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This study shows that brain organoids from individuals with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome and schizophrenia have delayed neuron development, linked to altered gene regulation and microRNAs, offering insight into how this deletion raises psychiatric disease risk.

Differences in the Pace of Aging are important for many health outcomes but difficult to measure. Here the authors describe the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging measure, an approach that uses a single brain image to measure how fast a person is aging and can help predict mortality or the risk of developing chronic disease.

Early environmental factors, like disadvantage, are associated with neurocognitive development. Here, the authors find that neonates and toddlers from economically disadvantaged backgrounds show accelerated brain development, with implications for language abilities in toddlerhood.

Phage-assisted noncontinuous selection of protein binders (PANCS-Binders) allows multiple high-diversity protein libraries to each be screened against a panel of dozens of targets for high-throughput protein binder discovery.

Warming is shifting temperate zones to become more tropical. Natural warming and CO₂ vent sites show that acidification buffers warming effects, reducing sea urchin numbers and grazing, thus creating a turf-dominated temperate habitat that is less hospitable to tropical fish than urchin barrens.

A cohort study tracking 20-year age-related declines in multiple organ systems finds that, already by midlife, those aging fastest showed cognitive declines, signs of brain aging, diminished sensory–motor function and negative views about aging.

Rudensky and colleagues demonstrate a context-dependent differential requirement for Foxp3 for T_reg cell transcriptional and functional programs.

The BabyScreen+ study offered genomic screening to 1,000 newborns in Australia, and showed that the approach is feasible and positively received by families, leading to molecular diagnoses in 1.6% of babies.

Khetarpal et al. show that the metabolic regulator PGC-1α is essential in heart muscle cells for exercise-driven cardiac growth, and that suppression of the stress-induced myokine GDF15 is required to enable cardiomyocyte adaptations to training.

Yamazoe et al. show that B cell-derived autoantibodies contribute to the development of atrial fibrillation, suggesting that targeting the humoral immune response may represent a viable therapeutic approach.

Distinguishing glioblastoma and primary central nervous system lymphoma (PCNSL) remains challenging due to their overlapping pathology features. Here, the authors develop a computational tool, PICTURE, for differentiating similar pathological features enabling improved diagnosis of CNS tumours.

The major ion chemistry of a North American river shows decreased lateral carbon transport due to exacerbated secondary carbonate formation and CO₂ evasion, according to analyses conducted during a 195-day drought.

The authors estimate genomic vulnerability for closely related species of rainbowfish. They find that narrow endemic species that have hybridized with a warm-adapted generalist show reduced vulnerability to climate change and that hybridization may facilitate evolutionary rescue for such species.

The sedimentary DNA signal obtained from Black Sea sedimentary archives revealed the past dynamics of microorganisms able to transform mercury into the neurotoxin methylmercury. Water column anoxia during the mid-Holocene Climate Optimum appeared to be the main driver of potential methylmercury production in the Black Sea.

Natural hydrogen is generated through chemical and radioactive processes in the Earth’s crust, and could be an important future clean chemical feedstock and energy resource. This Review examines the processes of geological hydrogen generation, migration, accumulation and preservation that enable the development of exploitable reserves.

Ocean simulations and proxy-constrained climate reconstructions suggest that the rapid retreat of West Antarctic outlet glaciers was initiated by local northerly wind trends over the twentieth century.

Cost, supply and logistics present challenges to COVID-19 vaccine rollout in low and middle income countries. Here, the authors model vaccination programmes in South Africa and demonstrate the importance of the pace of vaccine rollout, with even moderately efficacious vaccines likely to be cost-effective.

Protein variants with improved properties can be rapidly generated by a phage-based system that enables continuous directed evolution.

Genome-wide analyses in over one million self-reported cases and controls identify genetic variants associated with stuttering and find genetic correlations with autism, depression and impaired musical rhythm, supporting a potential neurological basis for stuttering.

