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The democratic peace hypothesis suggests that autocracies are more warlike than democracies. Here, the authors use evolutionary game theory to test this hypothesis across taxa, finding that democratic peace can emerge without the need for complex human institutions.

The triangle causal structure represents a departure from the usual Bell scenario, as it should allow to violate classical predictions without the need for external inputs setting the measurement bases. Here the authors realise this scenario using a photonic setup with three independent photon sources.

The authors report an experimental study of the Hall effect measuring electrical quantities in ultracold fermionic quantum simulators. This provides a way forward in measuring transport properties in these platforms and verifying long-standing theoretical predictions.

Ion diffusion region is an indicator of active magnetic reconnection, but it had not been detected in Jupiter’s magnetosphere previously. Here, the authors show a magnetic reconnection event in Jupiter’s inner magnetosphere that presents the detection of an ion diffusion region.

Evidence is presented for a Pines’ demon as a three-dimensional acoustic plasmon in the multiband metal Sr₂RuO₄ from momentum-resolved electron energy-loss spectroscopy using a collimated, defocused beam with high momentum resolution.

Herpesvirales utilize a unique nuclear egress route for capsid export. Here the authors show that herpesviruses exploit a cellular membrane protein, once thought to transport chloride, to facilitate membrane fusion and egress from the nucleus.

It is unclear which aspects of experience shape sleep’s contributions to learning. Here, by combining neural recordings in rats with reinforcement learning, the authors show that reward-prediction signals support sleep-dependent learning over multiple days.

This Consensus Statement provides a definition of the term ‘gut health’, as well as a discussion of the relevant domains that contribute to gut health and a framework for appropriate use of the term in the context of therapeutic interventions.

Screening methods to predict the development of type 1 diabetes (T1D) prior to pancreatic β-cell disruption are currently lacking. Here, the authors perform proteomics analysis of cord serum samples obtained from a Swedish birth cohort and identify an inflammatory signature predictive of disease development with good accuracy, suggesting that an inflammatory stage during pregnancy predisposes to T1D.

High-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) assays facilitate the ruling-out of myocardial infarction (MI) but identify a high number of patients with elevated troponin levels but without MI. Consequently, the term myocardial injury was included in the latest universal definition of MI. In the High-STEACS trial, use of a hs-cTnI assay was safe but had no prognostic benefit.

Neuroimmune interactions shape neurodegenerative disease progression. This Review examines how microglia integrate signals from central and peripheral immune cells, outlines emerging therapeutic targets beyond core pathology, and discusses the growing need for immune-based biomarkers in Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders.

Large-scale OMICs investigations of biological systems can be used to predict functional relationships between compounds, genes and proteins. Here, the authors develop a deep learning-based approach that significantly increases the number of high-quality compound-target predictions relative to existing methods.

Soft hair arrays anchored to a substrate are useful for bio-inspired engineering applications. Here, the authors demonstrate a rapid 3D printing technique for creating fine, continuous, biomimetic hair arrays using solvent exchange. Fibers as small as 1.5 µm are printed at high speeds, offering scalability for biomimetic and structural applications.

The existence and properties of tetraquark states with two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks have been widely debated. Here, the authors use a unitarized model to study the properties of an exotic narrow state compatible with a doubly charmed tetraquark.

Tandem mass spectroscopy is a useful tool to identify metabolites but is limited by the capability of computational methods to annotate peaks with chemical structures when spectra are dissimilar to previously observed spectra. Goldman and colleagues use a transformer-based method to annotate chemical structure fragments, thereby incorporating domain insights into its architecture, and to simultaneously predict the structure of the metabolite and its fragments from the spectrum.

In this study, the authors present an fMRI‑based signature of corticospinal connections, which predicts individual pain sensitivity, generalizes to patient cohorts, and tracks changes after brain stimulation, suggesting a biomarker to guide personalized pain care.

Direct observation of the physical dual a.c. Josephson effect, a series of quantized current steps in a superconducting nanowire, is reported and may offer a way to establish new metrological standards for currents.

Behavioural experiments to study decision-making in response to context-dependent accumulation of evidence provide testable models that are consistent with the heterogeneity in neural signatures among rats that perform well in trials.

Skin-penetrating nematodes infect hosts by burrowing through host skin. This study finds that in the human-parasitic, skin-penetrating nematode Strongyloides stercoralis, skin penetration behavior is controlled by dopaminergic signaling.

Peng and colleagues present SpatialTopic, a scalable computational method that decodes spatial tissue structure from large-scale multiplexed images, thereby enabling rapid, integrative analysis of millions of cells across multiple tissue slides.

Landau-Zener transitions near an avoided level crossing are a broadly relevant concept in quantum systems. Here the authors use a superconducting flux qubit to shed new light on the role of the environment in Landau-Zener tunneling by observing a crossover between weak and strong coupling.

Federated learning (FL) algorithms have emerged as a promising solution to train models for healthcare imaging across institutions while preserving privacy. Here, the authors describe the Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) challenge for the decentralised benchmarking of FL algorithms and evaluation of Healthcare AI algorithm generalizability in real-world cancer imaging datasets.

