Deborah Bloomfield

All that glitters isn’t usually gold, and the same is true for 183 million-year-old fossils found in the Posidonia Shale. Moreover, while the researchers used to think the shiny gold coating on the fossils was fool’s gold, new research has revealed a more surprising answer.  The Posidonia Shale in southwest Germany is the source of […]

When it comes to Lunar eclipses, you can have three types. The total eclipse, with the characteristic red blood color the Moon takes, happens when the lunar surface is completely within the shadow of the Earth. The partial eclipse is where only portions of the Moon are covered by our planet’s shadow. And then there […]

For the first time scientists have detected evidence that woolly mammoths experienced musth during the mating season, a hormone-driven surge in aggression that would’ve spurred on rival males at they competed for a mate. The discovery has also revealed that such hormone changes can be detected in the growth rings of tusks, something that can […]

A weird life hack is going around the Internet at the moment: people are adding a small pinch of salt to their coffee, like it’s some sort of horrible soup. The hack was first spread by Twitter user BirdRespecter, who told followers “a tiny pinch of salt in black coffee removes the bitterness almost entirely. […]

A team of archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 19th-century quarantine hospital and a small cemetery on a submerged island in the Dry Tortugas national park, near Florida. The site was discovered in August 2022, by the national park’s cultural resources staff, alongside the National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center, the Southeast Archaeological Center, […]

For the first time, astronomers have found what they called “fingerprints” left by the explosions of the first stars in the universe in three distant clouds. The first generation of stars made it possible for the universe to have the building blocks of planets and eventually life. These objects were made of just hydrogen and […]

If you’ve spent any amount of time online in the past, oh, 40 years or so, you’re probably aware it can be a pretty toxic place. Not all the time, of course – but let’s just say that if you’re, for example, a young woman, or a person of color, or any number of other […]

At the Montesiepi Chapel in Siena, Italy, there is a strange artifact that will be instantly familiar to fans of Arthurian legend and anybody who has watched Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, being that it is a literal sword embedded inside a stone. According to a chemical analysis of the artifact, it is probably from […]

This article first appeared in Issue 7 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  If you’ve ever taken a high school biology class, you might well fancy yourself an accomplished geneticist. Why are your eyes blue? Genes. Why is your hair curly? Genes, duh. We’re taught early on that our traits are predetermined by our DNA, […]

When Lord Carnarvon died shortly after the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the media was ablaze with rumors of a “mummy’s curse”. A 2002 study shut down the idea by demonstrating how exposure to the curse wasn’t associated with a significant increase in risk of death, but could such an ancient tomb be harboring dangerous pathogens? […]

A 35-year-old man with red-green color blindness experienced lasting improvements in his ability to distinguish different colors after taking magic mushrooms, a new case report reveals. According to the authors, this example may indicate the power of psilocybin to alter visual processing capabilities, despite the fact that color blindness is a genetic condition. The subject […]

Prehistoric Planet is back for season two, showcasing dinosaur species never seen on screen before in an epic five-part series. Now the first full season two trailer has just dropped, you can check out the new faces making their debut this time around, including the long-necked sauropod Isisaurus and a fierce feathered hunter called Pectinodon. […]

XBB.1.16 “Arcturus”, a new COVID-19 variant that appears to be more infectious than previous strains, has been confirmed in Los Angeles and comes with a strange new symptom that was previously extremely rare in coronaviruses.  Announced by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LACDPH), it is believed that the variant causes conjunctivitis (also known […]

Ringing phones, bills to pay, screaming kids – some days you need to get away. Not just a weekend break or a holiday, but as far away from humans as possible. RealLifeLore have created a video travel guide for doing just that. Take the volcanic islands of Tristan Da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean, […]

Whale watchers in California were recently treated to a rare experience when among a pod of killer whales, aka orca (Orcinus orca), a white calf was spotted.  CA216C1, or “Frosty” as the calf is known, is a three-year-old male orca who is leucistic. Frosty has patches of black on his dorsal fin and the front […]

A man often referred to as the “Godfather” of artificial intelligence (AI) has quit his job at Google this week over concerns about where AI is headed. Geoffrey Hinton is best known for his work on deep learning and neural networks, for which he won the $1 million Turing Award in 2019. At the time […]

Archaeologists have unearthed 500-year-old medical flasks that were used to test (and smell) pee at a medical dump within Caesar’s Forum in Rome. The flasks may provide important insights into late medieval and Renaissance disease prevention.  Italian physicians played an important role in developing early measures to prevent the spread of disease. This included the […]

Being “ghosted” – that is, having somebody totally shut down communication with you, effectively turning themselves into a “ghost” – is rarely a nice feeling. As disappointing as it may be to experience, though, chances are the person doing it to you feels even worse – at least, if you two were originally friends rather […]

Water vapor has been seen in the atmospheres of exoplanets before, but they were massive gas giants. Now, researchers report that detection but in a completely different system, GJ 486, where a rocky super-Earth orbits a red dwarf star. But the team is unsure if the signal comes from the star or the planet. The […]

When two groups of people were assigned different breathing exercises for 40 minutes a day participants ended up with dramatically different levels of amyloid beta, the peptide associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Whether one exercise can stem the rising tide of dementia in society remains to be proven. However, after the failure of more than a […]