Deborah Bloomfield

This grinning pink blob might populate your nightmares for the next week or two (sorry about that), but if you can see past the all-too-realistic eyes, you’ll find a very impressive feat of engineering. Scientists in Japan have figured out a way to attach lab-grown human skin tissue to the faces of complex humanoid robots.  […]

Astronomers have discovered the most distant, and so the oldest, known stellar clusters. This is the first time astronomers have seen star clusters from before the first half a billion years of the Universe. The light of these gravitationally bound groups of stars comes to us from just 460 million years after the Big Bang. […]

A new study has confirmed for the first time that various common “forever chemicals” can be absorbed into our bloodstream through contact with our skin. Forever chemicals, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), are synthetic chemicals that are resistant to degradation over time.  Advertisement Since the 1950s, these chemicals have been celebrated for their resistance […]

In the shadow of Mount Fuji, a new city is being built by Japanese car maker Toyota called “Woven City.” It’s been described as a “living laboratory” designed to investigate how urban inhabitants can live in tandem with autonomous vehicles, robots, clean energy, and artificial intelligence (AI). So-called smart cities, often surrounded by starry-eyed hype […]

Cheese is milk that’s been fermented and aged, but the process is a controlled one that strikes the right balance of bacterial activity to delicious cheesy goodness. Some traditional approaches to making cheese have pushed the boundaries of what’s safe for human consumption, and perhaps the most talked about is casu marzu. Advertisement Casu marzu […]

There have been questions over how cannabis use might affect someone’s risk of severe disease if they catch COVID-19, but a new study claims to be able to address some of the confusion. It seems clear that cannabis use is as risky as smoking when it comes to COVID, with people who used the drug […]

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized four menthol-flavored e-cigarette products, marking the first time a non-tobacco flavored vape product has been allowed to be marketed in the US. However, the decision has quickly drawn criticism from public health groups over concerns about the appeal of flavored vape products to young people. Advertisement The […]

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 […]