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Sedimentary rocks record planetary environmental history convolved with the internal dynamics of depositional landscapes. Ganti et al.show that the advection length of settling sediment sets bounds on internal landscape dynamics, providing a new tool to unravel sedimentary archives.

Understanding the microscopic variability of CMOS spin qubits is crucial for developing scalable quantum processors. Here the authors report a combined experimental and numerical study of the effect of interface roughness on variability of quantum dot spin qubits formed at the Si/SiO₂ interface.

Greenwald, Nederlof and colleagues developed a computational pipeline analyzing multiplex imaging data and established spatial patterns within breast cancer microenvironment that are predictive of immune checkpoint blockade response across treatment time course.

Estimating the probable magnitude of future sea-level rise under global warming is complicated by a limited understanding of long-term ice-sheet dynamics. This study presents a probabilistic approach for assessing upper bounds on twenty-first-century Antarctic ice-sheet loss, and its effect on sea level.

Jaxley is a versatile platform for biophysical modeling in neuroscience. It allows efficiently simulating large-scale biophysical models on CPUs, GPUs and TPUs. Model parameters can be optimized with gradient descent via backpropagation of error.

In a phase 1 trial testing healthy donor fecal microbial transplantation with immune checkpoint blockade in patients with previously untreated renal cell carcinoma, treatment was safe with an encouraging response signal and microbiome analyses, suggesting specific donor taxa associations with toxicity.

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.

In a phase 2 trial evaluating healthy donor fecal microbial transplantation plus either anti-PD-1 in patients with non-small cell lung cancer or anti-PD-1 and anti-CTLA-4 in patients with melanoma, encouraging efficacy was seen in both cohorts, with responses linked to significantly greater loss of baseline bacterial species.

The authors model the emergence of climate-driven changes in Antarctic sea ice, phytoplankton, krill, fish and penguins. They show earlier emergence for higher trophic levels, as well as highly seasonal and regional responses.

Prenatal Zika virus (ZIKV) exposure can lead to a spectrum of developmental issues, but the mechanisms remain unclear. Here the authors show that prenatal ZIKV exposure in macaques disrupts neurodevelopment, causing prolonged maternal attachment and visual deficits at 3 months that normalize by 12 months, independent of sensory function.

Pilcher et al. present a single-cell transcriptomics-based immune atlas of participants with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma, reporting on the association of cell types, gene expression and intercellular interactions with disease progression phenotypes.

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.

Lorentz invariance, tested more than a century ago by Michelson and Morley, is a foundational property of modern physics within the standard model and general relativity. Here, the authors report the most precise terrestrial test to date, bounding the lack of violations of Lorentz symmetry in photons to 10^–18.

Deaminases of the APOBEC3 family contribute to the mutagenesis of various cancers, including urothelial carcinoma (UC) of the bladder. Here, the authors use functional studies and transcriptomics to demonstrate that APOBEC3 promotes tumour progression and squamous trans-differentiation in UC through IL-1α and downstream activation of the AP-1 transcription factor.

Disease heterogeneity complicates precision medicine, which focuses on single conditions and ignores shared mechanisms. Here the authors introduce ‘pan-disease’ analysis using a deep learning model on multi-organ data, identifying 11 AI-derived biomarkers that reveal new therapeutic targets and pathways, enhancing patient stratification for disease risk monitoring and drug discovery.

An analysis of 204 countries estimates that diabetes will cost the global economy $10.2 trillion between the years 2020 and 2050.

Results of an early-phase breast cancer prevention trial demonstrate the potential for breast cancer prevention in premenopausal women with anti-progestin therapy by inducing epithelial–stromal remodelling and suppression of luminal progenitors.

It remains elusive whether the T cell repertoire will cover all point mutations of a major epitope. The authors here show that COVID vaccine–induced CD8⁺ T cells detect most YLQ peptide variants except R5, but naïve T cells fill this gap by responding to R5 despite abundant WT-specific cells, ensuring broad coverage to prevent viral immune-escape.

In somatic cells the mechanisms maintaining the chromosome ends are normally inactivated; however, cancer cells can re-activate these pathways to support continuous growth. Here, the authors characterize the telomeric landscapes across tumour types and identify genomic alterations associated with different telomere maintenance mechanisms.

Familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) is an inherited gastrointestinal syndrome associated with duodenal adenoma formation. Here the authors show that IL17A-producing NKp44- group 3 innate lymphoid cells accumulate in FAP duodenal tissue and are associated with duodenal adenoma formation in patients with FAP.

Quantum devices’ growth drives efforts to show their benefits. Here, the authors prove unconditionally that constant-depth quantum circuits surpass biased threshold circuits with neural network-like functions for all prime qudit dimensions, even with noise.

Vinyard et al. present a generative method to model cell dynamics using neural stochastic differential equations that learn state-dependent drift and diffusion, outperforming existing approaches and enabling perturbation studies of development and disease.

TCR-engineered T cells have shown limited efficacy in part due to the absence of co-stimulation leading to limited accumulation in solid tumors. The authors here show engineering the CD8β coreceptor with an intracellular CD28 domain enhances cytokine production, persistence, and tumor control in vivo independent of tumor-associated co-stimulatory ligand encounter.

