Tasked with finding clues about origins of life on Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft scooped up pieces of a rugged, rubble-pile asteroid named Bennu in late 2020 and delivered them to Earth about two months ago. On Monday (Dec. 11), scientists got their first detailed description of some of that extraterrestrial collection. “We definitely have hydrated, organic-rich remnants from the […]
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. The quest for new antibiotics is going back to the Stone Age. The urgency to identify possible candidates has never been greater as the global population faces nearly 5 million deaths every year that are associated […]
Gas Leak Fossil fuel companies drilling into the Norwegian permafrost may be unleashing a hidden monster. After analyzing 18 hydrocarbon exploration wells in Svalbard, an archipelago located between Norway and the North Pole, researchers discovered that half of them had struck accumulations of previously trapped methane gas. Allowing much of this gas to escape into […]
Two scientists who work at the University of Florida were arrested Friday after allegedly putting their kids in cages while they went to work. Dustin Huff, 35, and Yurui Xie, 31, are accused by the Gainesville Police Department of leaving their children home in small cages while they were at work, according to FOX 35. […]
Italian ecologist Francesco Ficetola was at a conference two years ago when it dawned on him that emojis can help power global conservation efforts. Ficetola does a lot of research on salamanders. But with no salamander emojis available, it’s hard to send a quick message to his colleagues when he’s busy. He realized he was […]
Earth has millions of fungi species, but the official emoji library has only one: Amanita muscaria, the red-capped, white-spotted mushroom found in fairy tale picture books and Super Mario Brothers. A staggering 180,000 species of butterflies and moths flit about this planet, yet their lone emoji avatar is a generic blue butterfly that looks like […]
Two revolutionary new ways to ease the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have been discovered, research has found. Electrical stimulation of the brain and light therapy might provide relief from some of the characteristic symptoms of the neurodegenerative disease, according to new papers published in the journals General Psychiatry and PLoS ONE, respectively. These treatments […]
Adolescents who use smartphones for more than 4 hours per day may be at higher risk of adverse mental health outcomes, a study has suggested. The research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, analyzed data on more than 50,000 South Korean adolescents taking part in an ongoing survey. The research found that smartphone usage for […]