Directed evolution creates new compact Cas9 variants that target most single pyrimidine nucleotide PAMs.

Biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) make small molecules with fitness-enhancing activities that drive BGC evolution. Here, the authors show that synthetic biology can leverage bioactivity to achieve continuous evolution of an antibiotic BGC in the lab and improve antibiotic production in a new host.

Human ignitions and lightning strikes both influence global fire regimes. Here the authors disaggregate the two effects in an analysis of global daily fuel moisture and flammability threshold datasets, and show that anthropogenic influences have lengthened fire seasons globally, regardless of other factors.

The authors report the implementation of a Transformer-based model on the same architecture used in Large Language Models in a 14nm analog AI accelerator with 35 million Phase Change Memory devices, which achieves near iso-accuracy despite hardware imperfections and noise.

Networks of miniaturized magnetoelectric wireless implantable devices can be individually powered and controlled by a single transmitter, show power and transfer data efficiencies that scale with the number of receivers and be used for spinal cord stimulation and cardiac pacing in large animals.

The authors introduce the term demographic competence to describe the ability of a host population to maintain endemic infections, and use models to explore the interaction between population regulation and host–pathogen life history traits.

A large-scale multi-cohort association study reveals strong and consistent impacts of birth order on DNA methylation events around the genome, potentially due to changes in placentation, nutrition, and growth factors between first and subsequent pregnancies.

Mendelian randomisation analysis of the UK Biobank cohort, supported by analyses of accelerometer-measured activity intensity, reveals that genetically-determined walking pace is associated with longer leucocyte telomere length (LTL), hinting at how brisk walking could offer health benefits.

Prolonged extreme oceanic warm water events, known as marine heatwaves, can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems. This Perspective explores the predictability of marine heatwaves, taking into account the physical drivers, monitoring and prediction approaches, and stakeholder considerations.

The authors combine tracking and body mass data from five migratory waterfowl species to understand their capacity to accelerate migration in response to earlier spring. They show considerable scope for faster migration by reducing the fuelling time before departure and subsequently on stopovers

The full potential of tunable perovskite nanocrystals is limited by complex synthesis space. Here, authors developed a self-driving lab that autonomously discovers and produces optimal scalable nanocrystals for next-generation photonic technologies.

Erlich et al. show that soluble LTα and membrane-bound LTα1β2 lymphotoxins expressed by B cells play distinct roles to attenuate the pathology observed in ileitis.

Migration is costly. In the first global analysis of migratory vertebrates, authors report that migratory birds and mammals have faster paces of life than their non-migratory relatives, and that among swimming and walking species, migrants tend to be larger, while among flying species, migrants are smaller.

The analysis of radial velocity variations of O-type stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud reveals a large fraction of close binaries, suggesting that binary physics also plays a prominent role in the low-metallicity environment of the distant Universe.

In the brain of fruit flies, the mushroom body achieves flexible learning by using interconnected short- and long-term memory units for dopamine-mediated integration of innate valences with learnt valences obtained through experience.

The expansion of nitrogen-fixing alders in Alaska’s central Seward Peninsula increases nitrogen inputs and promotes the expansion of tall shrubs, but the area available for future expansion is limited, according to a model analysis based on satellite remote sensing data over 1950-2018

Pocock et al. reveal that transient activation of 5′ AMP-activated protein kinase and estrogen-related receptor drives robust maturation of multicellular human cardiac organoids, enabling modeling of desmoplakin cardiomyopathy dysfunction, which could be rescued using the bromodomain and extra-terminal inhibitor INCB054329.

Aging is a risk factor for Parkinson’s disease; however, how DNA damage accumulation, a hallmark of aging, contributes to its pathophysiology remains incompletely understood. Here, the authors identify a blood-based DNA damage signature that is associated with disease progression in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

Using well-calibrated statistical methods the authors jointly analyze Undiagnosed Diseases Network genomes, identifying known and novel disease genes. Software is publicly available to support future cross-cohort rare disease discovery efforts.