The pros and cons of DeepSeek

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Fragments collected from the asteroid Bennu contain the building blocks for life — all five nucleobases that form DNA and RNA and 14 of the 20 amino acids needed to make known proteins. But there’s a twist: on Earth, amino acids in living organisms tend to have a ‘left-handed’ structure. Those on Bennu, however, contain nearly equal amounts of these structures and their ‘right-handed’, mirror-image forms. This calls into question a hypothesis favoured by many scientists that asteroids similar to this one might have seeded life on Earth.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: Nature Astronomy paper

The material from Bennu is also rich in salts created billions of years ago, probably when watery ponds on its parent asteroid evaporated and left behind a crust of minerals. Although no signs of life were spotted on Bennu, those salty ponds would have been a good environment to foster the chemistry that could lead to it. “Having these brines there, along with simple organic stuff, may have kick-started [the process of] making much more complicated and interesting organics like the nucleobases,” says mineralogist Sara Russell. (Nature | 5 min read)

Reference: Nature paper

A study of 20 bat genomes has revealed immune adaptations that make them almost invincible to viral infections. Many of these adaptations were shared by every species researchers studied, suggesting that they emerged in a common ancestor of all bats — and at around the same point that fossil evidence has suggested they evolved powered flight. Why the two seem to have co-evolved isn’t clear, but could be related to the metabolic demands of flying, which lead to the production of toxic chemicals in their bodies. The adaptations could help them cope with the toxicity, with immunity to viruses as a bonus.

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: Nature paper

A woman with heart failure had her heart strengthened using patches of muscle grown from stem cells. The woman had an operation to implant 10 patches of 400 million cells on the surface of her heart. The surgery stabilized her condition for three months, long enough for her to receive a heart transplant. The researchers have implanted similar muscle patches into 15 people so far. The approach “is offering another treatment to patients that are presently under palliative care,” says pharmacologist and study co-author Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: Nature paper

Scientists are flocking to DeepSeek-R1, a cheap and powerful artificial intelligence (AI) ‘reasoning’ model that sent the US stock market spiralling after it was released by a Chinese firm last week.Researchers say DeepSeek has some notable advantages:

• The model is much cheaper to use than proprietary rivals, such as OpenAI’s o1. Using its online chatbot, DeepThink, is free.

• Researchers can download DeepSeek to their own servers and run and build on it, also for free, which is a plus for privacy.

• DeepSeek matched o1’s performance in preliminary tests on data-driven scientific tasks.

There also seem to be drawbacks:

• The model fails on some relatively simple tasks known also to trip up other large-language models, such as counting the number of US state names that contain the letter W.

• DeepSeek-R1 appears to be intermittently incapable of providing information about topics that are deemed to be sensitive by China’s government, although it’s unclear whether this is built into the model or is applied to its interface.

Nature | 6 min read

Where will all the lithium come from?

The rechargeable batteries that are needed for the green-energy transition rely on lithium — but mining the mineral is expensive, energy-intensive and uses enormous amounts of water. The good news is that improvements to existing methods of separating lithium from lower-quality sources are on the way, says a Nature editorial. Another bottleneck is the production of rechargeable batteries at scale — something that few countries, notably, China, the United States and some in Europe have cracked so far.

Nature | 5 min read

Electronic waste is another potentially rich and sustainable source of lithium. But much of that potential rests on the work of informal workers, who sift through the detritus of cities such as New Delhi for the broken gadgets that serve as the grist for ‘urban mining’. Most earn little, and work without safety or labour protections. “The whole [electric vehicle] industry is trying to ensure that the supply chain for batteries remains formal from the beginning, but it’s proving to be a difficult job,” says Shubham Vishvakarma, who co-founded an e-waste recycling company that is backed by some of India’s biggest venture capital firms.

Climate Home News | 9 min read

Features & opinion

Around 2,000 metres under the sea, the coral Desmophyllum dianthus thrives in pitch dark and almost freezing conditions. Their preferred homes make them difficult to study. Luckily for researchers, a layer of sediment-filled freshwater sitting on top of the Comau fjord in Chilean Patagonia recreates the coral’s favourite habitat, without the extreme depths. Last year, a team collected a few specimens from the fjord and monitored them 24/7 in the lab to answer a question that’s stumped coral scientists for years — how do these species reproduce?

bioGraphic | 18 min read

Today I’m mesmerized watching a northern cricket frog (Acris crepitans) majestically ‘belly flop’ across the surface of water. To the naked eye, these little amphibians appear to skim over water, but a slowed-down video reveals that they actually sink a little before kicking their way back out, belly flopping over and over as they go.

Help us avoid flops in this newsletter by sending your feedback to [email protected].

Thanks for reading,

Jacob Smith, associate editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Flora Graham

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