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Freestanding membranes of hexagonal oxides remain difficult to obtain. In this work, a water-soluble crystalline hexagonal BaAl₂O₄ is found to serve as a sacrificial layer for obtaining freestanding membranes with six-fold or three-fold symmetry.

Gao et al. realized a discontinuous orbital angular momentum metasurface holography, which enhances the channel capacity for holographic multiplexing and makes significant strides in high-security optical information encryption.

The tunability of the polarization state of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) based on conventional semiconductors is usually limited. Here, the authors report the realization of mid-infrared LEDs based on a Weyl semiconductor, layered Te, showing the electrical tunability of the degree of linear polarization of the emitted light from ~100% to 36%.

Zhang et al. characterize the mitochondrial inner membrane subdomain organizer (MISO) protein, which responds to inner mitochondrial membrane stress by inducing membrane subdomains promoting homeostatic fission and mtDNA degradation.

A breakdown of the tight coupling between Antarctic and subarctic productivity is identified during the Last Interglacial, likely due to the Southern Hemisphere westerlies, sustaining high CO₂ and potentially impacting future climate.

Proton transfer plays a key role in fuel-producing reactions, but directly monitoring these processes in heterogeneous electrocatalysts is challenging. Now it has been shown that shifts in the Tafel slope in protic versus deuteric electrolytes can elucidate the rate-determining step during water splitting and reveal pH- and structure-dependent proton transfer behaviours.

An enhanced superconducting pairing temperature (T_g) has only been observed in single-layer FeSe interfaced with TiO_x system. Here, the authors construct a new interface composed of single-layer FeSe interfaced with LaFeO₃ showing a highest T_g of 80 K among all-known interfacial superconductors.

Characterizing the genetic architecture underlying egg production is important for chicken breeding. Here, the authors integrate RNA and whole-genome sequencing data to better understand the genetic regulation of egg production in chickens.

Single-crystal monolayer hexagonal boron nitride is unexpectedly tough owing to its asymmetric lattice structure, which facilitates repeated crack deflection, crack branching and edge swapping, enhancing energy dissipation.

A combination of large-scale phylogenomic analysis, mouse lethality experiments and bacterial growth assays shows that gene loss in the putrescine utilization pathway has enhanced biofilm formation and transmission-related characteristics in the pandemic clone of a bacterial pathogen, Vibrio parahaemolyticus, promoting successive waves of global transmission events.

Accessing strong correlation effects in Kagome materials remains challenging. Here, the authors realize a Kagome Kondo lattice in CsCr₆Sb₆ exhibiting flat, isolated Kagome bands at the Fermi level.

One of the most efficient method to access chiral poly-substituted pyrrolidines is the catalytic asymmetric 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition, but using this reaction with weakly activated alkenes remains elusive. Here, the authors disclose a copper(I)-catalyzed asymmetric 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition of azomethine ylides and 1,3-enynes.

Previous multi-wavelength metasurfaces are restricted to a few wavelengths or lack wavefront control ability. Here, the authors introduce a microcavity-assisted metasurface that achieves multi-resonant wavefront engineering at 15 high-Q peak wavelengths from 480 nm to 1000 nm.

Qin et al. realized a plasmonic exceptional point distribution that covers full Poincaré sphere based on extrinsic chirality and basis transformation, extending the application of singularity induced topological phase to arbitrary polarization states.

A real–momentum topological photonic crystal that harnesses real-space disorder is used to generate a Pancharatnam–Berry phase while preserving momentum-space topology.

The authors develop a super-gravity field remelting fabrication technology which is effective in synergistically optimizing the electrical and thermal transport properties. Under a super-gravity field, the brittle (Bi,Sb)₂Te₃ alloy undergoes unusual plastic deformation during melt solidification.

The authors report the chiral inversion of exceptional points (EPs) through a structural mirror-symmetric operation, extending the application of EP to any desired polarization states, surpassing the inherent limitation of conventional EP systems.

In this work, the employment of disordered metasurface as an ultra-stable and actively polarized speckle generator in a passive manner, coupled with a double-secure treatment to the plaintext, enables a highly secure speckle-based cryptosystem.

The kagome superconductor CsV₃Sb₅ exhibits a charge density wave (CDW) as well as superconductivity (SC). Here, the authors find that the CDW transition temperature decreases with decreasing sample thickness to 72 K at 27 atomic layers, but then unexpectedly increases to 120 K at 5 layers, an opposite trend to SC.

