Deborah Bloomfield

Wildflowers, like most things, seem to be suffering the effects of climate change and lack of insect pollinators. Instead of this spelling complete disaster for the hedgerows and verges across the globe, scientists have discovered something very surprising: The plants are evolving to do without the insects.  Pollination by insects is one of the most common […]

No matter where you are on the globe today, the Sun will reach its southernmost apparent position with respect to our planet. This is due to the tilt of the Earth that, as the planet orbits the Sun, makes our star look like it goes up and down between the two tropics. And today, December […]

Have you ever wondered where nuclear submarines go when they die? That is, where their highly radioactive cores are stored once they have been decommissioned? Well, there is a place in the US, called Trench 94, which is effectively a nuclear submarine graveyard, containing dozens of old reactors that are stored in perpetuity. And while […]

CERN’s ATLAS Collaboration has released a new measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson with a precision of 0.09 percent. Since the Higgs’ mass is one of the fundamental parameters that defines many aspects of the universe, this sort of precision can improve our understanding of many other particle interactions. For decades the Higgs […]

The great thing about science is that it’s constantly evolving. What was once common knowledge is now a (hopefully ironic) meme; diseases that once wiped out whole families quite literally no longer exist; and time and time again, we have found that everything we thought we knew about the course of history is, in fact, […]

An amateur astronomer hunting through old images from the Galileo mission spotted something everyone else had missed – an apparent impact crater. Now, professional astronomers have provided evidence that what Jesper Sandberg found was the real thing, an asteroid impact Io’s volcanic activity has yet to eliminate. From the moment Galileo turned his telescope to […]

Last week, the Sun released the strongest flare yet of this cycle and the strongest in six years. It was an X 2.8 class flare, the strongest recorded since September 10, 2017, and about 5 to 10 percent of the strongest on record from November 2003. The Sun is approaching its maximum activity for its […]

Although the human population officially reached 8 billion a little over a year ago, its growth rate is the slowest it’s been since 1950, dropping under 1 percent back in 2020. Some have even predicted this might be a sign of an impending decline in the global population. Whilst there’s no guarantee of this on a global […]

New species are found surprisingly often, and creatures with eight legs seem to be having a bit of a bumper year. In Ecuador two new species of tarantulas have been found – but they don’t seem to be very pleased, and have been given names to reflect their sassy personalities and the conservation issues they […]

When psychologists talk about “flow states”, they’re referring to that feeling of getting totally lost in a task, unaware of outside distractions. Sounds pretty great, right? Lots of research has pointed to the feelgood benefits of being in flow and how we can all achieve it, but a recent study discovered new insights into what […]

With a rise in antibiotic-resistant infections, the search for a new, effective antibiotic is as important as ever. On the hunt for such a substance, researchers believe they may well have found one, and it occurs naturally in a somewhat unexpected place: the human nose. Scientists at the University of Tübingen discovered epifadin, a member […]

Frogs might be famous for a lot of things – croaking, ending up where they shouldn’t, and even confusing the internet – but their teeth are not one of them. Most frog species barely even have them. There is a group of around 70 species, however, which has fangs. Hopping around Southeast Asia, they use their […]

You’ve probably seen the meme “Your job can wait. Tell us about your favorite dinosaur.” Luckily for us, that’s a daily chat at IFLScience, but it’s interesting to see just how often the classic childhood favorites come up: triceratops, stegosaurus, T. rex etc. Despite the resurgence of Jurassic World introducing the world to some lesser-known […]

Imagine this: you go into a vintage clothes store and buy a Victorian-era costume only to find it hides a heavily encrypted message that can’t be deciphered. We’ve all been there, right?  Well, this was actually the reality for Sara Rivers-Cofield, an archaeological curator who bought a 19th-century silk dress from an antique mall in […]

A nightclub in London, UK, has been fined after accidentally serving tequila shots with caustic soda instead of salt. On 7 December 2021, four customers at Tiger Tiger nightclub asked for tequila shots, traditionally served with salt and lime. The barman noticed there was no salt and, according to the Westminster City Council, went to […]

The inhabitants of the earliest human megasites got most of their protein from peas rather than meat, new research has revealed. Located in modern-day Ukraine and Moldova, the rural towns of the ancient Trypillia culture were founded more than 6,000 years ago and contained around 15,000 residents, making them the largest known prehistoric settlements in […]

If you’re a Brit reading this, we have some news that may shock you. No seriously – you may want to sit down for this. Many Americans have never tasted the flavor of blackcurrant. Told you it was shocking. “But what about purple sweets?!” you cry. Well… most of them are grape-flavored. Now that the […]

On December 14, China launched an experimental and reusable spaceplane into low Earth orbit, the spaceship’s third trip into space. China is keeping quiet about the purpose of the spaceplane, however, four days into the mission amateur astronomer and satellite tracker Scott Tilley noticed that trailing behind the craft were six “mysterious wingmen”, several of […]

Here’s something we haven’t come across before: some people are apparently confused why there are marine fossils at the top of Mount Everest. At the summit, there is the sedimentary rock limestone known as the “Qomolangma Limestone“. Within it are a number of fossilized marine creatures from the Ordovician Period 488.3 million-443.7 million years ago. […]

In the battle of the sexes, there’s one fight that never seems to die: who bears more pain? Childbirth is pretty much the gold standard of “this hurts” in everyday conversation – but ask someone with testicles, and they may well think that a swift kick in the balls simply must hurt more. Heck, even […]