Deborah Bloomfield

Last week astronauts dropped a toolbag while repairing external parts of the International Space Station (ISS). As we reported, the bag has been picked by trackers of space junk under the code 58229/1998-067WC, and its orbit calculated. It turns out there is more to the story, however, because you don’t need a high-powered telescope to […]

A team of researchers has reconstructed the face of a mature Neanderthal gentleman who lived and died roughly 50,000 years ago in modern-day France, revealing that our extinct cousins didn’t look all that different from us. Illustrating the ancient senior’s remarkably modern human-like features, the digital portrait contributes to our growing understanding of the similarities […]

The vast majority of the US is a hulking mainland, but on the peripherals of this heartland are an array of islands that are as plentiful as they are diverse. From paradise-like atolls to icy archipelagos, the US harbors some incredible islands. These are the five most significant, size-wise.   1. Hawai’i’s Big Island Hawai’i’s […]

For the first time ever, a chimeric monkey containing a large number of cells derived from embryonic stem cells has been born alive. The infant’s cells originate from two different embryos, meaning they are genetically distinct, therefore rendering the young primate a “chimera”. “This has been a long-sought goal in the field,” senior author Zhen […]

Two companies are looking to make diamonds from nuclear waste that can be used as batteries. However, while one is sticking to applications that seem to fit the technology, the other is talking about uses that seem incompatible with what they have demonstrated. Seven years ago, scientists at the University of Bristol announced that they […]

In 1917, three children in Fátima, Portugal, claimed that they had encountered an apparition of the Virgin Mary while returning home from tending sheep. According to the trio, Mary told them that she would reappear on the 13th day of every month for six months (like Urkel) before she disappeared. Word of this miracle spread, […]

Back in 1879, botanist William J. Beal began one of the world’s oldest science experiments, burying 20 glass pint bottles filled with 50 seeds in sand. One hundred and forty-four years later, scientists at the same university have continued his work, resurrecting those seeds and finding among them a hybrid plant, likely not meant to […]

Just over a year after DART hit asteroid Dimorphos, new images from the event were made public on the Planetary Data System on October 31, 2023. They were taken by DART’s companion LICIACube and cover the whole collision and some of the aftermath – and have now been turned into videos showing the event in […]

Astronomers have combined the observations of the two biggest telescopes in space to create what they are calling the “most colorful image of the universe”. By using JWST to observe one of Hubble’s famous “Frontier Fields” deep views of the universe, they’ve created a panchromatic image ranging from blue visible light all the way to […]

Three giant pandas left a zoo in Washington DC on Wednesday with a one-way ticket to China. This trio isn’t the first set of pandas in “the West” to take the monumental journey back to their ancestral homeland in recent times. Against the backdrop of hairy political tensions between the US and China, some are […]

Fluorescent green goo was seen oozing from sewers onto the streets of Manhattan last week, sowing confusion among New Yorkers and social media snoopers. There’s no need to call the Ghostbusters nor the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, though.  Images of the oddly bright liquid were near the World Trade Center in the Lower Manhattan area […]

A man’s life has been saved by emergency breast implants, after a lung infection required him to have a double lung transplant. That’s a sentence that needs some explaining. 34-year-old David “Davey” Bauer, described as vaping for years after smoking from the age of 21 until he quit in 2014, caught influenza and developed a […]

Whether it’s Wegovy or Ozempic, weight loss drugs feel like they’re everywhere at the moment. That doesn’t look set to stop any time soon either, with the FDA announcing yesterday the approval of Zepbound, a weight-management injectable that may well snatch the crown from its semaglutide-based competitors. Why was it approved? The approval comes after […]

Health professionals’ education and medical ethics should be informed by an in-depth understanding of how medicine was abused by the Nazi regime. By examining this dark phase in modern medical history, it is believed future generations of medical and healthcare professionals will be empowered to face moral and ethical dilemmas, as well as their own […]

Marine mammals, particularly orcas, underwent something of a tidal wave change in public opinion after the 2013 documentary film Blackfish was released. Foremost in that film was the story of Tilikum the orca, who killed several people while at SeaWorld. Tilikum died in 2017, but the outrage and animal welfare concerns sparked by the film […]

This week you can now use binoculars to see the toolbag dropped by ISS astronauts on a recent spacewalk, the world’s first “chimeric” monkey with a high proportion of stem cell-derived cells was born alive, and we may have just had our first fight in space. Finally, we question if “panda diplomacy” might be coming […]

There’s no doubt about it – humans love to talk. The average person speaks thousands of words a day and it’s a vital part of how we communicate with one another. But when did we become such chatty Cathy’s? Researchers have long pondered and argued over this question, coming up with quite a range of answers […]

A 450-million-year-old extinct marine organism is back not with a bang, but more of a gentle thud, after researchers recreated it in the form of a soft robotic replica. It’s hoped that it’s the first of many such robots that could be used to give us a better understanding of how extinct organisms moved, and […]

Synthetic DNA might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s fast becoming a reality. Researchers have created a yeast cell with a genome that’s over 50 percent synthetic, including the world’s first entirely synthetic chromosome. Scientists have previously produced synthetic bacterial and viral genomes, but the next step up was eukaryotic – a […]