Science

Human-caused climate change worsened floods that have killed hundreds of people and displaced millions in Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Sudan this year, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The intense rainy season has unleashed a humanitarian crisis across large areas of the Sahel region bordering the Sahara desert.

One of the world's rarest whale species has seen a slight population rebound, according to data released Tuesday, though experts warn it remains at serious risk of extinction.

The number of North Atlantic right whales rose to 373 in 2023, up four percent from a recent low of 358 individuals in 2020, according to the latest estimates by scientists at the New England Aquarium and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

A large communications satellite has broken up in orbit, affecting users in Europe, Central Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia, and adding to the growing swarm of space junk clouding our planet’s neighborhood.

The Intelsat 33e satellite provided broadband communication from a point some 35,000km above the Indian Ocean, in a geostationary orbit around the equator.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken center stage in basic science. The five winners of the 2024 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics shared a common thread: AI.

Indeed, many scientists – including the Nobel committees – are celebrating AI as a force for transforming science.

Chile has launched a vaccine described as the first of its kind that sterilizes dogs for a year and is expected to be sold in several dozen countries.

The injection prevents sexual behavior and reproduction, offering an alternative to irreversible surgical castration, its creators say.

The Guardian and anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate have revealed the existence of a new network of far-right intellectuals and activists in an undercover investigation. Called the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), this group advocates scientific racism and eugenics. Although it presents itself as having a scientific purpose, some of its figureheads have political ambitions in Germany and elsewhere.

Research shows these kinds of groups are nothing new and are linked to eugenics groups that have been active since the second world war. Defending the scientific legitimacy of eugenics, these organisations worked to keep a discredited intellectual tradition alive.

The world's biggest nature protection conference opens in Colombia Monday with the United Nations chief calling for countries to "convert words into action" and fatten a fund seeking to address biodiversity loss.

On the eve of the official start of the conference, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged "significant investment" in the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) created last year, as well as "commitments to mobilize other sources of public and private finance."

You can't walk very far through a forest in this part of the United States without stumbling upon a mushroom, an eruption from a vast fungal kingdom that all life depends on, but about which we know very little.

Some are tall and thin with a helmet top, others are great flourishes of brain-like folds; some seem like they should be sheltering fairies in a storybook.

Decades of mismanagement of water resources, deforestation, and the fossil fuel-driven crisis of global warming have put "unprecedented stress" on the Earth's water systems, according to a new report, and have thrown the world's hydrological cycle out of balance "for the first time in human history."

The Global Commission on the Economics of Water, affiliated with the Dutch government and comprised of global experts, published the study on Thursday, warning that policymakers must urgently "reframe the hydrological cycle as a global common good," recognizing that it is "deeply interlinked with the climate and biodiversity crises."

World-respected British primate expert Jane Goodall wants a coming United Nations summit on biodiversity to lead to action rather than "words and false promises".

As officials from around 200 countries meet in the Colombian city of Cali for the COP16 meeting starting Monday, the indefatigable zoologist said there was little time left to reverse the downward slide.

A global coral bleaching event that began last year has quickly grown to the largest on record, according to a U.S. agency, with the impacted reef area continuing to grow.

From the beginning of 2023 through October 10, 2024, "roughly 77 percent of the world's reef area has experienced bleaching-level heat stress," Derek Manzello of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told AFP on Friday.

For Deaf people, train travel can be a gamble. On an average day, nothing goes wrong: they catch their train to their destination and carry on with their business.

But when something out of the ordinary happens, the situation can quickly get scary, because most updates are only delivered by audio announcements. A Deaf traveller may miss their train because it was moved to a different platform, or watch as their station whizzes by because the train isn’t stopping there today. They may also remain on a train carriage in an emergency after everyone else has evacuated, and have to be rescued by station staff.

Fall for me as a teenager meant football games, homecoming dresses – and haunted houses. My friends organized group trips to the local fairground, where barn sheds were turned into halls of horror, and masked men nipped at our ankles with (chainless) chain saws as we waited in line, anticipating deeper frights to come once we were inside.

I’m not the only one who loves a good scare. Halloween attractions company America Haunts estimates Americans are spending upward of US$500 million annually on haunted house entrance fees simply for the privilege of being frightened. And lots of fright fans don’t limit their horror entertainment to spooky season, gorging horror movies, shows and books all year long.