Point a telescope at a magnetar and empty space itself starts behaving like a lens. After more than 140 hours watching the magnetar 1E 1547-5408, NASA's IXPE found its X-rays polarized in exactly the way quantum theory predicted in the 1930s: in a magnetic field trillions of times Earth's, the vacuum becomes birefringent and splits light. It is the first direct evidence that nothing has optical properties.
Researchers handed a genome-writing AI the job of designing viruses from scratch, then built them. Sixteen of the resulting bacteriophages worked — assembled, infected bacteria, replicated. It is the first time a functioning organism-scale genome has come out of a model rather than out of evolution, and the biosecurity questions arrived the same day.
People who eat a particular mushroom report seeing tiny humans going about their business in the room around them — and they report it in communities thousands of miles apart with no contact between them. The phenomenon, named Lilliputian hallucination after Gulliver's Travels, was long chalked up to shared folklore. Researchers have now pinned the visions to a specific fungus, which makes them chemistry rather than culture.
Betelgeuse has a companion, and someone has finally photographed it. Astronomers suspected a second star for roughly a century from the red supergiant's odd brightness rhythms, but the glare of the supergiant itself buried the evidence. The pair now has a portrait — of a system that will end as a supernova.
A female Amur tiger named Umit walked out of a crate into Kazakh reedbeds where no wild tiger has stood since the 1950s. Central Asia's tigers were shot and drained out of existence a century ago; this release is the first move in rebuilding a population from imported Amur stock. The habitat had to be restored first — deer, boar and river water before predator.