Deborah Bloomfield

A study of Australia’s many species of skink reveals they have evolved resistance to snake venom at least 25 times, a testimony to the continent’s dangers. Since each skink lineage had to evolve resistance from scratch through mutation, not all of them got the most effective protection, but some came back for a second round. […]

NASA’s Curiosity landed on Mars on August 5, 2012 – a date that has been marked ever since as its birthday. It was the year after, though, when the birthday celebrations took a turn that quickly became viral. The mission team made the rover sing itself Happy Birthday. Maybe saying that everybody loved it is […]

Flowering plants are a real treat for the senses, but when it comes to the biggest blooms, the talipot palm really puts on a show. With the largest branched inflorescence in the world, it can produce in the region of 24 million flowers that bloom all at once in a dazzling swan song that marks […]

If social media is to be believed, everything about our health and lifestyle needs to be optimized or “maxxed”. We’ve already seen sleepmaxxing, watermaxxing, and sunmaxxing – and now, people are maxxing out their fiber intake too. But is that really necessary? What is fiber? Fiber is a type of carbohydrate that can’t be easily […]

The complete genome of an early strain of “Spanish flu” – which killed up to 100,000 people between 1918 and 1920 – has been sequenced from the preserved lung of a young man who died of the illness. Presenting their findings in a new study, researchers say the virus displays a number of mutations that […]

NASA interim administrator Sean Duffy, who is also the Trump Administration Transportation Secretary, is set to announce plans to have a nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030 this week. Duffy, a former Fox News host, has been placed as the temporary head of the space agency, following President Trump’s rescinding the nomination of billionaire […]

A new giant virus with “unusual” features – including an unprecedentedly long tail – has been discovered in the Pacific Ocean. At 2.3 micrometers long – that’s 0.00023 centimeters – it may not be huge by our standards, but in the viral world, it’s a whopper. In fact, it’s the longest virus appendage described to […]

A zoo in Denmark has called out to the public to donate healthy chickens, rabbits, and guinea pigs to feed to its predator residents. In a translated social media post, Aalborg Zoo stated that these animals “make up an important part of the diet of our predators – especially the European lynx, which needs whole […]

Deep-sea jellyfish might not have a brain, but they don’t aimlessly drift around the world’s seas. In fact, they seem to stick within their set territory with an incredible sense of order.  In a new study, scientists at the University of Western Australia used historical records, molecular tools, and genetic analysis to study the geographical […]

Tyrannosaurus rex deserves its fearsome reputation, at least when it comes to bite force, a new analysis has concluded, but some of its fellow giant theropods were surprisingly weak in the jaw. Naturally, some of the largest predators ever to walk the Earth had a fearsome armory to bring down prey, but they apparently relied […]

A man born with Usher syndrome type 1b, a rare genetic disease that causes congenital deafness and progressive blindness, has reportedly experienced “substantial improvement” in his vision, after receiving a new type of gene therapy as part of an ongoing clinical trial. The 38-year-old man was the first patient in the world to be given […]

A giant marine reptile that lived during the age of dinosaurs has been discovered in Germany. Retrieved from the world-renowned Posidonia Shale fossil beds, the newly named Plesionectes longicollum has features unlike any other plesiosaur found to date. A new-to-science species, and the first plesiosauroid of its kind. Its name is derived from the Latin […]

Sometimes, genetics likes to throw a bit of a curveball when it comes to coloration of animals. These quirks can tip the scales in favor of all white or all black fur, feathers, or even skin and can even land somewhere in the middle in a genetic condition known as leucism.  Recently, the North Island […]

It is often remarked upon that the distribution of rings and moons around the giant planets of the Solar System – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – are themselves like miniature solar systems. Now, researchers think that giant planets outside our Solar System, too, might build their own personal collections of moons. In interstellar space […]

Much of the bottom of the North Sea is upside down, with older layers of sand lying on top of younger ones. This defiance of basic geological principles has been seen elsewhere, but never on this scale. Now, two geologists think they have an explanation. The North Sea has been extensively drilled for oil, hosts […]

We’ll give ourselves some credit, humans can be pretty hardcore. Doctors performing surgery on themselves, researchers deliberately self-infecting in the name of science – but some of the best examples of badassery come from elsewhere in the animal world. The most metal of them all? Well, that title might just go to the Iberian ribbed […]

We like the August sky because there are usually lots of beautiful things to see. We have had amazing solar eclipses, like the Great American Eclipse in 2017, and we will have two brilliant ones next year and the year after. The best meteor shower of the year, too, is in August: the Perseids. But […]

Adult winter-run Chinook salmon have been seen in Northern California’s McCloud River for the first time in decades.  On July 15, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) reported the sighting of an adult female Chinook salmon in McCloud River near Ash Camp, displaying spawning behavior and guarding her nest. They also spotted several […]

Over 20 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope looked at a little patch of sky for days, with this methodical approach catching the light of galaxies that existed when the universe was not even 1 billion years old. This was the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a panorama of 10,000 galaxies that took 400 orbits of […]

Like Ross and Rachel, modern humans and Neanderthals had something of an on-again, off-again love affair. Yet while Friends may have gone extinct after 10 seasons, our ancient ancestors repeatedly reunited over hundreds of thousands of years, and new research may have pinpointed exactly where on the planet these romantic episodes occurred. Previous studies have […]