Deborah Bloomfield

The most dazzling astronomical event of January is almost upon us. The conjunction of Venus and Saturn will take place on Sunday, January 22. The two objects will be so close to each other – less than a degree apart – that even with a small telescope you will be able to see them in […]

All good things must come to an end, and it’s best to plan beforehand. Revolutionary as the JWST has been, it has a much shorter life expectancy than the Hubble Space Telescope, let alone ground-based instruments. NASA has revealed plans for what could be the replacement to its replacement at the American Astronomical Society’s 241st meeting.  […]

Here’s a fun little fact: Google Images was created because of Jennifer Lopez, aka J. Lo. This bit of Internet history trivia was recently brought to our attention by Twitter user mattxiv. This can’t be true, can it? Well we dug around a little and discovered that yes, this is basically the case. Advertisement In […]

At the end of every year, I gather statistics on the most viewed Wikipedia articles of the year. This helps me, a computational social scientist, understand what topics captured the most attention and gives me a chance to reflect on the major public events of the year. I try to use data to determine how […]

If you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ve probably heard people throwing around “Moore’s Law” and whether it is “dead” or not. The concept of Moore’s Law has become a hot debate in the face of recent Nvidia statements and in the realm of technology hardware, but what does it actually mean?   What is […]

A grainy photograph taken in 1864 shows a group of Japanese samurai standing in front of the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. This jolting image messes with our sense of history – the traditional Japanese clothes, the ancient Egyptian monument, and the European camera just don’t seem to add up. As unexpected as this […]

On Saturday, the new Moon will be at the closest it has been to Earth since the Middle Ages. According to calculations by timeanddate.com, the new Moon has not been this close to us in 993 years and will not be this close to us for another 345 years.  The New Moon, due to its […]

What gives a pink lake in Australia its bizarrely vibrant bubblegum coloration has been pondered since before bubblegum was even invented. In 1802, Matthew Flinders became the first to suggest Lake Hillier’s pink color came from its salinity, but in the few hundred years that have followed, science has revealed that this is just part […]

Last week, Twitter user Gael Breton noticed that CNET had been publishing articles written by artificial intelligence (AI). Writing in a thread, Breton noted that the publisher had started to test “automation technology” around 11 November 2022, with several articles on personal finance authored by algorithms. Connie Guglielmo, editor-in-chief at CNET, defended the experiment in […]

People are once again sharing secrets from their own area of work, which would cause “general chaos” if the public at large knew about it.  Twitter user mykola first posed the question in 2019, though it has recently resurfaced with new answers. Advertisement Below are a few of our favorite sciency and techy answers. We’ll […]

The Golden Gate Bridge is currently singing a concerning song to all those who try to cross. If there’s one thing you really don’t want a bridge to do, it’s creak and groan in the wind. However, some people crossing the Golden Gate Bridge recently may have noticed a series of strange noises emanating from […]

A treasure trove of fossilized eggs were the subject of a recent study that discovered a curious specimen among the clutch: an egg-in-egg, or ovum-in-ovo, whereby an egg is found to contain another egg. The quirk of ovulation has only previously been reported in birds, not reptiles, and so it may be that these dinosaurs […]

Laying at the bottom of an ancient rock tomb, the remains of giant mummified crocodiles have been unearthed. While it’s not uncommon to find mummified animals at ancient Egyptian sites, this bask of crocodiles has been mummified in a particularly unusual way that’s caught the eye of archaeologists. The mummified remains of five isolated skulls […]

Scientists in the United States have developed a machine learning algorithm that can predict a surge of COVID-19 cases at county level across the US, in the vast majority of cases. Such a tool could have a powerful impact in protecting people, and let healthcare systems prepare up to six weeks before a major outbreak. […]

Most of the directions we use to describe the world center the self. We say up or down, in front or behind us, and left and right. These latter two are the most difficult to explain in fundamental terms given the symmetry of most physical laws. But in nature, there are molecules that have a […]

Ice cores collected from central-north Greenland provide a fine-grained record of climatic conditions in the area, and it’s not good news. Among other things they reveal the decade from 2001-2011 was 1.5°C (2.7°F) warmer than the 20th century average, as well as being the area’s hottest since at least 1000 CE. Greenland’s mighty ice sheet shapes […]

Dogs are among the most loved of pets, but hinging your happiness on a fluffy, four-legged pal comes with one mortal downfall: they don’t live for very long. Now, a start-up is looking to see if we can change that by making an anti-aging pill for dogs with the goal of increasing their longevity. Better […]

When humans first made the switch from hunter-gathering to agriculture, we were quite a wee bunch – yet new research suggests we may have grown taller and stronger as we started drinking milk. After analyzing thousands of ancient skeletons, the study authors found that increases in human body size tend to coincide with the genetic […]

A gold-plated pendant thought to date back to the late 12th century has been analyzed using a neutron-based imaging technique, revealing its innermost secrets for the first time. The painstaking work was conducted by a team from the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie at the Technical University of Munich. The ornately decorated pendant was first unearthed in […]

If you’ve ever watched air bubbles rising through water, you may have pondered the same thing as Leonardo Da Vinci: why don’t all of them travel straight to the surface? If so, you were more than 500 years too late, and probably insufficiently famous, for people to take much notice of your question, but the […]