Deborah Bloomfield

We all know what a headache feels like. Whether it’s from overindulgence the night before, staring at a screen for too long, or even just eating ice cream too quickly, the occasional pain in the head is a fact of life. At their most severe, disorders like migraine and cluster headaches can be very serious […]

Brain and nerve damage is most often associated with loss of control over areas associated with the damage – paraplegics, for example, may lose control over their legs following a spinal cord injury. However, what if that damage didn’t make the limb stop moving, but instead gave it a mind of its own? This strange […]

Any self-respecting trivia fan can tell you the largest country on Earth and most likely the smallest, but do you know the most rectangular? What about the most circular?  What’s the most rectangular country in the world? As explained on his blog, Australian statistician David Barry came across a friend’s Facebook comment saying that Turkey […]

The bright galaxies the JWST has discovered existing unexpectedly soon after the Big Bang might be powered not by hydrogen fusing, as stars are today, but by concentrations of Dark Matter, physicists have proposed. These “Dark Stars” are claimed to have masses a million times that of the Sun. Don’t let the name fool you, […]

It’s come to our attention lately that people aren’t really aware of how certain foods (like crab sticks) are made. This is perfectly understandable, given that for most modern humans when you fancy some parmesan you merely have to have an awkward interaction with a waiter rather than head out to kill a baby cow […]

In 2005, a group of young British folk involved in a reality TV show braced themselves in a Russian space shuttle base before being blasted into space. Or so they thought. Space Cadets, broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, saw 12 people sign up to go into low-Earth orbit for five days. They had […]

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the JWST a brand new image has been released of the closest star-forming region to Earth, capturing star birth in a way we have never seen before. The JWST is the largest and most powerful telescope ever made. Launched into space on Christmas Day 2021 at a cost of […]

When stars die, they leave behind beautiful wispy clouds of gas known as planetary nebulae – or, more poetically, “ghost stars”. These only last tens of thousands of years, compared to the billions of years most stars survive, but ten years ago a strange pattern was found amongst them. A new study indicates close binary […]

If you ever have the chance to look at a human brain outside the protective dome of the skull, you’ll find it looks distinctly… gray. And wet. But mostly gray. This color is almost irrevocably linked with the brain, perhaps most famously by Agatha Christie’s protagonist Hercule Poirot, who talked of his “little gray cells” […]

The sheer size of clouds, their deceptively hefty weight, and the threat of getting trapped inside one can make the prospect of giant sky marshmallows pretty terrifying. So, how would you feel seeing one start to sprout what appears to be a giant portal to an alternate dimension? Fear not, the phenomenon that makes it […]

Asteroid strikes, colliding continents, seismic eruptions, and the arrival of a devastating species – Earth’s had a lot to deal with in its day. These events do, however, make for great television, and you can get swept up in some of the most epic and destructive events in our planet’s history in a new five-part […]

The Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down, thanks to interactions with the Moon. Two billion years ago, there was a pause in those changes that lasted about a billion years. A new study not only explains this, but calculates how long the day would be if that pause had never occurred – and the answer […]

Researchers have just unraveled some of the subtle mysteries behind ancient Egyptian art. Using new scanning techniques, the team have shown how artists approached and modified tomb paintings that were either not up to scratch or needed reworks. The study of ancient Egyptian paintings is as old as Egyptology itself. Since the 19th century, generations […]

It’s not often we see our planet and satellite from the perspective of another world, and we’ve never seen them like this before. That little white dot zooming around the slightly bigger white dot, that’s the Moon orbiting Earth as seen from Mars. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express […]

Scientists claim to have reverted cells to a younger state by using just a chemical therapy, marking a potential breakthrough in anti-aging research. The study builds on existing research into anti-aging genes that won a Nobel Prize, so the approach certainly warrants a closer look, though it remains experimental and on small cell cultures at […]

Authorities are urging guests of a New Mexico spa to get come forward for HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C testing after multiple former guests were infected with HIV following procedures including “vampire facials”. The New Mexico Department of Health has been investigating a cluster of HIV cases associated with the VIP Spa in Albuquerque […]

They say dinosaurs live on in the form of modern birds, but why was it that some of their relatives survived while this mighty animal group perished? Scientists believe a rare discovery may hold clues, as they describe a pinch of juvenile feathers that belonged to a baby bird of an extinct species. The Ugly […]

In 2013, a man suddenly disappeared after a sinkhole opened right beneath him in the middle of the night. His family heard a loud bang and then a scream, running in to find that Jeff Bush, 37, was gone.   The sinkhole took in gravel and debris, and was filled in before returning a few […]

It’s been 40,000 years since the last Neanderthals walked the Earth, yet scientists are still trying to figure out who or what finished off the ancient hominid species. One of the more obvious possibilities is that modern humans massacred their Eurasian relatives, and the author of a new book suggests that our uniquely genocidal nature […]

A big name in Israeli archaeology has claimed he’s found a web of ancient cities that were part of King David’s empire, suggesting this biblical figure was not just a humble shepherd, but a mighty leader. However, his newly published theory is not convincing everyone in the field.  Writing in an open-access and peer-reviewed journal, […]