🧬 Scientists Just Found a Hidden Layer of the Mammalian Genome

Our genes may be considerably more combinatorial than we realized.

Researchers have discovered that mammalian cells can take pieces of RNA copied from completely different genes — sometimes located on different chromosomes — and splice them together into a single messenger RNA. That hybrid RNA can then be used to manufacture a new protein containing parts encoded by both genes.

Using direct RNA sequencing, the team detected more than 30,000 candidate chimeric RNAs in mouse immune cells and more than 900 in human macrophages. Crucially, they then showed that at least one of these strange hybrids is not biological noise.

In mice, an inflammatory response causes two genes called Gsdmd and Tmem106a to combine into a chimeric RNA. Its resulting hybrid protein helps accelerate pyroptosis — the dramatic process in which infected immune cells rupture and release inflammatory signals. When researchers specifically blocked the hybrid protein, the mice became worse at controlling Salmonella infection. But they were also dramatically more resistant to lethal inflammation in a sepsis model.

Even stranger, inflammation appears to physically reorganize the genome: normally distant chromosome regions move closer together inside the nucleus, helping their RNA transcripts combine.

There is a major caveat. The detailed functional experiments were performed in mice. Similar chimeric RNAs exist in human immune cells, but scientists have not yet established what most of them do. The researchers themselves say it could take years to map their biological importance.

Still, if the phenomenon is widespread, our current catalogue of proteins may be missing an entire class of molecules hiding in combinations of genes we already thought we understood.

We finished sequencing the human genome more than two decades ago.

Apparently, reading the instruction manual was another problem entirely.

#Genetics #Biology #RNA #Genome #Immunology #Biotechnology #Science

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10982-x

🪐 Saturn Has Grown a Giant 10-Sided Storm Pattern

Saturn has been famous for decades for the enormous hexagon circling its north pole.

Now Hubble has discovered something even stranger at the opposite end of the planet: a vast decagon — a 10-sided atmospheric wave — surrounding Saturn’s south pole.

The structure sits roughly between 58° and 63° south latitude inside a jet stream moving at about 400 km/h. The decagon itself drifts much more slowly around the planet, at about 10 km/h, while its corners oscillate back and forth over periods of roughly a month. Multiwavelength Hubble observations show that the pattern extends through several atmospheric levels rather than existing as a superficial cloud shape.

What makes the discovery particularly intriguing is that it seems to be new. Cassini saw no comparable structure before its mission ended in 2017. Hubble data reveal faint hints beginning in 2023, with the ten-sided shape becoming increasingly distinct in 2024 and 2025. Astronomers may therefore be watching a giant planetary wave form almost in real time.

Scientists do not yet know why Saturn produces geometric atmospheric structures at all. Models suggest the decagon may be a huge wave trapped inside the jet stream, possibly triggered by an instability or a nearby vortex. But why the north settled on six sides and the south apparently chose ten remains unexplained.

Earth gets hurricanes.

Saturn apparently prefers geometry.

#Saturn #Hubble #Astronomy #PlanetaryScience #Space #Science

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aee4251

🧬 Life Uses 4 DNA Letters. Scientists Just Made 8 Work.

Every known organism on Earth writes its genetic instructions using the same four DNA letters: A, T, C and G.

Scientists have now shown that one of biology’s most fundamental molecular machines can read an alphabet containing eight.

Researchers tested E. coli RNA polymerase — the enzyme that reads DNA and turns its information into RNA — with synthetic DNA containing four additional chemical letters known as P, Z, B and S. Remarkably, the enzyme successfully recognized and transcribed the artificial base pairs using much of the same molecular machinery it employs for natural DNA.

Using cryo-electron microscopy at resolutions down to about 2.4 ångströms, the team could watch how the synthetic letters fit inside the polymerase. The artificial pairs adopted almost the same geometry as ordinary Watson–Crick DNA pairs, allowing the enzyme’s catalytic machinery to close around them and continue transcription. Researchers also engineered a modified version of one synthetic letter to reduce copying errors.

The implications are potentially enormous. A larger genetic alphabet could eventually produce RNA molecules with chemical capabilities unavailable to natural biology and might help scientists design new diagnostics, drugs and engineered biological systems. Expanded genetic alphabets have already been used experimentally to create molecules that recognize cancer cells.

