Deborah Bloomfield

You might think that given how ubiquitous and essential photosynthesis is, we’d have long ago discovered how it works. Instead, major parts of the process remain a mystery. New research suggests one of these stages has considerable parallels with exciton condensates, something physicists have had to go to great lengths to produce in the lab. […]

People on the Internet appear to believe that the Sun has changed color over the last few decades. In a thread of some very confused Twitter users, people claimed to believe that the Sun used to be yellow, and is now white. “I’m just telling a person in their 20s that the sun used to […]

A trial of a new drug to combat Alzheimer’s disease has produced encouraging results, slowing clinical decline by 35 percent and leading to a 40-percent reduction in patients losing the ability to carry out everyday tasks. Pharma giant Eli Lilly and Company is now moving towards securing regulatory approval for the drug, called donanemab. It’s […]

Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital have described how they solved a medical mystery, figuring out that their patient had been faking a rare genetic disorder. The recently published case report details how a woman turned up with some alarming symptoms, but as the medical team began to investigate, things just didn’t add up. The patient […]

When a star runs out of hydrogen to fuse at its core a transformation occurs, the star first collapses a bit on itself to kickstart the fusion of helium and then it expands, becoming a million times larger. That star has become a red giant. Red giants are expected to engulf their closest planets as […]

Ancient DNA extracted from a deer tooth pendant has revealed that the age-old jewelry was worn by a single female owner between 19,000 and 25,000 years ago. Found in the famous Denisova Cave in Russia, the trinket belonged to a woman with strong genetic ties to a group of humans that lived further east in […]

Finding the right people to go to Mars will be no easy feat. They have to be prepared for the monumental risk of never returning, they must be happy to sit in a confined spacecraft for around seven months to get there, and they need to be some of the most highly trained specialists out […]

In a potentially game-changing breakthrough for brain cancer patients, researchers have managed to temporarily breach the blood-brain barrier using ultrasound and successfully deliver chemotherapy drugs to the brain.  A new study reports the results of a phase 1 clinical trial, providing the first direct evidence that ultrasound-based opening of the blood-brain barrier can significantly increase […]

The Grotte Mandrin cave has overturned anthropological thinking about the arrival of Homo sapiens in Western Europe. A new paper attempts to build a new picture that puts the Mandrin discoveries in context of human activity in Asia. The author concludes modern humans arrived in three waves, only displacing the Neanderthals with the third. Until […]

A new study has investigated whether alien civilizations could find humanity by detecting radio signals from cell phone towers leaking from Earth.  The team simulated leakage from cell towers around the world, attempting to work out if advanced aliens around nearby stars would be able to detect it using equipment equivalent to what we have […]

A video on TikTok has caused a bit of worry for nervous flyers this week, showing airport workers applying tape to the wings of a plane. “This is the reason why I don’t fly with Spirit. I don’t care if it is aviation airplane tape,” the voiceover in @myhoneysmacks‘ video says. “The fact that you have […]

If you’re looking to travel from the US this summer, expect a little chaos – the government has refused to delay the deadline for planes to be retrofitted to prevent interference from the growing 5G network.  The deadline was set by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for July 1 after a series of previous delays, […]

All that glitters isn’t usually gold, and the same is true for 183 million-year-old fossils found in the Posidonia Shale. Moreover, while the researchers used to think the shiny gold coating on the fossils was fool’s gold, new research has revealed a more surprising answer.  The Posidonia Shale in southwest Germany is the source of […]

When it comes to Lunar eclipses, you can have three types. The total eclipse, with the characteristic red blood color the Moon takes, happens when the lunar surface is completely within the shadow of the Earth. The partial eclipse is where only portions of the Moon are covered by our planet’s shadow. And then there […]

For the first time scientists have detected evidence that woolly mammoths experienced musth during the mating season, a hormone-driven surge in aggression that would’ve spurred on rival males at they competed for a mate. The discovery has also revealed that such hormone changes can be detected in the growth rings of tusks, something that can […]

A weird life hack is going around the Internet at the moment: people are adding a small pinch of salt to their coffee, like it’s some sort of horrible soup. The hack was first spread by Twitter user BirdRespecter, who told followers “a tiny pinch of salt in black coffee removes the bitterness almost entirely. […]

A team of archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 19th-century quarantine hospital and a small cemetery on a submerged island in the Dry Tortugas national park, near Florida. The site was discovered in August 2022, by the national park’s cultural resources staff, alongside the National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center, the Southeast Archaeological Center, […]

For the first time, astronomers have found what they called “fingerprints” left by the explosions of the first stars in the universe in three distant clouds. The first generation of stars made it possible for the universe to have the building blocks of planets and eventually life. These objects were made of just hydrogen and […]

If you’ve spent any amount of time online in the past, oh, 40 years or so, you’re probably aware it can be a pretty toxic place. Not all the time, of course – but let’s just say that if you’re, for example, a young woman, or a person of color, or any number of other […]

At the Montesiepi Chapel in Siena, Italy, there is a strange artifact that will be instantly familiar to fans of Arthurian legend and anybody who has watched Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, being that it is a literal sword embedded inside a stone. According to a chemical analysis of the artifact, it is probably from […]