Deborah Bloomfield

On December 1, Japan inaugurated JT-60SA, the largest operational superconducting tokamak in the world to date. A tokamak is a nuclear fusion reactor shaped like a donut and this new-build in Japan, with the support of the European Union (EU), is meant to be the forerunner of the under-construction International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which […]

Astronomers have been excited by outbursts of the exploding comet Pons-Brooks, each of which has caused it to brighten up to 100 times. For those in the know, reports of its post-explosion magnitude tell them whether it’s worth trying to spot the travelling ice-volcano, or if that’s an impossible dream. It’s a common story with […]

The first wolves to come begging for scraps at a campfire set in motion a chain of events that eventually led to the creation of chihuahuas, pugs, and a range of other un-wolf-like dog breeds. According to one popular theory, this fateful rendezvous between canids and humans took place around 15,000 years ago in a […]

In October, the remains of a dismembered great white shark were discovered on an Australian beach. Scientists have now analyzed them and confirmed that orcas killed the predator, in what is the first confirmed attack of its kind in these waters. The body, what remained of it at least, washed up on a beach in […]

If you fall into piranha-infested waters, how long do you have before they devour you before your very eyes? Minutes? Seconds? If you watched Netflix’s wildly popular Wednesday last year, you will have seen the show opens with the titular character enacting revenge on her brother’s bullies by unleashing a bag of the little biters […]

Regenerative medicine might just have had a new tool added to its arsenal: Scientists have created tiny biological robots out of living human cells. Though they may be small, the self-assembling bots are mighty, with a study demonstrating their potential for healing and treating disease.  The team had already proven their biological robotics chops back […]

Nothing ruins a road trip like the feeling of needing to vom all over your car mats – and yet, for more than one in four of us, it’s pretty common. Motion sickness is annoying for some, debilitating for others, and strikes seemingly at random, with some people getting it their entire lives and others […]

Our quest for the coldest place in the universe – which turned up a distinctive answer if you’re only looking at pure, natural cold – raises an obvious counterpart. As with the coldest, the heaviest object, the fastest object, and the hardest substance, it turns out the answer depends a bit on what you mean […]

Are you a paranoid Penny or a nervous Neville when you go into a hotel room? Have you ever looked at a mirror with suspicion and recalled all those movies with two-way mirrors, and wondered how to check what you are looking at? Well, there are a few tricks for that! What is a two-way […]

Turns out there’s more purpose to the design of an airplane window than allowing for aesthetically pleasing birds-eye-view photos or staring out of them pretending you’re in a music video. There’s a reason why they have that little hole and why we have to keep their shades up during takeoff. But what about their most […]

A huge prehistoric cemetery discovered in Lapland, just south of the Arctic Circle, is challenging what we know about how far Stone Age societies trekked into the bitterly cold, far-flung stretches of Northern Europe.  As per a new study on the prehistoric graveyard, this 6,500-year-old site might be one of the largest Stone Age cemeteries […]

Haze is not just a problem for transportation systems. It also affects how well we can study planets beyond the Solar System that are covered in vast oceans. To better understand those worlds, researchers have decided to cook up that “alien haze” directly in the lab. So, they now know how those claggy skies affect […]

A storm struck the Black Sea earlier this week and wreaked havoc along the coast. Among the victims of the wind’s brutality was the Sevastopol harbor, in occupied Crimea, where the Russian navy kept its military dolphins.  It is currently unclear whether the animals are still in their pens or whether they have jumped at […]

On April 3, 1965, NASA launched the Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power 10A (SNAP10A), the first nuclear electric propulsion system ever fired into space. While in orbit, the ion thruster system was powered by a space-worthy nuclear reactor. Now, nearly 60 years later, the US is planning to launch a nuclear reactor into space once […]

It has come to our attention that a number of people are confused about why the Moon is sometimes visible in the daytime, and appear to believe this is new behavior from Earth’s favorite satellite. Stew Peters, a right-wing broadcaster and conspiracy theorist, posted what he appears to believe is proof of a new phenomenon […]

When it comes to sleeping, the animal kingdom has a whole range of options. Some might opt for a long period of hibernation, and others dream the night away – but a new study on chinstrap penguins has revealed that they get around 11 hours of sleep in four-second bursts. On King George Island in […]

If you’re not looking forward to getting old, now at least you have someone to blame: dinosaurs. According to a new study, it could be that mammals decline as they get old in a way many reptiles and amphibians do not as a side-effect of our ancestors’ strategy for not being eaten by a raptor. […]

Earlier this year, the company Insta360 sent two cameras to low-Earth orbit on a private space mission. Their camera is called Insta360 X2 and it can capture incredible 360-degree views; when applied to our planet and the rest of the galaxy, the videos and photos are truly something else. This is the first time that […]

Some animals have big brains – humans, for one. Some have large heads. Some, we recently learned, are almost entirely heads. But what if we told you that one animal is able to learn without either a head or a brain? Meet the brittle star, a five-armed bundle of nerves that has shown itself to […]

A high-temperature hydrothermal vent field has been discovered in the Galápagos Marine Reserve. As well as being home to hot chimneys towering up to 15 meters (49 feet) tall, scientists discovered a host of species never spotted in the region before, including a “living fossil” mollusk. The new-to-science cluster of chimney vents has been named […]