Engineers reached across 20 billion kilometres to reconfigure Voyager 2's heating system, swapping three warming devices for versions that sip less power. The probe launched in 1977 and is now the second human object in interstellar space; the fix buys it more years of measuring a region no other instrument has ever sampled. Voyager 1 may get the same treatment.
The dust grains that eventually become rocky planets may have first condensed around 100 million years after the Big Bang, in the ejecta of the very first supernovae. That is before galaxies existed - the raw material for worlds was apparently lying around long before there were proper places to put it.
Growth rings inside a single fossil bone suggest a mammal ancestor was already giving birth to live young 236 million years ago, tens of millions of years earlier than the textbook timeline allows. The animal was a cynodont, and the reading of its bone rings implies pregnancy rather than egg-laying.
A European weather satellite parked 36,000 km up watched the Moon's shadow sweep across the Iberian peninsula between 20:26 and 20:34 CEST, then merge with the advancing shadow of ordinary dusk. Millions on the ground saw Spain's first total eclipse in over a century; from orbit it looked like two darknesses converging.
Divers recovered a sealed bottle of Guinness from a shipwreck, brewed 162 years ago while Queen Victoria was on the throne and possibly still safe to drink. The team wants to sequence the DNA of the surviving yeast, which would allow a brewery to reconstruct the flavour of a Victorian stout. Some of them also just want a sip.
Researchers handed the design of complete viral genomes to an AI, built the results in the lab, and some of them worked - functioning bacteriophages whose genetic instructions no organism ever wrote. The viruses attack bacteria, not people, but the capability now exists, and biosecurity rules were written for a world where genomes came from nature or from humans.
European viper venom, it turns out, may not have evolved to hurt. Testing the components against pain pathways suggests agony is an incidental side effect of chemistry built to immobilise a mouse - the thing humans fear most about vipers was never the point.
Rescuers spent ten hours cutting through concrete slabs to reach a 32-year-old woman who had been buried for 36 hours after Colombia's earthquake. She came out alive.
New reconstructions put the Denisovans among the largest archaic humans, likely towering over the small-bodied Homo erectus populations sharing Asia with them. We have only fragments of their bones, so their size has been inferred rather than measured - a big cousin sketched from a few teeth and finger joints.
Female frogs given a choice of one or two calling males picked the better singer; add more voices and their preference fell apart, and they settled for males they would otherwise have rejected. Choice overload, it seems, is not a human invention - and in a noisy chorus it may be what gives mediocre males a chance.