The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, in labs testing HIV vaccines…
Three separate monkey studies managed to coax rare, hard-to-find B cells into producing the broadly neutralizing antibodies that HIV has evaded for forty years. The trick is sequencing the vaccine: prime the right cells first, then push them step by step toward the antibody you want. It is the closest anyone has come to a design manual for an HIV vaccine.
Meanwhile, in the galaxy cluster Abell 2029…
Astronomers finally found the outer edge of IC 1101 and it sits more than 17 Milky Ways across. Light needs over two million years just to cross it. It now holds the title of largest galaxy known.
Meanwhile, in a Boston bioengineering lab…
Human cells turn out to be full of stable, abundant proteins that the genetic code does not straightforwardly predict. The link between gene sequence and protein abundance won a Nobel in 1968 and has been in every biology textbook since; it now appears to be incomplete rather than wrong.
Meanwhile, in northern Spain and Iceland…
For roughly two minutes on 12 August, the Moon will blot out the Sun's disc and hand researchers a view of the corona no instrument can fake. Teams are hauling equipment to Spain and Iceland to measure the magnetic field in the layer where the solar wind is born. It is the first totality over mainland Spain since 1905.
Meanwhile, at the University of Missouri…
Star clusters that were assumed to be uniform enough to serve as cosmic yardsticks turn out not to be. Since those clusters underpin how distances to galaxies are measured, the finding ripples outward into the reconstructed timeline of the universe itself.
Meanwhile, in a lab in Stuttgart…
A syringe folded out of DNA punctures a synthetic cell and pumps cargo through the membrane, rather than waiting for diffusion to drift it across. The design copies the injection machinery some bacteria use to stab their neighbours. It is a working mechanical pump built entirely from genetic material.
England is on course to be among the first countries anywhere to eliminate hepatitis C, a virus that killed hundreds of thousands worldwide each year before curative pills arrived a decade ago. Getting there required finding and treating people the health system usually loses track of.
Meanwhile, on a hobbyist's pen plotter…
A pen plotter, drawing nothing but carefully spaced arcs on plastic, produces a real hologram: an image that shifts and floats as you tilt it. No lasers, no darkroom, no photographic emulsion — just geometry scratched in the right places to steer light.
Meanwhile, in Cambridge Illinois…
Anderson Taylor started collecting specimens at seven and has now opened the Cambridge Natural History Museum, complete with school tours, making him the world's youngest museum curator at 11. Visitors travel across the region to a town of about 2,000 people to see it.
Lebanon's parliament voted to abolish the death penalty, the first country in the Middle East to do so, replacing death sentences with life imprisonment and hard labour. The law still needs cabinet approval.