Deborah Bloomfield

If you’ve ever watched The Wire, Breaking Bad, or have simply hung around with some interesting people during your time on Earth, you have probably come across the term “burner phones”. Burner phones are generally depicted as being used by drug dealers, or others trying to keep their activities a secret, usually for nefarious purposes. […]

People have been discussing the “dark forest hypothesis”, a potential solution to the Fermi paradox, finding it either cool, terrifying, or hilarious. If you haven’t heard of the Fermi paradox, this is the simple version: with all the stars, space, and time in the universe allowing for the possibility of alien life, how come we […]

Distrust in science has become an ever-growing theme across the globe, not least in the US where the public perception of some scientific topics – notably COVID-19 and climate change – has become dominated by partisanship, politicization, and conspiracy theories. According to a new study, support for former President Donald Trump is a major variable […]

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain,” wrote Ben Franklin in a letter to his pal Jean-Baptiste Le Roy in 1789, “except death and taxes.” This tells us two things: firstly, that Franklin knew a quotable turn of phrase when he saw one, and secondly, that he lived before the invention of […]

Hang around any supermarket for long enough and you’re sure to be approached by a mature shopper with a request to pass them a top-shelf item. And while it may seem impossible to imagine our future selves experiencing similar grocery woes, the reality is that your spinal column can start shrinking from as early as […]

A new noninvasive brain stimulation technique that has the potential to help people living with memory loss due to Alzheimer’s disease has been developed by scientists from the UK Dementia Research Institute. We spoke to the first author of the new paper, Dr Ines Violante, Senior Lecturer in Psychological Neuroscience at the University of Surrey, […]

Do video games make people more violent? It is a persistent belief among some people that they do, but the empirical evidence does not seem to support it. In fact, a new study has demonstrated that, contrary to making people more aggressive, playing violent video games can actually lower stress hormone levels in some players. […]

Despite common belief, English is not the official language of the US. In fact, it is one of the exceptional countries on the planet that does not officially recognize any language. To understand why, we must travel back to the genesis of the US and the ambitious ideals of the Founding Fathers. Across the world, […]

Astronomy is full of puzzling objects, and an international team of researchers has just added another juicy one: A dense compact object that has been spotted orbiting a pulsar. This in itself is not that groundbreaking – but the mass of this object is puzzling. It is in the so-called mass gap. Researchers are either […]

The world of robotics is an exciting place, especially when it comes to those robots that take inspiration from nature as a means to create something unique and impressive. A self-3D-printing, snake-like robot that grows longer as it moves (stop sniggering) in a similar manner to a vine has been created, opening up a mind-boggling […]

“When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world,” J. Robert Oppenheimer says to Albert Einstein at the end of Oppenheimer and the beginning of many Oppenheimer remixes. “What of it?” Einstein asks, to which Oppenheimer replies “I believe we did.” Oppenheimer is […]

The secret identity of a curious group of fossils has been revealed after palaeontologists sifted through almost 500 papers and got to watch a world-first microscope observation on YouTube. The fossils look a bit like a fingerprint that’s sloughed off, but they are, in fact, the encysted remains of a group of organisms that are […]

Happy respiratory virus season kids! We’re now in the depths of winter, which has brought with it a triple threat of respiratory diseases – the so-called “tripledemic”. But what does that actually mean? And how concerned should we be? We’ve got you covered. What is the tripledemic? The term tripledemic refers to the combination of […]

The yellow-winged bat is a vibrant species that comes in brilliant yellow, found flapping across countries in Africa. They’re one of five species of false vampire bats from the continent, but that’s not the only fake thing about them. Yellow-winged bats (Lavia frons) are around 58–80 millimeters (2.3–3.1 inches) in size with the females typically […]

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter successfully shot a laser toward India’s Vikram lander on the Moon. However, this was not the first shot in a new space war but a carefully planned scientific experiment. The laser traveled about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from orbit to the surface of the Moon, hitting a target just 5 centimeters […]

The hunt is on to find meteorites from an object that hit the Earth’s atmosphere 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Berlin over the weekend. Although bits of rock would be most prized, scientists are also keen to collect as many photographs of the descent of the meteor 2024BX1 as possible. Central Europeans awake at […]

Megalodon (Otodus megalodon) just got a tentative makeover thanks to new research that has estimated its body form. The study leaned on “three critical pieces of information” that have become available in recent years, and it paints a very different picture of this enormous bloodthirsty fish. The first piece in the tryptic puzzle was the […]

NASA’s Stardust mission to Comet Wild 2 has revealed its secrets very slowly. They’re finally coming together, however, and the results are showing that the outer Solar System in its early days was not the simple place previously thought. How one comet came to have dust from widely separated parts of the early Solar System […]