Deborah Bloomfield

NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Mike Barratt were supposed to go on a spacewalk on Monday, June 24 – but a fault led to the expected 6-and-a-half-hour walk being cut down to just 31 minutes. There was a water leak from the service and cooling umbilical unit on Dyson’s spacesuit that was described on […]

Two studies have taken a closer look at the mysterious stars surrounding our galaxy’s black hole, confirming that they are a lot younger than we expected, are highly organized, and are possibly “immortal” thanks to being continuously replenished by dark matter. Advertisement About 30 years ago, astronomers discovered stars moving around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive […]

The peregrine falcon is no slouch. Capable of achieving speeds of over 320 kilometers per hour (200 miles per hour), this rapid raptor is not just the fastest bird in the sky, but the speediest animal on the planet. Advertisement However, the peregrine falcon is only able to reach these dizzying speeds when performing a […]

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: women make better astronauts (according to science). Now, thanks to a recent study on the effects of space travel on the human immune system, we have all the more reason to believe that female folk may be more tolerant to the stresses of space than men. […]

News stories about semaglutide, perhaps better known under brand names like Wegovy and Ozempic, aren’t exactly few and far between at the moment – but the latest story comes not about the drugs themselves, but as a warning of an uptick in fake versions of them. Advertisement On June 19, the World Health Organization (WHO) […]

Humanity is upping the stakes on its deadly game of nuclear poker once again. The world spent a combined total of $91,393,404,739 on nuclear weapons in 2023 – that’s around $250 million each year, $173,884 per minute, or $2,898 a second. Advertisement Nine countries possess nukes – the US, Russia, France, China, the UK, Pakistan, […]

At around 7:14 am on June 30, 1908, a giant explosion occurred above the Podkamennaya Tunguska river in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. Advertisement The explosion flattened 2,150 square kilometers (830 square miles) with the force of an estimated 10-20 megatons, making it possibly thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bomb the […]

Carbon on the planet Mercury could have been compressed to form a layer of diamond beneath the crust kilometers thick, modeling suggests. When the nursery rhyme compares a star to a “diamond in the sky”, it might be accurate for one planet frequently confused with a star. Advertisement Mercury can shine quite brightly, but that’s […]

A study published two years to the day since the overturning of Roe v Wade, which ended the constitutional right to abortion access in the USA, has found that infant deaths rose by much more than expected in the state of Texas in the months following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion in early pregnancy. […]

China’s lunar probe has successfully returned the first ever samples taken from the far side of the Moon to Earth. Advertisement On June 1, Chang’e 6 touched down softly near the Lunar South Pole. This was the second time China achieved this feat, and they remain the only nation to have done so. Advertisement ⓘ IFLScience […]

A relatively nearby K-type star called HD 48948 has been found to host three planets, each modestly larger than the Earth. The outermost of these is in the “habitable zone”, where temperatures are right for liquid water at the surface. More investigation is needed – particularly to confirm it is predominantly rock or water, not […]

New research has uncovered a “worrying” way that large ice sheets can melt through warm seawater lapping against the underside of ground-based ice. The researchers believe the discovery might even be a new “climate tipping point” – a critical threshold that, when crossed, leads to runaway changes and totally upends an element in Earth’s system. […]

In June 1944, the German V-2 rocket became the first object to ever reach space. Over the last eight decades, humans have experimented with several different designs to get stuff into orbit and launch ever further into deep space. With revolutionary rockets having been tested recently or imminently taking flight, it is important to understand […]

It may sound like the lair of a Bond villain, but at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, an instrument is being built to detect neutrinos. Before the vast majority of the detector has been built, its construction has been vindicated with the announcement of an ultra-high-energy neutrino, probably the most energetic ever detected. Advertisement […]

The universe, already impressively big compared to say, a planet, is expanding. According to the cosmic microwave background (CMB), this expansion is happening at the rate of about 67.5 kilometers (41.9 miles) per second per megaparsec (3,260,000 light-years). Meanwhile, measuring the distance of Cepheids stars – by observing how their light has redshifted as it […]

In the midst of all of the record-breaking heatwaves the world is seeing at the moment, people’s sleep can be one of the first things to suffer. Not only is that straight up unenjoyable when it’s happening, but a lack of sleep can make us feel pretty awful in the days after too. So how […]

With summer temperatures baking much of the US, Texas’s notoriously ailing power grid is set to be put under intense strain once again. Blackouts and power failures are on the cards for many – but previous years have shown some cashing in on the sweltering weather. Advertisement Faced with sky-high demand last summer, the Electric […]

A 13-year-old boy has become the first patient in the world to test out a brain stimulation device to treat severe epilepsy. Oran Knowlson, who had the surgery in October 2023 when he was 12, was sometimes having hundreds of seizures per day before the device was fitted, and his family says he is already […]

For many years, NASA, together with national and international partners, has been conducting tabletop exercises on what it would be like if an asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet. Sometimes the Earth was saved, and sometimes it wasn’t. But there have always been lessons to learn. The latest one is […]

Remarkable white-tailed eagle specimens star in the Natural History Museum, London’s exhibition Birds: Brilliant And Bizarre, created in affiliation with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). These rare birds are the fourth largest eagles in the world, but almost went extinct in Europe in the 19th century. Now, thanks to a conservation […]