Deborah Bloomfield

Star Trek envisions a world where humanity has branched out past the confines of our home planet in the name of exploration and peace. LunarCrush, a crypto and NFT stock trading platform founded in 2018, has chosen a more prosaic motivation: cold hard cash. A stash of 62 Bitcoin, currently worth approximately $1.5 million (although […]

A chess opening refers to the first moves that take place in a game, which among professionals usually adheres to one of a handful of “book” openings that have been studied and are well-known. While the uninitiated start shifting pawns with beads of sweat on their brow, competitive players often lean on a tried and […]

The Gaia satellite from the European Space Agency (ESA) is busy creating the most detailed map of the stars in the Milky Way. This has led to the discovery of the two closest black holes to Earth and they may even be a new class of black holes. Named, respectively, Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2, […]

One of the cooler things about rocks, among many cool things, is that they allow us to look back into the past. The further down in a rock’s layers you go, the older the rock. Studying layers, and where these layers merge, can tell us about local geology as well as big events in our […]

Gaze at the face of a human who lived in Egypt thousands of years before the pyramids first stood. A recent project has created facial reconstructions from the 30,000-year-old remains of a human discovered in the Nile Valley, providing a deeply personal snapshot of prehistoric Egypt. The facial reconstructions were crafted by archaeologists Moacir Elias […]

There are many mysteries in the animal kingdom, some of which scientists have spent years unlocking the answers to, and some that might remain mysterious for a few decades yet. One of these unusual phenomena is the case of glowing animals. Photoluminescence in different mammal species has been discovered in the duck-billed platypus, squirrels, and […]

We know the question that keeps you awake at night: when did humans start eating snails? Well, researchers have recently discovered the earliest evidence of prehistoric people cooking and eating these terrestrial mollusks. But while you might imagine a rustic version of modern escargot, the snails in question were actually enormous in comparison.  A team […]

Just as the movies warned, Godzilla quietly lurks at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately, this isn’t a giant radiation-loaded monster with a hatred for moths, but an enormous geological feature found on the seabed. After 20 years of striving for recognition, it’s official: it’s been agreed that the vast complex of underwater ridges […]

Fish have been captured more than 8 kilometers (4.8 miles) below the ocean’s surface, and filmed deeper still. These not only break both records for deep sea angling, the team responsible believes they are getting close to the maximum depths at which fish can be found. At the western edge of the Pacific Ocean lies […]

The universe appears fond of special numbers. Some come from geometry, like π or the square root of two. Some, like the fine structure constant, connect stars being able to shine to why buttered bread falls more often on the buttered side. Then there is e, or Euler’s number: a mathematical constant found across fields […]

Nearly a century after it was first posed, mathematicians have made a breakthrough in one of the most difficult problems in combinatorics – the mind-bending area of math responsible for such concepts as numbers bigger than the universe and completely unique card shuffles. As any mathematician can tell you, there ain’t no party like a […]

NASA has announced the four astronauts that will make up the crew of Artemis II, the next step in the ambitious mission to return humans to the surface of the Moon. The four astronauts announced today are NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and record-breaking Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The mission will not […]

There is a big problem with penis research – or, at least, men will tell you it’s big. If you ask men their penis size, they will lie and tell you it is bigger than it actually is. A new study has looked at just how much men lie about their penis size to researchers, […]

We know now that light behaves as both waves and particles. Back in 1801, Thomas Young’s famous double-slit experiment clearly showed light’s wave nature. As light passes through two narrow, close-to-each-other slits, it interacts creating a diffraction pattern. Scientists have long suspected that the same would happen if the double-slit were to occur in time […]

Two new species of poisonous birds have been discovered during an expedition into New Guinea’s rainforest. Scientists discovered the species on their most recent venture to the region, gathering samples from poisonous birds that are packing enough neurotoxin in their feathers to make your eyes water like you’re chopping at an onion. The latest species […]

Cosquer cave is a beautiful display of ancient cave art, remaining one of the only known caves to depict over 150 animals across its walls in ornate paintings and engravings. But Cosquer cave is also entirely unique for another reason – it has just one entrance, and that entrance is deep underwater. So, how did […]

The world’s most valuable parasite makes a home for itself inside larval ghost moths, which it infects during the summer, while the caterpillars are underground. The body-snatching fungus will slowly eat away at its host over the coming months before sending its near-dead slave to the surface and spearing a fruiting body out of its […]

Scientists believe they have identified the cause of a mysterious surge of severe hepatitis cases that impacted hundreds of children around the world last year. According to a trio of new studies, the outbreak was likely driven by joint infections of common childhood viruses. The reason these otherwise common infections acted so unusually, they believe, […]

A repeating signal from the star YZ Ceti is thought to indicate that its innermost planet has a strong magnetic field. If so, this would be the first time we have detected a strong field around a rocky planet, Earth aside, rather than a Neptune-sized gas planet. Of all the things that make the Earth […]

This glimmering collection of ancient gold jewelry was found in an ancient burial cave near Jerusalem. Decorated with the symbol of the Roman goddess Luna, the 1,800-year-old jewelry was intended to ward off evil spirits and provide protection for a young girl in the afterlife. The beautiful objects were first discovered over 50 years ago, […]