In case you missed it this week, preserved Neanderthal and dinosaur footprints were found in different parts of the world, an ancient spider fossil set our spidey senses tingling, and the Opportunity rover’s mission came to an end after 15 years. The discovery of a dinosaur that wore a heart in its tail was also…

El Niño can have major implications for weather patterns across the globe. On Thursday morning, NOAA announced that El Niño is here and issued an El Niño Advisory. “El Niño conditions across the equatorial Pacific have come together, and we can now announce its arrival,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, and…

NASA has announced a two-year space mission to study the beginnings and evolution of the universe and determine how common the ingredients for life are within the planetary systems in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, nicknamed SPHEREx, is expected to launch…

The Earth is facing a climate crisis, but it’s also getting greener and leafier. According to new research, the rise is largely courtesy of China and India. A study by NASA, based on extensive satellite imagery and published in the journal Nature Sustainability, has revealed that the two countries with the world’s biggest populations are…

A fossilized mucus trail led to the discovery of the oldest evidence for mobility on Earth, dating to 2.1 billion years ago, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Previously, the oldest known traces of movement were dated to 570 million years ago, so this discovery…

There was a lot going on in the news this week, so you might have missed that six new species of tentacle-nosed catfish were found in the Amazon River. And that’s not even the best part. There were also two very different kinds of feathered fossil discoveries, beautiful photos from the cosmos and the surprising…

An odd kind of asteroid has been hiding out in our solar system, close to Venus, and it took a new state-of-the-art surveying camera to detect it. The Zwicky Transient Facility, known as ZTF, was installed on the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in March. Since then, it has…

A day after Pope Francis created an international uproar by saying Catholics nuns had been subjected to “sexual slavery” by the founder of a French order, the Vatican sought to clarify his remarks. “When the Holy Father, referring to the dissolution of a Congregation, spoke of ‘sexual slavery,’ he meant ‘manipulation,’ a form of abuse…

Last year was the fourth-hottest year ever recorded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, which means that the past five years have been the five warmest years in the modern record. NOAA and NASA discussed 2018’s global temperature and climate in a joint news conference Wednesday; both agencies maintain independent data…

For the first time, Pope Francis has acknowledged the sexual abuse of nuns by priests and bishops as a “problem” in the Catholic Church, saying that “we’ve been working on this for some time.” The Pope’s comments, which came during a press conference aboard the papal plane on a return flight to Rome from the…