Deborah Bloomfield

The Sun goes through an 11-year cycle of activity, going from the solar maximum, where it is covered in many sunspots and is more likely to have flares and coronal mass ejections, to the minimum, where there are no spots and those events are extremely rare. But this is not only the cycle our star […]

Times are tough at the moment and world news may feel like we are bouncing from one negative story to another, so here’s something to add some pep to our news consumption step. Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development (APOPO), a Belgian non-governmental organization, has just announced that HeroRAT Ronin has broken the Guinness World Record […]

It’s a truth often played for laughs that alcohol messes with your brain function. That’s why the cops make you do stuff like walk in a straight line and touch your nose when they suspect you’ve been drinking: those are some of the first things to deteriorate after a heavy night at the bar. But […]

In the cutthroat jungles of Madagascar, vast webs hang over the landscape’s bustling rivers, scooping up prey like industrial-strength bug-catching nets. They’re the handiwork of none other than Darwin’s bark spider. Despite the females being smaller than a human hand, this remarkable arachnid weaves webs that can stretch up to 25 meters (82 feet) across […]

Olo is described as a “new color” that scientists argue they’ve enabled people to see – one that doesn’t resemble anything in our everyday visual experience. It’s described as an intensely saturated greenish-blue, brought to life using a new technique that stimulates the eye’s photoreceptors in a non-conventional way. “We name this new color ‘olo’,” […]

Early next week, the Lyrid meteor shower will have its peak, and the Moon being less than half full will not ruin the spectacle too much. If you’re planning to watch, you won’t need any specialist equipment. In fact, telescopes or binoculars are often a hindrance to catching meteors.   The peak will be on […]

Pandemics, contentious political environments, economic distress, continued war, ecological degradation, climate change, wildfires – all these themes have featured in the 24-hour news cycle over the last few years, and it can be exhausting to constantly follow them all. However, consistently engaging with negative news is not just demoralizing. The frequent consumption of such information […]

We have been moderately lucky with comets in the last several months. We had Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS last October shining across the sky for weeks, visible to the naked eye, having survived a dangerous close encounter with the Sun. That chance now lies with C/2025 F2 (Swan), although it’s not expected to get as bright. The […]

Could aquatic mammals, such as whales, orcas, and bottlenose dolphins, ever evolve to live on land again? It seems the chances of this are actually vanishingly small, as the adaptations that allow them to thrive in the water are more or less irreversible, representing an evolutionary threshold beyond which there can be little chance of […]

What do Freddy Mercury, Nero’s mom, and an ancient Bulgarian vampire have in common? That’s right: they all have hyperdontia – aka “too many teeth”.  But while for these three toothy icons, their dental situation was variously a source of embarrassment, a lucky omen, and a genuine benefit to their goal of eating the local […]

In most European languages, the name of the holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus derives from the word “Pascha.” It’s called Pâques in French, Pasqua in Italian, Pasg in Welsh, Påske in Danish, Páskar in Icelandic, and Pasen in Dutch. Why, then, do we call it “Easter” in English? First things first, Pascha (or Πάσχα) […]

Whether it’s Adam and Eve being shunned from Eden, Prometheus chained upon the rock, or Odin sacrificing his own eye, humanity has long agreed: wisdom comes at a price.  Of course, for most of us, growing to an age where we might accept and understand the world a little better won’t bring the kinds of […]

Throughout the Iron Age, wealthy elites and royals swanned around the Mediterranean decked out in purple robes – although where and how these flamboyant garments acquired their aubergine hues has until now remained a mystery. Yet the authors of a new study report the discovery of an industrial-scale purple dye workshop near Haifa, Israel, which […]

Last year, Professor Richard Lieu proposed that there could be gravity happening even without mass. This proposal, outside the conventional understanding of physics, was to explain the effects of dark matter and dark energy, two hypothetical features that are at the cornerstone of the standard model of cosmology. Despite their importance, we have not found […]

The mummification process is perhaps one of the most talked about aspects of Ancient Egyptian life. It highlights the morbid curiosity shared by those of us alive at a time when funerary practices have gone in a different direction. It’s also a skewed view, offering us insights into the death rituals of only the ancient […]

The high seas haven’t been this sketchy since the Golden Age of Piracy. To navigate these tricky waters, a US-based tech start-up called Blue Water Autonomy is promising to “usher in” a new era of autonomous ships. They’ve just received $14 million in seed funding and have already begun saltwater testing in the real world.  […]

Well, la-di-da! Who knew great apes had such fine tastes? Gorillas in parts of the Congo are occasionally seen scratching at the soil, seemingly in search of bugs and grubs. However, new research has shown that they’re actually scouting for a much more specific food source: truffles. These findings were based on observations of western […]

Scientists have created nugget-sized bits of chicken meat in a bioreactor that can mimic the blood vessels to deliver nutrients and oxygen to the artificial tissue. It might bring the concept of “processed foods” to a whole other level, but the researchers suggest their technology offers a “sustainable, ethical alternative to conventional meat.” Creating lifelike […]

The 365-day Gregorian calendar we use today isn’t exactly a masterpiece of logic. The months arbitrarily have 30 or 31 days (and then February just does its own thing), plus we patch in an extra day every four years to make up for the fact that a solar year isn’t quite 365 days (it’s about […]

The 13th director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Science Advisor to the President, Michael Kratsios, has sparked a number of conspiracy theories over on Reddit after appearing to claim that the US possessed technology that can “manipulate time and space”. Kratsios was attending the “Endless Frontiers” retreat, an […]