Deborah Bloomfield

During the holiday season, many of us will be tucking into delicious meals which may well include a whole host of meats. But have you ever thought about going meat-free this time of year? With concerns over the impact of meat consumption on the planet, thoughts are turning to the future of the industry and […]

Lazy students the world over may have just got the loophole they were waiting for when it comes to using ChatGPT for their math homework: it turns out, even the researchers at Google do it. And the really impressive part? It looks like the artificial intelligence (AI) might have outperformed its creators. What is the […]

A fossil whale jaw found on the banks of Australia’s Murray River is much larger than was considered possible for such an old fossil. Together with other surprisingly big southern fossil whales, the find suggests whales started growing in the Southern Hemisphere long before they did in the North. It also suggests the baleen whales, […]

It’s just coming up to 1,000 years since the death of Sven Estridsen, the last Viking king of Denmark, and legends that have stood for the majority of the past millennium are now being re-written. According to the official narrative, Sven was buried opposite his mother, yet genetic analyses have revealed that the woman was […]

In the last three decades, we went from not knowing if planets existed beyond the Solar System to finding so many that we now suspect almost every star has one. So far, over 5,000 planets have been confirmed. Astronomers have discovered some stuff that has truly challenged our understanding of what planets are like. There’s […]

Hold onto your hats, the zoology world hasn’t finished for the holidays just yet. Instead, intrepid researchers have been out and about in the forests of Vietnam and northern Sumatra and have discovered two new species of downright adorable furry hedgehogs. While their prickly cousins might be more well known, furry hedgehogs, or gymnures, are […]

Gamma rays are the most powerful type of light, extremely dangerous to life forms. They can form in nuclear reactions, as well as in and around powerful astronomical events and bodies, such as black holes, pulsars, and supernovae. Studying the universe in gamma rays opens a window on these extremes and NASA’s Fermi has been […]

Ever since humans first domesticated dogs, we’ve been molding them – from their bodies down to their temperaments. Now, new research has suggested human actions may have even gone so far as to inadvertently steer the evolution of our pooch pals’ eye color. A team of scientists from Japan analyzed images of 22 grey wolves […]

As pure as the driven snow? Well, not so anymore, as a new study has shown that traces of sunscreen have been found in snow at the North Pole, on the glaciers of the Svalbard archipelago. In the last few decades, legacy contaminants have been turning up in Arctic environments. Through international efforts and regulations, […]

In 2021, the government of El Salvador did what many fans of cryptocurrencies had been pleading for: it made Bitcoin legal tender. All businesses in the Central American country were legally required to accept Bitcoin as an alternative to the US dollar, which had been El Salvador’s only currency since 2001. The government even launched […]

We have known for some time that our distant ancestors got more than familiar with other archaic hominins, especially Neanderthals. However, in 2021, researchers discovered what they believe is a previously unknown population of ancient hominins who exhibit a unique blend of Neanderthal and archaic human traits. The finding suggested that this other population had […]

2023 was a big year for bizarre animal news. As one town in England welcomed in the New Year by canceling their fireworks display for a masturbating walrus, scientists in India revealed the first known case of a dinosaur egg-in-egg, something that was thought to be unique to birds. You never know what’s going to […]

Christmas and the many other winter (in the northern hemisphere) holidays are a time of celebration – and also a time of telescopes trying to one-up each other with the most stunning pictures they can produce. JWST has delivered a breathtaking view of Uranus, and now it’s the turn of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), […]

A 15-year-old girl experienced vocal cord paralysis after a bout of COVID-19, according to a new case report. It’s the first time this particular complication of the disease has been reported in an adolescent, and medics are calling for greater awareness of this possibility, albeit rare, in children infected with SARS-CoV-2. Over the almost four […]

Fossil hunters in search of the teeth of ancient marine predators will tell you that one of the best places to head is the beach. Combing along the shoreline in places like the UK’s Jurassic Coast can turn up teeth dating back millions of years (including the snout of a 150-million-year-old “giant sea monster”) – […]

Occam’s Razor – a nifty problem-solving principle often attributed to a medieval Franciscan friar – is not just a tool we should all use, it is the heart of science itself and is valuable for separating legitimate ideas from superstition, pseudoscience, or fake news, according to a recent paper by a renowned Professor of Molecular […]

Wildflowers, like most things, seem to be suffering the effects of climate change and lack of insect pollinators. Instead of this spelling complete disaster for the hedgerows and verges across the globe, scientists have discovered something very surprising: The plants are evolving to do without the insects.  Pollination by insects is one of the most common […]

No matter where you are on the globe today, the Sun will reach its southernmost apparent position with respect to our planet. This is due to the tilt of the Earth that, as the planet orbits the Sun, makes our star look like it goes up and down between the two tropics. And today, December […]

Have you ever wondered where nuclear submarines go when they die? That is, where their highly radioactive cores are stored once they have been decommissioned? Well, there is a place in the US, called Trench 94, which is effectively a nuclear submarine graveyard, containing dozens of old reactors that are stored in perpetuity. And while […]

CERN’s ATLAS Collaboration has released a new measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson with a precision of 0.09 percent. Since the Higgs’ mass is one of the fundamental parameters that defines many aspects of the universe, this sort of precision can improve our understanding of many other particle interactions. For decades the Higgs […]