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Chronic care manages long-term, progressive conditions, while acute care handles short-term ones. Here, authors show chronic conditions account for most of the global health burden, with 68% of DALYs and 93% of YLDs attributed to chronic care needs.

Wood density is a key control on tree biomass, and understanding its spatial variation improves estimates of forest carbon stock. Sullivan et al. measure >900 forest plots to quantify wood density and produce high resolution maps of its variation across South American tropical forests.

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.

The ontogeny of conventional and plasmacytoid dendritic cells (DC) and how these two cell types are related is not fully known. Here the authors identify a pool of bone marrow precursor cells expressing Ly6D Siglec-H and Zbtb46 that can differentiate into either cDC or pDC and show that type I IFN can limit cDC and favor pDC output from these precursors.

Siglec-glycolipid interactions are often studied outside the context of a lipid bilayer. Here, the authors combine a variety of chemical biology techniques to demonstrate a unique and physiologically relevant ability of Siglec-6 to recognize glycolipids in a membrane.

The sea floor at the easternmost Southwest Indian mid-ocean ridge is smooth, unlike that at other mid-ocean ridges. Sonar imaging and analysis of rock samples show that the sea floor here is composed almost entirely of sea-water-altered mantle rocks that have been brought to the surface by large faults on both sides of the ridge axis over the past 11 million years.

Systematic analysis from the Global Burden of Disease study reported that, despite global improvements from 1990 to 2021, dietary iron deficiency-associated disease burden remains high in women, children and residents in low socio-demographic index countries.

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.

Medium- and branched-chain diols and amino alcohols are important industrial feedstocks, but they are biosynthetically challenging to produce. Here the authors introduce a modular polyketide synthase platform for the efficient production of these compounds.

Combination of epidemiology, preclinical models and ultradeep DNA profiling of clinical cohorts unpicks the inflammatory mechanism by which air pollution promotes lung cancer

The components of the tumour microenvironment contribute to prostate cancer initiation and progression. Here the authors perform single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics analysis of prostate cancer stroma from mouse models at different stages of the disease and develop a gene signature to predict distant metastasis in patients.

Characterization of clinical isolates of the cryptic fungal pathogen Aspergillus latus revealed traits that distinguish it from other species. Steenwyck et al show that A. latus originated via allodiploid hybridization with both parental subgenomes actively expressed.

Two Co single crystal surfaces remain metallic up to 1 bar during Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. The observed intermediates support the carbide mechanism as the reaction pathway. By adding and removing CO we can follow the dynamics of the (dis)appearance of intermediates.

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.

The authors analyse tree responses to an extreme heat and drought event across South America to understand long-term climate resistance. While no more sensitive to this than previous lesser events, forests in drier climates showed the greatest impacts and thus vulnerability to climate extremes.

Bacterial endospores are among the most resilient forms of life. Here, authors reveal ultrastructural details of the spore chromosome and the multiprotein, multilayered extracellular coat, shedding light on mechanisms contributing to spore resistance.

Dual-wavelength photochemical systems open up new avenues for novel lithographic techniques but currently only few wavelength-orthogonal photoreactive compounds undergoing reversible photoreaction are known. Here, the authors exploit cis/trans photoisomerization of azobenzenes and demonstrate photoligation of the cis state with a photochemically generated ketene.

Evolution has produced a range of diverse proteins, and now a generative model called Chroma can expand that set by allowing the user to design new proteins and protein complexes with desired properties and functions.

One picosecond after photoactivation, isomerized retinal pulls away from half of its numerous interactions with its binding pocket, and the excess of the photon energy is released through an anisotropic protein breathing motion in the direction of the extracellular space.

Western diet is one of the major causes underlying diabetes, and the microbes residing in the gut playing a critical role in mediating the effects of diet. Here the authors utilize network analysis to discover two species of Lactobacilli decreased by western diet, which improve glucose metabolism and restore of hepatic mitochondria in mice.

The LITMUS consortium provides a resource of rodent MASLD models benchmarked against metabolic, histologic and transcriptomic features that are relevant for human MASLD. The work is useful for selecting relevant rodent models for studying this common disease.

