Deborah Bloomfield

A hidden corridor inside the Great Pyramid of Giza has been seen for the first time since it was sealed some 4,500 years ago.  In 2017, a team known as ScanPyramids scanned the Great Pyramid of Giza using muon tomography. Looking inside the pyramid, the team found what tomb raiders through the centuries apparently hadn’t: […]

Most people believe that the first rapid-fire gun was the Gatling gun, which was invented in 1862 by Richard Gatling and used in the Civil War to deliver devastating losses, the likes of which no other weapon could inflict at the time. However, a rotating, hand-cranked gun was invented almost 150 years prior – luckily […]

Optical illusions work by challenging our brains to break out of their usual pattern of viewing the world, reconfiguring the way they process, predict and analyze visual stimuli. This requires intricate communication and feedback between different brain regions, and new research indicates that this process may be altered in autistic children. “When we view an […]

A new geological model, the most detailed yet, has enabled us to peer back in time over the past 100 million years of the Earth’s surface. As you might expect, a lot has changed in that time, the details of which will further our understanding of the Earth’s geophysical landscape as we know it today […]

A common treatment strategy in patients with liver disease may be inadvertently leading Enterococcus faecium bacteria to develop resistance to one of the last effective antibiotics we have, according to a new preprint. The research, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, found that treating patients with rifaximin was associated with genetic mutations in E. faecium that […]

It’s commonly believed that gold is one of the rarest and most expensive precious metals – but while it does rank pretty high comparatively, there is one metal that has it beat hands down both for price and rarity. The monetary worth of different metals is inconsistent, differing slightly depending on demand and access. Due […]

When a new telescope – especially one like JWST – comes online, there are a lot of expectations of discovering unknowns and challenging our current understanding. The expectations are bearing some tentative fruits in the many areas of focus of the telescope, but lately, the attention has been on cosmology and how observations might be […]

This article first appeared in Issue 5 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  Transhumanism offers humans one of the loftiest goals ever proposed: through science and technology, we hold the power to turbo-charge our senses, edit out our biological frailties, meld minds with computers, and perfect our fleshy bodies to the point where we become something […]

When you think about human evolution, there’s a good chance you’re imagining chimpanzees exploring ancient forests or early humans daubing woolly mammoths on to cave walls. But we humans, along with bears, lizards, hummingbirds and Tyrannosaurus rex, are actually lobe-finned fish. It might sound bizarre but the evidence is in our genes, anatomy and in […]

This article first appeared in Issue 5 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  When there’s a nip in the air and the long, cold nights are drawing in, animals sensibly get under the metaphorical covers and don’t surface until spring. So why, exactly, do humans stay awake? And – more importantly – do we really have […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) has proved to be a useful ally in the battle against antibiotic resistance. A powerful antibiotic that’s even able to kill superbugs has been discovered thanks to a machine-learning algorithm.  Researchers from MIT used a specially designed computer algorithm to sift through a vast digital archive of over 100 million chemical compounds […]

This week, a rare hybrid hummingbird is reported for the first time, cosmic rays reveal a long-lost corridor deep inside Khufu’s Great Pyramid of Giza, and we discover the ancient myths surrounding France’s mysterious Carnac stones. Man Arrested After Keeping 800-Year-Old Male Mummy As His “Spiritual Girlfriend” A man has been arrested in Peru after a […]

A person in Florida has died after being infected with a rare brain-eating amoeba. Health authorities suspect the person fell ill with the fatal infection after using tap water to rinse their sinuses, although they stressed that you cannot be infected by drinking tap water. The Florida Department of Health in Charlotte County announced the […]

Few people are lucky enough to see a wild lynx in Europe these days – but this privileged experience is about to become rarer as Sweden permits the hunting of this elusive cat.  Just weeks after the Scandinavian country approved the largest wolf cull in modern history, Sweden’s country administrators have issued licenses to hunt […]

A story out of Israel today provides a reminder that, sometimes, things really can be too good to be true. It must have felt like the find of a lifetime: a fragment of pottery, discovered serendipitously by a couple of visitors to the Tel Lachish National Park in central Israel, bearing the first-ever written evidence […]

When going out for a night at the bar, most people are acutely aware of what they are drinking if they are the designated driver, ensuring they don’t go over that important drink-driving threshold. But a little-known fact is how alcoholic random foods can be, with some containing almost as much alcohol content as a […]

The first people to master the art of horseback riding may have lived in eastern Europe around 5,000 years ago. After examining the remains of hundreds of individuals from the ancient Yamnaya culture, researchers identified signs of skeletal stress caused by equestrian activity in around 15 percent of samples. Exactly when humans first took to […]

In terms of “promises that epically fail to deliver,” few things can beat the world of cryptids. Take Nessie, for example: is she, as promised, an unbelievably long-lived plesiosaur, somehow surviving alone in a single Scottish lake, only surfacing to tease the odd tourist every few years? Or is she, as is arguably more likely, […]