CNN – World

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Rocket Lab, a prolific launch company that routinely blasts its towering Electron rockets out of New Zealand, conducted its first liftoff from US soil on Tuesday. The mission, nicknamed “Virginia is for Launch Lovers,” took off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s northern coast at 6 p.m. ET. The launch

By Kate Golembiewski, CNN The zombies are identifiable by the fungi bursting from their bodies: a thicket of spiky tendrils, a miniature garden of mushroom-like fruiting bodies. These fungal parasites act as puppeteers, commanding and positioning the zombies to infect entire communities. It’s the premise of “The Last of Us,” a video game series and

By Lianne Kolirin, CNN The rotation of Earth‘s inner core may have paused and it could even go into reverse, new research suggests. The Earth is formed of the crust, the mantle and the inner and outer cores. The solid inner core is situated about 3,200 miles below the Earth’s crust and is separated from

By Jennifer Hauser and Angela Fritz, CNN An iceberg nearly the size of Greater London broke off the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica on Sunday according to the British Antarctic Survey. Scientists first discovered significant cracks in the ice shelf a decade ago, but in the last two years there have been two major breaks.

By Megan Marples, Kristen Rogers and Rachel Ramirez, CNN The Doomsday Clock has been ticking for 76 years. But it’s no ordinary clock. It attempts to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world. On Tuesday, the clock was set at 90 seconds until midnight — the closest to the hour it has ever

By Laura Paddison, CNN It turns out burps can be big business. Billionaire Bill Gates has announced an investment in Australian start-up Rumin8, which is developing a seaweed-based feed to reduce the methane emissions cows produce through their burps and, to a lesser extent, farts. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. While it is shorter-lived

By Jackie Wattles, CNN During a recent excursion to the icy plains of Antarctica, an international team of researchers discovered five new meteorites — including one of the largest ever found on the continent. The rare meteorite is about the size of a cantaloupe but weighs a hefty 17 pounds (7.7 kilograms). The specimen is

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The James Webb Space Telescope peered inside a wispy molecular cloud located 630 light-years away and spied ices made of different elements. Molecular clouds are interstellar groupings of gas and dust where hydrogen and carbon monoxide molecules can form. Dense clumps within these clouds can collapse to form young stars called

By Kate Golembiewski, CNN From a deer’s elaborate branching antlers to the fiddler crab’s oversize claw, the animal kingdom is full of flashy features used in combat to help secure a mate. A team of researchers announced last week that it has found the earliest known evidence of sexual combat in the form of a

By Bryn Nelson, CNN In its violent early years, Earth was a molten hellscape that ejected the moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect. Later, it morphed from a watery expanse to a giant snowball that nearly snuffed out all existing life. Then hyper-hurricanes with waves as high as 300 feet

By Katie Hunt, CNN To pry open the mysteries of our planet’s past, scientists typically study rocks and fossilized bones. Eggs are an often overlooked but extremely rich source of information, with birds, reptiles, dinosaurs and a few oddball mammals laying them on land for more than 200 million years. Rare fossilized eggshells can illuminate

By Ashley Strickland, CNN South Korea’s first lunar probe has returned some striking images of Earth and the moon. The Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter began orbiting the moon in December after the Korea Aerospace Research Institute‘s spacecraft had launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August. The probe, also known

By Amarachi Orie, CNN In the largest DNA analysis of its kind, scientists have found evidence to suggest that historic plague pandemics, such as the Black Death, were not caused by newly evolved strains of bacteria but ones that could have emerged up to centuries before their outbreaks. The plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis is dated

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