Search

The quark structure of the f₀(980) hadron is still unknown after 50 years of its discovery. Here, the CMS Collaboration reports a measurement of the elliptic flow of the f₀(980) state in proton-lead collisions at a nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy of 8.16 TeV, providing strong evidence that the state is an ordinary meson.

The downstream recovery of rare earth elements from plant biomass via phytomining remains inefficient and resource-intensive. This study introduces a rapid electrothermal calcination strategy for rare earth enriched-enriched biomass, improving REE extractability through dilute acid leaching.

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.

Understanding transformations of non-equilibrium materials is a key open scientific question. Here the pathway by which different polar supertextures undergo dynamical correlations and collectively transform into a metastable supercrystal state is revealed experimentally and theoretically over seven orders of magnitude timescale.

Topological entanglement entropy provides a robust measure for detecting the long-range entanglement that characterizes quantum ground states displaying topological order. A new method for calculating this entropy isolates minimally entangled states from the ground states of a topological phase—offering a reliable test for identifying topological spin liquids.

A new artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek-R1, is introduced, demonstrating that the reasoning abilities of large language models can be incentivized through pure reinforcement learning, removing the need for human-annotated demonstrations.

GIANT, a genetically informed brain atlas, integrates genetic heritability with neuroanatomy. It shows strong neuroanatomical validity and surpasses traditional atlases in discovery power for brain imaging genomics.

Ice is not piezoelectric, despite the polarity of water molecules, but bending ice may produce electricity. This has now been experimentally demonstrated, with a flexoelectric coefficient comparable to that of common ceramic materials.

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.

Surfaces are the stage for vital catalytic reactions, but accurately simulating them is computationally expensive. Here, the authors introduce an efficient method using GPUs to model large, complex surfaces with exceptionally high, experiment-matching accuracy

By doping ice with NaCl, it is shown that a flexoelectric coefficient of up to 10 μC m⁻¹ is generated, enabling effective piezoelectric coefficients that are comparable to those of ceramics. This arises from the streaming current of quasi-liquid flow through grain boundaries from one side of the sample to the other.

The Einstein Probe has discovered a fast X-ray transient, EP240414a, associated with a broad-lined type Ic supernova. Its unusually soft spectrum and weak jet add to the diversity of stellar deaths and suggest a previously unknown Wolf–Rayet star explosion mechanism.

The CMS Collaboration reports evidence for off-shell Higgs boson contributions in the production of Z boson pairs, and measures the width of the Higgs boson, which is inversely related to its lifetime.

A multi-ancestry genome-wide gene–smoking interaction study identifies 13 new loci associated with serum lipids.

Iron pnictide compounds have recently been shown to have superconducting properties. Xuet al. show that the superconducting gap of underdoped pnictides scales linearly with the transition temperature, and that a pseudogap develops with underdoping.

Quantum many-body systems can show an elusive form of order known as topological order. Theoretical work now unifies several microscopic models whereby topological phases have been found, and predicts quantum phase transitions that are driven by quantum fluctuations of the topology.

The semileptonic decay channels of the Λc baryon can give important insights into weak interaction, but decay into a neutron, positron and electron neutrino has not been reported so far, due to difficulties in the final products’ identification. Here, the BESIII Collaboration reports its observation in e+e- collision data, exploiting machine-learning-based identification techniques.

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

While Bell inequalities have been violated several times—mostly in photonic systems—their violations within particle physics experiments are less explored. Here, the BESIII Collaboration showcases Bell-violating nonlocal correlations between entangled hyperon pairs.

Non-Abelian anyons are exotic quasiparticles envisioned to be promising candidates for solid-state quantum computation. Clarkeet al. propose a device fabricated from fractional quantum Hall states and superconductors that supports a new type of non-Abelian defect that binds parafermionic zero modes.

The recently discovered kagome metal AV₃Sb₅ is a new playground to study the interplay between superconductivity and charge-density-wave (CDW) state. Here, the authors report pressure-dependent evolution of CDW and superconductivity in CsV₃Sb₅, suggesting an unusual competition between the two phases.

Glioblastoma is resistant to immune-checkpoint inhibitors. In this study, the authors report the results of an expansion cohort (n = 25) of a randomized testing neoadjuvant plus adjuvant pembrolizumab versus adjuvant pembrolizumab alone in patients with recurrent glioblastoma with resectable tumors.

Electron doping is a powerful way to induce quantum phase transitions in materials and explore exotic states of matter. Here, Wen et al. present carefully-controlled potassium dosing in FeSe films and FeSe_0.93S_0.07bulk, which enhances superconductivity and induces other anomalous phases, revealing a complex phase diagram.

