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How neural responses to boundaries develop in the subiculum remains unknown. Here authors show that the receptive fields of Boundary Vector Cells (neurons signalling vector displacement to boundaries) are altered by environment geometry, with directional tunings aligning with square arena walls, including during development.

Spens and Burgess develop a computational model that shows how the hippocampus encodes episodic memories and replays them to train generative models of the world. Conceptual and sensory representations of experience can then be recombined for imagination and memory.

Rodents have an orientation map of their surroundings, produced and updated by a network of neurons in the entorhinal cortex known as 'grid cells'. However, it is currently unknown whether humans encode their location in a similar manner. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans, a macroscopic signal representing a subject's position in a virtual reality environment is now detected that meets the criteria for defining grid-cell encoding.

The realization of compact and reliable diode-pumped solid-state lasers that emit UV light is now opening the door to new industrial applications. Neil Savage describes the uses of the technology and a round-up of products in the area.

Successful navigation relies on reciprocal transformation between different reference frames. Here the authors report egocentric representations of the angle and distance to the boundaries and center of the environment in rodent medial entorhinal cortex, previously known to contain only allocentric spatial representations.

Meta-analyses in up to 1.3 million individuals identify 87 rare-variant associations with blood pressure traits. On average, rare variants exhibit effects ~8 times larger than the mean effects of common variants and implicate candidate causal genes at associated regions.

Patricia Munroe, Joanna Howson and colleagues genotype ∼350,000 individuals and identify 30 new blood pressure– or hypertension-associated risk loci. Their analyses provide insights into the pathophysiology of hypertension and highlight new potential targets for clinical intervention.

Bird and Burgess review the hippocampus's role in memory in light of a model of neuronal processing in which hippocampal activity constrains neocortical information to be perceivable from a single location. This enables spatially coherent mental imagery, explaining several recent findings and theoretical conflicts.

The species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric quantifies the contributions that abating threats and restoring habitats offer towards reducing species’ extinction risk in specific places.

Slow waves in sleep are crucial for homeostatic regulation of brain function. Here the authors show similar slow wave activity occurs during wakefulness in people with epilepsy to counter the impact of abnormal, epileptic, brain activity.

The role of impaired lung function in lung cancer etiology is complex due to the relation of cigarette smoking to both conditions. Here, supported by Mendelian randomization analysis the authors find a link between pulmonary function impairment and lung cancer risk beyond smoking, implicating immune-related pathways

A number of spatially selective neurons that encode an animal’s distance and direction from environmental features have been proposed by theoretical studies and experimentally identified. Andrej Bicanski and Neil Burgess summarize our current understanding of vector coding cells and describe their contribution to spatial cognition.

In this work the authors reveal in-situ cryoET characterization of β-amyloid plaques in the brain of a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease.

Place cells and grid cells are known to encode spatial information about an animal’s location relative to the surrounding environment. Here, the authors show that place cells predominantly encode environmental sensory inputs, while grid cell activity reflects a greater influence of physical motion.

How can citizen science impact large-scale outcomes? This study looks at hundreds of Global Biodiversity Framework indicators to examine which ones benefit from input from local communities and non-scientists.

Women with Cushing's syndrome are often misdiagnosed as having polycystic ovarian syndrome. The authors highlight the importance of correctly diagnosing the two disorders and describe the clinical features and investigations that can help to distinguish them.

Red List information is used to generate global maps of the likelihood of impacts on terrestrial vertebrates exerted by agriculture, hunting and trapping, logging, pollution, invasive species and climate change.

To promote the recovery of the currently declining global trends in terrestrial biodiversity, increases in both the extent of land under conservation management and the sustainability of the global food system from farm to fork are required.

Protected areas are intended to safeguard wildlife, but their effectiveness has at times been questioned. Barnes, Craigie, and colleagues show that protected areas do offer refuge—maintaining their bird and mammal abundances—but with greater success for larger-bodied species and in more developed nations.

The holistic retrieval of complex event memories is thought to be the hallmark of episodic memory. Here, the authors provide behavioural and neuroimaging evidence that the hippocampus binds together the elements forming an event to allow holistic episodic recollection via pattern completion of all elements.

Preventing deforestation—a key goal of international climate policy—can incur an opportunity cost for local communities who depend on forest resources for their livelihoods. A study compares the cost of carbon conservation through forest protection with that of a scheme that directly alleviates the demand for forest conversion.

The aboveground carbon stock of a montane African forest network is comparable to that of a lowland African forest network and two-thirds higher than default values for these montane forests.

Global spatial data for terrestrial vertebrate and vascular plant diversity, above- and below-ground biomass carbon, and potential clean freshwater volume are combined in a joint optimization study to identify potential synergies for conservation management.

In this study, the authors show that the spatial responses of populations of grid cells are constrained to a two-dimensional activity manifold, and the relationships between pairs of grid cells are resistant to perturbation. These findings provide evidence of low-dimensional continuous attractor dynamics in the network.

The measurement of the total cross-section of proton–proton collisions is of fundamental importance for particle physics. Here, the first measurement of the inelastic cross-section is presented for proton–proton collisions at an energy of 7 teraelectronvolts using the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider.

Land management and ownership by Indigenous Peoples are critical components of conservation strategies, but information on these has previously never been aggregated. Here, global data is compiled to show that Indigenous Peoples have tenure rights or manage a quarter of the world’s land area and 40% of all protected areas and intact ecosystems.

Hoxa- and Hoxd-deficient zebrafish generated using Crispr/Cas with fate mapping have reduced fin rays and increased endochondral elements, establishing homology between the developmental programs that create fin rays and the wrists and digits of mammals.

A novel method to assess the impacts of large-scale conservation interventions on household wealth while capturing local heterogeneity reveals small and variable impacts of a nationwide conservation programme in Tanzania.

Mucosal Associated Invariant T cells have been implicated in response to bacterial pathogens. Here the authors show that in human viral infections, these cells are activated by IL-18 in cooperation with other pro-inflammatory cytokines, producing interferon gamma and granzyme B.

Sven van der Lee, Julie Williams, Gerard Schellenberg and colleagues identify rare coding variants in PLCG2, ABI3 and TREM2 associated with Alzheimer's disease. These genes are highly expressed in microglia and provide additional evidence that the microglia-mediated immune response contributes to the development of Alzheimer's disease.

Sofosbuvir is a common therapy in hepatitis C virus infection, which targets the NS5B polymerase. Here, Smith et al. analyze the association between whole genome HCV polymorphisms and sofosbuvir treatment failure and identify three common polymorphisms present in non-targeted NS2 and NS3 proteins associated with reduced treatment response.

TRPA1 has been reported to contribute lung cancer adenocarcinoma (LUAD), but the mechanisms are unclear. Here the authors propose that TRPA1/FGFR2 interaction is functional in LUAD and show that astrocytes oppose brain metastasis by mediating the downregulation of TRPA1 through exosome-delivered miRNA-142-3p.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative Consortium RESOLUTE has started to develop tools and produce data sets to de-orphanize transporters in the solute carrier protein (SLC) superfamily, thereby lowering the barrier for the scientific community to explore SLCs as an attractive drug target class.