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High-speed imaging reveals that the squeak of soft–rigid frictional interfaces, like sneakers sliding on a basketball court, arises from intersonic opening slip pulses—analogous to earthquake ruptures—that thin ridges on the rubber confine to repeat at a musical frequency.

Biocatalysis of the chemotherapy drug, doxorubicin, relies on the cytochrome P450 DoxA, which is inefficient. Here, the authors ameliorated the biosynthetic limitations by identifying DoxA redox partners and DnrV, which prevents product inhibition, helping improve microbial production.

This study reveals that the malaria parasite Plasmodium uses a unique Aurora kinase complex to control cell division. This divergent machinery regulates spindle formation and is essential for parasite transmission.

Subcellular compartmentalization of the glycolytic enzyme PFKM regulates cell fate and metabolic switch during skeletal muscle differentiation.

Momentum-entangled atom pairs are used to demonstrate quantum non-locality, where changing one atom in an entangled pair instantly alters the state of the other atom. This result paves the way to study interactions between quantum states and gravity.

Scenario ensembles are widely used in climate change research, while their opportunistic nature could lead to biased outcomes in following analysis. Focusing on relevance, quality and diversity, researchers develop a simple and transparent weighting framework to address these challenges.

Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

Mangrove ecosystems are facing severe climate threats. However, this study shows that strategically expanding protected areas to include the most climate-resilient sites can safeguard biodiversity and ecosystem services for the future, and this can be achieved with only a modest increase in protected area.

Virtual nature exposure reduces self-reported pain and is associated with decreased brain responses linked to somatosensory and nociceptive processing, providing new insights into the underlying mechanisms of nature-induced analgesia.

An enzymatic route to indazoles, scaffolds present in many drugs, has not been developed yet. Here, the authors report nitroreductase-triggered indazole formation, in which 2-nitrobenzylamine derivatives are converted to reactive nitrosobenzylamine intermediates that spontaneously cyclize and aromatize to indazoles.

Johnson et al. link ARIA, a complication of anti-amyloid therapy, to clonal expansion of cytotoxic CD8 + T cells with glycolytic reprogramming and vascular trafficking potential, with implications for biomarker development and risk mitigation.

Here the authors compare genetic testing strategies in rare movement disorders, improve diagnostic yield with genome analysis, and establish CD99L2 as an X-linked spastic ataxia gene, showing that CD99L2–CAPN1 signaling disruption likely drives neurodegeneration.

Genome-wide association meta-analysis identifies 58 independent risk loci for major anxiety disorders among individuals of European ancestry and implicates GABAergic signaling as a potential mechanism underlying genetic risk for these disorders.

Mucosal administration of a multivalent, adjuvanted vaccine against Clostridioides difficile promoted bacterial clearance and protected against morbidity, mortality, tissue damage and recurrence in mice.

Jacquemyn et al. identify key lipid determinants controlling ectosome shedding from neurons. They find that ectosomes are a major route for the intercellular transport of misfolded α-synuclein, with relevance to Parkinson’s disease pathology.

A widespread bacterial defence system called SNIPE is shown to localize to the cell membrane, where it identifies and cleaves the DNA of infecting phage as it is injected into the bacterial cell.

Neuroinflammation triggers DNA damage and subsequent parthanatos-mediated neuron death. Inhibiting parthanatos in a mouse model of autoimmune inflammation is neuroprotective and reduces disease-associated paralysis.

Diastereoselective hydrogenation of multi-substituted (hetero)arenes provides an efficient and industrially valuable route for transforming these compounds into diversified 3D building blocks, with broad applications such as drug discovery. Here, the authors demonstrate that a rationally designed Pt catalyst enables general diastereoselective hydrogenation of a wide variety of multi-substituted and functionalized arenes and heteroarenes under mild conditions.

The APOE-ε4 allele is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, but it is not deterministic. Here, the authors show that common genetic variation changes how APOE-ε4 influences cognition.

Post-transcriptional regulation of mRNA translation was explored using Ribo-STAMP and single-cell RNA sequencing to reveal cell-type-specific and isoform-specific translation patterns across hippocampal neuronal and non-neuronal cell types, highlighting functional differences between CA1 and CA3.

Reconstructing microbial genomes from 820 reef-building corals collected at 99 reefs across 32 islands throughout the Pacific Ocean highlights the importance of conserving coral reefs as vital reservoirs of molecular diversity.

