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Mechanical response of semiconducting polymers affects their electrical properties, yet the detail remains elusive. Zhong et al. examine the multiscale structural evolution of conjugated polymer thin films during uniaxial deformation and link it to mechanical resilience and solar cell performance.

The study shows that incorporating information on pre-existing moisture conditions into the atmospheric river scale improves early-warning identification of flood-generating events.

Researchers report a solid that is amorphous in two dimensions but crystalline in the third, made of stacked disordered atomic layers. This shows that crystalline and amorphous order can coexist within a single material depending on direction.

Previous studies of Teneurins identified an uncharacterized family of Teneurin-like proteins in bacteria. Here, the authors show these proteins are widespread across both Gram groups but limited to certain species, where they form barrel-like structures that encapsulate a toxin and are co-expressed with potent immunity genes.

Coupling superconductors to mesoscopic systems leads to unusual effects that could be exploited in new devices including topological quantum computers. Here the authors present a double quantum dot with a Yu–Shiba–Rusinov ground state arising from the interplay of Coulomb interactions and superconductivity.

GDF15 has been associated with cancer-associated cachexia. Here, the authors show that STK11/LKB1 loss-of-function mutations in non-small cell lung cancer result in an exaggerated integrated stress response culminating in the tumor cell secretion of the cytokine GDF15 promoting cachexia.

The herpes simplex virus lytic-latent balance is incompletely understood. In this study, the authors show that it is controlled by the relative abundance of host activating and repressive forkhead box (FOX) transcription factors that recruit epigenetic cofactors to the viral genome to remodel viral chromatin.

Here, the authors show that 2’-O-methylated RNA fragments from ribosomal RNA naturally block TLR7 and TLR8, helping to avoid avoid harmful self-RNA detection and autoimmunity.

Native state proteomics of PV interneurons revealed unique molecular features of high translational and metabolic activity, and enrichment of Alzheimer’s risk genes. Early amyloid pathology exerted unique effects on mitochondria, mTOR signaling and neurotransmission in PV neurons.

The APOE-ε4 allele is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, but it is not deterministic. Here, the authors show that common genetic variation changes how APOE-ε4 influences cognition.

A Kitaev chain formed by two quantum dots coupled via a superconductor support the so-called poor man’s Majorana bound states. Here, the authors form a minimal Kitaev chain using Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states and show that the resulting bound states are more robust than in the case of unproximitized quantum dots.

Producing valuable hydrocarbons electrochemically from carbon monoxide (CO) is an energy-efficient pathway, but reliance on costly pure CO as a feedstock limits its economic viability. This article shows that abundant CO-rich syngas can be directly used to synthesize ethylene.

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.

The zero-bias state in FeTe_0.55Se_0.45 is conjectured to be related to Majorana physics, but most in-gap impurity states are not well understood. Here, the authors detect spatially dispersing Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states which can be tuned using an STM tip with varying tip-sample distance.

Stone tools illustrate behavioural complexities in Middle Pleistocene hominin populations. Here, the authors present small dimensional flakes and hafted tools from Xigou, central China, dated to ~160–72 thousand years ago that demonstrate early, complex technological advancements.

The authors developed a microfluidic device, FIND-Chip, designed to automate and enhance oocyte recovery from follicular fluid, a process traditionally done manually. When used in clinical settings, the device recovered additional oocytes missed during manual screening, substantially increasing the number of viable oocytes available for in vitro fertilization.

Identifying jets originating from heavy quarks plays a fundamental role in hadronic collider experiments. In this work, the ATLAS Collaboration describes and tests a transformer-based neural network architecture for jet flavour tagging based on low-level input and physics-inspired constraints.

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.

Application of multiancestry and ensemble-based approaches yields improved polygenic risk prediction models for breast cancer and its subtypes among women of African ancestry.

Global Burden of Disease estimates show that between 1990 and 2023, the prevalence and burden of drug use disorders, inclusive of amphetamine, cannabis, cocaine and opioid use, have been increasing in high-income countries, particularly in the USA.

Estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study reveal declines in chronic respiratory disease mortality between 1990 and 2023—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic—but the burdens on people affected remain substantial.

Here the authors present NCATS-SM0225, a small molecule that inhibits ERAD and selectively kills cancer cells by binding VDACs, disrupting calcium homeostasis, and triggering the PERK-STIM1 pathway to degrade ERAD regulators.

Changes in ocean fronts could impact biological productivity and carbon exchange. By analysing satellite and reanalysis data, the authors identify areas with active frontal activity and rapid change in properties, as well as highlighting the correspondence with surface productivity and CO₂ uptake.

