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Developing heat-resistant dielectric polymers for electrification is challenging due to the inverse relationship between thermal stability and electrical insulation. Using a machine learning-driven approach, the researchers identify and validate high-performance polymers that demonstrate promising thermal resilience and energy density for high-temperature applications.

Water electrolysis can produce clean hydrogen, but it is limited by the slow anodic oxygen evolution reaction. Now, a local electronic manipulation strategy for stabilizing high-valence Ru single site catalysts has been developed. The catalyst demonstrates efficient bifunctional activity for water electrolysis.

The ambiphilic reactivity of alkyl sulfonyl fluorides in stereoselective cyclopropanation under Pd(II) catalysis is reported. The method provides convenient access to cis-disubstituted cyclopropanes that are otherwise challenging to access. A representative carboxylic acid cyclopropane building block is scaled up to 100 mmol, demonstrating the practicality of this transformation.

Residual industrial heat could be harnessed as an energy source for CO₂ conversion. Here the authors present a method for storing electrons and hydrogen in catalysts using light and water, which are then released upon heating to enable CO₂ reduction with intermittent sunlight and residual heat.

Insertion of a tissue-invariant chromatin domain boundary into 16 ectopic loci leads to various structural phenotypes, which depend on local chromatin features, CTCF binding and transcriptional status.

Prenylation modifications of natural products play essential roles in chemical diversity and bioactivities, but imidazole modification prenyltransferases are not well investigated. Here, the authors discover and characterize a dimethylallyl tryptophan synthase family prenyltransferase, AuraA, that catalyzes the rare dimethylallylation on the imidazole moiety in the biosynthesis of aurantiamine.

The separation of chiral molecules is a fundamental and industrially relevant challenge. Here, the authors report a chiral metal-organic framework that functions as a solid-state host capable of absorbing and separating mixtures of a range of chiral amines, with high enatioselectivity.

Liu et al. experimentally demonstrate a terahertz chaos source based on a terahertz quantum cascade laser without any external perturbations. It is found that the chaos generation in the terahertz laser is ascribed to the defect-mediated turbulence.

The authors obtain tetragonal La3Ni2O6.92 single crystals at ambient pressure by post-annealing in a high-oxygen-pressure environment. Experimental results on these samples suggest that the tetragonal structure is not a prerequisite for achieving superconductivity in La3Ni2O7.

Native core microbiomes are often neglected when developing synthetic microbial communities to support plant health and growth. Here, the authors show that native core microorganisms have greater potential to support plant growth than both native non-core and non-native microorganisms.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports the observation of the electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair. This process is related to vector-boson scattering and allows the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking to be probed.

The electrosynthesis of amino acids is hindered by inefficient oxime intermediate conversion. Here, a relayed electron transfer mechanism is proposed using an ionic-liquid@Bi catalyst. Electrons are accepted by the ionic liquid to generate related radicals, which then transfer electrons to oxime, enabling efficient amino acid production.

The design of highly selective yet robust anion exchange membranes remains a challenge. Here, the authors prepare a stable polymer membrane composed of terphenyl isomers, demonstrate roll-to-roll manufacturing, and assess its properties in redox flow batteries, water electrolyzers and fuel cells.

The role of protein arginine methylation in serine metabolism of cancer cells in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains to be explored. Here, the authors show that phosphoglycerate dehydrogenase (PHGDH) is activated by PRMT1-mediated R236 methylation, promoting serine synthesis, redox homeostasis and HCC growth.

This study demonstrates a sustainable photocatalytic route for the production of ethylene glycol and H₂ using methyl tert-butyl ether as the substrate, offering a greener alternative to energy-intensive, petroleum-based industrial processes.

Controlling magnetization orientation and assembling high-coercivity micro-magnets at the microscale has been challenging due to harsh operational requirements and limited spatial precision. The authors present a stretchable linear magnet with programmable magnetization enabled by laser-activated phase-change microcells, achieving efficient and reversible reorientation under mild conditions.

