Deborah Bloomfield

A recently discovered meteor shower that peaks just once every five years is expected to reach its crescendo this week. Known as the chi Cygnids, the rare shower has been slowly increasing in intensity since late August, leading to predictions that it could light up the sky between September 13 and 15. The rest of […]

Back in September 2023, scientists monitoring seismic activity across the world were all met with a mysterious signal making its way throughout the whole of the planet. “We were baffled – the signal was unlike any previously recorded,” Stephen Hicks, Research Fellow in Computational Seismology at UCL, and Kristian Svennevig, Senior Researcher at the Geological […]

Volcanoes are well known for being, you know, fiery and hot. And yet, they can be found dotting the floor of the famously frigid deep ocean – a place where their existence seems to defy intuition. Why do they appear there? How do they survive? And what happens when they erupt? Turns out, some of […]

In 1977, a rhino was born at Dvůr Králové Zoo. She was named Nasi, and came as a bit of a surprised because her mother, a northern white rhino called Nasima, had only had contact with one male rhino. Why was that so strange? Well, he was an entirely different species. Hybrids like Nasi crop […]

A planetary science conference has heard how to redirect threatening asteroids so they don’t come back and endanger the Earth at a later date. You’d think that would be a key feature of any mission to protect the planet, but that assumes the mission is run by scientists, not chief financial officers. When Hollywood imagines […]

A group of researchers have watched every episode of the hit children’s cartoon Bluey, finding evidence for what most parents will tell you about the show against your will. Bluey, for those of you who aren’t of parent or child age, is an Australian cartoon about a family of dogs living in a version of […]

Welcome to the future, where we have two existential problems we simply can’t get rid of: the atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide, and plastic waste is freaking everywhere. Now, though, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have come up with a two-in-one breakthrough that uses one problem to solve the other – by transforming […]

NASA has some exciting new results from the Perseverance rover, and they will be presented during a press conference on Wednesday, September 10. The call for a press conference is exciting as it suggests that there is something really juicy to be showcased with a new paper published at the same time. The rest of […]

From the 1930s to the 1970s, barrels amounting to thousands of tons of chemicals were dumped off the coast of Los Angeles. It was an assault on the environment that would continue to unfold for decades to come, and worse still, we weren’t even sure what was inside the barrels. For a long time we […]

What’s your favorite song? Maybe it’s a classic, maybe it’s a forgotten B-side, a love song, a musical number, or something else. It is often said that it’s something we listened to as teenagers that we link to the strong emotions of those years. There might be truth to that, or at least we become […]

Every year, sea turtle hatchlings crawl across Florida’s beaches in search of the ocean. It’s a treacherous journey as it is – predators, debris, and light pollution all present roadblocks the tiny turtles must navigate – but it’s becoming even more so thanks to a stinky seaweed called Sargassum. This floating brown macroalgae washes up […]

Four volunteers will soon be sealed inside an imitation Mars habitat on Earth, simulating a year-long mission to the Red Planet ahead of the real deal. On October 19, the volunteers will step foot inside their new home and not emerge until Halloween 2026, 378 days later. The study is the second of three planned […]

Something fishy has unfolded in the Gulf of Panama. For the first time in recorded history, the annual restock of cold, nutrient-rich waters failed to emerge off Panama’s Pacific coastline. The cause is not totally clear, but the impact could be profound. Every year for four decades, researchers have noted how the waters in the […]

Once upon a time, there lived a group of ancient “terror crocodiles” that were around 10 meters (33 feet) long and had teeth “the size of bananas”. While perhaps not the most threatening of fruits, teeth of this enormous size allowed these ancient crocodiles to take down even the largest of dinosaurs as the biggest […]

Over the last few years, there have been several hearings in Congress regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), the more apt term by which UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) are known. There have been no dramatic shows of evidence about UAPs in these previous hearings, but maybe today is the day that everything changes. The rest of […]

When you picture something gracefully gliding through the air, your mind probably jumps to birds, bats, or maybe even flying squirrels. But we’re here to tell you, if you look up at the forest canopy in South Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, you might just see a snake take flight. Flying snakes, of the genus […]

The bumblebee bat, also known as Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, is the smallest known species of bat. Fragile in form and existence, there are serious fears that this teabag-sized treasure is in trouble, endangered with extinction and left with an uncertain future. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe […]

The nearby (on a galactic scale) star Fomalhaut has a giant ring that has puzzled astronomers since its discovery in 2005. Evidence has now been published that the ring is even more out of kilter with expectations, and a giant planet probably has a role. Fomalhaut is not a name that rolls easily off the […]

Ten years ago, on September 14, 2015, at 9:50 am UTC, our planet was compressed and then stretched by a tiny fraction of a nanometer for a handful of milliseconds. Earth has experienced this since its birth, 4.5 billion years ago; gravitational waves have existed since the beginning of the universe. This one, though, was […]

A protein that’s central to brain aging has been discovered by scientists, who’ve gone the extra mile by also finding out how it can be stopped. FTL1, as it’s called, is a key mediator of aging in the hippocampus – a part of the brain that’s particularly badly affected as the years roll by. As […]