News

What’s below the ice of Antarctica? Drill down into the Earth’s biggest desert to find out, and you’ll probably come away with the answer “more ice” – and that’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s certainly not the whole story. “The surface of Antarctica is pretty harsh. We see very little to no life at the […]

Modern cars are, that one brand notwithstanding, safer than ever before.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Don’t believe us? The numbers don’t lie: 100 years ago, there were around 18 motor vehicle-related deaths per 100 million miles driven; in the mid-1960s, […]

Spotted a pretty feather on the ground? It might be tempting to pick it up and pop it in your pocket, but that’s not as innocent an idea as it seems – you’d be committing a crime. The reason why takes us all the way back to the late 1800s, in the Gilded Age. In […]

They say “technology marches on,” but if we’re honest, that march has evolved into more of a sprint. Whatever you buy it’ll be mere minutes before a more up-to-date, faster, and higher-definition version is available, but is it worth it? After all, if you’re still using your humble human body to take it all in, […]

Comet 3I/ATLAS is the third known interstellar object to cross the Solar System, and in a matter of days it will pass the central point in its foray around our corner of the universe. On October 29, the comet will reach 203 million kilometers (126 million miles) from the Sun. That is about 36 percent […]

The great migrations of animals across the African savannah or birds between hemispheres are dwarfed by the movement of humans, a new study has calculated. That’s a consequence of humans and domesticated animals dominating biomass on land. Despite winter flights from colder climates to the Mediterranean or Caribbean, humans do not present as impressive a […]

Researchers have observed rats taking bats from the air for the first time. These adventurous hunters were recorded showing this behavior on a ledge outside a cave not far from Hamburg, snatching up their bat snacks at night. While an impressive skill, given that they are virtually blind in the darkness, the invasive rats could […]

Sci-fi movies and TV shows love to place a planet inside a binary system. In reality, a planet shouldn’t be able go around two stars that orbit each other closely. That configuration should just be too unstable. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the universe that it should not happen, because we keep finding them. Now, […]

A group of spiky reptiles living on Clarion Island off the coast of Mexico has escaped extermination after it was discovered that they are not the invaders they had been labeled. Known as spiny-tailed iguanas (Ctenosaura sp.), it had been assumed they were introduced to the island by humans, but oh how wrong we were. […]

It is a good rule of thumb to try to see meteors with the naked eye. They move too quickly and they are too ephemeral to catch them with a telescope. Still, all good rules have exceptions, and this latest exception created a stunning mirage around Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon), as a red helix seems […]

Men, on average, are about 13 centimeters (5 inches) taller than women, with sex hormones and growth genes thought to be the main drivers of this height difference. However, while numerous studies have sought to identify these male-specific genes, the long and short of it is that we still don’t really understand the genetic mechanisms […]

Scientists could be on course to develop the first treatment with a chance of controlling and even reversing liver fibrosis, thanks to a discovery from a rather surprising source. Pigments extracted from the henna tree Lawsonia inermis, used for generations for coloring hair and decorating skin, have proven to be a promising drug candidate in […]

A popular mushroom species can be trained to remember past electrical states, allowing it to act as both a memory device and data processor known as an organic memristor. Scaling performance may be a challenge, but theoretically, the discovery opens the way to computers that consume fewer resources and might eventually be cheaper and certainly […]

Anytime global warming or climate change get mentioned online, you can expect a bunch of comments claiming to be able to disprove the whole concept, at least in relation to human activity. Most of these have been debunked, not just in detailed scientific papers, but by plenty of popular science websites, IFLScience included. There’s at […]

Did you know the world’s largest waterfall is underwater? Us neither – every day’s a school day as they say. The tallest waterfall on Earth stands at a massive 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles), next to which Angel Falls, the tallest uninterrupted waterfall over land, pales in comparison. So, where is this underwater behemoth? The rest […]

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 interested in […]

Issue 40 (November 2025) of CURIOUS is out now, bringing you science highlights for the month plus deep dives into intriguing topics, interviews, exclusives, diary dates, and explanations for some of Earth’s most perplexing natural phenomena and landscapes. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the […]

Fridges are kind of a triumph of design. There are shelves; there are crisper drawers; there are little spaces for individual eggs; a light that comes on only when you open the door and, if you’re feeling fancy, even an ice machine. But not everything about your fridge is so well thought-out. The shelves inside the […]

Mars is a desert planet with dunes, canyons, and surprisingly fast winds. It is very cold, though, so it does not often get compared to desert planets of fiction, like Tatooine of Star Wars or Arrakis of Dune. But a mysterious feature made astronomers consider a parallel with the Dune planet, gullies carved in Martian […]

This week, almost 90 percent of US adults have at least one risk factor for a newly defined medical condition, the ancient Jomon of Japan might be one of the only groups of people outside Africa who had virtually no Denisovan DNA, and Iceland records its first-ever sighting of mosquitos in the country, meaning there’s […]