Deborah Bloomfield

Gamma-ray bursts are incredible releases of energy. Some last for a fraction of a second, caused by the merger of neutron stars, while others last for many seconds and some even for minutes. These last ones are ultra-long gamma-ray bursts and are defined by a duration of more than 1,000 seconds, which is almost 17 […]

The old joke says that the lottery is a tax on people who can’t do math, however, mathematical analysis can actually be used to try to understand the complex probability involved in such a game. But is there a minimum number of tickets you can buy to guarantee a win? Mathematicians at the University of […]

We at IFLScience love a cave. The deeper, bluer, and more terrifying the better. We are also always keen to celebrate the weirdest wonders planet Earth has to offer, and as geological oddballs go, the Trabuc Caves in southern France take the cake. Situated in Mialet, France, the caves are the largest network of underground […]

Doner Kebabs should be made of lamb, that’s pretty much the standard definition for what goes into the popular post-piss-up nosh (though opinion here is varied). But a recent YouTube video has divided viewers as it not only reveals how the meat is made but also what it is often made of. And let’s be […]

In the opening sequence to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, an ape-like hominin is depicted as the inventor of the first-ever primitive tool, changing the course of human history forever. Half a century after the film’s release, scientists confirmed that the earliest stone implements were indeed manufactured by a species that predated the Homo lineage, […]

Ball lightning is one of those phenomena that could very easily be made up. A floating luminous sphere of plasma that can sometimes explode with no clear explanation, often seen as a marvelous and beautifully eerie event and in other descriptions as a tremendous portent leaving death and destruction in its wake. Also, the explosions […]

Turtles migrate thousands of miles out in the open ocean, charting epic courses in search of food, mates, and nesting grounds. Exactly how they find where they’re going has long puzzled scientists who suspected magnetic fields were involved, but were unsure of the exact mechanism through which turtles were sensing it. We’ve since learned that […]

Astronomers have detected an overabundance of gamma rays with an energy of around a trillion electron volts (TeV) coming from the Sun. Emission from the Sun in such a high energy range was thought to require quite rare circumstances, so the discovery of how common these are will require a rethink of how something this […]

Most people have heard of white noise – a static-like sound produced when an old-fashioned television was on the fritz. But, did you know there are other color sounds? What is white noise? White noise (or broadband noise) is one of the best known of all color noises and the sound is produced by equally […]

History has seen many empires and civilizations rise and fall. Some survive a few decades at most, while others stretch on for centuries. So who lasted the longest? On the face of it, this may seem like a straightforward question, but the answer is anything but. The main issue here is that modern historians disagree […]

At 4 am on March 28, 1979, disaster struck Three Mile Island. It would become the worst nuclear accident in the history of the United States, leaking radiation into Pennsylvania, and almost causing what CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite said would’ve been “the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age.” Rather unfortunately, it […]

In a world first, Canada is set to become the first country to require health warnings on individual cigarettes, making the warnings so in your face they will be hard to ignore. Early this week on August 1, 2023, these regulations came into force, in a phased approach that will see most of the measures […]

In the opening sequence to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, an ape-like hominin is depicted as the inventor of the first-ever primitive tool, changing the course of human history forever. Half a century after the film’s release, scientists confirmed that the earliest stone implements were indeed manufactured by a species that predated the Homo lineage, […]

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, a strong contender for the most ridiculous (and anticipated) monster movie of the summer has arrived: The Meg 2. Without being too spoilery (since it appears in the trailer), the movie appears to feature a T. rex and megalodon in an extremely […]

You never know what you might find when you begin to dig into Earth’s surface. Digging near a railway construction recently revealed an ancient charioteer – and now, next to a construction site for a new airport in Mexico, the second-ever report of a fossilized flamingo egg in the world has been made. This is […]

This week, anthropology professor Mark Aldenderfer voiced concerns over Graham Hancock’s pseudoarchaeology, we investigated the mechanisms behind the uncanny valley, all while asking what the cheese paradox can tell us about vegetarians’ moral decision-making. And finally, we questioned the potentially life-changing discovery of a superconductor that functions at room temperature. Subscribe to the IFLScience newsletter […]

If you’d looked to the sky in the right part of Idaho back in the late 1940s, you might’ve been lucky enough to spot a parachuting beaver. The unconventional approach to wildlife management came in response to conflict that was emerging between native beavers in southwest Idaho and the increasing prevalence of an invasive species: […]

There are all sorts of things that can turn a guy off, but the smell of female tears could be one of the most unexpected. Research conducted over a decade ago suggested that sniffing the emotional secretions of crying women reduces subjective levels of sexual arousal in men, while also lowering testosterone and dampening activity […]

The path beyond the limits of regular computers, even the most powerful supercomputer, lies with the theory of quantum mechanics. Quantum computing promises to change the world, but how do quantum computers work, and how close are we to this fabled new approach to computation? Host Dr Alfredo Carpineti spoke with Professor Winfried Hensinger, Professor of […]

In 1846, astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier sat down and attempted to locate a planet that had never been seen before by humans. Uranus (grow up) had been moving in unexpected ways, as predicted by the Newtonian theory of gravity. Though the discrepancies were small, there was a difference between the observed orbit of Uranus […]