A team led by the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid has identified erythrulose, a four-carbon ketose sugar, in the molecular cloud G+0.693-0.027 near the galactic centre. The detection, published in Nature Astronomy and based on broadband spectral scans from two Spanish radio telescopes, marks the first confirmation of a true sugar in the interstellar medium. The molecule’s abundance—at least eight times higher than the undetected three-carbon sugars predicted by sequential carbon-addition models—forces a revision of how complex organic compounds assemble in space. Laboratory spectroscopy matched twelve spectral lines, and the statistical confidence leaves a 0.2 per cent probability of a chance alignment.

The finding challenges the prevailing view that interstellar sugars grow atom by atom. Instead, kinetic Monte Carlo simulations suggest erythrulose forms efficiently on icy dust-grain surfaces through the direct combination of two-carbon fragments such as glycolaldehyde and ethylene glycol. Because ketoses readily isomerise into aldoses in water, researchers argue the sugar could have acted as a prebiotic reservoir, delivering ready-made building blocks for early metabolic and genetic systems during the Late Heavy Bombardment roughly four billion years ago. Viewed from Spanish and German astrochemical groups, the result implies that key ingredients for life can emerge in cold molecular clouds long before star and planet formation.

Separate fossil analyses extend the timeline of complex behaviour and soft-tissue preservation. A 450-million-year-old crinoid from the Ordovician, re-examined by palaeontologists at the University of Oklahoma, revealed intact ambulacral feet—only the second such case in the fossil record—offering direct evidence of feeding structures in early echinoderms. In older Ediacaran strata, a study of 76 Spriggina floundersi specimens from South Australia, published in Scientific Reports, documents a statistically significant rightward body-curvature preference, the earliest known example of behavioural lateralisation, predating the Cambrian explosion by tens of millions of years.

A meta-analysis of 1.6 million marine body-size measurements, led by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, shows that warming-driven crises over the past 450 million years shrank marine invertebrates and fish roughly twice as severely as cooling or oxygen-depletion events. The pattern, consistent with oxygen-limitation physiology in cold-blooded organisms, adds a deep-time dimension to observed size declines in modern fisheries. Meanwhile, laboratory experiments at the University of Southern Denmark demonstrate that hydrostatic pressure at 2–6 km depth squeezes dissolved carbon and nitrogen from sinking marine snow, fuelling microbial blooms and altering carbon-sequestration estimates.

Researchers plan to test the nutrient-leakage mechanism during an Arctic expedition aboard the Polarstern, while astrochemists will extend the search for sugars to other molecular clouds. The Curiosity team at JPL continues to analyse the pure elemental sulphur unexpectedly fractured by the rover’s wheel in Gediz Vallis, a find that lacks a settled geological explanation on Mars.