13.8 billion years.
How did we get here?

A Near-Earth Asteroid Has Been Living a Double Life — It's Actually a Comet — Object 1998 SH2 has orbited Earth for decades catalogued as an asteroid, but JPL scientists tracking it via the Deep Space Network caught its motion behaving like a comet — and sure enough, a tail and coma have now emerged, published this week in Nature Astronomy.

Thermodynamic Computers Go With the (Energy) Flow — Today's computers burn enormous energy fighting random thermal fluctuations; a new generation of thermodynamic computers would flip this — harnessing those fluctuations as a computational resource rather than guarding against them.

New Theory Links Gravity, Entropy, and the Birth of Cosmic Structure — Mathematician Ginestra Bianconi proposes that gravity itself may emerge from entropy — a bold idea that would connect the second law of thermodynamics directly to why the universe clumped into galaxies rather than staying a uniform soup.

Neutral Atoms Could Be the Key to Quantum Error Correction — Quantum computers are powerful but fragile; new research shows that circuits built from neutral atoms — individually trapped and manipulated — can detect and fix errors in ways that bring fault-tolerant quantum computing meaningfully closer.

Astrophysicists Puzzle Over Webb's New Universe — JWST keeps finding massive black holes and fully-formed galaxies in the early universe that our standard models say shouldn't exist yet — and the theoretical scramble to explain them is producing a wealth of competing ideas, none of which fully fits.