Deborah Bloomfield

Plans to build the largest monkey-breeding facility in the US have attracted anger and concern from animal welfare groups and local residents in Georgia. The giant complex is set to eventually house up to 30,000 macaques – twice the human population of the local city – which will be sold to universities and pharmaceutical companies […]

Quartz is one of the world’s most abundant materials – and one of humanity’s oldest fascinations. From ancient myths to modern science, quartz has played a part in pretty much every aspect of human development – and it’s pretty to boot. But have you ever wondered what’s going on behind the twinkling gem at the […]

“Giant”, “sea”, and “spider” are perhaps not words best seen in combination – but unfortunately for any arachnophobes and thalassophobes out there, giant Antarctic sea spiders have crawled straight out your nightmares and into existence. Although not technically spiders, these strange, spindly creatures certainly look like their namesake (that’ll be the legs), and they hide […]

When you hear the word “mummy”, we bet your mind goes straight to the dried and bandaged remains of long-preserved Egyptian pharaohs. However, despite their fame, these specimens are not the oldest mummies in the world. That title belongs to the Chinchorro people of Chile’s Atacama Desert who mummified their dead 7,000 years ago. The […]

This cluster of pink loveliness might have put you in mind of a sea of cherry blossom, or a juicy raspberry compote just waiting to ooze over your pancakes. Well, you can shelve these delightful images immediately, we’re afraid. What you’re looking at here are bacteria, and though these structures might be called “pink berries”, […]

A new paper has taken a look at panspermia and the suggestion that dust particles could escape the gravity of host planets and make their way across the galaxy, seeding life on other planets. There are a number of ideas about how life began on Earth, with the most likely being that it emerged in […]

The dance of the continents could be about to take a new turn, with the Atlantic moving from a growth to a contraction phase. This, some geologists predict, will be caused by the breaking of tectonic plates, causing lines of volcanoes along the coastlines of Africa and Iberia. Over billions of years, the Earth’s continents […]

A new analysis of human activities at two prehistoric sites in the Colombian Amazon has revealed that people were well established in the region by around 13,000 years ago. By studying layers of soil, researchers were able to tease out the long-term history of both settlements, indicating that the ancient inhabitants began producing rock art […]

If someone says “Neanderthal” to you, what’s the first thing that pops up in your head? If it happens to be an image of a “caveman”-esque person, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. A quick image search brings up results mostly showing male Neanderthals – but what about the females of the species? What do […]

Previously only found in China, researchers have now discovered the world’s largest known population of endangered Skywalker gibbons in Myanmar – and they were led to them by the creatures’ love songs. Named after that bloke from the space films, Skywalker gibbons had only been confirmed as a distinct species in 2017 and only found […]

It’s almost four years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. As the specter of lockdowns loomed in the West, scientists had already been scrambling for weeks to learn as much as they could about the emerging threat. One key question centered around whether there could be a seasonal pattern to infections – […]

The majority of rivers start in lofty mountains before flowing down their slopes and ending up in the sea. While that simplistic story explains the route of most rivers, many others have more eccentric and elusive origin stories.  The starting point of a river is referred to as the river source and headwater. Along with […]

The most luminous object ever observed is so far outside the range of its peers that the astronomers who discovered it think it might never be exceeded. Not surprisingly, there are big questions about how something like this could operate so far off the scale we are used to. Black holes famously have such strong […]

Forget the term bird brain, many bird species are actually famous for their intelligence. And while parrots and corvids get all the credit, another group of birds is joining the ranks. The Oriental pied hornbill (Anthracoceros albirostris) is fascinating not just for its extraordinary mating and reproductive behaviors, but it’s also impressed scientists with its […]

Astronomers have looked back at potential places where the elusive, hypothetical Planet Nine could be hiding, if it exists at all, once again narrowing down where to look. Looking for planets in orbit around other stars is a relatively easy task, in comparison to hunting for Planet Nine, also known as Planet X. Essentially, when […]

For most of us, our mathematical education involved a lot of names. There’s Pythagoras’s Theorem; the Riemann Hypothesis; Hilbert’s Hotel, and so many more concepts and theorems intrinsically linked to the scholars who first discovered them. Or should we say invented them? It’s a serious question. We’re so used to math being this indispensable tool, […]

Natural selection shapes all life on Earth. As the world around them changes, organisms that can adapt have a better chance of reproducing. Humans are no exception – and while a few examples of recent evolution are known, we lack a deeper understanding of how the human genome is being shaped by natural selection. The findings are a […]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away – well, actually it was pretty close by in galactic terms – George Lucas came up with the idea of an epic space-age weapon. He dubbed it the “lightsaber”, and bestowed it upon only his noblest heroes – or his most fearsome villains. Thirty years […]