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The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has assured the country that “time is not broken”, after a power outage in Boulder, Colorado, caused official US time to drift by around 4.8 milliseconds over the last week. From 2007 onwards, the official US time (known as NIST UTC) has been set by NIST. It […]

It’s a pretty sad indictment of the current state of things that “rage bait” was recently crowned the word of the year by the Oxford University Press. Referring to online content that is intentionally designed to make us mad, the term may in fact be a product of our evolutionary psychology, reflecting an innate tendency […]

Some species on Earth are exceptionally long-lived, from ancient trees to the untimely demise of Ming the clam. Whales also can possess lifespans well into the hundreds, but these have often been thought of as outliers for a few individuals and not a general rule for whale species. However, scientists have explored whether this is […]

What is magic? Rabbits out of hats? Card tricks? Someone in a sparkly outfit getting sawn in half? Well, yes, but it’s also about defying expectations. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. To psychologist and magician Dr Gustav Kuhn, founder of the […]

On August 4, 2014, a Pedi lamb named Lammie arrived at the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre (HESC) in South Africa with a mission: to become a companion animal for an orphan named Gertjie. Their friendship would capture the hearts of millions, but it was a bit of an odd one. Why? Well, because Gertjie was […]

If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, we made it! We have passed the longest night and shortest day. The winter solstice was this weekend, and depending on where you were above the equator, you got the smallest amount of sunlight for the year. It might be surprising to know, though, that while the days […]

While getting ready to deck the halls and put up the Christmas tree this year, you may have been wondering what’s better for the planet: slashing down a natural tree or buying a synthetic one made out of plastic. It’s not totally straightforward, but one seems to narrowly take the win. We’ve all heard about […]

A new study from an international team of researchers suggests that the universe may be “lopsided”, and it could be a huge challenge to our current understanding of the cosmos. The more we have learned about the world and the cosmos, the more we have had to let go of ideas of our own importance. […]

When it comes to love, loyalty, and long-term partnerships, humans may naively think we’re unique, but the animal kingdom is full of surprises and faintly familiar trends. Across species, monogamy is actually the exception rather than the rule, and our own patterns of fidelity are just as complex as the rest. Monogamy comes in many […]

In a world awash with AI slop, you’d be forgiven for thinking Rainbow Mountain was cooked up by an image generator. Rest assured, it isn’t. Vinicunca, also known as Rainbow Mountain or Montaña de Siete Colores, is part of the Andean mountain range in the Cusco region of Peru. This is the same part of […]

Salt crystals formed when a saline lake dried up 1.4 billion years ago trapped air inside, providing a sample of the atmosphere of the day, before photosynthesis was productive enough to make it oxygen-rich. New techniques have allowed that air to be analyzed accurately, providing insight into what to expect of an Earth-like planet’s atmosphere […]

This year has seen significant progress across the fields of Space and Physics, as well as Health and Medicine. In this curated selection of some of the most important experiments of 2025, IFLScience’s Space & Physics Editor, Dr Alfredo Carpineti, and Health & Medicine Editor, Laura Simmons, put forward their picks for the most important […]

The future. It’s terrifying, right? A seemingly endless expanse of possibility, coming for us if we like it or not. If only there was some way to look ahead, to see what 2026 has in store for us. Well, there are actually plenty of ways to “predict the future”, the only question is if any […]

There are plenty of strategies in the animal world for surviving the winter; some, like the winners of Fat Bear Week, pile on the pounds and hunker down, sleeping through to warmer weather, while others brave the cold and extreme temperatures by finding safety and warmth in numbers. And some, like the woolly bear caterpillar, […]

Recently on Reddit, one user asked the question “is showering more hygienic than bathing because you aren’t sitting in a bunch of butthole and foot soup?” While we could debate until your fingers turn to prunes about whether the water in your bath constitutes a foot/bum soup, let’s focus on the cleanliness aspect and overall […]

Xmas is sometimes pictured as a lazy and disrespectful shorthand of the word Christmas; a “politically correct” attempt to erase the name of Christianity’s messiah and replace it with a woke, secular letter. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe […]

Winds from the red giant R Doradus are not powerful enough to spread the molecules that make up rocky planets through the galaxy, a new study has found. Since R Doradus is considered a classic example of the type of star responsible for many of the components of Earth, the finding overthrows our ideas on […]

In just a decade, gravitational wave observatories have changed astronomy. In this short time, we have accumulated hundreds of detections, with many more coming. A wide variety of events have been discovered even among the sub-populations of these cosmic collisions. One record-breaking event has recently been reported, and a new yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper argues that it […]

In 2025, botanist Chris Thorogood shared a video following what he described as a “life-changing” encounter in Sumatra. After days of trekking day and night, his team got to witness the opening of a Rafflesia hasseltii bloom – one of the planet’s most elusive plants and the largest flower on Earth (that also happens to […]

If you’re lucky enough to go hiking in South America’s Andes Mountains, you just might spot a strange weather phenomenon known as nieves penitentes (Spanish for “penitent snows”), so named for their resemblance to the pointed headwear of Christianity’s Holy Week penitents. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or […]