Deborah Bloomfield

Haze is not just a problem for transportation systems. It also affects how well we can study planets beyond the Solar System that are covered in vast oceans. To better understand those worlds, researchers have decided to cook up that “alien haze” directly in the lab. So, they now know how those claggy skies affect […]

A storm struck the Black Sea earlier this week and wreaked havoc along the coast. Among the victims of the wind’s brutality was the Sevastopol harbor, in occupied Crimea, where the Russian navy kept its military dolphins.  It is currently unclear whether the animals are still in their pens or whether they have jumped at […]

On April 3, 1965, NASA launched the Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power 10A (SNAP10A), the first nuclear electric propulsion system ever fired into space. While in orbit, the ion thruster system was powered by a space-worthy nuclear reactor. Now, nearly 60 years later, the US is planning to launch a nuclear reactor into space once […]

It has come to our attention that a number of people are confused about why the Moon is sometimes visible in the daytime, and appear to believe this is new behavior from Earth’s favorite satellite. Stew Peters, a right-wing broadcaster and conspiracy theorist, posted what he appears to believe is proof of a new phenomenon […]

When it comes to sleeping, the animal kingdom has a whole range of options. Some might opt for a long period of hibernation, and others dream the night away – but a new study on chinstrap penguins has revealed that they get around 11 hours of sleep in four-second bursts. On King George Island in […]

If you’re not looking forward to getting old, now at least you have someone to blame: dinosaurs. According to a new study, it could be that mammals decline as they get old in a way many reptiles and amphibians do not as a side-effect of our ancestors’ strategy for not being eaten by a raptor. […]

Earlier this year, the company Insta360 sent two cameras to low-Earth orbit on a private space mission. Their camera is called Insta360 X2 and it can capture incredible 360-degree views; when applied to our planet and the rest of the galaxy, the videos and photos are truly something else. This is the first time that […]

Some animals have big brains – humans, for one. Some have large heads. Some, we recently learned, are almost entirely heads. But what if we told you that one animal is able to learn without either a head or a brain? Meet the brittle star, a five-armed bundle of nerves that has shown itself to […]

A high-temperature hydrothermal vent field has been discovered in the Galápagos Marine Reserve. As well as being home to hot chimneys towering up to 15 meters (49 feet) tall, scientists discovered a host of species never spotted in the region before, including a “living fossil” mollusk. The new-to-science cluster of chimney vents has been named […]

Around 150,000 years ago, an enormous, fat-headed human species known as Homo longi (or “Dragon Man”) roamed the frosty forests of northern China. Despite its grotesque proportions, the ancient hominid has recently been identified as a sister lineage of Homo sapiens, and a new reconstruction of the extinct human’s face reveals what it might have […]

A new species of mosasaur has been discovered in Mexico, dating back to the Turonian stage of the Late Cretaceous, which makes it around 90 million years old. Retrieved from the state of Nuevo Leon, the near-complete mosasaur skull is the first of its genus to be found in Mexico, and has a shiny new […]

With over half a century since NASA last landed astronauts on the Moon, it’s pretty exciting that the space agency will soon be returning to it with the upcoming Artemis missions. Before the crewed launch (fingers tightly crossed) in November 2024, NASA will return to the Moon, hitching a lift aboard a private company’s lander […]

Going to space is, let’s face it, one of the coolest things most of us will never get to do. But while you’re in space, your body is undergoing some other strange effects, which might make you feel a little better about not being able to go there. Your fingernails can fall off In the […]

A team of researchers from McGill University and Tattoo Lounge MTL in Montreal, Canada – which should be your first clue that this is a doozy of a project – have described how the skin’s microbiome changes when we get our ears pierced.  All of us, whether we like it or not, are covered head-to-toe […]

The idea of finding a treasure chest within an ancient shipwreck might be a popular movie storyline, but far from gold and jewels, an unexpected new item might be the source of future wealth. In 2010, a group of divers discovered a shipwreck containing 168 bottles of champagne that were still full and surprisingly, still […]

This article first appeared in Issue 14 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. Monarchs are the only butterfly species known to make an annual two-way migration like birds, with a round-trip distance of around 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles). Many have wondered how a small insect could survive such a journey, but a recent study published in […]

The human brain is constantly receiving and processing information about the world around us via our senses. Removing any one of these data streams can have a significant impact, both in the long term and the short term. But sometimes, this onslaught of sensory information can be too much, and we might need a break […]

Earlier this year, while scientists attempted to figure out mysteries such as the missing matter in the universe and the nature of dark matter, people on TikTok were struggling with the concept of how mirrors work. In several videos posted to the platform, people attempted to figure out how the mirror could “see” objects placed […]

JWST’s latest picture of the month is, of course, stunning – but what’s the science inside the beauty? The space telescope has snapped a protostar system called HH 797. HH stands for Herbig-Haro, and Herbig-Haro objects are the nebulous structures formed by the jets of tiny young stars. This protostar is throwing stuff into the […]

To illuminate the “microbial dark matter” that lives deep within Earth, scientists took a journey deep within a gold mine and returned with samples detailing hundreds of different microbial species. This, however, is just a drop in the ocean of all the life that lives beneath our feet. The amount of microbial life below our […]