Deborah Bloomfield

If you’re looking for an example of when nature well and truly said “let’s fuck around and find out”, look no further than the extinct reptile Longisquama, potentially one of the most ridiculous-looking animals to have ever lived. This peculiar creature was discovered in the Madygen Formation, a geological formation found in the south of Kyrgyzstan […]

The first English colonizers to settle in North America were forced to eat dogs during an intense period of hardship, as shown by new archaeological discoveries. The grisly remains of this mini-famine also show how canine companions provide a unique insight into the power dynamics between European settlers and Indigenous peoples. Advertisement In a new […]

On the morning of June 3, look to the East. Just before sunrise, you will get six out of seven planets nicely aligned. Venus will be a bit too close to the Sun to be visible before the Sun appears. The alignment will give you great views in the order Jupiter, Mercury, Uranus, Mars, Neptune, […]

Scientists at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) have released a report on the recent rise in orcas ramming boats off the Iberian Peninsula. Advertisement Since 2020, a small group of orca off the Iberian Peninsula (known as Iberian killer whales) have interacted with vessels off the coast of Morocco, Spain, and Portugal at least 673 […]

After years of campaigning by Greenpeace, a court in the Philippines has revoked the permit to grow “Golden Rice”, a genetically modified crop designed to combat malnutrition. The move is a highly controversial one, with some scientists saying the decision could potentially cost “thousands and thousands” of lives. Advertisement The Philippines became the first country […]

When it comes to birth control, there’s a bit of an imbalance between products targeted at women and those assigned female at birth, and products targeted at men. And when we say “imbalance”, we mean that nearly all the effective, reversible methods are designed around the female reproductive system. There’s long been a drive to […]

Two lava flows on Venus show signs of being very recent, suggesting volcanic activity on Earth’s evil twin may be ongoing, providing exciting opportunities for future study. Advertisement It’s hard to believe today, but in the middle of the last century, hopes for life or future colonies on Venus were as high as for those […]

The Met Gala? That’s old news. The most Instagrammable event in Manhattan during May is something anyone can get a ticket to if they happen to be in the city, thanks to an unexpected partnership between the Sun and the street grid known as Manhattanhenge. Advertisement What is Manhattanhenge? Yes, Manhattanhenge sounds like a made-up […]

What started off as a family reunion with a big barbecue to boot wound up with six people infected with rare parasitic worms and three of those people ending up in hospital. The source? Undercooked black bear meat. Advertisement The story began to unravel when a 29-year-old man was admitted to hospital in July 2022 […]

A handful of puzzling cases in a brain bank of over 5,000 donated samples – these are the people identified in a new study from the Netherlands as having had asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease. These individuals are known as “resilient” to the disease, and scientists are only just beginning to uncover the secrets inside their brains. […]

The remains of three Stone Age mammoths have been uncovered within a wine cellar in Austria, providing incredible new insights into how ancient humans may have hunted the extinct beasts. Describing the find as the most significant of its kind in over a century, researchers have said that the bones are probably 30,000 to 40,000 […]

Forget breaking into the housing market or the millionaire class – millennials have officially just reached even headier heights. Specifically, heaven. The Vatican announced recently that Carlo Acutis, a London-born and Milan-raised boy who died from leukemia in 2006 aged just 15, now qualifies for canonization – in other words, he’s ready to be declared […]

Monotremes, now known only from the platypus and a handful of echidna species, were once a much more successful order, with three new species now identified from a single geologic formation. Yet while their diversity has dwindled, the egg-laying mammals appear to be onto a good thing. Indeed, their body design has changed so little […]

Over the last few months, a small but pretty noticeable change has been creeping into plastic bottles across Europe. No longer is it as easy to throw away the lid: it’s now tethered to the bottle, and it’s all part of preparing for a new rule that’s about to come into force in the European […]

South Africa’s Witwatersrand Basin could be sitting on a bundle of “invisible gold” reportedly worth up to $24 billion – and one young scientist believes he knows how we can get our hands on it. Advertisement Witwatersrand in South Africa was the site of a giant Gold Rush in the late 19th century that was […]

A new mathematical model provides insights into what may lie under the icy surface of the most famous dwarf planet: Pluto. Sputnik Planitia, the scientific name of its heart, looks dramatically different from the rest of the distant world. New modeling suggests what is likely to lie beneath it, and its properties. Advertisement When New […]

A team of researchers analyzing previously unpublished images of Mars’s moon Phobos have found hints that the unusual moon is not what we once thought. Advertisement Mars’s moons Phobos and Deimos are a little different from the other moons of the solar system. While not as strange as the Earth’s possible “ghost moon” (aka a […]

In May 2018, Kīlauea volcano in Hawai’i erupted repeatedly in quick succession, driving ash more than 9,000 meters (30,000 feet) into the sky. Although the damage to the towns below swallowed by lava looked tragically familiar, the eruptions had features so unusual that volcanologists have been studying them for six years, eventually identifying a new […]

Eyes come in just about every form in the animal world – from unusually shaped pupils, to bright colors, and even some animals that have evolved to do without. But what about the creatures that crawl across planet Earth? When you’re used to seeing the world from the safety of a web or from behind […]

Imagine for a moment you’re a ham radio enthusiast, alone at night, idly working your way through the radio spectrum when you come across a broadcast on a disused shortwave channel, where usually there would be nothing but static. Advertisement The broadcast is a tune, or a buzz, or sometimes cartoon character Yosemite Sam saying […]