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Many vascular‑disease risk loci lack defined causal genes. Here, the authors integrate functional genomics and CRISPR screens to identify genes influencing smooth muscle cell behaviour, validating roles for FES, BCAR1, CARF and SMARCA4, with Fes loss promoting atherosclerosis and hypertension.

By generating whole genomes of 150 participants representing 12 Khoe-San click-speaking groups, the authors, reveal over 1.3 million unknown DNA variants, distinct San and here described Damara genetic trajectories, while achieving century-long global predominance.

Isotope engineering can enhance spin coherence of solid-state defects, such as NV centers in diamond but progress for defects in hBN has been limited. Gong et al. report the optimization of isotopes in hBN and demonstrate improved coherence and relaxation times for the negatively charged boron vacancy centers.

Micromitophagy is found to occur in plant male germline cells, mediated by ATG5–HSP90.2 signalling, and is evolutionarily conserved in angiosperms. This mechanism underpins paternal mitochondrial elimination and supports the zygote-to-embryo transition.

We examine the historical development and underlying principles of foundation models realized in language and vision, and propose how physics-infused machine learning interaction potentials could dramatically transform at scale to create transformative foundation models for chemistry and materials science.

MMCLKin is a multimodal and multiscale contrastive learning framework for kinase-inhibitor affinity prediction, kinase inhibitor selectivity profiling, virtual screening for known, unknown, and mutated kinases, and interpretable analysis.

Sustainable food production under climate change requires farming practices that support plant–soil–microbe interactions. This study suggests that conservation agriculture with warming enhances wheat nitrogen uptake by reducing microbial competition.

RNA repair helps bacteria survive antibiotic stress. Here, authors show that Rtc-driven repair causes cell-to-cell variation in resistance levels, revealing a potential form of heteroresistance, and identify key Rtc targets to enhance antibiotic effectiveness.

Tokamak walls suffer erosion from steady and bursty heat loads. Here, the authors demonstrate that optimizing 3D magnetic field and cooling gas injection can tame destructive plasma bursts while enabling cooler, safer exhaust conditions.

Spin defects in 2D materials offer practical advantages for quantum sensing over their 3D counterparts. Here, the authors demonstrate quantum sensing under high pressure using boron vacancy centers in hBN placed inside a diamond anvil cell and use it to detect both stress gradient inside the pressure chamber and pressure-induced magnetic phase transitions.

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.

Here, the authors demonstrate that intense laser pulses drive electrons across the full Brillouin zone in monolayer WS₂, producing quantum interferences that control high harmonic generation.

This multi-omic longitudinal analysis of the healthy human peripheral immune system constructs the Human Immune Health Atlas and assembles data on immune cell composition and state changes with age, including responses to cytomegalovirus infection and influenza vaccination.

A millimetre-scale bioresorbable optoelectronic system with an onboard power supply and a wireless, optical control mechanism is developed for general applications in electrotherapy and specific uses in temporary cardiac pacing.

Twin propagation involves three-dimensional normal, forward and lateral motion of twin interfaces with respect to the twinning shear direction. Here, the authors combine electron microscopy and atomistic simulations to study the until now unknown lateral structure of tensile deformation twins in magnesium.

The development of practical photonic quantum technologies will be aided by the spatial control of entangled photons. Lenget al. achieve on-chip spatial control of entangled photons by using domain engineering, rather than by using external optical elements.

Imaging deformation twins in three dimensions is difficult and they are usually viewed as two-dimensional ellipsoids. Here, the authors statistically analyze more than two hundred deformation twins in magnesium observed in three different views and show lateral twin expansion is faster than forward propagation.

A high-confinement plasma that is potentially useful for controlled fusion has now been sustained for over 30 s. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in Hefei, China, achieved this record pulse length by first confining the plasma using lithium-treated vessel walls, and then maintaining it with a so-called lower hybrid current drive.

Photonic circuits often require separate components to manipulate light with orthogonal polarization, but this increases the chip size. Here, the authors create a polarization-dependent beam-splitter that uses dielectric loaded plasmonic waveguides to handle both polarizations in the same component.

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.

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.

A large-scale effort to uncover the gene-expression profiles of individual neurons and create a demographic atlas of the brain is under way. First data from this project are revealing new information about neuronal development.

