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If a monkey was placed before a typewriter and incentivized to hit keys at random it would take it vastly longer than the universe’s anticipated lifetime to produce the complete works of Shakespeare, or even a children’s book. The Infinite Monkey Theorem is a thought experiment used to epitomize the way random processes can produce […]

Forget fictional Rodents of Unusual Size – for wildlife traffickers, there are real life giant rats to be feared, after researchers successfully trained African giant pouched rats to pick up the scent of illegally traded animal parts. The black market for illegal wildlife products is a serious global problem. While authorities and scientists have been […]

Voyager 1 continues to amaze. After 47 years, having crossed together with its twin into interstellar space, you’d think the spacecraft would stop surprising us. No chance. The probe had another glitch in the last few weeks that caused a loss of communication, but it managed to find a fix all by itself using hardware […]

COVID-19 has been overtaken as the deadliest infectious disease on the planet. According to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO), tuberculosis (TB) is now once again the biggest killer among infectious pathogens, having previously held the top spot before being surpassed by the virus in 2020. Collating data from 193 countries, WHO […]

If you find yourself facing down the barrel of winter, the good news is you can escape to Asia every Sunday for the next seven weeks, all without leaving your living room. The BBC and Sir David Attenborough are providing some eye-balm in ultra-high-definition 4K with Asia, a seven-part series that will take you from […]

Humans have been burying their dead for millennia, but it’s not the only way we’ve utilized nature to help us transform corpses. In Tibet, birds of prey play a pivotal role in Sky Burials, and elsewhere, Zoroastrian tradition saw the erection of Towers Of Silence, a place where corpses are arranged so that carnivorous birds […]

You know, they say that complicated problems require creative solutions, but inventing a never-before-seen type of island and then building it off the coast of Belgium is definitely a new one to us. Nevertheless, that’s precisely what’s happening: the European Investment Bank (EIB) has approved a €650 million (around US$705 million) loan for the construction […]

Thanks to some inadvertent feline fieldwork, scientists have detailed the first-ever jeilongvirus to be found in the US – and it also happens to be the first of its kind ever to have been identified at all. It began when a cat named Pepper strolled into his home in Gainesville, Florida, and dropped a dead […]

An almost galaxy merger has been caught looking like a pair of eyes staring back at us from the depths of space. NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are a pair of galaxies engaged in the celestial tango that will end up in their eventual fusion into a single object. For the last few million years, […]

There have been some whopping great animals that have crawled, waddled, flapped, and even swum their way over planet Earth across many thousands of years. While the biggest animal to ever live is still swimming about in our oceans, some individual species go unrecognized in the history books for their achievements. Meet the (allegedly) largest […]

Ocean worlds, such as Europa around Jupiter and Enceladus around Saturn, are recent and fascinating discoveries. These moons hide, far beneath their icy crusts, a deep liquid ocean. Other moons and dwarf planets also hide liquid oceans underneath, and the latest candidate is Miranda – the smallest of Uranus’s five round moons. Miranda might be […]

The Pineapple Express is a stream of moisture in the atmosphere that delivers humid air from the tropical Pacific to the West Coast of North America. If there’s heavy rain in California, Oregon, Washington, or British Columbia, there’s a good chance the Pineapple Express is at play.  Not to be confused with the 2008 stoner […]

This Halloween, join us as we explore the spooky science behind the “feeling” of being watched, why wolves howl at the Moon, and how the smell of death affects human behavior. Plus, in our spooky season special, IFLScience investigates the paranormal at Chillingham Castle, one of England’s most haunted locations. The team tested ghost hunting […]

Nature loves to break the neat little boxes we use to classify stuff. In astronomy, one of these box breakers is brown dwarfs. These objects have both stellar and planetary qualities, existing on the cusp of both. New research continues to blur the line and the latest observations are no different. Brown dwarfs in the […]

The USA is, by pretty much all metrics, the most powerful country in the world right now. It has by far the largest nominal GDP and GDP per capita; the strongest and best-funded military; a leading role in just about any international organization or process, and frankly incredible cultural cachet. It wasn’t always this way. […]

Political and scientific news at the moment can seem like they are coming from parallel worlds. On the one hand science reporting is full of coverage of the – mostly disastrous – consequences of a hotter world. What gets published to a non-scientific audience is a tiny fraction of the research reaching the same conclusions. […]

As we walked through the twisting corridors of the ancient castle, the rain continued to fall outside. It had been raining heavily since we arrived, but now a full-blown storm had rolled in. Water trickled into some rooms from cracks barely hidden behind ornate paneling, while the wind, whistling and moaning, slammed doors in distant […]

Yes, spiders do sleep (or at least enter a sleep-like state that’s very similar to our form of slumber).  Much like us, spiders need a deep rest state to keep their brains functioning and their bodies healthy. Given the vast differences in brain structure and evolutionary history between humans and arachnids, it’s no shocker to […]

In a new package of 12 detailed papers, scientists have unveiled 3D “blueprints” of multiple different tumor types, giving researchers a close look at how cancers develop and progress. “These 3D maps of tumors are important because they finally let us see what, until now, we have only been able to infer about tumor structures […]

Few can resist the appeal of an adorable animal; from diddy chameleons to cute baby cows, the world is full of species that make you go “awww”. Now, it seems the ranks of impossibly small and incredible creatures have been bolstered by one new addition: a brand-new species of flea-toad that is the world’s second […]