Deborah Bloomfield

On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, an unknown man boarded flight 305 from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. He sat there and ordered a bourbon and soda, before slipping a note to a flight attendant as she went about her duty, the beginning of one of the strangest unsolved mysteries of the 20th century. […]

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has announced its intention to produce a new high-yield nuclear gravity bomb, pending Congressional authorization and funding. The DoD said on Friday that they sought to create a modern variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, to be termed the B61-13. The bomb will have a similar yield to […]

Elephants are fascinating for lots of reasons: their ability to care for each other, those incredible adapted trunks, and the ability to fight climate change. One element of an elephant that doesn’t get as much credit as it deserves is their feet. But we’re here to prove that those four enormous tootsies are just as […]

If a crab and Mr Tickle had a baby, it would look just like Big Daddy. An intimidating crustacean, he was named after a British wrestler of the same name (whose real name, incredibly, was Shirley Crabtree Jr) and holds the record for the widest crustacean in captivity ever. Measuring 3.11 meters (10.25 feet) claw-to-claw, […]

On 19 July 1952, the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California, undertook a survey of the night sky, focusing on a particular region and photographing it multiple times, in an attempt to spot bodies in the Solar System such as asteroids as they pass in front of stars, dimming them ever so slightly. At 8:52 […]

The universe is a spooky place. Besides the lurking Dark Matter and Dark Energy, even some of the things we can see look like they’d go bump in the night if space carried sound waves. Just in time for Halloween, NASA has released an image of one of the most eerie of all, a nebula nicknamed […]

EMERGENCE is a new and deeply original performance that is hitting the New York stage this month, and it promises to be unlike anything audiences have experienced before. Is it a musical? No. Is it a rock concert? A Dance? A Monologue? A chemically induced psychedelic trip? It is all of these things and more.  […]

This Halloween, don’t be afraid of the hammerhead bat, discover the science of scary noises, and learn about the (un)natural history of owls. Finally, watch an interview from IFLScience’s first-ever virtual science festival, CURIOUS Live, where we spoke to the authors of Plague-Busters! Medicine’s Battles With History’s Deadliest Diseases. Subscribe to the IFLScience newsletter for […]

During the Maunder Minimum, when solar activity had a 70-year lull, what little activity that did occur operated on a different timeline from the rest of history, Korean astronomical records reveal. The unexpected finding will force a rethink of what was considered a basic feature of solar behavior. Every 11 years, the Sun produces more […]

The UK is currently in the grip of an “unprecedented” disease outbreak. We’re not talking about COVID this time, or even the usual winter illnesses like the flu. Nope, we’re talking cryptosporidiosis, a parasitic infection that causes – among other nasty symptoms – long-lasting, severe diarrhea. It’s definitely something you want to avoid if you […]

After decades of studying human and primate behavior, Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has come to something of a controversial conclusion – humans have no free will. Although its existence has been debated by academics, the vast majority of people believe in free will, the idea that we have the capacity to make our own […]

For humanity to expand into space, we need to know how reproduction and gestation will happen in microgravity. From reproduction to birth, we do not know what is safe for parents and offspring in such conditions. But new research is slowly challenging our ignorance on the subject – a recent experiment on the International Space […]

If you’ve ever had the childish urge to stick your pinky in a pitcher plant, you’ve perhaps also wondered whether a carnivorous plant could ever “eat” a human, should they be so inclined.  Fortunately, someone has done the science (in the most ethical way possible).  Barry Rice, a professional carnivorous plant grower, runs The Carnivorous […]

If you are reading this article, you most likely used semiconductors. These materials, usually silicon, underpin most of our technology. They are incredibly useful, as one would imagine, but they are not without limitations. One of them, about the speed of transmission, might have now been overcome in a special superatomic semiconductor. This makes it […]

A ferocious sea beast that lived 80 million years ago has been discovered by palaeontologists. Defined by its “angry eyebrows” and gargantuan size, the new species of aquatic lizard has aptly been named after a sea serpent in Norse mythology, Jörmungandr, and the tiny city in North Dakota near where the fossil was found, called […]

The Victorian grassland earless dragon, Tympanocryptis pinguicolla, made a stunning comeback from the dead when it was sighted this year for the first time since 1969. Conservationists were excited, but know the little lizards are unlikely to survive much longer without assistance, so they have enlisted the help of Colossal Biosciences, the company seeking to restore […]

This article first appeared in Issue 13 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. Would you move to the Moon? It’s probably the cosmic world you’re most familiar with other than, you know, Earth – and where better to brag about having a holiday home? One thing − can you even buy real estate on the Moon? […]

The Indiana Jones franchise isn’t well known for its accuracy in depicting the average professor-of-archaeology lifestyle. Jones tends to whip the gun out of the hands of a Nazi in the time a proper archaeologist might use for logging artifacts.  However, there’s one bit they got right, in his love for discovering obviously cursed items that […]

Down in the deep sea, not only can you encounter a whole host of unusual-looking ocean creatures, but also some incredible ocean rock formations.  In a canyon north of Moloka’i, in the Hawaiian islands, the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Hercules captured footage of columnar basalt at around 1,700 meters (5,577 feet) deep. While the columns […]

If you look up at the sky for long enough or take a few seconds to Google its position, you may see the International Space Station (ISS) zipping its way over your head. You may also notice it’s moving quite fast, though you may not be aware just how fast.  Though of course it’s not […]