Deborah Bloomfield

Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) is everywhere. A growing body of evidence is showing that this human-made compound may be the most prolific “forever chemical” in the environment. It’s found in the organs of animals, the leaves of trees, the water you drink, house dust, and the rain that falls from the sky. There’s a good chance […]

Gobi bears are the most endangered of Earth’s eight bear species. Just 40 individuals are thought to be left surviving in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, a place of extreme temperatures and little water. Recently, a film crew captured sight of Gobi bears in this environment, and they even have a little one in tow.  […]

Alligators aren’t picky eaters. Given half a chance, they will consume all kinds of fish, birds, turtles, small mammals, and – rarely, but it has been known – the odd human. But among the more bizarre items found in their stomachs are rocks. There are many reasons why animals swallow rocks, which are called “gastroliths” […]

A new study has taken a look at how plausible the idea of “Dyson swarms” is, how long they could feasibly be maintained by an advanced civilization, and whether it would be possible for us to detect them. As well as finding that they may be plausibly detectable around certain star types, the author suggests […]

If you’ve spent a little too long on the creepier corners of the Internet, you have likely stumbled across the Dyatlov Pass Incident.  For those that haven’t, in 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers were climbing Kholat Syakhl Mountain when they went missing. Months later, rescue workers found their tent with most of their […]

Zebras may be the flashiest members of the equine family, but they’re surprisingly versatile when it comes to hybridization. Known collectively as zebroids, these hybrids result from breeding a zebra with another type of equine, most commonly horses, donkeys, or ponies.  Some of the most common combinations include: Zebra + Horse = Zorse Zebra + […]

The universe is big, and thanks to innovation and technology, we have seen some of it across incredible distances, all the way to some of the most distant galaxies and the first light that ever shone, the cosmic microwave background. It is undeniable that telescopes have been fundamental to understanding space, but it doesn’t mean […]

Baryons are subatomic particles made up of an odd number of quarks. Protons and neutrons found at the center of atoms are a type of baryon, but there is a whole menagerie of other baryons made of rarer and more unstable quarks. Because of that, these baryons decay into other particles, and the rarest known […]

When it comes to the human memory, many mysteries remain, but a new study is helping to solve some of them by peering into the brain’s “filing cabinet”. Using recordings of brain activity and machine learning tools, a research team has revealed new insights into how our brains sort and catalog memories of objects. For […]

Despite all that we’ve discovered about those who lived thousands of years ago, it can sometimes feel difficult to imagine them as real people. However, we’ve now been served up with a (literally) handy reminder, after researchers discovered a 4,000-year-old handprint on the base of what’s believed to be an ancient Egyptian tomb offering. The […]

A golden retriever named Bumper and a black Labrador retriever named Peanut have shown that Parkinson’s disease (PD) carries a distinct odor that can be detected by specially trained sniffer dogs. According to researchers, the pair’s olfactory expertise may offer hope for an early diagnostic test that could help doctors catch and treat the illness […]

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Boxing and cheerleading collide in the case of the pom-pom crab (Lybia edmondsoni). Also known as the boxer crab, it has evolved to use the stinging power of anemones to its advantage by holding the venomous species Triactis producta in each claw. The defense mechanism increases feeding opportunities for the anemone as it’s waved through […]

There are a lot of fun relationships between species in the underwater animal world, from hermit crabs using anemones as hats, to the complex system that exists between coral and algae. Sometimes, though, it’s a little bit simpler, as this chilled video of a crab hitchhiking reveals.  Underwater videographer and photographer Zoe Slack, who goes […]

Science has shown us that COVID-19 vaccines had a transformative effect, saving lives, preventing illness, and altering the course of the pandemic for the better. But thanks to a new study, we can put some numbers to it. According to this analysis, 2.5 million lives were saved by COVID shots during 2020-24. According to the […]

Landing on another body in the Solar System is a tough business. Despite many successful touchdowns throughout history, spacecraft sent to land on the lunar surface still regularly fail in the final moments. Meanwhile on Mars, the Spirit rover sent by NASA became stuck in the planet’s soft sand after its wheels broke through a […]

A new preprint study has taken a look at transient objects captured by astronomers in the pre-Sputnik era, finding a curious correlation with nuclear tests and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Since 2017, the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project has attempted to look for stars and other sources of light […]

What if planet Earth is undergoing such rapid change that the traditional framework of “seasons” no longer makes sense in our everyday experience? This is the bold new idea proposed by a pair of geographers at the University of York and London School of Economics in the UK. Seasons, in their most conventional sense, refer […]

Sharks and rays have been found to have an XY sex chromosome system superficially like our own, but with its own unique features. It’s also older than that of any other vertebrate. There are lots of ways to determine sex besides the XY system used by non-monotreme mammals, where XX (usually) denotes females and XY produces males. […]

Most of the black holes we know of are in two categories. They are either supermassive, millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun, or stellar-sized, from a few times to a few tens of times our little star. There is an in-between category known as intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) that weigh […]