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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.

MOSAIC is a versatile multimodal microscope that allows seamless transition between various light-sheet, two-photon, label-free and super-resolution modalities. It is demonstrated in various systems ranging from cell culture to mice.

PTCHD1-AS, which encodes a long non-coding RNA, is associated with the aetiology of autism spectrum disorder in humans through striatal molecular and circuit-level dysregulation.

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.

Electrochemical direct air capture achieves high energy efficiency only when producing a dilute hydroxide stream that is incompatible with existing air contactors. This study reports a redox-decoupled electrolysis strategy that spatially separates CO₂ liberation and sorbent regeneration, substantially improving current and energy efficiency.

Hybrid neural networks often underperform compared to conventional neural networks because of their low array utilization. Lu et al. propose a programmable spiking architecture that leverages photonic reconfigurable devices to integrate synaptic and neuronal functions without compromising performance.

Natural silk, mechanically strong and biodegradable, offers great potential for sustainable functional materials. Here the authors present a simple thermomechanical method for fabricating high-performance structural and optically active materials directly from silk fibres.

NatD is an acetyltransferase responsible for N-α-terminal acetylation of the histone H4 and H2A and has been linked to cell growth. Here the authors show that NatD-mediated acetylation of histone H4 serine 1 competes with the phosphorylation by CK2α at the same residue thus leading to the upregulation of Slug and tumor progression.

Jena, Qu et al. show that mannadjuvant, a formulation of fungal mannan and aluminum hydroxide, increases the magnitude, durability and breadth of the response elicited by mRNA-based vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 variants in mice and non-human primates.

Hydrogels have potential for applications in a range of environments, but tend to be unstable in high-saline conditions. Here, the authors report the development of a double-network hydrogel that strengthens with swelling in brine, due to the behavior of zwitterionic ion pairs.

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.

Prime editing is improved with engineered RNA-stabilizing motifs.

Integration of gene expression data from multiple tissues across four mammalian species reveals conserved transcriptomic signatures of mammalian ageing and mortality and uncovers the modular architecture of ageing and mortality hallmarks.

The mechanisms driving reversible dedifferentiation events towards a drug-tolerant persister (DTP) state remain to be explored. Here, multi-omics, information-theoretic approaches and dynamic systems modelling highlight the role of the oxidative-stress–mediated NF-κB/RelA axis in driving the transition towards DTP across multiple cancer types.

A computational redesign strategy improves evolved prime editors.

The authors develop RO-iSCAT, which uses rotational integration of off-axis oblique-illuminated interference scattering signals to remove speckle noise in real time. It enables fast, label-free imaging of axial spatiotemporal dynamics of tubular membrane protrusions.

The authors investigated metabolic remodeling in response to stem cell activation and the effect of aging on this response. Aging muscle stem cells lose a key glutamine-fueled metabolic pathway that powers de novo lipogenesis needed for activation. This study shows that reductive TCA cycling helps preserve stem cell function and may offer a new target against sarcopenia.

Many hospitalised children with acute illness in low- and middle-income countries experience incomplete recovery, readmission, and post-discharge mortality despite guideline-directed care. Here the authors report multiomic profiling to investigate biological drivers of hospital in-patient and post-discharge mortality in 3,101 acutely ill children across nine sites in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

By tuning graphene’s electronic density of states, the study shows electrode electronic structure—not just the electrolyte—dominates reorganization energy and thus controls outer-sphere electron-transfer rates at solid–liquid interfaces.

Chronic care manages long-term, progressive conditions, while acute care handles short-term ones. Here, authors show chronic conditions account for most of the global health burden, with 68% of DALYs and 93% of YLDs attributed to chronic care needs.

Higher-order interactions are shown to contribute to the decrease in species diversity from low to high latitudes in global forests, potentially explaining why this intricate phenomenon cannot be adequately explained by pairwise interactions alone.

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.

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

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

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.

Organic triplet excitons are ‘dark states’, rendering direct photoexcitation from the ground state and efficient phosphorescence difficult. Now it has been shown that attaching chromophores to lanthanide-doped nanocrystals enables spin-exchange-mediated direct triplet excitation and nanosecond-timescale, oxygen-insensitive phosphorescence in solution and under ambient conditions.

The authors resolve 63 structurally diverse haplotype structures for the 22q11.2 deletion syndrome region. Deletion risk differs depending on structure; individuals of African ancestry are enriched for inverted repeats that predispose to inversion.

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

The iNKT cell-targeted microparticle recruitment and activation system (iMRAS) is a biomimetic platform that serves to locally recruit, activate and expand CAR-iNKT cells in vivo to enhance CAR-iNKT functionality for improved cancer immunotherapy.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

The effects of global biodiversity loss on local plant communities have been equivocal. Across 57,398 European time series, covering > 100 years, local plant diversity gains are often associated with rises in generalist and non-native plants.

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.

The CMS experiment at CERN reports one of the highest-precision measurements of the W boson mass, finding it in line with standard model predictions and at odds with recent anomalous measurements.

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.

MultiSTAAR provides a general and flexible statistical framework for functionally informed multi-trait rare variant analysis of biobank-scale sequencing studies by jointly analyzing multiple traits and incorporating annotation information.

Cancers evolve as they progress under differing selective pressures. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, the authors present the method TrackSig the estimates evolutionary trajectories of somatic mutational processes from single bulk tumour data.

Multi-ancestry and ancestry-stratified genome-wide analyses identify genetic variants associated with refractive error and enable construction of an enhanced polygenic predictor incorporating functional annotations.

Whole-genome sequencing data for 2,778 cancer samples from 2,658 unique donors across 38 cancer types is used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer, revealing that driver mutations can precede diagnosis by several years to decades.

DNA damage burden and inadequate repair in CUX2⁺ cortical layer 2/3 excitatory neurons contributes to selective vulnerability in neuroinflammatory injury.

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.

FOXA1 is a master suppressor of prostate cancer tumorigenesis and lineage plasticity. Here, the authors discover that FOXA1 loss in mice drives basal-squamous de-differentiation and remodels the tumor microenvironment characterized by immunosuppressive myeloid cell accumulation and T-cell dysfunction.

Androgen activity in the male embryonic hindbrain prolongs hindbrain differentiation in male individuals and drives sex differences in the incidence and prognosis of posterior fossa type A (PFA) ependymoma, an aggressive childhood brain tumour.

Whole-genome sequencing data from more than 2,500 cancers of 38 tumour types reveal 16 signatures that can be used to classify somatic structural variants, highlighting the diversity of genomic rearrangements in cancer.

An analysis of 2,954 genomes from 38 cancer subtypes identified 19,166 retrotransposition events in 35% of samples. Aberrant LINE-1 retrotranspositions can lead to the deletion of tumor-suppressor genes as well as the amplification of oncogenes.

Across 17 forest plots (2.7 million trees, 5,400 species), competition dominated overall, but facilitation was relatively stronger near the equator and declined towards higher latitudes, partly linked to temperature, legumes, mycorrhizal associations and canopy nursing effect.

RNA velocity is a widely used method to predict the fate of single cells. Here the authors show that the concept can be adapted to predict the fate of individual human subjects, using RNA velocity of whole blood at a single point in time to predict future clinical outcomes and treatment responses.

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.

A pan-cancer genomic analysis reports the effects of structural variations on chromatin domains (TADs). Most TAD disruptions do not result in appreciable changes in expression of nearby genes.