Deborah Bloomfield

God, Albert Einstein famously declared, does not play dice. It’s a pithy statement, but a revealing one: to the famously genius physicist, true randomness – and the new quantum framework that threatened to once again rewrite the rules of the universe – was anathema.  Well, no offence to Einstein, but he was dead wrong on […]

With our planet’s changing climate seeing increased levels of moisture in the atmosphere, new research using climate simulations has suggested that this could have a significant impact on Antarctica, with the continent predicted to experience twice as many extreme “atmospheric river” weather events by the end of the century.   Atmospheric rivers are often described […]

This week on Break It Down: Seeing the Sun’s south pole for the first time ever, Ice Age puppies frozen in permafrost turn out to be wolves, a world-first fossil discovery reveals a sauropod’s final meal, “razor blade throat” and a traveling nimbus reveal what to expect from the new COVID variant, the deepest map […]

It’s not often that nature takes on the “bad guys” and wins, but in 2021, a rainforest went head-to-head with the gold miners tearing it apart and came away victorious. In a precedent-setting courtroom battle, Ecuador’s top court ruled in favor of the threatened Los Cedros cloud forest, stripping international mining companies of their permits […]

It’s June, which means solstice time – and therefore, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest night of the year. That’s a shame, as something else remarkable is set to occur this month as well: it’s “core season” for the Milky Way. In other words: go outside this month, find yourself a […]

Green = go, red = stop is a universal code that is burned into our brains and understood almost instinctively, no matter the language or culture. Except, of course, in Japan. A country known for its distinctive traditions and cultural quirks, Japan has a difficult relationship with the color green, a peculiarity that reveals itself […]

Your body is like your best friend. For better or worse you get to know all its quirks as you journey side-by-side through thick and thin. It figures, then, that when we suddenly lose part of our body, we can often feel as if it’s still with us. Unfortunately, that feeling can be a painful […]

London in the early 1780s was a tumultuous place. At the start of the decade, anti-Catholic riots, known as the Gordon Riots, had caused chaos in the city, leaving hundreds dead and many parts of the city in cinders. Across the Atlantic, the American Revolution was in full swing, so political attention was trained on […]

Majestic. Regal. Iconic. They’re all sort of wildlife documentary buzzwords, right? Ways to describe the elegance of nature, but what about the – how do we put this delicately? – what about the right weirdos? From beetles that fight their way out of frogs’ butts, to urine-quaffing giraffes, there’s another side to nature that less […]

Jadarite is a truly unique mineral. It is rich in lithium, and given our society’s hunger for the metal – key to batteries and the energy transition away from fossil fuels – there is a lot of interest in its properties and how it forms. So far, it has been found only in one location […]

How groups travel is an interesting part of animal behavior. Elephants can form circles to protect younger members of the herd, while whales can coordinate enough to make spiral rings of bubbles to catch prey. New research has revealed why baboons travel in straight lines, and the answer is much more wholesome than you might […]

A Roman soldier stationed at Hadrian’s Wall had feet so big that he would have had trouble finding shoes that fit in today’s stores, so one can only imagine the problems he had tracking down a pair of size 15 (US) military boots at the northern edge of the Empire. Yet not only did the […]

Mars is home to the tallest mountain in the Solar System, Olympus Mons, an extinct volcano three times as tall as Mount Everest. There are several other examples of volcanoes and volcanic features across the Red Planet, though new research suggests that we might have been missing many. Evidence for a volcano has been found […]

Anyone who has had a dental implant knows how alien it is to have a tooth-like thing in your mouth that isn’t really yours. Although millions of people have these long-term, natural-looking implants to replace missing teeth, traditional ones pretty much fall short of mimicking real teeth. However, researchers at Tufts University School of Medicine […]

A group of bat coronaviruses closely related to the virus behind Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) could be only a small mutation away from spilling over into the human population. Should that happen, we may find ourselves facing the next coronavirus pandemic.  Until recently, there hadn’t been all that much attention paid to the merbecoviruses, […]

Megastructures from the European Stone Age are incredibly rare. Long before agriculture, cities, or authoritative kings, moving massive stones and organizing large labor forces was nearly impossible. Despite anything, this was a time before metal tools, wheels, or written language. Yet along the Baltic Sea coast in Northern Europe, an archaeological discovery suggests that prehistoric […]

Last week, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS released the data behind an incredible catalog of galaxies, spanning further into the past than ever before, with a size that makes the Hubble Ultra Deep Field look like a postage stamp. This is COSMOS-Web. When the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was released in 2004, it was the […]

Some concepts seem so normal to us that we might assume they are naturally used around the world, despite the fact that they aren’t. The color blue, for instance, was not really described in ancient times, and is a more modern development. And then there’s the concept of “left” and “right”, describing people or objects […]

The Caspian Sea is dropping and revealing new islands to the world. In a recent discovery, Russian scientists have confirmed the presence of an emerging island in the world’s largest inland body of water. The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said the new island is located in the Astrakhan […]

If ever you were to fall in love with a spider, it would surely be Salticidae. Known as the jumping spiders, they are gloriously fuzzy with eyes straight out of Pixar, and the world has just been gifted a whole new genus discovered in the alpine regions of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their popularity shines through […]