Deborah Bloomfield

Anything is possible in a world where bees can be fish and lagoons can be people – including false teeth doubling up as hearing aids. It sounds wild, we know, but the future of assistive hearing devices could lie in our mouths via a dental implant capable of conducting sound from tooth to jaw to […]

Oxytocin is a hormone produced by the brain (specifically the hypothalamus) and released into the bloodstream. It is often touted as a “love hormone” or “love drug” – it can help us socially bond with others and generates happy feelings. But this hormone may be able to heal hearts after a heart attack, a study […]

Many forms of ear infections strike children and adults alike, but among the most common is acute otitis externa, also known as swimmer’s ear. About 10 percent of Americans will experience swimmer’s ear during their lifetimes. Adults are affected more commonly, and children only rarely, generally ages 5 to 12. Advertisement But you don’t have […]

Another hurricane, another chance to share old “footage” of sharks taking to the flooded streets in a classic case of sharks appearing where sharks definitely shouldn’t be. A classic hoax. Or is it?   You may have seen the video circulating on social media of what appears to be a shark swimming down a street […]

Dinosaurs are in the news these days, but it’s not just for groundbreaking discoveries. More and more paleontologists are ringing alarm bells about high-profile auctions in which dinosaur fossils sell for outrageous sums. The most recent example involves a 77 million-year-old Gorgosaurus skeleton that Sotheby’s sold for over US$6 million in August 2022. Advertisement But […]

Elon Musk has stirred up Twitter once again by suggesting that his much-hyped Cybertruck will be “waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat.” Given Musk’s notorious online persona, it’s impossible to tell whether this is a serious statement or just something he’s spitballing.  Nevertheless, the tweet caused a cascade of reactions (mainly negative). Advertisement […]

Are you sick of dealing with labyrinthine cookie consent popups just to navigate the web without being tracked? Well, researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark, have created a browser extension that automatically rejects them for you. Consent-O-Matic is free and available for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and other chromium-based browsers, and Safari for macOS and iOS. […]

This week, we see the first joint footage from Hubble and JWST, blessed images of a sloth with a big ol’ coconut for a head, and we learn about the man who prevented World War III. For First Time, Hubble And JWST Watched The Same Event: DART Slamming Into An Asteroid The two titans of […]

Researchers have identified a brand new species of polycotylid plesiosaur and they’ve named it “snaky crocface”. Technically, the new species is called Serpentisuchops pfisterae but the translation to snaky crocface from the Latin and Greek is pretty accurate.  Despite misconceptions, plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs but marine reptiles. Most plesiosaurs fall into either the small head, […]

The Mar Menor lagoon on Spain’s southeast coast has been granted personhood status by the Senate in Madrid, meaning legal action can now be taken on behalf of the threatened ecosystem against polluters. The new law is the first in Europe to bestow such rights upon a natural landscape and comes after some 640,000 Spanish […]

NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are setting out to study the possibility of using the private space company to boost the Hubble space telescope into a higher orbit, NASA announced yesterday. The pair signed a deal earlier this month that will see SpaceX study whether it’s possible for its Dragon spacecraft to safely rendezvous with […]

The Juno spacecraft has returned the first images taken during a flyby yesterday from just 352 kilometers (219 miles) above the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. The flyby, which was closer than most satellites are to the Earth, is an effort both to learn more about the enigmatic world and to move to a […]

Squids are finally having their moment this Squidtember thanks to the folks over at OceanX who are celebrating the remarkable skills of these complex organisms. Capable of glowing in the dark, swimming faster than any other invertebrate and surviving at incredible depths, they are truly ocean marvels.  “OceanX has a long history uncovering the secret […]

A galaxy in JWST’s first deep field image contains a galaxy 9 billion light years away, nicknamed the Sparkler Galaxy. Compared to some others in the field, that’s not particularly distant. However, the sparkles that inspired the name are star clusters, at least some of which are the most distant globular clusters ever seen. Dotted […]

Dr Christopher Yang (presumably) made a world first earlier this month, performing a vasectomy on his patient using power from a Rivian car battery.  Vasectomies involve going into both sides of your scrotum after applying local anesthetic, then cutting the tube that delivers sperm out of your testicles (where does the sperm go after you […]

Back before trees existed, when Earth was inhabited solely by single-celled organisms, the largest asteroid to ever hit our planet touched down near what we now know as Johannesburg, South Africa, forming the Vredefort crater. With an estimated crater size of between 250-280 kilometers (155-174 miles) upon first impact, the size of the asteroid was […]

Footage taken from a webcam at Fort Myers, Florida, has shown the devastating impacts of the storm surge caused by Hurricane Ian.  Water levels in Florida rose to abnormal levels ahead of Hurricane Ian in what’s known as a “storm surge”. The surges are mainly caused by high winds pushing water towards the coast, though […]

A prototype electric passenger aircraft hit the skies for the first time this week, quietly jetting off from Grant County International Airport in Washington state on a short trip with nine passengers onboard. Dubbed Alice, the plane is the brainchild of the Washington-based aerial engineering company Eviation. Powered by two magni650 electric propulsion units, it […]

It’s no secret that Bitcoin is bad for the environment. While some have compared its impact on our planet to that of gold mining, new research has found that it’s more comparable to the beef industry. The impacts of mining for the digital cryptocurrency as a share of the market price point to it as […]

As any parent knows, carrying babies in your arms for a long time is exhausting and can be impractical. It must have been more so 10,000 years ago when parents were also hunting and foraging constantly. However, the mechanism of how our early ancestors did this was unknown as there is little hard evidence. Now, […]