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Global Burden of Disease analysis found that in 2023, suboptimal diet was estimated to be responsible for 4 million deaths and 97 million morbidity burdens from ischemic heart disease.

Estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study reveal declines in chronic respiratory disease mortality between 1990 and 2023—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic—but the burdens on people affected remain substantial.

Analysis of neuroimaging datasets across five major psychedelics revealed a shared brain signature and provides a comprehensive insight into how these drugs reorganize brain architecture.

Robustness checks and reproduction of analyses with existing and updated data based on 110 articles in economics and political science journals with data and code-sharing requirements found high levels of robustness and reproducibility and determined that robustness was not dependent on author characteristics or data availability.

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.

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.

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.

Despite improving therapeutic options, the prognosis for patients with metastatic castration-resistance prostate cancer (mCRPC) remains poor. Here, the authors identify MCL1 copy number alterations as a prognostic and predictive biomarker, demonstrating its therapeutic potential as a drug target, either alone or in combination, in patients with mCRPC.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Human cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) have declined in recent years, but continued surveillance and research is needed to understand this trend and mitigate future zoonotic threats.

The 4D Nucleome Project demonstrates the use of genomic assays and computational methods to measure genome folding and then predict genomic structure from DNA sequence, facilitating the discovery of potential effects of genetic variants, including variants associated with disease, on genome structure and function.

Using well-calibrated statistical methods the authors jointly analyze Undiagnosed Diseases Network genomes, identifying known and novel disease genes. Software is publicly available to support future cross-cohort rare disease discovery efforts.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

The thymus is sensitive to acute insults including infection, as well as to injury from chemotherapy and myeloablative conditioning before hematopoietic cell transplantation. Here, Granadier et al. describe a role for IL-18 in limiting thymic regeneration by stimulating NK cells, which then target thymic epithelial cells.

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.

Palaeoproteomics offers an opportunity to resolve molecular phylogenies especially in contexts where ancient DNA does not preserve. Here collagen sequences resolve sloth phylogenies differently from morphology-based estimates, illuminating the utility of proteomics in systematics.

A high-resolution, global atlas of mortality of children under five years of age between 2000 and 2017 highlights subnational geographical inequalities in the distribution, rates and absolute counts of child deaths by age.

Adjusting nutrient and irrigation inputs can enhance crop growth, yet their combined role in adapting crop production to global warming has been largely overlooked. This study develops an integrated strategy by optimizing irrigation and nitrogen inputs to provide effective and sustainable solutions for climate change adaptation in US agriculture.

Geospatial estimates of the prevalence of anemia in women of reproductive age across 82 low-income and middle-income countries reveals considerable heterogeneity and inequality at national and subnational levels, with few countries on track to meet the WHO Global Nutrition Targets by 2030.

The roles of distinct dopaminergic neuron subpopulations and the circuit projections driving their activity during threat behaviors remain incompletely understood. Here, the authors demonstrate that substantia nigra pars lateralis dopamine neurons receive selective, robust excitation from auditory and temporal association cortices, which, combined with rapid action potential firing, contributes to auditory threat conditioning.

High numbers of COVID-19-related deaths have been reported in the United States, but estimation of the true numbers of infections is challenging. Here, the authors estimate that on 1 June 2020, 3.7% of the US population was infected with SARS-CoV-2, and 0.01% was infectious, with wide variation by state.

Both rare and common variants contribute to the aetiology of complex traits such as type 2 diabetes (T2D). Here, the authors examine the effect of coding variation on glycaemic traits and T2D, and identify low-frequency variation in GLP1Rsignificantly associated with these traits.

Non-pharmaceutical interventions for COVID-19 also impacted the transmission of other viruses including respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Here the authors describe the changing epidemiology, clinical severity, and genetic diversity of RSV in Chicago, Illinois, from July 2010 to April 2023.

Cryo-EM shows SSNA-1 forms anti-parallel coiled-coils with a triple-helical junction for microtubule binding. Disrupting self-assembly or deleting SSNA-1 reduces C. elegans embryonic viability and disrupts spindles, revealing its role in cell division.

Follow-on biologics, changes to the patent system, new rules from the FDA and the prospect of a new party in the White House dominate the policy outlook for biotechs. Aaron Lorenzo reports.

Although progress in the coverage of routine measles vaccination in children in low- and middle-income countries was made during 2000–2019, many countries remain far from the goal of 80% coverage in all districts by 2019.

Species’ traits and environmental conditions determine the abundance of tree species across the globe. Here, the authors find that dominant tree species are taller and have softer wood compared to rare species and that these trait differences are more strongly associated with temperature than water availability.

A vibrational spectral phase retrieval approach to broadband CARS spectroscopy is presented, therefore enabling supervised compressive CARS microspectroscopy for artifact-free, high-speed quantitative chemical imaging.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.

The primitive hominins from Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia are often thought to be akin to Homo erectus and are arguably the earliest known members of the human family outside Africa. This conclusion has come, so far, from the presentation of postcranial material: now a partial skeleton of an adolescent individual associated with a skull, and remains from three adult individuals, suggest that the Dmanisi hominids are even more primitive than that, akin to Homo habilis.

A genome-wide study by the Long COVID Host Genetics Initiative identifies an association between the FOXP4 locus and long COVID, implicating altered lung function in its pathophysiology.

Polygenic risk scores for Alzheimer’s disease derived from individuals of European ancestry can show improved performance in multiancestry settings after incorporating genome-wide association summary statistics from diverse populations.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

Analyses of the proportions of individuals who have completed key levels of schooling across all low- and middle-income countries from 2000 to 2017 reveal inequalities across countries as well as within populations.

The structure of a bacterial membrane protein complex involved in the bioremediation of tetrachloroethene, a major chlorinated organic pollutant, was determined. It elucidates the path of electrons from menaquinol to the active site of the enzyme.

Inborn errors of the alternative NF-κB pathway in humans impair the development of AIRE-expressing medullary thymic epithelial cells, thereby underlying the production of autoantibodies against type I IFNs and predisposition to viral diseases

Wood density is an important plant trait. Data from 1.1 million forest inventory plots and 10,703 tree species show a latitudinal gradient in wood density, with temperature and soil moisture explaining variation at the global scale and disturbance also having a role at the local level.

While BH3-mimetics can be effective for treatment of haematological malignancies, their efficacy in solid tumours is limited. Here, using a range of patient-derived prostate cancer models, the authors demonstrate that increased replication stress induced by RB1 loss confers sensitivity to BH3 mimetics targeting BCL-XL.

A new study from the eMERGE consortium provides insights on the development of a pipeline for the generation and reporting of polygenic risk scores for ten diseases to diverse populations in a clinical setting.

Whole-exome sequencing reveals that a rare variant of phospholipase D3 (PLD3(V232M)) segregates with Alzheimer’s disease status in two independent families and doubles risk for the disease in case–control series, and that several other PLD3 variants increase risk for Alzheimer’s disease in African Americans and people of European descent.

A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in more than 66,000 individuals identifies 68 new genomic loci that reliably associate with platelet count and volume, and reveals new gene functions.

Testicular germ cell tumors are highly heritable, and the authors present the largest genome association study, identifying 22 novel loci, which account for a third of those identified to date. Implicated pathways include male germ cell development and differentiation, and chromosomal segregation.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.