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By Jacopo Prisco, CNN (CNN) — Tryptophan, the essential amino acid behind the Thanksgiving myth that eating turkey can make you sleepy, has been found to exist on Bennu, a small asteroid that swings by our planet about every six years. The discovery stems from an unprecedented sample collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which landed

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — Archaeologists say a 3D model of a centuries-old quarry of unfinished stone head statues on Easter Island offers new clues about how these monuments were made and the Polynesian society that brought them into being. Also known as Rapa Nui, the remote island is famed for the gargantuan sculptures

By Jacopo Prisco, CNN (CNN) — A female wild wolf living on the central coast of British Columbia was filmed pulling a crab trap out of the ocean to eat the bait — a never-before-seen behavior that could constitute the first documented use of tools by a wolf. The traps were set by the Heiltsuk

By Jack Guy, CNN (CNN) — New Zealand has announced plans to eradicate feral cats by 2050, as part of efforts to protect the country’s biodiversity. Speaking to Radio New Zealand on Thursday, conservation minister Tama Potaka said that feral cats are “stone cold killers” and would be added to the country’s Predator Free 2050

By Ella Nilsen, Steve Contorno, CNN (CNN) — The Trump administration is proposing to open federal waters off the entire coastline of California to drilling, as well as an area off the coast of Florida. Neither state’s waters have been open to new drilling for decades. President Donald Trump’s Interior Department released a five-year offshore

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — The latest images of an interstellar comet shared by NASA have captured how an array of spacecraft witnessed a flyby that was truly out of this world, revealing clues to the object’s composition, revealing clues to the object’s composition. Astronomers first detected the rare comet, known as 3I/ATLAS, on

By Taylor Nicioli, CNN (CNN) — Upon the open grasslands of what is now Kazakhstan, there once stood a Bronze Age settlement that may have served as a center of exchange and power around 1600 BC. The settlement — called Semiyarka and nicknamed “The City of Seven Ravines” for its location overlooking a network of

By Gina Park, CNN (CNN) — Sky-gazers worldwide may get the chance to see a celestial display this week as the annual Leonid meteor shower reaches its peak. The Leonids are set to peak at 1 p.m. ET Monday, according to EarthSky. You may start glimpsing meteors at 11 p.m. Sunday local time, which is

By Amarachi Orie, CNN (CNN) — A scientist in Japan has developed a technique that uses brain scans and artificial intelligence to turn a person’s mental images into accurate, descriptive sentences. While there has been progress in using scans of brain activity to translate the words we think into text, turning our complex mental images

By Jackie Wattles, CNN (CNN) — Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its towering New Glenn rocket on a mission that marked its first major test. Carrying a pair of satellites that are destined to take a long, winding trip to Mars, New Glenn took flight from Cape Canaveral

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN (CNN) — Scientists have newly described three extraordinary species of tree toad that leapfrog over the egg-to-tadpole stage. The females give birth on land to dozens of toadlets, each measuring just a few millimeters long. Live birth, or skipping the egg-laying and larva stage, is extremely rare in amphibians. Among more

By Laura Paddison, CNN (CNN) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom pulled no punches at the COP30 climate talks in Brazil on Tuesday, calling President Donald Trump an “invasive species” and a “wrecking ball” during discussions about the US absence from global climate action. Newsom, a Democrat widely viewed as a likely presidential candidate in 2028,

By Laura Paddison, CNN (CNN) — The planet’s biggest climate conference, COP30, has kicked off with representatives from more than 190 countries descending on the Brazilian city of Belém. They will spend two weeks deep in negotiations — likely contentious — on how to rein in dangerous global warming. COP30 is supposed to be the

By Jackie Wattles, CNN (CNN) — A 62-page document written by President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again pick to run NASA, billionaire Jared Isaacman, outlines a sweeping, ambitious, and at times controversial plan for the space agency. Isaacman, who was tapped to be NASA administrator after Trump was elected in 2024, only to see his nomination retracted

