Deborah Bloomfield

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 […]

There is a lot of speculation about the end of the universe. Humans love a good ending after all. We know that the universe started with the Big Bang and it has been going for almost 14 billion years. But how the curtain call of the cosmos occurs is not certain yet. There are, of […]

Thinking of X-rays might trigger memories of broken bones or dental check-ups. But this extremely energetic light can show us more than just our bones: it is also used to study the molecular world, even biochemical reactions in real-time. One issue, though, is that researchers have never been able to study a single atom with […]

The Moon has one of the largest preserved craters in the Solar System, the South Pole-Aitken Basin, located on the far side of our satellite. The area is central to many investigations, with India’s first lunar lander aiming for the region, Artemis 3 hoping to land humans at the South Pole, and perhaps most curiously, […]

The science of super glue is nothing like watching paint dry. Within this situation-saving liquid, there’s some fascinating yet relatively simple chemistry going on.  Like many other good discoveries, super glue was invented by accident. The person credited with its creation is Dr Harry Coover, a chemist from the US who was attempting to make […]

On October 28, 2021, the Sun released a coronal mass ejection. A large swathe of plasma, electrically charged particles from the Sun, was thrown into the Solar System. The material spread out, fanning out and reaching the planets. And for the first time, it was detected on Earth, on the Moon, and on Mars, as […]

A special algorithm designed to spot dangerous near-Earth asteroids appears to be so good it has spotted its very first one during an initial test. The Vera C. Rubin Telescope is expected to come online in August 2024. Among the many incredible observations and surveys that it will conduct will be a 10-year survey of […]

Do sauropods live in the Congo? No, but that didn’t stop the idea from circulating in the not-so-distant past. The “dinosaur” in question was said to be a long-necked rotund sauropod-like herbivore that waded through swamps and rivers. It’s big in the cryptozoology circles, but its origins, like many cryptids, are murky. The mysterious animal […]

In Doctor Who, an alien species called the Silurians exists – technologically-advanced humanoid reptiles who lived long before humans, going into hiding and being basically undiscovered again until everyone’s favorite time-traveling alien came along in his phone box. So far, so not science. However, in 2018 two University of Cambridge scientists named their paper – The […]

A metal that fills in cracks in itself without human intervention could be the key to making self-healing machines and infrastructure that could save trillions in repairs and maintenance. Things get more alarming if you think about applying it to robots, but maybe we’re there already.  Metallic parts develop small cracks under repeated stress, known […]