What happened
The prospects of legalising assisted dying this year have dimmed sharply, with a senior supporter warning the bill is close to stalling entirely in the House of Lords. Former justice secretary Charlie Falconer said the legislation was unlikely to clear the upper chamber before the next parliamentary session, due to sustained opposition from peers. Without major procedural shifts, the bill would fall when Parliament is reset following the King’s Speech, expected in May. The impasse has raised the possibility of a rare constitutional confrontation, with supporters considering drastic steps to force the bill through despite Lords’ objections.

Who said what
Falconer told BBC News it was now “very very difficult” for the bill to succeed and said it had “absolutely no hope” unless peers altered their approach.

What next?
Falconer warned he may seek to use the Parliament Act to bypass the Lords, arguing that elected MPs should have the final say. That act “was last used in 2004 to pass a ban on foxhunting”, said Jessica Elgot in The Guardian. But if the government, which has so far remained neutral on the bill, “refuses to play ball”, then supporters have “run out of road”.

What happened
Mexico’s president is appealing to her counterpart in South Korea for more BTS concerts, due to intense demand. The K-pop megaband, touring for the first time in four years after completing their mandatory military service, is playing three shows in Mexico City in May, but tickets sold out in less than 40 minutes.

Who said what
Claudia Sheinbaum was told the tour’s packed itinerary made adding more shows unfeasible, prompting her to write to President Lee Jae Myung. “I still haven’t received the answer, but let's hope it’s positive,” Sheinbaum said on Monday. A million young people were vying for 150,000 tickets, she added.

“Spotify lists Mexico as K-pop’s fifth-largest market worldwide,” according to the BBC. “The BTS tour will be the event of the year,” Timothy Calkins, marketing professor at Northwestern University, told The Guardian. It “might be even bigger than Taylor Swift”. Seoul’s presidential office and foreign ministry declined to comment.

What next?
The BTS comeback tour begins in South Korea on 9 April, and comprises 79 shows across five continents: their biggest yet.

A new high-resolution map of distant galaxies may finally help scientists understand a mysterious substance that binds the universe together.

Taken by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, the latest images, published as part of a study in the journal Nature Astronomy, include information on new galaxy clusters dating back 10 billion years and, crucially, the strands of so-called “dark matter” that connect them.

Dark matter is “one of the most persistent and important puzzles in all of physics”, said Elizabeth Landau in National Geographic. 

While ordinary matter – stars, planets, people, basically anything the eye can see – makes up just 5% of the universe, dark matter comprises over a quarter, with “dark energy”, a mysterious but constant force which pushes stars and galaxies away from each other, making up the rest.

Dark matter “doesn’t have much of an impact on your midday lunch order or your nightly bedtime ritual”, said Adithi Ramakrishnan, science reporter at The Associated Press, “but it silently passes through your body all the time and has shaped the universe.”

The problem is that it “doesn’t absorb or give off light so scientists can’t study it directly”. Instead, they have to observe “how its gravity warps and bends the star stuff around it – for example, the light from distant galaxies”. 

Dark matter “is the gravitational scaffolding into which everything else falls and is built into galaxies. And we can actually see that process happening in this map,” said Richard Massey, study co-author and physicist at Durham University.