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Astronomers have spotted the largest and most distant flare ever observed from a supermassive black hole. Nicknamed “Superman,” the flare originated 10 billion light-years from Earth, and at its peak, the light emitted shone with the brightness of 10 trillion suns. The source of the flare is an active

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — Spotted from an airplane by remote sensing equipment, a vast and ancient Maya complex was hidden from view for millennia by forest and fields before it was made public in 2020. Five years on, archaeologists are spilling more of the monumental structure’s secrets. The artificial plateau made from earth,

By Ella Nilsen, Jackie Wattles, CNN (CNN) — Alarm is growing among federal workers at NASA’s iconic Goddard Space Flight Center’s main campus in Greenbelt, Maryland — the nerve center for groundbreaking missions like the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes — as more than a dozen buildings on the campus are being emptied and

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Paleontologists have long wrestled with how to differentiate between male and female dinosaurs based on their fossils. But new research may bring scientists closer to identifying the sex of one group of dinosaur. Hadrosaurs, also known as duck-dilled dinosaurs, were common during the Late Cretaceous Period (100.5 to 66

By Andrew Freedman, CNN (CNN) — The Trump administration does not intend to send a high-level delegation to the COP30 climate summit — or possibly any delegation at all. But that doesn’t mean the country’s influence won’t be felt at the talks. As nations prepare to gather in Belém, Brazil, for the negotiations, which begin

By Jackie Wattles, CNN (CNN) — A suggestion made last week by acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy that SpaceX could be booted from the agency’s upcoming moon-landing plans has rocked the space industry. Now, behind the scenes, pitches for alternate paths to the lunar surface are quietly starting to take shape. SpaceX currently has a

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — An interstellar comet that originated outside our solar system just made its closest pass of the sun, setting it on an outgoing path — but it’s not leaving our cosmic neighborhood yet. The comet, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, came within about 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) of our star, according

CNN By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — An interstellar comet that originated outside our solar system just made its closest pass of the sun, setting it on an outgoing path — but it’s not leaving our cosmic neighborhood yet. The comet, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, came within about 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) of our star,

By Andrew Freedman, CNN (CNN) — The water around Jamaica had been simmering all summer. By the time Hurricane Melissa roared ashore Tuesday, that uber-warm Caribbean Sea had helped turn it into a monster: a Category 5 storm with winds reaching 185 miles an hour, tied for the strongest hurricane to strike land in the

CNN By Andrew Freedman, CNN (CNN) — The water around Jamaica had been simmering all summer. By the time Hurricane Melissa roared ashore Tuesday, that uber-warm Caribbean Sea had helped turn it into a monster: a Category 5 storm with winds reaching 185 miles an hour, tied for the strongest hurricane to strike land in

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN (CNN) — Recent analysis of two fossils from Australia, estimated to be about 50,000 years old, suggests that Australia’s First Peoples valued big animals for their fossils as well as for their meat, collecting bones and transporting them over great distances. For decades, scientists viewed cut marks on the fossils as

By Taylor Nicioli, CNN (CNN) — Near the end of his reign, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte led an army of over half a million men in an invasion of Russia in 1812. Six months later, after the army was forced to retreat, an estimated tens of thousands of his soldiers made it back to France.

By Jacopo Prisco, CNN (CNN) — A type of mosquito that was believed to have evolved in the London Underground has a much older origin in the Mediterranean, according to a new genetic study. The myth originated during World War II when Londoners sheltering from German warplanes in subway stations had to endure bites from

By Amanda Schupak, CNN (CNN) — In the badlands of eastern Wyoming, the Lance Formation is a trove of prehistoric fossils. And one area in particular — a region less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) across — has provided scientists with at least half a dozen remarkably well-preserved dinosaur specimens complete with details of scaly

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — A site in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico is providing a rare glimpse into the last days of the dinosaurs. Rocks and fossils at the Naashoibito Member site show an ecosystem that was filled with a diverse population of dinosaurs just before they disappeared from Earth.