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Neural crest cells have been implicated in heart development, yet the mechanisms by which they act have remained elusive. Here, the authors show neural crest cells modulate Wnt signalling in cardiac progenitors, providing new insight into the mechanisms underpinning congenital heart defects.

Here, the authors conduct a metagenomic-based study of England’s rivers to show that biofilm bacteria are taxonomically and functionally diverse and are key to biogeochemical cycling, highlighting the importance of river biofilm bacteria in understanding and monitoring freshwater ecosystem health.

This study introduces the Lipid Nanoparticle Database (LNPDB) and web tool that consolidates lipid nanoparticle structure-function data. LNPDB facilitates molecular dynamics and deep learning approaches to advance data-driven design for nucleic acid delivery.

Generation of orbital currents in a non-magnetic material can be useful to build efficient orbitronic devices. Now, the interplay of chiral phonons and electrons is shown to produce orbital currents in α-quartz.

Floquet engineering is often limited by weak light–matter coupling and heating. Now it is shown that exciton-driven fields in monolayer semiconductors produce stronger, longer-lived Floquet effects and reveal hybridization linked to excitonic phases.

JWST’s COSMOS-Web survey is used to create an ultra-high-detail dark matter map, revealing hidden filaments, clusters and distant structures. By tracing features out to z = 2, this map shows how dark and luminous matter build the cosmic web across cosmic time.

Soil microbial populations bloom and then die-off in ecosystems with seasonal snowpack. This study showed that distinct taxa utilize different N sources for growth or energy during the microbial bloom and alter the fate of N after snowmelt.

The interplay between Kondo screening and magnetic order is pivotal in understanding strongly correlated systems, yet isolating the relevant mechanisms remains challenging due to complex electronic structures. Here, the authors use a Ni-based spin-(1/2,1) Kondo necklace model to demonstrate that Kondo coupling to spin-1 and higher can stabilize antiferromagnetic order.

By combining satellite observations with ground-based data and expert validation, this analysis demonstrates considerable misestimation of grassland extent and thereby carbon stock estimates in previous global assessments based on remote sensing.

Electrochemical CO reduction to multi-carbon products offers a carbon-negative approach to produce chemicals, but the intricate reaction pathways lead to a broad spectrum of products. Now it has been shown that alkali cations alter the mechanistic pathways that govern the reaction selectivity involved in the formation of hydrocarbons versus oxygenates.

Examples of materials with non-trivial band topology in the presence of strong electron correlations are rare. Now it is shown that quantum fluctuations near a quantum phase transition can promote topological phases in a heavy-fermion compound.

The PCRCR complex of Plasmodium spp. binds basigin on the erythrocyte surface. While Rh5 of the complex is restricted to P. falciparum, PTRAMP, CSS and Ripr orthologs are present across the genus, for which the authors report common features.

The study analyses data from NASA’s MMS mission to examine electromagnetic fluctuations in the electron diffusion region of Earth’s magnetotail offering insights into the link between reconnection and turbulence. It finds that electromagnetic anomalous viscosity supplies, at times, around 20% of the reconnection electric field.

The authors report long-lived pump-induced conductivity suppression in metallic Ti₃C₂ MXenes using ultrafast terahertz and reflectance spectroscopy. The effect is attributed to strong photothermal heating and slow heat dissipation.

A global synthesis of >600 studies finds that across agro-ecosystems, grasslands and forests in temperate and tropical zones, increasing plant diversity has a consistently positive effect on plant performance and the suppression of antagonists.

The properties of electronic transport through edge states of three-dimensional quantum Hall-like states are not yet resolved. Now, increasing the surface area of the edges is shown to produce increased conductance, suggesting that chiral surface states are present.

An integrated optical parametric amplifier on thin-film lithium niobate achieves more than 17 dB gain with less than 200 mW input power.

There has been a recent interest in control of magnetism via ionic transport. The appeal of such magneto-ionic control lies in its extent, non-volatility and potential energy-efficiency, however, the number of systems showing such behaviour is limited. Here, Tan, Ma, and coauthors demonstrate magneto-ionic control through Carbon transport.

This study examines long-term changes in species richness across tropical forests in the Andes and Amazon. Hotter, drier and more seasonal forests in the eastern and southern Amazon are losing species, while Northern Andean forests are accumulating species, acting as a refuge for climate-displaced species.

This study uses brain recordings, self-reports, and facial analysis to decode acute pain in epilepsy patients. Machine learning reveals stable neural markers in mesolimbic, striatal, and cortical regions, plus facial cues, enabling reliable pain detection in naturalistic settings.

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.

The authors report on imaging developments of solid-density plasmas and the current filamentation instability by means of the LCLS-XFEL at SLAC. This offers insights on the instability in the solid density region, stimulating new modelling of laser-solid interactions.

