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In this work, researchers build a scalable photonic Chern insulator by twisting a fibre during fabrication, breaking an effective time-reversal symmetry and inducing a pseudo-magnetic field. The team reveals a ‘Goldilocks’ regime that guarantees topological protection against fabrication-induced disorder of any symmetry class in the fibre cross-section.

Orbital angular momentum transfer from optical vortex beams to electronic quantum Hall states is reported in a graphene sheet, showing a robust contribution to the radial photocurrent that depends on the vorticity of light.

Using ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice, a Laughlin-like fractional quantum Hall state is prepared and mapped out on a microscopic level.

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.

Using magnetoencephalography, this study reveals hippocampal and cortical oscillatory dynamics supporting semantic processing in healthy adults, highlighting distinct functional roles for theta and gamma oscillations.

The authors develop a method for combining information across datasets to find genes that are reproducibly differentially expressed in many datasets. They apply this to neurodegenerative diseases and COVID-19 to reveal underlying molecular pathways.

Mobile impurities can be useful probes of quantum states. Here, the authors theoretically identify polarons formed on the edge of topological insulating states, termed chiral polarons, that can be used to probe topological matter.

It is an long-standing goal to produce a photonic quantum Hall effect, analogous to the well-known quantum Hall effect for electrons; now an artificial magnetic field for a continuum of photons has been produced, making it possible to observe photonic Landau levels in a photonic quantum Hall material.

The valley Hall effect offers an additional degree of freedom in 2D materials than can have implications for optoelectronic-based applications but measuring and controlling the effect is challenging. Here, the authors offer an approach to measure the valley Hall response using strain to induce variations in the particle density from which information on the Hall conductivity can be taken.

A magnetic material combining both low losses and strong perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) was so far missing in the field of magnon-spintronics. The authors here report on Bismuth doped YIG nanometer thick films showing both PMA and low magnetic losses for ultra-thin PMA materials.

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

Probing the local response of an integer quantum Hall system enables three different measures of its topology to be explored.

Previous investigations of Floquet states in solid state samples have been mostly based on ultrafast light excitations. Here, the authors report evidence of non-equilibrium steady states in graphene under continuous-wave mid-infrared irradiation, consistent with a long-lived Floquet phase physical picture.

The quantum Hall effect has had a profound impact on solid-state physics and has been investigated using different two-dimensional systems, including graphene. Here, the authors investigate graphene encapsulated by a ferroelectric insulator, CuInP₂S₆, where they observe a quantum Hall effect that endures over a wide temperature range in relatively modest magnetic fields.

The authors study a Pt/Nb hybrid structure by scanning microscopy and muon spin rotation. They find an anomalous absence of Meissner screening near the Pt/Nb interface due to spin-triplet pair correlations driven by spin-orbit coupling alone with no ferromagnetic layer necessary.

A novel antiviral targeting the SARS-CoV-2 PLpro protease shows strong efficacy in a mouse model, preventing lung pathology and reducing brain dysfunction. The study provides proof-of-principle that PLpro inhibition may be a viable strategy for preventing and treating long COVID.

Topologically protected states in a photonic crystal can prevent backscattering of light, but creating these states requires the photonic crystal to be engineered to break time-reversal symmetry. Major strides have been taken towards this goal using a photonic crystal driven by a circularly polarized laser.

Chronic care manages long-term, progressive conditions, while acute care handles short-term ones. Here, authors show chronic conditions account for most of the global health burden, with 68% of DALYs and 93% of YLDs attributed to chronic care needs.

Here the authors provide an explanation for 95% of examined predicted loss of function variants found in disease-associated haploinsufficient genes in the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), underscoring the power of the presented analysis to minimize false assignments of disease risk.

Stabilizing non-trivial magnetic spin textures at room temperature remains challenging. Here, the authors propose introducing magnetic atoms into the van der Waals gap of 2D magnets Fe₃GaTe₂ to stabilize the magnetic spin textures beyond skyrmion.

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.

Pairs of photons in the Laughlin state are created by mimicking a fractional quantum Hall system using the synthetic magnetic field induced by a twisted optical cavity and Rydberg-mediated polariton interactions.

Topological effects can be emulated using photonic lattices where the length of a waveguide represents time, which is often limited by fabrication constraints. Here, Mukherjee et al. exploit a single-photon detector array enabled state-recycling scheme to increase the accessible time scale.

This overview of the ENCODE project outlines the data accumulated so far, revealing that 80% of the human genome now has at least one biochemical function assigned to it; the newly identified functional elements should aid the interpretation of results of genome-wide association studies, as many correspond to sites of association with human disease.

An initial draft of the human pangenome is presented and made publicly available by the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium; the draft contains 94 de novo haplotype assemblies from 47 ancestrally diverse individuals.

Structural variants in more than 17,000 human genomes are mapped and characterized using whole-genome sequencing, showing how this type of variation contributes to rare deleterious coding and noncoding alleles.

Engineering multiple moiré patterns within a boron nitride–graphene–boron nitride heterostructure enables tunable crystal symmetry and strong modification of the graphene band structure.

Emergent anyonic correlations via spin–charge separation are observed in a one-dimensional strongly interacting quantum gas, enabling the exploration of non-equilibrium anyonic phenomena in a highly controllable setting.

Standard topological invariants commonly used in static systems are not enough to fully capture the topological properties of Floquet systems. In a periodically driven quantum gas, chiral edge modes emerge despite all Chern numbers being equal to zero.

Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) has been used extensively to encapsulate other van der Waals materials, protecting them from environmental degradation, and allowing integration into more complex heterostructures. Here, the authors make use of boron vacancy spin defects in h-BN using them to image the magnetic properties of a Fe₃GeTe₂ flake.

Antiferromagnets have a variety of attractive features for spintronic devices; they are inherently robust against external magnetic fields, and have fast, terahertz, dynamics. However, terahertz magnons are usually strongly damped. Here, Choe, Lujan and coauthors find that the zone boundary magnons in the AFM insulator CoTiO3 exhibit long lifetimes.

Nathan Wolfe applauds a tome on interspecies disease transmission that mixes research with human stories.

Which combination of current genome sequencing and assembly approaches results in high-quality, complete diploid genome assemblies is determined.

Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

There is a genetic component to the risk of severe COVID-19, but the genetic effects are difficult to separate from social constructs that covary with genetic ancestry. To address this, the authors identify determinants of COVID-19 severity using admixture mapping, viral phylodynamics, and host immune and metagenomic sequencing.

Very massive stars shed much of their mass in violent precursor eruptions as luminous blue variable stars before reaching their most likely end as supernovae. The nineteenth century eruption of η Carinae is the prototype of these events, for which some high speed ejecta has been seen. This paper reports observations of much faster material with speeds up to 3,500–6,000 km s⁻¹, reaching farther from the star than the fastest material in earlier reports.

In monolayer semiconductors phonons with momentum vectors pointing to the corners of the hexagonal Brillouin zone couple strongly to carriers’ spin and valley degree of freedom. Here, the authors report the observation of multiple valley phonons and the resulting exciton complexes in the monolayer semiconductor WSe₂.

Miniaturization of silicon transistors requires interconnects that can maintain low electrical resistivity. Here, resistivity is studied in anisotropic NbP as a function of crystal orientation as its size approaches the electron scattering length.

The flagship paper of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium describes the generation of the integrative analyses of 2,658 cancer whole genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types, the structures for international data sharing and standardized analyses, and the main scientific findings from across the consortium studies.