Deborah Bloomfield

Scientists challenging the problem-solving capacities of rare birds of prey on the Falkland Islands have found them astonishingly quick to learn when food is on offer – and remember those skills a year later. The finding supports Darwin’s assessment of the birds’ remarkable intelligence when he visited during the voyage of the Beagle, and also […]

Regular physical exercise is associated with all kinds of benefits, not least protecting the brain from the damaging effects of aging and helping to stave off dementia. But exercise is not accessible to all people, so researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California Los Angeles are investigating whether these […]

Earth’s magnetic poles aren’t set in stone (or ice). Over the past centuries, Earth’s magnetic north has been drifting east at an accelerating pace, shifting thousands of kilometers across the globe. The massive, compass-wobbling trend is being driven by vast oceans of liquid metal in Earth’s interior and some fundamental principles of electromagnetism. Since the […]

The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle accelerator at CERN, has a big announcement: They have observed top quarks in the collision between lead ions for the very first time. This observation is another step forward in understanding the conditions present just a fraction of a second after the beginning of […]

While there might be a pretty incredible array of creatures living on planet Earth at the moment, let’s take a second to wind back the clock and have a closer look at perhaps one of the most appealing clades that existed back in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of Earth’s history. Meet the Anurognathidae. Pterosaurs […]

An international team of astronomers has detected a record-breaking planet orbiting a Sun-like star. The system is called K2-360 and it has two known planets K2-360 b and K2-360 c. The innermost orbits the star in just 21 hours. It is an ultra-short period super-Earth, rocky but larger than our planet. That is not all; […]

Photographers from around the globe have been getting up close and personal with some of the natural world’s best and most interesting subjects in a bid to become Close-up Photographer of The Year 2024. From insects and intimate landscapes to underwater scenes and alien-like fungi, we take a look through a small selection of the […]

An exceptionally preserved fossil fills in an enormous gap in the evolution of pterosaurs, the largest animals capable of flight. Of all the major reptile orders of the age of dinosaurs, pterosaurs may be the least understood. It’s puzzling enough how they managed to take off while being the largest flying creatures until airplanes became […]

Eating spicy food can spark a variety of reactions: a euphoric buzz, a racing heart, a tingling tongue, gastrointestinal apocalypse, existential dread, and tears of pain/joy. A gullet full of chili-loaded foods can also, unusually, cause a runny nose. What makes food spicy? A chemical called capsaicin is usually the culprit when we feel the […]

Africa is home to a rich array of carnivorous animals, from ferocious felids like lions and cheetahs to smaller creatures like foxes and mongoose. However, many such predators are also some of the continent’s most endangered – perhaps none more so than the highland-dwelling Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis). An ancient African species… You’d be forgiven […]

A stash of 15 marine fossils has been found in a Neanderthal cave in northern Spain, indicating that the extinct hominids may have developed a passion for accumulating stuff in the same way that modern humans collect baseball cards, stamps, and memorabilia. Reporting the discovery, researchers say they currently have “no valid hypothesis” to explain […]

Geese are famously aggressive animals whose sassy attitude appears to be crucial to their social rank. Large in size with peculiar “geese teeth“, they can be scary, and yet despite this, 45 percent of Britons reckon they could take on a goose. It’s a curious question that got two naturalists wondering: isn’t it time someone […]

It’s been a record year for dengue infections, and amidst the surge in cases, researchers have been trying to pinpoint the causes. Now, a new study suggests that climate change is responsible for 19 percent of the current global dengue burden – and could soar as high as 60 percent if nothing is done to […]

The era of human-induced extinctions has a new victim: a migratory shorebird called the Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris) has been declared almost certainly deceased. Although 164 avian species are recognized to have gone extinct by the IUCN Red List, the curlew’s previous wide range makes its loss particularly disturbing. Like many migratory birds, the Slender-billed Curlew once […]

Sometimes, it’s the everyday things that are most confusing. Things like, what are those weird dots on your windshield? Why is pink salt more expensive than the regular stuff? Does blowing on your soup actually do anything? And here’s another one you’ve probably thought about every cold day since you were about six. Why does […]

There’s nowhere on Earth quite like the Atacama Desert. Literally: it exists in a basically unique meteorological void, rendering it all but devoid of water and home to almost no life at all.  But “almost no life” is not the same thing as “no life” – and increasingly, science is turning up ever-more bizarre and […]

This week, Ice Age Amazonian rock art has been interpreted and appears to depict shamans spiritually transforming into animals, a 35,000-year-old saber-toothed cub has been found mummified in permafrost, and the first amber fragments have been recovered from Antarctica, providing information about the continent’s ancient forests. Finally, we ask if animal testing is entirely necessary […]

Vast amounts of money and brainpower in the effort to achieve sustained, controlled, nuclear fusion. Many designs have been proposed, and even tried, but tokamaks are comfortably the most popular. The name may be familiar, but not everyone knows what they are.  What Is A Tokamak? Stars heat matter to such high temperatures that electrons […]