Deborah Bloomfield

At first glance, southeastern Libya looks like an unforgiving land of sand and barren mountains. However, look closer and you’ll see clues that the desert is home to a massive underground oasis.  Images taken by satellites and astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) show that Libya’s Kufrah district is not as desolate as it […]

Animals should have the right to vote, according to a recent paper. Check your calendars – we promise it’s not April Fool’s Day yet.  “The idea that animals should have the right to vote sounds preposterous,” the paper begins, accurately summarizing most people’s thoughts upon reading that headline. But, author Ioan-Radu Motoarcă goes on to […]

Dolphins have been observed interacting with manatee calves in unusual behavior, some of which has been aggressive and hostile. But while researchers are not sure why they are doing it, it is clearly deliberate.  Over a 21-year period, researchers documented 10 interactions between bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates) and Antillean manatee calves (Trichechus manatus manatus) in […]

Tables get dull pretty quickly. Sure they may have a nice pattern on them, or be made of some particularly fancy wood, but once you’ve seen one, you’ve basically seen them all. Just variation after variation of the “big flat thing on top of some legs” model which hasn’t really changed since we first started […]

Here at IFLScience, we love some good animal news – and today, it comes in the form of Ariel the cocker spaniel. Born with multiple birth defects and abandoned at 11 weeks old, Ariel was then rescued and has now successfully received surgery that removed her two extra limbs, giving her a bright future ahead. […]

Dotted throughout the mountainous Kabayan municipality in the Philippines, dozens of secretly concealed “fire mummies” have lain undisturbed for hundreds of years. Known by locals as meking, these well-preserved corpses belong to the ancient ancestors of the Indigenous Ibaloi, yet environmental changes now threaten to destroy these revered remains. The popular term “fire mummy” derives […]

Animals have a whole range of means to survive the cold, from thick fur and warm dens to simply sleeping through the cold winter months. Alligators might not be the first creatures that come to mind when thinking about survival tactics for cold weather, but videos reveal that freezing right along with the lake is […]

In a rare event, the Sun has simultaneously released two mighty solar flares separated by 500,000 kilometers (300,000 miles). The last 48 hours have seen remarkable behavior on the Sun, even by the standards of its last, highly active, year. Two sunspots, AR3559 and AR3561, have been filmed flaring simultaneously. The flares do not reach […]

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a clutch of like-minded folks are constructing a monumental clock that’s designed to last for 10,000 years. Its purpose, apparently, is to be an icon of “long-term thinking” and inspire people to dream far beyond the limited scope of a human lifetime. The project is the brainchild of computer scientist […]

The birthplaces of stars have never looked this good. Thanks to the keen infrared eye of JWST, which can see through some of the gas and dust that make up star-forming clouds, humans have gotten new insights into some incredible nebulae – and with beautiful pictures, too. The latest one is an image of N79 […]

A firm hoping to place the first private space station into low-Earth orbit has taken its latest steps towards that goal, inflating and then blowing up a test module. Sierra Space, based in Colorado, designed an expandable module which is only inflated to its full capacity once it is in orbit. The Large Integrated Flexible […]

Representing a 3D world on a 2D map is always going to end up with some issues and some compromises. No matter how accurate you try to make it, you will end up with stretched areas, squashed countries, or else parts of the map cut out altogether. The map you are likely familiar with is […]

The emergence of treponemal diseases, the unpleasant gang of illnesses that includes syphilis and yaws, has been a long-standing mystery that’s been hotly debated for decades. Thanks to a new study, the bodies of four prehistoric people found in Brazil have recently added an intriguing piece to the puzzle. Scientists at the University of Zürich […]

Of the many alternative ways the universe might end, nothing is as scary as “false vacuum decay”. This scenario is based on the idea that a fundamental field in the universe is not at its lowest possible state. Under that “false” stable region, our own universe has grown. The field might spontaneously jump into a […]

A dead body that’s been gnawed upon by cats and dogs might sound like a particularly grisly cold open to an episode of Bones, but pet-scavenged bodies aren’t just the stuff of police procedurals – your pets would probably eat you if you died. Thankfully, if that death happens to have occurred under criminal circumstances, […]

A reader has a question, which seems like it’ll be fun to discuss. “In space, an object in motion stays in motion right?” the IFLScience reader asked. “So if you banged a tuning fork in space would it produce the vibrations forever?” Without looking into it, you probably instinctively know that this shouldn’t be possible. […]

An 11-year-old boy who was born with congenital hearing loss has become the first patient to receive a new gene therapy procedure, and it’s allowed him to hear sounds for the first time in his life. “Gene therapy for hearing loss is something that we physicians and scientists in the world of hearing loss have […]

NASA has announced the winners of its 2024 funding for pioneering concepts in space exploration. Highlights include a fixed-wing plane to soar over Mars, a swarm of tiny probes to explore nearby star systems, and a set of telescopic dishes with a baseline the size of the Solar System.  NASA Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) grants […]

Okay. We’re all grownups here. We can admit when we’ve made a mistake. Despite previous headlines, it turns out multivitamins may not be useless after all.  “Cognitive decline is among the top health concerns for most older adults,” said Chirag Vyas, an instructor in investigation at the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and […]

Chickpeas have been grown on the Moon. Well, not on the Moon exactly – not even in the sense that one couple had sex “on the Moon” – but they have been grown using simulated lunar dust, replicating samples brought back by the Apollo missions. Assuming this work can be extended to other plant species, […]