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Aqueduct-supported cultivation of rice resulted in liquefaction of the alluvial soils that led to the landslides triggered by the Palu 2018 earthquake, according to satellite analyses.

Production stability depends on both yield and harvested area. Swapping rice for climate resilient cereals such as millets, maize, and sorghum in India could reduce climate-induced losses by 11% and increase farmer profits by 11%, achievable through targeted economic incentives.

Previously, a proof-of-concept for low frequency synthetic apomixis was established in a laboratory strain of rice by combining MiMe mutations with the egg cell expression of the embryogenic trigger - BBM1. Here, the authors achieve clonal seed formation in hybrid rice with almost full penetrance and higher fertility.

A reconstruction of the genomic history of japonica and indica rice over 9,000 yr with geographic, environmental, archaeobotanical and paleoclimate data.

The efficient induction of embryos without fertilization, which is important for crop breeding and hybrid seed production, can be achieved by combined expression in the egg of BBM1 and WOX9A, two rice transcription factors normally expressed from the male genome.

The current expansion of oil palm in India is occurring at the expense of biodiversity-rich landscapes. This study shows that on the national scale India has the potential to become self-sufficient in palm oil production without compromising either its biodiversity or its food security, while economic, social, political and nutritional factors will require attention at finer spatial scales.

Widespread switching of cereal crops in the Indo-Gangetic Plain from paddy/wheat to millet/sorghum will result in water savings with the co-benefits of improved nutrition, calorie production and increased farmers’ profits.

Wetland methane emissions contribute to global warming, and are oversimplified in climate models. Here the authors use eddy covariance measurements from 48 global sites to demonstrate seasonal hysteresis in methane-temperature relationships and suggest the importance of microbial processes.

Humanity’s Last Exam, a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, is designed to be an expert-level closed-ended academic benchmark with broad subject coverage.

Water scarcity is intensifying in China, India, and the USA, with growth in unsustainable water demand equaling or outpacing that of total water demand. These nations are increasingly relying on water in already stressed regions to meet their needs.

Spatial optimizations of high-resolution data from China on crop-specific yields, harvested areas, environmental footprints and farmer incomes shows that crop switching can enhance environmental sustainability and farmer incomes, and contribute substantially towards China’s agricultural sustainable development targets.

An integrated subnational environmental and nutritional optimization approach indicates that, with a transition from current production and consumption patterns, India has the capacity to achieve national food self-sufficiency goals while reducing regional cropland use, water demand and GHG emissions.

Understanding the propagation or attenuation of environmental variability and shocks along food supply chains is key to food security. This scoping review identifies entry points for variability, the main factors for variability diffusion, research gaps in terms of food items and types of shock studied, and risk reduction responses at individual, company and governmental levels.

By dissecting natural variants, Zhang et al. uncover design principles for engineering the FLS2 immune receptor with broad recognition spectra to detect evasive bacterial pathogens, offering a promising strategy to improve crop disease resistance.

Strontium isotope analysis can be applied to animal and plant tissues to help determine their provenance. Here, the authors generate a strontium isoscape of sub-Saharan Africa using data from 2266 environmental samples and demonstrate its efficacy by tracing the African roots of individuals from historic slavery contexts.

Elimination of hunger will require shifts in crop usage by 2030. Calories will need to be obtained from crops currently harvested for purposes other than direct food consumption. Sub-Saharan Africa, however, will likely fall short even if all harvested calories are used directly as food.

Tuning the morphology of nanoparticles can alter their optical properties but often at the cost of monodispersity. Here, the authors report the synthesis of monodisperse anisotropic gold nanoparticles with various tip geometries as well as highly tunable size augmentations from purified gold bipyramids.

Two dimensional materials are promising for electronic applications, which await the exploration of cooperative phenomena. Here, Liu et al. report switchable ferroelectric polarization in thin CuInP₂S₆film at room temperature, demonstrating good memory behaviour with on/off ratio of ∼100 based on two-dimensional ferroelectricity.

Emissions abatement efforts in the agriculture, forestry and land-use sector are vital to achieve climate change mitigation targets, but their effects on food security remain poorly understood. Using six global agroeconomic models, this study explores how afforestation, bioenergy and non-CO₂ emissions reductions could impact agricultural prices and the risk of hunger under different scenarios.

Farmer livelihoods and food production are impacted by water shortages in many regions globally. These shortages can be mitigated by changing the mix of crops produced in water-scarce regions, potentially resulting in reduced irrigation needs of 28–57%.

The current distribution of crops around the world neither attains maximum production nor minimum water use, according to a crop water model and yield data. An optimized crop distribution could feed an additional 825 million people and substantially reduce water use.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

Kyle Shelton applauds a study that probes the parlous state of US infrastructure.

