Links

In April, US State Department cables came to light showing embassy officials were worried about biosecurity at a virus lab in Wuhan, China. The lab is in the same city where the coronavirus outbreak was first detected.

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on.

Stars, galaxies, planets, pretty much everything that makes up our everyday lives owes its existence to a cosmic quirk. The nature of this quirk, which allowed matter to dominate the Universe at the expense of antimatter, remains a mystery.

The story that broke early last month that Google would again cooperate with Chinese authorities to run a censored version of its search engine, something the tech giant has neither confirmed nor denied, had ironic timing.

Have you recently considered deleting your Facebook account, boycotting Amazon or trying to find an alternative to Google? You wouldn’t be alone. The tech giants are invading our privacy, misusing our data, strangling economic growth and helping governments spy on us.

POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with you

Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that "about 2%" of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles. The Pope said that abuse of children was like "leprosy" infecting the Church, according to the Italian La Repubblica newspaper.

Catholic bishops from around the world are meeting at the Vatican to discuss the future of the Church in the Amazon. Over the next three weeks, some 260 participants will talk about climate change, migration and evangelism.

When I was in grade school, there was an anti-drug commercial that regularly came on television. There were a few different versions of it but the gist was, an egg would be shown to the camera as a voice said, “This is your brain.

These words, recorded in the Gospels as being spoken by Jesus during the Last Supper, are said daily at Church services around the world before the communion meal is eaten.

The film, The First Temptation of Christ, infuriated fervent Christians in the country. Two million people signed a petition calling for it to be axed, and the production company was attacked with Molotov cocktails last month.

An Indian man is fighting for the right to believe in the non-existence of God. But Ravi Kumar's quest for a document granting him legal recognition for his status has got him into trouble with the authorities. The BBC's Geeta Pandey reports from Tohana village in northern India.

image sourceReutersA handwritten letter by Albert Einstein in which he grapples with the concept of religion has smashed predictions and sold for nearly $2.9m (£2.3m).The so-called "God letter" was written in 1954 and was expected to fetch $1.5m (£1.2m) at auction in New York.

image copyrightGetty ImagesA US televangelist has asked his followers to help fund his fourth private jet - because Jesus "wouldn't be riding a donkey".Jesse Duplantis said God had told him to buy a Falcon 7X for $54m (£41m).

Whatever their size, cracks can be bad news. They make planes fall out the sky and bridges fall down. On a more mundane level they trip you up on a badly-maintained pavement. Now Strathclyde University in Glasgow is claiming a world-first with a centre dedicated to a new science of cracking-up.

image copyrighteternalcreative via Getty ImagesA Montreal researcher says he has found a way to take the emotional sting out a bad breakup by "editing" memories using therapy and a beta blocker.

Exosphere, a Chilean company and who labels themselves as a "learning and problem-solving community", will hold a three week Space Elevator program in Budapest, Hungary in mid-July as part of its Copernicus Series.

A space elevator is a proposed type of planet-to-space transportation system.[1] The main component would be a cable (also called a tether) anchored to the surface and extending into space.

Australian police are attempting to catch a thief who used a fishing rod to steal a Versace necklace from a high-end designer store in Melbourne. The thief was caught on CCTV trying to hook the A$800 (US$529; £414) jewellery off a mannequin's neck.

A middle-aged businessman pays a much-younger prostitute to be his live-in lover for a week. It’s a sordid premise for a feel-good romantic comedy, but that didn’t stop Pretty Woman being one of the biggest hits of 1990.

On 8 September 1941, Nazi forces surrounded Leningrad from the west and south, and through Finland to the north. A thin strip of land across Lake Ladoga kept the residents in touch with the rest of Russia, but heavy shelling made it impossible to evacuate the population.

Breakthrough Initiatives is a science-based program founded in 2015 and funded by Julia and Yuri Milner,[1] also of Breakthrough Prize, to search for extraterrestrial intelligence over a span of at least 10 years. The program is divided into multiple projects.

Jackie Lambert suspects that her habit of showering only every three days is unusual. “But I’m unapologetic for it because I think it’s fine,” she laughs. After all, a daily shower is more about cultural expectations than hygiene.

Given the current situation, many of us are more interested than ever in how food can (and can’t) support our health. To help you sort out fact from fiction, BBC Future is bringing back some of our most popular nutrition stories.

Car engines running, office heaters pumping – work as we know it has a substantial carbon footprint. Shouldn’t workers ditch the drive to a large office building and trade it in for the commute from their bed to their computer?

The design and computer code were posted online in March by a man in California, who had no prior experience at creating medical equipment. Marco Mascorro, a robotics engineer, said he built the ventilator because knew the machines were in high demand to treat Covid-19.

Examination of a mummy has revealed the original ancient Egyptian embalming recipe - first used to preserve bodies. The Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, is now home to the mummy in question.

image copyrightUniversity of Catania and Cairo UniversityA substance found by archaeologists working in an Ancient Egyptian tomb has proved to be one of the oldest cheeses ever discovered.Several years ago, the team discovered broken jars in the tomb of Ptahmes, a high-ranking Egyptian official.

On Thursday, classified files about the Kennedy assassination will be released - but what might they show? Where were you when Kennedy was shot?

Julian Assange secretly fathered two children while living inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, his partner has revealed. Stella Morris says she has been in a relationship with the Wikileaks founder since 2015 and has been raising their two young sons on her own.

Globalisation has been one of the buzzwords of the past 25 years. It may seem a rather strange concept, since any economic historian will tell you that people have been trading across vast distances for centuries, if not millennia.

The aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis will transform the way we live, work and travel in the UK, the AA says. It predicts a permanent reduction in the demand for travel because people have learned during the crisis to use home-working technology.

image sourceESABepiColombo, the joint European-Japanese mission to Mercury, has swung past the Earth - a key milestone in its seven-year journey to reach the "iron planet.