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Soil life relies on microbial nutrient exchange to maintain ecosystem balance. This study shows that cobamide-producing microbes act as essential connectors in soil food webs, supporting host health and highlighting cross-kingdom links central to One Health.

Using pear as a study system, the biosynthetic pathway of acetophenones has been elucidated: naturally impaired side-chain shortening of aromatic 3-ketoacyl-CoAs leads them to undergo hydrolysis, followed by decarboxylation, to yield acetophenones.

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.

Estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study reveal declines in chronic respiratory disease mortality between 1990 and 2023—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic—but the burdens on people affected remain substantial.

Global Burden of Disease estimates show that between 1990 and 2023, the prevalence and burden of drug use disorders, inclusive of amphetamine, cannabis, cocaine and opioid use, have been increasing in high-income countries, particularly in the USA.

Traditional nanopore sensors use barrel-shaped protein channels. Here, the authors report on a study into the use of globular protein, ferritin, as a nanopore sensor, demonstrating membrane insertion and sensor application, showing the potential of non-barrel-shaped proteins for nanopore sensing.

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.

Medicinal Aconitum species produce diterpene alkaloids with diverse oxidation catalyzed by yet unknown enzymes. Luo et al. discover that divergent multifunctional P450s are key to driving oxidative diversification, yielding cryptic bioactive diterpenoids in Aconitum spp.

Despite extensive structural studies elucidating how antigens are anchored to antigen-presenting molecules and presented to T cells, little is known about the display mechanism of the lipid-antigen-presenting molecule CD1c. Here, by combining structural immunology, lipidomics, and biophysical analysis, the authors reveal that the CD1c binding cleft accommodates two different lipids, one of them with a bulky headgroup positioned sideways for display to T cells, rather than upwards, different from the conventional upright antigen-presentation mode

cellSTAAR advances noncoding rare variant association analysis by integrating single-cell genomics data.

The SpatialEx(+) framework uses histology to generate and integrate complementary spatial multi-omics data across samples.

Medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) is a rare and aggressive neuroendocrine tumor with limited risk stratification. Here, the authors perform multi-omic analysis of MTC samples from 452 patients across 10 Chinese clinical centers, identify molecular subtypes and develop a prediction model.

Neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy has become the standard of care in patients with resectable locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (LA-ESCC). Here, authors present a randomised phase II trial reporting the non-inferiority of neoadjuvant camrelizumab (anti-PD-1) and chemotherapy (nab-paclitaxel and cisplatin) compared to chemoradiation (nab-paclitaxel, cisplatin, and radiotherapy in patients with resectable LA-ESCC.

A modular nanobody-based approach assembles combination vaccines by stably attaching diverse antigens to hepatitis E virus-like particles, preserving native immunogenicity and inducing broad protection against respiratory pathogens.

Climate limits where insects can live and which species can coexist. Using thermal tolerances of 653 moths on Asian mountains, this study shows warmer temperatures broaden thermal tolerance traits diversity; daily variation has little influence, and strong seasonality mildly weakens this pattern.

Electrochemical synthesis of solid compounds is an emerging frontier in electrocatalysis. Here, the authors report a Pt catalyst whose surface-coordinated halogens alleviate the scaling effect by regulating the local environment and enable simultaneous Mg(OH)₂ and H₂ production from natural seawater.

It is unclear how early-life urbanicity influences adult neurobehavioral traits. This study reveals that earlier menarche mediates the relationship between early-life urbanicity and adult neurobehavioral traits associated with mental disorders.

A cross-ancestry GWAS meta-analyses of brainstem structures identify 713 associations. It reveals shared/distinct genetic architectures across ancestries/substructures and overlaps with neuropsychiatric disorders and physiological functions.

Here a mechanism for nitrogen fixation maintenance is identified in Medicago truncatula where two polygalacturoneases are expressed in nodules and secreted into the symbiosome space for clearing of excessive un-esterified pectins.

Mapping of the neutrophil compartment using single-cell transcriptional data from multiple physiological and patological states reveals its organizational architecture and how cell state dynamics and trajectories vary during health, inflammation and cancer.

A reinforcement learning-based virtual reality system, implementing a series of sport sessions with coaching, was as effective as standard physical activity in reducing fat mass in adolescents, with positive effects on cognition.

Here, the authors report an exome-wide association study for multi-organ imaging traits by leveraging recent bioinformatic tools such as AlphaMissense. The identified signals elucidate the genetic effects from rare variants on human organs and their connections to complex diseases

Circadian rhythms influence key physiological functions. Here, the authors defined rhythmic quantitative trait loci that reveal novel genotype-specific rhythmic genes, explaining individual variations in rhythmic gene expression and disease risk.

The authors conducted a genome-wide association study of bipolar disorder (BD) in Han Chinese and integrated PGC4 East Asian and European datasets, discovering 23 novel loci, prioritizing 39 credible risk genes and implicating BD-related cell types and druggable targets.

Trained and validated on multimodal data from 14.5 million images from multicountry datasets, a foundation model is shown to increase diagnostic and referral accuracy of clinicians when used as an assistant in a trial involving 16 ophthalmologists and 668 patients.

Hydrogels are versatile materials, but achieving favorable properties can be challenging. Here, the authors report a hydrogel prepared through three processing stages, forming a hierarchical architecture for fatigue resistance and low swelling.

Polyurethane materials are used for flexible sensors, though they face stability issues. Here the authors design a fluorine-rich polyurethane optimizing electronic and mechanical properties.

Resistance to first line treatment is a major hurdle in cancer treatment, that can be overcome with drug combinations. Here, the authors provide a large drug combination screen across cancer cell lines to benchmark crowdsourced methods and to computationally predict drug synergies.

FcγRIIb captures its ligand and targets it to lysosomal degradation following endocytosis. Here authors design bispecific-antibody-like molecules they call FcγRIIb-targeting chimeras or FcRTACs, to capture antigens with one arm and degrade them via an FcγRIIb-binding second arm to promote the clearance of pathological protein aggregates.

The role of TGFβ in cancer is paradoxical and context-dependent. Here, the authors discover that a preserved, DLD-mediated metabolic suppression by TGFβ undermines anti-TGFβ therapy, promoting gastric cancer growth.

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.

An iontronic tip-sensing guidewire measures haemodynamic and contact pressure in animal stenosis models and can be integrated with commercial workhorse guidewires.

Allenes are versatile substrates in synthetic chemistry. Now an iron catalyst enables unusual regioselectivity by mediating an electrophilicity reversal of allenes for stereoselective alkenylzincation reactions affording 1,4-diene zinc products.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal disease characterized by rapid motor neuron (MN) degeneration, with unclear causes in sporadic cases. Here, the authors showed that N6-methyladenosine (m6A) RNA modification drives ALS, and restoring it may protect MNs and lessen motor issues.

Twisted two-dimensional materials are materials with fascinating properties. Here, the authors report on the incorporation of a crystallographically incompatible rotation element into two dimensional polymers to construct twist-stacked covalent organic framework nanofibers with interesting chiroptical properties.