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Historical images show that Antarctica’s Wordie Ice Shelf has disintegrated due to rising basal melt since the 1960s, causing varied glacier responses and highlighting the need for long-term observations to improve predictions of Antarctic ice loss.

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.

The demise of the Laurentide ice sheet during the early Holocene epoch allows rates of ice sheet decay under natural conditions to be assessed. Analysis of terrestrial and marine records of the deglaciation along with a climate model reveal two periods of rapid melting during the final retreat of this ice sheet, with rates of sea level rise of up to 1.3 cm per year.

A genomic study of 125 individuals from the Carpathian Basin (4800–3900 BCE) reveals different kinship systems in nearby Copper Age communities, and highlights both genetic continuity and contrasting patterns of social organization.

Enteroviruses are non-enveloped positive-sense RNA viruses that modulate cytoplasmic membranes for replication. To enlighten how enteroviruses assemble around nascent RNA genomes and get package into autophagosomes for release, Dahmane et al. perform cryo-electron tomography of poliovirus-infected cells. They find assembly intermediates that are only present on the cytosolic side of the replication compartment and provide evidence that host factor VPS34 is involved in progression of assembly intermediates.

The study presents cryo-electron microscopy structures of human autophagy-related protein (ATG) 2A in complex with WD-repeat protein interacting with phosphoinositides 4 (WIPI4) and the ATG2A–WIPI4–ATG9A complex, providing insights into spatially coupled lipid transport and re-equilibration during autophagosome formation.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.

During periods of glaciation, the Northern Hemisphere was swathed by large ice sheets. A review of ice-sheet retreat during the last two deglaciations shows that land-based ice sheets responded rapidly to rising summer insolation, whereas marine-based ice sheets underwent a delayed, but more abrupt, response.

Sex differences in fasting glucose and insulin have been identified, but the genetic loci underlying these differences have not. Here, the authors perform a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies to detect sex-specific and sex-dimorphic loci associated with fasting glucose and insulin.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports the observation of the electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair. This process is related to vector-boson scattering and allows the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking to be probed.

The outlet glaciers that comprise the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) have experienced accelerated retreat in recent years, yet their longterm stability remains unclear. Here, via cosmogenic surface exposure and radiocarbon ages, the authors investigate the stability of the NEGIS for the past 45 kyr.

Ten years after the discovery of the Higgs boson, the ATLAS  experiment at CERN probes its kinematic properties with a significantly larger dataset from 2015–2018 and provides further insights on its interaction with other known particles.

The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider reports a search for charged-lepton-flavour violation in decays of Z bosons into a τ lepton and an electron or muon of opposite charge.

Here the authors combine a multimodal imaging-snRNAseq transcriptomics strategy to provide insight into the distribution of a neurotropic tick-borne flavivirus in the brain, and show that absence of interferon signaling increases infection of resident microglia.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports a measurement of the ratio of the decay rates of W bosons to τ leptons and muons, in agreement with universal lepton couplings as postulated in the standard model of particle physics.

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias identifies new loci and enables generation of a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

Changes in ocean circulation are the most plausible explanation for the early Southern Hemisphere deglacial warming and its lead over Northern Hemisphere temperature.

Quantum electrodynamics predicts a rare process in which light is scattered by light. The ATLAS Collaboration reports signs of this elusive effect in the collisions of ultra-relativistic lead ions.

Claudia Langenberg, James Meigs and colleagues apply a joint meta-analysis approach that accounts for differences in body mass index to identify variants associated with glycemic traits. They report six new loci associated with fasting insulin levels and provide insights into the genetic basis of insulin resistance.

BET inhibitors that target bromodomain chromatin readers such as BRD4 are being explored as potential therapeutics in cancer; here triple-negative breast cancer cell lines are shown to respond to BET inhibitors and resistance seems to be associated with transcriptional changes rather than drug efflux and mutations, opening potential avenues to improve clinical responses to BET inhibitors.

Exome sequence analysis of nearly 10,000 people was carried out to identify alleles associated with early-onset myocardial infarction; mutations in low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR) or apolipoprotein A-V (APOA5) were associated with disease risk, identifying the key roles of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and metabolism of triglyceride-rich lipoproteins.

The factors leading to the full retreat of ice sheets during deglaciation are debated. Numerical modelling suggests that the Laurentide ice sheet retreated only after a threshold for warming and radiative forcing was passed in the Holocene.

The isotopic composition of glacial sediment discharged into the ocean from south Greenland is used to identify a major reduction in the amount of that sediment derived from erosion of Greenland’s Precambrian bedrock, probably indicating the cessation of subglacial erosion and sediment transport during Marine Isotope Stage 11 as a result of the almost complete deglaciation of south Greenland.

A Perspective on the open-source and open-development software project Bioconductor provides an overview for prospective users and developers dealing with high-throughput data in genomics and molecular biology.

A review of Earth system changes associated with past warmer climates provides constraints on the environmental changes that could occur under warming of 2 °C or more over pre-industrial temperatures.