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The underlying regulatory mechanisms of of human cortical diversity remains poorly understood. Here, authors profiled human brain cells to study how they use different gene programs across cortical regions, revealing molecular rules and specific transcription factors that drive functional specialization of neurons in the brain

Birdsong is simultaneously repetitive and highly diverse. Sierro et al. resolve this apparent paradox through experiments in blue tits showing that consistent repetition is a fitness indicator, while song diversity reduces habituation during singing displays.

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.

‘Conformist bias’, in which individuals learn a common behavioural variant more often than expected by chance, has not been demonstrated convincingly in non-human animals. This study analyses song recordings and models of cultural evolution to show conformist bias in swamp sparrow populations.

Efficiently imitating a complex motor sequence such as birdsong is a computationally intensive problem. Here the authors show that young zebra finches learn new songs using a non-optimal strategy that prioritizes efficient learning of syllable vocabulary over syllable sequence.

Surface-selective In³⁺ substitution in BiVO₄ suppresses hole polarons by weakening electron-phonon coupling. This strategy releases trapped carriers, significantly enhancing solar water splitting efficiency for sustainable fuel production.

The authors show that captive populations of zebra finches, which have been kept in isolation for up to 100 generations, have diverged in song dialect. When individuals singing different dialects are mixed, mating is assortative for song dialect.

Many vascular‑disease risk loci lack defined causal genes. Here, the authors integrate functional genomics and CRISPR screens to identify genes influencing smooth muscle cell behaviour, validating roles for FES, BCAR1, CARF and SMARCA4, with Fes loss promoting atherosclerosis and hypertension.

Johnson et al. link ARIA, a complication of anti-amyloid therapy, to clonal expansion of cytotoxic CD8 + T cells with glycolytic reprogramming and vascular trafficking potential, with implications for biomarker development and risk mitigation.

A deep neural network with ‘knockout training’ is used to model sensorimotor transformations and neural perturbations of male Drosophila melanogaster during visually guided social behaviour and provides predictions and insights into relationships between stimuli, neurons and behaviour.

Mimic birds share brain molecules.

Cumulative cultural evolution is ubiquitous in humans, but is rarely observed in non-human animals. Here, Williams et al. report elaboration of songs over several decades in Savannah sparrows, consistent with cumulative cultural evolution.

Vocal communication is essential for information transmission in many species, such as that related to mating opportunities or predator presence. Recent research revealing how phenotypic changes brought about by a changing climate may influence vocal communication raises some serious concerns for conservation management.

A M5 earthquake triggered the 2018 Sierra Negra eruption after 10 hours. Subsequent microseismicity revealed a cryptic fluid phase facilitated magma intrusion, highlighting that cascading processes are potentially essential for eruption initiations.

Applications of optical laser-based techniques are limited by the long wavelengths of the lasers. Now, observations of phonons and thermal transport at nanometre length scales are reported with an all-hard X-ray transient-grating spectroscopy technique.

The APOE-ε4 allele is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, but it is not deterministic. Here, the authors show that common genetic variation changes how APOE-ε4 influences cognition.

A certain class of neurons in the swamp sparrow forebrain displays a precise auditory–vocal correspondence, and it is shown that these neurons respond in a temporally precise fashion to auditory presentation of certain note sequences in this songbird's repertoire and to similar note sequences in other birds' songs.

Benchmarking greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater treatment plants is an essential step in developing mitigation strategies. This is now achieved for the USA by modelling over 15,000 facilities using Monte Carlo simulations to obtain a national baseline.

Three electron microscopy datasets are combined to provide a complete connectomic description of the neural circuitry that makes up the neck connective in Drosophila, including the descending neurons, ascending neurons and sensory ascending neurons.

Metastatic cancer cells rely on metabolic flexibility to survive. Here, the authors show that metastatic breast cancer cells use lactate for mitochondrial oxidation via the CD147/MCT1/LDHB complex to sustain stemness and promote metastasis.

Application of multiancestry and ensemble-based approaches yields improved polygenic risk prediction models for breast cancer and its subtypes among women of African ancestry.

How do neural circuits evolve to encode new social behaviors? Here we show that in Drosophila santomea, females signal their sexual receptivity by spreading wings in response to male songs, and this recently originated social behavior evolved through the actualization of a pre-existing latent circuit.

The challenge of sensory substitution as a therapeutic approach is to design systems that are well accepted by subjects. Here, in deaf songbirds, the authors substitute hearing with vision, suggesting substitution devices could provide sensory feedback for the key actions that are deprived.

By combining satellite observations with ground-based data and expert validation, this analysis demonstrates considerable misestimation of grassland extent and thereby carbon stock estimates in previous global assessments based on remote sensing.

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.

Living in noisy colonies, songbird vocal learning requires individuals to differentiate self-generated vocalizations from other sound sources to accurately match the learned song template. However, neurons responding to vocal output have not been identified. This study identifies neurons in the auditory forebrain of zebra finch that specifically responded to either song or playback perturbations, suggesting the existence of a computational error-checking function in the forebrain auditory areas.

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrates evidence of spin correlations in \(\Lambda \bar{\Lambda }\) hyperon pairs inherited from virtual spin-correlated strange quark–antiquark pairs during QCD confinement.

This study applies generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) and advanced transcriptome wide association study (TWAS) methods to improve the discovery of colorectal cancer risk transcription factors and genes, including potential druggable targets.

Metal-cation-free CO₂ electroreduction in strong acid minimizes reactant loss and salt precipitation yet struggles with CO₂ activation and hydrogen evolution competition. Here, the authors report bioinspired sharp gold triangles with a proton-blocking layer that polarize CO₂ and suppress hydrogen evolution.

Glitches in video calls can have a negative effect on the judgement of the people involved and correspond to worse outcomes in major areas of life such as job interviews and parole hearings.

ABC toxins are bacterial insecticides with biotechnological potential. Here, Low et al. have deciphered soluble and membrane-inserted structures of YenTc that highlight structural and mechanistic diversity in the ABC toxin family and provide insights into their evolution.

A single-cell epigenomic atlas of human immune cells highlights cell-type-specific features associated with genetic or environmental exposures.

NiPS₃ is a van der Waals antiferromagnetic semiconductor where the exciton formation is strongly influenced by the magnetic ordering. Previous studies have been limited to magneto-optical approaches, but here, Lebedev, Gish and coauthors succeed in making field effect transistors that operate below the Néel temperature and observe an ultranarrow electroluminescence with a high degree of linear polarization.