Deborah Bloomfield

During a routine medical examination, you may have wondered why your doctor looks at your nails and what exactly it is they are looking for. Nails are a good indicator of overall health, and certain features on them can be signs of disease and organ function.  There are a number of illnesses that can interrupt […]

An unopened bottle of wine believed to be around 1,700 years old sits in the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, Germany. Its contents look suspect, to say the least – but on a microbial scale, it might not actually make you ill, even if the texture made you sick to your stomach. The […]

It might have been a deadlier December than expected on Mars. After the expected (but still sad) demise of NASA’s InSight, another robotic explorer might have been claimed by dust and low winter light. Zhurong. The Chinese mission, arrived around Mars at the same time as NASA’s Perseverance, landing a few months later. Its exploration […]

As the world is still in the midst of rolling out 5G wireless technology to guide our telecommunications, scientists are already looking toward the next generation of mobile system technology: 6G. There are currently a number of ideas in the works, but a bold new proposal from the University of Massachusetts Amherst is arguing that humans […]

You may have heard that one day in the future, the Milky Way galaxy – in which we reside – will collide with Andromeda. If you include the outermost stars in each galaxy passing each other, then that day has almost come, following the discovery that some stretch halfway to our nearest large neighbor. The […]

Ah Utah, the state famous for its beautiful mountains, incredible landscapes, and its use as a dump for mysterious objects with no clear backstory. In 2020, there was the monolith. Though the best guess is that it was an art piece left in around 2016, it largely still remains a mystery. Now we have a […]

In the cloud forests of north-eastern Ecuador, a little snake has been slithering around harboring a fascinating secret. Tucked within its anatomy are the remnants of a pelvis, something snakes haven’t needed since they first lost their legs around 150 million years ago. Vestigial organs and limbs are remnants of evolution that demonstrate how simply […]

Lots of adults dislike woodlice. Some are physically revolted by them. But this distaste is cultural rather than innate since most small children are well-disposed towards woodlice and happy to handle them. Some people even keep them as pets. Woodlice are tiny, don’t bite, move slowly and are generally unthreatening. They are part of biological […]

England is going to ban single-use plastic cutlery and single-use polystyrene food containers, following similar initiatives by Scotland and Wales in 2022 that made providing such items an offense. It is estimated that the UK currently uses 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups annually, with England recycling only 10 percent of the 4.25 billion single-use cutlery […]

An experiment that saw mental health support provided to about 4,000 humans using an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot has been met with severe criticism online, over concerns about informed consent. On Friday, Rob Morris, co-founder of the social media app Koko, announced the results of an experiment his company had run using GPT-3.   Advertisement […]

A bunch of mammoth tusks and stone tools has recently been pored over by archaeologists in Mexico, uncovering some of the earliest known evidence of violent interactions between Ice Age people and megafauna in the Basin of Mexico.  Thanks to a new analysis by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), it’s been revealed […]

Picture the scene: you’ve huffed and puffed your way to the top of the local trig point as part of your New Year’s resolution. While the view from the top is worth the effort, the summit of the footpath is also covered in loads of stacked rocks, or cairns. The word “cairn” comes from the […]

The clever clogs of dogs has been named in a new study that put pooches through a battery of tests to score points and ascertain who is the most cognitively capable of canine breeds. Second place went to border collies, dogs that have featured heavily in studies about intelligence – but first place was snagged […]

Along the Little Colorado River, in the Navajo Nation of Arizona, sits an enormous waterfall that appears to be churning out pure chocolate. Looking like a scene straight out of Willy Wonka’s factory, the Grand Falls, also known as the Chocolate Falls, is a disappointingly inedible 57-meter (187-foot) tall wall of water that appears following […]

Thanks to the combined power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and JWST, researchers could see the complex interactions happening within the famous multi-galaxy collision event known as Stephan’s quintet. The ensemble has four galaxies actively interacting (the fifth galaxy is just nearby) and the intergalactic medium around them is experiencing some violent activities. […]

Scientists are looking to create a vault that will hold samples of human poop from around the world. Through building this “doomsday vault,” they hope to protect the world’s microbial diversity and foster a deeper understanding of how global health is influenced by the trillions of bacteria living inside the human gut. Dubbed the Microbiota […]

A team of scientists from 13 institutions tested 373 compounds produced by plants, fungi, and invertebrates seeking those capable of killing or stopping the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It’s a long way from petri dish to pharmacy, but three performed remarkably well, one of them coming from a marine organism that lives not far […]

NASA has announced the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) reentered the atmosphere at 11:04 pm EST on Sunday, January 8. The timing put it over the Bering Sea, so even if any pieces survived re-entry, the chance of damage to people or property was minimal. However, this was pure luck. The uncontrolled nature of the […]

The ozone layer should be completely recovered in the next four decades, according to a United Nations (UN)-backed report. The findings confirm that bans on ozone-depleting substances are having the desired effect, and could avoid an estimated 0.3-0.5°C (0.54-0.9°F) of global warming by the year 2100. The Montreal Protocol was adopted in September 1987, and […]

Spider scientists are an optimistic crowd. Perhaps it’s just that we see things from a different angle to arachnophobes. If you don’t believe me, look up Theridion grallator. Researchers from my field call this Hawaiian species the happy-face spider because of the smile-like curves on its back. Spiders have a reputation for inspiring fear. But […]