If you think there aren’t enough hours in the day on Earth, this newly discovered planet will make your head spin. On an exoplanet called GJ 367 b that’s orbiting a star 31 light-years away from our sun, a year only lasts for about eight hours. The discovery could shed light on these mysterious, rapidly…… MORE

The United States Supreme Court appears poised to pare down, or even entirely overturn, nearly five decades of constitutional protection of abortion — a move that would have reverberations not just in America, but around the world. Oral arguments began on Wednesday in a landmark Mississippi case that threatens the existence of Roe v. Wade.…… MORE

In the early days of November, laboratory technicians at Lancet Laboratories in Pretoria, South Africa, found unusual features in samples they were testing for the coronavirus. Essentially, a gene was missing in what would be a normal genome profile of the virus. PCR tests weren’t detecting one of their expected targets, a signal that something…… MORE

While we were eating Thanksgiving leftovers and shopping sales on Black Friday, astronauts on the International Space Station had a special taco night to celebrate their second successful chile pepper harvest. As with the first historic chile pepper picking on October 29, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei had the honor of completing the longest plant…… MORE

When South African officials sounded the alarm on the new Omicron variant last Thursday, stocks around the world tumbled and up to 70 countries, including the United States, imposed travel bans and restrictions to southern African countries. The knee-jerk response followed the news that the variant had an unusually high number of mutations, which scientists…… MORE