Deborah Bloomfield

In 1858 a catastrophic pollution event descended upon London as its sewer-filled streets and waterways built up to create “The Great Stink”. The Thames was and remains a central feature of England’s capital, but back then it wasn’t filled with seals, seahorses, and eels, like it is today. Back then, it was basically a big […]

In October 2024, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper missions, which will travel to Jupiter to study its second closest moon: Europa. The satellite harbors a deep-water ocean under a thick icy crust; it is a world that might have the right conditions for life. And if you’d like to make it more personal, your […]

This week the first-ever X-ray of a single atom was achieved, a volcanic island is home to rocks that do not belong there, and we investigate the most spectacular end to the universe – vacuum decay. Subscribe to the IFLScience newsletter for all the biggest science news delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday and […]

As the old saying goes: what goes up must come down. Unless, it seems, you happen to be Air Force One – because the aircraft of the President of the USA, it turns out, has somehow managed to take off more times than it has ever landed. How is that possible? No, you’re not forgetting […]

The world’s largest living fish – the whale shark – is a mysterious creature. Despite their size and popularity with ecotourism, little is known about the ecology and behavior of this majestic marine species. Now a new observation develops our understanding of the diet and feeding behavior of these impressive animals. According to the WWF, […]

Ahhhh, summer is approaching, and so with it come many bulbous-shaped glasses, filled to the brim with bright and zesty gin and tonic. This popular alcoholic beverage has more of a medicinal history than you might have once thought.   In fact, Winston Churchill once promoted the drink as a life-saver: “Gin and tonic has […]

New Zealand is making a controversial move begin weighing passengers who are getting on a flight, in order to better understand how passenger weight can affect load and distribution on planes. Passengers who board an Air New Zealand plane from Auckland International Airport to JFK Airport, New York, from May 29 to July 2 will […]

Humans, like many of our fellow primates, exist within complex social structures. It’s an essential part of who we are. Even very young children routinely use statistics to figure out the dynamics of their friendship groups. There are lots of reasons why it’s useful to figure out who within these social hierarchies holds the most […]

The Chemical industry just like the tobacco and oil industries were aware of the dangers of the product they were making but willingly suppressed the knowledge as it would hurt their bottom line, documents have revealed. Previously secret industry papers show that DuPont and 3M, the largest manufacturers of PFAS, the so-called “forever chemicals”, have […]

Australia’s dingo-proof fence has created a sharp ecological boundary, with some animals flourishing on one side and struggling on the other. Eventually we might expect this to lead to species evolving on separate paths, but new evidence suggests that what was expected to be a slow process might be happening in a matter of decades.  […]

Spoken words don’t leave a physical footstep on the world, so taking the origins of human language can be a tricky business. Language is also in a constant state of flux, with words and their meaning transforming and changing with every generation. As such, it would be missing the point to single out one language […]

Sometimes in science, a breakthrough comes not with some new discovery, but with the re-examination of something we’ve had under our noses for decades. Take, for example, a new analysis of the jewelry collection of Hetepheres I, a queen of Egypt more than 4,500 years ago – research that has revealed a century-old museum display […]

Octopolis and Octlantis are the ingenious nicknames given to two sites off the coast of Australia where surprising discoveries were made. Here, researchers stumbled upon two sites where the gloomy octopus (Octopus tetricus) was found living in burrows with neighbors. It might not sound all that unusual until you take into account the fact that […]

This article first appeared in Issue 8 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  Since the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), the technology has become unavoidable in our everyday lives. It powers predictive text, face ID, and digital voice assistants – it could even one day represent you in court. It’s wormed its way into so many facets of […]

How good are you at detecting bullshit? If you think the answer is very, a new study suggests you might actually be bullshitting yourself after finding what they call the “BS blind spot”. The team found that people that believe they are the best at detecting “pseudo-profound bullshit” were actually often the worst, while people […]

Astronomers have known for a while that WASP-18b is a weird planet. A world with an upper atmosphere dominated by carbon monoxide is not your run-of-the-mill exoplanet. New observations by JWST reveal even more intriguing insights into this ultra-hot Jupiter. First of all, the research team found evidence of water vapor. An important discovery. WASP-18b […]

It is always nice to know we are not alone on our path, even if those companions are not exactly traveling with us. This is the fate of the quasi-moons of Earth, not-quite satellites of our planet whose orbit around the Sun also takes them around Earth. Now, Earth’s got a new one. The object, […]

If you want healthy feet you’ve got to be honest with yourself about one simple and salient question: are you washing your feet properly? We’ve all been guilty of forgetting to soap the odd bit here and there, but if you’re not dedicating any scrubbing time to your tootsies, you could be opening yourself up […]

The crossover between acid house raves and scientific research is pretty limited, but a new study has managed to marry the two by examining the effects of mixing LSD and MDMA in the lab. Known as “candyflipping”, the combination has been a favorite among dancefloor demons since the late 1980s and has now piqued the […]

NASA has just held its first public meeting on its study of UFOs, revealing some surprisingly juicy information about the reports they’ve gathered. Among the hundreds of sightings they have received, many have involved reports of unexplained metallic orbs flying at high altitudes all around the world. The was panel launched last year with the […]