Deborah Bloomfield

A new NASA study has found that the Sun’s activity is ramping up, reversing the trend and surprising astronomers. Humans have known about sunspots since around 800 BCE, when ancient Chinese astronomers recorded observations of them in I Ching, the Book of Changes.  “Sunspots are areas where the magnetic field is about 2,500 times stronger […]

Earth is pretty special, and as far as we know, the only place in the universe with life. But how special is it really? There are billions upon billions of planets in the Milky Way alone; shouldn’t life be common? Maybe, but even if life is common, how common are advanced civilizations? Some new work […]

A week ago, a stunning total lunar eclipse was seen by a record-breaking number of people on the planet. This week, there is a solar eclipse, and it’s going to be the complete opposite. Eclipses often come in pairs, but these two are truly an odd couple. The lunar eclipse of September 7 was total, […]

You might be surprised to learn that the art of creating clay pots predates the development of agriculture. That’s right: our ancestors figured out pottery way back during the Last Glacial Maximum, when huge ice sheets shrouded the land and the first farmers were still millennia in the future. The oldest examples of clay pot […]

Around 10,000 years before the Egyptians developed their sophisticated embalming practices, people in Southeast Asia were already mummifying the dead. According to new research, the mortuary tradition may have been developed by the direct descendants of the very first modern humans to reach the easternmost region of Eurasia, and persists to this day among certain […]

It’s been a busy year so far for Yellowstone, with over 3.5 million recreational visits to the USA’s oldest national park up until the end of August. With all those visitors comes a whole lot of trash – some of which you’d expect to see, and some of it… well, not quite so much. In […]

It was April 1989, and the International Gold Council in New York was on the warpath. The culprit: the late AK Dewdney, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Western Ontario – and the man who, in one recent column for Scientific American, had thrown into jeopardy the entire basis of global civilization. […]

The parent world of asteroid Ryugu, the space rock visited by the Japanese mission Hayabusa2, had flowing water for over a billion years. This was not at all expected when the spacecraft collected and brought back the sample, and it adds to the record of evidence that suggests a much more peculiar early Solar System. […]

Flying foxes are some of the largest bats in the world. With a body the size of a cat and a wingspan that would make an eagle envious, these megabats are an incredible example of how mammals have developed a variety of adaptations to conquer the skies. Scientifically known as Pteropus, flying foxes are a […]

NASA has responded to claims – popularized by Harvard professor Avi Loeb – that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is a spacecraft sent to the Solar System by an advanced alien civilization. On July 1, 2025, astronomers spotted an object moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and […]

Planet Earth’s oceans hold a mindblowing quantity of gold, enough to satisfy the greed of Smaug many, many times over. Scientists have estimated that there’s around one gram of gold dissolved in every 100 million metric tons of seawater in the Atlantic and North Pacific. In other parts of the world, such as the Mediterranean […]

Last year was supposed to be when humanity went back to the Moon, this time as a prelude to staying. At the time, the schedule appeared improbable; now it looks silly to have ever suggested it. After the failures of Starship earlier this year, many people expressed doubts that America would put humans back on […]

On Monday 15 September 2025, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center issued a G3 geomagnetic storm warning, the result of a large coronal hole sending increased solar winds at Earth. Over the weekend, the northern lights were visible as far south as Maine and Connecticut, USA, as a moderate geomagnetic […]

Doctors in the United States have documented what is believed to be the longest-known case of COVID-19, lasting an extraordinary 776 days before the patient’s death. The unnamed man, who was living with HIV, shows how weakened immunity can allow the coronavirus to linger, mutate, and adapt in ways rarely seen in healthy people. The […]

Cement has long been seen as one of the world’s dullest but most essential building materials. Sturdy and gray, this material can be found everywhere in cities, such as in roads, buildings, and statues. And now, scientists have found a way to engineer “living cement” with the ability to store energy. The rest of this […]

Earwax is undeniably one of the body’s grossest secretions. Blood? A whole host of critters think that’s delicious. Snot? Hey, kids (and a truly worrying number of adults) eat it. But earwax? Disgusting. Luckily, this aural secretion does have a couple of redeeming qualities. First, it protects our ears from stuff like dirt, bacteria, and […]

In a move that we’re surprised not to have seen from Madagascar’s Melman, a giraffe living at a UK zoo is now breathing easy after learning how to use an inhaler. Mahiri, a 16-year-old female reticulated giraffe resident at Banham Zoo in Norfolk, has a long-term nasal condition that sees her get discharge from both […]

This week, scientists may have found a universal weak spot for nearly every tested flu strain using a carefully designed triple antibody cocktail, an animal with 229 pairs of chromosomes is officially declared to have the most chromosomes of any animal, and, for the first time, an 85-million-year-old dinosaur egg has been dated using an […]

Crocs are arguably the crème de la crème of carnivores, armed with a jaw full of huge teeth perfectly adapted for ripping flesh, not to mention a highly acidic stomach that can break down animal bones. While they can and do eat fruit and vegetables, meat is undoubtedly their meal of choice. But this bloodthirsty […]

A rare and powerful stratospheric warming event appears to be unfolding high above the South Pole – and it could have a knock-on effect through the global weather system.  Both of Earth’s poles are surrounded by a circling, swirling mass of cold air in the stratosphere, located between approximately 12 and 50 kilometers (7.5 and […]