Deborah Bloomfield

We like the August sky because there are usually lots of beautiful things to see. We have had amazing solar eclipses, like the Great American Eclipse in 2017, and we will have two brilliant ones next year and the year after. The best meteor shower of the year, too, is in August: the Perseids. But […]

Adult winter-run Chinook salmon have been seen in Northern California’s McCloud River for the first time in decades.  On July 15, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) reported the sighting of an adult female Chinook salmon in McCloud River near Ash Camp, displaying spawning behavior and guarding her nest. They also spotted several […]

Over 20 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope looked at a little patch of sky for days, with this methodical approach catching the light of galaxies that existed when the universe was not even 1 billion years old. This was the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a panorama of 10,000 galaxies that took 400 orbits of […]

Like Ross and Rachel, modern humans and Neanderthals had something of an on-again, off-again love affair. Yet while Friends may have gone extinct after 10 seasons, our ancient ancestors repeatedly reunited over hundreds of thousands of years, and new research may have pinpointed exactly where on the planet these romantic episodes occurred. Previous studies have […]

A hundred years ago, explorer Percy Fawcett went in search of a lost city deep in the Amazon rainforest. His quest to find “The City Of Z,” as he called it, was inspired by a mysterious “Manuscript 512” and Indigenous legends, including El Dorado, but did such a place ever exist? Despite warnings and several […]

Dormant cancer cells in the lung could be reactivated after a bout of COVID-19 or flu, according to new research. The findings suggest that a respiratory infection could spark a chain of events leading to a new metastatic tumor in patients who have previously survived a cancer diagnosis. Even after treatment and with a cancer […]

Our hair and nails are constantly growing, but not at a constant rate – indeed, everything from our hormones, to our nutrition, to age, to simple genetics can affect how fast they grow. But what about something not connected to our bodies at all? What about the season? You may have heard that our hair […]

Relics of the distant past and echoes of recent tragedy lie hidden within the cerulean depths of Belize’s Great Blue Hole. The Great Blue Hole is a large marine sinkhole in the Caribbean Sea, some 70 kilometers (43 miles) from the coast of Belize. With a diameter of 318 meters (1,043 feet) and a depth […]

What’s the biggest volcano in the world? Well, it depends on how you measure. Highest, biggest, most massive; they all have different answers – and each is as fascinating as the last. Highest volcano Sea level to peak, there’s a clear winner for the highest volcano: it’s Nevado Ojos del Salado, on the border between […]

When we’re feeling peaky, we might pop to the pharmacy for a remedy to help get us back on our feet, or visit a doctor for an expert opinion – we may even make ourselves a hearty bowl of chicken soup (there’s more science behind it than you might think). Other animals don’t have the […]

This week, scientists have discovered that one of our organs ages much faster than the others, a 2,000-year-old Siberian mummy’s tattoos provided a rare look at ancient skin art, and for the first time, the entire process of matriphagy in African social spiders has been filmed. Finally, we take an exclusive inside look at NASA’s […]

You may not recognize the name David Phillip Vetter, but you probably know his story. He was the Boy in the Bubble; “Bubble Boy”; a child who, through some of the worst genetic luck possible, lived his entire short life separated from the world by a clear plastic barrier.  But what was his story? Why […]

A study on the movement of molecules within glass has found something pretty astonishing, assuming that the results can be replicated. Processes within glass, as well as a few other materials with similar properties, appear to be time-reversible, potentially telling us something interesting about the second law of thermodynamics. Have you ever noticed, while walking […]

The pitter patter of tiny feet has reportedly come alongside a new world record for an Ohio couple, who recently welcomed a baby born from an embryo frozen for 30.5 years. Despite being less than a week old, that makes Thaddeus Daniel Pierce the world’s “oldest baby”, nabbing the title from a pair of twins […]

Thirty thousand years ago, humans became the last standing human species. Our sister species, Homo neanderthalensis, had held on the longest of all the others, but at last it too was gone. Only Homo sapiens remained. The fate of Neanderthals is the closest we’ll ever get to knowing what it looks like when a human […]

After six years of research and a successful trial period, a South African program that hopes to curb rhino poaching by inserting radioactive material into their horns is now in operation. While conservation efforts have seen rhino populations in South Africa and other parts of their range begin to bounce back from the brink of […]

New species are all around us, and while some have been hiding away in the foliage of tropical forests, some have been hiding in plain sight. In 2009, one manta ray species was revealed to actually be two distinct species, and now, after 15 years of it being suspected, a third new species officially joins […]

Around the polar region of our planet (and even elsewhere in the Solar System), electrically charged particles can form enormous vortices. These space hurricanes, as they are called, deliver a significant amount of energy into the atmosphere, leading to the creation of special auroral displays. Researchers have now published new insights into how they affect […]

Light moves at a finite speed, so whenever we look at something, we look at how it was in the past. This doesn’t matter in your everyday life, but when you consider space, it starts to become important. When we look at the Moon, for example, we are looking at how it was about one […]

MRI machines have become a staple of scientific research and clinical diagnosis. Hundreds of thousands of people owe their lives to them, either directly, or for the discoveries MRIs have facilitated. Some have presumably wondered how they manage to achieve such remarkable clarity of the inner workings of the body without bombarding it with potentially […]