News

READER QUESTION: We now know from evolutionary science that humanity has existed in some form or another for around 2 million years or more. Homo sapiens are comparatively new on the block. There were also many other human species, some which we interbred with. The question is then inevitable – when can we claim personhood […]

Well, that didn’t take long. Having picked up what they called Voyager 2’ “Heartbeat” on Wednesday, by Friday NASA had restored communications. It seems you can’t keep a good spacecraft down, and Voyager 2 is undoubtedly one of the best. After visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and returning arguably the richest treasure trove of scientific […]

There are few things more difficult than studying the end of the world, and how humanity would react before it. If you try when the world isn’t ending, then you probably won’t get an accurate impression, given that the world isn’t really ending. If you try while the world is actually ending, people won’t be that […]

This article first appeared in Issue 10 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. If you’re ever out walking and stumble across a geologist with a rock stuck to their tongue, fear not. They’ve not succumbed to the midday heat and started trying to eat their environment, they’ve simply struck fossilized bone. Advertisement In the pursuit of […]

This article first appeared in Issue 10 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. Speak to anyone with siblings and they’ll likely have a rich backlog of dumbassery they’ve witnessed in the company of their brothers or sisters. The quirks of genetics mean that sharing the same parents isn’t enough to guarantee any morphological consistency among siblings, […]

Deadly heatwaves, raging wildfires, and record global temperatures are upon us. But far from the flames, at the southernmost tip of the planet, something just as shocking is unfolding. It’s Antarctic winter, a time when the area of floating sea ice around the continent should be rapidly expanding. This year though, the freeze-up has been […]

An incredibly well-preserved fossil of an ancient Jurassic sea turtle has been uncovered in Germany, the first to have a complete skull, shell, and all four limbs. The marine turtle had a massive head and would have swum through the shallows of a tropical sea that once covered Europe 150 million years ago.  Across the […]

The walls of ancient Egyptian tombs can teach us much about the lives of the pharaohs and their entourages. Tomb paintings showed the deceased and their immediate family members involved in religious activities, the burial itself, or feasting at banquets and hunting in the Nile marshes. But many such tombs were looted in antiquity and […]

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is, ironically, one of the most militarized borders in the world. Laden with barbed wire, electric fences, and landmines, the DMZ serves as a buffer zone between South Korea and North Korea, which have been in conflict (both directly and indirectly) with each other for seven decades. Over the past […]

Gamma-ray bursts are incredible releases of energy. Some last for a fraction of a second, caused by the merger of neutron stars, while others last for many seconds and some even for minutes. These last ones are ultra-long gamma-ray bursts and are defined by a duration of more than 1,000 seconds, which is almost 17 […]

The old joke says that the lottery is a tax on people who can’t do math, however, mathematical analysis can actually be used to try to understand the complex probability involved in such a game. But is there a minimum number of tickets you can buy to guarantee a win? Mathematicians at the University of […]

We at IFLScience love a cave. The deeper, bluer, and more terrifying the better. We are also always keen to celebrate the weirdest wonders planet Earth has to offer, and as geological oddballs go, the Trabuc Caves in southern France take the cake. Situated in Mialet, France, the caves are the largest network of underground […]

Doner Kebabs should be made of lamb, that’s pretty much the standard definition for what goes into the popular post-piss-up nosh (though opinion here is varied). But a recent YouTube video has divided viewers as it not only reveals how the meat is made but also what it is often made of. And let’s be […]

In the opening sequence to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, an ape-like hominin is depicted as the inventor of the first-ever primitive tool, changing the course of human history forever. Half a century after the film’s release, scientists confirmed that the earliest stone implements were indeed manufactured by a species that predated the Homo lineage, […]

Ball lightning is one of those phenomena that could very easily be made up. A floating luminous sphere of plasma that can sometimes explode with no clear explanation, often seen as a marvelous and beautifully eerie event and in other descriptions as a tremendous portent leaving death and destruction in its wake. Also, the explosions […]

Turtles migrate thousands of miles out in the open ocean, charting epic courses in search of food, mates, and nesting grounds. Exactly how they find where they’re going has long puzzled scientists who suspected magnetic fields were involved, but were unsure of the exact mechanism through which turtles were sensing it. We’ve since learned that […]

Astronomers have detected an overabundance of gamma rays with an energy of around a trillion electron volts (TeV) coming from the Sun. Emission from the Sun in such a high energy range was thought to require quite rare circumstances, so the discovery of how common these are will require a rethink of how something this […]

Most people have heard of white noise – a static-like sound produced when an old-fashioned television was on the fritz. But, did you know there are other color sounds? What is white noise? White noise (or broadband noise) is one of the best known of all color noises and the sound is produced by equally […]

History has seen many empires and civilizations rise and fall. Some survive a few decades at most, while others stretch on for centuries. So who lasted the longest? On the face of it, this may seem like a straightforward question, but the answer is anything but. The main issue here is that modern historians disagree […]