Deborah Bloomfield

A fresh genetic analysis has revealed more of the story behind Ötzi the Iceman, a remarkably well preserved human who perished in the Italian Alps around 5,300 years ago. As it turns out, the unfortunate mummy was closely related to the early farmers from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey who migrated here. Furthermore, his skin was […]

Good news everyone, you’ve probably been tying your shoes wrong most of your life, and before that the only reason you weren’t tying them wrong was because you were in Velcro.  The method a lot of us use, once you’ve progressed from bunny ears, is the system of creating a loop with one lace, then […]

Back in 1973, British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose described “Penrose tiles,” two shapes that can be placed together in a neverending, non-repeating pattern. Not only did it look pretty, it challenged some of the conventional ideas around symmetry and periodicity. It was thought to be groundbreaking – and in most respects, it was – but […]

Thanks to gravitational wave observatories, we know that when two black holes merge, they create a third black hole. The final black hole is slightly less massive than the sum of its parents, as some energy has been lost as gravitational waves. This final black hole is also kicked away from its birthplace by the […]

If there’s one thing you can rely on in life, it’s the laws of physics. Things in your life may change, friends come and go, but there are the laws of physics day in, day out, tirelessly keeping you from floating away into space like you’ve sampled the wrong chocolate at Willy Wonka’s suspiciously high-fatality […]

Canterbury Cathedral is one of the oldest and most famous Christian buildings in England. It’s the site of the assassination of archbishop Thomas Becket and the destination of the pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. A pair of scientists saw something extra about this historic building. It has a large old roof – the perfect […]

Great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are famously solitary, highly adapted predators that take the blame for all manner of scary movie characteristics. However research has revealed that these giants of the ocean may have a softer side and even form close social bonds – shark BFFs, anyone? Researchers studying shark behavior have made an unusual […]

The hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica is strangely large for this time of year, prompting fears that it could lead to further warming of the South Pole. Oddly enough, it looks like this is a consequence of water vapor that ended up in Earth’s stratosphere following the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai eruption, the […]

When it comes to amphibians from fairy tales there are really only two options and whether you’re after Prince Charming or something to put in a witches cauldron we’ve got the reality check when it comes to telling the difference between frogs and toads.  Frog and toad characteristics First, let’s look at their skin. Frogs […]

In the history of medicine, there is one story that is a fantastic example of how observation and experimentation can lead to significant changes and discoveries. The same story, however, is also an extreme example of how some scientific ideas can nevertheless be dismissed in favor of tradition.  During the 1840s, at the Vienna General […]

A Pyrrhic victory means winning at such a great cost, it almost amounts to a defeat. Highly relatable to anyone who’s ever tried to “win” at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and a lesson that Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, learned the hard way when he went to war with elephants. The first time Romans saw an elephant […]

Greenwich is home to the Prime Meridian, but just visiting the world famous Royal Observatory won’t actually make you cross from one hemisphere to the other. That’s because the actual zero meridian is now a little bit off from where it was established: 102.5 meters (334 feet). You can blame improvements in technology and science […]

Alaska’s largest dinosaur track site has been discovered in Denali National Park, and researchers are calling it a “dinosaur coliseum”. If the epic nickname isn’t enough to convince you that this is a big deal, a new study has described how the coliseum contains a record number of species’ footprints across many generations in the […]

The pet dog lounging on your sofa and the feral wolf roaming the harsh wilderness share some clear differences – as well as some very significant similarities. Given their proximity in the family tree, it is possible for domestic dogs to breed with a number of wolf species, including gray wolves, eastern wolves, red wolves, […]

Whether power corrupts a person – or if a corrupt person is more apt to pursue a position of power – has long been a question amongst the scientific community.   Take, for example, the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, an inherently flawed study that was halted after six days following the abuse doled out by one […]

Music is such a central part of what it means to be human, yet there’s so much scientists don’t know about what goes on in our brains when we listen to our favorite tunes. Now, a study has broken new ground by showing that it is possible to reconstruct a song that someone was hearing […]

The world is on the cusp of a new “gold rush” – and it has the potential to be disastrous for the marine environment. As demand for electronics and batteries continues to grow, eagle-eyed investors are looking to make a fortune by mining the deep sea for rare minerals. While an appetite for profits is […]

An exceptional explosion 1.3 billion light years from Earth produced enough heavy metals to outweigh all the planets, moons, and asteroids in the Solar System combined, just from the scarcest elements in the universe. Despite the rarity of the event, the production of precious metals and other rarities was so great that these events could […]

In 1999, box office hit The Matrix introduced a wider audience to an age-old philosophical problem: how do you know what you’re experiencing is real? In the Wachowskis’ Matrix series, humans far in the future have been enslaved by sentient robots, to be used as one of the most inefficient batteries imaginable and somehow power […]

Quantum computers are the next step in computation. These devices can harness the peculiarities of quantum mechanics to dramatically boost the power of computers. Not even the most powerful supercomputer can compete with this approach. But to deliver on that incredible potential, the road ahead remains long. Still, in the last few years, big steps […]