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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

An Earth system model estimates that natural halogens, of marine biotic and abiotic origin, remove about 13% of present-day global tropospheric O₃. Projections suggest this ratio is stable through 2100, with high spatial heterogeneity, despite increasing natural halogens.

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.

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.

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.

Broken symmetry at material interfaces allows for novel spintronic functionality via emergent spin–orbit effects. Here, Hupfauer et al. follow the interface-to-bulk transition of ultra-thin epitaxial iron films on gallium arsenide via anisotropic magnetoresistance measurements and first-principle calculations.

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

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.

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.

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.

Fluid shear stress plays a role in medulloblastoma metastasis through a PIEZO2-actomyosin-GLUT1 signalling cascade.

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.

Biomolecular condensates are made of multiple components but current techniques cannot capture their complex composition quantitatively. Now it has been shown that the dense-phase binodal point defining the composition of multicomponent condensates can be inferred precisely from the intersection of a spectrometrically determined tie-line with an isorefractive line obtained from quantitative phase imaging.

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 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.

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.

The promise of X-ray tabletop broadband light sources by high-order harmonics generated in a gas medium has been limited by low conversion efficiencies. Here, Jin et al.show a method to enhance the high harmonic generation by optimizing the waveform of synthesized two and three colour laser fields.

Condensates of excitons have been observed in the quantum Hall regime, but evidence for their existence at low magnetic fields remains controversial. Now evidence of coherence between optically pumped interlayer excitons in MoS₂ marks a step towards confirming exciton condensation at low magnetic fields.

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.

Molecular magnets may serve as engineerable spin qubit candidates for quantum information science; however, the magnetic fields often used for control can be challenging to confine. Now, it has been shown that well-designed mononuclear Mn(II) complexes demonstrate enhanced spin–electric coupling, providing guidance for electrically controllable molecular spin qubits.

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

The paper focuses on the impacts of urban and cropland expansions on natural habitats in Southeast Asia. The impact of cropland expansion on natural habitats was nearly 16 times greater than that of urban expansion during 2000–2020.

Bedload type influences the long-term impact of wing-dams on river levels through the effects of armouring and bed erosion, according to a combination of 3D and 1D modelling applied to stretches of the Mississippi and Danube rivers.

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task in mice.

An optically addressable fluorescent-protein spin qubit is realized using enhanced yellow fluorescent protein; the qubit can be coherently controlled at liquid-nitrogen temperatures and the spin detected at room temperature in cells.