Deborah Bloomfield

Roughly the size of a small human, the Chinese giant salamander is one of the largest amphibians in the world. These blob-like beasts are sometimes called “living fossils” as they belong to a lineage stretching back 170 million years. In recent decades, however, a new phenomenon has emerged in their strange and twisting tale: hybrids.  […]

Somehow, for reasons that are still unclear, the natural world gave rise to tiny mushrooms teeming with the psychoactive compound psilocybin. Even more astonishingly, the ability to produce this particular psychedelic didn’t evolve just once – it emerged at least twice independently. Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic substance that profoundly alters consciousness and perception. […]

Imagine you’re in a bar, watching a patron tilt backwards on their stool. Further and further back they lean, the stool’s feet lifting more and more off the floor, until eventually, to nobody’s surprise but their own, they fall. They’re hurt and bruised, the stool is completely broken, and the bar staff are irate. Now […]

Until about 60,000 years ago, the Indonesian island of Flores was home to a miniature hominin species called Homo floresiensis – otherwise known as the Hobbit humans. The discovery of this petite primate in 2004 sent palaeontologists into a bit of a spin, as the species breaks one of the golden rules of human evolution […]

Sitting in the audience at a stand-up show; watching a comedy at the movies; at the office party when your boss breaks out their best knock-knock joke: these are all places where laughter is both encouraged and expected. During a quiet moment in church? Not so much. But wherever you are, if you hear someone […]

Math, outside of a few pivotal scenes in the original Mean Girls, is not usually seen as a competitive sport. But… maybe it should be.  After all, from the earliest days of formal math, the discipline has been marked by – and often fueled by – challenges and rivalries. There are the Millennium Prizes, of […]

What’s the circumference of your neck? No idea? That’s fair enough – but according to some experts, it might be worth getting to know your neck size. That’s because it could be a better indicator of some health risks than other measures we hear a lot about, like waist-to-hip ratio and body mass index (BMI). […]

Maria Branyas lived to the ripe old age of 117 years and 168 days, making her, at the time of her death in August 2024, the world’s oldest verified living person. It’s an extraordinary feat, especially when you consider that the life expectancy for women in her native Catalonia is 86 years. So, what was […]

A giant supermassive black hole (SMBH) that consumes the mass of the Sun a day has been found to be about one-fifteenth of its initially estimated size, which makes its rate of feeding even more inexplicable. As excited as astronomers are about solving one puzzle and having another made clearer, they’re even more enthused about […]

Lately, a handful of viral posts have been saying the “52-hertz whale”, the so-called world’s loneliest whale, has at last found a friend. But is there any truth behind the buzz? What is the 52 hertz whale? For those uninitiated in the tale of the 52 hertz whale, in 1989 a team from the Woods […]

Seals get a good rap as one of the cutest marine predators swooshing through our oceans, but did you know that they have nails? Zookeepers become occasional manicurists for their seals and sea lions, many species of which have nails similar to those on our toes and fingers on their flippers. The rest of this […]

Every year, collectively, we spend almost $50 billion on anti-aging products – and to what end? Our faces still sag and wrinkle; our bones still ache and crack; Death still edges ever closer over the horizon. Well, we can’t do much about the latter two (yet) – but a new face cream formulation containing the […]

Everything that’s alive has to die eventually (yes, even you, immortal jellyfish). It’s not just a natural part of life but a necessary one, too, as there is so much on Earth that wouldn’t be possible were it not for, well, corpses. So, is our approach to death getting in the way of new life? […]

Fall is here, school is back in session, and pumpkin spice is inescapable. For many of us, this changing season means thoughts of cozy blankets, warming recipes, and maybe a trip to go leaf peeping. But for your friendly neighborhood Health and Medicine Editor, it can only mean one thing: flu season is round the […]

Until recently, it was thought that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals split off from their last common ancestor around 600,000 years ago, but a prehistoric skull from China has just shattered that narrative. Dated to a million years ago, the cranium belongs to an extinct human clade which encompasses the Denisovans, indicating that we had already […]

In 1964, physicist Arno Allan Penzias and radio astronomer Robert Woodrow Wilson picked up a persistent hum in their radio telescope readings. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. The noise – like static on a radio – seemed to be there, no […]

In spectacularly good timing a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun is about to collide with an object which came from outside of the Solar System. On July 1, 2025, astronomers spotted an object moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The object, […]

Physicists have made an array of 6,100 neutral-atom qubits held in place by lasers, marking a dramatic increase in potential quantum computing size. Nevertheless, the qubits have not yet been entangled, and cannot operate as a computer until this occurs. The bits in classical computers can either represent ones or zeros, but qubits can combine […]

Astronaut Reid Wiseman, who will serve as Commander on NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission to the Moon and back, has explained why he “hopes” that the crew will be forgotten by history. On Monday, NASA announced its schedule for the second stage of the Artemis II, the second stage in the space agency’s project to […]

These giant, guitar-shaped fish have not been spotted in this part of the world since the 1990s, leading many to assume they had vanished in the region. However, to the surprise of locals and scientists, the body of a largetooth sawfish recently washed ashore, dispelling some myths about the species’ demise. The rest of this […]