This work identifies a mechanism, termed dynamic plastic delocalization, that homogenizes deformation in FCC alloys, breaking the usual trade-off between monotonic strength and cyclic fatigue strength and enabling improved fatigue performance without loss of strength.

A high-temperature immiscible blend of two dipolar polymers that self-assemble into three-dimensional all-polymer nanocomposites allows markedly enhanced dielectric and energy storage performances over a broad temperature range.

This study reports a post-assembly, reversible crosslinking strategy that enhances lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-mediated mRNA delivery while preserving efficient intracellular release. The resulting crosslinked LNPs enable improved endosomal escape, sustained in vivo expression and robust immune and antitumor responses across multiple clinically relevant LNP platforms.

The transcription factor ATF4 and its effector lipocalin 2 (LCN2) have a key role in immune evasion and tumour progression, and targeting the ATF4–LCN2 axis might provide a way to treat several types of solid tumour by increasing anti-cancer immunity.

A genetic study in over 300,000 males reveals that Y chromosome loss affects type 2 diabetes risk differently in East Asians and Europeans. Multi-omics data suggest that this may be due to impaired glucose metabolism in Y-deficient pancreatic β cells.

The lowest-frequency gravitational wave background may be shaped by supermassive black hole binaries that scatter nearby stars or dark matter. In this case, the NANOGrav 15-year dataset favours dense galactic centres with 10⁶ solar masses per cubic parsec.

Freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity are declining quickly. By integrating global environmental, socioeconomic, and biological data, this study identifies the key conditions associated with imperilment of freshwater fishes.

Variation in responses to bacterial and viral stimuli between Batwa rainforest hunter-gatherers and Bakiga agriculturalists from Uganda suggests population-level divergence under natural selection, with hunter-gatherers disproportionately showing signatures of positive selection.

The deep learning model STARLING can generate accurate ensembles of intrinsically disordered regions of proteins using only protein sequence as input.

Polyamides (PAs) or nylons are types of plastics with wide applications, but due to their accumulation in the environment, strategies for their deconstruction are of interest. Here, the authors screen 40 potential nylon-hydrolyzing enzymes (nylonases) using a mass spectrometry-based approach and identify a thermostabilized N-terminal nucleophile hydrolase as the most promising for further development, as well as crucial targets for progressing PA6 enzymatic depolymerization.

Natural and sexual selection can be in opposition favouring different trait sizes, but disentangling these processes empirically is difficult. Here Okada et al. show that predation on males shifts the balance of selection in experimentally evolving beetle populations, disfavoring a sexually-selected male trait but increasing female fitness.

Non-additive effect and trait-trait interactions are often overlooked in current genomic prediction approaches. Here, the authors extend quadratic phenotypic selection index to the genomic domain to enable phenotype-free, rapid-cycle multi-trait selection while capturing genome-wide nonlinear relationships.

Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.

Huang, Rigau and colleagues observe major changes in how DNA is organized in early germ cells before they start developing into sperm or eggs. These results show that germline removes structural ‘memory’ of DNA folding to start fresh for the next generation.

Iridium oxide is a state-of-the-art catalyst for green hydrogen production, but the identity of species present under operating conditions remains debated. Here, using multiple operando spectroscopy approaches with time-resolution, water oxidation is found to be driven by O⁻¹ states.

Using two newly developed immunoassays tested in three clinical cohorts, this study highlights CSF DOPA decarboxylase as a promising biomarker for differentiating dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson’s disease from Alzheimer’s disease and controls.

Nitrogen isotope tree-ring chronologies show that rising atmospheric CO₂ has reduced nitrogen availability in boreal forests in Sweden, suggesting that elevated atmospheric CO₂ is causing oligotrophication in boreal forests.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of nucleotide excision repair complexes reveal the roles of the constituent proteins XPA, XPB, XPC, XPD, XPF, XPG and RPA in DNA bubble formation and excision of the lesion strand.

Treatment-seeking for fever is widely used to estimate treatment of childhood infections, but cross-country comparisons are problematic. Here, the authors estimate the probability of seeking treatment for fever at public facilities across 29 countries by quantifying person-level latent variables.

The combination of within-species variation in pathogen load, the shape of the relationship between pathogen load and infectiousness, and vector feeding preferences shape transmission of multi-host vector-borne pathogens. Here, the authors use experimental and wild bird infection data to characterize the role of 17 host bird species in avian malaria transmission in Hawaii.

This study shows how the bacterial retron Eco2 defends against viruses. Phage nucleases trigger activation of Eco2, which cuts RNAs, shuts down protein production and stops phage replication.