Deborah Bloomfield

Depictions of the ancient Egyptian sky goddess found on tombs and coffins dating back almost 5,000 years may represent a key feature of the Milky Way. After analyzing hundreds of images of the deity known as Nut, astrophysicist Dr Or Graur noticed that the goddess is sometimes drawn with a band of darkness zig-zagging across […]

It’s a great day for wedding crashers and the casually decadent among us, as a new study seems to suggest that drinking champagne could reduce your risk of sudden cardiac arrest.  Well, okay, that’s underselling it. The study actually identified some 56 non-clinical risk factors – that is, things like your social, environmental, or financial […]

Deepfakes have become increasingly worrying in recent years, and it’s easy enough to imagine a future where their appearance is so good they defy even our best methods to unmask them. Of course, in such a situation, the technology would be valuable for criminals and any hostile state-sponsored persons to create deepfakes that slander or […]

In April last year, the extremely popular The Joe Rogan Experience podcast hosted a high-profile debate between two guests. On the one side was Flint Dibble, a professional archaeologist at Cardiff University in the UK, and on the other, was Graham Hancock, a British writer. The stakes: whether or not there is evidence of a […]

Men currently outperform women at the top of almost all sports, but the gap is narrowing. Moreover, in a few ultra-endurance sports, women are already matching the best-performing men, and may soon come to dominate. A study comparing energy expenditure in a long-distance skiing event offers some insight into why. In 1985, Libby Riddles sent […]

Look at this incredible view! Galaxies stretching over billions of years in a single small-but-mighty image from JWST with some assistance from the Hubble Space Telescope.  It is a small area of the sky, equivalent to holding a square of one millimeter by one millimeter at arm’s length. But tens of thousands of galaxies are […]

Everyone knows that red is hot and blue is cold – even blind people who have never seen colors. According to a new study, this might be because language can organically absorb information about the visual world and seamlessly convey those associations, even to individuals who have never experienced them firsthand. The research explores how […]

On Thursday, October 26, 2023, workers who were re-grading the road on the peatland outside the village of Bellaghy, in county Londonderry, Northern Ireland, unearthed something that likely made the autumnal conditions feel even colder. At first, a worker spotted what looked like a bone sticking out of the mud where a piece of machinery […]

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: not only has a prehistoric apex predator kidnapped your child, but it’s started shooting logic puzzles at you as well. “Your kid is in my mouth,” says the crocodile, smiling around little Billie’s wriggling body. “And I’m going to eat them.” It pauses for a second. “Or am I?” it […]

A family of stars spotted by the Gaia space telescope are behaving like none we have seen before, expanding the bounds of what we think is possible. Although two explanations have been proposed, we’re still a long way from understanding the causes of this unusual behavior. The Gaia spacecraft ended its remarkable mission this year, […]

A group of experts from different disciplines around vaccine science and policy have come together for the launch of the Vaccine Integrity Project. Spearheaded by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), the initiative’s stated aims include “safeguarding vaccine utilization in the US”, keeping it “grounded in the best available […]

The Yellowstone supervolcano is extremely well studied, but that doesn’t mean it is fully understood. Researchers have just discovered a new structure deep beneath Yellowstone, and it might be playing an important role in holding back an eruption from this major volcanic system. Researchers from across the US have been using seismic data and computer […]

The European Space Agency’s Biomass mission took to the sky on April 29 on a Vega-C satellite launched from French Guiana. Its scientific work will soon start, and it is set to revolutionize what we know about the Earth’s forests and the carbon that is stored within. The mission is the first ever satellite to […]

Insect populations have been declining across the world at an alarming rate, but no one has been sure why. According to a new study, intense agricultural practices are at the top of the list of causes, but there are multiple interrelated factors that are all contributing to quickly killing off these vital creatures. People have […]

The Soviet Union’s failed Kosmos 482 Venus spacecraft is set to make a somewhat delayed reappearance as it slams into the Earth in the next few weeks. Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet Union launched a series of space probes in order to study the second-closest planet to the Sun. The overall program was a […]

Sharks have been around longer than trees (that’s a fact you’re just going to have to accept, because things get much stranger from here). Alongside other cartilaginous fishes like rays and chimaera, they sit within the ancient and successful clade known as Chondrichthyes, which has been enduring our planet’s ever-changing landscape for over 400 million […]

What’s the biggest city in the world? Your gut might say somewhere like New York, and it’s not a bad guess – with a population of more than 8,000,000, it’s far and away the most populous place in the USA. But the biggest? Not even close. Give it some thought, maybe check your trivia handbooks, […]

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A pair of chert points found alongside human skeletons in a cave in Belize may represent the first known tattooing needles ever discovered from a site linked to the ancient Maya civilization. After testing the fragmented tools on pig skins, the authors of a new study determined that the markings present on the ancient relics […]

Pet cats are a relatively new addition to the Americas. While this part of the world does have plenty of wild cats – from bobcats and jaguars to lynx and cougars – the paws of domesticated cats didn’t set foot here until European colonization around 500 years ago.  Now, researchers may have uncovered some of […]