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At IFLScience, we often like to talk about the Mantelpiece Of Dreams, a line-up of rare geological trinkets we’d like to shine down on us as we sit on the sofa (were it not for, you know, ethics). London Natural History Museum’s Professor Paul Barrett said he’d like a triceratops skull (nice), our own Eleanor […]

On October 19, South Australian vet Dr Andrew Melville-Smith’s newly collected car was struck by something, leaving damage unlike anything repairers have seen before. The South Australian Museum has requested access to the car to collect samples, and suspects this may be the first recorded case of a meteorite striking a car while it was […]

There’s always a lot going on in the deep ocean, but anyone who had “carnivorous ‘death-ball’ sponge” on their bingo card for 2025 deserves to win the prize. It’s one of 30 new species discovered by researchers exploring the deep dark depths of the Southern Ocean, some of them pretty peculiar – even for the […]

Chimpanzees at Uganda’s Ngamba Island Sanctuary can do what was once considered an exclusively human trait: form expectations on the basis of evidence, but revise them on learning new facts. Responding to evidence is an essential skill for the survival of any animal, but given how often humans neglect our supposed superpower, seeing another species […]

Meteor showers are the product of comets or asteroids dropping debris on their orbit. Once these debris streams cross the Earth, they burn up in the atmosphere, creating the shooting stars that we know and love. Many famous comets are responsible for famous showers, but the most prolific seems to be Comet Encke. It might […]

Genetic analysis of the hoiho, also known as the yellow-eyed penguin, has revealed that this species is in fact made up of three distinct subspecies – knowledge that could be crucial in preventing these rare and notoriously shy birds from going extinct. Found solely on the New Zealand mainland and Enderby and Campbell Islands, the […]

Being allergic to other people is one thing (and it sounds terrible, honestly). But imagine if the opposite were true – and everybody else were allergic to you. It sounds like the monkey’s paw interpretation of an asthmatic’s lament, but it’s an oh-so-real phenomenon. It’s called “People Allergic To Me” – often shortened to PATM […]

The creation of art has historically been thought of as a distinctly Homo sapiens behavior, but the recent discovery of a crayon-like piece of ocher that’s at least 42,000 years old adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that our Neanderthal cousins also dabbled in a bit of symbolism. Researchers came to this conclusion […]

This month, we’ve been diving into one of the world’s most famous mysteries: the Loch Ness Monster. From its 1930s media debut to AI-generated “cryptids” reshaping modern folklore, we’re exploring how technology and storytelling keep legends like Nessie alive. And in our new documentary, we head to Loch Ness ourselves, speaking to experts, monster hunters, […]

An enormous area of the Earth’s crust has torn and slumped, dropping about 5 kilometers (3 miles). We’ve only just noticed because this is happening beneath the Pacific Ocean, but what sounds alarming could eventually end one of the planet’s most dangerous earthquake fault lines. The San Andreas Fault gets most of the USA’s attention […]

Stars like our Sun turn into red giants as they run out of hydrogen to fuse at their core. As the star continues to age, it will blow out its outer layers until the only thing that remains is an exposed core, a white dwarf. Before getting to the white dwarf state, Sun-sized stars can […]

Of the planet’s 34 vital signs, 22 are now at record levels, with many still skidding and nosediving in the wrong direction. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. That’s the central message of this year’s State of the Climate 2025 report, an […]

As physics has its atoms, so math has the primes: numbers that are indivisible into any smaller constituent pieces. When we first learn about them, some time in grade school, they’re usually presented as an interesting little aside – strange blips in the number line that might occasionally make long division a bit more difficult, […]

Halloween 2003 was a real treat for stargazers, yet rather tricky for astronauts, pilots, and satellite operators. Out of seemingly nowhere, three monstrous sunspots appeared in late October, bombarding the Earth with a series of freakish solar storms that triggered a Halloween light show unlike any other. The rest of this article is behind a […]

The skipper opened his laptop to a preloaded page. With one hand on the boat’s shift and throttle, he managed to start some footage while simultaneously adjusting the boat’s position against the wind. It was a subtly impressive display of skill, but it didn’t hold our attention for long as the footage started to play. […]

An ancient, and adorably named, new rhino species has been discovered in the Canadian Arctic. The exceptionally well-preserved and almost complete fossil represents the northernmost rhino species found to date, and belonged to a beast that roamed this region around 23 million years ago. The new species, unearthed in Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Nunavut, […]

Would you like to travel back in time? You may not need a flux capacitor or Tardis to unlock memories from your past, according to the neuroscientists behind a new study, who found that a little bit of image trickery could be enough to retrieve long-buried childhood memories. The team at Anglia Ruskin University in […]

Humans love a spot of pareidolia, our ability to see faces in things that do not have faces. But the Sun is definitely looking like a face, these days, right? Like, it’s got a big scary mouth, a large right eye, and it is definitely looking to its left. We are certain that even our […]

On July 1, humanity became aware of comet 3I/ATLAS. This is only the third interstellar object known to us, even though, statistically, many thousands are flying through the Solar System as we speak; we have only been able to catch three in the act over a number of years. Today is a special day for […]

In 2017, an absolute unit of an iceberg calved from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica’s Western Weddell Sea. It provided unprecedented access to this remote region that was a key search area in the hunt for Shackleton’s lost ship, Endurance. When scientists sent a remote-operated vehicle to investigate in 2019, they were hoping […]