Deborah Bloomfield

Time is relative. The ticking of the clock, even of the most precise clocks we can make, does not exist in an absolute. It depends on the gravity you are experiencing and on your speed. Being on the surface of a sizable planet moving at high speed through space, spinning around a yellow star and […]

“Necrobotics” is a ghoulishly named field of research that uses the bodies of dead animals as robot parts. In the latest step toward creating the walking dead, researchers at EPFL in Switzerland have turned leftover crustacean tails into surprisingly effective robots. The engineers began by collecting the exoskeletons of langoustine (small lobsters also known as […]

Italians are known for their food, architecture, and longevity (among other things), with the Mediterranean diet often cited as a major contributor to an extensive lifespan. Yet new genetic research reveals that Italians who reach the age of 100 may in fact have their ancient hunter-gatherer DNA to thank. The rest of this article is […]

We are just days away from interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS’s closest approach to Earth, so it is not surprising that this fascinating space rock has gotten more attention. Observatories on Earth and in space have been able to study it without any risk of getting too close to the Sun, and new details and beautiful images […]

Here at IFLScience, we work hard to convince you that bears aren’t actually just a guy in a bear suit, but every so often, a video comes along that really doesn’t help our cause. The latest incident? Two young bears that appear to be playing seesaw with a tree branch. The stars of the video […]

Human toes, long removed from their tree-gripping days, are mostly noticed only when they are stubbed or exposed in sandals. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Losing the ability to grip branches with them may seem like a backward step, given how […]

A large mass of granite that has been slowly releasing heat has been discovered buried beneath a crater on the Moon. This is not science fiction. It is ancient volcanism. The Moon once had lava fields and eruptions, but astronomers had never actually identified a more traditional Earth-like volcano until they examined what lay beneath […]

Back in 1967, the Soviet Union celebrated its 50th anniversary. As well as events on the ground, part of these celebrations involved a stunt to be carried out in space, which ultimately ended in the unnecessary death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who became known as “the man who fell from space”. The plan was to […]

Trekking nearly a whole day by plane to Australia might seem like a long-haul flight, but that’s got nothing on what the common swift is capable of. Lots of us get pretty restless after just a few hours, and we’re just sat on our asses. Imagine having to hold your arms out to the side […]

This week, a first-ever sauropod fossil with melanosomes suggests Diplodocus may have had a speckled color pattern, a new report outlines the priorities for a NASA-led human mission to Mars, and a new study has found that scheduling cancer immunotherapy in the morning may lower the risk of death by up to 63 percent. Finally, […]

The Christmas star. The Star of Bethlehem. Whatever you call it, it is a staple of any nativity scene, just as much as the wise men who followed it, usually represented as a bright star or comet above the stable where baby Jesus lies. The idea of the “star” comes from just a few lines […]

Humans are pretty monogamous, all things considered. That’s not a judgment call – it’s the conclusion of a new study from a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, which places Homo sapiens a healthy seventh out of 35 species in terms of faithfulness to a single reproductive partner. We’re also, to put […]

Everyone’s made some decisions that they later regret – going crazy with the hair dye, microwaving an egg, finding out how have snails have sex… But what about inadvertently chopping down what would later turn out to be the oldest tree ever dated?  That’s exactly what happened to an unfortunate graduate student named Donald R. […]

Smack bang in the middle of your brain sits a tiny structure called the pineal gland, which has puzzled neuroscientists and philosophers for centuries. Among those to speculate on the role of this little blob was one René Descartes, whose suggestion that the soul sits within it kickstarted one of the most stubborn pseudoscientific theories […]

Kīlauea is one of the world’s most active volcanoes, spewing out lava and ash intermittently for most of 2025. Now, a camera operated by the US Geological Survey (USGS) has filmed its own demise as the volcanic eruptions come ever closer to the lens. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign […]

The three Norths are moving on from their “historic” meet-up in England. After momentarily aligning over Britain for three years, the British Geological Survey has just reported that the alignment will drift off the coast of England very shortly and head over the North Sea. Defining North is fiddlier than you might think. “True north” […]

A few weeks ago, a particularly strong lightning bolt was released over the Adriatic Sea, between the Italian and Balkan Peninsula. The electric field spread across the atmosphere, traveling hundreds of kilometers, where, above the Northern Italian town of Possagno, not too far from Venice, not one but two rare atmospheric phenomena took place. Incredibly, […]

Depending on your age and continent, you might be aware that each year NORAD tracks Santa, keeping the children of the United States and Canada updated on his movements. The story of how this came to be, which really sounds like it should be a Christmas movie, has its own fame, but remains less well-known. […]

This weekend, we will see the peak of the Geminids meteor shower. This is one of the best of the year, with an expected peak of 150 meteors every hour. Considering that there will be only one-third of the waning Moon visible, this is a great time to go meteor hunting. The rest of this […]

We’re willing to bet that at some point in your life, you’ve been advised to “sleep on it”. When wrestling with a difficult problem, going to bed and revisiting it in the morning really does seem to help us see things more clearly – but this is not just a placebo effect. There’s some actual […]