CNN – World

By Rob Picheta and Hafsa Khalil, CNN The US could be vaccinating infants, toddlers and preschoolers against Covid-19 within days. Vaccine advisers at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are meeting Wednesday to discuss extending the emergency use authorization of Moderna’s and Pfizer/BioNTech’s shots to those aged six months and older. It comes a day

By Katie Hunt, CNN Catnip isn’t just intensely pleasurable for cats. It’s also practical. When your feline friend rubs, rolls against, chews and licks catnip leaves, it’s not just playful high jinks sparked by the plant’s intoxicating qualities. The behavior leads to the release of certain compounds that might protect cats from pesky mosquitoes, according

CNN Editorial Research Here is a look at the life of Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, son of late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Personal Birth date: June 25, 1972 Birth place: Tripoli, Libya Birth name: Saif al-Islam Gadhafi Father: Moammar Gadhafi, former leader of Libya for 42 years Mother: Safia (Farkash) Gadhafi Education: El-Fateh University, Libya, Degree

CNN Editorial Research Here is a look at Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting. In 2023, Ramadan is expected to begin at sundown on March 22 and end on April 21. (Dates may vary slightly by country depending on the first sighting of the crescent moon.) https://www.almanac.com/content/when-start-ramadan Facts Ramadan is the ninth month of

By Ashley Strickland, CNN A male mastodon died fighting with a rival during mating season about 13,200 years ago in what is now northeast Indiana. Now, his well-preserved fossil and tusks reveal not only how the 8-ton adult died, but also where he trekked across North America. The mastodon’s fossil was first found on a

By Katie Hunt, CNN Strange and unexpected tsunami-like starquakes — movements on stars’ crusts similar to earthquakes we experience on our planet — have been revealed by the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory. The unusual starquakes are among multiple new discoveries made by Gaia, a mission launched in 2013 to create the “most accurate

CNN Editorial Research Here is a look at the life of musician Paul McCartney, former member of the Beatles. Personal Birth date: June 18, 1942 Birth place: Liverpool, England Birth name: James Paul McCartney Father: James McCartney, salesman and musician Mother: Mary (Mohin) McCartney, nurse and midwife Marriages: Nancy Shevell (October 9, 2011-present); Heather Mills

By Ashley Strickland, CNN It’s a distinctly human trait to believe the impossible is a puzzle waiting to be solved. We’re driven to determine if “the truth is out there.” If we just had all of the pieces, they might fit together and form the bridge to a greater understanding. On Thursday, NASA announced the

CNN Editorial Research Here is a look at the solstice. The next summer solstice will take place on June 21, 2022. The next winter solstice will take place on December 21, 2022. Winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere occurs on December 21 or 22, when the sun appears at its most southerly position,directly overhead at

By Megan Marples, CNN The Perseverance rover made friends with a pet rock about four months ago, and the two have been inseparable ever since. A rock found its way into the rover’s left front wheel in early February while roaming around the red planet, according to Perseverance’s left hazard avoidance camera. In four months,

By Katie Hunt and Ashley Strickland, CNN NASA is putting a team together to study unidentified aerial phenomena, popularly known as UFOs, the US space agency said Thursday. The team will gather data on “events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena — from a scientific perspective,” the agency

CNN Editorial Research Here’s a look at the life of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Personal Birth date: June 19, 1951 Death date: July 31, 2022 Birth place: Egypt Birth name: Ayman Muhammad Rabi al-Zawahiri Father: Rabie al-Zawahiri, professor of pharmacology Mother: Umayma al-Zawahiri Marriages: Unknown publicly Children: Unknown publicly Education: Cairo University, 1974, master’s

By Rachel Ramirez, CNN The amount of money needed to aid communities in the face of extreme weather-related emergencies has increased by more than 800% in the past two decades as the climate crisis also rapidly accelerated, new research shows. The report, released Tuesday by Oxfam, found not only is the need for extreme weather-related

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Just a couple of weeks after the Ingenuity helicopter celebrated a year of flying on Mars, things got quiet. For the first time, the Ingenuity team on Earth lost contact with Ingenuity on sols 427 and 428, or Martian days that correspond with May 3 and May 4. The little chopper’s

