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"On October 20, 2020, a robot carefully scooped up 121.6 grams of the most expensive dirt in the solar system. That robot, a NASA spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx, had spent two years en route to its rendezvous with the near-earth asteroid Bennu and two more observing it. Its 1.16-billion-dollar mission: Recover a sample from Bennu's strange surface of loosely-bound space pebbles and return it to Earth. It succeeded, and on September 24, 2023, OSIRIS-REx dropped its carefully-packed sample capsule through Earth's atmosphere and into the waiting arms of eager scientists. Bennu and a handful of special asteroids like it are ancient objects, leftovers from the very earliest moments of planet formation in our solar system. The sample OSIRIS-REx returned contains minerals that formed in water and a dazzling diversity of organic compounds, which contain carbon."

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"The Roman sage Marcus Aurelius said we should never let the future disturb us. But then he never had a conversation with the futurologist Nick Bostrom about the state of the world in 2050. 'There's a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers,' Bostrom said in an email. 'Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn't be making any useful contributions.' Time to rethink your career options, Nature readers!"

"You know when someone spaces out for a second, and you can't get their attention? 'What are you thinking about?' prompts a response of 'Nothing,' which you figure is a euphemism for private thoughts. Historically, consciousness has been assumed to be continuous when you're awake, flowing between a focus on external things and internal thoughts as your mind wanders. But a new study in PNAS suggests that parts of our brain may actually be taking a nap during those thinking-about-nothing moments."

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"In 1781, Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels on the subject of flatulence, and what, perhaps, science could do about it. Because, as he wrote, 'It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind. That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it.' Franklin was concerned with how to make farts more pleasant-smelling so that they wouldn't disrupt civilized company. But a far simpler and healthier solution eluded even this legendary thinker: The Fart Walk."

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