The role of Endonuclease G in autophagy remains unclear. Here the authors report that ENDOG is released from mitochondria during starvation and promotes autophagy by suppressing mTOR signaling and activating DNA damage response.

Structural engineering at the subatomic level remains little for boosting operational stability of organic light-emitting diodes. Here, authors show that deuteration of acceptor is critical to enhance device stability, which is commonly neglected due to limited availability and synthetic complexity.

A set of three papers reports that the piRNA pathway is essential for mammalian female fertility based on genetic perturbation experiments performed in golden hamsters.

The role of PIWI proteins in mammalian reproduction remains poorly understood. Here, using golden hamsters, the authors establish expression profiles for all four PIWIs during gametogenesis and characterize their associated reproductive defects.

Stem cell factor (SCF) and its receptor, Kit, have known roles in regulating cell growth and survival. Here, Huang et al. reveal a new function of SCF/Kit signalling, showing that it increases energy expenditure and mitochondrial function in brown adipose tissue by promoting expression of PGC-1a.

Bilayer twisted photonic crystal slabs enable arbitrarily polarized bound states in continuum (BICs) covering full Poincare sphere.

RuO₂ is a promising anode catalyst for proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers but suffers from poor catalytic stability. Here the authors present a rhenium-doped RuO₂ with a unique dynamic electron accepting-donating that adaptively boosts activity and stability in acidic water oxidation.

A high-quality genome assembly of Weining rye sheds new light on gene duplications and their effects on starch biosynthesis genes, gene expression features underlying early heading trait and putative domestication-associated chromosomal regions.

Though multiplexing meta-holograms remains an attractive approach for realizing optical encoding, existing methods encode information based on the intensity of the holographic images. Here, the authors report vectorial metasurfaces that decouple and encode intensity and polarization information.

Chen et al. perform single-cell analysis and identify transcriptomic remodelling in epithelial cells, macrophages, T cells, fibroblasts and endothelial cells, which together regulate prostate cancer progression.

Here the authors propose an approach to construct metasurfaces, which activate all circularly polarized channels and make full utilization of transmitted energy simultaneously. By introducing chirality-assisted phase all the components in the Jones matrix can be decoupled and independently tuned.

The synthesis of explosive materials that are stable, highly dense, and have low sensitivity to external stimuli is a challenge. Here, the authors use a genomic approach to accelerate the discovery of insensitive high explosive molecules with good detonation and low sensitivity properties.

Water splitting by nanostructured, abundant catalysts provides a renewable means to make carbon neutral fuels, but the ideal material morphology and composition remain uncertain. Here, the authors prepare superaerophobic, multi-metallic sulfide nanotube arrays as bifunctional water splitting catalysts.

Controlling light with planar elements requires full polarization channels and reconstruction of optical signals. Here, the authors have demonstrated a general method relying on pixelated metasurfaces that enables wavefront shaping with arbitrary output polarization, allowing full utilization of polarization channels.

The Hippo pathway is a major regulator of organ size and growth control. Here Wu et al. provide evidence for a novel link between the Hippo signalling pathway and the unfolded protein response (UPR) in regulating organ growth and tumorigenesis.

The direct electrocatalytic synthesis of urea via C–N coupling is of great significance. The authors report a diatomic catalyst with bonded Fe–Ni pairs to improve the efficiency of electrochemical urea synthesis from nitrate and CO₂.

Damaged mitochondria are removed by mitophagy, and defects in mitophagy are linked to Parkinson’s disease; here it is shown that USP30, a deubiquitinase localized to mitochondria, antagonizes mitophagy by removing the ubiquitin tags put in place by Parkin, USP30 inhibition is therefore potentially beneficial for Parkinson’s disease by promoting mitochondrial clearance and quality control.

Mitochondria must be juxtaposed to phagosomes to supply reactive oxygen species for effective killing of microbes. Zhou and colleagues demonstrate that the kinases Mst1 and Mst2 are important for controlling this redistribution of mitochondria.

High oxidation resistance, without degradation of thermal or electrical conductivity, is achieved in copper using surface modification by a solvothermal or electrochemical treatment with sodium formate and formation of a thin surface coordination layer.