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Oxytocin promotes social behaviors, but its cortical targets remain unclear. Here, authors show that oxytocin activates local interneurons in the rat prefrontal cortex, enhancing sociability through top-down control of the basolateral amygdala.

A 3D soft electronic mesh allows high-resolution electrical recording and stimulation across the full surface of neural organoids, enabling long-term studies, drug testing and optogenetic control without compromising their viability owing to its porous design.

Achieving high resolution with optical neural interfaces is challenging. Here, the authors developed and chronically implanted 100-pixel microLED arrays on the surface of the mouse auditory cortex for optogenetic behavioural experiements.

Most active particles studied to date lack the ability to undergo controlled shape transformations and control over their propulsion in response to environmental stimuli. Here, the authors present a class of active particles made from stimuli-responsive materials that exhibit fully reversible shape-dependent propulsion.

Multi-layer film packaging revolutionized food preservation by combining diverse material layers to optimize barrier properties, mechanical strength, and shelf-life but they pose significant recycling challenges due to their structural complexity. This perspective examines key structure-property relationships governing barrier performance and highlights innovations in material design.

Optical neural network processors offering benefits in bandwidth and energy consumption but problems in scaling and parallelism. The author presenting a novel optical tensor processor capable of optically performing large-scale, high-speed matrix-matrix multiplication in a single step.

Short-lived halogens have a substantial indirect cooling effect on climate and this cooling effect has increased since pre-industrial times owing to anthropogenic amplification of natural halogen emissions.

Polymer thin films that emit and absorb circularly polarised light are promising in achieving important technological advances, but the origin of the large chiroptical effects in such films has remained elusive. Here the authors demonstrate that in non-aligned polymer thin films, large chiroptical effects are caused by magneto-electric coupling, not structural chirality as previously assumed.

From 2014–2017, marine heatwaves caused global mass coral bleaching, where the corals lose their symbiotic algae. The authors find, this event exceeded the severity of all prior global bleaching events in recorded history, with approximately half the world’s reefs bleaching and 15% experiencing substantial mortality.

The contribution of ether lipid species in cancer cell fate has not been fully understood yet. Here the authors show that malignant cancer cells employ ether lipids to modulate membrane biophysical properties, enhancing iron endocytosis and ferroptosis susceptibility.

A spatial and single-cell transcriptomics study across multiple mammalian species identifies epidermal BMP signalling as a functional requirement for rete ridge formation, providing insight into mechanisms underlying hair density loss and wound healing.

The deep learning model STARLING can generate accurate ensembles of intrinsically disordered regions of proteins using only protein sequence as input.

Polyamides (PAs) or nylons are types of plastics with wide applications, but due to their accumulation in the environment, strategies for their deconstruction are of interest. Here, the authors screen 40 potential nylon-hydrolyzing enzymes (nylonases) using a mass spectrometry-based approach and identify a thermostabilized N-terminal nucleophile hydrolase as the most promising for further development, as well as crucial targets for progressing PA6 enzymatic depolymerization.

This study shows that long-term climate change systematically alters small-scale wind variability and its vertical velocity, influencing cloud microphysics and the Earth’s radiative balance.

Juno radio occultations precisely redefine Jupiter’s shape, measuring a polar diameter of 66,842 km and an equatorial diameter of 71,488 km, both smaller than long-used values, bringing models of the planet’s interior into better agreement with observations.

Surface controls nanocrystal growth, but atomic-scale hard-soft interfaces are hard to measure. Here, the authors develop electron microscopy methods to reveal the position of metal adatoms and surfactant counterions on gold nanocuboid surfaces.

Guided by density functional theory, a commercially viable refractory alloy is developed, which exhibits excellent room-temperature ductility and strength, and high strength at elevated temperatures.

Reliability remains challenging for organic light-emitting diodes used in solid-state lighting. Here, the authors reduce the current density needed for a given brightness by fabricating devices on a high aspect ratio substrate with sub-mm texture, resulting in a 2.7x increase in operating lifetime.

Heparan sulfate proteoglycans facilitate the assembly of clusters of glycoRNAs and cell surface RNA-binding proteins, which negatively modulate VEGF-A signalling and angiogenesis.

High-pressure measurements of the electrical conductivity of (Mg,Fe)O, used as an analogue for basal magma ocean material, indicate that the conductivity is high enough to produce a dynamo much stronger than a core-driven dynamo for super-Earths larger than 3–6 Earth masses.

This study introduces P3T-Net, a pseudo-3D deep learning model that enables accurate and efficient cross-domain transfer of large 3D material images, improving image quality and ensuring image consistency across diverse imaging conditions.

An Earth system model estimates that natural halogens, of marine biotic and abiotic origin, remove about 13% of present-day global tropospheric O₃. Projections suggest this ratio is stable through 2100, with high spatial heterogeneity, despite increasing natural halogens.

The identification of cellular targets for natural products that potently inhibit the growth of cancer cell lines implicates oxysterol-binding proteins in the growth of cancer cells. These natural products, termed ORPphilins, also affect sphingomyelin biosynthesis.

