The origin of life on Earth is still enigmatic, but we are slowly unraveling the steps involved and the necessary ingredients. Scientists believe life arose in a primordial soup of organic chemicals and biomolecules on the early Earth, eventually leading to actual organisms. It’s long been suspected that some of these ingredients may have been delivered from space. Now a new study, published in Science Advances, shows that a special group of molecules, known as peptides, can form more easily under the conditions of space than those found on Earth. That means they could have been delivered to ..read more

From Covid boosters to annual flu shots, most of us are left wondering: Why so many, so often? There’s a reason to update vaccines. Viruses rapidly mutate, which can help them escape the body’s immune system, putting previously vaccinated people at risk of infection. Using AI modeling, scientists have increasingly been able to predict how viruses will evolve. But they mutate fast, and we’re still playing catch up. An alternative strategy is to break the cycle with a universal vaccine that can train the body to recognize a virus despite mutation. Such a vaccine could eradicate new flu strains ..read more

Dubbed “living drugs,” CAR T cells are bioengineered from a patient’s own immune cells to make them better able to hunt and destroy cancer. The treatment is successfully tackling previously untreatable blood cancers. Six therapies are already approved by the FDA. Over a thousand clinical trials are underway. These aren’t limited to cancer—they cover a range of difficult medical problems such as autoimmune diseases, heart conditions, and viral infections including HIV. They may even slow down the biological processes that contribute to aging. But CAR T has an Achilles heel. Once injected into t ..read more

Graphene has been hailed as a wonder material, but it also set off a rush to find other promising atomically thin materials. Now researchers have managed to create a 2D version of gold they call “goldene,” which could have a host of applications in chemistry. Scientists had speculated about the possibility of creating layers of carbon just a single atom thick for many decades. But it wasn’t until 2004 that a team from the University of Manchester in the UK first produced graphene sheets using the remarkably simple technique of peeling them off a lump of graphite with common sticky tape. The re ..read more

Yesterday, Boston Dynamics announced it was retiring its hydraulic Atlas robot. Atlas has long been the standard bearer of advanced humanoid robots. Over the years, the company was known as much for its research robots as it was for slick viral videos of them working out in military fatigues, forming dance mobs, and doing parkour. Fittingly, the company put together a send-off video of Atlas’s greatest hits and blunders. But there were clues this wasn’t really the end, not least of which was the specific inclusion of the word “hydraulic” and the last line of the video, “‘Til we meet again, At ..read more

Stars like the sun are remarkably constant. They vary in brightness by only 0.1 percent over years and decades, thanks to the fusion of hydrogen into helium that powers them. This process will keep the sun shining steadily for about 5 billion more years, but when stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, their deaths can lead to pyrotechnics. The sun will eventually die by growing large and then condensing into a type of star called a white dwarf. But stars over eight times more massive than the sun die violently in an explosion called a supernova. Supernovae happen across the Milky Way only a few ti ..read more

AI models are power hogs. As the algorithms grow and become more complex, they’re increasingly taxing current computer chips. Multiple companies have designed chips tailored to AI to reduce power draw. But they’re all based on one fundamental rule—they use electricity. This month, a team from Tsinghua University in China switched up the recipe. They built a neural network chip that uses light rather than electricity to run AI tasks at a fraction of the energy cost of NVIDIA’s H100, a state-of-the-art chip used to train and run AI models. Called Taichi, the chip combines two types of light-base ..read more

ROBOTICS Is Robotics About to Have Its Own ChatGPT Moment? Melissa Heikkilä | MIT Technology Review “For decades, roboticists have more or less focused on controlling robots’ ‘bodies’—their arms, legs, levers, wheels, and the like—via purpose-driven software. But a new generation of scientists and inventors believes that the previously missing ingredient of AI can give robots the ability to learn new skills and adapt to new environments faster than ever before. This new approach, just maybe, can finally bring robots out of the factory and into our homes.” ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Humans Forget ..read more

Elon Musk has long been open about his dreams of using SpaceX to spread humanity’s presence further into the solar system. And last weekend, he gave an updated outline of his vision for how the company’s rockets could enable the colonization of Mars. The serial entrepreneur has been clear for a number of years that the main motivation for founding SpaceX was to make humans a multiplanetary species. For a long time, that seemed like the kind of aspirational goal one might set to inspire and motivate engineers rather than one with a realistic chance of coming to fruition. But following the succe ..read more

Growing a substitute liver inside a human body sounds like science fiction. Yet a patient with severe liver damage just received an injection that could grow an additional “mini liver” directly inside their body. If all goes well, it’ll take up the failing liver’s job of filtering toxins from the blood. For people with end-stage liver disease, a transplant is the only solution. But matching donor organs are hard to come by. Across the globe, two million people die from liver failure each year. The new treatment, helmed by biotechnology company LyGenesis, offers an unusual solution. Rather than ..read more