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Human classification, from celestial bodies to living organisms, often starts with their morphology. Depending on how something looks, it gets a certain label. This is all well and good until you find the exceptions, so you expand the category. But what happens when you find an exception to the exception? Well, you get something like […]

On a small stretch of land near the Kenya-Somalia border lives the world’s rarest antelope, a curious-looking, “four-eyed” animal called the hirola that once roamed the region’s grasslands in the thousands. Today, it’s on the brink of extinction – but how exactly did it get there? Formally known as Beatragus hunteri, these bizarre members of […]

In 2000, the famous 1997 Levitating Frog experiment hopped its way to an Ig Nobel Prize, thanks to Dr. Andre Geim and his team, who figured out how to make a frog, a cricket, and a few plants float using magnetism. Geim would later win a real Nobel Prize for graphene, but that’s another story. […]

People on social media have noticed an odd quirk in the iPhone calendar: if you scroll back to October 1582, you’ll see it jump straight from the 4th to the 15th, skipping ten entire days. It’s not a glitch or a hidden joke from Apple’s developers; those ten days genuinely never existed. The days weren’t […]

A military spacecraft launched 56 years ago was moved from its orbit – and nobody is quite sure who did it, or why. In 1969 the UK launched Skynet-1A, a military communications satellite placed in orbit above the east coast of Africa in order to relay information to British armed forces. It stopped working due […]

For reasons that nobody is fully sure of, society seems to have decided that Real Men Eat Meat. It should perhaps be taken as proof that the universe has a sense of irony, therefore, that it seems a vegan diet might be best for preventing that most manly of health problems: erectile dysfunction. Why? Well, […]

This week, the world’s first butt-drag fossil shows a 126,000-year-old hyrax scooting across the ground, the first-ever living recipient of a pig-to-human liver transplant survived for 171 days, and a new study is questioning evidence of the long-assumed “oldest human habit”. Finally, we explore a “truly exceptional” 125-million-year-old two-headed reptile fossil. Create an IFLScience account […]

If you’ve ever used public transport, you may be a little confused as to why trains are one of the only vehicles (looking at you, too, buses) that don’t have seatbelts. Cars have seatbelts, planes have seatbelts, so why not trains? There are a few reasons, and not all of them are obvious. To start […]

The Atacama Desert in Chile might be one of the driest places on the planet, but even this barren landscape can occasionally bloom into a sea of colorful flowers – and right now it’s at its peak. The desert bloom phenomenon sees a vast and vibrant carpet of flowers appear in the world’s driest nonpolar […]

When trying to identify the nature of dark matter, sometimes it’s the things it doesn’t do that tell us the most, like turning the center of the Earth liquid. A new study has shown that if some models and particle masses for dark matter were correct, a “dark inferno” would be released within the Earth’s […]

The largest mammal in North America is also one of its longest-standing residents. Its ancestors arrived on the continent hundreds of thousands of years ago, and their descendants have lived there ever since – that is, until humans nearly caused them to disappear entirely. The iconic animals we were so close to driving extinct? Bison. […]

Today, the largest land animal in North America is the bison, which can clock in at nearly 4 meters (13 feet) in length, and weigh as much as two grand pianos. But as much as we love bison, they pale in comparison to the biggest terrestrial animal ever to have roamed the continent: Alamosaurus. The […]

This week on Break It Down: 3I/ATLAS is a 10 billion-year-old time capsule, a world-first fossil captures the moment a rock hyrax dragged its butt 126,000 years ago, a living person received a pig liver transplant for the first time, the “oldest human habit” might not be what it seems, a rare gynandromorph spider is […]

Comet 3I/ATLAS is the third interstellar visitor and continues to be a treasure trove of information about the condition of its formation. As it speeds through the Solar System, telescopes have been pointed at it, revealing new tidbits about this fascinating space rock. Just recently, we have learned about the unusual ratio of nickel to […]

Marking a defining moment in the “historic shift” away from fossil fuels, renewable energy surpassed coal to become the world’s largest source of electricity in the first half of 2025. The latest report from Ember shows that solar and wind power grew faster than global electricity demand, with solar alone covering 83 percent of the […]

In 2021, the Saint Louis Zoo in Missouri lost a very special resident. She was a snake, but not just any snake. You see, this ball python was the oldest snake in the world in zoo care. She lived to a staggering 62 years old, but not before doing something remarkable just a year before […]

Something may be stirring in the world’s largest oceanic current. New research suggests that this vast conveyor belt of cold water around the South Pole could shift its location over the coming centuries, if not millennia, potentially reshaping the planet’s climate and ecosystems. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is a vast current of cold seawater […]

When we look at maps of the world, landmasses seem to be well distributed. Sure, there is more water than landmasses, but they are all spread out. Well, not really. If you grab a globe and turn it towards the Pacific Ocean, you can angle it in a way that the only thing you can […]

While most of the world measures temperatures in Celsius and the United States clings to Fahrenheit as if its hands were frozen, scientists usually prefer Kelvin. A degree Kelvin marks the same difference in temperature as a degree Celsius, but the starting point is 273.15 degrees lower. If you think that sounds like an odd […]

Astronomers have broken two records in one thanks to an incredible serendipitous alignment of cosmic objects. It’s the highest resolution detection of a gravitationally lensed radio arc, and within it, a small kink indicating the presence of a small gravitational mass – the smallest ever seen, creating this effect at cosmic distances. The rest of […]