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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.

DNA recognition and cleavage control in type II topoisomerases are poorly understood processes. Here, the authors determine cleaved and uncleaved structures of supercoiled DNA-bound topoisomerase VI that reveal how the enzyme activates its cleavage state and prefers to act at deformable substrates.

Cationic amino acids are essential to protein synthesis and cellular signaling. Here, authors determine the structure of the cationic amino acid transporter 1 and determined how it is co-opted as a receptor for leukemia-causing animal viruses.

Survey-based indicators of wellbeing are often available for only large administrative units, like provinces. The authors use satellite-based machine learning models trained on such coarse data to make finer resolution estimates.

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.

Rafting dispersal can facilitate responses to environmental change. Here, authors integrate dispersal simulations, ecological genomics, and salinity stress experiments to elucidate the rafting dynamics and adaptive shifts of crustaceans.

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.

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.

Studies in zebra finches show that dopamine has a key role as a reinforcement signal in the trial-and-error process of learning that underlies complex natural behaviours.

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.

Crystalline materials for optical applications are synthesized in living dinoflagellates.

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.

How cellular metabolism influences tissue-resident macrophage survival is currently unknown. The authors here demonstrate that SerpinB2 regulates mitochondrial function to promote tissue-resident macrophage survival.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) plays an important role in decarbonization pathways to meet climate goals, but some methods are land-intensive. Multimodel analysis reveals conflicts between biodiversity and CDR that are distributed unevenly, and shows that synergies are crucial to meet climate and conservation goals.

Circadian clock in adipocytes maintains metabolic health by regulating mitochondrial complex I respiration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Exploration of the chemistry of allylic, benzylic, propargylic and allenylic oxonium ions is lacking despite the latest developments in onium ion chemistry. Now, a unified approach for the synthesis and NMR spectroscopic characterization of these unusual species is reported, helping to understand their reactivity.

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

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.

PCNA–PAF15 has a key role in determining replisome dynamics during genome replication and protecting against genome instability.

Plant traits drive ecosystem dynamics yet are challenging to map globally due to sparse measurements. Here, the authors combine crowdsourced biodiversity observations with Earth observation data to accurately map 31 plant traits at 1 km² resolution.

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.

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.

Haldane’s rule suggests that in hybrid crosses, the heterogametic sex is often rare or sterile. This study crosses Caenorhabditis nematodes, and determines that an underlying feature of Haldane’s rule is incompatibility between a sex chromosome derived from only one species and autosome pairs from both.

The Akt-mTOR axis influences cell activation, differentiation and metabolism. Jordan and colleagues show that thymic and inducible T_H17 cells exhibit different requirements for mTORC1 and mTORC2 as well as Akt isoforms.

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.

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.

Heparan sulfate proteoglycans facilitate the assembly of clusters of glycoRNAs and cell surface RNA-binding proteins, which negatively modulate VEGF-A signalling and angiogenesis.

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

With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in eastern Africa.

CAR-T cell efficacy is often limited by the inability to maintain a memory T cell program. Here, the authors show that intrinsic CXCR4 expression enhances CAR-T cell persistence and memory differentiation in acute myeloid leukemia.

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.

One of three back-to-back papers to show that dosage of BACH2 can modulate T cell differentiation and function and how we might apply this to enhance CAR T cell therapies for cancer.

Here the authors perform longitudinal sampling of lymphoid organs along with fate mapping and matched single-cell RNA sequencing and TCR sequencing to define the developmental dynamics of follicular regulatory T (T_FR) cells. They find that T_FR cells undergo clonal expansion and progressive differentiation in a process that requires follicular helper T cells.

Here, the authors show that brain dynamics mature from childhood to adulthood with increased hierarchical propagation and reduced visual-somatomotor dynamics. Top-down hierarchical flow strengthens throughout this developmental period.

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.