Search

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.

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.

The authors study a topological insulator (TI) sandwiched between two magnetic TIs. By keeping one of the magnetic TIs insulating, while tuning the other one into a metallic regime, they find half quantized anomalous Hall conductance, a boundary signature consistent with a quantized axion field.

Protein motion in crowded environments governs cellular transport and reaction rates. Here, the authors use megahertz X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy to reveal anomalous diffusion of ferritin, linking hydrodynamic and direct interactions to cage-trapping at microsecond time scales.

The authors analyze how sequencing depth, choice of control sample, paired-end versus single-end reads and the selection of peak-calling algorithm influence the interpretation of chromatin immunoprecipitation–sequencing (ChIP-seq) experiments.

Photonic time crystals (PTCs) have unveiled unusual band structures and phenomena due to temporal modulation of optical properties. Here, the authors address non-Hermitian features of PTCs within a purely Hermitian Hamiltonian description, bridging classical and quantum approaches.

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.

Electrical activity in neural organoids is captured with a device inspired by a paper-cutting art.

Electrochemical hydrogenation drives a reversible conductor–insulator transition in graphene. Authors show that it is 10⁶× faster than other methods and tunable by isotope effects and lattice corrugations, enabling ionic control of 2D electronics.

Here, the authors develop an integrated mass spectrometry-based strategy that allows metabolic biomarker discovery based on nanoliter-scale biofluids in seconds. Biomarkers of diabetic cataracts are detected in trace ocular fluids with high diagnostic performance revealed to have and anti-cataract activity.

A nanofluidic intracellular delivery (NanoFLUID) patch provides a versatile, biocompatible and efficient method for the targeted delivery of payloads to internal organs for therapeutic purposes and for biomolecular investigations.

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.

X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy has been mainly used to measure slow dynamics using synchrotron sources. Here the authors demonstrate the split-and- delay pulse set-up to study nanosecond dynamics of gold nanoparticles using XPCS with free electron laser pulses.

By controlling the flow or composition of liquids, optofluidics provides numerous possibilities for devices, and so has great potential for transformation optics. Here, a multi-mode optofluidic waveguide is presented, which manipulates light to produce controllable chirped focussing and interference.

The Van Allen radiation belts are two zones of energetic particles encircling the Earth, but how electrons are accelerated to relativistic energies remains unclear. Here, the authors analyse a radiation belt event and provide evidence in favour of the ULF wave-driven radial diffusion mechanism.

Water has remarkable dynamic properties; a transition from a fragile to a strong liquid has been proposed to explain how they change on cooling. Experiments now show evidence for such a transition in bulk supercooled water at around 233 K.

Due to the pulsed nature of X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) instruments the majority of protein crystals, which are injected using continuous jet injection techniques are wasted. Here, the authors present a microfluidic device to deliver aqueous protein crystal laden droplets segmented with an immiscible oil and demonstrate that with this device an approx. 60% reduction in sample waste was achieved for data collection of 3-deoxy-D-manno-octulosonate 8-phosphate synthase crystals at the EuXFEL.

The insertion of thin layers of cobalt can stabilize β-tungsten under back-end-of-line thermal constraints, allowing a 64-kb spin–orbit torque magnetic random-access memory to be fabricated that offers a spin–orbit torque switching of 1 ns, data retention of more than 10 years and a tunnelling magnetoresistance of 146%.

Weyl semimetals are interesting because they are characterized by topological invariants, but specific examples discovered to date tend to have complicated band structures with many Weyl points. Here, the authors show that TaIrTe₄ has only four Weyl points, the minimal number required by time-reversal symmetry.

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.

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.

A connectome of the right optic lobe from a male fruitfly is presented together with an extensive collection of genetic drivers matched to a comprehensive neuron-type catalogue.

A bubble at an air–liquid interface can form a liquid jet upon bursting, spraying aerosol droplets into the air. Leeet al. show that jetting is analogous to pinching-off in liquid coalescence, which may be useful in applications that prevent jet formation and in the improved incorporation of aerosols in climate models.

Drop impact on a liquid surface leads to the formation of vortex rings, but this process is still poorly understood due to the lack of effective experimental characterization. Here, Leeet al. visualize the process using ultrafast X-ray phase-contrast imaging and follow the dynamics of vortex rings.

Ginzburg–Landau theory provides a powerful framework for describing the behaviour of conventional superconductors without detailed microscopic information about them. Bao et al.construct a similar framework for describing spin superconductivity, a recently proposed analogue of conventional superconductivity.

The authors report their observation of the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in rhombohedral hexalayer graphene/hBN moiré superlattice devices.

Sublattice symmetry has long been synonymous with chiral symmetry when it comes to topological classification. Here, the authors challenge this notion by systematically investigating sublattice symmetry and revealing its spatial nature with a precise description in terms of symmetry algebra and representation.

Bioprinting has potential in the biofabrication of three dimensional tissues, but is poorly suited to the manipulation of neural organoids. Here, the authors develop a bioprinting platform to allow the arrangement of organoids to form assembloids.

A strong positive correlation between the warm and hot phases of extended filaments in massive galaxies within cooling-flow clusters supports theoretical models of active galactic nucleus feedback as the origin of these multiphase structures.

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.

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

Replacing animal feathers and wool with synthetic materials can ameliorate the ethical and environmental issues associated with the production of clothing designed to retain warmth. Here the authors present synthetic nanofibre textiles that combine wearability, comfort, lightness and thermal insulation.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.

The death of massive stars has traditionally been discovered by explosive events in the gamma-ray band. Liu et al. show that the sensitive wide-field monitor on board Einstein Probe can reveal a weak soft-X-ray signal much earlier than gamma rays.

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.

Erbium-doped lead magnesium niobium titanate ceramics demonstrate ultrahigh strain and piezoelectric coefficients under low electric fields, setting a benchmark for piezoelectric materials and offering versatile applications in precision actuators and sensors.

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.

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.

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.