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Bring up installing a bidet to the average American before the pandemic, and they might have likely flushed the idea straightaway. The bathroom washer business, once a foreign concept to many in the US, experienced a huge boom during the Covid-19 pandemic, when shoppers were battling over toilet paper shortages. But...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Humans have many wonderful qualities, but we lack something that’s a common feature among most animals with backbones: a tail. Exactly why that is has been something of a m...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. With its striking coloration, the giant panda is an instantly recognizable species. A handful of giant pandas that aren’t black-and-white, however, do exist. These majestic...

At the turn of the millennium, web-based technology was in a state of chrysalis. Google was just one of several mainstream search engines, not yet a monopolistic empire. Dial-up internet (and its iconic dial tone) was still a thing in many American homes. File-sharing services like Napster and LimeWire were just beg...

A Netflix adaptation of wildly popular Chinese sci-fi novel “The Three-Body Problem” has split opinions in China and sparked online nationalist anger over scenes depicting a violent and tumultuous period in the country’s modern history. Reactions have been mixed on Chinese social media since the Thursday premiere of...

ISIS has claimed responsibility for an attack at a popular concert hall complex near Moscow Friday after assailants stormed the venue with guns and incendiary devices, killing at least 60 people and injuring 145. The terror group took responsibility for the attack in a short statement published by ISIS-affiliated ne...

There’s a global energy crisis and onshore wind farms are a potential growth option. Larger wind turbines produce more power than standard ones, but the components are too big to be transported by road. What’s the solution? A Colorado-based energy startup named Radia has an idea. It’s developing the biggest aircraft...

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter which explores what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Chinese regulators have accused Evergrande and its founder of inflating revenues by $78 billion, putting the insolvent property developer at the heart of the coun...

Mongolia is freezing through its harshest winter in half a century with extreme conditions killing more than 4.7 million animals and threatening the livelihoods and food supply of thousands of people, the International Federation of the Red Cross has warned. The severe conditions, known as dzud, are characterized by...

New York CNN — “Buy your mom an iPhone.” That was Apple CEO Tim Cook’s famous response at Vox’s 2022 Code Conference, when a reporter complained that her mother couldn’t see the videos she texted to her mom’s Android phone because they were grainy and slow. It’s also a quip that US Attorney General Merrick Garland q...

Five times the size of Paris. Visible from space. The world’s biggest energy plant. Enough electricity to power Switzerland. The scale of the project transforming swathes of barren salt desert on the edge of western India into one of the most important sources of clean energy anywhere on the planet is so overwhelmin...

From old cellphones to broken refrigerators and discarded e-cigarettes, global electronic waste has reached record highs and is growing five times faster than rates of recycling – bringing a host of health, environmental and climate problems, according to new analysis. The numbers are staggering. In 2022, the world ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. It’s late summer 2,850 years ago. A fire engulfs a stilt village perched above a boggy, slow-moving river that weaves though the wetlands of eastern England. The tightly pa...

A New York state judge on Monday denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit against several social media companies alleging the platforms contributed to the radicalization of a gunman who killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York in 2022, court documents show. “The Court has determined the complaint suffici...

Cyberattacks are hitting water and wastewater systems “throughout the United States” and state governments and water facilities must improve their defenses against the threat, the White House and Environmental Protection Agency warned US governors on Tuesday. “We need your support to ensure that all water systems in...

The world’s oceans have now experienced an entire year of unprecedented heat, with a new temperature record broken every day, new data shows. Global ocean surface temperatures started breaking daily records in mid-March last year, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and ...

Japan has ended its negative interest rate policy, marking a historic shift away from an aggressive monetary easing program that was implemented years ago to fight chronic deflation. As part of the decision, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) raised its short-term interest rates to a tight range from “around zero to 0.1%,” up ...

Do you know your Gearóid from your Gobnait? Your Fearghal from your Muirgheal? To the untrained eye, Irish names can seem like a daunting ambush of rogue consonants and surprise vowels. That’s because while the Irish language uses the same Latin alphabet letters as English, they represent different sounds and have d...

Going to see the doctor soon? Prepare to be hounded with appointment reminders by phone. By text. By robocall. By email. And in your online “patient portal.” Doctors and dentist offices for years left a courtesy voicemail on patients’ home answering machines giving them a heads-up about their appointment. But now, m...

When Volkswagen decided to relaunch the Scout SUV brand it took a very unusual step. It created a new subsidiary company to design, build and sell vehicles targeted, almost entirely, at a single market: the United States. Its status as a subsidiary of Volkswagen Group, similar to Audi and Porsche, gives some indicat...

Tyler Anbinder didn’t know what he’d find when he started digging into a vast trove of records that had been locked inside a bank — and inaccessible to the public — for nearly 150 years. One detail immediately caught the historian’s attention: The accounts described in the bank’s ledgers had much more money in them ...

Iceland’s world-famous Blue Lagoon and the nearby town of Grindavik were evacuated on Saturday following a volcanic eruption in the country’s Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland’s public broadcaster RÚV reported. Lava appeared to be flowing rapidly towards north of the town Grindavík, just as it did during the eruption on ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Engineers have sent a “poke” to the Voyager 1 probe and received a potentially encouraging response as they hope to fix a communication issue with the aging spacecraft that...

Elon Musk’s Tesla once represented the future of automaking. Now the company’s own future is in question. The once red-hot electric vehicle maker — heralded as part of the so-called Magnificent Seven behemoth tech stocks — is currently the worst performer in the S&P 500 this year, down nearly 32% since January. The ...