Deborah Bloomfield

What’s the biggest river in the world? No, it’s not the Amazon, nor the Nile – it’s an atmospheric river, flowing a few kilometers above your head. That’s not a joke. Atmospheric rivers are typically thousands of kilometers long and hundreds wide, and they contain, on average, twice the amount of water as the Amazon. […]

Ketogenic diets, usually shortened to keto, are promoted as a way of losing weight and improving your general health, but the long-term impacts of following such a diet are still being unraveled. A new study throws some concerning findings into the mix, suggesting that while the diet may be effective for weight loss, it could […]

When 3I/ATLAS was first spotted a few months ago, it seemed to emit a reddish color. But earlier this month, some astronomers noted it was glowing green. So why is our latest interstellar visitor appearing to switch colors like a traffic light? The answer isn’t certain, but it has something to do with cosmic chemistry. […]

In January 2019, a beached whale in Florida started a chain reaction that led to the discovery of a brand new whale species. Originally thought to be a slightly funky population of Bryde’s whale, the newly minted Rice’s whale became Earth’s newest whale species. There’s only one problem: there are just 50 of these individuals […]

It’s a good time to see Saturn in terms of closeness to Earth and height in the sky, but if you take a look through a small telescope you might get a shock. The rings will be barely visible. Although they will gradually return to view, it’s likely that what you are seeing is a […]

Roughly the size of a small human, the Chinese giant salamander is one of the largest amphibians in the world. These blob-like beasts are sometimes called “living fossils” as they belong to a lineage stretching back 170 million years. In recent decades, however, a new phenomenon has emerged in their strange and twisting tale: hybrids.  […]

Somehow, for reasons that are still unclear, the natural world gave rise to tiny mushrooms teeming with the psychoactive compound psilocybin. Even more astonishingly, the ability to produce this particular psychedelic didn’t evolve just once – it emerged at least twice independently. Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic substance that profoundly alters consciousness and perception. […]

Imagine you’re in a bar, watching a patron tilt backwards on their stool. Further and further back they lean, the stool’s feet lifting more and more off the floor, until eventually, to nobody’s surprise but their own, they fall. They’re hurt and bruised, the stool is completely broken, and the bar staff are irate. Now […]

Until about 60,000 years ago, the Indonesian island of Flores was home to a miniature hominin species called Homo floresiensis – otherwise known as the Hobbit humans. The discovery of this petite primate in 2004 sent palaeontologists into a bit of a spin, as the species breaks one of the golden rules of human evolution […]

Sitting in the audience at a stand-up show; watching a comedy at the movies; at the office party when your boss breaks out their best knock-knock joke: these are all places where laughter is both encouraged and expected. During a quiet moment in church? Not so much. But wherever you are, if you hear someone […]

Math, outside of a few pivotal scenes in the original Mean Girls, is not usually seen as a competitive sport. But… maybe it should be.  After all, from the earliest days of formal math, the discipline has been marked by – and often fueled by – challenges and rivalries. There are the Millennium Prizes, of […]

What’s the circumference of your neck? No idea? That’s fair enough – but according to some experts, it might be worth getting to know your neck size. That’s because it could be a better indicator of some health risks than other measures we hear a lot about, like waist-to-hip ratio and body mass index (BMI). […]

Maria Branyas lived to the ripe old age of 117 years and 168 days, making her, at the time of her death in August 2024, the world’s oldest verified living person. It’s an extraordinary feat, especially when you consider that the life expectancy for women in her native Catalonia is 86 years. So, what was […]

A giant supermassive black hole (SMBH) that consumes the mass of the Sun a day has been found to be about one-fifteenth of its initially estimated size, which makes its rate of feeding even more inexplicable. As excited as astronomers are about solving one puzzle and having another made clearer, they’re even more enthused about […]

Lately, a handful of viral posts have been saying the “52-hertz whale”, the so-called world’s loneliest whale, has at last found a friend. But is there any truth behind the buzz? What is the 52 hertz whale? For those uninitiated in the tale of the 52 hertz whale, in 1989 a team from the Woods […]

Seals get a good rap as one of the cutest marine predators swooshing through our oceans, but did you know that they have nails? Zookeepers become occasional manicurists for their seals and sea lions, many species of which have nails similar to those on our toes and fingers on their flippers. The rest of this […]

Every year, collectively, we spend almost $50 billion on anti-aging products – and to what end? Our faces still sag and wrinkle; our bones still ache and crack; Death still edges ever closer over the horizon. Well, we can’t do much about the latter two (yet) – but a new face cream formulation containing the […]

Everything that’s alive has to die eventually (yes, even you, immortal jellyfish). It’s not just a natural part of life but a necessary one, too, as there is so much on Earth that wouldn’t be possible were it not for, well, corpses. So, is our approach to death getting in the way of new life? […]

Fall is here, school is back in session, and pumpkin spice is inescapable. For many of us, this changing season means thoughts of cozy blankets, warming recipes, and maybe a trip to go leaf peeping. But for your friendly neighborhood Health and Medicine Editor, it can only mean one thing: flu season is round the […]

Until recently, it was thought that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals split off from their last common ancestor around 600,000 years ago, but a prehistoric skull from China has just shattered that narrative. Dated to a million years ago, the cranium belongs to an extinct human clade which encompasses the Denisovans, indicating that we had already […]