How neuron-level interactions produce complex cognitive behavior remains unclear. Here, the authors develop a brain circuit mechanistic model based on physiological computation, that uncovers an unexpected neural code, subsequently validated by empirical data.

Neural spiking activity is inherently dynamic and out of equilibrium, yet tools to quantify its time-varying organization are limited. Here, the authors develop a state-space kinetic Ising model to track nonequilibrium entropy flow in neural populations, revealing task-dependent dissipation in the mouse visual cortex.

Phosphorylation-dephosphorylation and ubiquitination tune TCR signaling to avoid self-reactivity. Kim and colleagues show that acetylation also modulates TCR signaling.

There is a challenge of overestimation in figures of merit for organic electrochemical transistors due to a kink in the transistor current. Here, the authors investigate the origin of the kink and identify the charge transport phenomena that is impacted.

Color center magnetometry enables spin-wave imaging in complex magnetic textures. This work overcomes key limitations of current approaches by decoupling sensor spins from control fields and using diamond and hBN color centers for complementary frequency operation, achieving isofrequency imaging of field-controlled spin waves.

Cosmological simulations show that tiny black holes that formed from the first stars can grow far faster than expected to become the seeds of the supermassive black holes now observed by JWST at cosmic dawn.

Here the authors report that some aspects of clinical heterogeneity in type 2 diabetes vary across populations. Using a deep-learning–based tree model built from over 32,000 patients, they document disease patterns and risks specific for the Chinese population, potentially enabling more precise prediction and personalized care.

Projected impacts of climate change on malaria burden in Africa by 2050 highlight the urgent need for climate-resilient malaria control strategies and robust emergency response systems to safeguard progress towards malaria eradication.

MedHELM, an extensible evaluation framework including a new taxonomy for classifying medical tasks and a benchmark of many datasets across these categories, enables the evaluation of large language models on real-world clinical tasks.

Radiation reaction (RR) on particles in strong fields is the subject of intense experimental research, but previous efforts lacked statistical significance due to the extreme regimes required. Here, the authors report a 5σ observation of RR and obtain strong, quantitative evidence favouring quantum models over classical, using an all-optical setup where electrons are accelerated by a laser in a gas jet before colliding with a second, intense pulse.

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.

Cryogenic electron microscopy structures of human Ostα/β uncover a unique transport pathway featuring two substrate-binding sites connected by an amphipathic helix-gated conduit, and electrophysiological studies demonstrate voltage-sensitive, bidirectional transport, showing its efflux role in vivo.

Neural mechanisms underlying motivation-driven behaviors are not fully understood. Here authors show that non-cholinergic neurons in rodent basal forebrain link sensory stimuli with motivational states and experience-driven plasticity.

The electronic behaviour of complex oxides such as LaNiO₃ depends on many intrinsic and extrinsic factors, making it challenging to identify microscopic mechanisms. Here the authors demonstrate the influence of oxygen vacancies on the thickness-dependent metal-insulator transition of LaNiO₃ films.

Hexokinase detachment from the outer mitochondrial membrane is shown to support aerobic glycolysis in cancer cells. Differential localization of the HK1 isoform to the outer mitochondrial membrane, compared to the HK2 isoform, explains the conditional essentiality of HK2 in cancer cells cultured in physiologic media.

Polyamides (PAs) or nylons are types of plastics with wide applications, but due to their accumulation in the environment, strategies for their deconstruction are of interest. Here, the authors screen 40 potential nylon-hydrolyzing enzymes (nylonases) using a mass spectrometry-based approach and identify a thermostabilized N-terminal nucleophile hydrolase as the most promising for further development, as well as crucial targets for progressing PA6 enzymatic depolymerization.

Risk associated with genetically defined forms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can propagate by means of transcriptional regulation to affect convergently dysregulated pathways, providing insight into the convergent impact of ASD genetic risk on human neurodevelopment.

The authors report the discovery of charge order with onset temperature of 800 K in the kagome superconductor YRu₃Si₂. In addition, they observe time-reversal symmetry breaking below 25 K, field-induced magnetism below 90 K and bulk multi-gap superconductivity below 3.4 K.

The CMS Collaboration reports the measurement of the spin, parity, and charge conjugation properties of all-charm tetraquarks, exotic fleeting particles formed in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

CD44 expressed by fibroblastic reticular cells in secondary lymphoid organs regulates trafficking of dendritic cells, and thus has an essential role in the priming of T cells and the adaptive immune response.

High-order modes of hyperbolic polaritons – hybrid light-matter interactions – in anisotropic van der Waals materials hold potential for nanophotonics applications. Here, the authors report the observation of polariton mode conversion in step-shaped terraces of hexagonal boron nitride and α-MoO3.