Deborah Bloomfield

Albert Einstein, recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the photoelectric effect and the great physicist behind general and special relativity, once said: “The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.” Given his […]

The idea that the menstrual cycle is synced with the phases of the Moon is a controversial one, and one that’s generally considered to have little scientific evidence to support it. A new study, however, has proposed that periods were once significantly linked up with the lunar cycle, but that the rise of light-emitting diodes […]

Astronomers have witnessed the second-closest asteroid fly-by ever measured. Or at least we think they have, with government shutdowns preventing NASA from releasing a statement. Luckily, the European Space Agency is still on the ball and caught it. Once again, however, we only noticed the visitor after it had already passed us. The rest of […]

Was the legendary sinking of Endurance in 1915 due to a string of bad luck or a series of fatal design flaws and risky decisions? New research suggests that Sir Ernest Shackleton’s famous polar tale of survival and heroism may have been doomed before the ship even left the port. The story of the Endurance is an […]

The winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine are Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi “for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance”. The prize is worth 11 million Swedish kronor (around $1,170,000 USD at the time of publishing), which will be shared equally between the winners.  The rest of this […]

This week, a 13,000-year-old discovery is one of the earliest uses of blue pigment, Enceladus’s oceans may have every ingredient necessary to form life, and these 4,000-year-old mummified cheetahs are the first naturally mummified big cats ever found. Finally, Dr Jane Goodall, famed primatologist, passes away aged 91 – we explore what made her one […]

If you thought eagles nowadays were impressive, best believe they’ve got nothing on Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei).  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Appearing in New Zealand sometime between 700,000 to 1.8 million years ago, everything about this now-extinct beast of a […]

From whale milk cheese to boiled penguin eggs, we at IFLScience love a freaky foodie story. This latest one, however, might just take the cake. Reviving a traditional Balkan recipe, intrepid scientists have made – and taste-tested – yogurt produced using a very unexpected secret ingredient: ants. This is not about finding new and bizarre […]

Where did snakes come from? It’s a question that’s puzzled researchers for years, and now they are even more confused. A new Jurassic fossil has been discovered and it’s a curious mix of snake and lizard features. The creature was actually discovered in 2016 on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Named Breugnathair elgolensis, meaning “false […]

This week on Break It Down: the second oldest use of the color blue ever has been discovered in Europe dating back 13,000 years, “chemical fossils” suggest the oldest life on Earth may have been sponges 541 million years ago, skin cells have been turned into fertilizable egg cells thanks to some pretty nifty genetics […]

Perhaps comets are like buses, because this month, there are three that are easily observable at once. In what looks like part of the marketing campaign for Wicked, they are also all green. And yes, if you care to find them, look to the western sky (at least for another few days). The three comets […]

Move over, instant noodles. The dinner of the future might be a cell-cultured chicken cutlet, grown from scratch in a meat-making machine that sits on your kitchen counter. At least, that’s the dream of the Shojinmeat Project, an art collective-meet-science experiment based in Tokyo. The project is the brainchild of Yuki Hanyu, a scientist with […]

It is the season of the threes when it comes to the night sky. We have three observable comets, all green, in the night sky this October, and over the next few months we will see three supermoons. The first one is just a few days away: the next full Moon is October 7, and […]

In a massive win for organ transplantation research, scientists have demonstrated that they can successfully change the blood type of a donor kidney to type O before transplanting it into a brain-dead recipient. All signs pointed towards the new organ being “well tolerated” with no evidence of immediate rejection. Government figures suggest over 100,000 people […]

We’ve all been there – one too many slices of garlic bread and you’ve woken up with breath that smells like an Italian restaurant, and probably not in a good way. Humans have been known to have some pretty pungent odors waft out our mouths, but what about other animals?  The answer to the question […]

The Greenland shark is the poster child for animals with extreme longevity – and with good reason. As the longest-living vertebrates on Earth, they develop incredibly slowly in their frosty Arctic home, but when it comes to the longest-living animals on Earth, they’re not all that. The ocean quahog is a pretty unremarkable-looking clam, reaching […]

In 2007, Inuit whalers in Alaska made a surprising discovery. In the carcass of a whale, they found fragments of a weapon embedded in its flesh – but this wasn’t a modern piece of equipment. The harpoon was traced back to the 1900s, and after investigation, scientists estimated that the whale itself was around 115 […]

Bearded vultures have been revealed as the somewhat surprising curators of natural museums, after scientists investigating centuries-old, abandoned nests discovered that they were packed with a whole host of well-preserved historical remains. Once found throughout the mountains and cliffs of southern Spain, bearded vultures are now extinct in these areas, having begun to disappear between […]

Within just 75 years, the glaciers of California’s Sierra Nevada are likely to have melted away, exposing the rocky parts of the mountains for the first time since the Ice Age. When that happens, people alive today may witness something no human has ever seen before: Yosemite’s peaks stripped bare of ice. The rest of […]

The US has hit a regrettable new measles milestone, with over 1,500 cases reported in the country so far this year. This is the highest number since the disease was locally eliminated at the turn of the century. Although weekly cases are well down compared to the peak of the outbreak in March of this […]