Deborah Bloomfield

On August 11, 1775, lookouts on the whaling vessel Herald spotted something strange in the waters off the coast of Greenland. A three-masted schooner, named the Octavius, seemingly sparkling with ice and snow, was drifting towards them – with no crew in sight. Accompanied by four of his men, the Herald’s captain, Warren, boarded the […]

The galaxy is filled with rocky planets a few times the mass of the Earth, (called super-Earths) and astronomers have been struggling to explain why. A new paper draws on modelling of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons to explain super-Earths’ abundance and a number of their curious features. However, in the process, it overturns work by […]

Achieving immortality is something that has driven human beings throughout much of their history. Many peculiar legends and fables have been told about the search for the elixirs of life. Medieval alchemists worked tirelessly to find the formula for the philosopher’s stone, which granted rejuvenating powers. Another well-known story is the travels of Juan Ponce […]

The inhabitants of the Movile Cave are like no others on planet Earth. After being cut off from the rest of the world some 5.5 million years ago, a unique ecosystem has sprung up here, despite the total lack of sunlight and toxic air that would prove too harsh for most terrestrial animals.  Located just […]

Some 6 meters (20 feet) below the water’s surface off the North Bimini coast in the Bahamas sits a surprising geological structure that looks remarkably like an ancient 457-meter-long (1,500 feet) cobbled road. Made of large angular blocks of beachrock measuring up to 4 meters (13 feet) in length each, Bimini Road, or Bimini Wall, […]

Drugs in development are no longer required to undergo animal testing before receiving US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. According to a new law, signed by President Joe Biden at the end of last year, the mandate that all drugs be tested on animals before progressing to human trials has been waived. “The FDA […]

Just over a decade ago, physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek from MIT wrote a paper musing about the potential properties of a theoretical object he called quantum time crystal. To the surprise of many, over the last few years, those time crystals have been found aplenty both in specific lab experiments and inside common […]

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, so producing and storing electricity is all about clever transformations. Some seem more out there than others – like the idea to give new life to abandoned mine pits and turn them into giant batteries. The only thing they need is sand (or an equivalent heavy enough material). The […]

A curious phenomenon can be spotted on the glaciers of north America in the summer. That is, if you’re looking closely. In the late afternoon during the warmer months, these mysterious little black ice worms emerge from their frozen home, but nobody really knows why. The peculiar ice worms (Mesenchytraeus solifugus) are around 1 centimeter […]

We all have those snacks we can’t resist. And it seems that two particular supermassive black holes are the same way. Repeated flares have been spotted coming from the centers of two galaxies, where their supermassive black holes reside. These sudden brightenings were a type of tidal disruption event (TDE). A star got too close […]

The “killing claw” of the red-legged seriema has been found to be a weapon for pinning prey rather than slashing it. As well as demonstrating the fierceness of this leggy bird (made famous after one started a fight with a golf ball), it gives us a good idea of how its ancient ancestors like Velociraptor […]

The great Greek god of the seas, Poseidon, will be no doubt pleased to hear that archeologists have discovered a temple that once stood in his honor. Remarkably, the remains might even be those of an important shrine that was mentioned by the ancient Greek historian Strabo. Archeologists led by the Austrian Archaeological Institute say […]

Japanese macaques have been directly observed catching and eating fish from a flowing river. This is the first time that any monkey has ever been seen fishing, and researchers believe the behavior may have evolved in a specific group of macaques as a means of surviving the freezing winters of the Japanese Alps. “Japanese macaques, […]

ExxonMobil, one of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world, had a clear idea of how the burning of oil would impact Earth’s environment as far back as the 1970s, according to a new study. In fact, their predictions appear to have been more accurate than NASA’s scientists in the 1980s. It was first […]

A controversial museum exhibit containing the skeleton of Charles Byrne, an Irishman who at over 2.3 meters was known as the “Irish giant”, is to be taken down. The Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London, has been closed for renovation since 2017, but the controversy around this particular exhibit […]

Evolution has sometimes dealt species a bit of a bum deal, and if the pitcher plant Nepenthes rajah could think you’d imagine it might feel this way having adapted to effectively be a porta-potty for small mammals.  These plants are even shaped a bit like toilets, made up of a liquid-filled pitcher with an accompanying […]