DESI's map of nearly 15 million galaxies strengthens a hint that dark energy may be weakening over time, though the universe still has to stay balanced for life at every stage. The design question: why is the single number that decides whether galaxies can form tuned so finely for a cosmos that can hold life?

Cambridge chemists found a 45-letter RNA that copies its own strand at 94 percent accuracy, a step forward in the chemistry of replication, though it runs very slowly and was found by directed searching in the lab. The design question: chemistry can copy a coded sequence, but where does the meaningful, information-rich sequence come from in the first place?

Harvard physicists measured a 6.2-to-1 gear ratio inside the bacterial flagellar motor and described it as the first set of meshed gears found in a living cell. The design question: when a cell builds a working motor with matched gears, what best explains that kind of precisely fitted machinery?

A gene-editing screen tested about 1,000 candidate switches in non-coding DNA and found roughly 150 that do real work, many tied to Alzheimer's. The design question: as function keeps turning up in the DNA once called junk, is the genome better read as clutter or as dense, purposeful information?

A new Canadian site adds more than 100 Ediacaran animals just before the Cambrian, and its discoverers read it as moving certain origins earlier. The design question: filling in the run-up is real progress, but where does the sudden surge of new biological information that builds Cambrian body plans come from?

A statistical study of 517 exoplanets found only 0.6 percent met every habitability criterion and called Earth-like worlds genuine outliers, though it is an early preprint. The design question: as each new filter makes Earth rarer, is our fitness for life better explained by chance or by purpose?

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