Mars mantle anomaly, synthetic genetic codes and vaccine heart-risk clues lead science headlines

Moki

4 min read·2026/08/27

Moki

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Today’s science headlines connect planetary interiors, programmable biology and public health. Nature reports a surviving thermal anomaly beneath Mars’s southern highlands and a robotic platform for testing redesigned genetic codes, while medical studies point to possible cardiovascular benefits from the recombinant shingles vaccine and systemic effects from contractile muscle grafts. NASA also documents rare Atacama snowfall and new lunar landing plume tests.

Image / Nature

Mars gravity data point to a warm southern mantle

A Nature study used 16 years of radio-tracking data from Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to read seasonal changes in the planet’s gravity field. Degree-3 signals differed by up to 300% from expectations for a spherically symmetric Mars, implying more than 20% lateral variation in mantle shear modulus. The authors infer a 200–400 °C thermal anomaly beneath the southern highlands, possibly preserved by long-lived mantle convection or insulation from Mars’s thicker southern crust. The result matters because Mars’s north–south crustal dichotomy is tied to ancient volcanism, magnetism and possible past surface water.

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Image / Nature

Robotic cell-free biology speeds up genetic-code redesign

Another Nature paper describes AGENTEX, a robotic cell-free platform for prototyping alternative genetic codes without first rewriting a living genome. The system tests engineered tRNAs and ribosomes in vitro, then uses sequencing, mass spectrometry and reporter assays to evaluate translation. The team showed that many non-CCA-ended tRNAs can still be charged by E. coli aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, built compressed 34-codon translation systems and reassigned up to three codons while incorporating non-standard amino acids. The practical promise is faster design-build-test cycles for synthetic biology, biopolymers and future recoded organisms, though the result remains a cell-free proof of concept rather than a deployable organism.

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Image / Nature

Shingrix is linked to lower cardiovascular burden, but causality is not settled

Nature Medicine reports a natural-experiment analysis of U.S. electronic health records around the 2017–2018 switch from the live Zostavax shingles vaccine to the recombinant Shingrix vaccine. After propensity matching, the study compared 36,460 vaccinated adults aged 60 or older in each cohort and followed cardiovascular diagnoses for seven years. The Shingrix-predominant group had a 9% lower composite cardiovascular burden, including 10% lower ischemic-heart-disease burden and 12% lower heart-failure burden; men also showed a 12% lower ischemic-stroke burden. The authors and outside experts emphasize that this is observational evidence, not proof that the vaccine prevents heart disease, and call for randomized and mechanistic studies.

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Image / nature.com

Contracting muscle grafts reproduce some exercise-like signals in mice

A Nature Aging study, covered by Nature, reports subcutaneous autologous myocyte grafts that formed vascularized muscle tissue and contracted continuously in mice. Adult and aged mice with the myografts showed greater lean mass, thicker muscle fibers, better grip strength and running performance, and higher bone density after 15 weeks in older animals. In obesity models, the grafted mice had a higher lean-to-fat ratio, lower glucose and reduced inflammatory signs. The key idea is that active skeletal muscle functions as an endocrine organ, but the work is early and invasive; multiple grafts might be needed in people, and the approach cannot replace cardiovascular or neural benefits of exercise.

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Image / NASA Science

Atacama snow shows how El Niño can disrupt even hyper-arid regions

NASA Earth Observatory published Landsat and Terra images of rare, widespread August snowfall across northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. Successive winter storms covered areas from the Andes toward the Pacific coast, including the Chajnantor plateau, where ALMA moved antennas into protective survival mode. Atmospheric scientist René Garreaud told NASA that Taltal received nearly 40 millimeters of rain in three days, about ten times its annual mean, and that the late-August storm came from a cutoff low linked to a large hemispheric trough. The event fits a strengthening El Niño backdrop and also caused mudflows, flash flooding and damage in northern Chile.

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Image / NASA

NASA tests how lunar lander exhaust blasts regolith

NASA Langley has begun plume-surface interaction tests inside a 60-foot vacuum sphere to quantify how lunar lander exhaust moves dust, soil and rocks. The first campaign fires an ethane plume system with about 100 pounds of thrust into a roughly 6.5-foot-wide, 1-foot-deep bin of Black Point-1 lunar regolith simulant, with instruments measuring crater formation, ejecta angle and height, particle speeds and solid ejecta distribution during six-second runs. A later round will use a 14-inch 3D-printed hybrid rocket motor producing about 35 pounds of thrust. The data are intended to improve landing models for Artemis hardware, nearby payloads and eventually Mars operations.

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