Science

The next head of Europe's CERN physics laboratory said Thursday that he favored moving forward with plans for a giant particle collider far more powerful than the collider that discovered the famous "God particle".

"Scientifically, I am convinced it is the right option," Mark Thomson, whom CERN has tapped to be its next director-general, said of preliminary plans for the Future Circular Collider (FCC).

The Brazilian Amazon experienced its smallest amount of yearly deforestation in nearly a decade, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government reported Wednesday, in line with its promise to combat forest loss.

Deforestation fell by 30.6 percent in the year-to-year period beginning in August 2023, according to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

Bangladesh is struggling to tamp down a surge in dengue cases as climate change turns the disease into a year-round crisis, leaving some pediatric wards packed with children squeezed two to a bed.

The Aedes mosquito that spreads dengue -- identifiable by its black and white striped legs -- breeds in stagnant pools, and cases once slowed after the monsoon rains faded.

MSNBC's political reporter Vaughn Hillyard challenged Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Tuesday after he claimed that he didn't want to eliminate vaccines.

Kennedy has spent years opposing vaccines, according to many reports. But when he spoke to Hillyard, he promised to ensure they were accessible to anyone who wanted them.

Former left-wing conspiracy theorist turned Trump ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has big plans now that the twice-impeached former president is now heading back to the White House.

NPR's Steve Inskeep reports that Kennedy told him during an interview on Wednesday that the new Trump administration "will recommend getting fluoride out of drinking water" and will also provide consumers with more "information" about vaccines.

How did everything begin? It’s a question that humans have pondered for thousands of years. Over the last century or so, science has homed in on an answer: the Big Bang.

This describes how the Universe was born in a cataclysmic explosion almost 14 billion years ago. In a tiny fraction of a second, the observable universe grew by the equivalent of a bacterium expanding to the size of the Milky Way. The early universe was extraordinarily hot and extremely dense. But how do we know this happened?

Let’s look first at the evidence. In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that distant galaxies are moving away from each other, leading to the realisation that the universe is expanding. If we were to wind the clock back to the birth of the cosmos, the expansion would reverse and the galaxies would fall on top of each other 14 billion years ago. This age agrees nicely with the ages of the oldest astronomical objects we observe.

The idea was initially met with scepticism – and it was actually a sceptic, the English astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the name. Hoyle sarcastically dismissed the hypothesis as a “Big Bang” during an interview with BBC radio on March 28 1949.

The world's first wooden satellite has blasted off on a SpaceX rocket, its Japanese developers said Tuesday, part of a resupply mission to the International Space Station.

Scientists at Kyoto University expect the wooden material to burn up when the device re-enters the atmosphere -- potentially providing a way to avoid generating metal particles when a retired satellite returns to Earth.

Someone following the 2024 presidential election could have seen the following two videos on social media. One shows a man holding a bin full of mail-in ballots entering a building. The other, from before Joe Biden withdrew from the race and labeled “Migrants talk about 2024 election,” shows a man interviewing several people in Spanish, all of whom answer that they plan to vote for Biden.

These videos purport to show different types of illegal election activity: ballot harvesting and noncitizen voting. Both videos are real, not AI-generated, and both show real people behaving authentically, not acting. They also do not show the events they claim to represent.

Life in the digital world can be rewarding. It’s convenient to order groceries for pickup, share photographs or music, and keep in touch with family and friends, no matter the distance. However, it can also be draining. The feeling of being constantly “on” and productive has driven people to reconsider their balance in the saturated digital world.

More than 70% of American adults are concerned about how technology affects their mental health and personal relationships. This worry is reinforced through media that point to people’s unhealthy habits with social media and phones.

The fastest animal on land is the cheetah, capable of reaching top speeds of 104 kilometres per hour. In the water, the fastest animals are yellowfin tuna and wahoo, which can reach speeds of 75 and 77 km per hour respectively. In the air, the title of the fastest level flight (excluding diving) goes to the white-throated needletail swift, at more than 112 km per hour.

What do all of these speedy creatures have in common? None of them are particularly big, nor particularly small for the group of animals they represent. In fact, they are all intermediately sized.

Oxygen, the molecule that supports intelligent life as we know it, is largely made by plants. Whether underwater or on land, they do this by photosynthesising carbon dioxide. However, a recent study demonstrates that oxygen may be produced without the need for life at depths where light cannot reach.

The authors of a recent publication in Nature Geoscience were collecting samples from deep ocean sediments to determine the rate of oxygen consumption at the seafloor through things like organisms or sediments that can react with oxygen. But in several of their experiments, they actually found oxygen was increasing as opposed to decreasing as they would have expected. This left them questioning how this oxygen was being produced.

News reports of so-called forever chemicals in drinking water have left people worried about the safety of tap and bottled water. But recent research has shown there are ways to significantly reduce the levels of these harmful chemicals in our water.

Per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a wide range of synthetic chemicals that are used in many everyday products such as cosmetics, fabrics and food packaging (where they are used to make products resistant to water and grease), as well as in fire-fighting foams.