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High-latitude soils are future soil organic carbon loss hotspots, with losses dominated by particulate organic carbon (POC). The fraction of POC in total SOC (f_POC) is a key indicator, emphasizing the climate importance of preserving POC.

Imaging strain in large catalytic particles with high precision remains a challenge. Here, the authors apply four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy to map strain in perovskite-type hydroxides, revealing correlations that enable high-performance nitrate reduction to ammonia.

Polymer thin films that emit and absorb circularly polarised light are promising in achieving important technological advances, but the origin of the large chiroptical effects in such films has remained elusive. Here the authors demonstrate that in non-aligned polymer thin films, large chiroptical effects are caused by magneto-electric coupling, not structural chirality as previously assumed.

Exposure to high-energy heavy ions creates defects in semiconductors, modifying their electronic properties. Here, the authors demonstrate the formation of color centers in nitrogen-doped diamond using 1 GeV gold and uranium ions, revealing isolated quasi-1D NV-center chains with promising electron spin properties for quantum sensing and computing applications.

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.

This study demonstrates a sustainable strategy to co-upcycle spent lithium-ion batteries and plastic waste into carbon nanotube composites with microwave absorption, enabling efficient metal recovery while reducing environmental and carbon impacts.

The response of soil carbon to warming is critical feedback that has been difficult to constrain. This study uses a long-term experiment to show that precipitation modulates microbial and therefore carbon dynamics; drought leads to carbon loss with warming, but wet conditions increase soil carbon.

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.

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 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.

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.

Temperature sensitivity of bulk soil carbon stocks is controlled by the compositional distribution between mineral-associated and particulate carbon, according to analyses of global soil carbon pools.

Parity-time phase transition and exceptional points contribute to the design of many components, but are hard to access due to the dispersive nature of the required materials. Here, the authors introduce a method to systematically control acoustic parity-time phase transition through an active element.

A reassessment of soil radiocarbon profiles, which shows a strong influence of vertical transport processes, suggests that soil organic carbon is similarly responsive to environmental changes regardless of depth.

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.

Water-vapor interfaces have been studied with many techniques, yet open questions persist about their electronic and molecular structure. Here, the authors demonstrate the application of soft x-ray second harmonic generation to study the water surface by leveraging attosecond pulses at the LCLS and a flat liquid sheet microjet, providing insights on the H-bond structure.

Understanding of electrolyte-electrode interfaces is limited due to the lack of suitable probing techniques. Here, the authors present a vibrational spectroscopy based on graphene gratings, which enables sensitive and interface-specific detection of molecular vibrations at electrolyte-electrode interfaces.

Detection of electric fields, central to chemical and biological processes, has been limited to measurements of current (e.g., electrodes) and secondary reporters (e.g., fluorescent dyes). Here, the authors demonstrate an optical platform capable of imaging electric field dynamics with high spatio-temporal resolution.

This paper reports the discovery of two fossils of Rhamnaceae preserved in amber that provide evidence of fire adaptation in Cretaceous angiosperms.

Understanding deregulation of biological pathways in cancer can provide insight into disease etiology and potential therapies. Here, as part of the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium, the authors present pathway and network analysis of 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumour types.

Analyses of 2,658 whole genomes across 38 types of cancer identify the contribution of non-coding point mutations and structural variants to driving cancer.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

Multi-omics datasets pose major challenges to data interpretation and hypothesis generation owing to their high-dimensional molecular profiles. Here, the authors develop ActivePathways method, which uses data fusion techniques for integrative pathway analysis of multi-omics data and candidate gene discovery.

Cancers evolve as they progress under differing selective pressures. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, the authors present the method TrackSig the estimates evolutionary trajectories of somatic mutational processes from single bulk tumour data.

An electron beam technique can be used to write high-resolution doping patterns in graphene and MoS₂ van der Waals heterostructures, and could allow doped circuit designs to be created.

Graphene nanoribbons show promise for high-performance field-effect transistors, however they often suffer from short lengths and wide band gaps. Here, the authors use a bottom-up synthesis approach to fabricate 9- and 13-atom wide ribbons, enabling short-channel transistors with 10⁵ on-off current ratio.

A trans-ancestry meta-analysis of GWAS of glycemic traits in up to 281,416 individuals identifies 99 novel loci, of which one quarter was found due to the multi-ancestry approach, which also improves fine-mapping of credible variant sets.

A genome-wide association study including over 76,000 individuals with schizophrenia and over 243,000 control individuals identifies common variant associations at 287 genomic loci, and further fine-mapping analyses highlight the importance of genes involved in synaptic processes.

Future technologies based on ferroelectric materials will require new routes to control the nature of polar order. Through a combined experimental and theoretical study of compositionally and strain-graded Ba1-xSrxTiO3 heterostructures, Damodaranet al. demonstrate the ability to engineer large polarization gradients and temperature-stable susceptibilities.

Li, Burgos-Bravo and colleagues report that NDF phase separation regulates FACT condensation, which enhances transcription by generating a localized biochemical environment that promotes nucleosome disassembly while preserving chromatin integrity by retaining histones.

The black phase of formamidinium lead iodide perovskite is used to make highly efficient solar cells, and a technique to improve its purity and stability by controlling crystal nucleation could make them even better.

The characterization of 4,645 whole-genome and 19,184 exome sequences, covering most types of cancer, identifies 81 single-base substitution, doublet-base substitution and small-insertion-and-deletion mutational signatures, providing a systematic overview of the mutational processes that contribute to cancer development.

Cryo-EM structures of the stabilized prefusion conformation of the glycoprotein B ectodomain—the HSV-1 entry machine—identify a prefusion-specific neutralizing antibody and reveal how prefusion glycoprotein B may evade antibody-mediated neutralization.

Whole-genome sequencing data for 2,778 cancer samples from 2,658 unique donors across 38 cancer types is used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer, revealing that driver mutations can precede diagnosis by several years to decades.

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

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.

Traditional electrorefining process is limited by deposition potential of the metal itself. Here, the authors explore an in-situ anodic precipitation process based on different solubility of target metal chlorides that can efficiently separate components of aluminum alloys.

A study reports the development and validation of a wrist-worn, consumer wearable-based system that identifies sudden loss of pulse events with a performance profile suitable for societal-scale use.

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.

Organic carbon in the top metre of Earth’s soils is far older than previously thought, averaging 4,800 years old. These radiocarbon-derived age estimates require us to recalibrate our expectations of ecosystem gains and losses of carbon.

The unusual electronic properties of graphene can be modified by placing it on a boron-nitride substrate with a small crystallographic alignment angle. Chen et al.now reveal that such heterostructures grown by epitaxy have a large bandgap, useful for applications using magneto-optical spectroscopy.

Impedance mismatch between acoustic metamaterials and a surrounding medium hinders efficient applications, especially for zero-index materials. Here, Duboiset al. utilize the Dirac-like dispersion in a double-zero-index material to overcome this problem and to collimate sound.