With his moustache caked in icicles and frozen droplets, glaciologist Peter Neff shows his 220,000 TikTok followers a sample of old ice excavated from Antarctica's Allan Hills.
The drop-shaped fragment encapsulates tiny air bubbles, remnants of 100,000-year-old atmosphere.
The greenhouse gases trapped inside carry precious information on Earth's past climate, explains @icy_pete as he brings the translucid nugget closer to the camera.
Plastic pollution in the world's oceans has reached "unprecedented levels" over the past 15 years, a new study has found, calling for a legally binding international treaty to stop the harmful waste.
Ocean plastic pollution is a persistent problem around the globe -- animals may become entangled in larger pieces of plastic like fishing nets, or ingest microplastics that eventually enter the food chain to be consumed by humans.
Three people trapped deep inside a Spanish potash mine when a gallery collapsed earlier on Thursday have died, Catalan leader Pere Aragones said.
"Unfortunately, we can confirm the death of three young people who were working in the mine," Aragones told reporters outside Cabanasses mine in Suria, 75 kilometres (46 miles) northwest of Barcelona.
Rescuers had recovered and identified the bodies of three people who were "around 30 years old", he said, sending his condolences to their families and colleagues.
Golden Globe winner Chaim Topol, the Israeli actor famed for his depiction of Tevye in the movie "Fiddler on the Roof," died aged 87, Israeli officials said on Thursday.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1935, Topol grew up there before joining a military entertainment troupe where he was a singer and actor.
Following his army service, he moved to a kibbutz with his wife and worked as a mechanic while continuing performing in a theatre group he formed.
The Taliban governor of Afghanistan's Balkh province was killed at his office on Thursday in a suicide attack that was later claimed by the Islamic State group.
The killing of Mohammad Dawood Muzammil, the provincial governor, marked one of the highest-level attacks since the Taliban stormed back to power in 2021. A second person also died in the attack, police said.
Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, on a visit to Israel, expressed concerns on Thursday about Jewish settler violence against Palestinians and warned against acts that could trigger more insecurity.
The US defence secretary held talks in Israel as three suspected Palestinian militants were killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and protesters rallied against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-right government.
Late Thursday, a gunman shot and wounded three people on a Tel Aviv street in an attack carried out by a member of the armed wing of Hamas, Israeli police said.
A dusty logjam of trucks inches across a rut in the mountains splitting Pakistan and Afghanistan, teeming with a cargo of fruit and coal -- and paying the Taliban authorities for the privilege of passage.
In downtown Kabul, a patrol of accountants inspects a bazaar, billing shopkeepers for trading honey, hair conditioner and gas hobs under the snapping white flag of the country's new rulers.
Afghanistan is frozen deep in a second winter of humanitarian turmoil since the Taliban seized power in 2021, but cash is changing hands at a dizzying pace.
As he languishes in a cell in Bulgaria, Saudi dissident Abd al-Rahman al-Khalidi dreads one thing more than any other: being flown back to his home country.
"In the event of deportation, I will be subjected to torture and long imprisonment, as I have worked with the opposition for years," Khalidi, a failed asylum-seeker, told AFP by phone from a detention centre in Sofia.
The new UN envoy to Libya had hoped to usher in long-delayed elections, but his initiative is facing pushback from the eastern-based parliament and a lukewarm reception by its rivals in Tripoli.
Senegalese diplomat Abdoulaye Bathily told the UN Security Council last month he planned to create a panel tasked with delivering presidential and legislative elections in conflict-torn Libya later this year.
Cradling a pink stuffed animal as she sleeps in a United Arab Emirates hospital, a nine-year-old Syrian earthquake survivor is recovering from the wounds that nearly claimed her life, believing her mother is still alive.
Sham Sheikh Mohammed, who suffered severe crush injuries in a 40-hour ordeal under the rubble, has not yet been told that both her mother and sister died in the February 6 earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people in Syria and Turkey.
