CNN – World

By Katie Hunt, CNN The fast-expanding field of ancient DNA, formally known as paleogenetics, came of age in 2022, earning its pioneering scientist Svante Pääbo a Nobel prize for medicine and physiology. Pääbo, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, developed methods to recover, sequence and analyze ancient DNA from

By Laura Paddison, CNN More than 190 countries have adopted a sweeping agreement to protect nature at the United Nations’ biodiversity conference in Montreal. The gavel went down in the early hours of Monday on an agreement which includes 23 targets aimed at halting the biodiversity crisis, including a pledge to protect 30% of land

By Elizabeth Wolfe, Tavleen Tarrant and Jay Croft, CNN Five people were killed in a shooting at a condominium in a Toronto suburb Sunday night, police said, a “terrible” crime that came amid Canada’s efforts to tighten its gun control laws. After responding to an active shooting call about 7:20 p.m. at the residential building

By Heather Chen, Lindsay Isaac and Jennifer Hauser, CNN One of Iran’s best-known actresses has been arrested days after she criticized the execution of a man who was involved in the nationwide protests that have swept the country since September. Taraneh Alidoosti, who starred in the 2016 Oscar-winning film, “The Salesman,” had condemned the hanging

By Ashley Strickland, CNN Some of our favorite space missions are closing out the year in a big way. Artemis I made a literal splash(down) when it successfully returned to Earth on December 11. Engineers are studying the data collected by the Orion spacecraft now to prepare for the first crewed flight of Artemis II

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The Perseverance rover is about to build the first depot of rock and soil samples on another planet. Establishing a cache site is a milestone in the complex preparation to return the first rocks and dirt from Mars to Earth by 2033. Within days, the rover will start dropping some of

By Ivana Kottasová, CNN The global energy crisis caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine has pushed global demand for coal — the most polluting of all fossil fuels — to a record high in 2022, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Friday. Demand for coal is set to grow 1.2% and top 8 billion

By Kate Golembiewski, CNN Diplodocids were a family of dinosaurs with long necks and, often, even longer tails — some species’ tails reached 50 feet in length. They were wide-ranging, but especially flourished in what’s now the western US around 152 million years ago. For decades, scientists have debated whether these dinosaurs could whip their

By Ashley Strickland, CNN The first mission to survey nearly all of the water on Earth’s surface has launched. The international Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, known as SWOT, lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 6:46 a.m. ET on Friday. The first stage of

By Ashley Strickland, CNN When NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft slammed into the tiny asteroid Dimorphos, the impact certainly left a mark. The intentional collision, which took place on September 26 as a test of asteroid deflection technology, displaced more than 2 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of rocks and dust from the asteroid

By Rachel Ramirez, CNN The world’s largest whales are more than just astonishing creatures. Much like the ocean, soil and forests, whales can help save humanity from the accelerating climate crisis by sequestering and storing planet-heating carbon emissions, researchers say. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, climate researchers