Deborah Bloomfield

Whale watchers in California were recently treated to a rare experience when among a pod of killer whales, aka orca (Orcinus orca), a white calf was spotted.  CA216C1, or “Frosty” as the calf is known, is a three-year-old male orca who is leucistic. Frosty has patches of black on his dorsal fin and the front […]

A man often referred to as the “Godfather” of artificial intelligence (AI) has quit his job at Google this week over concerns about where AI is headed. Geoffrey Hinton is best known for his work on deep learning and neural networks, for which he won the $1 million Turing Award in 2019. At the time […]

Archaeologists have unearthed 500-year-old medical flasks that were used to test (and smell) pee at a medical dump within Caesar’s Forum in Rome. The flasks may provide important insights into late medieval and Renaissance disease prevention.  Italian physicians played an important role in developing early measures to prevent the spread of disease. This included the […]

Being “ghosted” – that is, having somebody totally shut down communication with you, effectively turning themselves into a “ghost” – is rarely a nice feeling. As disappointing as it may be to experience, though, chances are the person doing it to you feels even worse – at least, if you two were originally friends rather […]

Water vapor has been seen in the atmospheres of exoplanets before, but they were massive gas giants. Now, researchers report that detection but in a completely different system, GJ 486, where a rocky super-Earth orbits a red dwarf star. But the team is unsure if the signal comes from the star or the planet. The […]

When two groups of people were assigned different breathing exercises for 40 minutes a day participants ended up with dramatically different levels of amyloid beta, the peptide associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Whether one exercise can stem the rising tide of dementia in society remains to be proven. However, after the failure of more than a […]

In the 1930s, archaeological excavations at Dura-Europos, Syria, uncovered an unusual battle scene. Skeletal remains buried near the ancient city’s western walls indicated that a fight between Sasanian Persian soldiers and the occupying Roman side had taken place in a small mine shaft not large enough to stand in. Nineteen Roman soldiers, as well as […]

A recording of a strange sound said to be heard by people with Havana syndrome has been released by a US official, allowing the public to make conclusions for themselves about what it could be.   Havana syndrome is a collective term for a mysterious set of symptoms experienced by military and diplomatic service personnel […]

German archaeologists have discovered a spectacular pair of ancient scissors while investigating a construction site in Munich. The scissors are exceptionally well preserved and can still cut. Archaeologists from the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (BLfD) were originally called in by a bomb disposal team who were searching a construction site in […]

Supermassive black holes are impressive objects. They can weigh from a few hundred thousand to billions of times the mass of the Sun. A gravitational pull from which nothing, not even light, can escape. These objects are incredibly dense, and density is about mass and volume so it’s important to understand how big these giants […]

The “breakfast, lunch, and dinner” sign is an indicator of parasites recognized by medicine, and if you’ve woken up with the tell-tale bite pattern it could mean you have bedbugs. and they’re feasting on your blood. The lesions appear in this way because of the way bedbugs map the skin looking for the best lunch […]

You might already be aware that the name “strawberry” is a misnomer, as strawberries aren’t really berries at all. Well, it seems strawberries are full of surprises, or rather covered in them, because those seedy-looking white dots aren’t actually seeds. The strawberries’ pitted accessories are called achenes, and they are in fact the plant’s fruit, […]

ChatGPT may actually be more empathetic than human doctors, according to a new study looking at patient ratings. While many people would assume that AI would deliver uncaring, factual advice, when confronted with healthcare problems, it actually was rated better than real doctors when it came to tact.  The idea of using AI as a […]

A skin cancer that was almost invisible to the human eye has been successfully detected, a feat that has seen the medical team recognized with a Guinness World Record. More importantly, for patient Christy Staats, it means her cancer was caught at an early stage before it had a chance to spread. “I believe it […]

If you’re looking for a medical superhero, it might be hard to find anything less convincing than a sloth, yet in the fur of these notoriously sluggish animals lies bacteria that produce antibiotics that might just save us all. Antibiotics have played a major part in the doubling of human life expectancy over the last […]

Brains, eyes, and digestive organs. Those were just some of the soft tissue surprises waiting for researchers processing 462-million-year-old specimens retrieved from Castle Bank Quarry in Wales, UK. The Castle Bank Community, as the collection of ancient marine oddities is known, demonstrates remarkable diversity as well as preservation, contributing more than 170 new species to […]

The most energetic, luminous, and long-lasting transient celestial event known has been observed by astronomers. A supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy has ripped apart a star, turning it into a long bright stream of plasma – a process called spaghettification. The automatic survey gave the event the name ZTF20abrbeie and earned the nickname […]

This article first appeared in Issue 7 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  Since the second century BCE, the city of Pamukkale, which neighbors the ancient Roman site of Hierapolis, has been used as a natural spa. The ancient formation was once believed to have healing powers, decked out with hot thermal springs and white terraces […]

A new bill proposed by US lawmakers would prevent artificial intelligence (AI) from being able to singlehandedly launch nuclear weapons without human input, codifying existing Pentagon rules. While current rules forbid the autonomous launch of nuclear weapons, there aren’t any actual laws that prevent this from happening. With the astronomical rise in AI models in […]

A man from the Netherlands has been ordered by the courts to stop donating sperm after allegedly fathering over 550 children worldwide. The 41-year-old, named Jonathan in press reports, has been donating his sperm to fertility clinics since 2007 according to BBC News. In 2017, when it was discovered he had fathered over 100 children, […]