Hard Numbers: Danes tax cow farts, SCOTUS sides with Biden (on social), Deadly mpox strain hits DRC, China’s lunar probe returns
6-3: In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with the Biden administration in a dispute with Republican-led states over how far the government can go to combat misinformation on social media when it comes to topics like COVID-19 and election security. The case stemmed from administration efforts to have platforms remove posts that touched on issues like COVID vaccines and election fraud.
8,000: There have been nearly 8,000 cases of a new strain of mpox, aka monkeypox, this year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including 384 deaths – almost half of which were children under 15. The virus, which can cause lesions across the whole body, has been spreading at a worrying rate, risking cross-border and international spread of the virus.
4.5 billion: China’s lunar probe has returned to Earth with the first-ever samples from the unexplored far side of the moon. The Chang’e-6 landed in the Inner Mongolia desert on Tuesday after a nearly two-month mission that was fraught with risk. Scientists hope the samples will help test theories about how the moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago and whether it resulted from a collision with a very early version of Earth.