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Picture it now. You are a young scientist at your first conference, and you’ve just seen a senior researcher you’ve long admired. They’re bound to have great insights for your latest project; all you have to do is say hello – it all starts there. Everywhere around there’s a hum of conversation as researchers gather […]

Picture a rhinoceros and you might imagine a pointy-beaked bird perching on its back. These birds aren’t simply there to eat ticks and other tiny nuisances; this unlikely alliance is a complex relationship that blurs the line between parasitic and symbiotic. Oxpeckers are the “ride-or-die” companions of Africa’s megafauna. They most famously hitch a ride […]

Critically endangered species live life on a knife-edge. Often with populations in the low hundreds, every individual is vital to continue to breed and maintain numbers. Unforeseen events, like climate-related extreme weather, can often further threaten this precarious balance, as is the case recently with the Tapanuli orangutan, the rarest great ape in the world.  […]

NASA has just released two images from its recent near-infrared SPHEREx mission. This is an incredible near-infrared space telescope that aims to collect the detailed light spectrum of 450 million galaxies. To do that, it has very narrow filters which are equivalent to how we categorize colors, only not in the light that we can […]

Historically, Jesus of Nazareth was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious leader, seen as a prophet by followers of Islam – and, of course, he is believed to be God the Son made flesh and the long-awaited Messiah who was prophesied in the Hebrew Bible. This latter part earned him the appellative ‘Christ.’ Christians around […]

If you look in the right places, you may encounter the claim that there is only one, or two depending on who is speaking, places on Earth where you can walk directly on the mantle. Is this true, what does it even mean, and if it’s real, how did it happen? Any model of the […]

Organ transplantd have come a long way since the first human-to-human heart transplant back in 1967. A new record was set for organ transplants in the United States in 2024, as for the first time ever the country saw more than 48,000 organ transplants in a year. The more we do them, the more we […]

A biologist with a passion for invertebrates had been caring for an unassuming worm in his lab for decades. Only recently did he decide to test out how old this unlikely pet really was – and he was pleasantly surprised by the results.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in […]

A new species of carnivorous pitcher plant has been described on Palawan Island in the Philippines. Named for its “large mouth”, it’s an impressive specimen, but one that scientists say is already at risk of extinction with fewer than 50 known plants in existence. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign […]

Science fiction loves space travel. In the absence of a Stargate, to travel between the stars and explore the cosmos, you need spaceships. There are fast ones and slow ones, realistic ones and some that are sadly completely impossible. So many have captured the imagination of people across movies, television, video games, and novels. But […]

Our third known interstellar visitor, comet 3I/ATLAS, will reach its closest point to Earth today, December 19. It will still be pretty far away, at 270 million kilometers (168 million miles) away, but despite being almost twice the Earth-Sun distance, it’s the closest it will ever get to Earth as it continues its journey through […]

It’s barely perceptible, but from the morning after December 21 (or June 21 if you’re below the equator), the Sun starts to hang around for just a little longer each day. For most of us, that means we can start dreaming about the day that our morning commute doesn’t begin in complete darkness, but for […]

When faced with a physical challenge, studies have found, swearing improves performance. New research offers an explanation of the mechanism, and why in a crisis swearing might be exactly what is necessary.  In emergencies people sometimes show strength or speed they would never have considered possible. There may be a price to pay afterwards in […]

They even stack them up, did you know that? Tidy towers of poop bricks gathered around rocks or logs in the environment. These “latrines” aggregate easily because square poops don’t roll away, but now new research has discovered they may also be a way of communicating with each other. “There are signs that these latrines […]

In Season 5 of IFLScience’s podcast The Big Questions, we’ve deep-dived into some of the most intriguing (and biggest) scientific puzzles of 2025, from whether or not de-extinction is really possible to the reasons why people believe in the paranormal. Oh, and we searched for Nessie too. Hosts Dr Alfredo Carpineti, Katy Evans, Eleanor Higgs, […]

Years ago, astronomers believed they had found a planet forming around a nearby star called Fomalhaut. This was very exciting as the planet was imaged directly, the first time that had happened. A few years ago, however, astronomers discovered it was not a planet, but a cloud of debris from a collision in the star […]

NASA has finally got a new administrator. It is billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman who will run the space agency going forward. Isaacman’s name was first put forward very soon after the 2024 election, when his connections to the private space industry and Elon Musk placed him in favor with the Trump administration. In his […]

Skygazing astronomers have spotted a sudden, bold flash of light on the dark side of the Moon caused by an astronomical smash-up. The culprit is still being investigated, but it may have something to do with the one of the strangest space objects we know of. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. […]

Communities found in South Africa called microbialites look like green-tinged rocks, but they grow. Although they resemble some of the oldest evidence for life on Earth, new evidence indicates they are growing much faster than we thought, and drawing abundant carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they do it – even at night. As their […]

Where do lizards go to fall in love? For the Lesser Antillean iguana, “Love Island” can be found on Prickly Pear East, where scientists have embarked on an ambitious conservation project. These critically endangered reptiles were facing extinction on Anguilla not long ago, but following a matchmaking meet-cute that’s successfully established a new population, the […]