Deborah Bloomfield

The fortifications of Xi’an are an archaeological marvel and one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. The fortress was built during the 14th century by Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Emperor of the Ming dynasty, and it has been kept and refurbished several times since its construction. But to see the areas that might need interventions, researchers […]

When exploring some eroding boulders on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island with his son, Alan Tennyson of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa found fossil remnants of 57-million-year-old giant penguins. That would be exciting enough – but as other scientists assisted in unscrambling the finds, it became clear there were […]

A peculiar mummy was unearthed in 1975 during the renovation of the Barfüsser Church in Basel, Switzerland, as the remains of Anna Catharina Bischoff were found beneath the floors. She had died aged 68 way back in 1787, though exactly what caused her death has been the subject of some debate. Part of the reason […]

Believe it or not, this is a photo of sand. At 10 times magnification, sand from the beach at Point Spencer, Alaska, looks like a handful of glittering gemstones. This dazzling, colorful array can tell us much about the history of this wild, remote region. An ancient crossroads Nestled between the Kotzebue Sound to the […]

A team of researchers from the SERI-MATS research group have found some strange and partially inexplicable behavior in OpenAI’s ChatGPT, when the chatbot is presented with certain key words and phrases. Jessica Rumbelow and Matthew Watkins, who conducted the research, found that a number of unusual strings of characters result in the odd responses from […]

A mysterious Russian satellite has created a large cloud of debris after breaking apart in orbit in early January, posing a potential problem for years to come. According to the US Space Force’s 18th Defense Squadron (SDS), which tracks artificial objects in space, the event created at least 85 separate pieces of junk that will […]

It looks like Netflix is ramping up its efforts to stamp out the scourge of password sharers. This week, the video streaming company announced it had updated its policy on password sharing in four more countries: Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain. In these four countries, users will now have to set a primary location […]

We previously introduced you to Flossie, the world’s oldest living cat, and Bobi, the oldest dog on record. Now, meet Pat. At the whopping age of 9 years and 209 days old, he’s just been dubbed the oldest living mouse in human care by Guinness World Records. The fantastically named Pacific pocket mouse is the […]

Google’s wannabe rival to ChatGPT is off to a shaky start after its launch video featured a glaring error about the JWST and exoplanets. As a result of the blunder, shares in parent company Alphabet plunged by around $100 billion on Wednesday.  In a promo video posted on Wednesday, Googles’s new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, […]

In March 2020, as the UK was preparing to go into lockdown, two new trials were posted on the clinicaltrials.gov database. The researchers were proposing that BCG, an old vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), should be tested for its protective effect against COVID. As vaccines tend to activate very specific immune responses against their target disease, […]

The family of plants that give us such treasures as tomatoes, potatoes, our most popular herbs, and even coffee coexisted with the dinosaurs, a single fossil has revealed. That doesn’t mean any of these individual plants existed in the Cretaceous, let alone the eras giant herbivores took advantage – but we can certainly be grateful […]

The champions of unclouded thought were recently put to the test in a study that sought to explore if an illogical puzzle could be more easily solved by an animal with the associative learning approach of a computer. It saw researchers put a group of pigeons to the test to investigate their performance in a […]

A new species of titanosaur has been unearthed in Patagonia and based on the measurement of its femur, it was an absolute beast. With a thigh bone about the same length as a tall adult human, it’s a rare find and one that’s teaching us that there’s a lot more to learn about a group […]

We’ve all been there at one time or another: caught out in the rain. The sensible among us take shelter, while others might choose to stay out (ahem, Drew Barrymore) or turn to an umbrella or raincoat for protection. But what about birds? Do they don their metaphorical wellies and splash about? Or will you […]

The world’s oldest dog has been crowned a record-breaker at 30 years and 268 days old, toppling the previous winner Spike who was announced just two weeks ago at the age of 23. Spike the little Chihuahua has achieved a great age, but has been beaten by almost 10 years by Bobi, who almost lost […]

A unique gold bead dating back to the Roman era has been discovered in Jerusalem by an 18-year-old volunteer. The find was uncovered during painstaking sifting of dirt removed from the Pilgrimage Road excavation site. “I poured the pail onto the sieve and began to wash the material that was brought from the excavations in […]

In the desperate quest to find a way to avoid cooking the planet, scientists have run the numbers on using dust as a sunshade. They found it might just work, but only if the dust came from the Moon. The idea of blocking sunlight to offset the effects of human activity on the global climate […]

The worlds at the edge of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune, continue to show just how peculiar things can get far from the Sun. For example, the heart of Pluto, the curious shape of Arrokoth, and the rings of Haumea. And now we can add the unusual rings of Quaoar to the […]

Curiosity has discovered an exciting new rock on Mars, and not just any old rock, a delicious chocolatey meteorite. It’s not the first time the rover has found meteorites on Mars but it makes a nice change from its usual rocky scenery, and frankly, meteorites are cool on any planet. This one has been nicknamed […]

Amongst a flurry of questionable bills being introduced in American states recently, a new piece of legislation in Montana would prevent scientific theories from being taught in schools. According to the Republican that sponsors the bill, it is a move to prevent the teachings of things that “aren’t true”.  It calls into question exactly how […]