Deborah Bloomfield

The standard model of particle physics is both an incredible scientific achievement and a frustrating barrier that physicists are battling against. It has been crucial to understanding and predicting so much but at the same time, we know it is not complete. But finding what’s beyond has proven difficult. The latest measurement adds to this […]

Steel yourselves, Florida: something massive might be about to beach itself on your shores. Reports are forecasting that a gargantuan blob of sargassum seaweed has accumulated in the Atlantic Ocean and is headed for the US state, bringing with it millions of tons of odorous seaweed. Sargassum is a genus of brown macroalgae (the fancy […]

A plague of Garfield telephones was set upon the shores of Brittany, France, back in the 1980s that would last for over 30 years. Plastic landline phones the color of American cheese began washing up in the region in their hundreds, but for decades nobody knew where they were coming from. The iconic Tyco Garfield […]

The E-ring is quite unlike all the other rings of Saturn. It is much wider, roughly the Earth-Moon distance, and much thicker than the other rings. It is also rich in microscopic particles of ice and silica and the Cassini mission identified the icy moon Enceladus as its creator. Underneath its icy shell, Enceladus harbors […]

Valentine’s Day may have passed, but it looks like engineers at MIT have found another way for you to give your heart to a loved one in the future – 3D-print it! Every heart is unique. Not only does the organ’s overall shape and size vary from person to person and change with age, but […]

As Michael Jackson once famously sang: “I used to say ‘I’ and ‘me’/Now it’s ‘us’, now it’s ‘we’.” Yes, we know he was singing about a rat – but, if you find yourself making this same linguistic choice when talking about your significant other, it could be a sign that your relationship is on the […]

The further we peer back toward the Big Bang, the more our theories run into trouble with observations. This is happening a lot right now with JWST, but ground-based telescopes are getting in on the act, including the discovery of a galaxy named COS-87259, found through the COSMOS search and confirmed by the Atacama Large […]

A female bear that was discovered in 2020 by reindeer herders in the permafrost on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island, part of the New Siberian archipelago in Russia, has undergone a necropsy this week.  “This find is absolutely unique: the complete carcass of an ancient brown bear,” said Maxim Cheprasov, laboratory chief at the Lazarev Mammoth Museum […]

Over the past century, the Earth’s average temperature has swiftly increased by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). The evidence is hard to dispute. It comes from thermometers and other sensors around the world. But what about the thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, before thermometers, and before humans warmed the climate by […]

Over the last few days, several accounts across social media shared a very peculiar selfie. An Airforce pilot took a selfie as they flew past the now notorious “Chinese Spy Balloon” that was downed on February 3. The Pentagon confirmed that indeed the photo existed and released it into the public domain. The day before […]

On the side of the Hayu Marca Mountain, southern Peru, a large, mysterious stone doorway is carved into the rockface. While no one knows the true origins of the Aramu Muru doorway, its existence sheds light on the long and complex history of ancient Peruvian culture. Located near Lake Titicaca, the largest freshwater lake in […]

As well as straws designed to draw in liquids more slowly, there are other effective cures for persistent hiccups. They range from a digital rectal massage, to having your eyeballs mashed by a doctor, to having an orgasm. In 1990, a 60-year-old man developed hiccups after a nasogastric tube was fitted following his hospitalization for […]

Google has a set of six milestones they aim to surpass in order to have a commercially viable quantum computer. The first one was quantum advantage: having a quantum machine that could do a computation faster than a supercomputer. This was achieved in 2019. Now, the Mountain View based company has achieved its second one: […]

A new study has identified that houses in the US could be overvalued by a total of hundreds of billions of dollars as prices fail to account for flood risks due to climate change. The findings suggest significant policy changes need to happen in many states that do not consider such risks and that many […]

A non-surgical, focused ultrasound procedure has been found in a clinical trial to significantly improve symptoms in some patients with Parkinson’s disease. Nearly 70 percent of the treated patients responded well to the procedure, with two-thirds of these continuing to experience positive results a year later. There is still no cure for Parkinson’s disease, which […]

Few of us question the idea that we shouldn’t eat or drink – “nil per os” or “nothing by mouth” – for at least six and two hours, respectively, before any surgical procedures, but this may be changing. An increasing number of hospitals across the world have started a new approach that allows patients to […]

With a long snout sporting sharp pointed teeth, portraits of the spotted gar (Lepisosteus oculatus) can look quite intimidating – but these fish are actually the smallest modern gars. While alligator gars can morph into behemoths over 2.5 meters (8 feet) long, the humble spotted gar stops at around the 90-centimeter (three-foot) mark. Spotted gar […]

We’re pretty used, here in the West, to the “national housing crisis”, meaning too few houses being available. In Japan, however, they have the opposite problem: millions of akiya – empty and abandoned houses, strewn across the country, with virtually no hope of occupation. Sometimes called “witch houses”, these buildings are often ramshackle and awkward. […]

Scientists continue to unveil new clues about the composition of Asteroid Ryugu. Thanks to the sample of its surface and subsurface collected by Japanese probe Hayabusa-2, scientists have gained more insights into the history of this asteroid and even some details about the molecular composition of the cloud from which the Sun and the solar […]