The environmental weathering of plastics and the leaching kinetics of additives are key to assessing exposure concentrations. Here, the authors show that photoaging enhances the leaching rate of the common additive di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) by a factor of 1.5, and newly-formed harmful transformation products, such as mono(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (MEHP), phthalic acid, and phthalic anhydride, are released from PVC microplastics into the aquatic environment.

Copper-catalyzed asymmetric propargylic substitution of α-tertiary propargylic electrophiles using hydrazines and hydroxylamines can access multifunctional α-tertiary hydrazines or hydroxylamines. Here the authors use a sterically confined pyridinebisoxazolines to improve yields and enantioselectivity, supported by NMR analysis and theoretical calculations.

DCAF5 has a quality-control function for SWI/SNF complexes and promotes the degradation of incompletely assembled SWI/SNF complexes in the absence of SMARCB1.

Chronic alcohol use in humans and mice downregulates small intestinal mAChR4 and reduces goblet-cell-associated antigen passage formation, disrupting antimicrobial immunity.

Robust Cu single-atom catalysts show promise for CO₂ electroreduction but face stability challenges. Here, the authors report a self-healing Cu single-atom catalyst that maintains high performance and stability for CO₂-to-CH₄ conversion at industrial current densities.

A unified realization of the volt, ohm and ampere can be achieved by integrating a quantum anomalous Hall resistor and a programmable Josephson voltage standard in a single cryostat.

A mechanical exfoliation method for producing freestanding metal oxide ultrathin flakes is reported. The flakes can be transferred and integrated with 2D materials, providing a platform to investigate the fundamental properties of ultrathin metal oxides.

Systems with strong photon-photon interactions enable advanced quantum optical applications as well as the study of highly correlated light-matter states. Here the authors report strong coupling between single- and two-photon states in a superconducting circuit, enabling a new regime of nonlinear quantum optics.

It is now shown that coupled optical microcavities bear all the hallmarks of parity–time symmetry; that is, the system’s dynamics are unchanged by both time-reversal and mirror transformations. The resonant nature of microcavities results in unusual effects not seen in previous photonic analogues of parity–time-symmetric systems: for example, light travelling in one direction is resonantly enhanced but there are no resonance peaks going the other way.

Transparent conductive electrodes are widely used in modern optoelectronic devices, but they are rarely transparent in the near-infrared, limiting their use. Nanostructured bismuth selenide, a topological insulator, is now shown to be a flexible near-infrared transparent electrode.

Ten years after the discovery of the Higgs boson, the ATLAS  experiment at CERN probes its kinematic properties with a significantly larger dataset from 2015–2018 and provides further insights on its interaction with other known particles.

The authors present ARPES and STM/STS measurements of the kagome superconductor CsV_3-xTa_xSb₅. For the x = 0.4 Ta-doped sample, they report evidence for a van Hove singularity perfectly aligned with the Fermi level, and that the superconducting transition temperature is maximized at this doping.

Exploiting non-local optical resonances on 3R-MoS₂ flakes, researchers demonstrate single-pass second-harmonic conversion efficiencies of ~10⁻⁴ over only 160-nm-thick van der Waals nonlinear metastructures at telecom wavelengths.

Palladium is an effective but expensive catalyst used in catalytic converters. Here, the authors show that defective Co₃O₄nanocrystals, synthesized via oxidation of carbon-encapsulated cobalt nanoparticles, display similar or even comparable catalytic activity to palladium for hydrocarbon combustion.

Existing methods of characterizing electron beams carrying orbital angular momentum are inefficient as they allow measuring one OAM state at a time. Here the authors demonstrate an OAM spectrometer capable of analysing multiple OAM states and a potential tool for probing magnetic materials.

Mesoporous carbonaceous nanomaterials have technological potential for diverse applications ranging from gas separation to energy storage. We describe the template-directed assembly of monomicelles to make mesoporous materials with different structures.