The authors present DNA-Diffusion, a generative AI framework that designs synthetic regulatory elements with tunable cell-type specificity. Experimental validation demonstrates their ability to reactivate AXIN2 expression, a leukemia-protective gene, in its native genomic context.

cfDNA fragmentomics is a potential clinically applicable method for identifying cancer. Here, the authors assess fragmentomics analysis methods and their application to commercial targeted sequencing panels.

A combination of high-resolution spatial imaging, spatial proteomics and transcriptional data reveals sparse and heterogeneous bacterial signals in gliomas and brain metastases.

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

This study identifies protein signatures of pediatric obesity linked to cardiometabolic risk, shows treatment-related changes, and highlights a three-protein panel predictive of steatotic liver disease for early diagnosis

The extracellular matrix provides a critical scaffold for the epidermal layers of the skin. Here, He and Boraas et al. discover that the foundation for resilient skin healing in embryos lies in the supportive matrix beneath stem cells.

Type 2 inflammation drives the formation of pathologic mucus in patients with asthma. Here, authors reveal a role for intelectin-1 in IL-13-induced mucus properties, and that an ITLN1 eQTL is associated with protection from the formation of mucus plugs in T2-high asthma.

Two-dimensional polyaramid polymers are synthesized to form nanofilms that exhibit the lowest gas permeability of any polymer by orders of magnitude, despite lacking crystallinity, enabling molecular-scale nanomechanical resonators and barrier materials.

Combining high-resolution mapping of foliar and herbivore faecal sodium concentrations across Africa, the authors show that plant-derived sodium availability constrains megaherbivore densities at a continental scale.

This study finds that crowd-sensed plants as living sensors uncover climate and soil patterns in 326 European cities; extend the urban heat island effect to moisture, pH, salinity and disturbance; and show built-up areas homogenize whereas urban forests preserve environmental diversity.

As quantum simulations advance, improving classical methods for modelling quantum systems remains crucial as they provide key benchmarks for quantum simulators. Here the authors present a scalable tensor-network algorithm for simulating open quantum systems, addressing key limitations of existing approaches.

Analysis of medulloblastomas in humans and mice shows that the functional consequences of ZIC1 mutations are exquisitely dependent on the cells of origin that give rise to different subgroups of medulloblastoma.

Municipal solid waste (MSW) could power sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), but costs and technical hurdles such as gasification hinder its adoption. A study now shows that MSW can be turned into SAF with 80–90% lower lifecycle emissions while offering a 16% reduction in aviation greenhouse gas emissions.

Chure et al. analyse experimental data to show that E. coli bacteria maintain stable protein density ratios between cytoplasm and membranes. In addition, they develop a biophysical model that predicts surface-to-volume ratio from ribosomal content and protein partitioning across cell compartments.

The ratio between the levels of two synaptic proteins in cerebrospinal fluid predicts future cognitive resilience versus decline among presymptomatic individuals and individuals with early Alzheimer’s disease harboring amyloid and tau pathology.

Current single-cell RNA sequencing methods struggle to comprehensively profile transcriptomes, with many lowly expressed transcripts remaining undetected. Here authors present a workflow for enhancing the detection of both transcripts and regions of interest in combination with a standard transcriptome profile.

Post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (PI-ME/CFS) is a disabling disorder, yet the clinical phenotype is poorly defined and the pathophysiology unknown. Here, the authors conduct deep phenotyping of a cohort of PI-ME/CFS patients.

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.

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.

A theoretical foundation for entrapment methods is presented, along with a method that enables more accurate evaluation of false discovery rate (FDR) control in proteomics mass spectrometry analysis pipelines. Evaluation of popular data-dependent acquisition tools indicates that these generally seem to control the FDR, but data-independent acquisition tools exhibit inconsistent control of the FDR at both the peptide and protein levels.

Commutation relations define the limit to which two complementary properties can be simultaneously known—Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Yet it is thought that these canonical relations might be different in the quantum gravity regime. Researchers now show how quantum-optics experiments might provide a direct route for studying these effects.

Metabolomic profiling of 581 mother–child pairs revealed patterns associated with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD). Maternal metabolomic profiles at gestational week 24 showed the strongest predictive value, with quinolinate consistently associated with NDD across time points and linking maternal inflammation to NDD risk.

Whether rivers are speeding up or slowing down in a warming Arctic is unclear, but has implications for carbon cycling and infrastructure. This study finds divergent behaviour in migration rates for rivers in discontinuous versus continuous permafrost, driven by changes in permafrost thaw and river ice.

Pancreatic cancer progression is driven by a switch from HNF4G-driven transcriptional activity in primary disease to FOXA1-mediated transcription in the metastatic setting.

ACE2 and TMPRSS2 have received recent attention as entry factors for SARS-CoV-2. Here the authors analyze nasal airway transcriptome data from 695 children determining ACE2 and TMPRSS2 expression is induced by viral and type2 inflammation, respectively, and both exhibit eQTLs that vary across world populations.