Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced he had produced the first gene-edited human babies nearly two years ago. The scientific world has reeled ever since, looking for ways to provide oversight for this controversial sector of science.

A recent scientific paper challenges widely believed ideas about water on our planet. Although the study by secular scientists assumes a naturalistic beginning to Earth, it nevertheless suggests what the Bible has said all along: Water covered our planet from the very beginning.

Most modern scientists believe the newly formed Earth was dry because the intense heat of the inner solar system would have evaporated any moisture. They hypothesize that comets or asteroids delivered water from the cooler, outer solar system beyond Jupiter long after the rocky Earth came into existence.

Some 200 million miles from Earth, between Mars and Jupiter, a NASA spacecraft began slowly approaching the surface of Bennu on Tuesday. The Osiris-Rex takes 4½ hours to reach the surface to complete its mission, the United States’ first attempt to gather samples from an asteroid as it careens through space.

Supercharged bacterial clones appear responsible for new cases of scarlet fever.

American Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency spent weeks in quarantine before Wednesday’s launch from a facility in Kazakhstan. They docked at the International Space Station just three hours later for their six-month stay.

A spider 1 millimeter long can stretch its web back and fling it forward at an acceleration rate 100 times that of a cheetah. The snapping action, which allows it to surprise unsuspecting flies and mosquitoes as they cruise by, relies on a silk spring mechanism that surpasses anything humans have designed, scientists say.

A French and an American scientist shared a chemistry award for designing a tool to alter DNA mutations that can cause many diseases. Emmanuelle Charpentier of France and Jennifer A. Doudna of the United States won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for inventing CRISPR-Cas9.