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How biodiversity is linked to multiple ecosystem functions is not fully understood. Here, the authors show that a new mechanism, which they term the 'jack-of-all-trades' effect, best explains patterns of tree diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality in European forests.

The recent discovery of diamond graphite inclusions in the Earth's oldest zircon grains from the Jack Hills metasediments in Western Australia provides a unique opportunity to investigate Earth's earliest known carbon reservoir. This paper reports ion microprobe analyses of the carbon isotope composition of these diamond-graphite inclusions and finds low carbon isotopic ratios, which may reflect deep subduction of biogenic surface carbon. But such carbon isotope values may also be produced by inorganic chemical reactions.

This paper reports the discovery of micro-diamond inclusions in zircon from the Jack Hills (Western Australia), which is up to 4,252 million years old and includes the oldest known diamonds found in terrestrial rocks. The spread of ages indicates that either the conditions required for diamond formation were repeated several times during early Earth history or that there was significant recycling of ancient diamond.

John W. Griffin, internationally renowned expert on peripheral nerve disorders, founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute and launch Editor-in-Chief of Nature Reviews Neurology, died on 16^th April 2011. He will be remembered for his leadership in academic medicine, strong advocacy for young neurologists, and many original research contributions.

John W. 'Jack' Griffin (1942–2011) was the launch Editor-in-Chief ofNature Clinical Practice Neurology, and continued to serve on the Advisory Board after the journal was rebranded as Nature Reviews Neurologyin 2009. In this Essay, the authors pay tribute to Jack, highlighting his seminal contributions to the field of inflammatory neuropathies, and reviewing recent progress in this area, including the emergence of the node of Ranvier as a site of intensive investigation.

Structural designs based on the geometric arrangement of their building blocks have been utilized to develop advanced mechanical metamaterials. Here, the authors use the DNA origami method to realize a nanoscale metastructure exhibiting mechanical frustration, the mechanical counterpart of the well-known magnetic frustration, and show that this DNA metastructure can be precisely controlled to adopt either frustrated or non-frustrated mechanical states.

Particle physicist who shared Nobel for discovering muon neutrinos.

Organic chemist whose rules aided the synthesis of natural products.

Seismologist who helped demonstrate that Earth's continents move constantly.

Via an integrative modelling approach that combines population and clinical trial data, the authors find that polygenic risk score-based screening would reduce premature mortality across seven commonly screened conditions.

As the eightieth anniversary of the first description of Fanconi anaemia approaches, Stephan Lobitz and Eunike Velleuer look back on his career as a paediatrician and his contribution to cancer research.

KRAS is an oncogene that switches between a GDP-bound inactive state and a GTP-bound active state. Recently developed KRAS G12C inhibitors are specific to the GDP-bound inactive state. Here, the authors develop a class of covalent KRAS G12C inhibitors capable of targeting both states for the treatment of KRAS-driven cancer.

Large-effect variants in autism remain elusive. Here, the authors use long-read sequencing to assemble phased genomes for 189 individuals, identifying pathogenic variants in TBL1XR1, MECP2, and SYNGAP1, plus nine candidate structural variants missed by short-read methods.

p53 is an evolutionarily ancient coordinator of metazoan stress responses and its role in tumour suppression is likely to be a relatively recent adaptation. This Review discusses how such evolutionary retooling of this venerable transcription factor entails compromises that restrict its efficacy as a tumour suppressor.

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.

Oxygen isotopic evidence from Jack Hill zircon crystals suggests that meteoric (fresh) water interacted with crustal magma systems four billion years ago, meaning that the hydrological cycle began at or before this time.

An empirical correlation between the fragility of glass forming liquids and the broadness of their relaxation spectrum is believed to be universal. Van Lange et al. report an inverted correlation in a class of polymeric materials, implying a special role of long-ranged ionic interactions in vitrification.

It has been proposed that language meaning is represented throughout the cerebral cortex in a distributed ‘semantic system’, but little is known about the details of this network; here, voxel-wise modelling of functional MRI data collected while subjects listened to natural stories is used to create a detailed atlas that maps representations of word meaning in the human brain.

An analysis of more than one million people in the UK found that two-thirds of people who were vaccine-hesitant during the COVID-19 pandemic went on to get vaccinated.

The formation process for the oldest mineral grains on Earth has remained elusive. A comparison of trace element concentrations of these ancient zircons with known material suggests melting of igneous crust as their source.

The nuclear clock transition of ^229mTh in ²²⁹Th:CaF₂ crystals is characterized as a function of doping concentration, temperature and time, demonstrating high reproducibility and identifying ideal operating characteristics of these crystals as nuclear clocks.

Chronic stress disrupts the brain vasculature and contributes to mood disorders, but mechanisms of resilience remain unclear. Here, the authors show that enriched environments increase astrocytic Fgf2 to prevent stress-induced vascular alterations and depressive behavior with relevance to human depression.

In a phase 1b/2 trial, an off-the-shelf vaccine using gorilla adenoviral and modified vaccinia Ankara vectors with over 200 mutated peptides known to be present in persons with mismatch-repair-deficient tumors is safe and elicits neoantigen-specific T cells in individuals with Lynch syndrome.

The productivity of boreal forests in Eastern North America is predicted to increase with warming under sufficient moisture supply. Here D’Orangeville et al. study seven tree species and predict that growth enhancements may be seen up to 2 °C warming, but would decline if temperatures exceed this.

A recently developed class of magneto-sensitive fluorescent proteins are engineered to alter the properties of their response to magnetic fields and radio frequencies, enabling multimodal sensing of biological systems.

Reliably probing rejuvenation and memory effects in spin glasses by means of simulations is difficult. Now, a state-of-the-art numerical study shows that at least three different length scales play a crucial role in aging dynamics of spin glasses.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, the deep Northwest Atlantic was only about 2 °C colder than today, suggesting sustained production of relatively warm North Atlantic Deep Water during the Last Glacial Maximum.

One of three back-to-back papers to show that dosage of BACH2 can modulate T cell differentiation and function and how we might apply this to enhance CAR T cell therapies for cancer.

Structural, genetic, functional and biochemical analyses of the complex flagellar motor of Campylobacter jejuni reveal structural adaptations with an ancient origin also found more widely across bacterial species, including elements exapted from the type IV pilus machinery.

Why Earth’s crust only started becoming widely preserved in the Eoarchaean, 500 Ma after planetary accretion, is poorly understood. Here, the authors document a shift to juvenile magmatic sources in the early Eoarchaean, linking crustal preservation to the formation of stabilising melt-depleted mantle.

One of three back-to-back papers to show dosage of BACH2 can modulate T cell differentiation and function and how we might apply this to enhance chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapies for cancer.

CLASSIC is a high-throughput genetic profiling platform that combines long- and short-read next-generation-sequencing modalities to quantitatively assess pools of constructs of arbitrary length containing diverse genetic part compositions.

Cas12a3 nucleases constitute a distinct clade of type V CRISPR–Cas bacterial immune systems that preferentially cleave the 3′ tails of tRNAs after recognition of target RNA to induce growth arrest and block phage dissemination.

A heat-pipe model of Earth, whereby interior heat is brought to the surface through localized channels, yields predictions that agree with craton data and the detrital zircon record, and offers a global geodynamic framework in which to explore Earth’s evolution before the onset of plate tectonics.

The European X-ray free-electron laser (EuXFEL) in Hamburg is the first megahertz (MHz) repetition rate XFEL. Here the authors use lysozyme crystals and microcrystals from jack bean proteins and demonstrate that damage-free high quality data can be collected at a MHz repetition rate.