Deborah Bloomfield

Let’s travel back in time before Just Eat, five different supermarket chains within a 2-mile radius, or even agriculture. There, you’ll find foraging, one of the most ancient practices there is. Though it’s never truly gone away since then, foraging has seen something of a resurgence in recent years, and with it, a curiosity about […]

Quantum computers have the potential to outperform even the most powerful supercomputers by leveraging the laws of quantum mechanics for their computation. The qubits (quantum bits) that perform those operations are in quantum states that are susceptible to environmental effects, which can lead to errors. For this reason, error correction is a big focus in […]

What we know about the birth of the Sun comes from the many stellar nurseries that we can observe elsewhere in the Universe. Direct evidence is rare, the elements and molecules that were present there have been changed into what the Solar System is like now. But some of those molecules persist and we have […]

China’s answer to the Hyperloop, an ultra-high-speed maglev train, has recently broken its own speed record by achieving speeds over 623 kilometers (387 miles) per hour at a full-scale test track. The project is being run by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), a state-owned aerospace company that makes everything from rockets and […]

Have you ever wanted to push your partner out of bed as their snoring was so loud that it seemed to rattle the windows? You are not alone, as a third of US-based people opt for a “sleep divorce” (sleeping in separate rooms at night), partly thanks to snoring. Alongside relationship woes, snorers can experience […]

Four underwater mountains have been discovered in the Pacific, one of which towers for 2,681 meters (8,796 feet) – that’s over three times the height of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper.  The collection of seamounts was identified last month by Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor (too) while making a voyage between Golfito […]

Engineers have developed a new lithium battery with better electrodes that could change charging speed significantly. Their new battery charges in under five minutes, which is faster than any current battery available on the market, particularly when it comes to electric vehicles’ batteries. The researchers looked at a system that had an asymmetry between charging […]

Traces of dust particles in Antarctic ice are 2.3-2.7 million years old, analysis suggests. This would make them the oldest legacy of an airburst: an asteroid that exploded in the atmosphere, rather than hitting the ground while large enough to leave a mark. The discovery could be the first step on a path that enables […]

The Seikan Tunnel in Japan is the longest tunnel with an underwater section in the world, measuring a total of 53.85 kilometers (33.4 miles) in length, around 23.3 kilometers (14.5 miles) of which is under the seabed. With the underwater section located 100 metres (328 feet) below the seabed of the Tsugaru Strait, the Seikan […]

Nobody likes being sprayed with toilet juice (we assume) – and yet every time we flush away our waste, those miracles of modern engineering suddenly turn into raging sewage volcanoes. “No problem,” you might think, “my toilet comes with a fancy-pants lid, I can just close it!” Well, boy do we have bad news for […]

In a world first, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have successfully 3D-printed human brain tissue that can grow and function like the real thing.  “This could be a hugely powerful model to help us understand how brain cells and parts of the brain communicate in humans,” said professor of neuroscience and neurology at the […]

A video from everyone’s favorite engineer and cartoonist Randall Munroe has pondered what would happen if you were able to throw a baseball towards a batter at 90 percent of the speed of light. The creator of the XKCD webcomic and author of several books pondering fun hypothetical questions ignored how it would be possible […]

Pistachios are so delicious that people are willing to suffer the indignity of breaking their shells apart, like a little squirrel. In fact, we love them so much we’re willing to risk them spontaneously combusting on their journey to our nut bowls. Before we go any further, pistachios are of course “drupes” rather than nuts, […]

The highlands of Northwestern Thailand are scattered with dozens of caves that house some extremely curious human burials from the ancient past. They consist of large wooden coffins – often several meters long and crafted from a single tree trunk – that are mounted above the floor on wooden stilts.  The 40 or so burial […]

“Mathematics,” Carl Friedrich Gauss is said to have claimed, “is the queen of the sciences.” Of course, as one of history’s most famous and influential mathematicians, he was a little biased; ask a physicist, and she may well reply with the famous observation that “physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.” But whether […]

A row of about 20 Mancala game boards has been discovered in a Kenyan wildlife conservancy, suggesting local herders may have whittled their days away playing the popular strategy game thousands of years ago. The boards were found carved into a rock ledge, and while it’s impossible to determine their age, researchers say the discovery […]

New research is showing that the population of wolves living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) is genetically different from their counterparts outside of the region. Remarkably, the irradiated wolves appear to have developed protective mutations that increase their odds of surviving cancer.  Populations of wolves, as well as other animals, have boomed in the […]

Oceans inside moons seem to be quite common among the satellites of the giant planets of the Solar System, and researchers believe they can add one more to the list: Mimas. The small Saturnian moon is popular for its cratered surface, one of which makes it look remarkably like Star Wars’ Death Star. But it […]

In early February, CERN’s restricted council held a special meeting to discuss one important item in its future: the next particle accelerator that they are going to build. CERN is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most complex single machine in the world. The proposed design for the next-generation international collaboration particle smasher […]

Geologists have unearthed new evidence that the Pacific Ocean plate is wracked with colossal faults, caused by the plate slowly drifting westward and plunging into the Earth’s mantle. The researchers believe their findings, if accurate, have the potential to redefine what we previously understood about how our planet works.  From our human perspective, Earth seems […]