Nitrogen is a key ingredient in the biomolecules that form the building blocks of life. Yet as an unbonded gas, it is far more likely to drift into space than to lock itself into solid compounds, making it difficult for astronomers to trace its journey to Earth in the distant past.

Through new research published in Nature Astronomy, a team led by Toru Matsumoto at Kyoto University has found some of the best evidence yet of how this journey happened, hidden inside grains of dust from the asteroid Ryugu.

Evidence across the solar system
Nitrogen-bearing compounds, particularly ammonia, have already been spotted on the dwarf planet Ceres and on several carbon-rich asteroids, hinting ...

CAR T-cell therapy is an immune-reprogramming procedure that turns a patient’s own immune cells into cancer-fighting specialists. The entire process is complex, but researchers have now found a faster way to achieve similar effects using a single intravenous (IV) drip of a harmless engineered virus.

In the standard process, clinicians extract T cells from the patient’s blood, then re-engineer them in the lab, arming each one with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)—engineered proteins designed to recognize specific markers on cancer cells...

The results are in: Which AI model is the most fallible? Persuadable? Correctible? University of Arizona researchers assessed seven different generative AI large language models, or LLMs, for these three qualities during lengthy conversations. Their work, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, reveals intrinsic limitations that might go undetected during one-off interactions.

Among the seven LLMs tested—ChatGPT (GPT-3.5, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini), Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Llama-3-70B and DeepSeek-R1—they found that:

ChatGPT 3.5 was most vulnerable to reaffirming misinformation during a conversation containing repeated false statements; Claude 3.5 Sonnet was the least.
All seven were more susceptible to misinformation on obscure top...

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument has released the largest 2D map of the Universe. Credit: NSF NOIRLab

In 2012, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) was commissioned to measure the effect of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the expansion of the cosmos. Since then, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys have obtained optical images of tens of millions of galaxies and quasars, including through NOIRLab’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO). In recent news, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team made its 11th data release (DR 11), constituting the largest-ever 2D map of the universe.

The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, including stars, galaxies, black holes and asteroids...