Deborah Bloomfield

Four volunteers will soon be sealed inside an imitation Mars habitat on Earth, simulating a year-long mission to the Red Planet ahead of the real deal. On October 19, the volunteers will step foot inside their new home and not emerge until Halloween 2026, 378 days later. The study is the second of three planned […]

Something fishy has unfolded in the Gulf of Panama. For the first time in recorded history, the annual restock of cold, nutrient-rich waters failed to emerge off Panama’s Pacific coastline. The cause is not totally clear, but the impact could be profound. Every year for four decades, researchers have noted how the waters in the […]

Once upon a time, there lived a group of ancient “terror crocodiles” that were around 10 meters (33 feet) long and had teeth “the size of bananas”. While perhaps not the most threatening of fruits, teeth of this enormous size allowed these ancient crocodiles to take down even the largest of dinosaurs as the biggest […]

Over the last few years, there have been several hearings in Congress regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), the more apt term by which UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) are known. There have been no dramatic shows of evidence about UAPs in these previous hearings, but maybe today is the day that everything changes. The rest of […]

When you picture something gracefully gliding through the air, your mind probably jumps to birds, bats, or maybe even flying squirrels. But we’re here to tell you, if you look up at the forest canopy in South Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, you might just see a snake take flight. Flying snakes, of the genus […]

The bumblebee bat, also known as Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, is the smallest known species of bat. Fragile in form and existence, there are serious fears that this teabag-sized treasure is in trouble, endangered with extinction and left with an uncertain future. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe […]

The nearby (on a galactic scale) star Fomalhaut has a giant ring that has puzzled astronomers since its discovery in 2005. Evidence has now been published that the ring is even more out of kilter with expectations, and a giant planet probably has a role. Fomalhaut is not a name that rolls easily off the […]

Ten years ago, on September 14, 2015, at 9:50 am UTC, our planet was compressed and then stretched by a tiny fraction of a nanometer for a handful of milliseconds. Earth has experienced this since its birth, 4.5 billion years ago; gravitational waves have existed since the beginning of the universe. This one, though, was […]

A protein that’s central to brain aging has been discovered by scientists, who’ve gone the extra mile by also finding out how it can be stopped. FTL1, as it’s called, is a key mediator of aging in the hippocampus – a part of the brain that’s particularly badly affected as the years roll by. As […]

Air pollution doesn’t just affect your lungs; it could also be accelerating memory loss. The latest research has found that breathing in polluted air can increase the risk of developing a specific type of dementia.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. A […]

“The little things that run the world” is how biologist Edward O. Wilson described insects and other invertebrates – and it’s hard to argue with him when you look at the distribution of ants across the globe. The irrepressible creepy crawlies have colonized almost every landmass on Earth – but there are a few exceptions. […]

Naked mole-rats are the perfect example of why we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. They might look like someone decided to make a rat and had to call it a day before they had the chance to add fur, but by looking beneath the surface, these wrinkly little rodents are teaching scientists all […]

JWST observations are consistent with the planet TRAPPIST-1e having an atmosphere, two new papers report. The results don’t mean an atmosphere is definite, let alone tell us if it has a composition suited to habitability, but it’s a major step forward in the search for worlds like Earth. Given TRAPPIST-1e’s location firmly within its star’s […]

When the world’s largest land snail, the Giant African Snail, ends up in an ecosystem where it isn’t native, trouble often follows. In a series of slow-motion invasions, this voracious species has repeatedly turned up beyond Africa, including on US soil, where it poses a persistent headache for those battling invasive species. Native to East […]

Elevated blood pressure at age 7 is associated with an increased risk of dying prematurely of cardiovascular disease, new preliminary research has revealed. The risk was most prominent for children with blood pressure measurements in the top 10 percent for their age, sex, and height. “Specifically, having hypertension or elevated blood pressure as a child […]

In 2019, scientists spotted something strange thousands of meters below the ocean surface. There, they filmed a pink bumpy blob with cartoonishly big eyes and more pectoral fin-rays than you could shake a stick at. Now, they’ve been able to confirm that this was a new-to-science species. It’s a snailfish, and better yet, it’s one […]

Fall is finally upon us, and that means we’re about to see pumpkins galore – including some absolute chonkers. The winner of last year’s Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, for example, weighed roughly the same as two grizzly bears. But why do giant pumpkins like this get so big? The rest of this article is behind […]

Land snails are usually found trailing around forest floors or lingering beneath dark, humid logs and rocks. However, some species break this convention by chilling out at the very tops of trees, where it is light, dry, and seemingly unfriendly to snailkind. A few years ago, a team of Japanese scientists decided to find out […]

In East Africa’s ‘Cradle of Mankind’, a major shift in human evolution occurred just under 1.8 million years ago, when our ancestors began exploiting megafauna – including hippos and giraffes – for food. Known as Olduvai Gorge, this prehistoric hominin hotspot in Tanzania has now yielded its earliest known elephant butchery site, providing new insights […]

A study using JWST observations of the early universe has uncovered an intriguing mystery: most galaxies seem to rotate in the same direction. This unexpected pattern, which defies current cosmological models, could suggest that our universe exists inside a black hole, the researchers propose. The JWST has allowed astronomers to peer back further into the […]