Deborah Bloomfield

Our blue planet may be the most habitable we know of, but it still contains pockets of toxicity here and there. The Atacama Desert, for example; deepest Antarctica; worst of all, the crushing pressure, ice cold, and extreme salinity of the ocean floor.  Nevertheless, as a renowned mathematician once said, “life, uh, finds a way.” […]

In a dank cave below the Albanian-Greek border, scientists have uncovered a spider web that’s technically big enough to catch a whale. Stretching 106 square meters (1,140 square feet), the spindly structure is likely to be the biggest web of its kind ever found.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign […]

Evolution has a funny way of leaving the residue of past adaptations in strange places on animals’ bodies, and chestnuts on horses’ legs are a fine example. Nobody’s quite sure what horse chestnuts exactly are, but they’re believed to be a remnant left behind from horses’ five-toed ancestors. The rest of this article is behind […]

Possums living in the Greater Melbourne area have levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, often known as “forever chemicals”) in their livers high enough that their health may be affected, according to a new study. The findings raise questions about animals that occupy similar niches in other urban environments, and what may be in […]

It’s a question probably every child has asked at one point: why don’t we have tails? Our pets do; in fact, they’re found on the end of most vertebrates, and at least superficially on some invertebrates too. We even sometimes euphemistically refer to our own “tails”, or suffer through the agony of a bruised tailbone […]

Nobody turns down a trip to Loch Ness, a chance to visit the supposed home of the world’s favorite cryptid (sorry, Bigfoot, I will not be taking questions). Do I believe in Nessie? No. Did the trip raise more questions than I was anticipating? Yes. Because, as a journalist preparing for an investigation, I do […]

A month ago, we were talking about C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) as one of the three green comets then visible in the sky. It was the dimmest of the trio, so it did not get as much focus as C/2025 A6 Lemmon and C/2025 R2 Swan. It was also expected to be destroyed during its close […]

After 55 years missing from the Karakum Desert, it was suspected that the Turkestan long-eared bat (Plecotus turkmenicus) had likely gone extinct or become very rare. Nobody had seen the species since 1970 and there were no photos or recent descriptions to suggest otherwise. Until now. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. […]

There’s plenty of rough sex in the animal kingdom, but dinosaur copulation may have been so violent that it literally broke the spine of the female. Ironically, though, that’s wonderful news for palaeontologists, as the love scars left behind by these prehistoric couplings may finally enable us to distinguish between male and female specimens. The […]

New research has thrown a spanner in the works for giraffe conservation, after analyzing the genetics of giraffes kept in human care in North America, and finding that most of those studied are in fact hybrids. If we were talking about this prior to August 2025, there wouldn’t necessarily be a problem; before that point, […]

A piece of a comet decided to take a fatal dive into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing a bright flash and explosion tens of kilometers above the ground. The luminous celestial event passed across the Iberian Peninsula, flying over Portugal before exploding. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe […]

Power lines are a great place to look if you are in need of birds or shoes. It’s not unusual to see a group of small birds, or a larger bird, apparently relaxing on wires used to transfer electricity over long distances to consumers. So why do they do this, and how come they don’t […]

For the first time in humanity’s long history, a human-made object will soon be a full light-day away from our home planet. Space, as they say, is pretty big, and human-made objects are slow. The record speed any human has ever traveled was set by Apollo 10 back in 1969, and has not been broken […]

Every now and then on the Internet, people will ask the question, “If we ride around on horses, why aren’t we galloping around on zebras too?” It’s a silly thought, but it’s actually pretty interesting to go into. First off, how and when did humans domesticate horses? We have not always been such good friends […]

A team of astronomers monitoring interstellar object 3I/ATLAS have found something a little surprising. Our third confirmed interstellar visitor appears to have changed color for the second time. Meanwhile, another team finds that the comet has begun to show signs of non-gravitational acceleration as it approached perihelion. For those of you who haven’t been following […]

Nobody does it better than supermassive black hole J2245+3743. It is a bright, active galactic nucleus (AGN), with a mass 500 million times that of our Sun, and it just caused a flare like no other supermassive black hole has done to date. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in […]

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures that were put in place to control it had far-reaching consequences for humanity. This once-in-a-generation event affected education, the world economy, and – most obviously – physical and mental health. But there was one projected consequence that didn’t actually come to fruition, according to new analysis. With lockdowns and […]

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The Hektoria Glacier is disappearing at a rate that barely seems possible, losing almost half its area nearly 10 times as fast as any glacier ever observed. Although the Hektoria is small, with little direct impact on global sea levels, the processes that made this possible could happen on larger glaciers, making this a warning […]

A new species of Portuguese man o’ war has been discovered floating in the waters of northeast Japan. Spotted by a student-led research group, the discovery marks a species that has never been seen before in the area, raising questions about shifting distributions of marine creatures due to the effects of climate change.  The rest […]