Deborah Bloomfield

What’s the circumference of your neck? No idea? That’s fair enough – but according to some experts, it might be worth getting to know your neck size. That’s because it could be a better indicator of some health risks than other measures we hear a lot about, like waist-to-hip ratio and body mass index (BMI). […]

Maria Branyas lived to the ripe old age of 117 years and 168 days, making her, at the time of her death in August 2024, the world’s oldest verified living person. It’s an extraordinary feat, especially when you consider that the life expectancy for women in her native Catalonia is 86 years. So, what was […]

A giant supermassive black hole (SMBH) that consumes the mass of the Sun a day has been found to be about one-fifteenth of its initially estimated size, which makes its rate of feeding even more inexplicable. As excited as astronomers are about solving one puzzle and having another made clearer, they’re even more enthused about […]

Lately, a handful of viral posts have been saying the “52-hertz whale”, the so-called world’s loneliest whale, has at last found a friend. But is there any truth behind the buzz? What is the 52 hertz whale? For those uninitiated in the tale of the 52 hertz whale, in 1989 a team from the Woods […]

Seals get a good rap as one of the cutest marine predators swooshing through our oceans, but did you know that they have nails? Zookeepers become occasional manicurists for their seals and sea lions, many species of which have nails similar to those on our toes and fingers on their flippers. The rest of this […]

Every year, collectively, we spend almost $50 billion on anti-aging products – and to what end? Our faces still sag and wrinkle; our bones still ache and crack; Death still edges ever closer over the horizon. Well, we can’t do much about the latter two (yet) – but a new face cream formulation containing the […]

Everything that’s alive has to die eventually (yes, even you, immortal jellyfish). It’s not just a natural part of life but a necessary one, too, as there is so much on Earth that wouldn’t be possible were it not for, well, corpses. So, is our approach to death getting in the way of new life? […]

Fall is here, school is back in session, and pumpkin spice is inescapable. For many of us, this changing season means thoughts of cozy blankets, warming recipes, and maybe a trip to go leaf peeping. But for your friendly neighborhood Health and Medicine Editor, it can only mean one thing: flu season is round the […]

Until recently, it was thought that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals split off from their last common ancestor around 600,000 years ago, but a prehistoric skull from China has just shattered that narrative. Dated to a million years ago, the cranium belongs to an extinct human clade which encompasses the Denisovans, indicating that we had already […]

In 1964, physicist Arno Allan Penzias and radio astronomer Robert Woodrow Wilson picked up a persistent hum in their radio telescope readings. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. The noise – like static on a radio – seemed to be there, no […]

In spectacularly good timing a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun is about to collide with an object which came from outside of the Solar System. On July 1, 2025, astronomers spotted an object moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The object, […]

Physicists have made an array of 6,100 neutral-atom qubits held in place by lasers, marking a dramatic increase in potential quantum computing size. Nevertheless, the qubits have not yet been entangled, and cannot operate as a computer until this occurs. The bits in classical computers can either represent ones or zeros, but qubits can combine […]

Astronaut Reid Wiseman, who will serve as Commander on NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission to the Moon and back, has explained why he “hopes” that the crew will be forgotten by history. On Monday, NASA announced its schedule for the second stage of the Artemis II, the second stage in the space agency’s project to […]

These giant, guitar-shaped fish have not been spotted in this part of the world since the 1990s, leading many to assume they had vanished in the region. However, to the surprise of locals and scientists, the body of a largetooth sawfish recently washed ashore, dispelling some myths about the species’ demise. The rest of this […]

It’s not always easy inferring behavior from the fossil record because most often all the squishy bits are gone and we’re left to fill in the gaps from the odd bony bits n’ bobs. Sometimes, however, ancient creatures make palaeontologists’ lives a bit easier by remaining virtually complete for say, oh I don’t know, 240 […]

There are a lot of spookily named animals living it up on planet Earth: the vampire squid is neither vampire nor squid, vampire finches do actually eat blood, and vampire bats can run surprisingly fast as well as flying – so then what about the vampire deer? The rest of this article is behind a […]

To millions of Hindus, the Ganges River is more than a body of water – it is treated like the goddess Ganga Ma in physical form, a source of spiritual cleansing and blessings. But beyond its spiritual significance, the river is a lifeline for over 600 million people, providing water for drinking, farming, and industry. […]

A new study has attempted to pin down the properties of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas, finding it is “anomalously massive” at around 33 billion tons.  On July 1, 2025, astronomers spotted an object moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The object, which was confirmed […]

An experimental new gene therapy for Huntington’s disease has shown promising results in phase I/II trials, with 75 percent less disease progression observed in the patients receiving the treatment. If further trials continue to produce such positive results, we could be looking at a remarkable breakthrough for this incurable, life-limiting disease. Key takeaways AMT-130 is […]

In 1981, while conducting a redshift survey of the distribution of galaxies, astronomers spotted something (or nothing) that they weren’t expecting. “[W]e discovered that the redshift distributions in each of the three northern fields showed an identical 6,000 [kilometers per second] gap. Because these fields were separated by angles of ~35°, this suggested the existence […]