Students at a Pennsylvania high school are learning culinary skills in a program that allows them to earn a microcredential in the field. Officials say they hope to soon offer students an opportunity to work as apprentices at local businesses.

Conservation efforts are showing results for the mountain gorilla and two whale species, but several other species of animals and plants are moving closer to extinction, according to a report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The mountain gorilla and the western gray whale have moved from critically endangered to endangered and the fin whale has been reclassified from endangered to vulnerable, while quantities of the corpse flower, the vene tree and 54 species of fish are still declining.

Career and technical education students at a Michigan high school recently built a device to help a 6-year-old with a joint condition go to the bathroom on her own. Students in the school's drafting and design class designed and built three prototypes of the device using a 3D printer.

Winds, dry forests and any sort of spark are all it takes to start a devastating wildfire. "Over the past two months, the areas now burning have had far less precipitation than normal for this time of year, while experiencing above-average temperatures," said Syracuse University geographer Jacob Bendix.

The composition of the Amazon rain forest is changing as climate change puts pressure on the ecosystem, and it may not be adapting fast enough. Droughts in the region have led to "higher mortality in tree species most vulnerable to droughts and not enough compensatory growth in species better equipped to survive drier conditions," said University of Leeds geographer Adriane Esquivel Muelbert.

An exoplanet has been found orbiting a star six light-years away from the solar system, according to findings published in Nature. The planet, dubbed Barnard's Star b, is a super-Earth, and astronomers detected it using radial velocity, which tracks wobbles that stem from an orbiting planet's gravitational pull.

Depression has been linked to a genetic predisposition for obesity, findings published in the International Journal of Epidemiology suggest. "This analysis was important in that it suggests a psychosocial effect of higher BMI as well as, or instead of, a physiological effect driven by adverse metabolic health," the study says.

Radar has detected a huge crater far below the ice in Greenland, described in a study published in Science Advances. The crater is about 19.3 miles wide and was likely formed when a meteorite hit Earth during the Pleistocene Epoch.

An examination of approximately 200 skulls reveals that Neanderthals were likely no more violent than humans, a study published online in Nature suggests. "Our results suggest that [Neanderthal] lifestyles were not more dangerous than those of early modern Europeans," said lead researcher Katerina Harvati.

The McGill University Health Centre Foundation has designated $2.27 million to fund awards worth approximately $75,800 to winners of a competition involving high-risk, high-reward research. "This kind of support allows us to take that risk and do avant-garde research," said Dr. Donald Vinh of the Research Institute of MUHC.