Deborah Bloomfield

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 […]

The mystery of how the pyramids were built may have finally been solved thanks to the discovery of an ancient branch of the Nile that once flowed through Giza. Hundreds of meters wide, the enormous waterway has long since dried up, but could have provided transportation for the colossal amounts of material and workers needed […]

An international team of astronomers was able to solve the peculiar observations of possible planets around star HD 110067. Original observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) suggested the presence of two planets, and follow-up observations did not find the original but two different planets still. It took more detailed observations with another telescope to […]

An ancient ornithological mystery is the subject of a new paper that looked at fossil tracks made by unknown ancient animals dating back as far as the Late Triassic. They are distinctly bird-like, which doesn’t sound too strange – until you take into account that, at 210 million years old, some of them predate the […]

NASA has revealed an incredible – and unusual – new view of Mars’s horizon, one that took three months to plan and execute, for our viewing pleasure. Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting Earth often share mesmerizing views of Earth’s curvature, but this is what you would see if you were orbiting Mars. […]

“Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever,” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, one of the founding fathers of rocket science, once said. Since the late 1950s, humanity has taken the first shaky steps into the cosmos. This century, there have always been humans living in orbit, and we expect this will […]

A new study has shown for the first time how human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) binds to T cells. The finding could have implications for new therapies to combat this pernicious disease.  HIV remains a major global public health issue. Since its appearance in the 20th century, the disease has claimed 40.4 million lives and is […]

On Tuesday morning, biotech company Loyal announced that it had reached a key milestone in the path toward approval of its lifespan-extending drug for big dogs.  The announcement came after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Veterinary Medicine confirmed that Loyal’s data (all 2,300 pages of it, according to CEO Celine Halioua) met […]