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Blue light promotes DNA repair in plants via cryptochrome signalling. Here the authors report that this occurs via suppression of COP1 mediated degradation of the repair factor ADA2b and propose that together photoreceptors and COP1 balance genome stability with growth under fluctuating light.

In celebration of the fifth year anniversary of Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, we ask authors of some of our most impactful articles (with respect to news stories, social media engagement, Altmetric scores, citations, policy mentions and article accesses) to reflect on the successes of their Reviews.

RNAret introduces a Retentive Network-based architecture to RNA modeling, enabling linear complexity for long sequences and demonstrating superior performance in predicting RNA interactions, secondary structures, and coding potential.

Age-related obesity is a major health issue with unclear causes. This work reveals that the enzyme GSNOR promotes obesity by reducing mitochondria in fat, leading to tissue “whitening” and identifying it as a potential therapeutic target.

The authors consider the changing sensitivity of the leaf-onset date to temperature (S_T) for boreal deciduous broadleaf forests. S_T increased between 1982–1996 and 1998–2012—potentially linked to enhanced chilling accumulation—but this increase is underestimated in phenology models.

The extreme hot and dry conditions of 2023 reduced soil respiration and enhanced net forest carbon sequestration in Canada, offsetting wildfire emissions, according to satellite-based and in situ observations of CO₂ fluxes.

This study provides prognostic models for clinical translation and reveals methylation biomarkers and mechanisms of CAD adverse outcomes.

Target identification of natural products plays a critical role in the development of innovative drugs. Here, this group integrates molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations on Bufalin and reports the potential targets as well as its role in reversing endocrine resistance.

METTL3 promotes healthy placenta function by regulating m⁶A methylation and histone epigenetics. Deficiency in METTL3 leads to premature senescence, inflammation activation of trophoblasts, contributing to pregnancy complications like preeclampsia.

Nodal line semimetals have been observed in three-dimensional materials but are missing in two-dimensional counterparts. Here, Feng et al. report two-dimensional Dirac nodal line fermions protected by mirror reflection symmetry in monolayer Cu₂Si.

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations could stimulate plant photosynthesis and production. However, using the measurements from global eddy-covariance sites, this study shows that continued increases in atmospheric aridity in the future will counteract most of this fertilization effect.

The authors present a 3.5-million-year-long pollen record from the Zoige Basin of the eastern Tibetan Plateau, 3,442 m above sea level. The ~5,000 pollen assemblages retrieved from the core reveal many ecosystem transitions during this time and, when correlated with climatic curves, indicate what effects future warming may have on regional vegetation.

Trees outside forests, particularly in croplands, grasslands, and urban areas, accounted for 20.8–32.9% of China’s above-ground carbon in 2019, occupying 3.6–5.7 Pg C, based on a two-step machine learning approach integrating diverse remote sensing data.

Current wrinkling processes for pattern formation cannot be easily controlled, resulting in deformation or detachment of patterns from substrates. Here, Zhong et al. report a wrinkling strategy for creating patterned structures with long-range order and resistant to force relaxation.

The red fluorescent protein mScarlet3-H is bright, photostable and very robust to high temperature, chaotropic conditions and oxidative environments. mScarlet3-H works well in correlative light and electron microscopy, tissue clearing and time-lapse super-resolution microscopy.

Satellite data show declining global forest recovery from tree mortality since the 1990s, driven by warming and water scarcity. Canopy water recovers slower than greenness, stressing the need for a multifaceted approach to assessing recovery.

Direct stereoselective amination of tertiary C–H bonds without the assistance of directing groups is a challenging task in synthetic organic chemistry. Now a nitrene transferase is engineered to aminate tertiary C–H bonds with high enantioselectivity, providing direct access to valuable chiral α-tertiary primary amines.

Inspired by movable-type printing, we propose movable-type coding metasurfaces for reconfigurable DNN in computing, holography, and sensing.

The authors reveal the structure and gating mechanisms of BRTNaC1, a myriapod ion channel sensitive to heat and acidity. They show that a proton triggers a ‘twist the wrist’ motion, heat induces broad structural changes and testosterone inhibits channel activation.

Here, the authors develop a plasmon-free SERS platform based on two-dimensional MnPS₃ with sub-attomolar detection limit. Their strategy is based on a mechanochemical approach that combines wrinkling and chemical functionalization to boost SERS performance, making it relevant for biosensing.

Climate change is inducing widespread shifts in the phenology of terrestrial organisms. This global analysis reveals a growing asymmetry between plant and animal responses, with more pronounced phenological shifts in plants.

On-chip circuits based on plasmonic systems are a promising potential technology. Here the authors present efficient, on-chip, localized plasmonic excitation based on resonant inelastic electron tunneling with metallic quantum well junction.

Using multiple remote-sensing datasets, the authors show that temporal and spatial scale influence the detection of tree-mortality events and explain why there has been a seemingly conflicting pattern of both overall greening but also extensive tree mortality in recent decades.

Managing natural systems to mitigation climate change is a key strategy for limiting warming. In China, such natural climate solutions could offset 6% of CO₂ emissions during 2020–2030, contributing to mitigation goals but highlighting the importance of emissions reductions.

