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Global analysis of obesity trends from 1980 to 2024 in 200 countries and territories using data from 4,050 population-based studies reveals that framing obesity as a single global epidemic masks the highly varied dynamics across countries and age groups.

Hepatitis C virus remains a health burden due to the lack of an effective vaccine, hindered by difficulties in replicating the native E1E2 antigen structure. Here, the authors engineer a stabilized E1E2 heterodimer using cryo-EM-guided modifications, enhancing immunogenicity and paving the way for future HCV vaccine development.

Natural rubber is a widely used biopolymer and further improving its resistance to crack growth will extend its service life. Here the authors show a strategy to amplify the resistance to crack growth in natural rubber by forming a tanglemer.

Pentatellurides exhibit magnetoresistance oscillations that deviate from conventional 1/B Landau-quantization. Here, the authors demonstrate robust non-1/B oscillations in ZrTe₅ and show that nonlinear Landau level backbending reconciles the diverse oscillatory regimes across the pentatellurides.

The circulating proteome offers insights into an individual’s health and aging. Here, the authors show that the long-term temporal stability of circulating proteins is linked to their distinct biological properties and is influenced by age, genetics and disease state, providing an important reference for longitudinal biomarker studies.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors combined with chemotherapy have demonstrated significant benefits in treating triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). In this study, the authors present results from a randomized phase II trial evaluating the platinum-based and DNA-damaging agent carboplatin in combination with nivolumab in patients with metastatic TNBC.

Second-line CAR T cell therapies have become standard-of-care treatments for relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphomas (LBCL). However, real-world evidence on the efficacy and immunological phenotypes is limited. Here, the authors present a retrospective single-center study of 64 patients treated with axi-cel or liso-cel and report efficacy and safety readouts. By performing immunophenotypic analysis on samples from apheresis and post CAR T cell infusion, the authors also investigate how the magnitude of CAR T expansion and early phenotypic features influence persistence and therapeutic outcomes.

Comprehensive benchmarking of computational methods for the prognostic significance of tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in breast cancer remains elusive. Here, the authors perform multi-centric validation and evaluation of multiple cTILs methods in a large cohort of triple negative and HER2+ breast cancer patients.

This study used a controlled human malaria challenge study in African adults and a custom merozoite protein microarray to identify antigens associated with clinical immunity against P. falciparum malaria for further study and development.

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.

Iron is a primary constituent of terrestrial planetary cores. Through direct measurements of Fe strength at 310-430 GPa and 3700-5800 K, and simulations, the authors study rheological properties of iron under conditions approaching those of Earth's inner core.

CheckMate 650 was a multicohort phase 2 trial designed to study the safety and clinical activity of nivolumab plus ipilimumab combination therapy in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Here the authors report the results of the randomized portion of the trial, including three different immunotherapy treatment cohorts and a current standard-of-care chemotherapy cohort (cabazitaxel).

DNA-sequencing data from primary tumours and paired metastases from participants in the TRACERx lung study and PEACE autopsy programme are used to analyse the metastatic diversity of advanced non-small cell lung cancer and the seeding patterns that underpin it.

Foamy microglia are associated with multiple sclerosis progression, linking phagocytosis, altered lipid metabolism (oxylipins) and lysosomal stress to nonclassical neuroinflammation and disease severity, highlighting potential therapeutic targets.

A mode-selective Raman quantum memory in warm caesium vapour enables super-resolved optical frequency estimation with a 34-fold precision enhancement beyond direct intensity measurements.

Using remote sensing data, spatial modelling and counterfactual scenarios, this analysis reveals a positive relationship between forest patch size and productivity. This implies that preserving many small forest patches may not offset the carbon losses from larger contiguous forests.

Human-driven disturbances intensify and prolong evapotranspiration declines across South American ecosystems, disrupting the water balance and threatening ecological resilience, according to hydrological modelling and remote sensing data.

By comparing newly produced RNA in the nucleus with mature RNA in the cytosol, genetic variants that control gene expression showed striking differences in localization and biological mechanisms, helping explain how they contribute to disease.

Nonlinear dynamics typically require high driving powers, while quantum effects appear at low excitation levels. Here, the authors observe and model self-sustained oscillations in cavity electromechanics at the few-photon level, using a Kerr cavity to reduce the threshold for nonlinear dynamics.

