Deborah Bloomfield

A video posted to Twitter and Reddit reportedly shows birds acting strangely prior to the earthquake which hit Turkey and Syria on Monday.  The video is as yet unverified and there are of course reasons to be skeptical of it (think about how after every flood disaster, someone claims that a shark has made its […]

If you go walking beneath the Betsy Ross Bridge along the Delaware River, you will be met by a cascade of over 20,000 gravestones. The stones have been repurposed as rip-rap, foundational material that sits at the base of a breakwater or bridge, like the Betsy Ross. But how did they come to be here, […]

Females of a population of orcas (killer whales) have been found to invest an astonishing amount of effort in their male offspring, to an extent never previously reported in nature. Their daughters get much less support. The sacrifices are so large the mothers are much less likely to successfully raise younger children, of either sex, […]

Along the shores of Lake Victoria in Africa, archeologists have uncovered the oldest ever evidence of human ancestors using tools to butcher the meat of ancient hippopotamuses. Dating to roughly 2.9 million years old, the Stone Age toolkit shows the earliest found evidence of hominins chowing down on very large animals. It also raises questions […]

Science has a magical way of coming up with Hollywood solutions to everyday problems. The death of farmed fish in aquaculture from infections is astronomical each year, stretching into the millions, but now researchers have come up with a way to protect catfish from illness: by casually chucking a bit of alligator DNA into their […]

The Curiosity mission team has discovered the clearest evidence of ancient water ripples yet. Billions of years ago on Mars, waves on the surface of shallow water shook sediment at the bottom. As the water evaporated and the planet dried, the impression of waves turned into rocks that have now been spotted by the NASA […]

The fortifications of Xi’an are an archaeological marvel and one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. The fortress was built during the 14th century by Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Emperor of the Ming dynasty, and it has been kept and refurbished several times since its construction. But to see the areas that might need interventions, researchers […]

When exploring some eroding boulders on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island with his son, Alan Tennyson of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa found fossil remnants of 57-million-year-old giant penguins. That would be exciting enough – but as other scientists assisted in unscrambling the finds, it became clear there were […]

A peculiar mummy was unearthed in 1975 during the renovation of the Barfüsser Church in Basel, Switzerland, as the remains of Anna Catharina Bischoff were found beneath the floors. She had died aged 68 way back in 1787, though exactly what caused her death has been the subject of some debate. Part of the reason […]

Believe it or not, this is a photo of sand. At 10 times magnification, sand from the beach at Point Spencer, Alaska, looks like a handful of glittering gemstones. This dazzling, colorful array can tell us much about the history of this wild, remote region. An ancient crossroads Nestled between the Kotzebue Sound to the […]

A team of researchers from the SERI-MATS research group have found some strange and partially inexplicable behavior in OpenAI’s ChatGPT, when the chatbot is presented with certain key words and phrases. Jessica Rumbelow and Matthew Watkins, who conducted the research, found that a number of unusual strings of characters result in the odd responses from […]

A mysterious Russian satellite has created a large cloud of debris after breaking apart in orbit in early January, posing a potential problem for years to come. According to the US Space Force’s 18th Defense Squadron (SDS), which tracks artificial objects in space, the event created at least 85 separate pieces of junk that will […]

It looks like Netflix is ramping up its efforts to stamp out the scourge of password sharers. This week, the video streaming company announced it had updated its policy on password sharing in four more countries: Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain. In these four countries, users will now have to set a primary location […]

We previously introduced you to Flossie, the world’s oldest living cat, and Bobi, the oldest dog on record. Now, meet Pat. At the whopping age of 9 years and 209 days old, he’s just been dubbed the oldest living mouse in human care by Guinness World Records. The fantastically named Pacific pocket mouse is the […]

Google’s wannabe rival to ChatGPT is off to a shaky start after its launch video featured a glaring error about the JWST and exoplanets. As a result of the blunder, shares in parent company Alphabet plunged by around $100 billion on Wednesday.  In a promo video posted on Wednesday, Googles’s new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, […]

In March 2020, as the UK was preparing to go into lockdown, two new trials were posted on the clinicaltrials.gov database. The researchers were proposing that BCG, an old vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), should be tested for its protective effect against COVID. As vaccines tend to activate very specific immune responses against their target disease, […]

The family of plants that give us such treasures as tomatoes, potatoes, our most popular herbs, and even coffee coexisted with the dinosaurs, a single fossil has revealed. That doesn’t mean any of these individual plants existed in the Cretaceous, let alone the eras giant herbivores took advantage – but we can certainly be grateful […]

The champions of unclouded thought were recently put to the test in a study that sought to explore if an illogical puzzle could be more easily solved by an animal with the associative learning approach of a computer. It saw researchers put a group of pigeons to the test to investigate their performance in a […]

A new species of titanosaur has been unearthed in Patagonia and based on the measurement of its femur, it was an absolute beast. With a thigh bone about the same length as a tall adult human, it’s a rare find and one that’s teaching us that there’s a lot more to learn about a group […]