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Mercury has a global dayside exosphere that is very tenuous and does not extend far from the planet. Here, the authors show enhancement of neutral densities at high altitudes inferred from pickup ions that is most likely caused by the impact of a meteroid.

The recent Voyager 2 measurements across the termination shock found that the shocked solar wind plasma contains only ∼20 per cent of the energy released by the termination shock, whereas energetic particles above ∼28 keV contain only ∼10 per cent. This paper reports the detection and mapping of energetic neutral atoms produced by charge exchange of suprathermal ions with interstellar neutrals. These termination shock-energized pickup ions contain the missing ∼70 per cent of the energy dissipated in the termination shock, and they dominate the pressure in the heliosheath.

Pesticide and heavy metal pollution in water can cause environmental and public health issues. Here, the authors report thermoresponsive magnetic nanorobots that can efficiently pick up and dispose of pollutants from water by adjusting the water temperature.

Atomic manipulation can be used to fabricate unique structures at the atomic level but has previously been limited to conductive surfaces, mainly at low temperatures. Here, the authors present a systematic manipulation on an insulating surface using atomic force microscopy to construct complex patterns.

Observations from laboratory experiments involving two flux ropes show that electron beams induce magnetic turbulence and abruptly merge into a single structure, altering the magnetic topology in the magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) regime — a process supported by three-dimensional (3D) particle-in-cell simulations.

Superconductivity has been discovered in atomically thin two-dimensional van der Waals materials by resistance measurements, but magnetic measurements are lacking. Here, the authors use a micron-scale SQUID magnetometer to measure the superfluid response of exfoliated MoS₂.

Femtosecond laser spectroscopy has contributed to our understanding of structure and function of matter. Here, the authors explore the applicability of superfluid helium nanodroplets as a sample preparation method that allows investigation of previously inaccessible classes of tailor-made or fragile molecular systems.

A squeezed collective state of 10¹¹ rubidium atoms is generated by quantum non-demolition measurements, and the accuracy of the estimation of their collective spin is improved using past quantum state retrodiction.

Quantized edge current is the hallmark of topological phenomena in condensed matter physics. Here, the authors use advanced scanning techniques to image the chiral edge current distribution in the antiferromagnetic topological material MnBi₂Te₄.

Copper-based and iron-based compounds exhibit an interplay between magnetism and superconductivity. Now, this idea is extended to two-dimensional oxide heterostructures, where a spatially varying superconducting order is demonstrated at the EuO/KTaO₃ interface.

CrSBr is an air-stable van der Waals semiconducting layered antiferromagnet, holding the promise for a variety of spintronic applications. However, like all antiferromagnets, readout and control of the magnetic structures are challenging. Here, using a graphene gate on trilayer CrSBr, Hong, Sun, and coauthors succeed in full discrimination of otherwise degenerate magnetic states and electrical control of magnetic transitions.

Quantum wells based on mercury telluride are an experimental realization of a two-dimensional topological insulator. By using a scanning superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) technique, the magnetic fields flowing through HgTe/CdTe heterostructures are imaged both in the quantum spin Hall and the trivial regimes, revealing the edge states associated with the quantum spin Hall state.

Modelling suggests that the Solar System may have passed through a cold dense cloud 2–3 Myr ago, in agreement with geological evidence from ⁶⁰Fe and ²⁴⁴Pu isotopes, putting Earth in direct contact with the dense interstellar medium with potentially substantial impacts on its climate.

Conventional body-coupled wireless communication links for wearables rely on electro-quasistatic conduction, treating the human body as a wire. Samyadip Sarkar and colleagues demonstrate leveraging fields beyond electro -quasistatic frequencies unveils the human body’s transmission-line behaviour that enhances wearable-to-wearable communication channel capacity.

Advancing electron tomography to atomic resolution is a powerful and challenging process. Here, the authors demonstrate atomic resolution electron tomography on silver-gold core-shell nanoclusters grown in superfluid helium nanodroplets, revealing their three-dimensional morphology and composition.

Exchange bias occurs in a variety of magnetic materials and heterostructures. The quintessential example occurs in antiferromagnetic/ferromagnetic heterostructures and has been employed extensively in magnetic memory devices. Here, via a specific field training protocol, the authors demonstrate an exchange bias of up to 400mT in odd layered MnBi2Te4.

Abdel-Rahman and colleagues introduce a discrete modular material-robot system that is capable of serial, recursive (making more robots), and hierarchical (making larger robots) assembly. This is accomplished by discretizing the construction into a feedstock of simple primitive building blocks combined with an algorithm to plan the optimal construction path and assemble the building blocks into functional units and swarms.

A semirigid stamp and a standard photolithography mask-aligner enable a reliable and scalable pickup and release process for van der Waals materials integration at the wafer scale.

