Deborah Bloomfield

A pair of identical twins who were raised in separate countries have displayed unexpectedly large disparities in cognitive abilities while exhibiting highly similar personality traits. A comparison of the monozygotic sibling’s characteristics sheds new light on the age-old nature/nurture debate. Born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1974, the sisters became separated at the age of two when one […]

There is a widespread perception of old people having distinctive smells, expressed by less tactful children as, “grandpa smells funny”. Researchers decided to test if the scent was an intrinsic part of growing older, a product of the environment, or a trick of the mind. Although they found the smell is mostly an effect of […]

There are thought to be 7,000 living languages on our planet today. For fans of obscure facts, that means there are as many different ways of saying “Pass the cheese, please,” as there are species of lizard. But the scientists working on a recent study were far more interested in what we have in common […]

For those who find themselves wincing whenever they hear a “could of” instead of a “could have”, or a “less” when it should be “fewer”, it may not just be a passing annoyance. A new study has revealed that our bodies can show physical signs of stress upon hearing grammatical violations. As Dagmar Divjak, principal […]

Nature is often portrayed as a brutal dog-eat-dog world where only the fittest individuals are permitted to survive and thrive. Deep in the forests of New Zealand, however, there is a tree stump that shows it isn’t always that straightforward.  This stump of a kauri tree should have died long ago as it has lost […]

There is a lot about the Sun that we do not understand and even things that we do have a good idea of can surprise us. Chief among them is the solar cycle. Our star goes through cycles of activity of roughly 11 years, but how active the cycle gets at its maximum or when […]

It may be tempting to leave your Halloween pumpkins in the woods to feed wildlife after October 31, but it could actually do more harm than good, wildlife experts warn.  Thousands of discarded pumpkins are left in woods across Britain, according to The Telegraph. While well-meaning pumpkin carvers might think they are doing the local […]

More than 10,500 satellites are circling Earth as of late 2023, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Out of these spacecraft, 8,600 are currently in service. This number, however, keeps growing, and experts fear that maintaining order in space may become nigh impossible in just a few years. It’s a situation that could lead […]

Some 160 million years ago, no fish belly was safe from the scourge of blood-sucking vampire fish. Two freakishly large fossil lamprey species have been discovered in China that help explain how these peculiar sea beasts became some of the prime parasitic predators of the Jurrasic oceans. Lampreys are primitive fish with an eel-like appearance […]

Back in 2016, the world played matchmaker to Jeremy, a rare left-coiling snail that became something of an internet “shellebrity” on his quest to find a mate. Seven years later, there’s another lefty looking for love, and this time you might get to name it too. Although it was something of a tumultuous journey, Jeremy […]

An international team of researchers has worked out a way to take highly secured and highly precise snapshots of the contents of any room. Using radio antennas and mirrors, it is possible to create “radio fingerprints” so precise to notice an object displacement of just a few millimeters. This tech could have a lot of […]

Life was tough for our medieval ancestors. Between weapons, wars, and a general lack of health and safety legislation, serious injuries were not uncommon. Thankfully, medicine was coming on leaps and bounds, and while we still had a lot to learn about curing disease, the doctors of the day had been making inroads in the […]

If you spend much time in the “wellness” circles of TikTok, it may seem like, out of nowhere, sage is all the rage. However, sage burning – also called smudging or saging – is far from a new fad. In fact, the practice is ancient – its roots can be traced back to Native American […]

New footage shows members of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa tribe in Indonesia watching as a digger noisily tears up their forest. The “shocking” video provides a snapshot of what some campaigners are calling a “genocidal” mistreatment of this land and the Indigenous people who call it home. As shown by the new video (below), logging […]

On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, an unknown man boarded flight 305 from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. He sat there and ordered a bourbon and soda, before slipping a note to a flight attendant as she went about her duty, the beginning of one of the strangest unsolved mysteries of the 20th century. […]

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has announced its intention to produce a new high-yield nuclear gravity bomb, pending Congressional authorization and funding. The DoD said on Friday that they sought to create a modern variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, to be termed the B61-13. The bomb will have a similar yield to […]

Elephants are fascinating for lots of reasons: their ability to care for each other, those incredible adapted trunks, and the ability to fight climate change. One element of an elephant that doesn’t get as much credit as it deserves is their feet. But we’re here to prove that those four enormous tootsies are just as […]

If a crab and Mr Tickle had a baby, it would look just like Big Daddy. An intimidating crustacean, he was named after a British wrestler of the same name (whose real name, incredibly, was Shirley Crabtree Jr) and holds the record for the widest crustacean in captivity ever. Measuring 3.11 meters (10.25 feet) claw-to-claw, […]

On 19 July 1952, the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California, undertook a survey of the night sky, focusing on a particular region and photographing it multiple times, in an attempt to spot bodies in the Solar System such as asteroids as they pass in front of stars, dimming them ever so slightly. At 8:52 […]

The universe is a spooky place. Besides the lurking Dark Matter and Dark Energy, even some of the things we can see look like they’d go bump in the night if space carried sound waves. Just in time for Halloween, NASA has released an image of one of the most eerie of all, a nebula nicknamed […]