Deborah Bloomfield

We (hopefully) all know not to leave dogs or children in hot cars, but what about a half-full water bottle? Probably safe, right? Can’t suffocate; can’t get heat exhaustion; can’t catch on fire – no need to worry at all! Wait – okay, scratch that last one. Turns out, that half-finished Evian in your cup […]

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If you look up at the Moon tonight through binoculars or a small telescope, you may be able to see an unusual feature: a giant “X” on the lunar surface. This is known as the Lunar X or Werner X. If you scan your eyes along the terminator line, you may also see a temporary […]

Astronomers have detected an object with an orbit that will take it out of the Solar System, and almost certainly must have come from outside as well. Having recognized it long before it reaches its closest approach to the Sun, we will have months to study it as it brightens. What we already know, however, is […]

Despite having a reputation for strategically hunting marine mammals and occasionally sinking yachts in the Mediterranean, it has now been revealed that orcas have a more romantic side. After drones recently revealed they enjoy giving each other kelp massages, new research has since shown that they like to kiss, with tongues.  Until now, the behavior, […]

Given people’s disdain towards changing the clocks back and forth with the shifting of the seasons, you’d think countries would be put off from doing something like changing their time zone entirely. Still, several places have done so over the years – so how easy is it? Turns out, it’s simpler than you might think […]

Humans have been living continuously in space for nearly 25 years, with astronauts and cosmonauts living aboard the spacecraft since astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev first boarded the International Space Station (ISS) on Halloween, 2000. But all good things must come to an end.  The initial pieces of the ISS […]

A new paper from Harvard’s sometimes controversial physicist Avi Loeb has suggested that if we want to find advanced alien life, “black hole moons” may be the object to search for. Finding advanced alien life out there in the cosmos would be one of the most profound discoveries of humanity’s existence. But as much as […]

Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre is technically Australia’s biggest lake, but you wouldn’t know it most of the time – it rarely has water in it. But, thanks to record-breaking fall rains, this expanse has now transformed from salt pan to inland oasis, and though it will eventually disappear once again, it’s set to turn a delicious peachy […]

According to our best possible understanding of the universe, regular matter is only a small fraction of the matter-energy content of the universe. The energy we interact with and the matter we are made of and see is at most 5 percent of the total. What’s the rest? We don’t know exactly. About 70 percent […]

It’s a fairly common scenario: Someone (usually me) in your home informs you that there is a gigantic spider in the bathroom that needs dealing with, only for you to go up there and find a teeny tiny spider minding its own business, far smaller than described. A new study has looked into this size […]

Far from the fearsome reputation implied by their name, “killer whales”, orcas sometimes offer people gifts of food. Why orcas do this is a mystery we will probably take a long time to solve, but by collecting all the accounts they could, scientists have shown the behavior is surprisingly common. One of the less desirable […]

For millennia, the way we found our way home has been using the stars. The tech we have sent towards those stars also uses the position of distant shining dots to find their orientation and not lose “sight” of Earth. But researchers have just demonstrated that once you are far away from the planets of […]

A second nova has joined V462 Lupi in the sky, providing a brief window where both are visible at once without binoculars or telescopes under the right conditions. Such an event has only been recorded once before, and happened so quickly that no one noticed at the time. Astronomers spent much of 2024 anxiously awaiting […]

A long-lost city dating back some 2,400 years has been discovered next to a temple dedicated to the ancient Egyptian cobra goddess Wadjet. Unearthed in the eastern Nile Delta, the once-bustling settlement of Imet supported a large population during Egypt’s Late Period, yet the empire’s defeat at the hands of Alexander the Great appears to […]

The thing most people know about lemmings – their tendency to follow each other off a cliff – is not actually true (more on that later), but scientists have just learned something new about them: they are one of the newest mammal species on Earth. Genetic comparisons of the Norwegian lemming and its nearest relative, […]

The ancient Greeks believed that the city of Delphi was the Omphalos, the navel of the planet, the very middle of the world. In general, humans do like to find the center of things; it confuses us when there is none. The surface of our planet, being close to the surface of a sphere, doesn’t […]

A genus of around 20 burrowing frog species found mostly in South Africa is famous for its members’ short limbs, flat, angry-looking faces, and rounded “golf-ball” like bodies. Now, this collection of tiny frogs is adding one more member, after a new species was discovered almost by accident in South Africa. It began with a […]

An after-dinner cheese board? Can’t beat it. Silly little knives, fruity little chutneys, and mounds of glorious cheese, but the evening can take a turn when it’s time to go to sleep and the nightmares come knocking. Now, a new study has found that it could all come down to intolerances and allergies. The study […]

As nightmare fuel goes, the movie adaptation of The Martian author Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary is really up there: Waking up alone (well, almost) on a spaceship that’s light-years from home with almost no memories except that when you left Earth, it was in dire trouble. It doesn’t really get much worse, does it? […]