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Researchers isolate the protein thought to help migratory birds navigate, and astronomers pinpoint the stars that could view Earth as an exoplanet.

Removal of users shows the role social media companies could play in preventing misinformation sharing — plus how physicists coaxed ultracold molecules into an exotic quantum state.

Research suggests a combination of behaviours underlie the evolution of human cooperation, and researchers make an optical disc with enormous storage capacity.

How current and future ice loss in Greenland compares to the past, and using graphene to make ultra-sensitive radiation detectors.

A new method for reviving retinal cells, and the likelihood that life originated as RNA.

The cross-discipline effort to work out how ancient humans learned to count.

Core needle biopsy is the gold standard for cancer diagnostics, but may lead to pain and risk of complications. Here, the authors introduce shock-scattering micro-histotripsy cavitation of micro-liter volumes of tumor to acquire a thousand-fold enhancement of biomarkers via fine-needle aspiration.

A new method to separate out heavy water, and how smartphone data could help check the health of bridges.

Speeding up comparisons of behavioural interventions, and what to expect from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Ancient inner ears give clues to when mammals evolved ‘warm-bloodedness’, and an efficient enzyme that pulls carbon dioxide out of the air.

Laser-cooled antimatter opens up new physics experiments, and the staggering economic cost of invasive species.

Attention plays a key role in cognition and perception. Here, the authors offer a neuro-inspired mechanism aiming to unify behavioral and neurophysiological findings into a single principled architecture.

Tang et al. introduce MatterChat, a multimodal framework effectively integrating material structural data with large language models. It achieves high-precision property predictions and provides interpretable reasoning to accelerate materials discovery.

400-millon-year-old find gives insights into the evolution of jawed vertebrates, and the lack of evidence in transgender policy.

The earliest evidence of deliberate human burial in Africa, and a metal-free rechargeable battery.

When 100 social and behavioural science claims were examined, 34% of reanalyses closely matched the original results, with 74% reaching the same conclusion, revealing limited robustness of single-path analyses and the need to address analytical uncertainty.

Genome-wide analyses identify genetic loci and plasma proteins associated with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). This study highlights the hormonal and metabolic foundations of the disease and explores the impact of polygenic risk for PCOS in both sexes.

Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

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.

Memorable science-themed gifts, games, seasonal songs, and Nature’s 10.

Robustness checks and reproduction of analyses with existing and updated data based on 110 articles in economics and political science journals with data and code-sharing requirements found high levels of robustness and reproducibility and determined that robustness was not dependent on author characteristics or data availability.

SWI/SNF complexes are mutated in 20% of cancers, yet the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, the authors identify a compensatory mechanism of chromatin regulation that becomes essential in cancers carrying mutations that broadly inactivate SWI/SNF.

Wan et al. develop a deep loop profiling to uncover how sequence diversity in the complementarity-determining regions of single-domain antibodies shapes folding fitness, thereby enabling the design of more robust synthetic antibody libraries.

Understanding deregulation of biological pathways in cancer can provide insight into disease etiology and potential therapies. Here, as part of the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium, the authors present pathway and network analysis of 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumour types.

Protecting delicate quantum bits, and a competition to replicate findings from ancient computer code.

The grave concerns over ethical and societal impacts of inescapable facial-recognition technology.

Using efficacy estimates from a previous cluster randomized trial in Senegal and accounting for differences in weather, vegetation and population density between trial and non-trial areas, a machine learning-enabled method estimates intervention efficacy for mass drug administration against malaria at a granular scale and beyond the trial period.

Some cancer patients first present with metastases where the location of the primary is unidentified; these are difficult to treat. In this study, using machine learning, the authors develop a method to determine the tissue of origin of a cancer based on whole sequencing data.

Modelling accurate ground motion is key for seismic hazard analysis. In this study a conditional generative model simulates shaking across the San Francisco Bay Area, matching observed spectra and waveforms and capturing spatial variations with limited stations.

Decreased brain volumes and increased NfL levels can be observed earlier than disease diagnosis in short-tandem-repeat-associated neurological diseases.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

Current mapping of fork progression in the human genome suffers from drastically low throughput. Here, the authors introduce ForkML, a nanopore sequencing-based method automatically positioning thousands of individual fork velocities by tracking BrdU incorporation into asynchronously growing cells.

The flagship paper of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium describes the generation of the integrative analyses of 2,658 cancer whole genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types, the structures for international data sharing and standardized analyses, and the main scientific findings from across the consortium studies.

Objects in natural scenes are often partially occluded. Here, the authors show that recurrent processing can use knowledge of the occluder to explain away missing features, improving recognition of occluded objects in models and humans.

The protospacer-adjacent motif specificity of several Cas enzymes is customized using protein language models.

The APOE-ε4 allele is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, but it is not deterministic. Here, the authors show that common genetic variation changes how APOE-ε4 influences cognition.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

Brown adipocytes are embedded within an intricate network of blood vessels and sympathetic nerves that support their development and thermogenic function. This study shows that adipocyte progenitor cells control blood vessel growth and nerve wiring in brown fat during cold exposure. They do so by releasing Slit3, which is cleaved into fragments that coordinate angiogenesis and sympathetic innervation.

Single-nucleus chromatin and RNA sequencing identifies epigenetic chromatin domains that confer vulnerability to paediatric brain tumours such as ependymomas, providing insight into the development of such tumours despite ‘quiet’ genomes.

From 2014–2017, marine heatwaves caused global mass coral bleaching, where the corals lose their symbiotic algae. The authors find, this event exceeded the severity of all prior global bleaching events in recorded history, with approximately half the world’s reefs bleaching and 15% experiencing substantial mortality.

Analyses of 2,658 whole genomes across 38 types of cancer identify the contribution of non-coding point mutations and structural variants to driving cancer.

Multi-omics datasets pose major challenges to data interpretation and hypothesis generation owing to their high-dimensional molecular profiles. Here, the authors develop ActivePathways method, which uses data fusion techniques for integrative pathway analysis of multi-omics data and candidate gene discovery.

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.

The authors propose a Generalized Latent Equilibrium framework for fully local credit assignment in physical, dynamical neuronal networks such as the brain. By exploiting dendritic structure and prospective coding in cortical neurons, it enables an online approximation of backpropagation through space and time.

Macrophage-dependent phagocytosis elicits robust antitumor immunity. Nevertheless, therapeutic strategies harnessing phagocytosis have been met with limited success. Here the authors demonstrate that dual-phagocytosis checkpoint blockade, achieved by simultaneously targeting CD47 and CD24, greatly enhances tumor cell phagocytosis thus increasing antigen-presentation capacity, cGAS-STING activation and T cell infiltration into the tumor microenvironment, ultimately fostering robust antitumor immunity in preclinical mouse models of glioblastoma.

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