News

Behold the Colorado River toad. Also known as the Sonoran Desert toad, these bulbous fellas pack a psychedelic punch just below the surface. Their venom, which they can secrete through glands on their skin, contains a hallucinogenic compound, which the scientists behind a new study say could be a potent antidepressant. Advertisement Psychedelics have received […]

The more we learn about the world and the cosmos, the more we have had to let go of ideas of our own importance. We discovered that the world is not the center of the universe around which all objects rotate. Then we found that the Earth rotated around the Sun, and believed that that […]

When an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in the last days of World War Two, much of the city’s life was eviscerated. Around 140,000 people were killed and over 60,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged in a moment. Amid the rubble and ruins, however, glimmers of life held on. Against the odds, several trees […]

The collaborative power of the animal world is pretty impressive at the best of times – from teams of orcas working together to bumblebees sharing knowledge and the strength in numbers that comes from a large flock. Inspired by this idea of animal swarms, researchers have developed robot snails that not only traverse the ground […]

In 1974, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched its program to make vaccines accessible to children across the globe. Now, 50 years later, a new study suggests that vaccination has had a significant impact on public health, helping to avoid millions of deaths. Advertisement Though WHO’s Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) began with the goal […]

New archaeological evidence shines a light on the story of the now-famous settlers of the Roanoke colony. The new discoveries relate to a local Indigenous community that had ties to the settlers. Advertisement The supposed mystery The story of the “lost colony” of Roanoke is well known today, but it is steeped in supposed mystery […]

A grim milestone in the struggle against climate change has now been reached, as the disappearance of Venezuela’s final glacier means the country has won the race to be the first to see all of its ice bodies melt. As recently as 1910, the South American nation boasted six glaciers spanning a total area of […]

Written on the walls of sites in the Atbai Desert in Eastern Sudan, prehistoric rock art tells the story of a very distant past. While the region today is achingly arid, the artwork implies it was once a lush, green land filled with water, pastures, and animal life.  Advertisement Remarkably, the artwork only dates to […]

Black holes are strange objects which (though we have learned plenty about them) confound our understanding of physics. In an attempt to reconcile some of the paradoxes discovered when studying them, physicists have proposed stranger hypotheses still, with one suggesting that they imply we live in a holographic universe, where all of what we see […]

A “mysterious lump” of purple material was recently discovered while digging at a Roman site in the UK. It turned out that the curiously colored substance was an extremely rare chunk of Tyrian purple, a dye that was once worth more than its weight in gold. Advertisement The discovery was made in 2023 on the […]

CURIOUS Live is back for its first event of 2024. We’ll be putting intriguing questions to the experts on some curious topics during IFLScience’s second-ever virtual event, delving into nuclear war, the connection between mental and physical health, insect detectives, and the search for life elsewhere in the universe. We’re speaking to experts in each […]

Goliath beetles are among the heaviest beetles in the natural world and one of the strongest bugs on the planet. Where does the Goliath beetle live? Native to the many forests of Africa, Goliath beetles belong to a genus called Goliathus that includes at least five different species: G. goliatus, G. regius, G. cacicus, G. orientalis, and G. […]

Around 24,500 years ago, the body of a 4-year-old child was wrapped in an ochre-dyed shroud and lowered into a burial pit in the Lapedo Valley of central Portugal. Unlike any whippersnapper alive today, however, this extraordinary child exhibited a unique blend of modern human and Neanderthal features, disproving everything we thought we knew about […]

Earth is the only planet we know of that has ever had a fire. While there may be volcanos pushing out hot magma on the surface of Venus, the hottest planet in the Solar System, there has never been a fire there. Nor on Mercury, nor Jupiter, nor any of the other planets surrounding our […]

The centrifugal force is pretty cool. It could be used one day to create artificial gravity onboard space stations (saving sci-fi films a lot of budget in the process), sparing astronauts the strange effects of microgravity on their bodies. It is also responsible for the fact that the Earth bulges in the middle, and as […]

For the first time, a fighter jet controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been pitted against a human-controlled jet in a practice dogfight scenario. Advertisement The boundary-breaking test flight took place in September 2023, but footage of the feat was released by DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution program last month.  Advertisement The video shows the […]

The world’s tallest wooden wind turbine started turning last year near the town of Skara, not far from the city of Gothenburg in Sweden – a nation renowned for its flatpack wood furniture. Advertisement With a total height of 150 meters (492 feet) including the blades, the turbine features a 105-meter (345-foot) tower constructed out […]

It’s often said that to know your enemy, you must become your enemy – and when that enemy happens to be fake news, a new study of a game where players become “fake newsmongers” suggests it really does help. Advertisement The game in question is Bad News, developed by Dutch media platform DROG and scientists […]

Cetaceans have long been famous for their communication abilities. From the impressive clicks and whistles of dolphins to the magical sound of humpback whale song. Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) have been known to communicate too, and new research has made a big leap forward in understanding the structure of their vocalizations.  Advertisement Sperm whales are […]

A new study has suggested that a gene variant thought only to increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease could actually be one genetic cause of the condition. Advertisement The gene is called APOE, and the specific variant in question is called APOE4. The gene, present on chromosome 19, codes for a protein called apolipoprotein E […]