Deborah Bloomfield

Every now and then, somebody on the Internet will look at population statistics and ask, “Why is Canada so sparsely populated?” or even more specifically, “Why is the top of Canada so empty of people?” The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Despite […]

There’s a problem with that “March of Progress” picture that’s so often used to illustrate our species’ development: it ends. Human evolution, the image implies, began in apehood and finishes here, with us. We’re done. It’s poetic, but it’s wrong. Evolution, famously, has no end goal – and there’s no reason to assume we’re already […]

As both evolution and classic literature have taught us, everyone poops. And yet not everything about that experience is universal: European bathroom stalls have doors that reach all the way across, for example (revolutionary, we know); in Japan, toilets come with their own soundtrack; in America, the water level comes almost up to your butt […]

In a basement in Frederiksberg, Denmark, two bottles had been collecting dust for over a century. Last year, in a stroke of luck, researchers from the University of Copenhagen stumbled upon them once more, and found a suspect white powder lurking within. This residue, they would go on to uncover, contained bacteria from the 1890s […]

Necklaces dating back to the Upper Palaeolithic have been recreated from caves in southern Spain, with some of the beads made from the shells of fossilized marine mollusks. Curiously, however, the makers of these ancient adornments appear to have specifically selected two species of scaphopods – or tusk shells – despite the abundance of 24 […]

The 20th Century had its fair share of ups and significant downs, but an absolute highlight has to be how humanity went from being a largely ground-based species to one that can fly and leave the planet to visit others. A huge driver of this progress was not just the pursuit of knowledge, or doing […]

Stumble across a feisty feline, piss off a snake in the wild, or get a little too close to a family of geese, and you’ll likely be greeted with the same sound: a sharp, angry hiss. From reptiles to mammals to even certain birds, hissing shows up all over the animal kingdom. But why do […]

In the waters off Washington State, a mother orca has been seen pushing her dead newborn calf, seemingly in mourning. It isn’t the first time this grieving behavior has been documented in this killer whale pod, a population that’s imperiled with an uncertain future.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign […]

For many, early autumn might mean cozy blankets, pumpkin spice lattes, and pulling your favorite jumper out after a long hiatus – but not for arachnophobes.  In Europe and North America, late August through mid-October often brings a noticeable uptick in house spider sightings. What Is Spider Season? Is It A Real Thing? At the […]

In 1964, physicist Arno Allan Penzias and radio astronomer Robert Woodrow Wilson noticed an unusual noise always humming away in the background of their radio telescope observations. The noise – like static on a radio – seemed to be there, no matter what direction they pointed the telescope in the sky. At first, the two […]

The first image of a black hole was of M87*, the supermassive monster at the center of the enormous elliptical galaxy M87. The image was only possible thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, and follow-up observations have revealed more insight, including information about its magnetic field. Researchers have now seen that it is changing quite […]

When matter and antimatter collide, they turn into pure energy. Energy can also spontaneously turn into matter and antimatter pairs. If this happens in a vacuum under a strong electric field, this is known as the Schwinger effect. Researchers have now found a way to simulate this fascinating phenomenon in a much easier way. The […]

Surströmming is a regular cast member of viral videos where fame-hungry content creators crack open a can and (more often than not) proceed to gag, choke, and splutter as they attempt to eat this unusual-looking slurry of fish. But what exactly is this curious delicacy, and why does it smell so notoriously terrible? Fortunately, science […]

Back in 2019, researchers observed a collision between two black holes of wildly different masses. New analysis has revealed that the collision produced a massive recoil, sending the newly formed black hole moving so fast that it is no longer bound by the gravity of the globular cluster where it was born. The rest of […]

The Moon and the Earth have been dancing around each other since the Moon was first created 4.5 billion years ago, likely in a collision between planet Theia and Earth. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. But the orbits of these two bodies […]

A new NASA study has found that the Sun’s activity is ramping up, reversing the trend and surprising astronomers. Humans have known about sunspots since around 800 BCE, when ancient Chinese astronomers recorded observations of them in I Ching, the Book of Changes.  “Sunspots are areas where the magnetic field is about 2,500 times stronger […]

Earth is pretty special, and as far as we know, the only place in the universe with life. But how special is it really? There are billions upon billions of planets in the Milky Way alone; shouldn’t life be common? Maybe, but even if life is common, how common are advanced civilizations? Some new work […]

A week ago, a stunning total lunar eclipse was seen by a record-breaking number of people on the planet. This week, there is a solar eclipse, and it’s going to be the complete opposite. Eclipses often come in pairs, but these two are truly an odd couple. The lunar eclipse of September 7 was total, […]

You might be surprised to learn that the art of creating clay pots predates the development of agriculture. That’s right: our ancestors figured out pottery way back during the Last Glacial Maximum, when huge ice sheets shrouded the land and the first farmers were still millennia in the future. The oldest examples of clay pot […]

Around 10,000 years before the Egyptians developed their sophisticated embalming practices, people in Southeast Asia were already mummifying the dead. According to new research, the mortuary tradition may have been developed by the direct descendants of the very first modern humans to reach the easternmost region of Eurasia, and persists to this day among certain […]