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The soils of urban greenspaces are strikingly rich. This study finds that the variety of microbial life there is linked to acidic conditions and that this diversity is more homogenous than found in farmland soils.

Despite their differences, the rarer sarcoma CIC::DUX4 sarcoma (CDS) is typically treated with therapies developed for Ewing Sarcoma (EwS) with limited success. Here, the authors develop a co-clinical drug response profiling platform to establish patient-derived CDS and EwS tumoroids, identifying MCL1 inhibition as a promising therapeutic approach in CDS.

Soils are usually exposed to multiple global change factors (like warming or contamination by pollutants), but the response of soil communities to combined global change factors is poorly understood. The authors show that the combination of multiple global change factors shapes soil microbial communities differently than individual factors alone.

Morphological changes in catalyst structure are known to occur during electrocatalysis, and understanding such changes is important to gain insight into the catalytic process. Now, in the case of iridium oxide, these surface changes are probed in atomic-scale detail during the oxygen evolution reaction, and correlated with activity and stability.

Applying the concept of ecosystem energetics to a grassland biodiversity experiment, the authors show that the storage and flow of energy across the whole trophic network, both above- and belowground, becomes more efficient as plant diversity increases.

A large-scale multi-omics analysis reports oncogenic alterations that drive medulloblastoma progression, rather than initiation, and the findings show how single-cell technologies can be used for early detection and diagnosis of medulloblastoma.

Plant diversity and community history can jointly influence ecosystem functions, including those performed by soil fauna. This study shows that soil community history, rather than plant diversity or short-term plant adaptations, plays a crucial role in enhancing belowground ecosystem function.

Regulation of self-renewal is critical during steady state and stress in haematpoietic stem cells (HSCs), and underlies leukaemia pathology. Here, the authors show that LIGHT and its receptor LTβR promote quiescence and self-renewal of HSCs and that LTβR deficiency promotes survival in a mouse leukaemia model.

Spatial control of gene expression allows precise control over biological processes. Here, the authors develop an efficient light-responsive formulation based on upconversion nanoparticles, and demonstrate on-demand genetic manipulation in deep brain tissue.

An analysis of 38 ancient genomes from the aurochs, the extinct ancestor of modern cattle, provides insight into the population ancestry and domestication of this species.

Springtails are omnipresent soil arthropods, vital for ecosystems. In the first global assessment of springtails, this study shows a 20-fold biomass difference between the tundra and the tropics, with distinct temperature-related patterns for diversity and metabolism that suggest climate change may restructure the functioning of soil biodiversity.

This study demonstrates that tuning the grain boundary density in nanoparticle assemblies by controlling nanoparticle collisions significantly enhances their activity, selectivity, and stability towards electrocatalytic reactions.

A large-scale, five-year study in Indonesia finds that enriching oil palm-dominated landscapes with patches of trees bolsters biodiversity and ecosystem functioning without impairing oil palm yields but should not replace forest protection.

Small-scale farmers in Southeast Asia are increasingly turning to monocultures of oil palm and rubber to maximize income. Clough and colleagues demonstrate that this land-use change in Indonesia comes at a cost to a wide array of ecosystem functions and biodiversity.

The European continent is thought to have played a major role in the origins of modern dogs. Here, analysing two ancient dog genomes from Germany, the authors find significant genetic continuity throughout the Neolithic period and time dog domestication to ∼20,000–40,000 years ago.

Conversion of rainforest to plantations in Sumatra leads to higher energetic losses in animal food webs aboveground than belowground, with the belowground energy being reallocated from diverse arthropod communities to invasive earthworms.

High-resolution spatial maps of the global abundance of soil nematodes and the composition of functional groups show that soil nematodes are found in higher abundances in sub-Arctic regions, than in temperate or tropical regions.

The mechanisms driving soil carbon storage, one of the largest stores of terrestrial carbon, remain poorly understood. Here, the authors present data from the long-term Jena Experiment on grassland biodiversity, showing that elevated carbon storage at high plant diversity is a direct function of increased soil microbial activity.