Here, the authors report the characterization of stable few-layer PdSe₂ transistors encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride, showing field effect mobilities up to 700 cm²/Vs at room temperature and signatures of an 8-fold spin-valley degeneracy of the magnetotransport quantum oscillations at cryogenic temperatures.

FACED 2.0 builds on and expands the capabilities of the free-space angular-chirp-enhanced delay microscopy approach. Its high speed, large field of view and volumetric coverage enable two-photon voltage imaging of hundreds of neurons or calcium imaging of thousands of neurons in the mouse or zebrafish brain.

Inherited mitochondrial DNA mutations can result in diverse clinical phenotypes. Here, the authors characterise a heteroplasmic tRNA^Ala mutation (m.5019A>G) in mice and demonstrate that macrophages carrying this mutation display altered function and metabolism in vitro, along with increased type I IFN release following LPS challenge in vivo.

Nanomagnets are very promising structures for magnetic data storage. However, it is found that during exposure to ambient oxygen for processing, a nanomagnet develops a sidewall oxide layer that is detrimental for its magnetic properties. The problem can be solved by deposition of a metal layer (aluminium) that reduces and almost eliminates the problem.

A flexible micro-electrocorticography brain–computer interface that integrates a 256 × 256 array of electrodes, signal processing, data telemetry and wireless powering on a single complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor substrate can provide stable, chronic in vivo recordings.

Multielectron molecular CO₂ reduction in acid is challenged by weak CO binding and competing hydrogen evolution. Here a methanol Faradaic efficiency of 62% is achieved in acid by tuning the microenvironment with cationic, hydrophobic and aerophilic layers.

Antimicrobial resistance poses a significant global health threat, necessitating swift and precise diagnostic solutions. Here, the authors introduce a culture-free diagnostic platform integrating microfluidic cell enrichment, single-cell Raman spectroscopy, and deep learning, that identifies bacterial and fungal infections directly from clinical samples within 20 minutes.

Energy demand and intensive computation limit the use of machine learning on-device for wearables. Here, the authors deploy edge AI in a wearable form factor to provide clinical-grade gait-based frailty assessment over weeks with no interaction required from the wearer at any point.

Samples returned from asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission contain N-rich organics with prebiotic implications. This material probably formed in the earliest stages of the asteroid’s history possibly even before its water ice melted.

Fischer carbenes are typically synthesized by addition of pyrophoric reagents to toxic metal carbonyls. Now access to α-siloxycarbenes from thioesters has been reported via reductive silylation of cobalt acyls, providing a platform to harness carbene reactivity from carboxylates via metal acyls and allowing several new reactions occur, including heterodimerization to acyloin-type products.

The electrons that contribute to the Mott insulator state in single-layer 1T-TaSe2 are shown to also have a rich variation in their orbital occupation. As more layers are added, both the insulating state and orbital texture weaken.

Li, Cui, Yang, Lu, Jiang, Zhang and colleagues identify a lactate transport mechanism from tumour-associated macrophages that regulates DNA repair and immune cell infiltration, which could be targeted to enhance immunotherapy efficacy in glioblastoma models.

Nano et al. introduce a pipeline to generate meta-atlases of the human brain from existing single-cell datasets and extract gene modules linked to cell fate specification. Perturbing these programs in human cortical chimeroids validated their roles in cell type specification.

A synthetic route to GB18, an alkaloid from the bark of hallucinogenic Galbulimima sp., is developed, enabling its identification as an antagonist of κ- and μ-opioid receptors.

Iron–sulfur minerals play critical roles in regulating nitrogen cycling under anoxic conditions. This study shows that pyrrhotite with abundant iron vacancies promotes electron transfer and microbial nitrate reduction to dinitrogen.

Spectroscopic measurements confirm that when water is adsorbed on drops of an alkali alloy at low pressure a gold-coloured metallic layer forms as electrons rapidly move from the drop into the water.

Analysis of a deeply phenotyped, longitudinal cohort of 249 participants elucidates the network of concurrent molecular and macroscopic patterns related to insurgence and course of ME/CFS.

Atmospheric reanalyses combined with ocean observations and model simulations show that the extreme 2023 North Atlantic heatwave was primarily driven by anomalously weak winds leading to strongly shoaling mixed layers, with a smaller contribution from clearer skies.

Genomic analyses applied to 14 childhood- and adult-onset psychiatric disorders identifies five underlying genomic factors that explain the majority of the genetic variance of the individual disorders.

The dwarf planet Ceres is thought to have an ice-rich layer in its shallow subsurface. The morphologies of craters, however, suggest little relaxation by viscous flow has occurred and instead indicate a subsurface that is less than 40% ice.

This study reports a dense, late summer phytoplankton bloom in the Southern Ocean that accumulated unusually high levels of organic matter and supported feeding hot spots for birds and whales. The authors show that this recurring open ocean bloom is driven by anomalies in easterly winds that push sea ice southwards and favour the upwelling of deep waters enriched in hydrothermal iron.

High-density multimodal soft bioelectronic fibres provide a platform for minimally invasive implantable electronics, where diverse sensing and stimulation functionalities can be effectively integrated.