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Most studies assessing food self-sufficiency look at calories and neglect nutrient gaps. Comparing food demand and potential food production under land and water constraints, this study quantifies 9 key nutrient gaps for each of African’s 54 countries.

Previous work on periodically driven many-body systems has demonstrated the formation of time crystals that break time-translation symmetry. Now, more general phases with partial temporal ordering have been realized.

The magnetoelastic coupling at a ferroelectric-ferromagnetic interface is shown to be dominated by shear-strain effects. Using polarised x-ray microscopy to simultaneously image the ferroic domain structures, the authors demonstrate an anomalous coupling in the ultrathin film limit.

Realising scalable entangled photon sources with quantum dots requires compensating for both wavelength mismatches and exciton fine-structure splitting (FSS). So far, multiple QDs with the same emission wavelength and near-zero FSS have not been demonstrated. Here, the authors fill this gap, reaching high entanglement fidelity for multiple QDs tuned into resonance with each other or with Rb atoms.

Microcavity exciton-polaritons in atomically thin semiconductors are a promising platform for valley manipulation. Here, the authors show valley-selective control of polariton energies in monolayer WS2 using the optical Stark effect, thereby extending coherent valley manipulation to a hybrid light-matter regime

A manually operated portable water disinfection system can rapidly inactivate pathogens in water, offering a promising approach for safe water treatment in low-resource settings.

Researchers use a chimeric approach to reveal the first near-atomic resolution structures the yellow fever virion, showing key differences between vaccine and virulent strains that affect how antibodies recognise and neutralise the virus.

Adoptive regulatory T cell (Treg) therapy holds promise for the treatment of a range of immunopathological conditions. Here the authors explore the HLA engineering of allogenic Treg products that avoid T cell and NK cell attack and maintain immunomodulatory function in a human skin-xenograft model.

Women of reproductive age may have specific concerns relating to perceived impacts on fertility and menstrual cycles that make them hesitant to receive COVID-19 vaccination. In this study, the authors explore COVID-19 vaccine uptake rates in women of reproductive age using linked data for ~13 million women in England.

Here, the authors show the dynamic tuning of the moiré potential in a WS₂/WSe₂ heterobilayer by gate voltage and optical power, allowing for simultaneous observation of the first and second order Stark shift for the ground state and first excited state, respectively, of the moiré trapped exciton.

Engineering motif-specific 'hot spots' into an antibody scaffold yields antibodies with high affinity to targets containing phosphoserine, phosphothreonine or phosphotyrosine.

The electronic ground state of a correlated oxide interface is reversibly switched by light. Stemming from interfacial reconstructions, electrostatic confinement and photodoping, this effect opens a path towards engineering the optical response of oxides.

Berghoff et al. discover that polycrystalline MAPbI₃ undergoes transient Wannier Stark localization at moderate field strengths, exhibiting substantial optical modulation with a fast response time. Since the polycrystallinity does not hinder the switching behaviour, this low-cost material is promising for light modulation and photonic applications.

Rudensky and colleagues demonstrate a context-dependent differential requirement for Foxp3 for T_reg cell transcriptional and functional programs.

Multi-template PCR enables parallel DNA amplification but suffers from sequence-specific biases. Here, the authors develop a 1D-CNN model predicting amplification efficiency directly from the DNA sequence and discover adapter-mediated self-priming as a key cause of uneven amplification during PCR.

Chiral agrochemicals are known for enhanced effects, but chiral supramolecular functional materials remain underexplored. Here, the authors engineered S and R chiral cyclodextrin-based carriers, where the R-enantiomer exhibits superior foliar adhesion and biofilm disruption—revealing their promise for agrochemical applications.

Benefits on health have been found to vary across different levels of physical activity (PA) for chronic conditions including cancer. Here the authors report that each minute of vigorous intensity PA is equivalent to various minutes of moderate and light PA in terms of all-cause, cardiometabolic disease and cancer mortality outcomes in a device-based population.

GTPase-activating proteins (GAPs) often contain regulatory PH domains. In this work, Soubias et al, using an integrated structure-function approach, discovered a mechanism where a GAP PH domain binds directly to a GTPase to induce allosteric changes facilitating GTP hydrolysis.

Experiments with a trapped-ion quantum simulator observe Stark many-body localization, in which the quantum system evades thermalization despite having no disorder.

All-solid-state batteries face complex chemo-mechanical degradation. Here, authors reveal how interfacial chemical reactions in Ni-rich oxides govern reaction dynamics and microstructural changes and unveil that coatings enhance uniformity and durability.

Metronomic photodynamic therapy is a long-term, low-dose treatment strategy limited by the need of continuous photosensitizer administration. Here this group reports combining the self-bioluminescent bacteria with a neutral red photosensitizer in alginate microcapsules as a self-driven metronomic photodynamic therapeutic system with preclinical anti-cancer effects.

Condensates of excitons have been observed in the quantum Hall regime, but evidence for their existence at low magnetic fields remains controversial. Now evidence of coherence between optically pumped interlayer excitons in MoS₂ marks a step towards confirming exciton condensation at low magnetic fields.

