Hello Nature readers,
Today we learn that scientists have found the ingredients for life in the fragments of an asteroid (just not quite the right ones), discover bats’ built-in anti-virus software and weigh up the pros and cons of the DeepSeek-R1 artificial intelligence model.

Asteroid find upends story of life’s origin

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.

Bats have built-in anti-virus defence

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.

Stem cells strengthen failing heart

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.

The pros and cons of DeepSeek

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.

• 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.

How do cold water corals make babies?

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?