Astronomers have traced the signal of an enigmatic repeating fast radio burst for only the second time -- and it's in a spiral galaxy similar to our own, not so far away.

Multiple individual fast radio bursts in past years have been traced back to their sources in other galaxies, although those have yet to shed light on what created them.But this newly discovered repeating FRB has a different source from the first one that was found in 2019, deepening the mystery of how these radio waves are created.

"The FRB is among the closest yet seen, and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy," said Mohit Bhardwaj, study co-author and McGill University doctoral student. "However, the observation proved that it's in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB but close enough to now study using many other telescopes."

47.5 million people around the world suffer from dementia, which leads to a loss of memory and intellectual abilities. Watch this video to learn more.Source: CNN

47.5 million people around the world suffer from dementia, which leads to a loss of memory and intellectual abilities. Watch this video to learn more.Source: CNN

A huge 9th-century stone monument in Sweden may have been erected by Vikings who feared a repeat of a cold climate crisis that took place more than 300 years earlier, according to a new study.

A new interdisciplinary study by scholars from Swedish universities has concluded that the inscription is about anxiety triggered by a son's death and fears of a new cold climate crisis.

The study was based on archaeological research on a cold climate catastrophe from the years 536 to 550, which affected Scandinavia. The crisis took hold after a series of volcanic events and led to lower average temperatures, crop failures, hunger and mass extinctions. It is also estimated that the population of the Scandinavian Peninsula fell by 50% or more.

Once, Mars was a warm planet that could potentially support life and water on its surface. But something changed about 3.5 billion years ago and it lost most of its atmosphere.

A new study published this week in the journal Science reveals that more water vapor is accumulating in the upper atmosphere of Mars, allowing more of it to escape into space. This means that Mars is losing water more quickly than anticipated.

The accumulation of unprecedented amounts of water vapor is occurring about 50 miles up from the Martian surface. The orbiter revealed that parts of the atmosphere actually act like pockets, reaching supersaturated level. These pockets contain anywhere between 10 to a hundred times more water vapor than the atmospheric temperature should allow.

Smoke from fires in Australia is expected to make at least one "full circuit" around the globe and return to the skies over the country, scientists from NASA have warned.

Studying smoke plumes from late December, the space agency said that the smoke had traveled "halfway across Earth" and affected air quality in other countries. Australia is being ravaged by the worst wildfires seen in decades, with large swaths of the country devastated since the fire season began in late July.

At least 28 people have died nationwide, and in the state of New South Wales (NSW) alone, more than 3,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged. State and federal authorities are struggling to contain the massive blazes.

Earth endured its second-hottest year on record in 2019, NASA and NOAA scientists announced Wednesday, capping a decade they say was the warmest in recorded history.

The annual global climate assessment offers more evidence that the dangerous warming unleashed mostly by humans' burning of fossil fuels is continuing virtually unabated.

"This shows that what's happening is persistent, not a fluke due to some weather phenomenon: we know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in announcing the report.

he United States was once the dominant, global leader in science and engineering, but that ranking has dropped as other countries invest in research and development, according to a new report.

The findings were presented this week in the State of US Science and Engineering 2020 report, compiled and published by the National Science Board and the National Science Foundation. The report is published every two years and submitted to Congress."Our latest report shows the continued spread of [science and engineering] capacity across the globe, which is good for humanity because science is not a zero-sum game," said Diane Souvaine, National Science Board chair, in a statement. "However, it also means that where once the US was the uncontested leader in S&E, we now are playing a less-dominant role in many areas."

"Federal support of basic research drives innovation. Only the federal government can make a strategic, long-term commitment to creating new knowledge that [could] to lead to new or improved technologies, goods or services," said Julia Phillips, chair of the National Science Board's science and engineering policy committee. "Basic research is the 'seed corn' of our US S&E enterprise, a global competitive advantage, and the starting point for much of our GDP growth since World War II."

