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Timing and position of spontaneously arising waves of activity in the visual cortex predict the sensitivity of visual perception in awake, behaving marmosets (Callithrix jacchus).

Neural mechanisms underlying thalamic contributions to evoked potentials by brain stimulation, which has been widely used for therapeutic interventions, are not fully understood. In this translational study the authors show that the thalamus plays a critical role in shaping its neural responses across species and across stimulation modalities.

It is hoped that simulations of molecules and materials will provide a near-term application of quantum computers. A study of the performance of error mitigation highlights the obstacles to scaling up these calculations to practically useful sizes.

The ASAP4 family of genetically encoded voltage indicators allows recording of action potentials and subthreshold activity with either one- or two-photon microscopy over extended periods of time.

Using high-density electrophysiological recordings, how internally generated cell assemblies are updated by action plans to meet external goals is explored.

Understanding functional role of different neuronal cell types is challenging. Here the authors associate multi-modal in vitro cell properties with in vivo physiology of mouse visual cortex.

Sequential neural spiking activity is a potential substrate for learning and memory across species. Here, the authors showed spiking in the human cortex forms an average backbone sequence, and flexibility around this backbone is associated with cognition.

An ultra-low-loss integrated photonic chip fabricated on a customized multilayer silicon nitride 300-mm wafer platform, coupled over fibre with high-efficiency photon number resolving detectors, is used to generate Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill qubit states.

Quantum features such as entanglement can be used to improve metrological precision, but noise affects their performances. Here the authors construct schemes for exploiting quantum error correction to preserve the quantum Fisher information, thereby shielding quantum gain efficiently.

In order to be practical, schemes for characterizing quantum operations should require the simplest possible gate sequences and measurements. Here, the authors show how random gate sequences and native measurements (followed by classical post-processing) are sufficient for estimating several gate set properties.

How lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) neurons integrate both spatial and temporal information are not fully understood. Here authors showed that LEC neurons could change their firing rate at specific locations to signal temporal information, which provides a way to combine spatial and temporal information in the hippocampal episodic memory system.

Dopamine tone modulation generates changes in beta oscillation physiology. Here the authors show beta frequency, and not power, coherence, phase-locking, or PAC is monotonically linked to dopamine tone and is likely the key property of pathological oscillations in cortical and basal ganglia networks.

The SiO₂ contents of erupted volcanic melts are correlated with persistent seismic signals that accompany eruptions—volcanic tremor—and may represent an eruption monitoring tool, according to a study of volcanic ash glasses from Cumbre Vieja volcano.

The long-standing problem of determining the classical communication capacities of Gaussian bosonic channels is addressed by determining upper and lower bounds for the classical capacities of important active and passive bosonic channels. The results apply to any bosonic thermal-noise channel, including electromagnetic signaling at any frequency.

Electronic interactions underlie the exchange interaction responsible for the magnetic ordering and dynamics of magnetic materials. Here, Mentink et al. theoretically demonstrate the ultrafast and reversible tuning of the exchange interaction in Mott insulators driven by a time-periodic electric field.

Machine learning analyses and playback experiments in wild African elephants suggest that individuals address conspecifics with name-like calls that do not rely on imitation of the receiver.

Diffusive light propagation represents a valuable additional tool for integrated photonic technologies. As an example, here the authors experimentally demonstrate optical equalisation of coherent light propagating in a femtosecond laser written circuit which simulates a dissipatively-coupled quantum chain.

At low temperatures and separated by sufficient distances, magnetic impurities embedded in non-magnetic metals lose their magnetic nature. But when two such atoms are brought close together, it reappears. By varying the distance between two cobalt atoms with a scanning tunnelling microscope, the quantum phase transition between these two states can be explored.

Light passing through complex media is subject to scattering processes that mix together different photonic modes. This complexity can be harnessed to implement quantum operations.

Recent experiments have indicated that YbMgGaO₄ may be a quantum spin liquid with spinon Fermi surfaces but additional evidence is needed to support this interpretation. Shen et al. show weak magnetic fields cause changes in the excitation continuum that are consistent with spin liquid predictions.

A system for realizing many-photon quantum circuits is presented, comprising a programmable nanophotonic chip operating at room temperature, interfaced with a fully automated control system.

How human brain activity relates to peripheral metabolism is not known. Here, the authors find that intracranial activity is strongly coupled to peripheral glucose variations across multiple brain regions and is sufficient for decoding of glucose levels.

Faithful transfer of quantum states between different parts of a single complex quantum circuit will become more and more important as quantum computing devices grow in size. Here, the authors transfer single-qubit excitations, two-qubit entangled states, and two excitations across a 6 × 6 superconducting qubit device.

