The Latest Breaking News from The Conversation

The US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, believes that aluminium in vaccines can cause health issues, such as neurological disorders, allergies and autoimmune diseases. This contradicts scientific evidence from many studies that have confirmed the safety of vaccines and aluminium “adjuvants” – substances that boost vaccines’ effectiveness.

Scientists thought they had finally stumbled upon a possibly positive side effect of climate change. While rising CO₂ levels have been linked to various effects, from rising sea levels to changing temperatures, could an increase in CO₂ also be good for something? Plants use carbon dioxide and sunlight for photosynthesis,…

In African literature, Christianity has usually been shown as a foreign religion brought to the continent by European missionaries and colonisers. But in the past few decades, Nigeria’s writers have dealt with it in a far more complex way as Christianity is rooted in, and transformed by, local realities, ranging…

The late Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh often emphasized the interconnectedness of everything in this world. He explained how meditation can change our perceptions about the things we encounter in our daily lives by revealing this interdependence.

With Mariah Carey and Wham! saturating airwaves with their holiday tunes, it’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas.

In the middle of a chilly October night in 2025, my two friends and I suited up at the Cottonwood Creek trailhead and started a trek into the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Colorado. It was a little below freezing as we got moving at 1:30 a.m., and the Moon…

If you look across space with a telescope, you’ll see countless galaxies, most of which host large central black holes, billions of stars and their attendant planets. The universe teems with huge, spectacular objects, and it might seem like these massive objects should hold most of the universe’s matter.

Reducing the visibility of polarizing content in social media feeds can measurably lower partisan animosity. To come up with this finding, my colleagues and I developed a method that let us alter the ranking of people’s feeds, previously something only the social media companies could do.

When people use hand gestures that visually represent what they’re saying, listeners see them as more clear, competent and persuasive. That’s the key finding from my new research published in the Journal of Marketing Research, where I analyzed thousands of TED Talks and ran controlled experiments to examine how gestures…