Deborah Bloomfield

What’s that smell? Is that what you think it is? You check your shoes and, sure enough, one is adorned with a sticky, foul-smelling patty of fresh wrongness. You have stepped in a landmine of the canine variety. We’ve all been there, and we all know footpaths, nature strips, parks, playing fields and front lawns […]

The overuse of groundwater isn’t just a concern for areas that may soon run out of the substance they depend on the most, it’s literally affecting the whole planet. That effect can be measured by observing changes in the locations of the North and South Poles, which a new study reveals shifted almost 80 centimeters […]

Sub-atomic particles created by cosmic ray collisions have been used to create a “new kind of GPS.”  In a new study, scientists at the University of Tokyo have shown how they used these high-energy particles to navigate deep beneath a building in an underground basement – something that would not be possible using the go-to […]

Two weeks ago, a modest-looking paper was uploaded to the arXiv preprint server with the unassuming title “On the invariant subspace problem in Hilbert spaces”. The paper is just 13 pages long and its list of references contains only a single entry. The paper purports to contain the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle that […]

The TRAPPIST-1 system is made of a cool, small star and seven planets orbiting in a matter of days. All the planets have a size not dissimilar to Earth or Venus, and being relatively close to us makes this system an intriguing candidate for atmospheric searches with JWST, a crucial stepping stone to the investigation […]

On the top of a hill just outside the capital city of Lima, Peru, is the practice field of a professional soccer club. While that might not seem that extraordinary, just next door the body of a mummy has been found surrounded with coca leaves. Remains of the mummy’s hair and skull were found first, […]

Hookworm infection with live parasites can begin full-scale trials for inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), according to a new pilot study. Focusing on patients with ulcerative colitis, it’s the first study of its kind to deploy hookworms in a controlled setting and investigate how they are tolerated as a potential therapy for the condition. Hookworms target […]

Almost half a million people are estimated to get Lyme disease every year in the US alone. The most common vector-borne disease in the North American country, it is carried by ticks and their bites spreading the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi to humans. It clears with a course of antibiotics to be taken for a few weeks, […]

At over 42,000 years old, this might just be the earliest known representation of a penis. If that interpretation is correct, it could indicate that penises were among the very first things that prehistoric humans of Eurasia decided to artistically represent.  The phallus-like object was unearthed in 2016 in the Khangai Mountains of northern Mongolia. […]

Human remains once populated the world-famous Pirates Of The Caribbean ride at Disneyland. Now replaced with models, the story goes that the fake alternatives available back when the ride was built in 1967 weren’t up to scratch, and so the park’s “Imagineers” made do with some authentic materials. It might be shocking to consider in […]

The effects of climate change are seen everywhere in the world, but the polar regions are experiencing changes unseen elsewhere. In Antarctica, glaciers melt and retreat and the most vulnerable of them all is the massive Thwaites Glacier. Now researchers have mapped the ground underneath the glacier for the first time, to see how it […]

An interactive map compiled by WorldData.info allows curious people to compare penis sizes with people from around the world. First off, it’s important to state that despite the worries of men, likely fueled by larger penises featured in pornography, penis size is not that important. It is, however, something that men tend to fixate on […]

The first evidence has been produced of savage attacks on the elongated necks of ancient marine reptiles, confirming a long-term suspicion of palaeontologists, and a favorite subject for paleoart. Long necks were much in fashion when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. On land there were the sauropods, whether small or vast. In the oceans necks got […]

The earliest people who lived in North America shared the landscape with huge animals. On any day these hunter-gatherers might encounter a giant, snarling saber-toothed cat ready to pounce, or a group of elephantlike mammoths stripping tree branches. Maybe a herd of giant bison would stampede past. Obviously, you can’t see any of these ice […]

As great as things like “ethics” are for the health of volunteers and subjects, it has put an end to stories of people finding out about the effects of anesthesia by mashing each other’s testicles, or learning about the velocity of electricity by electrocuting a kilometer of monks. Jean-Antoine Nollet was a clergyman and physicist […]

In the 1960s and 70s, the US and Soviet Union conducted a number of nuclear tests. While devastating for the immediate environment, and causing a future where wars could trigger an ice age, there has been a surprising upside: scientists have used them to study the Earth’s core. There are of course no direct ways […]

Microplastics are now ubiquitous on our planet – they’re found all over the place, including fresh Antarctic snow, and are also present in our bodies. We are thought to inhale 16.2 bits of microplastic every hour, the equivalent of gulping down a credit card in just a week. That’s a staggering amount of plastic, but […]

A new study has proven something scientists had suspected for a long time: the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is capable of lying dormant within the brain. Cells called microglia, which form part of the brain’s own specialized immune system, act as a persistent reservoir for the virus – but now that we know it’s there, […]

There’s long been a question over whether being born via C-section means babies miss out on exposure to helpful bacteria that they would normally get from their mother’s birth canal. If it turns out these bacteria are important for a baby’s development, one solution that’s been proposed is a process called “vaginal seeding”. It’s not […]