Ultima Thule, the distant object NASA's New Horizons spacecraft explored on New Year's Day, is actually a pair of spheres that have been fused together by gravity, scientists revealed Wednesday. The Johns Hopkins-led mission could already be helping to confirm theories about how the planets formed.

The era of the whooping crane at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel is ending. The Trump administration cut the 50-year-old crane breeding program's $1.5 million budget, and by the end of the year, the birds' squawks will no longer be heard at the Patuxent Research Refuge.

Researchers are creating a map of the pockets of Baltimore where an abundance of blacktop and a lack of tree cover create what are known as urban heat islands. The data will help address rising public health concerns about heat-related illnesses.

Gov. Larry Hogan next month will seek a contractor to deal with sediment piled up behind the Conowingo dam, and his administration plans to deploy all the leverage it has to limit the pollution spilling into the Cheasapeake Bay.

Geologist Beth Sylvia sat on her knees stacking multiple sieves that looked like round cake pans with mesh bottoms. She then poured a sample of sand from Ocean City over the top one.

The Chesapeake Bay's waters are warming, in some places rising more rapidly even than the region's air temperatures, a new University of Maryland study finds. If unchecked, scientists say, the trend could complicate costly, long-running efforts to restore the ailing estuary, worsening fish-suffocating dead zones over time and even altering the food web on which the bay's fish and crabs depend.

The Maryland Geological Survey plans to install a seismometer in Western Maryland next year, anticipating the chance of earthquakes linked to 'fracking.'

The earthquake that rattled Millersville and Crownsville in Anne Arundel County late Saturday occurred in bedrock nearly 7 miles down and its light shaking likely spread farther than it would have elsewhere because it traveled upward and outward through Maryland's sandy coastal plain.

Amid concerns for the health of the nation's bees, a federal scientist and self-taught local naturalist team up to find a bee bonanza in an unlikely place – beneath power lines in a gritty bit of Baltimore.

The New Horizons spacecraft's first close-ups of Pluto show 11,000-foot mountains of water ice, a relatively thin crust of methane and nitrogen ice, and an unexpected lack of craters, evidence that the planet has more internal geological activity than scientists predicted.

As NASA's New Horizons mission nears an encounter with Pluto, scientists are getting one never-before-seen look of the dwarf planet after another.

Most streams in the Chesapeake Bay region are warming, an air-driven increase that could have significant impacts on the ailing estuary, a new study says.

A University of Maryland, College Park, researcher is using EarthScope, a network of seismometers, to create images of mysterious formations beneath the Earth's crust.

Scientists who observe Earth from space say the data they collect tells them climate change is impacting land use. With a goal of sharing that data with the masses, "Changing Landscapes Observed from Space" is the topic of a forum open to the public at Howard Community College on Nov. 8.

A spacecraft circling Mercury has captured the first photos of ice deep inside polar craters on Mercury, strengthening confirmation that such pockets exist and helping to further explain how they have evolved.

Despite early progress reducing Chesapeake Bay pollution, levels of a key pollutant, phosphorus, have not come down in many rivers in the past decade — and are actually worsening in several, officials say.

Lawrence Alexander Hardie, a retired Johns Hopkins University geology professor who successfully challenged an assumption about ocean salinity, died of Alzheimer's disease complications Dec. 17 at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in California. The former Pasadena and Forest Park resident was 80.

The crew of the Scarlett Isabella has been working almost nonstop since late June to map a 94-nautical-square-mile expanse of sea floor off Maryland's coast, gathering data that could help in placing up to 40 huge wind turbines there to generate power.

The Maryland Geological Survey is publishing a new map of Western Maryland that could guide potential shale exploration there and be a first step in redrawing a statewide map.

Scientists explain differences between East and West Coast quakes

John Mackenzie Wilson, who mapped the Eastern Shore for the Maryland Geological Survey, died of a lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, July 3 at the University of Maryland Medical Center. The Fells Point resident was 57.