Deborah Bloomfield

If you like figs then it could be argued that you have a taste for wasps. The relationship between figs and fig wasps is arguably the most interdependent pollination symbiosis known to science, and it ends with a lot of dead wasps going missing inside figs. By the time you come to eat the fig […]

Bing’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot appears to have cited lies originally made by Google’s rival chatbot Bard, in a worrying example of how misinformation could be spread by the new large language models. It’s been a tough week for AI chatbots, so it’s probably a good thing they don’t have feelings. Google launched its new […]

The idea of a multiverse consisting of “parallel universes” is a popular science fiction trope, recently explored in the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. However, it is within the realm of scientific possibility. It is important to state from the start that the existence (or not) of the multiverse is a consequence of […]

Plans to build a detector deep under the ocean to try and catch the most elusive particles in the world, neutrinos, have been announced by The Chinese Academy of Sciences. They are not the only ones: Work is currently underway to build three detectors in the Mediterranean Sea, one has been proposed off the coast […]

Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) is usually remembered as the inventor of a revolutionary miner’s safety lamp. But his wild popularity came as much from his influence on popular culture as it did from his contributions to chemistry and applied science. In the first few years of the 19th century, there was no hotter spectacle in […]

A major coronal hole has opened up in the Sun’s atmosphere and is now pointing almost straight at us. Such events are usually associated with an increase in solar wind speed and interplanetary magnetic field strength. If the location on the Sun is right, this can lead to geomagnetic storms and auroral activity as the […]

If you snoop around the Greek island of Naxos, you might stumble across a rock statue quietly sleeping in a marble quarry. He’s known as the Kouros of Apollonas. Although he may look a bit like an Easter Island Moai statue, it’s believed this unfinished sculpture actually depicts a bearded Greek god.  The Kouros of […]

Gold might represent first place, be pooped out by bacteria, and be the plot line of every major treasure hunt movie, but silver might just have it pipped to the post when it comes to the largest nugget ever found. Back in the 1860s, silver was found in Aspen, Colorado, USA. Of all the silver […]

In more recent times, our visions of the end of the world have ranged from the quite drastic threat of the climate crisis and nuclear war to imagining artificial intelligence absorbing and replacing us. Before that, there were biblical tales of angels pouring their bowels upon the Earth, turning the seas to blood, and the […]

Beneath your feet in the depths of our planet, there’s an unbelievably vast ecosystem teeming with life. In recent years, a massive international team of scientists revealed how billions upon billions of microorganisms live miles beneath Earth’s subsurface. Presenting their work at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in 2018, the researchers calculated the size […]

Back in 2017, archaeologists in Switzerland come across a truly baffling, yet potentially very important, discovery buried within an ancient grave: a 3,500-year-old bronze hand with a gold cuff around the wrist. It was the first and only time an object like this has ever been unearthed in this part of Europe, so the researchers […]

The idea that overweight or obese people more often survive after heart failure, called the “obesity paradox”, is likely to be false, according to new research. By looking at waist-to-height ratio instead of body mass index (BMI), the researchers discovered that the mysterious correlation disappears, putting further question to BMI as a medical metric.  Identified […]

Astronomers had to reclassify a galaxy this week because something almost unique happened at its center. Its active supermassive black hole has a jet, and it is no longer pointing in the same direction it used to. It is now pointing at us, after a major change. The galaxy is called PBC J2333.9-2343 and is […]

The Grand Prismatic Spring of Yellowstone National Park is the largest thermal spring in the US and the thirds largest in the world. But the sheer size of this 61-100 meter (200-330 feet) wide, almost 50 meters (160 feet) deep body of water isn’t what makes it Yellowstone’s most photographed feature. First named in 1871, […]

Recent research into the “facial feedback hypothesis” using Botox injections to the forehead has found that the injections can change the way the brain interprets and processes other people’s emotions. This may mean people’s ability to understand the expression of emotions is temporarily impaired due to disruption to neuromuscular feedback.  The facial feedback hypothesis states […]

The Illuminati are synonymous with conspiracy theories. Signaled by pyramids and creepy eye symbols, many believe they are a shadowy organization with global influence that’s hell-bent on controlling the world’s population, sparking wars for their own evil ends, and sculpting reality. It’s lesser known, however, that the idea of the Illuminati being puppet masters of […]

Klerksdorp spheres, found inside pyrophyllite deposits mined in South Africa, are weird. Looking like tiny ancient cricket balls, with seam-like lines around their middle, it’s easy to see why they became the subject of conspiracy theories involving aliens and ancient, forgotten civilizations. In articles in the 1980s, they were speculated to be made by “a […]

Banking giant JP Morgan Chase was left pretty disappointed after discovering their large haul of nickel was just plain old rocks, according to a new report.  As a result of an apparent warehouse mix-up, an operator weighing bags containing 54 metric tons of the metal found the supposed briquettes of nickel were not what they […]

When Voyager 2 swung past Uranus 37 years ago, it sent back radiation data that mystified astronomers. A forthcoming paper attributes the observations to water molecules escaping from one of Uranus’s moons. This could indicate the presence of an internal ocean, and therefore a chance of life, along with the possibility of sampling these waters […]

Looking at nutmeg, brown ball that it is with a telltale title to boot, you might find yourself wondering: is nutmeg a nut? As is often the way with kitchen staples, there’s sometimes confusion over where nutmeg comes from and what it actually is. The good news for people with nut allergies is that no, […]