Deborah Bloomfield

An experimental quantum drive is missing and presumed lost in space, after the team lost communication with the satellite it was supposed to move.  Rogue Space Systems launched the satellite Barry-1 into orbit in November 2023, hitching a lift from the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Unfortunately, the company’s first space mission did not all go […]

A picture of a heart-shaped lake definitely sounds like something that’s been photoshopped and does the rounds on Facebook every Valentine’s Day, but the lovely shape of Spirit Lake, Washington, is very much real. However, it hasn’t always looked this way. Rather than the full heart that we can see in satellite imagery today, the […]

Beneath your feet in the depths of our planet, there’s an unbelievably vast ecosystem teeming with life. In recent years, a massive international team of scientists revealed how billions upon billions of microorganisms live miles beneath Earth’s subsurface. Presenting their work at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in 2018, the researchers calculated the size […]

Klerksdorp spheres, found inside pyrophyllite deposits mined in South Africa, are weird. Looking like tiny ancient cricket balls, with seam-like lines around their middle, it’s easy to see why they became the subject of conspiracy theories involving aliens and ancient, forgotten civilizations. In articles in the 1980s, they were speculated to be made by “a higher […]

One Za’abeel, a double-skyscraper that adorns Dubai’s busy skyline, is set to take the title of the world’s longest cantilever building. In layman’s terms, a cantilever is a structure that sticks out horizontally beyond its vertical support, creating an overhanging section without the need for columns or supports, appearing as if it’s defying gravity. One […]

Inside our planet, there are the remains of another world. No, we are not peddling some conspiracy theory like the hollow Earth. We are talking about the remains of Theia, the Mars-sized object that, billions of years ago, hit our planet and led to the formation of the Moon. Its remains were simply incorporated with […]

The smallest human-like robot ever to exist has been created by a group of four teenagers in Hong Kong. Measuring just 14.1 centimeters (5.55 inches) in height, the tiny gizmo is 11.3 millimeters (0.44 inches) shorter than the previous world record holder, which was built by Zain Ahmad Qureshi from Pakistan in 2022. Verified by […]

In eastern Java, Indonesia lies the Kawah Ijen volcano, which has become something of a tourist hotspot in recent years. This is because, at night, otherworldly blue lights appear on its darkened slopes. These ghostly pale fires are caused by the large amounts of sulfur deposits on the volcano’s surface. When the high temperatures from […]

In California’s share of the Mojave Desert, one of the sunniest places on Earth, the largest single solar and battery energy storage project in the world has just become fully operational: the Edwards & Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage facility. Consisting of almost 2 million solar panels, the sprawling solar farm has 875 megawatts of […]

One of humanity’s great coming-of-age moments was the realization that the Sun is a star, falling somewhat unexceptionally within the range of those we see; made special only by our relationship to it. However, stars are not clones of each other. So do all other stars count as suns? Do any? If only some do, […]

Dubai is home to many a feat of engineering, but perhaps one of its most iconic is the Palm Jumeirah. This palm-tree-shaped archipelago of artificial islands began construction in 2001 and has since gone on to become one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks. So how do you make the world’s biggest artificial set of […]

Voyager 1 is the furthest any human object has ever gone from Earth. It is now over 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) from our planet, flying through interstellar space. Since its launch in August 1977, the spacecraft has remained in contact with Earth, but over the last several months, that communication has become non-sensical. […]

Species within ecosystems are intrinsically linked. Whether they time the birth of their offspring with the sea ice or have evolved to live aboard another organism, these connections can be found time and time again in nature. Now, on a beach on North Padre Island off the coast of Texas, yet another example has appeared […]

After decades of dreaming, Italy has once again set its sights on building the longest suspension bridge in the world to connect the Italian mainland with the island of Sicily. Their vision is a bridge that stretches around 3,300 meters (10,800 feet) over the Strait of Messina, the thin strip of sea between the “toe” […]

Being elusive might seem exclusively the realm of spies and space stuff, but animals are pretty good at it too, and one that takes the trait to heart is the Somali sharp-snouted worm lizard. Having not been officially seen in over 90 years, the odd-looking creature has now made a reappearance. The Somali sharp-snouted worm […]

Humans have affected pretty much every part of the planet with our various pollutants, no matter how hard they are to reach.  For example, in 2020 a new species found in the Mariana Trench was eventually named after the plastic found in its guts, and in 2023 microplastics were discovered in a cave system that […]

The climate crisis and the warming of the planet is having a devastating effect on the natural world and the animal species that live in it. While polar bears have been found to be at greater risk of starvation due to a lack of sea ice, another species is facing the opposite problem, being put […]

Deep beneath the surface of the Earth, there is a massive reservoir of water. It is estimated to contain three times the amount of water of all the oceans on our surface. In 2014, a team from the US used 2,000 seismometers to study seismic waves from over 500 earthquakes. By examining the speed of the […]

When OSIRIS-REx was planned, the mission team aimed to collect at least 60 grams of material. That was the requirement for a successful mission. Well, consider OSIRIS-REx doubly successful, as it brought back home 121.6 grams (4.29 ounces), the largest collection of extraterrestrial material from beyond the Moon. The return of the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition […]

This week a lone stingray in a North Carolina aquarium was found to be pregnant and the idea of the world’s first shark-ray hybrid was put forward, a 280-million-year-old fossil was identified as a partial forgery, and Earth has received a power beam sent from space for the first time. Finally, we take a closer […]