By Rachel Ramirez, CNN Humans’ historical greenhouse gas emissions have caused the climate crisis the world is in today. But it’s the amount emitted now and in coming years that will determine whether humanity can avert catastrophic climate changes. That’s the main finding of a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on

By Ashley Strickland, CNN A strange early relative of the giraffe was perfectly adapted for some serious headbutting 17 million years ago, according to new research. The oddball giraffoid didn’t have the signature long neck of today’s giraffe. Instead, the ancient animal, built for fierce fighting, sported helmet-like headgear and the most complex head-neck joints

By Katie Hunt, CNN Some lucky night sky watchers caught a glimpse of a brand new meteor shower on Monday night, as Earth passed through the debris trail of a crumbling comet. The meteor shower peaked around 1 a.m. ET, with 10 to 25 meteors an hour spotted falling through the night sky, according to

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The Artemis I mega moon rocket is getting ready for its latest attempt at a final prelaunch test, according to an update from NASA officials on Friday. The NASA team is preparing to roll the 322-foot-tall (98-meter-tall) Artemis I rocket stack, including the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft, back to

By John Blake, CNN Sports, it’s been said, reveals character. It also reveals something else: philosophy. There’s no better example of this than Rafael Nadal, the 35-year-old professional tennis player who’s competing this week at the French Open. Nadal is not just a gladiator on the court — he’s a philosopher at heart. You may

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Ancient volcanic eruptions on the moon could provide an unexpected resource for future lunar explorers: water. Between 2 billion and 4 billion years ago, the moon was a volcanic hotspot. Tens of thousands of volcanoes were erupting on the surface, releasing hundreds of thousands of square miles of lava across the

By Paula Newton, CNN Toronto Police fatally shot a man who was seen carrying a firearm near three schools in the Scarborough area Thursday, police said. Officers responded to reports of a man carrying a firearm and “there was an interaction” between officers and the man, according to the Special Investigations Unit in the Canadian

By Ashley Strickland, CNN More than 100 previously unknown Iron Age settlements have been found during a survey of the region north of Hadrian’s Wall in the United Kingdom. The 134 sites correspond to Indigenous settlements that date to Roman occupation. A study detailing the findings published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity. Construction of Hadrian’s

By Meera Senthilingam, CNN Postpartum depression (PPD) is estimated to affect more than one in ten women who have a baby and is just one of many mood disorders that a woman can get during pregnancy or in the first year after birth, known as the perinatal period. Yet these conditions, known as perinatal mood

By Megan Marples, CNN For these tiny robotic crabs, being small is a virtue. Engineers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, invented the world’s smallest remote-controlled walking robot, according to research published in the journal Science Robotics. Each one is about half a millimeter wide, which is smaller than the thickness of a United States

By Ashley Strickland, CNN This is the last time we’ll ever see a selfie from NASA’s InSight lander on Mars. And judging by the amount of dust coating the lander’s solar panels, it’s easy to see why. The stationary spacecraft captured the image on April 24 using its robotic arm, which will soon be placed

By Katie Hunt, CNN Fearsome predators like T. rex and towering, telescope-necked dinosaurs, such as Brachiosaurus, were warm-blooded creatures in the same way birds and mammals are, according to a groundbreaking new study. The question of whether the blood that coursed through dinosaurs’ giant frames ran warm or cold, like that of reptiles, is a

By Rob Picheta and Hafsa Khalil, CNN Vaccines, variants, natural immunity and better treatment options mean catching Covid-19 now isn’t the same as it was a year or two ago. But for millions of people who contracted the virus even in the pandemic’s first months, the impact of the disease lingers. As many as one

By Katie Hunt, CNN NASA’s Earth Observatory has released satellite images of an undersea volcano erupting. The image, taken on May 14 by the Operational Land Imager 2 on the Landsat 9 satellite, shows a plume of discolored water being emitted from the submarine volcano. The satellite is designed to capture high-resolution images of our

