Deborah Bloomfield

Last year, the Sun burped out one of the largest releases of plasma and magnetic fields since we started watching it closely, and the Parker Solar Probe flew through it, capturing incredible observations and footage. Considering the impact events like this can have on satellites and even on Earth, its survival is a testimony to […]

In 2018, the world got very excited about an unusual star. KIC 8462852, better known as Boyajian’s star or just the “alien megastructure” star, it was found to be dimming in an unusual way. As a planet orbits around a star, it blocks out a certain amount of light and causes it to dim from […]

New research has suggested that people with genes inherited from Neanderthals were at a higher risk of falling seriously sick with COVID-19 during the first devastating surge of the pandemic in 2020.  Neanderthals fell into extinction some 40,000 years ago, but their genetics still live on in today’s modern human population thanks to rampant interbreeding […]

The human body has a lot going on, and as such it checks out that it would be made up of a fair few cells. From brain cells and blood cells, to skin cells and stem cells, each type is finetuned to perform a specific task, which, when combined, keep us alive and functioning. But […]

Meditation is known to help calm both body and mind, yet an emerging field of research suggests that some experienced meditators may be able to take things to the next level by taking a deliberate leave of absence from their senses. Describing this unique yet poorly understood phenomenon in a new paper, an international team […]

A prowling puma’s late-night efforts to hunt sheep in Patagonia were foiled by the barking alarm call of guard dogs in dramatic footage captured for a new National Geographic series. In Animals Up Close, wildlife photographer, filmmaker, and presenter Bertie Gregory is on scene with a team using thermal imaging cameras to track the invading […]

The world is full of very tall things that tourists enjoy visiting: think the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Chrysler building in New York, or the Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates. But the tallest living tree in the world is one such visitor experience that you might not get to enjoy. With a […]

Just a few years ago, archeologists in China unearthed a 300,000-year-old hominin jawbone with a curious shape not quite like modern humans, but unlike most ancient hominins seen before. Somewhat sensationally, they speculate this strange individual may be an undescribed “sister lineage” in the human family tree. The skeletal remains were discovered at Hualongdong cave […]

Pink diamonds are rare among Earth’s precious stones, and the exact recipe to their formation has puzzled scientists. Now, a ground-breaking discovery from Western Australia’s Argyle has identified a crucial event that needs to take place for pink diamonds to form and appear near Earth’s surface, and it may make them easier to find in […]

In February 1987, a star went supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the small galaxies that orbit around our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It was the closest known supernova since 1604 and it has been studied with so many telescopes in so many different wavelengths. The latest taken to this task was […]

If we are going to find life in the universe, it makes sense to look at conditions on the only planet we know has life (you haven’t missed anything big, that’s still Earth) to see what sort of conditions to look for. One of these factors, thought to be important to the development of life, […]

JWST continues to deliver on the promise of incredible images. The latest one is of the protostellar outflows of Herbig-Haro 211. Said like that, even with the image above this text, might not tell you much. So let us put it another way: you are looking at what an extremely young and tiny star throws […]

Almost three years after touching the surface of asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx is coming back to Earth. The spacecraft is bringing back a sample collected during that incredible encounter and is scheduled to drop its precious cargo in the Utah desert on Sunday, making it the first-ever US mission to bring a piece of an […]

Archaeologists at an old mining site in Dürrnberg, near Salzburg, Austria, have recovered a perfectly preserved child’s shoe that is thought to be over 2,000 years old. The specimen is so well preserved that remnants of the fine materials used to lace it have also survived. Since 2001, researchers with the German Mining Museum Bochum, […]

Between plagues, wars, and freakishly cold weather, the early modern period was not the best time to be a human in England. For women in particular, there was another ever-present threat to contend with: allegations of witchcraft. But why were so many more women than men accused of practicing the dark arts? A new study […]

Physicists suspect the universe contains magnetic monopoles – north or south poles without their counterpart. They’ve yet to find them, but new data from the world’s most powerful particle collider has allowed them to tighten the limits on where in energy-space they may lie. Every magnet we know, from the Earth itself down to tiny […]

You’ve probably been told at some point that oil is made from dinosaurs, thinking that when you are at a gas station you are pumping refined velociraptor directly into your Volvo. As widespread as the belief is, it’s not true. Oil is not made from the decomposed bodies of ancient dinosaurs.  “For some strange reason, […]

We’re only three-quarters through this year, but scientists in China are already forecasting that 2023 is likely to see the hottest global surface temperatures in recorded history. Moreover, there’s a good chance we’ll see record-smashing temperatures in 2024 too if current trajectories are anything to go by. There are a few factors driving this trend. […]

In a step towards a Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs-esque future, 3D-printed vegan salmon can now be found on the shelves of Austrian supermarkets. The alternative fish fillet, dubbed “THE FILET – Inspired By Salmon” by its creator, the food tech startup Revo Foods, is thought to be the first 3D-printed food to reach […]

There are few things more sinister than a parasite that hijacks the brains of infected ants and effectively turns them into zombies. But new research has shown that these tiny worms are even more sophisticated than we gave them credit for, altering the behavior of their unwitting hosts in response to temperature to maximize their […]