Deborah Bloomfield

Hold onto your hats, the zoology world hasn’t finished for the holidays just yet. Instead, intrepid researchers have been out and about in the forests of Vietnam and northern Sumatra and have discovered two new species of downright adorable furry hedgehogs. While their prickly cousins might be more well known, furry hedgehogs, or gymnures, are […]

Gamma rays are the most powerful type of light, extremely dangerous to life forms. They can form in nuclear reactions, as well as in and around powerful astronomical events and bodies, such as black holes, pulsars, and supernovae. Studying the universe in gamma rays opens a window on these extremes and NASA’s Fermi has been […]

Ever since humans first domesticated dogs, we’ve been molding them – from their bodies down to their temperaments. Now, new research has suggested human actions may have even gone so far as to inadvertently steer the evolution of our pooch pals’ eye color. A team of scientists from Japan analyzed images of 22 grey wolves […]

As pure as the driven snow? Well, not so anymore, as a new study has shown that traces of sunscreen have been found in snow at the North Pole, on the glaciers of the Svalbard archipelago. In the last few decades, legacy contaminants have been turning up in Arctic environments. Through international efforts and regulations, […]

In 2021, the government of El Salvador did what many fans of cryptocurrencies had been pleading for: it made Bitcoin legal tender. All businesses in the Central American country were legally required to accept Bitcoin as an alternative to the US dollar, which had been El Salvador’s only currency since 2001. The government even launched […]

We have known for some time that our distant ancestors got more than familiar with other archaic hominins, especially Neanderthals. However, in 2021, researchers discovered what they believe is a previously unknown population of ancient hominins who exhibit a unique blend of Neanderthal and archaic human traits. The finding suggested that this other population had […]

2023 was a big year for bizarre animal news. As one town in England welcomed in the New Year by canceling their fireworks display for a masturbating walrus, scientists in India revealed the first known case of a dinosaur egg-in-egg, something that was thought to be unique to birds. You never know what’s going to […]

Christmas and the many other winter (in the northern hemisphere) holidays are a time of celebration – and also a time of telescopes trying to one-up each other with the most stunning pictures they can produce. JWST has delivered a breathtaking view of Uranus, and now it’s the turn of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), […]

A 15-year-old girl experienced vocal cord paralysis after a bout of COVID-19, according to a new case report. It’s the first time this particular complication of the disease has been reported in an adolescent, and medics are calling for greater awareness of this possibility, albeit rare, in children infected with SARS-CoV-2. Over the almost four […]

Fossil hunters in search of the teeth of ancient marine predators will tell you that one of the best places to head is the beach. Combing along the shoreline in places like the UK’s Jurassic Coast can turn up teeth dating back millions of years (including the snout of a 150-million-year-old “giant sea monster”) – […]

Occam’s Razor – a nifty problem-solving principle often attributed to a medieval Franciscan friar – is not just a tool we should all use, it is the heart of science itself and is valuable for separating legitimate ideas from superstition, pseudoscience, or fake news, according to a recent paper by a renowned Professor of Molecular […]

Wildflowers, like most things, seem to be suffering the effects of climate change and lack of insect pollinators. Instead of this spelling complete disaster for the hedgerows and verges across the globe, scientists have discovered something very surprising: The plants are evolving to do without the insects.  Pollination by insects is one of the most common […]

No matter where you are on the globe today, the Sun will reach its southernmost apparent position with respect to our planet. This is due to the tilt of the Earth that, as the planet orbits the Sun, makes our star look like it goes up and down between the two tropics. And today, December […]

Have you ever wondered where nuclear submarines go when they die? That is, where their highly radioactive cores are stored once they have been decommissioned? Well, there is a place in the US, called Trench 94, which is effectively a nuclear submarine graveyard, containing dozens of old reactors that are stored in perpetuity. And while […]

CERN’s ATLAS Collaboration has released a new measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson with a precision of 0.09 percent. Since the Higgs’ mass is one of the fundamental parameters that defines many aspects of the universe, this sort of precision can improve our understanding of many other particle interactions. For decades the Higgs […]

The great thing about science is that it’s constantly evolving. What was once common knowledge is now a (hopefully ironic) meme; diseases that once wiped out whole families quite literally no longer exist; and time and time again, we have found that everything we thought we knew about the course of history is, in fact, […]

An amateur astronomer hunting through old images from the Galileo mission spotted something everyone else had missed – an apparent impact crater. Now, professional astronomers have provided evidence that what Jesper Sandberg found was the real thing, an asteroid impact Io’s volcanic activity has yet to eliminate. From the moment Galileo turned his telescope to […]

Last week, the Sun released the strongest flare yet of this cycle and the strongest in six years. It was an X 2.8 class flare, the strongest recorded since September 10, 2017, and about 5 to 10 percent of the strongest on record from November 2003. The Sun is approaching its maximum activity for its […]

Although the human population officially reached 8 billion a little over a year ago, its growth rate is the slowest it’s been since 1950, dropping under 1 percent back in 2020. Some have even predicted this might be a sign of an impending decline in the global population. Whilst there’s no guarantee of this on a global […]

New species are found surprisingly often, and creatures with eight legs seem to be having a bit of a bumper year. In Ecuador two new species of tarantulas have been found – but they don’t seem to be very pleased, and have been given names to reflect their sassy personalities and the conservation issues they […]