Deborah Bloomfield

Guns, according to many a Second Amendment advocate, don’t kill people – people kill people. It’s a catchy turn of phrase, and it spawned a fun Welsh bop that one time, but it ignores one very important variable: that it’s a whole lot easier for people to kill people when they have easy access to […]

If you’re a bit of a fan of ancient and mysterious manuscripts, perhaps with a little sprinkling of satanic legend, then the Codex Gigas, or the Devil’s Bible, is for you. The legend behind it goes like this: In 13th-century Bohemia, a Christian monk named Herman broke his monastic vows and was subsequently sentenced to […]

Humans are pretty good at making things hot. Heck, it’s pretty much our species’ entire claim to fame at this point. But just how hot can we go when we really put our minds to it? It might seem like a frivolous question – but our ability to heat things up has been responsible for […]

Crystals that are perfectly symmetrical around a central point can nevertheless respond to light as if they were asymmetric, scientists have found. The discovery could lead to more sensitive measuring devices, improve the security of signal transmission, and even allow brighter optical displays, researchers claim. Symmetry comes in many forms. Our bodies, up to a […]

The US state of Alaska has issued its first-ever heat advisory, as meteorologists also warn of flooding caused by rapid snowmelt. The National Weather Service (NWS) offices in Fairbanks and Juneau issued the initial heat advisory on June 12, followed by an updated advisory on June 16 warning of temperatures up to 29.4 to 31.1°C […]

Scientists have developed the longest and most complex simulation to date of a binary neutron star collision that results in the formation of a black hole and a jet. The breakthrough will massively improve future observations of these collisions, since they heavily rely on the theoretical backing to be discovered. The first observation of gravitational […]

Imagine, if you will, you are a fly. Out for a stroll when lo! A strong, sticky substance has you ensnared: a spider’s web, built by the eight-legged giant on its way to kill you. You ready yourself for the fatal bite, fangs puncturing your tissues and delivering a mercifully lethal dose of venom, only […]

Scientists have found an intriguing discrepancy in the way electrons behave in different calcium atoms. The difference between the observations and actual theoretical calculation is subtle; however, the team believes the peculiar effect comes down to a single factor. Whether this factor is something known and missed, or something new, is yet to be determined, […]

Uranus is a very weird planet, and it turns out that there is a newly discovered oddity to add to its already extensive list. Astronomers used Hubble to study the interactions between the planet’s weird magnetic field and its moons, trying to demonstrate that a well-founded hypothesis was true. They found out the very opposite. […]

Nothing stays the same for long, even Earth’s seemingly solid crust. Your day-to-day perception of the ground you stand on might suggest otherwise, but our planet is an ever-changing, shape-shifting globule of crust floating around a molten sphere of mantle and metals. Scientists have managed to beautifully illustrate this idea through a 1-minute video (watch […]

In most (but not all) cultures, it’s incredibly rude to ignore a sneeze – it has to be publicly acknowledged with a go-to response that everyone knows by heart. In English, the reply is almost always “Bless you!” But do you know the origins of why we say that when a room rings out with […]

A dinosaur that lived not long before the asteroid ended its kind had a tumor that paleontologists have been studying for seven years. Now, some of those working on the specimen have used advanced microscopy to provide new insights into the disease that plagued the 4-meter (13 feet) long hadrosaur, and think the findings might […]

They say we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean, but it still might surprise you to learn that we only just officially recognized one of Earth’s continents in 2017. Known as Te Riu-a-Māui, or Zealandia, it’s sandwiched between Australia, Eurasia, and North America, and […]

A while back, the Internet was puzzled by a physics problem involving a set of scales, an iron ball, and a ping pong ball of equal size. Now that that one has been cleared up, Reddit has been mulling over another problem: why won’t this contraption turn? “I don’t know where else to ask,” Redditor […]

The animal world is full of contradictions, from tiny mouse-deer that are neither mice nor deer, to vampire squid that aren’t vampires or squid. Now, we come to another confusingly named creature: the Garman’s sea snake is a snake, but it doesn’t live in the sea.  Garman’s sea snake (Hydrophis semperi) is one of only […]

A little over 100,000 years ago, groups of prehistoric humans in the Levant suddenly began burying their dead, marking one of the most significant cognitive and behavioral leaps in the history of our species. Yet these primordial grave-diggers weren’t quite like us, and new research reveals that a young child from the world’s oldest cemetery […]

Microplastics are everywhere and unavoidable. They’re in the water we drink, the food we eat, and the air we breathe. But if you’re a city slicker looking to reduce the impact of airborne plastic particles, a green roof could be your best bet. By green roof, we’re not talking about painting your house green. We’re […]

Deep in the Amazon rainforest lives a culture that challenges everything we think we know about language and human cognition. The Pirahã people have captivated – and divided – linguists for decades because their language appears to lack words that express precise numerical values; threes, fours, fives, and the like simply don’t factor in their […]

When Dr Ana Gracanin of the Australian National University placed an infrared camera inside a large tree hollow used by greater gliders as a nest, she didn’t expect to see the glider father delivering food to the young. Even more surprising was the way he did it, with tasty stems wrapped in the doting father’s […]

Mount Everest, one of the go-to examples of a “thing that is large”, looks like a tiny hillock in comparison to other mountains of the Solar System. While Everest stands at 8,849 meters (29,032 feet) tall, the two tallest mountains orbiting the Sun reach over 20,000 meters (65,600 feet) in elevation. The second-tallest mountain structure […]