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The mediobasal hypothalamus plays a central role in integrating nutritional and sex-related signals to regulate energy homeostasis. Here, through snRNA-seq of the mediobasal hypothalamus in female and male mice across nutritional states, authors show that Agrp neurons are nutrition-sensitive, DA neurons exhibit transcriptional differences in a sex-dependent manner, and KNDy neurons are responsive to both sex and nutrition.

Here, the authors conduct a metagenomic-based study of England’s rivers to show that biofilm bacteria are taxonomically and functionally diverse and are key to biogeochemical cycling, highlighting the importance of river biofilm bacteria in understanding and monitoring freshwater ecosystem health.

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.

Radiation reaction (RR) on particles in strong fields is the subject of intense experimental research, but previous efforts lacked statistical significance due to the extreme regimes required. Here, the authors report a 5σ observation of RR and obtain strong, quantitative evidence favouring quantum models over classical, using an all-optical setup where electrons are accelerated by a laser in a gas jet before colliding with a second, intense pulse.

Crystalline materials for optical applications are synthesized in living dinoflagellates.

This study investigates whether genetic predisposition to systemic inflammation affects cortical thinning trajectories and the risk for psychopathology in adolescents, using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.

In this work, the authors demonstrate nonlinearity-engineered dissipative quadratic solitons (DQS) for the first time. Moreover, they achieve an in-situ sign reversal of the effective nonlinearity, enabling a transition from bright DQS to platicon generation without requiring any dispersion engineering.

This study finds that cell segmentation errors affect numerous downstream applications of spatial transcriptomics data and provides a method to correct these errors by factorizing molecular neighborhoods.

Reanalysis of radiometric data from Cassini indicates that Titan does not contain a subsurface ocean, as strong tidal dissipation observed in its gravity field is not consistent with the presence of a liquid layer.

Hepatic glycogenolysis is essential for protein glycosylation and rhythmic secretion by the liver. Disruptions to hepatic glycogenolysis, caused by congenital diseases or physiological factors such as obesity, caloric restriction and changes to meal timing, alter hepatic protein secretion.

In one-shot perceptual learning, what we see can be dramatically altered by a single past experience. Using psychophysics, fMRI, iEEG, and DNNs, the authors identify neural and computational mechanisms underlying this remarkable ability in humans.

Conventional type 1 dendritic cells (cDC1) can boost the precursor exhausted T cell population thought to be essential for efficacy of immune checkpoint therapy. Here the authors enhance this cellular network using Flt3L to expand cDC1s and then map the movement of T cells and DCs between tumors and lymph nodes.

Climate change threatens the future of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Here the authors show that individual drainage basins have different thresholds and loss patterns, suggesting the need to consider the dynamical interactive nature of the basins and their individual tipping points.

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

Bicycling offers great benefits for urban residents in low- and middle-income countries, yet pathways to scale its adoption remain poorly understood. This study reveals the current state of bicycling infrastructure and policy, as well as key barriers, through fieldwork in four cities.

This multidisciplinary response to investigate the large outbreak of unknown febrile illness in the Panzi Health Zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in late 2024 suggests that the outbreak was largely associated with malarial cases and concurrent viral respiratory infections.

Bång-Rudenstam et al. report that the acidic tumour microenvironment facilitates the assembly of chondroitin sulfate-enriched glycocalyx to disrupt lipid scavenging and prevent ferroptosis, thereby providing an adaptive mechanism upon tumour acidosis.

Using the single-cell Deep Visual Proteomics technique, the authors develop a resource providing spatially resolved proteomic analysis of individual cells in human liver tissue.

Using 63 globally distributed grassland and shrubland sites from the International Drought Experiment, this study identified plant traits linked to drought resistance after 1 year of extreme drought across growth forms, lifespans and climate.

A multiancestry phenome-wide analysis of copy number variants in the UK Biobank genomes increases power to detect genetic associations with complex traits across human populations.

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.

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.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episodic memory enables flexible decision-making.

Bright electron bunches power particle physics and photon science. Here, reproducible bunches were generated in a plasma with simultaneous high charge per unit energy and low emittance, advancing a scheme to produce ultra-bright bunches in future.

