Deborah Bloomfield

Quasar OJ287 is not wildly famous, but it is so bright that it can be seen even by amateur astronomers. Its brightness is due to the extremely active supermassive black hole at its center. But the black hole is not alone; it has a companion, as some intriguing, first-of-a-kind radio images have witnessed. The rest […]

The monolithic human figures of Rapa Nui, called Moai, are among the most recognizable statues in the world. There are 900 of them carved and erected between 1250 and 1500 CE. The making and transportation of these colossal statues became part of the oral traditions, and when the people of Rapa Nui were quizzed by […]

Wolves have been carefully (and often unconsciously) molded into docile dogs over thousands of years of domestication, many of their wild instincts softened into something more in tune with the way Homo sapiens tend to operate. Yet despite their many human-adjacent behaviors, “man’s best friend” still lacks one defining feature of our species: language. Why is […]

A paper from a SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Institute scientist has directly addressed claims that interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is an alien spacecraft. On July 1, 2025, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) detected an object moving through the Solar System on an escape trajectory. Follow-up observations soon confirmed that we were looking at our […]

Texas is experiencing a superbloom of a very different variety, as smacks of “pink meanie” jellyfish have been spotted along its coastline. These vibrantly colored and predatory jellyfish are remarkable-looking creatures – and they can get huge. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full […]

Why do dolphins end up stranded? In a new study, scientists have found evidence to suggest that some may be suffering from an Alzheimer’s-like disease, causing them to become disoriented much like humans do – and that harmful algal blooms could be to blame. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign […]

Stevia – the natural sugar substitute – may help boost hair loss treatment, suggests a new study in mice. Scientists developed a dissolving patch that contained a sweetener derived from the Stevia plant, which helped improve the efficacy of a common hair loss drug in a mouse model of alopecia. The rest of this article is […]

Would you like to go to a spider’s birthday party? No? Suit yourself, I think it would be excellent. Eight legs call for as many balloons, but how many candles might you expect on the cake? It might shock you to learn that for Number 16, the longest-lived spider on record, that number reached a […]

Time is everything to us: in terms of physical laws, in how we experience the world, and how society works. Still, its true nature remains beyond us. As scientists search for a deeper understanding, the way humans relate to time has changed massively. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in […]

Welcome to True Crime in Science. Over six episodes – all of which you can watch here – we have discussed some well-known true crime cases, as well as some cases you may not have heard of, and then looked further into the science and the forensic details behind them. In this special episode, we delve […]

Start talking about the Loch Ness monster and you’ll be met with all manner of ideas about what it could be. From plesiosaur to giant eels and even floating logs, the Loch Ness monster has captured imaginations from the small Scottish village of Drumnadrochit across the globe. But what could Nessie actually be? A case […]

The nearest star to the Sun might be several light-years away, but this doesn’t make the Solar System isolated. Asteroids and comets that formed around other stars flow through the Milky Way across millions of streams. In fact, thousands of these interstellar interlopers are currently within the orbit of Neptune. The difficult job is finding […]

How can we predict the future? A good way is to look into the past, and who better to ask than one of Earth’s longest-living animals: the quahog clam. These modest mollusks don’t look like much, but their shells tell a staggering story as they store a record of the environmental conditions across their lifespan. […]

Scientists researching myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), have claimed to have developed the first-ever blood test for the condition. ME/CFS is a debilitating, long-term illness that can cause people to experience extreme fatigue, sleep problems, difficulty thinking, and a worsening of their symptoms after any type of activity. It’s thought to […]

In 1927, a respected physicist conducted one of the largest experiments into telepathy the world has ever undertaken, involving over 25,000 participants.  Born in 1851, Oliver Lodge was an English physicist whose work was key to the development of radio communication, creating a device that became standard in wireless telegraph receivers after he demonstrated it […]

In 2006, a study published in the journal Biology Letters described a fossil unlike any ever seen before. It captured a prehistoric reptile that lived around 125 million years ago. That, in itself, wasn’t terribly surprising, but the fact that it had two heads really, really was. Bicephalism describes a quirk in animal development that […]

If stretched out straight, this recently discovered woolly rhino horn would be taller than Lady Gaga with a hat on. It’s the longest rhino horn of its kind ever recovered, a record-breaking relic that’s shedding new light on one of the Ice Age’s most mysterious megabeasts. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. […]

Training animals in captivity for vital instances like health checks and being able to give them medicines is a necessary part of the job, but it is not without its challenges. While logistics have a part to play, the individual personality of the animal is also a big factor, as researchers in Brazil found when […]

Nail-biting and nose-picking have probably been around since our ancient ancestors walked the Earth, but these habits don’t leave much of a physical trace. Tooth-picking, on the other hand, does – or so it was thought.  For decades, anthropologists have examined the dental remains of prehistoric hominins and noticed deep, V-shaped notches near the gum […]

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter are excellent spacecraft that have provided insights into the Red Planet time and time again. They are also capable of doing things beyond their standard job. They recently looked at interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. They were also used to measure the winds on the […]