Deborah Bloomfield

Forget the Amazon; forget India’s forests with their living bridges; even forget the remote Malaysian rainforest with one of the world’s tallest trees. The world’s oldest forest is in Cairo. No, not Cairo the capital of Egypt – Cairo, the small town in upstate New York. At the bottom of a sandstone quarry in the […]

We might only be two days into 2024, but thanks to New Year’s festivities, there’s probably some people out there who are experiencing the worst hangover they’ll have this year. They may well be clinging to the possibility that a heavy, sweaty gym session will be the cure, lest they turn up at work with […]

Footage of the world’s second rarest primate, the cao-vit gibbon (Nomascus nasutus) has been recorded in a forest in Vietnam. Two adults and one younger gibbon can be observed playing together in the leafy canopy before the infant tumbles through the trees. The species exhibits sexual dimorphism where the males are black and the females […]

Nowadays it’s more common to rely on technology to find our way, but for thousands of years, humans have been using environmental wayfinders to navigate across enormous distances. Sailors in the Marshall Islands have been known to use wave patterns as a way of navigating the Pacific Ocean; meanwhile, the Gwich’in Indigenous communities in Alaska […]

Smoothies are not only a delicious fruit soup, but can also be a quick and easy way to get in some vitamins and minerals. It turns out, however, that the key to their nutrition-boosting abilities could be in the combination of fruits used – and depending on what benefit you’re looking for, bananas might be […]

On the hills of the English countryside in Dorset, you can find the giant chalk figure of a butt-naked man wielding a bat and a mighty erection. The origins of this figure – the Cerne Abbas Giant – have been debated for centuries, but a new study believes it might finally have the answer.  There […]

Over 111 years after it sank, the Titanic continues to fascinate and surprise the public. For instance, did you know that it was found by a team that was pretending to look for the wreck of the Titanic? Or that – despite what the Internet believes – it partly imploded as it sank? Or that a […]

If we want to find the necessary conditions for life on the surface of another planet, let alone life itself, we should stop hoping for carbon in its atmosphere, a new paper argues. Instead, it is an absence, or at least shortage, of atmospheric carbon that could be the sign we’re getting close. All life […]

More than one in four people in the US have blue eyes. In the UK, it’s three out of every seven; in the Netherlands, it’s three out of five, and in Iceland, it’s three out of every four. Depending on where you live, it’s a very popular ocular color to have. But that’s kind of […]

You can find all kinds of cool things in caves. From pearls to softball-sized spiders, ancient human artwork, and even unicorns, there’s no telling what awaits the curious cave explorer. Nothing illustrates this fact more clearly than the surprise that greeted archaeologists in Mexico recently, when they rolled back a boulder to discover a true […]

Thanks to some beautiful imagery captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover during the recent Mars solar conjunction, you can now watch the passing of a day, from sunrise to sunset, on the surface of Mars. The 25-frame video was captured from the Martian surface using Curiosity’s black-and-white Hazard-Avoidance Cameras (Hazcam) on November 8, 2023, from 5:30 […]

If one of your New Year’s resolutions happens to be staying sober, scientists at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) have some good news for you: not drinking alcohol, or even just cutting back on the bevs, can reduce your risk of some cancers. There’s already evidence to suggest […]

Io is a world like no other, at least within the Solar System. Eruptions from 400 active volcanoes constantly turn it inside out. The Juno spacecraft has provided stunning images of this moon of Jupiter taken during its first flyby. Already, image processors, professional and amateur, are drawing out details that might be missed in […]

We are constantly reminded about how exercise benefits our bone and muscle health or reduces fat. However, there is also a growing interest in one element of our anatomy that is often overlooked: our fascia. Fascia is a thin casing of connective tissue, mainly made of collagen – a rope-like structure that provides strength and […]

Have you ever been wandering around the Natural History Museum in London, and just wanted to take a snooze next to Charles Darwin’s statue? Or perhaps, bumbling along the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and suddenly overcome with a wave of tiredness? Well, you may have been suffering from museum fatigue.   It was […]

Issue 18 (January 2024) of CURIOUS is out now, bringing you science highlights for the month plus deep dives into intriguing topics, interviews, exclusives, diary dates, and explanations for some of Earth’s most perplexing natural phenomena and landscapes. In This Issue… Advertisement OUR COVER STORY: What Does The Universe Smell Like? From cocktails to gunpowder, […]

What came first, oranges – the plump citrus fruit – or orange – the name of the juicy red-yellow color?  Perhaps surprisingly, the fruit came first. The first time the word “orange” was documented in the English language was around the late 14th century CE, when it was used to refer to the fruit, according […]

Ultraviolet (UV) nail polish dryers, typically used to cure gel manicures, could damage DNA in our hands and cause mutations, new research finds.  The dryers are a common fixture of beauty salons – but despite their widespread use and the fact that some spectrums of UV rays are known to be carcinogenic, there has never been formal […]

The gasoline in your car began its life (for want of a better term) around 360 million years ago. That’s long before even the first dinosaurs wandered the Earth; despite the popular image of the typical automobile being “fueled by exploding T. Rexes”, it’s actually ancient algae and plankton. Given how long it’s been hanging around so far, […]