Deborah Bloomfield

Today’s humans are exposed to black carbon particles not only from air pollution after birth, but as early as the first trimester of their gestation, new research has revealed. “We found black carbon particles in human cord blood, which provides evidence of their transfer to the fetal circulation system,” explains the paper, published this month […]

The Salton Sea, California’s most heavily polluted lake, is rapidly turning into toxic dust. Once a popular tourist spot, this troubled body of water is rapidly receding, upping the concentration of salt and chemicals in the remaining water. The landlocked “sea” was created by accident in the opening years of the 20th century when irrigation […]

Australia’s boab trees (Adansonia gregorii) are related to Africa’s baobabs that can live for 2,000 years. Boabs were a major source of food and shelter for the Indigenous people of the Tanami Desert, who engraved their bark with symbols resembling the famous rock art to the west. Despite the importance of these carvings to the […]

Archaeologists excavating Belize’s aptly-named Midnight Terror Cave think they may have found shreds of Mayan death gags that once silenced the victims of human sacrifice. Rummaging through the dental remains of those who were slain in the infamous cave, the researchers discovered bright blue fibers lodged between some of the victims’ teeth. First discovered in […]

Oregon police have issued a warning to beachgoers: do not play with the grenades. The Newport Police Department was forced to make such a warning after several explosive devices were found washed up near Agate beach. The police department headed to the area on October 4, after several reports of the devices being found by […]

An AI will make history by being the first AI robot to give evidence to the UK’s House of Lords, as part of an ongoing inquiry into how artificial intelligence may impact the art industry. Ai-Da, a humanoid artistic robot that has already created an impressive but somewhat abstract portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth […]

A video showing Albert Einstein explaining his most famous equation (perhaps the most famous equation) in physics has been widely shared on Twitter. The video shows Einstein talking through E=MC2, the equation describing mass-energy equivalence. Advertisement “It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same […]

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and Ganymede will soon be visited by more spacecraft that will certainly uncover their secrets. Planetary scientists are not idling waiting though. Juno is keeping them busy as it flies around Jupiter and we have Earth-based telescopes carrying out long-distance observations. Now, astronomers have released the sharpest views yet of these […]

A drop of ancient amber has given rise to a new-to-science group of insects with the aid of teeny tiny technology. Using microtomography (Micro-CT), researchers were able to confirm the existence of the genus Calliarcys contained within Eocene Baltic amber, representing a rare opportunity to learn more about ancient mayflies, which are hardly ever preserved […]

Here’s the thing about numbers: they go on for frickin’ ever. Literally. What’s the biggest number you can think of? 700? A million? Whatever’s in Elon Musk’s bank account today? It doesn’t matter – add one to it. Congratulations: you just made an even bigger number. You played yourself. A corollary of this unfortunate fact […]

For much of the latter part of the 20th Century, you couldn’t flip through the channels without finding at least one documentary on the Bermuda Triangle, an area in the Atlantic Ocean that was chomping down ships and airplanes like they were Reese’s Pieces.  But over recent years, a new genre of Tweet has come […]

Sleep can be remarkably difficult to get in these stressful times, so when you catch a few Zzzs it pays to get the best quality you can. While everything from avoiding blue light to reading and counting sheep has been touted as a tool for drifting off, the position we sleep in can also have […]

Swapping out your comfort blanket for the remains of a long-dead public figure might turn your stomach, but in history, such extremes have been reported as a success in treating maladies that had failed to respond to medicine. The “miracle” of one such bed body led to the posthumous canonization of Fray Diego de Alcalá, […]

If you are a Twitter user in the US, you might have seen little notes attached to popular or noteworthy tweets. These notes come from the company’s Birdwatch program, a novel approach to fact-checking that provides more context to tweets – all done by users. The first question that pops to mind knowing that this […]

An innocent man has been freed from prison after serving 35 years of his wrongful conviction, partially thanks to a rerun of an old Mythbusters episode.  In September 1986, two brothers were killed in a fire at an apartment in Southwest Chicago. Two siblings managed to escape the fire, and told authorities that they believed […]

The question of life on Mars is an open one. One approach to provide insights is looking at the past of the Red Planet and estimating if and when it ever had conditions suitable for life. A new study states that in the distant past, the subsurface of Mars was habitable for microorganisms that feed […]

Online fraudsters have reinvented an age-old online romance scam by pretending to be a Russian cosmonaut who needs money to return home to planet Earth. As far out as it may seem, the hustle recently managed to hook one woman living in Japan who reportedly sent 4.4 million yen ($30,000) to the unknown criminals. The […]

A new safety feature has arrived with the iPhone 14 that automatically notifies emergency services after detecting the owner has been in a collision, but it has not shipped without some pretty annoying bugs – reports in the US are suggesting 911 has been notified multiple times by the feature after confusing people on rollercoasters […]

The opening of Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities marks the first time utility-scale solar, wind and batteries have been combined at one site for reliable electricity production in the United States. It won’t be the last. The project is currently mostly a wind farm with batteries and solar attached, rather than an equal partnership triple-threat, but […]

At least four people have died and 52 have fallen sick after consuming synthetic cannabis containing rat poison, according to a new report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).   This latest cluster of cases first started appearing in Florida around December 2021, when the state poison center came across three […]