In a widely expected move, a committee organized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has voted to endorse removing restrictions on the manufacture of peptides for human use. Thursday's panel meeting saw a sharply divided group recommend lifting limits on four peptides; votes on three additional peptides are scheduled for today. The move comes despite a continuing lack of evidence regarding their safety and effectiveness.

The move had been telegraphed months earlier as peptide enthusiast and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took steps to ensure this outcome.

Like proteins, peptides are composed of amino acids that are chemically linked into a chain. Peptides differ merely by length; they're often 10–20 amino acids long, in contrast to proteins, which can be hundreds or thousands. Some of them, such as insulin, are specifically made by targeted processing of a protein into shorter fragments, and the resulting peptide interacts with receptors that have evolved to send signals to cells based on its levels.

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A couple of decades after the discovery of systems that could selectively target DNA, we're starting to see the first therapies based on gene editing. One challenge these developments have faced is safety. While we can make them pretty specific to the gene we want edited, the human genome is very large, and even rare DNA sequences can appear a couple of times by chance.

As a result, all the original gene-editing systems had known rates of what are called off-target effects, in which they simply edit the wrong sequence. This may be a low-probability event, but edit enough cells—and therapies generally have to edit many—and errors become inevitable.

A lot of effort has gone into finding ways to minimize or eliminate off-target edits. In a recent issue of Nature, researchers described modifying the AI protein-folding software AlphaFold to help identify key areas of gene-editing proteins responsible for off-target effects. Those areas were then modified to reduce the problems.

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On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled "Science: A New Golden Age," in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the Trump administration is in the perfect position to fix things. It's a bit unexpected coming from an administration that has been proposing crippling funding cuts to research and trying to enable political appointees to terminate grants awarded based on scientific merit.

The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of "Science, the Endless Frontier," a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.

The result is an odd mix. It completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it's a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley's perspective on innovation (Michael Kratsios, the director of the OSTP, formerly worked with Peter Thiel). As a result, it's unlikely to have anything like the impact of "Science, the Endless Frontier."

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Climate change is being driven largely by the greenhouse gases we've pumped into the atmosphere, which trap more of the Sun's energy there. That added energy increases the odds of extreme events: longer, more intense heat waves and droughts, interspersed with excessive precipitation. But these sorts of events have happened in the past—how can we tell if any given weather disaster has been made more likely by the climate?

It's a question with implications for everything from building codes to disaster preparedness. And there's some good news: According to a report released by the US National Academies of Science on Thursday, the field of climate attribution is growing increasingly mature and can answer some questions for us with far greater confidence than it could just a decade ago. The report also notes that there are still important limits and suggests steps to address them.

Overall, this makes it clear that climate attribution is normal, mainstream science. And the fossil fuel industry views that as a problem, as it could make it easier to hold companies liable for damages. This has triggered a backlash that has Republicans in Congress and state governments threatening the National Academies' funding.

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Most of the gas in the Universe is a mixture of hydrogen and helium. It's thought that the initial atmospheres of most planets also start out that way. However, over billions of years, as planets evolve, the composition of their atmospheres may shift. Hydrogen can react with other chemicals, and both it and helium can be lost to space. Venus, Earth, and Mars are thought to have second atmospheres, with their original hydrogen/helium envelopes having been lost and/or transformed.

The dynamics of loss are complicated. Lighter elements are lost more easily, but hydrogen can be protected by being incorporated into molecules like methane and ammonia. The gravity of the body can help retain some molecules, and a magnetic field can limit radiation's ability to blast material out of the atmosphere. Proximity to a star will matter too, both because of the radiation it produces and because it can heat the atmosphere and expand it to where gravity's influence is less substantial.

Given all these complications, it can be difficult to know what to expect to find on exoplanets. But a study in Wednesday's issue of Nature describes observations of helium being lost from the atmosphere of an exoplanet orbiting the star LHS 1140, about 50 light-years away. Based on the rate at which the helium is being lost, we can infer something about the remaining atmosphere.

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There are some obvious big picture issues that stand between us and useful quantum computing. Issues like whether we can make enough high-quality hardware qubits to connect into the error-corrected logical qubits we need, and how we generate the states needed to perform universal computation on those logical qubits. But there are also many less prominent challenges that will need to be solved before we can perform calculations.

One of those challenges, which only affects some types of hardware, is calibration. For devices we manufacture, like superconducting qubits, there are always subtle variations among individual qubits. (This is not true when we use something like an atom to hold the qubit, but the lasers that control them can drift.) As a result, this hardware is put through a process called calibration, where we test different frequencies and amplitudes of the microwave pulses that control them to find the combination that produces the lowest error rates, and then save those settings for use in calculations.

However, you can't perform the typical calibration process while you're doing calculations, which means drift becomes an issue for long and complicated algorithms. Google, though, has figured out that it's possible to do calibration using the same data that's used for error correction.

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One of the central features of plate tectonics is the formation of new crust at mid-ocean ridges. Part of the spreading process that drives continents apart, it was arguably the discovery of these ridges that drove widespread acceptance of plate tectonics as a theory. Thanks to decades of exploration, we now have a good picture of what the crust that forms at the site of spreading looks like. But we still have an incomplete idea of how its features are actually produced.

In other words, we have a good idea of the outcome of the process, but not a detailed picture of the process itself.

That is starting to change. In 2024, a team of French scientists was able to remotely monitor a major event on the border between the Australian and Antarctic plates, only two months after they installed equipment on the ocean floor. Their data shows that most of the spreading occurred in a relatively short time window, and some key events happened without any obvious seismic activity.

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