Bhattacharjee and Schaeffer et al. map exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) in 94 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), finding increased EBF practice and reduced subnational variation across the majority of LMICs from 2000 to 2018. However, only six LMICs will meet WHO’s target of ≥70% EBF by 2030 nationally, and only three will achieve this in all districts.

Understanding the emergence, evolution, and transmission of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) is essential to combat antimicrobial resistance. Here, Munk et al. analyse ARGs in hundreds of sewage samples from 101 countries and describe regional patterns, diverse genetic environments of common ARGs, and ARG-specific transmission patterns.

Using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, the surface composition of iron and ruthenium catalysts during ammonia synthesis at pressures up to 1 bar and temperatures as high as 723 K can be revealed.

A wireless ‘smart’ bandage stimulates wound healing.

Members of the Enterobacteriaceae, including adherent invasive Escherichia coli, reprogram their metabolism to preferentially consume dietary serine during periods of inflammation in the gut to promote their growth and outcompete other microbiome members.

From 1980 to 2018, the levels of total and non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol increased in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreased in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe.

Ocean acidification played no physiological role in coral susceptibility to thermal-stress-induced bleaching and did not alter the recovery of corals from heat stress in 2014 and 2015 in Hawai'i, according to observations of ambient and simulated ocean acidification.

This study tracked the initial self-assembly, oligomerization and structural conversion of α-synuclein inside neurons. Early seeding events occur on mitochondrial membranes, where oligomerization induces mitochondrial dysfunction and neuronal loss.

The authors present a workflow integrating metabolic perturbations with protein structural analysis to identify drug off-targets, demonstrating how combining machine learning methods with mechanistic analyses can benefit off-target identification.

Biomphalaria glabrata is a fresh water snail that acts as a host for trematode Schistosoma mansoni that causes intestinal infection in human. This work describes the genome and transcriptome analyses from 12 different tissues of B glabrata, and identify genes for snail behavior and evolution.

This study provides direct experimental evidence for an important hypothesized mechanism of ageing, showing that the maintenance of adult haematopoietic stem cell function during ageing and haematopoietic stem cell transplantation is critically dependent on DNA repair by the non-homologous end-joining pathway.

Combined analysis of proton-proton collision data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN by the CMS and LHCb collaborations leads to the observation of the extremely rare decay of the strange B meson into muons; the result is compatible with the standard model of particle physics, and does not show any signs of new physics, such as supersymmetry.

Most Amazon tree species are rare but a small proportion are common across the region. The authors show that different species are hyperdominant in different size classes and that hyperdominance is more phylogenetically restricted for larger canopy trees than for smaller understory ones.

Patient-derived xenograft models (PDX) have been extensively used to study the molecular and clinical features of cancers. Here the authors present a cohort of 536 PDX models from 25 cancers, as well as their genomic and evolutionary profiles and their suitability for clinical trials.

Remotely sensed NDVI data and contemporary field data from 84 grasslands on 6 continents show increasing divergence in aboveground plant biomass between sites in different bioclimatic regions.

The source of biological toluene production in diverse anoxic microbial communities is a glycyl radical enzyme that catalyzes phenylacetate decarboxylation (PhdB), and its cognate activating radical S-adenosylmethionine enzyme (PhdA).

Although plant functional trait combinations reflect ecological trade-offs at the species level, little is known about how this translates to whole communities. Here, the authors show that global trait composition is captured by two main dimensions that are only weakly related to macro-environmental drivers.

Methicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus appeared in European hedgehogs in the pre-antibiotic era as a co-evolutionary adaptation to antibiotic-producing dermatophytes and have spread within the local hedgehog populations and between hedgehogs and secondary hosts.

Contrary to the view that urbanization is a major driver of the global rise in obesity, the global increase in body-mass index is shown to be mostly due to increases in the body-mass indexes of rural populations.

Despite the identification of genetic risk loci for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD), the genetic architecture and prediction remains unclear. Here, the authors use genetic risk scores for prediction of LOAD across three datasets and show evidence suggesting oligogenic variant architecture for this disease.

A robust, cost-effective technique based on whole-exome sequencing data can be used to characterize immune infiltrates, relate the extent of these infiltrates to somatic changes in tumours, and enables prediction of tumour responses to immune checkpoint inhibition therapy.