Deborah Bloomfield

A ferocious sea beast that lived 80 million years ago has been discovered by palaeontologists. Defined by its “angry eyebrows” and gargantuan size, the new species of aquatic lizard has aptly been named after a sea serpent in Norse mythology, Jörmungandr, and the tiny city in North Dakota near where the fossil was found, called […]

The Victorian grassland earless dragon, Tympanocryptis pinguicolla, made a stunning comeback from the dead when it was sighted this year for the first time since 1969. Conservationists were excited, but know the little lizards are unlikely to survive much longer without assistance, so they have enlisted the help of Colossal Biosciences, the company seeking to restore […]

This article first appeared in Issue 13 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. Would you move to the Moon? It’s probably the cosmic world you’re most familiar with other than, you know, Earth – and where better to brag about having a holiday home? One thing − can you even buy real estate on the Moon? […]

The Indiana Jones franchise isn’t well known for its accuracy in depicting the average professor-of-archaeology lifestyle. Jones tends to whip the gun out of the hands of a Nazi in the time a proper archaeologist might use for logging artifacts.  However, there’s one bit they got right, in his love for discovering obviously cursed items that […]

Down in the deep sea, not only can you encounter a whole host of unusual-looking ocean creatures, but also some incredible ocean rock formations.  In a canyon north of Moloka’i, in the Hawaiian islands, the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Hercules captured footage of columnar basalt at around 1,700 meters (5,577 feet) deep. While the columns […]

If you look up at the sky for long enough or take a few seconds to Google its position, you may see the International Space Station (ISS) zipping its way over your head. You may also notice it’s moving quite fast, though you may not be aware just how fast.  Though of course it’s not […]

A “poison specialist” in Minnesota has been charged with murdering his wife by allegedly giving her a lethal dose of colchicine, a drug used to treat gout. Connor Bowman, 30, was arrested on Friday, October 20 2023, and charged with the second-degree murder of his wife, according to Olmsted Country court documents.  Advertisement Betty, the […]

Stories told by Indigenous Tasmanians to white settlers appear to describe the flooding of Bass Strait, which occurred 12,000 years ago, as well as the location of the stars at a similar time. Records of Tasmania’s Indigenous oral traditions are scant, but with the exception of some much more speculative connections, these appear to be […]

You ever think about polar bear milk? Yeah, us neither… but a recent email from the folks over at Polar Bears International got us thinking about their lactation situation. With Polar Bear Week being celebrated every year on the first week of November, now seemed as good a time as any to get into it. […]

An ancient worm has wriggled back to life after 46,000 years frozen in Siberian permafrost. The tiny animals, called nematodes, were revived from a lengthy slumber, which began in the late Pleistocene some 45,839 to 47,769 years ago, radiocarbon analysis has revealed. That’s quite the catnap. As well as being impressively hardy, the microscopic critters […]

The universe is flooded with billions of chemicals, each a tiny pinprick of potential. And we’ve only identified 1 percent of them. Scientists believe undiscovered chemical compounds could help remove greenhouse gases, or trigger a medical breakthrough much like penicillin did. But let’s just get this out there first: it’s not that chemists aren’t curious. […]

Weirdly enough, David Lynch got it right when he wrote the line, “The owls are not what they seem,” during a particularly odd moment in Twin Peaks. For much of history, and across the world, various people have seen owls as wholly contradictory creatures. In fact, as the zoologist Desmond Morris has argued, very few […]

“I knew there was a chance I could easily be killed by this whale,” whale scientist Nan Hauser can be heard saying in a 2021 interview with BBC Earth. Hauser was recollecting an unusual and shocking encounter between herself, a humpback whale, and a tiger shark. While it sounds like the cast of a “walks […]

Money makes the world go round but who in the world has the most of it? Back in 2021, there was a change at the top: The US was stripped of its title as the richest country in the world (by net worth), and China became the world’s wealthiest nation. The switch-up in the global […]

An extreme drought has seen river levels fall to record lows throughout parts of the Brazilian Amazon, exposing a series of pre-Hispanic rock carvings. Last seen over a decade ago when the region experienced a similar water shortage, the ancient engravings depict human faces and other forms, though it’s unclear who sculpted the artworks or […]

This week you can listen to the sound of Earth’s largest living organism, NASA is struggling to open the lid on its asteroid sample, and a lost continent has been located 155 million years after it broke from Australia. Finally, we look at the only known physical remains of a first-generation human hybrid. Subscribe to […]

When we hear “Aegean Sea”, it often conjures up images of Ancient Greece, relaxing beach holidays, or sparkling blue waters. But underneath the glittery surface lies Kolumbo, an active submarine volcano that in 1650, erupted and triggered a destructive tsunami. Thanks to modern imaging technology, researchers have now successfully reconstructed the event, finally solving the […]

Climate change appears to have driven a large-scale hybridization event in the Arctic between two subspecies of puffins. In the wake of warming temperatures in northern Norway, the habits of the two family members have merged and seemingly resulted in prolific canoodling between the pair.  The large-bodied subspecies of Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica naumanni) used […]

If you stray into the more health and wellness-focused parts of the internet, it won’t be too long before you find someone deriding the so-called evils of seed oils. One that seems to bear the brunt of a lot of this ill-feeling is canola oil – but is it really all bad? It’s time we […]