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By Ashley Strickland, CNN Whenever we’re confronted with aspects of science fiction becoming scientific reality, philosophical questions arise. This week, many were asking this one: What is a robot, really? Films and TV shows have offered us myriad archetypes of what robots could be like — as varied as the terrifyingly clever Cylons of “Battlestar

CNN Editorial Research Here’s a selected list of commercial airplane crashes caused by military acts or by terrorism. June 14, 1940 – Soviet bombers shoot down the Kaleva, a Finnish commercial plane traveling from Estonia to Finland, killing all nine on board. One passenger was Henry W. Antheil Jr., an American diplomat who was carrying

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The use of invisible lasers in space may sound like something from science fiction, but it’s real. NASA’s upcoming Laser Communications Relay Demonstration could revolutionize the way the agency communicates with future missions across the solar system. These lasers could lead to more high-definition videos and photos from space than ever

By Rhea Mogul, Adam Renton and Tara John, CNN The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

By Ashley Strickland, CNN If you think there aren’t enough hours in the day on Earth, this newly discovered planet will make your head spin. On an exoplanet called GJ 367 b that’s orbiting a star 31 light-years away from our sun, a year only lasts for about eight hours. The discovery could shed light

By Megan Marples, CNN Scientists revealed a newly discovered marine ichthyosaur species with gnarly teeth that was found in Colombia. The partial skull of an ichthyosaur, an extinct marine reptile, that looked like a swordfish was unearthed in Loma Pedro Luis, Villa de Leyva, in Boyacá, Colombia in the 1970s, according to a study published

By Rob Picheta, CNN The United States Supreme Court appears poised to pare down, or even entirely overturn, nearly five decades of constitutional protection of abortion — a move that would have reverberations not just in America, but around the world. Oral arguments began on Wednesday in a landmark Mississippi case that threatens the existence

By Ashley Strickland, CNN During a six and a half hour spacewalk Thursday, NASA astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron replaced a malfunctioning communications antenna and achieved other “get ahead” tasks. The duo began their spacewalk at 6:15 a.m. ET and ended at 12:47 p.m. ET. NASA postponed the spacewalk until Thursday, originally scheduled for

By Tim Lister and David McKenzie, CNN In the early days of November, laboratory technicians at Lancet Laboratories in Pretoria, South Africa, found unusual features in samples they were testing for the coronavirus. Essentially, a gene was missing in what would be a normal genome profile of the virus. PCR tests weren’t detecting one of

By Rhea Mogul, Adam Renton, Sheena McKenzie & Ed Upright, CNN The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

By Ashley Strickland, CNN While we were eating Thanksgiving leftovers and shopping sales on Black Friday, astronauts on the International Space Station had a special taco night to celebrate their second successful chile pepper harvest. As with the first historic chile pepper picking on October 29, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei had the honor of

By Katie Hunt, CNN A new species of armored dinosaur discovered in Chile had a weaponized tail not seen before in any other dinosaur. Roughly 2 meters (6.5 feet) in size, the small armored dinosaur called an ankylosaur dates from the late Cretaceous period, around 71.7 million to 74.9 million years ago. Its largely complete

By Tara John, CNN When South African officials sounded the alarm on the new Omicron variant last Thursday, stocks around the world tumbled and up to 70 countries, including the United States, imposed travel bans and restrictions to southern African countries. The knee-jerk response followed the news that the variant had an unusually high number

By Adam Renton, Brad Lendon, Sheena McKenzie, Ed Upright, Meg Wagner, Melissa Macaya and Melissa Mahtani, CNN The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

By Ashley Strickland and Katie Hunt, CNN NASA has postponed a spacewalk that was scheduled for Tuesday after receiving a space debris warning for the International Space Station. Just hours before the astronauts were due to venture out of the ISS, the agency said on its Twitter account that “due to the lack of opportunity

By Adrienne Vogt, Ben Westcott, Adam Renton, Sheena McKenzie and Ed Upright, CNN The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.