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Elaborate traits like birdsong are thought to be sexually selected in males but are poorly understood in females. This study shows that year-round territoriality and biparental care are selected for female birdsong, whereas migration, seasonal territoriality, and loss of male care led to losses of female song.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified over 200 genetic risk loci for breast cancer, but the target genes in these loci remain largely unknown. Here, the authors conduct multi-ancestry transcriptome-wide association studies to discover potential breast cancer susceptibility genes, which are further explored with single-cell sequencing and in vitro experiments.

In songbird, thalamus drives a small population of premotor neurons to initiate transitions between song syllables.

Young songbirds learn to imitate their parents’ songs. Here, the authors find that, in baby birds, neurons in a brain region at the interface of auditory and motor circuits signal the onsets of song syllables during both tutoring and babbling, suggesting a specific neural mechanism for vocal imitation.

Young birds rely on auditory feedback when learning to imitate the songs of adult birds. Here the authors find that, as with humans, birds use auditory feedback to correct vocal errors in adulthood. This suggests that lifelong error correction may be a general principle of learned vocal behavior.

Banerjee and colleagues find that activity within the orofacial motor cortex in a highly vocal rodent reflects different features of the produced song, forming a hierarchical control network with downstream structures to guide vocal production.

Global analysis of obesity trends from 1980 to 2024 in 200 countries and territories using data from 4,050 population-based studies reveals that framing obesity as a single global epidemic masks the highly varied dynamics across countries and age groups.

Comprehensive, multinational validation of the PREVENT and SCORE2 cardiovascular risk scores, used in the United States and Europe, respectively, in 44 observational studies and 18 randomized trials, shows similar performance for the two risk scores and generally good performance across geographical regions.

An unexpected imbalance in how particles containing the heaviest quarks decay might reveal exotic influences — and perhaps help to explain why matter, rather than antimatter, dominates the Universe.

It is said that you are what you eat. Diet can also determine how you sound and perhaps even what species you are — if you are one of Darwin's finches.

Complex motor behaviors such as birdsong are learned through practice and are thought to depend on specific excitatory connectivity in premotor circuits. Here the authors show that song learning in Bengalese Finches is associated with enrichment of inhibitory network connectivity that can affect specific song features.

In male zebra finches, song practice and courtship song performance are associated with distinct patterns of neural activity in the basal ganglia, resulting in reduced vocal variability during performance.

Identification of a binder of interferon regulatory factor 4 (IRF4) enabled development of a selective degrader, dIRF4-2, that exhibited strong cytotoxicity in multiple myeloma cell lines, offering an effective strategy to target transcription factors.

Control of sound production by fast vocal muscle is critical to vocal communication. Here the authors show that zebra finches need daily singing exercise to build and maintain peak vocal muscle performance. Lack of exercise alters vocal muscle physiology and reduces attractiveness to females.

A cross-organ, multi-omics U-shaped relationship between sleep duration and biological ageing clocks highlights the potential of sleep optimization to promote healthy ageing, lower disease risk and extend longevity.

Breeding crops with delayed senescence could plausibly increase grain yield. Here the authors show that variation at the rice SGR locus contributes to differences in senescence between indica and japonica subspecies and show that introgression can increase yield in an elite indica rice variety.

Longitudinal multi-omic analysis of pre-vaccination, hospitalized COVID-19 patients identifies early immune markers predicting durable or suboptimal memory T and B cell responses, revealing potential pathways that shape long-term SARS-CoV-2 immunity.

Humpbacks have picked up a catchy tune sung by immigrants from a distant ocean.

A new model that integrates satellite-based thermal and soil-moisture observations into a two-source energy balance framework accurately captures rapid forest responses to flash droughts, as validated by multi-source field data.

Even after a motor skill is overlearned, some variation remains every time it is performed. Such variation enables trial-and-error learning for adult bengalese finch song. Birds rapidly learned to make adaptive shifts in their vocalizations in response to auditory perturbations delivered to a subset of natural variations in their songs, consistent with the idea that motor variability is a form of exploration that can support continuous learning and optimization of performance.

Using advanced brain-recording techniques, parrots were found to have a brain organization for vocal control similar to humans, making them an important model for studying speech and for developing potential treatments for communication disorders.

CAR T cell therapies have been developed to treat paediatric diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), however, clinical efficacy remains limited. Here, the authors report that engineering B7-H3-targeting CAR T cells to express the chemokine receptor CXCR3-A enhances their trafficking and efficacy in DIPG preclinical models.

Ma et al. report a laser polishing and surface reconstruction strategy to improve the surface quality of micron-thick Pb-Sn narrow-bandgap perovskites, enabling single-junction and all-perovskite tandem solar cells with efficiencies of 23.47% (certified) and 29.80%, respectively, by the antisolvent-free method.

An updated meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies identified 91 risk loci for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias among individuals of European ancestry, of which 56 loci were specifically detected in clinically diagnosed AD cases.

When songbirds sing, neurons in premotor areas fire coordinated bursts precisely timed to the dynamics of the song. The cellular mechanism for such sequence generation is unknown. These authors make the technical breakthrough of recording intracellularly in HVC neurons in singing birds, allowing them to test models of burst generation. They found that membrane potential rapidly depolarizes 5–10 ms before burst onset, consistent with models in which HVC neurons form synaptically connected chains.

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.

Longitudinal metatranscriptomics in a prospective cohort of 1,164 adults hospitalized for COVID-19 reveals that azithromycin offered no apparent anti-inflammatory benefit but enriched the respiratory microbiome with potential pathogens and antimicrobial resistance genes.

Understanding urbanization trends, dynamics and environmental consequences is at the heart of charting sustainable futures in the 21st century. Interdisciplinary research is crucial to this, yet there often remains separation between the scales of urban analysis — searches for quantifiable, generalizable trends and detailed local, historical analyses — and between both scientific scales and policy. We argue for the importance of long-term institutional spaces and workflows that stimulate constant interaction between scalar perspectives and policy within a single epistemic, theory-based process to help to navigate an increasingly central way of human life.

An integrated carbon nanotube sensor platform enables room-temperature gas detection with tunable selectivity and supports label-free classification of clinically relevant microorganisms for scalable, low-cost sensing applications.

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.

In the nonpivotal stage 1 of the randomized phase 3 PRESERVE-003 trial, patients with immunochemotherapy-resistant metastatic squamous non-small cell lung cancer without actionable genomic alterations treated with the next-generation, pH-sensitive anti-CTLA-4 agent gotistobart had encouraging overall survival outcomes compared to docetaxel.

Song et al. find that biomolecular condensates can catalyze reductive amination of metabolites through a nonenzymatic mechanism, mediating C–N bond formation in vitro and impacting cellular metabolism in Escherichia coli.

The flagship paper of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium describes the generation of the integrative analyses of 2,658 cancer whole genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types, the structures for international data sharing and standardized analyses, and the main scientific findings from across the consortium studies.