Deborah Bloomfield

NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are setting out to study the possibility of using the private space company to boost the Hubble space telescope into a higher orbit, NASA announced yesterday. The pair signed a deal earlier this month that will see SpaceX study whether it’s possible for its Dragon spacecraft to safely rendezvous with […]

The Juno spacecraft has returned the first images taken during a flyby yesterday from just 352 kilometers (219 miles) above the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. The flyby, which was closer than most satellites are to the Earth, is an effort both to learn more about the enigmatic world and to move to a […]

Squids are finally having their moment this Squidtember thanks to the folks over at OceanX who are celebrating the remarkable skills of these complex organisms. Capable of glowing in the dark, swimming faster than any other invertebrate and surviving at incredible depths, they are truly ocean marvels.  “OceanX has a long history uncovering the secret […]

A galaxy in JWST’s first deep field image contains a galaxy 9 billion light years away, nicknamed the Sparkler Galaxy. Compared to some others in the field, that’s not particularly distant. However, the sparkles that inspired the name are star clusters, at least some of which are the most distant globular clusters ever seen. Dotted […]

Dr Christopher Yang (presumably) made a world first earlier this month, performing a vasectomy on his patient using power from a Rivian car battery.  Vasectomies involve going into both sides of your scrotum after applying local anesthetic, then cutting the tube that delivers sperm out of your testicles (where does the sperm go after you […]

Back before trees existed, when Earth was inhabited solely by single-celled organisms, the largest asteroid to ever hit our planet touched down near what we now know as Johannesburg, South Africa, forming the Vredefort crater. With an estimated crater size of between 250-280 kilometers (155-174 miles) upon first impact, the size of the asteroid was […]

Footage taken from a webcam at Fort Myers, Florida, has shown the devastating impacts of the storm surge caused by Hurricane Ian.  Water levels in Florida rose to abnormal levels ahead of Hurricane Ian in what’s known as a “storm surge”. The surges are mainly caused by high winds pushing water towards the coast, though […]

A prototype electric passenger aircraft hit the skies for the first time this week, quietly jetting off from Grant County International Airport in Washington state on a short trip with nine passengers onboard. Dubbed Alice, the plane is the brainchild of the Washington-based aerial engineering company Eviation. Powered by two magni650 electric propulsion units, it […]

It’s no secret that Bitcoin is bad for the environment. While some have compared its impact on our planet to that of gold mining, new research has found that it’s more comparable to the beef industry. The impacts of mining for the digital cryptocurrency as a share of the market price point to it as […]

As any parent knows, carrying babies in your arms for a long time is exhausting and can be impractical. It must have been more so 10,000 years ago when parents were also hunting and foraging constantly. However, the mechanism of how our early ancestors did this was unknown as there is little hard evidence. Now, […]

Picture the scene: you are a medieval lawyer, getting your client ready for court. Your client has been accused of the most heinous of crimes, witchcraft, after claims that they laid an egg. To complicate matters further, your client is a chicken.  This, minus a fancy lawyer for the defense, is what happened in Basel […]

Hurricane Ian has caused major problems in the southwest of Florida with over 2 million homes left without power after the category 4 storm struck on Wednesday 28 September. With wind speeds of over 241 kilometers per hour (150 miles per hour) recorded, you might think taking to the skies was the last thing you’d […]

The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is home to two separate species of sloth with heads that look just like coconuts, new research reveals. Found in a small region of this coastal forest, maned sloths were previously thought to represent a single species – but it turns out that those in the northern section of this range […]

Desk work can have a devastating impact on our health, encouraging people to sit for hours in a way that puts humans at greater risk of serious disease. However, new research has found that a small movement of the lower legs can mitigate some of the negative effects of sitting still by keeping one muscle’s […]

The two titans of space observatories – Hubble and JWST – both captured the moment NASA’s DART mission intentionally slammed into an asteroid earlier this week. It’s the first time this pair of iconic telescopes have been used to simultaneously observe the same celestial target and their joint work is already helping to shed light […]

The Milky Way Galaxy may be our precious home, but it can be a bully to smaller collections of stars. The dwarf galaxies it doesn’t consume tend to be ripped apart by the gravitational force of a much larger object. Consequently, the survival of two of our nearest galactic neighbors, the Large and Small Magellanic […]

Rejoice, fans of typing in a prompt and having artificial intelligence (AI) paint what you wrote, for DALLE-2 is now open to the general public.  There has been a lot of excitement recently about image-generating algorithms, particularly Imagen by Google Research, Midjourney, and Open AI’s DALL-E 2. Advertisement All these systems use a blend of […]

Death from the skies may not come in an isolated event. Instead, major asteroid impacts may be accompanied by smaller objects hitting the Earth – and the Moon too. The ages of lunar glass collected by the Chang’e-5 mission indicate clusters of craters coinciding with the Chicxulub event, plus two other periods associated with large […]

The accident at reactor four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 generated the largest release of radioactive material into the environment in human history. The impact of the acute exposure to high doses of radiation was severe for the environment and the human population. But more than three decades after the accident, Chernobyl […]