Scientific discoveries in 2019 awed and sometimes alarmed us. At the end of last year, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world with the announcement that he had used the CRISPR gene-editing tool to modify the DNA of human embryos who developed into twin girls. The scientific community continues to grapple with the implications of his rogue experiment, debating what limits regulators should place on developing reproductive technologies.

A little more than a year after Chinese scientist He Jiankui startled the world by announcing he had produced the first gene-edited human babies, new and incriminating evidence against him has come to light.

Less than two years ago, scientists at Cambridge University in Britain announced they had engineered artificial mouse embryos from stem cells rather than from an egg and sperm. Ethicists warned the new technique would lead to the production of synthetic human embryos—and it did.

A fossil discovery in Germany defies the bedrock evolutionary belief that humans evolved from ancient, knuckle-walking apes in Africa.

Doctors in the United States have, for the first time, placed a human in suspended animation, New Scientist reported.

For the first time, archaeologists have discovered scientific evidence that a 60-year drought likely precipitated the fall of the ancient Assyrian empire, which Biblical prophets predicted decades in advance.

According to historical records, the Assyrian kingdom, centered in modern northern Iraq, collapsed just as the prophet Zephaniah warned it would. Babylonians and Medes together destroyed the kingdom’s capital, Nineveh, around 612 B.C.

Happy the elephant is anything but in her 1-acre enclosure at New York’s Bronx Zoo, according to attorneys with the Nonhuman Rights Project. Late last month, her lawyers asked a judge to grant legal personhood to the 48-year-old pachyderm. The group hopes not only to gain freedom for Happy but to elevate the legal status of all elephants.