Deborah Bloomfield

In 2007, Inuit whalers in Alaska made a surprising discovery. In the carcass of a whale, they found fragments of a weapon embedded in its flesh – but this wasn’t a modern piece of equipment. The harpoon was traced back to the 1900s, and after investigation, scientists estimated that the whale itself was around 115 […]

Whilst Devils Tower might’ve been the first national monument to be established in the US, it’s not the only one that’s fiendishly named. Hop a few states southwest to California, and there you’ll find the Devils Postpile, an unusually beautiful reminder of this region’s fiery history. Residing in the national monument named after it, the […]

Think Earth is just a static rock? Dive deep, and you’ll find a dynamic world where metals leak, water seeps, and its insides churn. Inside the belly of planet Earth, a giant solid ball of metal is surrounded by a swooshing layer of liquid iron and nickel, making up the two innermost stages of Earth’s […]

A tiny skeleton became the subject of a big debate as scientists went back and forth over the identity of a reptile retrieved from a quarry near Bristol, UK. Now, the authors of the original study that crowned it the world’s oldest lizard have addressed criticism made about their discovery, confirming “that the little Bristol […]

Humans like to think we’re unpredictable beings, to a certain extent, governed by free will emerging somehow from physical processes. Well, here’s one weird thing to send you into a linguistics-based existential crisis; most languages appear to follow an equation known as Zipf’s law, and we have no idea why. Words are used with varying […]

A surprising finding in a mouse model could lead us to a new way of treating some types of cancer, with a helping hand from an unlikely source: COVID-19. An immune mechanism that was activated in the mice when they were given drugs to simulate severe COVID-19 had the side effect of fighting cancer, causing […]

A detailed investigation of the expansion in human brains over 7 million years finds faster growth in modern humans and our nearest relatives than our predecessors. Nevertheless, brains have grown as species evolved, rather than suddenly jumping when one branch of humanity replaced another. Brain size and intelligence do not correlate perfectly, but the findings […]

Get ready to meet your new favorite amphibian, because today we’d like to discuss the desert rain frog, Breviceps macrops. Also known as the marshmallow frog (for it is about the size of a marshmallow) these mini critters have evolved to thrive in desert ecosystems, and they have some pretty bizarre adaptations to show for […]

China has struck gold — literally — after geologists discovered an estimated $83 billion worth of gold in central China’s Hunan Province, though accessing the underground deposit might be easier said than done. The Geological Bureau of Hunan Province announced their geologists have detected over 40 gold veins with a reserve of 300 tonnes of […]

Uranus and Neptune were only visited once by human spacecraft when Voyager 2 passed by them almost 40 years ago. During those visits, scientists measured peculiar magnetic fields unlike those seen around other planets. A recent paper suggests that the Uranus measurements might have been messed up by the Sun, but in general, it has […]

A new plastic has been created, and its makers say it combines durability with complete recyclability while also breaking down in seawater and soil, in case it is not disposed of properly. Given the scale of plastic buildup in the oceans and the widespread presence of microplastics in the environment, any solution is welcome, but […]

If you look at the flight paths of planes traveling around the world, you may notice a few oddities. One is that they don’t appear to travel in straight paths to their destinations (the answer to this one is fairly obvious) and, if you really go into detail, that very few planes seem to fly […]

We all know we’re supposed to be drinking water – to survive, yes, but also for a myriad of health benefits. What are they? Well… that’s a good question, actually, and one that a new study set out to answer by conducting a systematic review of 18 clinical trials. Stanley cups at the ready, lads. […]

We’ve launched a brand new series called True Crime in Science. Over six episodes, we will break down some well-known true crime cases, as well as some cases you may not have heard of, and then delve further into the science and the forensic details behind them. Watch episode one on Colin Pitchfork now. If […]

Let’s face it: kids are not smart. That’s fine; they’re not meant to be – they have a lot of growing and learning left to do, and they can’t be spending that time grappling with the finer nuances of special relativity when “apples fall down because gravity” will serve them just as well. But it […]

As anyone who follows fashion knows, certain trends like indie sleaze and cargo pants can come back around after a long and quite deserved break. Orcas, it seems, are not immune. After a 37-year break, killer whales have once again been spotted wearing dead salmon on their head. Orcas are intelligent and social animals, known […]

By delving into the genomes of people on 23andMe, scientists have shown that human language and musical rhythm share “genetic architecture”, suggesting the two abilities may have evolved in tandem. Music was a human quality that confused the hell out of Charles Darwin. To him, it served no immediate advantage for our survival, so what’s […]

The luxurious textile that sparked the first global trade network may have been seen as more than just a material object in ancient China. Having discovered silk residues in a Bronze-Age sacrificial pit in Sichuan province, the authors of a new study suggest that the opulent larvae-derived fiber was revered as much for its elegance […]

When we talk about “The Age Of Dinosaurs,” we think of an era where these enormous beasts ruled the land, but that wasn’t always the case. Like all animals that have lived to taste the upper echelons of the food chain, dinosaurs had to work their way to the top by outcompeting those that came […]

For a long time, interstellar objects were considered theoretical, with no observations to back them up. Then in a matter of a few years, we had two: ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. This has opened the door on the study of these interstellar objects (ISOs) and researchers have begun to simulate how they move in the […]