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Cortical networks switch from asynchronous firing to sudden synchronized population events. Here, the authors show that differential excitatory short-term synaptic plasticity onto either excitatory or inhibitory targets establishes and shapes the dynamics of these population events.

Recent work has demonstrated a continuous time crystal in an electron-nuclear spin system in the InGaAs semiconductor. Here, using periodic modulation, the authors reveal effects of synchronization, quasi-periodic, and chaotic dynamics, demonstrating universal nonlinear effects in a time-crystalline platform.

A new version of nanorate DNA sequencing, with an error rate lower than five errors per billion base pairs and compatible with whole-exome and targeted capture, enables epidemiological-scale studies of somatic mutation and selection and the generation of high-resolution selection maps across coding and non-coding sites for many genes.

A combination of whole-genome NanoSeq with deep whole-exome and targeted NanoSeq is used to accurately characterize mutation rates and genes under positive selection in sperm cells.

The severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection varied over the course of the pandemic due to factors such as changes in variant characteristics and population immunity from previous infection or vaccination. Here, the authors estimate infection hospitalisation and infection fatality rates in England over time from the start of the pandemic until March 2023.

Polygenic risk scores can help identify individuals at higher risk of type 2 diabetes. Here, the authors characterise a multi-ancestry score across nearly 900,000 people, showing that its predictive value depends on demographic and clinical context and extends to related traits and complications.

In a post-hoc analysis of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) features from patients with metastatic prostate cancer treated with [¹⁷⁷Lu]Lu–PSMA-617 or cabazitaxel in the randomized phase 2 TheraP trial, low ctDNA levels at baseline were predictive of clinical benefit from [¹⁷⁷Lu]Lu–PSMA-617, and PTEN or ATM alterations were identified as potential biomarkers of response.

Mendelian randomization (MR) identifies causal relationships from observational data but has increased error rates when the genetic variants used as instruments come from a single region, a typical scenario when assessing molecular traits like protein or metabolite levels as risk factors. Here the authors introduce a single-region pleiotropy-robust MR method, validating the method on three ground truth sources, showing its capability to identify disease-causing molecular traits.

Using well-calibrated statistical methods the authors jointly analyze Undiagnosed Diseases Network genomes, identifying known and novel disease genes. Software is publicly available to support future cross-cohort rare disease discovery efforts.

Fine-scale geospatial mapping of overweight and wasting (two components of the double burden of malnutrition) in 105 LMICs shows that overweight has increased from 5.2% in 2000 to 6.0% in children under 5 in 2017. Although overall wasting decreased over the same period, most countries are not on track to meet the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Geospatial estimates of the prevalence of anemia in women of reproductive age across 82 low-income and middle-income countries reveals considerable heterogeneity and inequality at national and subnational levels, with few countries on track to meet the WHO Global Nutrition Targets by 2030.

A global model compiling seabird surveys finds that 37 seabird species and around 25% of the world’s tropical seabird individuals nest on atolls, where they act as major nutrient pumps within tropical oceans.

Bayesian Flow Networks generate diverse, novel, and coherent protein sequences, surpassing prior unconditional generation methods. They also permit flexible conditional generation during inference, which is demonstrated on antibody inpainting tasks.

A high-bandwidth neuromotor interface offers performant out-of-the-box generalization across people.

By learning to pair dermatological images and related concepts in a self-supervised manner, a visual-language foundation model is shown to have comparable performance to supervised models for concept annotation and is used to scrutinize model decisions for enhanced interpretability and accountability of medical imaging applications.

Foutel et. al. identify conformational buffering as a mechanism for functional selection in intrinsically disordered protein regions that allows robust encoding of a tethering function by a hypervariable disordered linker through compensatory changes in sequence length and composition.

The effects of detection noise on quantum metrology performances have not been rigorously investigated yet. Here, the authors fill this gap by generalising the quantum Fisher information to the case of noisy readout, and showing the consequences the imperfect measurements bring.

Polygenic Priority Score (PoPS) prioritizes candidate effector genes at complex trait loci by integrating genome-wide association summary statistics with other data types. Combining PoPS with methods that leverage local genetic signals further improves the performance.

VeloCycle is a manifold-constrained generative framework to estimate RNA velocity during the cell cycle.

