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Coronary artery disease has several genetic risk factors. Here, the authors develop a model that combines germline and somatic genetic drivers to predict coronary artery disease risk, identifying high-risk individuals not detected by polygenic risk scores alone.

The authors here demonstrate that hominins were consistently and specifically procuring a single kind of raw material to make stone tools at the South African site of Jojosi between 220 and 110 thousand years ago. This behaviour demonstrates both long-term planning and behavioural plasticity with how humans were interacting with their environment.

Authors show that mapping waterbird activity entropy has the potential for identifying hotspots of avian influenza risk. The framework reveals substantial surveillance gaps, particularly across sub-Saharan Africa.

Genetic analyses in more than 15,000 individuals from across the Americas, including individuals with autism and family members, define the genetic landscape of autism in Latin American populations and identify significant overlap with other ancestries.

Proteins are promising ligands for selective metal capture, but low-throughput assays limit their discovery and design. Now, a high-throughput platform for quantifying the rare earth selectivity of lanmodulin (LanM) proteins has been developed. The SpyCI-LAMBS platform enabled the identification of a set of LanMs capable of separating light rare-earth elements in a single step.

Rice paddies contribute to atmospheric methane (CH₄) levels. Here the authors show that increasing levels of the rice plant hormone PSY can reduce CH₄ emissions by over 50% via alteration of microbial H₂ cycling in the rhizosphere.

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.

The growing demand for rare earth elements (REEs) underscores the need for sustainable recovery methods and a reliable supply. Here the authors establish a platform using a yeast to produce bio-oxalic acid for REE recovery, achieving 99% REE recovery from low-grade ore.

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.

In this study, long-read RNA sequencing achieves accurate single-nucleotide polymorphism calling, haplotype phasing and allele-specific expression analysis.

High-pressure diamond anvil cell experiments reveal that compression strengthening of nanocrystalline nickel increases as its grain sizes decrease to 3 nanometres, owing to dislocation hardening and suppression of grain boundary plasticity.

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.

Large-effect variants in autism remain elusive. Here, the authors use long-read sequencing to assemble phased genomes for 189 individuals, identifying pathogenic variants in TBL1XR1, MECP2, and SYNGAP1, plus nine candidate structural variants missed by short-read methods.

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.

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.

In the standard Si transistor gate stack, replacing conventional dielectric HfO₂ with an ultrathin ferroelectric–antiferroelectric HfO₂–ZrO₂ heterostructure exhibiting the negative capacitance effect demonstrates ultrahigh capacitance without degradation in leakage and mobility, promising for ferroelectric integration into advanced logic technology.

The electrostatic interactions in aqueous ionic media are screened by mobile charge carriers, limiting device design and operation speed. Here the built-in electric field is leveraged to dope ions into vanadium dioxide, triggering a surface insulator-to-metal transition, further enabling high-speed in-memory sensing in aqueous solutions.

Sulfur(vi) fluoride exchange (SuFEx)—a type of click chemistry that generates S^VI-centred covalent linkages—has previously been used for polymer synthesis. Now, modular SuFEx polymerization using SOF₄ has been used to generate helical polymers. Unlike previous examples of SuFEx polymerization, the backbone retains S^VI–F motifs and therefore is able to undergo further SuFEx click reactions, enabling facile and efficient post-polymerization modification.

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.

Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of plants and fungi is enhanced by plasmid copy number variants.

Heteroepitaxy is used to precisely control the growth of Mn₃O₄ shells on the faces of a Co₃O₄ nanocube crystal, producing uniform grain boundary defects and highly ordered multigrain nanostructures.

Designing catalysts with atomically synergistic sites shows great promise as a pathway for advanced catalyst development. Here the authors report Zn-Cr catalyst with atomically binuclear active sites for iso-stoichiometric co-conversion of ethane and CO₂ through proximal atomic synergy.

Carbon–hydrogen bonds are strong and stable, rarely succumbing to the activation attempts of chemists. Certain bacteria are able to metabolize methane using a diiron-centred enzyme, but synthetic analogues have had much less reactivity. Now, an oxo-bridged diiron complex has been shown to have extremely high activity towards C–H bonds.

