Science

Plastic pollution litters our seas, our air and even our bodies, but negotiators face an uphill battle next week to agree on the world's first treaty aimed at ending the problem.

Countries will have a week in South Korea's Busan from Monday to round off two years of negotiations.

Scientists said Thursday they have taken the first ever close-up image of a star outside of the Milky Way, capturing a blurry shot of a dying behemoth 2,000 times bigger than the Sun.

Roughly 160,000 light years from Earth, the star WOH G64 sits in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our home Milky Way.

Physicists have long grappled with the question of why the universe was able to support the evolution of intelligent life. The values of the many forces and particles, represented by some 30 so-called fundamental constants, all seem to line up perfectly to enable it.

Take gravity. If it were much weaker, matter would struggle to clump together to form stars, planets and living beings. And if it were stronger, that would also create problems. Why are we so lucky?

The normally straight-faced CNN host Jake Tapper couldn't hold back his skepticism after airing a newly unearthed video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggesting the U.S. government secretly orchestrated the COVID-19 pandemic.

The video, revealed by The Bulwark on Tuesday, shows Kennedy — President-elect Donald Trump's choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services — talking about the pandemic, and that "a lot of it feels very planned to me."

A little-noticed change to South Africa’s national health research guidelines, published in May of this year, has put the country on an ethical precipice. The newly added language appears to position the country as the first to explicitly permit the use of genome editing to create genetically modified children.

Heritable human genome editing has long been hotly contested, in large part because of its societal and eugenic implications. As experts on the global policy landscape who have observed the high stakes and ongoing controversies over this technology — one from an academic standpoint (Françoise Baylis) and one from public interest advocacy (Katie Hasson) — we find it surprising that South Africa plans to facilitate this type of research.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) slammed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) conspiracy theory that Jewish space lasers ignited forest fires in California.

During a House Oversight Committee hearing Thursday, Moskowitz said he agreed with the decision to dismiss an employee of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, after she suggested that homes displaying support for President-elect Donald Trump should be avoided while providing hurricane relief.

Beliefs are convictions of reality that we accept as true. They provide us with the basic mental scaffolding to understand and engage meaningfully in our world. Beliefs remain fundamental to our behavior and identity, but are not well understood.

Delusions, on the other hand, are fixed, usually false, beliefs that are strongly held, but not widely shared. In previous work, we proposed that studying delusions provides unique insights into the cognitive nature of belief and its dysfunction.

Once every spring, a few days after the full moon, corals of the great barrier reef release eggs and sperm simultaneously – a phenomenon so spectacular it can be seen from space.

Not only does the Moon’s gravitational attraction interact with the Sun to cause our tides (ebb and flow), its orbit around Earth generates different Moon phases of varying luminosity. Scientists think the Moon’s light at a certain point each spring may provide a cue to corals that the conditions are right to release eggs and sperm.

Parts of the Great Barrer Reef have suffered the highest coral mortality on record, Australian research showed Tuesday, with scientists fearing the rest of it has suffered a similar fate.

The Australian Institute of Marine Science said surveys of 12 reefs found up to 72 percent coral mortality, thanks to a summer of mass bleaching, two cyclones, and flooding.

Black holes don’t have many identifying features. They come in one color (black) and one shape (spherical).

The main difference between black holes is mass: some weigh about as much as a star like our Sun, while others weigh around a million times more. Stellar-mass black holes can be found anywhere in a galaxy, but the really big ones (known as supermassive black holes) are found in the cores of galaxies.

When I started my research on the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection, a librarian leaned over my laptop one day to share some lore. “Legend has it,” she said, “John James Audubon really collected the skulls Morton claimed as his own.” Her voice was lowered so as not to disturb the other scholars in the hushed archive.

As my work progressed, I uncovered no evidence to substantiate her whispered claim. Audubon had collected human skulls, several of which he then passed on to Morton. But birds and ornithology remained Audubon’s passion.

Think back to a time when you needed a quick answer, maybe for a recipe or a DIY project. A few years ago, most people’s first instinct was to “Google it.” Today, however, many people are more likely to reach for ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational AI, which is changing the way people look for information.

Rather than simply providing lists of websites, ChatGPT gives more direct, conversational responses. But can ChatGPT do more than just answer straightforward questions? Can it actually help people be more creative?

China is expected to push forward in its quest to build the first lunar base on Friday, launching an in-space experiment to test whether the station's bricks could be made from the Moon's own soil.

Brick samples will blast off aboard a cargo rocket heading for China's Tiangong space station, part of Beijing's mission to put humans on the Moon by 2030 and build a permanent base there by 2035.