Deborah Bloomfield

How much of your high school French do you remember? Maybe enough to order a drink or ask where the library is? For most people, studying a language at school doesn’t allow them to achieve true fluency, so it’s probably not surprising that you’d start to lose those skills if you don’t practice them. But […]

Twenty-one years of observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory have been put together to make a film of Eta Carinae. The movie traces the after-effects of an explosion so large we lack adjectives to convey its scale. For 18 years in the mid-19th century, the leaderboard of brightest stars was upended when the previously faint […]

Researchers in Israel have uncovered the cremated remains of what was probably a high-class Greek escort from the period of Alexander the Great. Discovered by the side of a road in Jerusalem, the young woman’s leftovers were found alongside a series of bent iron nails and a remarkably well-preserved and rare bronze box mirror, providing […]

A new study shows that early Homo sapiens in Europe coexisted with Neanderthals in specific locations where there were sufficient herbivores to support both populations. The results add texture to the growing image we have of the interactions between these two species. Herbivore carrying capacity In ecology, there’s an idea called the “competitive exclusion principle” […]

Unusually powerful disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field have sparked some stunning red auroras this week, with the rare scarlet glow visible from locations across Europe and North America. Typically, the famous Northern Lights are made up of predominantly green hues, and while flashes or streaks of crimson are sometimes seen, sustained red skies are […]

Recent years have seen newly budding flowers spring up across parts of Antarctica, much to the concern of some scientists. The increasing spread of plant life in the South Pole appears to be a consequence of human-driven climate change and may even indicate that the ice-capped continent is reaching its “tipping point.” Due to its […]

The Neanderthals made a glue out of birch bark tar to stick tools together; new studies confirm this required skills anthropologists have not been sure our extinct relatives had. If there was any doubt that the use of the term “Neanderthal” to insult someone’s intelligence was wrong, this should put it to rest. When we […]

A new study has revealed that Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm commonly used in scientific research, could possibly possess primitive “emotions”. Although humans have anthropomorphized animal emotions for a long time, the reality is that studying their emotions is quite a challenging feat. However, changes in an animal’s behavior, in response to a trigger, might be […]

According to a new study, the Gulf Stream has slowed by 4 percent over the past four decades. More worryingly, the researchers are 99 percent certain that the weakening of this important ocean current is more than random chance. The Gulf Stream plays a significant role in maintaining the climate of the US East Coast […]

If you haven’t heard of the Fermi Paradox, it goes something like this: Given the vastness of the universe and the probability that implies of life evolving elsewhere, how come no alien civilization has ever gotten in touch? We have found many exoplanets in the brief time we’ve been looking. Surely there must be someone […]

A machine learning program trained to differentiate between living and non-living things has a 90 percent success rate at differentiating the products of biology from those of non-living origin. Naturally, the makers could only train it on Earth-based life forms, so we can’t be certain it will be similarly successful when exposed to alien life, […]

On Saturday, an interview with Guardians of the Galaxy and Parks and Recreation actor Chris Pratt caught everyone’s eye.  Pratt told Vanity Fair that part of his fitness routine involved drinking a glass of water for every pound he weighed, daily, adding that he was “peeing all day long, every day” and that “that part was a […]

A big new update to ChatGPT will enable the chatbot to interact with voice conversations and respond to images. That’s right, the artificial intelligence (AI) will be able to hear your questions, see the world around you, and respond accordingly.  OpenAI, the non-profit group behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, announced the “multimodal” update in a blog […]

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission is one of the most ambitious projects that NASA, in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), has planned. The idea is to get two helicopters to Mars to pick up samples collected by Perseverance, pack them in a rocket, attempt the first rocket launch from another planet, get […]

The animal world is full of unusual species, from tarantulas with electric blue hair to deep sea octopuses hidden beneath the waves. While most species stick to breeding habits within their own kind, just occasionally, a set of circumstances will occur that causes a hybrid to be born. While hybridization in the wild is rare […]

At about 40 light-years from Earth, there is the TRAPPIST-1 system. Seven Earth-sized worlds orbit very close to a red dwarf, much dimmer and cooler than our Sun. Three of these worlds might have the right conditions for life, and astronomers are very interested in studying all of these exoplanets. Observations so far, though, point […]

A few weeks ago, the world was baffled as journalist and UFO researcher Jaime Maussan presented “mummified aliens” to the Mexican congress, claiming that they were a thousand years old.  The objects – looking suspiciously not-unlike E.T. from the film E.T. – have since been sent for scans by a forensic doctor with the navy, […]

A holly tree that had been lost to botanists for almost two centuries has been found after a six-day search operation in Brazil. The four trees that were rediscovered are thought to be the only ones left of this species, so that fateful day back in March of this year was an emotional one for […]

Southern Africa holds possibly the greatest human genetic diversity on Earth and new research reveals that diversity is in better shape than had been suspected. When some languages from the Namib Desert died out, anthropologists feared the populations that spoke them had gone too, but new research indicates the people have maintained a genetic identity […]

The humble feather lies at the heart of a new study, in which palaeontologists have revealed that feathered dinosaurs and modern birds are even more similar than we thought. Previous studies of fossilized dinosaur feathers have suggested that they had a different protein composition to that of modern birds. It was thought that ancient dinosaur […]