Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Early analysis of a sample collected from the asteroid Bennu suggests the space rock has an unexpectedly water-rich past and may even have broken up from an ancient ocean world. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission collected a… Read More »
The Persian Gulf’s oil-rich states have big plans for the future as they hope to attract more tourists and investors, host major sporting events, build new cities and diversify their economies away from oil. But they face a major threat they cannot easily escape: extreme and sometimes deadly temperatures that scorch their country every summer,… Read More »
American astronaut Gus Grissom felt like he was on top of the world for about 15 minutes on July 21, 1961, and indeed he was. Grissom crewed on the Liberty Bell 7 mission, a ballistic test flight that launched him into the atmosphere on a rocket. During testing, it sat in a small capsule and… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific breakthroughs and more. It was revealed that the fossilized ear bone found in a cave in Spain belonged to a Neanderthal child who lived with Down syndrome until the age of 6. The findings suggested that community members… Read More »
It is widely accepted that humans have been warming the planet by burning coal, oil, and natural gas for more than a century. The Earth has warmed almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, and the planet is poised to quickly surpass the hoped-for 1.5 degree Celsius warming limit. But few people… Read More »
A binary system containing a massive star and possibly a black hole, together being a source of intense X-rays, has been shown to be a smaller-scale example of some of the brightest quasars on Earth. Universe. New findings from an international team used NASA‘S Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer spacecraft (IXPE), approximately 24,000 images of an… Read More »
On September 24, 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft dropped to Earth a capsule containing pure carbonaceous regolith collected from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. These samples were obtained after the probe made an impressive, seven-year round-trip journey across the solar system. Ever since these pieces of space rock arrived (about 120 grams of sample, to be exact),… Read More »
NASA’s oldest active astronaut will return to space for a six-month mission in September. 69-year-old Don Pettit will fly International Space station (ISS) as part of the Roscosmos-led Soyuz MS-26 mission, which included Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner. Russian state media source TASS said this week that the launch date would be September… Read More »
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found previously unseen structures and activity in Jupiter’s atmosphere above the Great Red Spot. These strange features appear to be caused by strong atmospheric gravitational waves. The Great Red Spot is the largest storm in the solar system, twice the size of Earth and believed to… Read More »
The heat wave that caused more than 100 million people to sweat in the eastern United States in June 2024 was so fast and so intense that forecasters warned that a sudden drought could hit large swathes of the region. Prolonged high temperatures can quickly dry out soils and trigger a rapid drought that can… Read More »