says Glasshouse Horticulturist at […]

Dogs with blue fur have been spotted snooping in Chernobyl, the restricted area surrounding the epicenter of the infamous nuclear disaster. Rest assured, the dogs have not changed color due to any freakish mutation from decades of radiation – the explanation is likely to be far more mundane, if not a little bit gross. Speaking to […]

The international LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration reports the observations of two record-breaking events in gravitational wave observations. They were detected in October and November 2024, and they might be a crucial step forward in our understanding of the ripples in space-time and the events that create them. In the 10 years since the first detection of gravitational […]

It’s official: Hurricane Melissa is the strongest storm of 2025. After slowly moving its way to the Caribbean, it rapidly intensified in strength to a Category 5 yesterday morning, and is soon to make landfall in Jamaica, where it’s likely to cause significant damage. Key takeaways Hurricane Melissa has reached Category 5 status, and is […]

For the first time, an ultrasound probe with the capability of imaging complete organs in four dimensions has been developed by a team of scientists in France.  For as long as we’ve had bodies, humans have wanted to look inside them. This desire to understand our inner workings and fix them when they go wrong […]

In a twist of fate that couldn’t be more perfect for the Halloween season, researchers have discovered that six species of North American bats glow green under UV light.  Last year, scientists discovered that the Mexican free-tailed bats’ toes twinkled a greenish-blue under UV light and it may be used as their own bat signal […]

Human intelligence has often been held apart from that of non-human animals, but as time goes by we are increasingly discovering that we’re not all so different. A pivotal moment in our understanding of animal intelligence came in 1976 when something remarkable broke out of an egg. The young bird wasn’t considered remarkable at the […]

What’s below the ice of Antarctica? Drill down into the Earth’s biggest desert to find out, and you’ll probably come away with the answer “more ice” – and that’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s certainly not the whole story. “The surface of Antarctica is pretty harsh. We see very little to no life at the […]

Modern cars are, that one brand notwithstanding, safer than ever before.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Don’t believe us? The numbers don’t lie: 100 years ago, there were around 18 motor vehicle-related deaths per 100 million miles driven; in the mid-1960s, […]

Spotted a pretty feather on the ground? It might be tempting to pick it up and pop it in your pocket, but that’s not as innocent an idea as it seems – you’d be committing a crime. The reason why takes us all the way back to the late 1800s, in the Gilded Age. In […]

They say “technology marches on,” but if we’re honest, that march has evolved into more of a sprint. Whatever you buy it’ll be mere minutes before a more up-to-date, faster, and higher-definition version is available, but is it worth it? After all, if you’re still using your humble human body to take it all in, […]