Deborah Bloomfield

If your mother tongue is English, you almost certainly follow this strange grammatical rule, despite never being actively taught it.  There’s an unspoken order for adjectives in English: Opinion > Size > Age > Shape > Color > Origin > Material > Purpose > Noun.  Nothing is stopping you from ignoring this rule, but it […]

The election of the pope is a major geopolitical event – the leader of the Catholic Church represents and influences the 1.4 billion Roman Catholics around the world. Its election happens in a conclave, where the electing cardinals are locked in the Sistine Chapel and select the new pope. Since the 1800s, smoke signals have […]

When children take the marshmallow test to see if they can delay gratification, having a partner who promises to go the distance helps them do better. In some ways, the experiment replicates buddy systems used to fight addiction, suggesting these would also work for young children, even when the buddy is an online stranger. The […]

Big news, California. It’s been confirmed that you have a new record for the highest tree, discovered by happy accident at a dizzying elevation of 3,858 meters (12,657 feet). The Jeffrey pine came as something of a surprise to UC Davis Professor Hugh Safford, who spotted the species while out hiking just for fun in […]

Yes, this is a real insect, and yes, it is a lot to take in. This buggy-eyed beast is the spiny devil katydid (Panacanthus cuspidatus), also known as the thorny devil. It wears its characteristic head protrusion like a tiny little crown, and rightly so, because these bizarre insects rule the forest. Most katydids feed […]

The lights shone bright and fluorescent as a crowd of people gathered in a small white room. Their eyes were mesmerized and locked on the viewing window. Behind the glass, two people were holding a medium-sized snake, with its mouth hinged open around a plastic dish covered with a thin parafilm layer, which was pierced […]

The dodo has become an enduring symbol of humanity’s role in driving species to extinction. By the late 17th century, European colonizers had wiped this flightless bird from the planet. Practically nothing of the species now remains – except for a fascinating specimen at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The so-called “Oxford Dodo” […]

Until recently, it was believed that certain aspects of musicality were universal to all human cultures, yet an Indigenous population in Paraguay has just shattered that assumption. Known as the Northern Aché, the forest-dwelling community is the only known human group that doesn’t sing to its babies or engage in dancing.  “This demonstrates that dance […]

A new “landmark assessment” has estimated that 397 snow leopards live across Nepal, up from earlier estimates of between 300 and 350 individuals. Sometimes called the “ghosts of the mountains,” snow leopards are famously elusive, blending effortlessly into the remote, snow-covered terrain they inhabit. Their solitary nature and rugged habitat make them one of the […]

Ancient patches of super-fertile black soil have been found dotted throughout the Amazon rainforest, supporting agricultural communities within the dense jungle for thousands of years. Over recent decades, archaeologists have been struggling to come up with an explanation for this so-called Amazonian dark earth, yet research shows that it was intentionally created by ancient cultures […]

If you go down for a dive today, you could be in for a great surprise. Swimming off the coast of Australia, diver Jules Casey spotted a rare white stingaree swimming along the seafloor. Stingarees belong to the family Urolophida, while the more common stingrays are found in the family Dasyatididae. Stingarees also have a […]

Elon Musk’s private space firm SpaceX now has its own municipality in Texas, complete with its own Mayor and Commissioner, following a Cameron County vote on Saturday. Musk has been vocal in the past about his desire to turn the SpaceX base of operations into a fully-fledged city, after the firm first began buying up […]

When looking at a towel, you may have wondered a few things, such as, “Why do I have to wash my towel when I only use it when I’ve literally just been cleaned?” and, “Huh, what the hell are those lines for?” The latter question has been discussed a lot this week, after one X […]

Much of the ocean has never been mapped, and it is for this reason that projects like Seabed 2030 exist, to finally map every ocean. Just over a quarter of the oceans’ floor has been mapped, which is small, but a significant increase from the 6 percent that it was in 2017. Still, there is […]

Scientists now have a new approach to study never-before-seen quantum phenomena. Physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have produced the first images of atoms freely interacting in space, showing correlations that had been predicted in theory but never directly photographed before. The team’s Atom-Resolved Microscopy is done in this way. Atoms are allowed to […]

Imprints of evolution can be seen among the Haenyeo of South Korea. After generations of foraging for food on the seabed, these all-women divers have fostered several genetic adaptations that allow them to freedive in chilly temperatures and for long periods. The Haenyeo – literally “sea women” – are a group of women who live […]

With the news that President Trump is looking to reopen Alcatraz, we wondered whether it’s true that there’s never been a successful prison break from the notorious island. This led us to a fascinating piece of research by scientists in 2014 that looked into the most famous escape attempt that occurred in June 1962. Their […]

The Vesuvius Challenge has announced the latest award for the identification of the first title on one of the ancient Herculaneum scrolls. The title has been unread for nearly 2,000 years, ever since the volcano erupted in 79 CE, but now innovative noninvasive techniques have recovered it from the still-rolled scroll that would have otherwise […]

A new-to-science species of worm has just pulled out one hell of a party trick: it can squash up like an accordion to a staggering one-fifth of its normal body length. No news yet on whether the feat comes with an equally comical gasp of discordant notes, but a reminder that worms really are a […]

A bill that has just passed out of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is aimed at tackling challenges beyond Earth “due to relativistic effects”.  The Celestial Time Standardization Act will now make its way through to a floor vote, before going to the Senate, before being signed into law. The purpose […]