But there is an important boundary: scientists have not created an eight-letter living organism here. The experiment demonstrates transcription by bacterial RNA polymerase; reliably replicating a full eight-letter genome and translating that expanded information into proteins inside living cells remain much harder problems.

For four billion years, life on Earth has been writing with four letters.

Apparently, biology’s machinery can read a bigger alphabet than evolution ever gave it.

#Genetics #DNA #SyntheticBiology #Biotechnology #RNA #Science

Primary paper — Nature Communications⁠

☀️ AI Just Learned to Control Fusion Plasma Faster Than Humans Can React

Inside a fusion reactor, plasma can become unstable in just a few milliseconds.

That is a problem when even a highly focused human operator reacts on the scale of seconds.

Researchers from Princeton University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have now tested an AI control framework called PACMAN on the real DIII-D tokamak in California. The system continuously reads temperatures, densities and magnetic signals, runs multiple machine-learning models, resolves their commands and sends instructions back to the machine — with a complete control cycle typically taking about 20 milliseconds.

In one of five live experiments, PACMAN predicted a dangerous tearing-mode instability about 200 milliseconds before it appeared. Instead of trying to suppress the instability after it had already formed, the controller changed the plasma early enough to prevent it. In other tests, the system controlled plasma heating, density and rotation, detected energetic-particle waves, and simultaneously optimized all six of DIII-D’s microwave heating systems.

This does not mean AI has solved fusion. DIII-D is an experimental tokamak, not a commercial power plant, and researchers still set the goals and safety limits. The important step is that machine-learning models are now fast enough to participate directly in the millisecond-by-millisecond control of a real fusion plasma rather than merely analyzing experiments afterward.

Fusion has always had a control problem: the plasma changes faster than humans can think.

Apparently, that is exactly the sort of problem AI likes.

#Fusion #AI #Physics #Tokamak #Energy #MachineLearning #Science

https://www.pppl.gov/news/2026/pacman-ai-framework-controlling-fusion-systems-safely-makes-key-decisions-milliseconds

🥊 This Is the Beginning of the End: Unitree Taught Robots to Fight Autonomously

The company unveiled UnifoLM-X2-1.0 — a world model that lets a robot decide in real time how to move, dodge and attack. No operator, no pre-scripted motions — it does it all on its own.

⚡️ The breakthrough in a nutshell:
Unitree calls this the first fully autonomous humanoid fight driven by a world model. The robot doesn't follow scripted punches — it builds a model of what's happening and makes decisions on the fly.

🔬 Key findings:
• The UnifoLM-X2-1.0 world model predicts the consequences of movements and plans actions in real time.
• The footage shows both actual recording and predictive modeling — the system "plays out" possible futures before acting.
• The robot dodges, attacks and keeps distance with no human in the loop.

💼 Why it matters:
This is a step from programmed motions to autonomous decision-making in a dynamic environment. The technology that teaches a robot to fight will tomorrow help in rescue, logistics and work in hazardous conditions.

It won't be funny for long 🪖

#Unitree #Robots #AI #Humanoids #Science

@science

🤖 Robots Are Now Building Robots

China’s XPeng has switched on a new production line for its humanoid robot IRON — and more than 80% of the line’s core manufacturing processes are automated.

The first production-line IRON completed assembly and then walked off the line by itself.

XPeng describes the facility as the world’s first automated production line for advanced general-purpose humanoid robots. The important nuance: this is not yet a completely human-free “self-replicating robot factory.” But it is a serious step from handcrafted prototypes toward industrial-scale humanoid production.

And IRON is not exactly a conventional industrial robot.

Its body has human-like proportions, flexible skin, highly articulated hands and movements realistic enough that, during XPeng’s 2025 AI Day, some viewers suspected there might actually be a person inside. CEO He Xiaopeng responded in the most convincing possible way: he cut open the robot’s leg on stage to reveal the machinery underneath.

XPeng plans to begin mass production before the end of 2026, with commercial deliveries expected in China and overseas in 2027.

For decades, factories used robots to manufacture cars.

Now a car company has built a factory where robots manufacture humanoid robots.

The recursion has officially begun.

#Robotics #AI #XPeng #HumanoidRobots #China #PhysicalAI #Technology

https://www.xpeng.com/news/01a080371029a057bc8e8a02a2c6012b