Deborah Bloomfield

What is your favorite gesture? A little thumbs up? The funny squiggle in the air when you want the check in a restaurant or even something ruder? Well, scientists have discovered that apes and humans aren’t the only ones making gestures. The Japanese tits (Parus minor) are getting in on the act and being downright […]

From the good old-fashioned Flat Earth movement, to QAnon “truthers” and anti-vaccine zealots, you don’t have to look very far in our hyperconnected world to find someone spreading conspiracy theories. Often, a slide down the rabbit hole into the murky world of conspiracies comes as a shock to someone’s friends and family – how does […]

It is remarkable that the Sun and the Moon are roughly the same apparent size so that in most solar eclipses – but not all – the whole solar disk is blocked by the Moon. However, the lunar disk is not a perfect circle, as the moon is not a smooth sphere, and this creates […]

Tiger-Lily, the incredibly rare two-headed western rat snake, is recovering well after undergoing critical surgery earlier this month which, surprisingly, had nothing to do with the snake’s many heads. Despite the western rat snake (Pantherophis obsoletus), also known as a black rat snake, being a common, nonvenomous species across much of central North America, this […]

What color is your blood? If you said red, you are correct – most of the time. Under certain circumstances, such as underneath the ocean, it can appear to be green. The reason behind this is the same reason why fish deep down in the Twilight Zone of the oceans have evolved red coloring.  First […]

In Australia and snake-infested parts of Indonesia, it pays to be resistant to snake venoms even, or perhaps especially, if you’re part of the same zoologic order as snakes. A study of how large and medium-sized lizards handle the problem of their cousins’ toxins has revealed a never-seen-before evolutionary sequence its discoverers compare to Russian […]

Barbie-pink sea pigs, rattail fish, and a unicumber: these were the unexpected stars of a recent expedition into the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) where scientists are studying biodiversity. The region’s animal life is of particular interest because it’s also the proposed site of deep-sea mining, being home to a huge volume of “sea potatoes” that contain […]

Palaeontology and archaeology have aligned in northeast Brazil, as a “remarkable” site featuring dinosaur footprints alongside ancient rock carvings has been uncovered.   The Serrote do Letreiro Site, in the Sousa municipality, Paraíba State, is home to three main rock outcrops, where the fossilized footprints of theropod, sauropod, and iguanodontian dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous […]

Gravitational wave detectors on Earth have already revolutionized astronomy and in the next decade, we will have LISA, the first gravitational observatory in deep space. But there is scope to build a detector in between these two types, both in terms of location and frequencies. This can be done by building it on the Moon. […]

Earth is being struck with strong geomagnetic storm activity after a coronal mass ejection was blurted out by the Sun over the past weekend. It’s a big one, but authorities say the risk to the public is minimal. It could also be a great opportunity to spot some aurora if you live along the appropriate […]

The humble cutting board, whether plastic, wooden, or glass, is a staple of the kitchen. That being said, if they’re not looked after properly, they can quickly become much more problematic by harboring some of the pesky bacterial species that can cause food poisoning. So just how much bacteria can be found on the average […]

It’s not long now until the 2024 total solar eclipse and, weather permitting, it should be a spectacular celestial event. As exciting as it is, there are a number of safety concerns, particularly in the parts of the US that will be in the path of totality, with some now announcing the deployment of the […]

When learning a new language, it’s easy to get the impression that native speakers can churn out sentences far faster than your brain can process. Surely you don’t speak this rapidly in your mother tongue? Rest assured, this isn’t necessarily your poor language skills or linguistic relativism – some languages may indeed be “faster” than […]

This week, a CRISPR-edited pig kidney has successfully been transplanted into a living person, breeding efforts welcome ridiculous-looking hatchlings of the world’s rarest fish, and scientists simulate black holes in the lab using “quantum tornados” for the first time. Finally, we investigate the longest solar eclipse on record. Subscribe to the IFLScience newsletter for all the biggest […]

You may have heard people claim the longest word in the English language is “antidisestablishmentarianism,” a dusty old term that’s defined as the “opposition to the withdrawal of state support or recognition from an established church.” With 28 letters and 12 syllables, it is certainly a mouthful, but it isn’t necessarily the lengthiest. Bury your […]

Anyone who’s experienced a menstrual cycle knows it can often feel like you’re at the whim of your hormones, but some people believe they have a solution: seed cycling. But what exactly is it – and, most importantly, does it actually do anything to help? What is seed cycling? Cast aside the image of a […]

After the invasion of the actually pretty friendly alien pea pods, we’re back with another banger of an aquatic blob – but this one isn’t quite so harmless, according to a new study, thanks to more frequent and intense ocean heatwaves. These gelatinous sea creatures are called pyrosomes, which are made up of colonies of […]

One of the great quests in astronomy is to find the first stars. These stars lived and died within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, but for those in very distant parts of the universe, their light may only be reaching us now, having spent 14 billion years crossing the space between. […]

A poonado of epic proportions may have saved some sperm whales from a fatal interaction with a pod of orcas off Western Australia’s southern coast. The highly scatological wildlife encounter was the first time this year that sperm whales had been seen in the area, and they put on a display nobody was expecting. The […]

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a new trojan asteroid in the orbit of Mars. This new companion of the Red Planet precedes Mars in its orbit, but unlike other trojan asteroids, this one might be in an unstable orbit, which suggests intriguing possibilities about its past. Trojan asteroids are located in the same orbit […]