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Japonica subspecies has a lower nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) than that of indica rice. Here, the authors show that natural variations in the NIN-like protein 4 (OsNLP4) encoding gene are responsible for the divergence and introgression of the indica OsNLP4 allele into elite japonica cultivar can increase NUE and grain yield.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of clinical trials investigating the efficacy and safety of obesity management medications reported tirzepatide and semaglutide to be the most effective in reducing body weight and obesity-related complications.

The underlying physics of the strange metal phase observed in many strongly correlated materials is not well understood. Now, evidence emerges that antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations play an important role.

Liang et al. estimate the prevalence of text modified by large language models in recent scientific papers and preprints, finding widespread use (up to 17.5% of papers in computer science).

The authors achieve a high electrocaloric effect in barium titanate ceramics with a defect dipole engineering strategy. As a result, defect dipole engineering enables BaTiO₃ to achieve an electrocaloric effect over a wide temperature range.

A terahertz field exceeding 1 V nm⁻¹ induced a structural phase transition in the top atomic layer of a bulk WTe₂ crystal. Differential imaging revealed a surface shift of 7 ± 3 pm and an electronic signature consistent with a topological phase transition.

Imaging through complex media is challenging because scattering results in image blurring. By introducing a fingerprint operator and applying it to the measured reflection matrix, information on a target within a complex medium becomes accessible.

Native top-down proteomics reveals epidermal growth factor receptor–estrogen receptor-alpha (EGFR–ER) signaling crosstalk in breast cancer cells and dissociation of nuclear transport factor 2 (NUTF2) dimers to modulate ER signaling and cell growth.

Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neural mode.

Owing to electron localization, two-dimensional materials are not expected to be metallic at low temperatures, but a field-induced quantum metal phase emerges in NbSe₂, whose behaviour is consistent with the Bose-metal model.

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.

Loretan and colleagues present a low-cost smartphone-based microscope capable of detecting single-molecule fluorescence. This approach opens doors to personalised and widely distributed applications in diagnostics, biosensing, and science education.

Cavity phonon-polaritons are a potential platform for controlling phonons. Here, the authors demonstrate multimode ultrastrong coupling between two optical phonon modes embedded in terahertz nanoslot cavities.

Adherent-invasive strains of E. coli are commonly isolated from patients with Crohn’s disease. Here, the authors show that an AIEC harbours a hybrid Type IV secretion system (T4SS) that mediates pilin polymerization and biofilm formation in vivo.

By exploiting an optical thermodynamic framework, researchers demonstrate universal routing of light. Specifically, light launched into any input port of a nonlinear array is universally channelled into a tightly localized ground state. The principles of optical thermodynamics demonstrated may enable new optical functionalities.

The temporal characterization of few-femtosecond vacuum ultraviolet pulses bring new opportunities for investigating ultrafast light-matter interactions.

How the brain creates compositional cognitive maps that support both flexible and efficient planning remains poorly understood. Here, authors propose a biologically-realistic computational model addressing this question, which reproduces response fields across cells in the medial entorhinal cortex.

The interplay between chirality, light and spin is an emerging frontier with broad impact. This study reveals chirality-induced spin polarization and ultrafast dynamic chirality in semiconductors, unlocking new pathways for coherent spin manipulation.

Near-infrared mechanoluminescence can be used in biostress imaging, but is subject to limitations in terms of the pre-irradiation process and low intensity. Here, the authors have circumvented these limitations by constructing an MgO/MgF₂:Cr³⁺ heterojunction piezo-photonics system.

Cells struggle to migrate on soft substrates, which don’t provide enough traction. Here, the authors show that rapid, cyclic changes in substrate rigidity allow cells to overcome this limitation and move quickly.

Two-qubit operations exceeding 99% fidelity have been demonstrated by silicon devices made with standard semiconductor tooling in a 300-mm foundry environment.

A systematic statistical genetics approach discovers CES drivers as hotspots of human de novo mutation and shows that clonal expansions in germline may both modulate the prevalence of disorders and lead to false-positive disease associations.

Perturbations to strongly lensed galaxy light in very long baseline interferometric imaging reveal a dark and unusually low-mass object at redshift z ≈ 0.9.

Accurate quantum mechanical benchmarks modeling ligand interactions with protein pockets are key in drug design. Here, such a large dimers dataset is created, analyzed, and probed with many methods

The author demonstrates that laser-driven ultracold Fermi gases can exhibit color-orbit-like coupling with SU(3) symmetry. This leads to color-like oscillations and other quantum-chromodyamics-like phenomena in an atomic physics laboratory.

