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

You have full access to this article via your institution. Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here . Credit: Claire Lamman/DESI collaboration 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. Nature | Leisurely scroll ‘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. …