Deborah Bloomfield

Neuroscience owes much to the brains of the gruesomely injured, whose crushed cortices have enabled doctors to study the workings of the mind under conditions that could never be ethically recreated in laboratory experiments. One such case is that of Patient M, who began experiencing the world back-to-front after being shot in the head during […]

What’s the lamest excuse you’ve ever used to get off work? Go on, we won’t tell anyone – or, say, commit it to stone in a way that’s readable thousands of years from now. Unfortunately for a group of Ancient Egyptians, such evidence of their slack-offery sits in the British Museum on an artifact known […]

To remove dead skin cells from their considerable bodies, humpback whales have been filmed scrubbing themselves in a sandy spa. Although this is not the first time this behavior has been suggested, this is the first time researchers have filmed them underwater rolling around in the sand on the sea bed. In these shallow bay […]

If you’ve ever heard the idea that HIV/AIDS was created in a US military laboratory, you’ve been exposed to a viral fake news story that was planted by the Soviet Union over 30 years ago. Despite this idea now being wholly disproven, it still holds traction in some parts of the world and serves as […]

If you’re not an avid cyclist, there’s a chance you won’t have come across the term “bonking” before. Actually, you probably have, but not in this context. Bonking is the word cyclists and endurance athletes give to that feeling of hitting a wall, the moment during your workout when all your reserves have run dry […]

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and warnings by prominent AI researchers that we need to pause AI research lest it destroys society, people have been talking a little more about the ethics of artificial intelligence lately. The topic is not new: Since people first imagined robots, some have tried to come up […]

The first images of Earth from a brand new weather satellite have been sent back home and our planet looks spectacular. The new satellite reveals details about the weather over Europe and Africa at a level not possible before at 36,000 kilometers (22,370 miles) away from Earth. The Meteosat Third Generation Imager-1 (MTG-I1) is a […]

Jupiter may be called the “king of the planets,” but it looks like Saturn has the biggest following (for the time being, at least). New observations suggest that Saturn has over 100 confirmed moons – the most of any planet in the solar system, overtaking its old rival Jupiter. The latest count comes from the […]

There are people living among us who have a rare and perhaps valuable superpower – they never forget a face. We’re not just talking about being good at recognizing faces, we’re talking about an exceptional ability to recall details, even after just a brief glimpse at someone. Yet while this unusual trait has been known […]

Recent times have seen the rise of many conspiracy theories, from 5G will kill you to the slightly more enjoyable satirical “birds aren’t real” movement. Many have focused around the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccines developed to protect people from it. In short, they have all been a bit grim, and too harmful to be in any […]

A UK regulator has confirmed that a small number of babies with DNA from three different people have been born in the country. The technique to create “three-parent” embryos became legally permissible several years ago, but it’s only now that information has been obtained establishing that the procedure has been successfully used in the UK.  […]

A draft of the first-ever human pangenome has been announced by an international genomics collaboration, which will attempt to incorporate the incredible diversity of the human race into a single reference genome. The team hope that by bringing a range of ethnicities and populations across the world into the pangenome, they can more accurately represent […]

After the letdown and subsequent cancellation of Google Glass – the “unappealing” glasses with a display in your field of view to distract you – you’re right to be skeptical about wearable technology. But a new demo of a wearable artificial intelligence (AI) is causing (small amount) of buzz on the Internet, because it does […]

Spanish social media influencer Paula Gonu has claimed that following surgery on her knee, she served up a spaghetti bolognese for her and her partner using the discarded cartilage. Thirty-year-old Gonu told the Club 113 podcast (full episode in Spanish below) that she had required surgery on her knee for an injury, and the surgeons had […]

Destruction of the world’s rainforests has long been a topic of environmental concern, with a warming world, habitat loss, and species extinctions all coming to the fore. While the impact of climate change has also been felt in the world’s oceans, and well documented in the media through the loss of coral reefs, there’s one […]

Here we go again. Mercury is currently in retrograde and will be until May 14. For some people, that is reason enough to make excuses for what may be going wrong in their lives. Blaming it on distant planets is very annoying, however, because that energy could be better spent pushing for change in society […]

Last summer, the City of Hope Hospital in California announced that one if its patients had become the fourth person in the world to have gone into long-term remission of HIV. The patient was also suffering from leukemia, and thanks to stem cell donations from a donor with a rare genetic mutation, he no longer […]

Growing burgers and steaks from cultured cells may be seen as the future of the meat industry, but a new analysis indicates that the mass-production of lab-grown meat using current technologies could be considerably worse for the environment than real beef. At present, animal cell-based meat (ACBM) is only produced at a very small scale […]

A jointed robot that moves like a snake has been unveiled by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the makers hope to send it to Enceladus to hunt for life. While it might give ophidiophobes nightmares, if the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) achieves its goal, it could be a giant slither for humankind. If […]

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid satellite completed the first part of its long journey into space on May 1 2023, when it arrived in Florida on a boat from Italy. It is scheduled to lift off on a Falcon 9 rocket, built by SpaceX, from Cape Canaveral in early July. Euclid is designed to […]