LLM agents could revolutionize laboratory automation, but their capabilities remain poorly tested. Here, the authors create a framework automating atomic force microscopy with LLMs and benchmark them through an end-to-end evaluation suite, revealing major limitations and safety concerns

In strong enough electric fields the non-linear response of electrons in crystals is expected to lead to spatial localization but so far this has only been seen in artificial structures. Schmidt et al. present evidence of this Wannier-Stark localization effect in bulk GaAs driven by intense mid-infrared pulses.

Here, the authors use a molecular epidemiological approach to investigate the frequency and intensity of clustering of HIV with different set-point viral loads and find that frequently transmitted strains in genetic transmission clusters have significantly higher viral loads than nonclustered viruses.

Reliable measuring the voltage dynamics of individual neurons in the intact brain is significantly challenging. Here authors developed an all-optical method combining two-photon voltage imaging and optogenetics to measure and induce synaptic plasticity in vivo, revealing LTP of inhibition in cerebellar circuits and providing a blueprint to link synaptic changes to learning.

The quantum-confined Stark effect is conventionally observed in inorganic semiconductor multilayer quantum well structures that are expensive to make. Here Walters et al. report large Stark effects in easily made layered hybrid perovskites and exploit the orientational polarizability of dipolar cations.

The field effect tunability of 2D semiconductors is at the basis of their technological appeal, but it is usually implemented via electrostatic gating. Here, the authors demonstrate an ultrafast THz field effect in 2D MoS₂ embedded in a nanoantenna converting the incident radiation field into an out-of-plane electric field of ~ MV/cm scale.

Myeloperoxidase, a highly expressed neutrophil protein, disassembles nucleosomes, facilitating neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) formation, and binds stably to NETs extracellularly.

The treatment potential of psilocybin for postpartum depression was investigated in a preclinical mouse model. Here the authors show both acute and long-term effects of psilocybin in mothers and their offspring who were exposed via lactation.

Telomere shortening marks cellular aging and links to heart disease. Here, the authors show shared genetic loci between leukocyte telomere length and coronary artery disease, highlighting genes such as SH2B3 and pathways involved in DNA biosynthesis and telomere maintenance.

In superconducting circuits, the nonlinearity of Josephson junctions mediates photon interactions, but they are typically dominated by two-photon processes. Here the authors observe multi-photon interactions in a superconducting circuit with Cooper-pair pairing, revealing a new regime of microwave quantum optics.

The gut microbiota can influence the severity of pneumonia through the production of metabolites. In this translational study, the authors investigate the effects of tryptophan metabolites, specifically indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), on pneumonia.

Cancer evolutionary dynamics are quantitatively inferred using a method, EVOFLUx, applied to fluctuating DNA methylation.

Authors used targeted long-read sequencing to facilitate the discovery of rare and novel HBV RNAs in the infected liver. They identified differential promoter activity with potential implications for drug resistance and cancer.

Here the authors show that MRAP2 tunes the melanocortin-4 receptor by boosting its G-protein signaling while limiting β-arrestin2 interaction and destabilizing receptor oligomers, shaping appetite regulation.

Glutamatergic and GABAergic (γ-aminobutyric acid-producing) cortical neuronal activity drives proliferation of small lung cell cancer via paracrine interactions and through synapses formed with tumour cells.

Two types of on-chip silicon device utilizing silicon T centres are developed: an O-band light-emitting diode and an electrically triggered single-photon source. Further, a new method of spin initialization with electrical excitation is demonstrated.

The neuronal architecture that develops after spinal cord injury and causes autonomic dysreflexia is uncovered.

Neurons that respond emergently to illusory contours drive pattern completion in V1. Pattern completion in lower cortical areas may therefore mediate perceptual inference by selectively reinforcing activity patterns that match prior expectations.

Multiple bonds involving heavier elements were considered impossible but have recently been shown to be stable and offer divergent reactivity. Here the isolation of an alumene (a compound containing an Al=C bond) via direct CO reduction is described. Analysis of the alumene and its ability to homologate CO is reported.

Indigenous peoples are disproportionally affected by poor kidney health outcomes globally. Here, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors provide a global overview of kidney health among Indigenous populations across different regions and its key determinants, including structural factors, and make actionable policy recommendations for addressing these health inequities.

Quantifying intermolecular coupling and local morphology is important to understand soft matter systems. Pollard et al. show how multispectral vibrational near-field optical microscopy can be used to image molecular-scale morphology and intermolecular interactions with nanometre spatial resolution.

In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same mother having distinct genomes and morphologies.

Malaria control and elimination require environmentally safe strategies. Here, the authors propose L-DOPA, a naturally occurring tyrosine derivative, as a mosquito dietary intervention that can shorten lifespan and reduce malaria parasite burden of female Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes.

Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes offer lower overhead than topological quantum error-correcting codes, but decoding remains a key challenge for scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing. This work introduces a highly parallelizable decoding algorithm for QLDPC codes that matches the accuracy of leading decoders while enabling significantly improved scalability.