Deborah Bloomfield

It’s the holiday season and I am sure many of us will enjoy some extra indulgence over the next week or so. However, for some people, alcohol consumption can lead to problematic behavior and health issues. If you experience problematic alcohol use (PAU), there’s a chance that it’s because of your genes. A new study […]

Let’s start with a quiz… How many senses do you have? Which of the following are magnetic: a tomato, you, paperclips? What are the primary colors of pigments and paints? What region of the tongue is responsible for sensing bitter tastes? What are the states of matter? If you answered five; paperclips; red, yellow, and […]

In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2, the spacecraft that have traveled further than any human-made objects, crossing the heliopause and heading into interstellar space.   While doing so, the probes have been communicating constantly with Earth, even if Voyager 1 has recently begun sending back repeating patterns of 1s and 0s. It has […]

Five years ago, a popular interactive map showed you where you would pop up if you were to dig your way right through the Earth. It’s a bit of fun, even if for the vast majority the answer was “somewhere in an ocean”. But would it be possible to dig through the Earth and pop out […]

Seeing the Earth from space is an experience like no other. At least, according to the few people who have flown into space and orbited around our little planet. It is a dream shared by many to boldly go where less than 1,000 humans have gone before. For this reason, many apply to be an […]

Tears in humans are not just for lubrication and the cleaning of the eyes. We shed tears also for emotional reasons. Sadness, joy, anger, or just being moved might lead to crying, but it is not obvious why humans have evolved such a capability. Or if animals could shed emotional tears. Scientists have in the […]

If you’ve been on the Internet and you aren’t a robot, you’ve probably taken and passed a classic “Are you a robot?” CAPTCHA – and if you’ve failed it, momentarily questioned if you are, in fact, a human. Existential crises aside, the ways these tests work might not be how you’d expect. In a “Completely […]

Is artificial intelligence (AI) conscious? Would we even be able to work out if it was? These are some of the questions that researchers in AI and neuroscience are grappling with. There is a lot we don’t know about consciousness, making the quest to understand it in AI so much more complex. A preprint report […]

Earlier this year, father-daughter duo Tim and Henley Wollak were out boating when they made an unexpected discovery: a 152-year-old shipwreck. The outing started when Henley (aged 4 at the time) wanted to go swimming and look at rocks and sea glass around the southeast shore of Lake Michigan’s Green Island. As her dad wanted […]

Homo sapiens is a complex species and for all our intelligence, we’ve encountered and created some pretty horrifying scenarios. This year we’ve dived into some of the weirdest “cures” we’ve come up with for history’s deadliest diseases (some of which were worse than the disease itself), as well as curious approaches we’ve taken to dealing […]

The Salton Sea is a complex body of water that, having been declared an environmental catastrophe in the past, might just be sitting on a tidy billion. The lake itself is the largest in the state of California, but that’s not what scientists are interested in. In a recent report from researchers at Lawrence Berkeley […]

It may be odd to think about, but the strangest of the strange creatures, octopuses, may hold information related to Antarctica’s ice sheets. In a new study, scientists have examined the genes of one species of tentacular cephalopods that live in this cold environment, and they have reached some worrying conclusions. According to the paper, […]

Some incredibly old written multiplication formulas have been unearthed at a mausoleum in central China. While excavating the Qinjiazui site in Hubei Province, archaeologists came across strips of bamboo inscribed with mathematical tables, which are likely to have been recorded more than 2,300 years ago. Announcing the discovery at a press conference, China’s National Cultural […]

Just because something is a classic, doesn’t mean everybody has heard of it. You might want to give the cowgirl position a spin in the bedroom (though please dismount before you do) but aren’t quite sure how to get started; you might want an explanation that doesn’t require clicking an “I am over 18” button; […]

There’s a gap between the way scientists usually describe astronomical distances, and the units that make sense to non-astronomers. Space, as Douglas Adams so authoritatively told us, is really big. This means we need big units to describe it. You can measure the distance from Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy in centimeters if you really […]

Hunting and gathering are two subsistence roles that describe how humans used to get their food, with females typically being associated with passive gathering, while the aggressive ancient men folk were considered to have gone off and done the active hunting. Not so, says a growing body of research that shows there’s both archaeological and […]

By burning plants from Australia, researchers have discovered that some molecules found in asteroids and meteorites formed long before the Sun, in the cold environment of interstellar space. Three years ago, Hayabusa-2 brought back to Earth samples from the surface and below the surface of Asteroid Ryugu, and within them, many interesting molecules have been […]

“Do your own research” has become a popular slogan among many conspiracy theorists in recent years. From flat earthers to anti-vaxxers, the phrase will often be issued as an attempted wake-up call to their doubters and detractors. Yet the idea of “research”, investigating something to learn more, seems like something that should limit the spread […]

Snake species come in all shapes and sizes, from enormous pythons to horned snakes slithering through the desert. In the snake world, it can be especially difficult to tell a new species from existing ones – many members of the same species can look physically very different, with variations in colors along their bodies. However, […]