In this work, authors show that alpibectir boosts ethionamide efficacy against Mycobacterium tuberculosis by enhancing its bioactivation and also shows intrinsic activity. The ethionamide-alpibectir combination (AlpE) is bactericidal in mice and active against drug-resistant strains.

A large-scale proteomics analysis of the dark proteome by the TransCODE Consortium reveals many translated non-canonical open reading frames to encode microproteins and peptideins.

Massively parallel reporter assays promise rapid in vivo characterization of enhancer AAVs. Here, through systematic testing, authors uncover pervasive technical and biological noise, including chimeric AAV species, that exposes fundamental limitations in pooled enhancer screening.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis owes its success partly to its ability to enter a ‘dormant’, non-replicative state, reactivating years or even decades after initial infection. In this work, authors find that a key alteration in a gene involved in this dormancy response has evolved, or is evolving, in parallel in human-adapted lineages across the globe.

Our investigation highlights substantial heterogeneity in islet cell composition associated with hormone secretory traits, sex, reported race and ethnicity, genetically predicted ancestry, and genetic risk for type 2 diabetes (T2D).

Measures of hyperglycaemia are risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Here the authors report that glycaemic variability is also a driver of cardiac vulnerability in diabetes, integrating population genetics, clinical data and experimental models to show how glucose fluctuations worsen heart injury and cardiovascular risk.

Connexin proteins found in white perch fish were used to engineer synthetic electrical synapses, enabling precision circuit editing in mammals.

Scenario modelling of nickel supply to meet demand to 2050 identifies extensive overlap between land and coastal mines and high-priority areas for terrestrial and marine conservation, and shows how this tension would increase under a moratorium on deep-sea mining.

Global Burden of Disease analysis found that in 2023, suboptimal diet was estimated to be responsible for 4 million deaths and 97 million morbidity burdens from ischemic heart disease.

Endocrine therapies are the main adjuvant therapy for estrogen receptor positive breast cancer, but 30% of patients recur. Here, the authors discover that endocrine therapy upregulates Rac1 signalling component P-Rex1, and inhibition of Rac1 reduces tumour growth in refractory breast cancer models.

Reconstructing coordinated membrane functions is a key challenge in synthetic cell engineering. Now it has been shown that a double-necked synthetic cell microreactor with two interacting, dynamic DNA-based pores can enable sequential, on-demand molecular transport with high spatiotemporal precision and support diverse confined biochemical reactions.

Ionic and dipolar liquids display unexpected behaviours, especially in confinement, that are relevant to energy storage, electrochemistry and catalysis. An approach that involves electronic screening while capturing molecular aspects of interfacial fluids is now proposed.

Deletion of one allele of Rps19 or Rpl5 highlights how ribosomal proteins control fetal hematopoiesis. Imbalanced ribosomal protein stoichiometry disrupts developmental programs leading to pediatric disorders known as ribosomopathies.

A large-scale study on the replicability of claims from social and behavioural science journals reports that about half of the results replicate in the same patterns as the original study.

Recent studies have shown that probing the heating and ionization dynamics of solid-density plasmas with x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) beams is inherently challenging. Here, the authors demonstrate sub-picosecond time resolution of solid-density Cu plasmas driven by an optical laser pulse, by combining resonant x-ray emission spectroscopy and absorption imaging from an XFEL probe beam.

Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.

As presented at the 2026 ESC Heart Failure Congress, in a phase 2 randomized trial in patients with heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction after myocardial infarction, treatment with CDR132L, an antisense oligonucleotide inhibitor of miR-132, was well tolerated but did not have a significant effect on measures of left ventricular structure or function.

MYST acetyltransferases are an emerging class of therapeutic targets in cancer. Here, the authors report the dose-dependent inhibition of MYST enzymes by clinical inhibitors and define biomarkers to monitor selective target engagement.

AlphaFold’s success in protein structure predictions has led to similar attempts to predict interactomes. Here, the authors demonstrate that AI-based screens are very limited in discovering truly novel interactions compared to experimental screens, exposing open challenges in interaction prediction.

FM-HCT is a foundation model for head CT trained using self-supervised learning on a large dataset of non-contrast 3D head CT scans. The model outperforms existing approaches, especially on scarce annotated datasets, and offers strong generalization.