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By carefully dispersing small amounts of Ir into the RuO₂ lattice, a Ru₆IrOₓ catalyst reduces Ir usage by 80% while still running stably for over 1,500 h at 2 A cm⁻² in both laboratory- and industrial-scale proton-exchange membrane water electrolysers.

Urbanization disrupts oak tree microbiomes by reducing beneficial fungi and increasing plant and human pathogens across leaves, roots and soils, with consequences for tree health, urban climate mitigation and potential human exposure to pathogens.

Haptotaxis was traditionally seen as migration up protein gradients. It is now shown that cells can also oscillate or migrate down the gradient.

Lithium-ion batteries rely on lithium diffusion within particles, traditionally assumed to follow concentration gradients. Here, authors use X-ray microscopy to track lithium movement in single particles, discovering that lithium can move against concentration gradients due to strain effects.

Head motion is an artifact in structural and functional MRI signals, and some traits or groups are more strongly correlated with motion than others. Here the authors describe a method to attribute a motion impact score to specific trait-functional connectivity relationships.

The electronic ground state of a correlated oxide interface is reversibly switched by light. Stemming from interfacial reconstructions, electrostatic confinement and photodoping, this effect opens a path towards engineering the optical response of oxides.

‘Ultrathin’ gold interlayers are shown to form nanoparticles that balance optical losses and electrical contact, enabling efficient perovskite–perovskite integration for scalable and durable triple-junction photovoltaics.

Direct measurement of edge transport in the quantum anomalous Hall effect can be made difficult due to the presence of parallel conductive paths. Here, Mahoney et al. report features associated with chiral edge plasmons, a signature of robust edge states, by probing the zero-field microwave response of a magnetised disk of Cr-(Bi,Sb)₂Te₃.

Glioblastoma—the deadliest form of brain cancer—alters the calvarial bone and its marrow components, pushing it toward producing more myeloid cells and contributing to an immunosuppressive environment.

Chemical functionalization of graphene is a useful method for modulating its properties, although this is limited by a lack of control and resulting in poorly defined structures. Here the authors report the atomically precise chlorination of nanographenes and apply the methods to graphene nanoribbons.

KOH-doped membranes, so-called ion-solvating membranes (ISMs), have been used in alkaline water electrolysers but face challenges with stability and narrow operational windows. Here a non-crosslinked, partially sulfonated polybenzimidazole ISM with enhanced conductivity and stability is reported, achieving high current densities and prolonged operation.

Quantum spin Hall edge states are protected by time-reversal symmetry and are expected to disappear in a strong magnetic field. Here, the authors use microwave impedance microscopy and find, surprisingly, edge conduction in mercury telluride quantum wells that survives up to 9 T with little change.

Highly protected areas help drylands stay productive under increasing aridity, delaying critical ecosystem thresholds and underscoring the need to expand protection to safeguard these vulnerable regions from climate change.

Ethanol electrosynthesis from CO reduction is achieved using an oxygen-affinity-engineered copper alloy catalyst. Unlike conventional CO dimerization pathways, which yield diverse products, this catalyst selectively promotes the CO–CH_x coupling route, enabling selective ethanol production.

An algorithm for proteoform identification with top-down mass spectra is proposed, and a pipeline is developed for generating simulated top-down spectra on the basis of input protein sequences with modifications.

Researchers developed a programmable metamaterial that enables real-time shaping of low-frequency vibrations. Using simple, off-the-shelf components, it unlocks applications ranging from refreshable multi-touch tactile displays to analog computing.

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Buchanan et al. show evidence confirming the phenomenon of semantic priming across speakers of 19 diverse languages.

Al-Hilal, Chrysovergi et al. identify a role for durotaxis in lung fibrosis and metastatic pancreatic cancer, mediated by the FAK–paxillin mechanosensor complex, and demonstrate therapeutic targeting of this pathway using the small molecule JP-153.

Adaptive optical vision Fourier transformer (AOViFT) is a machine learning-based framework for accurately inferring aberrations and restoring diffraction-limited performance in diverse biological specimens.

The authors report Acheulean hominin occupation of eastern Britain during glacial marine isotope stages 17–16 and again in glacial marine isotope stage 12 via stone tools in sediments dated to 712,000 to 424,000 years ago.

An interferometer design allows systematic investigation of the anyonic statistics of bulk fractional quantum Hall states.

The electron transfer from aluminum to hematite in a thermite reaction is investigated here using femtosecond extreme-ultraviolet spectroscopy, offering insights into charge flow in energetic materials and laying the basis for studying chemical reactions in the solid state at the femtosecond timescale.

Tissue phenotypes arise from molecular states of individual cells and their spatial organisation, so spatial omics assays can help reveal how they emerge. Here, the authors apply graph neural networks to classify tissue phenotypes from spatial omics patterns, and use this approach to understand patterns in cancers and their microenvironments.

CAR-T cells engineered with αPD-L1–IL-12 fusion proteins show antitumour activity in mouse models of prostate and ovarian cancer.

The coherent bunching of anyons and their dissociation was observed in an interference experiment. 

