Deborah Bloomfield

In I898, Olof Öhman, a Swedish immigrant living in Minnesota, claimed to have found a huge 90-kilogram (200-pound) slab of stone, hidden in the roots of a tree. The slab was covered in characters of the runic alphabet used by peoples of northern Europe, Britain, Scandinavia, and Iceland before the 17th century. A translation of […]

Humans are too recent arrivals on Earth to have taken advantage of a time when Antarctica was habitable, let alone when continental drift made it possible to walk there. Nevertheless, humans have visited many places they found too forbidding to stay, raising the question of whether humans saw, or even set foot on, Antarctica before […]

Tomorrow is a big day for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The space agency will attempt to land its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, on the Moon. If the mission is successful on a soft touch down, Japan will become the fifth nation to land on the Moon and the third this […]

In 2017, researchers used a virtual telescope the size of our planet to image the shadow of a supermassive black hole for the first time. The image was of M87*, the black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87, and was the first image of the shadow of the event horizon and bright accretion […]

Those of you who are chronic users of TikTok (welcome to the gang) may have seen an unusual animal video doing the rounds this week: a two-headed calf. It’s a condition known as polycephaly, and although it’s widespread in mythology, it’s much rarer in reality.  What is polycephaly? The term polycephaly stems from the Greek […]

Planetary scientists believe they have found an enormous deposit of water ice near the Mars equator. Almost two decades ago, researchers discovered some peculiar deep deposits underneath the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF). The latest data suggest these deposits are extremely rich in ice. The MFF is made of many wind-sculpted features and has an area […]

Following years of activism from Indigenous communities and environmentalists, the removal of dams along the Klamath River is allowing water to flow freely once again, marking a new hope for the region’s iconic salmon.  The Klamath River, which trails for 414 kilometers (257 miles) between Oregon and northwestern California, was once the third-largest salmon-producing river […]

If anywhere is going to be cursed, it’s the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, where thousands of bodies are perfectly preserved by the volcanic ash and pumice from an extraordinarily powerful eruption that wiped out everything, including neighboring town Herculaneum, thousands of years ago. Even rational people who know curses are Not A Thing might […]

If you received an invitation to get tested for the “Celtic Curse”, you might think you’d stumbled back in time, or through an enchanted piece of furniture to some fantasy realm. But the condition that goes by this nickname is very much a reality, and many sufferers are walking around without realizing they have it. […]

Most of us experience some sort of trauma during our lifetime, yet only about 25 to 35 percent of people who are exposed to severely disturbing events go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to a new study, a person’s vulnerability to the condition may be determined by their responsiveness to stress hormones, […]

A marsupial that has sex until it drops dead has been found to cannibalize the spent remains of males that died in the frisky fray. Before you question their stamina, you should know that these animals embark on mating marathons that can go on for over 10 hours, resulting in an attack of hormones that […]

It was mid-October, 1863, when a budding mathematics lecturer from the University of Oxford ventured into London to meet with a publisher. He had just completed what would one day be seen as his magnum opus: a 12-chapter treatise on some of the most controversial topics in modern math. He had named his book Alice’s […]

On January 27, Mercury and Mars will pass a fifth of a degree (12 arcminutes) from each other from Earth’s perspective. That will make both easily visible in the same field of view of a backyard telescope, let alone binoculars. However, you will not only need to be an early riser to see them, but […]

A year-long study has found what people have been complaining about on hard-to-find Reddit posts for a while now: Google is getting worse. People have complained online that Google’s search results have taken a dive in quality over the last year or so. The new study called it “a troubling sign that a noticeable number […]

Down in the deep ocean off the coast of Costa Rica scientists have discovered, not one, not two, not three, but four new species of deep-sea octopus in a 259-square-kilometer area (100 square miles). These new species live in seamounts in and around hydrothermal springs that were discovered in 2023. These areas contain octopus nurseries […]

The routine of taking a rapid COVID-19 test is one that’s become depressingly familiar to many of us in the years since the beginning of the pandemic. Generally, you need to wait with your fingers crossed for about 15 minutes before reading the result, but what if that timeframe could be shortened to just a […]

An animation of an asteroid’s close approach to Earth has attracted a lot of views over the last few days, largely because of just how close it appears.  The animation, shared by Facebook page Cosmoknowledge on Sunday, shows asteroid 99942 Apophis’s path, culminating in its closest approach on April 13, 2029. To be clear, there […]

Somebody on the Internet has asked a question that comes up from time to time: “How did the human race survive for thousands of years without vaccines?” Well, the answer, as has been explained to the poster in X’s (formerly known as Twitter) community note feature, is that the human race did survive without vaccines […]

Using little more than a tusk, scientists have pieced together the lifetime travels of a single woolly mammoth that wandered North America more than 14,000 years ago. Starting life in the western Yukon, the mammoth traveled hundreds of kilometers through northwestern Canada before arriving at her final resting place, an early human settlement in present-day […]

Astronomers have estimated the size and activity of a supermassive black hole discovered in one of the most distant galaxies we have ever seen. Because the speed of light is finite, looking farther into the universe is like looking farther back in time. The light from this galaxy comes from just 400 million years after […]