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Across 21 societies, people alter their speech and song when interacting with infants. These infant-directed vocalizations are recognized by listeners. This suggests that forms of human vocalizations may be shaped by their functions.

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.

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.

Thermal lepton pairs are ideal probes for the temperature of quark-gluon plasma. Here, the STAR Collaboration uses thermal electron-positron pair production to measure quark-gluon plasma average temperature at different stages of the evolution.

By examining the organization of bird song and human speech, the authors show that the two types of communication signals have similar sequential structures, following both hierarchical and Markovian organization.

Efficient electro-optic conversion is central to photonic computing, and thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) offers this capability. Here, the authors demonstrate computing circuits on the TFLN platform, enabling the next generation of photonic computing systems featuring both high-speed and low-power.

Bayesian models explain how context biases perceptual behavior toward expected categories, but sensory neurons do not reflect this bias. Instead, expectation sharpens sensory acuity, independent of downstream decision making.

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.

Consistent chemical treatment of wood is challenging due to its complex structure. Here, the authors present a self-flowing process inspired by natural liquid transport in trees that achieves high uniformity and effective wood delignification compared to conventional methods.

Using the well-established foundry-based lithium niobate nanophotonics platform, a general electro-optic digital-to-analogue link with ultrahigh bandwidth (>150 Gb s⁻¹) and ultralow power consumption (0.058 pJ b⁻¹) is demonstrated, providing a direct, energy-efficient, high-speed and scalable solution for interfacing digital electronics and photonics.

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.

The LHCb experiment at CERN has observed significant asymmetries between the decay rates of the beauty baryon and its CP-conjugated antibaryon, thus demonstrating CP violation in baryon decays.

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.

There’s an emerging body of evidence to show how biological sex impacts cancer incidence, treatment and underlying biology. Here, using a large pan-cancer dataset, the authors further highlight how sex differences shape the cancer genome.

The authors present SVclone, a computational method for inferring the cancer cell fraction of structural variants from whole-genome sequencing data.

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.

Multi-omics datasets pose major challenges to data interpretation and hypothesis generation owing to their high-dimensional molecular profiles. Here, the authors develop ActivePathways method, which uses data fusion techniques for integrative pathway analysis of multi-omics data and candidate gene discovery.

A method for design of polymer membranes uses strategically placed pendant groups with specific hydrophobicity to precisely tailor hydrated pore size, with applications in ion-conducting membranes for redox flow batteries.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

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.

Analyses of 2,658 whole genomes across 38 types of cancer identify the contribution of non-coding point mutations and structural variants to driving cancer.

Bound states in continuum have attracted attention in various platforms, and recently condensation of bound states in continuum polariton modes was demonstrated at low temperatures. Here the authors report the observation of such a state in a periodic air-hole perovskite-based photonic crystal at room temperature.

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.

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.

The microporous polymer membranes with the introduction of hydrophilic functional groups achieve high selectivity for monovalent/divalent ion separation in electrodialysis processes, providing an alternative approach to lithium extraction with easy scale-up.

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias identifies new loci and enables generation of a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

The death of massive stars has traditionally been discovered by explosive events in the gamma-ray band. Liu et al. show that the sensitive wide-field monitor on board Einstein Probe can reveal a weak soft-X-ray signal much earlier than gamma rays.

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.

The coexistence of topological and superconducting states in a single layer of FeSe on a SrTiO₃ substrate is reported.

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.

Large genome-wide meta-analysis of clinically diagnosed late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD) from 94,437 individuals identifies new LOAD risk loci and implicates Aβ formation, tau protein binding, immune response and lipid metabolism.

Understanding magnetic materials at the nanoscale is important for the development of novel applications, but has been hampered by a lack of suitable experimental techniques. Here, the use of transmitted electrons permits the determination of atomic site-specific magnetic information.

Rapid proton capture nucleosynthesis stalls at waiting-point nuclides, including ⁶⁴Ge. Precision mass measurements in the vicinity of this nuclide influence state-of-the-art calculations of X-ray bursts from accreting neutron stars.

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.

Meta-analysis of 36,760 cases and 375,188 controls identifies 54 loci associated with susceptibility to cutaneous melanoma. Further analysis combining nevus count and hair color GWAS results provide insights into the genetic architecture of melanoma.

An analysis of 2,954 genomes from 38 cancer subtypes identified 19,166 retrotransposition events in 35% of samples. Aberrant LINE-1 retrotranspositions can lead to the deletion of tumor-suppressor genes as well as the amplification of oncogenes.

Whole-genome sequencing data for 2,778 cancer samples from 2,658 unique donors across 38 cancer types is used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer, revealing that driver mutations can precede diagnosis by several years to decades.

Some many-body problems are challenging to solve in real space, but have a convenient Fock-space representation. A superconducting qubit experiment now demonstrates the benefits of this approach for the study of quantum dynamics and criticality.

Multiple complementary optical signatures confirm the persistence of ferroelectricity and inversion-symmetry-breaking magnetic order down to monolayer NiI₂, introducing the physics of type-II multiferroics into the area of van der Waals materials.

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.

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.

Methodological advances have increased our understanding of chromatin structure through chromosome conformation capture techniques and high resolution imaging, but integration of these datasets is challenging. Here the authors propose GEM-FISH, a method for reconstructing the 3D models of chromosomes through systematically integrating both Hi-C and FISH data with the prior biophysical knowledge of a polymer model.