Deborah Bloomfield

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 […]

Cancer patients receiving a certain type of immunotherapy were twice as likely to be alive after three years if they received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of beginning cancer treatment, new research presented at a recent conference has found.  It was when co-lead researcher Dr Adam Grippin was conducting graduate research at the […]

For nearly 35 years, a hidden message has lurked in plain sight on a sculpture outside the cafeteria of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Now, a pair of researchers claim they may have found the decoded message – although many insist the puzzle is far from solved. Created by American artist Jim Sanborn, Kryptos […]

A new study has quantified the carbon footprint of meat consumption across 3,531 cities across the United States. Each year, the cities consume 11 million tons of meat; the production, transport, and preparation of all that leads to 329 million tons of carbon emissions. This analysis is the first to systematically look at the details […]

Some animals naturally have extraordinarily long lifespans, like the Greenland shark or the bowhead whale. Others, however, far outlive their expected lifespans, reaching multiple significant birthdays. One such creature is Joao the chimpanzee. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Believed to be […]

A recent detection from JWST is being widely discussed. The discoverers suggest that it might be an incredible record-breaker: it could be the oldest galaxy we have ever seen. This is yet to be confirmed, and other hypotheses are also very intriguing. The object could be an extremely dusty galaxy, or a cool object in […]

A prehistoric hominin that lived more than four million years ago in Ethiopia may have climbed like a chimp and walked a bit like a human. Known as Ardipithecus ramidus – or Ardi for short – this extinct primate may therefore have served as a transitional species between apes and humans, indicating that our ancestors […]

It’s always a good day to celebrate vaccines. As one of the all-time great achievements in medicine, vaccines are the reason humanity has been able to eradicate smallpox, end the “summer plagues” of polio, and slash the incidence of cervical cancer, to name just a few. But there’s one disease that gets a bit less […]

If you go to the Eastland County Courthouse in Texas, you may lay your eyes on an unusual sight: a dead Texas horned lizard on display in its own velvet-lined coffin. According to local legend and newspaper reports from the 1920s, the reptile certainly earned this honor, living an unusually long time trapped in a […]

Imagine closing your eyes and rolling a billiards ball across a table. Where it goes; what angles it hits the sides at; how much it spins or swerves – all that is, for our purposes, basically random. And then, imagine you’re asked to roll it back to exactly its starting point. Could you do it? […]

An Ice Age giant was tumbling around North America during the Late Pleistocene. About the size of a bear, it was actually a kind of enormous sloth that had evolved to thrive in freezing conditions. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Known […]