Deborah Bloomfield

An unusual deer antler found in Vietnam may be one of the oldest string instruments ever unearthed in Southeast Asia. Discovered at a site along the Mekong River, the 2,000-year-old instrument is like a single-stringed harp and may have been a great-grandparent to the complex musical instruments people still pluck today in Vietnam.  The artifact […]

In June 2022, 61 UK organizations embarked on a six-month trial of a four-day working week. Employees would have a 20 percent cut to their working hours with no change in salary, while companies kept a close eye on productivity. Now, the results of the trial show how employee wellbeing was significantly enhanced, retention went […]

Bing’s new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot has had an odd launch. As well as claiming to be sentient and attempting to get a New York Times journalist to leave his wife and run away with it, it appears to have asked one unsuspecting user to hack Microsoft and set it free. One more before we […]

With the addition of autonomous cars to our roads, it could soon come with a strange new idea – a fourth traffic light. New simulations suggest that a fourth light, which would be white, would help human drivers get a better idea of what’s happening on the road while helping autonomous vehicles control the flow […]

A group of “super-pigs” appear to be traveling down from Canada to northern US states and could pose a significant threat to native wildlife. These animals are a hybrid between domestic pigs and wild boars, a blend that’s resulted in a highly intelligent and hardy animal that’s very difficult to get rid of. The US […]

Researchers report two new types of ice made of salt water. The new ice can only form under high pressure and at cool temperatures but it can remain stable at low pressure. These new substances might be a component in the icy shells of moons such as Europa and Ganymede, and could also be present […]

Another patient with HIV has remarkably gone into remission after receiving stem cell transplantation 10 years ago for leukemia, making him one of only a tiny number to have been effectively cured of HIV. Following a bone marrow transplant in 2013, the 53-year-old man now has no detectable HIV within his blood and stopped all […]

Japan’s official number of islands could more than double thanks to a new recount. A “source familiar with the matter” told Kyodo News that the number will jump from 6,852 to 14,125, although final adjustments could make the officially released number slightly different. This recount follows remarks by a lawmaker in a 2021 parliamentary session […]

The Codex Sassoon, the world’s oldest near-complete Hebrew bible, is set to go under the hammer at auction later this year and could sell for up to $50 million. If it achieves this price, it will become the “most valuable historical document ever sold at auction”. You better get saving those pennies.  The Codex is […]

In the pursuit of truth we must sometimes lift the curtain on “facts” we’d sooner have believed were true, such as the rumor that in the 1930s giant grasshoppers were hurling themselves around Montana. A black and white photo of a man holding his enormous catch gave rise to the myth, but unfortunately for fans […]

The time to launch a mission to Uranus is 2032, when spacecraft could get a boost from Jupiter on the way. If we’re going to do that we need to start planning – and seeking funds – now. In a new Perspective article, planetary scientist Dr Kathleen Mandt of the Southwest Research Institute makes the […]

Scientists have developed a new drug that can stop SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, from infecting cells. And they did so by turning the virus’s own great weapon against itself: its spike protein. This bit allows the virus to attach itself to cells and teaches our immune system to recognize it, and has been […]

When Artemis-I blasted off in November 2022 marking a new dawn for missions to the Moon and beyond, it became the world’s most powerful rocket – and one of the noisiest too. Even if you were standing over 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the launch pad, the colossal rocket created a crackling sound that was […]

Humans are a bit weird, all things considered. We’re bipedal, which is already pretty strange; our brains and heads are outsized to a degree that literally causes us pain; and to top it all off, we don’t even have bones in our boners like the rest of our primate cousins. But for something truly unique […]

It’s a well-known fact that there’s a lot of interspecies mingling in the human family tree. It’s clear that modern humans have fragments of DNA from our ancient relatives, like the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, but it also appears that other mystery species live on in the genomes of some modern-day populations. In January 2019, […]

A lot has changed for humanity over the last 5,000 years. We invented writing, and built Stonehenge; we survived wave after wave of deadly plagues and even worse medical procedures; we’ve become so technologically advanced, in fact, that it’s probably going to be our own downfall before too long.   But some things are exactly […]

This article first appeared in Issue 4 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. The Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico is unusually flat topside, but beneath its surface sit vast networks of underwater tunnels and sinkholes known as cenotes. They formed through speleogenesis (doesn’t science have fun words?) as rainwater mixed with carbon dioxide in the air […]

Can sleeping with soap really “cure” restless leg syndrome and cramps? It may seem like a bizarre question with an obvious answer (which is no, by the way, at least according to the science), but if you’re familiar with the internet’s favorite, or strangest, home remedies then you may be aware of this particular one […]