Comment

The Arctic winters are changing fast. In February 2025, Svalbard endured rain, thawing tundra, and pooling meltwater. The Comment by Bradley and coauthors describes how winter warming is reshaping polar ecosystems—and why this resembles the new Arctic.

Historical specimens have enabled transformative insights across kingdoms and ecosystems with new technologies, yet microbes remain largely overlooked in preservation efforts. As we recognize microbial communities as fundamental drivers of planetary health, comprehensive microbial archiving becomes an urgent intergenerational responsibility.

Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE) theory reframes trade as asymmetric transfers of biophysical resources from South to North, rejecting monetary value metrics. It challenges both mainstream and Marxian economics by emphasizing material flows over money-based interpretations of global inequality.

Recent evidence suggests the existence of a neural pathway specialized for social perception projecting between the well-established “what” and “where” pathways. A new study of neuropsychological patients demonstrates that this social pathway is causally essential for recognizing dynamic facial expressions.

The local climate zone framework is valuable for building climate-resilient cities but is limited in application. This limitation can be resolved by addressing three aspects: transdisciplinary dialog, global atlas construction, and cost–benefit assessment.

This commentary discusses health data challenges in Africa, focusing on digitization, standardization, and harmonization as key solutions. It highlights how addressing these foundational issues can enable AI and data science to transform healthcare systems across the continent.

Topological physics has been driving exciting progress in the area of condensed matter physics, with findings that have recently spilled over into the field of metamaterials research inspiring the design of structured materials that can govern in new ways the flow of light and sound. While so far these advances have been driven by fundamental curiosity-driven explorations, without a focused interest on their technological implications, opportunities to translate these findings into applied research have started to emerge, in particular in the context of sound control. Our team has been leading a highly collaborative research effort on advancing the field of topological acoustics, dubbed ‘New Frontiers of Sound’ and connecting it to technological opportunities for computing, communications, energy and sensing. In this comment, we outline our vision towards the future of topological sound, and its translation towards industry-relevant functionalities and operations based on extreme control of acoustic and phononic waves.

Climate-related planned relocations are happening globally yet vary significantly. Drawing on diverse case studies, we present a framework to showcase these differences and identify advocacy priorities and research needs across contexts to ensure more consensual and well-supported relocation practices.

Suboptimal vaccine uptake is a worldwide public health issue. We need (i) to develop interventional population health research on vaccine uptake and (ii) to ensure better use of the research results by public health authorities before developing and implementing a national strategy.

Tissue-agnostic cancer therapies promise to revolutionize oncology by targeting molecular drivers. Sledge et al.’s study of nearly 300,000 tumors found 21.5% with tissue-agnostic indications. Despite nine FDA approvals, real-world implementation challenges persist. Progress depends on universal genomic testing, an oncogenomic-savvy workforce, innovative trials, updated regulations, and real-world evidence to maximize potential.

The efficiency and light stability of inverted organic photovoltaics have been limited by the defects and photocatalytic reactivity of metal oxides transport layer. Here, authors discuss the recent progress and potential solutions for this technology to be put into production and industrialization.

As human-AI collaborations become the norm, we should remind ourselves that it is our basic nature to build hybrid thinking systems – ones that fluidly incorporate non-biological resources. Recognizing this invites us to change the way we think about both the threats and promises of the coming age.

Phosphorus is a critical bio-limiting nutrient in Earth’s ecosystems. A new study published in Nature Communications reports high availability of phosphite for possibly biological uptake in the late Archean ocean, suggesting an active redox cycling of phosphorus on the early Earth.

Recent discoveries reveal how cyanobacteria naturally overcome photosynthetic limits, supporting proposals to improve use of the solar spectrum. These insights could guide efforts to engineer more efficient crops and biofuel-producing organisms.

A rift has occurred within the scientific community between two formerly close-knit fields: condensed matter physics and electronic device engineering. What started as a union to understand the fundamental optical and electrical properties of semiconductors has been split by divergent interests. While the partnership has produced revolutionary changes in the way that information is processed and consumed by an increasingly interconnected society, now the two disciplines rarely speak to one another. As the years have passed, condensed matter physics has become enamored with delicate electronic effects in increasingly complex materials and geometries to the detriment of realistic applications. Meanwhile, device engineering has remained steadfastly focused on room-temperature performance and overall efficiency, prizing incremental improvement over potential disruptive advances using alternative materials and physics. Recent advances in topological electronic systems—in particular those exploiting Chern insulators—while elegant, prompt a necessary reexamination of the device engineering needs and the associated metrics with the goal of establishing a commonality within the blooming field of topological electronics. The purpose of this Comment is to initiate such a reexamination in the hopes that, with a better understanding of future device needs, perhaps the two areas may reunite to usher in the next electronic revolution via the use of topological phenomena.

Topology and chirality of fermionic quasiparticles have enabled exciting discoveries, including quantum anomalous Hall liquids and topological superconductivity. Recently, topological and chiral phonons emerge as new and fast-evolving research directions. While these concepts are separately developed, they are intimately connected in the context of Weyl phonons. The couplings between chiral and topological phonons with various electronic and magnetic quasiparticles are predicted to give rise to new quantum states and giant magnetism with fundamental and applicational interests, ranging from quantum information science to dark matter detectors.

Malaria vaccine research has progressed significantly, with RTS,S/AS01 and R21/Matrix-M receiving WHO endorsement in 2021 / 2023. These vaccines show promise, but challenges like vaccine adherence, strain variation, and resistance persist, highlighting the need for more effective, broad-reaching interventions.

The natural host for avian influenza virus (AIV) is waterfowl. However, certain subtypes have breached species barriers, causing epizootics in many avian and mammalian species with occasional zoonotic infections in humans. The ongoing spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) poses a significant and growing public health threat. Here, we discuss recent advances in viral detection and characterization technologies and their integration into the diagnostics and surveillance of AIV within a “One Health” framework.

A recent study by Buonomano et al. reports two important contributions; namely, empirical evidence for prediction error-like responses in single cells, using ex vivo preparations and optogenetics. Second, it foregrounds the role of asymmetric coupling in generating itinerant dynamics required for temporal prediction in neuronal circuits.