A stunningly detailed map of the Universe and the month’s best science images

Hello Nature readers,
Today we enjoy the month’s most spectacular science images, explore activity in the unconscious brain and track progress made on engineering pollution-eating bacteria.

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The month’s best science images

Last month, a cosmology project completed its initial five-year mission to create the most detailed 3D map of the Universe so far. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Survey (DESI), based at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, has measured the precise distances of 47 million galaxies and quasars. Pictured is a thin slice of the map, with the Milky Way at its centre; the inset shows how galaxies form a web of clusters and filaments under the pull of gravity. DESI’s preliminary results hinted that the leading model of cosmic expansion could be wrong.

See more of the month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.

Dark proteins come into the light

‘Dark’ portions of the genome, which weren’t thought to hold instructions for making working proteins, have mostly been excluded from research. Now thousands of the proteins encoded by these genes have an official, new name — peptideins — that marks their inclusion in major gene and protein databases used by the life-sciences community. Dark proteins tend to be very short in amino acid length and lack evolutionary relatives in other organisms, which is part of the reason they have been omitted. But some have been implicated in diseases including childhood cancers, as well as in basic cellular functions. “This is a major breakthrough,” says bioinformatician Christoph Dietrich. “These microproteins have the potential to really open up a new wave of research.”

Microbes eat pollution — if we let them

A growing community of synthetic biologists using biotechnology-led solutions — mostly microorganisms containing DNA tailored for a specific function — to tackle pollution ranging from microplastics and industrial waste to soils laced with heavy metals or explosive residues. But the field is held back by concerns around releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment, and the fact that current incentives make polluting profitable while cleaning up costs money.