Facebook Inc (FB.O) said it did not give some companies access to people’s data without their permission, after the New York Times reported on Tuesday that the social network allowed some large technology companies greater access to user data. The paper reported that Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without their consent, citing documents from 2017.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to blast off on Thursday after two canceled launches earlier this week due to last-minute technical problems, but poor weather is looming as a potential problem. The rocket will carry a roughly $500 million global positioning system (GPS) satellite built by Lockheed Martin Corp and is due to take off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral shortly after 9 am local time (1400 GMT).

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google of being biased in favor of opposition Democrats, a day after a report for the Senate revealed Russian agents had used social media in an attempt to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. “Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!” Trump tweeted. “Twitter, in fact, has made it much more difficult for people to join @realDonaldTrump. They have removed many names & greatly slowed the level and speed of increase. They have acknowledged-done NOTHING!”

We have long known that there is life under our feet, but now scientists have actually measured it. Visible only through a microscope, unicellular microbes that live underneath the Earth s surface account for between 15 and 23 billion tons of carbon — that s hundreds of times more than the amount of carbon in all the humans on Earth combined. This new knowledge is the result of a 10-year international collaboration initiative of the Deep Carbon Observatory.

Nations on Sunday struck a deal to breathe life into the landmark 2015 Paris climate treaty after marathon UN talks that failed to match the ambition the world’s most vulnerable countries need to avert dangerous global warming. Delegates from nearly 200 states finalized a common rule book designed to deliver the Paris goals of limiting global temperature rises to well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne is full of spaceship and rocket models. Walls are covered in logos of different space missions and pictures of the Europeans who made it into space. A huge, nearly 10-meter wide model of the International Space Station (ISS) hangs above our heads as we are sitting and waiting for the video call with German astronaut Alexander Gerst. He is the first German Commander of the ISS and has been in space for over than six months now. Eight days from now, he ll return to Earth together with two other astronauts. Just in time for Christmas! With all these models and pictures, the foyer of the DLR feels more like a museum than a conference room. More than a dozen journalists and around 50 employees closely observe the screen hanging under the ISS model waiting for the signal from space. Cameras are ready, questions prepared. The youngest participant of the press conference, a 10-year-old reporter from German TV channel Sat.1 sits in the front row.

Deutsche Welle: Mr. Reichart, transplanting a pig s heart into a baboon for the first time offers hope this might be possible for humans, too. Why are pigs particularly suitable as donor animals? Bruno Reichart: Ethics play an important role here. We ve been eating pigs for a long time, so it s socially acceptable to kill them. Also, pigs produce many offspring in a very short time — every four months — and they are fully grown and sexually mature after six months.

The Egyptian Competition Authority has ordered multinational technology company Apple to end their "anti-competitive practices" in the market, threatening to sue the mammoth corporation if it does not abide by the order within 60 days. In a decision that was published on Monday in the country s official gazette, the ECA said that Apple and its regional distributor Arab Business Machine (ABM) have violated the country s competition laws by banning parallel imports by authorised distributors in Egypt.

Just looking at the two women, you might find it difficult to tell them apart: Lisa and Julia Ngo are identical twins. Yet there is a major difference in their health: Lisa suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS), Julia does not. That made the sisters ideal volunteers for a study at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich into how MS develops. "I want to know where MS comes from," Lisa told DW. Sometimes I ask myself, why did it hit me

China launched a rover early Saturday destined to land on the far side of the moon, a global first that would boost Beijing’s ambitions to become a space superpower, state media said. The Chang’e-4 lunar probe mission — named after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology — launched on a Long March 3B rocket from the southwestern Xichang launch center at 2:23 am (1823 GMT), according to the official Xinhua news agency.

German auto giant Volkswagen will begin rolling out its last generation of combustion engine cars in 2026, in its latest green pledge as it looks to turn the corner on the “dieselgate” emissions cheating scandal. The carmaker, which last month announced a 44 billion euro ($50 billion) electric offensive by 2023, said it would phase out its diesel and petrol cars as it looks to meet the emissions targets of the 2015 Paris climate deal by 2050.

The European Union’s executive proposed on Wednesday spending more money to counter fake news on the Internet, establishing an early warning system to alert governments and pushing tech companies do more to stop disinformation before next year’s EU elections. The European Commission’s plan, which must be agreed by EU leaders, is part of an attempt to stop what the United States, NATO and the EU say are Russian attempts to undermine Western democracies with disinformation campaigns that sow division. Russia has repeatedly denied any such actions.

Australia s two main parties struck a deal Tuesday to pass sweeping cyber laws requiring tech giants to help government agencies get around encrypted communications used by suspected criminals and terrorists. The laws are urgently needed to investigate serious crimes like terrorism and child sex offences, the conservative government said, citing a recent case involving three men accused of plotting attacks who used encrypted messaging applications.

The first manned space mission to the International Space Station since an unprecedented accident in October, which raised concerns about Moscow’s Soviet-designed spacecraft, will launch on Monday. Oleg Kononenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Anne McClain of NASA and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency brushed aside any possible safety concerns, saying risk was just part of the job.

With the direst warnings yet of impending environmental disaster still ringing in their ears, representatives from nearly 200 nations gather Sunday in Poland to firm up their plan to prevent catastrophic climate change. The UN climate summit comes at a crucial juncture in mankind s response to planetary warming. The smaller, poorer nations that will bare its devastating brunt are pushing for richer states to make good on the promises they made in the 2015 Paris agreement.

Digital giants led by Google, Facebook and Amazon have warned Australia against passing a “fundamentally flawed” law allowing security services to spy on encrypted communications among suspected criminals and terrorists. In a submission sent to parliament this week and made available to AFP Thursday, the Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI) said the legislation proposed by Australia’s government would undermine rather than enhance the nation’s security.

The Chinese scientist who claims to have created the world’s first genetically-edited babies said Wednesday the trial had been paused, following an international outcry over the highly controversial procedure. He Jiankui defended his work in front of a packed Hong Kong biomedical conference, saying he had successfully altered the DNA of twin girls born to an HIV-positive father, an apparent medical first.

Cheers and applause erupted at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Monday as a waist-high unmanned lander, called InSight, touched down on Mars, capping a nearly seven-year journey from design to launch to landing. The dramatic arrival of the $993 million spacecraft — designed to listen for quakes and tremors as a way to unveil the Red Planet’s inner mysteries, how it formed billions of years ago and, by extension, how other rocky planets like Earth took shape — marked the eighth successful landing on Mars in NASA’s history.

A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world s first gene-edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life. If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics. A US scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes. Many mainstream scientists think it s too unsafe to try, and some denounced the Chinese report as human experimentation.

The British Parliament has obtained a set of internal Facebook documents the social media giant has fought for months to stop from being made public, according to Facebook and a lawyer involved in a suit against the company. The cache of documents, some of which may include correspondences between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company executives, stem from a lawsuit in California that outlines a litany of allegations against Facebook, including claims about the company s alleged disregard for user privacy and the claim that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg devised a scheme that forced Facebook s rivals, or potential rivals, out of business.

A pair of tiny experimental satellites trailing NASA s InSight spacecraft all the way to Mars face their biggest test yet. Their mission: Broadcast immediate news, good or bad, of InSight s plunge through the Martian atmosphere on Monday. Named WALL-E and EVE after the main characters in the 2008 animated movie, the twin CubeSats will pass within a few thousand miles (kilometers) of Mars as the lander attempts its dicey touchdown. If these pipsqueaks manage to relay InSight s radio signals to ground controllers nearly 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) away, we ll know within minutes whether the spacecraft landed safely.