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By Jacopo Prisco, CNN (CNN) — Like tiny photobombers, cosmic anomalies resembling small, bright red points show up in almost every snapshot taken by the most powerful space telescope ever made. Astronomers now call them little red dots, or LRDs, but there is no agreement yet on what exactly they are. Since NASA’s James Webb

By Jack Bantock, CNN (CNN) — Time and time again, Hollywood has embraced an imminent apocalypse, as films like “2012” beamed the fictionalized end of the world onto the big screen. Fortunately, the scientific logic for many such movies has been, to put it lightly, creative. The planet’s crust did not suddenly shift 14 years

By Jackie Wattles, CNN (CNN) — NASA has finished a crucial risk assessment ahead of its upcoming lunar flyby mission, and during a news conference Thursday, the agency revealed a new target launch date and discussed how officials evaluated the dangers the mission’s four-person crew will face. The agency is now aiming to launch the

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Mosquitoes haven’t always had a taste for human blood — partly because the tiny yet dangerous insects have been around a lot longer than humans. Pinpointing when mosquitoes shifted their preference to human blood could provide a novel window into the spread of early human ancestors across the globe,

By Jackie Wattles, CNN (CNN) — A large space probe plummeted into Earth’s atmosphere early Wednesday — years earlier than expected. And while most of the spacecraft was expected to disintegrate in a flaming blaze during reentry, a few components could have survived, according to NASA. The odds that a piece of debris would cause

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — The possibility that a huge space rock — once deemed the riskiest asteroid ever observed — could hit the moon now appears to be off the table. Discovered at the end of December 2024, asteroid 2024 YR4 at first seemed a serious threat to Earth, with scientists estimating as

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Scientists can now come face to face with an early human ancestor nicknamed Little Foot who lived 3.67 million years ago, thanks to digital reconstruction technology. Renowned paleoanthropologist Ronald Clarke identified four tiny bones in the University of the Witwatersrand’s museum collection and went on to discover Little Foot’s

By Andrew Freedman, CNN (CNN) — There was a decisive winner to the Lower 48 states’ split screen winter — a battle between frigid cold in the East and record warmth in the West. Anyone in the East who shivered through this winter could be in for a shock at the outcome. In the end,

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — Within 24 hours of the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran, ships in the region’s waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire, erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land. The location confusion was a result of widespread jamming and spoofing

By Laura Paddison, CNN (CNN) — Is the world getting hotter, faster? It’s a big question which has been puzzling and dividing scientists for years. A new paper says it has the answer, and it’s not good news. Global warming has accelerated “significantly” over the past 10 years, meaning the world may barrel through crucial

By Asuka Koda, CNN (CNN) — Scientists have captured the most complete, high-resolution map of the cold gas at the center of the Milky Way, which contains the raw material from which stars and planets are made. Information from the image could help astronomers understand the origin of our solar system. The image is the

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — Scientists are one step closer to understanding the origins of complex life on Earth after shedding new light on a mystery about our microbial ancestors. The key, they suspect, may lie in how simple microbes that lived billions of years ago adapted to the presence of oxygen. Humans, like

By Laura Paddison, CNN (CNN) — Sea levels along the world’s coastlines are much higher than previously assumed, more than 3 feet in some regions, according to new research, raising alarms that the world is underestimating the extent of the threat and how quickly coastlines could disappear. Sea level rise is one of the most

By Jacopo Prisco, CNN (CNN) — Astronomers have spotted a galaxy so faint, it’s almost invisible — a discovery that could help illuminate one of the most elusive substances in the universe. The researchers found Candidate Dark Galaxy-2, or CDG-2, using the Hubble Space Telescope, and they believe it’s made of at least 99.9% dark

By Lily Hautau, CNN (CNN) — A total lunar eclipse is turning the moon a deep reddish-orange on Tuesday for sky-gazers in Asia, Australia, the Pacific Islands and the Americas. This event, often referred to as a blood moon, occurs when Earth moves directly between the sun and the moon, casting a shadow on the