Deborah Bloomfield

Three giant pandas left a zoo in Washington DC on Wednesday with a one-way ticket to China. This trio isn’t the first set of pandas in “the West” to take the monumental journey back to their ancestral homeland in recent times. Against the backdrop of hairy political tensions between the US and China, some are […]

Fluorescent green goo was seen oozing from sewers onto the streets of Manhattan last week, sowing confusion among New Yorkers and social media snoopers. There’s no need to call the Ghostbusters nor the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, though.  Images of the oddly bright liquid were near the World Trade Center in the Lower Manhattan area […]

A man’s life has been saved by emergency breast implants, after a lung infection required him to have a double lung transplant. That’s a sentence that needs some explaining. 34-year-old David “Davey” Bauer, described as vaping for years after smoking from the age of 21 until he quit in 2014, caught influenza and developed a […]

Whether it’s Wegovy or Ozempic, weight loss drugs feel like they’re everywhere at the moment. That doesn’t look set to stop any time soon either, with the FDA announcing yesterday the approval of Zepbound, a weight-management injectable that may well snatch the crown from its semaglutide-based competitors. Why was it approved? The approval comes after […]

Health professionals’ education and medical ethics should be informed by an in-depth understanding of how medicine was abused by the Nazi regime. By examining this dark phase in modern medical history, it is believed future generations of medical and healthcare professionals will be empowered to face moral and ethical dilemmas, as well as their own […]

Marine mammals, particularly orcas, underwent something of a tidal wave change in public opinion after the 2013 documentary film Blackfish was released. Foremost in that film was the story of Tilikum the orca, who killed several people while at SeaWorld. Tilikum died in 2017, but the outrage and animal welfare concerns sparked by the film […]

This week you can now use binoculars to see the toolbag dropped by ISS astronauts on a recent spacewalk, the world’s first “chimeric” monkey with a high proportion of stem cell-derived cells was born alive, and we may have just had our first fight in space. Finally, we question if “panda diplomacy” might be coming […]

There’s no doubt about it – humans love to talk. The average person speaks thousands of words a day and it’s a vital part of how we communicate with one another. But when did we become such chatty Cathy’s? Researchers have long pondered and argued over this question, coming up with quite a range of answers […]

A 450-million-year-old extinct marine organism is back not with a bang, but more of a gentle thud, after researchers recreated it in the form of a soft robotic replica. It’s hoped that it’s the first of many such robots that could be used to give us a better understanding of how extinct organisms moved, and […]

Synthetic DNA might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s fast becoming a reality. Researchers have created a yeast cell with a genome that’s over 50 percent synthetic, including the world’s first entirely synthetic chromosome. Scientists have previously produced synthetic bacterial and viral genomes, but the next step up was eukaryotic – a […]

There is a type of bamboo known as henon, Phyllostachys nigra var. henonis, which only flowers once every 120 years. Though this may seem like a long time to put off flowering, the bamboo dies shortly afterward, so let’s not be so quick to judge. With a gap of over a century between flowering, botanists […]

For the last five decades, researchers have suspected that our planet’s major geological events occur in a cycle – but couldn’t get the data to properly back it up. However, with technology coming on in leaps and bounds, geologists have since been able to show that Earth does in fact have a beating geological heart, […]

We all have a pretty good idea of what “bad weather” means: wind, rain, sub-zero temperatures, that kind of thing – but where would you go to find the worst weather on Earth?  It sounds like an impossible question. After all, how do you quantify “bad”? Windiest, yes; highest rainfall, sure; most toes turned into […]

Humanity may have conducted its first-ever fight in space last week after Israel claims its air force shot down an “aerial threat” outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) claims that it shot down a surface-to-surface missile allegedly fired from Yemen on October 30 using its Arrow system. According to the Telegraph, […]

Thanks to an experimental spinal implant in his lower back, a man with Parkinson’s disease has experienced a drastic improvement in his ability to walk without falling. Marc Gauthier, a 63-year-old from Bordeaux in France, was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative condition over 20 years ago. The disease is characterized by uncontrollable movements and coordination problems, […]

Astronomers believe that it takes around 7 billion years (about half the age of the universe) to end up with a galaxy such as ours. So you can imagine their surprise when they observed ceers-2112, a galaxy with the same shape as the Milky Way, being well-ordered, and quite massive, just 2 billion years after […]

In 1905, the remains of mummified baboons were discovered in Egypt, sparking over a century of speculation as to how they came to be so far from home. Now, in a study that marries biology and history to answer questions surrounding the origin of these ancient interlopers, we finally have some idea of where they […]