The onset of Southern Ocean convection following a slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation during Heinrich events can help explain rapid CO₂ increases and Antarctic warming during these events, according to Earth system modelling.

The high-contrast dielectric boundary between a gold–air hybrid structure and its sharp spatial features are exploited to provide the momentum required for the excitation of higher-order hyperbolic phonon polaritons.

Myocardial ischemia is a pathological condition where cardiomyocytes lack oxygen and energy supply. Here, Cheng et al. develop a photosynthetic system consisting of Chlorella pyrenoidosa (C. pyre) and upconversion nanoparticles encapsulated in a hydrogel, which upon exposure to near-infrared light, enables oxygen production by C. pyre to alleviate the hypoxic myocardial environment.

An inherently explainable AI trained on 1,015 expert-annotated prostate tissue images achieved strong Gleason pattern segmentation while providing interpretable outputs and addressing interobserver variability in pathology.

Toxoplasma gondii forms membrane contact sites with the endoplasmic reticulum of the host cell to facilitate the transfer of biomolecules to its vacuole.

Phased Array Transducers (PATs) are used to shape ultrasound. They require complex electronics and are hard to scale, which limits their ability to form sophisticated patterns. Here, we introduce an analog platform that uses light to shift the electrical phase of the transducers and demonstrate versatile ultrasonic functions in a scalable device.

Static protein structures can capture the association of lipids, but it is unclear whether the association is due to lipids acting as long-lived ligands or the solvation of preferred lipids around the protein. A computational-experimental framework has now shown that for the protein CLC-ec1, it is the change in lipid solvation energies that drives dimerization, with preferred lipids around the protein modulating this driving force.

Here, the authors structurally and biochemically characterise the YcfA-YcfC enzyme system, crucial for biosynthesis of the anticancer and antimicrobial agent 6-thioguanine.

Psychometric network models have become increasingly popular in psychology and the social sciences. Huth et al. show that a large proportion of reported network findings are based on weak or inconclusive evidence inviting caution when interpreting results.

Mirror image peptides are of interest for a range of biotechnology applications. Here, the authors report on the creation of fully functional mirror-image transmembrane pores made of D-amino acid peptides, which have potential in nanopore sensing technologies and cancer therapies.

Viruses such as coxsackievirus B (CVB) have been associated with type I diabetes (T1D) and islet destruction. Here the authors show that Yes-associated protein (YAP) is upregulated in the whole pancreas in T1D and at-risk autoantibody (AAb + ) organ donors and that YAP over-expression enhances CVB replication, islet inflammation and β-cell apoptosis and suggest exocrine-islet-immune interactions as targeted interventions for T1D.

The authors demonstrate deeply subwavelength light confinement in the terahertz spectral range by exploiting the strong light–matter coupling and hyperbolicity of phonon polaritons in hafnium-based dichalcogenides.

An optical sieve—an array of optically resonant voids in gallium arsenide—enables sorting, detecting and counting nanoplastics as small as a few hundreds of nanometres at concentrations as low as 150 μg ml⁻¹ in lake water samples.

The Yamaji effect is a modulation of the electronic transport as the angle of an applied magnetic field is changed. This has been observed in a model cuprate and sheds light on the geometry of the Fermi surface and the nature of the pseudogap.

Understanding the mechanisms behind clinical immunity to malaria is crucial for developing effective interventions. Here, the authors demonstrate that clinical immunity to Plasmodium vivax develops rapidly after a single controlled human malaria infection, reducing inflammatory responses and protecting against symptoms, while not significantly affecting parasite load.

To what degree do the laws of thermodynamics constrain biological function? This work shows that the amount of free energy dissipated by microbes during growth imposes tight constraints on the versatility of their metabolism.

Simultaneous profiling of spatial transcriptomics (ST) and metabolomics (SM) offers a novel way to decode tissue microenvironment heterogeneity. Here, the authors present SpatialMETA, a conditional variational autoencoder-based framework designed for the integration of ST and SM data.

Breeding crops with delayed senescence could plausibly increase grain yield. Here the authors show that variation at the rice SGR locus contributes to differences in senescence between indica and japonica subspecies and show that introgression can increase yield in an elite indica rice variety.

Using mouse pancreatic cancer models, Tsanov et al. show that reactivation of SMAD4 at metastatic sites promotes tumor growth in the lung through RUNX1 but restrains metastatic growth through KLF4 in the liver, influenced by organ-specific epigenetic states.