Deborah Bloomfield

The earliest people who lived in North America shared the landscape with huge animals. On any day these hunter-gatherers might encounter a giant, snarling saber-toothed cat ready to pounce, or a group of elephantlike mammoths stripping tree branches. Maybe a herd of giant bison would stampede past. Obviously, you can’t see any of these ice […]

As great as things like “ethics” are for the health of volunteers and subjects, it has put an end to stories of people finding out about the effects of anesthesia by mashing each other’s testicles, or learning about the velocity of electricity by electrocuting a kilometer of monks. Jean-Antoine Nollet was a clergyman and physicist […]

In the 1960s and 70s, the US and Soviet Union conducted a number of nuclear tests. While devastating for the immediate environment, and causing a future where wars could trigger an ice age, there has been a surprising upside: scientists have used them to study the Earth’s core. There are of course no direct ways […]

Microplastics are now ubiquitous on our planet – they’re found all over the place, including fresh Antarctic snow, and are also present in our bodies. We are thought to inhale 16.2 bits of microplastic every hour, the equivalent of gulping down a credit card in just a week. That’s a staggering amount of plastic, but […]

A new study has proven something scientists had suspected for a long time: the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is capable of lying dormant within the brain. Cells called microglia, which form part of the brain’s own specialized immune system, act as a persistent reservoir for the virus – but now that we know it’s there, […]

There’s long been a question over whether being born via C-section means babies miss out on exposure to helpful bacteria that they would normally get from their mother’s birth canal. If it turns out these bacteria are important for a baby’s development, one solution that’s been proposed is a process called “vaginal seeding”. It’s not […]

An incredibly rare and well-preserved bronze sword, dating back to the 14th century BCE, has been unearthed in the town of Nördlingen, Bavaria. So remarkable is the preservation that the weapon hasn’t lost its luster, despite being crafted more than 3,000 years ago. The extraordinary find was made alongside the discovery of a Bronze Age […]

The Earth’s innermost geological layer is a solid metallic ball around 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles) across. We’ve never sampled it – just getting to the mantle is a challenge and then there are two more layers to go – but we know something of its composition and physical conditions from the way seismic waves pass […]

China’s National Nuclear Safety Administration has issued a license to the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to operate China’s first “Thorium Molten Salt Reactor – Liquid Fuel 1″ (TMSR-LF1), which was under construction between 2018 and 2021 in Wuwei city. This is the first license given in China […]

The sun is baking and everyone’s lawn may be in dire need of a trim, especially as it sways mockingly in the slight breeze while turning an almost unflattering shade of yellow in the heat. The first thought may be to reach for the lawn mower to turn each blade of grass into uniform little […]

People might disagree on whether Pluto should be considered a planet or a dwarf planet but no one disagrees this world is peculiar. Everything about it is so weird, from its heart to the fact that sometimes it is closer to the Sun than Neptune. Among the quirky characteristics of this distant dwarf planet are […]

One of the greatest apex predators of the sea are orcas (also known as killer whales) and recently they have been smashing into sailboats. Once thought to be a seemingly rare event, these attacks are now occurring almost daily.    Last year, Rui Alves launched a website called orcas.pt. This tracks the orca encounters with […]

Around 2,000 years ago, grave robbers placed the skull of a wolf on top of a burial mound in an attempt to prevent the deceased’s angry spirit from seeking revenge. Now this strange sentinel has been unearthed along with the surrounding tomb, and is revealing new insights into those it was set to guard.  The […]

To the Ancient Greeks, the underworld was a physical place that could be accessed by intrepid people if only they knew where to look. From Homer’s epic tales to the travel writers, classical stories are filled with references to such entrances where heroic individuals ventured into the subterranean world of the dead. Today, one of […]

Albert Einstein has become synonymous with genius, but he was a person with qualities and flaws like any other. And like any other human, he made mistakes. For the great physicist himself, his greatest scientific mistake might not be one we would consider today. His biggest blunder, as he called it, was wanting the universe […]

Grieving the loss of a cherished pet is always a difficult and upsetting time, whether that family member had four legs, two, or even none at all. However, a new alternative to cremation or burial is becoming more widely known, and it involves the process of aquamation. Aquamation is also known as alkaline hydrolysis, or […]

This week the Milky Way’s fastest runaway star was discovered traveling at 2,285 kilometers per second, a new 3D model shows “Lucy”, an early human ancestor, may have walked upright, and we investigate the Sentinelese, the world’s most isolated uncontacted tribe. Subscribe to the IFLScience newsletter for all the biggest science news delivered straight to […]

A new armored dinosaur, a species of ankylosaur, has been discovered on Britain’s famous dinosaur island, the Isle of Wight. It represents the first armored dinosaur from the island to be described in over 140 years.  The new tank-like dinosaur, Vectipelta barretti, was named in honor of Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum […]

2020, it’s fair to say, was an odd year. With a pandemic moving across the world and all the life changes that involved, it’s easy to forget smaller stories, like that weird point where monoliths started popping up around the world like Starbucks. So, did we ever get a satisfactory explanation? What was up with […]