Deborah Bloomfield

Over the last few decades, astronomers have discovered that planets are extremely common. Now they are focusing on better understanding how they form. And there have been some curveballs, delivering completely unexpected insights. Among the latest ones, researchers discovered that even around the hotter stars, you can find the building blocks of rocky planets. This […]

Marine mammals are known for their high levels of intelligence, their social skills, and their association with Netflix documentaries. However, most people probably wouldn’t list skincare as one of a whale’s most famous activities – and that’s where they’d be wrong. While orcas and humpback whales have been filmed enjoying a spa day, now they’ve got […]

Chinese rover Zhurong was the first Chinese mission to land on Mars, exploring one of the Red Planet’s largest impact basins: Utopia Planitia. This area was visited by Viking 2 in 1976 and decades of technological advancement meant that Zhurong could deliver new insights on the region. And some of them came from below the […]

Between 20 and 2 million years ago, a giant “terrible beast” roamed the Earth. Known to science as Deinotherium giganteum, it belonged to the same order as elephants living today – but it’s been suggested that its fossilized remains may have once been confused for the Cyclops, giving rise to the legend. The word “cyclops” […]

A pretty pink and white agate sitting in the Natural History Museum, London’s Mineralogy Collection since 1883 has turned out to be even more stunning than thought for a surprising reason. Around 15 centimeters (6 inches) across, almost completely spherical but otherwise unassuming, the specimen has remained in the collection for the last 175 years, […]

This article first appeared in Issue 14 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. Twelve thousand years ago, changing sea levels left a pocket of water isolated from the rest of the ocean, trapping in its confines a group of jellyfish. The unique subspecies can’t be found anywhere else on Earth, but exist in their millions in Palau’s Jellyfish Lake. […]

On December 1, Japan inaugurated JT-60SA, the largest operational superconducting tokamak in the world to date. A tokamak is a nuclear fusion reactor shaped like a donut and this new-build in Japan, with the support of the European Union (EU), is meant to be the forerunner of the under-construction International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which […]

Astronomers have been excited by outbursts of the exploding comet Pons-Brooks, each of which has caused it to brighten up to 100 times. For those in the know, reports of its post-explosion magnitude tell them whether it’s worth trying to spot the travelling ice-volcano, or if that’s an impossible dream. It’s a common story with […]

The first wolves to come begging for scraps at a campfire set in motion a chain of events that eventually led to the creation of chihuahuas, pugs, and a range of other un-wolf-like dog breeds. According to one popular theory, this fateful rendezvous between canids and humans took place around 15,000 years ago in a […]

In October, the remains of a dismembered great white shark were discovered on an Australian beach. Scientists have now analyzed them and confirmed that orcas killed the predator, in what is the first confirmed attack of its kind in these waters. The body, what remained of it at least, washed up on a beach in […]

If you fall into piranha-infested waters, how long do you have before they devour you before your very eyes? Minutes? Seconds? If you watched Netflix’s wildly popular Wednesday last year, you will have seen the show opens with the titular character enacting revenge on her brother’s bullies by unleashing a bag of the little biters […]

Regenerative medicine might just have had a new tool added to its arsenal: Scientists have created tiny biological robots out of living human cells. Though they may be small, the self-assembling bots are mighty, with a study demonstrating their potential for healing and treating disease.  The team had already proven their biological robotics chops back […]

Nothing ruins a road trip like the feeling of needing to vom all over your car mats – and yet, for more than one in four of us, it’s pretty common. Motion sickness is annoying for some, debilitating for others, and strikes seemingly at random, with some people getting it their entire lives and others […]

Our quest for the coldest place in the universe – which turned up a distinctive answer if you’re only looking at pure, natural cold – raises an obvious counterpart. As with the coldest, the heaviest object, the fastest object, and the hardest substance, it turns out the answer depends a bit on what you mean […]

Are you a paranoid Penny or a nervous Neville when you go into a hotel room? Have you ever looked at a mirror with suspicion and recalled all those movies with two-way mirrors, and wondered how to check what you are looking at? Well, there are a few tricks for that! What is a two-way […]

Turns out there’s more purpose to the design of an airplane window than allowing for aesthetically pleasing birds-eye-view photos or staring out of them pretending you’re in a music video. There’s a reason why they have that little hole and why we have to keep their shades up during takeoff. But what about their most […]

A huge prehistoric cemetery discovered in Lapland, just south of the Arctic Circle, is challenging what we know about how far Stone Age societies trekked into the bitterly cold, far-flung stretches of Northern Europe.  As per a new study on the prehistoric graveyard, this 6,500-year-old site might be one of the largest Stone Age cemeteries […]

Haze is not just a problem for transportation systems. It also affects how well we can study planets beyond the Solar System that are covered in vast oceans. To better understand those worlds, researchers have decided to cook up that “alien haze” directly in the lab. So, they now know how those claggy skies affect […]

A storm struck the Black Sea earlier this week and wreaked havoc along the coast. Among the victims of the wind’s brutality was the Sevastopol harbor, in occupied Crimea, where the Russian navy kept its military dolphins.  It is currently unclear whether the animals are still in their pens or whether they have jumped at […]

On April 3, 1965, NASA launched the Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power 10A (SNAP10A), the first nuclear electric propulsion system ever fired into space. While in orbit, the ion thruster system was powered by a space-worthy nuclear reactor. Now, nearly 60 years later, the US is planning to launch a nuclear reactor into space once […]