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The authors conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 62 studies, including more than 4,400 participants across 21 countries, to investigate the effects of nature exposure on self-reported pain.

Liet al. study degradation in organic photovoltaics from a morphological perspective. They find that donor and acceptor phases undergo excessive demixing via spinodal decomposition resulting in a reduction of charge generation. Demixing is due to the inherently low miscibility of both materials.

Men and women differ in their lipid biology. Here, the authors identify NCOA1 as a female-specific regulator that promotes the conversion of white fat into energy-burning fat, protecting women from obesity and metabolic disease by enhancing thermogenic activity in subcutaneous fat.

Treatment-seeking for fever is widely used to estimate treatment of childhood infections, but cross-country comparisons are problematic. Here, the authors estimate the probability of seeking treatment for fever at public facilities across 29 countries by quantifying person-level latent variables.

Rathmell and colleagues show that metabolic reprograming of regulatory T cells is associated with severity of critical illness in patients with and without sepsis.

Bruijns et al. present a modeling tool that enables the tracking of learning dynamics across subjects to reveal how behaviors emerge and adapt. Applying the tool to a decision-making task in mice uncovers similarities and differences across individuals.

The authors explore dental development in a stem-chondrichthyan ischnacanthid acanthodian to inform our understanding of the ancestral gnathostome dental condition, finding that although dermal oral tubercles are a conserved feature of early gnathostomes, the complex cyclic shedding dentitions and whorls appear to have evolved multiple times.

Detailed data on SARS-CoV-2 dynamics in Africa remain limited. Here, the authors use longitudinal serology and SARS-CoV-2 sequencing data from Ethiopia between August 2020 and July 2022 to characterise circulating variants, identify infection pathways, and explore cross-immunity properties.

Tree cover gains in the moist tropics (1982–2015) were 56% naturally regenerated forests and 27% managed tree systems, with forest type influencing carbon recovery. Effective forest restoration requires robust tracking of forest types established by restoration efforts.

X-rays are used for imaging and sterilisation of bone but cause damage due to ionising radiation. Here, the authors study the degradation of collagen caused by photon-electron excitations and show that damage is initiated from onset which has implications for X-ray imaging and the levels of safe exposure.

C-fibre polymodal nociceptors in primates have been classified into two groups based on their sensitivity to mechanical stimuli. Here, Wooten et al.describe how the differences in the response speed of the receptors to stimuli suggest that these should be considered as three separate groups.

Thirty years of forest demographic data, combined with recent ecophysiological measurements, reveal that intense Amazon droughts sharply increase tree mortality once soil moisture falls below a threshold, and that these hot droughts will become more frequent and intense as Earth warms towards hypertropical conditions.

Fire impacts soil organic carbon stocks, in addition to aboveground biomass, yet changes are not well constrained. This study shows that more soil carbon is lost from drier ecosystems than humid ones and that the carbon sink is increasing in savannah–grassland regions with declining burned area.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Robbie Waugh and colleagues report that the EARLINESS PER SE (EPS2) locus is associated with spring growth habit and environmental adaptation in barley. Resequencing the barley homolog of CENTRORADIALIS, located within the EPS2 locus, in 216 spring and 207 winter barley accessions identified haplotypes at HvCEN that correspond with winter or spring growth habit.

Prescribed burning is a common tool to mitigate the risk of dangerous wildfires. However, careful consideration of the public health impacts should be incorporated into forest management plans.

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.

Palladium supported on zeolite is a highly active catalyst for complete methane oxidation, but its stability needs to be improved. Here, the authors design a highly active catalyst resistant to steam-induced sintering under reaction conditions by alleviating the high mobility of palladium nanoparticles and zeolite degradation.

Soft tissue trauma can result in aberrant osteochondral differentiation of local mesenchymal progenitor cells. Here the authors show that, in mice, soft tissue trauma results in NGF expression by perivascular cells, which leads to axonal invasion and drives abnormal osteochondral differentiation, and show that this process can be prevented by inhibition of NGF signaling.

