Search

Extreme methane rainstorms on Titan occur in mid-latitudes, where alluvial fans are most common, according to a general circulation model. Average precipitation rates are insufficient to actively shape Titan’s surface.

Our knowledge of life in the Carboniferous Period is largely restricted to low-lying wetlands dated to 315–310 million years ago. Here, the authors present an older Lagerstätte on an alluvial fan 320–318 million years ago, preserving a diverse ecosystem of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, and plant-insect interactions.

This study identifies an autocrine role for hepatic FGF1, wherein its circadian rhythmicity synchronizes triglyceride secretion with activity. Disruption of this clock-regulated pathway impairs lipid homeostasis.

NASA’s Perseverance rover detected high nickel abundances in an ancient Martian river channel. Their chemistry resembles nickel enrichments in ancient Earth rocks and may hint at complex redox–organic processes in Mars’ past.

The transcription factor SlWRI3 integrates fatty acid metabolism with acylsugar biosynthesis in tomato trichomes, coordinating precursor supply and assembly of these natural insect defensive chemicals.

The authors from the ALICE collaboration identify multiple species of mesons and baryons and measure the anisotropic flow with non-flow removal techniques in pp and p-Pb collisions at the LHC, identifying the hallmark of quark flow associated with an expanding quark-gluon plasma.

Accurate characterization of emerging quantum sensors requires an imaging technique that does not depend on defect-specific optical readout. Here, using a NV center in diamond, the authors detect and map boron vacancy defects in hBN via spin cross-relaxation, enabling quantitative nanoscale imaging and spectroscopy without detecting hBN emission.

Single-variant and ultrarare variant burden analyses leveraging exome sequencing data from 22 cohorts identify new risk genes for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and show cumulative effects of several rare variants on disease risk.

In Drosophila, FC2 neurons signal a navigational goal, which is compared with the fly’s heading by PFL3 neurons to guide moment-to-moment steering.

A neural circuit for implementing a coordinate transformation and 2D vector computation is described in Drosophila.

SLCO2A1 (also known as OATP2A1) is responsible for the transport of eicosanoids, including prostaglandins (PGs), as well as of a subset of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Here, structures of SLCO2A1 bound to PGs and to four widely used drugs elucidate the molecular basis for PG and drug recognition.

Here, the authors report an exome-wide association study for multi-organ imaging traits by leveraging recent bioinformatic tools such as AlphaMissense. The identified signals elucidate the genetic effects from rare variants on human organs and their connections to complex diseases

Cell-type-specific electrophysiological recording, fibre photometry and optogenetic manipulations in mice show that dopamine signals from the ventral tegmental area to the lateral entorhinal cortex have a key role in cue–reward associative learning.

Understanding adaptation mechanisms towards external stimuli at the molecular level is crucial for progress in the design of chemical nanostructures with diverse functions and increasing complexity. Here, the authors demonstrate efficient formation of dynamic covalent cages that undergo a series of constitutional changes driven by light and external stimuli.

Fractional Chern insulators have been observed in moiré MoTe₂ at zero magnetic field, but the expected zero longitudinal resistance has not been demonstrated. Now it is shown that improving device quality allows this effect to appear.

Multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) together with deep-learning-based nucleus segmentation enabled the construction of a highly detailed and informative spatially resolved single-cell atlas of human fetal cortical development.

How white matter develops along the length of major tracts in humans remains unknown. Here, the authors identify fundamental patterns of human white matter development along distinct axes that reflect brain organization.

Rechargeable sodium-ion batteries are limited by slow ion movement in cathodes. Here the authors show that introducing solvent molecules into layered cathodes improves ion transport and reaction kinetics, enabling fast-charging batteries with stable long-term performance.

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 Perseverance rover detected polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons preserved within sulfates in the fan and floor of Jezero crater on Mars, offering new insights into past habitability and the preservation of organic matter on Mars.

Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental energy release mechanism in space and laboratory plasmas. Here, the authors show persistent magnetic null-point reconnection in the solar corona at a scale of about 390 km.

The lowest-frequency gravitational wave background may be shaped by supermassive black hole binaries that scatter nearby stars or dark matter. In this case, the NANOGrav 15-year dataset favours dense galactic centres with 10⁶ solar masses per cubic parsec.

A connectome of the right optic lobe from a male fruitfly is presented together with an extensive collection of genetic drivers matched to a comprehensive neuron-type catalogue.

Graphene on boron nitride gives rise to a moiré superlattice displaying the Hofstadter butterfly: a fractal dependence of energy bands on external magnetic fields. Now, by means of capacitance spectroscopy, further aspects of this system are revealed—most notably, suppression of quantum Hall antiferromagnetism at particular commensurate magnetic fluxes.

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.

A geological, petrographic and geochemical survey of distinctive mudstone and conglomerate outcrops of the Bright Angel formation on Mars reveals textures, chemical and mineral characteristics, and organic signatures that warrant consideration as potential biosignatures.

Neuroinflammation triggers DNA damage and subsequent parthanatos-mediated neuron death. Inhibiting parthanatos in a mouse model of autoimmune inflammation is neuroprotective and reduces disease-associated paralysis.

Two devices are constructed to manipulate and collect data from non-trivial but well-understood physical systems. The devices serve as a flexible real-world testbed for artificial intelligence algorithms.

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 Perseverance rover has made the most definitive identification of Fe-phosphate minerals on Mars to date. High-resolution chemical and textural PIXL analyses suggest they originally formed after vivianite in a potentially habitable environment.

Long-term Himalayan erosion rates remained stable through the global climatic changes of the past six million years, according to the cosmogenic nuclide composition of terrestrial sediments recovered from the Bay of Bengal.

In analogy with quantum Hall systems, it may be possible to find non-abelian anyons in the higher bands of Chern insulators. Now, the phase diagram of the second moiré band of twisted MoTe₂ is explored, laying the groundwork for such investigations.

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

The APOE-ε4 allele is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, but it is not deterministic. Here, the authors show that common genetic variation changes how APOE-ε4 influences cognition.

Earth’s crust is thought to eventually rebound following an earthquake so that deformation is not permanent. Field analysis in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, however, identifies numerous large cracks in the crust, implying that the crust here has been permanently deformed by thousands of earthquakes that have occurred over the past million years.

Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

Drought, fires, and human activities have reversed the accumulation of live biomass carbon in the Northern Hemisphere, with total biomass shifting from a positive to a negative trend around 2016.

Sleep loss has been known to increase seizure risk since antiquity, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Using fruit-fly epilepsy models, the authors show that rising “sleep drive”, not sleep duration, is what triggers seizures.

Sabatino and colleagues examine expanded CD8⁺ T cell clonotypes from a small cohort of multiple sclerosis patients. They identified several cognate peptide epitopes that derive from Epstein–Barr virus, suggesting EBV reactivation may drive pathogenesis in these patients.

DBiTplus represents an integrated experimental and computational workflow that unifies sequencing-based and imaging-based spatial omics, demonstrated by combining transcriptomic profiling and multiplexed protein imaging on the same tissue section.

Butenolides are important features of many bioactive compounds but known butenolide biosynthetic pathways are complex and challenging to harness. In this study, the authors report that avenolide, a 4-alkylbutenolide that regulates avermectin production in Streptomyces avermitilis, is assembled from a fatty acyl thioester by a multifunctional flavoenzyme and an iterative cytochrome P450.