Deborah Bloomfield

Hyenas are quite an unusual member of the animal kingdom, with powerful bone-crushing jaws and downright weird sex lives.  There are four species of hyena in the family Hyaenidea that all live in Africa; spotted, brown, striped, and aardwolf. In spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta), society is run by females, who are significantly bigger and more […]

Every Indiana Jones movie has its own MacGuffin, an object of importance that has the main good guys and bad guys busy searching and getting into wacky adventures. In the latest film – Dial of Destiny – that object is, you guessed it, an ancient object called the dial of destiny. The movie refers to […]

Australia has become the first country in the world to officially legalize the use of psychedelics to treat specific mental health conditions. From July 1, authorized psychiatrists are allowed to prescribe MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, for drug-resistant depression.  Following a decision made in February this […]

Cross a bloodworm and you could be in for a nasty surprise. Stretching to 35 centimeters (14 inches) in length, their narrow bodies and fleshy-pink coloration might not make them look all that threatening, but their metal teeth tell a different story. Bait diggers and fishers are the most likely to fall victim to the […]

A monkey was recently seen carrying the body of her dead baby for some time after it died. However, she later ate the corpse in a case of primate cannibalism. As unpleasant as this sounds, this unusual behavior may have evolutionary benefits that impact the mother’s chances of reproducing in the future.  The monkey in […]

Variations in the brightness of quasars from the early universe have been used to measure time dilation back to only a billion years after the Big Bang. The findings reveal an era when clocks moved five times slower than they do today – or would have, if there had been anyone to make clocks. It […]

A team of scientists thought they had struck gold when they discovered the only known natural antibiotic that contains arsenic and showed its ability to treat tough bacterial infections. But its potential did not end there. Now, new research has found that it could be a game-changing treatment for another serious infectious disease: malaria. Antibiotic […]

This red hot stripe across the Pacific shows that El Niño has arrived. Satellites have suggested that sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean are significantly higher than average, signaling that the triple-dip La Niña is over and El Niño has returned.  The data was gathered by two NASA satellites, Sentinel-6 […]

Modern humans and Neanderthals obviously got along well enough to mate with one another, although the level of conversation that preceded these inter-hominid romances remains a matter of great uncertainty. Given that fossils are unable to talk and Neanderthals disappeared long before the invention of recording equipment, archaeologists have no way of knowing whether our […]

An international team of astronomers has discovered a never-seen-before feature in the solar corona: “shooting stars” falling down on the Sun. Using the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter (SolO), they discovered that the phenomenon of coronal rain was hiding these meteor-like fireballs, which can get as big as 250 kilometers (155 miles) wide. Don’t let […]

The first images and videos of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) new Lightning Imager have been released and you can watch thousands of lightning strikes flash across the globe. This is the first ever satellite instrument capable of continuously detecting lightning across Europe and Africa.  ESA, along with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of […]

The rolling power of pill bugs and grip strength of chitons have landed them an unexpected role in robotics, as scientists working on biohybrid technologies have invented a robot arm with living grippers. The creators say that the method doesn’t harm the animals and that once they’ve done their grabbing, they can simply scuttle back […]

Do you sniff it, read the label, or wait to see bits floating in your coffee or tea? There are many ways to check when milk has gone off, but new research has shown that up to half of consumers decide to throw away milk based only on a brief glance at the date on […]

Forensics can be vital in supporting police and juries to reach accurate conclusions in complex cases where the facts are elusive. The potential of results to swing convictions or eliminate suspects means their correct application is paramount, which is why the field is now populated by experts who can search for clues in places most […]

Archeologists are looking for the skeleton of an elephant – not in the savannahs of Africa or the jungles of Asia, but in the green English countryside. In Victorian Britain, traveling menageries would scale up and down the country to show off the exotic animals looted from the empire’s distant lands, including lions, tigers, bears, […]

In the Indian Ocean, there is an anomaly. The gravity there is lower (compared to what we’d expect) than anywhere else on the planet, and now, a team of researchers may have figured out why. According to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, objects attract other objects with a force determined by their masses and the […]

This article first appeared in Issue 9 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. In 2003, in Exeter, UK, a 65-year-old man, now memorialized in scientific literature as patient “MX”, decided to visit his neurologist. He had a very peculiar problem: after a minor heart surgery, he had awoken to find that he had completely lost his […]

This article first appeared in Issue 9 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  To quote Edwin Hubble, “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.” Of course, we enhance our senses as much as we can with technology, but it is here we often start. How would the […]

Sir Elton John set a record at this year’s Glastonbury, becoming the most-watched headliner in the festival’s history, with more than 7 million people tuning in live to the BBC to watch his last ever UK performance. The 76-year-old singer certainly delivered all his characteristic showmanship. But many who have followed his music over the […]

You’ve got to give it to the Moon. It is not one to be photographed on the fly. Smartphone images of our natural satellite turn out like smudgy, flare-y blobs (unless you are using some AI trickery). But it doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to get a good picture of the […]