Deborah Bloomfield

Gunung Padang sits on top of an extinct volcano in West Java, Indonesia. In recent times, the beautiful hilltop has attracted bold theories that suggest it was an elaborate pyramid built by a long-lost civilization thousands of years before the pyramids of Egypt. As enticing as this idea may be, it’s one that’s founded on […]

“I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the ‘Law of Frequency of Error’,” the British polymath Francis Galton wrote in 1889. “The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it.” Now, Galton may have […]

Following the removal of dams along the Klamath River earlier this year, fall-run Chinook salmon have made a long-awaited return to the Oregon portion of the Klamath Basin, having recently been spotted there for the first time in 112 years. The first salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) was discovered by biologists with the Oregon Department of Fish […]

In the Ediacaran Hills, researchers have found one of the first moving animals – and an even more distinctive feature is a question-mark-shaped ridge that makes this the oldest known animal to show left-right asymmetry (in other words, to not be a mirror reflection of itself). The first animals appeared in the fossil record during […]

Earth would not have been a nice place for humans 3.26 billion years ago. There was not much oxygen for a start. There was water and life, though. Unfortunately, an enormous asteroid was about to hit our planet. Boom – but despite what you may think, this impact could have led certain organisms to thrive. […]

Billions of years of evolution have made modern cells incredibly complex. Inside cells are small compartments called organelles that perform specific functions essential for the cell’s survival and operation. For instance, the nucleus stores genetic material, and mitochondria produce energy. Another essential part of a cell is the membrane that encloses it. Proteins embedded on […]

New modeling research has shown that the natural global climate phenomena known as El Niño and its cold counterpart, La Niña, have been occurring for the last 250 million years. Although these complex weather patterns are the drivers of extreme weather changes today, the research suggests they were significantly stronger in the past. El Niño […]

At some point in human history, our ancestors decided to urbanize, building sprawling metropolises to live and work in. Some of these ancient cultural and economic hubs are still standing today, and have been inhabited ever since their construction – but which is the oldest? It’s not an easy question to answer – these cities […]

Researchers have discovered a brand new species of sawfly from an amazingly preserved fossil found in Australia. This is a great discovery – but we need to remember that sawflies are not flies at all. The new species is long extinct but would have been flying around what is now Australia in the Miocene Period. […]

Daylight saving time (DST) has been around in the US on and off since 1918, but after 106 years’ worth of back and forth – both in terms of political decision-making and, y’know, clocks – is it time to ditch it for good? What is daylight saving time – and why do we have it? […]

Extinct volcanoes that lurk around Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, may challenge some parts of the standard explanation about how tectonic plates move around our planet. It’s often taught that Earth’s rocky tectonic plates sit on top of a syrup-like bed of viscous rock, known as the mantle, that moves along with those plates like […]

There are a small number of isotopes that offer clues regarding ancient supernovae that helped shape the Earth and the rest of the Solar System. Of these, the one astronomers and planetary scientists turn to most often is iron-60, so what makes it so useful? Most of the elements that make up the Earth are […]

Total solar eclipses like the one that crossed North America this year are not just incredibly beautiful spectacles, they are scientifically valuable too. They allow us to study the solar corona (the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere) in important ways. However, due to the alignments of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, despite being regular, […]

Did you know that flies can smell a body from miles away and even dig down as far as 2 meters (6.5 feet) to wriggle into a coffin and lay their eggs? They’re lured in by chemical signals, but it seems it’s not just scavengers that can detect the smell of death. Research has uncovered […]

Clinical trials are about to begin for a spinal injury treatment using a “bridge” – made of stem cells from the patients’ own noses – over the damage. Millions of people worldwide have spinal injuries, creating immense demand for cures, so research indicating a path to treating spinal injuries using stem cells from the nose […]

Quasars occur when supermassive black holes gobble up an incredible amount of gas. Observations and general wisdom suggested that a galaxy needed a lot of neighbors to deliver that much gas to a supermassive black hole at its center – so imagine the surprise of seeing not one but five quasars on their own. Looking […]

Human burial has been practiced for millennia as a way of dealing with our dead, but it’s not a perfect solution. America is estimated to contain around 404,685 hectares (1 million acres) of land currently dedicated to human burial, and the production of caskets sees around 1.6 million hectares (4 million acres) of forest lost […]

China has broken a record by creating the world’s most powerful resistive magnet, just surpassing the previous record set by the US.  The new magnet is capable of creating a magnetic field of 42.02 tesla, which is more than 800,000 times stronger than the Earth’s and beats the 41.4 tesla record set by the US […]

Sometimes surgeons need to remove parts of our bodies to make them healthy, but where do those sections of human go? They can be destroyed, but other times – with the patient’s consent – they are handed over to scientists to see what we can learn from diseased tissues. Those scientists work in what we […]

So, we’ve seen panhandles that were created through compromise, through skullduggery, and through that age-old motivator, vendettas against Spain. But not all the states’ irregular shapes have such innocent origins – and in fact, like so much of US history, a lot of it is downright bloody. Step up to the plate, Oklahoma and West […]