Science

A massive ball of plasma and accompanying magnetic field ejected from the Sun is expected to strike Earth on Thursday morning, potentially triggering auroras as far south as Alabama, according to US forecasters.

It comes as the Sun approaches -- or is possibly at -- the peak of its 11-year cycle, when activity is heightened.

Wild populations of monitored animal species have plummeted over 70 percent in the last half-century, according to the latest edition of a landmark assessment by WWF published on Thursday.

Featuring data from 35,000 populations of more than 5,000 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish, the WWF Living Planet Index shows accelerating declines across the globe.

Americans David Baker and John Jumper, together with Briton Demis Hassabis, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for work revealing the secrets of proteins through computing and artificial intelligence.

The three were honored for cracking the code of the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life, with the jury hailing their work as holding "enormous potential" in a range of fields.

A U.S. scientist who won the 2024 Nobel physics prize for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence said Tuesday he found recent advances in the technology "very unnerving" and warned of possible catastrophe if not kept in check.

John Hopfield, a professor emeritus at Princeton, joined co-winner Geoffrey Hinton in calling for a deeper understanding of the inner workings of deep-learning systems to prevent them from spiraling out of control.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones accused Vice President Kamala Harris of having the ability to control hurricanes through so-called "weather weapons."

Jones kicked off his Tuesday broadcast by promising to explain how he knew the government could control the weather.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick on Tuesday posted footage taken from the Dragon Endeavour spacecraft showing Hurricane Milton as it barreled toward the Florida coast.

Writing on Twitter, Dominick explained how he got the opportunity to capture an orbital view of the hurricane.

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two scientists on Tuesday for discoveries that laid the groundwork for the artificial intelligence used by hugely popular tools such as ChatGPT.

British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton, known as a "godfather of AI," and US physicist John Hopfield were given the prize for "discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks," the Nobel jury said.

An "invisibility cloak", an atomic force microscope or quantum computing are some of the scientific achievements that could win a Nobel prize in physics Tuesday.

The award, to be announced at 11:45 am (0945 GMT) in Stockholm, is the second Nobel of the season after the Medicine Prize on Monday was awarded to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun.

Deforestation continued last year at a rate far beyond pledges to end the practice by 2030, according to a major study published Tuesday.

Forests nearly the size of Ireland were lost in 2023, according to two dozen research organizations, NGOs and advocacy groups, with 6.37 million hectares (15.7 million acres) of trees felled and burned.

Veteran meteorologist and hurricane expert John Morales of South Florida's NBC 6 became emotional when he examined the latest data on Hurricane Milton as it barreled toward Florida.

Monday afternoon, meteorologists upgraded the storm to a Category 5, the strongest and most powerful hurricane.

Increasingly intense floods and droughts are a "distress signal" of what is to come as climate change makes the planet's water cycle ever more unpredictable, the United Nations warned Monday.

Last year the world's rivers were their driest for more than 30 years, glaciers suffered their largest loss of ice mass in half a century and there was also a "significant" number of floods, the UN's World Meteorological Organization said in a report.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded on Monday to two US scientists for discovering microRNA, a previously unknown type of genetic switch which is hoped can pave the way for new medical breakthroughs.

But while several treatments and tests are under development using microRNAs against cancer, heart disease, viruses and other illnesses, none have actually yet reached patients.