Deborah Bloomfield

The first images and videos of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) new Lightning Imager have been released and you can watch thousands of lightning strikes flash across the globe. This is the first ever satellite instrument capable of continuously detecting lightning across Europe and Africa.  ESA, along with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of […]

The rolling power of pill bugs and grip strength of chitons have landed them an unexpected role in robotics, as scientists working on biohybrid technologies have invented a robot arm with living grippers. The creators say that the method doesn’t harm the animals and that once they’ve done their grabbing, they can simply scuttle back […]

Do you sniff it, read the label, or wait to see bits floating in your coffee or tea? There are many ways to check when milk has gone off, but new research has shown that up to half of consumers decide to throw away milk based only on a brief glance at the date on […]

Forensics can be vital in supporting police and juries to reach accurate conclusions in complex cases where the facts are elusive. The potential of results to swing convictions or eliminate suspects means their correct application is paramount, which is why the field is now populated by experts who can search for clues in places most […]

Archeologists are looking for the skeleton of an elephant – not in the savannahs of Africa or the jungles of Asia, but in the green English countryside. In Victorian Britain, traveling menageries would scale up and down the country to show off the exotic animals looted from the empire’s distant lands, including lions, tigers, bears, […]

In the Indian Ocean, there is an anomaly. The gravity there is lower (compared to what we’d expect) than anywhere else on the planet, and now, a team of researchers may have figured out why. According to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, objects attract other objects with a force determined by their masses and the […]

This article first appeared in Issue 9 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. In 2003, in Exeter, UK, a 65-year-old man, now memorialized in scientific literature as patient “MX”, decided to visit his neurologist. He had a very peculiar problem: after a minor heart surgery, he had awoken to find that he had completely lost his […]

This article first appeared in Issue 9 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  To quote Edwin Hubble, “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.” Of course, we enhance our senses as much as we can with technology, but it is here we often start. How would the […]

Sir Elton John set a record at this year’s Glastonbury, becoming the most-watched headliner in the festival’s history, with more than 7 million people tuning in live to the BBC to watch his last ever UK performance. The 76-year-old singer certainly delivered all his characteristic showmanship. But many who have followed his music over the […]

You’ve got to give it to the Moon. It is not one to be photographed on the fly. Smartphone images of our natural satellite turn out like smudgy, flare-y blobs (unless you are using some AI trickery). But it doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to get a good picture of the […]

The Victorian grassland earless dragon (Tympanocryptis pinguicolla), not seen since 1969, has been found in grasslands west of Melbourne. No need to fear this dragon, though; these lizards are just 15cm long fully grown. The dragon is Australia’s most imperilled scaled reptile. This is an extraordinary second chance. The rediscovery of a species thought to […]

All relationships are different, and people can change and improve their own behavior. However, a piece of research has found evidence that backs up the old “once a cheater, always a cheater” rule when it comes to staying faithful in relationships.  Researchers from the University of Denver wanted to look at whether infidelity in a […]

A survey by the charity Blood Cancer UK found that over half of UK adults cannot name a single symptom of blood cancer, despite it being the third-biggest cause of cancer deaths in the country.  The charity asked participants to list what they believed were common signs of blood cancer. As well as 55 percent […]

The Last Of Us wasn’t too far off reality when it suggested that climate change could make fungi a bigger threat to humanity, and a perfect example of this is currently spreading in parts of the US. Coccidioides is one of a small number of fungi known to infect humans, and its range is expanding […]

A genetic editing system similar to CRISPR-Cas9 has been uncovered for the first time in eukaryotes – the group of organisms that include fungi, plants, and animals. The system, based on a protein called Fanzor, can be guided to precisely target and edit sections of DNA, and that could open up the possibility of its […]

Few neuroscientists can claim to have probed the outer limits of human consciousness to the same extent as Dr Eben Alexander. After contracting bacterial meningoencephalitis in 2008, the brain surgeon wrote a book describing his remarkable near-death experience (NDE) while in a coma. A decade later, he smoked the psychedelic venom of the Sonoran Desert […]

In quite possibly the most wholesome and heartwarming story of the week, Vanilla the chimp has seen the sky for the first time in 29 years.  Vanilla is a 29-year-old female chimpanzee who lived until she was two years old at New York biomedical research facility the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates […]

This wall, known as the Muralla La Cumbre, was previously thought to have protected important farmland from invaders, but new research suggests it actually prevented El Niño floods from wreaking havoc. The ancient earthen wall is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) long and is located in the desert near Trujillo, in northern Peru. It was […]

At 7:17 am on the morning of June 30, 1908, something exploded over Russia. A celestial body disintegrated over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, with a yield comparable to up to 30 megatons of energy, certainly enough to raze a city. It flattened 2,150 square kilometers (830 square miles) of the Siberian forest. That’s […]

Microscopes are an iconic instrument in science and since their development over 400 years ago, they have proven to be vital for many key biological discoveries. These optical enhancers have relied heavily on advances in lens technologies and although their history is complex, together they have changed how we see the world. The first microscopes  […]