Deborah Bloomfield

Defining how hot or cold a planet is can get complicated. Just take Earth as an example. The temperatures in the tropics are definitely different from the temperatures at the poles. Variations in temperature, even extreme ones, are common both in the atmospheres and at locations across the planets.   But if we are looking […]

Would you call me a quack if I were to tell you that there is a duck on Mars? Well, humans love turning vague stimuli into well-known patterns, a phenomenon called pareidolia, but in this case, the fowl similarity of this rock to a duck fits the bill. Alright, enough duck puns and onto the […]

A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) enthusiast has burned a priceless drawing in the apparently mistaken belief that it would increase the artwork’s value on the blockchain. As well as not recouping anywhere near the artwork’s value, the artist is under investigation by Mexican authorities for the stunt. Businessman Martin Mobarak burned the artwork by acclaimed Mexican […]

News about potential Russian military recruits fleeing the country for safer, more peaceful climes is hardly rare at the moment. One such story, though, has already found a happy ending – as Hvaldimir, a beluga whale named for Russian President Vladimir Putin, is now hoping to live out his retirement in a 500-acre aquatic sanctuary […]

A 3,700-year-old ivory delousing comb found at Tel Lachish, Israel, contains what appears to be the oldest full sentence written using the ancestor of alphabets in the place of its invention. According to a new study, the letters reveal a lot about how the alphabet evolved, plus the concerns of antiquity’s elite. The invention of writing […]

Earlier this year, an astronomer analyzing thousands of stars in the area the famous “Wow!” signal came from proposed a potential Sun-like star as the source of the mysterious signal that occurred over 40 years ago. Now, astronomers have turned two telescopes on the most promising star – 2MASS 19281982-2640123 – in an attempt to […]

People in the United States seem to be an outlier in the amount of misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 they share compared to four other English-speaking countries, according to a new study. People in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand were exposed to roughly the same amount of misinformation online – but […]

Over 50,000 Bitcoins that were stolen from the online black market Silk Road have been seized by US authorities. When the cryptocurrency was seized it was worth $3.36 billion, making the catch the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) largest cryptocurrency seizure ever at the time.  On November 4, 32-year-old James Zhong pled guilty to committing […]

Quantum mechanics, the theory which rules the microworld of atoms and particles, certainly has the X factor. Unlike many other areas of physics, it is bizarre and counter-intuitive, which makes it dazzling and intriguing. When the 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for research shedding light […]

As world leaders assemble for the United Nations climate change conference (COP27) in Egypt, it’s hard to be optimistic the talks will generate any radical departure from the inexorable rise in global carbon emissions over the past two centuries. After all, before last year’s Glasgow talks, experts warned the summit was the world’s last chance […]

In a clip that has been widely shared across the Internet, one TikTok user has buried a sarcophagus filled with a single bag of flamin’ hot Cheetos to mess with future archaeologists. TikTok user Sunday Nobody made the 1,360-kilogram (3,000-pound) sarcophagus using reinforced concrete, as well as a headstone, on which he used a laser […]

The US government may have sexually “teased” soldiers in the First World War in an attempt to get them to fight harder, argues a paper published by Cambridge historian Eric Wycoff Rogers. Yep, it really is as strange as it sounds.   In 1914, war breaks out in Europe. Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia and […]

A mysterious tunnel that’s not been seen for centuries has recently been rediscovered beneath a colossal ancient Egyptian temple dedicated to the god Osiris. Rather sensationally, there has been some wild speculation that this is the tunnel that leads to the long-lost tomb of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.  While those bold claims may be overstated, […]

A device designed to allow patients with speech paralysis to silently spell out messages is the subject of a new study. While it has so far only been tested in one person, it could pave the way for future approaches that may be life-changing for people experiencing communication difficulties due to paralysis. The loss of […]

A particularly strong solar storm cracked a hole in Earth’s magnetic field this week, sparking some epic – and rare – pink auroras. No, the planet hasn’t been attacked by intergalactic unicorns riding in on a trail of pink stardust, but it does take some unusual circumstances to create this particular colorful light show. The […]

When we think about our Bronze Age ancestors, it’s easy to imagine their lives being an endless loop of the four Fs: fighting, feeding, fleeing, and, uh, mating. What we tend to forget is that ancient people were, you know, people – not that different from you or us. They had besties; they liked to […]

A 15-week-old kitten has bamboozled the care team at a UK charity. Originally thought to be a female, the new tabby-and-white arrival, named Hope, has been found to have no sex organs.  Cats Protection admitted the kitten into their care, and on further investigation found that Hope has neither external nor any internal sexual parts. […]

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken an incredible picture of the galactic system Arp 248, also known as Wild’s Triplet. These three interacting galaxies are renowned for having a luminous bridge of stars between two of them, an indication of the merging process that is underway between these objects. The image was released by the […]

More frozen mummies like Ötzi the Iceman could be revealed as rising global temperatures cause ice to melt, argue the authors of a new study. Previously, researchers had attributed the ancient murder victim’s longevity to a series of happy accidents that had kept his body frozen for millennia, yet more recent analyses suggest that Ötzi’s […]

Oculus VR founder and designer of the Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, has unveiled his latest virtual reality (VR) masterpiece: A headset that makes sure that if you die in the game, you die in real life. Luckey explained in a blog post that he was halfway to completing his headset (which he has called NerveGear) […]