Deborah Bloomfield

Last week, the world met “Toadzilla”, a cane toad the size of a football and six times larger than average. The rangers who found her – female toads are bigger than male – were stunned. Weighing in at 2.7 kilograms, Toadzilla may be the largest cane toad ever recorded. Is this a sign Australia’s cane […]

People in the Southern United States, the Caribbean, and Central America will be able to see a lunar occultation of Mars on January 30. The Moon, which will be 78 percent full, will cover the Red Planet as the two bodies move in the sky. After several hours, Mars will pop up again on the […]

Fast radio bursts (FRBs), incredibly brief but very powerful emissions of radio waves, were only discovered in the last 15 years or so. Their exact cause is a matter of debate; astronomers have discovered some that repeat regularly and others that seem to be a one-off event. Astronomers have now discovered a large number of […]

We all agree math is pretty amazing, but did you know it can literally tell the future? At least, that’s what proponents of numerology believe: that the numerical values of your birth and name can reveal deep truths about your personality and destiny. And, like, it’s got numbers in it, right? So it kind of […]

Artificial intelligence is opening the door to everything from better medicine to possibly speaking to animals. But you don’t have to wait for someone else to build your dream AI. This four-course ultimate training bundle will show you how to get started designing and launching your own machine learning tools. Each course in this bundle […]

Predictions of close asteroid approaches are becoming common as we gain more knowledge of objects with Earth-crossing orbits. Nevertheless, the passage of 2023 BU over South America shortly after midnight GMT tonight is on quite a different scale. Many astronomers define a close approach as coming inside the orbit of the Moon, although more distant […]

In a resurfaced video, a woman with no inner monologue has explained how it affects her everyday life. Kirsten Carlson told YouTube channel PA Struggles about the surprisingly-common phenomenon of having no inner voice.  One of the main things the host, and other Internet users, wanted to know was how she thinks and knows she […]

We humans have been messing with our willies for thousands of years, and while penis science has come a long way in that time, getting the snip in Ancient Egypt was apparently a rather crude affair. Thought to represent the earliest ever depiction of a circumcision, a scene carved into a 4,300-year-old-tomb shows a male […]

The vicious claws of the hairy frog were first discovered around the year 1900, but it wasn’t until after the turn of the millennium that we found out how these bizarre amphibians grow them – or break them, as it were. Yes, when aggravated the hairy frog (Trichobatrachus robustus) actively breaks its own toe bones, […]

Earth is absolutely heaving with bizarre geological formations, but nothing has us exclaiming “what in the turducken?” quite like Vulcan Point. This unique little island lies within a lake, within another island, within a lake, within another island, within an archipelago, within the Pacific.  It’s a rather tongue-twisting concoction of concentric lakes and islands, and while […]

Cats love to fight, so much so that it’s one of the most common forms of play, but with the line between light-hearted scrapping and aggressive attacking so easily blurred beneath all that fur, how’s an owner to know when to take it seriously? Researchers on a new study decided to investigate the behaviors mostly […]

Billions of kilometers beyond the orbit of Saturn, there’s a population of asteroids known as the Centaurs. The biggest among them is Chariklo, a rock 250 kilometers (160 miles) across that is known for also having two thin rings. The discovery of these two rings happened thanks to a phenomenon called stellar occultation. When an […]

When people want to possess something unique it usually has to be human-made, not a piece of the Earth. After all, we live on a large planet, and if geologic forces produce a particular mineral in one spot, there’s a pretty good chance they will make it somewhere else as well. Indeed, of the 6,000 […]

Scientists say they’ve solved an “80-year-old medical mystery” by showing how a specific form of kidney damage in children, which can be fatal in babies, isn’t always caused by a gene mutation, but sometimes the gene’s shape. Known as infantile hypercalcemia type 1, the condition causes a build-up of calcium in the blood, leading to […]

If you want to spot something black and white in a huge surrounding area of things that are largely black and white then you might think you’d have more luck with that needle in the haystack. Fortunately, the team at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have a few tricks up their sleeves.  To find penguin […]

A new study suggests that spanking children may have a detrimental impact on their social development, demonstrating a number of worsened social behaviors when compared to children from non-violent backgrounds. The research adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests physical punishment can have long-term effects on the children that last well into adulthood.  […]

Archaeologists in Egypt have reportedly found what is being hailed as the oldest mummy found in Egypt yet. The 4,300-year-old mummified remains were uncovered recently during ongoing excavations of tombs near the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, around 24 kilometers (15 miles) from Cairo. The mummified remains of a man named Hekashepes were discovered in a […]

Multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson has spent over $2 million in an attempt to de-age himself. The 45-year-old hired a team of medical professionals to help him, according to Bloomberg, “have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis, and rectum of an 18-year-old”. So far Johnson’s team has focused on the unsurprising: […]

Viral videos that have exploded across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok claim to show a new mineral that somehow holds a charge, with users demonstrating by rubbing them together and creating sparks, as well as connecting them with wires that then appear to power an LED. The rocks were supposedly discovered in the Democratic Republic […]