CNN – World

By Mitchell McCluskey, Caitlin Hu and Kathleen Magramo, CNN Chris Hipkins, New Zealand’s education minister, is bidding to replace Jacinda Ardern as prime minister, after her shock resignation announcement earlier this week. Hipkins emerged as the only candidate to be nominated for the leadership of the ruling Labour party on Saturday morning. The Labour Party

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Scientists were able to create a virtual lightning rod using a large, powerful laser atop a mountain in Switzerland, successfully diverting the path of lightning strikes. Lightning deflection technology hasn’t changed much since Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod in 1752. The Franklin rod, or a pointed metal mast on top

By Laura Paddison, CNN Climate change is sending the world hurtling towards a series of catastrophic tipping points, which risk setting off feedback loops that lock the world into irreversible climate change. That’s the bad news. The good news, however, is that there is also a series of “positive tipping points,” according to an analysis

By Jackie Wattles, CNN SpaceX fired a new GPS satellite into orbit on behalf of the US military on Wednesday, continuing an effort to bolster the constellation of global positioning and navigation satellites that underpin smartphone apps, wartime operations and more. The GPS satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:24 a.m. ET

By Katie Hunt, CNN Paleontologists working in central India have made a rare discovery — a fossilized dinosaur hatchery with 92 nests and 256 eggs belonging to colonies of giant plant-eating titanosaurs. A study of the nests and their bowling ball-size eggs has revealed intimate details about the lives of the colossal, long-necked sauropods that

By Rachel Ramirez, CNN As humans fiddle with the planet’s thermostat, scientists are piecing together Greenland’s history by drilling ice cores to analyze how the climate crisis has impacted the island country over the years. The further down they drilled, the further they went back in time, allowing them to separate which temperature fluctuations were

By Jorge Engels, Philip Wang and Emma Tucker, CNN Romanian authorities said they have seized nearly $4 million worth of assets belonging to controversial internet personality Andrew Tate over the past week as he and his brother are investigated on allegations of human trafficking and rape. Roughly 18 million lei, equivalent to $3,942,700, has been

By Hadas Gold, Michael Schwartz and Amir Tal, CNN Tens of thousands of people protested in Tel Aviv Saturday night against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government’s proposed changes to the Israeli judicial system. Despite pouring rain over the city, police estimated that more than 80,000 people flooded central Tel Aviv’s HaBima square

By Katie Hunt, CNN A defunct NASA satellite has fallen back to Earth after 38 years orbiting the planet. The Earth Radiation Budget Satellite, known as ERBS, was launched in 1984 aboard space shuttle Challenger. Until 2005, data from ERBS helped researchers investigate how Earth absorbed and radiated energy from the Sun, and measured ozone,

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Welcome to a new year, where fresh wonder already awaits. Rome has often been called the Eternal City. Ancient Romans took pride in their metropolis and viewed it as an unshakable pinnacle, and poets such as Virgil and Ovid made similar references in their works to perpetuate this idea. The imperial

By Laura Paddison, CNN Glaciers are set to lose substantially more ice and contribute more to sea level rise than current scientific estimates project, according to a new report. Using new satellite data to model different climate change scenarios, researchers found that up to half of glaciers could be lost by the end of the

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Walter Cunningham, a retired NASA astronaut and pilot of the first crewed flight in the space agency’s famed Apollo program, died early Tuesday morning at the age of 90, NASA said. Cunningham was one of the earliest members of NASA’s human spaceflight program as a member of its third astronaut class,

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The new year kicks off with the Quadrantids, one of 12 annual meteor showers. The celestial event is typically among the strongest meteor showers and is expected to peak overnight January 3 and 4, according to the American Meteor Society. Sky-gazers in the Northern Hemisphere can best view the shower between

By Amy Woodyatt, CNN For the love of all things sacred, please stop saying “GOAT” — unless you are shouting about a herd of mid-size animals. At least, that’s how a team of judges from Michigan’s Lake Superior State University feel about the term — an acronym for the “Greatest of All Time” — as

By Delia Gallagher, Niamh Kennedy and Emma Tucker, CNN Former Pope Benedict XVI, who died Saturday in a monastery in the Vatican at the age of 95, asked for forgiveness for those he has “wronged” in the spiritual testament published following his death. Benedict, who was the first pontiff in almost 600 years to resign

By Kendall Trammell, CNN Get out of your East Coast mentality, America. Not everyone starts their New Year when you do. The Pacific Island nations of Tonga, Samoa and Kiribati were the first to see in the new year — when it was still 5 a.m. on December 31 on the East Coast of the

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Mars may seem like a dry, desolate place, but the red planet transforms into an otherworldly wonderland in winter, according to a new video shared by NASA. It’s late winter in Mars’ Northern Hemisphere, where the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter are exploring an ancient river delta that once fed into

By Ashley Strickland and Jackie Wattles, CNN This year, humankind glimpsed the universe in ways that were never before possible, and space missions took unprecedented leaps forward in unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos. We witnessed the first mission to the International Space Station funded entirely by space tourists. A new space-based internet service played

