Deborah Bloomfield

The saying goes that good things come in small packages, and while the discovery of the world’s largest genome in any organism is an incredible find, the reality is a little bit more complicated than that. The New Caledonian fork fern species Tmesipteris oblanceolata has a genome that when stretched out would be taller than […]

The largest species of great ape to ever walk the Earth was Gigantopithecus blacki. Standing over 3 meters (nearly 10 feet) tall and weighing up to 300 kilograms (661 pounds), the extinct species would have easily dwarfed the gorillas, orangutans, chimps, and bonobos of today.  Advertisement What is a Gigantopithecus? G. blacki is sometimes called the […]

Iceland is famous for its volcanic activity, from the ash cloud produced by Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 that grounded flights, to countless news reports of recent eruptions. Advertisement Footage from the latest eruption shows the lava spreading near the Reykjanes peninsula, the fifth eruption in that area since December. According to the BBC, the small fishing […]

Everyone knows about the stacked rocks of Stonehenge in South West England, but on the country’s east coast, there’s another prehistoric monument that’s no less fascinating. Known as Seahenge, a researcher has re-investigated why the mysterious structure was built over 4,000 years ago.  Advertisement Seahenge, also known as Holme I, was only discovered in 1998 […]

This week on Break It Down, a mystery sighting in the deep ocean could be the first-ever footage of a colossal squid baby, orca attacks are more mischief than vengeance, astrology is debunked yet again, a second billionaire plans a trip to the Titanic, the world’s largest genome comes in a surprisingly small package, and […]

When people think about the risks of climate change, the idea of abrupt changes is pretty scary. Movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” feed that fear, with visions of unimaginable storms and populations fleeing to escape rapidly changing temperatures. While Hollywood clearly takes liberties with the speed and magnitude of disasters, several recent studies have […]

Welcome to Break It Down, your bite-size guide to this week in science. Join hosts Eleanor Higgs and Rachael Funnell as they discuss the biggest news stories of the week with guests from the IFLScience team and maybe even a surprise expert or two. Here’s what you may have missed in episodes 1 to 15, […]

The most up-to-date version of the periodic table contains 118 elements. It’s easy to imagine you can find the heaviest by scanning to the last element on the table, but that only gives one of several answers. Advertisement What Do We Mean By Heaviest? You’ve probably heard the old trick question; “Which is heavier, a […]

There’s great news today for cancer patients in England, as thousands are set to be fast-tracked onto a new program that will give them access to experimental personalized vaccines. The initiative, called the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, aims to get more patients onto trials of mRNA vaccines against their specific cancer, in the hopes of […]

May 2024 was a hard act to follow, so June certainly has its work cut out. However, an old friend is returning to help keep the party going, with the potential to trigger a repeat of the historic aurorae that lit up the night skies across the world last month. Advertisement That old chum is, […]

Zimbabwe has officially got a new currency called Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG) to replace the Zimbabwean dollar, a currency with a notorious history of runaway inflation. However, there are signs the new currency is already zigzagging into trouble.  Advertisement The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe started circulating ZiG in April 2024, starting with electronic payments before rolling out […]

A third case of bird flu has been confirmed in a dairy farm worker in the USA, the second identified in the state of Michigan. In contrast to the previous two cases, the infected individual has reportedly been experiencing traditional flu-like symptoms, though officials say they are now recovering. Advertisement The Centers for Disease Control […]

The one rare earth element whose chemistry has been largely unknown is now less of a mystery. Although promethium itself is unlikely to become as important to society as its neighbors on the periodic table, the information revealed about it could help improve our access to the rest. Advertisement The category known as “rare earth […]

We’ve all heard of the many benefits of interacting with animals as therapy, but what about the animals themselves? Does that interspecies solidarity go both ways? Well, according to a recent study, the answer is yes … if you’re a cow. Advertisement “Bovine-assisted therapy may not only be an effective treatment model that benefits human […]

Magnetic fields have been detected in very large stars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the first time this has been achieved for stars outside our galaxy. It is hoped the discoveries in metal-poor regions will help us understand the processes involved, given their outsized influence. Advertisement The Sun has a magnetic field, and […]

The strain of H5N1 that authorities have dubbed Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) has been wreaking havoc among domestic and wild bird populations across the globe, but it’s certainly not been limited to our feathered friends. Lots of mammal species, including some you wouldn’t expect, have also been affected – not to mention a handful […]

References to “heavy metals” are common when talking of mining, some industries, and the contents of certain asteroids. But what is the heaviest metal, and might that record be broken in future? What is heavy? You might not think there is much ambiguity in a five-word question like “What is the heaviest metal?” but you’d […]

A new paper taking a look at the Fermi Paradox using the Drake Equations has suggested an uncomfortable solution: maybe we are alone in the galaxy. Advertisement If you haven’t heard of the Fermi Paradox, it goes something like this: given the vastness of the universe and the probability that implies of life evolving elsewhere, […]

A new dark matter detector underneath a mountain in Jeongseon, South Korea, is about to be turned on. The team is attempting to rule out – or perhaps reproduce – puzzling results from a previous detector in Italy. Advertisement As far as astronomers studying the observable universe can tell, only around 5 percent of it […]