CrI3 is a van der Waals material which exhibits magnetic ordering down to the monolayer limit. Here, using ultrafast optical spectroscopy, Padmanabhan and Buessen et al. investigate the coupling between the magnetically ordered spins and lattice distortions, finding a coherent spin-coupled phonon mode.

During geomagnetic substorms, the energy accumulated from solar wind is abruptly transported to ionosphere. Here, the authors show application of community detection on the time-varying networks constructed from all magnetometers collaborating with the SuperMAG initiative.

Spatial expression assays are affected by segmentation errors leading to difficulty interpreting cell types. Here, the authors introduce a machine learning model to infer cell types accounting for such errors, and evaluation metrics and gold-standard datasets to enable further advances in this area.

Caustics, as a unique type of singularity in wave phenomena, occur in diverse physical systems. Here, the authors realize multi-dimensional customization of caustics with 3D-printed metasurfaces. This arbitrary caustic engineering is poised to bring new revolutions to many domains.

Non-Hermiticity is usually considered detrimental to quasiparticle physics. Here, the authors show that such an assumption of Hermiticity can be lifted in the context of a lattice model containing two non-Hermitian Dirac cones, with one hosting amplifying Dirac quasiparticles and the other hosting decaying ones.

The authors report the discovery of charge order with onset temperature of 800 K in the kagome superconductor YRu₃Si₂. In addition, they observe time-reversal symmetry breaking below 25 K, field-induced magnetism below 90 K and bulk multi-gap superconductivity below 3.4 K.

Quantifying the degree of correlation required to drive a Mott insulator transition is a crucial aspect in understanding and manipulating correlated electrons. Here, the authors introduce a thallium-based cuprate system and use resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, combined with Hubbard-Heisenberg modeling, to establish a universal relation between electron interactions and magnon dispersion, suggesting optimal superconductivity at intermediate correlation strength.

Granular materials exhibit complex behaviors in various flow regimes, with fluid-driven dynamics leading to phenomena like erosion and pattern formation. Here, the authors experimentally investigate flow regimes in a submerged quasi-two-dimensional fluid-driven silo, demonstrating wormhole-like instabilities and providing insights into how gravitational and viscous effects dictate the observed instabilities.

Lung adenocarcinomas bearing the ID2 mutational signature display increased LINE-1 retrotransposon activity, which contributes to their fast evolutionary dynamics and aggressive phenotype.

There is still a need for effective HIV vaccines. In this phase I clinical trial, the authors show that an HIV-1 vaccine candidate, ConM SOSIP.v7, is well-tolerated in HIV-negative adults and that it elicits a strain-specific neutralising antibody response that differed between female and male participants.

Squidiff is a diffusion-based model to predict transcriptomic changes in response to perturbations.

Magnetic symmetry is a vital factor to determine exotic topological phases. Here, Riberolles et al. demonstrate a helical antiferromagnetic order in EuIn₂As₂ which makes it a magnetic topological-crystalline axion insulator.

A major challenge in analyzing scRNA-seq data arises from challenges related to dimensionality and the prevalence of dropout events. Here the authors develop a deep graph learning method called scMGCA based on a graph-embedding autoencoder that simultaneously learns cell-cell topology representation and cluster assignments, outperforming other state-of-the-art models across multiple platforms.

Thermal lepton pairs are ideal probes for the temperature of quark-gluon plasma. Here, the STAR Collaboration uses thermal electron-positron pair production to measure quark-gluon plasma average temperature at different stages of the evolution.

Comparing single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq data from multiple batches is challenging due to technical artifacts. Here, the authors propose a method that disentangles technical and biological effects, facilitating batch-confounded chromatin and gene expression state discovery and enhancing the analysis of perturbation effects on cell populations.

Two doses of the coronavirus disease 2019 vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 boost antibody responses and functions in phase 1/2 trial participants.

ChronoStrain accurately profiles low-abundance strains in longitudinal samples by jointly modelling nucleotide sequencing errors, strain presence/absence and the temporal information associated with each sample using a differentiable Bayesian model.

Data from acute hospitals in England are used to quantify hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections, evaluate likely pathways of spread and factors associated with heightened transmission risk, and explore the impact on community transmission.

It’s still unclear whether entanglement can be generated, survive, and be observed in hot environments dominated by random collisions. Here, the authors use quantum non-demolition measurement on a hot alkali vapor to put more than ten trillion atoms in a long-lived and spatially extended entangled state.

Individually addressable ‘T centre’ photon-spin qubits are integrated in silicon photonic structures and their spin-dependent telecommunications-band optical transitions characterized, creating opportunities to construct silicon-integrated, telecommunications-band quantum information networks.

The authors find that TDP-43 loss of function—the pathology defining the neurodegenerative conditions ALS and FTD—induces novel mRNA polyadenylation events, which have different effects, including an increase in RNA stability, leading to higher protein levels.

MaxFuse enables data integration between modalities even when features are weakly correlated.

Studying gravitational waves from a black-hole merger can constrain both the magnitude and direction of the remnant’s recoil, offering new ways to test black-hole formation scenarios and support multi-messenger observations.

MultiSTAAR provides a general and flexible statistical framework for functionally informed multi-trait rare variant analysis of biobank-scale sequencing studies by jointly analyzing multiple traits and incorporating annotation information.