Deborah Bloomfield

The Greenland shark is the poster child for animals with extreme longevity – and with good reason. As the longest-living vertebrates on Earth, they develop incredibly slowly in their frosty Arctic home, but when it comes to the longest-living animals on Earth, they’re not all that. The ocean quahog is a pretty unremarkable-looking clam, reaching […]

In 2007, Inuit whalers in Alaska made a surprising discovery. In the carcass of a whale, they found fragments of a weapon embedded in its flesh – but this wasn’t a modern piece of equipment. The harpoon was traced back to the 1900s, and after investigation, scientists estimated that the whale itself was around 115 […]

Bearded vultures have been revealed as the somewhat surprising curators of natural museums, after scientists investigating centuries-old, abandoned nests discovered that they were packed with a whole host of well-preserved historical remains. Once found throughout the mountains and cliffs of southern Spain, bearded vultures are now extinct in these areas, having begun to disappear between […]

Within just 75 years, the glaciers of California’s Sierra Nevada are likely to have melted away, exposing the rocky parts of the mountains for the first time since the Ice Age. When that happens, people alive today may witness something no human has ever seen before: Yosemite’s peaks stripped bare of ice. The rest of […]

The US has hit a regrettable new measles milestone, with over 1,500 cases reported in the country so far this year. This is the highest number since the disease was locally eliminated at the turn of the century. Although weekly cases are well down compared to the peak of the outbreak in March of this […]

Not an accolade anyone wants, but for the Xerces blue butterfly, its extinction is considered the first of any American insect species to have been directly caused by humans. Last seen in 1941, genetic testing proved that the Xerces blue butterfly was a distinct species, and its disappearance was the first human-led insect extinction. Back in […]

Comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar visitor to the Solar System, will get closest to one particular planet in the Solar System. Bad news: it is not Earth, so we can’t get the best view of this object. Still, of all the planets of the Solar System, it is passing near Mars, where humanity has […]

India is home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s tigers. After a few precarious years due to hunting, conflict, and habitat loss, its population doubled between 2006 and 2018 thanks to conservation efforts, even increasing its range by 30 percent. However, some of the smaller populations are facing a common problem, one that tends to […]

The latest COVID-19 subvariants to spread around the world are causing a rise in cases that’s been noted in a number of countries. Should you be worried? Stratus and Nimbus variants If you’re struggling to keep up with all the variant names at this point, we get it. As a reminder, we’re onto clouds now, […]

An international team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have spotted a rogue planet breaking a new record; growing at a rate of 6 billion tonnes per second. Rogue planets – sometimes called free-floating planets – are interstellar, planetary-mass objects that are not gravitationally bound to a star or […]

We know how the universe began. An event we call the Big Bang started it all about 13.8 billion years ago. How the universe ends, though, is an open question. The path forward depends on the properties of two hypothetical components of the universe: dark matter and dark energy, and one recent study suggests that […]

A new study on interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has found unusual and as-yet-unexplained metals in the object’s coma. 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 was confirmed to be an interstellar comet with its own […]

A recent paper has proposed a new idea for what is causing the observed accelerated expansion of the universe, and dark matter, suggesting both of them may a “cosmic illusion” caused by the changing constants of the universe.  By observing the universe from the cosmic microwave background to our nearest galaxies, we know that our […]

Animal life is a recent addition to Earth, relatively speaking. The planet formed about 4.5 billion years ago, with microbial life likely emerging between 4.3 and 3.7 billion years ago. It was not until several billion years later that animals started to rock up in a humble and vaguely familiar form: sponges. In a new […]

Women, generally speaking, live longer than men. That’s true of humans across nearly all countries and historical time periods – and the male-female gap is even observed in other species. But why? A new study may shed some light on this long-standing mystery, hinting that it is deeply rooted in evolutionary history. An international team, […]

Dame Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91, her institute announced on October 1. Tributes have poured in as people mourn the loss of one of the most important scientists and conservationists of the 20th century.  British-born Dr Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, in 1960. What followed was a 65-year […]

Did her plane crash into the sea? Was she captured by Japanese soldiers? Was she eaten by giant crabs? Nearly 90 years after her disappearance, new details about the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart could soon come to light.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the […]

It was exactly two decades ago that the Cassini mission discovered that underneath the surface of Enceladus, one of the icy moons of Saturn, there is a deep ocean. Thanks to the mission, we have learned that the moon is releasing geysers into space, forming another ring of Saturn: the E Ring. In those geysers, […]

In a study taking data from across the USA, children and adolescents were found to have double the risk of developing long COVID after their second infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19. This goes against what many people assumed to be true – that your second run-in with the virus is generally less severe […]

Long before its days in the Bible, the Red Sea had a strange and turbulent history. Millions of years ago, this narrow strip of water between Africa and Asia totally dried out and turned the seabed into a salty plain. It then suddenly refilled due to a catastrophic megaflood. The rest of this article is […]