Deborah Bloomfield

The Sun has been pretty active lately, delighting scientists and amateur astronomers alike. This week, it took it up a level with a massive explosion on its far side that sent out a magnificent full-halo coronal mass ejection (CME), which scientists have described as a “no run-of-the-mill event”. Luckily Earth wasn’t in its way, but […]

Three and a half tonnes of nitrous oxide canisters were collected at Notting Hill carnival in London this year. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, nitrous oxide (also known as nos, whippits and laughing gas) is the second most commonly used recreational drug after cannabis among 16- to 24-year-olds. Nitrous oxide use […]

Slime videos emerging from TikTok sent some people into an understandable panic on Twitter recently as it looked as though they were casually tossing around mercury. While the liquid metal closely resembles mercury, it’s actually another very cool material called gallium. Gallium, or Ga on the Period Table, is a soft, silvery-white metal that’s similar […]

Bertie Gregory’s honest depictions of the highs and lows of wildlife filmmaking made him a global hit on social media. Working with National Geographic, his approach brings viewers behind the lens to get a better idea of what it’s really like going out into the field to film some of Earth’s most amazing, and sometimes […]

North America’s rarest snake, the rim rock crowned snake (Tantilla oolitica), was recently spotted for the first time in four years. Unfortunately, the elusive snake was found lifeless after seemingly choking to death on a giant centipede. The dueling specimens were found by a hiker in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park of Key Largo, […]

The Moon is the closest heavenly body to Earth, and so it sometimes passes in front of others, as seen from our perspective. When it does this to the Sun, we call it a solar eclipse, but when some other object is briefly blocked it is known as an occultation. This year is a big […]

If you could ask Thomas Jefferson where the roots of American democracy lay, he’d likely point to the English Magna Carta, or the one-man, one-vote (or to be precise, one-man-over-18-with-two-Athenian-parents-who-isn’t-a-slave-or-a-freed-slave-or-foreign-or-descended-from-a-foreigner-or-in-debt-or-a-criminal-or-descended-from-either, one-vote) system of ancient Athens. Which is odd, really – because why would you “bring democracy” all the way from Europe when it was already […]

Great Salt Lake, in northern Utah, is so named for three reasons: it’s big, it’s wet, and it’s full of salt. But usually, that last property isn’t quite so obvious as it is right now – because since Fall of 2019, the Great Salt Lake has been increasingly dotted with large, white mounds of a […]

An archeological mystery 1,300 years in the making – why ancient Chinese artists would sculpt a single “unicorn” in a sea of horses – has finally been solved. The answer: they didn’t. But a new study, published in the journal Heritage Science, has discovered what really happened. The first half of the eighth century was […]

Every year thousands of volunteers join paleontological digs in the hope of finding a new species of dinosaur. We don’t yet know if Teri Kaskie managed that last year when she spotted bones sticking out of a hillside in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, but it seems likely she’s done something even better. What Kaskie spotted […]

While reporting on NASA’s scrubbed Artemis I rocket launch on Saturday morning, news anchor Julie Chin started to experience what she described as “the beginnings of a stroke.” China was reading the news for an NBC station in Tulsa over the weekend when she started stumbling on her words and acting confused.  Advertisement “I’m sorry,” Chin […]

A 13-year-old chimpanzee escaped from Kharkiv Zoo in Ukraine and went on a delightful stroll around the northeastern city for a few hours. She was persuaded to come back by zookeepers as she decided the rain was not to her liking, donned a jacket, and then got transported home… on a bicycle. The escape artist, […]

A 31,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Borneo appears to have undergone a surgical amputation of its left foot. While Stone Age surgery sounds like an extremely dicey move, it looks like the young hunter-gatherer recovered and lived for a number of years after the operation. Reported in the journal Nature today, this find is the earliest […]

In response to the significant impact of the meat industry on climate change, the Dutch city of Haarlem has become the first to ban meat advertisements. The idea was originally proposed by green party GroenLinks – and, following the addition of meat into a list of products that contribute to the climate crisis, the ban […]

Those landing at Gibraltar International Airport on the morning of August 24, were treated to a spectacular view of a Levanter cloud billowing over the Rock of Gibraltar. A video from the Met Office of Gibraltar’s Twitter account shows the cloud sweeping over the peak in beautiful time-lapse footage.  Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory […]

Even the most devoted cat owners wonder at some point, perhaps waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, whether their cat really loves them. Dog people like to smugly point out dogs’ long history as humankind’s best friend. But research shows cats’ reputation as a cold and aloof pet is […]

If you’ve ever had a urinary tract infection (UTI) before, you know what a pain it can be. Not just because of the physical pains it causes, but because it can also be such a pain to go to the doctor, provide a urine sample, and wait for your results. UTIs are extremely common, with […]

A goal of space exploration is in-situ resource utilization, bringing very little from Earth and using what you might find on the moon, planet, or asteroid that you are visiting. Plenty of researchers are trying to work out how to craft materials on Mars and a new study has found a way to create a […]

For the first time ever, you can watch a virus enter a cell and infect it. Scientists from Harvard Medical School captured the live footage of engineered viruses doing their thing as they bound to living cells, and later injected their genomes into them. Their findings are published in the journal PNAS. Advertisement Viruses infect […]

Most astronomical objects can be studied with a wide variety of telescopes, but the Sun is a different matter; even a brief peek would destroy the sensitive instruments on most professional telescopes. The National Solar Observatory exists to build and operate telescopes across America suited to observing our local light source. Its most powerful instrument […]