Deborah Bloomfield

Ten years ago, on September 14, 2015, at 9:50 am UTC, our planet was compressed and then stretched by a tiny fraction of a nanometer for a handful of milliseconds. Earth has experienced this since its birth, 4.5 billion years ago; gravitational waves have existed since the beginning of the universe. This one, though, was […]

A protein that’s central to brain aging has been discovered by scientists, who’ve gone the extra mile by also finding out how it can be stopped. FTL1, as it’s called, is a key mediator of aging in the hippocampus – a part of the brain that’s particularly badly affected as the years roll by. As […]

Air pollution doesn’t just affect your lungs; it could also be accelerating memory loss. The latest research has found that breathing in polluted air can increase the risk of developing a specific type of dementia.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. A […]

“The little things that run the world” is how biologist Edward O. Wilson described insects and other invertebrates – and it’s hard to argue with him when you look at the distribution of ants across the globe. The irrepressible creepy crawlies have colonized almost every landmass on Earth – but there are a few exceptions. […]

Naked mole-rats are the perfect example of why we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. They might look like someone decided to make a rat and had to call it a day before they had the chance to add fur, but by looking beneath the surface, these wrinkly little rodents are teaching scientists all […]

JWST observations are consistent with the planet TRAPPIST-1e having an atmosphere, two new papers report. The results don’t mean an atmosphere is definite, let alone tell us if it has a composition suited to habitability, but it’s a major step forward in the search for worlds like Earth. Given TRAPPIST-1e’s location firmly within its star’s […]

When the world’s largest land snail, the Giant African Snail, ends up in an ecosystem where it isn’t native, trouble often follows. In a series of slow-motion invasions, this voracious species has repeatedly turned up beyond Africa, including on US soil, where it poses a persistent headache for those battling invasive species. Native to East […]

Elevated blood pressure at age 7 is associated with an increased risk of dying prematurely of cardiovascular disease, new preliminary research has revealed. The risk was most prominent for children with blood pressure measurements in the top 10 percent for their age, sex, and height. “Specifically, having hypertension or elevated blood pressure as a child […]

In 2019, scientists spotted something strange thousands of meters below the ocean surface. There, they filmed a pink bumpy blob with cartoonishly big eyes and more pectoral fin-rays than you could shake a stick at. Now, they’ve been able to confirm that this was a new-to-science species. It’s a snailfish, and better yet, it’s one […]

Fall is finally upon us, and that means we’re about to see pumpkins galore – including some absolute chonkers. The winner of last year’s Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, for example, weighed roughly the same as two grizzly bears. But why do giant pumpkins like this get so big? The rest of this article is behind […]

Land snails are usually found trailing around forest floors or lingering beneath dark, humid logs and rocks. However, some species break this convention by chilling out at the very tops of trees, where it is light, dry, and seemingly unfriendly to snailkind. A few years ago, a team of Japanese scientists decided to find out […]

In East Africa’s ‘Cradle of Mankind’, a major shift in human evolution occurred just under 1.8 million years ago, when our ancestors began exploiting megafauna – including hippos and giraffes – for food. Known as Olduvai Gorge, this prehistoric hominin hotspot in Tanzania has now yielded its earliest known elephant butchery site, providing new insights […]

A study using JWST observations of the early universe has uncovered an intriguing mystery: most galaxies seem to rotate in the same direction. This unexpected pattern, which defies current cosmological models, could suggest that our universe exists inside a black hole, the researchers propose. The JWST has allowed astronomers to peer back further into the […]

From time to time, Mars rovers and orbiting spacecraft send back striking images of unusual rock formations on the Red Planet. These discoveries range from the curious—like a donut-shaped rock that might not even originate from Mars—to the playful, such as the so-called avocado rock or a pile of stones jokingly dubbed ‘bones.’ Recently, attention […]

Time to refresh your geography: Earth actually has five oceans, not four, as many of us were taught. In 2021, National Geographic officially recognized the Southern Ocean as the world’s fifth ocean. This decision ended decades of debate over the waters encircling Antarctica and, quite literally, put the Southern Ocean on the map.  Traditionally, only […]

Psychologists are studying an optical illusion so powerful it can even fool the brain’s automatic visual reflexes. Strangely, only about 80 percent of people seem to experience the full effect, and researchers still don’t know why. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. […]

Around the turn of the century, a number of huge tunnels were discovered in South America. After investigation, the scientists who discovered them found that they are not made by any humans, nor geological process. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Professor […]

Could black holes be tunnels to other locations in space-time? Could they be wormholes connecting different regions of the universe? A study gives a resounding answer to this question. Black holes are complicated beasts. They have consistently broken our physics and studying them has opened our eyes to the limitations of our knowledge. One crucial […]

Communication is key. That’s true on Earth and it’s true in space. But in space, you need to contend with a crucial fact of life. The speed of light is finite and distances between worlds are pretty big; between star systems, they are enormous. An analysis envisions what it would be like to communicate with […]

At the outbreak of the Second World War, before a single shot was fired, the British began killing hundreds of thousands of their own pets. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. The British pet massacre is one of the stranger tragedies of […]