Deborah Bloomfield

Just over five years ago, on 22 February 2019, an unmanned space probe was placed in orbit around the Moon. Named Beresheet and built by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, it was intended to be the first private spacecraft to perform a soft landing. Among the probe’s payload were tardigrades, renowed for their ability to […]

Members of a pre-Roman culture in Italy were sometimes buried with animals including dogs and horses, though researchers are unable to explain why this was the case. After discovering several of these multi-species co-burials at a site in Verona, the authors of a new study speculate that the interred animals may have held some sort […]

Cheese was just as popular in the ancient world as it is today – and then, just as now, its production required patience and time to mature into something tasty. However, archaeologists have found various cheeses that push the limits of what we would consider “matured”, having been preserved for centuries in various places. So […]

This week a megalith discovered on a mountain in Peru is older than Egypt’s pyramids, a tiny 12-millimeter-long fish makes a sound comparable to a human hearing a jet plane take off, and the mighty blue whale reclaims its spot as the Earth’s heaviest animal to ever live. Finally, we discover the bizarre behind-the-scenes story […]

In one of the most extraordinary predation events ever witnessed, an orca has been observed annihilating a great white shark in less than two minutes. Previously, killer whales had been seen hunting the large sharks in packs, yet this is the first known instance of a single orca taking down a great white with no […]

Antarctica is the coldest, driest, and windiest place on Earth; inland, it can reach highs (no, that’s not a typo) of -30°C (-22°F) in the summer and lows of -80°C (-112°F) in the winter; it’s so remote that its permanent population is zero; and if you want to live there long-term, you may have to […]

Almost everywhere you look, people are talking about ultra-processed foods. Are they bad for our health? Should we be cutting back? What actually are ultra-processed foods anyway? Nutrition research can be tricky to wade through at the best of times, so we wanted to try and cut through some of the confusion and find out […]

Years of sample collection on the Hungarian steppe recently revealed four brand new species of fungi, including one that scientists say bears a striking resemblance to an infamous sci-fi monster. Its worm-like body and sandy dwelling place led the team to dub the new species Tulostoma shaihuludii, after the Shai-Hulud sandworms that feature in Frank […]

Looking at a fairy lantern, you might not realise it’s a plant. These ghostly white botanical specimens haunt the forest floor putting on spooky bioluminescent displays, and now we’ve got a whole new genus to add to the list. A genus is a taxonomic category that groups together species. It represents a whole group, rather […]

Tyrannosaurus rex is arguably the most famous of the dinosaurs, renowned for its enormous teeth and gargantuan size, but also its comparatively teeny arms. The fearsome predator was around 12 meters (40 feet) long and yet its arms measured just 1 meter (3 feet). This ridiculous ratio wasn’t reserved solely for the king of the […]

Just weeks after implanting a brain chip into a human for the first time, Elon Musk’s Neuralink has reportedly landed itself in trouble with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Inspectors from the FDA visited the company’s California animal research facility in June 2023 and found numerous problems with record keeping and quality controls […]

Last September, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx brought back to Earth the biggest haul of asteroid material in the history of humanity. And among that, there are the largest physical fragments of an asteroid: pebbles and other small rocks from the surface of asteroid Bennu. By contrast, the Hayabusa probes that collected samples from Itokawa and Ryugu, respectively, […]

Scientists have been pondering whether intentionally drying the Earth’s stratosphere could be a way to tackle the climate crisis (other than, y’know, stop burning ridiculous amounts of fossil fuels). When people talk about greenhouse gases, you probably imagine carbon dioxide and methane, two of the most problematic emissions pumped out by human industrial activity. However, […]

If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, March 2024 could be an exciting month for comet-watching. If you’re reading this later or elsewhere, there’ll be other opportunities later in the year or down the track. On the other hand, only the seriously hard-core tend to get excited about asteroid spotting. So, what’s the difference, and how […]

When galaxies collide, the supermassive black holes at their center can move close together, begin orbing one another, and eventually merge. Such a merger has never been seen but binary supermassive black holes have been known to exist at the core of several galaxies. And astronomers have now crowned the heaviest pair yet. These two […]

Have you ever wondered why that rich red-looking steak you bought a day or two ago has now turned grey in your fridge? For those who eat meat, you may think the color of the product is a surefire way of assessing its freshness and its quality – the redder the better, right? Well, color […]

Finding a new species can happen in all sorts of different ways from reclassifying species based on new genetic information with a little help from Will Smith, finding them hiding in the trees, or spending months looking closely at museum specimens. Scientists are always learning more about the animal species that surround us. Now a […]

The world’s first jet-suit race zoomed around the Dubai Marina this week with racers donning Iron Man-esque technology darting around floating buoys, hoping to cross the finishing line in a very noisy blaze of glory. The race on Wednesday, February 28, was organized by Gravity Industries, a UK-based aeronautical tech company that specializes in high-powered […]

If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be weeping as Adam Sandler embraced a giant arachnid in space, I’d have rolled with it because that sounds amazing – and oh boy, it is. SPACEMAN landed on Netflix on March 1, 2024, and is based on the novel Spaceman Of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař. […]

Scientists believe they have evidence of the fastest-moving crack in an ice sheet ever recorded. The 10.5-kilometer (6.5-mile) crack formed through an Antarctic ice sheet at a blistering speed of 35 meters (115 feet) per second, or about 128.7 kilometers per hour (80 miles per hour). Researchers at the University of Washington observed the lightning-fast […]