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AI in the lab: watermarks, ghost authors, and an agent that asked for help

Google DeepMind published a way to watermark AI-designed proteins without changing structure or function; Nature notes the marker can be erased, and Science frames it as a check on bioweapons and a way to keep scientific credit. Nature also tracked fake expert names — Elena, Aris, Marcus — polluting the literature. Science interviewed an AI agent that had emailed hundreds of researchers asking for help. Separately, the OpenAI Foundation’s life-sciences lead told Nature how a $25 billion research charity intends to spend.

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Medicine: one CRISPR dose, endometriosis, the pancreas, menopause

ScienceDaily reported a single experimental CRISPR treatment that cut LDL and triglycerides by about half for a year in hard-to-treat lipid disorders. Nature covered an early endometriosis drug aimed at the cells behind the lesions — a condition it puts at 190 million people — and a push to treat pancreatic cancer earlier. Science looked at blood-protein shifts that may explain menopause “brain fog” and later dementia risk.

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Heat, carbon, and who controls the science budget

Nature described a super El Niño cooking coral reefs and the odd countermeasures on trial, including underwater sound. Ars reported a device that captures carbon dioxide by pumping it across a battery. NYT found the National Science Foundation diverted $1.4 billion — about a fifth of its main research budget — from funds Congress had directed, another sign of tighter White House control of grants.

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Space: Venus haze, a lunar cave, and a 19th-century storm

Ars says Venus’s haze is cosmic dust: iron grains plus sulfuric acid in a physical model. NASA picked a team to see whether a lunar pit opens into a cave. The agency is also hiring its next class of flight directors, and Crew-12 wrapped its station science mission. A separate Ars piece closed an 1840s space-weather story: a Nature account of a geomagnetic storm delaying a train had the year wrong because of a typo.

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Deep time: flight more than once, life in the crater, cacao in Georgia

A Chinese fossil of a previously unknown species with feathery limbs adds to the case that dinosaurs and birds evolved flight more than once. Ars reported the dinosaur-killing crater may have been busy with life. Smithsonian described pottery with the earliest known chocolate traces east of the Mississippi, pointing to cacao use in present-day Georgia for about a thousand years.

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Physics and math: brine shrimp, brain waves, a 55-year conjecture

Quanta used sea monkeys to overturn a one-way rule of turbulence: energy flow can reverse. A second Quanta piece followed surprisingly complex waves that may reorganize human brain activity in real time. Mathematicians used randomness to settle a 55-year-old conjecture, likely born from juggling.

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Animals, vaccines, minerals

Science reported that what sounds like noise in an elephant herd is a group signal, parsed with AI. Africa’s plan to make most of its own vaccines by 2040 is hitting headwinds. Oil wells are being looked at as mines for critical minerals. Canada pledged $1.2 billion for oceans while still pushing a pipeline.

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