Deborah Bloomfield

In a world awash with AI slop, you’d be forgiven for thinking Rainbow Mountain was cooked up by an image generator. Rest assured, it isn’t. Vinicunca, also known as Rainbow Mountain or Montaña de Siete Colores, is part of the Andean mountain range in the Cusco region of Peru. This is the same part of […]

Salt crystals formed when a saline lake dried up 1.4 billion years ago trapped air inside, providing a sample of the atmosphere of the day, before photosynthesis was productive enough to make it oxygen-rich. New techniques have allowed that air to be analyzed accurately, providing insight into what to expect of an Earth-like planet’s atmosphere […]

This year has seen significant progress across the fields of Space and Physics, as well as Health and Medicine. In this curated selection of some of the most important experiments of 2025, IFLScience’s Space & Physics Editor, Dr Alfredo Carpineti, and Health & Medicine Editor, Laura Simmons, put forward their picks for the most important […]

The future. It’s terrifying, right? A seemingly endless expanse of possibility, coming for us if we like it or not. If only there was some way to look ahead, to see what 2026 has in store for us. Well, there are actually plenty of ways to “predict the future”, the only question is if any […]

There are plenty of strategies in the animal world for surviving the winter; some, like the winners of Fat Bear Week, pile on the pounds and hunker down, sleeping through to warmer weather, while others brave the cold and extreme temperatures by finding safety and warmth in numbers. And some, like the woolly bear caterpillar, […]

Recently on Reddit, one user asked the question “is showering more hygienic than bathing because you aren’t sitting in a bunch of butthole and foot soup?” While we could debate until your fingers turn to prunes about whether the water in your bath constitutes a foot/bum soup, let’s focus on the cleanliness aspect and overall […]

Xmas is sometimes pictured as a lazy and disrespectful shorthand of the word Christmas; a “politically correct” attempt to erase the name of Christianity’s messiah and replace it with a woke, secular letter. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe […]

Winds from the red giant R Doradus are not powerful enough to spread the molecules that make up rocky planets through the galaxy, a new study has found. Since R Doradus is considered a classic example of the type of star responsible for many of the components of Earth, the finding overthrows our ideas on […]

In just a decade, gravitational wave observatories have changed astronomy. In this short time, we have accumulated hundreds of detections, with many more coming. A wide variety of events have been discovered even among the sub-populations of these cosmic collisions. One record-breaking event has recently been reported, and a new yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper argues that it […]

In 2025, botanist Chris Thorogood shared a video following what he described as a “life-changing” encounter in Sumatra. After days of trekking day and night, his team got to witness the opening of a Rafflesia hasseltii bloom – one of the planet’s most elusive plants and the largest flower on Earth (that also happens to […]

If you’re lucky enough to go hiking in South America’s Andes Mountains, you just might spot a strange weather phenomenon known as nieves penitentes (Spanish for “penitent snows”), so named for their resemblance to the pointed headwear of Christianity’s Holy Week penitents. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or […]

Cassius the crocodile cheated death for more than a century until his wild life finally caught up with him last year in Australia. Now, experts dealing with his necroscopy have revealed what ultimately led to the giant’s demise. The 5.5-metre (nearly 18-foot) saltwater crocodile died in November 2024 at the Marineland Melanesia wildlife park on […]

Harvard astronomer and origin of the unnecessary “alien spacecraft” hypothesis has admitted that interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is “most likely natural” as it heads away from the Earth. On July 1, 2025, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System detected an object traveling through our Solar System on an escape trajectory. Traveling at 54 kilometers (33 miles) […]

Previous observations have seen butterflies and moths drinking the tears of animals such as turtles and crocodiles in the Amazon or other tropical areas. However, in Green Mountain National Forest, USA, a camera trap has captured images of some moths slurping up the tears of a moose in only the second record of this behavior […]

A webcam at Yellowstone National Park has captured a so-called dirty explosion throwing a mix of superheated water, mud, and anything else handy 10-12 meters (30-40 feet) into the air above Black Diamond Pool. The explosion is one of several that have happened after a much larger explosion wrecked a boardwalk last year, but the […]

‘Tis the season of relentless dishwashing and lethargy. After ingesting half a turkey and a gallon of eggnog, it is tempting to look at the piles of dirty plates, shrug, and think, meh, they could use a long soak in the sink anyway. But here’s the dirty truth: sinks are among the most germ-ridden spots […]

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has been such a fixture of the last six months that we might almost forget that discovering interstellar objects (ISOs) is actually incredibly rare. It’s thought that roughly seven ISOs pass through the inner Solar System every year, and yet we’ve only ever detected three. This year’s extraordinary finding, however, is hopefully […]

If you’ve ever owned a spider plant, you’ll know they love making babies. They do it with pride, presenting their offspring on the end of a long structure called a stolon. New research suggests that this stolon may be a vital lifeline equivalent to a mammalian placenta that provides dynamic care during a spider plant’s […]

The most recent addition to the human family tree – named after its unusually fat head – roamed northern China at the same time as the Denisovans. According to uranium-series dating, Homo juluensis existed between about 140,000 and 230,000 years ago, making it a contemporary of Homo longi – which literally means “Dragon Man”. The […]

The number of satellites in space continues to rise due to the deployment of megaconstellations. For decades, humanity has sent about 200 satellites every year into space. You need just a couple of days to deploy the same number now. This unconstrained deployment comes with many serious concerns about future utilization of space, but also […]