Deborah Bloomfield

This article first appeared in Issue 1 of our new free digital magazine CURIOUS. Conspiracy theories can range from the small and innocent (blue tack is just white tack that’s been colored in with pen) to the downright dangerous and absurd (have the people who think Bill Gates is a super-genius capable of a global […]

Bumblebees have had a mixed 2022 so far. Despite their success in being declared fish by the US Supreme Court, it has also been discovered that they are capable of feeling pain. Now the results of a new study found that a common pesticide can even affect their fine-color vision and long-term memory.  Glyphosate-based herbicides are […]

If you want a particularly unforgettable reminder to take your contact lenses out every night – or you just fancy a shiny new sleep paralysis demon – look no further. A video by an optometrist in Newport Beach, California, has gone viral after showing a patient having no fewer than 23 contact lenses removed from […]

Saying that the surface of Venus is inhospitable is an understatement. The pressure is twice what you’d get at the bottom of lake superior, the temperature is high enough to melt lead, and the air is a mixture of acids. But above this hellscape, there are clouds that are a bit more forgiving to robotic […]

The hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica hit its annual peak of 26.4 million square kilometers (10.2 million square miles) on October 5. While this is the third consecutive year that the ozone hole has expanded to this kind of size, the overall trend shows that it is in fact still shrinking. According to […]

Most of us, whether we like it or not, spend about twelve years minimum studying mathematics – learning how to recognize numbers, add them together and subtract one from another, multiply and raise powers, all that kind of stuff. Let’s face it, most of us have forgotten a whole lot of it a few years […]

Astronomers have discovered something puzzling in the atmospheres of two exoplanets: barium. The 56th member of the periodic table is the heaviest element ever discovered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, detected in the upper layers of two peculiar worlds, both ultra-hot Jupiters: WASP-76 b and WASP-121 b. And we’re not exaggerating when we say […]

It’s always wonderful when one of humanity’s cosmic explorers spots something unexpected. This time, is the turn of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express to get a glimpse of a rare event. The orbiting spacecraft has been studying the Red Planet for almost 20 years, and has now captured an astronomical occultation. Deimos, the smaller […]

This week, we explore the Native Land Digital interactive map, an absolute unit of a fish emerges from the murky depths, and we speak to director Marian Mohamed about her work on the new BBC documentary series The Elon Musk Show. Interactive Map Shows Which Indigenous Lands You Are Living On This week saw the […]

Nikola Tesla, famed for his work on alternating current, was one hell of an inventor, mechanical engineer and physicist. His inventions have been found to work better than expected even 100 years after he noted them down. However, nobody can be right 100 percent of the time, and Nikola Tesla had his fair share of […]

There is a widespread perception of old people having distinctive smell, expressed by less tactful children as, “grandpa smells funny”. Researchers decided to test if the scent was an intrinsic part of growing older, a product of the environment, or a trick of the mind.  Although they found the smell is mostly an effect of […]

Menthol is a weird flavor, isn’t it? Probably more of an experience than a flavor – you pop a mint in your mouth, or some minty soap under your arms (or, Darwin forbid, on your genitals), and feel that signature ice-cool freshness come over you – but have you ever wondered why that is? It […]

Humanity has been able to reach interstellar space only twice, thanks to the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, which have been traveling in space for over 45 years. During the last decade, they crossed the boundaries known as the termination shock and heliopause, the so-called edge of the Solar System where plasma originated from the […]

The world’s largest chameleon has been successfully bred at Chester Zoo in a first for the UK. The zoo welcomed to the world a fleet of tiny hatchlings with big shoes to fill. The Parson’s chameleon has the longest incubation time of any reptile in the world, cooking for around 600 days. So far just […]

Using high-speed microcinematography, researchers have revealed the hunting techniques of three species of predatory mosquito larvae – and it’s quite literally head-popping. The animal kingdom is full of weird and wonderful hunting techniques – ant-slayer spiders and parachuting octopuses anyone? However, nothing quite prepared us for the results of this new study, with larvae observed flinging […]

The fastest Internet network in the world, hosted at the United States Department of Energy, has just received an upgrade to ESnet6, which brings it to an astonishing bandwidth of 46 Terabits/s. The network will be dedicated exclusively to science, and will boost the speed at which new discoveries can be developed and communicated between […]

Podcaster Joe Rogan has interviewed a surprising guest, given that the guest has been dead for well over a decade. No, this is not us announcing in a roundabout way that zombies are a thing and it’s primarily affecting former CEOs of multinational corporations. Both voices, in fact, are generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The […]

When stars get too close to supermassive black holes, they are ripped to shreds. This is known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). The spewing out of material follows the destruction of the star. The intense gravity pulls the star apart and the material swirls around the black hole, lighting up, which we can observe. […]