Here the authors show DNGR-1 expressed by cDC1s promotes CD8⁺ T cell priming to cytoskeletal neoantigens from dying tumor cells, thereby shaping cancer immune visibility and tumor evolution through immunoediting.

Genome-wide association analyses using data from 19 biobanks identify variants influencing risk of thyroid diseases and yield polygenic risk scores associated with features of aggressive thyroid cancer.

Several recent publications have attempted to detect novel unannotated microproteins using mass spectrometry proteomics. Here, the authors reassess these claimed microprotein detections, finding that many are poorly supported, while a subset represents likely genuine discoveries of novel proteins.

A cavity-array microscope is realized using intra-cavity lenses to create a two-dimensional array of over 40 modes, each coupled to a single atom in free-space.

Immune checkpoint inhibition (ICI) has proven therapeutically valuable in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and other cancers but treatment failure is still seen. Here the authors use multiplex immunofluorescence to visualise the tumour microenvironment in NSCLC to probe functional and metabolic states and correlate this with survival.

The authors study epitaxial thin films of the pyrochlore-sublattice compound LiTi2O4 by RIXS and ARPES. They observe cooperation between strong electron correlations and strong electron-phonon coupling, giving rise to a mobile polaronic ground state in which charge motion and lattice distortions are coupled.

Chemical recycling of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) typically requires high temperatures. Here, the authors report the UV-initiated depolymerisation of PMMA at low temperatures, in non-chlorinated solvents, such as benzonitrile.

Denz et al. show that loss of the antiviral protein IFITM3 allows human SARS-CoV-2 variants to adapt more rapidly in mice while preserving distinct, variant-specific patterns of infection and disease.

Building scalable quantum technologies requires generating robust many-body entanglement in solid-state platforms. This Review highlights how engineered light–matter interactions, optical nonlinearities and coupling to nanophotonic structures enable coherent many-body entangled states that are resilient to disorder and decoherence.

This work highlights how changes to beaches are related to sand movement and human impacts to the coast and illuminates opportunities for sand management to resolve shoreline erosion and enhance beach sustainability.

Risk associated with genetically defined forms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can propagate by means of transcriptional regulation to affect convergently dysregulated pathways, providing insight into the convergent impact of ASD genetic risk on human neurodevelopment.

Radical chain initiation strategies are fundamental to the synthesis of small molecule drugs and macromolecular materials. Here a general, thermally driven and scalable method for reductive initiation is reported, in which inexpensive azo initiators are reacted with formate salts to form a carbon dioxide radical anion.

Using two-photon intravital imaging, the authors show that mechanical stress in skin triggers fluid-filled “stress vesicles” in epidermal cells, altering Piezo1-dependent calcium signals to drive stem cell differentiation and protect tissue integrity.

The lesion network mapping method links diverse brain lesions to similar functional brain networks, reflecting general brain organization rather than disorder-specific circuits.

One-shot tissue dynamics reconstruction can infer changes in tissue composition over time, from single-time-point spatial proteomics of human cancers.

Extreme events — such as floods, droughts and heatwaves — are escalating in frequency, magnitude and duration. This Review discusses the implications of these global changes for biodiversity in rivers, across population, community and ecosystem scales.

The high-plasticity cell state (HPCS) is a critical hub that enables reciprocal transitions between cancer cell states, and targeting the HPCS may suppress cancer progression and eradicate treatment resistance.

Bohlen and colleagues report that the E3 ubiquitin ligase CBL is necessary for the development, tolerance and activation of B cells in humans, unlike in mice where CBL deficiency results in loss of T cells.

The authors identify key enzymes, including four cytochrome P450s, a dehydrogenase and a sulfotransferase, that together build the core chemical scaffold of withanolides, medicinal compounds from ashwagandha with neurological and anti-cancer activities.

MedHELM, an extensible evaluation framework including a new taxonomy for classifying medical tasks and a benchmark of many datasets across these categories, enables the evaluation of large language models on real-world clinical tasks.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

The deactivation of CO₂ reduction electrocatalyst in microbial media remains a key barrier for hybrid bio-electrochemical systems. Here, the authors present a bioadaptive nickel single atom catalyst that resists organic poisoning to enable high-rate CO-mediated isopropanol production from CO₂.