News

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a clutch of like-minded folks are constructing a monumental clock that’s designed to last for 10,000 years. Its purpose, apparently, is to be an icon of “long-term thinking” and inspire people to dream far beyond the limited scope of a human lifetime. The project is the brainchild of computer scientist […]

The birthplaces of stars have never looked this good. Thanks to the keen infrared eye of JWST, which can see through some of the gas and dust that make up star-forming clouds, humans have gotten new insights into some incredible nebulae – and with beautiful pictures, too. The latest one is an image of N79 […]

A firm hoping to place the first private space station into low-Earth orbit has taken its latest steps towards that goal, inflating and then blowing up a test module. Sierra Space, based in Colorado, designed an expandable module which is only inflated to its full capacity once it is in orbit. The Large Integrated Flexible […]

Representing a 3D world on a 2D map is always going to end up with some issues and some compromises. No matter how accurate you try to make it, you will end up with stretched areas, squashed countries, or else parts of the map cut out altogether. The map you are likely familiar with is […]

The emergence of treponemal diseases, the unpleasant gang of illnesses that includes syphilis and yaws, has been a long-standing mystery that’s been hotly debated for decades. Thanks to a new study, the bodies of four prehistoric people found in Brazil have recently added an intriguing piece to the puzzle. Scientists at the University of Zürich […]

Of the many alternative ways the universe might end, nothing is as scary as “false vacuum decay”. This scenario is based on the idea that a fundamental field in the universe is not at its lowest possible state. Under that “false” stable region, our own universe has grown. The field might spontaneously jump into a […]

A dead body that’s been gnawed upon by cats and dogs might sound like a particularly grisly cold open to an episode of Bones, but pet-scavenged bodies aren’t just the stuff of police procedurals – your pets would probably eat you if you died. Thankfully, if that death happens to have occurred under criminal circumstances, […]

A reader has a question, which seems like it’ll be fun to discuss. “In space, an object in motion stays in motion right?” the IFLScience reader asked. “So if you banged a tuning fork in space would it produce the vibrations forever?” Without looking into it, you probably instinctively know that this shouldn’t be possible. […]

An 11-year-old boy who was born with congenital hearing loss has become the first patient to receive a new gene therapy procedure, and it’s allowed him to hear sounds for the first time in his life. “Gene therapy for hearing loss is something that we physicians and scientists in the world of hearing loss have […]

NASA has announced the winners of its 2024 funding for pioneering concepts in space exploration. Highlights include a fixed-wing plane to soar over Mars, a swarm of tiny probes to explore nearby star systems, and a set of telescopic dishes with a baseline the size of the Solar System.  NASA Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) grants […]

Okay. We’re all grownups here. We can admit when we’ve made a mistake. Despite previous headlines, it turns out multivitamins may not be useless after all.  “Cognitive decline is among the top health concerns for most older adults,” said Chirag Vyas, an instructor in investigation at the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and […]

Chickpeas have been grown on the Moon. Well, not on the Moon exactly – not even in the sense that one couple had sex “on the Moon” – but they have been grown using simulated lunar dust, replicating samples brought back by the Apollo missions. Assuming this work can be extended to other plant species, […]

On February 6, 2023, one of the worst earthquake sequences of the 21st century rocked Turkey and Syria, killing over 59,000 people and displacing many more. It can be hard to imagine the colossal geological forces that produce these disasters, but a new collection of photography from the wake of the disaster manages to illustrate […]

In 1997, a 14-year-old boy at Eagle Rock Junior High School in Idaho Falls began telling his classmates about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. “Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide […]

Where did life begin? While musing over this question in 1871, Charles Darwin suggested that the origins of life may have emerged from a “warm little pond” on the surface of the primordial Earth. Since then, scientists have learned that the complex molecules of life can indeed emerge from inorganic materials found in certain bodies […]

As a science website, it’s easy to get bogged down in questions like “Is there life on Enceladus?” and “Where are all the aliens?”, when people are struggling with more basic (but fun!) questions like “Why can’t we power our cars with magnets?” and “If you fell from a skyscraper on the Moon, would you […]

If you thought aliens in a Miami strip mall would take the title for “weirdest thing to happen in Florida” this month, you might have to think again – it is Florida, after all. Thankfully extraterrestrial life isn’t falling from the sky and into GameStop for a quick browse, but with chilly temperatures hitting the […]

We just love a mystery egg story, and an absolute cracker was dredged up from the deep this week as researchers announced the deepest free-living flatworms ever found following the discovery of some jet-black eggs. The egg capsules, or cocoons, were found in the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench, northwestern Pacific, and mark the first time we’ve achieved […]

Animal vision comes in quite literally all the colors, from those that can see the ultraviolet spectrum to those that see the world in grayscale. As each animal perceives color differently, it is of immense value to ecologists and zoologists to be able to see the world in the same way as their study subject. […]

A newly discovered planet is a record-breaker in many ways, but the one for which it is likely to be remembered is heat so extreme that one hemisphere is lava. The HD 63433 system, also known as (TOI 1726), interests astronomers because it is a relatively close star (73 light years away) that resembles a […]