Artificial intelligence has become popular as a cancer classification tool, but there is distrust of such systems due to their lack of transparency. Here, the authors develop an explainable AI system which produces text- and region-based explanations alongside its classifications which was assessed using clinicians’ diagnostic accuracy, diagnostic confidence, and their trust in the system.

Textures and dissolved water contents reveal that lavas may be formed from volcanic ash particles that stick back together while hot, and not by the eruption of magma that rose through the Earth’s crust in a coherent viscous state.

The correct function of ribozymes in a prebiotic world would be dependent on the presence of optimal salt compositions and concentrations. Now, local heat fluxes have been shown to create an ideal salt habitat for ribozyme activity based on geologically plausible salt-leaching processes.

Radiation-induced gliomas (RIGs) have been reported in patients after treatment with cranial irradiation for various primary malignancies but their origin are still unclear. Here, the authors define the genomic, epigenetic and transcriptional landscape of 32 RIGs cases.

Ependymoma is a tumor of the brain or spinal cord with the two most common and aggressive types mainly occurring in children. Here the authors employ 3D genomics and epigenomics to reveal targets for aggressive ependymoma tumors in children.

The nanostructuration of graphene by catalytic cutting using iron oxide nanoparticles leads to the formation of well-defined trenches and tunnels. Here, the authors use electron microscopy to investigate this process in three dimensions and to gain insight into the formation and nature of these nanostructures.

Most studies investigating the biodiversity–stability hypothesis have focused on disturbances that induce productivity losses. Using data from a 200–year flood event in a grassland biodiversity experiment, Wright et al. show that disturbances that increase productivity can also drive decreased stability.

The ancestry of the European bison (wisent) remains a mystery. Here, Cooper and colleagues examine ancient DNA from fossil remains of extinct bison, and reveal the wisent originated through the hybridization of the extinct Steppe bison and ancestors of modern cattle.

By comparing data from real-world grassland communities with data from two of the longest-running grassland biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiments, the authors show that conclusions derived from experimental systems are robust to the removal of unrealistic experimental communities.

Identifying economic and ecological trade-offs of land-use transitions is important to ensure sustainability. Here, Grass et al. find biodiversity-profit trade-offs in tropical land-use transitions in Sumatra, and show that targeted landscape planning is needed to increase land-use efficiency while ensuring socio-ecological sustainability.

The molecular characteristics and therapeutic vulnerabilities of TFCP2-rearranged rhabdomyosarcomas (RMS) require further exploration. Here, the authors use multi-omics analyses and functional and mechanistic investigations to characterize TFCP2-rearranged RMS – including cases with FUS/EWSR1-TFCP2 fusions – across two precision oncology programs.

The effects of biodiversity on ecosystem function are usually studied within trophic levels. These authors conduct a large experiment across trophic levels to show how manipulations of plant diversity affect function in different groups. The effects are consistent across groups, but are stronger at adjacent trophic levels and in above-ground rather than below-ground groups.

Analysing >40 plant traits and ecosystem properties over 10 years, the authors find moderate evidence for traits being predictors of ecosystem-level properties within years, but limited evidence for any effect across years.

A microcosm experiment replicated across 14 laboratories shows that deliberate inclusion of genetic variation enhances the reproducibility of an ecological study.

Analysis of 82 indictors of ecosystem functioning at the Jena grassland biodiversity experiment shows that multifunctionality increases strongly with diversity, but depends on the number and identity of the functions considered.

A bioenergetic consumer–resource model is used to explore how and why only particular predator–prey body-mass ratios promote stability in tri-trophic food chains, and finds that this 'persistence domain' of ratios is constrained by bottom-up energy availability when predators are much smaller than their prey, and by enrichment-driven dynamics when predators are much larger.

Field experiments across aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems show that biodiversity positively affects carbon and nitrogen cycling in leaf litter decomposition, indicating that reduced decomposition caused by biodiversity loss would modify the global carbon cycle and limit the nitrogen supply to the organisms at the base of the food chain.

The strain induced on the walls between ferroelastic domains of a thin film of terbium manganite grown on a substrate of strontium titanate can generate an unusual two-dimensional ferromagnetic phase that is yet to be produced by conventional chemical means.

A global database of alien plants, showing that over 13,000 species, nearly 4% of the global flora, have become naturalized in a new location.