CNN Other

By Andrew Freedman, CNN (CNN) — While the Trump administration wages war against clean energy, it is now vowing to lease millions of acres of public lands at a discount and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up the most polluting source of electricity: coal. This comes as the administration has restricted new

By Amanda Schupak (CNN) — What do you get when you cross a blue jay with a green jay? That’s not the start of a joke, but the subject of a new study that aims to describe a hybrid bird never encountered before in the wild. The bigger question scientists are puzzling over, though, is

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — A badly crushed cranium unearthed decades ago from a riverbank in central China that once defied classification is now shaking up the human family tree, according to a new analysis. Scientists digitally reconstructed the squashed skull, thought to be 1 million years old, and its features suggest that the

By Jack Guy, CNN (CNN) — Endangered leopard sharks have been observed mating in the wild for the first time, with scientists witnessing a “threesome” involving two males and a female. The encounter was filmed by Hugo Lassauce, a marine biologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, and documented in a research paper

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Surrounding our solar system is a natural and enigmatic cosmic shield called the heliosphere — and a new mission aims to help astronomers better understand it. Created by the solar wind, a constant flow of charged particles that stream away from the sun, the heliosphere acts as an enormous

By Jackie Wattles, CNN (CNN) — NASA on Monday introduced the 10 people — selected from a pool of 8,000 applicants — who will join the agency’s astronaut corps as it races to return to the moon before attempting an unprecedented crewed mission to Mars. The group includes six women and four men, whom acting

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Astronomers are trying to understand what caused a series of gamma ray bursts, or GRBs — the most powerful explosions in the universe. These energetic bursts are typically unleashed by the incendiary death of a star, or when it is shredded by a black hole. The observation of repeating

By Jacopo Prisco, CNN (CNN) — Astronomers might be close to confirming the presence of an Earth-like atmosphere on an exoplanet for the first time, if more detailed analyses verify preliminary observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. The planet is part of a planetary system about 40 light-years away from Earth called TRAPPIST-1, which

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — A plan to genetically engineer a version of the dodo, a giant flightless bird that disappeared 400 years ago and became the poster child for extinction, has made some headway, according to Texas-based biotechnology firm Colossal Biosciences. The company’s scientists said they have succeeded in culturing specialized cells from

By Bill Weir, CNN Chief Climate Correspondent It was 1985, and improvised empathy was cool. News reports of families starving to death in drought-stricken Ethiopia were enough to move the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats to assemble a British supergroup to help save them. Bob Geldof, Band Aid and “Do They Know It’s Christmas”

By Ella Nilsen, CNN (CNN) — New England, long burdened with some of the nation’s highest electricity costs, is facing a growing energy crisis. Winter cold snaps routinely send utility bills soaring in a region where natural gas fuels most of the grid. Offshore wind was seen as the answer — a long-promised relief for

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN (CNN) — A clutch of 28 dinosaur eggs found in the Qinglongshan fossil reserve in central China is about 86 million years old, according to scientists who used an “atomic clock” method to date the samples. Researchers said they now hope the eggs, and the technique employed to evaluate their age,

By Andrew Freedman, Jackie Wattles, CNN (CNN) — NASA has banned Chinese citizens with US visas from participating in agency programs — a dramatic escalation in the space race between China and the United States. It occurs as China gears up to send a crewed mission to land and potentially establish a habitat on the

By Jacopo Prisco (CNN) — Astronomers have detected a collision between two black holes in unprecedented detail, offering the clearest view yet into the nature of these cosmic oddities and confirming long-held predictions made by legendary physicists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The event, dubbed GW250114, became known in January when researchers spotted it with

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Scientists believe intriguing leopard spots on a rock sampled by the Perseverance rover on Mars last year may have potentially been made by ancient life, NASA announced Wednesday. The team has also published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature about the new analysis, though they say further study

By Amy Woodyatt, CNN A vaccine used to treat chlamydia in Australia’s koala population has been approved for rollout, in a world-first project. Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast spent more than 10 years developing a single-dose vaccine to protect the famed Australian marsupial from the effects of chlamydia, which include urinary tract

CNN By Amy Woodyatt, CNN A vaccine used to treat chlamydia in Australia’s koala population has been approved for rollout, in a world-first project. Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast spent more than 10 years developing a single-dose vaccine to protect the famed Australian marsupial from the effects of chlamydia, which include urinary

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN (CNN) — Neuroscientists from 22 labs joined forces in an unprecedented international partnership to produce a landmark achievement: a neural map that shows activity across the entire brain during decision-making. The data, gathered from 139 mice, encompass activity from more than 600,000 neurons in 279 areas of the brain — about

By Ella Nilsen, CNN (CNN) — Offshore wind developers and the attorneys general of Rhode Island and Connecticut are suing the federal government in an effort to reverse a stop-work order on a nearly complete wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. It’s the latest development in a rapidly escalating battle between President Donald

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN (CNN) — Tens of millions of years ago, an apex predator resembling a giant crocodile stalked the humid freshwater floodplains of southern Patagonia. Measuring up to 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) long and weighing about 550 pounds (250 kilograms), it ate whatever it could catch. Including some dinosaurs. Near the southern tip

By Issy Ronald and Amarachi Orie, CNN Glow-in-the-dark plants bright enough to light up streets at night may sound like the stuff of science fiction or fantasy. But scientists have already made plants that emit a greenish glow. They are even commercially available in the United States. A group of Chinese researchers has just gone

By Jackie Wattles, Kristen Holmes, CNN (CNN) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he will move the military’s US Space Command to Huntsville, Alabama — undoing a decision by the Biden administration to keep operations in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The US Space Command, or SPACECOM, is a joint command separate from the US Space

By Jackie Wattles, CNN A powerful solar storm is expected to reach Earth on Monday evening, potentially triggering a display of northern lights across the northern hemisphere. The stunning wave of auroras may be visible much farther south than is typical, reaching not just the northern US states but also parts of the lower Midwest

CNN By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — Forty years ago, in the early hours of September 1, grainy black-and-white images of a metal cylinder appeared on the video feeds in the command center of Knorr, a research vessel searching the Atlantic seafloor for the world’s most famous shipwreck: the Titanic. Members of the four-person watch

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — Forty years ago, in the early hours of September 1, grainy black-and-white images of a metal cylinder appeared on the video feeds in the command center of Knorr, a research vessel searching the Atlantic seafloor for the world’s most famous shipwreck: the Titanic. Members of the four-person watch team,