Deborah Bloomfield

Scientists performed the famous magic trick known as the French drop for three species of monkeys and found one saw right through it. Crucially, the difference was not in the animals’ eyes, but in their hands. Those with opposable thumbs like our own were taken in by the performance, sharing our expectations of how the […]

Discovered in the year 2000, the Cave of Crystals sits some 300 meters (984 feet) below the surface of the Sierra de Naica Mountain in Chihuahua, Mexico. Home to some of the largest known crystals on the planet, this vast, otherworldly cavern is both beautiful and deadly. Occupying a U-shaped cavern in the depths of […]

A team of students is about to beat NASA to a lunar first: sending a rover to the Moon before they have. The team of students from Carnegie Mellon University expect the Iris rover, and an additional sculpture project named MoonArk, to launch on May 4.  “Hundreds of students have poured thousands of hours into […]

A team of researchers may have found a way of improving large language model (LLM) chatbots, including improving ChatGPT-4’s accuracy by around 21 percent. In a new preprint paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, the team explains how they achieved it: allowing artificial intelligence (AI) agents to reflect on their own mistakes. The team used a […]

Research into a tiny cat that lives in the Moroccan desert has revealed big things for the Felis genus. Not only are sand cats the title holders for the largest range in the genus, living a seemingly nomadic life, they’ve also exhibited a behavior never seen before in wild cats. The nocturnal sand cat, Felis […]

An uncontacted tribe in Indonesia is under threat of being wiped out due to a colossal mining project that’s looking to harvest metals in their ancestral land for electric car batteries, according to tribal rights group, Survival. Mining companies and governments are being blamed, but the finger is also being pointed at electric car makers […]

Inside the caves of Mount Baigong, and in the surrounding area, there are dozens of strange pipe-like structures, subject to all sorts of conspiracy theories and rumors.  Known as Baigong Pipes, the first references to the structures appear to be from the Chinese state media affiliated news site Xinhua News Agency. According to the article, […]

In response to IFLScience’s recent article about the announcement of the Artemis II crew, author Dr Alfredo Carpineti received an email claiming: “Before we can go BACK to the moon we would have had to have gone there before. WE DID NOT.” Plenty of comments under the article on social media carried similar messages, although […]

Walking past Central Park’s waterways in New York City often involves some turtle gymnastics as these freshwater animals pile on top of one another to get the best spot in the sun. Basking during the day is well recognized, but it seems that nocturnal basking is more popular than expected, as new research has discovered […]

Star Trek envisions a world where humanity has branched out past the confines of our home planet in the name of exploration and peace. LunarCrush, a crypto and NFT stock trading platform founded in 2018, has chosen a more prosaic motivation: cold hard cash. A stash of 62 Bitcoin, currently worth approximately $1.5 million (although […]

A chess opening refers to the first moves that take place in a game, which among professionals usually adheres to one of a handful of “book” openings that have been studied and are well-known. While the uninitiated start shifting pawns with beads of sweat on their brow, competitive players often lean on a tried and […]

The Gaia satellite from the European Space Agency (ESA) is busy creating the most detailed map of the stars in the Milky Way. This has led to the discovery of the two closest black holes to Earth and they may even be a new class of black holes. Named, respectively, Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2, […]

One of the cooler things about rocks, among many cool things, is that they allow us to look back into the past. The further down in a rock’s layers you go, the older the rock. Studying layers, and where these layers merge, can tell us about local geology as well as big events in our […]

Gaze at the face of a human who lived in Egypt thousands of years before the pyramids first stood. A recent project has created facial reconstructions from the 30,000-year-old remains of a human discovered in the Nile Valley, providing a deeply personal snapshot of prehistoric Egypt. The facial reconstructions were crafted by archaeologists Moacir Elias […]

There are many mysteries in the animal kingdom, some of which scientists have spent years unlocking the answers to, and some that might remain mysterious for a few decades yet. One of these unusual phenomena is the case of glowing animals. Photoluminescence in different mammal species has been discovered in the duck-billed platypus, squirrels, and […]

We know the question that keeps you awake at night: when did humans start eating snails? Well, researchers have recently discovered the earliest evidence of prehistoric people cooking and eating these terrestrial mollusks. But while you might imagine a rustic version of modern escargot, the snails in question were actually enormous in comparison.  A team […]

Just as the movies warned, Godzilla quietly lurks at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately, this isn’t a giant radiation-loaded monster with a hatred for moths, but an enormous geological feature found on the seabed. After 20 years of striving for recognition, it’s official: it’s been agreed that the vast complex of underwater ridges […]

Fish have been captured more than 8 kilometers (4.8 miles) below the ocean’s surface, and filmed deeper still. These not only break both records for deep sea angling, the team responsible believes they are getting close to the maximum depths at which fish can be found. At the western edge of the Pacific Ocean lies […]

The universe appears fond of special numbers. Some come from geometry, like π or the square root of two. Some, like the fine structure constant, connect stars being able to shine to why buttered bread falls more often on the buttered side. Then there is e, or Euler’s number: a mathematical constant found across fields […]

Nearly a century after it was first posed, mathematicians have made a breakthrough in one of the most difficult problems in combinatorics – the mind-bending area of math responsible for such concepts as numbers bigger than the universe and completely unique card shuffles. As any mathematician can tell you, there ain’t no party like a […]