Deborah Bloomfield

In May 1969, Apollo 10 staged a dress rehearsal for the first human landing on the lunar surface. The mission was a success, with the crew of three orbiting the Moon for over 10 hours, and separating and then rejoining a lunar landing module. While they were up there, alone on the far side of […]

New research has found a method that can determine the sex of a chicken in early development by “sniffing” the scent emitted through the shell. If the technology is successfully scaled up, it has the potential to avoid the culling of millions of live chicks. Over 350 million male chicks are culled each year in […]

In an entirely predictable but damning vision of the internet’s future, a fake photograph of the Pentagon on fire has prompted a brief dip in the stock market, showing just how important it is to get the AI-fueled misinformation crisis under control.   Shared by a “verified” account (they paid $8 for a blue tick, […]

Farting is an odorous fact of life: humans do it, dogs definitely do it, lacewings do it with such aplomb they can take out six termites with a single toot. But do all animals release offensive gas in this way? It got us wondering… do cats fart? The short answer is yes, cats do fart. […]

The Lost Colony of Roanoke remains an enduring mystery in the minds of many Americans, and it is easy to see why. An entire community of settlers allegedly disappeared, leaving confusing and tantalizing clues as to what may have happened to them. One such example is the so-called Dare Stone which was once thought to […]

Axiom Space has launched its second space mission to the International Space Station (ISS). This is the third private mission to the ISS and includes among others Rayyanah Barnawi, a biomedical researcher and also the Saudi Space Commission’s first female astronaut. And now she’s is also the 600th person to orbit the Earth. Axiom-2 sees […]

You might not know it, but your pinky might contain a feature that’s extremely rare and little understood. It’s called an extra interphalangeal transverse, and it simply consists of a third crease on the little finger.  Also known as a supernumerary digital flexion crease, it’s typically found below the crease that’s created by the main […]

In Roman mythology, Jupiter was the god of lightning, as well as the sky and dubious sexual encounters in non-human form. It’s therefore highly appropriate that the planet named after him has been revealed to have a lot of lightning too. Decades after the existence of lightning on Jupiter was revealed by Voyager 1, we […]

Scrotums, let’s face it, are not the most attractive of the sexual organs. As the authors of a recent study describe it, it is “a sac-like structure containing the testicles” which “semifloat” around in there. The scrotum is outside of the body as the temperature inside is too high for sperm cells to be produced. […]

While whiling away the hours reading angry comments from strangers on the Internet, you may have come across the term “Luddite”. Usually thrown at people expressing even the slightest desire to pump the brakes on artificial intelligence (AI) before it takes all our jobs, the term is used to imply they are technophobes opposed to […]

It’s a ritual millions of us count on to get us through the day: we wake up, stumble into the kitchen, and pour ourselves a steaming hot mug of our favorite poop-inducer. But according to various urban legends, there’s more to your morning cup of joe than just the coffee beans and water you were […]

Prehistoric Planet has kicked off for a week of watch parties after an exhilarating first episode took viewers rafting among the island habitats of Earth 66 million years ago. While the tiny castaway Zalmoxes kicked off proceedings, the episode was arguably stolen by some of the series’ non-dinosaur stars, and there’s plenty more where that […]

Researchers report the peculiar motion of stars at the center of globular cluster M4, which is located 7,200 light-years away light-years from Earth. Researchers believe that the best explanation for the way the stars orbit is a black hole weighing about 800 times the mass of our Sun. A peculiar object in an extremely rare […]

A deep look at Uranus has revealed strong evidence of a polar cyclone swirling on top of the icy giant. This is something that’s never been definitively observed on the planet before, but affirms the long-held rule that all planets with an atmosphere in our Solar System, whether rocky or gas, will possess polar vortexes. […]

Scattered across the shores of the Great Lakes lie some pretty unassuming rocks – but hit them with a UV light, and they’ll start to glow like balls of lava. Fluorescent Sodalite-bearing Syenite, more commonly known as Yooperlites or Glowdalites, were discovered along the shores of Lake Superior by a professed rockhound and Michigan Upper […]

Relationship cheaters get a bad rap, but new research suggests that married people who have affairs often feel great about their infidelity and are rarely racked with guilt. Even more surprisingly, the study authors found that cheating is not generally motivated by a lack of love for one’s spouse or unhappiness in one’s marriage, and that […]

The earliest evidence of wine drinking in the Americas may have been found in the remnants of 15th-century ceramics. Discovered on a small Caribbean island, the sherds also tell a tale of changing culinary traditions of the area in the wake of Spanish colonialism. In a paper detailing their findings, researchers describe 40 pottery fragments […]

For a sustainable future, it’s widely accepted that the global population needs to move away from fossil fuels. While electric looks to be a suitably green alternative, it comes with one major flaw: there just aren’t enough metals to make the shift. We can get more metals by mining, something we’ve done for thousands of […]

Footage that is claimed to show ivory-billed woodpeckers in Louisiana has been released, almost eighty years after the last accepted sighting in the United States. With even the Cuban branch of the family not seen for 36 years, the bird’s rediscovery would be a rare moment of joy for lovers of endangered species. However, not […]

Tomorrow, Earthlings will get a dress rehearsal of what it may be like to receive a message from an extraterrestrial civilization. A message will be sent from the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) on May 24 at 7 pm UTC (12 pm PDT). About 16 minutes later, it will be picked up […]