Bayati et al. discovered that sequential treatment of iPSC-derived dopaminergic neurons with α-synuclein fibrils and proinflammatory cytokines leads to the formation of Lewy body–like inclusions, through the downregulation of lysosomal proteins.

Metallic kagome compounds are known to host several different electronic phases. Now, evidence for a form of nematic order that breaks time-reversal symmetry and is odd under a parity transformation is found in CsV₃Sb₅.

The most up-to-date combination of results on the properties of the Higgs boson is reported, which indicate that its properties are consistent with the standard model predictions, within the precision achieved to date.

Investigating the inner structure of baryons is important to further our understanding of the strong interaction. Here, the BESIII Collaboration extracts the absolute value of the ratio of the electric to magnetic form factors and its relative phase for e + e − → J/ψ → ΛΣ decays, enhancing the signal thanks to the vacuum polarisation effect at the J/ψ peak.

Observations of optical flares from AT2022tsd (the ‘Tasmanian Devil’) show that they have durations on the timescale of minutes, occur over a period of months, are highly energetic, are probably nonthermal and have supernova luminosities.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

Observations of γ-rays with energies up to 1.4 PeV find that 12 sources in the Galaxy are PeVatrons, one of which is the Crab Nebula.

Polarization observations of the fast radio burst FRB 180301 with the FAST radio telescope show diverse polarization angle swings, consistent with a magnetospheric origin of the emission.

Although progress in the coverage of routine measles vaccination in children in low- and middle-income countries was made during 2000–2019, many countries remain far from the goal of 80% coverage in all districts by 2019.

The family of pyrochlore complex oxides includes many materials of fundamental or practical interest, such as spin ices and dielectrics. Trump et al. show that flexibility of the pyrochlores’ structure leads to local displacements that explain some of their unusual physical properties.

Temozolomide therapy seems to lead to mismatch repair deficiency and hypermutation in gliomas, but not to an increase in response to immunotherapy.

Trans-ancestry meta-analysis of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from 1,046,070 individuals identifies 264 associated loci, providing a resource of molecular targets for translational research of chronic kidney disease.

Ming-Rong Wang, Benjamin Berman and colleagues perform whole-exome sequencing and global methylation profiling on different tumor regions of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. They find evidence for intratumoral heterogeneity and identify late driver mutations targeting oncogenes and early driver mutations occurring in tumor-suppressor genes.

Spin liquids are states of matter that reside outside the regime where the Landau paradigm for classifying phases can be applied. This makes them interesting, but also hard to find, as no conventional order parameters exist. The authors demonstrate that topologically ordered spin-liquid phases can be identified by numerically evaluating a measure known as topological entanglement entropy.

Ancestral avian influenza A viruses are used to identify adaptive changes in viral polymerase and nucleoproteins that enable efficient replication and transmission in pigs.

How accurate are social scientists in predicting societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? Grossmann et al. report the findings of two forecasting tournaments. Social scientists’ forecasts were on average no more accurate than those of simple statistical models.

Polar skyrmions are topologically protected structures that can exist in (PbTiO₃)_n/(SrTiO₃)_n superlattices. Here, it is shown that they have negative permittivity at the surface, and that they can undergo a reversible phase transition with large dielectric tunability under an electric field.

A survey of sharks and rays on coral reefs within 66 marine protected areas across 36 countries showcases that the conservation benefits of full MPA protection to sharks almost double when accompanied by effective fisheries management.

The mechanism of enhanced superconducting transition temperature (T_c) at the FeSe/SrTiO₃ interface remains enigmatic. Here, Song and Yu et al. reveal the evidence of cooperation between intrinsic pairing interaction in FeSe and interfacial electron–phonon coupling to enhance the T_c at the FeSe/SrTiO₃ interface.

Upon ultrafast irradiation, a (PbTiO₃)/(SrTiO₃) superlattice transforms into a complex supercrystal that contains periodicities of up to 30 nm in size and is stable in ambient. Creation and destruction, by heating, of the supercrystal is reversible.

The CMS Collaboration reports the study of three simultaneous hard interactions between quarks and gluons in proton–proton collisions. This manifests through the concurrent production of three J/ψ mesons, which consist of a charm-quark–antiquark pair.

The role of Ce one Mn-based catalysts for the selective catalytic reduction of NOx at low temperature is an ongoing debate. Here the authors demonstrate that Ce has a structural promoting effect but impacts negatively on the intrinsic catalytic activity of Mn.