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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.

Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission impact on asteroid Dimophos resulted in an elliptical ejecta plume. Here, the authors show that this elliptical ejecta is due to the curvature of the asteroid and makes kinetic momentum transfer less efficient.

Membranes can be used for energy efficient organic liquid mixture separations. Here the authors use machine learning and transport simulations to predict the separation of complex mixtures such as crude oils by any linear polymer membrane.

Inspired by dynamic textural modulation in cephalopod skin, polymer films whose colour and surface texture can be dynamically and independently controlled are developed and demonstrated using standard electron-beam patterning tools.

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.

Here, the authors show learning tasks with similar structures can initially cause interference and slow down learning, but both the brain and artificial networks gradually reorganize information over time, enabling them to perform better and adapt more efficiently.

Absorption in one-port passive systems is known to be bound by causality constraints. Here, authors study reflection and transmission of a two-port system to introduce a generalized causality constraint based on duality symmetry. Experimentally, the broadened bandwidth of their meta-absorbers shows the untapped absorption potential of broadband acoustic metamaterials.

The success of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for the treatment of haematological cancers is limited by the morbidity and mortality associated with graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Here the authors show that the microbial metabolite desaminotyrosine contributes to graft-versus-leukemia responses while protecting against GVHD and promoting mTORC1 and STING-dependent intestinal regeneration.

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.

The authors propose passive linear edge states based on spin-momentum locking of Rayleigh waves in 2D media in the limit of zero bulk to shear modulus ratio, that give backscattering-free propagation immune to edge roughness with no frequency limitation.

In this study, Aggarwal and colleagues perform prospective sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 isolates derived from asymptomatic student screening and symptomatic testing of students and staff at the University of Cambridge. They identify important factors that contributed to within university transmission and onward spread into the wider community.

Determining how cellular activity affects the collective properties of growing tissues is key to understanding morphogenesis. An epithelial tissue model shows how active tension can give rise to striking mechanical behaviours seen in experiments.

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task in mice.

Nitrogen fixation by legumes into the soil has long been known to benefit other plants, but this study finds a bidirectional relationship by which grasses help provide key nutrients for legumes. Grasses and clovers exploit soil nutrients better together than separately.

An Archimedes’ screw pumps energy into a fluid by lifting it to a higher ground. An optical screw uses helical space-time modulations in the properties of a material to grab hold of and amplify circularly polarized light of a specific handedness.

The authors theoretically delineate the maximal increases in tree growth that can be expected from increases in plant intrinsic water-use efficiency, which increases with rising CO₂. They highlight environmental and physiological limits on growth in the context of experimental data.

Li-Fraumeni syndrome is a cancer predisposition disorder caused by TP53 variants, but the way different TP53 variants contribute remains unclear. Here, the authors analyse TP53 mutagenesis datasets and identify five TP53 variant clusters that show associations with specific cancer patterns as well as potential clinical strategies.

Petahertz-scale optical-field metrology in a pump-probe setting enables the direct observation of how the optical properties of a medium evolve after 1-fs-scale photoinjection.

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Buchanan et al. show evidence confirming the phenomenon of semantic priming across speakers of 19 diverse languages.

Nicholas Maxwell, of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at University College, London, offers this comment on the current state of the art

In this study, the authors use a maternal infection mouse model to show that Zika virus infection during pregnancy reshapes offspring immunity in a sex-specific manner, weakening neutrophil defenses and heightening vulnerability to infections and inflammation later in life.

Analyses of genome and exome sequencing data identify rare coding and structural variants associated with atrial fibrillation and highlight genetic links between atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathies.

Idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension is a rare and fatal disease with a heterogeneous treatment response. Here the authors show that unsupervised machine learning of whole blood transcriptomes from 359 patients with idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension identifies 3 subgroups (endophenotypes) that improve risk stratification and provide new molecular insights.

Combinatorial experimental and bioinformatics methods can be used to analyse function and specificity of CD8 T cells. Here the authors propose a multiomic analysis framework Antigen-TCR Pairing and Multiomic Analysis of T cell (APMAT) to relate TCR specificity to transcriptomic phenotype indicating associations with physicochemical features.

John Chambers and colleagues identify common variants at four loci associated with serum creatinine levels, a marker of kidney function. Their findings provide insight into the pathways underlying susceptibility to chronic kidney disease.

The two dimensional magnetoplasmon edge state has been observed for a long time, but its nature is yet to be uncovered. Here, Jin et al. report that such a state is actually topological protected, analogous to the chiral Majorana edge state in a p-wave topological superconductor.

Analysing multiple tumours from the same patient permits the study of the germline contribution to cancer. Here, the authors sequence multiple renal tumours from VHL patients and find that intra-patient tumours are clonally distinct but share some genetic features, suggesting that patient-specific factors influence tumour formation.

The genus Serratia includes clinically-important and diverse environmental bacteria. Here, Williams et al. assemble and analyse a representative set of 664 genomes from across the genus, including historic isolates, to provide a genome-based phylogenetic framework for a better understanding of the emergence of clinical and environmental lineages of Serratia.

The coupling of photons to material quasiparticles such as plasmons, phonons and excitons opens new possibilities in light–matter interactions. This Review presents a generalized view of such quasiparticles and the technique that describes their interactions with matter: macroscopic quantum electrodynamics.

A study of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in England between September 2020 and June 2021 finds that interventions capable of containing previous variants were insufficient to stop the more transmissible Alpha and Delta variants.

Intron retention (IR) can increase protein diversity and function, and yet unregulated IR may be detrimental to cellular health. This study shows that aberrant IR occurs in ALS and finds nuclear loss of an RNA-binding protein called SFPQ as a new molecular hallmark in this devastating condition.

Plasmonics and metamaterials enable ptychographic coherent diffractive imaging with improved reconstructed phase and amplitude. The approach may be particularly useful for imaging of extremely thin or highly transparent objects.

The formation dynamics of excitons in 2D transition metal dichalcogenides are challenging to probe directly because of their inherently fast timescales. Here, the authors use extremely short optical pulses to excite an electron-hole plasma, and show the formation of 2D excitons in MoS₂ on the timescale of 30 fs.

Plastid terminal oxidase (PTOX) is efficient in photoprotection in stress-tolerant plants. Transferring this activity to different species requires modifications to the thylakoid structure to allow PTOX access to the Photosystem II acceptor pool.

Pulmonary arterial hypertension is a complex disease characterised by high morbidity and mortality. Here, the authors report methylation profiling of patients, finding disease associations in genes CTSZ, COG6 and ZNF678.

This study reports endothelial leakiness in vitro, in silico and in vivo, where adherens junctions are disrupted by their exposure to the anionic oligomers and seeds of Alzheimer’s amyloid beta, preceding proinflammatory and pro-oxidative events.

The Omicron variant evades vaccine-induced neutralization but also fails to form syncytia, shows reduced replication in human lung cells and preferentially uses a TMPRSS2-independent cell entry pathway, which may contribute to enhanced replication in cells of the upper airway. Altered fusion and cell entry characteristics are linked to distinct regions of the Omicron spike protein.