Deborah Bloomfield

The inevitability of death causes us mortals a great deal of anxiety, yet new research involving those who have come back from the brink reveals that the experience of passing away may be less distressing than many of us think. After interviewing patients who had undergone cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) following a cardiac arrest, researchers found […]

After taking over Twitter and announcing that users can be pay to be “verified” (perhaps without any identification check at all), Elon Musk appears to be slowly learning the hard way why Twitter implemented verification in the first place. Shortly after taking over the platform, Musk announced that users would be able to get verified […]

Blood made entirely in a lab has been given to patients in a world-first clinical trial to see how it performs and whether the body reacts negatively. Creating synthetic blood is incredibly difficult and will likely not replace current blood donations, but could represent a turning point in the shortage of rare blood groups if […]

Local authorities in the Dutch province of Gelderland have proposed a novel way of protecting the public from a local wolf pack. To discourage the animals from coming too close to human visitors, rangers in the Hoge Veluwe National Park will be permitted to shoot them with paintballs. Yes, you read that right. The move […]

World leaders are gathering in the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh for COP27, this year’s installment of the annual United Nations (UN) climate summit that hopes to address our planet’s climate crisis.  Optimism is in short supply this year – even Greta Thunberg is bailing on the summit, accusing it of being a forum […]

Astronomers have identified the oldest remains of planets in the Milky Way. And, they are relatively nearby, just 90 light-years from Earth. Researchers used observations of white dwarfs to identify those “polluted” by chunks of planets and other debris, and found one that has existed for an estimated 10.7 billion years. That’s over twice the […]

About a week after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, Musk is tweeting that birds aren’t real. Has the stress of owning a platform he doesn’t appear to understand the workings of finally got to him, or is there something else going on? For those uninitiated, the satirical birds aren’t real movement claims that birds were […]

Researchers have developed a quantum watch: a quantum system that has a unique way to measure time. It doesn’t need a reference time or a repeating pattern to provide a measurement of the elapsed time – and they weren’t even looking to demonstrate such a timepiece. The easiest analogy to understand how it works would […]

The Controversial Decisions of Elon Musk have been taking up so much of the news cycle over the past week or so that it’s easy to forget how, only a matter of months ago, he was most famous as the guy who once bought a car company and wants to install serfdom on Mars. At […]

Same-sex married couples often cope with stress in a healthier and more collaborative way than different-sex couples, according to a new study. The researchers argue that this is perhaps because homosexual couples face unique problems, including stigma, and may receive less support from wider family and traditional institutions compared to heterosexual couples.  To reach these […]

A team modeling the behavior of black holes has come to the conclusion the masses of the universe’s densest objects are quantized, similar to the way electrons orbiting atoms can only have specific energies. Moreover, just as particles can simultaneously be in multiple places at once, known as superposition, the authors of a new paper […]

A patient in the UK who had COVID-19 for a staggering 411 days was finally cleared of the infection after doctors sequenced the virus genome and targeted it with a personalized arsenal of drugs.  The incredible new case was the work of Dr Luke Blagdon Snell and colleagues from King’s College London and Guy’s and […]

NASA’s InSight has revolutionized our understanding of what goes on inside of Mars. From detecting marsquakes to pinpointing new meteorite collisions on the Red Planet, the mission has gone far beyond expectation. Its planned duration was 709 sols (martian days) and it has now almost doubled that. However, for the last several months, the lander […]

An expedition to survey the hidden depths around Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands has returned with some amazing finds. A team, led by Museums Victoria Research Institute, Australia, set out from Darwin on September 30 for a 35-day voyage on the research vessel (RV) Investigator, operated by the Australian national science agency CSIRO. […]

An international group of astronomers has determined the closest black hole to Earth. And, it is orbited by a star similar to our Sun, the first time such a binary system has been discovered in our galaxy. The object, known as Gaia BH1, is located 1,600 light-years away, and it has a mass about 10 […]

This week, we see Zuri the female lion who has suddenly grown the mane of a male, new research warns of the dangers of vaping and why it is an unsafe alternative to smoking, and 100 years on from his tomb’s discovery, we learn about the fascinating tale of Tutankhamun. Zuri The 18-Year-Old Female Lion […]

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption which happened on January 15 2022, has broken another record, knocking the previous record holder, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, off the top spot for highest plume ever recorded. Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai reached heights of 57 kilometers (34 miles), more than 17 kilometers (11 miles) clear of the previous […]

In the grand scheme of things, cosmos-wise, Mars is relatively young (a mere 4.6 billion years old to the universe’s 13.7 billion), which means it could still be in its pimply phase, as it appears in new NASA images. However, what may look like a spot of acne or a hormonal breakout on the Red […]