Deborah Bloomfield

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 […]

Arachnids are out there doing arachnid things, from eating shrews to chasing people and even dreaming their sweet arachnid dreams. Now, a new study has looked at harvestmen, which feature three types of males – alpha, beta, and gamma – to look at why this separation into these categories may have happened. Forsteropsalis pureora is a […]

Arguably some of the most iconic archaeological artifacts ever to supposedly come out of Mesoamerica, the famous Aztec crystal skulls have inspired countless blockhead theories about alien sculptors, psychic technologies, and magic stones. In reality, however, the supposed pre-Columbian relics might just be cheap knock-offs sold by a nineteenth-century French conman. The story of the […]

The face of one of the strongest characters in the human family tree, Homo floresiensis, has been reconstructed by a small team of archaeologists and 3D designers.   Nicknamed “the hobbit” because of its short stature, H. floresiensis is an extinct species of archaic human that stood around 1.1 meters (3 feet 7 inches) in […]

It’s a debate that is wheeled out on social media every week or so, when people aren’t having heated arguments over bread: should ketchup go in the cupboard or the fridge? It’s a topic people apparently have strong opinions on, including ketchup manufacturers. Roughly among the public (according to unscientific Twitter polls) opinion is split, […]

From mysterious purple-coated rocks to formations that look a bit like a doorway, our trusty Martian robot pals have made some cool and sometimes strange findings over the years.  Every now and then, they capture an image of a rock that looks completely out of place in the Martian landscape. This happened on Friday, when […]

Day-biting flies are a menace to humans throughout the world, but scientists once discovered that they were attracted to blue objects and decided to implement this in fly traps. Now, a new study has discovered that these flies are only attracted to blue because they confuse the color for an animal they want to feast […]

The NANOGrav collaboration, part of the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA), has announced the first significant evidence of the long-sought gravitational wave background, the low-frequency vibration of space-time that is expected to permeate the universe. This achievement comes from 15 years of work creating a gravitational wave detector that is as big as a galaxy. […]

Since the crew of the Titan submersible were killed in a catastrophic implosion as they aimed to explore the Titanic, there has been some confusion as to how exactly they died. Right now, the US Coast Guard is investigating the cause of the implosion, but that hasn’t stopped online speculation, and a lot of it […]

When you’re having a snooze, you could have more in common with an octopus than you might think, according to a new study. Researchers observed the brain activity and skin patterning of octopuses cycling between their two sleep states, “active” and “quiet” sleep, finding that activity during active sleep resembled activity seen when awake, similar […]

Quasars are the extremely active state of supermassive black holes. They are feeding at such a rate that their immediate environment becomes extremely luminous, so much so that they outshine their host galaxies. But those galaxies are still there, and it is very interesting to find out what they are up to. Now, astronomers have […]

Despite anecdotal reports, cats do not cry – at least, not in the sense of shedding tears. However, there are some clear signs and changes in behavior that can reveal whether your feline friend is sad, in distress, or experiencing pain.  Not many things separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, but shedding […]

The world is undoubtedly filled with all kinds of amazing flowering plant species, from those that only appear once in a blue moon, to those fossilized by time, and the more common well-loved species. Now scientists have described a new species that does something extremely peculiar in the plant world: it flowers underground. On the […]

When researchers revisited a damning report from the early 1970s that predicted global collapse within the coming century, they reached a worrying conclusion: their decades-old data was proving to be surprisingly accurate. Worse still, the planet was still heading down the same path with little sign of change on the horizon. In 1972, a team […]

Researchers have long known that brain tumors, specifically a type of tumor called a glioma, can affect a person’s cognitive and physical function. Patients with glioblastoma, the most fatal type of brain tumor in adults, experience an especially drastic decline in quality of life. Glioblastomas are thought to impair normal brain functions by compressing and […]

Sex has often defined the roles we assign to ancient humans when we look back in history, but a new study is challenging the idea that males were hunters while females were gatherers. Using data from a wide body of literature that investigated peoples and cultures of the past, it found that evidence from the […]

Lurking deep beneath the ice sheets of Antarctica, gravity-detecting satellites have rooted out the remnants of long-lost continents. Nope, it’s not quite Atlantis, but the discovery is shedding some much-needed light on the mysterious history of Antarctica. Researchers from Germany’s Kiel University and the British Antarctic Survey discovered the ancient continents in 2018 using gravity-mapping […]

When a hurricane hits land, the destruction can be visible for years or even decades. Less obvious, but also powerful, is the effect hurricanes have on the oceans. In a new study, we show through real-time measurements that hurricanes don’t just churn water at the surface. They can also push heat deep into the ocean […]