page_title: 2018 in science
section_title: April
hierarchical_section_title: 2018 in science / Events / April
caption_attribution_description: English: Aerial view of Minamitori Island (Minami-Torishima), Japan. There is a runway which supported the US Coast Guard station located there prior to 1993. Minamitori Island is the easternmost island of the Japanese archipelago. Deutsch: Luftaufnahme der Minamitori Insel (Minami-Torishima), Japan. 日本語: 南鳥島の空中写真。
context_page_description: A number of significant scientific events occurred in 2018.
context_section_description: 2 April
  The inoperative Tiangong-1 space lab comes down over the South Pacific Ocean, northwest  of Tahiti.
  Astronomers report the detection of the most distant individual star (actually, a blue supergiant), named Icarus (formally, MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1), at 9 billion light-years (light-travel distance) away from Earth.
  5 April – Odilorhabdins, a novel class of naturally-produced antibiotics, is formally described.
  10 April – Researchers in Japan report finding centuries' worth of rare-earth metals in deep sea mud, located near Minami-Tori-shima in the northwest Pacific.
  11 April – Two studies, both published in Nature, find that the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream is at its weakest for at least 1,600 years.
  17 April – Engineers at MIT develop a new more efficient method of producing long strips of graphene.
  18 April
  NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is launched.
  Nanyang Technological University demonstrates a robot that can autonomously assemble an IKEA chair without interruption.
  19 April – The results of a new gene therapy trial of 22 patients with the blood disorder beta thalassemia, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates 15 of the patients being cured entirely while 7 requiring fewer annual blood transfusions.
  25 April
  The Gaia collaboration publishes its second data release containing 1.7 billion light sources, with positions, parallaxes and proper motions for about 1.3 billion of them.
  Scientists publish evidence that asteroids may have been primarily responsible for bringing water to Earth.
  26 April
  Scientists report that a letter of intent was signed by NASA and ESA which may provide a basis for sample return missions to other planets, including Mars sample return missions, with the purpose of better studying the possible existence of past or present extraterrestrial primitive life forms, including microorganisms.
  Scientists identify 44 gene variants linked to increased risk for depression.
  The Belle II experiment starts taking data to study B mesons.
  27 April – Stephen Hawking's final paper – A smooth exit from eternal inflation? – is published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
  30 April – Researchers report identifying 6,331 groups of genes that are common to all living animals, and which may have arisen from a single common ancestor that lived 650 million years ago in the Precambrian.
caption: 10 April: Centuries' worth of rare-earth metals reported near the island of Minami-Tori-shima (pictured).
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "Aerial view of Marcus Island and the runway which supports the US Coast Guard station located there.  Marcus Island is the southernmost island in the Japanese chain.", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "282", "Image YResolution": "282", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2006:07:19 10:06:49", "Image Artist": "CMSGT DON SUTHERLAND", "Image ExifOffset": "368", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "506", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3099", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2824", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1789"}