Deborah Bloomfield

This week, just a few days after Queen Elizabth II died after a 70-year long reign and was replaced by her son as the new King of England, a meteor flew across the skies of the UK. Of course in modern times we realize that this is just a coincidence of timing, and that so […]

A virus that has the potential to cause polio-like paralysis in children has reared its ugly head in the US once again. Its name is enterovirus D68, aka EV-D68, and US health authorities are asking doctors to keep an eye out for the infection over the coming fall.  The US Centers for Disease Control and […]

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has released a brand new image of what seems to be two spiral galaxies overlapping with each other. However, as the team at European Space Agency (ESA) points out, the galaxies are not actually interacting, it is just a case of perfect timing and alignment that gives way to an almost […]

This summer NASA’s Perseverance has been busy studying the Jezero Crater ancient river delta on Mars and it looks like it has hit jackpot. A preliminary analysis of one of the rock samples scooped up by the rover has the team amazed: the rock has the highest abundance of organic molecules found on Mars yet. […]

Love him or loathe him – and there are plenty of reasons for both – Genghis Khan was undeniably one of the most impressive figures in world history. Born into a small nomadic tribe near Lake Baikal, Temüjin, as he was originally named, grew into the man who united Mongolia and ruled over an empire […]

The winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022 have been announced, and as always they are spectacular. Chosen from over three thousand entries from 67 countries, Austrian photographer Gerald Rhemann has taken the top honors and the £10,000 prize with his photograph “Disconnection Event”.  The incredible image features Comet Leonard’s gas tail being […]

Did you know that your older siblings might have passed on to you more than just a bag of ill-fitting old clothes? If you’re a living human who came out of a womb, you probably have some sort of connection to microchimerism. What is microchimerism? Not to be confused with a chimera (a creature from […]

This week, people who have managed to dodge COVID-19 are needed by scientists, a 380-million-year-old heart is helping us better understand evolution, and we learn about the mysterious role of the “Stone of Destiny”.  Are You A COVID “Super-Dodger?” Then Scientists Want To Hear From You Advertisement COVID-19 has infected over 600 million people in […]

Recently, we met Ameca, a half-impressive, half absolutely terrifying robot with realistic facial expressions, designed to be a smooth interface between human and robot interaction. It’s all incredibly “Uncanny Valley”, but nonetheless a remarkable display of current technological improvements.  Well, Ameca just got an upgrade. A team of UK researchers have added the use of […]

In the 1970s and ’80s, a group of people living in the jungles of Mindanao Island in the Philippines caught the attention of both the media and anthropologists. The first time was for their discovery, and the second for alleged fraud. The Tasaday people were first “discovered” in 1971. Reports claimed that 26 people were […]

The oldest heart known to science has been discovered in the remains of an ancient, jawed fish, along with a stomach, intestine, and liver to boot. The 380 million-year-old fish organ smashes previous records by a comfortable 250 million years and is shedding light on the evolution of even human bodies. It comes from an […]

The origin of Saturn’s spectacular rings and its mysterious and peculiar connection to Neptune could have a single solution. Saturn used to have another moon that fell into the planet and some of its fragments went on to form the incredible rings that now adorn Saturn, a new study speculates. Scientists have decided to call […]

We might think we know how water behaves, but we’ve been overlooking what happens when it gets into spaces so small it’s just a single molecule thick. The outcomes turn out to be very different from water in bulk. Water’s three familiar phases of matter – solid, liquid, and gas – can lead to icebergs […]

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 […]