News

Balloons and as yet unidentified flying objects are popping up all over the place at the moment. As well as four (so far) objects being shot down above the US and Canada, China says it is preparing to down one in its air space, while the Uruguayan air force is investigating reports and photos of […]

When you wonder which country has the most time zones, your mind probably goes to the countries with the largest area – Russia, Canada, the USA, China, etc – but that is incorrect. Instead, it’s better to think about the question in terms of history, colonialism, and global extent rather than sheer land mass. Surprisingly, […]

In the second federal probe into Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company, Neuralink has been accused of shipping contaminated brain implants taken from diseased monkeys, in violation of transport regulations. As reported by Reuters, the allegations were made by the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal welfare group, to the Secretary of Transportation Pete […]

All the fun of drinking alcohol without the nasty hangover? It might sound too good to be true, but it’s something that’s currently in the works by world-renowned drug expert Professor David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist from Imperial College London.  IFLScience spoke to Professor Nutt in December 2022 for an episode of our podcast series The […]

Between 1914 and 1917, Sir Ernest Shackleton embarked on a wild plot to cross the entire Antarctic, an ill-fated journey that would ultimately fail but be remembered as one of the greatest feats of endurance in human history. When the Endurance, the ship carrying Shackleton’s party, became stuck in ice in 1915, the group of […]

To build a great empire you need a lot of people, so it’s hardly surprising that the most powerful civilizations in human history were all obsessed with the mysteries of baby-making. Each of these ancient cultures had its own methods to combat libido loss, though some of the aphrodisiacs employed by the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, […]

A small meteor about 1 meter (3 feet) in diameter burned up over the Channel between France and the UK in the early hours of this morning. The object, called Sar 2667, was discovered just a few hours previously and has become only the seventh asteroid impact that has been predicted to happen before hitting […]

The US military has shot down a fourth flying object over North American airspace in just two weeks. It’s currently uncertain what the latest object to be down was, but authorities say they’re not ruling anything out at the moment — not even extraterrestrials.  The airborne object was picked up on radar above Montana on […]

The Russian Space Agency Roscosmos has acknowledged a leak (officially a “depressurization”) on the Progress MS-21 cargo ship (Progress 82), which is currently docked to the International Space Station (ISS). Official statements indicate there is no immediate threat to the Station or crew – but with the effects of a previous leak still unresolved, the […]

In 18th-century England, an unwashed, bearded old man living at the bottom of your garden was the must-have fashion accessory for wealthy elites. The hermits-for-hire would be encouraged to dress as a druid and made to live in a makeshift grotto on the property where the landowner could care for them, conversate with them, or […]

The Sun is having a grand old time at the moment, flinging out plasma, solar flares, and CMEs as it starts to ramp up to the solar maximum. The latest activity saw a sunspot explode in the early hours of this morning, sending out a solar flare and shockwave through the Sun’s atmosphere. Luckily caught […]

This week, researchers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher ancient Babylonian texts, the sky over Hawai’i appears to glitch like the title screen of The Matrix, and we ask the question: is your phone heavier when it’s full of data? Google’s Rival To ChatGPT Makes Embarrassing JWST Error That Wipes $100 Billion Off Shares […]

On February 9, SpaceX performed the static fire test of Starship, its reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle. In such a test the rocket goes nowhere – it’s to test the performance of the engines. Starship has 33 engines, and when it launches will be the most powerful rocket system in history, beating the record set […]

The number of deaths from Monday’s devastating earthquake and aftershocks in Turkey and Syria has now topped 21,000, according to reports. The 7.8-magnitude quake struck southeastern Turkey, not far from the border with Syria, in the early hours, and was followed by a 6.7-magnitude aftershock. A second earthquake, measuring 7.6 in magnitude, hit less than […]

Watch out New Caledonian crows, there is a new challenger for the tool use among non-primate species crown. Goffin’s cockatoos have been found to understand tools’ different utilities and to identify when a single tool will do, and when they need a set. This makes them, alongside chimpanzees, the only known non-human animals to use […]

We’re often told that, since the advent of social media, modern society has become unprecedently toxic. What this view fails to account for, however, is just how petty and vengeful our ancestors were – and while they may not have had tweets available to take it out on the random folk they felt had wronged […]

In the depths of the Congo Rainforest, it’s said that a population of savage giant apes rules supreme. Known as the Bondo ape or Bili ape, murky accounts of these creatures suggest they walk on two feet, stand the size of a grown man, and nest on the ground like gorillas. So the tales go, […]

In 2011, scientists found something unexpected hiding beneath the Amazon. There, 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) beneath the earth was an enormous body of water almost long enough to rival the Amazon and much wider. River Hamza, as Brazil’s National Observatory unofficially named the beast, acts like drainage for the region and was discovered after Petrobras […]

Once described as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”, the Amber Room was an opulent chamber befitting the luxurious surroundings of the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. Designed by sculptor Andreas Schlüter, it is one of the earliest examples of the use of amber in interior design. Such striking, golden décor you’d think would be hard […]

Polygraph tests are everywhere. They spring up in police interrogations, screenings for government jobs – there are even entire reality TV shows based around the results of a single polygraph. It may surprise you to know, then, that the science behind polygraphs is flimsy at best – so flimsy that they should definitely not be […]