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Industrial biotechnology and biopharmaceutical manufacturing leverage biology to enable cellular systems to serve as factories to produce molecules of value to humankind. These biotechnological processes utilize diverse host organisms and address applications from biofuel, polymer building blocks, antibiotics, and whole cell therapies. Industrial biotechnology can address environmental and sustainability goals in addition to chemical production. In a similar fashion, the field of biopharmaceutical manufacturing has and continues to produce life-saving medicines. Despite these diverse applications, these fields rely on common biological themes and require similar approaches for genetic and metabolic engineering as discussed in this review. Through advances in synthetic biology, targeted genetic engineering, DNA sequencing, adaptation and high-throughput screening, industrial biotechnology and biopharmaceutical manufacturing utilize the same framework for efficient biochemical production which can be leveraged in current and future collaborations to enable rapid innovation. 

Cosmic rays are energetic charged particles from extraterrestrial sources, with the highest-energy events thought to come from extragalactic sources. Their arrival is infrequent, so detection requires instruments with large collecting areas. In this work, we report the detection of an extremely energetic particle recorded by the surface detector array of the Telescope Array experiment. We calculate the particle’s energy as $244\pm 29\left(\text{stat}\text{.}\right){}_{-76}^{+51}\left(\text{syst}\text{.}\right)\text{ exa–electron volts}$(~40 joules). Its arrival direction points back to a void in the large-scale structure of the Universe. Possible explanations include a large deflection by the foreground magnetic field, an unidentified source in the local extragalactic neighborhood, or an incomplete knowledge of particle physics.