Deborah Bloomfield

The sun is baking and everyone’s lawn may be in dire need of a trim, especially as it sways mockingly in the slight breeze while turning an almost unflattering shade of yellow in the heat. The first thought may be to reach for the lawn mower to turn each blade of grass into uniform little […]

People might disagree on whether Pluto should be considered a planet or a dwarf planet but no one disagrees this world is peculiar. Everything about it is so weird, from its heart to the fact that sometimes it is closer to the Sun than Neptune. Among the quirky characteristics of this distant dwarf planet are […]

One of the greatest apex predators of the sea are orcas (also known as killer whales) and recently they have been smashing into sailboats. Once thought to be a seemingly rare event, these attacks are now occurring almost daily.    Last year, Rui Alves launched a website called orcas.pt. This tracks the orca encounters with […]

Around 2,000 years ago, grave robbers placed the skull of a wolf on top of a burial mound in an attempt to prevent the deceased’s angry spirit from seeking revenge. Now this strange sentinel has been unearthed along with the surrounding tomb, and is revealing new insights into those it was set to guard.  The […]

To the Ancient Greeks, the underworld was a physical place that could be accessed by intrepid people if only they knew where to look. From Homer’s epic tales to the travel writers, classical stories are filled with references to such entrances where heroic individuals ventured into the subterranean world of the dead. Today, one of […]

Albert Einstein has become synonymous with genius, but he was a person with qualities and flaws like any other. And like any other human, he made mistakes. For the great physicist himself, his greatest scientific mistake might not be one we would consider today. His biggest blunder, as he called it, was wanting the universe […]

Grieving the loss of a cherished pet is always a difficult and upsetting time, whether that family member had four legs, two, or even none at all. However, a new alternative to cremation or burial is becoming more widely known, and it involves the process of aquamation. Aquamation is also known as alkaline hydrolysis, or […]

This week the Milky Way’s fastest runaway star was discovered traveling at 2,285 kilometers per second, a new 3D model shows “Lucy”, an early human ancestor, may have walked upright, and we investigate the Sentinelese, the world’s most isolated uncontacted tribe. Subscribe to the IFLScience newsletter for all the biggest science news delivered straight to […]

A new armored dinosaur, a species of ankylosaur, has been discovered on Britain’s famous dinosaur island, the Isle of Wight. It represents the first armored dinosaur from the island to be described in over 140 years.  The new tank-like dinosaur, Vectipelta barretti, was named in honor of Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum […]

2020, it’s fair to say, was an odd year. With a pandemic moving across the world and all the life changes that involved, it’s easy to forget smaller stories, like that weird point where monoliths started popping up around the world like Starbucks. So, did we ever get a satisfactory explanation? What was up with […]

“Viking Disease”, or Dupuytren’s contracture, is an unusual disorder where the tissue under the skin of a hand becomes thicker and less flexible, often leaving one or more fingers in a permanently bent position. For a long time, researchers knew the condition was more common in Northern Europeans than in those with African ancestry, but […]

Officials from the US Geological Survey (USGS) have warned that Hawai’i’s Kīlauea volcano, which is currently erupting, may start spewing “vog” and Pele’s hair. The volcano, which was briefly deemed a code red, began erupting on June 7 and has been monitored closely since. The USGS is now warning residents that high levels of vog […]

During the Cold War, when a nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union did not appear out of the question, the US Air Force looked into an unusual defense strategy.  According to Daniel Ellsberg, a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation who says in 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War […]

A man has broken one of the world records you don’t want to set, after having a 13.372-centimeter (5.264-inch) kidney stone removed. Army doctors removed the kidney stone – the largest on record – from Canistus Coonghe at the Colombo Army Hospital in Narahenpita, Sri Lanka on June 1. The stone weighs in at 801 […]

A new study has quantified how much the ozone in the atmosphere contributes to the planet’s energy budget – the balance of sunlight received versus heat radiated that affects the Earth’s temperatures. A lot of things affect this budget, and it turns out that if you were to remove the ozone, the planet would likely […]

So many Native Americans were killed during European colonization that it may have contributed to the Little Ice Age. As European colonizers headed to the Americas, they caused what is known as “Great Dying”. In 1492 CE, the population of Native Americans was estimated to be 60.5 million by a team from University College London, […]

A newly described species of skink was 1,000 times heavier than the typical member of that family. The largest known skink went extinct 47,000 years ago, at the same time as many other Australian giants were dying off. The discoverers believe there are plenty more giant skinks from the same era waiting to be identified, […]

Buried in a bat-ridden cave beneath a Welsh castle, archaeologists have uncovered extremely early evidence of prehistoric humans. Dating to the last Ice Age, the objects left by these people suggest they were among the very first Homo sapiens to dwell in Britain. The discovery was made during ongoing excavations at Wogan Cavern beneath Pembroke […]

A team of scientists claims to have cracked part of the code in telling male and female non-avian dinosaurs apart. In what may be a rare case of evidence of sexual dimorphism in dinosaurs, they’ve sorted a large collection of leg bones into two categories they think are sexually divided, although they can’t say which […]

What’s with bizarrely moving legumes in Central and South America? Mexico has its jumping beans and Argentina has dancing peanuts. This is the name of a curious phenomenon that happens when you drop peanuts into a pint of lager, something that some people do in the country of Tango (to remain on the topic of […]