Livestock grazing may drive grassland degradation. Here, the authors use process-based modelling validated with empirical data to define a stocking rate threshold across grassland on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, identify vulnerable areas and predict threshold shifts under future climate scenarios.

Wind speeds have reduced globally over land since the 1980s. In situ data show that this reversed around 2010, with natural ocean–atmosphere variability thought to drive the wind speed changes, as well as a 17% increase in potential wind energy for 2010–2017 and a boosted wind power capacity factor.

Hepatic expression of constitutively active glucagon receptor may have contributed to the glucose and lipid metabolism and the high metabolic rates that enabled the evolution of flight in birds.

Yu, Zhou, Cao, He et al. show that BMP4 reconfigures the nuclear architecture during the transition from primed to naive pluripotency by targeting Zbtb7a and Zbtb7b, which encode proteins that mediate the opening of naive chromatin loci.

Combining long-term atmospheric CO₂ records with satellite observations of vegetation activities across the Northern Hemisphere, the authors identify a weakening trend of the link between spring and summer productivity over the past 40 years.

China’s large-scale tree planting could sequester 5.9 ± 0.5 PgC by planting 44.7 billion trees. Tree densification in existing forests may be a more cost-effective strategy than afforestation.

By inducing a transformation in a manganese-rich cation-disordered rocksalt, partially ordered spinels with nanomosaic domains of 3–7 nm in size can be obtained, which exhibit high energy density and rate capability at an average particle size of 3–5 µm.

Regions such as the United States, the Amazon and Southern Europe are hot spots in wildfire research, while Africa and Siberia with the largest burned areas are largely understudied, according to an analysis of more than 60,000 peer-reviewed articles over 1982-2022 using a large language model.

The impact of land-use and cover-change (LUCC) on ecosystem carbon stock in China is poorly known due to large biases in existing databases. Here the authors develop a new LUCC database with corrected false signals and reveal that forest expansion is the dominant driver of China’s recent carbon sink.

The authors reveal complex drought recovery responses to phenology shifts, in that early spring can shorten or lengthen recovery, while delayed spring following drought events delays it. These effects suggest a need to incorporate phenology aspects into resilience models.

Historical latitudinal and seasonal trends in global soil moisture aridity are attributable to greenhouse gas emissions.

Arid regions are projected to expand in the future. An ensemble of climate model simulations reveals that limiting anthropogenic warming to 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C can markedly reduce the area undergoing, and thus the population exposed to, aridification.

The impact of forest loss on land surface temperature in the tropics is five times greater than the response to forest gain, according to satellite observations of temperature and land cover.

Using a global coupled biogeochemistry–climate model and a chemistry and transport model reveals that China’s present-day global radiative forcing is about ten per cent of the current global total, made up of both warming and cooling contributions; if in the future China reduces the cooling forcings, global warming could accelerate.

Food demand is increasing, while climate change is impacting the magnitude and stability of crop yields. High-quality soils are able to buffer the negative impacts of climate change and lead to smaller yield reduction and higher yield stability, indicating a potential adaptation strategy.

A high-resolution map of the realized range limit of high-elevation trees across the Himalayas shows that trees are absent from the thermal treeline, determined by growing-season temperature, across the western and central Himalayas, as a result of human disturbance and/or premonsoon drought.

Crop pests and diseases (CPDs) can substantially reduce attainable crop yields worldwide, but the understanding of CPD dynamics remains limited because CPD occurrence is complex and interacts with climate and agronomic practices. Using a historical dataset of CPD occurrence in China, the national average rate of CPD occurrence was found to increase by a factor of four during 1970–2016, and climate change will lead to a greater increase in CPD occurrence by the end of the century.

Emerging evidence suggests that exit from pluripotency is a regulated, rather than passive process. Here the authors identify a requirement for SS18-mediated Brg/Brahma-associated factors (BAF) chromatin remodeling complex assembly during exit from pluripotency, and that SS18 promotes BAF assembly through liquidliquid phase separation.

Using data from long-term nationwide observations and multi-level rainfall manipulative experiments, this study reveals that rice yield reductions due to extreme rainfall in China were comparable to those induced by extreme heat over the past two decades. Further projections highlight the increasing risk of rice yield reductions induced by extreme rainfall by the end of this century.

Deforestation causes elevation-dependent warming over tropical mountain regions, according to high-resolution climate simulations.

Resequencing and genome-wide association analysis of 683 common bean accessions across different latitudes identifies 505 loci associated with yield components, of which seed size, flowering and harvest maturity traits are stable across environments.

Earthquakes can cause decadal-scale shifts in forest growth resilience by increasing the infiltration of precipitation through earthquake-induced soil cracks, according to global analyses of tree-ring width and historic earthquake data.

Menthol in mints elicits a coolness sensation by selective activation of TRPM8 ion channel. Here authors dock menthol to TRPM8 and systematically validate their menthol binding models with thermodynamic mutant cycle analysis in functional tests, and shed light on TRPM8 activation by menthol at the atomic level.