Deborah Bloomfield

This week, researchers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher ancient Babylonian texts, the sky over Hawai’i appears to glitch like the title screen of The Matrix, and we ask the question: is your phone heavier when it’s full of data? Google’s Rival To ChatGPT Makes Embarrassing JWST Error That Wipes $100 Billion Off Shares […]

On February 9, SpaceX performed the static fire test of Starship, its reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle. In such a test the rocket goes nowhere – it’s to test the performance of the engines. Starship has 33 engines, and when it launches will be the most powerful rocket system in history, beating the record set […]

The number of deaths from Monday’s devastating earthquake and aftershocks in Turkey and Syria has now topped 21,000, according to reports. The 7.8-magnitude quake struck southeastern Turkey, not far from the border with Syria, in the early hours, and was followed by a 6.7-magnitude aftershock. A second earthquake, measuring 7.6 in magnitude, hit less than […]

Watch out New Caledonian crows, there is a new challenger for the tool use among non-primate species crown. Goffin’s cockatoos have been found to understand tools’ different utilities and to identify when a single tool will do, and when they need a set. This makes them, alongside chimpanzees, the only known non-human animals to use […]

We’re often told that, since the advent of social media, modern society has become unprecedently toxic. What this view fails to account for, however, is just how petty and vengeful our ancestors were – and while they may not have had tweets available to take it out on the random folk they felt had wronged […]

In the depths of the Congo Rainforest, it’s said that a population of savage giant apes rules supreme. Known as the Bondo ape or Bili ape, murky accounts of these creatures suggest they walk on two feet, stand the size of a grown man, and nest on the ground like gorillas. So the tales go, […]

In 2011, scientists found something unexpected hiding beneath the Amazon. There, 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) beneath the earth was an enormous body of water almost long enough to rival the Amazon and much wider. River Hamza, as Brazil’s National Observatory unofficially named the beast, acts like drainage for the region and was discovered after Petrobras […]

Once described as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”, the Amber Room was an opulent chamber befitting the luxurious surroundings of the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. Designed by sculptor Andreas Schlüter, it is one of the earliest examples of the use of amber in interior design. Such striking, golden décor you’d think would be hard […]

Polygraph tests are everywhere. They spring up in police interrogations, screenings for government jobs – there are even entire reality TV shows based around the results of a single polygraph. It may surprise you to know, then, that the science behind polygraphs is flimsy at best – so flimsy that they should definitely not be […]

The last time Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was visible in our skies Neanderthals still roamed the Earth, 50,000 years ago, so if you don’t want to have to wait another 50 millennia, the time to see it is now. Well, maybe. But more on that later. The comet is now just under the average limit […]

There is a lot that we don’t know about the Sun and its behavior but something that might be especially shocking is that we have never seen its poles. Detailed investigations of these regions will happen in the coming years, but until then we can just marvel at some of the peculiar events that happen […]

Every year, February 11 is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. This year, we have asked some of our team who their favorite female scientist of all time is and why.  Answer by Laura Simmons, Editor and Staff Writer Advertisement Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923) was a mathematician, inventor, suffragist, and someone who didn’t let […]

NASA’s Voyager mission in the 1980s discovered that the rings of Saturn get temporary “spokes”, smudgy areas within the rings that are either darker or lighter than the surrounding material. The spokes happen only during a certain period, the years right before and after an equinox. The autumnal equinox for Saturn’s northern hemisphere is coming […]

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has said he believes ChatGPT will “change the world” on a similar scale to the advent of the personal computer. Let’s not forget, however, that Microsoft has poured heaps of cash into the development of ChatGPT and has some vested interest in its success.  Speaking to the German business newspaper Handelsblatt, […]

Humans weren’t the only beings doing it tough with mental health issues during the pandemic. Our pets suffered too – particularly dogs, who are known to pick up on and share our own anxiety and stress. In 2022 owners reported increased fear in their dogs towards both other dogs and unfamiliar humans, as well as […]

How much do you like the color green? It’s beautiful isn’t it, the color of alligators and peas. But if your answer wasn’t “I would literally die for it” then you aren’t as big a fan as the Victorians, who spent decades getting killed by the color and their own unwillingness to go outside for […]

Have you ever suffered through tales of greatness from a self-absorbed “friend” who reminds you of Michael Scott from “The Office” – and not in a good way? Have you been betrayed by a colleague out of the blue, undermined on a project by the office mean girl, or had a work friendship dropped altogether […]

A video posted to Twitter and Reddit reportedly shows birds acting strangely prior to the earthquake which hit Turkey and Syria on Monday.  The video is as yet unverified and there are of course reasons to be skeptical of it (think about how after every flood disaster, someone claims that a shark has made its […]

If you go walking beneath the Betsy Ross Bridge along the Delaware River, you will be met by a cascade of over 20,000 gravestones. The stones have been repurposed as rip-rap, foundational material that sits at the base of a breakwater or bridge, like the Betsy Ross. But how did they come to be here, […]