The gene edit that saved Alyssa, and Vera Rubin's telescope opens its eye

A bone marrow transplant had failed. Her parents were looking at remortgaging their house to seek experimental treatment abroad. Then a team at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London offered her something nobody had ever tried: T-cells edited with CRISPR base editing to target leukemia without destroying themselves. The catch is that T-cell leukemia is usually untreatable with CAR-T therapy, because modified T-cells attack each other. CRISPR base editing changed that. The team altered specific DNA letters in donor T-cells so they could hunt leukemia without triggering self-destruction. The treatment worked. Alyssa is alive. She is the first person on earth whose life was saved by CRISPR base editing [16]. In the same week, a paper in Nature reported that a similar approach, using three different delivery platforms to train the immune system against HIV-1, achieved neutralization breadth against 90% of diverse viral strains in macaques within 12 weeks, with broadly neutralizing antibodies appearing as early as 4 weeks [7].

Every night it generates 15 terabytes of data. Every time something in the sky changes, an automated alert goes out to researchers anywhere in the world who signed up to watch for it. Over the decade of the survey, astronomers expect to catalog 20 billion galaxies [51]. The telescope is named for Vera Rubin, who spent the 1970s proving that galaxies rotate too fast to hold themselves together with visible matter alone. She concluded that something invisible and unknown, dark matter, makes up the difference. She was largely ignored for years. The observatory that carries her name is now looking for it [52].

The findings were surprising in both directions. Newborns aged zero to three days show measurable neural activity distinguishing between different quantities, suggesting a primitive number sense is present before a baby can focus its eyes [15]. Bilingual speakers store the meaning of words in the same geometric neural map in the hippocampus regardless of language, meaning the brain maintains a language-independent model for what things mean [86]. And handedness, one of the things most people assume is hardwired, turns out to be entirely the product of practice. The skill gap between your two hands exists only because one of them has spent a lifetime holding tools [57].

Johns Hopkins neuroscientists found a cluster of evolutionarily ancient neurons in the brainstem that act as a biological toggle for selective attention. Silence these neurons and mice become hyper-distractible; reactivate them the next day and the same mice ignore even powerful distractors. The neurons exist in birds, fish, and mammals alike, meaning the focus mechanism has been conserved for hundreds of millions of years [43]. Separately, Shimane University researchers found that axon initial segments, the firing thresholds of neurons in the prefrontal cortex, are shortened in the autism mouse model they studied. Activating a specific neural pathway restored their length. Social behavior and repetitive movements improved [89].

The most rigorous trials in the set showed reductions closer to 10 points. That is the same order of magnitude as relief from NSAIDs and prescription opioids. The mechanism makes biological sense: chronic pain destroys sleep quality, and sleep deprivation raises pain sensitivity through a process called hyperalgesia. Melatonin interrupts that loop by improving sleep while also acting on peripheral pain pathways directly [58].

Cartilage grew back. Not the low-quality fibrocartilage that often appears as a scar substitute, but hyaline cartilage, the smooth, load-bearing kind needed for normal joint movement. The cells in the joint, chondrocytes, shifted their gene expression and returned to a more functional state without any stem cell involvement. Human tissue samples from knee replacement surgeries showed the same response after just one week of treatment. The paper was published in Science [233].

The dataset now includes 535,000 whole genome sequences linked to nearly 482,000 electronic health records, 1.3 billion genetic variants, and, for the first time, proteomics data from nearly 10,000 participants and RNA sequencing from nearly 9,000, meaning researchers can study not just which genes someone carries but which ones are actively expressing. The update added more than 114,000 participants since the previous release. What makes this program different from every earlier genomic database: 86% of its participants come from communities historically underrepresented in biomedical research, including people of color, older adults, rural residents, women, and people with disabilities [56].