Deborah Bloomfield

A piece of a comet decided to take a fatal dive into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing a bright flash and explosion tens of kilometers above the ground. The luminous celestial event passed across the Iberian Peninsula, flying over Portugal before exploding. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe […]

Power lines are a great place to look if you are in need of birds or shoes. It’s not unusual to see a group of small birds, or a larger bird, apparently relaxing on wires used to transfer electricity over long distances to consumers. So why do they do this, and how come they don’t […]

For the first time in humanity’s long history, a human-made object will soon be a full light-day away from our home planet. Space, as they say, is pretty big, and human-made objects are slow. The record speed any human has ever traveled was set by Apollo 10 back in 1969, and has not been broken […]

Every now and then on the Internet, people will ask the question, “If we ride around on horses, why aren’t we galloping around on zebras too?” It’s a silly thought, but it’s actually pretty interesting to go into. First off, how and when did humans domesticate horses? We have not always been such good friends […]

A team of astronomers monitoring interstellar object 3I/ATLAS have found something a little surprising. Our third confirmed interstellar visitor appears to have changed color for the second time. Meanwhile, another team finds that the comet has begun to show signs of non-gravitational acceleration as it approached perihelion. For those of you who haven’t been following […]

Nobody does it better than supermassive black hole J2245+3743. It is a bright, active galactic nucleus (AGN), with a mass 500 million times that of our Sun, and it just caused a flare like no other supermassive black hole has done to date. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in […]

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures that were put in place to control it had far-reaching consequences for humanity. This once-in-a-generation event affected education, the world economy, and – most obviously – physical and mental health. But there was one projected consequence that didn’t actually come to fruition, according to new analysis. With lockdowns and […]

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The Hektoria Glacier is disappearing at a rate that barely seems possible, losing almost half its area nearly 10 times as fast as any glacier ever observed. Although the Hektoria is small, with little direct impact on global sea levels, the processes that made this possible could happen on larger glaciers, making this a warning […]

A new species of Portuguese man o’ war has been discovered floating in the waters of northeast Japan. Spotted by a student-led research group, the discovery marks a species that has never been seen before in the area, raising questions about shifting distributions of marine creatures due to the effects of climate change.  The rest […]

In the Gulf Of California, a group of orcas have developed specialized shark-hunting skills that mean they can make short work of one of the ocean’s greatest predators. Known as Moctezuma’s pod, they ram great whites so they get flipped upside-down, and then take advantage of their immobilized state to suck out their liver. The […]

The Neolithic inhabitants of the South Pacific feasted on large, fast-moving marine predators, including multiple species of shark and tuna. By identifying the remains of these ancient meals at a 1,800-year-old site in Micronesia, researchers have begun to reveal the remarkable fishing strategies employed by these prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The rest of this article is behind […]

Supermassive black holes remain full of mysteries, from their formation to their behaviors. One of them might soon be solved, though this won’t be coming from some new space observations. The insights from a particle accelerator on Earth deliver a solution to a long-standing problem. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please […]

Chicken, whether Kentucky fried or simply buttered, is a large part of the human diet. The average American, for instance, eats around 45 kilograms (100 pounds) of chicken every year, according to the National Chicken Council. If you were so inclined, you could fashion that amount of chicken into a sculpture larger than a German […]

In what might be the coolest solution to “how to find fossils”, a new study has revealed how we can take to the skies when trying to find dinosaur remains all thanks to vibrant orange-colored lichens. Two species (Rusavskia elegans and Xanthomendoza trachyphylla) were found to grow across as much as 50 percent of exposed […]

Magnetic deposits laid down during the Ediacaran Period, 630 million years ago to 541 million years ago, are not inexplicable fluctuations, some researchers argue. Instead, there is a pattern encoded in the rocks of Morocco’s Anti-Atlas Mountains consistent with rapid shifts in the planet’s magnetic field. The Earth’s magnetic field is stable enough that people […]

Two weeks ago, interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was at conjunction, on the opposite side of the Sun with respect to Earth. Last week, it reached perihelion, the closest point it would ever get to the Sun. Now it is back from behind the Sun and we can see it again. In fact, Earth is moving towards […]

On November 2, 2000, astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev entered the International Space Station (ISS). That means that for the last 25 years, there have always been some humans in space – a quarter of a century in which a few members of our species have not been on the […]

People are ever so slightly horrified and a little grossed out after learning the foamy truth about how horses sweat.  Every now and then on the Internet, people rediscover something weird about animals that breaks their expectations. For instance, in 2020, people (including myself) were pretty shocked to find out what koalas sound like, while […]

The Maldives has become the first country in the world to successfully implement a generational tobacco ban, with the new law making it illegal for anyone born on or after January 1, 2007, to buy, use, or sell any form of tobacco. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or […]