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Here, the authors present archaeology of the Namorotukunan site in Kenya’s Turkana Basin that demonstrates adaptive shifts in hominin tool-making behaviour spanning 300,000 years and increasing environmental variability. They contextualize these findings with paleoenvironmental proxies, dating, and geological descriptions.

The ferroelectric material α-GeTe(111) is an excellent playground for spin-to charge conversion due to its strong Rashba coupling. Here, the authors reveal an ultrafast modulation of its Rashba coupling on the femtosecond timescale.

Combining attosecond metrology and soliton dynamics in hollow-core fibres, the generation of attosecond laser pulses from the deep-ultraviolet to the near-infrared regime and the measurement of attosecond solitons with 350-as durations at optical wavelengths are demonstrated, providing an efficient route to generate intense isolated attosecond pulses complementary to those based on high-harmonic generation in gases.

Interwoven magnetic and non-magnetic layers in TbTi₃Bi₄ overcome kagome frustration, producing coupled elliptical-spiral magnetic and spin-density-wave orders and a very large anomalous Hall effect driven by strong electron–magnetic field interactions.

Active fluids, such as bacterial suspensions, exhibit chaotic flows at low Reynolds number - a phenomenon known as active turbulence. Here, the authors show a discontinuous transition from laminar to chaotic flows in unconfined active nematics.

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.

Catalytic asymmetric synthesis of stable, acyclic N-stereogenic amines by the addition of enol silanes to nitronium ions that ion pair to a confined chiral anion is described.

This study introduces nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) magnetic sensing for wireless tracking, enabling millimeter-scale accuracy and miniaturized trackers for guidewires, soft, and shape morphing medical devices.

Population-scale WGS reveals genetic determinants of persistent EBV DNA, linking immune regulation—especially antigen processing and MHC class II variation—to EBV persistence and heterogeneous disease associations.

This research finds a strong recency bias in information gathering, attenuated in those on the OCD spectrum—a possible mechanism for indecisiveness. Behavioural and MEG data show reduced evidence updating in high-OC individuals.

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.

Observations of the Faraday rotation towards pulsars in the halo globular cluster 47 Tucanae have been used to constrain the magnetic field strength in the Galactic halo, finding that it is unexpectedly strong.

Using pancreatic organoids, Lee et al. show that the balance between epithelial tissue permeability-driven lumenal pressure and cell proliferation affects ductal morphogenesis.

RNA nanotechnology creates structural and functional RNA architectures for biomedicine, synthetic biology and beyond. Here, the authors introduce pyFuRNAce, an intuitive browser-based RNA design tool. With pyFuRNAce, they realize the largest cotranscriptionally folded RNA nanostructures to date.

This study presents a design for fabricating a terahertz chiral photonic-crystal cavity with broken time-reversal symmetry. By combining density functional theory with a microscopic model, the cavity-induced gap in graphene was estimated, showing enhanced light–matter coupling at the Dirac nodes.

Using single broadband X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser on a gaseous neon target, coherent, nonlinear four-photon interactions with core–shell electrons is demonstrated, representing a strategy for multidimensional correlation spectroscopy at the atomic scale.

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.

Division of embryonic cells with an incomplete contractile ring occurs by a ratchet mechanism with repeated cycles of cytoplasmic stiffening, which stabilizes the contractile actin band, and fluidization, which enables band ingression.

Regulations on the amount of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances allowed in drinking water are getting more and more stringent, and detecting small amounts is challenging. A sensing platform based on a remote gate field-effect transistor allows a sensitivity higher than that required by the US Environmental Protection Agency to be reached.

The authors reveal an inherent trade-off between logarithmic average phonon frequency and the electron-phonon coupling constant in conventional BCS superconductors. The analysis suggests that achieving room-temperature conventional superconductivity at ambient pressure is extremely unlikely.

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.

Tissue stiffness mediated by Piezo1 is shown to regulate the expression of diffusive guidance cues in the developing Xenopus laevis brain, revealing a crosstalk between mechanical signals and long-range chemical signalling.

The authors show that structured optically driven cavities can recreate Moiré-like exciton localization and that cavity vacuum fluctuations induce long-range exciton interactions, modifying exciton masses and optical properties without twisting.

Auvray and colleagues present a covalent fluorescent probe targeting tubulin, a key cytoskeletal protein. The probe is cell-permeable, fluorogenic, and STED-compatible, enabling clear, minimally-invasive imaging of dynamic processes in live and fixed cells.

The 4D Nucleome Project demonstrates the use of genomic assays and computational methods to measure genome folding and then predict genomic structure from DNA sequence, facilitating the discovery of potential effects of genetic variants, including variants associated with disease, on genome structure and function.

