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It is unclear whether the harsh abiotic conditions of drylands hinder biological invasions. This global analysis shows that drylands are vulnerable to non-native plants and are likely to become more so as native plant diversity declines and grazing pressure intensifies.

Using 63 globally distributed grassland and shrubland sites from the International Drought Experiment, this study identified plant traits linked to drought resistance after 1 year of extreme drought across growth forms, lifespans and climate.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

How landscapes are arranged affects soil pathogenic fungi worldwide. The authors reveal the global pattern and pronounced scale-dependency of landscape complexity and land-cover quantity on soil pathogenic fungal diversity.

The CMS Collaboration reports the measurement of the spin, parity, and charge conjugation properties of all-charm tetraquarks, exotic fleeting particles formed in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

The early days of genomics were marked by concerns that wide-ranging gene patents would restrict research and medical discovery. So far, proteomics hasn't toiled under the same cloud. But don't get complacent, warns David Cyranoski.

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.

RNA viruses, such as Zika and Dengue, activate the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) signaling to restrict the antiviral response. Here, the authors report that coronaviruses also activate AHR signaling, potentially allowing them to escape the immune response, and show that AHR antagonism limits SARS-CoV-2 replication in vitro, suggesting that AHR could be targeted for antiviral therapy.

A comparison of alpha diversity (number of plant species) and dark diversity (species that are currently absent from a site despite being ecologically suitable) demonstrates the negative effects of regional-scale anthropogenic activity on plant diversity.

Species’ traits and environmental conditions determine the abundance of tree species across the globe. Here, the authors find that dominant tree species are taller and have softer wood compared to rare species and that these trait differences are more strongly associated with temperature than water availability.

Frontal ring-opening metathesis polymerization (FROMP) is a promising energy-efficient approach to fabricate polymeric materials but the characteristic properties of the front are currently controlled primarily by varying the resin composition or the environmental conditions. Here, the authors present an approach to control FROMP of dicyclopentadiene using photochemical methods.

Aarrestad et al. show that, in contrast to psychedelics, the nonhallucinogenic psychoplastogen tabernanthalog promotes neuroplasticity through 5-HT_2AR activation without immediately increasing extracellular glutamate levels or immediate early gene expression.

Engineered T cells with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) are emerging as an effective cancer therapy. Here the authors show that CAR T cells recognizing self-MHC can be ‘tuned’ ex vivo via CAR downregulation and CAR T cell death to generate a CAR T pool specifically targeting tumor cells with high MHC expression.

In-mold electronics often rely on vacuum forming processes, which are traditionally limited to thermoplastics. Here, the authors introduce a vacuum forming method for thermoset materials using frontal polymerization.

By combining modelling and simulated data with empirical data from 76 grassland sites across 6 continents, the authors show that the relative abundance of dominant species predicts species richness, while their absolute abundance predicts community biomass.

A common but untested expectation is that nutrient enrichment causes biotic homogenization. However, a globally standardized nutrient addition experiment in grasslands shows proportionally similar species loss across scales and no biotic homogenization after up to 14 years of treatment.

Analysis of 20 chemical and morphological plant traits at diverse sites across 6 continents shows that the transition from semi-arid to arid zones is associated with an unexpected 88% increase in trait diversity.

Grasslands tend to be limited by both nutrient and water availability. Here the authors use standardized field experiments to show that the effects of nutrient addition on grassland biomass may cancel out the negative impact of drought, but the outcome depends on aridity and other local conditions.

Ramses Gallegos-Monterrosa, Mathilde Nordgaard Christensen, and colleagues investigate how a single or double deletion of the rap-phr genes, parts of peptide-based quorum sensing systems, impacts the sporulation and biofilm formation of B. subtilis under four different conditions and a multitude of strains. Using strain-specific barcoding and complete genome sequencing, the authors show that competitive selection is driven by acquired mutations, and that selected strains demonstrate increased spore fitness relative to their ancestors and wild types.

Ultra-high-energy gamma-ray emission from the microquasar V4641 Sagittarii is reported, suggesting that large-scale jets from microquasars could be more common than previously thought and also could be a notable source of galactic cosmic rays.

Protection afforded by inorganic minerals is assumed to make mineral-associated organic carbon less susceptible to loss under climate change than particulate organic carbon. However, a global study of soil organic carbon from drylands suggests that this is not the case.

Shukla and colleagues study the genomic and transcriptomic data of exceptional responders to immunotherapy in renal cell carcinoma and find that such responses could be related to tertiary lymphoid structures, clonal neoantigen load and altered metabolism.

Wood density is an important plant trait. Data from 1.1 million forest inventory plots and 10,703 tree species show a latitudinal gradient in wood density, with temperature and soil moisture explaining variation at the global scale and disturbance also having a role at the local level.

Steele et al. use single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics to provide an atlas of adult human skin fibroblasts in healthy and diseased human skin.

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.

Alternative stable states in forests have implications for the biosphere. Here, the authors combine forest biodiversity observations and simulations revealing that leaf types across temperate regions of the NH follow a bimodal distribution suggesting signatures of alternative forest states.

The modification of peptides and proteins for application in drug discovery and chemical biology is currently a rapidly growing field of research. Here, the authors report a photocatalytic diselenide contraction method for the dimerization and site-specific functionalisation of peptides and protein.

Rhs proteins delivered by the Type VI secretion system play a key role in competition between rival bacteria. Here, the authors show that Rhs proteins with exchangeable NAD(P)⁺ glycohydrolase toxin domains and ‘orphan’ immunity proteins are flexible agents of intraspecies competition in Serratia.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.

A deep learning system able to identify the most common skin conditions may help clinicians in making more accurate diagnoses in routine clinical practice

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.

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.

Van Heijst and colleagues show that CD4⁺ T cells are programmed to downregulate TCR expression at the peak of clonal expansion in proportion to the strength of initial antigen recognition.

A very high-energy muon observed by the KM3NeT experiment in the Mediterranean Sea is evidence for the interaction of an exceptionally high-energy neutrino of cosmic origin.  

Damian Smedley and colleagues report the phenotypic characterization of the first 3,328 genes by the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium. They develop new mouse models based on genes known to be associated with human mendelian diseases and identify potential disease-associated genes with little or no previous functional annotation.

The authors analyse tree responses to an extreme heat and drought event across South America to understand long-term climate resistance. While no more sensitive to this than previous lesser events, forests in drier climates showed the greatest impacts and thus vulnerability to climate extremes.

Soil carbon content is positively related with plant diversity in global grasslands, and this relationship is particularly strong in warm and arid climates. Plant diversity is related to soil carbon via the quality of organic matter.

The insurance hypothesis posits that more diverse communities are more stable through time. Here, the authors show that plant biodiversity reduces the spatial variability of productivity in grassland communities, demonstrating that the insurance hypothesis applies also across space.

Identification and characterization, using a comprehensive embryonic phenotyping pipeline, of 410 lethal alleles during the generation of the first 1,751 of 5,000 unique gene knockouts produced by the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium.

How accurate are social scientists in predicting societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? Grossmann et al. report the findings of two forecasting tournaments. Social scientists’ forecasts were on average no more accurate than those of simple statistical models.

Seed banks are reservoirs of plant diversity. This study shows that nutrient addition decreases diversity of grassland seed banks, increases their similarity to aboveground communities and interacts with aboveground herbivory to affect their abundance.

Remotely sensed NDVI data and contemporary field data from 84 grasslands on 6 continents show increasing divergence in aboveground plant biomass between sites in different bioclimatic regions.