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Measuring the expansion rate of the universe was one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s main goals when it was launched in 1990. Over the past 30 years, the space observatory has helped scientists discover and refine that accelerating rate — as well as uncover a mysterious wrinkle that only brand-new physics

By Zoe Sottile, CNN Things are looking up for the greater one-horned rhino. The massive mammal, also called the Indian rhinoceros, saw its global population reach its highest level since the 1980s, according to the International Rhino Foundation, a Texas-based nonprofit focused on rhino conservation. There are now a total of 4,014 greater one-horned rhinos

By Katie Hunt, CNN Have you ever wondered whether, tens of thousands of years from now, you could end up in the fossil record? I confess I have. It’s definitely a long shot. The vast majority of animals that have lived on the planet don’t end up encased in stone or with their skeletons preserved

By Katie Hunt, CNN There is a lot to love about bees. They are crucial to growing many of our favorite and healthiest foods as they move pollen from plant to plant, pollinating more than a hundred fruits and vegetables including strawberries, potatoes and apples. Unfortunately, many bee species are under threat as a result

Story by Reuters In a world beset by conflicts and natural disasters, the number of people who fled their homes and sought shelter within their own countries hit a record high of close to 60 million by the end of last year, according to new data. Disasters, including weather events such as cyclones and floods

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The unexpected discovery of “ghost” fossils belonging to tiny, ancient organisms could provide insights about how life reacts to climate change in Earth’s oceans. Looking through a powerful microscope, researchers were stunned to see the impressions left by single-celled plankton, or fossilized nannoplankton, that lived millions of years ago — especially

By Katie Hunt, CNN In the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt, bottlenose dolphins were spotted in 2009 doing something unusual. They lined up to rub their bodies against coral. They were choosy about which type of corals they rubbed against, noticed wildlife biologist Angela Ziltener, a guest researcher at the University of Zurich

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The Voyager 1 probe is still exploring interstellar space 45 years after launching, but it has encountered an issue that mystifies the spacecraft’s team on Earth. Voyager 1 continues to operate well, despite its advanced age and 14.5 billion-mile distance (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth. And it can receive and execute

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The Solar Orbiter mission’s first close pass of the sun in March has revealed our star in a new light. The spacecraft, which flew by the sun on March 26, has returned a treasure trove of new images and insights after coming within one-third the distance from the sun to the

Story by Reuters and Angela Dewan, CNN The world’s oceans in 2021 grew to their warmest and most acidic levels on record, while melting ice sheets helped push sea levels to new heights, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday, prompting a call to action from United Nations chief António Guterres. Oceans saw the

By Jessie Yeung and Rhea Mogul, CNN Pollution caused one in six deaths worldwide in 2019, a new study has revealed — more than the annual global tolls for war, malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, drugs or alcohol. The study, published Tuesday by the Lancet Commission on pollution and health, found pollution kills 9 million people every

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The NASA InSight lander, which has been revealing the mysterious interior of Mars since 2018, is coming to an end. Due to a decreasing power supply, the mission will cease scientific operations by the end of late summer, said Kathya Zamora Garcia, InSight deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

CNN Editorial Research Here’s a look at the life of convicted terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence in prison without parole for his part in plotting the 9/11 attacks. Personal Birth date: May 30, 1968 Birth place: St. Jean-de-Luz, France Birth name: Zacarias Moussaoui Father: Omar Moussaoui Mother: Aicha el-Wafi Education: South

By Katie Hunt, Megan Marples and Ashley Strickland, CNN The moon glowed red on Sunday night and the early hours of Monday, after a total lunar eclipse that saw the sun, Earth and moon form a straight line in the night sky. During a full lunar eclipse, the moon passes through the darkest part of

By Megan Marples and Ashley Strickland, CNN May’s full moon, known as the flower moon, will blossom in the sky on Sunday night into Monday. The moon will reach its peak at 12:15 a.m. ET on Monday, May 16, so it will appear at its roundest the evening of May 15, according to The Old

