Deborah Bloomfield

The dizzying height of Mount Everest’s 8,849-meter (29,032-foot) peak has cemented this famous Himalayan mountain as the tallest in the world. Semantically speaking, however, it isn’t. Measuring from base to peak, and distance from the equator, Mount Everest has been beaten hands down by two other rocky contenders. Before you leave a strongly worded comment, […]

A birth control pill that can be purchased without a prescription has been approved for use in the US for the first time. The over-the-counter drug received groundbreaking approval from the US Food And Drug Administration (FDA), and will be available online and in-store. “Today’s approval marks the first time a nonprescription daily oral contraceptive […]

It’s a common sight in upmarket restaurants desperate to make the $40 steak seem worth it: “28-day matured beef”. In fact, most places selling meat will often advertise it as aged or matured, and meat enthusiasts will tell you that makes it significantly tastier. But why is that?  To a non-meat eater, 28-day-aged meat sounds […]

Not all stellar objects turn into stars: some are not big enough to turn on nuclear fusions at their core. They become brown dwarfs and end up not much bigger than a planet like Jupiter. Some of them are also colder than a campfire or the hottest setting of an electric stove. Among these ultracool […]

The ocean is a dangerous place at the best of times and now another creature, a sea otter by the name of 841, has joined the orcas in the great uprising of marine animals in 2023. We jest, of course, but maybe consider other places to surf this summer than the California coast. Otter 841 […]

A randomized clinical trial has found that ketamine is life-changing for many people whose depression has failed to respond to other treatments. Moreover, the type of ketamine tested is much cheaper than the nasally administered S-ketamine that has been used in most previous trials, potentially bringing the treatment within reach for those who can’t afford […]

One of the iconic staples of Britain’s infamously dubious cuisine is black pudding, a grainy dark sausage commonly seen alongside a full English breakfast. However, it’s lesser known to friends on the other side of the Atlantic that the main ingredient of this food is blood.  Native to the UK and Ireland, black pudding is […]

Ask any new parent and they’ll tell you how their baby smells indescribably pleasant (as long as their diaper has been recently changed). This isn’t just a matter of parents doting over their newborns: “new baby smell” is a real thing and it appears to play an incredibly effective role in building bonds. In 2019, […]

If you’re someone who struggles to get to sleep or experiences anxiety and stress, then a technique that is being showcased on TikTok and other social media platforms may be able to help you. The so-called “five finger breathing technique”, which sounds like something from an old martial arts film, can allegedly make it easier […]

This week, JWST marked one year of official science missions. To celebrate, a special image was released, a standard birthday gift the telescopes tend to do. Veterans like Hubble have dozens of them, for example. We sat down with some of the astronomers working on JWST, and the excitement for the year was more than […]

We all know what a headache feels like. Whether it’s from overindulgence the night before, staring at a screen for too long, or even just eating ice cream too quickly, the occasional pain in the head is a fact of life. At their most severe, disorders like migraine and cluster headaches can be very serious […]

Brain and nerve damage is most often associated with loss of control over areas associated with the damage – paraplegics, for example, may lose control over their legs following a spinal cord injury. However, what if that damage didn’t make the limb stop moving, but instead gave it a mind of its own? This strange […]

Any self-respecting trivia fan can tell you the largest country on Earth and most likely the smallest, but do you know the most rectangular? What about the most circular?  What’s the most rectangular country in the world? As explained on his blog, Australian statistician David Barry came across a friend’s Facebook comment saying that Turkey […]

The bright galaxies the JWST has discovered existing unexpectedly soon after the Big Bang might be powered not by hydrogen fusing, as stars are today, but by concentrations of Dark Matter, physicists have proposed. These “Dark Stars” are claimed to have masses a million times that of the Sun. Don’t let the name fool you, […]

It’s come to our attention lately that people aren’t really aware of how certain foods (like crab sticks) are made. This is perfectly understandable, given that for most modern humans when you fancy some parmesan you merely have to have an awkward interaction with a waiter rather than head out to kill a baby cow […]

In 2005, a group of young British folk involved in a reality TV show braced themselves in a Russian space shuttle base before being blasted into space. Or so they thought. Space Cadets, broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, saw 12 people sign up to go into low-Earth orbit for five days. They had […]

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the JWST a brand new image has been released of the closest star-forming region to Earth, capturing star birth in a way we have never seen before. The JWST is the largest and most powerful telescope ever made. Launched into space on Christmas Day 2021 at a cost of […]

When stars die, they leave behind beautiful wispy clouds of gas known as planetary nebulae – or, more poetically, “ghost stars”. These only last tens of thousands of years, compared to the billions of years most stars survive, but ten years ago a strange pattern was found amongst them. A new study indicates close binary […]

If you ever have the chance to look at a human brain outside the protective dome of the skull, you’ll find it looks distinctly… gray. And wet. But mostly gray. This color is almost irrevocably linked with the brain, perhaps most famously by Agatha Christie’s protagonist Hercule Poirot, who talked of his “little gray cells” […]

The sheer size of clouds, their deceptively hefty weight, and the threat of getting trapped inside one can make the prospect of giant sky marshmallows pretty terrifying. So, how would you feel seeing one start to sprout what appears to be a giant portal to an alternate dimension? Fear not, the phenomenon that makes it […]