Deborah Bloomfield

2024’s Apocalypse Bingo Card can put a big fat cross through “insect invasion” as America is scheduled to have the first double brood emergence of cicadas in 221 years. How can we know that? Because these peculiar insects have a passion for prime numbers. Periodical cicadas don’t emerge often – once every 13 or 17 […]

Money talks, people talk – and now, according to new research, the plants are talking too. While we knew that plants had been chatting away to each other since 1983, one team has taken a closer look at the chemicals involved in this communication. When a plant is damaged by an animal or a careless […]

Fossils from the Llangynog Inlier of south Wales have been dated with unprecedented accuracy. As these fossils represent some of the oldest specimens of large multicellular life and match those from other parts of the world, this dating helps narrow down the point when life transformed from something we could barely see into an abundance […]

If you want to hunt dinosaurs, Vernal in Utah is the only place in the world where you can do it legally. That’s because they offer official dinosaur hunting licenses, but if you get one, we still can’t guarantee you any success. Vernal began issuing dinosaur hunting licenses back in 1951, reports The Museum of […]

Supersonic air travel holds the promise to get us across the world faster, but it comes with a big and loud drawback: Sonic booms. Supersonic planes are not allowed to travel over land because the boom they create is loud and disruptive. NASA has been working for decades to design an aircraft that can avoid […]

In Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat can disappear leaving only its grin behind. Physicists consider something analogous might exist in quantum mechanics when a particle can be separated from its properties, and the two travel on different paths. This quantum Cheshire cat effect explained that and other weird events like particles swapping disembodied properties. […]

Parental duties in the animal kingdom cover a whole range of options, from those that lay eggs and then sacrifice a normal sleep to care for their young, to those that give birth to live young that can move about within a few hours. Most nature shows feature animals growing up and learning the ropes, […]

A version of this article was first published in 2018 and we are pretty much resharing it as it was because the whole corporate invention of “Blue Monday” continues to be peddled as “science”, and there are only a limited number of ways to say this is bullsh*t. It’s the third week of January and […]

There once was a time when living into your 100s seemed like a pretty rare possibility – but if you happen to live in the US, you might be interested to know that your chances are on the up. Projections from the US Census Bureau (USCB) suggest that the number of American centenarians is set […]

In the morning of Sunday, January 14, the Earth opened up again in the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland. A new eruption took place in the active region, and this time the lava reached the town of Grindavík. After the eruption of last month, defenses were built to direct the lava flow away from the town, […]

An expansion of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program means that for the first time, humanity is starting to collect a substantial sample of the radio universe for this purpose, thanks to advances in detection equipment.  Despite occasional flutters of excitement, none of our scanning of the skies has turned up evidence of alien […]

You wouldn’t want to be on Venus right now. Or any day really. The atmospheric pressure and temperature are so high that you would be flattened and cooked immediately. It is much more bearable in the clouds of the planet, with a tropical climate and Earth-normal temperatures – as long as you don’t mind the […]

This article first appeared in Issue 15 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  A 5,000-year-old bristlecone pine stands in the White Mountains of California, making it the oldest non-cloned living organism on Earth. We know the extremes of longevity can get messy in the context of animal cancers, but what about botanical species? Do plants get […]

Lying deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, an immense geological superstructure has been growing since the Cretaceous period, fuelled by an area of intraplate volcanism that’s larger than Great Britain. In a new study, geologists attempt to piece together how the so-called Melanesian Border Plateau was formed, concluding that it was formed through several different pulses […]

This article first appeared in Issue 15 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  H.G. Wells set off an obsession with his novel The Time Machine, one whose frequent appearances in science fiction testifies to its popularity ever since. Many of the other futuristic concepts Wells and his contemporaries wrote about have long since come true, but […]

The fourth anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic is almost upon us. In 2024, the availability of vaccines has made it a very different beast from the disease authorities were struggling to contain at the start of 2020. Since that time, we’ve learned much about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its effects, but this research […]

On February 21, 1997, a man calling himself Mel Waters rang the late-night radio talk show “Coast to Coast with Art Bell” with a very strange story to tell. According to Waters, on his property, around 14 kilometers (9 miles) west of Ellensburg, Washington, there was a hole that seemingly had no bottom. Waters told […]

Fingerprint analysis is considered an invaluable tool in forensic and security settings due to the uniqueness and permanence of the patterns. No two people have been found to share a fingerprint pattern, not even identical twins. Fingerprints are so unique, in fact, that your own fingerprints don’t even match each other. But now, new research […]

There’s nothing like a cup of hot brown water to start your day. For some it’s the taste, while others seek the energy boost, but does tea or coffee have more caffeine?  The answer changes depending on how you do your brew, so let’s dive into it. Advertisement How much caffeine does tea have? Tea […]