Deborah Bloomfield

Rocks keep time. Not on our human-scale time, but deep time: the almost unimaginable span of billions of years which have already come and gone. Let’s say you’re in the far future and you’re looking for evidence of previous civilisations. Where would you look? The first place would be in the rocks. Advertisement For decades, […]

The Crypt of Civilization was sealed 83 years ago. It won’t be opened again until the year 8113 CE. While studying Ancient Egypt, Dr Thornwell Jacobs was struck by how little accurate information about ancient civilizations had survived. He realized that virtually all our knowledge of life in Ancient Egypt came from just a few […]

Simply type in your address into this interactive map and you can see what your location looked like at the time of the dinosaurs and beyond. Using the Ancient Earth Map – freely accessible at https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth – you can easily click through these colossal changes and see how the Earth appeared through the eons.  Advertisement The appearance […]

Physicists like me don’t fully understand what makes up about 83% of the matter of the universe — something we call “dark matter.” But with a tank full of xenon buried nearly a mile under South Dakota, we might one day be able to measure what dark matter really is. In the typical model, dark […]

An incredibly rare, fully articulated dinosaur embryo has been found inside a fossilized egg that had been collecting dust for over a decade in the storage room of a museum in China. Thought to be between 66 and 72 million years old, the unborn specimen reveals an incredible link between dinosaurs and modern birds. Belonging […]

When researchers discover a new species that has been hiding away for many thousands of years, unsurprisingly, the discovery is usually fossilized. However in Turkey, scientists have now discovered not one, but two new species of living moles that they think have remained hidden away for around 3 million years. The adorable new discoveries have […]

The Greenland shark is the poster child for animals with extreme longevity – and with good reason. As the longest-living vertebrates on Earth, they develop incredibly slowly in their frosty Arctic home, but when it comes to the longest-living animals on Earth, they’re not all that. The ocean quahog is a pretty unremarkable-looking clam, reaching […]

Archaeologists have found the remains of a 17th-century burial near Pień in the Pomeranian Voivodeship in Poland. The infant occupant of this grave had been padlocked and buried facedown, in a practice used to stop the wicked dead from returning to haunt the living. The discovery was found close to another grave where a female […]

Around 85 percent of the world’s people identify with a religion, most of which are thousands upon thousands of years old. Of all the countless religious belief systems globally, Hinduism is most often cited as the oldest surviving major religion. However, there are a number of spiritual belief systems that deserve a mention when exploring […]

Brightness fluctuations on a star with 10,000 times the Sun’s volume have been explained by enormous waves rippling in its outer layers. Instead of sloshing endlessly around the star, these waves break once a month, throwing gases into orbit. Naming a star MACHO 80.7443.1718 makes it sound tough. However, this star is called that because […]

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. That’s especially true when it comes to the internet and the many free services you’re offered, whether it’s social media platforms or search engines. Internet companies often make their billions by advertising and harvesting their users’ data. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to get a […]

Russian scientists have introduced 12 bison to the Russian Arctic in the hope they will restore the ancient ecosystem that was once maintained by woolly mammoths. In addition, the scientists involved hope these animals will help slow down the damage being caused by climate change.  The bison (Bison bison bison – easy to remember), also […]

One of the oldest burial chambers in the Iberian Peninsula has been identified in a cave in northern Spain, with bones from within the pit dated to over 6,000 years ago. Representing some of the earliest Neolithic human remains ever discovered in the region, the find provides a rare insight into the funerary customs of […]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has updated its forecast for the ongoing 2023 Atlantic hurricane season, ramping up its predictions from a near-normal level of activity to an above-normal level of activity. The latest update was announced by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center on August 10.  Advertisement Its previous forecast in May predicted just […]

People have done all kinds of wacky things in the name of science. Thankfully, the events of this story are a bit less drastic than that time a scientist fed birds rice to see if they would explode, or when the discoverer of LSD took a pretty hefty dose to test it out, culminating in […]

This week a new species of tarantula showed off its locks of golden hair, astronomers have set their next target following the first-ever image of a black hole, and a new shark species was discovered in Australia with some funky-looking teeth. Finally, we learned about the first name ever given in print for a dinosaur […]

Airplane mode is not just for when you want to secretly read your WhatsApp messages – it’s actually supposed to be used on, you know, airplanes. You might not have realized it, but your phone’s radio signals could be causing all sorts of havoc as you zoom through the sky, with knock-on effects that could […]

The Perseid meteor shower, the best of the year, is set to peak on Saturday, August 12 with an expected 40 meteors an hour. The Perseids is one of the most prolific meteor showers and this year the conditions are perfect to view the fireworks. The rate per hour of this shower can reach 100 […]