Deborah Bloomfield

The planet Haila accompanies a star that should, in the ordinary course of stellar evolution, have expanded far beyond Haila’s orbit before shrinking again. No planet could survive being swallowed by its star like that, leaving astronomers with a mystery they’re struggling to resolve. As stars age they puff up to become red giants, prior […]

This week the first significant evidence of the long-sought gravitational wave background has been found, cytoelectric coupling describes how brain waves might be sculpting the structure of our minds, the story of a legendary monarch leads us to question if it’s possible to be immune to poison, and we investigate how the flawed BMI calculation […]

One-horned creatures are found in myths around the world. Although unicorns in different cultures have little to do with one another, they have multiple associations in European thought. For example, the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder wrote about unicorns in the first century AD. The unicorn features in both medieval Christian and Celtic beliefs, […]

Deep off the coast of Costa Rica, scientists have discovered a nursery teeming with octopuses. Most incredibly, the team even managed to catch a glimpse of the babies hatching from their eggs, showing this part of the deep sea is an active nursery. The octopus garden was discovered at a low-temperature hydrothermal vent offshore of […]

There’s a theory – usually told to drivers by their parents to make them slow down – that changing lanes on the highway in traffic, weaving in and out of cars, doesn’t get you to your destination any faster. It sounds strange, but there is a little bit of truth behind it. In 2014, the […]

Human stem cells have been coaxed into organizing themselves into synthetic embryo-like models, all without the need for eggs or sperm. These models can be used to help understand a crucial moment in embryo development, which has so far remained a mystery to scientists. The question mark occurs around two to three weeks after conception […]

Not all the experiments onboard NASA’s Perseverance are there to study the Red Planet. MOXIE is there to test future technology. It’s the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, and it is used to turn a bit of the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere of Mars into breathable oxygen. Earlier this month, it doubled its maximum output. […]

Here’s a fun fact to pull out the next particularly hot or cold day: we are technically still living in an ice age that began around 3 million years ago.  What is an ice age? An ice age is a long period of time – from millions to hundreds of millions of years – where […]

If you’re in the market for a favorite historical figure then look no further than Mithridates VI Eupator, king of Pontus from 120 to 63 BCE and arguably the most cunning adversary ever encountered by the Roman Empire. Like a comic book supervillain, the legendary monarch is said to have made himself immune to the […]

A gnarled Neanderthal thumb bone recovered from a cave in France suggests that the digit’s owner suffered from osteoarthritis (OA) of the left hand, and provides the first evidence for this condition in a finger belonging to one of our extinct cousins. Analyzing the relic’s pathological features, the authors of a new study suggest that […]

A robotic “smart hand” that could help musicians who suffer strokes to regain their ability to play their instruments has been developed by a team of scientists. The lightweight, flexible glove can be customized for each wearer, and uses machine learning technology. “Here we show that our smart exoskeleton glove, with its integrated tactile sensors, […]

Most people have probably heard of megalodon by now, given its arrival as a sea beastie on the silver screen in recent years. It was an enormous primeval predator that grew to sizes that make even the largest great white sharks look like pathetic minnows. But despite having gone extinct around 1.6 million years ago, […]

There’s much that we take for granted in our modern world. For example, have you ever considered the history of lenses, and how they have extended our view of the universe? The development of this subtle technology not only allows us to examine the very small or to peer into the vastness of space, but […]

In a bar, you may have noticed people banging their shot glasses on the table before they down their drink and thought “why are they doing that?” Well, you’re not alone. It’s not entirely clear to some people why they are doing it either, and there are multiple explanations for the quirky custom. Advertisement One […]

Although it may sound like the plot from a superhero film where some dastardly villain has reversed the age of an entire nation, it is actually the result of a long-expected change to the country’s methods for recording ages. The new law aligns the nation’s traditional age-counting approaches with international standards.  Traditionally, South Korea has […]

Light, from gamma rays to radio waves, is how we study the universe – but there are other ways. Gravitational waves and neutrinos can also be used with increasing success despite major technical challenges. The latter are nicknamed “ghost particles”, and for good reason. There are 100 trillion of them passing through your body every […]

A recent study has found a correlation between being prone to anger and the likelihood of believing in conspiracy theories. Additionally, the findings suggest that being actively angry works alongside trait anger to increase conspiracy theory beliefs. While personality traits, like narcissism, have been shown to make people more susceptible to believing conspiracy theories, historically, […]

On August 21, 1986, a strange rumbling noise was heard at Lake Nyos in Northwest Cameroon. The following morning, 1,746 people and over 3,500 livestock within 25 kilometers (16 miles) of the lake were found dead. Ephriam Che, a farmer who lived in a nearby mud-brick house on a cliff, heard the rumbling at around […]

Birds and honey badgers may be teaming up to carry out heists on bees, according to new research. It looked to the knowledge of locals to see if there was any stock in the Pixar-worthy tale of two species working together to access food, and found that 61 percent of the Hadzabe honey-hunters in Tanzania […]

Body mass index (BMI) has long been used by the medical profession as a way to determine whether you are healthy, and although simple to work out, it also comes with a long list of negatives. How BMI was originally created may come as a shock to some people. Back in the 1800s, there was […]