Deborah Bloomfield

Astronomers have discovered three new near-Earth asteroids hiding in the glare of the Sun, including the biggest “potentially hazardous” asteroid discovered in eight years. Thanks to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the discovery adds to the known Near-Earth objects, in particular, those that stay between the orbit of Earth and Venus. The asteroid, known as […]

A newly discovered species of hairy land snail has been found perfectly preserved in a piece of 99-million-year-old Mesozoic amber. The fuzzy mollusk has been named Archaeocyclotus brevivillosus, deriving from the Latin “brevis” meaning small, and “villōsus” meaning hairy. The specimen was first collected before 2017 from an amber mine in the Hukawng Valley in […]

In a remarkable comeback, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has just won Brazil’s presidential election, ending the regime of the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro whose reign has proved devastating for the Amazon rainforest, climate change, and the country’s Indigenous people. Known mononymously as Lula, the left-wing politician and trade unionist previously served as […]

The world’s largest aircraft has smashed through another milestone in its ongoing development by successfully carrying the hypersonic prototype vehicle Talon-A over the Mojave desert. The Stratolaunch Roc, which is essentially two large airliners attached together by the wing, is designed to carry the Talon-A to a high altitude, where the Mach 6 rocket test […]

The bacterium Chlamydia pneumoniae can infect the central nervous system. In mice, it has been found to trigger responses matching those seen in people with Alzheimer’s disease- notably, the build up of plaques made of the protein amyloid beta, which are the main way Alzheimer’s is distinguished from other forms of dementia. Although Chlamydia is […]

In 1882, in a workhouse in Leicester, England, a young man named Joe Merrick was having an operation on his face. He had been born 20 years earlier, apparently a perfectly normal, healthy baby – but now, he was so covered in deformities and protrusions that he could barely eat or speak. In years to […]

It’s Halloween and time to scare yourself silly, so why not do so with a little bit of science. Users of Reddit have been discussing what the “scariest thing that science has proven real” is. Here are some of the best, and as ever we will jump in if something needs explaining or elaborating. This […]

For the thousands of years that humans believed Earth was the center of the universe, a puzzling fact about the heavens was the motion of the planets. They all move in one direction except every once in a while, they appear to stop, move backwards for a bit, and then revert to their normal path. […]

Just days into the new reign of Elon Musk, Twitter is reportedly interested in making users pay to have their blue-tick verification badge. It’s even believed that people currently with blue ticks will be stripped of their checkmarks unless they foot the bill. “The whole verification process is being revamped right now”, Musk tweeted on […]

Asteroid PHA 2022 RM4 will make its closest approach to Earth either tomorrow or the morning after, depending on your time zone. As asteroid encounters go it’s not particularly close, passing us at 2.3 million kilometers (1.43 million miles) away, or six times the distance to the Moon. There are, however, aspects to this event […]

Sara Miguel Pico is a lead artist at Tessera Studios, as well as one of its founders. She recently worked across Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova, a sci-fi video game that’s the first based on the series of the same name from Paramount+ and Nickelodeon. We caught up with her to find out more about what […]

Let us tell you a tale of murder most foul: many years ago, in a village called Wadhurst, in England, a newlywed couple were murdered in cold blood inside their cottage. The husband was killed first; the wife called for help, but her pleas were unintelligible through her injuries, and nobody came to their rescue. […]

All stars, including the Sun, have a finite lifetime. Stars shine by the process of nuclear fusion in which lighter atoms, such as hydrogen, fuse together to create heavier ones. This process releases vast quantities of energy which counteracts the ever-present inward pull of the star’s gravity. Ultimately, fusion helps stars to resist gravitational collapse. […]

Despite being around for more than 100 years, Ouija boards (a wooden board covered with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and the words “yes”, “no” and “goodbye”) continue to be a popular activity – especially around Halloween. To work, all participants must place their hands on the wooden pointer (or planchette) and […]

The presence of two new sublineages of COVID-19, designated as variants BQ.1 and XBB, have been confirmed in the UK, with more than 700 cases of BQ.1 and 18 of XBB being detected in the country recently. While neither sublineage is currently considered a variant of concern, experts have cautioned that they are likely highly […]

This article first appeared in Issue 1 of our new free digital magazine CURIOUS.  With the looming threat of a giant asteroid strike, Meryl Streep et al. jet off on a spaceship, their bodies cryonically frozen as they search for a new planet to colonize, and inevitably destroy as they did the last. In case you […]

A bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) has been recorded flying 13,560 kilometers (8,435 miles) between Alaska and Ansons Bay, Tasmania, the longest non-stop migratory flight ever measured. The odyssey is not only a demonstration of birds’ staggering capabilities, but has given scientists and environmentalists a chance to highlight the threats to these winged adventurers’ survival. Godwits are […]