CNN – World

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The James Webb Space Telescope peered inside a wispy molecular cloud located 630 light-years away and spied ices made of different elements. Molecular clouds are interstellar groupings of gas and dust where hydrogen and carbon monoxide molecules can form. Dense clumps within these clouds can collapse to form young stars called

By Kate Golembiewski, CNN From a deer’s elaborate branching antlers to the fiddler crab’s oversize claw, the animal kingdom is full of flashy features used in combat to help secure a mate. A team of researchers announced last week that it has found the earliest known evidence of sexual combat in the form of a

By Bryn Nelson, CNN In its violent early years, Earth was a molten hellscape that ejected the moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect. Later, it morphed from a watery expanse to a giant snowball that nearly snuffed out all existing life. Then hyper-hurricanes with waves as high as 300 feet

By Katie Hunt, CNN To pry open the mysteries of our planet’s past, scientists typically study rocks and fossilized bones. Eggs are an often overlooked but extremely rich source of information, with birds, reptiles, dinosaurs and a few oddball mammals laying them on land for more than 200 million years. Rare fossilized eggshells can illuminate

By Ashley Strickland, CNN South Korea’s first lunar probe has returned some striking images of Earth and the moon. The Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter began orbiting the moon in December after the Korea Aerospace Research Institute‘s spacecraft had launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August. The probe, also known

By Amarachi Orie, CNN In the largest DNA analysis of its kind, scientists have found evidence to suggest that historic plague pandemics, such as the Black Death, were not caused by newly evolved strains of bacteria but ones that could have emerged up to centuries before their outbreaks. The plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis is dated

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Scientists were able to create a virtual lightning rod using a large, powerful laser atop a mountain in Switzerland, successfully diverting the path of lightning strikes. Lightning deflection technology hasn’t changed much since Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod in 1752. The Franklin rod, or a pointed metal mast on top

By Heather Chen, Angus Watson, Mitchell McCluskey and Stefano Pozzebon, CNN A man who spent 24 days adrift in the Caribbean Sea says he survived by eating little more than ketchup. Elvis Francois, 47, was found 120 nautical miles northwest of Colombia’s Puerto Bolívar after a plane saw the word “help” engraved on the hull

By Laura Paddison, CNN Climate change is sending the world hurtling towards a series of catastrophic tipping points, which risk setting off feedback loops that lock the world into irreversible climate change. That’s the bad news. The good news, however, is that there is also a series of “positive tipping points,” according to an analysis

By Ashley Strickland, CNN A new survey of the Milky Way galaxy has unveiled 3.3 billion celestial objects. Our galaxy is brimming with hundreds of billions of stars, dark pillars of dust and gas, and gleaming stellar nurseries where stars are born. Now, astronomers have documented those wonders in unprecedented detail during the Dark Energy

By Kristen Rogers, CNN The world’s population of North Atlantic right whales has been decimated in recent years by human-caused vessel strikes and rope entanglements, and now another member of this rare species faces the same fate. A 4-year-old female right whale found heavily entangled about 20 miles east of Rodanthe, North Carolina, is “likely

By Jackie Wattles, CNN SpaceX fired a new GPS satellite into orbit on behalf of the US military on Wednesday, continuing an effort to bolster the constellation of global positioning and navigation satellites that underpin smartphone apps, wartime operations and more. The GPS satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:24 a.m. ET

By Katie Hunt, CNN Paleontologists working in central India have made a rare discovery — a fossilized dinosaur hatchery with 92 nests and 256 eggs belonging to colonies of giant plant-eating titanosaurs. A study of the nests and their bowling ball-size eggs has revealed intimate details about the lives of the colossal, long-necked sauropods that

By Zoe Sottile, CNN Extremely rare — and extremely adorable. The Chester Zoo in Cheshire, England, has welcomed the birth of a Western chimpanzee, the most endangered subspecies of chimpanzees. The zoo announced the baby boy’s birth in a Thursday news release. The little one, born to mother ZeeZee, will join a troop of 22