Certain sounds are especially attention-grabbing and often unpleasant as well. Here, the authors show that fast but perceptible amplitude modulations in the ‘roughness range' (30–150 Hz) are temporally salient and synchronise not just brain auditory networks but also salience-related networks.

Brain slices offer an experimental window into human neurophysiology. Using high-density microelectrode array recordings and adeno-associated virus–mediated optogenetics, the authors demonstrate that optogenetic targeting of CAMK2A+ neurons can affect network activity in human hippocampal slices.

At high temperature, the heat diffusion in an insulator is expected to be dominated by entirely classical phonon dynamics. But theoretical study shows that the transport lifetime is subject to a quantum-mechanical bound related to the sound velocity.

This study uses human astrocytes and glioma tumorspheres to generate an atlas of mutant-IDH1-induced epigenomic reprogramming. The findings have implications for understanding mutant IDH function and for optimizing approaches to target IDH-mutant tumors.

The authors theoretically propose a simple microscopic mechanism for light-induced superconductivity based on a boson coupled to an electronic interband transition. The electron-electron attraction needed for the superconductivity can be resonantly amplified when the boson’s frequency is close to the energy difference between the two electronic bands. The model can be engineered using a 2D heterostructure.

A tether-less and battery-less implant allows for the recording of electroencephalograms, electromyograms and body temperature in freely moving small animals, and for closed-loop neuromodulation via optogenetics and pharmacology.

In their analysis of two datasets, Djonlagic et al. identify 23 objective sleep metrics that predict cognitive performance and processing speed in older adults.

Quantum process tomography represents one of the workhorses of quantum information processing, but suffers from exponential resource scaling. Here, the authors propose to efficiently infer general processes by approximating them through a sequence of two-qubit processes, and demonstrate it on a three-qubit case.

Active locomotion requires closed-loop sensorimotor co ordination between perception and action. Here the authors show using behavioural, imaging and modelling approaches that gaze orientation during phototaxis behaviour in larval zebrafish is related to oscillatory dynamics of a neuronal population in the hindbrain.

The crowd sourcing and gamification of a problem in quantum computing are described; human players succeed in solving the problem where purely numerical optimization fails, providing insight into, and a starting point for, strategies for optimization.

Multipartite entanglement is of both fundamental and practical interest, but is notoriously difficult to witness and characterise. Here, Zarkeshian et al. demonstrate multipartite entanglement in an atomic frequency comb storing a single photon in a Dicke state spread over a macroscopic ensemble.

As part of the modENCODE initiative, which aims to characterize functional DNA elements in D. melanogaster and C. elegans, this study presents a genome-wide chromatin landscape of the fruitfly, based on 18 histone modifications. Nine prevalent chromatin states are described. Integrating these analyses with other data types reveals individual characteristics of different genomic elements. The work provides a resource of unprecedented scale for future experimental investigations.

Ears encode sound with precisely timed spikes, but the perceptual role of this temporal coding remains uncertain. Here, the authors report that high-fidelity temporal coding is necessary for neural network models to reproduce human-like auditory behavior.

More than 40 years ago Berezinskii, Kosterlitz and Thouless (BKT) predicted a state of matter characterized by topological order driven by the binding of vortex-antivortex pairs. Here Tutsch et al.report experimental evidences of BKT physics in a two-dimensional spin-dimer system.

Current ultrasound transducers are bulky and rigid. Here, the authors describe a new way to realize large-area and mechanically flexible ultrasound arrays on polymer foils suited for wearable ultrasound applications

Surprising events affect ongoing behaviour and cognitive processing, yet the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. Wessel and colleagues show that surprise recruits a motor suppression mechanism which may be implemented via the sub-thalamic nucleus and interrupts working memory performance.

It is known that compressed sequences of hippocampal place cells can ‘replay’ previous navigational trajectories in linearly constrained mazes; here, rat place-cell sequences representing two-dimensional spatial trajectories were observed before navigational decisions, and predicted the immediate navigational path.

Kondo materials exhibit extremely rich physics, from unconventional superconductivity to topological phases. Unfortunately, for a real material, direct solution of the Kondo lattice is practically impossible. Here, Simeth et al. present a tractable approach to this problem, showing how a multi-orbital periodic Anderson model can be reduced to a Kondo lattice model, and be applied to relevant materials and quantitatively validated with neutron spectroscopy.

The Consistent Histories formalism can solve paradoxes in quantum mechanics, but finding such consistent sets of histories requires a computational overhead which is exponential in the problem’s size. Here, the authors report a variational hybrid algorithm solving this problem using polynomial resources.