your science briefing for 04.01.2025

A galaxy upending our understanding of the early universe, the sinister plan to muzzle American science, a potential revolution for encryption, and more...

A galaxy at the dawn of the universe, just 330 million years after the Big Bang, lit up the instruments aboard the JWST, glowing brilliantly as massive stars and ravenous black holes were doing their thing. There’s just one tiny little problem with this galaxy, known to astronomers as JADES-GS-z13. We should not be seeing its light. It’s way too early in the universe’s history and there should be too many clouds of hydrogen for the light to shine through for another 300 million years… (Bad Astronomy)

A study on deep sea fish, their ancestry, and their genetics yielded two surprises. The first is that none of them called the crushing, dark, and icy depths below 1,200 meters home until at least 145 million years ago and then kept going deeper as various genes responsible for DNA repair evolved to cope with the harsh environment. The second is that all twelve studied species have the same mutation in the RTF1 gene, used to read and transcribe genes into proteins, despite any of these species being related to each other. We don’t know exactly what that means, but this kind of independent mutation indicates that there’s something specific about this environment… (LiveScience)

Science tends to be notoriously terrible at telling certain politicians and their backers what they want to hear. It finds that cigarettes cause cancer, plastic pollution is awful for us and the environment, global warming is happening and creating a geopolitical migration crisis that will only get worse. So, the Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025 has a solution. Muzzle and defund every scientist that gets in the way of profit and far right dogmas… (Nature)

Random numbers in computing aren’t really random. There is an algorithm on how to generate them, and while it’s extremely difficult to guess the next number it produces, it is, theoretically possible with enough resources. You can make it more difficult with a cryptographic version of this random number generation algorithm, which we use to encrypt sensitive data, but it’s still not entirely foolproof. Just difficult to match. Which is why it’s such a big deal that a new technique using a quantum chip can generate a truly random, un-guessable number, greatly improving encryption and security when two machines talk to each other… (ScienceAlert)

For decades, we’ve been promised that humanity will become a spacefaring species that will once again get to explore frontiers instead of spreadsheets. So what exactly happens when two eccentric billionaires promise you the journey of a lifetime where you could get at least a small taste of this amazing future, then fail to deliver when it turns out their promises were just PR stunts… (Rolling Stone)