Deborah Bloomfield

Sand and dust storms – described by UN officials as “one of nature’s most intimidating spectacles” – have become dramatically more common in many world regions. While these colossal forces of nature are a seasonal natural phenomenon, up to 25 percent of them can now be attributed to human-driven factors, such as poor land management […]

M87 is a relatively close elliptical galaxy and M87*, its supermassive black hole, was the first of these gargantuan objects to be photographed. The black hole is known for the release of a jet of material stretching for millions of light-years – and researchers believe that the jet is powered by theft. Its energy is […]

The latest advances in 3D printing have been put to good use by scientists at ETH Zürich, who have now unveiled an incredibly human-like robotic hand. What makes this hand unique is that it’s made up of bones, ligaments, and tendons – all the building blocks of a human skeleton – created from different flexible […]

The building blocks of life have been found on comets, asteroids, and in interstellar space. But how they end up on the surface of planets is not exactly clear. One idea is that comets and asteroids can ferry these molecules to worlds where life can emerge, but they need to travel relatively slowly for molecules to […]

A wind chime in the shape of a winged penis has been discovered among the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Viminacium in modern-day Serbia. Hung (pun intended) from the porch of a building, the whimsical wang was intended to bring luck and ward off evil energies. Still popular today, the human penis has […]

A woman from Alabama who was born with a rare double uterus is pregnant with two babies – one in each womb. Kelsey Hatcher, 32, found out that she had two uteruses, as well as two cervixes, when she was 17. The condition, known medically as uterus didelphys, affects around 0.3 percent of the population […]

Residents of a town in Northern Ireland have been extra-grouchy recently due to an ongoing “hummmmmm” noise that’s been keeping them up at night. No one’s sure where the irritating noise is coming from, so the local council has brought in sonic experts to investigate the problem. The nighttime annoyance has been heard across a […]

“Comets are like cats,” David H Levy said, “They both have tails and do precisely what they want.” As co-discoverer of many comets – including Shoemaker-Levy 9, made famous for smashing into Jupiter before the eyes of the world – Levy should know. The saying is popular among astronomers watching one comet after another fail […]

The Caribbean island of Dominica might only be small, but it’s now taken on the mighty task of protecting one of our planet’s largest animals: the sperm whale. By creating the world’s first marine protected area, the island nation hopes to simultaneously keep the giant species from harm and take advantage of its pooping habits […]

Roopkund Lake in the Indian Himalayas has several hundred bodies scattered around and within it, earning the nickname “Skeleton Lake”. Local tales refer to an ancient party caught in a mountain hailstorm. However, an analysis of the ages and genomes of the bones reveals something much stranger and harder to explain: the victims were separated […]

Optical illusions tend to get the lion’s share when we talk about things that make us question reality, but acoustic anomalies can be equally trippy especially if they were not designed with the intention to confuse and mystify. This is the case for the “Center of the Universe”, a peculiar phenomenon known as a sound […]

White faces created by artificial intelligence (AI) are now appear more “realistic” than actual human faces, according to researchers from the Australian National University (ANU). Although the participants in the new study found AI-generated white human faces more realistic than actual faces, the same was not true for images of people of color. The reason […]

The average life expectancy for women in the US is now nearly six years longer than that of men. According to new research, this gap increased from a low of 4.8 years in 2010 to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest it has been since 1996. Overall, average life expectancy in the US has dropped […]

Scientists have come up with many innovative ways to explore different parts of the Earth and beyond. From enormous space telescopes, to fancy LIDAR equipment, these technologies can teach us more about the world (and universe) we live in. Now, scientists have turned to the animal kingdom and recruited the help of some marine mammals […]

Plant neurobiology is a growing field of science that explores the ways that plants may perceive their environment and alter their morphology and physiology accordingly. It’s sparked some blowback as there are others who argue that growing with style isn’t akin to cognition or consciousness, but what about unconsciousness? Plants don’t sleep in the same […]

The top part of the Earth’s atmosphere, from several tens of kilometers up to well past the orbit of the International Space Station, is the ionosphere. Charged particles from the Sun hit atoms and molecules there, freeing their electrons. And now researchers have discovered that it can also be affected by an exploding star over […]

All those Looney Tunes shows you watched as a kid were deeply deceiving. Quicksand, as it turns out, is a relatively insignificant threat to your well-being and scarcely ever appears in adult life. That said, this slurry-like solution is a real thing and certainly something that should be taken seriously.  Quicksand became a common trope […]

Stars, to be fair to them, are pretty reliable. Look up at them one day and, assuming you have a human lifespan, you can look again some time in the future and you’ll likely still find them there, twinkling away from years to billions of years in the past. Every now and then though, astronomers […]