Deborah Bloomfield

In 2017, a surprisingly popular Reddit post asked the scientists of the site a simple question: Do giraffes get struck by lightning more often than other animals? Well, not only are there a number of reports out there of giraffes being killed by lightning, there are also case reports which suggest the tall animals can […]

Scientists are developing a vaccine they hope could be the first immunization to fight against invasive fungal infections. While it has only been tested on animals so far, the research could eventually pave the way toward a broad-spectrum vaccine that could tackle the growing threat of drug-resistant fungi.  In a recent study, an experimental vaccine […]

When it came to sending people to the Moon, a lot of focus is on the rockets, the math, and the astronauts. However, the incredible machinery that was NASA in the 1960s also required some more down-to-Earth logistics. The space agency had to acquire land on Merrit Island in Florida in the early 1960s to […]

For the past year, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department (TPCHD) in Washington has been issuing multiple court orders for a resident to agree to treatment and isolation over an active case of tuberculosis. According to NBC News, the woman in question has refused the requests and may now be facing legal action. Tuberculosis is an […]

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected]. If dinosaurs died, how come there are birds? Caiden S., age 9, Wylie, Texas Advertisement Everyone knows what a bird is – and pretty much everyone knows what a dinosaur […]

Google is set to launch its own rival to Open AI’s ChatGPT, a language model that can answer your questions and queries. The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot named Bard will roll out to the public in the coming weeks. Bard, CEO of Google Sundar Pichai explained in an update, will initially be a scaled-down version […]

Here’s a question: would you rather fight one angry human or 15,000 furious ants? Aggressive naked apes can be a pain, but the smallness of insects is only an upside until they all club together. What if, say, all land insects on Earth were to combine? It’d be a hell of a force to be […]

A team of Chinese scientists has brought together two major revelations from General Relativity and found they may add up to something big when it comes to finding wormholes. Wormholes are conceived as tunnels through spacetime connecting two distant regions, allowing shortcuts that avoid the need to travel immense distances. Microlenses, despite their name, are […]

Sleep and rest are essential parts of staying healthy. Yet, according to the CDC, one in three adults report not getting enough sleep each night. And while there are many old wives’ tales floating around to try and help, modern science has come up with better, easier ways to help your body relax. For those […]

Archeological discoveries along the Portuguese coast show that Neanderthals were fine diners who enjoyed roasting crabs and other shellfish over 90,000 years ago. The new study is yet another reminder that our closest cousins were not the knuckleheads they are often depicted as, but an intelligent species that bear many close similarities to us.  Researchers […]

The sometimes astonishing sex lives of animals are well known, especially the huge range in penis structures, evolved to increase the number of offspring that males father. For example, ducks have corkscrew-shaped penises, and echidnas (also known as spiny anteaters) have a four-headed penis. But what about female genitalia? For hundreds of years, scientists assumed […]

Gazing upon the wrinkled face of a pug it can be hard to believe that all dogs are descended from wolves. We know older breeds are genetically more similar to wolves than modern ones, but are there some easy-to-spot indicators as to which is which? A new study says yes, as it found that a […]

A woodpecker has filled a house’s walls with acorns, using the wall cavity as food storage. The owners of the house in California called pest control who cut open a hole in the wall, allowing thousands upon thousands of acorns to fall out. Nick’s Extreme Pest Control posted images of the situation to Facebook. Advertisement […]

A care home in Iowa has been fined $10,000 after wrongly declaring a patient dead. The woman, who was 66 years old, had spent almost 50 minutes zipped inside a body bag while being transported to a funeral home before staff members realized she was still alive. She was presumed dead at 6 am on […]

Deep in the genome of Antarctic octopuses, marine biologists have found something odd. Although the work is still undergoing peer review, the most likely explanation is an event over 100,000 years ago with very serious implications for the Earth’s future in a warmer climate. During the 2010 football World Cup, an octopus named Paul achieved […]

A man developed foreign accent syndrome (FAS) as a rare and perhaps unique manifestation of his prostate cancer, his doctors have described in a BMJ Case report. The case describes how a man, in his 50s, was diagnosed with prostate cancer 20 months prior to his speech issues. At that point, he reported notable changes […]

What did our early ancestors eat? It’s one of the central questions in palaeoanthropology. If researchers can understand the diet of ancient hominins, this in turn provides clues as to what they looked like, where they lived, and how they socialized with each other. Now, a new Perspective paper has outlined the modern techniques that […]

So far, the list of animals known to be able to recognize their own reflection is slim, but now it seems the unsuspecting cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus) could be the latest addition. A study into mirror self-recognition (MSR) has investigated the reactions of cleaner fish to images of themselves and of other members of their […]

It’s not often in life that scientists get the opportunity to explore a habitat frozen in time for millennia, but when researchers in 2015 began to suspect that a cavernous space was hiding within the rock of south-east Spain, they got a hell of a lot more than they’d bargained for.  It would be years […]

We humans produce a frankly ridiculous amount of data, whether that’s your dissertationfinalfinalfinal.docx word file containing what went on to be your rough first draft of your dissertation, or an adorable video of a panda sneezing.  In 2020, it was estimated that the world produced about 2.5 quintillion digital data bytes per day. By 2025, […]