Lab notes: strange news from another star as physics melts the internet

First up, this just in: astronomers have detected a mysterious space rock hurtling past the sun, and believe it could be the first object that can be traced back to another solar system. It's not aliens, but it's pretty exciting. You know what else is exciting? The release of Stephen Hawking's 1966 PhD thesis online. People really went wild for it: demand was so huge it crashed Cambridge's repository website. Oops. No less exciting is a fresh breakthrough in DNA base editing, or "chemical surgery", which brings hope of potential treatment for huge number of diseases that arise as a result of a single genetic "misspelling". Finally we have not one but two stories involving both skulls and cute animals (it's been quite the week). First up is the discovery that the medieval love of squirrel fur may have helped spread leprosy. A human skull found in a Suffolk garden has yields new evidence of link between human and animal leprosy - with red squirrel fur traded with Viking Scandinavia thought to be a factor. But that's as nothing compared to the strange discovery that shrews shrink their skulls and brains to survive winter - and then regrow them in the spring. Ponder that, if you will.