Deborah Bloomfield

The Earth may appear to be a nice little closed system. We get energy from the Sun of course, but it seems that from the atmosphere down, all of the processes are terrestrial in source.  We know that this idea is not exactly true — the Sun is also spewing a constant stream of charged […]

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the ancient city of Pompeii was decimated and thousands of people died. Despite being one of the most famous, and best-preserved, natural disasters in human history, there is still much debate as to how these people perished. Now, a new analysis adds credence to the theory that some […]

Yesterday, India made history, becoming the fourth nation to land on the Moon and the first to land at the lunar South Pole. Now, we’ve got the first photos of the landing site and the plucky rover Pragyan, the Moon’s newest resident, has started exploring its new home. “The Ch-3 Rover ramped down from the Lander […]

Researchers in Australia have used spent coffee grounds to make concrete 30 percent stronger. Simply by replacing a percentage of sand with waste coffee, something common to many households, it is possible to make construction more efficient and greener.  As a household item, coffee grounds are everywhere. It is currently estimated that around 60 million […]

If we want to lower our carbon emissions, persuading people to switch to a vegan diet – or at least reduce their meat consumption – is a good place to start. Vegan diets have around half the climate footprint of the average diet, and if the world was to shift to a vegan diet, food-related […]

A Bronze Age family that lived 3,800 years ago in the Southern Urals may have taken a flexible approach to marriage, with most men allowed just one wife while a select few enjoyed the company of multiple women. Analyzing the genomes of 32 ancient relatives who were all interred in the same burial mound, researchers […]

Climate change and a global rise in temperature are often synonymous with species like polar bears, who face drastic problems due to lack of sea ice at the temperature extremes in the poles. However, a new study by experts at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has placed African wild dogs on the brink of a […]

Glitter is everywhere: clothing, holiday decorations, and bodily crevices that aren’t appropriate to mention. Inevitably, it’s made its way into waterways, where new research suggests it impairs the growth of key aquatic bacteria. Some scientists have already called for glitter to be banned, as it’s made up of non-biodegradable microplastics. Too small to be filtered […]

Japan has announced it will begin releasing the treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant later this week. The water, which was originally contaminated after the 2011 earthquake destroyed the reactor, is scheduled for release on Thursday, August 24, 2023, and will be the first step in a phased process that has become […]

We often think of patterns and visualize something with geometric regularity, but those are not the only patterns that exist. There are plenty of patterns in nature that are hardly geometrical but are clearly distinctive – think of the spots on a giraffe (although they now come in plain too!). We might not instinctively understand […]

It’s among the smallest of human chromosomes, but the complex structure of the Y chromosome has made it notoriously resistant to efforts to fully decipher it. Now, the first-ever complete sequence of the Y chromosome has been revealed, bringing us one step closer to solving a plethora of unanswered questions. “Now that we have this […]

In 1929, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy wrote the short story Chains, containing a concept you’re probably familiar with thanks to the star of My Dog Skip and Footloose. In the story, a group is chatting when the narrator has a minor revelation about how the world has shrunk due to quickening communication and transport. During […]

Some Mars rovers have friends, while others have foes, and unfortunately for NASA’s Curiosity, it falls into this latter bracket. The rover’s nemesis comes in the form of Gediz Vallis Ridge, which has been dubbed Mars’ “Bermuda Triangle” due to several thwarted efforts to reach it. Now, Curiosity is set to make another, hopefully less […]

Particle accelerators are either built, like at CERN, or happen naturally around extreme cosmic objects. A new study suggests that the first particle accelerators might have happened at the very beginning of the universe, a mere fraction of a second following the Big Bang. They were caused by bubbles created by the rapidly changing universe, […]

Rare earth metals are set to take center stage in the “green revolution” as they provide high-performance magnets used in renewable infrastructure like wind turbines, high-tech appliances, and electric cars. However, getting our hands on these much-sought-after materials is not always easy. Fortunately, there might be a solution in the form of a mysterious metal […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already passed a hefty test, proving they are better than humans at passing those online “I am not a robot” CAPTCHA tests. But can they pass the Turing test?  The Turing test (which renowned mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing originally and much more modestly called The Imitation Game) involves separating […]

When humans were busy pummeling the Earth with atomic bombs in the latter half of the 20th century, turtles and tortoises across the world were quietly (and very slowly) getting on with their lives. Unbeknownst to them, the legacy of the dreadful explosions was becoming deeply imprinted into their shells. New research has studied the […]

India did it. The lander and rover of the Chandrayaan-3 mission reached the surface of the Moon, landing as expected on Wednesday, August 23 at 12:34 pm UTC (8:34 am EST). This makes India the fourth nation to successfully soft land on the Moon, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China. Chandrayaan-3 has […]

In Roman Spain, some 2,000 years ago, people may have been dousing themselves with the musky scent of patchouli, recent research hints. The study marks the first time that the composition of a Roman perfume has been identified, offering us a rare whiff of a bygone empire. The perfume, which has solidified after two millennia […]