Deborah Bloomfield

A group of potty-mouthed parrots living at a British zoo are to be sworn into a larger flock in an attempt to teach them some manners. The eight African greys have become a star attraction at the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park for their tendency to turn the air blue, yet zookeepers have now seemingly had enough […]

While T. rex and other large ancient predators had the advantage of size and frankly enormous teeth when it came to intimidating their prey, smaller dinosaurs didn’t have quite the same arsenal of claws and fangs to rely on. Instead, a new paper has suggested that to source their prey, these small feathered dinos used […]

When the doomed submersible the Titan imploded as the crew attempted to explore the wreck of the Titanic in June 2023, people began asking a lot of questions about implosions, including why the Titanic itself didn’t implode despite being at a lower depth. One such question, asked a number of times over the last year, […]

Superconductive materials can transmit electricity without resistance, making them fundamental for advanced and efficient technologies. The current drawback is that this property is only obtained below a certain temperature, often pretty close to absolute zero. Even high-temperature superconductors remain below freezing – but scientists are hunting for the material that would be superconductive at room […]

Charged molecules do not form a boundary layer between saltwater and air as previously thought, new research reveals. Indeed, they are depleted there relative to their abundance in the liquid as a whole. Instead, at a depth of a few molecule’s diameters an ion-enrichment layer lurks, like some mythical beast waiting to surprise. The discovery […]

Linguists have documented what they believe to be a new language that’s been quietly blooming in Lajamanu, a remote village in the Northern Territory of Australia predominately inhabited by Warlpiri people. Known as Light Warlpiri or Warlpiri rampaku, it’s a mixed language created by blending different elements of standard Australian English with Warlpiri – an […]

Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) successfully soft-landed on the Moon on Friday, January 19, and was able to deploy two small rovers to explore the lunar surface. But from the get-go researchers suspected that there was something odd – the solar panels were not catching sunlight and charging the lander. Images from one […]

Ask if anyone in a group gets migraines, and the nodding faces will no doubt have a haunted look to them. These strange and often debilitating headaches come with a host of unpleasant symptoms, one of which is psychedelic patterns in the affected person’s vision. So, what are they? The strange patterns people see when […]

Children ask a lot of fun questions, often quite persistently and while you are trying to cook food. One such question comes from the 9-year-old child of a Reddit user, who asked: “If helium is lighter than air, would a balloon with a vacuum in it, also float?” An excellent and enjoyable question. First, sorry […]

Sudden increases in methane concentrations in the Martian atmosphere have been a major puzzle for scientists, and the answer may lie in fluctuations in atmospheric pressure. The conclusion wouldn’t really change the prospects for life on our neighbor – but if it’s right, it would be a big step forward in knowing how to look […]

Lying can be pretty difficult to spot, even for the machines that are made to catch liars out. So how can we tell fact from fabrication? Researchers have a few tricks up their sleeves. Fibbing facial cues What do you get when you combine big data, machine learning tech, and facial analysis software with a […]

Another day, another blurring of the lines between reality and fiction. There’s a decent chance you’re one of the millions of people who’s watched the viral video of ants marching around a speaker that’s blasting AC/DC in a “death spiral”.  We hate to break it to you, but the video is fake.  The post (below) […]

A monstrous oviraptor from the Hell Creek Formation has been discovered in the US. Analysis of the hell chicken’s hindlimb suggests it weighed about 78 kilograms (172 pounds) and is a new-to-science species, indicating that there was a greater diversity of caenagnathid dinosaurs in the Hell Creek ecosystem shortly before the asteroid hit. The Chicxulub […]

Big news, everyone: the sausage catastrophe has been reproduced with tiny balls. Look. It’s a little-known fact in mathematics, but the more difficult your theorem is to prove, the sillier its name has to be. Take, for example, the fact that there is no nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field on even-dimensional n-spheres – or to […]

If you grab a jar of honey out of the kitchen cupboard (or your jar of royal honey out of the bedside table), you’ll be able to see an expiration date stamped across the packaging. But does honey ever really “expire”? And if not, why? The components that make up honey are, crucially, nothing to […]

A huge breakthrough for endangered rhino species in Africa has been achieved through the world’s first in-vitro fertilization (IVF) rhino pregnancy. A team has successfully implanted a lab-created rhino embryo into a surrogate rhino mother for the first time, resulting in pregnancy. This could be a big step towards saving the northern white rhino, a […]

At first glance, southeastern Libya looks like an unforgiving land of sand and barren mountains. However, look closer and you’ll see clues that the desert is home to a massive underground oasis.  Images taken by satellites and astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) show that Libya’s Kufrah district is not as desolate as it […]

Animals should have the right to vote, according to a recent paper. Check your calendars – we promise it’s not April Fool’s Day yet.  “The idea that animals should have the right to vote sounds preposterous,” the paper begins, accurately summarizing most people’s thoughts upon reading that headline. But, author Ioan-Radu Motoarcă goes on to […]

Dolphins have been observed interacting with manatee calves in unusual behavior, some of which has been aggressive and hostile. But while researchers are not sure why they are doing it, it is clearly deliberate.  Over a 21-year period, researchers documented 10 interactions between bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates) and Antillean manatee calves (Trichechus manatus manatus) in […]

Tables get dull pretty quickly. Sure they may have a nice pattern on them, or be made of some particularly fancy wood, but once you’ve seen one, you’ve basically seen them all. Just variation after variation of the “big flat thing on top of some legs” model which hasn’t really changed since we first started […]