Deborah Bloomfield

Some concepts seem so normal to us that we might assume they are naturally used around the world, despite the fact that they aren’t. The color blue, for instance, was not really described in ancient times, and is a more modern development. And then there’s the concept of “left” and “right”, describing people or objects […]

The Caspian Sea is dropping and revealing new islands to the world. In a recent discovery, Russian scientists have confirmed the presence of an emerging island in the world’s largest inland body of water. The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said the new island is located in the Astrakhan […]

If ever you were to fall in love with a spider, it would surely be Salticidae. Known as the jumping spiders, they are gloriously fuzzy with eyes straight out of Pixar, and the world has just been gifted a whole new genus discovered in the alpine regions of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their popularity shines through […]

Exercise is supposed to be good for us, and yet every so often, our body rewards our efforts to keep ourselves healthy with what we can only assume is the same level of pain as a xenomorph breaking out of your belly… Okay, maybe we’re being a bit melodramatic, though stitches are still pretty unpleasant […]

There’s that great sequence in Finding Nemo where Bruce, the great white shark seemingly in recovery for eating fish, gets a nostril-full of Dory’s blood following a scuba-mask accident. He sniffs, and it triggers euphoria before sending poor Bruce (it’s a disease!) on a bloodthirsty rampage. Yes, I know it’s a kids’ movie, but bear […]

Bioengineers have created a soft, thin, and stretchable bioelectronic device that can be implanted into frog embryos’ developing brains, effectively making tiny cyborgs. This technology, they suggest, could help us understand and treat neurodevelopmental conditions in children in the future. The device is implanted into the embryo’s neural plate, a flat structure that eventually folds […]

The idea of plate tectonics – which describes how Earth’s crust is arranged into slowly moving plates, with volcanic activity and earthquakes taking place along the boundaries – is so normal to us now that it might be surprising to learn it was only really accepted by geologists during the 1960s. Before that, and the […]

The Moon is certainly not a colorful world. Forget the crimson hue of Mars or the blue of Neptune. Our natural satellite is instead in grayscale, a magnificent desolation that only changes color in eclipses. However, there are pockets of color on the Moon, and some of them tell us of dramatic events in the […]

Camera traps are an invaluable resource when it comes to conservation; they can help scientists see “ghosts” in the dark, rediscover lost species, and build up a picture of how different members of a habitat are using the space. Camera traps can also provide a sneaky secret window into the lives of these creatures, revealing […]

Have you ever heard of an octopus map? If not, you’ll likely see them everywhere after this, as a new study demonstrates. In short, an octopus map is a map that depicts some enemy as a centralized menace with various tentacle-like threats dispersing from them across other territories, or indeed the whole world. Traditionally, these […]

A YouTuber has created what might be the world’s strongest handheld laser, and it is capable of punching through titanium. “The legal power limit for a laser pointer is 5 milliwatts. Well, I think it would be funny to build one that’s  50,000 times stronger than that,” Drake Anthony, who goes by “styropyro” on YouTube, […]

Thought we’d seen the last of it? Sorry to disappoint, but there’s a new COVID-19 variant gallivanting across the globe. Its official title is NB.1.8.1, but some have taken to calling it “Nimbus”. In the Southern Hemisphere, where flu season is just starting to ramp up, medics are bracing for a new wave of cases, […]

Diving into the world of the arachnids is not for the faint-hearted – even fans of all things eight-legged might just think twice about the critters belonging to Solifugae. “Here is an odd creature, a monstrous apparition. How weirdly fashioned, how ill-proportioned, how evil and forbidding in its hideous shape and coat of bristling hairs!” […]

Visit Lancaster County, in Pennsylvania, and you might meet an unexpected resident. Standing around 1.2 to 1.5 meters tall – 4 or 5 feet in the local lingo – the Albatwitch is a pencil-thin, hairy local legend, with huge eyes that glow an ominous red, or perhaps yellow, through the night. Christopher Vera, Director of […]

Ask most people getting older, and they’ll tell you, time feels like it’s speeding up as you gradually run out of it. The endless summers of childhood, once dragging on forever, now seem to pass in a blink. And the years? They just don’t last as long as they used to. So why does this […]

If there’s one thing worse than a virus, you’ve got to imagine it’s a massive version of the same thing. So it may not sound like good news that scientists from the University of Miami have just discovered some 230 previously unknown types of giant virus, present in just about every ocean across the planet […]

When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, lava, ash, and debris left the landscape barren for miles. It was obvious that recovery would take decades. But one team of scientists had an unconventional idea to help jumpstart the process: send a few gophers on a one-day mission to the mountain. Plant life struggled to return […]

Between 120,000 and 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals embarked on a second wave of major migrations from Eastern Europe to southern Siberia and Central Asia. Using supercomputers, anthropologists have now managed to track the path of that journey with incredible precision. It’s known that Neanderthals made this journey based on archaeological sites in Eastern Europe dating […]

Diagrams and animations of planetary orbits are, in a way, lying to you a little bit, though it’s more accurate to say they’re simplifying things. They leave out the concept of barycenters so teachers don’t have to explain complex gravitational dynamics to kids still wrapping their heads around the fact that Earth isn’t the only […]

If you’ve ever counted beyond ten, and we’re going to be generous and assume that you have, at some point you’ve probably noticed the names of the numbers are a little odd. While we say “thirteen”, “fourteen”, “fifteen”, “sixteen” and so on, when it comes to 11 and 12, we don’t say “oneteen” or “twoteen”, […]