Deborah Bloomfield

NASA’s Perseverance Rover captured a gorgeous view of Phobos eclipsing the Sun, from the surface of Mars. From the point of view of any Martian microbes lurking out there, the eclipse may have seemed more ominous (yeah ok, there might not be living organisms up there, let alone ones sentient enough to grasp the concept […]

This week two planets have been spotted appearing to share the same orbit for the first time, we explain why it is extremely unlikely that report suggesting the universe is actually 26.7 billion years old is true, there’s a good reason Einstein makes a cameo in new movie Oppenheimer, and we find out what real […]

Cannabis use, both recent and long-term, has been linked to epigenetic changes in a new study. The researchers found evidence that the drug is associated with DNA methylation, a chemical alteration to the DNA inside human cells. With almost half of adults in the US having tried cannabis at least once, according to some estimates, […]

Walking at extreme elevations can lead to fatal altitude sickness, but what happens to people who venture deep into the Earth? Miners and bridge engineers have historically been exposed to atmospheric pressures twice that at the surface, and the toll it took on their bodies was also sometimes fatal. It got us wondering, what does […]

Two US Navy pilots are set to testify at a US House Oversight Committee hearing into unidentified flying objects (UFOs) next week. Rep. Tim Burchett announced on Thursday that the committee will provide “firsthand accounts of unidentified anomalous phenomena” at the hearing next Wednesday. Former Navy commander David Braver and former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, […]

There is an idea, first proposed thousands of years ago by Greek philosopher Philolaus, that behind the Sun where we can’t see it there lurks a “counter-Earth”, named Antichthon. The theory, strange as it seems today, was likely created as a way to explain lunar eclipses. Lunar eclipses are more frequent than solar eclipses, and […]

Fish with teeth are old news. After all, we all grew up thinking piranhas were going to be a much bigger problem in our daily lives. That said, it never gets old when someone finds a pacu – think piranha, but with dentures. The human-like teeth of pacu have seen them circulate in the press […]

Deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert, there lies an ugly monument to fast fashion and cheap online clothing stores: piles upon piles of unsold clothing mounting like synthetic sand dunes. The majority of the world’s clothing is made in China, literally on the other side of the world from Chile. However, huge quantities of the clothes […]

A bird’s eye view over the deserts of western Bolivia reveals thousands of dead-straight lines that were etched into the ground thousands of years ago. When exactly, and why they were created, however, remains a bit of a mystery. Know as the Sajama Lines, the geoglyphs are located in the shadow of the Nevado Sajama […]

Our understanding of the universe is incomplete. The best model we have requires the existence of two substances we have yet to prove to exist: dark energy and dark matter. While that is less than ideal, the model has been far better than the alternatives and it has great predictive power. But not knowing how […]

A horsey dinner party in rural Siberia has reportedly led to a small outbreak of anthrax. Unfortunately, some of the infected people have left their sick beds, escaped the hospital, and are now on the run. The regional health ministry in the Tuva Region of southern Siberia sounded the alarm on Tuesday, July 18, noting […]

Southeast Asian curries are among the world’s most popular takeaway dishes, yet new research suggests that the very first Ruby Murray (yup, we’re bringing back Cockney rhyming slang) was delivered to the region around 2,000 years ago. While analyzing residues left on stone grinding tools at an archaeological site in Vietnam, researchers identified eight different […]

A short sail away from the idyllic canals of Venice, there’s a rectangular island with a dark and strange history. Called the Lazzaretto Vecchio, or Old Lazzaretto, it was built during the Renaissance to isolate the sick souls who had fallen ill with the plague.  Learning lessons from the Black Death a century prior, the […]

You might already be aware that the name “strawberry” is a misnomer, as strawberries aren’t really berries at all. Well, it seems strawberries are full of surprises, or rather covered in them because those seedy-looking white dots aren’t actually seeds. The strawberries’ pitted accessories are called achenes, and they are in fact the plant’s fruit, with each […]

We’ve had cocaine bear, the depressing story of a bear that ate 31.8 kilograms (70 pounds) of cocaine lost during a drug deal. Now, get ready for something just as depressing: cocaine sharks. In a documentary for the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, an environmental scientist from the University of Florida, Tracy Fanara, and marine biologist […]

A gorilla in Ohio just pulled off a grand reveal that left zookeepers reeling when Sully the “male” gave birth to a baby girl. The birth was, understandably, not expected of the gorilla who was believed to have male reproductive organs, but marks a surprise win for a critically endangered species. So, before we get […]

In further evidence asteroids are not as tough as they seem, the Hubble Space Telescope has spotted large rocks escaping from Dimorphos after it was hit by the DART mission. Although we only have a sample of one, this adds to a picture of asteroids being only weakly bound together, making them vulnerable to human […]

Researchers have presented a new material called LionGlass that promises to halve the carbon footprint of the standard soda lime silicate glass. It is also at least 10 times as crack-resistant as regular glass. The new material could be revolutionary. The new glass reduced the carbon footprint in two ways. Regular glass is made by […]

The existence or not of a theoretical object or phenomenon doesn’t stop physicists from studying it. First of all, it builds the foundation for explaining different known events and it is possible that because math allows it, the universe does too. Black holes are such objects. For decades, they were mere oddities causing problems in […]