Deborah Bloomfield

A particularly cold September has given us a glimpse of the winter to come. The cold will bite hardest for the 13% of England’s households that are already in fuel poverty. As the energy crisis intensifies, this is expected to rise further. European leaders have therefore rushed to implement measures to protect households. The UK’s […]

Two weeks of observations of the Didymos/Dimorphos system have confirmed NASA’s DART mission has substantially changed Dimorphos’s orbit, the first time humans have changed the motion of a natural object in space and altered its orbit forever.  The finding demonstrates that under the right circumstances, smashing a spacecraft into a space rock can be all […]

The winners of the Natural History Museum’s (NHM) Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2022 competition have been revealed, and as ever, we’re in for a treat. This year’s top prize was scooped by American photographer Karine Aigner for their beautifully captured shot of a buzzing ball of cactus bees snowballing in the Texas sand. The […]

As the 2022 Brazilian general election continues to roll on, a resurfaced video of sitting president Jair Bolsonaro bragging that he’d eat an Indigenous person’s flesh has gone viral. The video – which was uploaded to Bolsonaro’s official YouTube page in 2016 – shows the divisive politician talking to a journalist from the New York […]

Being such playful, charismatic, and energetic animals, it’s easy to understand why humans are so charmed by dolphins. However, their social behavior and remarkable intelligence are precisely the reason why these animals aren’t suited to life in captivity. Luckily, if you’ve always yearned to get up close and personal with these wonderful animals but felt […]

Around  6,000 years ago Taiwan was settled by Austronesians, who brought with them Neolithic technology and still make up around 2 percent of the island’s population. However, 15 of the 16 Austronesian groups on the island have stories of small, dark people already living in the island’s forests and perhaps surviving alongside the Austronesians until […]

A game of pin the ear on the reptile would likely highlight a gap in the average person’s knowledge surrounding turtle ears, but new research has taken a good look inside their noggins and found they’re surprisingly big. The apparatus in question is known as a bony labyrinth and as researchers on a new study […]

Professional photographer and science communicator Miguel Claro has created an incredible time-lapse video of the Sun flinging out a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. Around one hour’s worth of images captured in Portugal shows the motion of the plasma along the magnetic field lines. The Sun’s cycle lasts around 11 years, going from a […]

Before scientists had subtweets and call-out posts, natural philosophers had treatises where they could still mock each other’s ideas and opinions. It turns out that Galileo Galilei – father of the modern scientific method – conducted a few using pseudonyms. Now, researcher Matteo Cosci has found evidence to attribute another one to the iconic Italian […]

Air fryers have taken the 2020s by storm, offering home cooks a quick, easy, apparently delicious, and supposedly healthy way of cooking their food without the perils of deep-fat frying.  With energy bills set to skyrocket in many parts of the world this winter, sales of air fryers have also been reportedly on the rise […]

Today’s humans are exposed to black carbon particles not only from air pollution after birth, but as early as the first trimester of their gestation, new research has revealed. “We found black carbon particles in human cord blood, which provides evidence of their transfer to the fetal circulation system,” explains the paper, published this month […]

The Salton Sea, California’s most heavily polluted lake, is rapidly turning into toxic dust. Once a popular tourist spot, this troubled body of water is rapidly receding, upping the concentration of salt and chemicals in the remaining water. The landlocked “sea” was created by accident in the opening years of the 20th century when irrigation […]

Australia’s boab trees (Adansonia gregorii) are related to Africa’s baobabs that can live for 2,000 years. Boabs were a major source of food and shelter for the Indigenous people of the Tanami Desert, who engraved their bark with symbols resembling the famous rock art to the west. Despite the importance of these carvings to the […]

Archaeologists excavating Belize’s aptly-named Midnight Terror Cave think they may have found shreds of Mayan death gags that once silenced the victims of human sacrifice. Rummaging through the dental remains of those who were slain in the infamous cave, the researchers discovered bright blue fibers lodged between some of the victims’ teeth. First discovered in […]

Oregon police have issued a warning to beachgoers: do not play with the grenades. The Newport Police Department was forced to make such a warning after several explosive devices were found washed up near Agate beach. The police department headed to the area on October 4, after several reports of the devices being found by […]

An AI will make history by being the first AI robot to give evidence to the UK’s House of Lords, as part of an ongoing inquiry into how artificial intelligence may impact the art industry. Ai-Da, a humanoid artistic robot that has already created an impressive but somewhat abstract portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth […]

A video showing Albert Einstein explaining his most famous equation (perhaps the most famous equation) in physics has been widely shared on Twitter. The video shows Einstein talking through E=MC2, the equation describing mass-energy equivalence. Advertisement “It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same […]

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and Ganymede will soon be visited by more spacecraft that will certainly uncover their secrets. Planetary scientists are not idling waiting though. Juno is keeping them busy as it flies around Jupiter and we have Earth-based telescopes carrying out long-distance observations. Now, astronomers have released the sharpest views yet of these […]

A drop of ancient amber has given rise to a new-to-science group of insects with the aid of teeny tiny technology. Using microtomography (Micro-CT), researchers were able to confirm the existence of the genus Calliarcys contained within Eocene Baltic amber, representing a rare opportunity to learn more about ancient mayflies, which are hardly ever preserved […]