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The effective conservation of soil biodiversity and ecosystem services in the face of global-change threats requires improvements in national monitoring. We outline the Global Soil Biodiversity Observatory, an initiative that aims to develop standardized indicators and enhance national monitoring capacities to support evidence-based policymaking and facilitate global assessments.

Experiments performed in the CERN CLOUD chamber show that, under upper-tropospheric conditions, new atmospheric particle formation may be initiated by the reaction of hydroxyl radicals with isoprene emitted by rainforests.

Elezaby et al. show that cardiac troponin I interacts with mitochondrial ATP synthase to increase ATPase activity. Disrupting this interaction reduces cardiac damage following transient ischemia.

Beta II protein kinase C (βIIPKC) activation contributes to heart failure. Here the authors show, in a rat model of myocardial infarction, that heart failure outcome can be improved by selectively inhibiting the interaction between βIIPKC and its downstream mitochondrial target Mitofusin-1, and that this strategy is superior to global βIIPKC inhibition.

The recently discovered aptamer Beetroot is a homodimeric RNA that binds and activates DFAME, a conditional, red-shifted fluorophore derived from GFP. Here the authors determine the Beetroot-DFAME co-crystal structure, which is distinctively different from that of similar RNA aptamer Corn.

On the electrocardiogram, the PR interval reflects conduction from the atria to ventricles and also serves as risk indicator of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Here, the authors perform genome-wide meta-analyses for PR interval in multiple ancestries and identify 141 previously unreported genetic loci.

The chemical sector is both hard-to-abate and hard-to-defossilize. This study shows how limiting the availability of alternative carbon feedstocks impacts climate goals and efforts to phase out fossil fuels.

Multicriteria optimization identifies global priority areas for ecosystem restoration and estimates their benefits for biodiversity and climate, providing cost–benefit analyses that highlight the importance of optimizing spatial planning and incorporating several biomes in restoration strategies.

The spatial and frontal QRS-T angles are electrocardiographic (ECG) predictors for arrhythmia. This work used genetic analyses to identify associated loci and pathways, and explore their relationships with other ECG traits and cardiovascular disease.

Strontium isotope analysis can be applied to animal and plant tissues to help determine their provenance. Here, the authors generate a strontium isoscape of sub-Saharan Africa using data from 2266 environmental samples and demonstrate its efficacy by tracing the African roots of individuals from historic slavery contexts.

Most Amazon tree species are rare but a small proportion are common across the region. The authors show that different species are hyperdominant in different size classes and that hyperdominance is more phylogenetically restricted for larger canopy trees than for smaller understory ones.

Examination of archaeological pottery residues and modern genes suggest that environmental conditions, subsistence economics and pathogen exposure may explain selection for lactase persistence better than prehistoric consumption of milk.

Rezende et al. analyze the link between geomagnetic activity and myocardial infarction hospitalizations in a city of Sao Paulo State, Brazil during 1998-2005. They find that disturbance in geomagnetic conditions that are due to solar activity increase myocardial infarction cases, particularly for women.

Biodiversity is positively associated with carbon density in highly disturbed tropical forests, but this relationship breaks down in relatively undisturbed areas. Consequently, carbon conservation schemes can fail to protect the most ecologically valuable forests.

Using 13 functional traits we characterize the Amazonian trees and the communities they form. Amazonian tree communities are distributed along a fast-slow-spectrum. This results in clear differences in traits among these forests, as well as their biomass and biomass productivity.

Haue, Holm et al. use unsupervised clustering to subgroup a large set of ischemic heart disease patients from their pre-existing diseases, covering the entire multimorbidity spectrum. They identify subgroups that have different risk profiles and are characterized by different patterns when looking at patient blood tests and genetic profiles.

Genome-wide analyses identify 27 loci associated with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and provide insights into its genetic architecture in relation to other psychiatric disorders and cognitive traits.

The Amazon rainforest is dominated by relatively few tree species, yet the degree to which this hyperdominance influences carbon cycling remains unknown. Here, the authors analyse 530 forest plots and show that ∼1% of species are responsible for 50% of the aboveground carbon storage and productivity.

Frequent dispersal and short-lived local transmission clusters fuelled the 2013–2016 Ebola virus epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Quantifying forest degradation and biodiversity losses is necessary to inform conservation and restoration policies. Here the authors analyze a large dataset for the Atlantic Forest in South America to quantify losses in forest biomass and tree species richness, functional traits, and conservation value.

