Deborah Bloomfield

A new digital map of the road network that once connected the Roman Empire has been created, revealing a staggeringly vast constellation of interlocking routes. Named Itiner-e, the new digital map includes 299,171 kilometers (186,000 miles) of ancient roads spanning from the British Isles to the Middle East. Famous for their straight roads, the Romans […]

The Moon is notoriously difficult to photograph. Sometimes you want to snap a picture of it with your smartphone, and the flash goes off. It is much rarer that you are recording it and the flash happens on the Moon, but it does happen. That’s a meteor hitting our natural satellite and creating a new […]

Researchers at Princeton University have reported a new quantum computing breakthrough. They developed a quantum bit, or qubit – the fundamental processing unit of quantum computers – that can last for over 1 millisecond. This is three times longer than the best-ever qubit lifetime in a lab setting and almost 15 times longer than what’s […]

Amphibians like frogs and toads are a great way to observe metamorphosis. They lay eggs that develop into tadpoles, and then these tadpoles develop into froglets and toadlets until at last we have our big, strong adults that come crawling out of the water.  Except, it doesn’t always go like that. There are some amphibians […]

One such question, asked every now and then, is why humans float more easily in saltwater. There are a few places in the world where this is especially apparent, for example in the Dead Sea, or in the waters of oases in Siwa, Egypt. ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites. For […]

Echidnas are strange little fellas at the best of times, so imagine the surprise when a wildlife filmmaker stumbled upon one with striking white fur and bright blonde spines. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. The extra-unusual individual was recently filmed by […]

Finns who voted in the 1999 parliamentary elections are more likely to have still been alive in December 2020 than those of similar age who skipped the election. That finding is consistent with previous indicators that voters are usually healthier than non-voters, and the relationship turns out to be even stronger than that with education […]

Burrowing for 137 kilometers (85 miles) beneath New York, the Delaware Aqueduct holds the title of the world’s longest continuous tunnel. This incredible feat of engineering quietly delivers famously quaffable water to millions of New Yorkers every day, but few realize the scale and complexity hidden deep beneath the Earth.  The Delaware Aqueduct is a […]

A cluster of stars known as LAP1-B, seen around 800 million years after the universe was formed, is the first we have seen consistent with being composed of the first stars, a new paper claims. That is, these would be stars whose initial ingredients were entirely forged in the Big Bang, rather than by an […]

It has come to our attention that a few people out there are a little confused as to why flying against the rotation of the Earth does not speed up flight times. In a post, admittedly by someone who denies that the Earth is spinning, a confused person writes: “Plane flying from east to west […]

For almost a century, we have known that the universe is expanding. For several decades, evidence has suggested that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Crucial to those estimates were the use of standard candles, celestial events of the same luminosity that can be used to measure cosmic distances like milestones on a road. […]

Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station orbiting the Earth have enjoyed humanity’s first-ever barbecue in space. While developing food that can be conveniently stored and eaten is space became a priority as humanity took longer missions into our Solar System, so far astronaut and cosmonaut menus have been somewhat restricted. The first person to […]

There are plenty of items that you are not allowed on planes, and usually for fairly obvious reasons. You cannot, for instance, bring ammunition on board. Nor slingshots, firearms, or harpoon guns. Flammable liquids are also a no no, as well as any item containing its own internal combustion engine. The rest of this article […]

A colossal structure in southern Mexico that dwarfs every other building in the Maya world was probably built without the use of forced labor, centuries before the emergence of the empire’s structured hierarchy or elite rulers, according to a new study. Known as Aguada Fénix, the colossal project was most likely conceived as a model […]

It could be said that we still live in an age of dinosaurs. After all, birds are dinosaurs, but they’re not the only close relatives we have to look to as analogs for extinct dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, birds, and crocodiles all sit within the Archosauria, a clade of “ruling reptiles” made up from diapsids with single […]

A new study has become the first-ever to definitively identify an ankylosaur hatchling. The specimen is around 115 million years old and belongs to the species Liaoningosaurus paradoxus, for which we’d previously only found juveniles. We’ve still yet to find a Liaoningosaurus adult, and as for why? The rest of this article is behind a paywall. […]

Beelzebufo might’ve been king of the frogs 70 million years ago, but nowadays, a different champ for “World’s Biggest Frog” reigns. It’s cat-sized, it’s quiet, it’s hench af… it’s the goliath frog (Conraua goliath). The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Yes, cat-sized – […]

New observations of comet 3I/ATLAS have shown that our interstellar visitor may have lost a significant amount of mass following its close encounter with the Sun. For those who haven’t heard of 3I/ATLAS, on July 1, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) spotted an object zipping its way through our Solar System […]

The Mississippi River floodplains are home to one of Earth’s most impressive river monsters: the alligator gar. Known to science as Atractosteus spatula, it is the largest of the gar species alive today and among the largest fish in North America. Dr Solomon David, AKA “The Gar Guy”, has had more experience than most with […]

Our blue planet may be the most habitable we know of, but it still contains pockets of toxicity here and there. The Atacama Desert, for example; deepest Antarctica; worst of all, the crushing pressure, ice cold, and extreme salinity of the ocean floor.  Nevertheless, as a renowned mathematician once said, “life, uh, finds a way.” […]