Deborah Bloomfield

If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere and the skies are clear, you might get a few natural fireworks on New Year’s Eve. The Quadrantids meteor shower lasts from December 28 to January 12, peaking on January 3/4. It’s one of the best showers of the year in terms of the brightness and frequency of its […]

We’ve all heard our fair share of conspiracies. There’s the one about the US government being run by a secret cabal of pedophile Satan worshippers, for example – or the even more sinister one about birds not being real. It’s easy to dismiss such theories as nothing more than the ramblings of cranks – but […]

A weight-loss drug that’s been shown to encourage weight loss in people with obesity is now available for children as young as 12 in the US. Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug Wegovy for use in adolescents who are 12 years old or over, according to the drug maker […]

Archivists have recently stumbled across a walking cane that’s believed to depict a suspect in the case of Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer who raised hell in the East End of London in the autumn of 1888. Jack the ripper was responsible for the murders of at least five female sex workers in […]

It’s no secret that removing abortion access leads to an uptick in death rates among pregnant people and babies – it’s not even surprising, really, since by definition it involves removing access to lifesaving healthcare to those who need it. But a new study has shown another deadly aspect of draconian anti-abortion laws: they could […]

A team of scientists has recently headed to the South Pole in a push to dig deep beneath Antarctica and capture some of Earth’s oldest ice. To provide a little snapshot of this important work, one of the project’s scientists Austin Carter, a graduate student at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, recently shared a stunning time-lapse […]

It would be most people’s worst nightmare. In the summer of 2021, as the UK was taking long-awaited, tentative steps out of COVID lockdown restrictions, a man in the southeastern town of Windsor was enjoying his garden when the unthinkable happened. Human waste from a passing plane was dumped, causing a veritable poonami that covered […]

As the old saying goes: you’ve got to fake it till you make it. It’s why we dress for the job we want, not the job we have; why we carry ourselves as if we’re cute (even if we think we’re so-so); and most importantly, why we put on a happy face, even when we’re […]

South Korea has reported its first ever case of, and subsequent death by, the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri. The patient, who died on December 21, had been suffering from meningitis symptoms, which were caused by the pathogen, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) confirmed Monday. In a statement, the KDCA said the patient […]

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that human brain organoids are able to form functional connections with mouse brain tissue and respond to visual stimuli. After implanting the human “mini brains” into the animals’ cortices, the study authors used a variety of imaging techniques to confirm the formation of “human-mouse synapses.” In recent years, […]

‘Tis the season for winter viruses. If you’ve not succumbed to the lurgy yourself, chances are you know someone who has. We’re all used to the idea of testing for COVID by now, but it’s not always easy to get hold of a test kit, and if your symptoms are mild, you might be forgiven […]

This is the story of Captain Schlitt, a sunken submarine, and a very unfortunate bowel movement. In April 1945, just weeks away from Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War Two, a soldier’s trip to the toilet resulted in a Nazi submarine suffering a dramatic – and highly unpleasant – demise. The U-boat 1206 was cruising […]

A widely believed theory about the origins of Native Americans has been dealt a huge blow by a new genetic analysis of ancient teeth, implying the ancient inhabitants of what is now America were not who we thought they were. The theory, largely based on archaeological evidence found at Native American sites, claims that the […]

There’s a massive lump of liquidized, carbon-rich material hiding hundreds of kilometers beneath Yellowstone’s supervolcano and the greater Western United States area. It’s truly massive – 1.8 million square kilometers (about 700,000 square miles) in size – and it’s bubbling inside the upper region of the mantle, the region of the planet that’s a partly-molten churning mass […]

A TikTok video has recently gone viral, and it is of a forensic pathologist (an expert in determining the cause and manner of deaths) who explains what she thinks are the most preventable deaths. Dr Judy Melinek has had a long and extensive career in forensics and is a forensic pathologist in New Zealand. She […]

Were it not for the stellar flares, the TRAPPIST-1 star system would look like the perfect place to hunt for life. With three rocky planets in the “habitable zone” where temperatures are right for liquid water, TRAPPIST-1’s worlds have fascinated astrobiologists since their discovery. At just 39 light years from Earth, it is also close […]

A giant “water battery” in the Swiss Alps is finally operational, 14 years after construction began. The Nant de Drance Hydropower Plant can store enough power to charge 400,000 car batteries. Until fusion (fingers crossed for the next few decades/centuries) is capable of solving all of our power needs, we have a problem to deal […]

The menu of life just grew a little as researchers have discovered that certain organisms can not only eat viruses, but thrive on them too. As a testament to the fact that life, uh, finds a way, it seems some living things have evolved to eat something that’s plastered just about everywhere – viruses. The […]

If you look up into the sky over the next few months, you can see an object last seen when Neanderthals walked the Earth. On March 2, 2022, astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility discovered a comet using a wide-field survey camera. The comet is estimated to complete an orbit of the Sun once every […]