Deborah Bloomfield

The Kepler-10 planetary system is clearly a place of extremes. It has a small, Earth-sized world that is half scorched, the first rocky world ever discovered by the Kepler mission. That’s Kepler-10 b. Another world was also discovered in the system, Kepler-10c, but it has been more complicated to get its properties clarified. Now, new […]

On Sunday, Liverpool FC won the Premier League, clinching the top spot with an impressive 5-1 victory over Tottenham Hotspur at Anfield.  That’s an unlikely sentence to read on a science website, but there’s a reason we’re talking about it. Despite being one of the top clubs in England for decades (full disclosure, I am […]

Yesterday lunchtime, at around 12:30 pm Madrid time (11:30 am in Lisbon/GMT), the entire Iberian Peninsula suddenly lost electricity as a monster power outage took down the grid that feeds both Spain and Portugal – as well as part of France. By midnight, power had been restored across the region, and as the authorities now […]

In the Devil Wears Prada, Andrea Sachs thinks she’s all that when she walks into work wearing the Chanel boots, but a new pair of kicks are about to stomp all over her parade: enter, Tyrannosaurus rex leather. That’s the vision of a new partnership working to create what they say will be a more […]

We are so used to the oceans being blue we use it as a signifier everyone recognizes on maps. However, the color is not inevitable, and new evidence has emerged that green was the dominant color for a long time, perhaps billions of years. Blue might just be a passing stage on the way to […]

For as long as we’ve had mirrors, we’ve been wary of them. For the ancients, they were connections to the gods, or to the land of the dead; they reflected not just your face but your very soul. Those who disrespected the devices by damaging them, or even simply gazing too long into them, were inviting the […]

One of the largest structures in the sky, as seen from our perspective, has only just been discovered. It’s an enormous cloud of molecular hydrogen gas that may one day condense down into stars. However, because its light is only detectable in a rarely studied part of the spectrum, all this gas has not been […]

Does it matter which arm you get your shots in? The short answer is yes, and not just because you probably want to avoid post-injection pain on your dominant side. Getting a vaccine booster in the same arm as the original shot can generate a better immune response, and now scientists are figuring out why. […]

While the tech bros of the world declare the singularity – the moment where artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence – imminent, various AI systems are still struggling with tasks humans can perform with ease. For instance, image generators struggle with hands, teeth, or a glass of wine that is full to the brim, while […]

A quiet and extremely niche revolution may be underway: according to reports out of China, HDMI is on its last legs. Its successor? GPMI. If all that sounds like a bunch of vaguely familiar random letters to you, though, here’s why it’s important. What is HDMI? HDMI stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface, and if you’ve […]

A male skeleton that was previously identified as Alexander the Great’s father has turned out to be the remains of an unknown Macedonian royal who died at least 20 years before Alexander’s old man was assassinated. Housed within the Great Tumulus of Vergina, the ancient bones are widely accepted to belong to a relative of […]

It’s easy to think of countries as having been around for a long time, but many of the world’s nations are yet to have even reached 100. In fact, the youngest that’s most widely recognized, South Sudan, is only just about to turn 14 – but it might soon lose its title for “world’s newest […]

An analysis of the interior of a single bone suggests its owner was probably an aquatic or semi-aquatic animal. Since the bone has been proposed to come from an ancestor of echidnas, or at least a relative, the finding raises the possibility that the common ancestor of all monotremes had a lifestyle more like a […]

You see a beetle covered in bugs. Poor thing, must be parasitized, right? Well, not necessarily. You see, a lot of animals are partial to hitchhiking in a kind of commensal interaction between species in which one animal clambers onto another so that it can benefit from being carried around. It’s called phoresy, and it’s […]

For the first time, physicists have created a “black hole bomb” in the lab, providing evidence for the “Zel’dovich effect” proposed half a century ago. The idea behind the Zel’dovich effect came from an unusual place. In 1969, British physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose suggested that energy could be extracted from black holes by lowering […]

Grappling with the aftermath of a devastating bushfire, the Australian state of Victoria has taken the controversial step of using helicopter snipers to shoot hundreds of koalas. It’s a move that officials say was a necessary evil to prevent widespread suffering, but one that has ignited political backlash and fierce public outrage. The Victorian government […]

An Associate Professor in Physics at the University of Portsmouth in the UK believes that gravity could be explained by information-reducing processes inside a computational or simulated universe. Dr Melvin Vopson has made headlines in recent years for some pretty “huge if true” suggestions about the nature of the universe, claiming to have found (tentative) […]

The US is looking to dramatically expand its efforts to churn up the seafloor in a new hunt for rare metals and critical resources. Supporters say the move could secure essential minerals and even lead to the discovery of new compounds, but environmental groups warn it will cause irreversible damage to marine ecosystems and “speed […]

A gene mutation has been identified in bed bugs for the first time, and it could explain why these little beasties are on the rise. Finding it was something of a happy accident, lurking within the last few samples urban entomologist Warren Booth was sifting through, and suggests they may have a similar resistance to […]

It was October 1963, and France was in love. With whom? A young explorer and aviatrix, named Félicette, who had just made history as one of the very first non-US, non-USSR astronauts to get out to space and come back again. It was the kind of story that seems almost perfectly designed for the silver […]