A study of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in England between September 2020 and June 2021 finds that interventions capable of containing previous variants were insufficient to stop the more transmissible Alpha and Delta variants.

Many tumours exhibit hypoxia (low oxygen) and hypoxic tumours often respond poorly to therapy. Here, the authors quantify hypoxia in 1188 tumours from 27 cancer types, showing elevated hypoxia links to increased mutational load, directing evolutionary trajectories.

Menu manipulation is a promising strategy to increase environmental and health benefits of food choices. Drawing on data from a UK university residence, this study illustrates such potential.

Analysis of the pulse profile of a fast radio burst showed sub-second periodicity, providing evidence for a neutron-star origin of the event and favouring emission arising from the magnetosphere.

Understanding the keyhole porosity formation is important in laser powder bed fusion. Here the authors reveal the dynamics of keyhole fluctuation, and collapse that induces bubble formation with three main stages of evolution; growth, shrinkage, and being captured by the solidification front.

The urgency of the developing COVID-19 epidemic has led to a large number of novel diagnostic approaches, many of which use machine learning. DeGrave and colleagues use explainable AI techniques to analyse a selection of these approaches and find that the methods frequently learn to identify features unrelated to the actual disease.

Polygenic scores for body mass index and obesity constructed using data from 5 million people with different ancestries were associated with distinct weight gain trajectories from early childhood to adulthood.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

A scheme for watermarking the text generated by large language models shows high text quality preservation and detection accuracy and low latency, and is feasible in large-scale-production settings.

A leaky accumulation model can predict rats’ changes of mind during decision making in a dynamic environment explaining reversals in frontal cortical activity and demonstrating a stable choice code despite environmental uncertainty.

Marine fishes can substantially contribute to the inorganic carbon cycle through the excretion of intestinally precipitated carbonates, but the underlying drivers remain largely unknown. This study identifies the environmental factors and fish traits that predict carbonate excretion rate and mineralogical composition in tropical reef fishes.

Non-uniform noise introduces bias in multivariate analysis of mass spectrometry data. Here, the authors study the noise structure of the widely used Orbitrap to develop a data scaling method that reduces this bias resulting in clearer separation of chemical information from noise in biological data.

Mutational signature analysis of blood cells isolated from 23 chemotherapy-exposed samples and 9 nonexposed controls characterizes the effects of various drugs on mutational burden, signature exposure and cell types.

The authors report signal enhancements in high-resolution liquid-state NMR by a new setup for dynamic nuclear polarization. Two-dimensional NMR techniques are used to transfer hyperpolarization within the nuclei of molecules such as metabolites or drugs.

The authors show that adriamycin induces global changes on chromatin conformation associated with phase transitions mediated through Histone H1.

The challenge of accurate particle picking in cryo-EM analysis is addressed with Topaz, a neural-network-based algorithm that shows advantages over other tools, especially in picking unusually shaped particles.

Materials with a Kitaev spin liquid ground state are sought after as models of quantum phases but candidates so far form either zig-zag or incommensurate magnetic order. Ruiz et al. find a crossover between these states in β-Li₂IrO₃ under weak magnetic fields, indicating strongly frustrated spin interactions.

Isolating and studying haematopoietic stem cells in young and aged mice demonstrates evolutionary processes related to blood production and provides a framework for interpreting future work using laboratory mice to study stem cell ageing.

Two below-threshold surface code memories on superconducting processors markedly reduce logical error rates, achieving high efficiency and real-time decoding, indicating potential for practical large-scale fault-tolerant quantum algorithms.

Crustal permeability evolution predicted from observed MEQs using Bi-LSTM models. MEQ-to-permeability relations confirmed across multiple field data sets using transfer learning with scaling relationships confirmed using physics-based models.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

Quantum computers may help to solve classically intractable problems, such as simulating non-equilibrium dissipative quantum systems. The critical dynamics of a dissipative quantum model has now been probed on a trapped-ion quantum computer.

Although progress in the coverage of routine measles vaccination in children in low- and middle-income countries was made during 2000–2019, many countries remain far from the goal of 80% coverage in all districts by 2019.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

A machine learning model allows the identification of new small-molecule kinase inhibitors in days.