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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.

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.

Leveraging multi-element symbiosis, protective interfacial nanolayers are engineered in an intermetallic alloy. This results in a high fatigue limit of ~1,100 MPa, far exceeding that of conventional intermetallic alloys.

Global travel hubs could be key in future pandemic surveillance efforts. Here, using a global metapopulation model calibrated to epidemiology, phylogeography and air travel, the authors show that traveler-focused genomic surveillance at key hubs can speed up detection of SARS-CoV-2 variants under resource constraints.

Simulations of long-term atmospheric evolution show that rocky planets with Earth-like masses in the classical habitable zone of Sun-like stars can retain thick He-dominated primordial atmospheres.

When 100 social and behavioural science claims were examined, 34% of reanalyses closely matched the original results, with 74% reaching the same conclusion, revealing limited robustness of single-path analyses and the need to address analytical uncertainty.

Analyses of large-scale, multitaxa and long-term thermophilization patterns in forests, grasslands and alpine summits across Europe provide insight into shifts in community composition among different ecosystems in a warming world.

A fully automated methodology based on rubrics capturing a broad range of cognitive and intellectual demands is illustrated using LLMs and tasks, demonstrating a new way to evaluate the capabilities of AI systems and anticipate their performance.

Simulations help reveal the complex relationship between the changing structure of the magnetic field lines and the plasma in the corona of the Sun, which is one hundred times hotter than the surface itself.

Bimerons are magnetic solitons that are topologically equivalent to skyrmions in in-plane magnetized systems. This study demonstrates the room-temperature creation of bimerons in Co₈Zn₈Mn₄ via femtosecond laser pulse excitation, revealing dynamic topological control and morphological transitions of these solitons.

The flow of energy in Earth's primary light harvesters — photosynthetic pigment–protein complexes — needs to be heavily regulated, as the sun's energy supply can vary over many orders of magnitude. Observing hundreds of individual light-harvesting complexes has now provided important insights into the machinery that regulates this process.

ATF6α activation in human and preclinical models of hepatocellular carcinoma is significantly associated with an aggressive tumour phenotype characterized by reduced survival, glycolytic reprogramming and local immunosuppression.

A star in a primordial dwarf galaxy has preserved the elements produced by the first generation of stars. The star lacks heavy elements but exhibits an extreme amount of carbon, suggesting that low-energy explosions can seed the initial chemistry of early galaxies.

In a prospective multi-centre cohort in China, people living in areas of high soil selenium had a 35% increased risk of incident diabetes over a 3-year study period, with a stronger effect seen for men.

The skin’s tanning response to sun exposure shows great interindividual variability. Here, Visconti et al. perform a genome-wide association study for ease of skin tanning and identify 20 genetic loci, ten of which had not previously been associated with pigmentation-related traits.

Observations of multi-temperature stellar eruptions from EK Draconis reveal a solar-like yet complex view of stellar coronal mass ejections. Such frequent, powerful events on the young Sun may have shaped Earth’s early atmosphere.

The APOE-ε4 allele is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, but it is not deterministic. Here, the authors show that common genetic variation changes how APOE-ε4 influences cognition.

Spectroscopic observations of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-189b reveal both volatile (H₂O, CO, OH) and refractory (Fe, Mg, Si) gas in its atmosphere. Here, the authors show that the abundance ratio of refractory species reflects that of the host star.

Lewis et al. identify lamin B receptor (LBR) and lamina-associated polypeptide 2 (LAP2) as major factors that tether heterochromatin to the envelope. Deletion of these proteins causes changes in 3D genome organization, gene expression and cell fate determination.

The authors mapped the continental-scale fraction of age-dependent leaf area index and revealed a widespread increase in the fraction of photosynthetically efficient young leaves across the majority of Amazon rainforests over the past decades.

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.

Wide-bandgap perovskite solar cells suffer from instability under rapid thermal cycling. Here, Sun et al. investigate the degradation mechanism, showing that temperature-induced structural strain, phase transition, and increased non-radiative defects drive the degradation processes.

High-resolution flare footpoint observations in the extreme ultraviolet and X-rays were taken by Solar Orbiter. Combined with simulations, the results reveal that the dominant mechanism carrying flare energy through the Sun’s atmosphere can vary on small spatial scales.

Schuermans et al. discovered that genetic predisposition to thromboembolism is associated with a greater risk of post-acute sequelae after SARS-CoV-2 infection, including long COVID, and downstream analyses implicated PAR-1 as a potential contributor to long COVID.

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.

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.

Application of multiancestry and ensemble-based approaches yields improved polygenic risk prediction models for breast cancer and its subtypes among women of African ancestry.

In this study, long-read RNA sequencing achieves accurate single-nucleotide polymorphism calling, haplotype phasing and allele-specific expression analysis.

Ion diffusion region is an indicator of active magnetic reconnection, but it had not been detected in Jupiter’s magnetosphere previously. Here, the authors show a magnetic reconnection event in Jupiter’s inner magnetosphere that presents the detection of an ion diffusion region.

Genome-wide association analyses using data from 19 biobanks identify variants influencing risk of thyroid diseases and yield polygenic risk scores associated with features of aggressive thyroid cancer.

The performance of flexible all-perovskite tandem solar cells remains limited by interfacial losses in narrow-bandgap subcells. Here, authors incorporate Triton X-100 to disrupt the vertical phase segregation in PEDOT:PSS films, achieving maximum cell and mini-module efficiencies of 25.4% and 19.7%.

A combination of measurements from the Solar Dynamics Observatory and radiospectroscopy data from the Nançay Radioheliograph now details the mechanism that connects coronal mass ejections from the sun and the acceleration of particles to relativistic speeds. A spatial and temporal correlation between a coronal ‘bright front’ and radio emissions associated with electron acceleration demonstrates the fundamental relationship between the two.

The light concentrating properties of single p-i-n GaAs nanowires are shown to result in far greater photocurrent densities than expected under one sun illumination. The results suggest that such cells could in principle operate with power conversion efficiencies beyond the Shockley–Queisser limit.

Superflares are large explosive events on stellar surfaces, much larger than solar flares, but it remains unclear whether they share the same origin. Here, the authors analysed 48 superflare stars and determine the relation between their chromospheric activity and the occurrence of superflares.

There’s an emerging body of evidence to show how biological sex impacts cancer incidence, treatment and underlying biology. Here, using a large pan-cancer dataset, the authors further highlight how sex differences shape the cancer genome.

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

Opacities are considered to be the source of the disagreement between theoretical solar models and helioseismic data. Here, the authors show solar opacity profiles derived from seismic inferences, which differs from theoretical values used in the solar models.

Analysis of soundscape data from 139 globally distributed sites reveals that sounds of biological origin exhibit predictable rhythms depending on location and season, whereas sounds of anthropogenic origin are less predictable. Comparisons between paired urban–rural sites show that urban green spaces are noisier and dominated by sounds of technological origin.

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.

The authors find that distinct radial glia subtypes generate and support midbrain dopaminergic neurons, revealing specialized function and lineage relationships among the diverse cell types that shape dopamine neuron development.

Rare coding variants that reduce the activity of a protein can have a beneficial impact on health. Here, researchers identify rare genetic variants in the CHRNB3 gene that associate with reduced cigarette smoking across diverse populations.

The use of III-V semiconductor nanowires can overcome the need for lattice matching in multi-junction solar cells, which restricts the choice of materials and their bandgaps. This work demonstrates efficient solar cells with GaAsP single nanowires with tunable bandgap and grown on low-cost Si substrates.

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.