Deborah Bloomfield

The bacterium Chlamydia pneumoniae can infect the central nervous system. In mice, it has been found to trigger responses matching those seen in people with Alzheimer’s disease- notably, the build up of plaques made of the protein amyloid beta, which are the main way Alzheimer’s is distinguished from other forms of dementia. Although Chlamydia is […]

In 1882, in a workhouse in Leicester, England, a young man named Joe Merrick was having an operation on his face. He had been born 20 years earlier, apparently a perfectly normal, healthy baby – but now, he was so covered in deformities and protrusions that he could barely eat or speak. In years to […]

It’s Halloween and time to scare yourself silly, so why not do so with a little bit of science. Users of Reddit have been discussing what the “scariest thing that science has proven real” is. Here are some of the best, and as ever we will jump in if something needs explaining or elaborating. This […]

For the thousands of years that humans believed Earth was the center of the universe, a puzzling fact about the heavens was the motion of the planets. They all move in one direction except every once in a while, they appear to stop, move backwards for a bit, and then revert to their normal path. […]

Just days into the new reign of Elon Musk, Twitter is reportedly interested in making users pay to have their blue-tick verification badge. It’s even believed that people currently with blue ticks will be stripped of their checkmarks unless they foot the bill. “The whole verification process is being revamped right now”, Musk tweeted on […]

Asteroid PHA 2022 RM4 will make its closest approach to Earth either tomorrow or the morning after, depending on your time zone. As asteroid encounters go it’s not particularly close, passing us at 2.3 million kilometers (1.43 million miles) away, or six times the distance to the Moon. There are, however, aspects to this event […]

Sara Miguel Pico is a lead artist at Tessera Studios, as well as one of its founders. She recently worked across Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova, a sci-fi video game that’s the first based on the series of the same name from Paramount+ and Nickelodeon. We caught up with her to find out more about what […]

Let us tell you a tale of murder most foul: many years ago, in a village called Wadhurst, in England, a newlywed couple were murdered in cold blood inside their cottage. The husband was killed first; the wife called for help, but her pleas were unintelligible through her injuries, and nobody came to their rescue. […]

All stars, including the Sun, have a finite lifetime. Stars shine by the process of nuclear fusion in which lighter atoms, such as hydrogen, fuse together to create heavier ones. This process releases vast quantities of energy which counteracts the ever-present inward pull of the star’s gravity. Ultimately, fusion helps stars to resist gravitational collapse. […]

Despite being around for more than 100 years, Ouija boards (a wooden board covered with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and the words “yes”, “no” and “goodbye”) continue to be a popular activity – especially around Halloween. To work, all participants must place their hands on the wooden pointer (or planchette) and […]

The presence of two new sublineages of COVID-19, designated as variants BQ.1 and XBB, have been confirmed in the UK, with more than 700 cases of BQ.1 and 18 of XBB being detected in the country recently. While neither sublineage is currently considered a variant of concern, experts have cautioned that they are likely highly […]

This article first appeared in Issue 1 of our new free digital magazine CURIOUS.  With the looming threat of a giant asteroid strike, Meryl Streep et al. jet off on a spaceship, their bodies cryonically frozen as they search for a new planet to colonize, and inevitably destroy as they did the last. In case you […]

A bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) has been recorded flying 13,560 kilometers (8,435 miles) between Alaska and Ansons Bay, Tasmania, the longest non-stop migratory flight ever measured. The odyssey is not only a demonstration of birds’ staggering capabilities, but has given scientists and environmentalists a chance to highlight the threats to these winged adventurers’ survival. Godwits are […]

The Pillars of Creations have always brought awe and amazement to both astronomers and the general public. These light-years-long structures are the birthplace of many new stars and they always look incredible. JWST’s recent image in near-infrared is not just beautiful but allows us to peel back some of the dust layers to see the […]

If you were to take a sledgehammer to homes across the British Isles, you’d likely come across a few pairs of shoes stuffed inside the walls of old homes. Some of these “concealed shoes” will have sat in hiding for hundreds of years, and they were put there to carry out an important job: keeping […]

Scientists have been surprised to discover a vast river larger than the Thames that runs beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Building on previous observations, the latest study further shows how an interconnected network of rivers, lakes, and marine ecosystems can be found deep beneath this largely inaccessible and understudied chunk of the planet.  The river […]

Seismic signals collected over the last few years have led scientists to reconsider a previous idea about Mars. The planet is likely to still have magma, and it may plays an active role in changing the Martian surface. Many marsquakes appear to have been generated by a possible volcanic feature. If that is the case, […]

On the morning of October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union carried out the Tsar Bomba test, a hydrogen bomb that was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested. The Tsar Bomba packed a punch of over 50 megatons, which is the equivalent of 50 million tons of conventional explosives. That’s 10 times more […]