Deborah Bloomfield

The BASE collaboration within the Antimatter Factory at CERN is having an exciting year. Not only are they getting ready to transport antimatter around the facility on the back of a van, but they have also demonstrated for the first time a quantum bit or qubit (the fundamental processing unit of a quantum computer) using […]

Ever wondered what it would look like if you could combine the features of a rat, a skunk, and a porcupine? Well, wonder no more, because nature has already dished up such a creature: the African crested rat (Lophiomys imhausi). It looks endearingly bonkers, but don’t be fooled. This maned rodent has a toxic trick […]

A new experiment involving a network of entangled atomic clocks could finally help us test how quantum mechanics fits with general relativity. Quantum mechanics is our best understanding of the universe at atomic and subatomic scales. With it, we have revolutionized our understanding of physics on teeny tiny scales. General relativity – first outlined by […]

Astronomers report the discovery of 17 different complex organic molecules around protostar V883 Orionis. They also report the first tentative detection of ethylene glycol and glycolonitrile, which are precursors to crucial building blocks of life such as the amino acids glycine and alanine, as well as the nucleobase adenine found in both DNA and RNA. […]

In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, fusion startup Marathon claims that they have come up with a method for turning mercury into gold. There is an old joke that fusion is always 30 years away. After being proposed in the 1950s as a solution to our energy needs, we have still not found a way to make […]

What do you think of when you imagine a hyena? A cackling, meat-eating character, right? Turns out, they’re not all like that. Like any family, there’s one member of the hyena clan that’s something of an oddball – the aardwolf (Proteles cristatus). The name might conjure up images of the cursed result of an experiment […]

To misquote Hamlet, there seems to be more types of planets across the heavens than have been dreamt in our astronomy before the advent of dedicated planet-hunting telescopes. In the Solar System, we have rocky worlds, dwarf planets, gas giants, and icy giants. Beyond, we find super-Earths, sub-Neptunes, hot Jupiters, and more. Now, astronomers have […]

Dogs are great judges of character, right? That’s certainly what lots of people think anyway. If dogs gravitate towards someone then that person must be safe and trustworthy, but if the pooch gets protective then perhaps that someone is untrustworthy. But whether or not this is true and how, if at all, dogs socially evaluate […]

As the search for life on Mars continues – with the Mars Sample Return program set to return samples of the planet in the early 2030s – one scientist has suggested that we may have already found life on the Red Planet, almost 50 years ago. And then, in what would not be an all-time […]

A late Cretaceous trackway in Canada contains the footprints of at least nine dinosaurs from four species. Two of the trackmakers were large tyrannosaurs, which may have sparked the motions of the other dinosaurs, or happened to be nearby a few hours earlier or later. However, while that part of the puzzle remains unsolved, the […]

For the first time in 80 years, a new generation of fully-fledged aspen trees has grown in Yellowstone’s northern range. According to a new study, the reason for the success is thanks to the wolves that were reintroduced into the national park in the 1990s.  Wolves were eradicated in Yellowstone by humans in the early […]

From CCTV and smartphones to dashcams and smart doorbells, cameras follow your every step in the 21st century. While the constant threat of ever-watching eyes may be turning us into a self-conscious surveillance society, it does make for some interesting science occasionally. Case in point: a security camera in Myanmar captured something never before seen […]

Join us as we dive into a fascinating ocean mystery: a massive, unidentified object discovered by explorers on the floor of the Baltic Sea. In one (admittedly blurry) sonar image, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the Millennium Falcon from above. Most intriguingly, the team that found it in 2011 noted it appeared to rest […]

Humanity has successfully landed probes on Mars and Venus, two of the four rocky planets of the Solar System. While a mission to Mercury, being so close to the Sun and nearly as hot as Venus, is a tricky goal for future operations, if it has a rocky surface, human scientists will find a way […]

We’re often told we need to walk “X number” of steps every day in order to stay healthy, although most of these claims are made by people who talk the talk but can’t walk the walk. With little or no scientific evidence to back up these daily benchmarks, it has until now remained unclear exactly […]

In what is being hailed as a “groundbreaking achievement” for Uruguay and South America, a weight loss drug has successfully completed its Phase I human trials. The drug is the first to have been completely developed in the country, and operates by burning calories by generating creatine-based heat without impacting patients’ appetites. The drug is […]

For five months, a toxic algal bloom off South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula has been killing marine life and making swimming and surfing unsafe. Instead of easing with the coming of winter as was expected, the affected area has expanded, including to the Gulf of St Vincent on which Adelaide sits. Damage has worsened, and volunteers […]

To be clear, we’re not making a crack about math problems “sending you to sleep” or anything. It’s actually much cooler than that: a new study from researchers at the University of Surrey has found that the so-called “two-process model” of sleep – the usual framework through which we understand the phenomenon – can be […]

On September 20, 1977, citizens of northern Europe and Soviet Russia were greeted with an unusual sight in the night sky. Early that morning witnesses in Petrozavodsk, but also as far away as Copenhagen and Helsinki, saw a large glowing light which “hovered over the city in the form of a jellyfish sending down a […]

Is there anyone out there? Anyone who’s ever peered into the deepest parts of the night sky has likely asked themselves this question at least once in their life. And, if they’ve ever considered the sheer size of the universe, then they may have even answered in the affirmative; there must be other life out […]