Deborah Bloomfield

Every now and then, a fact gets passed around the internet that gas giant Saturn would float if you placed it in water. But is it true? For that, we need to know a little about buoyancy, and a little about gas giants. Buoyancy is an upward force in a fluid (any flowing substance, including […]

Earth’s continents appear to be in a constant cycle of breaking apart and moving together. At this moment in time, we’re in an awkward intermediate phase following the breakup of Pangea around 175 million years ago. If that’s accurate, it’s looking like Earth could be sliding back into a supercontinent another 250 million years down […]

In 2021, in Vacaria, at the southern tip of Brazil, somebody hit an animal with their car. A sad story, but not an unusual one – except that, in this case, the creature survived. And nobody knew what it was. “What a strange hybrid beast!” tweeted Roland Kays, director of the Biodiversity Laboratory at the […]

Neighboring Neanderthal communities living in the Middle East some 60,000 years ago appear to have developed distinct butchering practices, suggesting that different families may have had their own culinary traditions. By examining cut marks on animal bones found at two nearby Neanderthal sites in Israel, researchers found that foodie culture varied from cave to cave, […]

People who like to gawp at celestial events (as we all should) are in for a real treat at the moment. As well as the best meteor shower of the year – courtesy of Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle – there is the upcoming lunar eclipse, visible to around 60 percent of the world’s population. But the Moon […]

An extraordinary fossil has blown the socks of palaeontologists as it was found to contain the soft tissues of a Temnodontosaurus ichthyosaur, marking the first time we’ve ever found soft tissue remains of a giant ichthyosaur and introducing new-to-science features that reveal how they hunted. The discovery is going to revolutionize the way we look at […]

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IFLScience needs the contact information you provide to us to contact you about our products and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time. For information on how to unsubscribe, as well as our privacy practices and commitment to protecting your privacy, check out ourPrivacy Policy Deborah BloomfieldSource Link: Could You Survive Being […]

At some point in the second century, the Syrian writer and satirist Lucian of Samosata changed the world. With a new short novel, wryly titled A True Story, he had invented an entirely new genre of fiction: one with space travel, interplanetary warfare, and extraterrestrial beings communicating with humans. Ever since then, the idea that […]

Apollo 12 landed on the Lunar Ocean of Storms, but it had to face storms here on Earth before it could reach its celestial destination. The goal was not just reaching the Oceanus Procellarum, the large dark basaltic plane on the western edge of the lunar nearside; it was landing in the crater that was […]

Analysis of meteorite Northwest Africa 12264 suggests that we may have to alter our timeline of the early Solar System, potentially changing our models of planet formation. In 2018, a small meteorite was found in Northwest Africa. The precise area where it was found is unknown, but in August of that year, the small piece […]

In Yellowstone National Park, a hydrothermal explosion has formed a new hole, filled with chalk blue water that’s hotter than a warm bath.  A team of USGS geologists discovered the new pool in April 2025 within a smaller subbasin of Norris Geyser Basin, described as “the hottest, oldest, and most dynamic” thermal area in Yellowstone. […]

The Subaru telescope located at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawai’i has found a new world within our Solar System, dubbed “Ammonite” by the team who found it. In 2003, NASA-funded researchers spotted what was then the most distant object discovered in our Solar System. The dwarf planet, named Sedna after the Inuit goddess of […]

The formation of planetary systems is not fully understood. There are many steps that require further observations, modeling, and theories. Stars form from clouds of gas and dust, and following star formation, that dust will crystallize into minerals, which will become pebbles, which might end up growing into planets. For the first time, researchers have […]

Excavations at a 2,000-year-old settlement in Spain have yielded the first ever trilobite fossil from Roman times. Found in a trash heap associated with a high-status household, the specimen appears to have been intentionally modified to form part of a necklace or bracelet, and was probably used as a magical pendant designed to protect its […]

Pigeons with missing toes and deformed feet are a disturbingly familiar sight in many cities. While it’s often assumed that these injuries stem from infections and grime, a 2019 study conducted by researchers in France suggested another, more unexpected factor: hairdressing salons.  Researchers from the Center for Ecology and Conservation Sciences in Paris investigated the […]

Astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein were searching through archive images from the Dark Energy Survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile when they noticed a comet around 4.1 billion kilometers (2.6 billion miles) from the Sun. Comets are remnants of dust, ice, and rock left over from the formation of the Solar […]

Are you fed up of your commute to work, packing yourself onto busy underground trains only to rub shoulders with the same fatigued, bored, or otherwise stressed passengers each day? It’s a typical experience of the modern urban work life, but wouldn’t it be so much better if this situation included dogs? There are few […]

In a world that still contains some potent predators, you might think the deadliest animal would be something like a great white shark, or a grizzly bear, or another similar beastie. You would certainly be forgiven for thinking so, given how much media attention a rare big animal attack gets these days. However, the world’s […]

Pepper the pet cat has had his paws in the discovery of two viruses. After helping to find the first jeilongvirus in the US last year, he’s just doubled down and contributed to the identification of a new strain of orthoreovirus. Granted, Pepper isn’t breaking a sweat over a lab workbench, carefully processing samples and […]