Search

Military personnel face increased exposure to pandemic-related stressors, yet their mental health impacts remain underexplored. Here, the authors analyze data from the STARRS Longitudinal Study, revealing significant increases in mental health issues among soldiers during COVID-19, particularly among vulnerable groups, underscoring the need for targeted support during pandemics.

Heller et al. showed dense longitudinal imaging in four females, including one with endometriosis and one using oral contraceptives, and the finding that different hormonal milieus influence widespread brain volume changes linked to progesterone or estradiol.

Brain age gaps (BAGs) highlight deviations from healthy brain aging, yet their biophysical underpinnings in aging and dementia are not well understood. Here, the authors use EEG connectivity and generative modeling across diverse populations to reveal that BAGs are influenced by geography, income, sex and education, with implications for understanding accelerated aging and dementia.

Delphi-2M forecasts a person’s future health, covering more than 1,000 diseases, provides insights into co-morbidity dynamics and generates synthetic data for the training of AI models that have never seen actual data.

Climate change is impacting mountain regions and the agricultural livelihood of residents, and will continue to do so. In this study, the authors survey farmers in ten African mountain regions to understand their perceptions of climate change impacts and identify adaptation opportunities and constraints.

While biodiversity levels have been studied in many different landscapes, villages have been relatively unexplored in comparison. This study examines biodiversity in Eastern European villages across landscape complexity and proximity to cities in the context of social and economic well-being.

“Dissolved oxygen (DO) sustains river ecosystems, but the effects of hydrological extremes remain poorly understood. Here it is shown that sudden floods cause abrupt declines in DO, suggesting that increased future flooding may lead to the degradation of aquatic ecosystems.

Here, the authors created a virtual reality task for monkeys and mice to explore if internal states like attention are similar across species. Their facial expressions during the task were similar, suggesting facial expressions reflect shared internal states.

In a comprehensive dataset from 3,652 patients across 20 centers in eight countries, an ultrasound-based AI model shows robust performance across centers, ultrasound systems, 58 histological diagnoses and patient age groups and reduced referral to experts by 63% in a retrospective triage simulation.

Systematic analysis from the Global Burden of Disease study reported that, despite global improvements from 1990 to 2021, dietary iron deficiency-associated disease burden remains high in women, children and residents in low socio-demographic index countries.

Literature produced inconsistent findings regarding the links between extreme weather events and climate policy support across regions, populations and events. This global study offers a holistic assessment of these relationships and highlights the role of subjective attribution.

The Data Provenance Initiative audits over 1,800 text artificial intelligence (AI) datasets, analysing trends, permissions of use and global representation. It exposes frequent errors on several major data hosting sites and offers tools for transparent and informed use of AI training data.

Here, the authors analyse spiking neural networks with adaptive leaky integrate-and-fire neurons and demonstrate a discretization method that improves stability and performance. The models excel in spatio-temporal tasks like speech recognition and ECG classification without normalization techniques.

Analysis of data on six stable crops, capturing two-thirds of global crop calories, allows estimation of agricultural impacts and the potential of global producer adaptations to reduce output losses owing to climate change.

Global geospatial datasets and a regression discontinuity design enable the country-level effects, such as agricultural policies, on crop yields and nitrogen pollution to be quantified. The influences of countries were much larger on nitrogen pollution than on crop yields.

Artificial molecular systems can show complex kinetics of reproduction, however their integration into larger ensembles remains a challenge towards evolving higher order functionality. Here authors use show that self-reproducing lipids can initiate and accelerate octanol droplet movement and that reciprocally chemotactic movement of these droplets increases the rate of lipid reproduction substantially.

Large language models (LLMs) are already transforming the study of individual cognition, but their application to studying collective cognition has been underexplored. We lay out how LLMs may be able to address the complexity that has hindered the study of collectives and raise possible risks that warrant new methods.

Trees come in all shapes and size, but what drives this incredible variation in tree form remains poorly understood. Using a global dataset, the authors show that a combination of climate, competition, disturbance and evolutionary history shape the crown architecture of the world’s trees and thereby constrain the 3D structure of woody ecosystems.

Excitons can exhibit topologically non-trivial states. Here, the authors theoretically demonstrate that excitons can exhibit controllable topology and localization properties due to their geometry in organic polymers.

The authors introduce a machine-learning framework that predicts how materials respond to electric fields with quantum-level accuracy, capturing vibrational, dielectric, and ferroelectric behaviors up to the million-atom scale.

Surface wrinkling reduces the performance of mixed-halide perovskite solar cells. Here, the authors identify that sequential nucleation of bromide-rich and iodide-rich domains results in compositional heterogeneity and subsequent wrinkling.

The Trezona Formation of South Australia pre-dates the 635-million-year-old Marinoan glaciation. Fossils found at this location are up to several millimetres in size, and share morphological characteristics with sponge-grade animals.

The next step after sequencing a genome is to figure out how the cell actually uses it as an instruction manual. A large international consortium has examined 1% of the genome for what part is transcribed, where proteins are bound, what the chromatin structure looks like, and how the sequence compares to that of other organisms.

MARBLE uses geometric deep learning to map dynamics such as neural activity into a latent representation, which can then be used to decode the neural activity or compare it across systems.

Waste production is a basic output of human society, and its scale and logistics challenge cities and our Earth system. This study identifies universal patterns by which wastewater, municipal solid waste, and greenhouse gas waste scale across urban systems worldwide.

A consensus cell type atlas for the fly brain provides both an intellectual framework and open-source toolchains for brain-scale comparative connectomics.

Tin perovskites have emerged as promising alternatives to toxic lead perovskite in next-generation photovoltaics, but the poor environmental stability remains an obstacle for the application. Here, the authors study the degradation mechanism of tin perovskite films, and identify a cyclic degradation mechanism involving tin (IV) iodide.

An initial draft of the human pangenome is presented and made publicly available by the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium; the draft contains 94 de novo haplotype assemblies from 47 ancestrally diverse individuals.

The movement of people into societies that offer a better way of life is a more powerful driver of cultural evolution than conflict and conquest, say Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd.

As an alternative to monetary estimates, this study expresses the costs of climate change in terms of numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’, which reflects the historically highly conserved distribution of human population density relative to mean annual temperature.

Using global data, econometrics and climate science to estimate the damages induced by the emission of one ton of carbon dioxide, climate change is projected to increase electricity spending but reduce overall end-use energy expenditure.

This Perspective presents recent insights into vimentin filament structure and function and discusses emerging findings that point to a role in tumour invasion in mesenchymal cells analogous to embryonic development and wound healing.

Equivariant neural networks are state-of-the-art for machine learning-driven molecular dynamics (MD) simulations but have high computational cost. Here, the authors develop a Euclidean transformer that balances accuracy, stability, and speed, enabling stable long-timescale simulations of complex molecules

The set of causal relations that can connect two systems is much richer in the quantum world. Here the authors show that it is possible to have a coherent mixture of a cause-effect and a common-cause mechanism between two systems, realizing this in a quantum optics experiment.