Deborah Bloomfield

Japan’s official number of islands could more than double thanks to a new recount. A “source familiar with the matter” told Kyodo News that the number will jump from 6,852 to 14,125, although final adjustments could make the officially released number slightly different. This recount follows remarks by a lawmaker in a 2021 parliamentary session […]

The Codex Sassoon, the world’s oldest near-complete Hebrew bible, is set to go under the hammer at auction later this year and could sell for up to $50 million. If it achieves this price, it will become the “most valuable historical document ever sold at auction”. You better get saving those pennies.  The Codex is […]

In the pursuit of truth we must sometimes lift the curtain on “facts” we’d sooner have believed were true, such as the rumor that in the 1930s giant grasshoppers were hurling themselves around Montana. A black and white photo of a man holding his enormous catch gave rise to the myth, but unfortunately for fans […]

The time to launch a mission to Uranus is 2032, when spacecraft could get a boost from Jupiter on the way. If we’re going to do that we need to start planning – and seeking funds – now. In a new Perspective article, planetary scientist Dr Kathleen Mandt of the Southwest Research Institute makes the […]

Scientists have developed a new drug that can stop SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, from infecting cells. And they did so by turning the virus’s own great weapon against itself: its spike protein. This bit allows the virus to attach itself to cells and teaches our immune system to recognize it, and has been […]

When Artemis-I blasted off in November 2022 marking a new dawn for missions to the Moon and beyond, it became the world’s most powerful rocket – and one of the noisiest too. Even if you were standing over 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the launch pad, the colossal rocket created a crackling sound that was […]

Humans are a bit weird, all things considered. We’re bipedal, which is already pretty strange; our brains and heads are outsized to a degree that literally causes us pain; and to top it all off, we don’t even have bones in our boners like the rest of our primate cousins. But for something truly unique […]

It’s a well-known fact that there’s a lot of interspecies mingling in the human family tree. It’s clear that modern humans have fragments of DNA from our ancient relatives, like the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, but it also appears that other mystery species live on in the genomes of some modern-day populations. In January 2019, […]

A lot has changed for humanity over the last 5,000 years. We invented writing, and built Stonehenge; we survived wave after wave of deadly plagues and even worse medical procedures; we’ve become so technologically advanced, in fact, that it’s probably going to be our own downfall before too long.   But some things are exactly […]

This article first appeared in Issue 4 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. The Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico is unusually flat topside, but beneath its surface sit vast networks of underwater tunnels and sinkholes known as cenotes. They formed through speleogenesis (doesn’t science have fun words?) as rainwater mixed with carbon dioxide in the air […]

Can sleeping with soap really “cure” restless leg syndrome and cramps? It may seem like a bizarre question with an obvious answer (which is no, by the way, at least according to the science), but if you’re familiar with the internet’s favorite, or strangest, home remedies then you may be aware of this particular one […]

The discoveries made in the Shanidar Cave are some of the most thought-provoking and divisive Neanderthal remains ever recovered. Among the handful of skeletons found scattered within the cave, one appears to have been laid to rest alongside significant amounts of pollen.  Some have interpreted this as evidence of a grand burial ritual as if a […]

In amongst the flurry of AI news as ChatGPT takes over our entire lives, Google threw their hat in the ring and released Bard, their competitor AI. Unfortunately for them, the first demonstrations were less than optimal – a promo video for Bard showed it explaining that the JWST was the first telescope to ever […]

This week, Bing’s new chatbot claims to be both sentient and depressed, a bizarre 10-meter-long jellyfish is captured on film, and we investigate Third Man syndrome, a potentially life-saving hallucination. Scientists Have Tested The “Enjuin Mummy” To Find Out What It Really Is The Enjuin “mummy” was found in a box in a Japanese temple. […]

Caves have always been home to the weirdest and most bizarre members of the animal kingdom. Owing to their unique environmental properties of being largely dark, wet and sometimes humid, this has given rise to a whole host of funky critters, adapted to living in low light and these tricky conditions by convergent evolution. Now, […]

When you start to notice them, psychopaths seem to be everywhere. This is especially true of people in powerful places. By one estimate, as many as 20 percent of business leaders have “clinically relevant levels” of psychopathic tendencies – despite the fact as little as 1 percent of the general population are considered psychopaths. Psychopaths […]

Our Solar System is a pretty busy place. There are millions of objects moving around – everything from planets, to moons, to comets and asteroids. And each year we’re discovering more and more objects (usually small asteroids or speedy comets) that call the Solar System home. Astronomers had found all eight of the main planets […]

The original creator of the internet believes that we have gone down the wrong path and is looking to change how the entire internet works with his company, Inrupt. Sir Tim Berners-Lee states that the internet as we see it today has deviated from his original vision when he created the world wide web in […]