By Marcia Reverdosa, Maija-Liisa Ehlinger and Heather Chen, CNN The son and daughter of Brazilian football legend Pelé have taken to Instagram to post moving tributes and pictures of their father as they spend Christmas at his side at the Albert Einstein Jewish Hospital in São Paulo. “We continue to be here, in fight and

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Officials at NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, are working to decide how to bring home several people at the International Space Station after a Russian Soyuz spacecraft sprang a leak last week. None of the seven people currently on board the ISS — including three Roscosmos cosmonauts, three NASA astronauts

By Ashley Strickland and Jackie Wattles, CNN The International Space Station got its second solar power boost in a month as two NASA astronauts carried out a spacewalk to install a new solar panel. The event comes after a piece of wayward space garbage interfered with plans to carry out the spacewalk Wednesday. NASA was

By Danya Gainor, CNN The National Marine Aquarium, the largest display for sea life in the United Kingdom, has officially welcomed Heidi, an olive ridley turtle rescued in 2018 from the Maldives. Heidi had embarked on a 26-hour journey to the aquarium in Plymouth, England, at the start of November and has spent his time

By Ashley Strickland, CNN After making groundbreaking discoveries about the mysterious interior of the red planet, the InSight lander’s mission has officially ended. The stationary lander spent nearly 1,500 days on Mars. Mission managers declared the program’s end on Wednesday after the lander failed to respond to two messages from mission control at NASA’s Jet

By Katie Hunt, CNN The fast-expanding field of ancient DNA, formally known as paleogenetics, came of age in 2022, earning its pioneering scientist Svante Pääbo a Nobel prize for medicine and physiology. Pääbo, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, developed methods to recover, sequence and analyze ancient DNA from

By Elizabeth Wolfe, Tavleen Tarrant and Jay Croft, CNN Five people were killed in a shooting at a condominium in a Toronto suburb Sunday night, police said, a “terrible” crime that came amid Canada’s efforts to tighten its gun control laws. After responding to an active shooting call about 7:20 p.m. at the residential building

By Heather Chen, Lindsay Isaac and Jennifer Hauser, CNN One of Iran’s best-known actresses has been arrested days after she criticized the execution of a man who was involved in the nationwide protests that have swept the country since September. Taraneh Alidoosti, who starred in the 2016 Oscar-winning film, “The Salesman,” had condemned the hanging

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Some of our favorite space missions are closing out the year in a big way. Artemis I made a literal splash(down) when it successfully returned to Earth on December 11. Engineers are studying the data collected by the Orion spacecraft now to prepare for the first crewed flight of Artemis II

By Ivana Kottasová, CNN The global energy crisis caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine has pushed global demand for coal — the most polluting of all fossil fuels — to a record high in 2022, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Friday. Demand for coal is set to grow 1.2% and top 8 billion

By Ashley Strickland, CNN When NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft slammed into the tiny asteroid Dimorphos, the impact certainly left a mark. The intentional collision, which took place on September 26 as a test of asteroid deflection technology, displaced more than 2 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of rocks and dust from the asteroid

By Rachel Ramirez, CNN The world’s largest whales are more than just astonishing creatures. Much like the ocean, soil and forests, whales can help save humanity from the accelerating climate crisis by sequestering and storing planet-heating carbon emissions, researchers say. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, climate researchers

By Ashley Strickland, CNN A NASA spacecraft is gearing up for the first of a series of close encounters with the most volcanic place in the solar system. The Juno spacecraft will fly by Jupiter’s moon Io on Thursday, December 15. The maneuver will be one of nine flybys of Io made by Juno over

By Ashley Strickland, CNN A towering whirlwind of dust passed right over the Perseverance rover as it explored the site of an ancient lake on Mars — and the rover recorded the first sounds of this Martian dust devil using its microphone. Dust devils, or dust whirlwinds, are common on Mars, and they’re part of

By Taylor Nicioli, CNN The best chance to see the strongest meteor shower of the year is on its way this week. The Geminids, known for bright, intensely colored meteors, have been streaking across the night sky since late November, and the shower will peak the night of December 13 through December 14, according to

By Jackie Wattles, CNN The Artemis I mission — a 25½-day uncrewed test flight around the moon meant to pave the way for future astronaut missions — is coming to an end as NASA’s Orion spacecraft is expected to make an ocean splashdown Sunday. The spacecraft is finishing the final stretch of its journey, closing

Story by Reuters The effects of human activity from climate change to pollution are “devastating” marine life, with nearly a tenth of underwater plants and animals assessed so far threatened with extinction, the latest Red List of Threatened Species showed on Friday. The report’s release coincides with a UN summit on nature in Montreal where

By Scottie Andrew, CNN What’s in a swear? The world’s filthiest words typically refer to something vulgar or taboo, for one. But there’s something else swears across the world’s languages have in common. They’re all missing the more melodic consonant sounds you’re more likely to hear in a lullaby than in a colorful reaction to