Deborah Bloomfield

Fall is finally upon us, and that means we’re about to see pumpkins galore – including some absolute chonkers. The winner of last year’s Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, for example, weighed roughly the same as two grizzly bears. But why do giant pumpkins like this get so big? The rest of this article is behind […]

Land snails are usually found trailing around forest floors or lingering beneath dark, humid logs and rocks. However, some species break this convention by chilling out at the very tops of trees, where it is light, dry, and seemingly unfriendly to snailkind. A few years ago, a team of Japanese scientists decided to find out […]

In East Africa’s ‘Cradle of Mankind’, a major shift in human evolution occurred just under 1.8 million years ago, when our ancestors began exploiting megafauna – including hippos and giraffes – for food. Known as Olduvai Gorge, this prehistoric hominin hotspot in Tanzania has now yielded its earliest known elephant butchery site, providing new insights […]

A study using JWST observations of the early universe has uncovered an intriguing mystery: most galaxies seem to rotate in the same direction. This unexpected pattern, which defies current cosmological models, could suggest that our universe exists inside a black hole, the researchers propose. The JWST has allowed astronomers to peer back further into the […]

From time to time, Mars rovers and orbiting spacecraft send back striking images of unusual rock formations on the Red Planet. These discoveries range from the curious—like a donut-shaped rock that might not even originate from Mars—to the playful, such as the so-called avocado rock or a pile of stones jokingly dubbed ‘bones.’ Recently, attention […]

Time to refresh your geography: Earth actually has five oceans, not four, as many of us were taught. In 2021, National Geographic officially recognized the Southern Ocean as the world’s fifth ocean. This decision ended decades of debate over the waters encircling Antarctica and, quite literally, put the Southern Ocean on the map.  Traditionally, only […]

Psychologists are studying an optical illusion so powerful it can even fool the brain’s automatic visual reflexes. Strangely, only about 80 percent of people seem to experience the full effect, and researchers still don’t know why. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. […]

Around the turn of the century, a number of huge tunnels were discovered in South America. After investigation, the scientists who discovered them found that they are not made by any humans, nor geological process. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Professor […]

Could black holes be tunnels to other locations in space-time? Could they be wormholes connecting different regions of the universe? A study gives a resounding answer to this question. Black holes are complicated beasts. They have consistently broken our physics and studying them has opened our eyes to the limitations of our knowledge. One crucial […]

Communication is key. That’s true on Earth and it’s true in space. But in space, you need to contend with a crucial fact of life. The speed of light is finite and distances between worlds are pretty big; between star systems, they are enormous. An analysis envisions what it would be like to communicate with […]

At the outbreak of the Second World War, before a single shot was fired, the British began killing hundreds of thousands of their own pets. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. The British pet massacre is one of the stranger tragedies of […]

Kids are full of curious questions, often asked repeatedly, and usually right when you’re trying to cook. One such question came from the 9-year-old child of a Reddit user, who wondered: “If helium is lighter than air, would a balloon with a vacuum in it, also float?” The rest of this article is behind a […]

This week, a new lineage of tropical mammoth has been discovered in Mexico, the latest in the saga of whether the small-brained Homo naledi may have buried its dead, and violent storms led to the perfect preservation of hatchling pterosaurs. Finally, we ask: what is the largest egg of any animal? Spoiler, it’s not an […]

Goldfish are often – and unfairly – maligned for having super-short attention spans. In reality, goldfish have quite impressive brains. They can also grow to be absolutely massive and are competent motorists, so you should watch what you say about them. Humans, on the other hand? If recent research is to be believed, our attention […]

A 1,000-year-old gaming piece made from walrus ivory may be the first depiction of an actual Viking ever found, revealing how these ancient Norsemen wore their hair. Sporting a center parting and sideburns, the miniature figurine – which probably represented a king – may also be stroking its massive beard in an apparent display of […]

The longest snake in the world is the reticulated python, Malayopython reticulatus. While they typically stretch to lengths surpassing 6 meters (20 feet), the longest ever recorded was said to be a whopping 10-meter (33-foot) long reticulated python that was found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in 1912. Unfortunately, that lengthy specimen was also […]

Scientists at the University of Leicester, UK are turning to an unexpected source in their mission for new medical treatments: zoo animal poo. Yes, the waste from giraffes, tigers, elephants, and other exotic animals has been collected, but not for fertilizer. Hidden inside animal droppings are fascinating little viruses called bacteriophages (or phages for short) […]

It’s rare enough to find a plant encased in amber, rarer still to find part of a dinosaur – so imagine paleontologists’ surprise when they discovered this feathery “flower” was in fact a feathery tail that once belonged to a juvenile theropod. The fascinating case of mistaken identity began back in 2015 when Lida Xing […]

A former NASA analyst on TikTok has explained the (hopefully obvious) reason why photographs of our galaxy – the Milky Way – are not real. Responding to the question “How do we take pictures of the Milky Way if we are in it?”, science communicator and former NASA space analyst Alexandra Doten explained that we […]

Teeth and the evolution of teeth have long fascinated researchers in all manner of species. Questions arise, such as why they evolved, why they were lost, and even in some cases, why they evolved again. However, these questions focus on teeth within the mouth – one fish species is growing teeth straight out of its […]