The wire that reads itself back
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A new analysis pins down the mass and orbit of GJ 3378 b, a likely rocky world about 2.3 times Earth's mass that receives roughly 90 percent as much starlight as Earth — but whether it holds an atmosphere remains unknown.
A commercial spacecraft called LINK is set to rendezvous with the aging Swift observatory and raise its decaying orbit, in what NASA calls a first-of-its-kind rescue. A rocket problem scrubbed the July 2 launch attempt.
A University of Minnesota team reports assembling a synthetic, cell-like system from non-living chemical parts that can grow, copy its DNA and divide under laboratory conditions. The work, posted as a preprint, has not been peer-reviewed, and researchers stress it is not a living organism and is not yet self-sustaining.