To eliminate transport emissions by 2050, low carbon fuels must rapidly replace fossil fuels. The authors model these technological transitions for each transport mode and evaluate economy-wide tradeoffs of varied levels of transport decarbonization.

Specific functions of viral helicases in genome replication of RNA viruses are widely unknown. This study suggests that hepatitis C virus NS3 helicase unwinds stem loop structures at the 3’end of the genome, thereby facilitating (−) strand synthesis.

Here, the authors describe the global distribution of crAssphage, its presence in Old-World and New-World primates, and its association with gut bacterial communities and dietary factors, providing insights into the origin, evolution and epidemiology of human gut crAssphage.

Stabilizing climate change requires simultaneous mitigation of all greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Here the authors examine 90 mitigation scenarios pairing different levels of CO₂ and non-CO₂ GHG abatement pathways to demonstrate the contributions of different GHGs towards 1.5 °C and 2 °C goals.

Autosomal Recessive Renal Tubular Dysgenesis (AR-RTD) arises from mutations in Angiotensin II sensing genes, but how they impact the kidney was unclear. This study reveals that delayed angiogenesis at a critical developmental window underlies AR-RTD.

Pyrochlore iridates lie at a tuning-free magnetic quantum critical point hosting several complex exotic phenomena. Here, the authors discover an electronic phase separation in single crystalline Pr₂Ir₂O₇, where well-defined Kondo resonances are interweaved with a non-magnetic metallic phase with Kondo-destruction.

Water use in river basins is an age-old resource-management question, but it is rare to quantify consumption by specific sectors. The Colorado River is being overused for beef and dairy production, endangering the entire river ecosystem.

The oomycete Bremia lactucae is a highly variable pathogen that causes lettuce downy mildew. Here, the authors generate a high-quality genome assembly for B. lactucae, detect a high prevalence of heterokaryosis, and investigate its pathogenic consequences.

Dense calcium imaging combined with co-registered high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction of the brain of the same mouse provide a functional connectomics map of tens of thousands of neurons of a region of the primary cortex and higher visual areas.

Kyle Walsh and colleagues identify a variant near TERC associated with glioma susceptibility. They further show that glioma risk alleles near TERC and TERT are associated with longer mean telomere length in leukocytes, implicating telomerase activity in gliomagenesis.

Water scarcity associated with large-scale land acquisitions is exacerbated by adoption of water-intensive crops and expansion of irrigation, which in turn increases rival water uses.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

A biased atomic force microscopy tip can write complex in-plane polar topologies in a model ferroelectric Pb_0.6Sr_0.4TiO₃ by means of a smart scan path design. Hence, on-demand generation, reading and erasing of tunable topologies is possible.

Wastewater treatment plants are important reservoirs of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Here, the authors analyze ARGs in a global collection of samples from wastewater treatment plants across six continents, providing insights into biotic and abiotic mechanisms that appear to control ARG diversity and distribution.

Large-scale sequence-based analyses identify novel risk variants and susceptibility genes for Crohn’s disease, and implicate mesenchymal cell-mediated intestinal homeostasis in disease etiology.

Reliably predicting where crop yields may stagnate in the future can offer a suite of benefits for food system sustainability.

Analysis of 97,691 high-coverage human blood DNA-derived whole-genome sequences enabled simultaneous identification of germline and somatic mutations that predispose individuals to clonal expansion of haematopoietic stem cells, indicating that both inherited and acquired mutations are linked to age-related cancers and coronary heart disease.

Phosphonate modifications can be present on microbial cell surfaces. Here the authors perform bioinformatics analyses and observe a widespread occurrence of nucleotidyltransferase-encoding genes in bacterial phosphonate biosynthesis and functionally characterize two of the identified phosphonate specific cytidylyltransferases (PntCs) and determine the crystal structure of T. denticola PntC.

Robert Jenkins and colleagues report fine mapping of the glioma risk region at 8q24.21. They identify a new low-frequency variant in the region that is strongly associated with risk of oligodendroglial tumors and astrocytomas with IDH1 or IDH2 mutation.

Mast cells are activated and proliferate during allergic reactions which can involve mast cell specific proteins. Here the authors show that mast cell-expressed membrane protein1 (MCEMP1) is an adaptor for KIT to promote SCF mediated mast cell proliferation and lack of MCEMP1 reduces inflammation in mouse asthma models.

The role of cohesin in organizing a functional nuclear architecture remains poorly understood. Here the authors show that cohesin depleted cells pass through endomitosis forming a multilobulated nucleus able to proceed through S-phase with typical features of active and inactive nuclear compartments and spatio-temporal patterns of replication domains.

Assessing the accuracy of evapotranspiration (ET) data is crucial for managing the water used by crops and natural vegetation. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of the accuracy of a remotely sensed ET model ensemble from the OpenET system using in situ ET measurements collected across the contiguous United States.