Deborah Bloomfield

Locals watched in awe as a fireball exploded and hundreds of meteorite fragments rained down on the city of Tatahouine, Tunisia, on June 27, 1931. Fittingly, the city later became a major filming location of the Star Wars movie series. The desert climate and traditional villages became a huge inspiration to the director, George Lucas, […]

Over 240 years ago, famous mathematician Leonhard Euler came up with a question: if six army regiments each have six officers of six different ranks, can they be arranged in a square formation such that no row or column repeats either a rank or regiment? After searching in vain for a solution, Euler declared the problem […]

“Why does gravity pull us down and not up?” – Gracie, age 9, Brookline, Massachusetts Gravity is the reason things with mass or energy are attracted to each other. It is why apples fall toward the ground and planets orbit stars. Advertisement Magnets attract some types of metals, but they can also push other magnets […]

Giant fissures have been appearing in the ground across the southwest US. In southcentral Arizona alone, 272 kilometers (169 miles) of these cracks have been mapped, while they have also appeared in Utah, California, and Texas. The cracks are not natural formations, according to Joseph Cook of the Arizona Geological Survey, who told Insider that […]

Here’s some good news: the mortality rate in the UK, and maybe the world, should be down in 2024 thanks to some intervention from the BBC and Disney. Admittedly, to believe that you need either a very poor understanding of statistics or a very optimistic faith in the influence of television, but that’s most people, […]

As the mathematician De La Soul famously stated, three is the magic number. But if physicist Richard Feynman is to be believed, that figure is off by a factor of about 400. For Feynman, you see, the “magic number” is around 1/137 – specifically, it’s 1/137.03599913.  Physicists know it as α, or the fine structure constant. […]

Many terms get mentioned when it comes to animal conservation, especially in regard to species that are under threat from habitat loss, pollution, the illegal wildlife trade, and even extinction. But what do all those terms really mean? We break down the scale from Near Threatened to Extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature […]

Scientists are becoming increasingly aware of plastic rocks that have been formed by trash-loaded waves crashing against rocky shores.  Known as plasticrusts, the phenomenon was first reported in 2016 by Portuguese scientists who spotted unnaturally colored rocks on the idyllic island of Madeira off the northwest coast of Africa. In certain parts of the mid-intertidal […]

Next month, all going well, a Long March rocket will launch a highly innovative X-ray telescope of a kind astronomers have been dreaming of for decades. The joint mission between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the European Space Agency could overcome obstacles that have hindered X-ray astronomy. Yet the mission is so low-profile it […]

Bats are one of a handful of mammals known to hibernate in snow, with one species creating little icy bat caves for themselves when winter conditions make it tough to survive as a warm-blooded animal. When the behavior was confirmed in 2018, the Ussurian tube-nosed bat joined polar bears as the only two mammals known […]

Alaska’s rusting rivers are proving to be a bit of a conundrum for scientists at the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Iron-bearing minerals appear to be the culprit, but the reason behind their increasing abundance is not totally clear. In recent years, researchers have documented how numerous streams in the Alaskan Arctic Region have become […]

U Thant Island, officially known as Belmont Island, is a miniature spit of land that sits between New York’s Manhattan and Queens. It was heaved into existence when a piano manufacturer began construction on a tunnel beneath the East River, dumping the resulting materials until a half-acre island emerged from the water. The tunnel project […]

The mummified remains of a teenage girl who died during childbirth in ancient Egypt have been analyzed by researchers, revealing that the young mother-to-be was in the process of delivering twins when she passed away. Sadly, the labor took a negative turn when the head of the first baby became stuck in the birth canal, […]

The enormous teeth of a “giant sea monster” were restored by fossil expert Chris Moore after he and Steve Etches endured the painstaking task of removing a huge fossil skull 12 meters (39 feet) up a cliff in Dorset, UK. It belonged to a pliosaur, an ancient marine reptile with a bite force that could’ve […]

While knowing the name of the largest lake currently on Earth might win you a couple of points at a pub quiz (spoilers, it’s the Caspian Sea), the largest lake ever to exist on Earth puts all the other inland water bodies to shame. So vast was this area that it has now been awarded […]

What’s the weirdest way you’ve ever illuminated a dark evening? Torch on your head? Stick of fire? If a candle made of a storm petrel chick isn’t on your list, you’ve barely dipped your toe into the world of weird ways of getting around. The grim, rare, but real practice, is the subject of a […]

For centuries, the quest for new elements was a driving force in many scientific disciplines. Understanding an atom’s structure and the development of nuclear science allowed scientists to accomplish the old goal of alchemists – turning one element into another. Over the past few decades, scientists in the United States, Germany, and Russia have figured […]

Earth hasn’t always been a blue and green oasis of life in an otherwise inhospitable solar system. During our planet’s first 50 million years, around 4.5 billion years ago, its surface was a hellscape of magma oceans, bubbling and belching with heat from Earth’s interior. The subsequent cooling of the planet from this molten state, […]