Deborah Bloomfield

This year, as every fourth year since 1904, the world will add an extra day on February 29, making 2024 a leap year. While that is generally accepted, debate is growing about whether we should keep adding the occasional leap second. It might seem like an arcane question of little relevance to most people, but […]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people took up different hobbies as lockdown restrictions forced schools to close and people to stay inside their homes. While some took up crafts or yoga, one entomologist got his students involved in a rather different kind of lockdown project: studying the facial patterns of ants. The project started at […]

More evidence is showing that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals are more closely related than once thought. A new estimate suggests that our species may have diverged from Neanderthals just 408,000 years ago, which is “substantially later” than previous estimates.  Neanderthals are an extinct species of hominin who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. […]

WASP-121 b is an extreme planet. It orbits so close to its star that it’s shaped more like an egg than a sphere and is so hot that iron and maybe even liquid sapphires and rubies might be falling on its night side. The proximity to stars has helped astronomers look at this distant world […]

Actress Jane Seymour, Texas Rangers pitcher Max Scherzer, and the cat in the header of this article. Not three figures you might typically put together, but they all have something in common: heterochromia. What is heterochromia? Formally known as heterochromia iridum or iridis, but usually shortened to just heterochromia, this often striking feature is characterized […]

Titan is the only other place in the Solar System with rivers, lakes, and seas. But they are unlike anything on Earth. They are not made of water, but of liquid hydrocarbons, mostly methane. On the surfaces of those seas, observations from orbit spotted bright spots lasting between a few hours and several weeks. These […]

Life can be pretty busy and finding the time to exercise in amongst work, socializing, and sleep isn’t an easy task. So, for some people looking to lose weight, the prospect of a drug that could speed up and simplify the process might sound appealing. But does such a quick fix really exist? What are […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover has given us a twirl and created a beautiful 360° panorama of a Martian region known as Jezero Crater. It’s believed this vast basin was once flooded with water, making it a promising location to search for evidence of life.  The video is a mosaic of 993 individual images captured by Perseverance’s […]

Pierce Brosnan, the former James Bond actor, has reportedly been charged with going off the prescribed trail near the Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. As a result, Brosnan is due to appear at a Wyoming court on January 23. This may sound like a trivial situation – wandering off the path in a […]

Imagine being able to virtually “chat” with a deceased friend or relative: a gift to the grieving, or a dystopian nightmare come true? With the recent acceleration in development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology like ChatGPT, the idea of a “digital resurrection” is no longer just the muse of science fiction writers. But are people […]

Almost 3,000 years after the supposed destruction of a major Philistine city, the event – which is mentioned in the Old Testament – has finally been corroborated thanks to a new technique that detects ancient magnetic fields in burnt bricks. In addition to confirming that a building in the area was indeed ravaged by a […]

The first discovery of an in-situ megalodon tooth was made during a three-week expedition aboard Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus. Researchers were piloting the remote-operated vehicle Hercules when they stumbled across the Otodus megalodon tooth at a depth of around 3,090 meters (9,842 feet) within the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. The megalodon tooth is […]

This week evidence of 518-million-year-old giant predatory worms was discovered in Greenland, the Zoo Hypothesis is the unnerving answer to the Fermi Paradox, and evolution may not be as random as previously thought. Finally, we ask: what is Munchausen by proxy, and how does it affect others? Subscribe to the IFLScience newsletter for all the […]

Hypnosis is a legitimate tool that can be used as part of treatment for various psychological conditions, but not everyone is susceptible to being hypnotized. In fact, only around 15 percent of adults are considered “highly hypnotizable”, although scientists may have just found a way around this: A short session of mild electrical brain stimulation […]

Arachnophobes, look away now. Rarely do we believe at IFLScience that some small part of spider ecology or behavior can’t overcome the horror felt by even the most fearful of spider-phobes, but this one might be a step too far. Behold Hercules, the largest ever male specimen of a Sydney funnel-web spider (Atrax robustus). Not […]

Tennis is the fourth most viewed sport in the world, with the BBC’s 2023 Wimbledon coverage smashing digital viewership records with 54.3 million streams. But amidst all the grunting, have you ever stopped to wonder why tennis balls are so different from other sports balls? And why are they so damn hairy? A history of […]

New analysis of the busiest areas of the world’s oceans has revealed that we know much less about what’s going on out there than you might think. The 2,000 terabytes of satellite data revealed that around three-quarters of industrial fishing vessels, and up to 30 percent of transport and energy vessels, are not publicly tracked, […]

An antibiotic belonging to an entirely new class of drugs has been discovered, and it has already shown promise against one of the greatest bacterial threats to human health. Clinical trials have begun, and if they go well, it could mean the addition of a much-needed new tool to our antimicrobial arsenal. The antibiotic, identified […]

The long-lost remains of an ancient mangrove forest that disappeared over 22 million years ago have been discovered on an island in the Panama Canal. Scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute recently discovered 121 fossilized wood specimens in a stream on Barro Colorado Island in the middle of the human-made Panama Canal. The fossils […]

Many of us spend our lives chasing the wrong narratives, only to realize what really matters when faced with our own mortality. Unfortunately, by this point, it’s too late to start over, which is why many people end their days heavy with regret. Of course, no two people share the same life history and it’s […]