Deborah Bloomfield

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“How, then, did life originate on Earth?,” the distinguished speaker, William Thomson, asked his audience during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). “Tracing the physical history of the Earth backwards, on strict dynamical principles, we are brought to a red-hot melted globe on which no life could exist.” This […]

In 2018, astronomers discovered a brown dwarf binary system. Brown dwarfs are stellar objects that never had enough mass to fuse hydrogen and become fully fledged stars. They are often found in binaries, but this one was only the second eclipsing binary system discovered with both members being brown dwarfs. But there is something odd […]

Researchers have scanned the brains of more than 500 babies and young children in order to paint a detailed picture of the brain’s development during the first six years of life. By observing how functional connectivity within and between different brain networks changes at different timepoints, the study authors were able to map out a […]

A new explanation has emerged for why Homo sapiens survived in Europe and North Asia when the apparently better-adapted Neanderthals did not. A variety of approaches, including ochre sunscreen and tailored clothes, may have saved them from skin cancer and weakened immune systems when a weaker magnetic field let in more radiation. During the Earth’s […]

It appears conservative Americans have a deeper distrust in science than previously believed. Not only do they distrust scientific ideas that do not correspond to their worldview, but they also distrust fields that contribute to economic growth and productivity when compared to liberals. Unfortunately, short-term interventions aimed at improving trust seem to have little impact. […]

Sound can induce changes in cells and one team of researchers think this could be an effective way to manipulate their behavior, including for the treatment of disease. Sound waves are variations in air pressure. Our ears are so finely tuned to amplifying them over a certain range of frequencies, that we can sense pressure […]

Dark matter is a hypothetical substance that outweighs regular matter – which makes stars, planets, and everything we can see and touch – by five to one. But we don’t know what it is. One hypothesis, with some astronomical backing, is that it is made of extremely light particles known as axions. Researchers have now […]

Something significant is happening to religious life across the US. In just a few decades, remarkably large numbers of people have been leaving organized religion. However, this exodus is not in favor of secular rationality, but rather the pursuit of spirituality that is more aligned with their personal values. The number of people who regard […]

YouTuber and science communicator Steve Mould, famed for his excellent and interesting demonstrations of physics and engineering (check out this life-sized pop pop boat, for example) has turned his attention to an old idea about treadmills. Rather than getting the result he had expected, he ended up feeling a little more empathy for flat-Earthers when […]

Behold: a live colossal squid in all its glory. After a century of searching, the extremely elusive cephalopod has been caught on camera alive in its natural habitat for the first time (and, for once, not inside the belly of a whale or washed up dead on a beach). The juvenile squid was filmed on […]

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that fewer Americans than ever before now intend on having them. At least, that’s the finding from a new study out of Michigan State University: “We found that the percentage of nonparents who don’t want any children rose from 14 percent in 2002 to 29 percent in 2023,” said Jennifer […]

An unknown tribe of ancient hunter-gatherers that lived on the south Texas coast may have made music using modified human bones. After sifting through bone artifacts in a museum collection, the author of a new study identified a musical rasp fashioned from a humerus, resembling a macabre instrument called an omichicahuaztli that was used by […]

Sometimes, there are things we know, but we don’t know, you know? Like: when you play the lottery, getting the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 is technically just as likely as any other selection of six numbers – but somehow, we instinctively feel like that would just never happen. As it turns […]

An intriguing new study suggests that the universe may rotate once every 500 billion years. If correct, the authors believe that it could explain one of the most annoying puzzles in astronomic history: the Hubble tension. The Hubble tension, for the uninitiated, is that measurements of the expansion of the universe differ depending on how […]

Chicxulub, that pesky asteroid, really did a number on the dinosaurs. It wiped them off the Earth as it cleaned up around 76 percent of all species on the planet (apart from the birds, of course) – and yet while they died, the crocodylomorphs survived. That’s not the only mass extinction this animal group has […]

We may have visually led predators to thank for some of the most dazzling marine species: sea slugs. Luminous greens, blues, pinks, oranges, and even rainbow coloration are all on the cards when it comes to these gastropod mollusks (also known as nudibranchs). Often, it’s sending a very clear message: eat me and you’re going […]

If you are in the Southern Hemisphere, you can see the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) with your naked eye. It’s a dwarf galaxy satellite of the Milky Way looking fuzzy in the sky. What you wouldn’t know from looking at it, is that it’s being torn apart by another satellite, also visible to the naked […]

Cosmology these days is dominated by the search for things we are confident exist, but can’t find or explain: dark energy, dark matter, and “missing matter”. Now a large collaboration claims to have found the last of these. While the failure to find missing matter has not drawn anything like the resources or attention of […]

The ocean’s chatter is getting a high-tech translator. A new AI model is diving into the clicks, whistles, and pulses of dolphins, bringing scientists closer than ever to cracking the code of one of the animal kingdom’s most sophisticated forms of communication. Dubbed DolphinGemma, the new AI system is a dolphin-friendly large language model developed […]