Predicting RNA structure from sequence is challenging due to the relative sparsity of experimentally-determined RNA 3D structures for model training. Here, the authors propose a way to incorporate knowledge on interactions at the atomic and base–base level to refine the prediction of RNA structures.

High-quality, non-layered 2D β-Bi₂O₃ crystals are grown using a vapour–liquid–solid–solid growth technique. These crystals demonstrate promising properties for p-channel field-effect transistors.

Here, the authors provide evidence that SARS-CoV-2 N protein leads to autophagic degradation of Dicer, XPO5, SRSF3, and hnRNPA3, inducing DNA damage and proteotoxic stress, eventually causing pneumonia. The small-molecule drug PJ34 or anastrozole alleviates N protein-induced pneumonia.

Structural and biochemical studies of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Rpd3 small complex in free and H3K36me3 nucleosome-bound states reveal multiple nucleosome-binding modes and provide insights into mechanisms underlying epigenetic regulation by histone modification.

Nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems have shown potential for treating malignant tumors, however, limited tumor penetration of nanosystems remains a hurdle for effective tumor therapy. Here, the authors report a biomimetic bubble nanomachine with tumor-cell-membrane-derived nanovesicle secretion triggered by near-infrared laser irradiation for enhanced tumor penetration.

Switchable structural and physical bistability in ferroelectric materials can be achieved as result of molecular orbital breaking. Here, the authors describe the photo-mediated bistability in organosilicon Schiff base ferroelectric crystals for the modulation of dielectric, second-harmonic generation, and ferroelectric polarization and showing good in vitro biocompatibility.

The results of the Fifth RNA-Puzzles contest highlights advances in RNA three-dimensional structure prediction and uncovers new insights into RNA folding and structure.

Combined use of multiple siRNAs promises a new path for drug development. Here, the authors demonstrate a multiplexed combinatorial screening of thousands of siRNA formulations through highthroughput single-cell gene silencing, discovering the most effective anti-cancer siRNA cocktail therapeutics.

mBrainAligner is a cross-modal registration platform for whole mouse brains imaged with different modalities. In addition, a fluorescence micro-optical sectioning tomography-based mouse brain atlas has been generated.

La₅Ni₃O₁₁, a hybrid Ruddlesden–Popper nickelate, exhibits pressure-induced superconductivity with a high superconducting volume fraction. It offers insights into the interplay of structure and electronic order in nickelate superconductors.

The practicality of osmotic energy for portable electronics has been challenging despite recent advancements. Researchers devise a method to store iontronic energy in a polymer film based on osmotic effects, achieving high energy and power density.

The tumor environment is nutrient deficient. Here the authors show that early availability of methionine is critical for optimal T cell activation and prevents T cell dysfunction, and that dietary methionine can improve the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy in mice.

Voltage imaging is a powerful technique for studying electrical signalling in neurons. A palette of bright and sensitive voltage indicators has now been developed via enzyme-mediated ligation and Diels–Alder cycloaddition. Among these, a far-red indicator faithfully reports neuronal action potential dynamics with an excitation spectrum orthogonal to optogenetic actuators and green/red-emitting biosensors.

TransBrain translates brain phenotypes between mouse and human via homology mapping, thus making it possible to capitalize on the wealth of knowledge about the mouse brain and gain insights into the human brain.

Twisted 2D materials have recently emerged as a controllable quantum simulator platform. Here, the authors apply the same approach to tune the edge states of zigzag graphene nanoribbons, showing a unique degree of freedom represented by the lateral stacking offset of the 1D nanostructures.

Concurrent tandem catalysis, with two or more catalysts conducting multistep reactions in the same reactor, would be beneficial for (bio)pharmaceutical and fine chemical manufacturing. Here, the authors report the co-immobilization of metal nanoparticles and a biocatalytic multienzyme system within a synthetic covalent organic framework capsule, COFcap-2, and employ it to prepare eleven homochiral amines using dinitrogen as a feedstock.