Deborah Bloomfield

Kefir, kimchi, and sauerkraut: not the best combination together, but as a part of a balanced diet, these fermented products are superfoods. Fermentation can make a piece of cabbage last months, even years, but what is the pickling power that makes it possible? What are fermented foods? Food fermentation is an example of biotechnology, which […]

After nailing its first flight, the XB-1 experimental aircraft is hoping to usher in a new era of civil supersonic air travel over 20 years after Concorde was forced into retirement. Designed and made by Boom Supersonic, XB-1 completed its maiden flight at Mojave Air & Space Port in California on Friday March 22. Advertisement […]

Universities and colleges generally present themselves as grand, well-established institutions, existing on a continuum stretching all the way back to people like Plato and Pythagoras. But the truth is, most of them are pretty young, relatively speaking, barely scratching a few centuries out of the history books.  But that makes sense, right? After all, as […]

Trekking nearly a whole day by plane to Australia might seem like a long-haul flight, but that’s got nothing on what the common swift is capable of. Lots of us get pretty restless after just a few hours, and we’re just sat on our asses. Imagine having to hold your arms out to the side […]

Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed at 01:27 am EDT (05:27 am UTC) on March 26. The Singapore-flagged container ship “Dali” collided with one of the bridge’s pillars leading to a catastrophic collapse of the whole structure. At the time, there were workers on the bridge and the Baltimore City Fire Department stated that at […]

Who needs Google Maps when you can just use your buddies’ electrifying aura? New research suggests that some electric fish may utilize their comrades’ electric fields to navigate the world in a shocking form of “collective sensing” that’s never been seen before.  Peters’s elephantnose fish, also known as the African weakly electric fish, are equipped […]

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has warned of disruption to air travel along the path of April 8’s total solar eclipse. According to a statement released by the agency, air traffic and airports should prepare for disruption to normal proceedings before, during, and after the event, starting from 10:00 am UTC on April 7 […]

Mimicry is pretty common in the animal kingdom. It might involve species mimicking the coloration of trees to better hide from predators, or it can involve species mimicking each other to act as a defense mechanism. In some cases, predators mimic the surroundings to better ambush unsuspecting prey items. One new potential example of mimicry […]

Dogs have an innate ability to recognize nouns, forming mental representations of the objects they hear referenced with words. And while our furry friends may have kept this remarkable power hidden up to now by generally refusing to fetch items on demand, a new study on canine brain activity has given them away. Until now, […]

A display of corpses was a highlight for flâneurs passing the Paris Morgue in the 1860s. Captured by the “culture of looking”, the word “flânerie” was invented to describe aimless wandering as a way of taking in the city, and in the 19th century, that included ogling the dead. The Paris Morgue had a salle […]

Last night the Earth experienced the strongest geomagnetic storm since 2017, but it was minor compared to the one triggered by the most powerful solar storm on record in 1859, known as the Carrington Event. Now, we learn the disruption to the Earth’s magnetic field during the Carrington Event was even greater than previously estimated. […]

What is your favorite gesture? A little thumbs up? The funny squiggle in the air when you want the check in a restaurant or even something ruder? Well, scientists have discovered that apes and humans aren’t the only ones making gestures. The Japanese tits (Parus minor) are getting in on the act and being downright […]

From the good old-fashioned Flat Earth movement, to QAnon “truthers” and anti-vaccine zealots, you don’t have to look very far in our hyperconnected world to find someone spreading conspiracy theories. Often, a slide down the rabbit hole into the murky world of conspiracies comes as a shock to someone’s friends and family – how does […]

It is remarkable that the Sun and the Moon are roughly the same apparent size so that in most solar eclipses – but not all – the whole solar disk is blocked by the Moon. However, the lunar disk is not a perfect circle, as the moon is not a smooth sphere, and this creates […]

Tiger-Lily, the incredibly rare two-headed western rat snake, is recovering well after undergoing critical surgery earlier this month which, surprisingly, had nothing to do with the snake’s many heads. Despite the western rat snake (Pantherophis obsoletus), also known as a black rat snake, being a common, nonvenomous species across much of central North America, this […]

What color is your blood? If you said red, you are correct – most of the time. Under certain circumstances, such as underneath the ocean, it can appear to be green. The reason behind this is the same reason why fish deep down in the Twilight Zone of the oceans have evolved red coloring.  First […]

In Australia and snake-infested parts of Indonesia, it pays to be resistant to snake venoms even, or perhaps especially, if you’re part of the same zoologic order as snakes. A study of how large and medium-sized lizards handle the problem of their cousins’ toxins has revealed a never-seen-before evolutionary sequence its discoverers compare to Russian […]

Barbie-pink sea pigs, rattail fish, and a unicumber: these were the unexpected stars of a recent expedition into the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) where scientists are studying biodiversity. The region’s animal life is of particular interest because it’s also the proposed site of deep-sea mining, being home to a huge volume of “sea potatoes” that contain […]

Palaeontology and archaeology have aligned in northeast Brazil, as a “remarkable” site featuring dinosaur footprints alongside ancient rock carvings has been uncovered.   The Serrote do Letreiro Site, in the Sousa municipality, Paraíba State, is home to three main rock outcrops, where the fossilized footprints of theropod, sauropod, and iguanodontian dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous […]

Gravitational wave detectors on Earth have already revolutionized astronomy and in the next decade, we will have LISA, the first gravitational observatory in deep space. But there is scope to build a detector in between these two types, both in terms of location and frequencies. This can be done by building it on the Moon. […]