Deborah Bloomfield

Diving into the world of the arachnids is not for the faint-hearted – even fans of all things eight-legged might just think twice about the critters belonging to Solifugae. “Here is an odd creature, a monstrous apparition. How weirdly fashioned, how ill-proportioned, how evil and forbidding in its hideous shape and coat of bristling hairs!” […]

Visit Lancaster County, in Pennsylvania, and you might meet an unexpected resident. Standing around 1.2 to 1.5 meters tall – 4 or 5 feet in the local lingo – the Albatwitch is a pencil-thin, hairy local legend, with huge eyes that glow an ominous red, or perhaps yellow, through the night. Christopher Vera, Director of […]

Ask most people getting older, and they’ll tell you, time feels like it’s speeding up as you gradually run out of it. The endless summers of childhood, once dragging on forever, now seem to pass in a blink. And the years? They just don’t last as long as they used to. So why does this […]

If there’s one thing worse than a virus, you’ve got to imagine it’s a massive version of the same thing. So it may not sound like good news that scientists from the University of Miami have just discovered some 230 previously unknown types of giant virus, present in just about every ocean across the planet […]

When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, lava, ash, and debris left the landscape barren for miles. It was obvious that recovery would take decades. But one team of scientists had an unconventional idea to help jumpstart the process: send a few gophers on a one-day mission to the mountain. Plant life struggled to return […]

Between 120,000 and 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals embarked on a second wave of major migrations from Eastern Europe to southern Siberia and Central Asia. Using supercomputers, anthropologists have now managed to track the path of that journey with incredible precision. It’s known that Neanderthals made this journey based on archaeological sites in Eastern Europe dating […]

Diagrams and animations of planetary orbits are, in a way, lying to you a little bit, though it’s more accurate to say they’re simplifying things. They leave out the concept of barycenters so teachers don’t have to explain complex gravitational dynamics to kids still wrapping their heads around the fact that Earth isn’t the only […]

If you’ve ever counted beyond ten, and we’re going to be generous and assume that you have, at some point you’ve probably noticed the names of the numbers are a little odd. While we say “thirteen”, “fourteen”, “fifteen”, “sixteen” and so on, when it comes to 11 and 12, we don’t say “oneteen” or “twoteen”, […]

When two “puppies” were recovered from the Siberian permafrost, perfectly preserved like prehistoric popsicles, they were initially believed to be early domesticated dogs. However, new research has revealed they were actually red-blooded wolves. Even more remarkably, scientists discovered that these Ice Age pups dined on woolly rhinoceroses, an unexpectedly formidable prey for a small canine. […]

Walking in Interior Alaska in winter is an astonishing experience. The snowy landscape, the crisp air, the frozen frogs… Wait, what? Yes, were you to feel about in the leaf litter during the region’s coldest months, you just might be lucky enough to find a frog frozen solid. Typically, you’d expect this to be sad […]

A new species of dinosaur has been discovered in Mongolia, and it’s palaeontological royalty. Named Khankhuuluu (pronounced khan-KOO-loo) after the Mongolian for “dragon prince”, it represents the closest known ancestor to tyrannosaurs and has inspired a team of scientists to rewrite the evolutionary history of this iconic group of dinosaurs. The dragon prince, or Khankhuuluu mongoliensis […]

Scientists have developed a laser-based device that can read letters from over a kilometer away. The device, which is so precise it can even read letters that are millimeters wide, could be used as a spy tool. The laser was developed by scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China and international colleagues, […]

The number of satellites in orbit, especially in low-Earth orbit, has massively increased in the last decade. This has brought an increase in brightness across the surface of the Earth, meaning there are places on the planet experiencing light pollution for the first time because of it. This is a threat to the natural nocturnal […]

We’re sorry to say this is a sad and unpleasant one. A new study has shown the hidden world of pain fish endure before they die after being caught. In some instances, the animals can suffer high levels of pain for up to 10 minutes, a situation that experts say needs greater regulation to improve […]

You may have missed it, but last Sunday was World Oceans Day – an international observation designed to foster public interest in the protection of the ocean and the sustainable management of its resources. It is therefore fitting, or else darkly ironic, that the day also saw the unveiling by China of a new deep-sea […]

New research has taken a look at an odd phenomenon first observed in the artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM), Claude Opus 4. The so-called “spiritual bliss” attractor state occurs when two LLMs are left to talk to each other with no further input, and show a tendency for the chatbots to begin conversing […]

In Senegal, an elephant so rare they’re considered near mythical has been caught on camera for the first time in half a decade. Known as “ghost elephants”, it’s thought there are only five to 10 left in Niokolo-Koba National Park, a place where there were once hundreds of elephants. “Ghost elephant” is an umbrella term […]

The Sun is the closest star to us and the most studied by humanity. There is a lot we still do not know about it. Among the unknowns, until today, were the Sun’s polar regions. We simply had not seen them before. Now, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter has delivered our first-ever look at […]

In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager probes to study the Solar System’s edge, and the interstellar medium between the stars. One by one, they both hit the “wall of fire” at the boundaries of our home system, measuring temperatures of 30,000-50,000 kelvin (54,000-90,000 degrees Fahrenheit) on their passage through it. There are a few ways […]

It’s a hard life, being a shark. You’re already fighting off extinction at all hours; you’re working against a 50-year-old bad rap that’s left millions of people convinced you’re a soulless ocean psychopath; and everything from orcas, to humans, to those same humans’ tiny pets, think you’re little more than a swimming snack-in-waiting. And to […]