Deborah Bloomfield

They say we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean, but it still might surprise you to learn that we only just officially recognized one of Earth’s continents in 2017. Known as Te Riu-a-Māui, or Zealandia, it’s sandwiched between Australia, Eurasia, and North America, and […]

A while back, the Internet was puzzled by a physics problem involving a set of scales, an iron ball, and a ping pong ball of equal size. Now that that one has been cleared up, Reddit has been mulling over another problem: why won’t this contraption turn? “I don’t know where else to ask,” Redditor […]

The animal world is full of contradictions, from tiny mouse-deer that are neither mice nor deer, to vampire squid that aren’t vampires or squid. Now, we come to another confusingly named creature: the Garman’s sea snake is a snake, but it doesn’t live in the sea.  Garman’s sea snake (Hydrophis semperi) is one of only […]

A little over 100,000 years ago, groups of prehistoric humans in the Levant suddenly began burying their dead, marking one of the most significant cognitive and behavioral leaps in the history of our species. Yet these primordial grave-diggers weren’t quite like us, and new research reveals that a young child from the world’s oldest cemetery […]

Microplastics are everywhere and unavoidable. They’re in the water we drink, the food we eat, and the air we breathe. But if you’re a city slicker looking to reduce the impact of airborne plastic particles, a green roof could be your best bet. By green roof, we’re not talking about painting your house green. We’re […]

Deep in the Amazon rainforest lives a culture that challenges everything we think we know about language and human cognition. The Pirahã people have captivated – and divided – linguists for decades because their language appears to lack words that express precise numerical values; threes, fours, fives, and the like simply don’t factor in their […]

When Dr Ana Gracanin of the Australian National University placed an infrared camera inside a large tree hollow used by greater gliders as a nest, she didn’t expect to see the glider father delivering food to the young. Even more surprising was the way he did it, with tasty stems wrapped in the doting father’s […]

Mount Everest, one of the go-to examples of a “thing that is large”, looks like a tiny hillock in comparison to other mountains of the Solar System. While Everest stands at 8,849 meters (29,032 feet) tall, the two tallest mountains orbiting the Sun reach over 20,000 meters (65,600 feet) in elevation. The second-tallest mountain structure […]

The US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has set a new distance record for wireless energy transfer, sending more than 800 watts of power to a receiver 8.6 kilometers (5.3 miles) away. Ever since the days of Nikola Tesla, humans have looked into the idea of wireless power transfer (WPT), the transfer of […]

A particle detector flying above Antarctica has detected highly unusual radio pulses coming from beneath the ice.  The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment floats a range of instruments above Antarctica using a stratospheric balloon. The experiment is aimed at detecting cosmic neutrinos, tiny particles which only interact via gravity and the weak force, originating […]

Is your group chat dominated by the likes of Moo Deng and Pesto? Perhaps the only way your dad uses Instagram is to send you multiple reels of puppies and kittens. A lot of us send content like this without really thinking about it – but it could be helping to strengthen relationships and foster […]

Total solar eclipses are not just incredible celestial events. They are also important scientific moments that allow scientists to study the solar corona, the incredibly hot atmosphere of the Sun, probing its behavior. But solar eclipses do not happen every day, so the European Space Agency (ESA) decided to start making artificial eclipses using the […]

An egret that clearly had places to be stunned scientists conducting what they believe to be the first-ever GPS tracking study of these large waterbirds in Australia. Data revealed that the bird took off from Australia and clocked 38 hours in the air without stopping before landing in Papua New Guinea – a journey that […]

The pearlfish is famous for its hiding skills. A small, slender, and scaleless fish, it’s a bit defenceless out in the ocean, but it’s found a unique way to survive the dangers of the day: it lives inside the buttholes of sea cucumbers. “You see, the underdogs, they know that in the game of life […]

A group of teeny tiny mouse-deer in the family Tragulidae numbers 10 species that live in warmer parts of Southeast Asia, India, and Africa. They are small, delicate, and extremely elusive: they are the chevrotains. Technically, these animals are neither related to mice nor deer, instead existing in their own taxonomic family (Tragulidae). However, like […]

Cultured salmon cells are the latest lab-grown food to pass a pre-market safety consultation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It’s the fourth cultivated meat to receive this green light and the first seafood to do so. The product comes from Californian start-up Wildtype, which has spent years working on a way to […]

It’s a metaphor beloved by the wheeliest of dealers: a shark, they tell us, has to keep on moving, or else they’ll die. But is that true? Or is it just a bunch of chum? Well, turns out it’s a bit of both. “The short answer is it depends,” marine conservation biologist David Shiffman told […]

When a tree fell in a remote region of the Brazilian Amazon, local villagers noticed something big and very strange lurking beneath its exposed roots. A team of archaeologists arrived shortly afterwards and revealed that the buried objects were in fact ancient funerary urns containing pre-Hispanic human and animal skeletons. A total of seven urns […]

Distributing seeds is among plants’ key challenges, and many have turned to animals for help. However, some get over-reliant on a single species or a few similar ones, with dire consequences when these go extinct. A live demonstration is happening in the biodiversity hotspot of Central Chile where plants with fruits that were once distributed […]

The Copernican principle is an important concept in astronomy. It states that Earth and humanity cannot have a special or privileged position in the universe. But looking at the Solar System and at the currently known star systems out there in the galaxy, we immediately spot a discrepancy: there is nothing that looks remotely close […]