Fan et al. describe DF-003, an alpha-kinase 1 (ALPK1) inhibitor that targets the root cause of the rare genetic disease ROSAH syndrome, demonstrating the ability of DF-003 to inhibit ocular inflammatory pathology in ROSAH model mice.

Electrides are an emerging family of materials with potential for hosting topological states. Here, the authors demonstrate the presence of Fermi-arc surface states in close proximity to the floating electron layer on the surface of an electride.

Energy density and cyclability are often a trade-off for lithium-ion batteries. The authors develop cobalt- and nickel-free cathodes with both good cycling stability and high energy density through the integration of polyanion units into rocksalt structures.

Pcm1 bridges centrosome asymmetry and polarized endosome trafficking to regulate radial glia progenitor fate decisions, balancing self-renewal and differentiation in zebrafish and human cortical organoids.

Technetium-99 retention in spinel-containing glass is a promising strategy for radioactive waste management, but volatility is still an issue. Here, the authors show that doping magnetite with 1st row transition metals enhances technetium retention by altering the redox capacity of the Tc-containing spinel.

The Authors in this work predict the radiation of twisted bilayer photonic crystals to host an optical vortex in the far field, which is enabled by connecting BIC modes in photonic crystals with the free space through a ‘moiré channel’.

Mass spectral analysis is used to map the composition of materials and surfaces in numerous fields. Here, the authors report a mass spectral technique based on extreme ultraviolet laser ablation that allows three-dimensional imaging of chemical composition in addition to giving highly sensitive nanoscale resolution.

Nuclear-grade graphite is an important high-temperature structural material for fission reactors. Here, the authors perform simultaneous X-ray tomography and mechanical testing on a nuclear-grade graphite, finding simultaneous improvement of strength and toughness at elevated temperatures which they attribute primarily to reduction of residual tensile stresses in the as-made material.

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

This work employs nano- to microscale characterization to identify different structural change pathways associated with non-homogeneous reactions within the particles, and explores differences in the failure mechanisms of lithium-rich transition metal oxide materials at different current densities.

Solar photoelectrochemical reactions are one of the most promising paths for sustainable energy production, but systems with high efficiency and long-term stability have remained elusive. Here, the authors show a photoelectrode strategy that enables high efficiency and long-term stability.

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.

This Genome Watch discusses the great biosynthetic capacity that has been identified in marine environmental and host-associated microbiomes, along with approaches to facilitate research into these diverse and resource-rich microbial communities.

Previous work proposed the Berry curvature dipole as the mechanism of the nonlinear Hall effect. Lee et al. establish the sign-changing Berry curvature hot spots from spin-orbit split bands as the origin of the Berry curvature dipole and link it to the nonlinear Hall effect in the topological semimetal NbIrTe₄.

High-resolution speleothem records and an isotope-enabled climate model suggest distinct responses of East Asian summer monsoon δ¹⁸O to various kinds of interstadials, driven by nuanced shifts of Westerlies modulated by high-latitude warming intensity.

Using multi-ancestry genome-wide association study and fine-mapping, 298 loci and 36 credible genes are identified in the aetiology of bipolar disorder.

A large genome-wide association study of more than 5 million individuals reveals that 12,111 single-nucleotide polymorphisms account for nearly all the heritability of height attributable to common genetic variants.

Ataxia-telangiectasia mutated protein (ATM) phosphorylates CD98HC to promote neutral amino acid antiporter trafficking. Here the authors show that ATM loss impairs glutamate, cystine, and arginine transport, driving metabolic stress and ataxia telangiectasia–like phenotypes.

A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of type 2 diabetes (T2D) identifies more than 600 T2D-associated loci; integrating physiological trait and single-cell chromatin accessibility data at these loci sheds light on heterogeneity within the T2D phenotype.

The authors observe out-of-plane ferroelectric polarization induced by interlayer sliding in a multiferroic van der Waals semiconductor. The switching voltage scales down to 0.3 V at room temperature, which promises low-power device applications.

Weathering of deep bedrock releases reactive nitrogen into the subsurface, which contributes to the flux of nitrous oxide to the atmosphere, according to a field study that combines soil, rock and groundwater data within a river catchment.