Deborah Bloomfield

Imagine you’ve been waiting all day for five minutes to yourself so you can sit down and tuck into a bar of your favorite chocolate. You peel back the wrapper, excitement mounting, tastebuds tingling… but alas! It’s all covered in weird white stuff! Why does chocolate sometimes go white like this, and – most importantly […]

There are plenty of physics problems out there that are unresolved, from the Hubble tension to the black hole information. But one particularly cool and far more demonstrable mystery revolves around something you probably see just about every day of your life; bubbles. In 1934, scientists at the University of Cologne were studying sonar when […]

Scientists have suggested we could create housing on Mars for future settlers using an Ancient Roman technique of making concrete.  If humans ever want to set up a home elsewhere in the Solar System, Mars seems like the most viable bet, beating off the competition by not being a hell world, having a surface we […]

Down in the depths of the ocean live all sorts of rare and unusual beasties – from squids with tentacles that stretch for days and seals picking up good vibrations, the sea bed is home to all sorts of rare life. In the southwestern Pacific Ocean near the Tonga Trench, researchers used a camera trap […]

An Alabama woman who had been on the waiting list for a kidney transplant since 2017 just became the third-ever recipient of a gene-edited pig kidney. Fifty-three-year-old Towana Looney had previously donated a kidney to her own mother, but when her one remaining kidney began to fail, the long wait for a donor organ began. […]

The Southern Ocean is growing restless. Storms are increasing around Antarctica due to rampant sea ice loss in what researchers have described as a “shift unlike anything seen in the past century.” In a new study, scientists at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre looked at the record low sea ice levels in the Antarctic during […]

How do you create an army of cockroach cyborgs? Why, you enrol the robots, of course. That’s the direction a new preprint study has taken in equipping cockroaches with little backpacks in under 68 seconds using an automatic assembly method, something they’ve termed the “Cyborg Insect Factory”. It sounds like nightmare fuel, but it’s actually […]

We can hear thanks to our middle ear bones, something that began with holes in the sides of therapsid skulls. Among these ancient animals was a group of saber-toothed gorgonopsians, the oldest of which were thought to have lived 265 million years ago. But don’t you know it, we just found one that is wayyy […]

Hoping to keep tabs on the magnetic north’s wandering ways, the World Magnetic Model 2025 has been released this week, revealing the latest official predicted placement of Earth’s magnetic fields. This version will remain valid until late 2029, during which time we can expect to see the magnetic north pole slowly edge further toward Russia. […]

A team of physicists say they have found a new type of quasiparticle which appears to be found in all magnetic materials, hinting that magnetism isn’t as static as we thought. First off, what are quasiparticles? In certain systems, such as electrical circuits, quasiparticles can emerge. For instance, in lithium atoms packed together, electrons in […]

This September, the Polaris Dawn mission became the first to have a private space walk. Run by billionaire Jared Isaacman, the mission was seen by some as risky – and it has now been revealed that the spacecraft lost contact with ground control for at least an hour. This incident was not reported on at […]

The universe is undergoing an accelerated expansion. We call the source of this expansion dark energy – a mysterious form of energy that permeates the whole universe pushing space-time apart. We do not know what dark energy is but its existence allows astronomers to explain so many features of the universe. A new hypothesis suggests […]

Squirrels go nuts for nuts, right? That’s what’s with all the digging and the tree climbing and the hurling nuts from a great height – but in California, it seems they’ve developed a taste for blood. New evidence marks the first for predatory and carnivorous behaviors among California ground squirrels, which have been caught on […]

Let’s be honest, Christmas can be a magical time of year, but it can also be an inter-relational minefield with various taboo topics that spring up – be it etiquette around who helps (too much or too little) to cook dinner, the stresses concerning the cost of living, or differing expectations about gift-buying. All these […]

We Homo sapiens possess surprisingly few functional genes that distinguish us from extinct human lineages such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, according to the authors of an unpublished study. Based on this finding, the researchers conclude that we are actually the same species as these ancient hominids, albeit an abnormally intelligent, weird-looking population of people within […]

Snow is beautiful, but also powerful and destructive – and, if we’re honest, a bit confusing. For something made entirely of water, it can come in many forms: light and fluffy, sticky and heavy, shaped like a perfect snowflake, or falling in needle-like flecks. Its consistency changes a lot, but so does its color, which […]

An unprecedented die-off has been declared in Alaska, where as many as four million murres are estimated to be missing from colonies across the state. According to a new study, it’s the worst single species die-off in modern history and was triggered by “The Blob“, a mass of warm water in the north Pacific Ocean […]

Hands up if you’ve heard this one before: “I can’t drink tonight, I’m on antibiotics.” We’ll be the first to tell you that if you’re dealing with an infection that requires antibiotic treatment, a night on the sauce is not going to benefit your recovery. But not all of these drugs are the same, and […]

Surviving in harsh climates is part and parcel of life in the animal world and coming up with adaptations to make life easier in very dry habitats can lead to some pretty remarkable features. Now, researchers have taken a closer look at the behavior of rattlesnakes to work out not just how their bodies are […]

Meet SGC-250 – known as “Big Carl” to his friends – the biggest land-based crane in the world.  Fully upright, Big Carl can reach heights of up to 250 meters (820 feet), according to Sarens, the Belgian construction company that owns the crane. The heavy lifter is able to hoist up an impressive 5,000 tonnes […]