CNN – World

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 Heather Chen, Angus Watson, Mitchell McCluskey and Stefano Pozzebon, CNN A man who spent 24 days adrift in the Caribbean Sea says he survived by eating little more than ketchup. Elvis Francois, 47, was found 120 nautical miles northwest of Colombia’s Puerto Bolívar after a plane saw the word “help” engraved on the hull

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 Ashley Strickland, CNN A new survey of the Milky Way galaxy has unveiled 3.3 billion celestial objects. Our galaxy is brimming with hundreds of billions of stars, dark pillars of dust and gas, and gleaming stellar nurseries where stars are born. Now, astronomers have documented those wonders in unprecedented detail during the Dark Energy

By Kristen Rogers, CNN The world’s population of North Atlantic right whales has been decimated in recent years by human-caused vessel strikes and rope entanglements, and now another member of this rare species faces the same fate. A 4-year-old female right whale found heavily entangled about 20 miles east of Rodanthe, North Carolina, is “likely

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 Zoe Sottile, CNN Extremely rare — and extremely adorable. The Chester Zoo in Cheshire, England, has welcomed the birth of a Western chimpanzee, the most endangered subspecies of chimpanzees. The zoo announced the baby boy’s birth in a Thursday news release. The little one, born to mother ZeeZee, will join a troop of 22

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 Ashley Strickland, CNN There are more than 5,000 known worlds beyond our solar system. Since the 1990s, astronomers have used ground and space-based telescopes to search for signs of planets beyond our tiny corner of the universe. Exoplanets are notoriously difficult to directly image because they’re so far away from Earth. But scientists know

By Zoe Sottile, CNN A study has found that dolphins are unable to communicate as effectively when exposed to human-generated noises, forcing them to change their sounds much like people do when shouting. An international team of researchers from the University of Bristol, the Dolphin Research Center, Syracuse University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Aarhus

By Ashley Strickland and Jackie Wattles, CNN Russian space agency Roscosmos will launch an uncrewed spacecraft, Soyuz MS-23, to the International Space Station to serve as a return vehicle for cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio after the vehicle in which they launched in September sustained damage in space. The