By Gina Park, CNN (CNN) — Keep your eyes high in the sky this week to see the last supermoon of the year. December’s full supermoon, also called the cold moon, will be at its fullest around 6:14 p.m. ET Thursday, according to EarthSky. “On Thursday, the moon will rise right around sunset time, and
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By Jackie Wattles, CNN (CNN) — A rare spectacle played out on Capitol Hill as Jared Isaacman — the billionaire tech entrepreneur and Elon Musk ally who has been tapped to serve as NASA administrator — faced a second confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The two-hour hearing was livestreamed
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By Andrew Freedman, CNN (CNN) — The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ended November 30, showcased the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence for storm forecasting. And experts say there is no turning back. This season, the National Hurricane Center supplemented its usual cadre of traditional models with AI-driven models, including one developed by Google
Continue ReadingBy Simone McCarthy, Mike Valerio, Fred He, John Liu, CNN Beijing (CNN) — A private Chinese space firm successfully sent its Zhuque-3 rocket to orbit but failed in its historic attempt to re-land the rocket booster Wednesday – the first such trial by a Chinese firm as the country’s growing commercial space sector races to
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By Ella Nilsen, CNN (CNN) — Zillow, the nation’s largest real estate listing website, has removed extreme weather risk data meant to help buyers figure out if the biggest purchase of their life is particularly susceptible to floods, high winds or wildfires. Now, other major real estate listing websites are facing pressure to do the
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By Laura Paddison, CNN (CNN) — Rows of worshippers, some with their faces raised toward the sky, others with their heads bowed, prayed for rain at a mosque in Tehran earlier this month. Theirs is an increasingly desperate plea. The city is grappling with a water crisis so severe the Iranian president has suggested people
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By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — The origins of domestic cats — centuries before they conquered the world’s sofas and internet memes — have long been murky. Now, ancient DNA is helping to fill in the blanks, and the findings shake up the traditional story. Archaeologists had thought that cats and humans began living with
Continue ReadingBy Brad Lendon, Nina Subkhanberdina, CNN (CNN) — A launch pad at Russia’s main space complex was damaged during Thursday’s launch of a mission carrying two Russians and an American to the International Space Station, Moscow’s space agency announced. The Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft successfully docked with the space station and the three crew members had
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By Jacopo Prisco, CNN (CNN) — Tryptophan, the essential amino acid behind the Thanksgiving myth that eating turkey can make you sleepy, has been found to exist on Bennu, a small asteroid that swings by our planet about every six years. The discovery stems from an unprecedented sample collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which landed
Continue ReadingBy Laura Paddison, CNN (CNN) — The surging tide of microplastics is already an environmental and health threat, but as the world heats up — driving increasingly extreme weather — it’s transforming them into “more mobile, persistent, and hazardous pollutants,” according to a new study, which calls for urgent action. The connection between plastic and
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By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — Archaeologists say a 3D model of a centuries-old quarry of unfinished stone head statues on Easter Island offers new clues about how these monuments were made and the Polynesian society that brought them into being. Also known as Rapa Nui, the remote island is famed for the gargantuan sculptures
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By Jacopo Prisco, CNN (CNN) — A female wild wolf living on the central coast of British Columbia was filmed pulling a crab trap out of the ocean to eat the bait — a never-before-seen behavior that could constitute the first documented use of tools by a wolf. The traps were set by the Heiltsuk
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By Jack Guy, CNN (CNN) — New Zealand has announced plans to eradicate feral cats by 2050, as part of efforts to protect the country’s biodiversity. Speaking to Radio New Zealand on Thursday, conservation minister Tama Potaka said that feral cats are “stone cold killers” and would be added to the country’s Predator Free 2050
Continue ReadingBy Amanda Schupak, CNN (CNN) — The clever, adaptable urban raccoon may be evolving a shorter snout — a key physical trait of pets and other domesticated animals. The new finding describes what a biologist says could be the first account of domestication in its earliest stages. For Raffaela Lesch, an assistant professor at the
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By Laura Paddison, Andrew Freedman, Ella Nilsen, CNN (CNN) — The world struck a new climate deal at the COP30 summit in Brazil Saturday, which calls for a tripling of funding to help countries adapt to increasingly severe climate impacts. But countries failed to agree to a roadmap away from fossil fuels, after entrenched divisions
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By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — A series of about 5,200 holes stretching nearly a mile (1.5 kilometers) across the Pisco Valley in the southern Peruvian Andes has baffled researchers for nearly a century. But a fresh look at the site, called Monte Sierpe, or “serpent mountain,” may help archaeologists to decipher why ancient people
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By Ella Nilsen, Steve Contorno, CNN (CNN) — The Trump administration is proposing to open federal waters off the entire coastline of California to drilling, as well as an area off the coast of Florida. Neither state’s waters have been open to new drilling for decades. President Donald Trump’s Interior Department released a five-year offshore
Continue ReadingBy Jacopo Prisco, CNN (CNN) — The universe’s expansion might not be accelerating but slowing down, a new study suggests. If confirmed, the finding would upend decades of established astronomical assumptions and rewrite our understanding of dark energy, the elusive force that counters the inward pull of gravity in our universe. Two separate teams of
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By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — The latest images of an interstellar comet shared by NASA have captured how an array of spacecraft witnessed a flyby that was truly out of this world, revealing clues to the object’s composition. Astronomers first detected the rare comet, known as 3I/ATLAS, on July 1. It’s only the third
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By Ella Nilsen, CNN (CNN) — The Trump administration moved on Wednesday to roll back Biden-era protections for endangered species and their habitats. The Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service proposed restoring rules from the first Trump administration that stripped safeguards for plants and animals threatened by human development
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