Polymer thin films that emit and absorb circularly polarised light are promising in achieving important technological advances, but the origin of the large chiroptical effects in such films has remained elusive. Here the authors demonstrate that in non-aligned polymer thin films, large chiroptical effects are caused by magneto-electric coupling, not structural chirality as previously assumed.

DrugGPT outperforms existing LLMs to answer questions related to drug interactions and recommendations.

Tilt-corrected bright-field scanning transmission electron microscopy offers enhanced cryogenic electron microscopy contrast and substantial improvement in dose efficiency for thick samples such as bacterial cells and large organelles, while still being able to perform single-particle analysis.

Here the authors use a range of approaches to examine the interplay between genetic variants linked to risk for polygenic skin diseases and transcription factors (TFs) important for skin homeostasis. The findings implicate dysregulated binding of specific TF families in risk for diverse skin diseases.

Scoliosis is a common yet poorly understood pediatric disorder. Using zebrafish disease models, Pumputis et al. identify pervasive cell stress responses as causing spine deformity and present possibilities for new therapies and diagnostic tools.

Squeezed light field microscopy (SLIM) combines ideas from tomography and compressed sensing with light field microscopy to enable volumetric imaging at kilohertz rates, as demonstrated in blood flow imaging in zebrafish and voltage imaging in leeches and mice.

Available wheat genomes are annotated by projecting Chinese Spring gene models across the new assemblies. Here, the authors generate de novo gene annotations for the 9 wheat genomes, identify core and dispensable transcriptome, and reveal conservation and divergence of gene expression balance across homoeologous subgenomes.

Edge-localized plasma modes in a tokamak can damage its innermost wall. Simulations now show that fast ions can modify the spatio-temporal structure of these modes. These effects need to be considered in the optimization of control techniques.

Neuroinflammation following intracortical microelectrode implantation impairs long-term brain-machine interface performance. Here, the authors developed a nanoparticle-based therapy that improves local hemostasis and delivers dexamethasone, reducing inflammation.

Embryonic stem cells for chicken and seven other avian species are derived.

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.

Some bacterial species display gliding motility associated with slime secretion through nozzle-like structures at the cell poles. Here, Zuckerman, So & Hoiczyk show that the nozzles are composed of PilQ/GspD proteins usually associated with protein secretion, thus suggesting that secretins may be required for the secretion of non-proteinaceous polymers in these bacteria.

Rizzollo et al. show that BDH2 participates in iron distribution between cellular compartments, which sets the threshold for the ferroptosis vulnerability of the melanoma cell phenotypes, ultimately affecting their metastatic capacity

Comparative genomics and high-resolution mass spectrometry reveal the biosynthetic gene clusters, and vast chemical diversity of natural products that they encode, in Photorhabdus and Xenorhabdus, bacteria that interact with hosts as symbionts and entomopathogens.

Cells often navigate through confined spaces. Now it is shown that cells retain a mechanical memory of previous confinement events, which makes them more efficient at migrating through narrow microenvironments.

Topological edge states offer the prospect of dissipationless transport for nanoelectronics, but a precise method to spatially engineer such nanoscale conducting channels is still lacking. Here, the authors demonstrate patterning of topological boundary states in Sb₂Te₃ using a focused ion beam to create amorphous, topologically trivial regions.

Topological materials hold great promise for dissipationless information transmission. Here, the authors create Chern insulator junctions between domains with different Chern numbers in MnBi₂Te₄ to realize the basic operation of a topological circuit.

Intratumoural spatial heterogeneity is crucial to enhance therapeutic resistance in glioblastoma. Here, the authors show a paracrine signaling mechanism where glioblastoma-initiating cells located in the tumour edge elevate their malignancy by interaction with core-located tumour cells.

The suppression of edge-localized modes in tokamak plasmas is crucial to prevent them from damaging the walls of the chamber. Now experiments confirm the role that magnetic islands play in suppressing these detrimental modes.

Here, the authors show robust edge state transport in patterned nanoribbon networks produced on epigraphene—graphene that is epitaxially grown on non-polar faces of SiC wafers. The edge state forms a zero-energy, one-dimensional ballistic network with dissipationless nodes at ribbon–ribbon junctions.

Actinide compounds possess complex electronic structures. Here the authors introduce the satellite peak in actinide M₄-edge resonant inelastic X-ray scattering to probe the number of localized 5 f electrons and assesses bond covalency in actinide compounds.

The authors report resonant soft x-ray scattering and polarimetry measurements on epitaxial thin films of La3Ni2O7. They find a diagonal bicollinear double spin stripe order, with no evidence of charge modulation.

By studying dynamic folding intermediates on the human ribosome, Pellowe et al. show that newly made domains help each other to fold but do not stably interact until synthesis is complete, avoiding interdomain misfolding.

Context counts, and not just for social and economic aspects of urban life. This study finds that, for 16 cities in the United Kingdom, the landcover of the rural surroundings is a better predictor of ticks and environmental Lyme disease hazard than the landcover within the cities themselves.

A fresh approach to protein design that incorporates excited intermediate states enables precise control over the lifetime of protein interactions, with potential applications in cell-signalling modulation and in biosensors and synthetic circuits.