Deborah Bloomfield

In the Karoo Basin of South Africa, an unusual tusked beast is painted on a rock wall. Archaeologists have previously pondered whether the artwork depicts a mythical creature from the realm of fantasy, but new research makes the bold claim it was inspired by a dicynodont, an extinct species that lived long before humans. Advertisement […]

Io is one of the largest moons of Jupiter and the closest of the four Galilean moons. It’s also the most volcanically active place in the Solar System, and it continues to confirm this record by revealing that it’s formed a brand new volcano in less than three decades. The moon was last observed up […]

A taxonomist’s work is never done, as the title of a recent study that identified 22 new species of tiny parasitic wasps would suggest. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy: Integrative taxonomic characterization of 22 new Ceroptres species” dives into the curious world of gall-raiding wasps, discovering a host of new-to-science species that have been given […]

Face transplants are still a cutting-edge procedure. From 2005 to 2021, only 50 of these surgeries were carried out on 48 people, across 11 countries. As we’re approaching 20 years of these groundbreaking operations, scientists have conducted the first study to assess how the patients fared after their transplants, and the results are encouraging. Advertisement […]

In 2021, it was announced that a group of remarkable lizards had become the first vertebrates known to use bubbles for breathing underwater. It seemed anoles were using their air accessories as a kind of rebreathing equipment, but it was still up for debate as to whether it served a function or was simply a […]

In an out-of-this-world first, Earth and Phobos have been photographed together in the sky by NASA’s Curiosity. The rover has previously snapped this moon and its companion Deimos, including in a beautiful eclipse, something also seen by Curiosity’s sibling Perseverance. The rover has also seen the Earth in the Martian sky, a bright dot like […]

A plane has captured the first photo of a spacecraft reentering the Earth’s atmosphere from a high-speed orbit as it flew over the South Pacific Ocean. Advertisement On September 8, the first of the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Cluster satellites – named Salsa – made its final journey to Earth. Launched in the year 2000, […]

China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, is an absolute beast of an infrastructure project. If you’ve come across the mindblowing claim that it’s so vast it affects the spin of Earth, the idea is not as ridiculous as it sounds.  Advertisement Located in central China’s Hubei province, the Three Gorges Dam spans […]

Is there life out there in the universe? This is perhaps one of the most compelling questions that haunts humanity. This is why some people take supposed evidence of extra-terrestrial visitation seriously – and the case of the strange metal shard that was recently subjected to scientific assessment (and no, it’s probably not aliens) is […]

The ozone hole over Antarctica is relatively small and healthy at the moment, providing further proof that the ozone layer is on the path toward a full recovery. Advertisement That’s the good news. The bad news is that the current size of the ozone hole is linked to sudden stratospheric warming over Antarctica in July […]

Vitamins and health supplements are popular products in the modern era, but how many of us really look at what’s going into them? Humans have formulated all kinds of creative ways to capture chemicals that can do us some good – and when it comes to vitamin D, it seems the recipe is sometimes more […]

COVID-19 may not meet the criteria for a seasonal infection – at least not yet – but that doesn’t mean there’s been no pattern to its peaks and troughs over the last few years. In a first detailed analysis, public health experts have revealed that the US has been seeing six-month waves of COVID that […]

Bubbles. Whether in a jacuzzi or being blown into your eyeballs by a child, you’ve got to love them. And behind the general aesthetics, they’re pretty interesting physically. Advertisement For a time, they were even used to model atomic behavior, with “bubble rafts” on a water surface creating a surprisingly good analog of the structure […]

Picture the scene: you’re out walking when an almighty smell catches your attention. A whale has died and washed ashore. Do you: Cut its head off, I’m not one to turn down a knick-knack Leave it be, nature’s best left well alone Consult the internet: am I allowed to keep dead animals? It’s an interesting […]

How often do you see your friends? Do you find yourself trying to make plans, spending time synchronizing your calendars just to scratch together a few hours a week? Do you feel more isolated from the people you used to spend so much time with? If so, then you are not alone (ironically) – the […]

We need to take the popular belief in alien visitations seriously, one researcher has argued – not because it could be true, but rather because that credence can be very harmful. Advertisement The beliefs that extraterrestrial spacecraft buzz in our skies, and that past visitors provided ancient civilizations with much of their technologies, have attracted […]

Here at IFLScience we enjoy a little interactive internet quiz or poll just as much as the next person, from finding out if we see the same color blue as each other to testing the Earworm Eraser after one too many TikToks. Now, the Landsat series of satellites is getting in on the action with […]

When it comes to cats and science we just can’t get enough and now researchers have made tiny crochet hats for them in a bid to understand more about their brain activity and how it relates to chronic pain.  Advertisement Over 25 percent of adult cats have chronic pain associated with radiographic osteoarthritis and the […]

A new species of wasp has been discovered parasitizing adult fruit flies – the first of its kind ever documented. Parasitoid wasps’ life cycles can get pretty gruesome (at least from the perspective of their host), with species that use the bodies of other insects as a cozy home for their eggs often eating or […]

Next time you’re sniffing and itching from a bout of hay fever, spare a thought for the doomed mammoth whose infamous extinction may have been linked to the rise of pollen and bunged-up trunks. Advertisement New research has made the bold claim that hay fever may have been a factor in the untimely demise of […]