Deborah Bloomfield

The shockingly high death toll from COVID-19 is “both a profound tragedy and a massive global failure at multiple levels,” says a new report by the Lancet COVID-19 Commission. A huge interdisciplinary team of researchers reviewed evidence from the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic to see what could have been done better and […]

A rare type of fossil was retrieved recently from the Morrison Formation of southeastern Utah when researchers realized they had found preserved vomit. Inside the small regurgitalite was a gathering of amphibians, including at least one small frog and a salamander that might be the smallest ever found in the region. Fossil vomit is a […]

Despite their popularity, it’s no secret that multivitamin supplements are completely useless for most people. Aside from giving you some especially expensive urine, they make little difference to your health, and might even raise your risks of certain cancers and heart disease. However, a new study might have found an exception – for older people, […]

People aged 65 and over had a significantly higher risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease within a year of contracting COVID-19, according to a huge new study of 6 million people. When compared to the control group, there was a 50-80 percent increased risk of developing the neurological disease in people infected with COVID-19, […]

If current trends continue, Christians could soon become a minority in the US within just a few decades, according to a new report. Social trends like this are notoriously hard to predict, but it’s evident that the number of people following Christianity in the US has been slipping since the 1970s – and little seems […]

When COVID-19 first came onto the scene at the tail-end of 2019, the health advice was simple: it caused ten days or so of fevers, coughs, and trouble breathing, and that was about it. Since then, though, a plethora of symptoms have been added to the list, and “long COVID” – the vernacular name for […]

A bright fireball shot across the night sky over the UK and Ireland Wednesday evening sparking almost 800 reports of a possible meteor to the UK Meteor Network. The spectacle, captured in multiple videos and shared online, is now being investigated by scientists. Whether it was a visiting space rock or space junk is not […]

It’s pretty much impossible to truly imagine the consequences of launching a nuclear strike and killing millions of innocent people. This might not be a problem for you, as you will (almost certainly) never have to make a call about whether to use nuclear weapons. But, if you do have the nuclear codes on account […]

All over the world dinosaurs laid billions of eggs, some of which never hatched. Quirks of geology have meant that more of these have been preserved in China than elsewhere. The Qianshan Basin is an exception. Although rich in mammal, reptile, and bird fossils, it is only recently that three dinosaur eggs were discovered there. […]

We were not ready for this incredible mosaic of Mars collected by NASA’s Perseverance: a combination of 1,118 individual frames stitched together to create a 2.5 billion pixel landscape.  You can see the granularity of the Martian sand, the effect of the wind, hairline fractures of rocks, and the sedimentary layer left by drying mud […]

Over 6.5 million lives have been lost so far, but the end of the COVID-19 pandemic is now “in sight,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO). However, they went on to stress that this last leg of the race won’t be easy.  “Last week, the number of weekly reported deaths from COVID-19 was the […]

“Intelligence” is a concept we usually associate with, say, Sherlock Holmes. You know – he’s rational, logical, not necessarily good with people, but goshdarnit if he can’t solve an expert-level killer sudoku in record time, and that’s what’s really important in life.  But that isn’t the only way we can be intelligent. Emotional intelligence – […]

The more narcissistic the US president, the more prolonged their wars tend to be, according to a new study. In sum, the eight US leaders who scored above average for narcissism spent an average of 613 days at war, while the 11 least narcissistic presidents were at war for just 136 days. Study author John […]

A paper co-authored by a senior scientist at Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory DeepMind has concluded that advanced AI could have “catastrophic consequences” if left to its own methods of achieving goals. The paper – also co-written by researchers from the University of Oxford – is centered around what happens if you leave AI […]

A food delivery robot has been caught on video happily ramming its way through a cordoned-off crime scene in Los Angeles. In a video widely seen on Twitter and Reddit, the robot doesn’t seem to care about the looks it gets from police officers. The footage appears to show a Serve Robotics model, described as […]

In 1978, the USS Stein, a US Navy frigate, suddenly had an emergency that resulted in an immediate reroute to its home base – the radar system responsible for identifying submarine threats suddenly went unserviceable (US). The Stein headed for land and reached dry dock so that the engineers could examine the fault, which likely laid […]

Taking inspiration from the floating trains that travel at incredible speeds, researchers from China have now tested Maglev cars that float above dedicated magnetic highways. Hovering 3.5 centimeters (1.4 inches) above the highway, the modified car wobbles its way through the course in what looks like a pretty uncomfortable ride.   If the technology could […]

The mighty weather phenomenon La Niña will continue for the third year in a row and may last until early next year, according to World Meteorological Organization (WMO). This is set to have a knock-on effect on weather across the globe, from droughts in Africa to a wet and wild summer in Australia. In a […]

What weighs more: a kilogram of feathers or a kilogram of lead? This old joke is actually no joke to physicists – since the time of Galileo, they have been trying to demonstrate that objects in a gravitational field experience the same acceleration. This is the universality of free fall, and it has now proven […]

The reproductive system is an essential part of the continuation of the human population. But, it is actually a very complex system and when it goes wrong… boy your body can let you know about it. September is polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) awareness month – so, what exactly is PCOS, and are there any treatments? […]