Deborah Bloomfield

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 […]

The theory of evolution by natural selection is robust and well-evidenced, but that doesn’t mean we are not learning new things about how life develops and changes over time. A new study has found that evolution may not be as unpredictable as previously thought. The implications could open the door to novel ways to tackle […]

A new paper has taken a fresh look at the Fermi Paradox, arguing that if we continue to find no evidence of advanced alien life as our technology progresses we will soon be left with two options: The Zoo Hypothesis, or nothing. If you haven’t heard of the Fermi Paradox, it goes something like this: […]

In the galaxy next door lies an intriguing nebula we call Tarantula. Inside, stars have been born and have died for millions of years. The closest supernova in the last 50 years comes from its outskirts, Supernova 1987A. But another supernova remnant in this nebula has caught the eye of the researchers lately: 30 Doradus […]

Egg laying was the go-to for snails for millions of years – but at some point in the last 100,000, a group of marine snails ditched eggs in favor of live birth. The switch happened in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, and scientists have now discovered that it was driven by around […]

In 1812, Friedrich Mohs created a scale to measure the hardness of substances. There were problems with the scale, which have inspired other scientists to invent alternatives. Nevertheless, these have issues of their own, and the Mohs scale continues to be the most widely used. It is, however, sometimes misinterpreted, so time to explain what […]

The diversity of humanity’s languages is dying. In the wake of cultural globalization and global trade, our languages are becoming increasingly homogenized. Today, almost half of the world’s population speaks one of only the top eight most-spoken languages. Nevertheless, some 7,000 languages are still currently spoken and signed, many of which are unbelievably unique and […]

A survey of researchers working in artificial intelligence (AI) has shown that the industry as a whole thinks the rate of progress is speeding up and could benefit humanity in all sorts of ways, while many have concerns about potential downsides to our race towards more advanced AI.  The survey, which has not yet been […]

In 1984, Voyager 2 flew past Saturn, taking astonishing photographs of the gas giant in resolutions we had never seen before. As well as spotting undulations in the planet’s rings – the result of a then undiscovered ring-shepherd moon –  the probe captured images of strange dark “spokes” in Saturn’s rings.  These features have since […]

In 1969, the US had a brief and crunchy moral panic. People, including senators, believed that members of the public were injecting themselves with peanut butter to get high. The panic, according to website The Museum of Hoaxes, began at the American Academy of Pediatrics annual meeting in October 1969. At the meeting, two government […]

Structures key to oxygen-producing photosynthesis in cyanobacteria have been found in 1.75-billion-year-old fossil cells, three times the age of the previous record. Although Earth’s atmosphere became rich in oxygen before this, the discovery could help piece together the history of one of the most important developments in our planet’s history. Oxygen is the currency in […]

Ever wondered why the people at Google spend so much time trying to calculate eleventy-billion digits of pi? Why a number like one third can be so simple to write as a fraction, but impossible to jot down in decimal form? Or why there’s a number that’s literally just called “e”? Well, we have the […]