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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.

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.

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.

Proposals for the realization of Weyl semimetals, topologically non-trivial materials which host Weyl fermion quasiparticles, have faced demanding experimental requirements. Here, the authors predict such a state in stoichiometric TaAs, arising due to the breaking of inversion symmetry.

Understanding the spin texture of topological insulator surface states is crucial for applications in spintronics and nanodevices. Here, Neupane et al. report systematic spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy on ultrathin Bi₂Se₃films for the first time.

A superconducting material containing a topologically non-trivial electronic band structure presents the possibility of realizing Majorana states as well as exotic excitations with potential in quantum computing. Here, the authors evidence the required ingredients in the noncentrosymmetric superconductor BiPd.

Analysis of 97,691 high-coverage human blood DNA-derived whole-genome sequences enabled simultaneous identification of germline and somatic mutations that predispose individuals to clonal expansion of haematopoietic stem cells, indicating that both inherited and acquired mutations are linked to age-related cancers and coronary heart disease.

Systematic analysis from the Global Burden of Disease study reported that, despite global improvements from 1990 to 2021, dietary iron deficiency-associated disease burden remains high in women, children and residents in low socio-demographic index countries.

Mapping enhancer regulation across human cell types and tissues illuminates genome function and provides a resource to connect risk variants for common diseases to their molecular and cellular functions.

Polygenic Priority Score (PoPS) prioritizes candidate effector genes at complex trait loci by integrating genome-wide association summary statistics with other data types. Combining PoPS with methods that leverage local genetic signals further improves the performance.

Transposable elements (TE) make up a large component of the human genome and have been shown to contribute to human diseases. Here, Hormozdiari et al. estimate the contribution of TEs to the heritability of 41 complex traits and diseases and find enrichment of SINEs in blood traits.

A heritability-based framework for evaluation of SNP-to-gene linking methods is used to construct an optimal, combined approach and applied to 49 traits. Analysis of trait omnigenicity suggests gene-level architecture varies depending on variant frequency.

A new high-throughput assay applied to 1,000 enhancers and 1,000 promoters in human cells reveals how different classes of enhancers and promoters control RNA expression.

Here the authors studied pulmonary arterial endothelial cells (PAEC) under laminar shear stress and show that this physiologic condition markedly changes chromatin accessibility at regulatory regions, when compared to cells grown in a static state. They find that KLF4 organizes chromatin by interacting with the SWI/SNF nucleosome remodeling complex to regulate vasculo-protective gene expression.

This Perspective article discusses the stratification of patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA) in the context of current guidelines, biomarkers and emerging and future developments of targeted treatment. The authors aim to highlight how these novel developments can enhance the stratification of patients with knee OA to improve patient outcomes.

It is fifty years since the launch of Sputnik. The ensuing 'space race' had major impact — politically, of course, and technologically, but it also created a new avenue for physics research and a rich seam of funding for a generation of young scientists.

Frequent dispersal and short-lived local transmission clusters fuelled the 2013–2016 Ebola virus epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Single layers of atoms can exhibit electronic properties far removed from their three-dimensional counter parts, with much potential for spintronics. Here, the authors provide evidence of spin-orbit splitting and extrinsic quantum well states in MoS2 and MoSe2 by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy

Topological Dirac semimetals constitute a promising platform for the study of quantum Hall phenomena and Weyl fermion transport. Using high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, Neupane et al. identify the topological bulk Dirac semimetal phase in a Cd₃As₂system.

In topological insulators, topology imposes a quantum phase transition between the trivial and nontrivial phases. Here, Xu et al. demonstrate how properties of the topological surface states emerge in the trivial phase of BiTl(S_1-δSe_δ)₂when close to its chemically tuned phase transition.

The viral lineage responsible for the February 2021 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Guinea is nested within a clade that predominantly consists of genomes sampled during the 2013–2016 epidemic, suggesting that the virus might have re-emerged after a long period of latency within a previously infected individual.

Experimentalists have observed the predicted half-integer quantum Hall effect using the topological insulator BiSbTeSe₂, which exhibits topological surface states at room temperature, with each surface contributing a half quantum of Hall conductance.

Breaking the time-reversal symmetry of the surface states of topological insulators is predicted to produce many exotic and potentially useful phenomena. Spin-resolved angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy spectra reveal that magnetic dopants can induce such symmetry breaking in Be₂Se₃ thin films.

Supersymmetry and Majorana fermions that are their own antiparticles are both concepts from particle physics that may become testable in condensed-matter systems. The observation of Cooper pairs in a helical Dirac gas brings this goal a step closer.

Combining CRISPRi-FlowFISH to perturb enhancers with an activity-by-contact model to predict complex connections allows systematic mapping of enhancer–gene connections in a given cell type, on the basis of chromatin-state measurements.

Analysis of 179 new Ebola virus sequences from patient samples collected in Guinea between March 2014 and January 2015 shows how different lineages evolved and spread in West Africa.

Signed linkage disequilibrium profile regression is a new method for detecting directional effects of genomic annotations on disease risk. The results implicate new causal disease genes and can suggest mechanisms underlying the effects of causal genes on disease.

Fatal Ebola virus disease is characterized by a high proportion of CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T cells expressing the inhibitory molecules CTLA-4 and PD-1, correlating with high virus load; individuals who survive the infection exhibit lower expression of these inhibitory molecules and generate Ebola-specific CD8⁺ T cells, suggesting that dysregulation of the T cell response is a key component of Ebola virus disease pathophysiology.

To begin to uncover the mechanisms underlying the return of consciousness following traumatic brain injury, Mofakham et al. recorded local field potentials from depth cortical regions in these patients. They found that thalamic input to the cortex plays a role in mediating the cortical dynamics associated with recovery of consciousness.