At a time when almost everything is politicized, vaccination has planted itself squarely on the national stage.

On one side of the debate are parents who are rebelling against settled science and calling on states to broaden vaccine exemptions. They cite their faith or believe vaccines pose danger to their children, even though no major religion opposes them and claims of vaccines' link to autism has been long debunked.

"I won't be surprised if we see many pro-vaccine bills this year," said Dr. Sean O'Leary, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. "The measles outbreaks were really a wake-up call, showing legislators that maintaining high vaccination rates is not just a theoretical goal."

Ever since a huge crater was discovered off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in the early 1990s, scientists have been confident that an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs and most life on the planet.

Now, a group of researchers at Yale University are putting the blame back solely on the asteroid. They say that any environmental impact from the eruptions and lava flows that occurred in the Deccan Traps (located in what is now India) happened well before the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, which scientists call K-Pg.

Some researchers believe that emissions from the volcanoes, which released gases like sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, weakened the ecosystem so that dinosaurs went extinct more easily when the asteroid hit.

On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.

These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.

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If you've heard of the term "MSG," you might have also heard of its common -- but inaccurate -- connotations.For years, monosodium glutamate, a food additive known as MSG, has been branded as an unhealthy processed ingredient mainly found in Chinese food, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence.

Now, activists have launched a campaign called "Redefine CRS." Headed by Japanese food and seasoning company Ajinomoto, the online campaign urges Merriam-Webster to change its entry to reflect the scientific consensus on MSG -- and the impact of misinformation on the American public's perception of Asian cuisine.

First off: what is MSG?Chances are, you've eaten it. It's a common amino acid naturally found in foods like tomatoes and cheese, which people then figured out how to extract and ferment -- a process similar to how we make yogurt and wine. This fermented MSG is now used to flavor lots of different foods like stews or chicken stock. It's so widely used because it taps into our fifth basic taste: umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). Umami is less well known than the other tastes like saltiness or sweetness, but it's everywhere -- it's the complex, savory taste you find in mushrooms or Parmesan cheese.

From the moment Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made their relationship known to the public in 2016, the message many Britons sent to her was clear:You aren't one of us, and you aren't welcome.

Meghan, a biracial, divorced American actress, was far from what many envisioned as a fairy-tale match for a beloved member of the British royal family. While many in the UK welcomed her, the British tabloid media and a large swath of the Twitterverse were not kind.

While Meghan identifies as biracial, she is being treated as a black woman. Every black woman, including myself, knows what that means. As far as the world is concerned, your entire being is filtered through the color of your skin.

When NASA's Mars 2020 rover lands on the Red Planet in February 2021, it will touch down in Jezero Crater, the site of a lake that existed 3.5 billion years ago. The next generation rover will build on the goals of previous robotic explorers by collecting the first samples of Mars, which would be returned to Earth at a later date.

"We're very much thinking about how Mars could be inhabited, how humans could come to Mars and make use of the resources that we have there in the Martian environment today," said Stack. "We send our robotic scouts first to learn about these other places, hopefully for us to prepare the way for us to go ourselves."

"Combining an understanding of the composition of the rocks, but also the very fine detail that we see in the rocks and the textures, can make a powerful case for ancient signs of life," Stack said. "We know that ancient Mars was habitable. But we haven't yet been able to show that we have signs, real signs, of ancient life yet. And with our instrument suite, we think we can make real advances towards that on the surface.

Aliens definitely exist, Britain's first astronaut has said -- and it's possible they're living among us on Earth but have gone undetected so far.

Then, in a tantalizing theory that should probably make you very suspicious of your colleagues, Sharman added: "It's possible they're here right now and we simply can't see them."

A former Pentagon official who led a secret government program to research potential UFOs, revealed in 2017, told CNN at the time that he believes there is evidence of alien life reaching Earth.

armaker Toyota has unveiled plans for a 2,000-person "city of the future," where it will test autonomous vehicles, smart technology and robot-assisted living.