A global synthesis of >600 studies finds that across agro-ecosystems, grasslands and forests in temperate and tropical zones, increasing plant diversity has a consistently positive effect on plant performance and the suppression of antagonists.

cellSTAAR advances noncoding rare variant association analysis by integrating single-cell genomics data.

Saccadic eye movements during free viewing exhibit patterns that reflect a strategy to increase neural responses by matching motor behavior with the statistics of the natural world and with the processing limitations of sensory systems.

Enzymes adapt by sampling new conformations while balancing destabilizing effects of mutations. Here, the authors reveal how TEM-1 β-lactamase acquires cefotaxime resistance through reshaping of dynamic conformational ensembles and localized stability networks, offering insight into the molecular framework of the activity-stability tradeoff.

Josephson junctions based on topological insulators are expected to host Majorana bound states which are accompanied by the experimental absence of odd Shapiro steps in current-voltage characteristics. Here, the authors investigate Shapiro steps in a ballistic junction with Bi₂Te_2.3Se_0.7, finding that overheating effects, rather than topological superconductivity, are sufficient to explain the suppression of the first step, challenging conventional interpretations.

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrates evidence of spin correlations in \(\Lambda \bar{\Lambda }\) hyperon pairs inherited from virtual spin-correlated strange quark–antiquark pairs during QCD confinement.

Metagenomic profiling of Caprinae gut microbiota characterizes the resistome and virulome, uncovering genetic linkages between resistance and mobility while identifying critical antibiotic resistance genes shared with the human gut.

A protein biomarker, the NOTCH3 extracellular domain, identifies individuals with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension, correlates with disease progression, improves mortality risk prediction and provides a readily implementable, noninvasive blood test for this disease.

Marine cloud brightening over the Pacific offsets global warming from aerosol reductions but creates uneven regional cooling and precipitation shifts, revealing complex trade-offs for geoengineering strategies, based on climate model simulations with targeted sea salt injections.

The CMS Collaboration reports the measurement of the spin, parity, and charge conjugation properties of all-charm tetraquarks, exotic fleeting particles formed in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

Analysing the causal links of gene expression and protein abundance on type 2 diabetes risk in blood and seven tissues related to the disease from individuals of four ancestries, the authors advance our understanding of the genetic architecture of type 2 diabetes

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.

Addressing how the nitrogen-induced changes in plant diversity differ from those in soil organisms is critical. This global meta-analysis suggests that nitrogen enrichment has stronger negative effects on plant diversity but modest to negligible effects on soil bacterial and fungal diversity.

Symmetry breaking is key to numerous notable effects, for instance, the emergence of a Rashba interaction at interfaces between two materials. Here, Zhang, Ding, and coauthors succeed in breaking in-plane mirror symmetries via crystallographic engineering, and observe a giant non-linear Hall effect and current induced magnetization at room temperature.

Improved vaccines and antivirals are needed for many enveloped viruses. Here, the authors identify sulfur-based small molecules that disrupt viral membrane properties, inhibiting fusion and entry, and safely inactivate influenza virus. The resulting inactivated influenza vaccine is protective in mice.

Amorphous sulfurized polyacrylonitrile suppresses polysulfide shuttling in Li–S batteries, enabling long cycle life, but the structural processes involved during synthesis and initial cycling remained unclear. An operando pair distribution function, wide-angle scattering and sulfur absorption spectroscopy reveal S–C bond formation, π–π stacking and sulfur-chain shortening, which enable reversible sulfur redox.

Here they developed an inflamed human intestinal organoid model and used it to build a scRNA-seq perturbation atlas of microenvironmental cues in the context of inflammatory bowel disease.

Transcription factor osr2 is identified as a specific marker and regulator of mural lymphatic endothelial cell (muLEC) differentiation and maintenance, and muLECs and border-associated macrophages share functional analogies but are not homologous, providing an example of convergent evolution.

Analysis of a placebo-controlled trial of a BCMA-targeting CAR-T cell therapy in patients with myasthenia gravis shows that CAR-T cell infusion selectively remodels the systemic immune environment, with elimination of BCMA-high plasma cells and activated plasmacytoid dendritic cells and changes in the autoreactive B cell repertoire.

Affinity-proteomics platforms often yield poorly correlated measurements. Here, the authors show that protein-altering variants drive a portion of inter-platform inconsistency and that accounting for genetic variants can improve concordance of protein measures and phenotypic associations across ancestries.