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Whenever I travel, I always try to catch the sunrise. There is something about watching light spill over a new place, every aspect just waiting to be explored. It reminds me of the concept in astronomy of first light, when a new telescope observes the universe for the first time. The

By Megan Marples and Ashley Strickland, CNN May’s full moon will have stargazers seeing red. The moon will glow a scarlet color during this year’s first total lunar eclipse on Sunday — a stark contrast to its ordinarily milky white sheen. A partial eclipse will begin at 10:27 p.m. ET Sunday, with the total lunar

By Nima Elbagir, Barbara Arvanitidis, Gianluca Mezzofiore, Katie Polglase, Tamara Qiblawi, Alex Platt, Victoria Butenko, Darya Tarasova and Maria Avdeeva Graphics by Henrik Pettersson and Connie Chen, Video editing by Oscar Featherstone As she fetched drinking water for her family on a sunny but cold afternoon in late February, Margarita Kiriukhina tried to ignore the

By Ashley Strickland, CNN In a landmark first, scientists have grown plants in lunar soil using samples collected during the Apollo missions to the moon. This is the first time plants have been sprouted and grown on Earth in soil from another celestial body. The study could lay the foundation for growing plants that supply

CNN Editorial Research Here’s a look at the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports. Facts “Doping” by professional athletes has been acknowledged as a problem since at least the 1960s. The issue gained prominence as a result of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) investigation, tell-alls by former professional athletes, a 2007 report on drugs

By Ashley Strickland, CNN China’s Zhurong rover has found evidence suggesting that water persisted on Mars for much longer than expected. Zhurong landed in a large plain in Mars’ northern hemisphere called Utopia Planitia on May 15, 2021 — where NASA’s Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976. The rover’s primary mission, which lasted for

By Katie Hunt, CNN A tiny fragment of the asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago may have been found encased in amber — a discovery NASA has described as “mind-blowing.” It’s one of several astounding finds at a unique fossil site in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota that has preserved remnants

By Megan Marples, CNN An Asiatic cheetah has given birth to cubs at a facility in Iran, marking the first time the species reproduced in captivity, according to the Iranian Cheetah Society. Three young cheetahs were welcomed into the world at the Asian Cheetah Breeding Center of the Turan Biosphere Reserve in Tehran, according to

By Ashley Strickland, CNN This is the big one scientists have been anticipating. The NASA InSight lander just detected the biggest quake ever found on another planet — a marsquake with a magnitude of 5 that took place on the red planet on May 4. “Since we set our seismometer down in December 2018, we’ve

By Hannah Ryan, CNN There’s now a 50:50 chance that the world will surpass a critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming in the next five years, a new World Meteorological Organization report shows, warning of heating that could have devastating impacts on systems like coral reefs as well as Arctic ice. The

By Zoe Sottile, CNN They’re tiny, adorable and endangered: Six new species of miniature frog have been discovered in Mexico by researchers from the University of Cambridge, London’s Natural History Museum and the University of Texas at Arlington. At just 15 mm long when fully grown, all six species are smaller than a penny (around

By Zoe Sottile, CNN A fleece jacket worn and signed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sold for £90,000, or around $111,000, at a fundraiser for Ukraine in London on Thursday. “Today, the whole word looks up to a man wearing a simple fleece jacket,” the Ukrainian Embassy to the United Kingdom said in a video

By Kristen Rogers, CNN If you’re a mother, you have probably experienced the mental “what if” game on repeat since you found out you were becoming a parent. What if my kid never learns to read? What if they like another parent better? What if their food isn’t organic, or I pick the wrong preschool?

By Zoe Sottile, CNN Space researchers want to send a coded message to aliens, including illustrations of nude humans. The proposal, “A Beacon in the Galaxy” (BITG), was presented by 11 researchers from a range of institutions, including NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was published this week in Arxiv, an open-access repository of scientific papers.

By Ashley Strickland, CNN As a kid, I wanted to be Indiana Jones — and I know I wasn’t alone in that wish. I would set out with a pail and shovel and a hefty amount of determination, digging in hopes of finding a fossil or buried treasure that belonged in a museum. I dreamed