Deborah Bloomfield

Being the driest place in North America, Death Valley probably isn’t the first place that springs to mind when thinking about lakes – but that doesn’t mean you won’t find one there. After Hurricane Hilary brought heavy rainfall to the region last year, a lake popped up in Badwater Basin and though at first it […]

An ancient bronze hand inscribed with a mysterious ancient language may help to illuminate the backstory of the Basque language, a fascinating “language isolate” that has no living relatives.  It’s said to be a “miracle” that the Basque language is still used today. It’s spoken by just under 1 million people who live in the […]

The US officially has a new national park. Amache National Historic Site near Granada, Colorado, has officially joined the likes of Yellowstone and Yosemite, the National Park Service announced last week.  Amache – also known as the Granada Relocation Center – has a dark past, having been one of 10 incarceration sites established by the […]

We get it okay, the ocean is frankly one of the weirdest habitats the Earth has to offer, with everything from tiny octopuses to giant whales swimming below the surface. While you might have come across scallops on the menu at the local seafood restaurant, what exactly are they and what do they get up […]

If you’ve ever made the mistake of gaming online, and then made the further mistake of enabling chat and/or messages from strangers, you may have noticed gaming has a misogyny problem. Surveys have found that around 50 percent of women overall have experienced harassment of some kind, with 75 percent of women aged between 18 […]

The Amazon rainforest hosts the largest and heaviest (although not longest) snake species on Earth: the green anaconda. However, what was thought to be a single species covering a vast area has now been revealed as two, with a little help from Will Smith and an accompanying documentary crew. Professor Bryan Fry of the University […]

Plans to build the largest monkey-breeding facility in the US have attracted anger and concern from animal welfare groups and local residents in Georgia. The giant complex is set to eventually house up to 30,000 macaques – twice the human population of the local city – which will be sold to universities and pharmaceutical companies […]

Quartz is one of the world’s most abundant materials – and one of humanity’s oldest fascinations. From ancient myths to modern science, quartz has played a part in pretty much every aspect of human development – and it’s pretty to boot. But have you ever wondered what’s going on behind the twinkling gem at the […]

“Giant”, “sea”, and “spider” are perhaps not words best seen in combination – but unfortunately for any arachnophobes and thalassophobes out there, giant Antarctic sea spiders have crawled straight out your nightmares and into existence. Although not technically spiders, these strange, spindly creatures certainly look like their namesake (that’ll be the legs), and they hide […]

When you hear the word “mummy”, we bet your mind goes straight to the dried and bandaged remains of long-preserved Egyptian pharaohs. However, despite their fame, these specimens are not the oldest mummies in the world. That title belongs to the Chinchorro people of Chile’s Atacama Desert who mummified their dead 7,000 years ago. The […]

This cluster of pink loveliness might have put you in mind of a sea of cherry blossom, or a juicy raspberry compote just waiting to ooze over your pancakes. Well, you can shelve these delightful images immediately, we’re afraid. What you’re looking at here are bacteria, and though these structures might be called “pink berries”, […]

A new paper has taken a look at panspermia and the suggestion that dust particles could escape the gravity of host planets and make their way across the galaxy, seeding life on other planets. There are a number of ideas about how life began on Earth, with the most likely being that it emerged in […]

The dance of the continents could be about to take a new turn, with the Atlantic moving from a growth to a contraction phase. This, some geologists predict, will be caused by the breaking of tectonic plates, causing lines of volcanoes along the coastlines of Africa and Iberia. Over billions of years, the Earth’s continents […]

A new analysis of human activities at two prehistoric sites in the Colombian Amazon has revealed that people were well established in the region by around 13,000 years ago. By studying layers of soil, researchers were able to tease out the long-term history of both settlements, indicating that the ancient inhabitants began producing rock art […]

If someone says “Neanderthal” to you, what’s the first thing that pops up in your head? If it happens to be an image of a “caveman”-esque person, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. A quick image search brings up results mostly showing male Neanderthals – but what about the females of the species? What do […]

Previously only found in China, researchers have now discovered the world’s largest known population of endangered Skywalker gibbons in Myanmar – and they were led to them by the creatures’ love songs. Named after that bloke from the space films, Skywalker gibbons had only been confirmed as a distinct species in 2017 and only found […]

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 […]