Deborah Bloomfield

Here’s a weird question: does your phone weigh more when it’s “full” than when it’s “empty”? It sounds almost ridiculously naïve – of course, a phone isn’t like a jug of water, with each photo or contact adding an extra few milliliters to the total. How could information have a weight? But like many apparently […]

Flip over a wine bottle and you’ll notice it has a large dent on its base. It’s a peculiar feature that’s found almost exclusively on bottles of beloved boozy grape juice, but scarcely on any other liquor bottles.  The indentation on wine bottle bottoms has served different functions over the ages, but today it’s thought […]

Quantum computers have the potential to revolutionize information technology, processing problems that even our most powerful supercomputers can’t solve.  However, those problems require quantum computers that have millions of qubits (quantum bits), while today’s quantum computers operate on a 100-qubit scale. Connecting more quantum microchips could help overcome the limitations of today’s machines, but they […]

The Church of England is weighing up whether the Christian God should no longer be referred to as “he”. While the news has sparked blind outrage in the British tabloids, the idea of a gender-neutral God is nothing new.  The church said it would launch a commission in a few months that will investigate the […]

A cache of 57 coded letters, sent over four centuries ago by none other than Mary, Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in England by Elizabeth I, has been discovered and decrypted by a team of international scholars. Thought until now to be lost or destroyed, the letters turned up in precisely the kind […]

One of the trickiest things about panic attacks is that they often occur out of the blue, leaving people that experience them feeling out of control. A new study – which is yet to be peer-reviewed – highlights how individuals can track their moods to retrospectively identify triggers, and how potentially triggering events in the […]

Many people believe that the richest 10 percent are significantly smarter or more hard-working than people less wealthy than them. This is particularly prevalent among opinions of the ultra-rich, where some look to billionaires for guidance in all walks of life. But are they actually more intelligent than the rest of us?  A new study […]

An extremely large earthquake has occurred in the southeast of Turkey, near the border with Syria. Data from seismometers which measure shaking of the ground caused by earthquake waves suggest this this event, in the early morning of February 6, was a magnitude 7.8 out of 10 on the moment magnitude scale. Seismic waves were […]

The devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on Monday has caused catastrophic damage to Gaziantep Castle, a historic Roman-era castle in Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Region.  Photographs and footage from the scene show large parts of its ancient stone walls have fallen down the surrounding hillside. Some bastions in the east, south, and south-east parts […]

Five years ago yesterday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched a Tesla into space, in a stunt that even the most hardened Musk haters would grudgingly admit is pretty cool.  The Roadster has since been on one hell of a journey, driving away from Earth at the impressive speed of 26,619 kilometers per hour (16,540 miles per […]

Researchers have crafted an artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of deciphering fragments of ancient Babylonian texts. Dubbed the “Fragmentarium,” the algorithm holds the potential to piece together some of the oldest stories ever written by humans, including the Epic of Gilgamesh. The work comes from a team at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany who have […]

A natural product made by bacteria in the genus Pseudomonas has been found to have antimicrobial properties. The substances, named keanumycins, have been shown in a new study to be effective against fungi that cause disease in both plants and humans. The rise in antimicrobial resistance means there is an urgent need to find new ways […]

Wind turbines are getting ever larger, particularly offshore, but even by the standards of modern titans those being installed at the Zhangpu Liuao offshore wind farm are absolute beasts. According to the China Global Television Network, the farm is to be the first outing of the 16-megawatt turbine being produced by Goldwind Science and Technology […]

JWST has discovered its first asteroid, and it is quite a small object, all things considered. The space rock is between 100 and 200 meters in length (300 to 650 feet), which is roughly the size of the Colosseum in Rome. It orbits the Sun in the main asteroid belt, which is located between Mars […]

In 2017, a surprisingly popular Reddit post asked the scientists of the site a simple question: Do giraffes get struck by lightning more often than other animals? Well, not only are there a number of reports out there of giraffes being killed by lightning, there are also case reports which suggest the tall animals can […]

Scientists are developing a vaccine they hope could be the first immunization to fight against invasive fungal infections. While it has only been tested on animals so far, the research could eventually pave the way toward a broad-spectrum vaccine that could tackle the growing threat of drug-resistant fungi.  In a recent study, an experimental vaccine […]

When it came to sending people to the Moon, a lot of focus is on the rockets, the math, and the astronauts. However, the incredible machinery that was NASA in the 1960s also required some more down-to-Earth logistics. The space agency had to acquire land on Merrit Island in Florida in the early 1960s to […]

For the past year, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department (TPCHD) in Washington has been issuing multiple court orders for a resident to agree to treatment and isolation over an active case of tuberculosis. According to NBC News, the woman in question has refused the requests and may now be facing legal action. Tuberculosis is an […]

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected]. If dinosaurs died, how come there are birds? Caiden S., age 9, Wylie, Texas Advertisement Everyone knows what a bird is – and pretty much everyone knows what a dinosaur […]

Google is set to launch its own rival to Open AI’s ChatGPT, a language model that can answer your questions and queries. The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot named Bard will roll out to the public in the coming weeks. Bard, CEO of Google Sundar Pichai explained in an update, will initially be a scaled-down version […]