News

In June 2024, astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore became temporarily stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) after the ship they rode in on – the Boeing Starliner – malfunctioned.  Though the two stressed that they signed up for the mission knowing that delays are possible, and that they did not resent the extra […]

A treasure trove of rare freshwater fossils has been described from Taiwan in a new study. Dating back to the Early Pleistocene, over 1 million years ago, they include a baby snail preserved inside its mother’s shell. Did she eat it? Oh no, these snails gave birth to live young and it’s only the second-ever […]

A few years ago, an “acoustic portrait” of Pando — a vast clonal aspen colony in the USA — was released to raise awareness of this astonishing tree and the threats it faces. Recordings of humpback whale songs released as records in the 1960s helped turn public opinion in most of the world against whaling […]

A fantastic new discovery has given astronomy an unexpected window into the formation of life-precursor molecules in an environment significantly different from our galaxy, the Milky Way. Scientists report the first-ever detection of Complex Organic Molecules (COMs) – potential “building blocks” of life – in ice outside of our galaxy. The detection comes from the […]

In an awesome space-based surprise, China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter has sent back intriguing photos of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, taken from the orbit of Mars. For those just joining the story of our interstellar visitor, on July 1 this year astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) spotted an object moving through the Solar System […]

Science fiction is filled with cool gadgets, but sometimes real life mirrors the movies as scientists invent new toys for monitoring and moving around. Just look at Polar Bears International (PBI), who recently launched two very cool pieces of equipment: Bear-Dar, and their shiny new EV Tundra Buggy One. After years of testing in Winnipeg […]

A new digital map of the road network that once connected the Roman Empire has been created, revealing a staggeringly vast constellation of interlocking routes. Named Itiner-e, the new digital map includes 299,171 kilometers (186,000 miles) of ancient roads spanning from the British Isles to the Middle East. Famous for their straight roads, the Romans […]

The Moon is notoriously difficult to photograph. Sometimes you want to snap a picture of it with your smartphone, and the flash goes off. It is much rarer that you are recording it and the flash happens on the Moon, but it does happen. That’s a meteor hitting our natural satellite and creating a new […]

Researchers at Princeton University have reported a new quantum computing breakthrough. They developed a quantum bit, or qubit – the fundamental processing unit of quantum computers – that can last for over 1 millisecond. This is three times longer than the best-ever qubit lifetime in a lab setting and almost 15 times longer than what’s […]

Amphibians like frogs and toads are a great way to observe metamorphosis. They lay eggs that develop into tadpoles, and then these tadpoles develop into froglets and toadlets until at last we have our big, strong adults that come crawling out of the water.  Except, it doesn’t always go like that. There are some amphibians […]

One such question, asked every now and then, is why humans float more easily in saltwater. There are a few places in the world where this is especially apparent, for example in the Dead Sea, or in the waters of oases in Siwa, Egypt. ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites. For […]

Echidnas are strange little fellas at the best of times, so imagine the surprise when a wildlife filmmaker stumbled upon one with striking white fur and bright blonde spines. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. The extra-unusual individual was recently filmed by […]

Finns who voted in the 1999 parliamentary elections are more likely to have still been alive in December 2020 than those of similar age who skipped the election. That finding is consistent with previous indicators that voters are usually healthier than non-voters, and the relationship turns out to be even stronger than that with education […]

Burrowing for 137 kilometers (85 miles) beneath New York, the Delaware Aqueduct holds the title of the world’s longest continuous tunnel. This incredible feat of engineering quietly delivers famously quaffable water to millions of New Yorkers every day, but few realize the scale and complexity hidden deep beneath the Earth.  The Delaware Aqueduct is a […]

A cluster of stars known as LAP1-B, seen around 800 million years after the universe was formed, is the first we have seen consistent with being composed of the first stars, a new paper claims. That is, these would be stars whose initial ingredients were entirely forged in the Big Bang, rather than by an […]

It has come to our attention that a few people out there are a little confused as to why flying against the rotation of the Earth does not speed up flight times. In a post, admittedly by someone who denies that the Earth is spinning, a confused person writes: “Plane flying from east to west […]

For almost a century, we have known that the universe is expanding. For several decades, evidence has suggested that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Crucial to those estimates were the use of standard candles, celestial events of the same luminosity that can be used to measure cosmic distances like milestones on a road. […]

Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station orbiting the Earth have enjoyed humanity’s first-ever barbecue in space. While developing food that can be conveniently stored and eaten is space became a priority as humanity took longer missions into our Solar System, so far astronaut and cosmonaut menus have been somewhat restricted. The first person to […]

There are plenty of items that you are not allowed on planes, and usually for fairly obvious reasons. You cannot, for instance, bring ammunition on board. Nor slingshots, firearms, or harpoon guns. Flammable liquids are also a no no, as well as any item containing its own internal combustion engine. The rest of this article […]

A colossal structure in southern Mexico that dwarfs every other building in the Maya world was probably built without the use of forced labor, centuries before the emergence of the empire’s structured hierarchy or elite rulers, according to a new study. Known as Aguada Fénix, the colossal project was most likely conceived as a model […]