Get ready to wave to an asteroid 👋🪨 In 2029, asteroid Apophis will swing by Earth, passing safely about 20,000 miles from the surface. The OSIRIS-APEX mission will meet up with the asteroid shortly after, to map the surface and study its chemical makeup.

Anthropic went after the largest bacterium ever found, a single cell you can see with the naked eye, and read the machinery packed inside it. The size was never the interesting part. The question was how one cell keeps millions of copies of its own factory working in sync. > COUNT - every ribosome location in the cell mapped, rather than averaged across it > WRAP - the membrane sacs holding DNA and ribosomes treated as separate rooms > FLOW - what each room produces compared against what sits next to it > SPLIT - rooms with different output flagged as independent units > SCALE - the whole layout tested against how large a normal cell can grow Bacteria are supposed to be simple bags. One compartment, everything mixed, nothing filed away. This one files. Its DNA and its ribosomes sit inside membranes, which textbooks reserve for complex cells. That single arrangement is what lifts the size ceiling. A cell without rooms hits a physical wall long before a centimetre. The rooms are not identical either. Output varies from one to the next, meaning parts of the same cell are doing different jobs. That edges close to what tissue does, inside something that is still one organism by every definition we use. The line between simple and complex life was drawn before anyone had seen this, and it was drawn on compartments. Every room, its output and the size math behind it sit in the breakdown below.

Human's are causing the Earth's sixth mass extinction. 83% of wild mammals have already been pushed past the brink. If nature goes, its taking us with it. No time to wait. #ActOnClimate #biodiversity #natureneedshalf #biodiversity #votegreen

An invisible stream of plasma is heading straight toward Earth. Scientists are thrilled. spklr.io/6019Ep11Z

AI titan Anthropic has launched a biology ‘wet lab’ where human scientists and AI agents will work together to design and conduct experiments. The company has released one of the team’s first finds: a peculiar pattern of DNA in the genomes of several giant viruses. go.nature.com/46K4qmC

Cyrielle Chatelain, Jérémie Iordanoff, députés écologistes de l’Isère, et Guillaume Gontard, sénateur de l’Isère, ont écrit à la préfète de l’Isère et à la DREAL (Direction régionale de l’environnement, de l’aménagement et du logement) afin de leur deman… l.ledauphine.com/xCg

Gravity can act like a lens. When light from a distant source passes a massive object such as a galaxy or galaxy cluster, the curvature of spacetime changes the path of the light, so an observer can see distorted, magnified or multiple images of the same source. The geometry depends on the alignment of the source, lens and observer. When they are nearly perfectly aligned, the image can form a ring around the lens-the Einstein ring, one of the clearest visual consequences of gravitational lensing predicted by general relativity.

🛰️🧊 De son maximum annuel le 15 mars à son minimum le 12 septembre 2026, cette animation montre l’évolution quotidienne de la banquise arctique grâce notamment aux données de l’agence spatiale japonaise JAXA. 👉 Depuis 1978, les satellites permettent de suivre son évolution en continu. La limite jaune indique l’étendue moyenne minimale observée entre 1981 et 2010. 📹 : NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

A recent @ScienceTM Review synthesizes the translational pipeline of research decoding how tumors interact with both the central and peripheral nervous systems to fuel their growth—as well as implications for drug repurposing and interventions. Learn more on #WorldCancerResearchDay: scim.ag/4xzN5HW

EARTH HAS A COSMIC CLOCK. Earth's climate doesn't stay exactly the same forever. Over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, Earth's orbit and orientation in space slowly change. These changes are called the Milankovitch cycles. There are three major cycles: ECCENTRICITY Earth's orbital shape changes from more circular to more elliptical over roughly 100,000 years. OBLIQUITY Earth's axial tilt varies between about 22.1° and 24.5° over roughly 41,000 years. PRECESSION Earth's rotational axis slowly wobbles like a spinning top over roughly 26,000 years. Together, these cycles change where and when sunlight is distributed across Earth, particularly at high latitudes. Over geological timescales, these orbital changes are an important factor in Earth's long-term climate variations and the timing of many glacial and interglacial periods. Think about the scale: Earth's orientation changes over tens of thousands of years... while a human lifetime is only a tiny moment on that clock. The planet isn't just traveling around the Sun. Its entire orbital geometry is slowly changing too. Which cycle surprised you most: eccentricity, obliquity, or precession?

Nature research paper: Sequence-encoded hexagonal lattices in multichannel peptide nanofibrils go.nature.com/4hsf8mJ

Conditions that could sustain a proposed early stage of life known as the RNA World may have stabilized around 4.33 billion years ago, according to a modelling study published in Nature Communications. go.nature.com/4yRAwbN