Deborah Bloomfield

Grease is the word – at least, it was for Neanderthals living in what is now Germany some 125,000 years ago. New research shows that our extinct cousins collected huge quantities of animal bones at a dedicated “fat factory”, where they intensively processed them to extract bone grease, adding vital nutrients to their diet. It […]

On July 3, 2025, at 3:54 pm ET, the Earth will officially reach its furthest point from the Sun for this year. This is called aphelion. Our planet’s orbit is very close to a circle, but it is not a circle. It’s an ellipse, so the Earth gets closer and farther from the Sun as […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover may have recorded evidence of a triboelectric discharge caused by a dust devil on Mars, according to a team who presented those findings at the 2025 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC). If correct, the strength of the discharge is enough to suggest that lightning could be created within Martian dust devils. […]

Archaeologists have found a hymn dating from nearly 3,000 years ago that describes the city of Babylon in glowing terms, praises its people, location, and river. It seems the words struck such a chord with the inhabitants of what was, for a time, the world’s largest city, that they were widely copied so that it […]

Hidden away among the unexplored limestone hills of Cambodia are a series of karst formations. These uncharted caves, sinkholes, and towers have long been home to rare and elusive wildlife, but we’re only just discovering them. Most recently, four new populations of Kamping Poi bent-toed geckos have been discovered and are suspected of being four […]

OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) ChatGPT is surprisingly good at piloting spacecraft, according to a team that trained it to participate in a simulated spaceflight competition, coming in second place. In 2015, Mexican games studio Squad created the surprise hit video game Kerbal Space Program. In the space flight simulation game, you play a group […]

Astronomers have finally found evidence for a proposed mechanism for a special kind of supernova, known as a Type Ia supernova. It was proposed that at least some of them experience a double detonation, and now they have found evidence that this is indeed the case. The Sun will never go supernova; it’s not massive […]

We (hopefully) all know not to leave dogs or children in hot cars, but what about a half-full water bottle? Probably safe, right? Can’t suffocate; can’t get heat exhaustion; can’t catch on fire – no need to worry at all! Wait – okay, scratch that last one. Turns out, that half-finished Evian in your cup […]

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If you look up at the Moon tonight through binoculars or a small telescope, you may be able to see an unusual feature: a giant “X” on the lunar surface. This is known as the Lunar X or Werner X. If you scan your eyes along the terminator line, you may also see a temporary […]

Astronomers have detected an object with an orbit that will take it out of the Solar System, and almost certainly must have come from outside as well. Having recognized it long before it reaches its closest approach to the Sun, we will have months to study it as it brightens. What we already know, however, is […]

Despite having a reputation for strategically hunting marine mammals and occasionally sinking yachts in the Mediterranean, it has now been revealed that orcas have a more romantic side. After drones recently revealed they enjoy giving each other kelp massages, new research has since shown that they like to kiss, with tongues.  Until now, the behavior, […]

Given people’s disdain towards changing the clocks back and forth with the shifting of the seasons, you’d think countries would be put off from doing something like changing their time zone entirely. Still, several places have done so over the years – so how easy is it? Turns out, it’s simpler than you might think […]

Humans have been living continuously in space for nearly 25 years, with astronauts and cosmonauts living aboard the spacecraft since astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev first boarded the International Space Station (ISS) on Halloween, 2000. But all good things must come to an end.  The initial pieces of the ISS […]

A new paper from Harvard’s sometimes controversial physicist Avi Loeb has suggested that if we want to find advanced alien life, “black hole moons” may be the object to search for. Finding advanced alien life out there in the cosmos would be one of the most profound discoveries of humanity’s existence. But as much as […]

Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre is technically Australia’s biggest lake, but you wouldn’t know it most of the time – it rarely has water in it. But, thanks to record-breaking fall rains, this expanse has now transformed from salt pan to inland oasis, and though it will eventually disappear once again, it’s set to turn a delicious peachy […]

According to our best possible understanding of the universe, regular matter is only a small fraction of the matter-energy content of the universe. The energy we interact with and the matter we are made of and see is at most 5 percent of the total. What’s the rest? We don’t know exactly. About 70 percent […]

It’s a fairly common scenario: Someone (usually me) in your home informs you that there is a gigantic spider in the bathroom that needs dealing with, only for you to go up there and find a teeny tiny spider minding its own business, far smaller than described. A new study has looked into this size […]

Far from the fearsome reputation implied by their name, “killer whales”, orcas sometimes offer people gifts of food. Why orcas do this is a mystery we will probably take a long time to solve, but by collecting all the accounts they could, scientists have shown the behavior is surprisingly common. One of the less desirable […]

For millennia, the way we found our way home has been using the stars. The tech we have sent towards those stars also uses the position of distant shining dots to find their orientation and not lose “sight” of Earth. But researchers have just demonstrated that once you are far away from the planets of […]