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Soil microbes drive ecosystem functions but are vulnerable to environmental stressors triggered by global change. This study reveals that multiple environmental stressors drive community-level restructuring of soil functional microbiomes globally.

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.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

The authors report a trial subset analysis of the immune responses induced by two inactivated quadrivalent influenza vaccines (QIVs): Sinovac QIV and Vaxigrip-Tetra™. Both vaccines elicit robust humoral responses and distinct T cell profiles.

Highly axial lanthanide complexes with strong magnetic anisotropy are attractive candidates for high-performance single-molecule magnets. Now dysprosium(III) and terbium(III) homoleptic bis(stannolediide) complexes have been synthesized, with the dysprosium compound exhibiting a high energy barrier to relaxation and a high blocking temperature. Access to a rare divalent Dy(II) analogue displaying magnetic anisotropy has also been demonstrated.

The study identifies novel genetic variants linked to core cerebrospinal fluid Alzheimer’s Disease biomarkers using a genome-wide analysis, showing how endophenotypes can identify genes and disease mechanisms not captured by case-control studies.

Known genetic loci account for only a fraction of the genetic contribution to Alzheimer’s disease. Here, the authors have performed a large genome-wide meta-analysis comprising 409,435 individuals to discover 6 new loci and demonstrate the efficacy of an Alzheimer’s disease polygenic risk score.

Plant traits drive ecosystem dynamics yet are challenging to map globally due to sparse measurements. Here, the authors combine crowdsourced biodiversity observations with Earth observation data to accurately map 31 plant traits at 1 km² resolution.

Care-oriented policies, which promote health while addressing its social determinants, are increasingly common in Latin America. Using ethnographic observation, interviews and focus groups, this study finds that Bogotá, Colombia’s, District Care System (SIDICU) provided women caregivers with access to public institutions as well as new social networks.

Identifying jets originating from heavy quarks plays a fundamental role in hadronic collider experiments. In this work, the ATLAS Collaboration describes and tests a transformer-based neural network architecture for jet flavour tagging based on low-level input and physics-inspired constraints.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

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.

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias identifies new loci and enables generation of a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

Here the authors apply machine learning approaches to Alzheimer’s genetics, confirm known associations and suggest novel risk loci. These methods demonstrate predictive power comparable to traditional approaches, while also offering potential new insights beyond standard genetic analyses.

The Single Cell Notebooks provide multilingual, open-access training materials for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analysis through reusable notebooks. They have evolved into a community-driven platform for education and capacity building, lowering language and computational barriers to support equitable participation in omics research.

Ice flow acceleration has played a crucial role in the rapid retreat of calving glaciers in Alaska, Greenland and Antarctica. High-frequency measurements of ice speed and basal water temperatures from a calving glacier in Patagonia show that changes in basal water pressure by a few per cent can significantly affect ice flow speed.

Using a tapered two-wire transmission line, researchers experimentally focus mid-infrared energy to a nanoscale confined spot with a diameter of 60 nm at the taper apex.

A comparison of alpha diversity (number of plant species) and dark diversity (species that are currently absent from a site despite being ecologically suitable) demonstrates the negative effects of regional-scale anthropogenic activity on plant diversity.

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.

Wood density is an important plant trait. Data from 1.1 million forest inventory plots and 10,703 tree species show a latitudinal gradient in wood density, with temperature and soil moisture explaining variation at the global scale and disturbance also having a role at the local level.

Long-term metastatic relapse is observed in patients with luminal breast cancer (BC). Here, the authors show that fatty acid amide hydrolase is a tumour suppressor for lung metastasis in mouse models of BC and a predictor of metastasis in patients with luminal BC.

Time reversal symmetry breaking gives rise to magnetic circular dichroism and Faraday rotation in graphene. The authors use terahertz magneto-electro-optical spectroscopy to demonstrate that electrostatic doping at a fixed magnetic field allows inversion of magnetic circular dichroism and Faraday rotation.

Phonon polaritons can be harnessed for SEIRA spectroscopy. Here, the authors demonstrate a compact on-chip phononic SEIRA platform based on a h-BN/graphene/h-BN heterostructure atop a metal split-gate that serves both as a SEIRA substrate and as a room-temperature infrared detector.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.

Here the authors provide an explanation for 95% of examined predicted loss of function variants found in disease-associated haploinsufficient genes in the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), underscoring the power of the presented analysis to minimize false assignments of disease risk.

Liu et al. demonstrate that human-driven soil contamination in natural areas mirrors that in nearby urban greenspaces globally, and highlight the potential influence that soil contaminants have on ecosystem functions.

Polygenic risk scores for Alzheimer’s disease derived from individuals of European ancestry can show improved performance in multiancestry settings after incorporating genome-wide association summary statistics from diverse populations.

Examining drivers of the latitudinal biodiversity gradient in a global database of local tree species richness, the authors show that co-limitation by multiple environmental and anthropogenic factors causes steeper increases in richness with latitude in tropical versus temperate and boreal zones.

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Buchanan et al. show evidence confirming the phenomenon of semantic priming across speakers of 19 diverse languages.

A selection of individuals from the biotech ecosystem give their views on the challenges facing the sector over the coming years.

A consensus cell type atlas for the fly brain provides both an intellectual framework and open-source toolchains for brain-scale comparative connectomics.

The transport measurements of an interacting fermionic quantum gas in an optical lattice provide a direct experimental realization of the Hubbard model—one of the central models for interacting electrons in solids—and give insights into the transport properties of many-body phases in condensed-matter physics.

One of the possible events signaling a neutrinoless double beta decay is a Xe atom decaying into a Ba ion and two electrons. Aiming at the realisation of a detector for such a process, the authors show that Ba ions can be efficiently trapped (chelated) in vacuum by an organic molecule layer on a surface.

Embryonal tumour with multilayered rosettes (ETMR) is a rare and aggressive paediatric brain tumour. Here, the authors analyse intratumour heterogeneity and the tumour microenvironment in ETMR using single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, in vitro cultures, and a 3D forebrain organoid model, finding important aspects – such as the communication with pericytes – for ETMR development and response to therapy.

Analysis of 2,170 SARS-CoV-2 sequences from the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in Spain provides insights into transmission patterns and the effects of lockdown on the emergence of new variants.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.

Peripheral T-cell lymphoma, not otherwise specified (PTCL-NOS) is a heterogeneous and aggressive type of T-cell lymphoma. Here, the authors perform single-cell analyses of human and murine PTCL-NOS tumors, and identify a subtype defined by the loss of SMARCB1 that could be targeted with HDAC-inhibitor combination therapies.

A major Chilean earthquake shows how two physical processes cohesively make intermediate-depth quakes bigger. This allows ruptures to extend into previously assumed stable rocks, posing a greater destructive potential than previously understood.

A significant challenge of infrared (IR) photodetectors is to funnel light into a small nanoscale active area and efficiently convert it into an electrical signal. Here, the authors couple a plasmonic antenna to hyperbolic phonon-polaritons in hexagonal-BN to highly concentrate mid-IR light into a graphene pn-junction.

G49, a dual glucagon/glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist, triggers an inter-organ crosstalk between adipose tissue, pancreas and liver, leading to brown fat activation with the final outcomes of increased energy expenditure and body weight loss.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

Analysing >1,700 inventory plots from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network, the authors show that the majority of Amazon tree species can occupy floodplains and that patterns of species turnover are closely linked to regional flood patterns.

Empirically based models of disease progression in familial frontotemporal dementia reveal the relative ordering of clinical, neuroimaging, and fluid biomarker changes and facilitate novel clinical trial designs