Deborah Bloomfield

The hearts of patients who were positive for COVID-19 appear to be as safe for transplantation as those without the disease. The result comes from a short-term analysis, lasting about one year, from a database showing heart transplants in the United States. The findings are good news, as they suggest that more safe transplants are […]

The first crash test dummy designed to mimic a woman’s body has finally been developed by a team of Swedish researchers, hoping to end the long history of man-centric safety in cars. Standing at an average height of 162 centimeters (5 feet 3 inches) and weighing 62 kilograms (137 pounds), the dummy will look to […]

Among the many considerations that people apparently take into account when buying a house are “how bad is the traffic during peak commuter hours” and “am I going to be hounded out of the place by an unholy poltergeist from hell?”. Surveys have shown that people are actually put off buying a house if it […]

Zuri, an 18-year-old female lion at Topeka Zoo and Conservation Center in Kansas, USA, has sprouted a mane like a male. Lions are normally famous for their sexual dimorphism with the males typically sporting the big brown manes that make them worthy to be the King of Pride Rock. Most of the time female lions […]

The US is seeing a spurt of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) cases much earlier in the season than typically seen, leading medical experts to fret it could be a very rough winter ahead for the healthcare system.  RSV infections can occur all year round, but cases tend to spike from late December to mid-February in […]

Astronomers have discovered three new near-Earth asteroids hiding in the glare of the Sun, including the biggest “potentially hazardous” asteroid discovered in eight years. Thanks to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the discovery adds to the known Near-Earth objects, in particular, those that stay between the orbit of Earth and Venus. The asteroid, known as […]

A newly discovered species of hairy land snail has been found perfectly preserved in a piece of 99-million-year-old Mesozoic amber. The fuzzy mollusk has been named Archaeocyclotus brevivillosus, deriving from the Latin “brevis” meaning small, and “villōsus” meaning hairy. The specimen was first collected before 2017 from an amber mine in the Hukawng Valley in […]

In a remarkable comeback, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has just won Brazil’s presidential election, ending the regime of the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro whose reign has proved devastating for the Amazon rainforest, climate change, and the country’s Indigenous people. Known mononymously as Lula, the left-wing politician and trade unionist previously served as […]

The world’s largest aircraft has smashed through another milestone in its ongoing development by successfully carrying the hypersonic prototype vehicle Talon-A over the Mojave desert. The Stratolaunch Roc, which is essentially two large airliners attached together by the wing, is designed to carry the Talon-A to a high altitude, where the Mach 6 rocket test […]

The bacterium Chlamydia pneumoniae can infect the central nervous system. In mice, it has been found to trigger responses matching those seen in people with Alzheimer’s disease- notably, the build up of plaques made of the protein amyloid beta, which are the main way Alzheimer’s is distinguished from other forms of dementia. Although Chlamydia is […]

In 1882, in a workhouse in Leicester, England, a young man named Joe Merrick was having an operation on his face. He had been born 20 years earlier, apparently a perfectly normal, healthy baby – but now, he was so covered in deformities and protrusions that he could barely eat or speak. In years to […]

It’s Halloween and time to scare yourself silly, so why not do so with a little bit of science. Users of Reddit have been discussing what the “scariest thing that science has proven real” is. Here are some of the best, and as ever we will jump in if something needs explaining or elaborating. This […]

For the thousands of years that humans believed Earth was the center of the universe, a puzzling fact about the heavens was the motion of the planets. They all move in one direction except every once in a while, they appear to stop, move backwards for a bit, and then revert to their normal path. […]

Just days into the new reign of Elon Musk, Twitter is reportedly interested in making users pay to have their blue-tick verification badge. It’s even believed that people currently with blue ticks will be stripped of their checkmarks unless they foot the bill. “The whole verification process is being revamped right now”, Musk tweeted on […]

Asteroid PHA 2022 RM4 will make its closest approach to Earth either tomorrow or the morning after, depending on your time zone. As asteroid encounters go it’s not particularly close, passing us at 2.3 million kilometers (1.43 million miles) away, or six times the distance to the Moon. There are, however, aspects to this event […]

Sara Miguel Pico is a lead artist at Tessera Studios, as well as one of its founders. She recently worked across Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova, a sci-fi video game that’s the first based on the series of the same name from Paramount+ and Nickelodeon. We caught up with her to find out more about what […]

Let us tell you a tale of murder most foul: many years ago, in a village called Wadhurst, in England, a newlywed couple were murdered in cold blood inside their cottage. The husband was killed first; the wife called for help, but her pleas were unintelligible through her injuries, and nobody came to their rescue. […]