Deborah Bloomfield

Researchers in the Philippines have announced an exciting first step towards a vaccine against stomach ulcers and cancer – but there’s still a lot of work and time to go before you can expect to get one. If you’ve found yourself noticeably stressed out in front of a boomer at some point – and let’s […]

There are all sorts of things that can ruin a vacation, from missed flights, to food poisoning, and even fights for sun-loungers. Mosquitoes can also cause all kinds of problems, so those looking to escape the noisy pest might choose cooler climes to avoid them. Unfortunately, Iceland might now be off that list as entomologists […]

Pleistocene humans were more than happy to get into bed with Neanderthals and Denisovans, which is why most of us now carry DNA from these extinct species. However, there’s one group of prehistoric people in Japan that appears to have missed out on all the inter-hominin debauchery, giving rise to an ancient community with strangely […]

A new study published in Scientific Reports has taken a look at transient objects captured by astronomers in the pre-Sputnik era, finding a curious correlation with nuclear tests and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Since 2017, the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project has attempted to look for stars and other […]

Researchers have gained new insights into the Maya calendar and, in particular, the ability to predict eclipses. Like other advanced ancient civilizations, the Maya looked at the sky for auspicious signs and divine punishment, but their calendar is quite different from what we are used to, making its use an enduring mystery to modern archaeologists. […]

Elon Musk’s space firm SpaceX has settled its lawsuit brought by adult party game creators Cards Against Humanity. In 2017, Cards Against Humanity (CAH) launched a “holiday campaign” in order to protest President Donald Trump’s construction of a border wall with Mexico. In total, 150,000 people paid $15 each towards the campaign, and CAH purchased […]

If you are somewhere with lovely, clear skies tonight, you should go out and try to catch the Orionid meteor shower. The new Moon was yesterday, so there is just the beginning of its waxing crescent tonight, giving us a great chance to see this beautiful meteor shower without too much distraction. The rest of […]

Spiders really can do it all. I guess that’s what you get for having eight limbs and eight eyes (most of the time), super-strong silk, and legs that act like ears. Web spinners have dominated the land while fishing spiders have conquered water, but did you know that there are also spiders that can fly? […]

A video recently shared on Instagram captures a rather unusual scene – for Florida, at least. In it, someone taking a restful boat ride down Silver Springs suddenly gets rained upon by small projectiles. It’s not rain. It’s not even hail, oh no. It’s raining monkeys. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. […]

According to the laws of physics, matter and antimatter behave the same way and were formed in equal quantities in the Big Bang. When matter and antimatter interact, they annihilate, turning into pure energy. Those two facts suggest that the universe should have nothing in it but energy. As you can see, this is not […]

It’s a somewhat uncomfortable reality that Homo sapiens interbred with their closest relatives, the “sister species” Neanderthals, multiple times during their overlapping history. This rampant prehistoric mingling didn’t seem to harm our species much – traces of Neanderthal DNA still quietly live in some people today – although more research suggests that these repeated encounters may […]

An amateur astronomer monitoring satellites as a hobby has discovered a strange signal being emitted by SpaceX’s classified network of satellites known as “Starshield”. In 2021, Elon Musk’s space firm SpaceX signed a $1.8 billion classified contract with an unknown US government agency, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. In 2024, Reuters reported that […]

As the worlds of the Solar System go, Uranus is among the weirdest. Its peculiar properties, from internal heating to its crooked magnetic fields, have left astronomers baffled. Maybe it is not even an ice giant at all, but a weirder rocky giant planet. This and more are motivations to send a mission to the […]

When someone close to us dies, it can be very hard to adapt to a new world in which that special person isn’t in it. People have reported seeing their loved ones and even speaking to them after they’ve gone, sometimes called “after-death communications” (ADCs). The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please […]

Goats are pretty weird. From the nightmare-fuel Damascus goats to their strange rectangular pupils, it’s no wonder they’re linked to mythical demons like Krampus. But their theatrical flair doesn’t stop with their dramatic visage; one particular breed will stiffen up and faint at even the slightest startle.  These myotonic goats, also known as the Tennessee […]

This July, astronomers were left reeling by an event unlike anything seen before: a gamma-ray burst (GRB) that repeated four times in a day, instead of lasting a few minutes as is usually the case. The JWST has examined the source of this event and a paper undergoing peer-review claims the total energy released probably […]

These plucky shorebirds undertake the longest non-stop flight of any animal, embarking on an odyssey for 11,000 kilometers (6,800 miles) up and down the globe. These ultra-endurance aviators stay airbound for more than a week without food, energy drinks, or in-flight entertainment. The journey is so extreme that the bird must literally consume parts of […]

Western Australian police have announced the finding of an object on an access road to a mine in the Pilbara region. Their social media post describes the object as burning, and while space junk expert Professor Steven Tingay of Curtin University is cautious, he told IFLScience images certainly make it likely it was on fire […]

Predator defence can be a pretty big part of an animal’s life in the wild, whether you play dead, try and blend in with your environment, or in the case of the armadillo girdled lizard (Ouroborus cataphractus), bite your own tail to survive. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in […]

An extremely rare Egyptian alabastron that was once owned by a royal elite has been found to contain traces of opium. This surprising discovery suggests that the narcotic may have been highly revered and widely consumed in ancient Egypt, with kings and rulers even choosing to carry the substance with them on their journey through […]