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Severe summer aridification caused freshwater scarcity and the decline of Homo floresiensis and its prey at Liang Bua 61,000 years ago, as revealed by a rainfall record based on speleothem geochemical data from the island of Flores, Indonesia.

Cationic amino acids are essential to protein synthesis and cellular signaling. Here, authors determine the structure of the cationic amino acid transporter 1 and determined how it is co-opted as a receptor for leukemia-causing animal viruses.

New excavations in Liang Bua, where the remains of the ‘Hobbit’ (Homo floresiensis) were discovered, show that this diminutive human species used this cave between 190,000 and 50,000 years ago, and not until as recently as 12,000 years ago as previously interpreted; modern humans have been present in Australia since around 50,000 years ago, so whether Homo floresiensis survived long enough to witness the arrival of modern humans is still an open question.

CAR-T cell efficacy is often limited by the inability to maintain a memory T cell program. Here, the authors show that intrinsic CXCR4 expression enhances CAR-T cell persistence and memory differentiation in acute myeloid leukemia.

The global monsoon is considered to have provided an important interhemispheric climate link during deglaciation, but direct evidence is lacking. Here, climate evidence from speleothems suggests that rapid latitudinal displacements of the Australasian monsoon play a key role in deglacial warming.

Prostate cancer incidence and mortality rates vary across males from diverse populations. Here, the authors perform a proteome-wide association study across different populations and establish population-specific genetic prediction models.

Wide-bandgap perovskite solar cells suffer from instability under rapid thermal cycling. Here, Sun et al. investigate the degradation mechanism, showing that temperature-induced structural strain, phase transition, and increased non-radiative defects drive the degradation processes.

Identifying jets originating from heavy quarks plays a fundamental role in hadronic collider experiments. In this work, the ATLAS Collaboration describes and tests a transformer-based neural network architecture for jet flavour tagging based on low-level input and physics-inspired constraints.

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.

By combining satellite observations with ground-based data and expert validation, this analysis demonstrates considerable misestimation of grassland extent and thereby carbon stock estimates in previous global assessments based on remote sensing.

Humanity’s Last Exam, a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, is designed to be an expert-level closed-ended academic benchmark with broad subject coverage.

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrates evidence of spin correlations in \(\Lambda \bar{\Lambda }\) hyperon pairs inherited from virtual spin-correlated strange quark–antiquark pairs during QCD confinement.

Tree cover gains in the moist tropics (1982–2015) were 56% naturally regenerated forests and 27% managed tree systems, with forest type influencing carbon recovery. Effective forest restoration requires robust tracking of forest types established by restoration efforts.

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.

Stylistic similarities of stone tools recovered from 800,000-year-old deposits in Flores with stone tools associated with the much later Homo floresiensis suggest continuity — calling into question claims that the brain of Homo floresiensis was too small to have accommodated technology.

Semaglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist, may offer neuroprotective benefits after stroke, but its effects in large vessel occlusion (LVO) are unknown. Here the authors show, in a phase 2 randomized trial, that semaglutide is safe after endovascular therapy and may improve recovery in patients not receiving intravenous thrombolysis.

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.

Efficient and durable energy storage is vital for renewable integration. Here, the authors design an aqueous iron-cerium redox flow battery using a universal complexing agent that enhances stability and efficiency, achieving long cycle life and high performance in neutral conditions.

Lung CT imaging and artificial intelligence are increasingly integral to modern patient care. Here, the authors show LCTfound, a vision foundation model, which employs diffusion-based pretraining to enable a wide range of downstream applications.

CRISPR-Cas9 technology holds the potential to treat a wide spectrum of genetic diseases. Here, the authors describe a modular platform for extracellular vesicle-based Cas9 delivery, using MS2-based RNA-binding domains and UV-cleavable linkers, suitable for various Cas9-based moieties.

By integrating a ribo-seq dataset of 195 individuals with RNA-seq and proteomics data from the same cohort, researchers found prevalent post-transcriptional attenuation of eQTL effects and identified omic-specific QTLs associated with schizophrenia.

In this study, authors use molecular dynamics simulations to explore why Tantalum (Ta) and Zirconium (Zr) have different glass-forming abilities. It is shown that Ta’s lower critical cooling rate is due to stronger competing ordering effects and local icosahedral structures, which influence crystallisation pathways.

A new artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek-R1, is introduced, demonstrating that the reasoning abilities of large language models can be incentivized through pure reinforcement learning, removing the need for human-annotated demonstrations.

The ALICE Collaboration provides details on the microscopic mechanism that ends up creating antideuteron in high-energy proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

A multimodal pretrained transformer uses 154,274 pairs of chest CT scans and their corresponding reports and is applied to diverse clinical tasks with multimodal data.

