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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.

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.

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.

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.

Van der Waals materials of the MB₂T₄ family (M = transition metal or rare-earth metal, B = Bi or Sb, T = Te, Se, or S) have attracted interest for their magnetic and topological properties, but their direct synthesis into 2D form remains challenging. Here the authors report a flux-assisted, phase-controlled growth strategy to directly grow six magnetic 2D MB₂T₄ crystals.

Here the authors propose an evaporation-driven approach to print various nanomaterials on porous substrates, allowing for high-throughput roll-to-roll and spatially programmable fabrication of functional nanomaterial films.

Zinc-ion batteries face challenges like dendrite formation, limiting their performance. Here, authors reveal that high-current deposition forms (002) textured Zn, enhancing cycling life, and propose guidelines for optimizing battery cycling protocols based on advanced in situ XRD analysis.

The development of fast-charging and high-capacity negative electrodes is critical for advanced lithium-ion batteries. Here, authors use a vacancy engineering strategy to develop a layered Prussian blue analogue with competitive rate capability, delivering a specific capacity of 510 mAh g⁻¹ at a specific current of 8 A g⁻¹.

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.

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.

An approach that integrates electrochemical CO₂ reduction and biological denitrification provides a new solution for nitrogen removal, where the formate obtained from CO₂ is used directly as the carbon source in the denitrification process in wastewater treatment.

Cell type labelling in single-cell datasets remains a major bottleneck. Here, the authors present AnnDictionary, an open-source toolkit that enables atlas-scale analysis and provides the first benchmark of LLMs for de novo cell type annotation from marker genes, showing high accuracy at low cost.

Typical quantum error correcting codes assign fixed roles to the underlying physical qubits. Now the performance benefits of alternative, dynamic error correction schemes have been demonstrated on a superconducting quantum processor.

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.

Experimental measurements of high-order out-of-time-order correlators on a superconducting quantum processor show that these correlators remain highly sensitive to the quantum many-body dynamics in quantum computers at long timescales.

Semiconductor polymers containing selenophene in their backbones and immunomodulatory groups in their side chains enable the fabrication of implantable bioelectronic devices with enhanced immune compatibility and low foreign-body response.

Control of liquid-based materials is important for developing materials based on these, but topological flexibility is limited. Here, the authors report a method for digital fabrication of slippery objects with solid-liquid composite interfaces and geometric design freedom.

Mixed matrix membranes capable of breaking the permeability-selectivity trade-off suffer from the inefficient and disconnected bulky transport channels as well as low compatibility between nanomaterials and polymers. Here the authors propose an original photothermally triggered in-situ gelation approach to elaborate a nanofiber-interwoven gel membranes with tunable 3D-interconnected ultrafast transport channels for highly-selective CO₂ separation.

Understanding interfacial proton transport in an excited state is crucial for catalytic and diagnostic applications of nanomaterials. Here, the authors combine ultra-low-field NMR relaxometry with a light source to study the light-induced proton dissociation of graphene quantum dots.

Licensing of eukaryotic origins of replication with MCM double hexamers (DHs) can occur through distinct pathways. Here, Lim et al. show that in yeast, cell cycle-dependent regulation of DH formation by CDK and origin structure have co-evolved.

Adaptive optics (AO) corrects aberrations and restores resolution but requires specialized hardware. Kang et al. introduce a self-supervised AO method (CoCoA) for widefield microscopy, achieving in vivo mouse brain imaging without wavefront sensors.

Colour code on a superconducting qubit quantum processor is demonstrated, reporting above-breakeven performance and logical error scaling with increased code size by a factor of 1.56 moving from distance-3 to distance-5 code.

Lithium-sulfur batteries promise high energy density, but polysulfide shuttling acts as a major stumbling block toward practical development. Here, a redox-active interlayer is proposed to confine polysulfides, increase the cell capacity and improve cell cycle life.

Heteroepitaxy is used to precisely control the growth of Mn₃O₄ shells on the faces of a Co₃O₄ nanocube crystal, producing uniform grain boundary defects and highly ordered multigrain nanostructures.

In a quantum simulation of a (2+1)D lattice gauge theory using a superconducting quantum processor, the dynamics of strings reveal the transition from deconfined to confined excitations as the effective electric field is increased.

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.

The internal structure of the neutron has now been probed by highly energetic photons scattering off it. Combined with previous results for protons, these measurements reveal the contributions of quark flavours to the nucleon structure.

Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of CaNi₂ shows a band with vanishing dispersion across the full 3D Brillouin zone that is identified with the pyrochlore flat band as well as two additional flat bands that arise from multi-orbital interference of Ni d-electrons.

A hybrid analogue–digital quantum simulator is used to demonstrate beyond-classical performance in benchmarking experiments and to study thermalization phenomena in an XY quantum magnet, including the breakdown of Kibble–Zurek scaling predictions and signatures of the Kosterlitz–Thouless phase transition.

A transformer-based representation-learning model that processes multimodal input in a unified manner outperformed non-unified multimodal models in two clinical diagnostic tasks.

Variant-to-gene-to-program is a new approach to building maps of genome function to link risk variants to disease genes and to convergent signalling pathways in an unbiased manner; its strength is demonstrated in coronary artery disease.

The CMS Collaboration reports the study of three simultaneous hard interactions between quarks and gluons in proton–proton collisions. This manifests through the concurrent production of three J/ψ mesons, which consist of a charm-quark–antiquark pair.

A consensus cell type atlas for the fly brain provides both an intellectual framework and open-source toolchains for brain-scale comparative connectomics.

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

The high energy densities of Li-rich cathodes are promising for Li-ion batteries, but voltage hysteresis limits their practical implementation. Voltage hysteresis is shown to be related to collective migration of metal ions, and isolating migration leads to high-capacity reversible cathodes.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

A collective excitation called Higgs mode may arise in multi-band superconductors via strong interband interaction, but it is yet to be accessed. Here, the authors observe a tunable coherent amplitude oscillation of the order parameter in Ba(Fe_1−xCo_x)₂As₂, suggesting appearance and control of the Higgs mode by light tuning interband interaction.

Researchers have demonstrated the generation and control of subfemtosecond pulse pairs from a two-colour X-ray free-electron laser and conducted pump–probe experiments in core-ionized molecules.

The semileptonic decay channels of the Λc baryon can give important insights into weak interaction, but decay into a neutron, positron and electron neutrino has not been reported so far, due to difficulties in the final products’ identification. Here, the BESIII Collaboration reports its observation in e+e- collision data, exploiting machine-learning-based identification techniques.

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

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.

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.

Whole-genome sequencing data for 2,778 cancer samples from 2,658 unique donors across 38 cancer types is used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer, revealing that driver mutations can precede diagnosis by several years to decades.

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.

Pressure-induced modulation of interlayer coupling and elastic constant in two-dimensional layered materials is quantitatively described through a unified chain model, offering insights into the tunable mechanical behaviors under extreme conditions.

Accurately predicting how much rising atmospheric carbon dioxide can increase rice production is important for managing global rice production. This study highlights that elevated carbon dioxide will boost rice yields more in middle-to-high-income countries than in low-income countries, and that this yield gap will continue to widen in the future.