Our understanding of microbial diversity and physiology in marine sediments is limited. Here, Gong et al. analyze thousands of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from coastal and deep-sea sediments, and identify MAGs belonging to new bacterial phyla that seem able to mediate key steps in sedimentary biogeochemistry.

Perineural invasion and cancer-induced nerve injury of tumour-associated nerves are associated with poor response to anti-PD-1 therapy, which can be reversed by combining anti-PD-1 therapy with anti-inflammatory interventions.

Stable and robust topological edge modes are observed at finite temperatures in an array of 100 programmable superconducting qubits because of emergent symmetries present in the prethermal regime of this system.

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.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have improved our understanding of the genetic basis of lung adenocarcinoma but known susceptibility variants explain only a small fraction of the familial risk. Here, the authors perform a two-stage GWAS and report 12 novel genetic loci associated with lung adenocarcinoma in East Asians.

A cluster randomized trial in China shows that telemedicine-based, village doctor-led delivery of integrated care reduced the occurrence of adverse cardiovascular events and hospitalizations in older adults with atrial fibrillation.

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.

A microfluidic embryo-trap array for large-scale end-on imaging of Drosophila melanogaster embryos permits quantitative analysis of dorsoventral gradients during development.

The accelerated liquid–gel transition of collagen induced by an inert crowding agent enables the rapid and versatile fabrication of collagenous tissues under biocompatible and bioactive conditions for tissue engineering applications.

The LHCb experiment at CERN has observed significant asymmetries between the decay rates of the beauty baryon and its CP-conjugated antibaryon, thus demonstrating CP violation in baryon decays.

It is challenging to directly characterize mechanical properties of soft 3D cardiac organoids with current sensors. Here the authors report an electronic skin-based all-soft organoid-sensing system which can wirelessly monitor minute force profiles of cardiac organoids in real-time in-situ.

Qu et al. report a self-assembled material with π-expanded conjugation to form hydrophilic ordered bilayer as hole selective layer for inverted perovskite solar cells. The enhanced interfacial charge extraction and transport enable certified efficiency of 26.39% and 25.21% for 7.15 mm² - and 99.12 mm² -devices, respectively.

African ancestry is a known risk factor for prostate cancer development, but the genetic determinants of this are incompletely understood. Here, the authors identify 172 potentially pathogenic variants which are enriched in an African population.

Timothy Frayling, Joel Hirschhorn, Peter Visscher and colleagues report a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for adult height in 253,288 individuals. They identify 697 variants in 423 loci significantly associated with adult height and find that these variants cluster in pathways involved in growth and together explain one-fifth of the heritability for this trait.

A trans-ancestry meta-analysis of GWAS of glycemic traits in up to 281,416 individuals identifies 99 novel loci, of which one quarter was found due to the multi-ancestry approach, which also improves fine-mapping of credible variant sets.

Only a minority of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors. Here the authors design a nanosystem for the co-delivery of a PLK1 inhibitor and PD-L1 antibody, showing anti-tumor immune responses in preclinical lung cancer models.

Sun et al. report human lifespan changes in the brain’s functional connectome in 33,250 individuals, which highlights critical growth milestones and distinct maturation patterns and offers a normative reference for development, aging and diseases.

Gibberellin is a major hormone in plant growth. Mixing old-style grafting with modern molecular genetics in Arabidopsis shows that the GA₁₂ precursor is the chemical form of gibberellin undergoing long-distance transport across plant organs.

This systematic review synthesizes evidence from 30 studies using machine learning approaches to identify predictors for post-traumatic stress disorder risk. The authors detect underexplored predictors and overlaps in predictors across studies and find an alignment between data-driven results and theory-based models.

Spatial molecular imaging analysis of human pancreatic adenocarcinomas describes multicellular neighborhoods in the tumor microenvironment. Ligand–receptor analysis using optimal transport-based SCOTIA identifies interleukin-6 as a mediator of chemoresistance.

Macrocycles are molecular structures extensively used in the design of catalysts, therapeutics and supramolecular assemblies but synthesis procedures that can produce macrocycles in high yield under high reaction concentrations are rare. Here the authors report the use of dynamic hindered urea bond for the construction of urea macrocycles with high efficiency.