The textile industry’s reliance on synthetic dyes is an important source of greenhouse gas emissions. Here the authors describe a process involving sustainable solvents that allows the extraction, purification, and reuse of dyes, as well as the recycling of dye-free fabrics.

The Australian–Indonesian summer monsoon affects rainfall variability across the Indo–Pacific region. Reconstructions of monsoon strength from stalagmites show that precipitation increased from 11,000 to 7,000 years ago, as rising global sea level caused the flooding of the Indonesian continental shelf.

Here the authors report new human fossils from Tam Pà Ling cave, Laos, consisting of a cranial and a tibial fragment, dated to 68–86 thousand years ago. This find confirms that Homo sapiens were present in Southeast Asia by this time and the shape of the fossils indicates they may have descended from non-local populations.

Genome-wide data of 16 ancient human individuals from islands of the North Moluccas, Sulawesi and East Nusa Tenggara reveal diverse sources of admixture and support a scenario of multiple dispersals into Wallacea.

Transcription factors (TFs) represent an emerging class of therapeutic targets in oncology. Here, the authors develop Epiregulon, a computational method that constructs gene regulatory networks from ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq and RNA-seq data for accurate prediction of TF activity at the single-cell level, thereby facilitating the discovery of therapeutics targeting TFs.

While Bell inequalities have been violated several times—mostly in photonic systems—their violations within particle physics experiments are less explored. Here, the BESIII Collaboration showcases Bell-violating nonlocal correlations between entangled hyperon pairs.

Optical metrology applications require lasers with high spectral purity but on-chip devices with sub-100 Hz linewidth are yet to be realized. Here, Liang et al.present a heterogeneously integrated, chip-scale semiconductor laser with 30 Hz integral linewidth and sub-Hz instantaneous linewidth.

An Fe^III/V redox mechanism in Li₄FeSbO₆ on delithiation without Fe^IV or oxygen formation with resistance to aging, high operating potential and low voltage hysteresis is demonstrated, with implications for Fe-based high-voltage applications.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

The phase 3 STEER trial showed that a single intrathecal dose of onasemnogene abeparvovec significantly improved motor function in children and adolescents with spinal muscular atrophy versus sham, with a similar and acceptable safety profile.

Developing porous crystalline materials with tailored properties is challenging because of the vast design space and the high cost of screening. Now, highly fluorescent covalent organic frameworks have been identified through an AI-assisted iterative experiment–learning cycle workflow that integrates electronic configuration and quantum-level insights into the learning process.

mRNA vaccines targeting SARS-CoV-2 also sensitize tumours to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

A combination of high-resolution spatial imaging, spatial proteomics and transcriptional data reveals sparse and heterogeneous bacterial signals in gliomas and brain metastases.

The role of mosquito saliva proteins in viral infection remains incompletely understood. Here, the authors show that sialokinin facilitates viral dissemination while suppressing immune response and inflammation in chikungunya virus-infected mice.

A large genome-wide association study of more than 5 million individuals reveals that 12,111 single-nucleotide polymorphisms account for nearly all the heritability of height attributable to common genetic variants.

The authors present SVclone, a computational method for inferring the cancer cell fraction of structural variants from whole-genome sequencing data.

Investigating the inner structure of baryons is important to further our understanding of the strong interaction. Here, the BESIII Collaboration extracts the absolute value of the ratio of the electric to magnetic form factors and its relative phase for e + e − → J/ψ → ΛΣ decays, enhancing the signal thanks to the vacuum polarisation effect at the J/ψ peak.

Archaeological and genetic evidence suggest differing scenarios for human migration out of Africa. Here, the authors present archaeological evidence of intense occupation in Wallacea from 44 thousand years ago, suggesting that this occupation obscured genetic evidence of earlier dispersals.

Reducing non-radiative recombination at the perovskite/electron transport layer interface remains a critical challenge for achieving efficient perovskite/TOPCon silicon tandem solar cells. Here, authors employ bilayer passivation using AlOx/PDAI2 treatment, achieving device efficiency of 31.6%.

Interlayer electronic states in twisted bilayer graphene are characterized by flat-band regions hosting many-body electronic effects. Here, the authors observe two-photon photoluminescence excitation and excited-state absorption spectra on graphene containing a variety of twist angles to access the dark exciton transitions and estimate the exciton binding energy.

In this study, the authors generated iPSC lines from more than 100 sporadic ALS cases, which recapitulated key disease phenotypes and enabled large-scale drug screening, identifying a promising combination therapy of baricitinib, memantine and riluzole.