Science

TAXONOMY Bacteria naming method relies on DNA A controversial new system for naming bacteria and other prokaryotes relies only on their DNA, rather than laboratory cultures, to identify them. The approach, dubbed SeqCode and described this week in Nature Microbiology, promises to relieve a backlog created because so many microbial species are being revealed through DNA analyses. Under an existing protocol, the scientific community accepts a bacterium, or a prokaryote known as an archaeon, as real only if microbiologists grow the species in the lab and submit a pure “type” culture to at least two of the world’s facilities that keep microbes in perpetuity. Instead, SeqCode accepts a full or comprehensive set of a bacterium’s genome sequence data a...

ASTRONOMY The Sun’s kinky magnetism New images from the European Solar Orbiter may shed light on mysterious shifts in the Sun’s magnetic field and could help explain why the solar wind blows at two different speeds. In March, the spacecraft spotted an S-shaped vortex of ejecting plasma in the Sun’s corona—an observation that jibes with previous predictions that the star’s looping magnetic field lines sometimes crash into rarer straight ones, causing straight lines of emanating plasma to develop a telltale kink known as a switchback. Scientists had previously seen evidence of switchbacks in magnetic field data, but the images of them reported last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters are a first. The findings support the idea that slower sol...