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most commonly used exam for the screening and evaluation of cardiovascular diseases. Here, the authors propose that the age predicted by artificial intelligence from the raw ECG tracing can be a measure of cardiovascular health and provide prognostic information.

Examining drivers of the latitudinal biodiversity gradient in a global database of local tree species richness, the authors show that co-limitation by multiple environmental and anthropogenic factors causes steeper increases in richness with latitude in tropical versus temperate and boreal zones.

The biological understanding of poor prognosis associated with lymph node metastasis in head and neck cancer (HNC) remains crucial. Here, a proteomic characterisation of 140 multisite samples from a 59-HNC patient cohort and machine learning reveals potential biomarkers and metastasis related signatures.

The synthesis of two-dimensional diamond is the ultimate goal of diamond thin-film technology. Here, the authors perform Raman spectroscopy of bilayer graphene under pressure, and obtain spectroscopic evidence of formation of diamondene, an atomically thin form of diamond.

It is unclear whether trait trade-offs and optimality principles observed at the individual level scale up to the ecosystem level. Here, the authors show that plant trait coordination principles also predict patterns between community-level traits and ecosystem-scale processes.

In this study, the authors demonstrated that agents targeting skeletal muscle metabolism by modulating β₂-adrenergic receptor-dependent signaling may prove beneficial as novel antidiabetic drugs.

The search for antivirals against SARS-CoV-2 continue due to the emergence of variants of concerns, able to escape the vaccinal humoral response. In this work, authors pre-clinically explore the potential of kinetin against SARS-CoV-2, which could be used alone or in combination with other antivirals.

The high global temperatures of the Eocene and subsequent habitat reconfigurations might have been critical for the rise and retention of the highly productive, high-turnover fish faunas that characterize modern coral reef ecosystems.

A single species of electric eel, Electrophorus electricus, has been described. Here, de Santana et al. show that there are three major lineages of Electrophorus distributed across Greater Amazonia and describe two new species, one with a much stronger electric discharge than was previously known.

Global observations from mangroves and saltmarshes unravel hidden carbon pathways. Inorganic carbon outwelling is revealed to dominate carbon budgets, impact coastal pH, and enhance the climate mitigation potential of blue carbon ecosystems.

The identification of candidate neural biomarkers of obsessive-compulsive disorder symptom intensity in ecologically valid environments.

New antimalarials are urgently needed. Here, the authors identify Open Source Malaria compound, OSMS-106, as a reaction hijacking inhibitor of the malaria parasite protein synthesis machinery, with potential use for treatment and prophylaxis.

Predicting species responses to climate change may be complicated by the influence of other factors. Here, the authors report that warming is linked to terrestrial and freshwater community shifts towards warm-adapted species overall, but body size, thermal niche breadth, species richness and baseline temperature modulate the trends.

In this study, Kreuzaler et al. perform zonal analysis to study metabolic heterogeneity in breast cancer and identify the metabolic dependency on pantothenic acid (vitamin B5) in areas of the tumor that show high expression levels of the oncogene MYC. Dietary restriction of vitamin B5 reverses several MYC-driven metabolic changes and hampers tumor progression.

Tree species turnover across Amazonian forests unveils sharp floristic transitional zones, that are linked with changes in soil fertility and climate.

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.

The role of automatic electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis in clinical practice is limited by the accuracy of existing models. In that context, the authors present a Deep Neural Network (DNN) that recognizes different abnormalities in ECG recordings which matches or outperform cardiology and emergency resident medical doctors.

Pumas are experiencing increased isolation as human persecution and habitat loss fragment the populations of this once widespread species. Here, the authors estimate the genomic consequences of this isolation by analyzing the genomes of ten pumas from across North and South America.

New results shed light on the molecular mechanisms of dexamethasone action, underlying its therapeutic benefit in patients with severe COVID-19.

Many countries introduced COVID certificates that were required to access public venues. Here, the authors analyse data from France, Germany, and Italy, and estimate that these policies led to increased vaccine uptake of 6-13 percentage points with subsequent beneficial impacts on health and economic outcomes.

Certain shorelines can be modeled with prediction accuracies comparable to satellite observations, according to benchmarking results using satellite-derived shoreline datasets for model calibration and evaluation.

Pathway analysis aids interpretation of large-scale gene expression data, but existing algorithms fall short of providing robust pathway identification. The method introduced here includes coexpression analysis and gene importance estimation to robustly identify relevant pathways and biomarkers for patient stratification.