Deborah Bloomfield

Something’s up with the Earth’s magnetic poles. Over the past few thousand years, Earth’s geomagnetic field has been getting weaker and weaker. If it decays enough, it could collapse altogether and flip the poles. North would become South and South would become North. Looking at the geological history of Earth, magnetic field flips appear to […]

NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) has been studying the Red Planet for several years. Its suite of instruments has provided numerous insights into the Martian atmosphere, including the peculiar ultraviolet aurorae that happen there. Now, NASA has provided us with a full global version of Mars in ultraviolet. And by Ares, it is […]

The Euclid Space Telescope’s mission is to map the dark matter and dark energy in the universe so we can learn their mysterious nature.  Its wide field of view is crucial to this, but its resolution may not always be up to the task. Fortunately, however, we already have an instrument capable of filling at […]

A cave filled with an unbelievable quantity of animal bones – from mammoths and bears to frogs and wooly rhinos – has been discovered in Siberia. It’s pretty clear how the site amassed all of these Ice Age bones: this was a vast lair belonging to a gang of cave hyenas who dragged dozens of […]

New research finds that obesity diminishes the brain’s ability to identify when a person is full. Moreover, these changes to how the brain detects nutrients could be permanent, and could explain why it’s difficult for some people to lose weight and maintain that loss.  According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 4 million people […]

On an uninhabited island in the Pacific, there lies a lake chock-full of millions of unique jellyfish that can’t be found anywhere else on Earth. Inventively named Jellyfish Lake, this bizarre body of water is largely cut off from the rest of the world, allowing its inhabitants to evolve some remarkable traits.  Jellyfish Lake is […]

The planet Haila accompanies a star that should, in the ordinary course of stellar evolution, have expanded far beyond Haila’s orbit before shrinking again. No planet could survive being swallowed by its star like that, leaving astronomers with a mystery they’re struggling to resolve. As stars age they puff up to become red giants, prior […]

This week the first significant evidence of the long-sought gravitational wave background has been found, cytoelectric coupling describes how brain waves might be sculpting the structure of our minds, the story of a legendary monarch leads us to question if it’s possible to be immune to poison, and we investigate how the flawed BMI calculation […]

One-horned creatures are found in myths around the world. Although unicorns in different cultures have little to do with one another, they have multiple associations in European thought. For example, the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder wrote about unicorns in the first century AD. The unicorn features in both medieval Christian and Celtic beliefs, […]

Deep off the coast of Costa Rica, scientists have discovered a nursery teeming with octopuses. Most incredibly, the team even managed to catch a glimpse of the babies hatching from their eggs, showing this part of the deep sea is an active nursery. The octopus garden was discovered at a low-temperature hydrothermal vent offshore of […]

There’s a theory – usually told to drivers by their parents to make them slow down – that changing lanes on the highway in traffic, weaving in and out of cars, doesn’t get you to your destination any faster. It sounds strange, but there is a little bit of truth behind it. In 2014, the […]

Human stem cells have been coaxed into organizing themselves into synthetic embryo-like models, all without the need for eggs or sperm. These models can be used to help understand a crucial moment in embryo development, which has so far remained a mystery to scientists. The question mark occurs around two to three weeks after conception […]

Not all the experiments onboard NASA’s Perseverance are there to study the Red Planet. MOXIE is there to test future technology. It’s the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, and it is used to turn a bit of the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere of Mars into breathable oxygen. Earlier this month, it doubled its maximum output. […]

Here’s a fun fact to pull out the next particularly hot or cold day: we are technically still living in an ice age that began around 3 million years ago.  What is an ice age? An ice age is a long period of time – from millions to hundreds of millions of years – where […]

If you’re in the market for a favorite historical figure then look no further than Mithridates VI Eupator, king of Pontus from 120 to 63 BCE and arguably the most cunning adversary ever encountered by the Roman Empire. Like a comic book supervillain, the legendary monarch is said to have made himself immune to the […]

A gnarled Neanderthal thumb bone recovered from a cave in France suggests that the digit’s owner suffered from osteoarthritis (OA) of the left hand, and provides the first evidence for this condition in a finger belonging to one of our extinct cousins. Analyzing the relic’s pathological features, the authors of a new study suggest that […]

A robotic “smart hand” that could help musicians who suffer strokes to regain their ability to play their instruments has been developed by a team of scientists. The lightweight, flexible glove can be customized for each wearer, and uses machine learning technology. “Here we show that our smart exoskeleton glove, with its integrated tactile sensors, […]

Most people have probably heard of megalodon by now, given its arrival as a sea beastie on the silver screen in recent years. It was an enormous primeval predator that grew to sizes that make even the largest great white sharks look like pathetic minnows. But despite having gone extinct around 1.6 million years ago, […]

There’s much that we take for granted in our modern world. For example, have you ever considered the history of lenses, and how they have extended our view of the universe? The development of this subtle technology not only allows us to examine the very small or to peer into the vastness of space, but […]

In a bar, you may have noticed people banging their shot glasses on the table before they down their drink and thought “why are they doing that?” Well, you’re not alone. It’s not entirely clear to some people why they are doing it either, and there are multiple explanations for the quirky custom. Advertisement One […]