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Polygenic scores for body mass index and obesity constructed using data from 5 million people with different ancestries were associated with distinct weight gain trajectories from early childhood to adulthood.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

The 3CL protease of SARS-CoV-2 is inhibited by PF-00835231 in vitro. Here, the authors show that the prodrug PF-07304814 has broad spectrum activity, inhibiting SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 in mice and its ADME and safety profile support clinical development.

Combination of epidemiology, preclinical models and ultradeep DNA profiling of clinical cohorts unpicks the inflammatory mechanism by which air pollution promotes lung cancer

Changes in the leaf area index alter the distribution of heat and moisture. The change in energy partitioning related to leaf area, increasing latent and decreasing sensible fluxes over the observational period 1982–2016, is moderated by plant functional type and background climate.

Motor preparation processes guide movement. Here, by recording neural activity in monkeys reaching toward targets that can change location, the authors provide evidence that changing a prepared movement midway through completion reengages motor preparation.

In rhesus monkeys, learning of a motor task is accompanied by uniform changes in preparatory activity in motor cortex that are orthogonal to the force-predictive neural state subspace.

The authors use high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to determine the microscopic structure of three-dimensional charge order in AV₃Sb₅ (A = K, Rb, Cs) and its interplay with superconductivity.

The authors measured the variability of neuronal responses across a large number of datasets and cortical areas. They found that variability decreased in response to all stimuli tested, whether the animal was awake, behaving or anesthetized, suggesting that the stabilization of cortex in response to an input is a general cortical property.

LFADS, a deep learning method for analyzing neural population activity, can extract neural dynamics from single-trial recordings, stitch separate datasets into a single model, and infer perturbations, for example, from behavioral choices to these dynamics.

Spectroscopic measurements show how the features of the band structure related to the kagome lattice in CsV₃Sb₅ contribute to the observed strongly correlated phases.

Surface two-photon imaging of the brain cannot access somatic calcium signals of neurons from deep layers of the macaque cortex. Here, the authors present an implant and imaging system for chronic motion-stabilized two-photon imaging of dendritic calcium signals to drive an optical brain-computer interface in macaques.

A new type of brain–machine interface device enables recording of neural activity in the monkey cortex and extraction of intended target signals, leaving the monkey able to place a cursor on a location, just by thinking about it.

Fibrin deposition occurs after the blood–brain barrier is breached. Akassoglou and colleagues generate a therapeutic monoclonal antibody that targets a cryptic fibrin epitope to suppress activation of innate immune responses in the CNS and diminish neuroinflammation.

In macaque motor cortex, moment-to-moment fluctuations in neurally derived decision variables are tightly linked to decision state and predict behavioural choices with better accuracy than condition-averaged decision variables or the visual stimulus alone, and can be used to distinguish between different models of decision making.

Hennig et al. study how changes in internal state interact with learning in primates. They report stereotyped activity fluctuations in the motor cortex that reflect the animal’s level of engagement and predict how quickly the animals learned.

An epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) lineage-tracing system in a mouse model of breast-to-lung metastasis reveals that although some cells undergo EMT in a primary epithelial tumour, the lung metastases mainly arise from cells that have not undergone EMT; in addition, cells that have undergone EMT appear more resistant to chemotherapy.

Learning is ubiquitous in everyday life, yet it is unclear how neurons change their activity together during learning. Golub and colleagues show that short-term learning relies on a fixed neural repertoire, which limits behavioral improvement.

In online experiments with monkeys the authors demonstrate, for the first time, that incorporating neural dynamics substantially improves brain–machine interface performance. This result is consistent with a framework hypothesizing that motor cortex is a dynamical machine that generates movement.

Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) depend on algorithms to decode neural signals, but these decoders cope poorly with signal variability. Here, authors report a BMI decoder which circumvents these problems by using a large and perturbed training dataset to improve performance with variable neural signals.

Using more than 100 independent iPSC lines derived from patients with Alzheimer’s disease, the authors discovered loci associated with the neuronal production of amyloid β and confirmed their influence using RNA interference.

TMEM127 is a tumor suppressor protein, loss of which predisposes to catecholamine-secreting tumors. Here the authors show that TMEM127 expression is modulated by nutritional status and that it has a role in regulating organismal insulin sensitivity.

Brain areas directly involved in driving movement are active well before movement begins. Muscle activity is some readout of this neural activity, yet remains largely unchanged during preparation. Here the authors find that during movement preparation, changes in motor cortical activity cancel out at the level of population activity within dorsal premotor and primary motor cortex.

The Impact of Genomic Variation on Function Consortium is combining single-cell mapping, genomic perturbations and predictive modelling to investigate relationships between human genomic variation, genome function and phenotypes and will provide an open resource to the community.

Evidence is presented for electron pairing in strontium titanate far above the superconducting transition temperature; such pairs are thought to be the long-sought pre-formed pairs that condense at lower temperatures to give rise to the unconventional superconducting state in this system.

During learning, the new patterns of neural population activity that develop are constrained by the existing network structure so that certain patterns can be generated more readily than others.

Current neural prostheses can translate neural activity into control signals for guiding prosthetic devices, but poor performance limits practical application. Here the authors present a new cursor-control algorithm that approaches native arm control speed and accuracy, permits sustained uninterrupted use for hours, generalizes to more challenging tasks and provides repeatable high performance for years after implantation, thereby increasing the clinical viability of neural prostheses.

Gonçalo Abecasis and colleagues report a large-scale meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), including over 17,100 advanced cases and 60,000 controls. They identify seven loci newly associated with AMD and report pathway analysis that shows enrichment in the complement system and atherosclerosis signaling.