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By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Ancient DNA has revealed surprises about the identities of some people who perished in the ancient Roman town of Pompeii after a volcanic eruption, overturning misconceptions about their genetic relationships, ancestry and sex. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, the volcano spewed hot, lethal gases and ash into

By Ella Nilsen, CNN (CNN) — Hours after former President Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election, the Biden administration moved Wednesday to limit oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Oil drilling had been banned for decades in the Arctic refuge — a pristine natural region in northeast Alaska home

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — With a sickle across her neck and a padlock on her left big toe, the corpse of a young woman found in northern Poland would have been unable to rise from her unmarked grave, according to local 17th century folklore. But her identity and how she ended up in

By Brandon Miller and Ella Nilsen, CNN (CNN) — New data confirms 2024 will be the hottest year on record and the first calendar year to exceed the Paris Agreement threshold — devastating news for the planet that comes as America chooses a president that has promised to undo its climate progress both at home

By Jack Guy, CNN (CNN) — An emperor penguin surprised locals when it appeared on a beach in Australia after making an epic journey of thousands of miles from its home in Antarctica. The penguin arrived on Ocean Beach in Denmark, Western Australia, on Friday, according to a statement from Australia’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Researchers have uncovered links between the precursor to the world’s oldest writing system and the mysterious, intricate designs left behind by engraved cylindrical seals that were rolled across clay tablets about 6,000 years ago. Scholars consider cuneiform the first writing system, and humans used its wedge-shaped characters to inscribe

By Taylor Nicioli, CNN (CNN) — A meteor shower known for blazing fireballs is set to peak on Monday night into early Tuesday and could present a dazzling display for patient sky-gazers. The Southern Taurids, the first branch of the Taurid meteors showers, will be optimally visible after midnight early Tuesday. Both showers tend to

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — The Mary Rose was a royal favorite when it first set sail as the flagship of King Henry VIII’s fleet in 1512. Nearly 500 years after the vessel sank in 1545 during a battle with a French fleet, the shipwreck is revealing what life was like in Tudor England.

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN (CNN) — For more than 1,000 years, dense forests in the Mexican state of Campeche concealed the region’s ancient human history. Scientists called Campeche an archaeological “blank spot” in the Maya Lowlands, an area spanning what is now Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and southeastern Mexico, and which the Maya inhabited from

By Julianna Bragg, CNN (CNN) — For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an all-consuming passion. He devoted nearly one year and invested a considerable sum of his own money to uncover the world’s largest

By Amarachi Orie, CNN (CNN) — Talented though they may be, monkeys will never type out the complete works of William Shakespeare, or even a short book, a new study suggests. The Infinite Monkey Theorem is a famous thought experiment that states that a monkey pressing random keys on a typewriter would eventually reproduce the

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — The 47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in touch with NASA — but not out of the woods — after a technical issue caused a days-long communications blackout with the historic mission, which is billions of miles away in interstellar space. Voyager 1 is now using a radio transmitter

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — The Perseverance rover spotted a quick glimpse of a cosmic “googly eye” on Mars during a recent solar eclipse. As Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons, passed in front of the sun, it cast a lumpy, potato-shaped shadow on the sun’s face as well as on the Martian surface.

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Well-preserved bones recovered from an English shipwreck are shedding light on what life was like for the crew of the ill-fated Mary Rose — and offering surprising insights about changes in bone chemistry that could benefit modern medical research. The Mary Rose was one of the largest warships of

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — When a supernova was seen glittering in the night sky for six months in 1181, it was so bright that Chinese and Japanese astronomers recorded it as a “guest star” in the Cassiopeia constellation. Now, astronomers using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager, or KCWI, at the W. M. Keck

By Taylor Nicioli, CNN (CNN) — A comet nicknamed the “Halloween comet” disintegrated on Monday during its closest approach of the sun, and the European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory mission captured footage of its final moments. Astronomers first discovered Comet C/2024 S1 (ATLAS) on September 27 via an Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — A shimmering ancient fossil unearthed in New York state looks like a piece of finely crafted jewelry, but it’s also a portal into the natural world 450 million years ago. The striking fossil is a newly identified species of arthropod, a distant relative of modern-day horseshoe crabs, scorpions, and

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — Louisiana students Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson wowed their teachers in 2022 when they discovered a new way to prove the 2000-year-old Pythagorean theorem in response to a bonus question in a high school math contest. But that was only the beginning. A volunteer at their former school, New

By Kathleen Magramo, CNN (CNN) — Water was already up to his knees, but 22-year-old Kierwen Garlan’s first thought was how to help his neighbors, as their homes were filling with floodwater and being lashed by heavy rain. Tropical Storm Trami, known locally as Kristine, swept across the northeastern Philippines last week, inundating entire towns