Deborah Bloomfield

Imagine this, you’re investigating an ancient bear bone found in an Alaskan cave only to realize that what you have in your hands will shine more light on human history. That’s the experience a team of researchers from the University of Buffalo recently had.  Charlotte Lindqvist, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences in the College of […]

In 2022, the first fully complete human genome with no gaps was revealed, marking a huge moment for human genetics. On release to the public, scientists described the painstaking work that goes into sequencing an over 6 billion base pair genome, with 200 million added in this new research. The new genome added 99 genes […]

As far as archaeological discoveries go, finding a mummified hand of a tiny baby clutching at a late medieval coin is already Indiana Jones territory. But in 2005, a team opened up a pot at an abandoned cemetery in Nyarlorinc, Hungary, and found just that. Also, the hand was green, pushing the whole find well […]

For the first time, a team of researchers has discovered a hidden underground necropolis underneath the streets of Naples using muon tomography – essentially, cosmic ray particles. In muon tomography, or muography, scientists use cosmic rays to map previously-inaccessible areas. Muon particles are negatively-charged particles produced by cosmic rays that collide with atoms in the […]

Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new change to WhatsApp’s disappearing messages, which can now be saved by other users before they disappear. Previously, a disappearing message would be gone once the allotted time was up, meaning people that wanted them to stick around needed to screenshot or risk never seeing it again. Now, users can […]

A collection of 32 iron bars has been found in the basement of a home in Valdres, Norway, dating back to the Viking or early Middle Ages. Grete Margot Sørum came across the approximately 1,000-year-old treasure while cleaning out the basement of her parents’ home. The collection contains a number of small identical iron rods […]

A pulsar 12 million light years away has been confirmed as being brighter than our standing laws of physics allow. A new paper provides evidence that its magnetic field is so powerful that it is turning atoms into long threads, allowing it to achieve otherwise impossible levels of brightness. In 1924, astronomer Arthur Eddington proposed […]

Astronomers using the JWST have discovered hundreds of stars surrounded by dust, the raw material from which rocky planets are born. The observations come from a star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the small companion galaxies of the Milky Way. This galaxy is located just 200,000 light-years from our own. The star-forming […]

Parrots are the fourth most popular pet in the United States with over 20.6 million pet parrots kept in households across the country. These birds are highly intelligent with complex social, cognitive, and emotional needs. In the wild, most parrot species would usually be found in large flocks, but captive birds often live alone, and […]

The spicy history of the chili pepper may have just been rewritten following the discovery of a rare fossilized berry, Lycianthoides calycina. It’s a member of the chili pepper tribe Capsiceae, which was originally thought to have emerged in South America 15 million years ago, but now looks as if it was heating up North […]

Dark matter is a hypothetical substance that is expected to surround galaxies, outweighing regular matter five-to-one. It’s invisible so the only way to see its effects is through gravity. Its existence was proposed to explain the weird rotation of galaxies and, assuming its existence, can explain a lot of what the universe is like – […]

It’s a credit to how good Isaac Newton was at physics and math that people rarely mention that time he threatened to burn his mother’s house down, or the equally-baffling time he stuck a number of needles into his own eyeballs to see what would happen. Yes, when Newton wasn’t revolutionizing our notions of motion […]

The Martian liquid core is smaller, denser, and probably smells worse than previously thought, the InSight lander has revealed by capturing seismic waves originating on the other side of the planet. Our knowledge of Earth’s core comes from more than a century of studying the distorting effect it has on waves from earthquakes on the […]

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. The two potato-shaped objects have puzzled planetary scientists for a long time. What is their origin? Are they captured asteroids or were they once part of the Red Planet, like the Moon was part of ours? Now, the closest images ever taken of Deimos appear to indicate the […]

There is a piece of rock in the UK called the “Stone of Destiny” (and occasionally the far less fun “Stone of Scone”) which is involved in the ceremony of crowning new kings and queens. The big slab of red sandstone was originally used in the coronation of Scottish kings dating back to sometime around […]

The Vatican has created a new observatory that will study and attempt to validate alleged mysterious “apparitions” and other phenomena of the Virgin Mary, so that they can be authenticated by the Catholic Church.  Created by the Pontifical Marian Academy Internationalis (PAMI), the new “observatory” will study mythical Marian phenomena like Virgin Mary statues weeping […]

Deepfakes inspire a range of responses, from fascination and entertainment to outright fear. Their increased appearance online raises all sorts of moral, social, and legal challenges – but psychologists have recently taken an interest in their potential as tools to promote positive social and political policy-related change as well. Deepfakes are seemingly realistic, digitally created […]

Microplastics can cross the blood-brain barrier and enter the brain after being ingested, a new study on mice reveals. The brains of mice fed micro- and nano-plastics (MNPs) were found to contain them just two hours after ingestion via a mechanism previously unknown to science, suggesting that the tiny plastics found almost everywhere could be […]

Long before Suzanne Collins dreamed up the notion of sending young tributes into deadly Hunger Games, the Aztecs devised their own system for pitting selected combatants against one another in highly organized mortal encounters. Known as xochiyaoyotl, or “Flower Wars“, these ritualized skirmishes are believed to have been held in order to secure a continual […]

Mathematical motifs feature in many of Shakespeare’s most memorable scenes. He lived and wrote in the late 16th century, when new mathematical concepts were transforming perceptions of the world. Part of the role of the theatre was to process the cultural implications of all these changes. People in Shakespeare’s time were used to the idea […]