Deborah Bloomfield

As dangerous and illegal as anabolic steroids are, they’re also – to put it bluntly – fricking everywhere. Without them, we’d have no Terminator, flabbier movie stars, and, apparently, barely any good baseball. In fact, they’re so ubiquitous that roughly one in 15 men are estimated to have used them at some point. But who […]

Depending on where you are, it’s the equinox today or tomorrow, but what does that really mean? It’s easy to define the solstices; they represent the longest day or night of the year depending on your hemisphere. On the other hand, the definition of the equinoxes is that the equator is pointed directly towards the […]

Astronomers now routinely discover planets orbiting stars outside of the solar system – they’re called exoplanets. But in summer 2022, teams working on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite found a few particularly interesting planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars. One planet is 30% larger than Earth and orbits its star in […]

Anywhere between five and 50 percent of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus behind the still-very-much-ongoing worldwide pandemic – will go on to develop Long COVID. It’s a condition that so far has escaped hard study or explanation – though a few hypotheses have begun to take hold. Now, another piece of evidence has […]

The Koh-i-Noor, the largest diamond in the world, is continuing to stir up controversy in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. Though undeniably stunning and unparalleled in its rarity, this egg-sized diamond has, in the eyes of some, become a potent symbol of bloodshed, stolen history, and the horrors of colonialism. The 105.6-carat diamond […]

The personal wealth of Meta overlord Mark Zuckerberg has plummeted by $71 billion in 2022 alone, according to Bloomberg. While Wall Street has been having a rough year in general, the decline of Zuck’s fortunes is the biggest seen among any of the billionaires.  Zuckerberg still has a total net worth of $54 billion, but […]

Soil is a thriving ecosystem of life and death, with insects and plants using it to sustain them until their timely demise, at which point bacteria, fungi, and other decomposers take over and degrade them back into the earth. Within this complex system, viruses utilize special genes that are crucial to their metabolic processes but […]

Octopuses are everyone’s favorite eight-armed underwater creature with complex brains and serious smarts. How they move, however, is no less than random, with those eight limbs making them look downright peculiar at times. Now, new research has looked at how octopuses use their arms for hunting and discovered some surprising results. “Normally when you look at […]

Enceladus has quickly gone from being just another small moon of Saturn to prime territory to answer the great question: are we alone in the universe? No one thinks Enceladus could be home to sentient creatures, but if it hosts microbes, it would be powerful evidence that life is abundant and that given a chance […]

Miami Beach is considering paying bounties for dead iguanas, after the cost of paying professionals to destroy the creatures rocketed to over $200,000.  Miami Beach has an iguana problem. An invasive species of American iguana (aka green iguana) is flourishing in the area, and causing all kinds of destruction. The species, native from southern Brazil […]

Ever since Neptune’s discovery back on September 23, 1846, the planet has fascinated astronomers worldwide. The ice giant makes a complete orbit of our Sun every 164.8 years and hides its secrets in one of the dimmest parts of our Solar System. But when you shine the most powerful space telescope ever built on something, […]

The sudden halting of menstrual periods (amenorrhea) experienced by prisoners at Nazi concentration camps has historically been attributed to the effects of trauma and malnutrition, although new research paints a considerably darker picture. Drawing upon written historical records and interviews with Holocaust survivors, the study authors find evidence that synthetic steroids were added to the […]

If you’ve ever hung around a post box in the UK, really taking your time to savor the moment of sending in that tax return, you may have noticed a few letters on it, beneath an image of a crown. If that’s happened to you, you are not alone. Every now and then, someone spots […]

Space Force, the smallest branch of the US armed services, has been mocked by the Internet pretty much since its inception. Whether that’s by trekkies for their logo, or by everybody for the fact that their uniforms are the kind of camo that disguises you among trees, which are famously not that abundant in space, […]

An Ebola outbreak has officially been declared in Uganda after a person tested positive for the Sudan species of the virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday. This is following six “suspicious deaths” in the past month. Worryingly, it’s uncertain whether the existing Ebola vaccines will work against this rarer species of the […]

We can sometimes think of pain as a purely physical experience – the result of something going wrong or getting injured in your physical body. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: pain is a physical sensation, but it’s also incredibly tied up with factors like our emotions and psychology. It’s also affected […]

 CC BY-ND People have been exploring the surface of Mars for over 50 years. According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, nations have sent 18 human-made objects to Mars over 14 separate missions. Many of these missions are still ongoing, but over the decades of Martian exploration, humankind has left behind many […]