Deborah Bloomfield

It’s almost four years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. As the specter of lockdowns loomed in the West, scientists had already been scrambling for weeks to learn as much as they could about the emerging threat. One key question centered around whether there could be a seasonal pattern to infections – […]

The majority of rivers start in lofty mountains before flowing down their slopes and ending up in the sea. While that simplistic story explains the route of most rivers, many others have more eccentric and elusive origin stories.  The starting point of a river is referred to as the river source and headwater. Along with […]

The most luminous object ever observed is so far outside the range of its peers that the astronomers who discovered it think it might never be exceeded. Not surprisingly, there are big questions about how something like this could operate so far off the scale we are used to. Black holes famously have such strong […]

Forget the term bird brain, many bird species are actually famous for their intelligence. And while parrots and corvids get all the credit, another group of birds is joining the ranks. The Oriental pied hornbill (Anthracoceros albirostris) is fascinating not just for its extraordinary mating and reproductive behaviors, but it’s also impressed scientists with its […]

Astronomers have looked back at potential places where the elusive, hypothetical Planet Nine could be hiding, if it exists at all, once again narrowing down where to look. Looking for planets in orbit around other stars is a relatively easy task, in comparison to hunting for Planet Nine, also known as Planet X. Essentially, when […]

For most of us, our mathematical education involved a lot of names. There’s Pythagoras’s Theorem; the Riemann Hypothesis; Hilbert’s Hotel, and so many more concepts and theorems intrinsically linked to the scholars who first discovered them. Or should we say invented them? It’s a serious question. We’re so used to math being this indispensable tool, […]

Natural selection shapes all life on Earth. As the world around them changes, organisms that can adapt have a better chance of reproducing. Humans are no exception – and while a few examples of recent evolution are known, we lack a deeper understanding of how the human genome is being shaped by natural selection. The findings are a […]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away – well, actually it was pretty close by in galactic terms – George Lucas came up with the idea of an epic space-age weapon. He dubbed it the “lightsaber”, and bestowed it upon only his noblest heroes – or his most fearsome villains. Thirty years […]

There’s no two ways about it: having a cold sucks. A lot of the time, it’s expected that we’ll simply power through it – but a stuffy nose, aches in places you didn’t know could ache, and fatigue can be a lot to contend with. But does science have a way we can avoid the […]

The Amazon rainforest could soon be reaching a tipping point, according to a new study, with a combination of human-induced pressures such as global warming and deforestation pushing it towards either partial or, in the worst-case scenario, total collapse, by 2050. “We are approaching a potential large-scale tipping point, and we may be closer (both […]

The minerals that lie deep beneath our feet hold all sorts of secrets about our planet, like the superdeep diamonds that tell us about the formation of continents. But there’s one particularly rare, buried mineral you may well have never heard of, and it too has uncovered some mysteries. Its name? Ringwoodite. What is ringwoodite? […]

Research has found that supplementing older people with GlyNAC – a combination of glycine and N-acetylcysteine – wards off several key indicators of aging and keeps people healthier as they age. Not only that, but older people also appeared to be fitter and stronger with slimmer waistlines after taking the GlyNAC supplement.  As reported in the study, […]

At last count, there are 118 confirmed elements in the periodic table – yet, out of that huge number, you’re more than nine times more likely to come into contact with just five than the other 113. That’s because, out of all of the dozens of elements found in the Earth’s crust, it’s those five […]

An experimental quantum drive is missing and presumed lost in space, after the team lost communication with the satellite it was supposed to move.  Rogue Space Systems launched the satellite Barry-1 into orbit in November 2023, hitching a lift from the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Unfortunately, the company’s first space mission did not all go […]

A picture of a heart-shaped lake definitely sounds like something that’s been photoshopped and does the rounds on Facebook every Valentine’s Day, but the lovely shape of Spirit Lake, Washington, is very much real. However, it hasn’t always looked this way. Rather than the full heart that we can see in satellite imagery today, the […]

Beneath your feet in the depths of our planet, there’s an unbelievably vast ecosystem teeming with life. In recent years, a massive international team of scientists revealed how billions upon billions of microorganisms live miles beneath Earth’s subsurface. Presenting their work at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in 2018, the researchers calculated the size […]

Klerksdorp spheres, found inside pyrophyllite deposits mined in South Africa, are weird. Looking like tiny ancient cricket balls, with seam-like lines around their middle, it’s easy to see why they became the subject of conspiracy theories involving aliens and ancient, forgotten civilizations. In articles in the 1980s, they were speculated to be made by “a higher […]