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The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

The 2025 Los Angeles fires exposed the escalating threat of urban fires and their potential to trigger major human disasters. This Comment outlines key policy strategies to strengthen fire resilience and reframe urban fires as both a climate risk and a national security concern.

This study reports widespread loss of mountain vegetation worldwide from 2000 to 2020, with ∼89% attributable to human expansion, primarily agriculture. Over half of this loss occurred within protected areas and other biodiversity-rich areas, threatening conservation efforts.

In the past three decades, fish abundance, richness and uniqueness have diverged across cold and warm streams, and the effects on native fish communities of stream warming and increases in introduced fishes have magnified each other.

Assessing 3,129 species of trees and shrubs found in 164 global urban areas shows that over half of the species currently experience non-ideal climates. They project increases in risk due to climate change by 2050 and highlight cities where all species are at risk.

Ohenhen et al. used space geodetic measurements to rigorously quantify land subsidence in the 28 most populous US cities. They find that over 20% of the area in each city is sinking, affecting approximately 34 million people and placing more than 29,000 buildings at high risk of damage.

Anthropogenic change, such as urban heat islands, present challenges to biodiversity that can be overcome through phenotypic plasticity. Unlike their ancestral counterparts, urban lizards have fewer maladaptive gene expression responses to higher temperatures in a common garden experiment, suggesting the evolution of adaptive plasticity.

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.

A retrospective, observational study shows that completion of a diabetes prevention program in England (the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme) was associated with decreased incidence of type 2 diabetes and long-term conditions such as dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at 24 months.

Although progress in the coverage of routine measles vaccination in children in low- and middle-income countries was made during 2000–2019, many countries remain far from the goal of 80% coverage in all districts by 2019.

The flagship paper of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium describes the generation of the integrative analyses of 2,658 cancer whole genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types, the structures for international data sharing and standardized analyses, and the main scientific findings from across the consortium studies.

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

Phylogeography and phylogenomic analyses of E. coli isolates collected from humans and domesticated and wild animals across 99 households in Nairobi reveal strong intra-household, and lower but detectable inter-household and inter-host, strain-sharing patterns.

Migration responses to climate are demographically heterogeneous. Accounting for age and education greatly improves predictions, with demographic-specific effects often an order of magnitude larger than population wide averages.

Many cities have enough space to satisfy their population’s demand for fruits and vegetables. A conceptual framework based on the city of Sheffield, United Kingdom, highlights key challenges and opportunities for the realization of untapped urban horticultural potential.

Contrary to the view that urbanization is a major driver of the global rise in obesity, the global increase in body-mass index is shown to be mostly due to increases in the body-mass indexes of rural populations.

This study shows that epigenetic gene body DNA methylation regulates transcription and accounts for much of its variance in the Arabidopsis population, efficiently identifies genes regulating diverse traits and may facilitate local adaptation.

Non-falciparum malaria may cause a significant disease burden in highly endemic regions, but epidemiological data is limited. In this study, the authors estimate the incidence and prevalence of P. malariae, P. ovale spp., in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo and compare to P. falciparum, which known to be common in the region.

An estimated area of 215 million hectares has the potential for natural forest regeneration across tropical forested countries and biomes, representing an above-ground carbon sequestration potential of 23.4 Gt C.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.

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.

Ambient air pollution exposure in early childhood has been linked to infection risk but the mechanism is unclear. Here, the authors investigate the association between air pollution-linked proteomic profiles in pregnancy and infection in early childhood using data from Denmark and Sweden.

Earth observations show that flash flood erosion in the Derna watershed in Libya aggravated the disastrous impacts of Storm Daniel catastrophic flood. The authors demonstrate the urgent need to mitigate the increased vulnerability of coastal watersheds in arid areas.

Multi-omics datasets pose major challenges to data interpretation and hypothesis generation owing to their high-dimensional molecular profiles. Here, the authors develop ActivePathways method, which uses data fusion techniques for integrative pathway analysis of multi-omics data and candidate gene discovery.

Understanding deregulation of biological pathways in cancer can provide insight into disease etiology and potential therapies. Here, as part of the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium, the authors present pathway and network analysis of 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumour types.

It is becoming increasingly clear that animal cultures have intrinsic, irreplaceable value, and yet they are not adequately protected by preserving habitat. The time has come for UNESCO to explicitly protect non-human cultural heritage alongside human heritage.

In this study the authors consider the structural variants (SVs) present within cancer cases of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium. They report hundreds of genes, including known cancer-associated genes for which the nearby presence of a SV breakpoint is associated with altered expression.

Genotype and exome sequencing of 150,000 participants and whole-genome sequencing of 9,950 selected individuals recruited into the Mexico City Prospective Study constitute a valuable, publicly available resource of non-European sequencing data.

A comparison of alpha diversity (number of plant species) and dark diversity (species that are currently absent from a site despite being ecologically suitable) demonstrates the negative effects of regional-scale anthropogenic activity on plant diversity.

Genomic studies often lack representation from diverse populations, limiting equitable insights. Here, the authors show that the BIG Initiative captures extensive genetic diversity and reveals ancestry-linked health disparities in a community-based Mid-South cohort.

Whole-genome sequences and field experiments focusing on the global invasive forage crop, Trifolium repens, show high levels of genetic variation across continents and parallel signatures of selection in five haploblocks.

Analyses of 2,658 whole genomes across 38 types of cancer identify the contribution of non-coding point mutations and structural variants to driving cancer.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

Second-generation oxidation boosts the production of anthropogenic organic aerosol, according to an analysis of urban haze in an experimental chamber.

Convection shapes BVOC dynamics over the Amazon rainforest, driving dawn photochemistry in the upper troposphere. Changes in BVOC emissions can strongly impact regional and global atmospheric chemistry.

The authors present SVclone, a computational method for inferring the cancer cell fraction of structural variants from whole-genome sequencing data.

From 1980 to 2018, the levels of total and non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol increased in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreased in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe.

Whole-genome sequencing data for 2,778 cancer samples from 2,658 unique donors across 38 cancer types is used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer, revealing that driver mutations can precede diagnosis by several years to decades.

Viral pathogen load in cancer genomes is estimated through analysis of sequencing data from 2,656 tumors across 35 cancer types using multiple pathogen-detection pipelines, identifying viruses in 382 genomic and 68 transcriptome datasets.

A pan-cancer genomic analysis reports the effects of structural variations on chromatin domains (TADs). Most TAD disruptions do not result in appreciable changes in expression of nearby genes.

An analysis of 2,954 genomes from 38 cancer subtypes identified 19,166 retrotransposition events in 35% of samples. Aberrant LINE-1 retrotranspositions can lead to the deletion of tumor-suppressor genes as well as the amplification of oncogenes.