Mindy Weisberger

A once-in-a-century wave that struck a cargo ship 25 years ago caused the worst toy-related environmental disaster of all time, known as the Great Lego Spill.

Hacking coughs, uncontrollable sneezing, high fevers and pounding headaches can make anyone miserable — even a dinosaur.

Bacteria help the sponges digest extinct creatures' remains.

What would it take to dislodge the moon from its orbit and send it on a collision course with Earth?

Reed-threaded vertebrae, some of which date to nearly 600 years ago, were found in tombs in coastal Peru. This unusual mortuary practice may have been a way to reassemble desecrated remains.

About 9 million years ago, marine worms burrowed into a dead fish's head and left behind a skull full of fossilized poop.

A wildlife photographer recently captured images of polar bears like you've never seen them before: living in abandoned buildings in the Russian Arctic.

It literally turned victims inside out.

After a month in space, the Webb Telescope — the most powerful space telescope ever launched — has reached its permanent cosmic address, 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.

The hypothetical clock's hands mark our nearness to annihilation.

The Doomsday Clock debuted 75 years ago to highlight the threat of nuclear weapons to our survival as a species, a risk now accompanied by escalating climate change and global pandemics.

An enormous asteroid more massive than two Empire State Buildings will zoom harmlessly past Earth next week. Look up!

A site in Australia that holds thousands of astonishingly well-preserved fossils has been kept a closely guarded secret among paleontologists for the past three years.

During an archaeological inspection of a waterway project site in Rome, archaeologists found ancient funerary relics, including a terracotta statue with a dog's head.

Scientists just collected the first measurements of violent eruptions in extremely dense magnetic stars called magnetars.

Signs of accelerating global warming abounded this year, but we could still prevent the worst-case scenarios — if we act soon.

In a year of unusual and surprising news at Live Science, these stories stood out.

Here are some of our favorite gross-outs in science news this year.

An international partnership of space agencies just launched JWST, the biggest, most powerful space telescope ever made, in an achievement that was decades in the making.

After an asteroid struck at the end of the Cretaceous period, debris from wildfires filled the atmosphere and blocked sunlight across Earth, causing ecosystem collapse and extinctions.

The James Webb Space Telescope, an upgrade to Hubble, is scheduled to launch on Dec. 25.

A geomagnetic event around 41,000 years ago sent the aurora wandering for centuries, as far south as the equator.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe dipped into the sun's atmosphere to sample particles from the corona — a scientific first.

Thwaites Glacier is roughly the size of Florida, and holds enough ice to raise sea levels over two feet. New research shows that the collapse of its ice shelf may be just a few years away.

Preserved trackways from the Cretaceous period provide a rare snapshot of fast running speeds in theropod dinosaurs.