Deborah Bloomfield

With space agencies’ sights set on increasingly long missions, beyond building resilient spacecraft, they’re also having to figure out the best way to keep astronauts well-fed. Researchers now think they’ve found the answer, and we’ve got bad news for any meat-loving space travelers: it’s a vegetarian salad. Astronauts have a unique set of needs when […]

As we move away from powering our civilizations with the ancient remains of not dinosaurs, we will have to overcome a few teething problems.  One is that renewable sources don’t necessarily generate electricity at the precise point that we need it (the wind doesn’t know – or doesn’t care – to blow extra hard when […]

Several news outlets have reported that the Earth may be hit by a “lost” asteroid this year. According to the reports, if asteroid 2007 FT3 were to hit Earth it would do so with the equivalent energy of 2.6 billion tons of TNT, NASA has lost track it, and it has a chance of hitting […]

It’s been said that in an infinite universe, anything can happen. Now, our universe may or may not count as infinite, but there’s definitely some weird stuff going on out there – and, as it turns out, a black hole sitting right in the middle of a star doesn’t even rate that highly in the […]

Thanks to one of the most successful scientific hoaxes of all time, palaeontologists spent the first half of the 20th century believing in the existence of an ancient hominid known as the Piltdown Man. Displaying an odd mix of human and ape characteristics, the anomalous animal was eventually exposed as a complete fraud in 1953, […]

The Quadrantid meteor shower will peak this week and it’s set to be one of the strongest showers of 2024 with up to 120 shooting stars being visible each hour. The Quadrantids are due to reach peak activity on the night of January 3 to 4, according to the American Meteor Society.  Advertisement The Quadrantid […]

Forget the Amazon; forget India’s forests with their living bridges; even forget the remote Malaysian rainforest with one of the world’s tallest trees. The world’s oldest forest is in Cairo. No, not Cairo the capital of Egypt – Cairo, the small town in upstate New York. At the bottom of a sandstone quarry in the […]

We might only be two days into 2024, but thanks to New Year’s festivities, there’s probably some people out there who are experiencing the worst hangover they’ll have this year. They may well be clinging to the possibility that a heavy, sweaty gym session will be the cure, lest they turn up at work with […]

Footage of the world’s second rarest primate, the cao-vit gibbon (Nomascus nasutus) has been recorded in a forest in Vietnam. Two adults and one younger gibbon can be observed playing together in the leafy canopy before the infant tumbles through the trees. The species exhibits sexual dimorphism where the males are black and the females […]

Nowadays it’s more common to rely on technology to find our way, but for thousands of years, humans have been using environmental wayfinders to navigate across enormous distances. Sailors in the Marshall Islands have been known to use wave patterns as a way of navigating the Pacific Ocean; meanwhile, the Gwich’in Indigenous communities in Alaska […]

Smoothies are not only a delicious fruit soup, but can also be a quick and easy way to get in some vitamins and minerals. It turns out, however, that the key to their nutrition-boosting abilities could be in the combination of fruits used – and depending on what benefit you’re looking for, bananas might be […]

On the hills of the English countryside in Dorset, you can find the giant chalk figure of a butt-naked man wielding a bat and a mighty erection. The origins of this figure – the Cerne Abbas Giant – have been debated for centuries, but a new study believes it might finally have the answer.  There […]

Over 111 years after it sank, the Titanic continues to fascinate and surprise the public. For instance, did you know that it was found by a team that was pretending to look for the wreck of the Titanic? Or that – despite what the Internet believes – it partly imploded as it sank? Or that a […]

If we want to find the necessary conditions for life on the surface of another planet, let alone life itself, we should stop hoping for carbon in its atmosphere, a new paper argues. Instead, it is an absence, or at least shortage, of atmospheric carbon that could be the sign we’re getting close. All life […]

More than one in four people in the US have blue eyes. In the UK, it’s three out of every seven; in the Netherlands, it’s three out of five, and in Iceland, it’s three out of every four. Depending on where you live, it’s a very popular ocular color to have. But that’s kind of […]

You can find all kinds of cool things in caves. From pearls to softball-sized spiders, ancient human artwork, and even unicorns, there’s no telling what awaits the curious cave explorer. Nothing illustrates this fact more clearly than the surprise that greeted archaeologists in Mexico recently, when they rolled back a boulder to discover a true […]

Thanks to some beautiful imagery captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover during the recent Mars solar conjunction, you can now watch the passing of a day, from sunrise to sunset, on the surface of Mars. The 25-frame video was captured from the Martian surface using Curiosity’s black-and-white Hazard-Avoidance Cameras (Hazcam) on November 8, 2023, from 5:30 […]

If one of your New Year’s resolutions happens to be staying sober, scientists at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) have some good news for you: not drinking alcohol, or even just cutting back on the bevs, can reduce your risk of some cancers. There’s already evidence to suggest […]

Io is a world like no other, at least within the Solar System. Eruptions from 400 active volcanoes constantly turn it inside out. The Juno spacecraft has provided stunning images of this moon of Jupiter taken during its first flyby. Already, image processors, professional and amateur, are drawing out details that might be missed in […]