Deborah Bloomfield

Somewhere around 7,000 years ago, a tsunami struck the southern edge of Tongatapu, picked up a giant boulder, and slid it 200 meters (700 feet) inland. That’s remarkable, but we’ve found other huge boulders moved by waves. This boulder, however, started off on top of a 30 meter (100 foot) high cliff, beyond the reach […]

Tiny pollen grains too small to see have revealed that flowers are at least 123 million years old, more than 2 million years older than the previous oldest example. The date signals not just the origins of the things that bring color to our gardens but the most abundant clade of land plants on the […]

This newly discovered species of octopus is a deep-sea shapeshifter with large eyes and blood-red tentacles. Sounds terrifying? Don’t fret: these strange little guys are smaller than a golf ball.  Measuring just 4 centimeters (around 1.5 inches) across, the species has been named the Carnarvon flapjack octopus (Opisthoteuthis carnarvonensis), a nod to its discovery in […]

Galaxy interactions can be dramatically violent. Minor mergers can cause the smaller galaxies to disappear into the larger ones. Major mergers can change the whole geometry of the galaxies involved, and even flybys are highly disruptive. For the first time ever, researchers have discovered that the interactions don’t even have to involve gravity; galaxies can […]

Is it possible to pop a few fine needles into your skin, hook them up to a little bit of electricity, and cure all manner of ills? That’s what some people believe electroacupuncture, the zappier version of standard acupuncture, can do – but is there any truth in it? What is electroacupuncture? Electroacupuncture is a […]

Picture it: a giant beast, feathered like a bird, but seemingly without wings; towering over you in height and outweighing your entire family. Its head leans down, blind eyes trying to make out whether you’re food or foe. At its feet, an egg easily the size of 150 chicken eggs. The animal you’re facing down? […]

Reheated leftovers can go one of two ways: barely resuscitated into a disappointing mush or revitalized into a surprisingly flavorsome delight that’s X times better than it was last night. So why is it that some meals just always seem to taste better the day after cooking?  Cooking is basically chemistry in action. Fats render, […]

If you were to ask scientists where life exists beyond Earth, they would correctly tell you that we do not know. There is so much that we do not understand about life on Earth, let alone about where life might emerge in space. However, asking them (like we did), if they were betting people, where […]

Infection with herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), the virus that causes cold sores, is associated with the development of Alzheimer’s disease – that’s the conclusion of a new case-control study of almost 350,000 pairs of people. Most people will be exposed to HSV-1 in their lives and lots of people get cold sores, so […]

Some species across the world are known only from museum specimens. Sadly, for some, the information we know from the museums is the only information we will ever have, but for others the museum collections can be just the beginning. A species of rat known only from historical museum material has been pictured alive and […]

This is the real story behind the hairless bear that often circulates online and pops up on newsfeeds. You might have seen its image accompanied by sensational and misleading headlines, including the absurd notion that it’s a “new species” thriving in the ruins of Chernobyl.  But the truth is far less mysterious and far more […]

The world’s largest iceberg may soon not be. After a more than two-year-long adventure away from its home in Antarctica, new satellite photos have shown that the “megaberg” A-23A is starting to break into thousands of smaller pieces – resulting in what NASA describes as “a scene reminiscent of a dark starry night.” It’s a […]

Leonardo da Vinci – the artist, scientist, and archetypal polymath of the Renaissance – may still have descendants living among us. In a new book, researchers from the Leonardo DNA Project have put together the clearest view yet of the late genius’s family tree and even claimed they have found six of his living family […]

The Neanderthal occupants of a cave in central Spain had a pretty unusual tradition that seems to have been passed down through multiple generations and may have persisted for thousands of years. Filling their cavernous home with the skulls of large, horned animals, these prehistoric hominids are thought to have used the crania for some […]

Until not many years ago, scientists didn’t think planets could exist around a pair of stars. The complications from the three-body problem would make most of them unstable. Yet, we’ve found plenty of binary systems with planets. And it seems that they can get weirder and weirder. The system ʋ Octantis (pronounced nu Octantis) should […]

Lack of sleep can be seriously injurious to one’s health, but it’s not just hours a night that matter; quality sleep is important too. Sleep experts have long warned that snoozing after an alarm doesn’t give you what you need, but a new study shows we’re not taking their advice. Ideally, none of us would […]

In the Gobi desert lives one of the rarest animals on Earth. Known in Mongolian as the Mazaalai, the Gobi bear (Ursus arctos gobiensis) is the rarest of the planet’s eight bear species. As Sir David Attenborough said in the BBC series Asia, “They are so rarely seen they were thought to be a myth.” […]

As the most massive planet in the Solar System, and first to form, Jupiter’s gravity shaped the formation of everything else. To better understand how the newborn giant threw its weight around, astrophysicists have attempted to model its early years and have come to some surprising conclusions. Professor Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of […]

Researchers from a bunch of US government agencies recently published the results of the first-ever “Space Weather Tabletop Exercise” to assess their preparedness for a severe solar storm. It turns out, we’re woefully unprepared for such an event.  To sum up, an intense geomagnetic storm has the potential to spark regional-scale blackouts, radio communications outages, […]

The Chicago Archaeopteryx is a remarkable fossil, the “best preserved” of its kind, in fact. That’s according to palaeontologist Prof Jingmai O’Connor, who’s something of an expert in the transition that saw theropods morph into birds, and here Archaeopteryx is key. The oldest known fossil bird, it lived during the Late Jurassic 150 million years […]