The Week Matter Remembered It Knew How to Invent

That afternoon of the twenty-third of April, in a warehouse in Tokyo that Sony had converted into a court, the robot its engineers named Ace defeated, one after another, three Japanese professional table-tennis players. It did not defeat them with violence. It defeated them with patience. Nine cameras watched everything from above, three event-based sensors read the logo printed on the ball to deduce how many times it spun in the air, and an arm governed by a reinforcement-learning policy answered every shot in ten milliseconds — more than thirty times faster than a human blink. Peter Stone, chief scientist of Sony AI, summarized it in a sentence that could sit on the back cover of a Cortázar novel: "This is much bigger than table tennis: for the first time, an artificial system perceives, reasons, and acts in a real world that changes fast and demands precision." Nature put Ace on the cover of the April 23rd issue, under the title Outplaying Elite Table Tennis Players with an Autonomous Robot. The umpires were licensed by the Japan Table Tennis Association. Nobody had to specify that the table was regulation. In the videos that circulated that afternoon, one of the defeated professionals smiles at the arm the way a man smiles at a nephew who has just learned to walk.

The same morning Sony announced Ace, a team at Stanford University published in the journal Science a finding that for half a century had been considered impossible. A bacterium — any bacterium — has among its defenses against viruses an enzyme called Drt3b that can manufacture DNA without a template, without a molding strand, without copying. It copies itself: its own structure, its own amino acids, work as the pattern. "The protein itself serves as the blueprint for the DNA sequence," said the Stanford biochemist Alex Gao, and it was a line to underline, because it violated a dogma that since Watson and Crick had been taught in every textbook in the world. The enzyme, for now, only knows how to write a single word, two letters repeated, AC-AC-AC-AC, the way someone hums a bolero without lyrics. But the word was written without being dictated. In biology, that is beginning again.

Everything arrived at the same time.

While Ace was winning in Tokyo and the bacterium was writing without dictation in Palo Alto, the rover Curiosity published, through NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the results of an experiment it had performed in silence in the year twenty-twenty on dust taken from Glen Torridon, inside Gale Crater, on Mars. The machine used a reagent called TMAH to break open the large molecules and look at the smaller ones that fell out. Twenty-one carbon-bearing molecules fell out. Seven of them had never been seen on Mars before. One of the seven carries nitrogen and has the same structure as a precursor of DNA. Published in Nature Communications on the twenty-second of April, the work does not prove Mars had life — none of the authors claim it. It proves something more modest and more durable: that the red planet kept, for three billion years, the loose pieces of a vocabulary that the Earth once used to write us. The pieces were there. Someone had to read them aloud for them to be noticed.

Justin Rebo is a longevity researcher who founded, three years ago in New Hampshire, a company called Kind Biotechnology. His idea has no clean precedent in the history of surgery, but he describes it with the naturalness of someone explaining how to make cheese: grow, inside the womb of an animal, an integrated organ network — ION, in the dry language of the laboratory — with a complete lack of any ability to think, to feel, or to wake. The organs depend on each other to survive, the way they would depend inside a body; but there is no body. Only organs. The technique has been proven in mice. This year they move to pigs. The year after, if everything continues as it has, to sheep. Rebo wants that within less than three years a patient receives a kidney, a liver, a pancreas that never belonged to a being that could be called alive in the classical sense. Cosa de no creer, as they still say in Latin America. They are building it anyway.

And one ordinary afternoon at an English zoo, Dr. Joanne Littlefair, of University College London, held a filter to the air and walked away. The filter, a week later, gave back the names: tiger, at two hundred meters from the enclosure; horse and chicken and pig, which were the tiger's lunches; hedgehog, bat, squirrel, which were the neighbors no one had invited. The zoo's air carried, in suspension, the complete biography of its inhabitants. One no longer needs to see a tiger to know it is there. It is enough to breathe where it has breathed.