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Severe summer aridification caused freshwater scarcity and the decline of Homo floresiensis and its prey at Liang Bua 61,000 years ago, as revealed by a rainfall record based on speleothem geochemical data from the island of Flores, Indonesia.

In Eastern Asia, vegetation greening, especially in perennial drylands, has increasingly reduced dust emissions since the early 2000s, with effects amplified over long timescales, underscoring the mitigating capacity of land-surface change for multi-decadal dust trends.

New excavations in Liang Bua, where the remains of the ‘Hobbit’ (Homo floresiensis) were discovered, show that this diminutive human species used this cave between 190,000 and 50,000 years ago, and not until as recently as 12,000 years ago as previously interpreted; modern humans have been present in Australia since around 50,000 years ago, so whether Homo floresiensis survived long enough to witness the arrival of modern humans is still an open question.

Developing hafnium dioxide-based high-κ dielectrics via morphotropic phase boundaries remains challenging. This study proposes a thermal-stable high-κ strategy via coherent interface design and elucidates the atomic-scale enhancement mechanism.

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrates evidence of spin correlations in \(\Lambda \bar{\Lambda }\) hyperon pairs inherited from virtual spin-correlated strange quark–antiquark pairs during QCD confinement.

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.

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.

This study uses single-nucleus RNA sequencing to analyze lung tissue from 141 individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Distinct patterns of spatially resolved changes in cell composition and cell states that correlate with clinical features are highlighted.

Mounier et al., analyse whether obesity, measured by body mass index (BMI) affects the shared genetic risk between 71 long-term health conditions including diabetes, heart disease and arthritis. Health interventions that help to lower BMI can reduce multimorbidity and promote longer and healthier lives.

The Taiwan Precision Medicine Initiative recruited and genotyped more than half a million Taiwanese participants, almost all of Han Chinese ancestry, and performed comprehensive genomic analyses and developed polygenic risk score prediction models for numerous health conditions.

MultiSuSiE is an extension of the Sum of Single Effects fine-mapping model that allows causal effect sizes to vary across ancestries. Applying MultiSuSiE to quantitative traits in All of Us identifies fine-mapped variants not implicated by other methods.

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.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

Two main acceleration mechanisms in the auroral acceleration region are electric potential and Alfvénic acceleration but associated energy dynamics are not completely resolved. Here, the authors show that Alfvén waves power the Earth’s auroral arc through a static potential drop in the auroral acceleration region.

Man-made ammonia emissions have harmful effects on human health and ecosystems, yet global mitigation strategies remain underexploited. A study now finds that emissions could be halved cost-effectively by 2050 through targeted and prioritized measures, with benefits far outweighing costs.

The Taiwan Precision Medicine Initiative (TPMI) has built a cohort of more than half a million individuals with Han Chinese ancestry, providing a rich resource of genetic and medical data for this group.

Prostate cancer incidence and mortality rates vary across males from diverse populations. Here, the authors perform a proteome-wide association study across different populations and establish population-specific genetic prediction models.

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.

Researchers studied the blood-based metabolome of over 23,000 people from ten ethnically diverse cohorts. They identified 235 metabolites associated with future risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D). By integrating genetic and modifiable lifestyle factors, their findings provide insights into T2D mechanisms and could improve risk prediction and inform precision prevention.

A van der Waals heterostructure made from atomic layers of ferroelectric CuCrP₂S₆ and ferromagnetic Fe₃GeTe₂ can offer reversible, non-volatile ferroelectric control of two-dimensional magnetism.

With rich, multi-layered baseline data and long-term follow-up through linkage, the HELIOS Study provides a resource to investigate the behavioural, environmental, genomic, and molecular factors impacting health in Asian populations.

The ALICE Collaboration provides details on the microscopic mechanism that ends up creating antideuteron in high-energy proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

A model has been developed to identify the least-cost technology pathway for global individual iron and steel plants over 2020–2050 in alignment with national carbon-neutrality targets.

Variants in NOS1AP can cause monogenic nephrotic syndrome. Here, the authors show that disrupting the intergenic NOS1AP splice isoform that is more prevalent in podocytes leads to monogenic kidney disease responsive to RAAS inhibition.

Semaglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist, may offer neuroprotective benefits after stroke, but its effects in large vessel occlusion (LVO) are unknown. Here the authors show, in a phase 2 randomized trial, that semaglutide is safe after endovascular therapy and may improve recovery in patients not receiving intravenous thrombolysis.

Efficient solubilization of plant cell wall carbohydrates is required for microbial production of biofuels from lignocellulosic biomass. Here, the authors employ metaproteomics to interrogate enzymatic strategies of a methanogenic microbiome deconstructing switchgrass at increasing solids loading.

Polygenic scores for body mass index and obesity constructed using data from 5 million people with different ancestries were associated with distinct weight gain trajectories from early childhood to adulthood.

This research quantifies hospital admissions in Shanghai for mental and behavioral disorders linked to humid heat, projecting a 68.2% increase by the 2090s under high greenhouse gas emissions and emphasizing the importance of mitigation strategies to reduce future morbidity burdens.

Complex prophage integration dynamics, including low-level induction, cross-family host range and transposase-mediated mobilization, challenge existing paradigms and deepen our understanding of phage–bacterial interactions in the human gut microbiome.

Here the authors reveal a study of 486,956 Han Chinese individuals showing that most people with genetic variants affecting drug response do not have the predicted adverse events, highlighting the challenges of implementing pharmacogenetics in clinical practice.

CRISPR-Cas9 technology holds the potential to treat a wide spectrum of genetic diseases. Here, the authors describe a modular platform for extracellular vesicle-based Cas9 delivery, using MS2-based RNA-binding domains and UV-cleavable linkers, suitable for various Cas9-based moieties.

The textile industry’s reliance on synthetic dyes is an important source of greenhouse gas emissions. Here the authors describe a process involving sustainable solvents that allows the extraction, purification, and reuse of dyes, as well as the recycling of dye-free fabrics.

While Bell inequalities have been violated several times—mostly in photonic systems—their violations within particle physics experiments are less explored. Here, the BESIII Collaboration showcases Bell-violating nonlocal correlations between entangled hyperon pairs.

Locksley and colleagues describe a nutrient-sensing circuit in the small intestine. Upon feeding, TSLP production from fibroblasts is increased in a GLP-2-dependent manner, resulting in increased ILC2 activation and tuft cell hyperplasia, thus linking food intake with ILC2 activation.

Remains of what appears to be Homo floresiensis have now been found at another site in Flores in Indonesia; these 700,000-year-old fossils are older and slightly smaller than the first fossils identified as Homo floresiensis.

Despite recent advances with trappedion-based platforms, achieving quantum networks with link efficiency greater than unity on metropolitan scales is still a challenge. Here, the authors demonstrate a multiplexed quantum network generating heralded entanglement at a rate faster than local decoherence.

Investigating the inner structure of baryons is important to further our understanding of the strong interaction. Here, the BESIII Collaboration extracts the absolute value of the ratio of the electric to magnetic form factors and its relative phase for e + e − → J/ψ → ΛΣ decays, enhancing the signal thanks to the vacuum polarisation effect at the J/ψ peak.

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.

Electron distributions exhibit velocity-space signatures indicative of the rapid energy released by magnetic reconnection explosions occurring in Earth’s magnetosphere and in plasmas throughout the universe. Here, the authors discover a smile-shaped signature in the electron gradient distribution associated with reconnection occurring at Earth’s dayside magnetopause boundary.

A combination of high-resolution spatial imaging, spatial proteomics and transcriptional data reveals sparse and heterogeneous bacterial signals in gliomas and brain metastases.

A groundbreaking study reveals how physical confinement triggers ferroptosis. It finds the nucleus acts as a mechanosensor, orchestrating Drp1 and cPLA2 that leads to mitochondrial dysfunction and ultimately, cell death.

mRNA vaccines targeting SARS-CoV-2 also sensitize tumours to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

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 Australian–Indonesian summer monsoon affects rainfall variability across the Indo–Pacific region. Reconstructions of monsoon strength from stalagmites show that precipitation increased from 11,000 to 7,000 years ago, as rising global sea level caused the flooding of the Indonesian continental shelf.

In this study, authors use molecular dynamics simulations to explore why Tantalum (Ta) and Zirconium (Zr) have different glass-forming abilities. It is shown that Ta’s lower critical cooling rate is due to stronger competing ordering effects and local icosahedral structures, which influence crystallisation pathways.