Deborah Bloomfield

In a world first, scientists have successfully grown human brain organoids – so-called “mini brains” – from human fetal tissue. The organoids are only about the size of a grain of rice, but they have the potential to offer a whole new way of studying brain development and disease. Organoid research has exploded in recent […]

Astronomers have discovered what they have dubbed “overmassive” black holes, supermassive black holes that appear to violate the well-established relationship between the stellar mass of a host galaxy and the mass of its central black hole. The black holes are too big and this excess is telling something profound about the origin of these objects. […]

At least one of the gravitational waves detected by the LIGO and Virgo detectors might not be from black holes or neutron stars, but something even more exotic, physicists have claimed. Known as boson stars or dark matter stars, we have no other evidence these objects even exist. However, they would be useful in explaining […]

When Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the Moon, forgoing his planned nap time, he did so in a suit that had been made by Playtex, a brand more famous for manufacturing underwear. Going into the near vacuum of space or the Moon requires a robust wardrobe. Without an airtight suit, the […]

A Greenlandic start-up has dreamt up the idea of collecting “untouched” ice from the Arctic and shipping it to Dubai where it can be enjoyed in fancy cocktail bars. How refreshing.  While some might say this sounds like a slow-motion environmental disaster in the making, the company insists its business intends to protect the environment, […]

The fluid surrounding the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease carries proteins different from those seen in people without the neurodegenerative condition. When Dutch scientists compared samples from more than 400 patients, however, they found they were not all the same. Instead, they identified five variants of the disease, with each patient having a set […]

Every now and then people on the Internet, bless them, believe they have found evidence for time travel in an old painting. It happens surprisingly often, and always with a simple explanation that doesn’t necessitate time travel being real, and time travelers themselves being absolute posers who insist on sitting for portraits in their old-timey […]

Diamonds on Earth are pretty rare, despite being a girl’s best friend. But on ice giant planets like Uranus and Neptune, it is expected that diamonds rain down through the atmosphere. Now, lab experiments suggest that sparkly precipitation happens at lower temperatures and pressure than previously thought, making it more common not just in the […]

Fire ant rafts enable these invertebrates to survive floods by aggregating in floating islands of living organisms. For a long time, their formation was thought to come down to something called the “Cheerios effect” – but new research has revealed that actually, pheromones could be a better fit as a trigger for the phenomenon. The […]

Ah, the honeymoon phase – when everything is new and exciting, and you can’t keep your hands off each other. It’s thrilling, nerve-wracking… and a really bad time to be making important financial or career decisions. For many years, science wasn’t clear on exactly why our brains go to mush when we’re falling in love, […]

Have you ever driven through what appeared from a distance to be an active patch of rainfall coming from dense cloud cover, just to find the land underneath dry as a bone? That’s virga, baby! Virga, from the Latin word meaning “rod” or “branch”, refers to the wisps attached to the underside of rain clouds […]

While leaving product reviews is a pastime for some, one reviewer left a comment on a body lotion product that read more like a public service announcement. A warning to those not keen on spider-kind: the review suggested that the smell of the body lotion was attracting wolf spiders from far and wide. Let’s take […]

We could soon be living in an apres-ski world if global temperatures continue to soar, according to the findings of a study. After analyzing the expected future precipitation at more than 2,000 European ski resorts under different climate eventualities, the authors found that more than half will experience a severe lack of snow if temperatures […]

Venus is truly an odd twin of Earth. Despite its similar size, the planet has such a thick, hot atmosphere that it would crush you and cook you if you were to stand on its surface. And the space oddities don’t end there. As all the other planets spin anticlockwise on their axes, Venus spins […]

At some point, perhaps during a terrible business seminar run by an ’80s guy, you may have come across the story of a boiled frog. According to the story, if you place a frog directly into boiling water it will jump out immediately, but if you place it in cold water and slowly raise the […]

Today, January 8 (at 7:18 am UT) Astrobotic launched its Peregrine Mission One towards the Moon, the first US mission to land on the Moon in 50 years. It is the third private company attempting to reach our natural satellite and the first one from the US. However, the company has since announced that an […]

Kingo, one of the world’s most beloved lowland gorillas who inspired three decades of conservation, has sadly passed away at the grand old (estimated) age of 45. His body was found in Djéké Triangle Forest, Republic of Congo, on December 26, 2023, and his death is believed to be related to his advanced age. The […]

2023 was the year when the hype around artificial intelligence (AI) went into hyperdrive. Following its release in late 2022, ChatGPT-3 made AI technology accessible and genuinely useful to the general public, prompting the development of numerous other Large Language Models (LLM) by some of Silicon Valley’s mightiest giants. AI was the word on everyone’s […]

For a quarter of a century, we have known that the universe is experiencing an accelerated expansion. We call the culprit dark energy, but we are yet to know its true nature. In the current best model, dark energy is a cosmological constant – its value at every point in space and time is always […]

For the first time, NASA is about to publicly unveil the X-59, an experimental aircraft that’s designed to pull off a remarkable engineering feat: supersonic flight without a sonic boom.  The game-changing plane will be rolling out of its Californian hangar on Friday, January 12. NASA is calling this moment a “historic milestone in aviation […]