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.

Runx2 is essential for tuning the generation of bone from skeletal stem cells (SSCs). Here, the authors demonstrate that the CK2/HAUSP pathway stabilizes RUNX2 protein thereby regulating the commitment of SSCs to osteoprogenitors as well as their subsequent maturation, and that inhibition of this pathway can block heterotopic ossification.

Soil carbon loss from human agriculture-related land use in the dry tropics largely offsets gains in northern lands, leading to a small net sink of 0.34 ± 0.30 PgC yr⁻¹ at a global scale.

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

Wildfire smoke increasingly covers large swaths of the US at a time when solar energy is rapidly expanding. Yet, average photovoltaic solar resource losses remain modest outside areas immediately near active fires, where plumes are fresh and dense.

Loss of peat through increased burning will have major impacts on the global carbon cycle. Here, the authors use pyrolysis combustion flow calorimetry to determine the temperature of maximum thermal decomposition (T_max) of peats from different latitudes, and couple this to a botanical composition analysis.

Dengue is a major public health concern in the Americas, and the Caribbean can be a source for reintroduction and spread. Here, the authors use travel surveillance data and genomic epidemiology to reconstruct Dengue epidemic dynamics in the Caribbean from 2009-2022.

Adopting early dry season fires has been proposed as a means of generating sufficient carbon revenues to pay for conservation in Africa. However, the climatic impact thereof is deeply questionable and may have unforeseen detrimental effects.

Poor fossil records impede testing how Cenozoic climatic perturbations have affected the assembly of many regional biotas. Here, the authors use molecular phylogenetic data to show mid-Cenozoic restructuring of Australia’s lizards and snakes.

In this study, Aggarwal and colleagues perform prospective sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 isolates derived from asymptomatic student screening and symptomatic testing of students and staff at the University of Cambridge. They identify important factors that contributed to within university transmission and onward spread into the wider community.

Using tree community data from 29 tropical and temperate sites that have experienced multi-decadal alterations in fire frequency, the authors show repeated burning generally reduces stem density and basal area, with most pronounced effects in savanna ecosystems and in sites with strong wet seasons or strong dry seasons.

Brain-wide recordings in mice reveal that prior expectations are distributed through recurrent loops across all levels of cortical and subcortical processing.

India’s methane emissions have been quantified using atmospheric measurements to provide an independent comparison with reported emissions. Here Ganesan et al. find that derived methane emissions are consistent with India’s reports and no significant trend has been observed between 2010–2015.

Parity induces an accumulation of CD8⁺ T cells, including cells with a tissue-resident-memory-like phenotype within human normal breast tissue, offering long-term protection against triple-negative breast cancer.

Analyses of 475 ancient horse genomes show modern horses emerged around 2200 bce, coinciding with sudden expansion across Eurasia, refuting the narrative of large horse herds accompanying earlier migrations of steppe peoples across Europe.

Cooperative species of extrachromosomal DNAs are coordinately inherited through mitotic co-segregation.

Investigations in wild bats and non-human primates in Brazil and Costa Rica inform about diverse Morbillivirus ecology in neotropical bats and host jumps, and about zoonotic potential of morbilliviruses in Latin America.

Analysis of 100 consecutive personalized bacteriophage therapy cases supports the use of personalized and sometimes pre-adapted, bacteriophage preparations, often in combination with antibiotics.

How the carbon stocks of the Arctic–Boreal Zone change with warming is not well understood. Here the authors show that wildfires and large regional differences in net carbon fluxes offset the overall increasing CO₂ uptake.

Robbie Waugh, Nils Stein, Gary Muehlbauer and colleagues report the exome sequencing of 267 landraces and wild accessions of barley from diverse regions to study adaptations to different agricultural environments. They observe correlations of days to heading and height with environment and find that variation in flowering-associated genes has strong geographical structuring.