Deborah Bloomfield

The city of Lexington, Kentucky has sent a message via laser to the TRAPPIST-1 system, officially in the hope of attracting tourists from one of the many Earth-like planets there. Some may suspect the real agenda is to attract visitors from closer to home, but we’ll let you be the judge of that. There’s plenty […]

Long COVID is perhaps most famous for the “brain fog” it can cause in those who have it, but that’s far from the only symptom. The physical symptoms can be equally debilitating, including long-lasting and extreme fatigue, especially after exercise – and thanks to a new study out of Amsterdam, now we know what causes […]

For years now, the potential benefits of psychoactive drugs have been slowly moving from “hippie nonsense” to “science-backed research.” From magic mushrooms to psychedelic toad milk, it seems ever clearer that tripping balls can actually be a pretty effective treatment for certain mental illnesses – including, suggests a small new study out of Stanford University, […]

When it comes to protecting ourselves from asteroids, we remain poorly prepared. Big leaps have been made – we know where the planet-killing asteroids are and even how to deflect them thanks to DART. We have expanded the number of known objects a lot but there are too many that are discovered too late, in […]

Despite being knocked off the top spot by TikTok back in late 2021, Google soon reclaimed its title as the most popular domain on the internet, and if the past is anything to go by, it doesn’t seem set to give it up anytime soon. According to Cloudfare Radar’s popularity rankings, Google and its offshoots […]

One of the risks that come with aging and obesity is the development of metabolic diseases, including nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Figuring out the intricacies of this process and how it could be stopped is far from an easy task, but researchers now believe they may have found the answers in a protein called ZAK-alpha. […]

We’re faced with an all-too-familiar stress when it comes to grocery shopping. No, we’re not talking about entering a Walmart in the week before Thanksgiving – it’s those carefully constructed sloping towers of fruit. Picking up a few apples on the way home suddenly becomes an intense and very public game of produce-themed Jenga. But […]

If we’re ever to survive on other planets, we’re going to need to come up with effective and sustainable ways of not becoming dead. This means growing food, having water and oxygen, and all the other stuff we have on Earth that prevents us from being a corpse. Short of terraforming a whole planet, we’re […]

Over more than a century of aliens in cinema, we’ve seen Earth’s first encounter with extraterrestrials imagined in a myriad of ways. Would humanity be forced into an intergalactic war, like in Independence Day? Would it happen after a watershed technological advance, like in Star Trek: First Contact? Or would it be more like… you […]

The term “ivory tower” refers to a metaphorical state in which people live without awareness of the facts and practicalities of the real world.  For instance, people of high social status – from academics and artists to politicians and celebrities – are often accused of “living in an ivory tower” when they lose touch with […]

Uranus and Neptune are the ice giant planets of the Solar System and have plenty of similarities. A major difference at a glance has always been their color – sure, they were both on the blue spectrum, but the aquamarine Uranus was strikingly paler than the cobalt Neptune. It turns out that contrast was down […]

Munchausen by proxy cases have risen to a strange kind of infamy following the release of series and documentaries like The Act and Take Care of Maya. They chronicle the devasting impact that this psychological condition can have on families and the extremes that the abused have reached to escape their situation. Munchausen syndrome by […]

NASA, together with private space companies Elysium Space and Celestis, will be sending human remains to the lunar surface this month – but not everyone is on board with the idea. The Navajo Nation has heavily criticized the plan for ignoring the sacred status of the moon in many Indigenous cultures, while other commentators have […]

Archaeologists have unearthed a strange, early medieval belt buckle depicting a serpent-like creature, either a snake or a dragon, eating a frog. The bronze artifact may be a symbol from a previously unknown pagan cult that was once distributed across central Europe. The belt buckle was discovered by a metal detector at an archaeological site […]

This year, as every fourth year since 1904, the world will add an extra day on February 29, making 2024 a leap year. While that is generally accepted, debate is growing about whether we should keep adding the occasional leap second. It might seem like an arcane question of little relevance to most people, but […]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people took up different hobbies as lockdown restrictions forced schools to close and people to stay inside their homes. While some took up crafts or yoga, one entomologist got his students involved in a rather different kind of lockdown project: studying the facial patterns of ants. The project started at […]

More evidence is showing that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals are more closely related than once thought. A new estimate suggests that our species may have diverged from Neanderthals just 408,000 years ago, which is “substantially later” than previous estimates.  Neanderthals are an extinct species of hominin who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. […]

WASP-121 b is an extreme planet. It orbits so close to its star that it’s shaped more like an egg than a sphere and is so hot that iron and maybe even liquid sapphires and rubies might be falling on its night side. The proximity to stars has helped astronomers look at this distant world […]

Actress Jane Seymour, Texas Rangers pitcher Max Scherzer, and the cat in the header of this article. Not three figures you might typically put together, but they all have something in common: heterochromia. What is heterochromia? Formally known as heterochromia iridum or iridis, but usually shortened to just heterochromia, this often striking feature is characterized […]