Deborah Bloomfield

The nights are drawing in, the weather’s turning chilly, and spooky season is upon us – the Northern Hemisphere is fully in the grip of fall. But as well as all the cozy vibes and holiday fun, this time of year unfortunately brings with it a wave of respiratory viruses. The Centers for Disease Control […]

Often when people think “shark” the mind will immediately start playing the Jaws soundtrack. However the world’s oceans (and some lakes) are full of a wide variety of shark species, from the famous great white, to the hammerhead, the bull, and everything in between. Now it’s time to take a look at the world’s smallest […]

Every year, billions of capelins migrate to the Norwegian coast to spawn, and predators take advantage and feast. Scientists analyzing one migration witnessed the largest single act of predation humans have ever seen, as millions of cod attacked a giant capelin shoal over the course of four hours. In the process, they have gained insight […]

Cancer is not limited to us humans. Plenty of other species are also afflicted by it, but despite its pervasiveness, there’s still so much we don’t know. What animals are most likely to get it, for example – and why? This is the crux of Peto’s paradox. What is Peto’s paradox? Large-bodied, long-lived animals should […]

A huge new mine in southwestern Nevada has just been given the final thumbs up by the US government. While the mine could supply enough lithium to power 50 million electric vehicles, its construction threatens the existence of a rare wildflower, sparking debate about advancing clean energy and the protection of fragile ecosystems. On October […]

Does it feel like online spaces have gotten more toxic lately? Noticed an uptick in weird conspiracy theories surrounding “globalists” or immigrants? It’s not just you – according to a new study, the 2020 US election really did lead to a huge wave of hate content getting washed into the mainstream. “Based on the most […]

Sprinkling a little salt on some mango or grapefruit doesn’t seem like something that would make it taste nicer and yet people do it all the time – and claim that the fruit is all the sweeter for it. But how exactly does salt lead to more sweetness? Understanding how this works requires us to […]

Are you partial to a sliced onion over a diced one? Perhaps you’ve always thought that apples are more delicious chopped up than whole. It might seem doubtful that the way in which a food is cut would make it more or less flavorsome, but science suggests there might actually be something to it. In […]

On Saturday, November 2, humans will have continuously lived in space on the International Space Station (ISS) for 24 years. It has been a momentous quarter-century for sure, and the ISS is not getting any younger. The current plan is for the space station to continue working until 2030 and then be deorbited in 2031. […]

A see-through figure floating down a hallway. A creaking floorboard. A looming dark shape in the corner of a room. Stories of ghosts have been around for thousands of years, however, there has been no scientific proof of their existence. So, what causes people to see things that may go bump in the night? It […]

After receiving the thumbs up from regulators, California is set to build its first carbon capture plant with a project that aims to suck up CO2 and inject it deep underground where it can’t meddle with Earth’s climate. Last week, the Kern County Board of Supervisors approved a permit for the California Resources Corp (CRC) […]

We humans are a bit magpie-ish when it comes to the environment, our eyes growing big and greedy when we spot shiny things sticking out of rocks. Take a walk down the mineralogy collection of any good natural history museum and your face will be aglow with the sparkle of minerals, crystals, and gemstones – […]

Welcome to IFLScience’s first-ever Halloween podcast special, bringing you a feature-length episode of The Big Questions as we take on the UK’s most haunted castle.  We journeyed to Northumberland up by the Anglo-Scottish border to spend the night in Chillingham Castle, a place that allegedly boasts an above-average number of ghosts. We wanted to explore […]

Ideas from quantum physics have seeped into popular culture over recent decades in a way they failed to for the first half century after its development. Nevertheless, while memes about Schrödinger’s Cat or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle abound on social media, the physics on which they are built is less widely known. The wave-particle duality is […]

Newly published research suggests that the first-ever image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is not an accurate representation of the cosmic object. The image was revealed in 2022 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration that took the first-ever image of a black hole back in […]

Astronomers in China and Japan observed the appearance of a “guest star” in 1181 CE. It was a supernova and for the following 840 years it was lost. In 2021, a peculiar nebula was spotted by citizen scientist Dana Patchick and it was linked back to the witnessed event. Called Pa 30, it became a […]

In the first assessment of its kind, nearly all of the world’s tree species have been added to the IUCN Red List, which acts as an inventory of species’ conservation status. In doing so, however, it’s been discovered that 38 percent of the tree species identified are currently at risk of extinction. The Global Tree […]

Sitting on a heavy wooden bench with torchlight illuminating the cold and breezy dungeon wasn’t what I thought I would be doing on a Tuesday night. Yet, there I was, next to my scared colleague, with a heart monitor on the end of my finger, in supposedly the UK’s most haunted castle, to figure out […]

On August 8, 1900, at the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, David Hilbert presented 10 of 23 as-yet unsolved problems that he believed would be the “goals […] toward which the leading mathematical spirits of coming generations will strive.” He was right – though the fact that he was one of the most […]

Okay, we know that not all toilets are white – who remembers those avocado and salmon pink bathrooms suites of the UK 1970s? But the vast majority of today’s toilets are white, and this seems to be the case across the world: in private homes, offices, and public bathrooms, apart from those terrifying stainless steel […]