Deborah Bloomfield

Possibly the hardest part of being a good scientist is admitting when you’re wrong – particularly when you are very, very wrong. So full credit to Professor Gregory Retallack of the University of Oregon and team who published a paper that turned out to be wrong by a factor of more than a hundred million, […]

A Japanese zoo has solved the mystery of how a female gibbon in their care became pregnant while being kept alone in an enclosure. Before you get too carried away imagining a beautiful miracle, you should know that the answer was a glory hole. In February 2021, Momo gave birth, surprising her keepers at the […]

A mother in Brazil recently gave birth to a two-foot-tall baby weighing 16lb (7.3kg). Angerson Santos was born via caesarean section at Hospital Padre Colombo in Parintins, Amazonas State. Angerson eclipsed the heaviest baby girl on record, who was 15lb (6.8kg) when she was born in 2016, but neither come close to the heaviest baby […]

Netflix have unveiled how they plan to tackle account sharing: where people share their Netflix login details with somebody living outside of their home.  The streaming giant has planned to end password-sharing for some time, and has now updated its FAQ section, revealing how it is going to be policed. The firm, which allows sharing […]

Forty-five percent of male university students believe that they could locate the nubis on a diagram of the female reproductive system.  “The problem?” author and Vice reporter Sophia Smith Galer wrote on Twitter. “I made the nubis up.” Advertisement Smith Galer commissioned a piece of research with UK polling firm Savanta, ahead of the launch […]

A neutron star 11.400 light-years away is doomed to eventually collide with its giant companion. By the time it does, the giant will also be a neutron star, setting off an explosion that will seed the galaxy for thousands of light-years around with precious metals, known as a kilonova.  The makeup of the universe depends […]

A collaboration between the US government and military contractors have completed a milestone test of their Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC), achieving a blistering speed of Mach 5 and succeeding in all test objectives. The tests were designed to get more data on the hypersonic scramjet missile system that will form the next generation of […]

If you have one or have inspected one for long enough, you may have wondered what that seam-like structure of thicker skin is that runs from your penis, down through the center of your scrotum to your anus. “In adults and children, the penile and scrotal raphe vary in shape and thickness between individuals and […]

If you asked what’s the deepest trench on Earth, almost everyone would answer the Mariana Trench. They’d be right – at around 11,000 meters (36,000 feet), the Mariana Trench dwarfs any other oceanic trench out there. But if you asked “what is the deepest continental trench in the world?”, few would be able to answer. […]

A group of bioengineers may have solved the problem of grafting flat sheets of artificial skin onto awkward areas of the body by growing skin in complex, 3D shapes. Aptly termed “biological clothing”, the technique could make it possible to construct seamless 3D tissues that can be transplanted directly onto the body. Take the human […]

Almost a hundred years ago, a fossilized fish skull was pulled from a coal mine in Lancashire, England. However, neither the miners nor the paleontologists who initially studied the discovery realized the true value of the find. Now, a CT scan reveals a brain relic unmatched for any vertebrate of similar age, providing a record […]

While you might think panning for gold was left behind in the 1800s, you would be very much mistaken. Amateur gold panning trips, centers, and even social media groups can offer the would-be prospector the chance to hit rich and find some gold. But should you be so lucky as to find a nugget, do […]

Here are a few horrifying statistics that have come out of several studies: women are 73 percent more likely than men to be seriously injured in a frontal car crash, almost twice as likely to become trapped in the wreckage of a car crash, and 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash. […]

As early human tool use turned to weaponry, our ancient ancestors got creative with bones as projectiles. In Europe, bone points were used during the Upper Palaeolithic, and now the discovery of a projectile lodged in a mastodon’s rib cage has shown that in the Americas, bone points date back as far as 13,900 years […]

For Brits in the eighth and early ninth centuries, Viking raids were just part of life. There you’d be, hoeing your turnips, when along comes a rampaging horde to ransack the local monastery and steal the king’s daughter. It usually didn’t last long – they were smash and grabs rather than invasions. That is, until […]

Despite its name, the mammoth was not the largest Pleistocene land animal. That status goes to its relative, the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), which weighed up to 13 tonnes and lived across Asia and Europe until around 100,000 years ago. Anthropologists have sought evidence that Neanderthals hunted Palaeoloxodon, maybe even to extinction, but evidence has […]

People who have been sexually assaulted or raped can accurately recall details of the attack after drinking, new research suggests. When alcohol is involved, people are often considered unreliable witnesses of their own assault, but the new study challenges that assumption by demonstrating that women could remember details of a hypothetical assault – including whether […]

The Atlit Yam sits submerged 10 meters (33 feet) beneath the sea off the coast of Atlit village in Haifa, Israel. An enormous Neolithic coastal settlement, these complex remains tell a story of a once-thriving community that existed almost 9,000 years ago – and this one really did exist. During the beginning of the Holocene, […]

We’re currently experiencing a pandemic of fungal fascination, as each week millions of people are tuning into The Last Of Us, the TV adaptation of a game of the same name. In it, the world falls to a fungal pathogen that creates zombies capable of biting other humans and spreading the disease, and it was […]

The discovery of an Ancient Egyptian mummification workshop in Saqqara has enabled researchers to reveal the secret recipes that embalmers used to preserve different body parts almost three millennia ago. Astonishingly, many of the ointments involved in the process contained ingredients from far-flung parts of the world, suggesting that the Egyptians’ passion for mummification helped […]