"With people buildings and vehicles all connected and communicating with each other through data and sensors, we will be able to test AI technology, in both the virtual and the physical world, maximizing its potential," he said on stage during Tuesday's unveiling. "We want to turn artificial intelligence into intelligence amplified."

The project is a collaboration between the Japanese carmaker and Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), which designed the city's master plan. Buildings on the site will be made primarily from wood, and partly constructed using robotics. But the designs also look to Japan's past for inspiration, incorporating traditional joinery techniques and the sweeping roofs characteristic of the country's architecture.

Five exoplanets and eight planet candidates have been found around nearby stars, including a "cold Neptune" and two super-Earths that are potentially habitable, according to a new study. The two super-Earths, GJ180d and GJ229Ac, were found around small red dwarf stars that are 19 and 40 light-years away from our sun, while the cold Neptune was found around a similar star that's 29.5 light-years away.

"GJ 433 d is the nearest, widest and coldest Neptune-like planet ever detected," said Fabo Feng, lead study author and astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. A multitude of exoplanets, especially terrestrial planets like Earth, have been found around red dwarf stars. They're smaller and cooler than our sun, and they're the most common star in our galaxy. Exoplanets tend to orbit closer to these stars and still be within the star's habitable zone, or the perfect distance for the planet to be temperate and potentially host liquid water on their surfaces.

Meanwhile, the other super-Earth, GJ229Ac, is the nearest temperate super-Earth in a system where the host star is also orbited by a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are known as failed stars that can't sustain the hydrogen fusion needed to power them

Citigroup is making progress toward shrinking its gender pay gap. But it still has some work to do.

Globally, the bank's female employees earned 27% less than men did, according to a new report from the company. That's a slight improvement over the 29% gender pay gap Citigroup reported for 2018. This year's analysis also found that the median income for minority workers in the US was 6% less than the median income for non-minorities, down from 7% last year.

When adjusted to account for job titles, seniority and location, women at Citigroup (C) earned 1% less than their male counterparts, according to the report. Citigroup said that following a review of its global pay, it made pay adjustments as part of this year's compensation cycle according to the blog post.The company also said it has committed to increasing representation at the assistant vice president through managing director levels to at least 40% for women globally and 8% for black employees in the US by the end of 2021.

Taking away screens and reading to our children during the formative years of birth to age 5 boosts brain development. We all know that's true, but now science can convince us with startling images.

Both images are from recent studies done by the Reading & Literacy Discovery Center of Cincinnati's Children's Hospital. They are the first studies to provide neurobiological evidence for the potential benefits of reading and the potential detriments of screen time on a preschool child's brain development.

Both studies used a special type of MRI, called diffusion tensor imaging, to examine the white matter of 47 healthy children between the ages of three and five who had not yet started kindergarten.

As many as one million seabirds died at sea in less than 12 months in one of the largest mass die-offs in recorded history -- and researchers say warm ocean waters are to blame.

The birds, a fish-eating species called the common murre, were severely emaciated and appeared to have died of starvation between the summer of 2015 and the spring of 2016, washing up along North America's west coast, from California to Alaska.

The heat wave created the Blob -- a 1,000-mile (1,600 km) stretch of ocean that was warmed by 3 to 6 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 10.8 Fahrenheit). A high-pressure ridge calmed the ocean waters -- meaning heat stays in the water, without storms to help cool it down.

In 2016, astronomers found a potentially habitable planet called Proxima b around the star Proxima Centauri, which is only 4.2 light-years from Earth. Now, researchers have traced a second signal they believe belongs to a super-Earth orbiting the same star, increasing the intrigue of this neighboring planetary system and its potential.

After the discovery of the first planet around Proxima Centauri, researchers speculated about the existence of another planet in the system. Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes in Chile to trace light signals that appeared to be coming from that direction.

The radial velocity method is based on gravity and the Doppler effect, in which light increases or decreases in frequency as a source and observed objects move toward or away from each other.