These are our favorite animal stories of 2022

From spiders that catapult their way to safety to sea sponges that sneeze themselves clean, here are the creature features that most impressed us in 2022. Fishing fox Pics or…

Medical racism didn’t begin or end with the syphilis study at Tuskegee

“We were all hard-working men … and citizens of the United States.” Herman Shaw, 1997 Born in Alabama in 1902, Herman Shaw was a farmer and a cotton mill worker.…

The James Webb telescope is getting glimpses of small, far-off planets

BALTIMORE — When the James Webb Space Telescope was first dreamed up, exoplanets hadn’t even been discovered yet. Now the observatory is showing astronomers what it can learn about planets…

Mysterious ichthyosaur graveyard may have been a breeding ground

Some 230 million years ago, massive dolphinlike reptiles called ichthyosaurs gathered to breed in safe waters — just like many modern whales do.   That’s the conclusion that researchers arrived…

Reflections on the U.N. Global Biodiversity Conference

A CNPS COP15 Update CNPS staff in Montreal for the United Nations 15th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15). Pictured left to right: CNPS IPA…

The first planet found by the Kepler space telescope is doomed

The first planet ever spotted by the Kepler space telescope is falling into its star. Kepler launched in 2009 on a mission to find exoplanets by watching them cross in…

These science discoveries from 2022 could be game changers

These reported discoveries from 2022 could be game changers, if only we were sure of the findings. News reports this year left us wondering … Is new physics around the…

The last vital ingredient for life has been discovered on Enceladus

CHICAGO — The last key ingredient for life has been discovered on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Phosphorus is a vital building block of life, used to construct DNA and RNA.…

Adult mouse brains are teeming with ‘silent synapses’

Learning lots of new information as a baby requires a pool of ready-to-go, immature connections between nerve cells to form memories quickly. Called silent synapses, these connections are inactive until…

How the James Webb telescope’s glances back in time are reshaping cosmology

BALTIMORE — The James Webb Space Telescope is living up to its promise as a wayback machine. The spectacularly sensitive observatory is finding and confirming galaxies more distant, and therefore…