Deborah Bloomfield

Many of us know cranberries as a tasty condiment to have with our Christmas turkey, or the juice that accompanies vodka in a cosmopolitan cocktail. You might have also heard cranberries prevent urinary tract infections (UTIs). While this is often dismissed as a myth, our new review of the evidence shows consuming cranberry juice or […]

Researchers have confirmed the secret of lime plaster used by the Ancient Maya. The Mesoamerican people likely added a special ingredient to this construction material: tree bark extracts. And this made their lime plaster much more durable, something that might have important applications today. The team worked with local Maya-descended masons at Copán in Honduras […]

Last week, a SpaceX launch created a serendipitous and beautiful event over the Alaskan skies. In the midst of dancing green Northern Lights, a spiral cloud appeared in the sky. This is the result of the reentry stage of a Falcon 9 rocket taking satellites to orbit, including the first Earth observation satellite designed and […]

What do you get if you cross Mulan with Merida and plop the result into 13th-century Mongolia? The answer:  Khutulun, the warrior princess who reputedly turned down more than 1,000 suitors after beating them all in displays of strength and athletic ability. Born around the year 1260 to a cousin of Kublai Khan – the […]

The factors that make a star a suitable host for life on surrounding planets are complex, and new research indicates something we thought was an asset – high metal content – may instead be harmful. If so, it indicates we’ve been focusing our search for life-supporting planets in the wrong places. More worryingly, it means […]

Astronomy and timekeeping were two of the Ancient Maya’s biggest loves, and new research may have finally revealed the intricate system that once connected these two pillars of Mesoamerican life. According to the study authors, the enigmatic Maya calendar can be used to track the movement of the planets across the night sky over a […]

Microscopic analysis of wood suggests that Norse people in Greenland were using timber that came from North America over 700 years ago. The research is further evidence that Viking sailors were making contact with the east coast of North America long before Christopher Columbus “discovered the New World” in 1492 CE. Archaeologist Lísabet Guðmundsdóttir from […]

Back in 2018, a church in New Mexico claimed that their statue of the Virgin Mary was “weeping” liquid from its eyes. It all started on May 20, 2018 – Pentecost Sunday in the Catholic religious calendar – when the parishioners of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces reportedly witnessed the statue crying tears […]

How we manage our emotions could impact our sex drive, suggests a new study, which finds that those of us adept at cognitive reappraisal – a popular emotion regulation strategy – may also have heightened sexual desire.  Cognitive reappraisal involves changing how you think about a given situation, reframing it in order to reduce the […]

All the world’s a stage and the stage itself is space-time where all the laws of physics are merely players. But maybe space-time is not the fundamental aspect that it is believed to be. A team of researchers from Japan’s RIKEN suggests that space-time could emerge from quantum properties, and one in particular that is […]

The onset of schizophrenia in children under 13 is extremely rare, but it does occur. When it does, its symptoms are far more severe and persistently debilitating than for patients who develop the condition at a later stage in life. Now a ten-year research effort has found new genetic factors that help to understand the […]

Sabertooth cats might be best known from their apparently social behaviors in movies (looking at you Diego), but evidence from the fossil record suggests that they were known to hunt cooperatively. A new skull fossil of a primitive sabertooth from the Linxia Basin, China, shows cranial adaptations to social behavior, and an injured forepaw reveals […]

As far as we know, the fastest things in the universe are photons of light, closely followed by subatomic particles, be they in particle accelerators or high-energy astronomical situations. However, when people ask what the fastest thing in the universe is, they probably don’t mean something far too small to see. The search for the […]

A few years ago, strange black stains began to appear on a collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous drawings and writings: The Codex Atlanticus. The codex, housed since 1997 in a controlled micro-climate at Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, began showing signs of blackening. Investigation showed that these darkened patches were on some 210 pages of […]

India is on track to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by mid-2023. Roughly before the end of June, India’s population is projected to be 1.4286 billion, compared with China’s 1.4257 billion, according to new estimates from the United Nations (UN).  The data comes from a new report by the United Nations Population […]

For decades in the Cândido Godói (CG) municipality in Brazil, there was a strange mystery: The rate of twin births is significantly higher than the surrounding area, and twin births around the world. Studies have put the twin birth rate at 10 percent in one district, which is “significantly higher than the 1.8 percent rate […]

The Michael J Fox Foundation has announced the findings of a landmark paper that identified a biomarker for Parkinson’s disease with high accuracy, which may be able to indicate disease before typical symptoms appear. The researchers believe the biomarker will allow scientists to finally define Parkinson’s disease biologically, opening up new routes in diagnostics and […]

Every year, on April 19, an important anniversary rolls around that you may never have heard of. To those in the know, it’s called Bicycle Day, and it commemorates the first-ever intentional LSD trip.  It all started when a Swiss chemist called Albert Hofmann had a very peculiar time while cycling home from the lab. […]

A runner has been disqualified from the 80-kilometer (50-mile) Manchester to Liverpool Ultra race, after tracking data revealed she partly used a car. Dr Joasia Zakrzewski, a record-breaking athlete who regularly competes in long-distance events, finished third in the race on April 7. However, the race organizers brag that you can watch live with GPS […]

Buying gifts is difficult, even when you aren’t purchasing them for an incredibly wealthy man who also owns all the UK’s swans. Fortunately for the Pope, he has a catalog of unusual artifacts at the Vatican just perfect for the occasion and has gifted the King of England a piece of the “True Cross” for […]