Deborah Bloomfield

An eight-year-old has broken new ground in two questions most Australians have pondered at some time: why do magpies swoop, and how do they pick their targets? What started out as a modest school project went viral and received tens of thousands of responses. While some of the survey’s associated questions might not be what […]

Planetary scientists studying lunar rocks might have discovered some boulders behaving oddly. While studying some cracked boulders, they noticed that some were different from others. They believe some boulders are attracting only certain types of lunar dust, potentially due to magnetic properties. Dust on Earth is certainly not pleasant, but it is certainly better than […]

It has long been presumed that primate societies were predominantly run by males. With the exception of lemur society, which was thought to be an outlier, most primates, including gorillas, chimps, and monkeys were believed to be largely male-dominated. Now, a literature review of 79 primate species is challenging that long-held assumption, suggesting that things […]

Quasicrystals are very interesting entities. They have ordered structures but they do not repeat, so they are – as the name suggests – almost like crystals, but not exactly. This difference is certainly not a disadvantage, since quasicrystals often showcase properties your common-or-garden material could only dream of. And this is the case for a […]

Nearly 75 percent of the US – an area that’s home to hundreds of millions of Americans – is at risk of experiencing earthquake damage over the next 100 years. That’s according to new maps and data released by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The areas at the highest risk are California, Alaska, and […]

Today, January 19, at 3:20 pm UTC, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has made history – not just for Japan, but for the whole world. Its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) successfully soft-landed on the Moon. The goal was to be able to do so within just 100 meters (330 feet) of a […]

Some discoveries are more impressive than others and finding the largest deep-sea coral reef habitat in the world is pretty damn impressive. The team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has discovered an area larger than the state of Vermont that contains a whole seascape of cold-water coral mounds that had, until now, remained […]

The Underwater Photography Guide has revealed the winners of their 12th annual Ocean Art competition, showcasing some of the finest underwater photography you’ll see this year. The Ocean Art 2023 competition featured 14 different categories, ranging from Portrait and Marine Life Behavior to Underwater Conservation and Black & White. They even have a category dedicated […]

Ten millennia ago, a bunch of teenagers in what is now Sweden chewed up and spat out pieces of birch resin, in much the same way that modern kids might stick their used gum to the underside of a school desk. Little did these ancient adolescents know, however, that their discarded chewings would one day […]

New research has revealed a grave historical error at Palacio de Cortés in Mexico. It was long assumed that a skeleton on display at the palace was that of a Spanish monk – but a new analysis has shown that it actually likely belonged to an Aztec woman. Palacio de Cortés in the city of […]

Some memories are best forgotten. Granted, this observation is unlikely to make you feel better if you’re running late for work because you can’t remember where you put your keys… but when we’re talking about memories associated with addictive substances, the possible issues around this become clearer. A new study has uncovered the mechanism that […]

This week, water flows freely down the Klamath River for the first time in 100 years, the oldest known supermassive black hole was found at the center of GN-z11, and a 14,000-year-old woolly mammoth tusk tells the tale of the animal’s huge journey. Finally, we ask what will be happening on the surface of the […]

Snake fangs get a lot of attention, from their use in creating anti-venom to figuring out how they evolved. One area of research has now gone beyond just the fangs, looking at the way that all of the teeth and their morphology are related to the whole of the snake as it moves in response […]

Call it Botox, Dysport, or Jeuveau – there’s no denying that injections with botulinum toxin A are popular. In fact, over 8.7 million cosmetic procedures were carried out with them in the US in 2022. But does their regular, long-term use make any real difference to the faces of those who receive them? A case […]

If you are someone who has a child, plays some other role in a child’s life, or are simply near one at a bus stop, at some point you are going to be asked how clouds stay in the sky by a toddler. Science lessons from your youth fade pretty quickly, we get it. There’s […]

This is the computer that helped secure the Allied victory in the Second World War and sent the Third Reich to the trash can of history. GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence agency, has unveiled never-before-seen images of the code-cracking computers that played a crucial role in the Second World War. They’ve been released to mark the […]

Honey is enjoyed by humans and animals alike the world over, but if stories about it being delicious bee barf have put you off your breakfast, you can rest assured it’s not vomit – but it’s also not much better. There are around 20,000 species of bees in the world and, of these, less than […]

In I898, Olof Öhman, a Swedish immigrant living in Minnesota, claimed to have found a huge 90-kilogram (200-pound) slab of stone, hidden in the roots of a tree. The slab was covered in characters of the runic alphabet used by peoples of northern Europe, Britain, Scandinavia, and Iceland before the 17th century. A translation of […]

Humans are too recent arrivals on Earth to have taken advantage of a time when Antarctica was habitable, let alone when continental drift made it possible to walk there. Nevertheless, humans have visited many places they found too forbidding to stay, raising the question of whether humans saw, or even set foot on, Antarctica before […]

Tomorrow is a big day for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The space agency will attempt to land its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, on the Moon. If the mission is successful on a soft touch down, Japan will become the fifth nation to land on the Moon and the third this […]