Deborah Bloomfield

The world’s largest lava lake lies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), nestled within Mount Nyiragongo. Stretching about 250 meters (820 feet) across at a depth of 600 meters (1,970 feet), it’s quite the hot tub of bubbling magma. Part of the Virunga Mountains, it sits within the UNESCO World Heritage Site Virunga […]

Trying to figure out what alien life may look like is, as you might imagine, a pretty difficult task, given we have data on life from exactly one planet: Earth. But that doesn’t mean that we have nothing to work with. Astrobiologists have attempted to figure out how aliens may evolve given what we know […]

In August 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space with no idea they would go on to become the space agency’s longest-running mission. The twin probes would end up visiting Jupiter and Saturn, and Uranus and Neptune, respectively, before going on to become the first (and only) human-made objects to get to […]

On April 29, 2017 a thin, dehydrated, and distressed orangutan was rescued after being captured and caged within Indonesian Borneo. While this is unfortunately not an unusual occurrence, the orangutan in question was something totally unique: a rare albino who became known as Alba. Alba was thought to be around 5 years old at the […]

Raising offspring is expensive. It costs you time, it costs you money, and for some species: it costs you your life. This is the grisly fate of the African social spider, Stegodyphus dumicola, a dedicated mother who can only become a mother once. Why? Because her babies will eat her. This is what’s known as […]

When Homo sapiens first came onto the scene, we were just one of several human species walking the Earth. You might imagine that we just sort of popped up one day with a nice, simple, single point of origin, but the true story is a bit more complicated than that. Our emergence was slow and, […]

At 11:25 am local time on July 30, one of the strongest earthquakes ever hit the Kamchatka Peninsula, in eastern Russia. The quake had a reported magnitude of 8.8, making it tied for the sixth strongest on record. Two stronger ones were the 2004 Indian Ocean quake that hit Sumatra and the 2011 Tōhoku quake, […]

Tips for boosting your Wi-Fi signal range from the sensible to the downright bizarre (yes, aluminum hats can help, no, a Faraday cage won’t). But sometimes the issue isn’t the router itself; it’s the objects you have placed near it. Routers connect our devices to the Internet by sending signals that direct data traffic between […]

An unprecedented die-off has been declared in Alaska, where as many as four million murres are estimated to be missing from colonies across the state. According to the study in late 2024, it’s the worst single species die-off in modern history and was triggered by “The Blob“, a mass of warm water in the north Pacific […]

You may have noticed, perhaps around the time you started studying magnets in school, that we don’t power vehicles by strapping a magnet to the front of them and propelling them forward with a second magnet just out of reach in front of it. Instead, we continue to power our cars using electricity and the […]

What’s the longest lightning storm you’ve ever seen? For the people of Venezuela, seeing an electrical display that goes on for up to nine hours isn’t out of the ordinary. Here, at the mouth of the Catatumbo River, specific conditions for heat and humidity give rise to one of the most dramatic lightning displays on […]

An area of anomalously hot rocks 200 kilometers (120 miles) beneath the northern Appalachian Mountains could be the product of a continental divorce when dinosaurs still ruled, geologists claim. The presence of this deep heat has been known for a while, but the most common explanation has been an even older rift with Africa. The […]

Neutrinos are fundamental particles with a tiny mass and no electric charge. This allows them to move undisturbed through solid objects, such as the whole planet. Every second, 60 billion neutrinos from the Sun go through every square centimeter of us. To capture these so-called “ghost particles”, researchers need enormous detectors. A new method for […]

People have been searching for the mysterious “sixth sense” ever since… well, since 1761 at least, but potentially since the days of Aristotle. It was he, after all, who originally declared the number of senses to be five, and labeled them too: touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing.  But Aristotle said a lot of garbage. […]

K2-18b is back in the news thanks to new research that quells a controversial claim made in April. Researchers at the University of Cambridge had claimed that in the light filtered through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, they had seen the “strongest hint yet” of biological activity. New observations from a different team, which await peer review, […]

For almost 800 years, scholars and clerics have been locked in dispute over whether a piece of linen known as the Shroud of Turin was used to wrap the body of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. And white believers are unlikely to be easily swayed, a new study suggests that the markings left on the […]

Our memories may not be as stable as we thought. A growing body of evidence suggests that they can “drift” across different populations of neurons, and this latest study has demonstrated that that can be true even when talking about memories of the same environment.  We tend to think of memory as static, unchanging, like […]

Perhaps surprisingly, a horse can generate far more than a single horsepower, at least in short bursts. Some estimates suggest a galloping horse can briefly produce between 12 and nearly 15 horsepower. What Is Horsepower? Horsepower (hp) is a unit of measurement of power that describes the rate at which work is done. It’s most […]

A derivative of the metal-organic complex ferrocene has 20 valence electrons in a stable configuration, overturning the expectation for the last 100 years of a ceiling at 18 valence electrons.  Combinations of metals and carbon-based molecules show rich possibilities for unusual chemistry. One class of these metal-organic complexes is metallocenes, where organic rings sit either […]

Science and music YouTuber Benn Jordan has stored an image of a bird within a bird, before getting the bird to reproduce the image at an estimated rate of 2 megabytes per second. Though parrots take all the popular glory for their ability to parrot back human speech, they are not the only species of […]