Although it has been predicted that chirality metrics such as the pseudoscalar Osipov-Pickup-Dunmur (OPD) index can exhibit “chiral zeros”, which occur when a chiral object is incorrectly assigned a chirality index value of zero, their occurrence in biomolecules remains underexplored. Here, the authors study the differences between OPD and another chirality measure, the Hausdorff Chirality Measure (HCM), in different systems, including single amino acids, subsets of protein structures, naturally occurring α-helices, and protein interaction sites, showing that chiral zeros are prevalent in all of those cases and that OPD is unsuitable for quantifying chirality in complex molecular structures with the exception of simple helicoids.

The authors show that electronic thermal transport in an in-plane magnetic field in compressively strained HgTe at the Weyl points follows the Wiedemann–Franz law, challenging predictions of gravitational-anomaly signatures in this system.

A transition between the supersonic solar wind and the subsonic heliosheath happens at the 'termination shock'. This paper reports observations of the magnetic field structure and dynamics of the termination shock, made by Voyager 2 on 31 August–1 September 2007 at 83.7 au from the Sun. The data revealed a complex shock of moderate strength undergoing reformation on a scale of a few hours, rather than the expected days

The observation of superconductivity in infinite-layer nickelates has been limited to epitaxial thin films, which has restricted their experimental investigation. Now, a technique is reported for the release of millimetre-scale freestanding superconducting nickelate membranes. This geometry enables a range of studies, including the response of superconductivity to strain.

Water molecules in Europa’s icy surface are split into hydrogen and oxygen by charged particle bombardment. NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew near Europa and constrained the production of oxygen in Europa’s surface ice, thus providing only a narrow range to support habitability in its subsurface ocean.

This study introduces nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) magnetic sensing for wireless tracking, enabling millimeter-scale accuracy and miniaturized trackers for guidewires, soft, and shape morphing medical devices.

Magnetic-flux noise measurements with a SQUID-based spectrometer demonstrate the presence of a magnetic monopole plasma in Dy₂Ti₂O₇.

The emergence of conductivity at the {001} interface of LaAlO₃ and SrTiO₃ is one of the more celebrated examples of interface engineering. Using a microscopy approach based on a sensitive magnetometry probe, it is now shown that narrow paths of enhanced conductivity occur along the crystallographic axes of the oxide structures.

Semiconductor nanowires with superconducting leads are considered promising for quantum computation. The current–phase relation is systematically explored in gate-tunable InAs Josephson junctions, and is shown to provide a clean handle for characterizing the transport properties of these structures.

Encasing a single atom within a fullerene (C₆₀) cage can create a robustly packaged single atomic spin system. Here, the authors perform electron paramagnetic resonance on a single encased spin using a diamond NV-center, demonstrating the first steps in controlling single spins in fullerene cages.

Signatures of superconductivity in single crystals of La₃Ni₂O₇ were observed at a maximum transition temperature of 80  K at pressures between 14.0  GPa and 43.5  GPa.

This paper reports measurements of the magnetic fields and energetic particles detected by the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it passed from the heliosphere, through the heliosheath and heliopause, to the interstellar medium. As predicted by models, Voyager 2 encountered a ‘magnetic barrier’ before reaching the heliopause.

Spatial cell distribution within a tissue microenvironment is a rapidly advancing field. Here, authors assess three commercially available single-cell resolution spatial transcriptomics approaches (CosMx, MERFISH, and Xenium) to inform which technology outperforms for immune profiling of solid tumors using patient samples.

Studies requiring neural modulation in species that fly are difficult because of the need for wired connections to record experimental data. Here, Ausra et al. present a wireless and battery free device that achieves this in songbirds, model organisms used to study vocal learning and maintenance.

An electrostatic-repulsion-enabled advanced transfer technique based on ammonia solution is introduced for separating van der Waals thin-film materials from their substrates, demonstrating suitability for its use in the complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) industry.

Data from the plasma and magnetic field instruments on Voyager 2 indicate that non-thermal ion distributions probably play key roles in mediating dynamical processes at the termination shock and in the heliosheath. Intensities of low-energy ions measured at Voyager 2 produce non-thermal partial ion pressures in the heliosheath that are comparable to (or exceed) both the thermal plasma pressures and the scalar magnetic field pressures. The acceleration of ions extracts a large fraction of bulk flow kinetic energy from the incident solar wind.

Insights into the behavior of quantum materials are only possible because of the development of suitable experimental probes. Modic et. al. develop the theoretical and experimental basis for resonant torsion magnetometry—a technique to measure anisotropic magnetic responses with high sensitivity.

Applying pressure to a cuprate reveals that the strange metal phase has a two-dimensional character, as shown by emerging Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless behaviour.