Deborah Bloomfield

“Comets are like cats,” David H Levy said, “They both have tails and do precisely what they want.” As co-discoverer of many comets – including Shoemaker-Levy 9, made famous for smashing into Jupiter before the eyes of the world – Levy should know. The saying is popular among astronomers watching one comet after another fail […]

The Caribbean island of Dominica might only be small, but it’s now taken on the mighty task of protecting one of our planet’s largest animals: the sperm whale. By creating the world’s first marine protected area, the island nation hopes to simultaneously keep the giant species from harm and take advantage of its pooping habits […]

Roopkund Lake in the Indian Himalayas has several hundred bodies scattered around and within it, earning the nickname “Skeleton Lake”. Local tales refer to an ancient party caught in a mountain hailstorm. However, an analysis of the ages and genomes of the bones reveals something much stranger and harder to explain: the victims were separated […]

Optical illusions tend to get the lion’s share when we talk about things that make us question reality, but acoustic anomalies can be equally trippy especially if they were not designed with the intention to confuse and mystify. This is the case for the “Center of the Universe”, a peculiar phenomenon known as a sound […]

White faces created by artificial intelligence (AI) are now appear more “realistic” than actual human faces, according to researchers from the Australian National University (ANU). Although the participants in the new study found AI-generated white human faces more realistic than actual faces, the same was not true for images of people of color. The reason […]

The average life expectancy for women in the US is now nearly six years longer than that of men. According to new research, this gap increased from a low of 4.8 years in 2010 to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest it has been since 1996. Overall, average life expectancy in the US has dropped […]

Scientists have come up with many innovative ways to explore different parts of the Earth and beyond. From enormous space telescopes, to fancy LIDAR equipment, these technologies can teach us more about the world (and universe) we live in. Now, scientists have turned to the animal kingdom and recruited the help of some marine mammals […]

Plant neurobiology is a growing field of science that explores the ways that plants may perceive their environment and alter their morphology and physiology accordingly. It’s sparked some blowback as there are others who argue that growing with style isn’t akin to cognition or consciousness, but what about unconsciousness? Plants don’t sleep in the same […]

The top part of the Earth’s atmosphere, from several tens of kilometers up to well past the orbit of the International Space Station, is the ionosphere. Charged particles from the Sun hit atoms and molecules there, freeing their electrons. And now researchers have discovered that it can also be affected by an exploding star over […]

All those Looney Tunes shows you watched as a kid were deeply deceiving. Quicksand, as it turns out, is a relatively insignificant threat to your well-being and scarcely ever appears in adult life. That said, this slurry-like solution is a real thing and certainly something that should be taken seriously.  Quicksand became a common trope […]

Stars, to be fair to them, are pretty reliable. Look up at them one day and, assuming you have a human lifespan, you can look again some time in the future and you’ll likely still find them there, twinkling away from years to billions of years in the past. Every now and then though, astronomers […]

Our current best understanding of the universe requires the existence of an invisible substance known as dark matter. The exact nature of dark matter (or its actual existence) is still unknown, and there are multiple competing theories to explain the effect of this matter on the Universe. An exciting new one is called Recycled Dark […]

If Scooby Doo has taught us anything it’s that if you dig deep enough all ghost sightings have a rational explanation, and you shouldn’t trust hotel managers.  In 1998, a group of scientists working in a laboratory at a medical equipment company began noticing strange events. One of the scientists, Vic Tandy (shortened to V.T. […]

A long-lasting powerful radio burst emerging from the Sun in 2016 was highly circularly polarized and took place directly above a sunspot, a new study reports. The burst may shed light on possibly similar events detected on red and brown dwarf stars, although it is far weaker. On April 9, 2016, astronomers turned the Karl […]

A stone statue of a serpent warrior’s head has been unearthed among the ruins of the iconic Maya site of Chichén Itzá in southern Mexico. Wearing a “snake helmet” and a feathered headdress, the ancient sculpture is likely to date from the Maya Late Classic period, which lasted from around 600 to 900 CE. Archaeologists […]

“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids,” sang Elton John. It is not just cold as hell, it lacks a lot of the basic necessities that humans need to survive, including oxygen to breathe. And given that we would like to get humans there at some point, and bringing stuff from Earth […]

In the 1800s, the USA was hit with some of the largest earthquakes in its history. According to a new study, the country is still feeling the aftershocks. In the paper, researchers from the University of Missouri and Wuhan University looked at the idea that seismic activity today near the epicenters of large earthquakes over […]

We tend to think of the appendix as something we can easily manage without, but recently science has started to take a more favorable view of this unassuming little organ. Since it persists in several evolutionary lineages, surely it must have some useful purpose? The problem up to now has been trying to work out […]