Deborah Bloomfield

NASA’s Ingenuity team has said a final goodbye to the helicopter robot, receiving a final message before the team disbands – but Ingenuity is not actually dead yet, and will continue to collect data on the Red Planet. Ingenuity is an impressive little robot, becoming the first to make a powered, controlled flight on a […]

When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto and its moons in July 2015, it sent back the first close-up photos we have of the dwarf planet. With it, it brought a mystery, one that has finally been solved.  Photographs revealed an unusual heart-shaped structure on Pluto’s surface, known as Tombaugh Regio, or “Pluto’s heart”, […]

Lasers have been used to uncover a long-lost city’s remains on the Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga. Placed along the idyllic Pacific shores and palm trees, the ancient ruins show that urban environments emerged in the region way earlier than thought – and long before Europeans arrived.  Archeologists at the Australian National University used […]

Good news, fans of witnessing astronomical events without being obliterated by them: Potentially hazardous asteroid 2013 NK4 is making a close approach this week, and you can view it as it flies past. The asteroid, first discovered in 2013 by the Siding Spring Survey, is between 400 and 1,000 meters (1,300 and 3,280 feet) across. […]

Sometimes in nature, there are events that we have to wait for. Some, like the upcoming American cicadapocaplypse might not be so popular – whereas, across the pond in Birmingham, UK, botanists are thrilled to reveal the blooming of their sapphire tower. The sapphire tower plant (Puya alpestri) from the Chilean Andes can take up […]

Archaeologists at the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) have uncovered what they describe as an “unprecedented” monument in Marliens, near Dijon, France. Excavating the site, the team found artifacts from the Neolithic age to the Iron Age, including flint arrowheads, an archer’s brace, and a copper alloy dagger.  Advertisement These arrowheads, braces, flint […]

Archaeologists in Hungary have discovered something weird in a Roman-era pit: the skeletal remains of a lynx buried in a layer below the skeletons of four dogs. Not only is this find puzzling, but it is also the only known archaeological example of a complete Eurasian lynx skeleton to be found in Europe. The Eurasian […]

We are currently experiencing a global coral bleaching event – the fourth such event on record and the second in the last decade – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Monday (April 15). “From February 2023 to April 2024, significant coral bleaching has been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of […]

Great white sharks are some of the world’s toughest travelers, regularly seen traversing extreme routes around the world’s oceans. They don’t gently wander on their voyages either; the iconic species can complete some of the fastest transoceanic migrations ever seen by marine animals. In the early 2000s, a great white shark swam approximately 20,000 kilometers […]

The Winchcombe meteorite has been analyzed in a level of detail previously reserved for space mission retrievals, rather than rocks that fall of their own accord. The result is an insight into its history that shows it had survived multiple rounds of being smashed apart before reforming, as well as processing by water, before it […]

Stonehenge is famously aligned with the sunrise on the summer solstice and sunset on the winter solstice, yet archaeologists suspect that the Neolithic monument may also have been designed to capture the lunistices, otherwise known as lunar standstills. In particular, the major lunar standstill – which is next due to occur in January 2025 – […]

After a video of two men destroying ancient rock formations at Lake Mead went viral earlier this month, park rangers are now asking the public for information to help identify the suspects. Footage of the incident, believed to have been taken on April 7, showed two adult males standing on top of a sandstone formation […]

For the first time, a donated heart has been flown 12 hours and 6,750 kilometers (4,194 miles) across the Atlantic Ocean and successfully transplanted into its recipient. The donor heart came from a 48-year-old man in the French West Indies who had a stroke and, three days later, was declared brain dead. After a routine […]

It’s April, which means the second meteor shower of the year is upon us: the Lyrids. Known for its super-fast shooting stars that zip across the night sky in a flash, the Lyrid meteor shower is currently ramping up its activity and is set to peak next week. How To View The Lyrid Meteor Shower […]

It’s estimated that there are around 1082 atoms in the observable universe. With each element in the periodic table containing at least one electron, you can therefore safely assume there are at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 electrons in the observable universe as well. Or can you? According to a theory proposed by theoretical physicist John Wheeler, who […]

One of NASA’s most ambitious missions, bringing back samples from the surface of Mars for analysis on Earth, is in trouble. Cost estimates are blowing out, and some scientists are questioning the priority given to the project. However, in an announcement on the mission’s future, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson remained committed to the idea (with […]

The glittering golden hue of a cracked lump of pyrite gives false promises of riches for a rock that’s not really all that valuable – but a new announcement suggests there could be more to “fool’s gold” than meets the eye. Pyrite sampled from the United States was found to contain a surprising amount of […]

Less than a year after the discovery of one of the closest supernovae of the century, another has popped up only slightly further away. So far, no professional images of the exploding star have been released, but amateurs are filling the gap, although many live too far north to be able to participate. Since the […]

Before 1962, Centralia, Pennsylvania, was a thriving old mining town. However, that changed when a fire broke out in May that year. Although it is not completely clear what started it, the results are well known: the fire spread into the labyrinthine mining tunnels running under the town, causing devastation as it went. Fissures appeared […]

Between December 1968 and October 1969 – and potentially before and after those dates, too – the San Francisco Bay Area was rocked by a series of high-profile murders. It wasn’t the method or number of the killings that set them apart, though; all things considered, they were pretty boring in their execution, and while […]