The authors study microstructured UTe₂ by high-field transport, focusing on the field-reinforced superconducting phase. They reveal a highly-directional vortex pinning force typical of quasi-2D superconductors, indicating a vortex lock-in state and consistent with a change of order parameter from the low-field superconducting phase.

Graph Neural Networks achieve accurate predictions of optical spectra after finetuning on only a few hundreds of spectra from a higher rung on Jacob’s ladder of optoelectronic properties, offering an efficient route towards experimental accuracy.

The temporal characterization of few-femtosecond vacuum ultraviolet pulses bring new opportunities for investigating ultrafast light-matter interactions.

Intense lasers can both ionize atoms and subsequently drive the recollision of the released electrons with their ionized parents. Holography experiments now show that the orientation of the parent can change the recollision process, requiring a refinement of the commonly used strong-field approximation.

The analysis of complex (bio)molecules by NMR spectroscopy is often complicated by limitations in sensitivity. Now, it has been shown that ¹³C NMR signals are strongly enhanced in solution by resonant microwave irradiation of a nitroxide polarizer. This method exhibits up to one-thousand-fold improvements in sensitivity, which stands to greatly improve the detail with which small molecules and metabolites can be studied.

Hepatocyte organoids derived directly from human tissue enable long-term hepatocyte expansion and can be combined with portal mesenchyme and cholangiocyte organoids to form a donor-specific periportal liver assembloid system.

3D correlative nanoscale tomography on an Fe-W alloy shows that topology requires secondary grain boundary dislocations which strongly control patterned solute segregation, reshaping segregation energy spectra and opening routes for advanced alloy design.

How are various visual signals integrated in the vertebrate brain for navigation? Here authors show that different spatial signals are topographically organized and align to one another in the zebrafish interpeduncular nucleus.

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.

The authors demonstrate a proof-of-principle example of an NH-π hydrogen bond on the surface of an intrinsically disordered protein through detection of weak scalar couplings by NMR, supported by Molecular Dynamics simulation and DFT calculations.

Rare-earth permanent magnets are engineered with a complex microstructure of composition and phase, grains and grain boundaries, and it is this complex structure which leads to the magnetic performance. Here, Giron and coauthors, through thorough microstructural analysis, demonstrate that the grain microstructure, not grain boundaries, are primarily responsible for optimal magnetic properties.

State-of-the-art approaches for modelling electrified solid–electrolyte interfaces are critically discussed, highlighting key challenges in incorporating thermodynamic open-boundary conditions, large electrostatic potentials and their dynamic fluctuations into realistic ab initio simulations.

Terahertz radiation is used to directly probe magnetotransport in metallic multilayers on the timescale of electron momentum scattering—the fundamental conditions of Nevill Mott’s model of spin-dependent conduction in metals.

Sensory experience transforms endogenously structured cortical networks with diverse and unreliable visual responses into reliable representations. This process is proposed to involve the alignment of feedforward and recurrent networks.

The Greenland shark, the longest-living vertebrate, inhabits the dim, frigid depths of the Arctic Ocean. Despite its extreme lifespan, this study finds that its vision remains intact and well-adapted for life in dim light, revealing remarkable preservation of sensory function across centuries.

The quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories is anticipated to be an important scientific application of future quantum computing capabilities. This work elaborates on a formulation of lattice gauge theory quantum simulation that aims to require quantum computing techniques akin to those for simulating ϕ⁴ scalar field theory by utilizing non-compact continuous variable quantum degrees of freedom.

Ying and colleagues present PhyE2E, an AI framework incorporating symbolic search techniques for discovering physics formulas directly from data. The method has already led to improvements in space physics models when compared, for example, with NASA’s 1993 formula for solar activity.

Trends in global H₂ sources and sinks are analysed from 1990 to 2020, and a comprehensive budget for the decade 2010–2020 is presented.

The application of high-harmonic spectroscopy to liquid samples shows that the cut-off energy is a material characteristic. This approach may also give experimental access to electron mean free paths.

Mechanically interlocked monolayer and bilayer two-dimensional polymers (2DPs) are synthesized on the water surface by embedding macrocyclic molecules with one and two cavities into the backbones. The resulting bilayer 2DP displays a high effective Young’s modulus, exceeding other reported multilayer 2DPs.

Experimental evidence of coherent charge transport in the normal state of the kagome metal CsV₃Sb₅ is presented, revealing the nature of correlated order in kagome metals and new directions for exploring quantum coherence in correlated electron systems.

Here, the authors present evidence that the gut microbiome alone, without changes in the host genome, can shape how animals respond to selection, identifying a bacterium and its metabolite that independently reduce mouse locomotion.