While scientists scramble to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, others are working to unravel the mystery of how the new virus developed. It seems to have jumped from an animal host to humans at a market in Wuhan, China, but theories about where it originated continue to surface.

Every year, nearly 24,000 women in the United States miscarry a child. Research at the University of California, San Francisco, offers hope to parents whose babies have metabolic disorders that often cause a miscarriage.

Intelligent design experts and creationists say evolutionists are overhyping the recent discovery of “ghost DNA” in West Africa.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University plan to place a tiny museum on the moon next year for discovery by humans in the distant future—who have very strong magnifying glasses. The MoonArk has four chambers about 2 inches high and wide and weighs only about 8 ounces in total. But it carries nanoscale samples of poetry, music, art, and samples from Earth’s surface.

Katherine Johnson, an African American mathematician who worked on NASA’s early space missions, has died. She was 101 years old.

When the Ebola epidemic struck West Africa in 2014, drugmakers had been working on a vaccine for the virus for 10 years. But it took more than a year to get it to affected areas.

“That vaccine was shown to be 100 percent effective, suggesting that much of the epidemic could have been prevented,” according to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which formed in 2017 to try to prevent the Ebola failure from happening again. The coronavirus outbreak is the first major test of the organization’s resources.

A snowman-shaped object far beyond Pluto is breaking new ground in scientists’ understanding of our solar system. New data suggests two smaller objects merged slowly over time, rather than colliding, to form the planetesimal named Arrokoth, the team behind NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft said at a meeting in Seattle on Thursday.