Deborah Bloomfield

The stuff that makes up animals, planets, and stars is just a small part of the matter scientists believe is out there. Five-sixths of all matter in the universe is believed to be an invisible substance known as dark matter. We do not know what it is because it doesn’t interact with light, only with […]

Chinese scientists have opened up the first ever samples taken from the far side of the Moon. Advertisement On June 1, Chang’e 6 touched down softly on the far side of the moon. This was the second time China achieved this feat, and they remain the only nation to have done so. Advertisement ⓘ IFLScience is […]

The Great Barrier Reef was struck by an extremely harsh mass beaching event this year, and it looks like parts of the reef are struggling to bounce back. Drone imagery of Lizard Island’s North Point Reef shows that 97 percent of the bleached coral has died since the event earlier this year. Advertisement “This is […]

The sample collected by OSIRIS-REx on asteroid Bennu continues to deliver unique insights into the history of this small space rock and the early Solar System. In the first few weeks following the opening of the sample, evidence began to show that Bennu might have had a wet past. A new discovery now adds to […]

A prehistoric wolf that’s been frozen like a popsicle for over 44,000 years has undergone a post-mortem in Russia, set to reveal all kinds of insights into its life as an apex predator in the Ice Age.  Advertisement The wolf was discovered in 2021 beneath around 40 meters (131 feet) of permafrost on the Tirekhtyakh […]

Bornean elephants, best known as the world’s smallest living elephants, have now been classified as “Endangered” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), following decades of habitat destruction, conflict with humans, and debate over their status as a subspecies. Advertisement Unique to the island they’re named after, Bornean elephants are characteristically small […]

In a world first, Denmark will tax farmers for the greenhouse gas emissions belched out by their cows, pigs, and other livestock.  Advertisement The agreement was announced on June 24 by the Danish government after months of discussions between politicians, farmers, business leaders, and other parties.  Advertisement “Agriculture is Denmark’s largest emitter of CO2. It […]

In 2017, astronomers at the Pan-STARRS1 observatory looking for near-Earth asteroids spotted an object as it hurtled past our Sun at 38.3 kilometers per second (23.8 miles per second).  Advertisement Soon, telescopes around the world pointed in the unusual object’s direction, trying to capture as much data as they could before it moved away from […]

The Antikythera mechanism has fascinated people for over 120 years and research in recent years has brought more insight into this incredible device. The fragments that remain have revealed that it was likely used to calculate celestial events such as eclipses and the positions of the planets. Astronomers from the University of Glasgow have added […]

Lukas McClish, a Californian hiker who became lost and stranded in the Santa Cruz Mountains, has been found 10 days after he first set off for what he thought was a three-hour hike. McClish left for his hike on 11 June, but became lost in part due to recent wildfires destroying landmarks used for navigation. […]

For thousands of years after mammoths had gone extinct elsewhere, they survived on Wrangel Island off Siberia. The cause of their final demise remains debated, but new evidence indicates we can rule out one popular explanation: inbreeding. Despite being descended from no more than eight individuals, the Wrangel mammoths had enough genetic diversity to still […]

Back in the early days of the trans-Atlantic postal service, British packages were taking weeks longer than expected to reach the east coast of North America. With customs officials growing increasingly confused and frustrated at these slow delivery times, it fell to future Founding Father of the United States Benjamin Franklin to solve the problem […]

Humans have been living continuously in space for nearly 24 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. Advertisement All good things must come to an end, and NASA is now planning for […]

Scientists in South Africa have for the first time inserted radioactive material into the horns of live rhinos, as part of efforts to make the horns easier to detect at international borders and curb poaching. Advertisement After facing near extinction, successful conservation work has seen rhino populations in Africa back on the up, with the […]

The Juno spacecraft’s focus has turned from Jupiter itself to its moons, and a fly-by of Io has produced valuable data for understanding the Solar System’s most volcanic world. Among other things, it shows just how widespread Io’s lava lakes really are, and reveals that when a crust forms on them it is often surrounded […]

Homo sapiens – us – are the only surviving human species. The question, and it is a big one, is why? Who were the species that came before us, or lived alongside us, and what happened to them? Host Dr Alfredo Carpineti is joined by Professor Chris Stringer, human evolution research lead at the Natural […]

Space in the vicinity around our planet is getting quite full, or at least full for space. We are a messy species, and low-Earth orbit is apparently no exception to our “we’ll clean up later” rule. One concern about the debris is that it could cause the “Kessler Effect” (or Kessler Syndrome).  Simply put, the […]

Around 6 million antelope have been recorded on a trek across East Africa, marking the world’s largest land mammal migration ever recorded. Advertisement The scale of the Great Nile Migration recently became apparent through an ongoing project between African Parks and the Government of South Sudan. Advertisement Between April 28 and May 15, 2023, after […]

Over the past several decades, scientists have developed optical and acoustic tweezers. Using light or sound waves, they can lift and control the motion of a small object, like a tiny tractor beam. These are exciting developments, but have very stringent requirements to work. Researchers have now developed a new way to move and manipulate […]

If you heard that someone was receiving a kidney transplant, you might naturally assume they’d have to spend at least a few days in hospital afterward. You might also assume that they would be put to sleep for the procedure. A 28-year-old man from Chicago just managed to buck both of those trends by receiving […]