A Protein Written in Plain English, and a Galaxy That Moved

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Here is a sentence that would have sounded like a joke a few years ago. A group of researchers typed a description of a protein they wanted, in ordinary written English, and a machine wrote down the recipe.

The system is called Pinal, built at Westlake University in China and reported in Nature. Proteins are chains of amino acids that fold into a shape, and the shape is what does the job: holding oxygen, cutting a molecule in half, glowing green. Designing one usually means translating what you want into geometry, which is specialist work and slow. Pinal takes a sentence instead, turning your description into a rough structural sketch and then writing a sequence of amino acids to match.

Then comes the part that counts, because a sequence on a screen is just an opinion. They built four: a fluorescent protein, an enzyme that breaks down the plastic in drink bottles, an enzyme that processes alcohol, and a small metabolic helper called an H protein. All four did what had been asked of them, and both enzymes genuinely worked as catalysts. Dropped into a chain of enzymes that pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, the H protein outperformed the bacterium's own version by a factor of 1.7, first try, with no tinkering afterwards.

Generating candidates is cheap, though, and checking them is not. For the fluorescent protein, Pinal produced fifty thousand sequences, the team made twenty-nine, and exactly one glowed. Asking for a specific shade of green, the authors say, remains challenging. So this is not design on demand. It is a fast way of producing plausible guesses, bolted onto the slow business of testing them. But the instruction was a sentence, and the result was an enzyme in a tube.

From the very small to something that was briefly the most distant thing anyone had ever seen.

Earlier this year, astronomers described a faint red smudge in images from the Webb telescope and nicknamed it Capotauro. It was bright in the longer infrared wavelengths and simply absent in the shorter ones. The usual reading of that pattern is hydrogen soaking up the blue end of the light, stretched into the infrared by the expansion of the universe, and the amount of stretching implied a galaxy seen 100 million years after the Big Bang.

A team led from Edinburgh checked something simpler. A galaxy that far away sits still; anything inside our own galaxy drifts. So they compared Webb images from December 2022 with images from June 2026, lined them up on sixty-eight reference points, and measured. Capotauro had moved, by 0.13 of an arcsecond, about a human hair seen from a hundred and fifty metres.

So the most distant object ever claimed is a neighbour: a Y dwarf, the coldest class of brown dwarf, a failed star at about 350 kelvin, roughly the temperature of a hot cup of tea, some 2,400 light years away. The reason it fooled everyone is rather lovely. Y dwarf atmospheres are full of water, methane and ammonia, which absorb wide bands of infrared, and that absorption imitates the signature of a galaxy at the edge of time.

Next, a possible chemical explanation for why you give up.

At Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, thirty-one volunteers sat a demanding twenty-minute memory test on two separate days. On one day they received mild electrical stimulation aimed at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the region that does much of the heavy lifting in concentration. On the other day, a convincing fake. Before and after each test they chose between easy memory tasks for small rewards and hard ones for bigger rewards, which prices a person's willingness to make an effort.

The stimulation worked, in the short term, and people did better on the test. Afterwards, though, they were less willing to take the harder, better paid option, and levels of one brain chemical, glutamate, were higher. The gain, as the authors put it, came at the cost of a subsequently reduced willingness to select high effort options.

Thirty-one healthy adults is a small study, and the glutamate may be a signature of hard work rather than its brake. Still: the feeling of not being bothered may be less a character flaw than an accounting system, quietly raising the price of effort.

Finally, a funeral in Denmark, 9.5 million years late.

In 2018, at a clay pit near the town of Gram, palaeontologists dug out the lower jaw of a beaked whale, and sensibly kept the mud as well as the bones. Washed, sieved and put under an electron microscope, the grit held tiny skeletal plates from brittle stars, the whippy armed relatives of starfish, from a species nobody had described before.

Modern brittle stars swarm to whale carcasses in their thousands, but fossil evidence of that habit was missing, and one awkward fact about mud is that things get into it. So the team checked. Only the three samples taken right beside the bones held brittle stars; samples from the same layer further away held none. Sea urchin fragments of similar size and mineral makeup turned up everywhere, so this was not better preservation in one spot. The brittle stars were there because the whale was.

It rests on three samples, and the fossils cannot say what the animals were eating. But it is a glimpse of an ordinary afternoon on a Miocene seabed. The species is named, incidentally, after the founders of the Wacken Open Air heavy metal festival, held just down the road, whose legendary mud probably comes from the same deposits.

One last thing, for the 18th of this month. At quarter past five in the morning, Eastern time, Voyager 1 will be 16,094,799,096 miles from Earth, which is exactly one light day. Forty nine years after it left, we can still send it a question. The answer just takes two days to come back.